Terren Meyer had returned to the past.
Why? He had no idea. He’d simply fallen asleep and woken up to a familiar ceiling staring back at him.
The gray wallpaper of the Royal Academy dormitory that had been with him throughout his school years, the glittering chandelier — they passed through his pupils and into him. Terren jolted upright in a panic, thrashing like a man having a seizure.
Not his lavish mansion, but a cramped, suffocating dormitory room. And inside it, there was only a single boy clutching his hammering chest atop a bunk bed, eyes darting frantically around him.
Terren climbed down the creaking bed ladder. He forced strength into his legs and faced the bathroom mirror. His height, a full hand shorter. The worn pajamas on his body. His haggard face. His unruly, overgrown hair…
It was certain. He was now inside the body of his teenage self.
Wondering if it was a dream, he slapped his cheek hard — but all he felt was pain, nothing else. He drew a blade across his arm, and only the searing pain of steel cutting into flesh and the welling of red blood greeted him, no different from reality in the slightest.
He despaired. This was a wretched nightmare.
Terren Meyer. Repulsive Terren Meyer. That Terren Meyer.
The name Terren Meyer had always been close to a proper noun in its own right. As a child, he was known as the neighborhood pauper. A little older, the repulsive Terren. And older still, that Terren Meyer.
Everyone laughed when they heard the name of Terren Meyer, “son of the madwoman.” Everyone scowled when they caught sight of Terren Meyer, “the disgusting lowlife.” But by the end, when Terren was that Terren Meyer, people went pale with terror at the mere sight of him.
Because the last of the three — that Terren — was a murderer, a rebel, a dark sorcerer… a criminal draped in every wretched infamy imaginable.
Not yet a murderer, not yet a rebel, not yet a dark sorcerer — merely a pathetic outsider, Terren sat blankly on the top bunk for roughly an hour, staring into empty air. The calendar he had examined proudly displayed the words: Year 200 of the Founding.
Year 200 of the Founding. The year he was sixteen.
“Sixteen…”
Terren muttered. Before his return to the past, he had been twenty-six. He had gone back exactly ten years. His own hands, visible in his line of sight, felt strange to him. They were small, and soft without a single scar.
Only then did it truly sink in, and he let out a hollow laugh. That empty laugh twisted into a sound laced with madness. Terren Meyer slammed the back of his head against the wall and let out a broken, shuddering sob.
Why?
Why in the world?
Me — why?!
His family, his classmates, his teachers, even the king of the kingdom himself. A demon of the age who had led them all to their deaths and personally killed roughly half of them — a dark sorcerer named Terren Meyer — had, out of nowhere, been sent back ten years into the past. And of all places, back into this hellish Royal Academy!
Terren would have sooner wished this were a dream. He wanted to believe that his god had turned him into a wraith left to drift through a past age, that this was the punishment handed down to him.
Twenty-six-year-old Terren Meyer was going to die soon regardless, and he had been hoping to sink into an endless sleep, to forget every sin he’d committed and return to the earth. Not to be dropped back into the most wretched sixteen of his life.
“Damn it—”
He slammed his head against the wall beside the bed again. A loud crack rang through the room, and at the same moment rapid footsteps approached, and the door flew open. Terren lifted his head and stared blankly at the doorway.
A brown-haired boy stood there, brow furrowed, looking at Terren.
“Terren Meyer. Have you lost your mind? Shut up. You’re being loud.”
A face that looked gentle even in stillness. Yet a boy whose expression always soured the moment he laid eyes on Terren Meyer.
“…Lloyd?”
“You’ve finally snapped. What you do on a weekend afternoon is your business, but don’t take a single step anywhere near my bed.”
Lloyd van Acker, the student vice president of the Royal Academy, fixed Terren with a gaze full of contempt, then pulled the door shut and left. Terren stared vacantly at the space where he’d been.
Lloyd van Acker.
He had been sixteen-year-old Terren Meyer’s roommate — and a casualty of the war, dead at nineteen.
Nineteen. When the rebellion began.
With the rebellion as its spark, Terren had seized control of the Academy. A battle had broken out between the dark sorcerers and the students. Terren too had moved furiously through it, subduing and killing his opponents one after another. That was when he had come across Lloyd.
The dark sorcerer at Terren’s side had fired a spell immediately, and in less than five seconds, Lloyd was dead.
Yes. Lloyd van Acker — brilliant prodigy, one of the kingdom’s great hopes — had died to a single dark spell, unable to offer even one moment of resistance. His entire body had rotted away under the dark magic as he died.
And yet.
Lloyd was here, right now — alive without a care in the world.
A face that scrunched slightly as he spoke. Brown hair swaying. Eyes filled with contempt. A calm, cool voice.
He was alive.
He was no longer a corpse contaminated by dark magic, rolling on the ground. No one had yet muttered “so you were the one who killed Lloyd” upon seeing Terren. And none of it had happened yet — not Lloyd’s death, not the death of that damned bastard who had murmured those words, not his mother’s death. By the time those scenes of the past had begun to flash through his mind, Terren was already drenched in a cold sweat.
Lloyd…! Please, please… Lloyd, I’m sorry. It was my fault. Wake up. Wake up, damn you…
Terren gasped for breath. Appalled at himself for even now rationalizing his thoughts, he stumbled off the bed. He rummaged frantically through papers, then seized a quill and began scrawling everything he needed to remember in a desperate rush.
At sixteen, he had stepped into dark magic.
At seventeen, he had begun killing without end.
At eighteen, he had prepared the rebellion.
At nineteen, he had launched the rebellion, killed the reigning king, and placed his lord on the throne.
At twenty, everyone was dead.
The rebellion had succeeded. The kingdom became a nation of dark sorcerers, and Terren began to oversee state affairs under the new king. The high-ranking officials who handled government business alongside him were all dark sorcerers — murderers who had slaughtered people without a second thought. He had lived six more years in a crumbling kingdom.
“Why am I… here…”
Could he truly claim he had not been bone-deep in regret? That there had been nothing wrong with the life he had dragged himself through day by day, numbed by drugs because he could not endure the pain?
He had thought of the people he had killed — the people who had died — every single day. The Terren Meyer of his teenage years, who had thought every one of them deserved to die, had been haunted by them, absurdly, for the entirety of his twenties.
In his imagination, they were sometimes crueler than they had ever been in life, and sometimes a little kinder. And then, on certain days, they would weep and clutch at his trouser legs, saying — “Terren, I’m sorry. It was all my fault” — and beg for his forgiveness.
Ah. So I was filled with regret after all.
Terren Meyer’s foolish choices had taken the life of his only mother. They had taken the lives of people he had hated even a fraction less than the rest. And they had hurled Terren himself into a terrible, suffocating solitude.
There was only one reason the great villain Terren Meyer — trash who deserved to die — had been returned to this place.
Atonement for every soul he had made a sacrifice.
Wash clean your sins and close your eyes in peace, Terren Meyer. For you are not yet worthy of the right to die.
It was as though a voice had descended from the heavens.
