Karma?

Right now, attending an Academy lecture for the very first time in my life, I found myself pelted by intensely stinging glares.

Truth be told, the lecture wasn't registering in my head at all. It was hard enough trying to concentrate on unfamiliar course material, but having everyone around me glaring holes into my skull made the whole ordeal pure torture.

"No matter the circumstances, you must never mistreat civilians! As Academy cadets, you must always act with pride and—"

I felt genuinely sorry for Professor Maria, who was delivering her lecture with such fiery enthusiasm from the podium, but this class didn't strike me as particularly important. If it were truly crucial, the bastards surrounding me would have been staring at the blackboard instead of glaring daggers at my head. Desperately worried about whatever disaster awaited me the moment the bell rang, I forced my eyes down onto my textbook and tried my best to look engrossed.

At long last, the lecture came to an end.

Somewhere around the halfway mark, I had actually managed to immerse myself in the material. Rather than demanding dense, specialized knowledge, the class focused on ethical dilemmas—essentially the fantasy world's equivalent of a high school ethics class. But fascinating or not, my immediate situation was undeniably grim.

The second Professor Maria stepped out of the lecture hall, my desk was promptly surrounded.

"Hey. You deaf?"

...Surrounded, that was, by a crowd of punks practically foaming at the mouth to pick a fight.

"Ha! You're gonna ignore me now?"

It wasn't just one or two disgruntled classmates. Nearly half the students remaining in the hall were clustered right in front of me. At their head stood a guy swaggering about like the self-appointed ringleader—chubby, with slick blond hair, dripping with enough gaudy, glittering accessories to show he came from money. The flock behind him looked like thoroughly unremarkable lackeys. At the very least, none of them were characters I recognized from the novel's official illustrations. Pure extras, in other words.

Still, what in the world had Jeonghye done to draw the pure, concentrated hatred of this many people? I desperately wished I could rummage through her memories.

Taking my silent frustration for something else, the greasy punk closed the distance, his voice dripping with irritation.

"Always strutting around like you're better than everyone else, and now what—did someone tape your mouth sh—"

"And who the hell are you to be raising hell with me?"

He didn't seem like anyone I needed to bend over backwards for, so I decided to come out swinging. He was clearly an insignificant extra, and knowing the original Jeonghye, she wouldn't have treated him with kid gloves anyway. Besides, it was the literal truth—I didn't have the faintest clue who he was.

Evidently pushed past his boiling point by my sharp tongue, his face flushed deep crimson as he huffed with indignation.

"If you must know, I happen to hail from the most renowned family in the Ruiya Region—"

He launched into some grandiose, self-aggrandizing pedigree, but his greasy, pompous voice grated on my nerves so badly that I let most of it wash over me. I did manage to glean one useful detail from the tirade, however: his name was... Henry.

"Right, Henry. How about you stop glaring and actually explain why you're busting my balls?"

"How dare you speak to me in such—!"

Fuming with outrage, Henry took a menacing step toward me, only for a bespectacled flunky beside him to grab his arm, hurriedly pacifying him with an urgent, Restrain yourself, Henry!

What a laughably melodramatic performance.

Evidently pleased by his lackey's timely intervention, Henry pulled a silk handkerchief from his breast pocket, dabbed his glistening forehead, and sneered down at me.

"Looking down your nose at your opponent in every single spar!"

"Spewing vile, insolent remarks at noble-born peers despite your wretched, commoner blood!"

"And after having the sheer gall to insult the entire Academy and declare you'd walk out on your own two feet, you have the shameless audacity to crawl back in here and show your face?!"

Hmm.

Did you really do all that, Jeonghye? Well, beats me.

Naturally, no matter how many questions I posed in my mind, no answer came back. Still, it seemed undeniable that she had racked up an absurd amount of bad karma. Judging by the miserable conduct of the clowns in front of me, though, I doubted the fault lay entirely with her. The real issue was that, regardless of who was to blame, my Academy life was already catastrophically derailed.

With no way of knowing whether his accusations held water, I had nothing to say in my defense. So, I simply decided to leave.

The moment I took a step forward, Henry flinched, his hefty bulk hastily stumbling backward. The flock of cronies behind him retreated a step in perfect sync.

"W-What is this?! Do you actually intend to resort to violence outside of scheduled sparring hours?!"

Did Jeonghye beat the living daylights out of him before I transmigrated? Not that I had any intention of throwing hands right now. Petty brawls were the least of my concerns.

"No, I don't. Excuse me."

A far graver crisis was eating away at me.

Namely, despite transmigrating into a fantasy novel, I couldn't feel a single fundamental change in this body.

Now that was a truly catastrophic problem.

Just before heading to the lecture hall with Professor Maria earlier, I had asked her for a small favor. According to my timetable, that was the only class scheduled for today, so I went straight to her office the moment I broke free from the classroom.

When I arrived, Professor Maria greeted me with a warm, radiant smile.

"Ah, you're here! Here are the documents you requested!"

"Ah, thank you so much, Professor."

What I had asked for were documents detailing Jeonghye's student background. Back in Korea, it would have been called a cumulative student record—a comprehensive school dossier. That was what I desperately needed. I had briefly worried whether the concept of a school dossier would translate in this world, but—

"I've gathered everything right here: ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Student Jeonghye's grades, personal background, and related records."

Fortunately, Professor Maria had understood my intent without missing a beat. Between the hostile confrontation in the classroom and my total ignorance regarding this body, I needed a much firmer grasp of my situation.

I took the thick envelope from her hands.

"May I ask what made you want to look over these?" she asked gently.

"I felt... that I needed time to reflect on myself."

Well, strictly speaking, it was hard to call it myself, but it was a convincing enough excuse.

"Reflecting on the past is a wonderful way to steady your resolve. That's a very mature choice."

Thankfully, the professor didn't pry any further. Instead, she reached out and gently clasped my hands in hers.

"If you ever have any questions or worries, please feel free to stop by anytime outside my lecture hours. My door is always open for counseling!"

"...Yes, thank you."

She truly seemed like an exceptionally kind woman. Though considering she had remained oblivious to the hostile tension brewing right beneath her nose throughout the entire class, her situational awareness left something to be desired.

I left her office, closed the door behind me, and walked straight back to my dorm.

It was time to find out who this person named "Jeonghye" really was.

Exiting the main Academy building, I avoided all detours and headed directly to my room.

Apparently, Academy dorms were standard double rooms. I had wondered why there were two beds when I first woke up here, but perhaps an odd number of total students had left this room with only one occupant. For me, that was an immense blessing. Whether my roommate were a girl or a guy, sharing quarters would have been an absolute nightmare.

Inside the dorm room, I sat straight down at the desk and broke the seal on the envelope. A hefty stack of papers slid out.

First, I picked up the sheet with a portrait attached to the upper left corner. Papers like this usually held personal identification and background information.

Looking down at the page, the first detail that caught my eye was striking.

The entire family background section was completely blank.

Because she lacked a grand, aristocratic surname like the nobles in this novel and carried only a single given name, I had assumed she was of commoner birth. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠But I hadn't expected her to ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠have no recorded family whatsoever. That meant, at the very least, there was nowhere and no one I could turn to for assistance. As an ordinary student, it wasn't as if she had substantial savings stashed away either.

Setting the personal identification sheet aside on the desk, I pulled out the next document.

"What's this...?"

The paper displayed a list of course titles alongside a neatly organized grid of marks.

"Looks like a transcript."

I spread out all the sheets that looked like academic grade reports.

"Let's see what classes she actually took..."

As my eyes swept down the subject column, my breath caught.

"Wait, what?"

Her grades were astonishingly good. In every single subject, her ranking was lodged squarely between 1st and 5th place.

Yet there was an even stranger peculiarity.

"...What on earth did she fight with?"

She hadn't taken a single combat course—no swordsmanship, no spellcasting, nothing. Every single course Jeonghye had enrolled in was purely theoretical.

And below that lay another table marked with simple O's and X's.

"What's this one?"

Looking closer, I noticed a list of names with an O or an X marked beside each one.

Sparring match records, most likely.

In almost every academy-setting story, sparring matches held immense narrative and academic weight. Regression Dunce was certainly no exception; in fact, the original novel featured countless scenes of the protagonist dueling his peers. The "practical evaluation" Professor Maria had mentioned likely referred to these very spars.

I carefully read down the list.

Her track record was remarkably solid. Come to think of it, that greasy blonde, Henry, was right there on the list. Had he been nursing a bitter grudge ever since she handed him a humiliating defeat? Outstanding in written exams, outstanding in practical combat... Had the hostility Jeonghye faced from these mediocrities simply stemmed from petty jealousy?

"Honestly, it'd be a relief if that were all it was."

I skimmed through the remaining documents, but found little else of significance. While the student records had answered several logistical questions, they failed to resolve the single greatest enigma confounding me.

I transmigrated into a novel, yet nothing about me has changed.

To an outside observer, that might not sound like a crisis, but to me, it was terrifying.

Regression Dunce was a high-fantasy web novel—a realm where flames burst from open palms and steel blades cleanly cleaved granite boulders. In web novels of this genre, ordinary people who had lived peaceful, mundane lives on Earth would transmigrate and immediately wield devastating magic or swing swords as if guided by instinct. Naturally, I had assumed the same miraculous awakening would happen to me.

Yet I felt no special power humming beneath my skin. At most, my body felt slightly lighter on its feet than my previous one, but that was the extent of it. Because of that, I had briefly wondered if Jeonghye was purely an academic non-combatant. But her sparring records showed a win rate hovering near seventy percent, and her only recorded losses were against prominent figures whose names carried weight in the novel's main plot.

Which led to an inescapable conclusion: she was undeniably capable of combat.

And yet, I couldn't sense a single speck of mana, qi, or any other fantastical energy. Swallowing my pride, I had already spent an embarrassing amount of time secretly whispering "Status!" and "Status Window!" in the privacy of my room. Naturally, nothing had appeared.

The more I thought about it, the more questions crowded my mind. What was I supposed to do from here on out? With a suffocating weight pressing down on my chest, I frantically flipped back through the documents, desperately searching for any vital clue I might have missed.