By day five, Callista realized this wasn’t magical transmigration. It was just uncompensated corporate employment under an insufferable nepo baby.
And this was only her first week of school!
Sure, it was the start of the first semester, where freshmen were given a brief grace period to mess around before the academic pressure cooked them alive.
Snatching her bag off the desk, she headed for the door, fully expecting Corvina to be lurking in the hallway. Instead, she was met with Livia standing stoically in the threshold.
"Livia? What are you doing here?"
"Your father noticed your... unusual schedule," Lithia replied smoothly. "He instructed me to keep a close eye on you from now on."
Oh, shit. He caught on.
"Haha..." Callista let out a weak, agonizingly awkward laugh.
Juggling Corvina’s insane demands was hard enough, but now her hyper-calculating maid was auditing her daily movements.
"Have you actually learned anything from your classes, My Lady?" Lithia asked.
Nope. Absolute zero.
Every time a teacher opened their mouth about complex mana filtration, Callista’s brain immediately went offline.
The next thing she knew, she was back at Corvina’s side, dragged into whatever high-society mind game her master had engineered for the afternoon.
Despite the petty bullying, these absurd routines felt almost... nostalgic. Just brainless, chaotic fun.
But she knew better than to relax. The real drama hadn’t even started yet.
Beneath all the goofy tropes, this game was notoriously brutal to beat, the cozy slice-of-life comedy was just the calm before the lore got terrifyingly dark.
At least, that was the word from her little sister, who’d spent months glued to this exact game.
What was supposed to be a run-of-the-mill otome game, replete with flashy male leads and a cookie-cutter villainess-versus-heroine plot, turned out to be anything but standard.
The real kicker was that Callista had no idea what made it so abnormal.
Before all this, she was just David: a completely average, law-abiding normie.
"I think... I really might have to depend on you," Callista murmured, gently taking Livia’s hands. Here stood her literal, walkthrough-guide equivalent in the flesh. "I can count on you, right?"
Livia’s stoic expression didn’t so much as twitch. "...Assuming the compensation meets my standards."
Naturally.
Before Callista could negotiate a reasonable hourly rate, the heavy stone archways of the hallway became loud.
It wasn’t a roar or an explosion.
It was a sickening, low-frequency vibration that rattled right through their teeth; the distinct sound of the academy’s protective mana barrier being subtly pierced.
In Zideus, where casting massive, flashy spells risked triggering a localized mana collapse, true violence was rarely loud. It was quiet, precise, and sneaky.
A few yards down the corridor, a group of upperclassmen collapsed to their knees.
The ambient mana in the oxygen turned an unnatural, swirling around them like toxic smog.
They gasped, their skin breaking out in glowing veins, the early, terrifying symptoms of residual mana poisoning.
"A distortion field," Lithia murmured, her calm posture instantly shifting into a low, combat-ready stance. Her eyes, usually dull and submissive, turned razor-sharp. "Someone just forced a localized mana surge inside the campus."
"A... a what now?!" Callista stumbled back, her heart hammering against her ribs.