Shattered Innocence: Transmigrated Into a Novel as an Extra

Chapter 897: Archmage of....

Starlight.

The power said to be born from the cold hush between constellations, older than mana yet stubbornly refusing to fit any of the old arcane taxonomies. Scholars once tried—luminos essence, cosmic qi, astral quintessence—dozens of names filed into dusty academies. None stuck. Because Starlight wasn’t merely energy; it was a rumor wearing the shape of power.

It did not glow like fire-aura or crackle like storm-ether. It was quieter, and razor-clean, as if midnight itself had been distilled into motion. Those who’d brushed against it said it felt weightless in the palm but heavy in the soul—an echo of distant gravity, tugging thought outward toward infinity.

No scroll prior to the Ninth Epoch so much as footnoted the attribute. Not one bardic verse, not one marginalia scribble from half-mad court alchemists. Starlight arrived the way comets do: sudden, brilliant, and immediately bending maps around its path.

The first confirmed bearer was a sellsword who answered to many titles and one legend:

Starscourge Gerald.

The first name ever etched beside the word Starlight.

And the only one who wore it like a mantle before the world even understood what it was.

His Starlight did not gleam gold like divine blessings, nor burn red like blood-forged flame. It shimmered violet—deep, deliberate, impossibly vast. Like the color of a nebula glimpsed through a telescope not yet invented. It didn’t flash to impress. It pulsed. Slow. Certain. The kind of certainty that made even archmages hesitate before drawing their next breath.

Gerald was born into dust and salt—son of a tradeswoman in the drought-torn southern belts of the continent. His village had no name on official maps, and the house he grew up in had no floor—just packed earth and the stench of old grain sacks. He was never tested for affinity. No one thought to. In a place where magic was rumor and hunger fact, children grew fast and died faster.

But even then—before stars bent to him—he moved different. He watched storms roll across dry plains and tilted his head like he was listening for something deeper than thunder.

Then, when he was fifteen, something answered.

Witnesses spoke of a night where no stars shone above the village, and yet the ground itself glowed. Gerald, thin as thread and bare-chested beneath the frost, had walked into the center of the fields where a neighbor’s sons had been swallowed by a droughtfissure. He’d raised a hand. Said nothing. And violet light burst from his skin like a sun trying to remember how to rise.

The fissure closed. The boys survived. The village fled.

Gerald didn’t.

By his first year in the army, he marched alone to the Lorian Empire’s southern conscription line and demanded a uniform. By his second month, he was on the battlefield—not trained, not polished, but devastating. His strikes came with no element, no chant, no talisman. Just Starlight—whipping like a comet’s tail from a blade too dull to deserve it. And still, his enemies fell. Not crushed. Erased. As if the cosmos themselves had redacted their existence from the world.

The generals didn’t trust him. The mages whispered.

But war makes pragmatists of all skeptics.

The Arcanis front was losing ground in the border region of Eltvar. Commanders gambled. Sent Gerald. Alone.

He didn’t return for three days.

When he did, his armor had melted, his blade cracked, and his expression was... blank. He carried no banners. No trophies.

Just one scroll. The war map of Eltvar.

With every enemy camp circled.

Every circle was scorched into the parchment—by starlight, they later guessed.

Within the month, the Arcanis Empire had pulled back their siege across the Eltvar Ridge. And Gerald had earned his epithet: Starscourge.

What unsettled most scholars and sovereigns alike wasn’t just his meteoric rise. It was timing.

Starlight had never been recorded before him. No records, no echoes. No trace of it in ancient cultivator texts. No mythologies foreshadowing its potential. Magic in this world evolved slowly. Lineages refined methods over generations. New attributes took centuries to shape into form.

But Gerald?

Gerald appeared.

Thirty years ago.

Just thirty.

And the wars he fought in—the ones still ink-wet in national memory—were barely two decades old.

His emergence shattered expectations. Attributes weren’t supposed to start with one man. They weren’t supposed to bloom without lineage. And yet, here it was—cosmic, invasive, transcendent.

Starlight.

They tested his blood. His mana. His soul structure.

None of it matched any known framework. His spiritual lattice bent at angles no one had drawn. His core contained no elemental signature, no attribute resonance. It was silent. Like deep space.

And maybe that’s why they feared him most.

Because what Gerald proved wasn’t just that a new power had awakened—

He proved it didn’t need permission.

Everyone thought it was his alone.

Starlight.

The world whispered it like myth because that’s how it behaved—singular, unreplicable, bound to a man who rose from nowhere and carved his name into the annals of warfare by brute will and celestial force.

Gerald had never taken a disciple. Never taught. Never once stopped long enough to be studied.

He fought.

He won.

And then—

He vanished.

Not retired. Not entombed. Gone.

No one saw him fall. No records of burial. Just a war-torn outpost left with glassed craters and silence, and a sky that refused to show stars for three nights after. The only thing left behind was a sigil—burned into black stone. A shape no scholar could decipher.

So it was accepted: Starlight had lived and died with him. A freak mutation of magic. A cosmic gift too strange to replicate. The gods’ anomaly.

Until she arrived.

Until Selenne.

She wasn’t announced. No legacy. No prophecy. Just a name buried in the margins of minor academy registries—one of a hundred thousand girls enrolled across the continent. Quiet. Distant. And beneath it all...

Wrong.

Wrong in the way stars look when they move out of pattern.

Then came the Southern Incident.

A beast wave—no, a surge—from the Hollowveil Ridge. Creatures that hadn’t crawled out of their subterranean dens in centuries suddenly surfaced in swarms, blanketing the farmlands in claw and shriek and shadow. Farmers fled. Cities sealed their gates. Even fortified posts near the southern reach cracked under pressure.

The Draycott family, the ruling ducal family known of the region—renowned for their archmage nurturing and crystalline formations and precise battlefield mana-weaving—reacted too slow.

Perhaps they hadn’t believed the reports. Perhaps they thought the defenses would hold. Perhaps, in their arrogance, they assumed nothing could threaten their ancestral lands.

But by the time they mobilized, it was already over.

Because she had arrived first.

Selenne.

No banners. No entourage. Just a cloak of faded twilight and the weight of something far older than the southern soil.

Eyewitnesses spoke in fragments afterward. Of beasts halted mid-charge, their bodies suspended in the air like stars pinned to a frozen sky. Of violet lines—gentle, almost beautiful—drifting across the field before collapsing into blades of light that cut without movement. No gestures. No incantations. Just silence, and then obliteration.

They said she walked into the chaos like she had been waiting for it. As if each monster was a note in a forgotten melody, and she—she—was the composer come to end the song.

She didn’t scream orders. She didn’t call for aid.

She ended it.

When the Draycotts finally arrived, robes gilded and spells primed, they found a field coated in cooling mana and a sky returning to calm. The beasts were gone. Turned to dust. Turned to nothing.

And in the center of the stillness, Selenne stood—one hand behind her back, the other tracing quiet arcs through the air, as though cataloging something only she could see.

She did not bow to the Draycotts.

They did not question why.

And the name, Selenne, as the second user of Starlight attribute was came to known with that.