Alan Vermilion

Alan is the protagonist and the character through whose eyes most of the story is told. The illegitimate son of Lyan, head of the warrior house of Marquis Vermilion, he was an outsider in his own family from childhood. At his Awakening ceremony at age ten he received a skill that even the temple clergy could not read, and it turned out his aptitude for almost every skill was negative. From then on the servants grew openly cold to him, his food arrived cold, and he was allowed only ice-cold water to wash.

At twelve, Alan is expelled from the house on a false charge — that he broke a family vase — and forbidden to bear the Vermilion name. It is at this moment that his memory of a past life returns: a Japanese systems engineer who was framed by colleagues, shamed online, and killed by a truck before he understood what had happened. The goddess of rebirth told him to 'try living like a human this time' — and the promised bonus turned out to be the Reversal skill.

Reversal flips the properties of things. Because Alan's own aptitudes are negative, inversion turns them into the very highest: from his unreadable left eye he gains the Divine Eye, from zero swordsmanship the Sword God (above Holy Sword), from his inability to scout the top scouting skill, and so on. As he meets new foes his arsenal grows: dark magic with enslavement, stone-iron magic, holy magic, space-time teleportation, and dozens more.

Despite his enormous power, Alan never lets his guard down: remembering the light-novel plots of his past life, in which a hero relying on a single skill dies, he trains constantly and keeps a multiplied gravity load on his body. Outwardly cold and calculating, cynical toward local customs, he still retains an earthly conscience — he secretly heals abandoned low-ranks, rescues kidnapped girls, and helps ordinary people without demanding reward.

His guiding principle is to never again let others control him. He is merciless to anyone who threatens his freedom or his life, and humane to those who deal with him honestly. The small detail that betrays his past life is his longing for a proper hot bath, unavailable even to the nobles of this world.

The core of Alan's power is the Reversal skill: it inverts an object's property into its opposite. Applied to his own negative aptitudes, it turns them into top-tier versions of skills — yielding the Divine Eye (total analysis and protection from it), the Sword God (the pinnacle of swordsmanship, with 'Earth Compression' for movement), a top scouting skill, dark magic with enslavement and necromancy, stone-iron magic, and holy and space-time magic.

Beyond inversion, Reversal lets him bounce received damage back at an enemy, restore broken junk to mint condition, debase the value of coins, and even temporarily change his own sex — which Alan uses as a disguise, becoming 'Alice.' With 'Skill Theft' he takes others' skills for himself. He also repairs and sells 'elixirs' restored from discarded potions, which earns him his first money.

Alan is level-headed, ironic, and prone to comparing events to the light novels of his past life. He despises the local class violence and arbitrariness, but does not try to remake the world — he only defends his right to live freely. His creed is to submit only to the strongest, and here the strongest is himself.

Yet he is not without compassion: he secretly heals abandoned Bronze and low-rank adventurers after a stampede, rescues the girl Marl from the forest, cures Charlie's mother, and saves the abducted Nina and Selena. He usually receives and seeks no reward for this — what matters more to him is not letting the weak die in vain.