The Shadows of the Thirteenth Bell
By @john1208
I just wanted a quiet morning to brew my tea. Instead, the Schola’s morning bell tolled a thirteenth time, and my reflection in the mirror wept black blood. It was the exact eerie omen that preceded Master Othor's assassination in my first life. I thought my regression was a divine second chance. I thought if I hid my lethal Eclipse Executioner class behind the timid facade of a basic dagger-scout, I could quietly gather the strength I lacked before. I was wrong about everything. I kept my head down, enduring the cruel mockery of Prefect Morvath, our sadistic instructor who openly favors the wealthy patricians. But when a grotesque Dredge-Goliath breaches the training grounds and Morvath cowardly abandons a young novice to die, my stubborn streak takes over. I sever the beast’s head in a single breath, my unleashed shadows shattering the courtyard's ancient mist-barrier for all to see. Now my secret is out, and Carys - the brilliant illusionist who always saw past my shy act - is caught in the crossfire. As the supposedly wise Arch-Curator offers me shelter, a chilling truth dawns on me: the regression system isn't a gift. It's a parasitic trap. Can I rewrite the rules before the shadows claim us all?
3
The Tycoon's Sensory Delivery: My Driver Owns the Supply Chain
By @john1208
Loredana Cenzerro is the brilliant black sheep of Vellor’s most cutthroat luxury-biotech dynasty. Refusing to weaponize her chemistry skills for her family’s manipulative enterprises, she runs a struggling indie neuro-fragrance boutique. Her most loyal employee is Tavish, a stubbornly quiet delivery driver who works for minimum wage and constantly endures the mockery of Loredana’s wealthy suitors. But Loredana doesn’t know that Tavish is secretly the vanished apex-shareholder of the Morvath Trust, the monolithic supply empire her family desperately relies upon. Diagnosed with a psychosomatic neural block that erased his senses of taste and smell, Tavish abandoned high society in a depressive spiral - until he accidentally inhaled one of Loredana's failed prototype perfumes during a delivery and felt something for the first time in years. Now, he acts as her humble courier to stay close to the only scents that penetrate his numbness. When the Cenzerro patriarch orchestrates a hostile embargo to force Loredana back into the fold, he unknowingly threatens the trillionaire’s only source of sensation. Will Loredana’s humble driver merely deliver her packages, or will he deliver the absolute financial annihilation of her bloodline?
1
Behind the Rogue's Smile
By @john1208
Cazien failed. Despite his terrifying mastery as a shadow assassin, he was a second too late to save his master, Orenzia, from a brutal assassination. Broken and grieving, he receives a strange, blood-stained parcel on the anniversary of her death - a temporal hourglass that catapults him back to his first year at the Marrowglass Conservatory. Determined to save her, Cazien buries his melancholy beneath a shameless, cheeky persona, masquerading as a trash-tier rogue. He happily endures the mockery of Instructor Zarvel, a sadistic teacher who favors wealthy nobles, while constantly clashing with Velloris, a rigid honor student investigating a series of bizarre dimensional rifts. Told in alternating perspectives, the two rivals soon realize their quests are intimately connected. The horrifying twist dawns: the rifts Velloris hunts and the assassins Cazien seeks are the exact same plotline, orchestrated by elites to summon a monstrous entity. His slacker paradise shatters during a corrupted assembly. When the mind-controlled Conservatory Director unleashes a lethal ultimate attack on the students, Cazien drops his cheeky facade, casually swatting the apocalyptic spell into oblivion. With his terrifying true power exposed, how will the 'weakest rogue' explain himself?
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