The punishment came before dinner, and Damian was already expecting it.
“Three days,” said the steward, a thin man with a narrow nose who clearly relished this part of the job.
“No meals from the royal kitchen. His Majesty finds it… inappropriate… for a bastard to wander the palace unescorted on the day of the Ceremony.”
It hadn’t really been about the wandering.
It had been about the word “Strategist” reaching the wrong ears before he’d even made it back to his room — someone had decided it was funny enough to be worth repeating twice.
But arguing about it wasn’t going to change anything, and Damian had already learned, in the first six hours of this new body, that spending energy arguing with people who don’t decide anything was the kind of mistake only someone who’s never played a strategy game makes.
“Understood,” he said.
The steward looked almost disappointed there was no fight to be had.
He left without another word.
Three days without food from the royal kitchen wasn’t, technically, three days without food — he’d already seen servants toss stale bread to the stable dogs, and dogs didn’t complain about sharing.
A problem solved before it even became a real problem.
He filed that detail away too: the punishment exists to hurt pride, not the stomach.
That says something about who’s really in charge here.
He went back to his room, shut the door, and for the first time since waking up, let his mind stop reacting and start planning.
Field Vision Lv.
1, read the notification only he could see, pulsing quietly at the edge of his vision since the ceremony.
Passive skill unlocked: Status Analysis (limited use — 3x per day).
Three times a day.
Not much.
In the game, once the Strategist class hit level twenty, that number became unlimited, and the skill gained depth — not just a name and a level, but intent, loyalty, tactical weak points.
At level one, he suspected he was only getting the basics.
A name.
A number.
A threat rating, maybe.
He needed to test it.
And testing it safely meant testing it on someone who couldn’t do anything about the result.
He waited until the guard rotation — he already knew the schedule by heart, even without ever timing anything in this body, because he’d memorized the castle’s patrol pattern decades ago, in a life where that had been nothing but an immersion detail nobody else seemed to notice.
He peered through the crack in the door at the exact moment Borin walked past.
Status Analysis.
The notification flickered, hesitated for half a second — as if the system itself were calculating how much it could show a level-one user — then settled:
> BORIN VASK
> Level: 12 | Class: Royal Guard
> Loyalty: King Aldric (78%) | Coin (22%)
> Threat assessed: Low
Damian stood still a moment longer than he should have, staring at text that had already vanished.
It’s not just a name and a level.
It’s a percentage of who this person actually answers to.
That changed everything.
It wasn’t a cheat that dealt damage, wasn’t a magic sword, wasn’t anything that would impress an opponent in a duel.
But on a board where he couldn’t beat anyone in a straight fight, knowing exactly what price tag hung on every piece was, without exaggeration, the most dangerous weapon in that entire castle.
Twenty-two percent of Borin is for sale.
All I need now is something worth twenty-two percent to offer.
He filed the math away and slipped back before the guard noticed the door standing ajar.
He decided to spend the day’s other two uses carefully.
The first he used on Roderick, three days later, hidden behind a column in the training yard, watching his twelve-year-old half-brother hammer a practice dummy with a fury that matched nothing about the sloppy technique behind it.
> RODERICK VORN
> Level: 6 | Class: Warrior (Aspirant)
> Loyalty: Self-Ambition (91%) | Darius (9%)
> Threat assessed: Medium — Rising
Rising threat.
Not a decorative phrase.
The system was saying, plainly, that this boy was going to become a problem — and Damian already knew, from another life, exactly when: in eight months, Roderick would try to kill him.
Not in the original game — there, the Bastard Prince didn’t even have that scene, since he didn’t exist as a playable character before age thirty.
But some secondary NPC’s journal, one of the handful of lore texts nobody but a completionist ever finished reading, mentioned in passing that “the second middle son, Roderick, had a history of violent rivalry with weaker siblings before maturing — or not — into General Roderick of the Northern Front.”
If he’s going to try to kill me either way, Damian thought, watching the boy botch a basic swing and curse at his own dummy, the job isn’t to prevent it.
It’s to make sure that when he tries, the attempt serves me more than it serves him.
Not a plan yet.
Just a direction.
But it was the first real piece on his board — and he set it aside with the same care he’d used to file away the name Kael.
He nearly wasted the day’s third use.
Nearly.
He was on his way back to his room when he passed a maid carrying a basket of dirty laundry — nobody who should matter, nobody who should yield anything worth knowing.
But something about her posture, a quick glance over her shoulder before turning down a corridor that didn’t lead to the laundry room, made him burn the day’s last use without a second thought.
> MIRA HOLT
> Level: 3 | Class: ???
(Hidden)
> Loyalty: ???
(Insufficient data)
> Threat assessed: Unknown
Damian stopped in the middle of the corridor.
Hidden class.
In the game, that only ever happened with a handful of NPCs across the entire campaign — characters the system treated as “unresolved” until some specific story trigger revealed who they really were.
He’d seen it exactly three times in eight-thousand-odd hours of play.
One turned out to be an infiltrated spy.
Another was a hero in disguise, waiting for the right moment.
The third he’d never managed to identify, because the route that revealed that character required a choice he’d never once made, in any of his runs.
And now there was a maid carrying dirty laundry through the palace’s service corridors, holding a class the system itself refused to reveal to a level-one Strategist.
He didn’t follow her.
Not today.
Tailing someone with a hidden class, with no plan at all, was the kind of decision a side character in an anime makes right before vanishing from the story for three arcs.
But he filed the name away.
Mira Holt.
Next to Kael, on a mental list that only had two entries and already felt dangerously full of things he didn’t know.
That night, lying on the straw bed with his stomach complaining quietly — the stable dogs had eaten well; he hadn’t — Damian stared up at the ceiling, at the stain that only became a map at the right angle, and did the math that actually mattered.
Three uses of Analysis per day.
A system answering questions no guide had ever answered.
A world diverging from the game just enough to have hidden forks, siblings with no entry in any wiki, and maids with classes the system itself refused to show.
I don’t know everything, he thought, and it was the first time he’d admitted that to himself without trying to soften it.
I know enough to have an edge.
Not enough to be certain.
The gap between those two things was going to decide whether he reached thirty-seven as an emperor or as a footnote in someone else’s history.
He closed his eyes.
Somewhere in the castle, Roderick was probably still training, cursing at his own dummy.
Somewhere in the service corridors, Mira Holt was carrying dirty laundry to somewhere that wasn’t the laundry room.
And somewhere beneath the Hall of Blades, whatever had woken on the day of the ceremony was still counting its own days, on a clock Damian hadn’t yet found a way to read.
Days until the Players Arrive: 10,955