Reborn to be a Hermit

Chapter 2: The Unwilling Accomplice

Rina studied the boy before her with the cold, detached gaze of a forensic scientist examining a fatal flaw. They called him the half-breed, the outcast, the strange one. They could have guessed his truth so easily, she thought, if they hadn’t been so blinded by their own petty prejudices and the Kingdom of Bohemia’s meticulously crafted propaganda.

The signs of his demonkin heritage were not subtle; they were screaming, glorious anomalies in the wretched, sun-baked landscape of the village. His skin, a striking, flawless alabaster, refused to submit to the brutal glare of the noon sun. While the other villagers were shades of baked earth and grit, Edam was a statue of pure, defiant marble. His hair was a torrent of unnatural black—not the faded, sun-bleached brown of poverty, but a deep, glossy void that seemed to absorb all surrounding light.

But Rina knew the true, chilling giveaways.

He tried to hide his forehead with a perpetually overgrown fringe, yet in the faint afternoon light, she could still discern the traces of two faint black spots above his temples—the nascent buds where the obsidian horns of his father’s people would eventually erupt, marking him as a creature of immense power and certain doom. His hands were another sign. Unlike the wide, calloused paws of the village men, Edam’s fingers were tapered, almost unnaturally slender, and while he meticulously trimmed his nails, Rina saw the way they curled inward, subtly preparing themselves to become the hooked, formidable claws of a true demon warrior.

A walking arsenal, she thought, and he doesn’t even know the calibre of his own gun.

He was a tragic masterpiece of misplaced magic, a ticking clock counting down to his own annihilation. She knew his one weakness, the fatal, beautiful chasm in his otherwise guarded soul: his deep-seated, painful need to belong, which had been ruthlessly exploited by the shimmering lie that was Elora Bright.

She remembered the strange, almost magnetic pull he had toward the sacred wildflower fields at the edge of the village—a place he visited every morning despite the routine beatings and punishments. It was a compulsion, a trait common to the rarer demon species, an inability to resist the alluring temptations of intoxicating magic or singular beauty. He was attracted to Elora for the same reason a moth is drawn to a fire—a lethal, irresistible yearning for what he could never have.

"No matter what, I am not the person he has a crush on," Rina muttered under her breath, a bitter taste rising in her throat. She couldn't manipulate him with affection, not the way Elora could. Her currency was not beauty or kindness, but truth. Hard, unforgiving, murderous truth.

To survive, she needed more than a single refusal from the school. A lone child rejecting the highly-coveted Royal Academy admission, which came with a generous, life-saving stipend, would be instantly labeled a lunatic, drugged, and shipped off anyway. They needed a conspiracy, a pair of rejections—a united front that signaled a crisis, a pair of losses that would make the local nobility think twice before pushing further.

She walked straight up to him. He was seated by a broken stone trough, meticulously washing the blood and mud off his meager school tunic—a testament to the routine abuse he endured. He looked up, his dark eyes instantly sparking with distrust and the wounded pride he wore like cheap armor.

“Did you come to gawk, Rina?” he demanded, his voice a low, hostile growl. “I’ve had enough of the village’s pity for a lifetime.”

She ignored the barb. Her past self might have hesitated, might have tried to soften the blow with a careful lie, but the ten years of betrayal and death had sandpapered her soul clean of all courtesy. She went straight for the heart of the matter, her voice a low, intense whisper that cut through the silence of the desolate back alley.

“If I tell you that you are going to face a great disaster when the magic Awakening test is through,” she asked, her gaze locking onto his, "will you believe me?"

Edam froze, the movement of his hands on the tunic ceasing instantly. The water in the trough dripped—drip, drip, drip—a slow, agonizing countdown. The sudden shift in her demeanor, the lack of her usual detached boredom, seemed to shock him more than the words themselves.

“Will I have a disaster when the Awakening is through?” he repeated, his voice barely audible, the skepticism battling with a raw, panicked terror he couldn't hide. He didn't ask how she knew. He asked if her prophecy was true.

"Yes," Rina answered, her single word a cold, sharp blade.

He stared at her for a long, torturous minute. He searched her face, looking for the familiar mockery, the childish cruelty, the patronizing pity. He found none of it. Her eyes were ancient, filled with the wreckage of a life he couldn't comprehend.

Finally, the fight left him. The proud stiffness in his shoulders slumped. He whispered, the sound raw and desperate, “I believe you.”

---

His faith was a terrifying thing. It wasn't born of trust, but of the bone-deep knowledge of his own difference, the constant, low-level threat that hummed beneath the surface of his life.

Rina moved closer, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial level, as if the damp, reeking walls had ears. She laid out the foundation of her desperate, impossible plan.

"Good. Because you and I are going to find a spell. A specific, ancient spell. One that will make our magic vanish."

The terror in Edam’s eyes sharpened into sheer incredulity. "Vanish? The Awakening is tomorrow! Why would we—"

"Listen to me," Rina hissed, cutting him off, her urgency a palpable force. "The system is a lie. The Royal Academy is not a school; it is a slaughterhouse. You, Edam... you are not destined for the military. You are destined to be a sacrificial ingredient."

She did not spare him the details, though she spoke in cold, clinical terms. She explained the Symbiosis Rite—the forbidden ritual the Eleventh Prince intended to use to extend his miserable life—and the horrifying, ironic prerequisite: the victim must be willing.

"They need a pure source of Demonkin magic. They need your immense, untainted power. And they need your willing sacrifice to make the transfer permanent and absolute."

Edam recoiled as if struck, his marble-pale face turning a sickly, greenish hue. "The Eleventh Prince? Elora..."

The name of his crush was a choked-off cry of a dying man. Rina felt a surge of cold satisfaction. The poison of truth was working. Elora Bright's casual, selfish betrayal, the leveraging of his hopeless devotion for a single, deadly ritual, was far more devastating than any physical abuse he had endured.

"She will convince you," Rina stated, flatly, decisively. "She will twist your loneliness into a sense of noble destiny, and you will walk to the altar, thinking you are saving the world, when you are merely extending the life of a parasitic royal. We must make you unwilling. We must make you useless."

The logic was undeniable, brutal, and terrifyingly clear.

"A spell, then," Edam repeated, his voice barely a rasp. "What kind of spell?"

"A curse," Rina corrected. "A powerful, self-inflicted Demon Magic spell that causes the caster to lose their magic core completely. It's an act of magical suicide, a last resort of the old Demonkin bloodlines to deny their power to their enemies. No magic, no source. No source, no pill."

She knew his mother, the herbalist, had been a Demonkin refugee, a solitary, silent woman who had lived on the fringes of the village before her death. "Your family... your mother was connected to the old ways. You might have access to texts, to knowledge that the Bohemian archives were forced to ignore or destroy. We are looking for the Curse of the Barren Soul."

Edam wiped a tear of pure, horrified understanding from his eye. "I... I will look. My mother had an old, locked chest."

The urgency was now mutual, the terror a bond stronger than any friendship. The magical Awakening test was the catalyst, the point of no return. The very act of undergoing the Awakening ritual would map out his immense power for the nobility, making him an even more sought-after prize.

"You have to find it now," Rina urged, giving him a look that conveyed the full weight of her past life. "The Awakening is hours away. We do this, or you die a slow, meaningless death as a battery."

---

The air in the village schoolhouse was thick and humid, a suffocating blend of fear, excitement, and the coppery tang of the incense used for the ritual. The classroom was a cramped, miserable cage of hopeful students, all awaiting their turn for the Awakening.

Rina slipped into her seat, her mind an ice bath of focused calculation. Edam followed, his presence instantly generating a pocket of hostile silence around him.

The teacher, a portly man named Master Veridian, his face slick with sweat and the anxiety of potential bonuses, called her name.

"Song Rina!"

She rose, her eyes sweeping over the room. The children around her were a pathetic gallery of doomed ambition. They possessed magic, yes, for magic was rife in Bohemian blood, but it was weak, stunted, and ruthlessly siphoned off by the clandestine runes woven into the Royal Academy's contracts.

The class is full of commoners, Rina cataloged, all destined for mediocrity. Most of them possessed less than ten units of raw magical power. The standard spell required a minimum of fifteen units. They were functionally powerless, regardless of their 'talent.' Their future was written in stone: they would toil in the fields as impoverished citizens, or they would be conscripted as fodder into the military, dying in some forgotten dungeon while hunting based on deliberately unreliable information.

The magic they carried was just enough to be stolen, not enough to be useful.

"Go to the Chamber," the teacher instructed, pointing toward the heavy oak door. "And don't ask the others what it feels like. It is forbidden to speak of the talent."

Rina nodded, her lips pressed into a thin, grim line. The Awakening was a solitary, deeply personal process, often done while unconscious, lying on a specific ceremonial bed imbued with the power of the Blessed Tree's leaves. It was supposed to clarify one's talent, but Rina knew its true purpose: a final, high-definition scan of the magical core before the levy began.

As she reached the door, she heard a commotion behind her.

"Wait, Master Veridian!" The voice was tight with righteous resentment. It was Edam.

He stood up, his dark eyes fixed on the teacher, then on the students who instantly shrank away from him. He was a magnet for scorn, the constant target of the bullies who saw his quiet dignity as an intolerable offense.

Rina remembered her past life's knowledge of him: the boy who would have put bugs in the teacher's pet's bag if he hadn't been too busy running for his life. He hated the system, hated the favorites, and now, he was taking a defiant stand.

"I need to leave now," Edam announced, his voice firm, echoing in the hushed room. "I will not be participating in the Awakening."

The teacher’s face turned scarlet, the sudden loss of a potential 'talented' student—and the commensurate loss of his meager yearly bonus—sending him into a sputtering rage. "Silence, you cursed mongrel! Sit down! The stipend! The glory! You defy your lord's grace?"

But Edam was resolute. He was not rejecting the academy for himself, Rina realized with a sudden, chilling certainty. He was rejecting it for the woman who had just revealed the true, blood-soaked path laid out before them. He was acting as her unwilling accomplice, driven not by affection for her, but by the desperate, clawing need to escape the butcher's knife and the horror of Elora Bright's final betrayal.

"I will not," Edam said, his stance unyielding, a tiny speck of marble defiance against the colossal, corrupt machine of Bohemia.

Rina paused at the door, a flicker of something close to respect crossing her face. Good. Let them see the resistance.

She stepped into the dark chamber, the heavy oak door swinging shut behind her, plunging her into the heavy, magical gloom. The ritual was now fully underway, but for Rina, the real fight, the one for their lives, had already been won in the desperate, whispered conspiracy by the stinking stone trough. She had traded his blind devotion to a golden goddess for the sharp, bitter taste of his own survival.