William's head throbbed as consciousness dragged him from the void.
His first sensation was the smell of stale alcohol, sweat, and something sickly sweet that made his stomach turn. His second was the weight pressing against his arm, warm and unfamiliar. His eyes snapped open.
A woman lay beside him, her dark hair spilled across a pillow that had seen better days. She was beautiful in the dim morning light filtering through torn curtains, her bare shoulder exposed above the threadbare sheets. William's breath caught in his throat.
*No. No, no, no.*
He jerked upright, and immediately regretted it. Pain lanced through his skull like someone had driven a spike between his eyes. The room spun, and he had to grip the edge of the mattress to keep from falling. Empty bottles littered the floor, wine, spirits, things he couldn't identify. Clothes were scattered everywhere, his and hers mixed together in a trail leading to the bed.
The woman moved but didn't wake up.
William carefully extracted himself from the bed, his heart hammering. He stumbled to the corner where a cracked mirror hung on the wall, and froze.
The face staring back at him wasn't his own.
Silver hair, messy and unkempt, fell past sharp cheekbones. Crimson eyes, bloodshot and dull, gazed back with an expression caught between shock and horror. He was handsome, devastatingly so, but there was something hollow about the face, something broken. Dark circles shadowed those red eyes. His bare chest showed he was thin, almost gaunt, lacking the muscle definition one would expect from a noble family.
"Raye Silva," he whispered, and the stranger in the mirror mouthed the words with him.
It was real. All of it was horrifyingly real.
William had died, he remembered that much. A truck without a driver heading towards the crosswall and the sickening moment of impact. Then nothing. Then this. He had woken up in the body of one of literature's most pathetic characters, the abandoned brother of the protagonist from Extra's Regression.
Raye Silva. The useless one. The drunk. The lecher. The villain who would eventually try to kill his own brother and die for it.
His legs gave out, and he sank to the floor, pressing his palms against his eyes. This couldn't be happening. This had to be some kind of nightmare, some dying hallucination as his real body lay broken on the pavement.
But the cold floor against his bare skin felt too real. The pounding in his head felt real. The shame burning in his chest as he looked at the woman still sleeping in his bed, a woman he didn't know, or remember, felt far too real.
"Think," he muttered to himself. "Think, damn it."
If this was real, if he really had transmigrated into Extra's Regression, then he knew what came next. The original Raye Silva had been cast out from the Silva family three years ago when he failed to awaken properly. His mana core was damaged, weak, unable to support even basic magic. In a world where power meant everything, where dungeons and monsters threatened humanity's existence, being unable to awaken was a death sentence for any noble's career.
The Silva family was one of the top five families in the Arcanum Empire. They couldn't afford to be associated with failure. So they had given Raye a pittance of an allowance and sent him away to this... slum. Left him to rot while his younger brother Lucas Silva became the shining star everyone had hoped Raye would be.
The original Raye had taken it badly. He'd drowned himself in alcohol and women, burning through what little money he had, building a reputation as a pathetic waste of noble blood. The novel had barely mentioned him until chapter 87, when he had shown up drunk at the academy, tried to kill Lucas out of jealousy, and been cut down by the protagonist's party.
A tragic, pointless death for a tragic, pointless character.
Raye, William, pressed his fists against his temples. He had to get control of himself. Panicking wouldn't help. If this was real, if he was truly stuck in this situation, then he had knowledge. He had read Extra's Regression three times. He knew the major plot points, the hidden opportunities, the disasters that would unfold. That had to count for something.
And he had one advantage the original Raye Silva never had: he wasn't going to become that pathetic drunk.
"Never again," he whispered.
A knock at the door made him jump.
"Raye! Raye, you bastard, open up!" A man's voice, rough and angry. "You owe me for last night! Don't think you can skip out on the tab!"
Ah. The bar owner. Of course.
Raye scrambled for his pants, pulling them on as quietly as possible. The knocking grew more insistent, threatening to wake the woman. He found a shirt, wrinkled and stained, and pulled it over his head. His hands were shaking.
"I know you're in there! I'll break this door down!"
"Coming," Raye called out, his voice hoarse. It sounded different than William's had been, deeper, rougher, damaged by alcohol and cigarettes. Another reminder that this body wasn't his.
He found a small pouch near the bed, checked inside, and felt his heart sink. A handful of copper coins and two small silver pieces. That was all he had. The original Raye had blown through his monthly allowance in the first week, as usual.
The banging intensified.
Raye took a deep breath, steadied himself, and opened the door.
The man on the other side was broad-shouldered and red-faced, his expression murderous. "Forty silver," he growled. "You and your little girlfriend drank enough to put down a horse last night. Forty silver, now."
Forty silver. Raye had maybe two.
"I don't—" he started, but the bar owner grabbed him by the shirt and slammed him against the doorframe.
"Don't give me that. You nobles are all the same. Think you can drink on credit because of your fancy name." He leaned in close, his breath reeking of onions. "Your family name doesn't mean shit down here, Silva. Pay up or I'll beat it out of you."
For a moment, William's instincts screamed at him to fight back, to do something. But this body was weak. Malnourished. Untrained. He would lose any physical confrontation.
"I'll get you the money," Raye said quietly. "I just need—"
"Now." The bar owner's grip tightened. "Or I take it in blood."
Something stirred inside Raye's chest. Not fear, he was terrified, but something else. Something cold and dark, responding to his desperation. His right hand tingled, and for just a moment, he felt something coalesce in his palm.
A weight. Solid and real.
He looked down and froze.
A dagger had appeared in his hand. Black as midnight, its blade seemed to drink in the light rather than reflect it. The metal, if it was metal, shifted subtly, almost alive, its edge gleaming with an otherworldly sharpness.
The bar owner saw it and stumbled backward, his face paling. "What the—"
Raye stared at the weapon. He hadn't summoned it consciously. It had simply... appeared. Responding to his needs.
Shadow.
The words appeared in his mind, not spoken but known: [Shadow - Rank E - Growth Type - Bound Weapon]
The unique skill. The God-forged weapon. It was real.
"I'll have your money by tonight," Raye heard himself say, his voice steady despite the chaos in his mind. "You have my word."
The bar owner looked at the dagger, then at Raye's face, and seemed to recognize something in his eyes that hadn't been there before. He backed away. "Tonight," he spat. "Or I'm coming for you."
He turned and left, his footsteps heavy on the stairs.
Raye closed the door and leaned against it with the dagger still in his hand. Shadow pulsed once, as if acknowledging him, then dissolved into black mist that sank into his skin.
Behind him, the woman in the bed stirred. "Raye?" she murmured sleepily. "Is everything alright?"
He closed his eyes. He had no money. He had no home, not really. He had a damaged core and a ruined reputation. He had a deadline with an angry bar owner and a future that ended in blood on the academy grounds.
But he also had knowledge. And now, impossibly, he had Shadow.
Raye Silva opened his eyes, looked at his reflection in the cracked mirror, and saw something different than before. Not the broken drunk the world expected him to be.
Someone who was going to survive.
"Everything's fine," he told the woman, though she had already drifted back to sleep. He said it again, quieter, to himself. "Everything's going to be fine."
He just had to figure out how to make forty silver by nightfall without getting killed.
And after that? He had a story to rewrite.