Chapter 2
The House Breio had long employed five scholars specializing in the translation of ancient texts.
Of course, their interest was limited to practical fields like magic and swordsmanship.
Even so, I read every book they ignored—books that fell outside the scholars’ scope—without overlooking a single one.
After all, no one could know where ancient truths might be hidden. And more importantly, I had run out of other texts to read.
<The Book That Grants Wishes>
It was an old tome, dismissed as a fairy tale by the Breio family’s librarians.
There were a few other ancient storybooks as well, used by students of the old tongue as beginner texts.
They were simple, filled with basic vocabulary and unremarkable content.
<The Book That Grants Wishes>, however, was not even suited for that purpose.
Its contents were absurd, and it was riddled with words no one could translate.
Yet I managed to decipher almost ninety percent of it.
"If you truly grant my wish, I’d even offer up my soul— cough!"
A dry cough escaped me. A searing pain clawed at my throat, and I coughed up a handful of blood.
There was no more time to waste.
Even if it was a rotten lifeline or a foolish fairy tale—if there was any chance it could work, I had to try.
Flap!
I turned the page.
The story wasn’t particularly unique.
It told of a being, who was neither good nor evil, who brought ruin to the world, and that the good and evil gods joined forces to seal him away.
The myth was strikingly similar to the creation story of Armanism, the former state religion of the Kingdom of Xenon in the previous century.
On the last page, strange symbols and illegible script filled the space.
No one had paid them any mind. Except me.
I used those symbols and characters to construct a magic circle. But I couldn’t activate it—because I had not even a trace of mana. However, if my interpretation was correct, this magic circle didn’t demand mana. It required life itself.
Cough!
Blood spattered the ancient text.
As if confirming its fragility, the worn pages immediately softened the moment they soaked in blood.
‘What’s this symbol now?’
A mark I had never seen—or perhaps had long forgotten—appeared on the bloodstained page.
Two diagonal lines converged into a sharp peak, mirrored in reverse and intertwined. A diamond shape sat at the center of the criss crossed lines.
‘Th-this is…...’
It resembled ancient magical sigils. I quickly analyzed it and modified the magic circle I had already envisioned.
[TL/N: Ancient magical sigils are symbolic representations, often line diagrams, used in rituals and spells for various purposes, from summoning spirits to attracting specific outcomes.]
I had to live. No—I could live. Faced with even a sliver of hope, I no longer had a reason to hesitate.
Swoooosh!
Light flared.
It wasn’t the book that ignited, it was my mind that caught fire.
I transferred what was forming in my head onto the floor. Not with a pen, but with my fingertip. The circle wasn’t complex. It didn’t even require ink.
It needed to be drawn with my blood to carry any meaning.
‘Ahh...!’
In that moment, I grasped truths I had never understood before. I felt like I was on the verge of transcending human limits. That distant height was nearly within reach.
Then, just as my mind began to waver, a burning sensation welled up in my gut. An excruciating pain followed—so intense it nearly turned my vision inside out.
“You... you’re...!”
I saw murderous eyes. That was no hallucination.
My mind was not only clear—it was sharper than ever.
‘An assassin!’
Someone had come to kill me. And they had succeeded. The smug look in their eyes said it all.
At that moment, a whisper echoed in my mind:
...Your wish has been granted.
* * *
My body felt heavy and sore.
Something poked into my back, and there was a musty smell in the air.
When I opened my eyes, I saw a low ceiling.
‘What? Did I pass out and end up in a barn?’
I was lying in bed.
I forced myself upright and looked around.
It was a shabby room—one that might belong to a servant of a noble house.
As I stepped out into the hall, I heard movement.
Someone was passing by.
“You’re awake, young master?”
A woman in worn clothes greeted me with a smile.
How dare she meet the eyes of the young master of the Breio family?
Clearly, this maid had never been properly trained.
"You..."
I was about to scold the maid for her mistake, until I suddenly remembered who she was.
For some reason, I knew this woman named Mariam.
She was a servant of the Hebron barony—and the one who had cared for me my entire life.
‘Barony...? Why would a baron’s maid be treating me like this...?’
I clutched my head in pain.
Memories and emotions I had never experienced came flooding into me all at once, overwhelming my mind.
“Y-Young Master?”
“Aaaaaargh!!”
“Young Maaaasteeer!!”
* * *
When I came to my senses, I realized—I had become the eldest son of the Baron of Hebron.
Hebron.
My father, Duke Breio, used to sneer at the family, calling them ‘grass-eaters’..
He often warned me to learn from their fall.
They were once a marquisate who helped found the Kingdom of Xenon, but the Hebron family later declined until they were reduced to mere barons.
Hebron scraped by each year, desperately trying to pay the taxes owed to the royal family.
And in this fallen house, I was now their nineteen-year-old heir: Louis de Hebron.
Louis de Hebron and Louis de Breio—the same name, but utterly different people. Different talents. Different lives.
‘They erased me completely…..!’
Even a poor barony kept a library.
Most of the books were handwritten copies, but there were still records detailing noble bloodlines, especially those of the royal family and high nobility.
I found the Duke Breio family registry listed right after the royal lineage of Xenon.
The record was updated annually, bestowed by the royal family—after a hefty tax payment, of course. The cost of the registry was baked into the taxes.
But I wasn’t in it.
Not as the firstborn, not the second, not even as the youngest. There was no mention of Louis de Breio anywhere.
‘Was it from when I was fifteen?’
I dug through older entries.
Nothing at fifteen. Nothing at ten. No mention at all—every trace of me was wiped clean.
‘…Did I never exist in the first place?’
There were only two possibilities. Either Duke Breio had erased me from existence….
Or whoever sent me here had erased Louis de Breio entirely.
‘It was probably the Duke. It had to be.’
I now carried Louis de Hebron’s memories as well.
As a minor noble, he had been expected to memorize the genealogies of greater houses, like Breio’s.
As a child, he had remembered another Louis de Breio—one with the same name.
He even remembered the exact year I vanished from the registry: fourteen years ago.
‘Fourteen years? Then the Duke started erasing me when I was only eight?’
That was during the time I was hailed as a Theoretical genius.
But the Duke must have already seen through me.
He gave up hope and erased me from the family.
‘…..I was used. All the records I left behind in House Breio helped them raise his other children.’
Only now did I understand why Duke Breio had once fed me the rare and expensive Dragon’s Breath.
He wanted to ignite a fire in me, not to save me, but to use me.
He planned to raise his other children with my brilliance, grounding House Breio’s foundations on the eccentric ideas of their discarded prodigy.
‘So I was meant to be thrown away from the start? That was all I ever amounted to in his eyes?’
“Ahahahahahahaha!”
I laughed for a long time.
When the laughter stopped, I felt hollow inside.
And then—rage filled the void.
I had devoted my entire self to someone who had never once truly looked at me.
‘Fine then. I’ll show you. I’ll prove what kind of person ‘Louis’ you abandoned really was. And I’ll find the one who killed me. I will have my revenge. They won’t even realize it’s coming. They’ll die not knowing why—or better yet, I’ll make sure they live a life worse than death.’
Louis de Hebron had been an ordinary man.
Just like his ancestors.
The House of Hebron, unlike Breio, didn’t obsess over talent.
They respected individual inclinations and strengths, and most of all, they valued happiness.
That’s how they earned the nickname grass-eating Hebrons.
Louis de Hebron had often resented his own mediocrity.
He had no way to protect his house with such limited ability.
He had always lived in fear that Hebron would fall—either during his lifetime or in the generation after.
“…..The circumstances are different, but you and I—maybe we’re not so different after all. But you can rest easy now. I’ll change things. I’ll rebuild our lives from the ground up. And I’ll show you what real talent is. I’ll surpass even the Breio family, the ones who can turn dogs into dragons.”
There would be no looking back.
And I was determined to live the life I’d never been allowed to enjoy.
I would unleash my talent without holding anything back.
‘From what I remember, this body has no talent for magic. As a knight, I’m… mediocre at best?’
An utterly unremarkable body.
I hadn’t even checked whether I had potential for spirit magic or divine magic.
Spirit summoners were so rare that most people would never meet one in their lifetime—and it was even rarer for a noble heir to become one, given how few devoted themselves to the Church.
“Then spirit summoning is where I’ll start.”
Books on spirit arts were nearly impossible to find.
Naturally, the Hebron barony’s library had none.
At best, there were novels with fictional spirit summoners in them.
‘Fortunately, I still have all my old memories.’
My mind wasn’t as sharp as it used to be.
It took much longer now to memorize anything new.
But I didn’t mind.
I’d had more than my fill of intellectual privilege in the past, and the knowledge etched deep in my mind hadn’t faded.
I could practically recite the contents of the Breio family’s entire library from memory.
I locked the door and drew a summoning circle on the floor with chalk.
Sunlight streamed in warmly through the window.
In House Breio, I had lived deep underground—my only light was magical, artificial, and eternal. Day and night had no meaning there.
Now, I could hear birds singing outside.
In my previous life, the only voices I heard were the idle gossip of maids beyond the iron bars. That alone gave me the will to live.
“It’s a crude magic circle”
Spirit arts technically fell under the domain of magic, but the nature of it was different.
There was only one kind of magic circle used in spirit summoning: the circle of contract.
Those born with high spirit affinity could just draw a rough circle, drip a bit of blood, and high-ranking spirits would come rushing.
“And this one—I improved it myself.”
I had spent three whole days preparing this.
I didn’t know what elemental affinity the summoned spirit would have—if any—but I was hoping something would answer the call.
“If it doesn’t work, so be it. Even if I have no gift for spirit summoning, I still have the sword.”
I touched my lower abdomen.
There, I had managed to gather a small spark of aura.
It was the lowest level of aura cultivation—barely attained through a rudimentary method.
But even that small flicker of strength was precious to me.
Even this worthless power could be pushed to its peak through the techniques of House Breio.
Drip! Drip!
I let my blood fall onto the center of the magic circle.
A spirit stone would have been better—spirits loved those—but a single one cost enough to buy three or four Hebron estates.
‘It’s reacting…!’
My blood started to gather, swirling softly.
Then, from that pool—something rose.
Whoosh!
Flames.
It was fire.
Tiny, like a candle’s flicker.
That meant my spirit affinity was only strong enough to attract a lowest-class spirit.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t plan to settle for this.”
This wasn’t the kind of result I’d built this magic circle for.
Unless I had zero talent whatsoever, even the faintest bit of affinity could be turned into the power of a dragon—if I applied the Breio family’s theories perfectly.
They had tested those secrets on me countless times. I failed each one.
Drip! Drip!
The magic circle was composed of three layers.
I let more blood drip between the first and second circle.
