The sewer grate gave way with a wet crack, and Dylan Ashfall dropped six feet into ankle-deep filth.
Something splashed beside him—too big to be a rat, too small to be human.
The dark laughed at him.
[Status window pending…]
He didn't need a hologram to know the facts:
Level 1.
Strength 3.
Mana 0.
Reputation—"Academy Parasite."
A label the seniors had branded on his forehead yesterday when they locked him down here "to farm slime cores."
Translation: die quietly so the curve rises.
Dylan spat blood and slogged forward.
The tunnel reeked of rust, piss, and the metallic tang of expired potions students flushed when professors weren't looking.
He clutched the only inheritance his dead mother left: a cracked copper badge that once read "A-Rank" before something had melted the letter A into a scar.
A squeal echoed.
Red eyes blinked—dozens.
Sewer rats, but these were the size of mastiffs, fur slick with mana-mold that glowed septic green.
They'd already stripped two sophomores to polished bone last week; the academy simply posted "Field Exercise Canceled" on the notice board.
Dylan's hands shook.
He had no sword, no spell circles, no party.
What he did have was a hypothesis: mana wasn't gifted by gods—it was loaned by physics, and physics could be pick-pocketed.
He pressed his palm to the grimy wall.
Cold.
Wet.
Perfect conductor.
The first rat lunged.
Time slowed the way it does when death inhales.
Dylan's reflection stared back from the beast's black eye—scrawny, bruised, forgettable.
He refused that obituary.
He whispered the equation Professor Veyra had dismissed as "childish numerology":
> "Potential difference equals suffering over resistance."
Then he ground his broken thumbnail into the pipe's rust and pulled.
Snap.
A static spark jumped—pathetic under normal circumstances, but the sewer air was saturated with evaporated mana.
The spark caught, multiplying like gossip.
Blue veins of raw energy spider-webbed across wet brick, converging on Dylan's palm.
For one impossible heartbeat he held power.
He punched the charging rat in the snout.
Lightning cracked.
The beast flew ten feet, spine arching, fur smoldering.
It landed with a sizzle, tiny status box flickering above the corpse:
> [Sewer Rat – Lv 4]
[DEAD]
[Loot: 1 × Moldy Mana Core (F)]
Dylan's knees buckled—not exhaustion, hunger.
The same hunger that had haunted him since childhood, the one doctors mistook for malnutrition.
It wasn't his stomach that starved; it was his soul.
He crawled to the corpse, fingers trembling.
The core was a slimy pearl the color of toxic waste.
Common sense screamed don't, but the hunger sang.
He popped it into his mouth and swallowed.
Pain.
Ecstasy.
[System calibration 3 %… 18 %…]
A rectangle of translucent blue unfolded in his vision, letters stuttering like bad code.
> [Dylan Ashfall]
[Race: Human (Variant?)]
[Class: None]
[Level: 1 → 2]
[STR 3 | AGI 4 | VIT 3 | INT 6 | WIS 5 | LCK 1]
[Mana: 0 → 12]
[Skill embryo detected: —]
[Warning: foreign resonance unstable.]
He laughed—hacked, wet, delirious.
For the first time in fifteen years the world had answered.
More rats circled, emboldened by the smell of their own dead.
Dylan wiped sewer water from his eyes and raised his sparking hand.
The blue veins hadn't faded; they pulsed beneath his skin like neon roots.
"Line up," he whispered.
"I need the experience."
They charged.
He pulled again—larger this time, reckless.
Mana surged, but the equation wobbled; resistance dropped too low, suffering too high.
Lightning backfired.
Pain slammed through his arm, bones glowing.
He screamed—and the scream carried voltage.
Sound and lightning merged into a cone that vaporized three rats mid-leap.
The tunnel went silent except for the drip-drip of blood condensation.
Loot boxes flickered like fireflies.
Dylan crawled among them, gagging down cores until the hunger dulled to a cramp.
Each swallow dinged another trivial level-up, but the numbers weren't what mattered.
What mattered was the embryo.
A new line crawled across the status window:
> [Skill: Arc-Siphon (Unranked) – born]
[Effect: Convert environmental mana → lightning.
Recoil damage 30 % of output.
Proficiency 0.01 %]
He stared at the recoil clause and grinned like a skull.
Thirty percent hurt meant seventy percent worked.
Math he could survive.
Footsteps splashed overhead—upper-grate hatch.
A girl's voice, bored: "Check if the rat-bait's bones are pickable. I need calc-phosphate for alchemy."
Dylan's grin died.
They weren't letting him die; they were harvesting him.
He looked at the scorched walls, the smoking rat corpses, the veins of power still glowing beneath his skin.
Escape routes: zero.
Weapons: his bare, burning hands.
Options: one.
Make them check the wrong bones.
He dragged the largest rat carcass beneath the drip-pipe, arranged his tattered cloak over it, smashed a broken bottle to shred cloth and flesh together.
Quick palm-press: siphon a micro-arc, just enough to char fingerprints.
The smell turned his stomach.
He slipped into the side-pipe, heart hammering louder than the dripping blood.
The hatch creaked open.
Torchlight licked the scene.
A silhouette gagged. "Ugh, he's soup. Grab the femurs and let's—"
Dylan exhaled, released every volt he'd hoarded.
Lightning roared up the iron ladder, kissed the torch, blossomed into a white bouquet that blew the silhouette into the ceiling with a crack too wet to be wood.
A single loot box tumbled down the shaft, clinking at Dylan's feet.
> [Hunter – Lv 9]
[DEAD]
[Loot: Academy Seal (Rare) | 1 × Lesser Healing Potion]
He stared at the seal—the same crest that had expelled him three days ago for "lack of magical aptitude."
Irony tasted like ozone.
Somewhere above, alarm bells began to scream.
Dylan clenched the seal until its edges drew blood.
For years the academy had measured his worth in zeros.
Tonight he'd written a new number in lightning across their wall:
One.
And one was enough to start a countdown.
He turned toward the black throat of the sewer, where rumors said older things than rats nested—things even professors feared.
Each step squelched, but the veins under his skin brightened, mapping a path only he could see.
Behind him, the academy lights flickered, one by one, as the breakers tripped.
Status window hovered at the corner of his eye, cursor blinking on the final line:
> [Next milestone: Level 10 – Class Unlock]
[Estimated cores required: 97]
[Warning: recoil threshold approaching.]
Dylan smiled through cracked lips.
"Ninety-seven," he echoed.
"Convenient. I know exactly where to find them."
Then he walked into the dark—
—and the dark stepped aside.
---
End of Chapter 1