Reborn to be a Hermit

Chapter 1 : The scars of the return

The chill was the first sensation—a biting, primal cold that had nothing to do with the grave and everything to do with the squalor of a life she thought she had finally escaped. Rina’s eyes snapped open, meeting the inverted sky of her youth. A ceiling of rough-hewn timber, pocked and scarred, yet rendered sublime by the slivers of starlight that stabbed through the gaps, mapping constellations onto the splintered wood.

This… this is their home.

The realization was a punch to the gut, stealing the air from her lungs. Not the familiar stone cell of her execution, not the endless, echoing void of death, but the wretched, leaking hut in the village she had fled a decade ago. Every nerve ending shrieked a protest, a desperate rejection of this resurrected reality.

What in the world am I doing here?

Then, the final, undeniable truth landed, not in her mind, but on her skin.

‘PLOP!’

A fat, icy raindrop struck her forehead, shattering the last illusion of peace.

"Wet," she finished the thought, the word tasting like ash. The rain was not falling outside; it was penetrating the flimsy roof, pooling on the mud floor. It was the chronic, damp misery of her past, now her present.

A low, guttural curse ripped through the gloom. On the mat beside her, her mother hauled herself up, a silhouette of resentment and chronic exhaustion.

Her dear parents. They were the architects of her first demise, though they had no concept of the monstrous future they'd sold her into. They'd been jubilant, celebratory even, to see her—and every other child they could spare—offered up to the Royal School of Magic, eager for the pitiful stipend that ensured their own slothful survival. Their proudest achievement was a teeming, neglected brood, each one a lottery ticket for a life of meager handouts.

Rina’s knuckles turned white where she gripped the coarse blanket. There was no scam more cruel, more absolute, than the one perpetrated by the so-called Royal Academy of the Kingdom of Bohemia.

She remembered the smoke, the smell of her own scorched skin, the rebels’ cold steel—but most vividly, she remembered the whisper, the awful, life-ending secret that had shattered her world in the last agonizing moments of her past life.

She had been a soldier, a common mage, one of the countless children of the unlanded populace. The prevailing myth, a lie woven into the very fabric of society, was that magic flowed in the blood, that only the noble lines possessed the strength to command true power. Rina had believed it, believing her own mediocrity was a flaw in her own veins.

It seems not.

It was a dark conspiracy. The entry form to the Royal Academy, free for every common child, was no act of benevolence. It was a contract of theft. A clandestine runic array—a masterpiece of magical parasitism—was layered beneath the seemingly innocuous enrollment documents. Every new acolyte's burgeoning, raw magical power was instantly and ruthlessly levied—siphoned off like blood from a freshly opened vein—and channeled to the noble houses.

The nobles, in turn, were simply reservoirs for the true apex predators: the Royal Family.

She had only learned this truth after being captured, during weeks of delirious questioning under the rebels’ dark arts. Her life had been normal until she was one of the few who lingered long enough to understand that the system didn’t just suppress common magic; it consumed it. They were not being trained; they were being farmed. They were power batteries, emptied slowly and left to wither in the military or the mines until their magical core was too depleted to be worth the effort.

In her previous life, she had walked this path, a willing sacrificial lamb led by her own desperate hope and her parents' greed. She had died a bitter, hollow woman, her magic core as dry as a desert well.

I must have died. The thought was cold and precise. Yet, the sheer, impossible absurdity of her return held a chilling promise. She was back. She was Song Rina, the scrawny village girl, her body weak, her magic nascent, but her mind held the terrifying blueprint of the future. She held ten years of classified knowledge, ten years of magical schematics, political betrayals, and the very secrets that killed her.

She swung her legs over the side of the sodden sleeping mat, pushing the memory of the hut’s stench—the accumulated filth of her family’s life—out of her mind. The rain pattered harder, her mother's curses continuing in a low, resentful monotone. Rina ignored them all. They were ghosts of her past, mere obstacles to be stepped over.

The village. It was a network of filth, poverty, and suspicion. And in this wretched landscape, she had her first target, her first piece to move on the blood-soaked chessboard of her second life.

---

THE OUTCAST AND THE ORACLE

She found him by the dilapidated, moss-eaten fence that marked the edge of the village’s unofficial 'unclean' sector. Edam. Even from a distance, the aura of the outcast clung to him—the way he kept his back straight, stiff with a proud isolation, the way the other village children gave him a wide, scornful berth.

He was sitting on a broken stump, meticulously cleaning a pair of muddy boots. When he saw her approaching, his dark, sharp eyes narrowed, and a flicker of deep-seated unease crossed his face.

"What are you looking at, Rina?" he demanded, his voice low, rough with a controlled anger that always masked a deeper vulnerability. "Haven't you got a pack of wretched siblings to watch over? Go on. Don't come off as too cool for your station."

He always had a sharp tongue, a defense mechanism against the world that saw his mere existence as a contamination. He was handsome, too—in a stark, unusual way that was a constant source of gossip. His hair was a deep, glossy black that seemed to absorb the light. His skin, a striking alabaster, was utterly impervious to the harsh sun of their region.

And Rina knew why.

She knew the two black spots hidden under his overgrown fringe—the nascent buds where horns would eventually erupt. She knew why his fingers were tapered, not wide like a human’s, hinting at the claws that were waiting to manifest.

Edam was a demonkin. A creature of the Demon Continent, a race with formidable, instinctual magic, yet a forbidden and feared lineage in Bohemia.

And she knew the tragedy that awaited him.

His words stung, but the pain was a dull ache compared to the trauma of her death. She registered his rejection, his attempt to push her away, but she felt only a terrible, focused pity for his ignorance.

He should not even be reserved for the Eleventh Prince.

The chilling horror of his destiny tightened the knot in her stomach. Edam, the demonkin, was slated to become a longevity pill. Not a victim of battle or a spy, but a sacrificial ingredient in an arcane Symbiosis Rite—a process where one's life force and the powerful, natural magic of a demonkin were forcibly transferred to a royal host to extend their lifespan indefinitely.

The key detail, the monstrous irony, was that the rite required the victim to be willing.

She followed the path of his gaze, which drifted momentarily past her shoulder, focused on something—or someone—beyond the fence line. Her heart instantly filled with ice.

There she is.

"Elora Bright." Rina didn't say the name; she spat it out in the silent, seething vault of her mind.

The girl shimmered into view, a vision of golden excess against the village's gray austerity. Elora Bright, the diamond of the local nobility, the future fiancée of the very Eleventh Prince who coveted Edam’s life.

Her hair was a cascade of golden curls that seemed to possess their own gravity, bouncing with a light-hearted insolence. Her skin wasn't merely fair; it was a luminescence, giving off a faint, internal glow that belied the mundane sun. The champagne-colored dress she wore was a masterpiece of lethal tailoring, tight where it should be tight, its fabric whispering of expense, revealing long, flawless legs that seemed to stretch into forever.

It wasn't a crush; it was an obsession. Edam was staring, a familiar, agonizing blend of yearning and hopelessness etched on his face. It’s amazing the boy did not have a crush on her.

And that was the lever. Elora Bright, the golden predator, must have convinced him. She must have leveraged his hopeless infatuation, twisted his pride and self-loathing into a sense of noble sacrifice, convincing him that his 'demon' life was a small price to pay for her happiness, or her family's favor.

Elora is more than selfish enough to beg such a thing off a boy who had a crush on her.

Rina's teeth ground together. In her previous life, she had been a pawn, a useful tool, and a victim of Elora’s casual, devastating selfishness more than once. The golden girl was a monster wrapped in silk, the kind of person who would swallow without even spitting out the bones—and laugh while doing it.

This time, Rina was not kind. She was not forgiving. She was a woman who had been betrayed by the world, by her family, and by the very magic she served. Her purpose was not charity; it was survival, and the methodical dismantling of the system that had murdered her.

She looked at Edam, still glowering, still trying to fend her off with sharp words.

In this situation, it really felt like I would lose if I let go of Edam.

He was a piece of the future she needed. He was a power source she could not ignore, a debt owed by the Bright family she intended to collect with interest. He was the first step in her war.

She shrugged off his angry words, letting them fall uselessly to the muddy ground between them. Her gaze was steady, cold, and utterly devoid of romantic or friendly interest.

“I still have functional hands and feet,” Rina stated, her voice surprisingly steady, cutting through the heavy air. “Don’t worry, I am not seducing you. Neither do I have any contagious diseases.”

She moved with the brisk, no-nonsense efficiency of a field medic, gripping his arm with unexpected strength, a strength forged in the agony of her past life. Edam flinched, startled by the sudden, possessive touch.

“Walk,” she commanded, pulling him forward, away from the fence, away from the glittering, poisonous silhouette of Elora Bright.

Rina did not need friends. She did not need allies. She needed weapons. And the bitter, powerful demonkin who stood unknowingly on the brink of his own destruction was now hers to command. The clock was ticking, the shadow of the Royal Academy was lengthening, and Rina had just claimed the first, most dangerous piece on the board. She had returned to life not as a victim, but as an oracle of vengeance, and the war for her survival had just begun with a single, defiant tug on a stubborn demonkin's arm.