Chapter 6 The Four-Year Ledger

The trees in the deep northern woods grew close together, blocking out most of the gray sky. There were no paths here, only wet dirt, rotting leaves, and the sound of a cold wind passing through the branches.

Jack sat on a large fallen tree trunk. His new body was big and muscular, but right now, every single part of it hurt. His ribs throbbed where the men had hit him, and his right thigh felt stiff from the cut he had taken during the messy fight. He let out a long, slow breath, watching his white mist disappear into the cold air.

He pulled up the blue screen in his mind, keeping it right in front of his face.

[Host Status: D-Rank]

[Current Balance: 50 / 100 EXP]

[Health Points: 45 / 100]

"A forty-five percent asset retention," Jack muttered to himself. He rubbed his aching face with his large hands. "That is a bad start. I am operating at a loss before the first fiscal quarter is even over."

He looked down at his palms. They were raw and covered in small, red blisters. Every time he tried to use that strange skill, [Mana Dissection], on a wild plant or a small woodland animal, the energy did not behave. It felt like trying to balance a ledger where the numbers kept changing places on their own. It was slippery. It burned.

He looked at a small blue flower growing near the roots of a tree. The flower had a tiny bit of glowing energy inside its stem. It was faint, a simple spark of mana.

Jack reached out his hand. He focused his mind, trying to grab the magic, he pulled his fingers backward, trying to separate the light from the physical plant.

The glowing line snapped.

A sharp heat flashed across his skin, making him hiss in pain. The flower did not turn to dust; it just withered into a black, oily smudge on the dirt. His hands burned even worse now, the red blisters turning white at the edges.

"Everything is completely wrong," he said, his voice dropping into a dry, tired line.

He leaned back against a thick branch, staring blankly at the dark canopy above. On Earth, he had spent thirty-five years dealing with numbers that stayed exactly where he put them. Two plus two was always four. If an account was short, you found the missing entry, you fixed it, and the balance returned to zero.

But this world did not care about standard logic. The King at the palace was an immovable force. The mages who had attacked him had massive amounts of power stored away. And then there was Being X, the light in the white room who had forced him into this dead prince's skin.

The gap between a D-Rank accountant and a god was too wide. It was like a clerk trying to buy an entire empire with a single copper coin. The math simply did not add up. He felt a heavy weight in his stomach, a familiar feeling of being completely small and useless, just like the day Mr. Miller had thrown his life into a trash can.

Suddenly, the air around the fallen tree turned freezing cold. The blue screen flickered violently, the edges turning a sharp, mocking red.

[ALERT: TRANSMISSION FROM BEING X.]

"Are you beginning to see the true scale of your debt, Jack? You are a tiny speck trying to argue with me, do you need a reminder about who I am? Drop to your knees. Say my name with respect, and I will help you out. I am your only solution."

Jack looked at the glowing red words. He didn't blink. He didn't cry out in fear. The heavy feeling in his stomach didn't turn into despair; it turned into a cold, hard knot of anger.

He tilted his head back, looking straight up through the gray branches at the empty sky. He let out a dry, hacking laugh, then leaned over and spit a mouthful of dark blood into the dirt, clearing his lip from the fight before.

He slowly lifted his right hand and held his middle finger high toward the clouds, keeping it there in the quiet woods until the red text began to fade away.

"You are a terrible manager," Jack said to the empty air. His voice was calm, but it was very steady. "A good boss does not have to beg his workers to praise him. You keep looking for a fucking reason to be pat on the head, you want me to sing your praises, I am not grateful to you for heavens sake. Just let me die in peace, goddamnit!!"

The red screen vanished, turning back into the quiet blue grid. Jack focused on the calendar tucked into the corner of the system interface. He noted the exact day, the month, and the year of this new world.

He stood up from the fallen tree. His legs were still weak, but he forced his weight onto his feet. He looked deeper into the woods, where the trees grew so thick it looked like total darkness. There were no palaces there. No princes. No fiancée waiting for him here, just raw, unmanaged wilderness.

"Lyra said they will send more men," Jack muttered, adjusting the rough cloak over his shoulders. "And she said I fight like a dying dog. She is right. My current fighting style is a total failure."

He opened his main status page again, staring at the numbers until they stayed perfectly still in his mind.

"How long do we have before the kingdom notices the north is out of alignment?" Jack asked himself, his fingers tracing the hilt of the rusty sword at his belt. "The imperial tax audit. The palace records said the King collects the regional yields once every four years. That means nobody from the capital will come down here to check on a dead bastard prince until the next cycle is due."

He looked back toward the path that led to the commoners' village, then turned his body completely toward the dark, deeper forest.

"Four years," Jack said. His face hardened, the dry wit returning to his eyes. "Four years to rot in this gutter. That is forty-eight months of hidden training. That is plenty of time to cook these people, show them this body is not for shit and most importantly, get strong enough to break a god's entire system."

He stepped off the path and walked straight into the dark brush, disappearing completely into the w

ild north to start his new life.