Chapter 1 : Chapter 1
Chapter 1: An Otherworld Beginning Beside the Villain Boss
“Sir Knight, are you awake?”
Cyril Adrien lay flat on a cold, hard wooden bed, his tired eyes open as he stared at the darkened space above him, where the brown-black firwood ceiling could only be made out faintly.
He clearly remembered that he was supposed to be lying in the elven underground palace in the game Road of Radiance, with a magical stone tablet engraved with ancient elven script above his head. Whenever it sensed the flow of mana, it would glow with a soft blue light, like a river of stars across the night sky.
So how had he ended up in a place like this after doing nothing more than closing his eyes for a short rest?
Pain pulsed through his body in waves. He could feel himself breaking out in cold sweat again and again, breathing in shallow little gasps, as weak as if he were genuinely down with a fever. His mind was a muddled mess as well, heavy and foggy, so drowsy that all he wanted to do was shut his eyes and sleep properly.
But confusion rose within him all the same. Although Road of Radiance was famous for its realism, it still took great care of the player experience. Pain could be reduced to one percent, and negative conditions like sickness or poison only appeared as status data. They did not affect the senses themselves.
A state of weakness this real should have been impossible.
“Sir Knight, Mr. Adrien, may the starlight shine upon you. You’re finally awake!”
Half-conscious, he heard that frail female voice again. This time it came together with the sound of a towel being wrung out and droplets of water pattering down. A moment later, a cool cloth settled over his face and began gently wiping across it.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t dare light a fire to heat water, so this was all I could do.”
Cyril turned his head with difficulty. By the pale morning light leaking in through a gap in the curtains, he finally saw the owner of the voice clearly—
She was a girl of about fourteen or fifteen, with short silver hair as clean and white as the snowfields of the endless northern wastes. It seemed she had not washed it properly in several days, however, and it sat in a messy tangle, her bangs falling over her eyes from time to time. Her eyelashes were long and thick, drooping slightly, unable to conceal the catlike almond eyes beneath them. The corners of her eyes were narrow and long, and the hollows around them were sunken, as though she had not had a good night’s sleep in days. Her nose was small and delicately upturned, twitching as she sniffled. Speaking with a nasal tone, she said,
“Mr. Adrien, do you know what happened in town?”
Adrien? She was calling me that? Not my ID?
Only then did he finally react. From the environment and sensations around him—so real that they far exceeded anything a mere game should have been capable of—he finally extracted a crucial piece of information:
He had transmigrated. He had transmigrated into the game he had immersed himself in for years, Road of Radiance.
His mind was still in chaos, but Cyril forced himself to calm down. As one of the top Rogues among the player base, observing his surroundings and gathering useful information had long since become instinct. The house was built mainly from brown-black firwood. What kind of place would use such plain, unattractive material as its main building timber?
The answer had already leapt into his mind. Coupled with the icy air that seemed to make his body colder with every breath, Cyril became even more certain of where he was now—
The north of the Kingdom of La Rochelle, in winter.
That answer made his already poor complexion sink even further. He struggled to prop himself up a little and instinctively reached toward his thigh. Sure enough, the dagger he trusted most, Night Raven’s Cry, was nowhere to be found.
“What year is it now?”
Cyril spoke to the girl beside him. His vocal cords had clearly gone unused for a long time, and his voice came out terribly hoarse.
“Ah? Mr. Adrien, it’s the year 1440 of the Continental Calendar, the Year of the Dragon’s Roar.”
“1440? The Year of the Dragon’s Roar?” Cyril froze on the spot at that date. The game timeline he knew should have been the year 1466. Setting aside the fact that he had somehow transmigrated nearly thirty years into the past, the year 1440 held profound meaning for every player—especially those who had started in the Kingdom of La Rochelle.
That was the year Road of Radiance officially launched.
It was also the year the long and desperate struggle of La Rochelle’s players began.
The girl, however, clearly could not tell that Cyril’s heart was far from calm at the moment. As though she had been holding her words in for far too long, she began pouring them out all at once.
“All the uncles and aunts in town fell to the ground. I tried waking them up, but none of them would answer me. They even tried to bite me. I was terrified. Only you, Mr. Adrien, helped block them a few times…”
“Stop for a moment.” Cyril could not help cutting her off. The more she said, the more information he had to process. “Slower. Give me a little time—”
The girl obediently fell silent. She sat there quietly looking at Cyril, as if she understood that a man who had only just woken from unconsciousness needed time.
“Thank you.”
Cyril drew a deep breath.
The year 1440. The beginning of the Kingdom of La Rochelle’s thirteen years of calamity. It was from the kingdom’s north—the very place where he now found himself—that everything had begun.
In his previous life as a player, he had been able to do nothing but watch as La Rochelle struggled and sank amid the torrent of history, only to be destroyed in the end at a corner of the bay and swallowed up by the neighboring country that had eyed it covetously for so long.
He had died countless times in that drawn-out war. Even standing on the very front lines as a player, he had still never been able to win even the slightest chance of survival for La Rochelle.
He remembered the frightened yet resolute expressions on the faces of the recruits standing beneath the collapsing city walls. He remembered the last knight of the order, limping as he shouted for the charge and marched forward to his death with tragic heroism. He remembered the sound of those elegant, gentle priests weeping as they prayed for the soldiers.
He remembered the poets’ impassioned speeches, the anguished cries of the soldier whose arms had been severed, the desolate posture of the defeated general kneeling in defeat, and the old man lying stiff and dead with eyes that would not close. He remembered the commoner who shielded his children behind him only to be trampled beneath the undead, and the wealthy men who gave everything they had to support the army.
He remembered that the land now ground beneath white bones had once been lush with green grass. He remembered that the fog-filled air had once held blue skies over open fields. He remembered the trade cities where commerce had once flourished and carriages had rolled without end. He remembered the bustling harbors, full of noisy taverns and ships coming and going.
And he remembered those NPC companions who had raised their cups with him and fought at his side, so vivid they had seemed truly alive.
That familiar La Rochelle—so beautiful in his memories, the La Rochelle for which he had spent years giving everything he had to protect—he had returned.
He had never once imagined that he would one day transmigrate into the game. He knew the course of its history by heart. Carrying complete memories, he had returned to the very beginning of the disaster, and now he had the chance to grow faster than the era itself—
Did he now have a chance to stop La Rochelle from repeating the tragic fate it had suffered in the game?
He did not know.
But it was still the year 1440, the beginning of all calamity. He had plenty of time and plenty of opportunities to try—
“Cyril Adrien…” he murmured softly, repeating the name belonging to this body. “You will have the fortune of becoming the brightest rising star on this continent—”
At that very moment, Cyril suddenly felt a flicker of disorientation. It seemed to him that he had heard his own name somewhere before. But after quickly searching through the famous generals of La Rochelle from his previous life, he found no one by that name.
Was it only an illusion?
He turned his head again. The white-haired girl had been silent for quite a while now. Once she quieted down, even her taut nerves seemed to loosen. Her eyelids were already drooping heavily.
“This… Miss, what should I call you?” he asked after a brief hesitation, only now realizing that he still did not know the girl’s name.
“Mr. Adrien, I’m the blacksmith’s daughter from town. Just call me Caroline.” The girl was utterly exhausted. Sitting on her little stool, she bent forward as she spoke and rested against the edge of the bed. “That’s wonderful… I finally don’t have to be alone anymore…”
The moment that not-at-all-loud voice spoke her name, it exploded in Cyril’s ears like thunder. Goosebumps almost instantly crawled all over his skin—
Caroline? Which Caroline? Caroline, the “Twilight Shadow” of the northern dark-creature Keltir Alliance? That Caroline, who in the later years of La Rochelle’s calamity had single-handedly shattered the last remaining hope holding La Rochelle together?
Before he could even process the fact that this great villain boss was sitting right beside him, a sudden guess about the identity of this body made him let out a mute, disbelieving laugh—
“This Cyril Adrien of mine… could he possibly be Adrien the Linebreaker, chief among Caroline’s Three Knights?”
In other words, after fighting dark creatures for more than ten years, he had transmigrated into a minor villain-side boss?