...THREE CENTURIES EARLIER...

The Great Shadow War had ended six months earlier when Astraeus Eldrath gathered twelve men in a room with no windows.

They were not the Empire’s strongest. They were the ones who had survived—a difference Eldrath considered more valuable than any other quality.

"You have seen what war does to those who are unprepared," Eldrath said, in a voice that historical records would describe centuries later as "neither gentle nor cruel, only final."

"I am going to build an academy. It will train people capable of facing what you faced. But training without real consequences produces nothing but theory."

He looked at the twelve.

"I need something that teaches without words. Something that shows the weight of failure without killing those who are still learning."

One of the twelve, the oldest, a scar stretching across his entire face, understood first.

"You want us to die."

"I want you to remain," Eldrath corrected. "There is a difference."

What happened inside that room was never fully documented. Only fragments survived in diaries, letters, and indirect records that Cathedral scholars pieced together over generations.

The twelve men, their groups, and the group of groups offered their very essence—not an ordinary death, but an anchoring.

Their souls were deliberately bound to the ground of the future academy, condemned to endlessly repeat the moment or routine that had defined who they were in life.

In return: an eternal purpose. To serve Eldrath by testing future generations until the academy itself ceased to exist.

They did not know, when they made the offer, that "eternity" would mean three hundred and forty-seven years... and counting.

WHAT REMAINED

Each of the twelve anchored themselves to a different part of the land. Some to buildings that did not yet exist, others to empty spaces that centuries later would become hallways, classrooms, and courtyards.

The Gate Sentinel: He died protecting an entrance that, at the time, led to a temporary refugee shelter. The gate no longer exists, yet he still stands watch, asking for a password no one remembers.

The Patrolman: He walked the night watch around the perimeter of the original encampment. Centuries later, he still patrols that same route, passing through walls that did not exist when he died.

The Scribe: Every night he wrote letters to his wife, promising he would return. He still writes them—paper that is never finished, ink that never dries, words that never reach a destination that stopped existing three hundred years ago.

The Father: He searched for the son he lost during the wartime evacuation. He never found him. He is still searching.

The Forgotten General: To this day he believes the war is still raging. He attacks any movement he interprets as an enemy, trapped inside a battle that ended generations ago.

And seven others, each with their own routine, their own wound, their own unresolved judgment.

The academy had always known about the Twelve and their groups.

For three hundred years, they remained a secret guarded by the faculty, occasionally used as an extreme, individual trial for the most promising student of each generation.

A private encounter, undocumented, its outcome known only by those who needed to know.

This year, the council decided to change that.

"Why now?" a young professor asked during the planning meeting.

The oldest professor, the same one who had commented on the Living Map, answered while looking out the window toward the Artificial Forest, which rebuilt itself after being half destroyed.

"Because enough generations have passed that the Twelve have begun to forget why they are anchored," she said. "A ritual without witnesses eventually loses its meaning to those who sustain it."

Pause.

"Perhaps it’s time to let the students see them. Not merely be tested by them. See them."

The central courtyard had the same setup as Test One, but the atmosphere was different—heavier, without the competitive chaos from before.

This time, the supervising professor did not use the tone of a game.

"Three hundred and forty-seven years ago," he began, "twelve men offered their very existence to found this academy."

A different kind of silence followed, the kind that comes when something stops being a game mechanic and becomes real history.

"They are not monsters. They are not obstacles," he continued. "They are people who died in the middle of something—a promise, a duty, a search—and never managed to finish it."

"You will meet them," he said. "Each one still doing what they have always done... for three hundred years, without stopping."

A long pause.

"This test is not merely about defeating them."

He slowly looked around.

"It is about understanding what each of them is still trying to accomplish."

"Only then can you judge whether they deserve rest, whether they deserve help finishing what they began, or whether they simply need to be contained because time has corrupted them beyond salvation."

"There is a scoring system," he admitted. "But in this particular test, points without understanding are meaningless. The evaluators will judge how you treated each Knight, not how many you ’defeated.’"

Haru listened in absolute silence.

"Three hundred and forty-seven years," he thought. "Souls voluntarily bound, still doing the same thing, never able to finish."

He thought of his own hundred spirits, the voices he carried, echoes of who they had once been, trapped inside him in a different way—but perhaps not so different after all.

"I think I understand this kind of prison better than anyone else here."

On the opposite side of the courtyard, Genius processed it differently, calculating implications while feeling something unusual inside his own reasoning, as though the logic refused to fit together completely.

"How do you deduce regret?" he thought. "I can map movement patterns. But what motivates the pattern..."

He did not finish the thought.

Armand listened with a different kind of interest, calculating not understanding, but usefulness.

"Souls anchored for three hundred years," he thought. "Power accumulated for that long without ever being completely drained."

"If I could control even one..."

Lilithine felt something stir inside her chest—not Lilith, but something simpler, something more human.

"Souls that have never found rest," she thought. "This is exactly the kind of suffering the Cathedral exists to ease."

"Perhaps I can truly help during this test."

"The test begins at dawn," the professor concluded. "You will receive partial records about the Twelve—fragments of diaries, mentions in old letters, rumors that have survived the passage of time."

"Use that information to understand before you act."

He looked at the crowd one last time, his expression more serious than during the announcement of the first test.

"Astraeus Eldrath once said that training without real consequences produces nothing but theory," he said. "The Twelve and their groups are those real consequences."

"Treat them with the respect that three hundred and forty-seven years of service deserve."

"Oh." The professor said, almost like an afterthought, but the tone was far too calculated to be accidental. "And I almost forgot."

Pause.

"This second test also serves as a second chance for those who didn’t see their names on the rankings from the previous test."

Murmurs spread, several students who had gone through the Living Map completely unnoticed in the rankings suddenly paying twice as much attention.

"So." He concluded. "Good luck to all of you."

He disappeared with the ease of someone who had been doing that for decades.

The silence that followed lasted exactly three seconds.

Then everyone took off running at once, all heading in the same obvious direction to anyone who had lived at the academy long enough.

The library.

Some doubted the academy library held enough records about the Twelve—three centuries of history, preserved fragments, perhaps too scattered to all be in one place.

"The Imperial!" Someone shouted while running in the opposite direction. "The city’s library has a larger historical archive!"

A group rushed out through the gates, betting on quantity instead of specificity.

Haru sprinted toward his own room—not the library.

Viper Eyes stood still in the middle of the chaos.

Genius did too, the two of them isolated from the rest of the crowd for a single moment of processing that no one else had.

"This doesn’t exist in any DLC." Seline thought. "I already knew about the Living Map from the original game, even before I transmigrated. But living it is different from playing it—it’s far more limitless, full of details no DLC ever documented."

"But this..."

"The Tribunal doesn’t exist in any version I know."

Genius was processing the same confusion from a different angle.

"I have no reference for this." He thought. "The original game never reached this content... or Genius Genials never took part in this part of the story."

"I’m just as lost as any ordinary human here."

That was uncomfortable in an entirely new way.

On the other side, Kaelthar watched through the system, seeing Viper Eyes visibly confused, without the advantage of prior knowledge.

"Gamer Effect." He thought. "Again."

Gamers transmigrating changed history in ways even they themselves couldn’t fully predict. The Tribunal probably hadn’t existed originally; it had emerged as a consequence of the choices Gamers had made, the academy adapting to presences that were never supposed to be there.

"We really changed the game."

He shouted at his own system, knowing it made no real difference.

"Damn it, run to the library!"

No one heard him. No one could.

But it was satisfying to yell anyway.

Lilithine headed straight to the Cathedral, not because of the information about the Twelve, but because she needed a moment before processing what was coming.

She knelt before the statue of her namesake Saint, crown of thorns, blindfolded eyes, tears forming the Eternal Lake.

She prayed.

Not asking for power. Not asking to win the test.

She asked for clarity—about what to do when she encountered souls trapped for three hundred years, about how to help without causing harm, about the weight she felt growing inside her own chest.

Moments later, Father Elias arrived, footsteps she recognized without needing to look, entering the confessional beside her without saying anything directly to her.

Lilithine kept praying.

But she felt the weight of his presence the same way she always did now—a subtle discomfort.

Haru burst in, breathing hard, throwing the door open with enough force for it to slam against the wall.

He searched under the bed, inside the wardrobe, between the clothes he never fully organized.

He found it.

The Eldrath book, leather cover, embossed title, bookmarked at the page where he had stopped reading weeks ago.

"Historical summary." He thought. "There has to be something about the Twelve and their groups."

He opened it quickly, flipping through the pages until he reached a section he had never fully read before.

The Chapter about the foundation. The names of the Twelve, listed without excessive detail, but there.

And more...

He smiled, genuine, almost euphoric.

"I finally found a reason to read this book all the way through."

He had never finished it before—distraction, laziness, lack of any urgent reason.

Now he had one.

He jumped out the window, an automatic gesture, almost a reflex by now, landing in the courtyard with the book tucked under his arm.

He headed straight for the attendants’ wing.

"There’s a table there, it’s quiet, and no one will bother me until the morning shift."

He sat down in the attendants’ break room, empty at that hour, the lantern burning dimly, with only the sound of his breathing gradually returning to normal.

He opened the book again, this time without rushing.

"The Tribunal." He thought as he truly began reading.

"I’m going to get to know every one of you before I meet you."