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## Julius
The first thing he noticed was the heartbeat.
Not his — he hadn't had one of those in what felt like a very long time. This one was Julius von Muller's, and it was doing something deeply alarming.
*Thud.*
*...Thud.*
*....Thud.*
*That's not a rhythm,* Shinji noted, from whatever non-place he currently occupied between the ghost and the body. *That's a countdown.*
He pushed.
There was no better word for it. "Absolute Dominion" wasn't elegant — it was the spiritual equivalent of a locksmith kicking in a door. He found the fading command signals of Julius's brain, the fraying thread of consciousness that was slowly, gracefully letting go, and he grabbed it. He pressed his ghost-self into the wound the way you'd press a cloth against a bleed — hard, insistent, refusing the body's natural instinct to stop.
"Vessel Stabilization" activated.
The result was — educational.
Every nerve ending that Julius von Muller possessed fired simultaneously.
*Oh,* Shinji thought, very distantly. *So that's what pain is.*
He had forgotten. Four percent magicules and incorporeal existence had insulated him from it rather nicely. Now he remembered with extraordinary completeness — the shredded chest cavity, the torn muscle, the four broken ribs where the Direwolf's claw had hit with the casual force of something that considered a human body a minor inconvenience. His new heart — *Julius's* heart, corrected the part of him that was running "The Origin Template" at full paranoid capacity — beat once more. Stuttered. Beat again.
*Keep going,* he told it.
He got the impression the heart was not particularly impressed by instruction from a ghost.
He pushed more of himself into the nervous system — threading his spectral essence along the pathways that "Vessel Stabilization" mapped for him, finding the severed connections, the shock-dimmed signals, and knitting them back together one by one with the focused desperation of a man defusing something that had already started beeping. The bleeding slowed. Then stopped. The tissue at the wound's edge began to creep inward — slowly, expensively, costing him magicules he couldn't afford.
*I need fuel,* he recognized. *Now.*
He opened Julius's eyes.
The forest looked back at him.
Different, through physical eyes. Heavier. Colours too saturated and yet somehow less — whatever magical perception he'd had as a ghost was gone, replaced by the blunt instrument of human vision. Everything was just *there*, immediate and insistent, without the soul-wavelength overlay that had let him read the world like a heat map. He felt suddenly claustrophobic in a way that had nothing to do with the trees.
*You're in a meat suit,* he told himself. *You knew this going in. Focus.*
He turned Julius's head — carefully, because the neck hurt — and looked at the clearing.
Twenty bodies.
He'd known the number. Knowing it and seeing it were different operations.
Captain Vane was the closest — a broad man with a grey beard and the solid, competent stillness of someone who had been very good at his job until about forty minutes ago. The others fanned out across the clearing in the geometry of a formation that had shattered: some still in defensive posture, some mid-draw, some simply dropped where the alpha's first charge had taken them. The horses were gone — fled or dead. The Greater Direwolf had eaten its fill and departed, leaving behind the particular smell that Shinji's borrowed nose catalogued as *blood, churned earth, wet fur,* and *this is going to draw scavengers.*
He had, he estimated, maybe an hour before something else arrived.
*Work.*
---
He activated "The Great Harvest".
He had expected it to feel like theft. Clean, transactional — take the magicules, process the data, move on.
It didn't feel like that.
It felt like remembering things that had never happened to him.
Captain Vane came first, because he was closest, and what arrived wasn't just energy — it was thirty-two years of guard service in a single compressed cascade. The weight of a longsword. The specific creak of the fortress gate. The smell of his daughter's hair when she was four years old and had fallen asleep against his shoulder during the harvest festival. The exact angle to hold a blade when expecting a high thrust from a mounted attacker. The face of the first man he'd killed. The recipe for his wife's lentil soup.
*"The Eternal Library". Archive it. Don't absorb it. Archive.*
The data sorted. Filed. Became a shelf he could read from rather than a voice speaking over his own.
He moved to the next guard.
Then the next.
Magicules rose. 4% became 11% became 23% became — he stopped counting at some point, because the data was arriving faster than he could consciously process it and "The Origin Template" was working overtime separating *Shinji Satou, analyst, age 29, deceased* from the growing library of borrowed lives he was building. The chest wound drank the energy as quickly as he generated it. He felt Julius's heart strengthen — from a whisper to a murmur to an actual, sustained, irritated *thump thump thump* that felt almost accusatory.
*Don't look at me like that,* he told it. *You'd be dead without me.*
The heart had no response to this, which he appreciated.
By the time he reached the last of the twenty — a young guard, barely seventeen, whose primary memories seemed to consist of training drills and a girl in the village market — Shinji Satou was at 67% magicule capacity, possessed of more sword forms than he'd ever wanted to know, and in possession of one piece of information that made every other data point irrelevant.
＜＜Confirmed. Magicule capacity threshold crossed.
Soul archive: 20 units registered.
Skill blueprints extracted: 11 categories.
Note: Energy signature of current harvest detectable by A-Rank and above within regional radius.＞＞
He sat very still with Julius's body against the moss-covered oak and read it again. Slowly. The way you read something when you're hoping you misunderstood it the first time.
Captain Vane. Forty days ago. A private meeting in the back room of an inn in Blumund. A man in Falmuth travelling clothes, careful hands, forgettable face. Three gold pieces — not silver, *gold*, Falmuth-minted — changing hands. A patrol route written in the Captain's own hand being passed across a table. The words: *"The direwolves use the eastern gully as a run. If the patrol moves through at midday, they'll catch the pack during feeding. The alpha won't tolerate the intrusion."*
Not an accident. Not bad luck.
Twenty guards dead and one nearly-dead noble heir, by design. Someone had paid for this outcome.
*Someone in the Muller household paid in Falmuth gold,* he concluded. *The coin type matters — Falmuth and Blumund are not on warm terms. This isn't a robbery. This is geopolitical.*
Shinji leaned Julius's head back against the oak and stared up through the canopy at the early stars appearing in the darkening sky.
*Welcome to your new life,* he told himself. *You're nineteen years old, you have a traitor in your house, a cousin who wants you dead, parents who will definitely notice you're not quite yourself, and a famous sword teacher who is going to want to spar the moment you get home.*
A distant howl drifted through the trees. Far away. Not immediate.
*Right,* he thought. *And there's also the forest full of monsters.*
He pressed Julius's hands against the oak and stood up.
The body worked. Unsteadily — the chest was still knitting, and the borrowed muscle memory from the guards hadn't fully settled into limbs that had their own long-trained patterns — but it worked. Six feet of noble-born, nineteen-year-old human architecture with golden hair and a torn, blood-soaked uniform and the signet ring of the Muller family glinting on his right hand.
He looked at the ring for a moment.
*This is what a trap looks like from the inside,* he thought. *You just walked into it with someone else's face.*
He flexed Julius's fingers. The rapier was still in its scabbard — the Silvershard, family heirloom, magic-conductive silver, excellent for channeling spectral energy if you happened to be a ghost wearing a person. He drew it without fully deciding to and turned it in the starlight. The balance was good. His ghost-self had no reference for 'good rapier balance,' but the borrowed muscle memory from Julius's years of training responded to the weight the way a hand responds to a familiar shape in the dark.
*I have the data,* he acknowledged. *I don't have the body's fluency yet. That's a problem.*
He needed a cave. He needed six hours of darkness and silence to practice until his borrowed arms stopped shaking and the Muller Family Fencing forms stopped feeling like instructions he was consciously executing and started feeling like instinct. He needed to rehearse Julius's voice — that slight formal drawl, the habit of adjusting the left cuff when uncertain. He needed to build the performance before the audience arrived.
He also needed to decide what to do with Captain Vane's memory.
*Later,* he told himself. *Cave first. Conspiracy second.*
He moved into the forest.
---
He found it forty minutes later — not through luck but through "Omniscient Analysis" cross-referencing the guards' memories of this patrol route with the topographical features they'd noted. A limestone shelf approximately two hundred meters north-northeast of the ambush site, a cave mouth screened by bracken and an overhang that would hide firelight from all directions. Captain Vane had used it once, three years ago, during a storm.
Shinji filed the mild irony of that and ducked inside.
He didn't make a fire. He didn't need one — the body's temperature regulation was working, the wound was stable, and more importantly, he wasn't interested in advertising. He sat in the dark, which his borrowed eyes found deeply inconvenient (the Night Walker sub-skill apparently didn't transfer to physical form; noted), and began to do what he'd always done when the world became complicated.
He made a list.
*Immediate threats, in order of urgency:*
*One: The 71-hour stabilization window. "System Stability" says the fusion is holding. The Core Weaver took the Direwolf's cardiac energy when I passed the carcass — Julius's chest is approximately 80% healed. It'll be sore. Explainable. "I survived the attack" requires looking like someone who survived an attack, not someone who walked away clean.*
*Two: The search party. The Muller family sent Julius with twenty guards. When he doesn't return by sunset, they send more. Estimate departure from the fortress: two hours ago. Estimate arrival at ambush site: four hours. I need to be moving toward them, not away, and I need to look like a traumatized nineteen-year-old who barely lived.*
He paused.
*Three: The traitor. Captain Vane's memory gives me a description but no name. The man in Falmuth clothes could be anyone with access to the patrol schedule. That means it's someone inside the household, someone who knew Julius's route, someone with a reason to want the Muller heir dead. Cousin Kapel is the obvious answer. The obvious answer is sometimes correct. But obvious answers are also sometimes what you're meant to think.*
*Four: Being Julius. Earl Raymond expects his son to return as 'a man who has tasted blood.' He sent Julius on a bravery test. I have twenty guards' worth of military experience and a healed chest wound. I can do 'man who has tasted blood.' The harder performance is the one Countess Elara will require — she knew her son. She hired the extra guards privately. She will notice if the eyes are wrong.*
He spent two hours in the dark practicing.
Not sword forms — not yet, not until he could see his hands. He practiced voice. He practiced posture. He pulled Julius's memories forward and watched them like footage, studying the specific quality of the boy's attention, the way he'd stood in doorways looking at things before entering rooms, the private expression he wore when he was frightened and didn't want it to show.
*He was afraid all the time,* Shinji realized, somewhere in the second hour. *Everything he did, all of it — the sword practice, the formal drawl, the rigid spine — it was all performance. He was terrified of disappointing his father and he built a person on top of that terror and wore it every day.*
He sat with that for a moment.
*That's useful,* the analyst in him noted. *I know how to perform around fear. I've been doing it for twenty-nine years.*
*That's also sad,* the part of him that was still trying to be human noted. *He was nineteen and he was already exhausted.*
He adjusted Julius's cuffs — left one first, then right. A habit he now owned.
He spent the remaining dark hours running the sword forms until the body stopped fighting him. At some point in the third hour, something shifted — the archived data and the muscle memory finding a common language, the movements becoming less instruction and more instinct. He registered the change the way you register a lock clicking open: not dramatically, just correctly.
＜＜Confirmed. Skill Synthesis successful.
Extra Skill [Blade of the Fallen] — acquired.
Components: [Sword Mastery (composite, 18 sources)] + [Aura Manipulation].
Effect: Spectral strike extension via Ghost Core projection.＞＞
*There it is,* he thought.
Far to the northwest, something that had been paying very little attention to the Jura Forest briefly paid slightly more. Then it returned to whatever it had been doing.
Shinji didn't notice. He was already running the forms again.
*I'll keep the parts that work,* he decided. *The formal drawl. The precision. The spine. I'll drop the terror, because I have better things to be afraid of.*
He thought about the Countess's private guards — twenty men she'd sent without her husband's knowledge, because she'd loved her son enough to protect him secretly.
Twenty men whose memories he now carried.
He would make sure Earl Raymond never knew she'd hired them. Whatever cover story he built for the ambush, the extra guards would be explained as Muller regulars. He'd let the Countess believe her precaution had helped, that it had simply been insufficient against an alpha Direwolf.
It was a small mercy. He'd give it for free.
*Equivalent exchange doesn't apply to the dead,* he decided. *Only to the living.*
Dawn was approximately three hours away when he heard them — the sound of horses, the flicker of torches through the treeline, the specific noise of an organized search pattern spreading through the forest. Professional spacing. Military discipline. Someone at the front calling Julius's name with increasing urgency.
He stood up.
He drew the Silvershard and looked at his reflection in the blade — Julius's face, pale from blood loss, eyes with a quality the boy had never quite possessed: flat, calculating, intensely focused in the way of someone taking inventory rather than experiencing fear.
*Wrong,* he recognized. *Too composed. He would have been in shock. He would have been shaking.*
He considered this.
Then he let himself feel, for exactly one controlled second, the accumulated weight of everything that had happened since he'd been tied to forty kilograms of concrete and dropped into the Pacific Ocean.
The reflection looked considerably more appropriate.
He sheathed the rapier and stepped out of the cave into the torchlight.
---
"*Here.*"
His voice came out right — that formal drawl, cracked at the edges with exactly the correct amount of exhausted relief. He raised Julius's left hand, and the movement made his chest pull sharply at the not-quite-healed wound, and the wince that crossed his face required no performance at all.
The nearest soldier spun, and Shinji watched the man's expression cycle through recognition, disbelief, and what he could only describe as the specific emotion of someone who had been preparing to deliver terrible news and has just been unexpectedly reprieved from it.
"*Young Master Julius!*"
*Yes,* Shinji thought, watching the torches converge. *That's me.*
He let himself look slightly dazed. He let himself accept the arm that came under his shoulder. He filed the names and faces of the search party against Captain Vane's intelligence and began building a social map in real time.
Forty-seven meters behind the search party's lead, sitting a horse with the careful stillness of someone trying not to look invested in the outcome — a man with Falmuth-cut boots.
Shinji noticed him. He filed the face. He said nothing.
*Evidence, not accusation,* the analyst in him instructed. *You don't know yet. You suspect. Suspects are resources until they aren't.*
"The wolves," he said, in Julius's voice, with Julius's drawl. "There were more than we expected."
He let the soldier help him toward the horses.
He adjusted his left cuff.
He began, quietly and without any outward sign, planning what came next.
---
Chapter End.