Transmigrated into Eroge as the Simp, but I Refuse This Fate-Chapter 187: Locking in

The files came in like a storm—clean, sharp, efficient.

Damien's tablet chimed softly as the data finished transferring, his eyes narrowing with interest rather than surprise. He was already reclined on the old dorm chair, fingers hovering just above the screen, the glow of incoming PDFs casting a faint blue across his jaw.

| Victoria [19:17]

| Here. Everything.

| Don't lose them. And don't ask again.

'Tch. So dramatic.'

Still, as his eyes scanned the folders—Week 1 to 3, each subdivided by subject, then broken further into branches—he felt a grin twitch at the corner of his lips.

"Goddamn," he muttered. "She wasn't kidding."

It was a fortress of knowledge. Each section marked by subject, color-coded annotations curling through diagrams and blocks of theory like veins. Her handwriting—tight, crisp, not a single flourish wasted—framed bullet points like they were laws. References. Cross-links. Even footnotes where she found gaps in the teacher's lectures.

He tapped open Science first.

Physics. Then Chemistry. Then Biology.

A scroll through the Physics notes showed exactly what he was expecting. Newtonian mechanics, momentum conservation, impulse diagrams, experimental summaries—each page formatted like a battle plan. Neat enough for memorization, deep enough to catch nuance. Useful.

Biology carried protein structure breakdowns, cell respiration pathways, and questions that clearly reflected last year's exam trends. Even the goddamn organelle tables are layered with color to differentiate functions. Who does this?

Then Chemistry—electrolysis diagrams, periodic group trends, the works. The girl even included warning symbols for common exam traps.

Damien clicked his tongue.

'So this is what being an obsessive overachiever looks like.'

Still, he didn't stop.

He moved next into Social Sciences. frёewebnoѵel.ƈo๓

History? Detailed. Every major political era and its downstream implications. Key figures bolded, context provided for each shift in international law. Geography? Equally brutal. Trade patterns, resource maps, climate zone overlays. Philosophy had quotes and application case studies. Mana?

Ah. Mana.

Mana.

Damien paused.

Not because the notes were hard to read—but because of what they represented.

This was the stuff they drilled into everyone by the time they hit secondary year. Not cultivation, not application, just structure. What mana is, how it behaves, and—most importantly—what it means for society.

Victoria's notes were no exception.

At the top of the page, underlined with sharp, no-nonsense penmanship:

"Mana Theory – Core Concepts for National Evaluation"

He skimmed.

Mana exists in all living things. It flows, circulates, and, under the right circumstances, awakens.

The Awakening is not forced. It's triggered—by trauma, by discipline, by anomaly.

Three main pathways: Bloodline Resonance, External Stimulation (i.e., artifacts, potions, artificial methods), or Internal Accumulation (mental/spiritual thresholds).

Nothing new.

But it was the structure that caught his eye.

Every paragraph was followed by bullets. Definitions. Acronyms. Exam bait boiled down to digestible terms. She wasn't just recording information—she was decoding the intent behind the syllabus.

He scrolled further.

--------------

Awakened Ranks:

Note: Classification varies depending on national standard. The Curriculum uses the Eastern Continental Evaluation Index (ECEI).

--------------

Damien grunted under his breath.

He wasn't Awakened. Not officially.

But his body had already started moving. The trait was changing him. Compressing him. All those rank lines—they were fences meant to define people.

He was already stepping over them.

'Not bad for general knowledge,' he mused, closing the Mana section.

Then he tapped over to Literature and Comprehension.

And this—this—was where Victoria's psychosis truly came alive.

Dozens of practice paragraphs, each with red-underlined key terms, margin notes questioning the author's intent, and little mental cues she must've built for herself.

Observe. Infer. Eliminate. Answer.

Her method was laid bare on the side of every page like a mantra. A system inside the system.

The comprehension questions were the kind that didn't test knowledge—they tested attention. Logic traps. Sentence manipulation. Vocabulary that forced you to think twice before choosing what sounded correct.

She even tagged patterns in answer structures.

--------------

If all four answers are plausible, the correct one is usually the most contextually specific. If two are clearly wrong and two are similar, lean toward the one with tighter cause-effect structure. If a question asks for "author's tone," eliminate anything emotional unless the passage justifies it directly.

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"Hohoho…"

The sound left him before he even realized it—low, dry, and laced with a kind of reluctant admiration.

Damien leaned back, one arm slung over the chair, the other scrolling through Victoria's labyrinthine note system. His grin stayed sharp, eyes flicking between highlighted margins and dissected questions.

Observe. Infer. Eliminate. Answer.

He muttered it once under his breath.

"That's not just test strategy. That's life strategy."

Because the truth was—this wasn't just about passing exams. The real world? It was flooded with text. Messages. Screens. Comments. Contracts. Every day, people were surrounded by language, and most of them?

They read like fools.

"They see the words… but what they hear is their own voice," he said aloud, voice low.

It was the habit of the masses.

Attaching their assumptions to whatever they read—stretching the meaning, warping it to fit whatever personal narrative they were already carrying.

Hell, he'd seen it a hundred times.

| "I love eating meat."

Simple. Straightforward.

But someone always came crawling out of the woodwork with:

| "So you hate vegans?"

Damien's grin widened. "No, dipshit. I just like steak."

But that's how it went.

People didn't read to understand. They read to react.

To project.

But that's how it went.

People didn't read to understand. They read to react.

To project.

And that—

That was the real trap in this section of the exam.

Because most students didn't fail it for lack of intelligence.

They failed it because they couldn't shut up their own thoughts.

And in doing so?

They missed the point entirely.

Damien tapped the screen once, letting the next passage slide into view—an analysis of social structure in ancient coastal societies. Dry. Wordy. Deceptively simple.

But if you carried in your assumptions?

You'd trip over every line.

That's why the section didn't require background knowledge. That wasn't the goal.

The goal was clarity. Pattern recognition. Whether you could look at a body of text, drain the bias from your eyes, and see the bones underneath.

Just read.

Not infer. Not attach. Not moralize.

Just read.

"Read it like a stranger," Damien murmured, fingers steepled. "Let the words do the talking."

It was why this part of the exam had never given him trouble.

Not because he studied it harder.

But because it played to his strength.

His mind was quiet when he needed it to be.

No ideological filter. No emotional lag. No ghost of personal agenda clinging to the words.

He wanted to see things as they were.

"No wonder people flail through this," he muttered. "They walk into the page already angry."

In any case—

Damien liked this.

He really liked this.

The structure. The rhythm. The precision of it all. Victoria's notes didn't just help—they streamlined everything. Like walking into a minefield and suddenly seeing the tripwires lit up in neon blue. The chaos of three weeks missed wasn't chaos anymore.

It was a path.

He set the tablet flat on his desk, screen split—notes on the left, blank interface on the right. No distractions. No music. Just the soft hum of the dorm's overhead light and the faintest tick of his stylus moving across digital paper.

First subject?

Physics.

Momentum. Conservation. Vector diagrams.

He didn't just copy the notes—he rewrote them. Compressed them into shorthand that he understood. The act of writing helped him commit, helped him remember. When Victoria wrote like a scholar, Damien rewrote it like an engineer planning for demolition.

Then he shifted gears.

He could feel his brain grinding back into rhythm—like an old engine choking on dust and finally spitting out clean fire. This wasn't the painful fog of catching up. This was a return.

The Damien who once aced logical reasoning modules just to shut his teachers up?

He was still here.

Still sharp.

Still dangerous.

Just buried under months of rot.

He kept going. An hour passed. Then another.

Science. Social Studies. Review. Cycle again. He didn't check the time. Didn't check messages. Didn't check how many pages he'd gone through.

Because there was no point.

There was only one number that mattered.

Top 25.