Kenji had always believed that information was power.

  The one who knew more always won. He always did deep research for his raids in VR, and now he had to rely on that skill more than ever. Raids had bosses. This world had nobles. Same danger, different graphics

  Now, trapped in a body that couldn’t even hold up its own head.

  It had been seven days since his rebirth.

  Rebirth. The word made him dazed. He still couldn’t believe it.

  He remembered the truck. Screaming. Tires. Glass. Blood.

  And then... this.

  He pushed the memory away every time it clawed back—he didn’t have time to panic. Not when the tutorial had barely started.

  A nursery.

  Not just any nursery—a noble’s nursery. Gilded beams arched overhead, carved with ivy and dragons. A crystal chandelier sparkled above a velvet-draped crib. The air smelled of lavender oil, cedar polish, and old parchment.

  From what Kenji had gathered, he’d been reborn into a high-ranking aristocratic family. Old money. Older blood. Everyone moved like dancers in a court performance. Even the servants bowed when leaving rooms.

  He had been reborn in luxury, and he couldn't help but feel ecstatic. Being rich gave him a massive head start. Pay to Win was a universal truth, and for the first time, he finally had the capital. Back on Earth, he didn't have the money to buy the skins he wanted or the limited-time items that broke the meta. But now? He was loaded.

  But wealth was only half the meta. To actually stay on top, he needed data. He needed to map out this new world before he could even crawl across it.

  His mission: Collect intel. Information was the one thing he could wield when he couldn’t even lift his own arms. His body was a potato, but his mind? A scalpel. He spent his hours cataloging habits, voices, and tales. Like he was studying a strategy guide. He was a master of observation. A silent, calculating phantom.

  “It’s time for lunch,” a wet nurse said as she came in to feed him.

  The cold strategist in his head suddenly disappeared. As a former teenage shut-in, this part of his "new life" was… complicated. It was awkward, incredibly personal, and definitely not something he’d ever experienced back on Earth. But he was a professional now. If the "game" provided high-quality sustenance and certain viewing privileges, he wouldn't complain about the situation.

  Kenji, now Ray, couldn't help but giggle. For a former teenage boy, this was, by far, his favorite time of the day.

  Before he could latch onto the wet nurse, a woman with glossy black hair walked in. Lady Sai Melborne, Marquess of Ashvale, his mother.

  She never raised her voice. Never broke posture. Never offered affection freely. Even her silence felt like a strategy. But when she looked at him, it felt like she saw opportunity. When she heard of the news of his engagement, she became visibly elated — an emotion she rarely displayed.

  Sometimes, she stood by his crib and smiled at him.

  She never held him. But once, when no one was looking, she adjusted his blanket with a gloved hand and whispered:

  “You are our key to the future.”

  Her voice—soft, precise. Like a blade drawn slowly.

  Kenji didn’t know whether to shiver or smile.

  Then a thunderous voice came from the halls. His father: Lord Hadrian Melborne, the Iron Flame of Velhraine.

  Every word sounded like a command. His coat never came off. Not at court. Not at dinner. Not even at home. It carried war-like scent: smoke, steel, old fire.

  He took Ray from the wet nurse's hand, and Ray started to cry.

  “Strong lungs,” Hadrian said once, after a crying fit. “Could put those to use in a command tent.”

  Ray could already tell: this man didn’t see him as a child.

  He saw potential. Or failure. Nothing in between.

  Lord Melborne laughed with rare joy. “It looks like we interrupted his mealtime.” He handed Ray back to the wet nurse to feed.

  Two small figures lingered near the doorway — children, watching him with the intensity of rival guild leaders assessing a newcomer.

  As he ate, he saw a young boy and girl looking at him. Ray watched them. Measured them. Noted the animosity in the boy's eyes while the girl looked at him with indifference.

  Ray learned quickly that he was not the only child in the estate…

  Just the only one who mattered now.

  He saw it first in their eyes.

  Garret Melborne — the eldest son

  Eight years old.

  All scraped knees, wooden swords, and the desperate seriousness only a child trying to be an adult can have.

  When Garret first saw Ray, he didn’t smile.

  Didn’t even poke the baby like normal kids did.

  He just stood there with his arms crossed, chin tilted up in a perfect imitation of their father—

  except a little wobbly, like he wasn’t sure if the pose made him look strong or silly.

  “So this is the one,” he muttered, thinking the nurse couldn’t hear. “The Avery girl’s fiancé.”

  There was bitterness in his voice, but it wasn’t noble resentment.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  It was the same bitterness a kid gets when someone takes the bigger slice of cake.

  Ray recognized that instantly.

  Whenever servants bowed to the crib, Garret’s eyebrows scrunched together.

  He kicked at the rug when he thought no one was looking.

  When letters from House Avery arrived, Garret swung his training sword until his arms shook— He didn’t know what to do with the anger. So swinging his sword was all he could do.

  The day he overheard someone say Ray might one day outrank him, he snapped his wooden sword clean in half.

  Garret wasn’t a rival.

  Not yet.

  He was an eight-year-old boy who suddenly felt small in his own home.

  Whenever he walked into the nursery, the air tightened.

  With the helpless, hot jealousy of a child who didn’t understand why everyone suddenly cared about the baby.

  And beneath that…

  just a hint of fear.

  The kind a child feels when they think someone new is coming to take their place at the table.

  Isolde Melborne—his sister.

  According to the servants, she was six years old and sharp-tongued. In reality? She just liked copying their mother's dialogue. The court whispered that she was "precociously observant," but to Ray, she was nosy. She didn’t glare at him; she watched him like a puzzle she hadn't quite solved yet.

  Every morning, she stood by his crib with her hands behind her back, trying to maintain a formal posture—but she swayed on her toes the whole time, unable to stay truly still.

  “Hm,” she said once, leaning so close Ray could feel her breath on his face. “He doesn’t look special. Does he?”

  The wet nurse gasped. Isolde’s eyes widened, a flash of "naughty child" breaking through the mask before she quickly straightened her back, pretending she had meant to be provocative.

  “Father says a good marriage is a political sword,” she recited, clearly parroting a lecture. “Mother says alliances are money.” She swung her legs back and forth. “And now we’re giving the Avery girl our brother.”

  She paused dramatically—because she loved the theater of it. “He’d better be useful.”

  She didn’t cry or scream, but she didn’t know what to do with her frustration either. So she acted older. She copied the adults, sat with books she couldn't understand, and spied on conversations she couldn't follow. She repeated words she didn't grasp because they made her feel important.

  She wasn’t truly ambitious. She was six. She just didn’t want to be forgotten. If their brother Garret carried hurt pride, Isolde carried the quiet panic of a child afraid she’d stopped mattering.

  Ray could already tell: Garret resented him. Isolde scrutinized him.

  But beneath the layers of nobility, they were just kids. Kids who didn’t understand high-stakes politics or the intricacies of the Avery alliance. They didn’t hate Ray—not yet. They simply hated how the world shifted the moment he arrived.

  Ray, once Takahara Kenji, logged that away. He didn’t have enemies. He had siblings. And in this house, siblings were a battlefield all their own.

  It felt different from Earth. His sister Rika’s jealousy had been warm—expressed in pouting, stolen snacks, and eventually, hugs. His brother Shinji’s rivalry came with ruffled hair and ice cream. Their jealousy had been human.

  Here, jealousy was a whetstone. It was sharper, colder. It felt less like siblings fighting for affection and more like children guarding territory.

  They hated him because the adults whispered about him as if he were the dawn of a new age. Because he had a fiancée before he had teeth. They hated him because he represented a future where a newborn—helpless, wordless, barely sentient—was already worth more than the two of them combined.

  Ray watched them both through his infant eyes. In their faces, he saw the same patterns he had studied in raids, guild drama, and school politics: Competition, territory, status, social aggro.

  He wasn’t just their brother. He was their rival. Whether he liked it or not, the "PvP" phase of his new life had already begun.

  Every bedtime story was a textbook. Every overheard conversation, a briefing. Every passing servant, an NPC with dialogue.

  Ray learned more from the servants than from his own parents. Servants talked. They always talked. They whispered while folding blankets, polishing armor, and dusting the portraits of ancestors who could no longer judge them. They whispered because the walls of House Melborne were old, and old walls taught people to speak quietly.

  But they whispered loudly enough for a reincarnated mind to translate.

  He heard the first "patch notes" during a morning feeding. Two maids moved through the nursery, their voices hushed but trembling.

  “Did you hear?” one murmured. “Another Thornmarch raid last night. They hit a farming village near the river.”

  “Again?” the other hissed. “That’s the third this week.”

  “Aye. Burned fields. Stolen livestock. Warnings nailed to the doors.” She paused, glancing at the crib. “They’re getting bolder.”

  “They wouldn’t dare come this close to the estate… right?”

  A humorless snort. “They dared two generations ago. Thornmarch doesn’t fear Melborne steel like it used to. The border is bleeding, and Lord Hadrian is out there every night trying to stitch it back together.”

  The other maid shivered, folding a blanket with white-knuckled intensity. “What about the scouts?”

  “They say Thornmarch has a new, powerful warrior,” she whispered, her voice barely audible over the rain. “Some devil in armor who defeats every warrior on sight.”

  Ray stilled. An undefeated soldier. A boss-level threat.

  “The Iron Flame can’t hold forever,” the maid continued. “Not without aid. But Bram won’t send supplies because they think we’re already losing. No one wants to throw grain into a sinking ship.”

  The door creaked, and the steward walked in, stern and silent. The maids bowed deeply, but as they bent, they exchanged one last forbidden thought:

  “If Thornmarch pushes past the outer fortresses… even the Avery engagement might not save us.”

  Ray blinked, watching them leave. Engagement. War. Raids. Even as an infant, the lesson was being hammered home:

  Information was power. And this house was drowning in it.

  And then he learned about power. Real power.

  In this world, some could draw strength from the fabric of existence—harnessing energy and binding it into living bodies through intricate symbols. It was like painting a canvas, not on parchment, but on flesh.

  The ones who bear this power are sigil bearers. And the ones who carve it are called Engravers

  His mother had engravings. His father, too. So did the Melborne warriors. They carried sigils across their skin like invisible armor, power burning beneath the lines—controlled, condensed, and lethal. Ray watched the way those marks glowed faintly in the candlelight. He watched warriors bow while heat rippled under their collars. He watched his mother gesture and felt the air shift with the weight of an unseen force.

  And though he had no sigil of his own… something inside him pulsed.

  A flicker under the skin. A warmth that shouldn’t exist. A quiet hum threaded through his tiny bones like a chord waiting for the right hand to pluck it.

  He didn’t understand it yet. But he would.

  Legacy. War. Engravings. These were the rules of this world. And Ray Melborne, formerly Takahara Kenji, cataloged every one of them with razor-sharp focus.

  He was a newborn in a cradle, but he wasn’t helpless. He was gathering intel. He was learning the system. He was preparing. Because someday soon, the nobles would whisper his name with awe… or with fear.

  And when that day came, Ray already knew what he would say—the truth he had carried through two lives:

  “I am the main character, after all.”