He woke up before the bell.
That was the first sign something had changed. Baek Cheon's body had a history — Junho could feel it in the muscle memory, the old habits, the way the joints moved. This body was used to dragging itself out of bed at the last possible moment.
But the mana wouldn't let him sleep.
It moved through his circuits like cold water through clean pipes. Steady. Unobstructed. Completely unlike the damaged, stuttering flow he'd inherited from Baek Cheon's original condition.
He sat up, pressed two fingers to his inner wrist, and felt it pulse.
The potion had worked. Completely.
He stood up and rolled his shoulders.
Alright. Fine. He was fixed. Now the real problem.
The Azure Heaven Style was the official martial art of the Academy.
Junho knew it well. He'd spent approximately forty minutes in Chapter 3 complaining about it in his review thread.
The author clearly designed the forms to look impressive in illustrated panels. The wide stances, the dramatic overhead swings, the spinning heel kicks. Very cool aesthetically. Completely suicidal against anyone who's ever heard of a low center of gravity.
He ran through the first sequence in the small space beside his bed.
Stance. Sweep. Rising cut. Pivot.
His body knew the movements. Baek Cheon had drilled them for years. But now that his mana was actually flowing correctly, Junho could feel exactly how wrong they were.
The pivot left his right side open for three full seconds.
Three seconds. In a real fight. Against anyone competent.
The author had designed a martial art around looking good in slow motion.
Junho stopped mid-form. He stood still for a moment. Then he shifted his weight, shortened the pivot to one second, and redirected the follow-through into something that actually covered the gap.
Better. Not perfect. But better.
He ran it again with the adjustment.
Then again.
By the time the morning bell rang, he had "edited" seven of the first twelve movements. Nothing dramatic. No sudden genius. Just eleven years of reading fight scene critiques finally having a body to work with.
He picked up his instructor's badge from the desk.
Time to teach a class he'd once described as "a masterclass in wasted potential."
The training grounds were loud.
Forty students in blue uniforms, all running drills, and in the middle of them, moving like the world had arranged itself around him specifically —
Han Soyeol.
Junho stopped walking.
He'd known this moment was coming. He'd prepared for it mentally. He'd reminded himself, twice, that the protagonist was a fictional construct designed by a lazy author to fulfill a power fantasy.
It didn't help.
The kid was annoyingly, aggressively, almost personally perfect.
Tall. Sharp-featured. Dark hair that moved correctly in the morning breeze. The kind of handsome that didn't look like it was trying. His uniform was somehow both regulation-standard and slightly more flattering than everyone else's, which made no physical sense.
He was running a basic drill, and the students around him had slowed down to watch without realizing they were doing it.
Main character gravity. Junho had complained about this exact phenomenon in Volume 2.
"The author constantly describes other characters being inexplicably drawn to the protagonist without establishing why. It's lazy. It's a cheat. Real charisma is earned through action, not through the narrative simply asserting it exists."
He still believed that.
It was just harder to believe while watching it happen in front of him.
Soyeol finished the drill and transitioned, smoothly, into the Azure Heaven Style's third sequence.
The students stopped. Actually stopped. Someone started clapping.
Junho watched the sequence with his arms crossed.
He saw the wide stance telegraph the follow-up.
He saw the overextended leading arm that should have left the shoulder exposed.
He saw the showy aerial finish that served absolutely no combat purpose and would get anyone killed against a second opponent.
And then the world bent.
That was the only way to describe it. The technique should have looked sloppy at three key moments. Instead, the light caught Soyeol's blade at a perfect angle each time. The wind — actual wind — pulled his hair back dramatically on the landing. Two students who had been mid-conversation turned and fell silent at exactly the right moment to witness the finish.
Junho's eye twitched.
The author's physics were protecting him. The world itself was making the protagonist look good.
"Instructor Baek."
Soyeol had turned and spotted him. He bowed, politely, with exactly the right amount of deference. Humble without being servile. Respectful without being sycophantic.
The author had done that on purpose. He'd written a protagonist that was impossible to reasonably dislike.
"You practice early," Junho said flatly.
"I couldn't sleep," Soyeol said. He smiled. It was an irritatingly genuine smile. "There's a lot I still need to improve."
There it was. The false modesty. The protagonist always said things like that. Always framed themselves as the underdog, always acted like they were struggling, while the plot quietly ensured every struggle resolved in their favor.
Soyeol's background: orphan, low-grade mana circuits, no family connections, self-taught.
What the author had actually given him: protagonist intuition that let him master techniques in days instead of months, a hidden bloodline that hadn't activated yet but would at the most convenient possible moment, and a narrative contract with the universe ensuring that every setback was temporary and instructional.
The underdog status was a costume. He'd been born in plot armor.
"Lots to improve," Junho agreed, and walked past him to the front of the grounds.
He taught the class. He corrected stances. He demonstrated adjustments that weren't in the official curriculum because the official curriculum was poorly designed by an author who'd never held a sword.
He caught Soyeol watching him with an expression like someone trying to solve a puzzle.
He ignored it.
He had somewhere to be after this.
The East Courtyard wasn't really a courtyard anymore.
It had been one, once. Now it was a neglected square of overgrown ground behind the Academy's oldest storage building. Cracked stone tiles. Weeds coming up between them. A half-dead tree in the corner dropping leaves into a dry basin that used to be a fountain.
Nobody came here. The author had used it once, in Chapter 12, as a backdrop for a moping scene.
"Soyeol sat alone in the abandoned courtyard, resting on a rusted metal rod half-buried in the earth, staring at the sky and wondering if he was strong enough."
That was it. That was the entire description.
1,488 chapters later, in a flashback, a dying elder character had said: "The Rusty Branch of the World Tree. Last seen in the Azure Heaven Academy. The only weapon capable of channeling the Void Flame technique at full capacity. Lost for centuries."
The author had not connected these two scenes.
The author had the legendary precursor weapon to the most powerful technique in the story's final arc sitting in an abandoned courtyard as a prop for a brooding scene, and had apparently forgotten he'd put it there.
Junho had lost his mind about it in a 3 AM post that now had 47,000 upvotes.
He found it in under two minutes.
It was exactly as described. A rusted rod, about the length of a short sword, jutting out of the earth at an angle near the dead tree. Completely unremarkable. The rust was thick. It looked like refuse.
He crouched down next to it.
"Hey."
He didn't turn around.
A student. Young. Confident in the way that meant they'd never been properly corrected. He could hear it in the single syllable.
"This area is reserved," the student said. "Senior students only. You should—"
"Yun Pil," Junho said.
Pause. "...How did you know my name?"
Because you appear in Chapter 11 as the first person to bully Soyeol publicly. Because the author introduces you as a recurring obstacle and then forgets you exist by Chapter 30. Because you have a pressure point at the junction of your right shoulder and neck that Junho had read about in Chapter 156, when a much later character used it in a fight scene and the author explained the mechanics in a footnote.
"Instructor," Junho said instead.
He stood up, still not turning around, reached back without looking, and pressed two fingers to exactly the right spot on Yun Pil's shoulder.
Yun Pil made a very small sound and sat down on the ground.
Not dramatically. Not violently. His legs just stopped working for a moment and he sat, looking confused, like a puppet whose strings had been briefly gathered together.
"This area is for faculty," Junho said, still not looking at him. "Go somewhere else."
Yun Pil went somewhere else. Quickly. With the energy of someone who was going to spend the rest of the day pretending that hadn't happened.
Junho crouched back down.
He worked the rod loose from the dirt slowly. It came free with a dull resistance, packed earth releasing it reluctantly. The rust didn't flake the way old iron should have. Underneath it, barely visible, the surface had a grain to it. A texture.
Not metal.
Wood. Old enough to look like metal. Dense enough to be mistaken for iron.
The World Tree Branch. Sitting in the dirt. For twelve chapters. Used as a bench.
He stood up, holding it at his side.
Soyeol was supposed to find this in Chapter 1,500 during a vision quest. The discovery was supposed to be the emotional turning point of the final arc. The author had written six chapters of buildup around that moment.
Junho was holding it on Day 2.
The final arc's emotional climax was currently covered in dirt in his hand.
The Hero's "destined" weapon was gone.
He didn't laugh. He wasn't the laughing type.
But standing in the overgrown courtyard, holding a legendary relic that the plot had completely forgotten to protect, he felt something loosen in his chest that had been tight since he'd woken up in this world.
Spite.
Clean, honest, productive spite.
He tucked the Branch under his arm and walked back toward his quarters.
He had ten days left before the Proving Ceremony.
He was already so far off-script that the author's ghost was probably having a breakdown somewhere.
Good.