He was an unlucky one. Born into poverty, with an abusive and terrible "family", if you could even call it that. And yet, despite all of that, his hands were fine and delicate, adequately equipped to handle even the most volatile substances.

"DISGUSTING RAT!", his father yelled at him, kicking him in the gut, throwing him towards the wall.

He coughed violently, grasping his torso. Yet, not a sound of pain escaped his lips; his expression remained devoid of any emotion, as if such distress were an ordinary, unremarkable part of his day.

His father continued saying the most horrible things to him, as he kicked and punched and thrashed him for the next minute before running out of breath.

After that, the father returned to his room, to drink once more.

The boy got up from the ground, dusted himself and started to walk, only to lose his balance and fall to the floor again.

Before closing his eyes, he muttered, "... I'll... kill you..."

An indeterminate period had elapsed before he regained consciousness, lying precisely where he had collapsed. No one had taken the trouble to lift him and tend to his needs, although he hadn't anticipated any assistance.

After getting up, he examined his shabby body. Then, he raised his open palm and looked thoroughly at it.

"... No trembling at all... as expected...", he muttered to himself.

He then proceeded to sit down on the ground, with his back resting against the hard wall.

"... How fascinating... I've been reincarnated, it seems. And in some shitty novel, no less...", he mused.

He showed absolutely no excitement or surprise at the knowledge. In his mind, he had countless explanations for this sudden epiphany. Maybe he had finally gone insane after so long, or maybe he really had remembered his past life. Perhaps some divine entity delivered to him his long-lost luck, or maybe all of this was merely hallucinations before his death, he wasn't really sure. He'd lost touch with reality a while ago, something like this was nothing to him.

"I was a villain, huh... Interesting... although, from the looks of it, I stood no chance against the full party of the main character and died pathetically... How fitting.", he sat there, recalling details.

"But one good thing is... now I know what my power actually is...", he said as he looked at the closed window on the wall.

He stood up and touched the cold, smooth glass of the window and stared at it intently.

After a few moments of silence, something supernatural occurred... the glass slowly started to move around within its own volume, behaving almost like a liquid.

Soon, all the glass in the window formed a transparent and strikingly beautiful floating blob in his hands.

As he moved his fingers, the shape of the blob changed rapidly. First, a needle, then a cup, then a spoon, and even an entire knife.

It was as if the glass was obeying every single command of the boy and taking on the shapes he was imagining.

After playing with the glass for a few more dozen seconds, he put the glass back into the window pane, just as it was before, with no trace.

"I can't control them if I'm not directly touching them yet... I must get better... To leave this shithole as soon as possible..."

Johnathan was currently 15. He was the son of a barbaric mercenary and a whore. Naturally, he had pulled the short end of the stick when it came to life. With no money to his name and a shitty father, he never got to taste the true delicacies of life. Happiness was so far from him, that he never got to understand its meaning and pain was so close to him, that it became his norm.

The only thing he had going for him was his strange ability: The ability to control the shapes and forms of glass. He discovered this ability when he was 5 years old. He had accidentally broken a beer bottle that belonged to his father. His entire life flashed before his eyes and fear overtook all of his senses. He had to fix the bottle, no matter what. And suddenly, the glass pieces that he touched with his hands, bent and flowed according to his will, slowly reshaping themselves and recreating the bottle perfectly.

He knew from then on that he wasn't as worthless as his father claimed him to be. And that he belonged somewhere better than where he was, someplace where pain and suffering weren't as common and happiness was an emotion he could reasonably feel.

He would do anything to achieve that. He didn't care for anyone else at all. Why should he? after all, people avoided eye contact with him because they feared they'd be "dirtied" by his gaze alone.

And now, especially after gaining knowledge of the future from his "past life", his desires became more and more achievable to him.

"The only way to get out of poverty and... disgusting living conditions in this garbage world is... Getting lucky with a job... or whoring yourself out... or... becoming a university graduate from a high-ranked university... and the highest ranking university... is the one on which the novel was about... I'll aim to get in there first...", he resolved.

He had 2 years of preparation time. He needed to build up his resume within that time to be able to even stand a chance at the entrance examination of Apophis University of Magic, or for short, "AUM".

The next two years he'll have to face, will be the toughest of them all.