"Two hundred and ninety-nine."
"Three hundred."
"Three hundred and one."
"Three hundred and two."
The count came out as barely a breath, steady and flat. Morning light pushed through the windowsill in thin strips, falling across the floorboards and climbing the wall as the sun rose higher. The room was small — a bed against one wall, a study desk buried under training manuals and textbooks, a cracked mirror above a basin in the corner.
Nova Stern's upper body was bare, skin damp, doing one-handed push-ups with the kind of form that came from repetition rather than thought. Back flat, each rep controlled. He'd been at it for over an hour.
He stopped when the knock came.
"Nova, I've gone to work. Remember to eat the breakfast on the table."
"Got it, Aunt Mira."
He waited until her footsteps faded and the front door clicked shut, then pressed both palms down, engaged his core, and flipped to his feet. One long exhale. He rolled his neck until it cracked.
"Nyx, how long have I been exercising?"
The watch display rippled. A sleek black cat materialized on screen, standing on its hind legs, tail curling.
"Master got up early today and exercised for 1 hour and 7 minutes. Excellent work, nya~"
Nova nodded. Basic martial arts forms, ten cycles. A hundred sit-ups. A hundred squats. Three hundred push-ups each hand. Just over an hour. His baseline was still creeping forward, which was the only thing that mattered.
"Open the panel."
Status
[Character: Nova Stern]
[Race: Human]
[Age: 17]
[Level — Unawakened]
[Profession: None]
[Talent: None]
[Physical Strength: 14]
[Strength: 12+1]
[Speed: 11]
[Spirit: 15]
[Luck: 10]
[Intents: None]
[Laws: None]
[Passive Special Essence: None]
[Active Skills: None]
[Practice Method: Basic Martial Arts, Basic Breathing Method, Basic Body Building Method]
[Equipment: None]
[Free Attribute Points: 0][Evaluation: Weaker than an abyssal ant]
"Still pathetic," Nova muttered, and headed for the shower.
Three minutes under cold water. He stood at the basin afterward, wiping his face, and caught his reflection staring back at him. Sharp features, dark eyes, the kind of face that had earned him an embarrassing nickname at the academy — something about a heartbreaker. He'd never asked for it and couldn't get rid of it.
He looked at himself for a moment and thought, not for the first time, about the life before this one.
He'd been a high school student. Completely ordinary — average grades, no special talents, no remarkable story. Then, shortly after his fifteenth birthday, something went wrong with his body. A slow, quiet deterioration that no doctor could explain. They ran every test available and came back with nothing. No disease. No structural abnormality. No cause. Just a boy getting weaker by the month, and medicine standing at the edge of that fact with empty hands.
He died before he turned seventeen.
The strange part had never been the death itself. The strange part was the dreams he'd carried his entire life — long before any illness, long before any of it. He'd dreamed of moving through the void of space, of watching civilizations from above as they rose and collapsed over millennia. Of clashing with enemies across dimensions he had no words for. Of crushing through the walls between realms like they were paper. Wild, vivid, utterly inexplicable dreams that felt less like imagination and more like memory.
He'd chalked it up to an overactive mind. A kid who read too much.
Then he transmigrated. Watched a man split a boulder with a flick of his wrist. Saw a Tier 2 warrior tear apart an Abyssal Spawn that weighed fifty tons. Stood in front of an awakening array and felt the faint hum of primordial energy moving through the air like something breathing.
The dreams stopped feeling like fiction after that.
He had no proof. Nothing concrete. Just a persistent, bone-deep suspicion that his soul was older than one lifetime, and that whatever he'd been before this — before the sick kid in a hospital bed, before Nova Stern doing push-ups in a small room in Thornhaven City — it wasn't ordinary.
He intended to find out. But strength came first. Everything else came after.
He got dressed, ate Aunt Mira's breakfast fast, and left.
The Skyrail was packed. Nova squeezed through the doors a breath before they sealed and found an empty seat near the window, which felt like the universe offering a small, grudging apology for everything else.
The car hummed and lifted. Below, the suburban district fell away — houses shrinking to the size of scattered toys as the rail climbed to its cruising height of nearly a hundred meters. Ahead, the city proper rose in a dense wall of towers, steel and glass stretching hundreds of meters into the sky. Aircraft moved through the upper airspace in organized streams, their exhaust trails catching the morning light.
At the city's center stood the clock tower, cloud-piercing, its peak lost to haze. And at the far edge, barely visible on a clear day like today, the defensive wall stretched across the horizon — a steel barrier hundreds of meters tall, standing between the city and whatever lived outside it.
Nova always looked at the wall. He wasn't sure why. Force of habit, maybe.
"Welcome to Skyrail Line 51. Good morning, passengers of Thornhaven City. Today is another peaceful day."
"Last night, a small-scale spawn tide erupted from the A-rank Abyssal Rift in Sector 13. Suppressed within half an hour by City Garrison Commander Drakon Vess. A Tier 6 Abyssal Spawn was eliminated."
Around him, most passengers didn't react. Spawn tides from the outer rifts were regular enough that a half-hour suppression barely registered as news.
"Headmaster Gareth Ironveil of Thornhaven First Combat Academy has broken through to Tier 7 and is expected to run for the next City Lord position."
A few people stirred at that one. Tier 7 was a different category of existence entirely.
"Anomalous phenomena in the Silverpeak Ocean are suspected to involve a King-class Abyssal Spawn. The Sakuran Empire has sent an envoy to the Valdris Federation to discuss countermeasures..."
Nova let the broadcast fade to background noise.
As a transmigrator, seventeen years had passed since he arrived in this world. He couldn't say with certainty whether he had crossed into an entirely separate world or a divergent future of his original planet — the history texts muddied that question rather than answering it. Up until the year 2024 AD, three hundred years ago, every recorded historical event matched what he knew. The same nations, the same technological progression, the same civilizational arc.
Three hundred years ago — Year One of the Cataclysm Era, back when the calendar still read 2025 — the Eternal Abyss had descended without warning. Abyssal Rifts tore open across the globe, monsters poured through by the millions, and humanity lost half its population before anyone understood what was happening. What saved the other half was the System Integration — the planet itself awakening in response to the invasion, using its own laws to convert the energy of slain monsters into resources, routing experience back to the people who did the killing, handing every human a digitized interface and the means to grow stronger. The world expanded. Dungeons appeared. A martial order emerged from the wreckage, and two centuries of grinding, dying, and adapting later, humanity was still here.
Year 297 now. The outer rifts were training grounds. The strongest humans touched the Demigod tier. And seventeen-year-olds rode the Skyrail to their awakening ceremonies while debating streamers.
"—I'm telling you, those figures are absolutely lethal."
"Is it really that good?!"
"Obviously! Didn't you notice my blood and qi vitality dropped?"
The two students ahead of him were fully committed to the conversation. Nova had no interest. His mind was already on the ceremony.
Today, every graduating student would go through two awakenings. The first — origin talent awakening — was the one that kept people up at night. A designated array would resonate with your soul and draw out whatever law existed within it, etching it permanently. The talent was yours from that moment. Unique to you, the way a soul was unique. And with it came an instinctive surface understanding of the law it was tied to.
The ceiling question came after. Upgrading a talent meant comprehending the law beneath it at a deeper level — and that was something no amount of grinding or money could shortcut. It required sitting with the law, studying it until a new layer cracked open. Most warriors never managed it once across their entire lives. So if you awakened weak talent, the odds were long.
The second awakening — the job ceremony — worked differently. The planet conducted it through the System directly, running each candidate through a trial before etching a class law into the soul. An additional grant from a world that had decided its best investment was the people protecting it.
Origin talent for your ceiling. Job for your role. And between those two things, a person's entire future could pivot in a single morning.
Nova watched the city slide past the glass.
He had no powerful background, no hidden patron, no cheat inherited from another life — at least not one he could access yet. What he had was seventeen years of careful preparation, a body he'd built rep by rep, a suspicion about his own soul that he couldn't prove, and the kind of stubbornness that didn't have an off switch.
It would have to be enough.
"Thornhaven Combat Academy, now arriving."
Nova stood, straightened his uniform, and moved with the crowd toward the doors.
The academy gates rose ahead. Banners in deep navy and silver hung on either side. Students poured in from every direction — some loud and restless, some quiet, all of them heading to the same place.
He walked through without slowing.
Ready for your notes or chapter two.