The world burned. It wasn't a metaphor. The air itself had ignited, choking the shattered ruins of humanity's final stronghold with Abyssal fire.
"Hold the line! For the Citadel!"
A distant, dying scream pierced the roar of the roaring inferno, abruptly cut off by a wet crunch. Kaelen spat a mouthful of acidic blood onto the blackened cobblestones. The Capital of Obsidian was gone. The grand magical spires were reduced to jagged tombstones jutting into a crimson sky.
Kaelen knelt on the edge of the collapsing courtyard. His lungs felt like they were filled with crushed glass. Every breath tasted of ozone, charred meat, and ash. Around him lay the mutilated remains of his finest soldiers, torn limb from limb by the advancing wave of shadows.
A monstrous silhouette eclipsed the bruised sky. A demonic gargantua from the deepest circles of the Abyss. It raised a foot the size of a cathedral, wreathed in dark violet lightning.
Kaelen didn't run. There was nowhere left to run. His mana was drained. His limbs were shattered. He closed his eyes, raising his shattered blade one last time in pure, hateful defiance.
'If only… if only I had more power from the beginning.'
"CRUNCH."
The sky vanished. A crushing weight obliterated Kaelen's physical form. His bones snapped, his internal organs ruptured in a nanosecond, and his consciousness sank into a suffocating, freezing void.
Then—he gasped, violently lurching upward.
"Ahhhh!"
Kaelen's eyes snapped open. His left hand violently slapped his side, desperately reaching for a sword that wasn't there. His fingers instead dug into soft silk bedsheets.
He was breathing heavily. The agonizing, absolute cold of the Abyss was completely gone, replaced by the damp, mild breeze characteristic of a quiet summer night.
'Wait. Where am I? Is this heaven?' Kaelen frowned. 'No, my chest… it's entirely whole.'
He frantically scrambled out of the bed, stumbling over a set of polished boots and colliding with a full-length mirror leaning against the stone wall. Kaelen squinted at the reflection. The scars that crisscrossed his neck and cheek were completely gone. The profound, haggard exhaustion carved into his thirty-year-old face had been smoothed out. Staring back at him was a nineteen-year-old youth with pale skin, unmarred muscles, and piercing, shock-widened gray eyes.
The setting was intimately familiar, a place he hadn't seen since it was turned to slag ten years prior: his old bedroom in the original Citadel of Obsidian.
Kaelen darted his eyes around the room. On the desk lay an unwrapped present—a cheap, steel broadsword from the town's blacksmith. He looked toward the wall, eyeing the tattered cloth calendar pinned near his window.
His eyes locked onto the circled date in red ink. The seventh day of the Moon of Falling Leaves.
A chill traced up his spine as fragmented, overlapping memories flooded his mind like an unleashed tidal wave. By the time he recovered from the shock, he knew precisely when he was. It was exactly ten years in the past.
It was the Day of Awakening.
"It can't be," Kaelen whispered, gripping the edge of the stone window frame until his knuckles turned bone-white. The regression to the past was scientifically and magically impossible according to all laws known to the Grand Mages of the future. Yet here he was, flesh and blood.
Before his mind could formulate another coherent thought, the world outside simply ceased making sense. The faint moonlight vanished entirely.
The atmosphere outside thickened rapidly. The air itself took on a gelatinous texture, suffocating the region under an unimaginable weight. A translucent wave of sheer, blinding azure energy rippled down from the upper limits of the cosmos, colliding directly with the planet's surface.
"The Mana Wave!" Kaelen shielded his eyes. "It's starting!"
In the future timeline, they simply called this event the Great Integration. The absolute laws of the physical world were aggressively rewritten by the Soulbound Arcanum, converting the essence of reality into absolute numerical values, stats, levels, and talents. It was a baptism of cosmic fire meant to arm the populace, giving everyone a standardized fighting Class—Mage, Warrior, Rogue.
Kaelen closed his eyes and stabilized his breathing, welcoming the torrential wave of dimensional energy. The magical surge slammed into his chest like a physical sledgehammer. Instantly, an overwhelming heat washed over every pore of his skin.
He waited for the familiar sensation of receiving the [Class: Adept Mage]. He knew exactly how the original timeline unfolded. But this time, something felt deeply, catastrophically wrong.
A sharp agony lanced through his skull. The Azure energy currently pouring into his young physical body met with extreme resistance. It was colliding with a metaphysical paradox. His physical shell was only nineteen years old, but his actual soul was saturated with an entire decade of unimaginable war, slaughter, and exposure to divine abyssal horrors. His soul was ten years too old, dense, and corrupted to accept standard celestial formatting.
Suddenly, an alien sound tore through his consciousness, metallic and divine simultaneously.
[Ding!]
[Integration Phase Initialized.]
[Warning: Analyzing host's Soul Resonance.]
[Error! Paradox detected. Host possesses excessive residual timeline energy!]
[Soul Mass cannot be catalogued in standardized Class tiers. Recalculating reality formatting...]
Kaelen collapsed onto one knee, gripping his chest. His veins were literally pulsing with radiant blue light beneath his skin. The integration magic was trying desperately to categorize him, to enforce a Class rule, but the sheer gravity of his future self's unyielding will completely shattered the protocol.
[System Error! World Laws localized around Host are fracturing!]
[Anomaly recognized. Class integration abandoned.]
[Congratulations, Regressor! Instead of a Class, your paradox has forced the World Laws to grant you a Divine Talent!]
[Divine Talent Awakened: Apex Multiplier (Passive) (Unranked)]
A barrage of luminous, azure interface panels exploded into Kaelen's peripheral vision, far more detailed and aggressively glowing than the standard dull bronze panels everyone else was getting in this era.
┏━━━━━━━[ Profile ]━━━━━━━┓
│ Name: Kaelen Obsidian
│ True Age: ??? (Paradox Warning)
│ Path: Lawless Anomaly
│ Lifeform Tier: Level 1 Mortal <0.00%>
┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┛
┏━━━━━━[ Attributes ]━━━━━━┓
│ Strength: 5
│ Agility: 6
│ Vigor: 5
│ Mana: 12
┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┛
┏━━━━━━[ Talents & Skills ]━━━━━━┓
│ Divine Talent: Apex Multiplier [MAX]
│ > Description: Any material gain, stat increment, summoning luck, construction time, or consumed resource affecting the Host is subject to a 10,000-fold multiplication. This overwrites the baseline reality limits set by the Soulbound Arcanum.
│
│ Active Combat Skills: NONE
┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┛
Kaelen stared utterly paralyzed at the final box floating directly in the center of his retina. "A ten thousand... multiplier?" he rasped out loud, unable to stop the wild tremor in his voice. "Everything?"
To test the theory, he immediately shut his eyes and commanded his breathing. Ten years in the future, it took almost an hour of seated, absolute meditation just to draw a single droplet of pure free-floating ambient mana into his system to restore internal reserves. Following that same memory, Kaelen deeply inhaled once, forcefully focusing his core to drag the lingering azure energy from the air into his chest.
Immediately, the minuscule speck of mana, no bigger than a single teardrop, trickled past his newly established barriers and sank into his bloodstream. In the original timeline, that microscopic dot would simply settle softly inside him.
Instead, a mechanical hum instantly rang out in his brain.
[Ding!]
[Host has absorbed 1 unit of pure ambient mana!]
[Divine Talent 'Apex Multiplier' triggered. Multiplying volume...]
A devastating shockwave originated strictly within his ribcage. The minuscule, single unit of absorbed mana erupted violently, surging into 10,000 independent streams of compressed energy! It was like opening the floodgates to an ocean within the confined space of a bathtub. Kaelen's mouth flew wide open in shock, his entire muscular system cramping wildly as a tsunami of azure light blasted through his expanded, greedily devouring cells.
"Guh-!" He crashed onto the wooden floorboards as his veins glowed blue-white, trembling violently under the absolute majesty of an entire week's worth of active, excruciating cultivation happening inside his physical body within a single span of a breath.
His attributes rapidly flickered before his eyes, recalculating live.
[Warning: Level 1 vessel at mana absorption capacity. Remaining multiplied mana will convert to direct physical strengthening.]
He watched helplessly as his bare Strength and Vigor stats each forcibly climbed from five, up to ten, rocketing all the way to fifteen within literal seconds! Kaelen clutched his temples. A chaotic cocktail of disbelief, maniacal glee, and surging power filled him.
A power boost that should have easily taken his nineteen-year-old self six brutal, exhausting months to train had just manifested off a single deliberate intake of air. It wasn't a glitch—it was the very fabric of Fate bowing down to a man who had ripped his way out of hell and defied time itself.
Outside his window, horrifying bestial screams suddenly split the silent night. The Great Integration wasn't just a gentle baptism of statistics—it was violently introducing the true terrors of the celestial sphere. Dungeons were currently blooming across the continents, and roaming packs of rabid beasts mutated instantly into blood-starved nightmares under the wild atmospheric shifts.
The original survival clock was already ticking. Millions were already beginning to scream as monsters broke into civilian houses worldwide. Kaelen forced his hyper-charged, strengthened legs under himself, leaping back to his feet. He could worry about celebrating later. The first hours of the Great Integration determined survival over the following decade. He didn't have minutes to waste.
His eyes flickered down the grand stone hallway leading towards his decaying family estate's underground basement. Deep beneath the citadel laid the ancient ancestral family altar, built on the intersecting ley lines of this territory.
There was a crucial tool he needed to activate immediately before the volatile background magical resonance from the planetary awakening dissipated entirely. Kaelen charged forward into the dark hallway, abandoning his new cheap sword. He no longer needed ordinary steel. He had the opportunity to build a legendary legion starting immediately.