I Became the Simp Character I Roasted Online-Chapter 37: What Burns Wrong

Sleep didn’t come. Revan hadn’t expected it to.

He lay in the dark for what felt like an hour but was probably twenty minutes, staring at the warped ceiling of the dining carriage.

The fire Dain had ordered built inside the car was doing its job, barely. The flames burned a strange blue-white color. Something about the Dead Zone’s atmosphere was stripping the warmth from combustion itself.

It gave light but no comfort, like a lantern behind glass.

Around him, the survivors had arranged themselves with the instinctive geometry of people who didn’t trust each other. Dain sat by the door, awake, broadsword across his knees.

The three mobile guards had clustered near the fire. Two sleeping in shifts, one watching the southern window.

Cassian had taken the far corner, the one with the best sightlines to both exits. He sat with his back against the wall, coat buttoned to the collar, eyes closed.

Whether he was actually sleeping was anyone’s guess.

Revan got up. His ribs made their opinion known immediately.

He ignored them, picked up one of the mercenary coats from the supply pile, and walked toward the VIP carriage.

He didn’t go in.

He folded the coat and set it on the floor, just inside the doorway, where she’d see it when the light shifted. Then he walked back.

It was a coat. That’s all it was.

***

He couldn’t sleep, so he made himself useful.

The two stretcher cases were in the rear section of the dining carriage. They were separated from the rest by a collapsed partition that someone had propped up with a broken table leg.

Revan went to check on them. Both were still alive, though one barely. Then a small hand grabbed his sleeve and pulled him sideways into the wreckage of the research wagon.

On his way back.

he noticed a faint light leaking from the cracked wall of the research wagon. A chemical lamp — the kind Mirael used for lab work. She’d been in there since the group settled in, hunched over whatever was left of her equipment, doing whatever it was she did when she thought no one was paying attention.

He didn’t get two steps past the wagon before a small hand shot through the gap in the wall and grabbed his sleeve.

"Sit," Mirael said, pulling him sideways into the wreckage.

"I’m fine."

"I didn’t ask."

She had already laid out her remaining supplies on a torn piece of canvas. Bandages, a bottle of antiseptic that was more than half empty, a suturing kit, and a small brass instrument Revan didn’t recognize.

Her left arm was splinted and bound to her chest. She was working one-handed.

"Your ribs," she said. Not a question.

"Fractured. Maybe two."

"Three." She pressed two fingers against his left side, just below the armpit.

Revan’s vision went white for a half-second.

"Three, and one of them is grinding against something it shouldn’t be grinding against. Take the coat off."

He took the coat off. Underneath, his shirt was stiff with dried blood, some his, some not.

Mirael cut it open with a small surgical knife, exposing the mess beneath.

Bruising from the collarbone to the hip. Deep lacerations across the shoulder where a blade had caught him during the mercenary fight.

And across the lower ribs, a pattern of discoloration that looked less like an injury and more like something had been painted onto his skin.

Mirael went still.

"When did you get this?" She was pointing at the discoloration. It was a web of dark lines radiating outward from the largest laceration, thin and branching, like roots growing under the skin.

"The mercenary fight. One of them got me with a short blade across the ribs."

"Just a blade?"

"Just a blade."

Mirael picked up the brass instrument, some kind of magnifying lens with a chemical filter, and held it over the discoloration.

She adjusted something on the side. Looked. Adjusted again.

Then she sat back.

"That’s not normal infection," she said. "That’s residue."

"Residue from what?"

"The weapon that cut you was coated. Or infused. The chemical signature in the wound margin is consistent with..."

She paused. Chose her words.

"It’s a byproduct. Of Crimson Tears refinement."

The fire crackled. Blue-white. Cold light on cold news.

"The mercenaries had CT-laced weapons," Revan said.

"Not laced. That would imply a deliberate coating. This is cruder. A byproduct, a waste product from the production process.

Whatever forge made those blades was handling CT materials. The contamination bled into the steel during smelting."

Revan looked at the dark lines on his ribs. "Is it dangerous?"

"Not in this quantity. Your body will metabolize it in a few days. But that’s not the point."

Mirael’s voice had shifted. "The point is what it tells us about the production chain."

"Which is?"

"Crimson Tears isn’t synthetic. Or rather, it’s not purely synthetic," Mirael said. "The byproduct in your wound contains organic markers. Biological degradation patterns that don’t exist in mineral-based alchemy."

Revan waited.

"The raw material is organic," Mirael said quietly. "Something alive, or something that was alive, goes into making Crimson Tears."

Revan’s mind went somewhere Mirael couldn’t follow.

In the game, the wiki had been clear about one thing. Crimson Tears was refined from Red Mana. Not regular mana. Red Mana.

Mana that had been destabilized by extreme negative emotion, or in rarer cases, corrupted through demonic interference.

The wiki described it as "mana that has lost its neutrality," energy saturated with the residue of suffering, rage, or despair.

The production method was labeled "forbidden alchemy" with no further detail. Most players treated Red Mana as an abstract game resource, a red bar you farmed from corrupted zones or demonic encounters.

But mana was existence itself. It was the very essence of living things.

Which meant Mirael was completely right.

He didn’t say any of this. Mirael was watching him with the sharp attention of someone who noticed when people knew more than they should.

"You don’t seem surprised," Mirael said after a while.

"Would it help if I was?"

"No. But most people would at least pretend."

"I’m too tired to pretend."

Mirael almost smiled. It was a small, humorless thing, there and gone.

She began bandaging his ribs. Tight, efficient wraps that limited breathing but stabilized the fractures. One-handed. Impressive.

"How long have you known?" Revan asked.

"Suspected since I examined the creature’s spine after the derailment. The CT crystals embedded in the monster had the same organic markers. I assumed contamination at first, sloppy manufacturing."

She tapped the dark lines on his ribs. "But this is a different batch, different source, same signature. It’s not contamination. It’s the base ingredient."

"You’ve been running this analysis in your head for two days?"

"Three months, actually," Mirael said. "The Academy gave me a research grant to study anomalous mana signatures in the eastern provinces. Three months of fieldwork, hundreds of samples."

"Then, two weeks before I was scheduled to return to Valorheim, I received new orders. Reassigned. House Vespera requested a scientific escort for a classified cargo transport. Someone with field experience in mana anomalies."

"Vespera requested you specifically?"

"By name. The letter came through the Academy’s administrative office, but the seal was Vespera."

She paused. "I thought it was an honor, a Ducal house selecting a junior researcher for a sensitive assignment. Now I think they wanted me where they could see me."

"Because of what your research was finding."

"All my samples were on this train. Three months of evidence, packed into six crates, loaded into a cargo wagon that also happened to contain a weaponized Crimson Tears experiment."

"Convenient, isn’t it? If the attack had gone as planned, if we’d all died in the derailment or the ambush, my research would have been destroyed along with us. Clean."

"But the attack didn’t go as planned." 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

"No. And now my samples are gone anyway. Stolen during the assault by people who knew exactly which crates were mine."

The word landed flat. "Someone made sure of that."

Silence. The kind that happens when two people are thinking the same thing but neither wants to be the first to say it.

Revan said it. "Whoever stole your research knew what you’d find."

"Yes."

"Which means someone on this train knew what you were researching before we left Valorheim."

Mirael didn’t answer. She finished the last bandage wrap, tied it off, and began packing her supplies with the careful economy of someone who knew there wouldn’t be more.

"Get some rest," she said.

Her voice was light again, the mask sliding back into place. But it didn’t fit as well as it used to.

***

Revan didn’t get rest.

He went to the locomotive.

The captain’s body was still where it had fallen during the derailment, pinned beneath a collapsed section of the control panel and half-buried in debris.

The other survivors had covered him with a sheet of torn canvas. It was a gesture of respect that nobody had the energy to improve upon.

Revan pulled the canvas back. Searched the body.

Belt: an empty knife sheath, standard issue compass, and a small notepad soaked in frozen blood.

Pockets: nothing. Breast pocket: nothing.

The chain around the captain’s neck that should have held his identification tag was broken, the tag itself missing.

And the key ring that every train captain carried, the one that held the master keys to every compartment on the train, was gone.

Not broken off. Not lost in the wreckage.

The belt loop where it should have been clipped was intact. Undamaged. The key ring had been deliberately removed.

Revan checked twice. Three times. Ran his fingers along the belt loop, feeling for any sign of tearing or stress.

Nothing. Clean removal. Someone had unclipped it with care.

He stood. Looked at the wreckage around him. Looked at the canvas-covered body at his feet. Looked at nothing for a long time.

The master key opened every compartment on the train. Including the engineering compartment where the maintenance toolkit was stored.

The toolkit that contained the equipment needed to make the precise, millimeter-level adjustments to the rail switching mechanism that had derailed them.

Whoever took that key ring did it before or during the crash. Not after, because after the crash, the engineering compartment didn’t matter anymore. The damage was done.

Someone took it before.

He covered the captain’s body again. Walked back toward the dining carriage.

On the way, he passed Carriage Three. It was the service car, half-collapsed and mostly ignored by the survivors. He stopped.

A sound. Faint. From inside.

Revan pressed himself against the exterior wall and listened. Footsteps. Careful, deliberate footsteps on broken flooring.

Someone was in there, moving through the wreckage with purpose.

He edged toward the gap in the carriage wall where a panel had been torn loose. Looked through.

Cassian.

The young lord was crouched beside an overturned storage trunk, going through its contents by touch.

His white gloves were off, the first time Revan had ever seen his bare hands. He moved quickly, discarding items, searching for something specific.

His face was unreadable in the blue-white glow leaking through the carriage’s broken roof.

Cassian found what he was looking for. A small object, Revan couldn’t see what, disappeared into his coat’s inner pocket in one smooth motion.

Then he stood, replaced his gloves, and walked toward the far exit as if he’d never been there.

Revan didn’t follow. Didn’t confront.

He memorized the trunk. Third row, second from the left. Service car storage. He’d check it later, when he could do it without being watched.

He walked back to the dining carriage and sat down in his corner. The fire had burned lower. The blue-white light was fading into something darker, closer to gray.

From the dining carriage doorway, the northern horizon was visible through a gap in the wreckage.

And there, faint, almost imperceptible, was a glow. Not starlight. Not moonlight. Something steady, something grounded, coming from the southeast.

In the Dead Zone, nothing should glow.

Revan stared at it until his eyes burned. He filed it alongside the missing key ring, the organic CT residue, the encrypted folio, and the wilted flower symbol.

The pile of things he didn’t understand was growing faster than the pile of things he did.

Dawn was two hours away.