The last thing Leo remembered was the cursor.
It was blinking on monitor three, mocking his bloodshot, heavy eyes at 4:14 AM. He had been locked in a seventy-two-hour, non-stop, coffee-fueled debugging crunch for a broken virtual reality RPG launch. As a senior QA tester, his life was a sequence of tracing memory leaks, reproducing falling-through-map bugs, and filing crash reports. He had just typed out a fix for a broken status-condition loop when a sudden, tight squeeze gripped his chest.
A sharp spike of pain, a gasp for air that wouldn't come, and then—a rapid fade to black.
He didn't wake up in a hospital.
```
[SYSTEM INITIALIZING...]
[LOADING BASE KERNEL...]
[BOOT PROTOCOL 0.0.1: RUNNING...]
```
"Ugh..."
Leo tried to sit up, but a sharp, biting cold racked his bones, forcing a ragged wheeze from his throat. His muscles felt stiff, weak, and entirely starved of warmth.
He wasn't resting on an ergonomic office chair or a sterile hospital gurney. He was lying on damp, rotting straw spread over a freezing stone floor. The air was thick and foul, smelling of ancient mold, wet earth, and sour, cheap ale.
Leo raised his hands to his face, but stopped, freezing. These weren't the pale, slightly calloused hands of a programmer who spent his life typing on mechanical keyboards. These hands were incredibly thin, skeletal almost, caked in dried grime, and covered in small, unhealed bruises.
Before he could even process the sight, a violent rush of foreign memories slammed into his brain like a physical blow.
He was still named Leo. But he was no longer a thirty-year-old game developer in a high-rise office.
He was now Leo Vermis—the neglected, illegitimate bastard son of Baron Vermis, a minor and notoriously cruel noble ruling over a lawless, freezing border town at the edge of the civilized world. In this world, magical capability and bloodline purity were everything. Leo possessed neither. He was treated worse than the family’s hounds, mocked by the servants, and despised by his half-siblings.
Just hours ago, his eldest half-brother, Julian, had decided it would be amusing to accuse Leo of stealing a minor magic stone. As punishment, Julian’s guards had beaten him and thrown him down into this locked, subterranean cellar to freeze to death in the dead of winter.
"A bastard left to die in a dark cellar," Leo muttered, his voice cracking. A puff of white mist bloomed from his lips. "Could the fantasy transmigration cliché be any more basic?"
He tried to shift his weight, but the movement sent a shuddering wave of cold through his thin shirt. The draft filtering down from the stone ceiling was relentless. If he didn't find a way to get warm or get out within the next few hours, the hypothermia would finish what Julian had started.
Suddenly, a translucent, semi-transparent blue screen materialized in front of his eyes.
```
==================================
STATUS SHEET (LOCAL)
==================================
Name: Leo Vermis
Class: None (Unawakened)
Title: None
Health: 12 / 45 [Warning: Hypothermia Imminent]
Mana: 0 / 100 [CRITICAL ERROR: Core Malfunction]
Attributes:
- Strength: 4
- Agility: 5
- Vitality: 3
- Intelligence: 14
==================================
```
Leo stared at the hovering display, his teeth chattering in a rapid, rhythmic beat. The developer in him immediately locked onto the anomalous line.
"A core malfunction..." he whispered.
In this world's system, a mana capacity of zero was mechanically impossible for a living human. Even the most magic-less peasant usually registered a default capacity of ten.
He closed his eyes, trying to search inside his chest for the spark of warmth—the "mana core"—that the memories of this body insisted everyone possessed. The moment he attempted to pull at that internal energy, an agonizing spike of heat flared in his chest. It felt like liquid fire pouring into a sealed, rusted pipe.
"Argh!"
Leo collapsed back onto the straw, coughing violently. A small splatter of dark, stagnant blood stained the frost-rimed floor. His chest throbbed with a dull, bruised ache.
*Clank.*
At the far end of the cellar, the heavy, iron-reinforced wooden door at the top of the stone stairs creaked open. A flickering, yellow light cast long, distorted shadows down the steps.
A heavy-set servant holding a dim oil lantern peered into the darkness, followed closely by Julian Vermis. Julian was dressed in thick, silver-trimmed wolf-skin furs—luxuries bought with the taxes squeezed from the starving border town.
"Still breathing, trash?" Julian sneered, holding a silk handkerchief to his nose to block the cellar's stench. He reached into a small leather pouch at his waist and tossed a moldy, rock-hard heel of bread down the steps. It bounced off the stone and rolled into the dirt near Leo's trembling hand.
"Enjoy your feast," Julian mocked, a cruel, satisfied smirk playing on his lips. "Don't worry, father won't ask about you. As far as the House of Vermis is concerned, you're already dead."
With a harsh laugh, Julian turned. The heavy door slammed shut, and the slide of a massive iron bolt locked Leo back into the absolute, freezing darkness.
Leo stared into the pitch-black void where the bread had fallen. He didn't reach for the food. His stomach was hollow, but his mind was burning with a cold, sharp focus. The fear was gone, replaced by the familiar, stubborn irritation of a programmer who had just been handed a completely broken, poorly coded project.
"Already dead, huh?" Leo whispered, his eyes narrowing as the blue system screen reflected in his dark pupils. "Not if I find a way to break your game first."