The Warping Mage: A Frith Chronicles Fan Fiction

I am not from this world. I am a transmigrator.The world I live in now is one I already know. In my last life I read The Frith Chronicles until the spines cracked and the pages softened. I know the names that have not yet become legends. I know the disasters that have not yet arrived. That should have been an advantage.It is also a curse. This is a dangerous world to enter as an ordinary human.And I am worse off than most.I have a System.It is not a gift. Not yet. For now it is only a window: a cold pane of light that lists my stats and my skills and nothing else. No quests. No map. No inventory. No shop. No skill books falling out of the sky. No tutorial. Just numbers and empty slots that tell me, with perfect honesty, how close I am to dying.Right now those numbers are ugly.Strength that would embarrass a dock worker. Stamina that would fail after a long walk. Magic: zero. Skills: almost nothing that matters here. I can read. I remember the books. The System does not care. It will not turn that knowledge into a sword.In this world, power is not something you are born with. You earn it by bonding a mystical creature—an eldrin—and becoming an arcanist. A seven-pointed star burns into your forehead. You stop aging. You heal fast. You can call fire, shadow, storm, venom, or worse, depending on what chose you. Without that bond you are just meat that happens to talk.The Trials of Worth are how you get the bond. Every species has its own test. Some are merely hard. Many are cruel. Some demand a price no decent person should pay. Manticores want eyes. Ghouls want flesh. Other creatures want loyalty proven in blood. Fail, and the creature does not shrug and walk away. It eats you, or leaves you for something that will.I know the plot. I know the Dread Pirate Calisto exists—the manticore arcanist who takes what he wants and laughs while he does it. I know the arcane plague is coming, a sickness that turns mystical creatures into warped, starving parodies of themselves. Infected eldrin will try to force a bond on any unbonded human they can catch, so the plague can spread. I know god-creatures will spawn, and the people who bond them become walking disasters. I know the Second Ascension will try to seize those god-creatures and burn the world if that is what it takes.Knowing the storm is coming does not give you a roof.An unbonded human in a city of arcanists is invisible until someone needs a body to throw at a problem. On the open sea you are cargo or bait. In the wild you are food for things that never needed a Trial, because they were never meant to be tamed. Even “safe” work—gravedigging, sailing, running messages—puts you next to people who can drown you with a thought or set you on fire for looking at them wrong.My system will update if I get stronger. If I ever get stronger. It will list a new skill if I survive long enough to learn one the hard way. It will not pull me out of the water when a leviathan arcanist decides the weather should change. It will not warn me that the friendly-looking creature in the alley is already infected and looking for a host. It will only show me, after the fact, that my health dropped and I still have no magic.So here is the truth, spoken from inside a body that can still bleed and stay dead:This world is beautiful, and it will kill you for being ordinary. The books made the danger feel like adventure because the hero found his knightmare and kept finding reasons to live. I do not have a knightmare. I have a status screen that tells me I am still Level 0.If I want to survive, I cannot wait for the plot to notice me. I have to stay small. Stay quiet. Learn about this place. And when the time comes, I have to bet everything on a mythical creature strong enough to keep me from dying at random.You can bet I will do whatever it takes.