I spent the first eight of my ten minutes doing something no villain should ever be caught doing.
Panicking.
Not the dramatic kind — not screaming or throwing things or collapsing against a wall. Cedric Valdrake's body apparently wasn't built for that. Even in the grip of existential terror, these shoulders refused to slump. This spine wouldn't curve. It was like wearing a suit of armor made of aristocratic posture, and the muscle memory was so deeply ingrained that my body defaulted to "regal disdain" the way a normal person's defaulted to "breathing."
No, my panic was the quiet kind. The kind that happened behind the eyes while the face stayed perfectly still. The kind where your mind ran calculations at a speed that felt physically dangerous, cycling through every scrap of information you had while the clock counted down to a dinner with one of the most dangerous men in a fictional world that had apparently decided to stop being fictional.
Seven minutes left.
I catalogued what I knew.
Duke Varen Valdrake. Head of House Valdrake. Cultivation rank: Monarch (A-rank). In raw power terms, that meant he could level a city block with a gesture and crush my current self the way a normal person crushed an ant — not with effort, but with the vague awareness that something small was in the way.
In the game, I'd seen his character model exactly four times. Twice in cutscenes. Once in a flashback. Once standing over Cedric's body in Route 3's bad ending, delivering a single line of dialogue that the fan wiki debated for years:
"Disappointing, but expected."
That was the man I was about to have dinner with.
Six minutes.
I moved through the bedroom — my bedroom, apparently — with the careful attention of someone defusing a bomb. Every object was a clue. Every detail was a data point.
The room was enormous. Cathedral ceilings. Dark wood paneling. A writing desk carved from something that looked like petrified shadow, its surface bare except for a quill set and a leather journal I didn't dare open yet. Bookshelves lined one wall, filled with texts in a language I could somehow read — a side effect of inhabiting Cedric's body, presumably. The titles were a mix of Aether theory, military history, and Valdrake family genealogy.
A wardrobe taller than me stood open, displaying rows of clothing in blacks, dark purples, and charcoal grays. Not a single bright color. Cedric Valdrake's aesthetic had apparently been "funeral attendee who outranks the deceased."
I dressed quickly, choosing based on game knowledge. In the dinner cutscene from Route 1, Cedric wore a high-collared black coat with silver buttons and the Valdrake crest — a circle of void swallowing a crown — embroidered over the heart. I found the exact coat. The game had gotten the buttons right. Twelve of them, each stamped with a tiny void sigil. I buttoned them with fingers that knew the motions better than I did.
Four minutes.
I stood before the mirror again.
The person staring back at me looked like a weapon someone had shaped into human form. Everything about Cedric's appearance was designed to intimidate: the angular features, the sharp jawline, the violet eyes that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. He was seventeen but looked older — the kind of face that had never been young because the family it belonged to didn't permit childhood.
Handsome, though. Objectively, uncomfortably handsome. The kind of handsome that made people either want to get closer or back away, depending on their survival instincts.
I adjusted the collar. Smoothed the coat. Watched the face in the mirror settle into its default expression — cold, composed, faintly contemptuous. As if the world was an inconvenience and I was graciously choosing not to end it.
Good. That was the mask. That was what Cedric looked like in every cutscene, every dialogue box, every piece of promotional art. I needed to be that.
Two minutes.
I took a breath. Held it. Let it go.
Forty-seven death flags. Duke Valdrake wasn't directly responsible for most of them, but his political machinations created the conditions for at least a dozen. He was the architect of a dozen schemes that all used Cedric as a pawn — a powerful, disposable pawn meant to provoke enemies, absorb threats, and die at the strategically optimal moment.
In three routes, Cedric's death benefited the Duke directly.
In two routes, the Duke ordered it personally.
In the remaining two, he simply didn't intervene when others came for his son.
Father of the year.
One minute.
I walked to the door. My hand closed around the handle — cool metal, ornate, shaped like a serpent eating its own tail. The Valdrake family apparently themed everything around ominous symbolism with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
I opened the door.
The maid was still there. She was young — maybe my age, maybe a year or two older — with brown hair pulled into a tight bun and the particular brand of terrified professionalism that came from working in a household where the walls had probably witnessed things that would make a horror novelist take notes.
"Young Master," she said, dipping into a curtsy. Her eyes stayed fixed on the floor. "Please follow me."
She didn't look at me. None of the servants we passed looked at me.
In the game, there was a loading screen tip about the Valdrake household: "The servants of House Valdrake are trained to serve in silence and see nothing. Those who fail to learn this lesson are not seen again."
I'd thought it was flavor text. A bit of world-building atmosphere. Walking through the actual hallways of the Valdrake estate, watching real people press themselves against walls as I passed, their faces blank with practiced invisibility — it didn't feel like flavor text anymore.
It felt like a warning.
The estate was exactly as the game had rendered it, and also nothing like it at all. The architecture was the same — vaulted corridors of dark stone, Void-sigil lanterns that burned with a light that was somehow darker than the shadows it cast, arched windows overlooking grounds that stretched to the horizon. But the game hadn't captured the weight of it. The way the stone seemed to hum with a frequency just below hearing. The way the air tasted like iron and something sharper — Void Aether, saturating the walls themselves after centuries of Valdrake habitation.
I felt it against my skin. A pressure. A presence. Like standing in the palm of a hand that could close at any moment.
The dining room was at the end of a corridor long enough to qualify as a psychological weapon in its own right. Double doors, black iron, each one fifteen feet tall and carved with scenes from Valdrake history — battles, conquests, and at the very center, a figure wreathed in void that held the world in its fist.
The maid stopped. Curtsied again. Gestured toward the doors without speaking and then retreated so quickly her footsteps barely made a sound.
I stood alone before the doors.
From behind them, I could feel something. Not a sound. Not a smell. A pressure. The ambient Aether in the hallway was being drawn inward, toward the room, toward the person inside — pulled like water circling a drain. This was what it felt like to stand near a Monarch-rank cultivator. The world literally bent around them.
I pushed the doors open.
The dining room could have seated fifty. Two places were set.
The table was obsidian — polished to a mirror sheen, long enough to land a small aircraft on, lit by three chandeliers that hung from the ceiling like constellations of trapped void-light. Silverware gleamed. Crystal glasses caught the dark light and split it into colors that didn't quite belong in the visible spectrum.
At the far end, alone, sat Duke Varen Valdrake.
The game had not done him justice.
He was tall even seated — broad-shouldered in a way that suggested power kept in reserve rather than displayed. His hair was the same midnight black as mine, but streaked at the temples with silver that looked less like aging and more like metal running through stone. His face was an older, harder version of the one I'd seen in my mirror — the same angular structure, the same violet eyes — but where Cedric's features had a sharp, youthful cruelty, the Duke's had been worn by decades of absolute authority into something that went beyond cruel.
His eyes were calm. Patient. The eyes of a man who had never, in his entire life, encountered something he couldn't control.
He was reading a document. He didn't look up when I entered. He didn't look up as I walked the length of the table — a walk that took approximately forty years, subjectively — and pulled out the chair at the near end, twelve feet of polished obsidian between us.
I sat.
He continued reading.
Three seconds. Five. Ten.
In the game, this scene was a simple dialogue exchange. Cedric sat down. The Duke asked about academy preparations. Cedric responded with arrogant confidence. The Duke expressed measured approval. End of scene. Maybe forty seconds of voice-acted dialogue with static character portraits.
In person, the silence was a weapon.
He was testing me. I knew that because I'd analyzed every interaction the Duke had in the game, dissecting his patterns the way you'd dissect a boss fight. Varen Valdrake never did anything without purpose. The silence was a measurement. He was gauging how long I could sit in the presence of a Monarch-rank aura without fidgeting, flinching, or trying to fill the void with words.
The original Cedric, at seventeen, could handle about fifteen seconds before speaking.
I sat in perfect stillness and counted to thirty.
At twenty-three seconds, something shifted in the Duke's expression. Not a smile — I was fairly certain those muscles had atrophied decades ago — but a microscopic loosening of the skin around his eyes. Interest. The kind of interest a wolf showed when a rabbit did something unexpected.
He set the document down.
"You look rested," he said.
His voice was exactly as the game portrayed it. Deep. Measured. Every syllable placed with the precision of a chess move. But the game's speakers hadn't captured the undertone — the hum of Void Aether that resonated in his words, not as an overt threat but as an ambient fact, the way gravity was a fact. You didn't threaten someone with gravity. You simply let them know it applied to them.
"I slept well, Father."
The word felt wrong in my mouth. Foreign. This man was not my father. My father was a ghost who left when I was twelve and sent birthday cards until I was fifteen and then stopped. That man didn't have violet eyes or the ability to reshape reality.
But Cedric would say "Father." Cedric would say it with precisely calibrated respect — enough to acknowledge authority, not enough to imply submission.
I said it exactly like that.
The Duke studied me. Violet eyes moved across my face with the attention of someone reading a ledger — checking each entry, confirming each sum. I held the gaze because Cedric would hold it, because a Valdrake didn't look away first, and because I was viscerally certain that showing weakness to this man was a death flag that wasn't even in the system's count.
"The academy term begins in three weeks," he said. "Your enrollment is confirmed. House Seraphel's girl will be attending as well. The Drakeveil boy, the Kaelthar second son, the Embercrown heiress. And several commoner entrants the Emperor insists on admitting as part of his 'equality initiative.'"
The way he said "equality initiative" carried so much quiet disdain that the words practically froze in the air. The Duke didn't hate commoners the way some nobles did — with passion, with ideology. He simply didn't consider them. They existed in a category below his notice, like weather.
"I'm aware," I said. "I've reviewed the enrollment lists."
A lie. I hadn't reviewed anything because I'd been alive in this body for approximately twenty minutes. But the Cedric of the game would have reviewed them — the original Cedric was obsessive about knowing his competition.
"Good." The Duke picked up his wine glass. The liquid inside was darker than any wine I'd seen — almost black, with a faint violet luminescence. Void-infused wine. Of course. "I expect Zenith tier within the first semester. Gold at minimum if the assessment is unfavorable."
In the game, Cedric started at Gold tier. But that was with a D-rank Aether Core.
I had an F-rank core. A shattered, barely functional, one-step-above-a-normal-human F-rank core that could generously be described as "still technically awakened."
If the Duke found out about that, I wasn't sure what would happen. The game never showed a scenario where Cedric was this weak. But I was fairly certain that a Valdrake heir who couldn't meet the family's minimum combat standards was a Valdrake heir who became... expendable.
"Zenith," I repeated, with exactly the amount of arrogant confidence that a Cedric who didn't know he was crippled would have. "Anything less would be an insult to the name."
Another loosening around the eyes. Not approval. Assessment. He was measuring the gap between my words and my capabilities, and right now he had no reason to doubt they matched. The original Cedric's arrogance was his most consistent trait. It was also the trait that got him killed in six out of seven routes.
But arrogance and confidence sounded identical when delivered correctly. The difference was that arrogant people believed their own words. I just needed the Duke to believe them.
"House Seraphel will position their daughter as a counter to you. Their rivalry with us predates both of you." He sipped the dark wine. "Don't be distracted by her. She's a tool of their house, nothing more."