“If you’re inside me,” he said, staring at nothing, “then you already know what I’m asking.”
The reply didn’t sound like a voice.
It just arrived, already formed, sitting in his mind like something that had always been there.
The information exists.
A short gap.
Access is restricted.
His fingers pressed into the stone edge of the balustrade.
“Of course it is.” He looked off toward the mountains instead.
“My memories are restricted.
Where I am is restricted.
My own name is restricted.” He turned back.
“Then what can you actually do.”
Display.
The air in front of him thickened into a pale blue rectangle, plain lines of text hanging there like they’d always belonged in the light.
╔══════════════════════════════╗
[ STATUS ]
╚══════════════════════════════╝
Name: ???
Level: 0
Age: 22
EXP: 0 / 200
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Strength: 2.1
Agility: 2.4
Physique: 3.7
Intelligence: 3.9
Perception: 3.8
Mana: 2.0
Charm: 2.6
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Active Skills: None
Passive Skills: None
Bloodline: Locked
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
System Access: Basic
Remark: Unawakened state.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
He read it twice.
“What are these numbers.”
Attributes.
“That’s not an answer.”
Strength — physical output.
Agility — movement and reaction.
Physique — durability and recovery.
He looked at his hands, turned them over once.
“So this is what I’m capable of.
This is the ceiling.”
This is your current capacity.
“Then I’m weak.”
Nothing came back.
He didn’t need it to.
Most of the numbers barely cleared two.
His eyes caught on three of them, higher than the rest.
“These are different.
Why.”
Insufficient data.
He breathed out through his nose, short and dry.
“Right.” He moved down the list.
“Skills.
Empty.”
No accessible records.
“Bloodline locked.” He stopped at the bottom entries.
He didn’t push further.
There was something about seeing his whole self laid out this way — level zero, most of the sheet blank or sealed — that felt colder than it should have.
Even his name had been reduced to three question marks.
He pointed at them.
“Why can’t I see my own name?”
The gap before the answer was longer this time.
“Whose condition.
Mine?, or something you did to me?”
Silence.
It didn’t answer that one at all.
He stared at the question marks a while longer.
He’d wanted one solid thing — his name, where he was from, who his people were, what an ordinary day used to look like for him.
There was nothing there.
Just the gap where those things should have been.
He remembered a boy called Ram.
He remembered the exact curve of a girl’s smile.
That life had felt whole, real, lived-in.
And now he was standing in a stone courtyard reading a status sheet that belonged to someone whose name he couldn’t even see.
“I don’t know anything,” he said, mostly to himself.
He looked out past the terrace — the fields, the treeline, the mountains, and somewhere past the eastern towers, that thing still circling.
All of it unfamiliar.
He didn’t know what lived out there, who governed this place, or whether anything beyond these walls had a reason to keep him breathing.
He stood there a while, letting the wind do what it could.
Then his hand closed around the balustrade, knuckles going pale.
The fear hadn’t left.
But something else had started sitting alongside it, plainer and harder to talk himself out of.
No memories — fine, he’d work without them.
No strength — the castle had ways to build it, apparently, and he’d use them.
If the place was dangerous, he’d learn exactly how, and not stand there useless while it decided things for him.
Not again.
Not with his legs locked and a van coming down a lane and no say in what happened next.
He looked at the number on the screen.
Zero.
At least it was somewhere to start.
“I don’t know who I am,” he said, quiet, flat.
“I’m going to find out.”
The screen stayed where it was.
But for the first time since he’d opened his eyes under that stone ceiling, he wasn’t waiting on it to tell him anything.
He was already looking toward the door.