Chapter 1: The Beginning
Arc 1: A Future Measured in Rank
Chapter 1: The Beginning
At the farthest edge of the continent, beyond the influence of the greater powers, stood the neutral Sunset Empire. In one of its protected cities, Elia City, a boy woke inside a small apartment with death still ringing in his ears.
A violent screech tore through Adrian’s mind. For one breath, he saw bright headlights rushing toward him, heard metal twisting like paper, and felt pain swallow every thought he had left. The crash came with the sound of breaking glass, snapping bone, and a shout he could no longer tell apart from his own voice.
The memory disappeared before he could reach the end of it.
“Ugh…”
Adrian opened his eyes to a cracked ceiling and an old fan turning weakly above him. Its blades moved with a tired creak every few seconds, stirring air that smelled faintly of dust, cheap detergent, and unfamiliar wood. He stared at it for several seconds, his thoughts heavy and scattered, until one simple fact pushed through the haze.
He was not in a hospital, and this was not the room he remembered.
“Where… am I?”
His voice came out hoarse, but that was not what made his heart tighten. It sounded wrong, as if it belonged to someone younger.
Adrian pushed himself upright and looked around. The room was narrow, barely large enough for the bed, a cheap wooden table, and an old school bag slumped beside the wall. Sunlight seeped through thin curtains, and the distant noise of the city drifted in from outside, muffled by old glass and concrete. Nothing here felt connected to his life, from the worn furniture to the clothes folded on the chair and the faint reflection staring back from the dark window.
His body felt wrong before he even looked down.
His hands were smaller. His wrists were thinner, and the arms beneath his sleeves lacked the weight and strength he remembered. When he touched his face, his fingers found softer features, a smaller jaw, and skin that did not feel like his own.
A cold pressure settled in his chest.
“No…” Adrian whispered. “This isn’t possible.”
He pulled back the blanket and nearly stumbled as his feet touched the floor. His balance was off, his height was wrong, and every movement carried the unsettling feeling of living inside a stranger’s body. It was as if someone had taken his life, folded it in half, and forced him into a younger version of someone else.
Before panic could fully take hold, pale blue light appeared in front of him.
Adrian’s breath caught in his throat.
A translucent screen floated silently in the air, its pale words hanging before his eyes without any visible source. Adrian stared at it, unable to decide whether he was still unconscious, hallucinating, or standing at the beginning of something far worse than death.
“A system…?”
The word left his mouth before he could stop it. He had read enough novels to recognize the setup, but recognition did not make it easier to accept. Reincarnation, systems, chosen hosts, other worlds—those were supposed to be convenient fantasies for people lying in bed after a long day, not something that appeared after the sound of a car crash.
His fingers trembled as he reached toward the screen, only for them to pass through the empty light.
“Wait…” His breathing turned uneven. “This is the kind of thing that only happens in novels.”
The screen flickered.
Adrian’s expression stiffened. “Locked?”
Another line appeared.
Adrian stared at the words, and the phrase age eighteen settled heavily in his mind.
If the system had a condition like that, then this body was not eighteen. He already knew it from the size of his hands, the sound of his voice, and the weakness in his limbs, but seeing the requirement written in front of him made the truth harder to deny.
“How old am I?”
For a moment, Adrian could only stare.
His first reaction should have been relief. He was alive. Somehow, impossibly, he had escaped death. But the longer he looked at the screen, the more that relief twisted into disbelief.
“You want me to wait four years?” he said. “No quests, no rewards, no powers? Then what exactly are you supposed to do?”
The system gave no reply. His panic meant nothing to it.
Adrian pressed a hand against his forehead and tried to force his thoughts into order. He was in another body, possibly another world, and the strange system floating before him had already announced that it would not activate. He did not know who owned this room, whose life he had entered, or what kind of world required something called an Awakening Ceremony.
Before he could ask another question, the pale blue light shifted again.
Adrian froze. “Wait—what kind of warning is tha—”
Pain erupted inside his skull.
The memories did not arrive gently. They crushed into him like another life being forced through his mind all at once: names, faces, streets, classrooms, laws, monsters, mana, awakeners, family, poverty, fear, and grief. The Sunset Empire, Elia City, the Great Expansion, and the Awakening Ceremony all poured into his thoughts without order or mercy, dragging with them the remnants of a dead boy’s past and a life that was now his whether he accepted it or not.
“AAARGH!”
Adrian fell from the bed and hit the floor hard, clutching his head as if he could hold the memories back by force. His vision blurred. His chest heaved. The room tilted around him while the blue screen faded from sight, leaving him with the creaking fan above, the cold floor beneath his cheek, and the unbearable weight of another person’s past.
His fingers scraped weakly against the floorboards as the pain dragged him under again.
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