Chapter 1

I died once.

That's not quite accurate. My body was crushed in the abyss, but my consciousness didn't scatter. The dark flame burned through the void for an entire night—or perhaps an instant; there's no time in the void—then dropped me back into my eighteen-year-old body. Not a near-death reversal. Death rewind. Twenty-four years of memory crammed into an eighteen-year-old's shell, like forcing a longsword back into a sheath that was never meant to hold it.

In the Ashen Guild, death isn't news. From the day I was adopted at six, old Moriarty had clamped the blood-oath collar around my neck and said: "Boy, your life belongs to the guild now." I didn't fully understand what that meant back then. It took me twelve years to figure it out—every mission, the collar took something from me. Not blood. Something more precious than blood. We called it "life oil."

My name is Sebastian Ash. The old king's bastard son, born to a whore who sang in a brothel and died in childbirth. I learned that when I was thirteen, when old Moriarty got drunk and pointed at my face and said: "You look like him."

I asked who, and he slapped me and told me to go practice my blades.

In the winter of my eighteenth year, I found Leonora in the back alleys of Silvermist City's east district.

It was raining, bone-cold. She was curled up beside a pile of garbage, her skirt caked in mud—but the fabric was double-layer wool from the northern border, and the embroidery on her cuffs was so fine you couldn't see the joins. That wasn't workmanship you could buy in the lower city. Blood seeped from below her collarbone; I would later learn that was a wound from a dragonbone shard implantation. She looked up at me, her eyes gray-green, like rain-soaked moss.

"Help me," she said.

I thought then that she was like me—someone thrown away in the garbage.

But I was born in a garbage heap. She was placed on one to be picked up.

The difference wasn't in origin—it was that she'd known the difference from the start, and it took me three years to understand.

During those three years, I took the most dangerous jobs in the guild for her. Each time the blood-oath collar activated, another chunk of my lifespan burned away. Old Moriarty called me insane; Gareth just laughed and said, "Bro, take a break. That woman's not gilded." I didn't listen to him. What did Gareth know? He couldn't even hold a blade—fainted at the sight of blood. All he could do was run errands for nobles for a few coppers. He wouldn't understand that feeling—having someone care for you, even just a little.

Leonora would wait at the guild gate after my missions, holding a cup of hot tea. She would sit quietly beside me when I didn't feel like talking. Back then I thought that was tenderness. Later I learned she was just calculating—how much longer could this bastard still be useful?

In late autumn of my twenty-fourth year, I returned from the southern border, covered in wounds and carrying a fire-attribute magic core. That core could sell for three thousand gold—enough for her to buy a proper dress for Silvermist City's high society season. I pushed open the door and heard voices from upstairs.

Leonora was laughing.

The kind of laugh I'd never heard from her—not soft, not gentle, but wild and triumphant. Gareth's voice was mixed in: "You've written it too harshly. 'Like a dog that's been kicked too many times'—if he sees that, he'll lose his mind."

"He won't see it," Leonora said. "Once the premiere is over, he's useless."

Gareth added: "What if he finds out I was the one behind it from the start—"

"He never knew from beginning to end," Leonora cut him off. "He thought he was the rescuer. Fool."

I stood at the stairwell landing, still clutching the magic core. Gareth's smile froze for only an instant. Then he stepped back, his hand moving to his waist—where a signal bell hung, the guild's standard-issue contact for peripheral informants. He'd been ready for this. Not in case I caught him—but for this day. No matter when I found out, all he had to do was press that bell, and the enforcers hidden around the corner would break down the door within three minutes.

I put the magic core in my pocket and pushed the door open.

Both their faces went pale at the same time. A journal lay open on the table. I flipped to the first page. The date was from three years ago, on that rainy night.

"Today, the bastard took the bait."

The pages that followed covered three years. Every entry was a variation on the same theme: how pathetic he was, how clever she was, how ridiculous this relationship was. She wrote about how my hands trembled the first time I held hers—"like a dog that's been kicked too many times, wagging its tail at the slightest touch." She wrote all this while I was in the next room, sharpening my blades.

The Ashen Guild's enforcers arrived quickly. The blood-oath collar wasn't just a restraint—it was also the guild's enforcement tool. Old Moriarty only needed to utter a single incantation, and the collar would tighten, severing the wearer's magical circuits. From the moment the enforcers broke down the door, I had no way to fight back. Gareth chose the day I returned from a mission to report me because only on that day would I have a magic core in hand, and the blood-oath collar wouldn't have been reset by the cooldown period after activation. Timing, location, evidence—he'd calculated everything.

The guild's rules were simple: traitors die. Embezzling mission loot counts as treason. Collusion with outside forces counts as treason. Attempting to remove the blood-oath collar also counts as treason. If any one of these three charges stuck, the execution platform would have a place for you. Gareth's chosen breach was embezzlement—that magic core, placed in a velvet-lined wooden box, was found in Leonora's dressing table's second drawer. In my past life, I had never opened that drawer; she'd said it held her mother's keepsakes. When the enforcers opened it, I stood beside her. The core's dark red glow reflected off her pearl necklaces, beautiful as an exhibit long prepared.

Witness, evidence, journal—three things stacked together. Even if old Moriarty had doubts, he still had to deal with me.

The holding cell was three floors underground. When Leonora came, the lamplight stretched her shadow long.

"I need a villain," she said, her tone flat as if reading lines. "No background, no backing, no one to care. You were the most suitable choice."

"The crown prince loves stories—especially ones adapted from real lives." Her voice was soft. "Gareth has already written a draft of the first three acts. His Highness read it and said that if the ending was spectacular enough, he would attend the premiere in person. After that, I would be a guest of the royal court—no longer just a fallen noble from the northern border."

Gareth stood at the door, holding a lantern. As always, he never got close to anything dangerous. But he dared to write letters in the shadows, arrange everything in corners where the lamplight couldn't reach. His hands couldn't hold a blade, but they never trembled when holding a pen.

"The premiere is tomorrow night. You're the sacrificial lamb."

The executioner carved out my magic core. The core was placed in a crystal bottle and handed to Leonora. Her fingers didn't tremble when she took it. Gareth stood behind her, a smile on his lips.

Then I fell into the abyss.

It was like hell itself—nothing but endless pain and void.

I refused to die there.

When I opened my eyes again, rain was hitting my face.

The back alley of Silvermist City's east district, beside the garbage heap. The bell tower rang seven times. A voice came from behind me.

"Help me."

I didn't turn around. I stood up, brushed the mud off my clothes, and walked toward the alley's mouth. The voice came again, with a tremor and just the right amount of tears.

I pushed open the iron gate at the alley's entrance.

The gate closed behind me.

I didn't look back.