Chapter 33: Wet Spaghetti

Cold, oily sweat was pouring down his temples, soaking the collar of his silk nightshirt, plastering his black bangs to his forehead.

"Water," he croaked, his voice cracking violently. "Need... liquid. Anything that isn’t boiling fat."

Slowly, using the edge of the bedframe like a shipwrecked sailor hauling himself onto a raft, Lucien dragged his trembling limbs off the floor.

His knees felt like wet spaghetti.

His hands were shaking so severely that when he reached for the glass water carafe on the small side table, the crystal stopper clattered against the rim like a telegraph machine in the middle of an emergency transmission.

He abandoned the glass. He seized the entire crystal carafe with both hands, brought the spout directly to his lips, and tilted it backward.

Gulp. Gulp. Gulp.

The water was ice-cold, chilled by a minor preservation rune on the coaster, and it hit his stomach with the force of a frozen brick.

He choked, coughed, water spilling down his chin and soaking the front of his silk shirt, but he kept drinking until the three-liter decanter was completely empty.

He set the carafe down with a trembling clack, leaned his palms against the tabletop, and hung his head, staring at the small puddle of water between his hands.

The silence of the Everhart campus villa was deafening.

Outside the heavy velvet drapes, the pre-dawn wind rustled softly through the boughs of the silver birch trees.

From down the hall came the faint, rhythmic, muffled snoring of Caelan, punctuated by the occasional tiny zzzt of sleep-induced static electricity grounding into his bedposts.

Everything was normal.

Everything was peaceful.

Lucien was twenty years old.

He was an unawakened noble extra.

He was sitting in a luxury villa in the center of the continent’s most prestigious magical institution.

"It was a dream," Lucien whispered aloud, his voice raspy, desperate to hear the logical, comforting sound of his own modern reasoning. "It was just a dream. A vivid, hyper-detailed, psychologically scarring dream caused by stress, carbohydrate overload, and an overactive imagination fueled by eight hundred Chapters of dark fantasy lore."

He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, rubbing his sore retinas.

"I am a salted fish," he recited like a mantra. "I eat tarts, file administrative complaints, outsource my political problems to a brooding paladin named Cassian. I have never been to an iron volcano. I have never roasted anyone in a cage. I have never seen a knight with bloodshot eyes."

He pulled his hands away from his face.

The room remained dark.

He waited.

He stared at the empty space above the desk, his heart slowly descending from his throat back into his ribcage.

No ding.

No glowing silver rectangle.

No [Emergency Quest: Avenge the Thirty Maidens in 48 Hours or Your Spine Inverts].

Nothing.

The System remained completely silent.

Lucien let out a long, shuddering breath, his shoulders finally sagging with enormous relief.

"See?" he muttered to the empty room, offering a weak, cynical smirk to his reflection in the corner mirror. "No quest. If it were a plot event, that digital parasite would have chimed three times and handed me a reward tier for surviving the trauma. It was just a random neural firing. A leftover memory fragment from the original owner’s soul, or perhaps some ancient historical garbage Lucien read in the family archives before he died."

He rubbed the back of his neck, where the skin was still prickling with residual cold sweat.

Though... those eyes.

The smirk vanished from his lips.

The image of that blackened iron helmet, tilting with that agonizing precision, burned into his memory with terrifying clarity.

Those eyes hadn’t looked like a random neural firing, nor did they looked like a dream artifact.

They had looked directly at him.

Not at Lucien Everhart, because Lucien Everhart hadn’t existed eight hundred years ago. Those eyes had pierced through the veil of time, space, and narrative structure, locking onto the foreign soul of Lucien Alaric Everhart with an intensity that bordered on prophecy.

And that voice.

"REMEMBER."

"Remember what?" Lucien muttered, his voice dropping into an irritated, defensive growl as he paced two steps across the carpet. "Remember that your feudal lord was a sociopathic lard-bucket with bad skin? I don’t know you, man! I am an enterprise software engineer! My greatest crime against humanity was accidentally pushing an untested database migration to production on a Friday afternoon! I didn’t burn your village! I didn’t cut out anyone’s tongue! Go haunt the guy with the ivory throne!"

He picked up a dry linen towel, vigorously scrubbing the cold sweat and spilled water from his neck and chest.

’It doesn’t make sense,’ his analytical brain argued, trying to categorize the event into neat boxes. ’The First Necromancer War happened eight hundred years ago. Mortis Vael fought against the entities from beyond the world. If that was a memory from that era, what does it have to do with me?’

The System didn’t register it.

The System tracks my soul traits, my leveling curve, and my proximity to the Hero Party. If the System didn’t trigger, it means the event has zero relevance to my current survival parameters.

"Therefore," Lucien declared with absolute, desperate finality, "it does not exist. It is nothing but irrelevant data. It is just a spam mail in the spiritual inbox. Move to trash. Empty recycle bin."

He walked over to the bed, kicked the tangled duvet straight with his bare foot, and climbed back under the covers.

The sheets were slightly rumpled, but they were warm, dry, and smelled reassuringly of lavender and expensive laundry soap.

The mattress conformed comfortably to his spine, supporting his aching muscles with exquisite luxury.

He pulled the heavy blanket right up to his chin, nestling his head deep into the feather pillow.

"I have a big day tomorrow," Lucien told himself, closing his eyes firmly. "Tomorrow, Cassian Valemont will probably find Silas’s anonymous tip and the Astra Party will begin their righteous investigation into Professor Graves’ illegal vault access."