My head still throbbed. The inked vines curled across the page, alive with a quiet pulse. I whispered, “What… was that?”

Crimson Thorns. I knew that title. A romance fantasy I’d read before: the heroine, blessed with healing magic, trailed by yandere suitors who clawed for her devotion. At the time, I’d found it entertaining enough. Crown prince route, glittering palace wedding, happily ever after. Typical RoFan.

But the ending I had just seen—blood pooling across the banquet floor, corpses falling like wheat, her smile faint in a ring of crimson petals—that was not in the book I knew.

And Jeanne? The name had been a throwaway line. A girl from the Dorian family, sent off to some forgotten march. Dead within a chapter. An afterthought.

I touched my own face. No—this face. I was Jeanne now. If her fate had been obscurity, then mine would not be. This world was full of plants I had never studied. Forget the heroine. Forget her menagerie of obsessive suitors. Forget even that eerie smile. I would make this place a research paradise.

I looked down. The Gift of Growth.

The passage described it as the power to hasten a plant’s natural rhythm. Seeds sprouting in hours, fruit ripening in days. Not miracle-making—not desert into farmland, not salt into soil. But acceleration of what already lived.

Was this mine? Jeanne’s? My heart thudded. Perfect. Absolutely perfect. For experiments, for trials, for answers no one else had the patience to find. What they had dismissed as useless was everything I had ever wanted.

A note followed, written small at the bottom: little is known of this gift, as it is incredibly rare. Only one bearer recorded—Altheon, the Verdant Hand, whispered of in legends before the kingdom’s founding.

I pressed my palm flat against the page. They had cast Jeanne aside for this? Called her worthless, when she carried a gift that could touch the pulse of life itself? She had wasted away in gloom, convinced she had nothing. But I—no. I would not waste it. My fate would not be to die forgotten in a coastal march.

The script shifted, from gifts to history. Magic had not always been common. At its dawn, the gifted were so few they gathered together, building a kingdom to protect themselves. Yet they were never numerous enough to rule alone. Their answer was land. At sixteen, every noble child was given a territory—reward, burden, and trial. A way to prove themselves and spread their bloodlines.

So that was the ceremony. The weapons review. A test of one’s gift before land was carved into their hands. Vesa’s words finally made sense.

The next section recorded the founding dukes. The Dorians—my family—had Corrosion. Stone, steel, flesh—everything crumbled at their touch. A terror on the battlefield, the legacy that secured them a place as one of the empire’s four pillars.

My throat tightened as I traced the words. Corrosion. Ruin. Decay. That was their inheritance.

And me? Growth.

The Valcrests followed—weapon-forgers from light. The Marrens, who bent wind and storm. The Kallixes, whose flames could melt stone. And above them all, the royals, wielders of Ruin—the power to unmake matter and energy alike, feared enough to eclipse even the dukes and break kingdoms at will.

Every one of them, powers of destruction. Of endings.

I glanced back at the illustration of curling vines. Mine was different. Not an ending, but a beginning. Life, instead of death.