# Chapter 2: Nail Clippers and Blood Debt
The clock on the dormitory wall showed midnight. The only source of light in the cramped room came from a cheap tallow candle melting on a wooden table. In his bed, Toby was snoring with an irregular rhythm, occasionally smacking his lips as if he were dreaming of eating meat pies.
Aster sat hunched over his desk, narrowing his eyes at the pile of “treasures” he had collected from the trash bin behind the Crafting workshop that afternoon. A rusty iron spoon, a broken wall-clock spring, and a scrap of tin from an old potion wrapper.
“I need five gold coins,” Aster whispered to himself, his voice nearly drowned out by Toby’s snoring. “And all the capital I have is trash even sewer rats wouldn’t eat.”
His plan was simple, logical, and thoroughly down-to-earth. He would make nail clippers. In Aethelgard’s magical world, nobles and high-level mages were obsessed with cleanliness and appearance, yet they always used wind or water magic to cut their nails, which occasionally led to minor accidents like slicing off their fingertips. Mechanical nail clippers with precise springs were rare items considered “exotic grooming tools” from another continent. If he could make a dozen high-quality pairs of nail clippers, he could sell them to nobles’ personal servants on the black market for five silver coins apiece. One hundred silver coins equaled one gold coin. He only needed two days.
Using small pliers and an iron file, Aster got to work. He cut the rusty iron spoon, bent it, and fitted the clock spring into the middle. His fingers grew raw and bloody from the sharp edges of the tin, but he didn’t care. He sharpened the cutting blades with a whetstone until he was convinced they were sharp enough to clip even a dragon’s toenails.
After two hours of work, with sweat dripping onto the table, a miniature pair of nail clippers now lay before him. They were somewhat crooked, their color mottled between rust and gleaming tin, and at a glance, they looked more like a miniature torture device than a grooming tool.
“Done,” Aster exhaled, wiping the sweat from his forehead. “Physically, it works. Aesthetically, though, it’s a disaster. No noble’s servant would touch this thing.”
He closed his eyes, drew a deep breath, and called upon the entity that had been hiding inside his consciousness since yesterday.
“System. Activate the Crafting Module. Evaluate and improve this item’s aesthetics.”
The temperature around the desk plummeted instantly. A pale blue, semitransparent screen appeared, flickering wildly with ear-piercing static.
[Crafting Module Activated.] [Scanning Materials... Rusty Iron (Quality: F), Damaged Clock Spring (Quality: F), Scrap Tin (Quality: F).] [Scanning User Intent: Aesthetic Nail Clippers for Sale.] [The World Law rejects the conversion of scrap materials into an aesthetic item. Probability of failure: 100%.]
Aster ground his teeth. “I’m not asking you to turn it into gold! Just clean up the rust a little so I can sell it!”
[Error... Error... Connection to the World Magic Server lost.] [World Law has detected an anomaly. Attempting to block the crafting process...] [Activating Emergency Camouflage Protocol. Searching for a loophole in the Law of Causality...] [Absolute Compensation Implanted.] [Concept Granted: Absolute Severance of Karma and Bonds.] [Item Created: Fate-Cutting Nail Clippers (???).]
A dim golden light flickered once above the desk, then vanished.
Aster stared at the nail clippers in front of him. They still looked exactly the same. Still crooked, still rusty, and still like a source of tetanus. There were no dragon engravings, no holy aura radiating from them.
“You gave me a god-tier concept, but you couldn’t even clean the rust off?” Aster muttered in frustration as he carefully picked up the nail clippers. They felt incredibly light, but when he gripped them, he sensed something strange at his fingertips. As if the clippers weren’t cutting through the air, but cutting through the space where the air existed.
He needed to test their sharpness. Aster took a thick copper wire from his desk drawer. He clamped the nail clipper blades onto the wire, then pressed the lever.
Click.
There was no sound of copper being forced apart. The thick wire simply split, without offering the slightest resistance. But what made the hairs on the back of Aster’s neck stand up wasn’t the severed wire. The shadow of the copper wire cast on the wall by the candlelight... had been cut too. The shadow split in two, even though the actual object was still joined at the bottom.
Aster swallowed, setting the wire down with trembling hands. “Okay. These aren’t nail clippers. They’re a physics anomaly. I need to be extremely careful.”
He prepared to wrap the clippers in thick cloth. But when he moved his left hand, his uniform sleeve slipped back, revealing his left wrist.
A blood-red tattoo forming a circular chain pattern lay there. The tattoo pulsed faintly, radiating heat that stung his skin.
This was the “Blood Debt Contract.” In his desperation to pay the academy’s entrance fee, Aster’s original body had borrowed money from a loan shark in the underground city and signed this magical contract. Every month, the contract would siphon away one-tenth of his mana and physical vitality as interest. If he failed to repay the principal within three months, his soul would be forcibly extracted. In the original novel, the original Aster died from losing all his vitality before the Coffee Spill Incident in the cafeteria took place.
“Hot...” Aster hissed, clutching his wrist. The chain tattoo began to glow brighter, indicating that midnight was when the contract siphoned away his vitality. Aster could feel his body weakening, his breathing growing ragged.
In a sudden burst of panic and pain, Aster reflexively searched for something to scratch the heat on his wrist. His right hand, still holding the nail clippers, accidentally caught a patch of dead skin near the chain tattoo.
Click.
The faint sound of the clip echoed through the silent room.
Aster froze. His eyes widened in horror as he stared at his wrist. He hadn’t cut the dead skin. With terrifying precision, the clipper blades had caught and cut through the red chain tattoo.
No blood came out. Instead, the chain tattoo, which should have been indestructible even by high-level magic, suddenly cracked. A sound like shattering glass rang inside Aster’s head. In a fraction of a second, the red chain shattered into countless particles of red light, then evaporated into the air, leaving behind clean, pale skin on his wrist.
The searing heat and crippling weakness in his body vanished instantly. His blood seemed to flow freely, and his lungs filled with fresh air he hadn’t felt in a long time.
The contract hadn’t merely been canceled. The concept that Aster had “ever owed money” to that loan shark had been erased from the universe’s causal order.
Aster stared at the rusty nail clippers in his right hand with unimaginable horror. “You... you just cut through a high-level soul contract with a tool that’s supposed to be used on toenails?”
He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The thing in his hand could sever contractual bonds, cut through curses, or perhaps even sever marriages and blood relations if he wasn’t careful. It was a forbidden item that could make the entire Royal Mage Tower chase him to the ends of the world.
Moving with extreme slowness and care, Aster took ten layers of thick canvas, wrapped the nail clippers, and tied them with leather cord until they formed something shaped like a brick. He shoved the bundle into his backpack. He still had to sell it on the black market. The thing was far too dangerous to keep in the dormitory, and he still needed money to buy the Cracked Stone the night after tomorrow.
However, before he could extinguish the candle, the system screen in his mind flickered again, this time in a dazzling blood-red.
[Warning: Causality Anomaly Detected.] [Blood Contract “Vespera” has been forcibly severed from the Client’s side.] [The Creditor Entity is experiencing a soul backlash. They are tracing the coordinates of the contract’s severance point.] [Arrival time: 30 seconds.]
Aster nearly leaped out of his chair. Backlash?! They were tracking his location?!
Just as he snatched up his black cloak and ran toward the bedroom window, a deafening explosion rocked the wooden door of their dormitory room.
BLAAAR!
The thick oak door exploded into splinters, ripping its hinges from the stone wall. Dust and wooden fragments flew into the room. Toby woke with a muffled scream, fell out of bed, and hid beneath his blanket.
Standing in the shattered doorway was a man in a black suit with a deathly pale face and fresh blood dripping from his nose. Behind him, three large thugs with dense mana auras stood ready, daggers drawn.
The suited man stared into the wrecked room, his eyes sweeping over it with a murderous gaze mixed with confusion, because the contract in his soul had just vanished for no reason.
“Find him,” the man rasped, his voice like a knife scraping across stone. “Aster Vale has stolen something that doesn’t belong to him. Bring him to Vespera alive.”
Aster, now perched on the second-floor windowsill with the backpack containing the “Fate-Cutting Nail Clippers” on his back, looked at the thugs with a stiff smile.
“Excuse me, gentlemen,” Aster said in impeccably polite formal speech, just before throwing himself into the darkness of the night. “I’m not accepting visitors.”