(Six months before the First Gate Opening. Seoul, South Korea)
The ceiling of the alley was a strip of grey sky between two buildings, and it was the most beautiful thing Ryu Seok had seen in years.
Not because it was beautiful, but Because he knew it.
This particular strip of Seoul sky above this particular alley in the Mapo district: he had stared at it once before, on a morning fifty-one years ago, when he had been sixteen years old and sleeping rough because the group home's curfew policy had failed to account for the fact that the building's rear door lock could be defeated by a firm shoulder. He had come out here to think. To be alone in the specific way that teenagers who have no one are alone, not lonely so much as accustomed to their own company.
He was here again.
He sat up. His hands, young, unhurt, all ten fingers present, were shaking, and he spent a moment simply looking at them. The scars were gone. The missing fingers were back. The knuckle of his right index finger, broken and badly set in the Sixth Gate Siege, was smooth and straight as the day it was born.
He was sixteen years old, approximately fifty-one years of memory packed behind his eyes, and his body felt so thin and light and untested that it was almost offensive.
The notification appeared without ceremony.
[SYSTEM ACTIVE]
---
[Host: Ryu Seok
Physical Age: 16
Rank: F (Registered)
Title: Void-Scarred (Sealed)]
---
[Skills Granted:
▸ Iron Veil [Passive]
▸ Deathread [Active — 1x/month]
▸ Ashen Crown [Sealed]
---
He read the panel. Read it again.
Iron Veil. Deathread. Ashen Crown.
He tapped the first.
IRON VEIL [Passive]
Your cells retain the physical memory of 51 years of combat training. Skills and techniques unlock gradually as your body's mana capacity grows to support them.
[Current Unlock Rate: 1.2%]
He tapped the second.
DEATHREAD [Active]
Calculate the exact probability that a chosen action results in your death within the next 72 hours. Cost: 6 months of remaining lifespan per use.
[Cooldown: 30 days]
He did not tap Ashen Crown. He already knew it would say sealed and give him nothing. Systems, in his experience, did not offer what they weren't ready to offer.
He closed the panel.
The alley smelled like old rain and the exhaust from the noodle shop two doors down. A cat crossed the mouth of the alley at a measured pace, paused to regard him with complete indifference, and continued. The city made its ordinary morning sounds. Someone's radio. The rattle of a cart. A bus.
Six months.
Six months before the first Gate opened over the Han River and nothing was ever ordinary again.
He had spent fifty-one years learning, fighting, losing, adjusting, and fighting again. He had watched people die who didn't need to. He had made decisions at twenty-three and thirty-one and forty-five that he had spent decades quietly regretting. He had arrived at the final battle as the strongest living human being, and it had not been enough, and he had died knowing that the world died with him.
Six months.
He stood up, straightened the thin jacket that his sixteen-year-old self apparently owned, and walked out of the alley.
He had work to do.
The Shinmyung Hunter Academy application deadline was in four days. He had never applied in his original life — had been discovered through a street fight during the chaos of the first Gate Opening, recruited by a low-grade guild who had burned through him and discarded him, and he had clawed his way up from there. It had worked. Eventually. Slowly. Wastefully.
He was not doing that again.
He needed training infrastructure, institutional cover, and proximity to the people who would matter in the years ahead. The Academy provided all three. And if it cost him two years of playing harmless in a school full of teenagers who thought rank and potential scores were the measure of a person — fine. He had spent fifty-one years developing patience.
He stopped at a public washroom to splash water on his face and look at himself in the cracked mirror above the sink.
Young. Thin. Unremarkable by every metric that the Hunter registration system would use to assess him. Dark eyes, he had forgotten how dark his eyes had been before the years had bleached everything out, including that. His face was a face before it had been weathered into what his original face had become: the angles hadn't been worn in yet, the jaw hadn't set, the lines around his mouth that people had eventually learned to read as either patience or something colder were entirely absent.
He looked at himself for a while. Not out of vanity or grief. Just accounting.
This was the body he had to work with. Sixteen, malnourished from years of inadequate institutional feeding, mana pathways entirely undeveloped, physical baseline below-average even for the age cohort. In his first run through this life he had been furious at his own weakness for the first three years. He had burned through his twenties making up for lost development with sheer aggressive training that had broken things that had never fully healed.
He was not doing that this time. He knew now what he hadn't known at sixteen or twenty-three or thirty: that the body was not an obstacle. The body was infrastructure, and infrastructure you abused in the beginning cost you at the end in ways that weren't always visible until it mattered.
He would build it right. Slowly. Correctly. With the patience of a man who had already lived through the consequences of the alternative.
He dried his hands and walked out into the Seoul morning.
The application deadline for Shinmyung Academy was in four days. He would need proof of academic standing, his original records were in the group home's system, accessible through the administrative office. He would need to arrange accommodation through the scholarship housing portal, which required a two-step verification that he remembered being complicated at sixteen and suspected would be less complicated with fifty-one years of bureaucratic experience behind it. He would need to get his mana aptitude test done at the nearest government awakening assessment center, score it at an appropriate level ,not so low as to be suspicious of incompetence, not so high as to invite guild attention, and file the registration before the window closed.
Four days. He had managed supply lines for a thirty-thousand-person military operation in active Gate territory. He could manage an academy application.
He allowed himself something that was not quite a smile.
Then he stepped back out into the Seoul morning, full of people who did not know what was coming, and began the careful work of becoming someone who could change it.