The elixir arrived steaming in a white bowl.
Helen transferred it to Sylvia with the practiced economy of someone who had learned which tasks required her full attention and which did not. Sylvia accepted it and began cooling it with small, careful breaths, her eyes on Raon, who was producing the slow, rhythmic sounds of someone deeply asleep.
He was not asleep.
"Do you think it will be difficult to get him to take it?"
"Children detest bitter things, milady." Helen folded her hands. "You disliked bitter medicine yourself, when you were young."
"I did?"
"You may not remember. There was a period where you ran away rather than take it."
"Helen — Raon is right there."
"Haha."
They glanced down at him. He maintained his breathing pattern without variation.
"No child likes medicine. And Raon is so young." Sylvia's voice softened with the particular quality it took on when she was preparing herself for something she found difficult. "He will hate it even more."
"But milady—"
"I know." She straightened. "He must take it."
This is an elixir from Uncle. Not a single drop can be wasted.
Patrick had returned to the annexe some days after her confrontation with Glenn — quietly, without announcement, as was his nature — and left three elixirs of fire property without making her ask for them twice. She had been diluting them carefully, measuring each dose against what Patrick had described as the appropriate concentration for a child's constitution. They would last some time. Longer, if she was careful.
She would find more when these ran out. She had already begun making inquiries.
"Raon."
She smoothed his hair back from his forehead, gently, not wanting to startle him into waking.
"Nghh…"
He flexed his fingers and opened his eyes.
"Did you sleep well?"
"Ah-ooh-nghh."
"There is something you must do every day from now on, Raon." She lifted the small wooden spoon. "You must drink all of this."
He will drink it. Then he will cry.
It was a child's instinct to accept what was placed in their mouth. What followed was invariably less cooperative. She braced for the expression, the tears, the small mouth twisting away from the spoon.
"Let's drink."
She poured the elixir past his lips carefully, watching to make sure none escaped.
"Ooh-aah…"
His face crumpled. She watched him and waited for what came next.
What came next was silence.
His expression remained compressed — brows drawn, eyes narrowed against the bitterness — but no sound followed. And then his hands rose, small and unsteady, and began moving in the air with unmistakable intent.
More.
"Helen—"
"Young master appears to be asking for more, milady."
"That's what I thought too. Is that — Raon, is that correct?"
She picked up the spoon again and loaded it more generously than before. His mouth opened to receive it.
"Ooh-ooh!"
His eyebrows climbed. His hands moved faster.
Sylvia's lips parted without sound.
"Do you think he understands?"
"He must." Helen's voice had taken on an unsteady quality. "He can see that you need him to drink it, milady. He's enduring it for you."
The bitterness was visible in every line of his small face. And he was asking for more anyway.
"Raon—"
She gathered him up before she finished saying his name.
Just give me the medicine. Faster.
Raon moved his hand against Sylvia's shoulder in what he intended as a signal for her to continue. She interpreted it as an embrace and tightened her arms around him.
Even if it is bitter, this is nothing.
It was bitter. It was also hot enough that the tip of his tongue had gone somewhat numb. Neither of these facts were worth the attention he might have given them. The elixir was exactly what he needed — fire property, appropriately diluted for a child's constitution, arriving on a daily schedule. To treat this as anything other than an exceptional opportunity would be wasteful in a way he found genuinely difficult to tolerate.
The moment it reached his stomach, a blast of heat ignited there and began moving outward through his mana circuit, pressing against the cold concentrations with the blunt, patient force of something that understood it had time.
The dilution is right.
Too concentrated and the heat would have been damaging rather than useful — a child's mana circuit lacked the structural integrity to process a full-strength fire elixir without consequence. Sylvia and Helen had calibrated it correctly, either through Patrick's instruction or their own careful observation. Either way, the result was effective.
He gave a small burp after the spoon was empty and licked the residue from it before closing his eyes.
"Milady."
"Yes. Let's leave him."
Their footsteps receded. The door closed.
He waited for the count of thirty.
"Whew."
He opened his eyes.
They won't return soon.
There was no reason for them to. He had been fed and given his medicine. The logic of caring for an infant dictated that sleep was now the expected outcome and that disturbing it would be counterproductive. He had perhaps two hours, possibly more.
He drew the warmth still moving through his body forward and turned his attention inward.
With the elixir's help, the Ring of Fire will progress faster.
The thought arrived with something that was not quite a smile — his face was too young and too uncooperative for the precise expression he intended — but that occupied the same interior space.
Time, in the way of things that are measured only by their accumulation, passed.
Two and a half years of it.
His daily routine had settled into a pattern that he had optimized through iteration. Morning: Sylvia and Helen. Afternoon: the elixir, feigned sleep, practice. Midnight: the second session, conducted in genuine silence, everyone else unconscious.
It was, by any objective measure, more disciplined than the schedule of most adults he had known. The fact that the body executing this schedule was currently the size of a moderately large cat did not change the assessment.
If conditions hold, One-Star should be achievable today.
The elixir had been the difference. Without it, the cold in his mana circuit would have slowed his progress to a crawl. With it, each session had produced measurable advancement — the concentrations of cold giving ground incrementally, the Ring of Fire's pattern stabilizing with each repetition.
Glenn still hasn't appeared.
The observation surfaced without particular weight. Glenn Zieghart had given him his name and left. In the weeks and months since, there had been no visit, no inquiry, no indication that the head of House Zieghart was aware that the annexe building continued to exist. It was consistent with everything Raon had understood about the man before arriving here.
It doesn't matter.
His plan had not changed. Take what Zieghart offered — the environment, the resources, eventually the swordsmanship techniques stored somewhere in the clan's archives — and leave when the time was right. The only variables were timeline and method.
But it is a little…
He examined the thought carefully, the way he would examine anything unfamiliar.
Three years was a long time to spend in close proximity to people who treated him as something other than a tool. Sylvia. Helen. The maids whose names he had learned and whose habits he had catalogued not because they were useful intelligence but because they were simply people he now knew. Something had accumulated in the space between them and him, small and unasked-for and increasingly difficult to treat as irrelevant.
He recognized this as a complication. He was not yet certain what to do with it.
"Raon, say Mommy!"
Sylvia swept him up with the cheerful unpredictability that had proven, over time, to be her dominant characteristic. Her eyes were already bright with anticipation.
"Maam!"
"One more time!"
"Mama!"
"Aaah!"
When he produced the syllables in a form that satisfied her, her face achieved an expression that he had never seen directed at himself in his previous life and that he had no adequate prior framework for categorizing. Her eyes softened entirely. The brightness in them became something different — warmer, less energetic, more settled.
"Just once more!"
"Mama!"
"Milady, I've brought the medicine."
Helen arrived with the elixir before Sylvia could request a fourth repetition. Raon noted this with something adjacent to gratitude.
"Oh, thank you."
Sylvia accepted the bowl, cooled it, and offered the first spoon.
"Ah-mmf!"
He leaned forward to meet it.
"Look at you!"
They smiled at each other over his head. He swallowed the elixir without ceremony and blinked his eyes in the slow, weighted pattern he had developed for indicating drowsiness.
"Nap time, then?"
"Mhm."
"Alright. Sleep well."
Sylvia settled him on the bed facing the window and patted his stomach with her palm — three beats, slow, the same rhythm every time. He had come to recognize it as a closing signal.
He listened to her and Helen leave. He listened to the corridor settle.
Now.
He closed his eyes and began.
The mana entered with his breath and moved through him in thin, careful lines.
The flow is smooth.
Smoother than yesterday. The elixir's warmth was still present in his mana circuit, and the cold concentrations had been fractionally reduced by the previous session's work. The conditions were better than they had been at any previous point.
Don't rush.
He exhaled and held the mana's movement steady. His lungs were small. The capacity they offered was limited, and exceeding it produced a trembling in his fingertips that disrupted the precision the Ring of Fire required. He had learned this boundary through repeated encounter and now worked within it without resentment.
He shaped the elixir's warmth into something narrow and drove it against the nearest cold concentration. The mana from nature followed alongside it, the two forces working in the pattern the Ring of Fire prescribed — not fighting the cold, but incorporating it, drawing it into the circuit's flow and letting it move with everything else.
The cold gave ground.
He continued.
Calm. Steady.
Crackle.
He felt the combined energy reach his bones and move through them — through muscle, through skin, through every layer of the body he had been given and was learning to use effectively. The sensation was different from aura. More diffuse. Less directed. But real, and growing.
His focus had the quality of a blade that had been sharpened past the point where you could see the edge and could only determine its condition by what it cut.
He maintained it.
Time passed in the way that time passed during genuine practice — not slowly and not quickly, but with the density of something that was being used rather than endured.
And then—
Flash.
A burning sensation detonated in his chest. Not painful — the opposite of painful, if there was a word for that. It traveled outward from his heart in a ring, warm and definitive, and then settled into a steady rotation.
The first Ring of Fire had closed.
It's finally—
Gold light.
Ding.
The first
He nearly opened his eyes.
The light hung in front of him with the quality of a sorcerer's magic circle — structured, deliberate, clearly legible. More text followed beneath the first line.
Your body has become a little stronger with the effect of
What is this.
He read it twice. Then a third time.
His body did feel lighter — not dramatically, the change was calibrated to what a child's frame could accommodate, but the difference was measurable. The chronic, low-level ache from the cold concentrations had diminished perceptibly.
The Ring of Fire didn't do this in my past life.
He was certain of that. One-Star had produced no physical effect in his previous life. The technique's benefits only became tangible at Three-Star, and only became significant at Four. The gap between what he remembered and what he was currently experiencing was not a small one.
The elixir? The child's body? Or this message itself?
He examined the question from multiple angles and arrived at no conclusion. He would need more data.
"Young master! You're awake already."
Helen's voice. She had returned while he was processing the notification — he had lost track of time in a way that his previous self would have found professionally unacceptable.
"Hewen! Wook at tis!"
He pointed at the floating text.
"Yes? The bed?"
She could not see it. He had suspected this but now had confirmation. The light was visible only to him — personal, internal, like memory or intention.
Please check the
Status Window.
He formed the words in his mind without speaking them aloud. A second display appeared alongside the first.
Name: Raon Zieghart
Title: None
State: Curse of Frost (Nine Strands), Poor Stamina, Cold Body, Decline in Athletic Ability, Decline in Mana Affinity.
*Additional Abilities have not been unlocked.
He read through it carefully.
So that's the full accounting.
The Curse of Frost he had known about. The cold body, the poor stamina, the reduced athletic capacity and mana affinity — these aligned with everything he had observed in his own functioning over the past three years. The status window had not introduced any new problems. It had simply named the ones that already existed.
It doesn't matter.
He examined this thought as well, and found it genuine rather than performed. His constitution was poor. This was a fact. Facts were starting conditions, not conclusions. He had been the best assassin of his generation operating from a starting condition of being property. He was not particularly concerned about poor stamina.
This is Zieghart.
The clan's swordsmanship archives were somewhere within these grounds. That was the resource he needed most. If he could access and master what was stored there — combined with the Ring of Fire's continued development — then the gap between himself and Derus Robert became something that patience and time could close.
And I am only three years old.
Derus was the strongest swordsman on the continent. Attacking before he was ready would not be revenge. It would be repetition — dying at the same hands for the same reason. He would not repeat himself.
Slow and steady. One step at a time.
He balled his small fists against the mattress.
But what is this message?
He turned the question over and set it carefully aside. His instincts — the ones that had kept him alive through twelve years of assassination work — found nothing threatening in the light or the text. The opposite, if anything.
It has something to do with why I was reborn.
He could not be more precise than that. He would learn more as he continued. He had learned, over a long career, that the things you could not explain immediately were best observed patiently rather than forced prematurely into conclusions.
The second
He did not bother suppressing the smile this time.
Finally.
Two and a half years of afternoon sessions and midnight sessions and calibrated patience. The second ring had closed vertically, perpendicular to the first, the two of them now rotating around his heart in intersecting planes. He could feel the difference in his sensitivity to the mana in the room — not dramatically, but enough to confirm that the status window's claim about Mana Affinity was accurate.
Two rings by age five.
He was reasonably certain no one else in the continent's recorded history had achieved this. The Ring of Fire was a technique from a thousand years ago. Its practitioners in that era had been adults with fully developed mana circuits and access to resources he was currently improvising around. He was a five-year-old with a compromised constitution and approximately two hours of practice time per day.
He allowed himself a moment of quiet satisfaction before setting it aside.
I don't want to cause them harm.
The thought arrived cleanly, without the qualifications he might have expected from himself three years ago. Sylvia had treated him as something worth protecting from the first day he opened his eyes in this body. Helen and the maids had followed her lead. None of them had received anything in return that a normal infant would not have provided.
Whatever I do next, that matters.
He was still working out what to do with that conclusion when the door opened.
"My son!"
Sylvia entered at speed, carrying a set of dark red clothing and wearing an expression that combined bright determination with a pallor that she was visibly trying to conceal.
"Mother?"
He had graduated to proper pronunciation in the past weeks. The slight softness of a five-year-old's consonants remained, but the word was recognizable.
"Do you remember when I said there was somewhere we needed to go together?"
She was already pulling his sleepwear off with the efficient cheerfulness of someone who had decided that moving quickly was preferable to thinking too carefully.
The assembly.
She had mentioned it several days ago — children of both the direct and collateral lines, gathered to have something assessed.
"Don't worry. It will be over quickly."
She smiled. It reached her eyes imperfectly.
"Okay."
"How is my son so kind and handsome at the same time?!"
She had paused mid-dressing to press her cheek against his. He endured this with the stillness of someone who had learned that resistance was less efficient than patience.
It was Helen who intervened.
"Milady." Her voice carried the particular quality of someone who had deployed it in exactly this capacity many times before. "We will be late. The Judgment Ceremony begins soon."