[Names were changed from Marcus to Micheal]
The first thing Michael kept in mind was that the original Michael was broke.
He was not the regular broke. The kind of broke that had a specific smell, instant noodle packets stacked in the corner of the desk, a phone with a cracked screen held together by a strip of clear tape, shoes by the door that had been resoled at least once and were due for a second round. Michael recognized it immediately because he had been living a variation of that same broke for the better part of four years.
At least they had that in common.
He spent the first hour just taking inventory. He was lighter than he had ever been in his adult life, which should have felt good and instead just felt disorienting, like wearing someone else's coat. His arms had the lean, underfed look of someone who didn't eat enough rather than someone who trained. His reflection in the small mirror above the desk showed a face he didn't recognize, it was mixed and sharp-jawed, with dark circles under eyes that were currently doing the thousand yard stare of a man processing an existential crisis at six in the morning.
Not bad looking, actually. Michael noted that with the detached objectivity of someone observing a stranger.
The original Michael was a seventeen year old scholarship student at Western National Academy of Awakeners. That much the orientation packet confirmed. The rest Michael pieced together from the room itself, the sparse walls, the absence of any family photos, the single shelf above the desk holding three textbooks, a worn notebook, and a small trophy from a middle school academic competition that someone had clearly kept not out of pride but out of having nothing else to keep.
The notebook told him more than anything else.
Not a diary exactly. More like a running record of grievances written in the cramped handwriting of someone who had learned early that the only place safe to be honest was on paper. Michael flipped through it with a growing sense of recognition that was almost uncomfortable.
He was a scholarship kid who had no ability. His parents were gone too.
The details were vague, written around rather than through, the way people wrote about things that still hurt too much to look at directly. One entry near the back, dated three weeks ago, said simply: 'I got in. I don't know how. I don't know what I'm supposed to do when I get there.'
Michael closed the notebook and put it back exactly where he'd found it.
'Yeah,' he thought. 'Me neither.'
---
Western National Academy of Awakeners was not the kind of institution that needed to advertise.
It had been founded twenty years ago, one of the first purpose-built Awakener academies in the country, back when the government was still scrambling to formalize training pipelines and figure out what exactly it was building. In the years since, it had produced more S-rank Awakeners than any other institution on the continent, sent more graduates into the National Rift Response Corps, and maintained a waitlist so long that the acceptance rate had dropped below three percent.
It sat in the northern quarter of Hallow City on a campus that had been designed to impress, clean modernist architecture, training facilities that cost more than most city budgets, and a central tower that the locals called the Spire, visible from half the city, its upper floors perpetually lit even at night. The kind of place that made it very clear, the moment you stepped through the gates, that you were either supposed to be here or you weren't.
Michael, by every measurable metric, was not supposed to be here.
Michael understood that clearly by the time he finished reading through the orientation packet properly. Western National operated on a tier system, although not officially, not in any document the administration would put their names on, but structurally, in the way the academy had evolved over two decades of intake classes. At the top were the Crests, students from established Awakener families, legacy admissions, people who had been training since childhood and arrived already ranked. Below them were the Talents, students who had demonstrated strong awakening potential in standardized testing, the meritocratic middle layer the academy pointed to when it needed to defend its reputation. And at the bottom, small enough to be practically decorative, was the Scholarship Division. Students admitted on academic merit alone, no awakening ability required, the academy's gesture toward accessibility that everyone tacitly understood was more optics than opportunity.
Marcus had tested at zero for awakening potential. Absolute baseline. The kind of score that usually meant a comfortable civilian career somewhere adjacent to the industry, support staff, analysts, logistics, rather than anything involving actually going into a dungeon.
And yet here he was. Here Michael was.
In a dorm room that smelled like instant noodles, holding an orientation packet for an academy full of people who were going to take one look at him and immediately understand exactly how little he belonged.
Michael set the packet down and leaned back on the narrow bed and stared at the cracked ceiling and thought about his life. Both of them.
Two different people, he reflected, and somehow I managed to land at the bottom both times. That's either impressive consistency or a cosmic joke.
Probably both.
He closed his eyes. Orientation was at nine. He had two hours and forty minutes and absolutely nothing useful to do with them, which meant his brain was going to spend that time doing what it always did — processing, cataloguing, building a picture from available data.
The picture it built was not encouraging.
He had no ability or family connections, neither did he have money. Scholarship Division in an academy that treated its scholarship students the way a five star restaurant treated the fire exit, technically necessary, never the first thing you showed people. First day tomorrow. An unknown number of ways for everything to go catastrophically wrong.
Michael had spent four years watching raid streams and memorizing Awakener rankings and absorbing everything there was to know about a world that had never given him any reason to believe he'd ever actually be part of it.
He supposed that was about to change.
One way or another.
---
He was still staring at the ceiling when it happened.
No warning. No buildup. One moment the room was quiet and the next the air pressure changed in a way that had nothing to do with air pressure, a sensation like static electricity running from the base of his spine straight to the back of his skull, and then —
Light.
Not real light. Somewhere behind his eyes, vivid and sharp and entirely impossible, an interface materialized in his vision like a screen overlaid on the world. Clean lines. Dark background. Text that shouldn't have been readable because it wasn't actually there but somehow was, perfectly crisp and impossible to look away from.
[SYSTEM INITIALIZATION COMPLETE]
[HOST DETECTED: MICHAEL — SOUL ORIGIN CONFIRMED]
[AWAKENING PROTOCOL: DIVINE CUCK SYSTEM]
Michael stared at it.
The text stared back.
[The stronger your attraction, the stronger your power.]
[Claim what others take for granted. What you desire, you can take.]
[Welcome, Host. Your first quest awaits.]
A long silence.
Michael sat up slowly, looked at the words floating in his vision, and said out loud to an empty room:
"You have got to be kidding me."
[The system does not kid.]
"That's exactly what something kidding would say."
A pause. The interface flickered once, almost like a shrug.
[First Quest available. Proceed to Western National Academy orientation to begin.]
Michael looked at the ceiling and then looked at the interface. Looked at the original Michael's cracked phone and instant noodle collection and single middle school trophy.
"Fine," he said.
He got up and started getting dressed.