The first thing Roland did when he opened his eyes was not panic.
The first thing he did was check the gravitational acceleration.
His body was lying on its side, his back resting against a padded surface that vibrated at a steady rhythm. He inhaled, held it, then relaxed his wrist to feel the downward pull. No deviation. No prolonged sensation of free fall or compression against his chest. The acceleration was approximately 9.8 meters per second squared—the number was so familiar that he almost forgot he was no longer where he used to be. The air was moderately cool and humid, the sweat on his forehead drying slowly; he estimated the temperature at around twenty-two degrees.
Tentative conclusion: he was alive, on a planetary surface with gravity close to that of the place he remembered.
The place he remembered.
Roland closed his eyes again for two seconds. His final memory was unpleasantly clear: the fourth-floor laboratory, the monitor running the field simulation he had stayed awake for three nights to calibrate, the stale cup of coffee beside his keyboard, and a blinking progress bar reporting that the simulation was still running. Then a very small pop from the power supply. Then darkness.
Then he was here. In a body that was not his own—he knew because the hand resting on his knee was slimmer, the nails neatly trimmed in a way he had never had the patience to manage, and there was no scar on his left wrist from when the laboratory door had caught it during his sophomore year.
Primary hypothesis: his consciousness had been transferred into another vessel while his original body ceased functioning. The probability of this hypothesis, according to every model he had ever studied, approached zero. He noted that fact, then set it aside for the moment. In physics, when a phenomenon with zero probability still occurs, the problem is not the phenomenon—the problem is the model. He would revise the hypothesis later. Right now, he needed data.
And precisely when he needed data, the data appeared on its own.
A glowing window lit up in midair, hovering directly in front of him, transparent enough for him to see through it to the carriage window curtains swaying behind. It was pink. Pale pink. Its edges were rounded, a tiny heart blinked in the upper-right corner, and sparkling stars were scattered across the background, slowly spinning as if someone had dumped an entire box of glitter into the software.
He looked at it. It looked at him.
[♡ Welcome, Love, to your destined journey! ♡]
Roland read the line twice.
“I am not the ‘love’ of anything,” he said, his voice hoarse from disuse since opening his eyes. “And I request that this interface disable its decorative mode. The density of the glowing particles is interfering with my ability to read the information.”
The glowing window did not turn off. It actually sparkled even more enthusiastically, as though his complaint were a caress.
[♡ Thank you for interacting! Your enthusiasm makes the System so happy! ♡]
“I am not enthusiastic,” Roland replied. “I am requesting debugging.”
[♡ Love’s debugging request has been noted! ♡]
He let out a long breath, careful not to fog the glowing window with it. Fine. A responsive interface speaking in the voice of a dating app he had once seen advertised between cooking tutorial videos—but permanently stuck in cute mode and lacking an exit button. He did not understand it. He did not yet understand anything here. So he did the only rational thing: read everything it displayed, in order, without skipping a single comma.
He scanned the screen. The upper-left corner read “Otome System v2.1.” He did not know what “otome” meant in this context, and he disliked words he could not define, so he temporarily filed it under “unsolved” in his mind. Below it was a status bar, an item labeled “Event” blinking beside it, and a number next to a heart icon: “Affection—???.”
Before he could read further, the carriage window curtain was pulled aside, and daylight poured in alongside a woman’s voice as sharp as the edge of paper.
“You’re awake.”
The girl sitting across from him in the carriage compartment did not look pleased in the slightest. Her brown hair was tied neatly at the nape of her neck, a stack of parchment was tucked under her arm, and her eyes swept over him with the speed of someone reviewing a contract for unfavorable clauses. She wore a long ash-gray coat buttoned all the way to her chin, and her entire person radiated an energy that, if he had to assign it a unit of measurement, Roland would call “organized endurance.”
“You slept through the last leg of the journey,” she said, not asking. “I had to tell the coachman you were ‘centering yourself before a momentous occasion.’ The truth is that you fainted. They’re two different things, but my version sounds better for the Kingdom’s reputation.”
“I did not faint,” Roland said. “I transitioned states of consciousness.”
She looked at him for another one and a half seconds. He counted exactly one and a half seconds because he was trying to calibrate his ability to measure the silences of the person opposite him, and this silence was longer than average.
“Yes,” she finally replied, her voice flat as a windless lake. “You ‘transitioned states of consciousness.’ I’ll record it exactly that way, Sir Roland, and I’ll prepare an explanation for the court about why our only diplomat speaks like a ‘textbook that fell down a well.’”
Roland. His name here was Roland. He stored that information in its place, beside “9.8 acceleration” and “pink interface.” Then he realized he had just been about to ask her a question, and his throat had gotten ahead of his reason.
“You are—”
He stopped. Because he did not know who she was. He did not know who he was in this body, beyond the name that the pink interface and the cramp in his stomach seemed to confirm together. And he did not know why he was sitting in a carriage rolling toward whatever the pink interface had just called “destiny”—an event, he guessed, that he did not remember agreeing to attend.
The girl looked at him. The contract-reviewing gaze from before froze, then shifted into something else—the look of someone who had just discovered that the unfavorable clause was not on the paper but right in front of her. She did not answer at once. She set the stack of parchment on the seat, very slowly, and leaned toward him.
“You don’t remember me,” she said. Not a question. Her voice dropped half a tone, the way people lowered their voices when speaking to someone who had just woken up after taking a blow to the head. “Sir Roland. You’re looking at me like a stranger who wandered into your carriage compartment by mistake.”
Roland considered lying. Lying would require a model of what he was “supposed” to remember, and he had no such model; every fabrication would be exposed at the first detail someone questioned. In physics, a theory that did not fit the observational data would collapse sooner or later. It was better not to construct the wrong theory in the first place.
“I don’t remember,” he said. “I remember how to think. I remember how to measure. I don’t remember you or this carriage. But I can infer that I’m being taken to meet someone with the authority to decide something very significant, and I’m the person who has to speak with them—I just don’t remember why it’s me, or who they are. I apologize for the inconvenience.”
A silence. This time he did not count because he was busy reading her face. The muscles around her eyes tightened—not anger, he thought, but calculation. She was weighing a gamble she lacked enough information to assess: an amnesiac diplomat who had to enter the hall in ten minutes, with forty-one thousand lives and no other diplomat to wager.
“Therion has forty-one thousand people in three border provinces,” she said, and this time her voice was no longer flat—it had thinned, like a sheet of paper pulled taut. “If the treaty isn’t signed today, or if it’s signed under the terms the Empire proposed last time, those three provinces will pass under its control during the Dormant Season. Our people there won’t be killed, Sir. They’ll be taxed until they have to abandon their fields, and the people who abandon their fields die more slowly than those who are killed, but they still die. Do you understand?”
Roland understood.
He looked out the window. The carriage was passing through a stone-paved square. He saw a flag—a red field bearing a golden lion—hanging limp in the windless air, its edges frayed. He saw a woman sitting on the ground against a wall, holding a child, and the child was watching his carriage pass with utterly expressionless eyes, the kind of expressionlessness belonging to people who had stopped expecting anything.
Forty-one thousand. Not a number in a simulation. Not a row in a spreadsheet he could delete if his calculations were wrong.
“All right,” he said. His voice was calmer than he expected. “Show me what you have on the person I’m about to meet.”
Lysandra handed him the stack of parchment. Before he could take it, the pink glowing window in front of him—the thing that had continued sparkling patiently despite all his debugging requests—suddenly gave a little shake, and a new item opened with a sweet little chime so sugary that he wanted to throw it out the window.
[♡ Profile Unlocked! ♡] [♡ Target: Leon Vael—Emperor of the Empire. Affectionate nickname: “The Tyrant Emperor” (don’t worry, that’s just what people call those who love too intensely! ♡). Likes: collecting artifacts from countries that have… ceased to exist. Hates: being disturbed, being contradicted, and cold tea. ♡]
Roland read the final line twice. “Cold tea.” In the entire profile of an emperor who could decide the fate of forty-one thousand people, the thing listed alongside “collecting the spoils of annihilated nations” was the temperature of a beverage.
He looked up at Lysandra. “Does your profile mention that he hates cold tea?”
“No,” she replied cautiously. “My profile says he loses patience during prolonged audiences. Why do you ask?”
“Nothing,” Roland said. “It’s just that two sets of information are describing the same phenomenon through different reference frames. Interesting.”
“Reference… what?” Lysandra asked, and this time the caution in her voice gave way to a blank space—but Roland, learning how to read blank spaces, realized that this one was not empty. It was full. Full of something she was trying not to let spill out, and that something was not irritation. The muscles around her jaw tightened for the briefest instant, then relaxed, as quickly as if she had ordered herself to let go. She was not afraid of him—he could read that much—she was afraid of what he had just let slip, afraid it might reach someone other than her, in a room other than this carriage. “Sir, I don’t—what language are you speaking?”
Roland blinked. He had just assumed the person opposite him shared his basic vocabulary, and that assumption was wrong. “Reference frame”—a phrase he used as naturally as breathing—was meaningless to her, or worse, evidence that his mind had not fully woken up yet. He noted this as a new constraint, no less important than gravitational acceleration: the language in his head and the language in the heads of the people around him did not overlap. Everything he said would require a translation step, and he could not perform that step himself.
“Forget it,” he said. “I mean, your profile and my… interface are talking about the same thing in two different ways. It’s not important.”
She did not ask anything else, but he saw her finger tap once against the stack of papers—the tap of someone adding another bullet point to the list of things to worry about concerning him. He did not blame her. If he were her, he would be worried too.
[♡ Main Event starting! ♡] the glowing window chimed, entirely unconcerned with Lysandra’s tapping finger or his heart rate of one hundred ten. [♡ “Destined Tea Time with the Tyrant Emperor”! Objective: A Happy Ending! Let your heart lead the way, Love! ♡]
“My heart is leading the way at a rate of one hundred ten beats per minute,” Roland muttered. “That’s a sign of acute stress, not destiny.”
“What did you say?”
“I said I’m ready,” he replied, and surprisingly, that was the statement closest to the truth he could make at that moment.
The carriage slowed. The wooden wheels ground over gravel, then came to a complete stop. Outside, a deep, even male voice began reciting a chain of titles so long that Roland was certain the speaker must have practiced it like a musician practicing scales; within that long chain, one surname repeated like a refrain—Vael—matching the surname he had just read in the Profile and allowing him to immediately join the pieces into a single person: the one being hailed, the one about to sit upon the dais, was Leon Vael. Lysandra stood, smoothing a wrinkle from her coat that did not exist, then looked down at him—a final inspection, as though checking whether any pink glitter had stuck to him.
“Sir Roland,” she said, and this time her voice softened by exactly one millimeter, enough for him to notice. “I don’t know how empty your head is right now, and I don’t know how much of the person who prepared with me yesterday you still retain. But I do know one thing. You don’t need to be eloquent. You don’t need to charm him. You only need to be ‘right.’ He hates liars more than he hates blunt people. Give him the truth, and let me handle making that truth sound diplomatic. Clear?”
“Clear,” Roland said. “You’re the filter. I’m the raw signal.”
A silence. This time, two seconds. A new record.
“Yes,” Lysandra said, and Roland was certain the corner of her mouth twitched, so slightly that he would have missed it if he had not been calibrating his ability to observe microexpressions. “You’re the raw signal. I’ll record that phrase in my personal journal, right beneath ‘things I’ll tell my grandchildren when I’m old’—though, to be honest, I’m not entirely sure what you meant literally, but I’ll assign it a meaning I can endure. Now, please get out of the carriage, Sir ‘Raw Signal.’”
She pulled the curtain aside. The door opened.
The Imperial Hall did not resemble any laboratory Roland had ever entered, and he had entered quite a few. The ceiling was absurdly high, marble columns stood in two rows like an experiment in symmetry pushed to an extreme, and at the end of the hall, on a dais exactly three steps above the floor—he counted—sat a man in a chair whose every detail screamed “power” in the most subtle way possible: no gaudy gilding, just dark wood carved enough to make it clear that whoever had carved it had been paid extremely well.
Emperor Leon. He was younger than Roland had expected—or younger than the nickname “tyrant” suggested. Dark hair, broad shoulders, and a face that, if Roland had to describe it in geometric terms, he would call “features converging on a central point with unsettling precision.” He was looking at him. Not Lysandra. Not the entourage. Him, the way someone looked at an unsolved equation without knowing whether they would like the answer.
The pink glowing window in his field of vision immediately updated.
[♡ Affection—Leon: 12. ♡] [♡ (Don’t be discouraged! Twelve is a wonderful start! Every great love begins with a modest number! ♡)]
Twelve. Roland did not know what the scale went up to, but his rational intuition—the intuition that had survived four years of being ground down by professors’ critiques—told him that twelve on an undefined scale was a “very” modest number, glitter-soaked encouragement notwithstanding. Noted: he was starting near the bottom. Forty-one thousand people hung on a twelve and a trembling body.
He moved forward. With every step he placed on the marble floor, he felt his heart rate drop a little—not because he was calming down, but because he was doing what he did best: observing, measuring, and turning fear into data. Distance from the door to the dais: roughly twenty meters. Number of armed people in his peripheral vision: six, standing symmetrically, their hands near the hilts of their swords but not touching them—a trained stance, not one prepared to attack. Temperature in the hall: lower than outside, but not enough for breath to mist, meaning the heating system was well controlled, meaning this was a place accustomed to keeping everything within its control. A place like that would not appreciate someone disrupting the order.
Roland stopped at the foot of the three steps. The ritual, according to what this body still remembered and the tiny movement of Lysandra’s chin behind him, required him to bow first. He bowed. He estimated the angle at approximately thirty degrees, respectful enough without looking submissive—a piece of optimization he hoped fell within the acceptable range of this culture.
When he raised his head, a servant had placed a small table between him and the raised dais, along with a tea set. White porcelain with silver trim, and from the mouth of the pot, a thin wisp of steam rose and vanished almost immediately in the hall’s cold air.
Emperor Leon still said nothing. He merely tilted his head, very slightly, as though waiting to see what Roland—the diplomat of a tiny kingdom begging for mercy—would say first. A plea? A compliment? A polished ceremonial opening?
Behind him, Lysandra was barely breathing. Roland sensed her held breath like a change in pressure. This was the moment her filter had been waiting for raw signal from him, so she could turn it into diplomacy. Forty-one thousand people were waiting for raw signal from him. The number twelve was waiting for raw signal from him.
And Roland, a former theoretical physics student who had measured the gravitational acceleration of an unfamiliar world and the heart rate of a borrowed body within ten minutes, looked at the steam vanishing too quickly and his brain—the brain that had never learned to stay quiet in the presence of a measurable phenomenon—automatically began calculating. Evaporation rate. Temperature difference from the hall’s surroundings. Heat-transfer coefficient of silver-trimmed porcelain. Everything converged on one number, and that number was, to him, absurdly important at precisely the second when nothing should have mattered more than forty-one thousand lives.
His mouth opened before the filter could intervene.
“The water in this pot,” Roland heard himself say, his voice even and clear as it rang through the silence of the great hall, “is only about seventy-two degrees Celsius. That’s lower than the proper temperature for the leaves you’re using. Whoever boiled this water for you, Your Majesty, made an unacceptable error.”
The silence that followed was not one and a half seconds. It was not two seconds. It was the kind of silence with mass, the kind Roland felt he could reach out and touch, and within that solid silence, he saw Lysandra—the only reliable filter he had in this world—slowly close her eyes. Not because he had criticized the tea. He realized, exactly one beat too late, that she did not even understand how he was criticizing it: “seventy-two degrees Celsius” meant nothing to her, “error” was not a recognizable offense, and she had no concept of any of it—and a filter could not translate what it did not understand. He had just thrown her a raw signal in a language that did not exist in this world, then stood there waiting for her to turn it into diplomacy—and in the instant she closed her eyes, Roland saw not a filter jammed in place, but a person calculating, very quickly, how to keep that foreign tongue from ever leaving this room, because if it did, before anyone other than Leon, the person who left along with it would be him, in a way no one in the room wanted to imagine.
And Emperor Leon, the number twelve, the man who hated being contradicted, slowly placed a hand on the arm of his chair.
—End of Chapter 1—