“Guess I’ll have to pull off an A.S.S. invasion now,” I muttered, already picturing the madness that awaited me.

Adventure, whether I liked it or not.

Still, if I played my cards right, Alvanta was the only realistic option.

Definitely insanity, sure… but much more doable than walking into the Divine Realm of a dead god and unlike that cosmic suicide mission, this one was something I could actually pull off alone.

Alvanta wasn’t just any world.

It was a planet ruled by A.S.S or more accurately, one of the races under their bloated coalition.

A peaceful and quiet planet.

Roughly the same size as this world… and most importantly, it was far from the war zone.

So if I could somehow reach that planet and run a bit of well-planned chaos, I was fairly certain I could get my hands on the flower and slip back out before anyone noticed.

If not… well, death was waiting either way.

But at least this route came with a comparatively lower chance of getting obliterated instantly.

And when it came to death, even a one-percent chance could save me… or kill me.

Now the real question was: how the hell do I get to a planet a few light-years away?

And the answer hit me immediately.

By becoming a slave.

Yeah, not the most optimal plan in the universe but if I played it right… I could make it work.

Just not now.

I had only just enrolled in the academy. Vanishing out of nowhere right after admission would set off every strange-behavior alarm imaginable and draw the attention of way too many weirdos I didn’t want sniffing around.

I had three months or more accurately, about two months and a half. I would need at least fifteen days just to find the flower and plan the theft.

My mind kicked into overdrive as a plan slowly took shape.

The first arc.

I could use that.

The first arc of the novel was Sylvie going berserk… but that wasn’t the whole picture.

A.S.S attacked Noxvalen, not just the cult but with their elites, and during that assault, a lot of students were killed and some were taken captive.

In that chaos, Sylvie awakened her chaos ability and became the center of attention.

The novel followed Noah’s perspective and he barely encountered any A.S.S elites. He was suddenly thrown in front of Sylvie while the academy staff dealt with the real monsters.

That’s why Sylvie was the main “boss” of the arc.

And if things played out the same way this time…

Then I could slip in.

Somehow.

The first arc was fated to take place in roughly two months, maybe even a bit earlier, right after the rank allocation exam.

It was the perfect time.

The exact window I needed.

If I could slip in at that time, I would have more than enough time to reach Alvanta and maybe even make it back within a month or two.

By then, instead of being a suspicious student who vanished for weeks, I would return as a hero, someone who ran away from A.S.S. captivity.

Honestly? I liked the sound of that already.

And why bother staying tied to the academy at all, instead of running off the moment I escaped this mess?

Well… what can I say, I liked danger.

And where else was I going to find threats scaled to my level except around those walking disaster magnets called the main characters?

That, and I actually wanted to experience a genuine academy life for once and play games with the smart characters. It was a lot more fun than wandering around alone like some tragic side-villain.

And I am sure Ru would cry, and Lyra would curse me into the afterlife if they found out I had been captured or died to A.S.S.

So, for their sake, I have to return.

And I can go wander all I want once I graduate from this hell of an academy.

“So, A.S.S. invasion it is,” I muttered but then my reflection in the massive mirror caught my eye. “But first, I need to fix this appearance somehow.”

I mean, I couldn’t exactly walk around with white hair, green eyes and a cracked face.

Not unless I wanted even more problems.

“Now, how should I fix this?” I muttered, digging through every corner of my mind for an easy solution, anything to avoid raising unnecessary suspicion.

And then it hit me.

I had a whole pile of artifacts stuffed into my cloak from the cave in the Forest of Unmasked.

Maybe one of them would be useful.

I had tossed them all in earlier without even checking, mostly because I was in a rush.

But now… maybe one of them had exactly what I needed.

I pulled out all the artifacts I had taken from the cave and the ones I had collected from those bullies.

I mean, my new friends.

There were a total of seventeen artifacts.

—

After scanning through them for a while and frying my brain with the same repetitive “a father made this for his blind son” sob story, I finally found what I needed.

Most of the cave artifacts shared that exact description but buried among them was the one thing that actually mattered.

Skinwalker’s Mask.

The only artifact in the entire pile that matched the effect I needed.

Everything else was useless junk in comparison, especially the bunch I picked up from the bullies.

That was a special kind of trash among trash.

At least their garbage didn’t come with that same tired sob-story description so I didn’t mind much.

The mask had a simple feature.

It could create a second skin over my real face.

But, of course, it came with an annoying side effect.

The mask would twist my expression into the opposite of whatever I was actually feeling.

If I smiled, it showed sadness.

If I frowned, it showed joy.

Completely backwards.

Which meant I would have to pull off some expert acting, always making the opposite expression of what I wanted just so the mask would show the right one.

And even then, the mask was only a temporary fix.

Anyone strong enough could still see through it.

But oh well, as long as I kept a low profile and didn’t run into Morvana anytime soon, I doubted many strong people would bother questioning why I was hiding my real face.

“With that done, I guess I should finally check my skills. Maybe I’ll find some joy in that.”

And with that thought, I opened the skill window I had been trying to look at for a while now.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep