Inspector Vane stood at the foot of the bed, her posture rigid and her eyes narrowing into cold, calculating slits.
She had interrogated rogue hunters, black-market artifact smugglers, and guild masters who thought their wealth placed them above the law.
She knew how to break a suspect. She knew how to find the crack in a person's facade and hammer it until the truth spilled out.
But the man lying in the bed wasn't giving her a facade. There was no defiance in his posture, no nervous twitch in his fingers, and no rapid pulse visible in the pale skin of his throat.
He just looked at her with the dull, unfocused gaze of someone waiting for a slow clock to tick.
"You were tired," Vane repeated, her voice dripping with a dangerous incredulity. "That is your official statement for the Association records?"
"Yes," Lucian said.
Vane's jaw tightened. She reached into her core and released a fraction of her mana. It wasn't an attack, but a localized pressure drop, a psychological tactic used to suffocate the bravado out of uncooperative witnesses.
The air in the medical suite instantly grew heavy. The holographic display on the desk flickered, and the ambient temperature dropped.
To a normal civilian, or even a low-ranking hunter, the pressure would feel like an invisible hand wrapping around their lungs.
Lucian didn't even blink.
In his previous lives, he had stood at the epicenter of mana-storms that leveled entire continents. He had faced the crushing, divine aura of beings that could extinguish stars.
Inspector Vane's attempt at intimidation felt like a slightly cool draft blowing through an open crack in a window.
"You think this is a joke, Mr. Thorne?" Vane stepped closer, her mana flaring slightly higher.
The glass of water on the nightstand vibrated, sending tiny ripples across the surface.
"A Class-A drone malfunctioned. We are investigating potential sabotage, and you are sitting there acting as if you missed a bus. If you used a suppression artifact to mask your reaction, or if you staged this to clear your ruined reputation—"
"I didn't," Lucian interrupted. His voice was completely devoid of defensive heat. "I don't care about my reputation. Or the drone. You can write whatever you want in your report. Just finish it."
Vane stared at him, her frustration mounting. She pulled up her datapad, tapping a few commands to initiate a deep-tissue mana scan.
A fan of blue light swept over the bed, reading the flow of energy within Lucian's body. She waited for the results to process, expecting to find the jagged, erratic spikes of a man suppressing a massive lie, or the artificial void of a cloaking device.
The datapad chimed. Vane looked at the screen, her brow furrowing in deep confusion.
The reading was completely flat. It wasn't the artificial absence created by a machine, it was the stagnant, dead stillness of a lake that had dried up decades ago.
There was no suppressed energy. There was no fear. There was no physiological reaction at all.
"This is impossible," Vane muttered to herself, tapping the screen to recalibrate the scanner. The result was exactly the same. The man in front of her was physically alive, but his mana signature read like a corpse.
She looked back up at Lucian. He had already turned his head away, his eyes fixed on the gray sky outside the window, waiting for her to cease existing in his space.
A cold, unsettling shiver ran down Vane's spine. The anger drained out of her, replaced by the instinctual wariness of a hunter encountering something fundamentally unnatural.
"I am marking this interview as incomplete due to the psychological state of the subject,"
Vane said, her voice entirely stripped of its previous authority. She backed away toward the door.
"Do not leave the city, Mr. Thorne."
Lucian didn't answer. The door hissed open, and the Inspector practically fled the room, the heavy, oppressive silence rushing back in to fill the space she left behind.
Lucian let out a slow breath. He closed his eyes, preparing to sink back into the heavy, dreamless sleep he had been cultivating.
The mattress was soft, the room was quiet, and he had successfully bored the law enforcement away.
But the silence only lasted for ten minutes.
The door chime buzzed again, followed by the soft sound of the lock disengaging.
Lucian kept his eyes closed, assuming Hans had returned to deliver a lecture or another tray of terrible food.
"Leave the tray on the desk, Hans," Lucian murmured.
"I am not Hans," a voice replied.
The voice was melodic, refined, and laced with a delicate, practiced superiority. Along with it came the scent of expensive floral perfume, a sharp, sweet smell that immediately invaded the sterile air of the medical suite.
Lucian opened his eyes.
Standing at the foot of his bed was Lady Seraphina. She was the picture of aristocratic perfection.
Her golden hair was styled in immaculate, flowing waves, and her dress was woven from silk that shimmered with faint, protective enchantments.
She looked entirely out of place in the dark, quiet room, like a bright, intrusive light shone directly into a sleeping eye.
Hans hovered in the doorway behind her, his face a picture of absolute misery
.
"Young Master," Hans said softly, avoiding Lucian's gaze. "The Marquis... he explicitly ordered me to permit Lady Seraphina entry. He insisted it was necessary for your recovery."
The Marquis was playing a desperate hand. He couldn't understand Lucian's apathy, so he had sent the one person who used to make the original Lucian fly into violent, obsessive rages.
He was hoping to shock his son's system, to reignite the fire of the "Trash" just to prove the boy was still alive inside.
"Close the door, Hans," Lucian said.
The butler bowed and retreated, the heavy door sealing shut behind him.
Seraphina stood tall, her hands clasped elegantly in front of her. She looked at the bandages on his shoulder, the pale, sickly tone of his skin, and the dullness in his eyes.
She took a deep breath, clearly preparing a speech she had rehearsed in the carriage ride over.
"Lucian," Seraphina began, her tone a perfect mixture of pity and firm boundary-setting.
"Your father requested that I come. He told me about the accident in the training hall. About how you threw yourself in front of a drone to save your sister. And while that was... surprisingly noble of you, it does not change anything."
Lucian didn't sit up. He just looked at her, his face a blank mask.
"I heard the rumors," Seraphina continued, taking a step closer. "The servants say you haven't spoken above a whisper in days. They say you are starving yourself, that you sit in the dark, and that your mind has cracked. I know why you are doing this. I know you are trying to make me feel guilty for returning the engagement gifts and ending our arrangement."
As she spoke, her voice became background noise. Lucian closed his eyes again, not out of pain, but because he was sifting through the mental archives of the body he now inhabited. He dove into the original Lucian Thorne's memories, searching for the deep, agonizing heartbreak Seraphina was so convinced she had caused.
He found the memories of the jewelry purchases. He found the memories of the loud, drunken toasts made in her name.
He found the nights spent screaming at the servants when she didn't reply to a message.
But as he dug deeper, past the alcohol and the tantrums, he hit the core of the emotion.
There was no love there. Not a single drop.
The original Lucian didn't care about the golden hair or the melodic voice.
He didn't care about her personality or her family's prestige. Every artifact bought, every embarrassing public display of affection, every violent outburst in her name, it was all a performance directed at an audience of one.
The Marquis or rather his own father.
The original Lucian had been a desperate, pathetic child screaming in an empty room. He bought the twelve crates of engagement gifts not to win a bride, but to see if his father would care enough to stop him from ruining the family treasury.
He acted like a obsessed tyrant to force his father to look at him, to discipline him, to show any sign of parental engagement other than cold disappointment.
Seraphina wasn't a lost love, she was just a prop in a tragic, failed play for a father's attention.
A play that had ended with the son throwing himself out a window when he realized the audience had walked out of the theater long ago.
The sheer, staggering absurdity of it hit Lucian all at once.
In the middle of Seraphina's speech about how he needed to "find the strength to move on," a sound broke from Lucian's throat.
"Ha... hahaha.."
It started as a low, raspy exhale, and then it bubbled up into something else. He laughed. It wasn't a warm, happy sound. It was dark, sudden, and completely devoid of joy. It was the sound of a man finding a terrible, bitter joke hidden at the bottom of a grave.
"Hahaha... Hahaha hahaha!!"
Seraphina stopped mid-sentence, her eyes widening in shock. She took a step back, the perfectly rehearsed pity vanishing from her face.
"You're laughing?" she asked, her voice trembling slightly.
"I am telling you that our future is over, that you are destroying yourself for nothing, and you laugh?"
Lucian stopped. The dark amusement lingered on his face, twisting the corner of his mouth into a cold, hollow smirk. It was the first genuine expression he had made since waking up in this body, and it was entirely unsettling.
"You think this is about you," Lucian said, his voice scratching against the silence of the room.
"Of course it is," Seraphina stammered, her confidence cracking. "You bought out the entire auction house for me. You fought your brother over my honor. You—"
"I didn't care," Lucian stated, cutting her off. The smirk remained, a cruel, sharp thing on his pale face. "I never loved you. I never even liked you."
Seraphina froze. Her ego, built on a lifetime of being desired and admired, violently rejected the words.
"That's a lie. You're just saying that because your pride is hurt. You threw yourself out a window because I left!"
"I threw myself out a window because I was bored of the noise," Lucian corrected her, his voice dropping back to that terrifying, flat register.
"You were just a prop. A really expensive, really loud prop. I bought those gifts to make my father angry. I chased you to make my father look at me. You were nothing but a tool to test the limits of a man who didn't care."
Seraphina's breath hitched. She stared at the man in the bed, searching his face for the lie. She looked for the bitter resentment of a rejected lover. She looked for the desperate anger of a man trying to save face.
She found absolutely nothing.
The absolute certainty in his dull, golden eyes stripped away her vanity in a single second. He wasn't lying. He genuinely did not care about her. The realization was devastating, not because she loved him, but because she had believed she held the power to destroy him.
"If... if not for me," Seraphina whispered, a genuine, creeping fear bleeding into her voice as she looked at the empty shell of the man before her.
"Then why... why are you like this? What happened to you?"
Lucian looked at her terrified face. The dark amusement vanished in an instant, wiped away as if it had never existed. The smirk fell, the energy drained from his posture, and the heavy, crushing apathy returned to his features.
The brief flicker of life was gone.
He turned his head away from her, his gaze settling back onto the gray sky outside the window.
"...Close the door on your way out," Lucian said.
He didn't look back. He didn't say another word. He simply withdrew his presence from the room, leaving her standing there in the cold, echoing silence.
Seraphina stood frozen for a few seconds, her heart hammering against her ribs. The man in the bed wasn't heartbroken. He wasn't angry. He was just a void.
And standing near a void was the most terrifying thing she had ever experienced.
She turned on her heel, her silk dress rustling frantically, and practically ran for the door. She didn't look back as she pulled it open and fled into the hallway, desperate to escape the suffocating emptiness of Lucian Thorne's room.
When the lock clicked shut, the silence settled back over the bed. Lucian exhaled, closing his eyes, and finally went back to sleep.