Trash of the Count's Family

Cale Henituse opens his eyes with another man's memories behind them. A reader who knows the ending of his favorite novel has woken up inside it, wearing the body of the Count's trash eldest son — a wine-soaked noble famous for tavern brawls, notorious for one spectacular, drunken mistake involving a quiet travelling swordsman named Choi Han. In the book, the mistake is page one of a hero's legend: the trash gets punched through a wall, the swordsman walks into destiny, and nobody thinks about either one again. Nobody expects the trash to matter.

That suits the new Cale fine. He has read to the last chapter. He knows a war is coming — an immortal collector with a white star burning in his pupil, dragons bred in cages, villages put to the torch, ancient powers dug out of the dirt and turned into weapons. His own plan is humbler: stay out of the plot, guard the Count's peaceful family, and spend money like water on the longest, laziest retirement the Western continent has ever seen.

The continent has other plans, because Cale cannot walk past a bad deal. A cursed rock that does nothing but talk in his dreams — an old strategist he privately nicknames the Super Rock, whose memories reach back to the end of the world. A silver shield relic that refuses to shatter no matter what lands on it. A wind that carries one man's shout across a battlefield. A heartbeat that keeps a broken body upright and walking. Thunder, purifying light, a voice that makes the dead flinch. Every ruinously overpriced, haunted, unwanted purchase turns out to hold an ancient power in disguise — and every purchase is one fewer weapon for what is coming in the novel's later chapters.

So the trash of the Count's family starts collecting what money was never supposed to buy. Choi Han stops looking through Cale and starts standing at his back, blade drawn. A black Dragon he frees from a Magic Tower cage names himself Raon Miru, declares himself great and mighty, and flatly refuses to leave. The crown prince with a throne-threatening secret keeps sending impossible jobs, half apology and half trap. A necromancer in a black robe learns to laugh at the family table. A household that braced for scandal finds itself defended to the last coin instead.

The nights in this world run warm — wine on the breath, low firelight, silk, a bruise pressed over a racing heartbeat, a gaze held one beat past polite — and the story always cuts away at the door, letting the heat smolder somewhere the reader cannot see. Everyone in these pages is an adult; nothing is shown, everything is felt, and morning always arrives with the mystery intact.

But the White Star is collecting too, and he has been at it for centuries, burning whole regions for whatever refuses to be handed over. Cale's shopping spree has just put the last ancient powers on the board, the God of Death keeps forwarding the bill, and the Super Rock's memories show exactly how a world ends. Cale keeps insisting that all he wants is a slacker's nap in a sunny field.

He can nap when the world stops trying to end.