’Yeah, I’m fucked,’ thought Rian, or rather, Tristan.
’Okay. First, let’s take a moment and gather my thoughts.’
This world was, without a doubt, Flamecrest Legacy.
And somehow, he’d transmigrated into the body of Tristan Verneuil.
Sounds impressive, right? Being part of one of the most powerful clans on the continent.
Yeah. About that.
This guy was so useless, so utterly forgettable, that Rian was fairly sure Tristan had maybe half a scene in the entire game, the one where he got laughed out of a courtyard for his uselessness.
Touché. Turns out that wasn’t an exaggeration.
’Man, I miss my time as Rian already.’
And looking at his current predicament, chained down, surrounded, one bad word away from becoming a family scandal’s punchline, his time as Tristan might not last much longer either.
There was a reason for that. One simple, humiliating reason.
The runepage.
Arguably the single most important system in all of Flamecrest Legacy. And somehow, Tristan had become the one guy in the entire game who managed to break it.
Here’s how it worked.
Every child on the Altyr continent was gifted one at fifteen. No training required. No opting out. Nobody really knew where it came from, some legend about a beam of light straight from the heavens, blessing every child the moment they turned fifteen with their own personal, invisible-to-everyone-else status screen.
Definitely not cult-like at all.
The runepage itself was simple enough, a shimmering interface only its owner could see, laying out three things: a person’s unique skill, their core, and their core’s rank.
The core was the actual core of it (no pun intended). It was what let an awakened touch essence at all, channel it, shape it, bend it into something useful. It doubled as a rough measure of raw physical power too, and it fed directly into whatever unique skill a person had been handed.
Cores were divided into 7 distinct ranks: awakened, tempered, refined, master, ascendant, sovereign, transcendent.
Usually by the time someone reaches sixteen they have a high awakened or low tempered core, but Tristan?
And he had never awakened a runepage. At all.
Not awakened. Not some sad, barely-there fraction of a rank.
Nothing.
Which, in a world where "nothing" wasn’t even meant to be a possibility, made him less of an outlier and more of a rumor, the kind of thing whispered about like a curse, or a bad omen, or, his personal favorite, a defect.
Two years of nothing. Two years of watching his siblings pull ahead while he stood still, runepage-less, useless, a stain the family hadn’t gotten around to getting rid of yet.
’Well,’ Tristan thought, glancing down at the chains currently doing an excellent job of keeping him horizontal, ’guess today’s the day they finally get around to it.’
Except.
That didn’t actually explain the chains.
Being useless was one thing. The Verneuils had tolerated seventeen years of uselessness without once bothering to chain him to a platform in front of half the clan.
Whatever this was it probably wasn’t just "the family snapped"
Something had definitely happened.
Something Tristan had absolutely no memory of, because apparently transmigration came with some awful memory drawbacks and headaches. Awesome.
"The accused will answer for himself."
Right. That again.
The voice belonged to an elder seated off to the side of the dais, silver-haired, sharp-eyed, and radiating energy of pure annoyance and spite.
"Answer for what, exactly?" Tristan said, and immediately regretted how raw his throat sounded doing it. "Because I’m going to be honest, I don’t actually know what I’m being accused of."
"Convenient," the elder said dryly.
"No, genuinely. Enlighten me. What did I supposedly do?" Tristan pressed, surprised by his own confidence in the situation.
The elder’s mouth curled, somewhere between disgust and satisfaction, the exact expression of someone who’d been waiting all day to say the next part out loud.
"Three nights from now, the Verneuil Clan hosts a banquet with House Suna of the Southern Coalition."
A banquet between a Northern Bastion clan and a Southern Coalition house wasn’t exactly a daily matter. From what he actually remembered about the world’s politics half from Tristan’s fragmented memories, half from his video game grinding, the North and South weren’t at war, not officially, but they weren’t friends either.
Which meant a banquet like this wasn’t about food. It was a message. Most likely some kind of diplomatic meet-up of sorts.
"As a gesture of goodwill," the elder continued, "the clan arranged to serve Sandrose Whiskey at the banquet."
Sandrose Whiskey. That, he actually recognized. A Southern delicacy, distilled from some rare desert bloom that only grew in the Coalition’s territory, practically impossible to find anywhere in the North unless you had the coin and the connections to import it.
A nice gesture. Genuinely.
Which was exactly the kind of nice gesture that made Tristan’s stomach drop, because he was starting to see exactly where this was going.
"That whiskey," the elder said, voice sharpening, "was discovered missing from the cellar two nights ago. Half the bottle, gone. And you, Tristan, were found unconscious on the cellar floor, reeking of it."
Silence.
Tristan almost laughed. Almost.
’That’s it? That’s the big crime?’ he thought, staring at the elder like the man had just accused him of jaywalking. ’I got hammered on the good stuff. That’s a Tuesday, not a chain-me-to-the-ground offense.’
Tristan looked around the hall and it clicked into place with sickening ease.
Nobody here actually cared about half a bottle of imported whiskey.
They’d just been waiting for an excuse. And he’d been stupid enough, or rather, the old him had been stupid enough, to hand them a perfectly convenient one, three days before a banquet where the family desperately needed to look composed, disciplined, and unified in front of a foreign house they were trying very hard to impress.
A drunk, useless third son stumbling around the cellar and ruining the centerpiece gift wasn’t just an embarrassment.
It was a liability.
And liabilities, Tristan was quickly learning, didn’t survive long in a family like this.