Here's the prologue for Infinite Ascension: The Max Level Sovereign:
PROLOGUE: The Boy Who Died Smiling
The truck never slowed down.
Haroon Parhar Rai saw it coming—the screech of tires, the blur of metal, the child frozen in the middle of Kot Addu's busiest intersection. He didn't think. He moved, shoving the boy clear with enough force to send them both sprawling. The impact came a heartbeat later, a white-hot explosion that started in his ribs and ended somewhere in the clouds he suddenly found himself staring up at.
Funny, he thought, blood bubbling at his lips. The sky is so blue today.
He tried to turn his head, to see if the child was safe, but his body wasn't listening anymore. Voices screamed around him—ambulance, police, oh God, he's so young—but they sounded distant, like a television playing in another room. Haroon wanted to tell them not to worry. He wanted to make a joke about Pakistani traffic laws, or maybe ask if someone could call his mother so she wouldn't hear about this from a stranger.
Instead, he smiled.
It wasn't bravery. It wasn't acceptance. It was simply that Haroon Parhar Rai had spent twenty-two years cultivating a default setting of cheerful, and his body didn't know how to die any other way.
The light didn't fade. It shifted.
One moment, he was staring at clouds. The next, he was falling through a void that tasted like static and smelled like ozone. No pain. No body, really—just the sensation of self tumbling downward while colors that didn't exist painted impossible geometries across his consciousness.
[SOUL HARVESTED]
The words appeared in his mind without sound, burning with golden authority.
[CAUSE OF DEATH: TRAUMATIC IMPACT]
[AGE AT DEATH: 22 YEARS, 4 MONTHS, 17 DAYS]
[KARMA EVALUATION: POSITIVE—SELF-SACRIFICE]
[ELIGIBILITY: CONFIRMED]
Eligibility for what? Haroon tried to ask, but he had no mouth.
The void answered anyway.
[WELCOME TO THE GOD DOMAIN, CANDIDATE 7,291,446,882]
[PREPARE FOR TUTORIAL SCENARIO: ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE—ORIGINAL WORLD]
[DIFFICULTY: F-RANK]
[SURVIVAL RATE: 34.7%]
[BONUS: TALENT AWAKENING IMMINENT]
Zombies? Haroon would have laughed if he could. He'd spent half his teenage years watching anime and playing video games, dreaming of exactly this kind of second chance. The irony of getting isekai'd by a Mitsubishi truck wasn't lost on him.
Then the pain started.
Not physical—something deeper. Something that reached into the core of whatever he was now and twisted. Information flooded his consciousness: the nature of the Domain, the endless scenarios, the competition between dead souls from infinite realities. He understood the currency of Scenario Points, the danger of revelation to natives, the forbidden truth that players who climbed high enough could extract characters from their worlds, bringing fiction into reality.
And he understood his own Talent.
[TALENT AWAKENING COMPLETE]
[RANK: TRIPLE EX UNIQUE—SOLE INSTANCE IN MULTIVERSE]
[TALENT 1: INSTANT MAX LEVEL]
[DESCRIPTION: Any skill, technique, ability, or power acquired by the user instantly achieves theoretical maximum proficiency and mastery. No training required. No practice necessary. Perfection upon conception.]
[TALENT 2: FUSION]
[DESCRIPTION: User may merge any two or more skills, items, bloodlines, energy types, or conceptual powers into new hybrid existences. Fused creations retain strengths of components while eliminating weaknesses. Limit: User's comprehension and energy reserves.]
[WARNING: UNIQUE RANK TALENTS ATTRACT ATTENTION. RECOMMENDATION: CONCEALMENT]
Haroon would have blinked. Then he would have grinned.
Even in death—especially in death—his luck was absurd.
The void spat him out into a world of rust and ruin. He hit concrete knees-first, gasping as sensation returned to his body. It was his body, he realized. Younger, maybe—nineteen, twenty at most—but unmistakably Haroon Parhar Rai: wheat-brown skin, curly black hair, the same scar above his left eyebrow from a childhood cricket accident.
Around him, a city screamed.
Not metaphorically. Literally screamed—the high, hungry shrieks of the infected, the desperate shouts of survivors, the distant thunder of collapsing infrastructure. Haroon stumbled to his feet in an alley that smelled like rotting garbage and older, fouler things. Three meters away, a corpse in a police uniform twitched and began to rise, its neck at an impossible angle, its eyes milky with hunger.
[TUTORIAL OBJECTIVE: SURVIVE 24 HOURS]
[HINT: SEARCH FOR WEAPONS. AVOID HORDES. TRUST NO ONE]
The zombie—because that's what it was, undeniably, actually a zombie—lurched toward him with the jerky speed of fresh reanimation. Haroon backed against a brick wall, heart hammering, and realized with distant surprise that he was still smiling.
Old habits.
His hand brushed something metal in a pile of trash. A pipe, rusted but solid. He gripped it automatically, and—
[WEAPON ACQUIRED: STEEL PIPE (POOR QUALITY)]
[SKILL GENERATING...]
[BLUNT WEAPON MASTERY—MAXIMUM LEVEL ACHIEVED]
Knowledge flooded him. Not memory—muscle. The perfect grip for crushing skulls. The optimal angle for preserving stamina. The exact force required to shatter a human temple. He knew this pipe like he'd trained with it for twenty years, knew the weight and balance and weak points, knew precisely how it would sing through the air when swung with intent.
The zombie lunged.
Haroon sidestepped without thinking, body moving on instincts that shouldn't exist. The pipe came up, around, down—a clean arc that terminated in the zombie's skull with a wet crunch. The creature dropped. Didn't rise again.
He stared at the body. At the pipe. At his own hands, trembling now but not from fear.
Oh, he thought. Oh, this is dangerous.
Not the power itself. Haroon wasn't stupid—he'd read enough light novels to recognize a broken protagonist ability when he saw one. No, the danger was the attention. The warning in his Talent description. In a place where the strong preyed on the weak and information was currency, possessing the only Triple Ex Unique rank in existence made him either a king or a target.
And Haroon Parhar Rai had never been particularly good at being a target.
He wiped the pipe on his jeans—standard Pakistani student wear, he noted, complete with his university hoodie—and looked up at the burning skyline. Somewhere in this nightmare, there would be other players. Veterans who'd survived dozens of scenarios. Monsters wearing human skin. People who would see his cheerful demeanor and underestimate him, or see his potential and try to crush him before he grew.
He could hide. Should hide, probably. Play the weakling, the lucky fool, the harmless support character while secretly maxing every skill he touched and fusing them into things the Domain had never seen.
Or he could trust. Find allies. Build something real in this place of second chances.
The zombie at his feet twitched. Haroon brought the pipe down again, just to be sure, and made his decision the same way he'd made the one that killed him—without hesitation, without regret, with a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes yet.
He would survive. He would climb. And somewhere between the scenarios and the slaughter, he would find people worth keeping.
Because Haroon had died once already, alone on hot asphalt with strangers screaming around him. He had no intention of dying that way again.
[TUTORIAL TIMER: 23:47:12]
[PLAYER STATUS: ACTIVE]
[WELCOME TO INFINITY, CANDIDATE]
Haroon Parhar Rai, twenty-two years old, formerly of Kot Addu, Punjab, Pakistan, adjusted his grip on his pipe and walked toward the screaming.
He was humming an old Pakistani folk song his mother used to sing. It helped with the fear he wasn't allowed to show.
Not yet.
Maybe not ever.
But that was okay. Smiles were weapons too, in their own way. And Haroon had always been very good at smiling.
The Domain watched, and waited, and for the first time in eons, something that might have been concern flickered through its ancient consciousness.
The boy with the broken talent had begun to climb.
And he was bringing music with him.