The sky above the arena was wrong.
It was too blue. Too clean. Too calm.
It didn't match the screams.
They echoed off the black stone walls, high and jagged like broken teeth, enclosing a field of cracked earth and scattered bones. The air smelled of iron and old blood, thick enough that every breath scratched the throat.
A boy ran.
He wasn't fast.
His lungs burned, legs shaking as he stumbled between jagged rocks and shattered weapons. His academy uniform—white and grey, the color of hopeful mediocrity—was torn and smeared with dirt. A shallow cut traced his cheek, beading blood that stung his eyes.
He didn't look like a noble heir.
He looked like prey.
"Help—!" he gasped, voice cracking.
No one answered. No one could. Every candidate thrown into the arena had their own monsters to survive.
The exam proctors watched from elevated platforms along the wall, their robes fluttering in the cold wind. To them, this was a routine assessment.
To the boy, it was the end.
The ground shook.
Something heavy landed behind him with a wet thud.
He didn't dare look back.
Claws scraped stone. Breath wheezed, ragged and hungry. The boy's heart pounded so hard he felt it in his teeth. He sprinted toward the nearest ruined column, boots slipping on dark stains.
Sixty seconds, they'd said.
Survive five monsters or sixty seconds.
Most candidates chose sixty seconds.
He hadn't lasted ten.
The shadow fell over him.
He turned.
The beast loomed a head taller than a grown man, all matted fur and exposed ribs, its spine arched with hooked bone spurs. Its eyes were pits of milky, rotting white—but it moved with a jagged, eager intent. A Sigil-bred thing. A failure of nature and an experiment of man.
It opened its maw. Rows of uneven teeth, cracked and stained, glistened with saliva.
The boy's legs gave up.
He fell backward, palms scraping rock. Fingers trembled as he raised a hand instinctively in front of his face.
"N–No, no, please, I—"
The beast's claws came down.
Pain exploded from his chest, hot and searing. He heard something crunch, something tear. His breath vanished in a gurgling choke. The arena blurred—stone, sky, beast, distant nobles watching with bored eyes—all of it smeared into streaks of gray.
He thought, dimly:
I… don't want… to…
His thoughts unraveled.
His heart shuddered.
Then stopped.
Silence swallowed him.
For one breathless moment, the world forgot he existed.
And in that empty space—
Something else moved.
Death was not unfamiliar to him.
Caelum remembered fire first.
Not the physical sensation of it—that had already been burned out of his nerves long ago—but the shape of it. The way it writhed along stone walls, eating tapestries, licking at black-armored bodies crumpled on the ground. The way it painted everything with reflected gold and red.
He remembered the war chamber's heavy doors twisted inward like paper.
He remembered the taste of blood in his mouth, hot and metallic, filling his throat.
He remembered the circle.
I drew it correctly, Caelum thought, distantly. I didn't make a mistake.
His own hand had moved slowly then, the bones already visible where flesh had burned away. Charred fingers tracing lines of ash and blood across the cracked floor. A circle. Seven intersecting runes. Twelve broken sigils. A forbidden pattern, pulled from records that were never meant to survive.
Reincarnation magic was not a gentle art.
It was theft. A forced stitch into a fabric that had already been woven.
"If I die here," he had murmured, voice raw, "I die to incompetents."
That, more than the flames consuming his lungs, was intolerable.
He'd pressed his ruined palm into the center of the circle.
The world had torn.
Pain like nothing he'd ever known had ripped him apart—not his body, but his mind, his memory, his self. Every thread of his soul had been pulled taut until he heard them sing like shrieking metal.
Then—
Nothing.
An endless, suffocating black.
No sound. No heat. No body. Just the faint echo of his own thought:
I refuse to lose to people with inferior minds.
The darkness… agreed.
Or perhaps it simply broke.
Something gave way. A seam in reality, a hairline fracture. Through it, his soul forced itself, dragging shattered memories and burned-out logic like a twisted, tangled net.
Then he felt it:
A pull.
A direction.
A gap.
There. A vacant thread in the tapestry of life, recently snapped. Nearby, in some other place, some other body.
A soul had just died.
A perfect opening.
Caelum did not hesitate. He latched onto the frayed end of that broken thread and forced himself through.
The boy's body lay sprawled in the dirt.
Blood pooled beneath him, dark and growing. The beast sniffed at his limp arm, jaw working as if deciding whether to keep playing or simply crush the skull and move on to the next candidate.
It never got the chance.
Reality… twitched.
Not enough for the watching instructors to notice. Not enough to stir alarm among the nobles. Just a tremor, like the air itself flinched.
A thin, translucent thread appeared over the corpse's chest. No one saw it. No one, except the thing forcing itself along it.
The thread pulsed.
Something slid down, a fractured mass of thought and burned will. It collided with the hollow where a soul had been and—
stitched.
Badly. Violently. Wrong.
Cracks ran along the boy's unseen soul-core like shattered glass. A Sigil, dim and weak, flickered beneath the damage—an almost useless support-type mark, barely awakened.
Then another mark pressed down over it.
Not a proper Sigil.
A scar.
A glitch.
Residual Thread.
For a heartbeat, both marks struggled for dominance.
Then the weak one snapped.
The Proto-Sigil sank its hooks into the broken soul and dragged it together, threads of foreign memory binding torn fragments of identity. The boy's emotions were swallowed, his hopes, his fears, his shame—
—consumed for fuel.
The beast reared back suddenly, claws digging into stone, as if something had shoved it away.
The corpse's fingers twitched.
Once.
Twice.
Then the boy who was no longer the boy gasped and inhaled air like someone remembering how to breathe.
The world slammed back in.
Sound came first—too loud, too messy, layered with screams and roars and the wet ripping of flesh somewhere nearby.
Then smell—blood and dirt and rotten fur and something chemical, acrid, burning in the distance.
Then pain—muted, distant, like it belonged to someone else.
Caelum opened his eyes.
Stone sky. Wrong color. Gray-black arena walls. Narrowing perspective. He realized, clinically, that he was lying flat on his back with a monster looming over him.
New environment. Unknown realm. Immediate threat within two meters. Body compromised.
His vision still wavered at the edges, but details sharpened with each second. He saw the beast's chest heave. Saw saliva drip from its uneven teeth. Saw the way its front left leg trembled slightly when it leaned too far forward.
Old injury. Weight imbalance.
Useful.
He tried to move his arm. It responded, sluggish but obedient. His fingers brushed against something cold near his side—a broken blade, half-buried in dirt.
Good.
He did not jerk. He did not flinch. To the beast's cloudy eyes, the boy beneath it was just another twitching corpse.
Caelum let his gaze go dull.
His heart beat slowly. Too slowly for panic. He felt it, heavy in his chest, out of sync with the new body.
This organism is weak, he observed, clinical. Malnourished. Undertrained. Sigil channels… restricted. This is not ideal.
The beast leaned in, sniffing his face.
Its breath was foul, a mixture of old meat and rot. Threads of drool dripped onto his cheek.
He didn't react.
Assess: he thought calmly. Muscle strength: low. Stamina: unknown, likely poor. Ribcage compromised? Internal damage minimal—healed during stitching. Proto-Sigil integration unstable. Reality warp detectable? Mild. Visible? Not yet.
The beast opened its jaw wider.
Its tongue lolled out, about to snap down around his face.
Now.
His hand flashed up.
The broken blade carved through soft flesh, opening the monster's throat in a single, efficient line. Warm liquid spilled over his arm. The beast reared back, choking, claws raking at its own neck.
Caelum rolled to the side, ignoring the way his body protested. His head spun. His lungs burned. The world lurched—threads and colors overlapping for a heartbeat, reality crackling like fabric under tension.
He pushed himself to his feet.
The beast staggered, blood pumping out in thick spurts. It fixated on him again, enraged, and lunged.
Too predictable.
Caelum stepped in instead of away, slipping past its arc with a movement that looked more like falling than footwork. The broken blade stabbed up, not at the chest or the head—the obvious, protected targets—but at the exposed junction between two ribs where the creature's armor plates shifted with its breath.
The point sank in.
Not deep. Not enough to kill.
Enough to make it scream.
He stepped back as it convulsed.
Yes. Good. Scream. Draw attention.
On the wall above, one of the proctors leaned forward slightly.
"Oh?" a voice murmured. "That one was dead a moment ago."
"Adrenaline surge," another replied. "Or a misread. It happens."
Caelum heard none of it.
The beast thrashed, slamming against a broken column. The impact sent cracks racing up the stone. Dust fell around them.
Caelum's heart pounded harder now, not from fear, but exertion. This body was weaker than his old one by magnitudes.
But it was alive.
Alive and—he could feel it now—connected to something immense.
The Sigil.
No, not the original one. That had been feeble, nearly useless. He could sense where it had been—like a worn-out brand on burnt flesh.
Over it, something else pulsed.
A mark that didn't belong.
His mark.
Residual Thread.
It hummed within his chest, not as a neatly defined symbol but as a coil of tangled lines, frayed and half-broken, trying to decide whether the soul it clung to should exist at all.
You will, Caelum told it, simply. Because I will.
He took a step toward the dying beast.
It tried to lunge again and collapsed instead, its front legs folding. Blood pooled beneath its shredded throat. Its eyes dimmed.
He could let it die.
He didn't.
He knelt beside it, ignoring the tremble in his legs, and placed his hand over the wound he'd made. Warm blood soaked into his skin.
The Proto-Sigil stirred.
A faint shimmer, invisible to human eyes, danced between his fingers and the beast's twisted flesh. Threads. Not fully formed, but present—fine, filament-like lines connecting his soul to the fading spark within the creature.
Caelum's lips curved slightly.
Interesting.
He pulled.
Not physically. Not with muscles or breath. He pulled with the same instinct he'd used to drag himself through the gap between life and death.
The beast convulsed once.
Something cold and wild slid along the invisible thread into him—rage and hunger and simple, animal panic. It crashed against his mind like a wave, threatening to drag his thoughts into feral madness.
He crushed it.
The Proto-Sigil drank.
The thread dissolved.
The beast went still.
In the stands, a proctor frowned.
"Heart stop," they muttered, marking something on a glowing slate. "Candidate thirty-eight. Confirmed kill."
Caelum exhaled slowly.
His own heartbeat steadied. His body ached less. The torn muscles felt… not healed, but supported. Reinforced. A thread at a time.
So that's how it is, he thought.
No glowing screens. No numbers. No neat steps of "Level Up."
Just a soul scratching at reality until it bled more power.
Inefficient.
Brutal.
Beautiful.
He wiped the blade on the beast's fur and straightened.
Shouts and screams still echoed across the arena. Other candidates ran, fought, or lay broken. One tried to climb the wall and was swatted down by a summoned beast. Light flashed in the distance as some noble-born unleashed an elemental Sigil far above what a commoner could dream of.
Caelum watched for a heartbeat.
Information: limited. Context: insufficient. Conclusion: I need data.
He lowered his gaze to his own hands.
Slim. Scarred. A faint, jagged mark circled his wrist, like someone had wrapped a thread too tightly there long ago and never loosened it.
His lips barely moved as he whispered, testing the new world's language.
"What… is the name of this place?"
The body's remaining memories rose sluggishly, like things dredged from mud.
Ashthorne.
Ashthorne Dominion Academy.
Syldros Empire.
Good, Caelum thought. An empire. Academies. Sigil system. Structured power.
He could work with this.
A roar snapped his attention back to the field.
Another beast—larger, plated in dark bone, its back ridged with spines—charged toward him. The exam wasn't finished. Time hadn't expired. He'd killed one monster.
He needed to survive five.
Or sixty seconds.
He glanced toward the central stone pillar where a clock was carved in glowing sigil-lines, counting down in steady ticks.
Fifty-four seconds remained.
He smiled faintly.
Sixty seconds is for people who plan to survive by chance, he thought.
I am not here by chance.
He tightened his grip on the broken blade, adjusted his stance to compensate for the body's weaknesses, and turned to meet the monster head-on.
Above, under the watchful gaze of nobles, instructors, and hidden powers—
Caelum Veylor took his first step in a new world.
And the faint, unseen threads of reality around him shivered in response.