Breakfast wound down the way most things did with Rivelius at the table: efficiently, without unnecessary conversation, plates cleared before the sun had fully climbed past the windows.
He rose first, as always, old habit dictating that a man didn’t linger anywhere longer than a task required.
"Where are you going?"
He paused. It was, he noted, the kind of question he would once have ignored on principle. His business had never been anyone’s to ask after, not a general’s, not a king’s, and certainly, not a wife’s—
[Warden: Active]
The marker blinked, patient and infuriatingly present, at the exact corner of his vision reserved apparently, for reminding him he no longer had the luxury of principles.
"To speak with Captain Volgard," he said after a beat. "About the guard."
Cordelia nodded, and said nothing more, though something in the way she watched him go suggested she’d have liked to.
He found Reyna back at the training yard, dismissing the last of the morning drills.
"Lord Kane."
"The guard," he said, without preamble. "I want to expand it. Properly. Not just a dozen men standing in a field built for a thousand."
"That would take coin, my lord. A great deal of it." Reyna replied firmly.
Rivelius almost said something dismissive about coin being the least of his concerns; he was, after all, heir to House Kane, the single most powerful military family in the empire, second in authority to the Royal Family itself. Access to funds should have been the least complicated part of any of this.
Except the memory sync had already told him otherwise. Rivelius Kane the Second had never once, in the entirety of his wasted life, bothered to learn what his own monthly stipend actually was. He’d simply spent — drink, tables, women, whatever caught his attention — without the faintest curiosity about where the coin came from or how much of it there’d been to begin with.
"Fool," he muttered, more to the memory than to anyone present.
"Did you say something, my lord?"
He looked at her instead of answering. "Do you know the amount of my monthly stipend?"
"Not the exact figure, no. That’s handled directly by the House Steward back at the capital." Reyna considered it a moment. "What I can tell you is my own. For the guard’s upkeep, salaries, equipment, and Mireille’s, for the household. Between the two of us, it keeps Ashfall Hold running. Yours, though, comes separately. Minister Marcus Voss of House Kane, sends it from the capital once a month." A pause. "The next transfer should arrive in two days’ time, if I recall correctly."
She paused again, as though only just remembering. "Oh, and... Princess Cordelia’s own stipend as a member of the royal family, would be a separate matter entirely. I couldn’t say what that figure is. Only she would know."
Rivelius considered that for a moment; another resource he hadn’t known existed until someone else had to point it out to him, sitting inside a marriage he’d been handed without a single briefing.
"I see," he said finally.
"Anything else, my lord?"
"The beast grounds. What do we have?"
"Not much, if I’m honest. Two lizard-mounts you’ve already seen, and a handful of pack beasts for supply runs." Reyna paused, clearly expecting the conversation to end there.
Rivelius looked at her, waiting. She stared back at him, also waiting.
"...Well. Take me there, then."
"Oh. Yes, my lord." She fell into step beside him.
The faint edge in her voice suggested she genuinely hadn’t expected the infamous Lord Kane to care what was living in his own stables.
The stables sat past the training yard, a low stone building with wide double doors thrown open to the morning air. A handful of handlers — three, maybe four — moved between the stalls, tending to the lizard-mounts and pack beasts with the unhurried competence of people who’d long since made peace with the smallness of their work.
At the far end of the building, one stall stood apart from the rest; reinforced iron in place of wood, bolted rather than latched, set back from where anyone bothered to walk unless they had a reason to.
Nobody went near it. Not the handlers, not Reyna, who led him past it with barely a glance, the way a person avoids acknowledging a crack in a wall they’ve decided not to think about.
Rivelius slowed.
"What’s in that one?"
Reyna stopped mid-stride, and for the first time since he’d met her, something that wasn’t quite composure crossed her face.
"You don’t want to go near that, my lord."
"I didn’t ask about getting close or not. I asked what’s in it."
She exhaled. "A tigermaw," she said. "Caught three months ago, half-grown even then, and it’s only gotten worse since. Killed two handlers trying to tame it. We keep it fed and contained because killing it outright seemed like a waste, and taming it properly hasn’t been possible. That’s the whole of what anyone’s managed."
Rivelius said nothing. He was already walking toward it.
"My lord—"
He didn’t stop.
The closer he got, the more the iron reinforcement made sense.
The stall shuddered faintly with something enormous shifting inside it, quiet the way a cat is quiet, right before it isn’t. Through the bars, he caught his first real look at it: black-striped, twice the mass of anything that had a right to move that quietly, tiger-shaped but for the pair of curved horns rising off its skull.
Two amber eyes found him and went very, very still.
The tigermaw growled as Rivelius stepped closer, low, constant, rolling up from somewhere deep in its chest.
The handlers had gone still the moment the growling started, and the other beasts down the row shifted uneasily in their stalls, sensing something none of the humans present could quite name.
Behind him, Reyna moved fast; a bow snatched off a nearby rack, arrow nocked and aimed past his shoulder at the bars before anyone else had finished registering the sound.
"My lord, step back—"
Rivelius kept walking, until he stopped close enough that the tigermaw could have torn his arm off through the bars if it had wanted to.
It didn’t. It stared instead, amber eyes locked on Rivelius, the growl still rolling low. Rivelius stared back. Flat. Unbothered, as though he weren’t standing well within a predator’s kill radius.
The growl thinned, then stopped entirely, the silence that followed was somehow louder than the sound had been.
Then, unexpectedly, the tigermaw lowered its head.
Rivelius reached through the bars without hesitation and rested a hand against its skull, just above the horns. It didn’t so much as flinch.
"This will do," he said, to no one in particular. A pause. "I’ll call you... Ashen."
He turned back toward the stall’s entrance. "Let it out. It’s safe now."
Silence answered him; Reyna still frozen mid-draw, the arrow’s point drifting slowly toward the ground as her arms forgot what they were doing, her bow lowering along with her jaw. Behind her, the handlers stood exactly where they’d stopped, none of them blinking, all of them apparently reconsidering everything they thought they knew about the man standing in front of the cage.
Rivelius tilted his head, slightly, the same flat look he’d given the tigermaw now aimed at her instead. "Reyna."
"Y— yes, my lord." She lowered the bow the rest of the way, turning fast toward the handlers, already barking instructions about restraints and caution and procedures none of them had apparently expected to need today.
Rivelius left them to it, walking back the way he’d come, unhurried. Even though every set of eyes in the stable followed him the entire way without a single one of them saying a word about it.
Once he was far enough that no one could hear him, he spoke, low, to no one at all.
"Warden. Show me the Status Sheet."
The air in front of him rippled.
[Status Sheet — Rivelius Kane]
World Limit: 10,000
Strength (STR): 861
Agility (AGI): 792
Speed (SPD): 2,438
Vitality (VIT): 401
Intelligence (INT): 9,789
Charisma (CHA): ??? (value exceeds display parameters)
Reputation (REP): 12
Bloodline Awakening: 3% — Dormant
[Marital Instinct — Lv. 2]
EXP: 175/500 to Lv. 3
Rivelius stared at the numbers for a long moment.
He had conquered a world at full strength, and whatever remained of that strength now amounted to a rounding error.
"Is this the entirety of what I have to work with?"
[These are the current stats of the body you’re occupying. Rivelius Kane the Second’s numbers. Not yours.]
He considered that, and found it, on balance, an improvement; better a mediocre foundation to build past than a genuine collapse from what he’d once been.
"And Charisma?"
[Have you seen the way you move? Are you seriously asking me that? Look at what you just did to a tigermaw that’s killed two men.]
[Also, Intelligence and Charisma are the only two stats that are actually yours. Transmigration doesn’t change what’s in your head.]
He thought about that for a second. "Fair."
He kept walking, turning the rest of it over. "What’s my limit," he said. "The highest point I can reach. I want to understand how far I will be able to climb."
[For context: roughly fifty percent of the people in this world sit somewhere around these same numbers. One thousand Strength and above is where "strong" starts to mean something. The truly dangerous ones sit well above seven thousand, in Strength alone.]
[As for your limit, your actual ceiling, based on what your former self was capable of, it’s the same number as your Charisma. That’s the number you’re climbing toward.]
Rivelius absorbed that slowly.
So my former self would have conquered this world too, he thought.
A pause, something almost satisfied in it. "Good to know."
Then he slowed.
"Warden."
[Yes?]
"One more thing." He turned the numbers over again, methodically. "My experience at Marital Instinct Level 1, before I reached Level 2, was 10. The reward for serving Cordelia breakfast was 150. Ten plus one-fifty is one hundred sixty." A beat. "I currently have one hundred seventy-five. Why?"
[Because how you did it was lovely.]
Rivelius stopped entirely.
"That doesn’t even make any sense."
[Life doesn’t make any sense.]
He opened his mouth, closed it again, made the executive decision not to engage further, and resumed walking.
Warden, he was beginning to understand, derived a very specific kind of satisfaction from watching him flounder.