Kael didn't go back immediately.
He stood in his apartment for a long minute, boots planted on scarred linoleum, forest mud drying in cracked flakes around the soles. Shoulder still leaked slow heat under his torn sleeve, wet warmth soaking the cheap fabric and sticking it to his skin. The wall in front of him stayed solid. Peeling nicotine-yellow paint. Hairline cracks. A faint damp stain shaped like some forgotten continent nobody would ever bother to name.
Same room.
Same wobbling metal table with one leg shorter than the others.
Same cheap TV with a folded, unpaid electricity bill wedged underneath it like that would somehow stop the due date from crawling closer.
Except he wasn't the same.
His breathing sounded too loud for the tiny space. Heart not pounding like panic now, but steady, heavy, like someone had dropped an engine block inside his chest and told it to keep running.
He walked to the metal table and flipped open his old laptop. The casing was scratched, one hinge a little loose. When he hit the power button, the fan woke with a high-pitched whine, spinning resentful, like the machine was offended he'd dared ask it to work again.
If this was real and it was, because his shoulder burned like something had carved its name into the bone then he couldn't just swing fists and hope the universe played nice.
He needed numbers.
The browser took its sweet time, loading everything in stuttering bursts. His stolen neighbor Wi-Fi blinked weak in the corner. Eventually, the homepage came up ads for mana insurance, guild recruitment banners, some clickbait headline about an S-rank clearing a city-tier gate in record time.
He ignored all of it and went straight to the forums.
Raid boards. Build theory discussions. Grainy screenshots of status windows with usernames blurred. People flexing power curves and pretending they weren't doing it for validation.
Search bar.
He typed with stiff fingers, knuckles still scraped and raw.
"EXP requirement per level awakened"
Enter.
Threads loaded. Arguments. Half-baked math. Some people quoting official Association training manuals like scripture, others calling them bullshit. He scrolled, scanning for patterns, not perfect answers. He didn't need perfect. He needed approximate.
He opened a tab.
Level 1 to 5 in green-ranked stable dungeons?
Usually weeks in safe rotations. Faster if boosted by a high-level carry team. Slower for solo trash.
Another tab.
Level 5 to 10?
Months, unless backed by strong parties, optimized comps, or high-risk routes that could wipe you out just as easily as level you.
EXP distributed equally in party clears. Party size mattered. Kill credit, contribution weighting, all that bullshit.
Solo growth?
Rare.
Extremely rare.
Most people who tried it either washed out early or ended up as feel-good news clips: "Local man attempts solo D-rank, dies heroically saving no one."
Kael moved his finger on the worn touchpad, eyes skipping over flame wars and ego contests. He clicked something older, archived an Association training seminar summary someone had recorded and dumped online years ago.
Approximate scaling curves.
He read the line three times to make sure his vision wasn't blurring.
Level 2 – 100 EXP
Level 3 – 300 EXP
Level 4 – 800 EXP
Level 5 – 1,600 EXP
Level 6 – 3,200 EXP
Level 7 – 5,000+ EXP
Exponential climb.
The numbers weren't exact, the comments beneath argued that "depends on dungeon rating," "mob quality," "System variance" but the shape of it stayed the same.
Each step up cost more than everything before.
Kael leaned back slowly in the rickety chair. The backrest creaked, threatening to snap if he pushed too hard.
He had reached Level 5 in one night.
Not in some party-boosted green gate. Not with a tank, a healer, and a cheerful DPS shouting skill names for the camera. Alone. In something that didn't match anything on the public registry.
Not because he was special.
Because that dungeon wasn't normal.
His cursor blinked in the search bar again. He hesitated a second. Then he typed:
"Late awakening registration procedure"
New threads, more official-sounding this time. Links to Association portals. PDFs nobody actually read unless they had to.
He skimmed.
Late awakeners-those who triggered after eighteen via trauma, extreme mana exposure, or near-death events-fell under a special category. Mandatory reporting within seventy-two hours of first confirmed awakening. Standardized testing. Mana stability scans. Controlled dungeon entry under supervision.
Mana irregularities flagged.
Certain types of awakenings, especially those involving unregistered dungeons or anomalous mana signatures, triggered automatic investigations.
Extreme cases categorized as mana-deviants.
He stopped scrolling.
Mana-deviant.
He stared at the term until the letters blurred together.
Stories floated around every year. Half urban legend, half news cycle. Someone awakened alone. They didn't stabilize properly. Mana twisted wrong, personality fracturing under pressure. Civilians died in whatever mess followed. Association suppression squads handled the rest ,clean, efficient, no follow-up details.
People in the break room always had opinions.
"Mana-deviants are just psychos with power."
"System culls the unstable ones."
"Association overreacts to control awakening narrative."
Kael shut the laptop with a soft, final click.
No.
He would not become that.
He would not give anyone an excuse to put a bullet in his skull or seal him inside some research facility because his numbers didn't fit the chart.
He needed to stage this properly.
But first....He needed strength.
Everything else would be easier if he didn't die the next time a prisoner's claws slipped past his guard.
He turned back toward the cracked wall. To anyone else, it was just cheap rental paint and cheap rental neglect. To him, it was a hinge.
The air in front of the stained patch felt normal. Room temperature. Stale apartment smell instant noodles, cheap detergent, street dust.
He stepped forward.
The fabric of the world shivered.
Cold hit him like someone had opened a freezer inside his lungs.
Vision smeared, then snapped.
The forest swallowed him whole.
Sound died immediately. No cars. No distant honking. No TV through thin walls. Just a flat, heavy silence that made his own breathing feel like an intrusion.
Gray trees clawed at a bruised sky. Bark the color of old bones, twisted trunks leaning at wrong angles like they'd been forced to grow in pain. The earth under his boots stank of rot and wet metal, soft enough that every step left a clear print.
He checked behind him.
The distortion shimmered faintly between the same pair of oaks as before, barely visible unless you knew exactly where to squint. A thin, oily ripple in the air, like heat haze on cold ground.
Still open.
Good.
He let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding and called his status with a thought.
Name: Kael
Level: 5
Strength: 15
Agility: 11
Vitality: 11
Endurance: 8
Perception: 6
Mana: 5
Unassigned Points: 20
Twenty free points sitting there since his first run.
He'd pushed through earlier on base stats and adrenaline, knowing he could allocate anytime. That had been stupid. If that collar on the stronger one had taken half a second longer to crack…He crouched, letting his fingers brush the damp leaves. Cold seeped into his skin. He closed his eyes and listened.
Somewhere to his left, deeper between the trunks, a wet dragging sound moved through the undergrowth. Like something pulling dead weight by the limbs. Slow, unsteady, but getting closer.
He stood up in one smooth motion, muscles tensing, awareness sharpening.
Then he allocated.
No spreadsheets. No overthinking. He'd done enough theory reading to know one thing: living was better than a perfectly optimized late-game build.
Strength +5 (20)
Vitality +5 (16)
Agility +5 (16)
Endurance +3 (11)
Perception +2 (8)
Balanced.
No glass cannon bullshit. No single stat so low that one mistake meant instant death. Strength high enough to break things. Vitality to stop him bleeding out in the mud. Agility to move when he needed to. Endurance so he didn't burn out after ten minutes. Perception to at least notice when something tried to flank.
He dismissed the window.
The dragging noise grew clearer.
A shape emerged from behind a nearby trunk.
Not fast.
Not elegant.
A prisoner.