As one of the officials led him away from the podium, Chén Yè could feel the eyes on his back.
He didn't need to look to know their expressions. The pity from the other children. The confusion on the face of the instructor.
The divine existence had overseen thousands of awakenings across his centuries of service. He had seen noble children manifest concepts of such power that the testing chamber itself trembled. He had seen commoners with connections so faint they barely registered. He had seen everything in between.
This boy would was of the latter. Most children didn't understand what the stone truly did. They saw only the manifestation—the water reacting, their concept made visible for the first time. They didn't comprehend the burden that awakening carried, the backlash of forcing a concept into physical expression before the body and soul were prepared to bear its weight.
The concept stone absorbed that backlash.
It was, in essence, a shield—taking upon itself the cost that would otherwise shatter these fragile vessels. Without it, perhaps one in ten children would survive their first manifestation. With it, the loss rate dropped to something acceptable.
Acceptable. The divine existence allowed himself a moment of dark amusement at the word. Everything in this system was measured in terms of acceptable losses.
Chén was led to a cordoned-off section at the far end of the vast hall. A handful of other children were already there, huddled together in a small, miserable cluster.
This was the corner for the rejects.
The air here was different. The nervous excitement from the main group was gone, replaced by a thick, suffocating atmosphere of despair.
A small girl with a tear-streaked face was sobbing quietly into her hands. A boy stared blankly at the stone floor, his expression completely hollow.
Chén Yè's eyes scanned the small group, his analytical mind taking inventory even now.
There was a boy curled into a ball against the wall, his shoulders shaking with silent, heartbroken sobs. He looked young—younger than most—with a soft, almost babyish face. His despair was a palpable thing. Someone had mentioned earlier that his sister had gone to the main group, the successful ones. Now he was here, and she was there. Separated by a line neither of them had chosen to cross.
He saw others he vaguely recognized from the waiting hall—a chocolate-skinned boy with gray hair who sat perfectly still, staring at nothing; a quiet, almost invisible boy who seemed to fade into the wall itself.
All of them had stepped up to the Concept Stone. All of them had recalled their visions.
And for all of them, the stone had done nothing.
No fire. No ice. No dramatic transformation of the water. Just... stillness. As if the stone couldn't see them. As if their concepts were too strange, too abstract, too nothing for the system to recognize.
He was one of them now. One of the Unfavored.
Chén Yè found an empty patch of wall and slid down to the floor, pulling his knees to his chest.
The purse of gold coins felt like a lead weight in his pocket. He had sold a girl's freedom for a future, and that future had just evaporated.
The irony was so bitter it almost made him laugh.
He looked at the successful children across the hall, watching them receive their jade stone keys, their faces bright with achievement and relief. They were the "valuable" ones. They would receive training, resources, a path forward.
And what would happen to them? The ones who had failed to awaken? The ones whose connection was too faint, or whose vision in the room had been too strange, too abstract... or, in his case, had simply vanished?
He remembered the looks on the faces of the divine existences returning from the war. He remembered the bodies carried through the streets at dawn.
The system did not tolerate uselessness.
He knew, with a certainty that chilled him to the bone, that death awaited those who could not prove their worth. The only question was how long they had until it came for them.
Freedom? he thought, a humorless smirk touching his lips. You have to earn that with power and value. The weak and the useless don't have that right.
He closed his eyes, shutting out the sight of the successful children, and resigned himself to whatever came next.
He had survived the streets. He would survive this.
Or he would die trying.
High above, in their pocket dimension, the Transcendent Rulers had already forgotten him.
Heiyun Jue smiled, pleased with his harvest. "A natural awakener and a good crop of assets," he murmured to the others. "An excellent day. Now, which of your divisions shall we look at next?"
The focus of the gods had moved on, leaving the dregs in the corner to contemplate their fate.
End of Chapter 6