Time flies like a white pony glimpsed through a crack in a door. Seventeen years and nine months had passed since that fateful, undignified day in the alleyway.
Oliver Throne was now exactly three months away from his eighteenth birthday—the deadline the system had set for his "activation" task.
His survival was a stroke of mundane luck. On that freezing night nearly two decades ago, a woman named May Parker had stepped out to take out the trash.
Being a meticulous soul, May always glanced into the bin before tossing her bags. That small habit had saved Oliver's life.
Finding a blue-lipped infant still clinging to breath, May hadn't hesitated. She rushed him to the hospital, where doctors were baffled to find that despite the exposure, the baby was in peak physical condition—better, in fact, than most newborns.
Once he was cleared, May and her husband, Ben, decided to adopt the "abandoned" boy.
They named him Oliver blue Parker.
For seventeen years, the system had remained a "fluttering" ghost in the back of his mind, dormant and unhelpful. Oliver had tried everything to jumpstart it.
He'd even tried "accidentally" shocking himself with a live wire once, which resulted in nothing but twitching limbs and a very concerned Aunt May.
Eventually, he discovered a pattern. Since he began practicing chakra extraction at the age of three, the system's progress bar would tick up by exactly 1% on every birthday.
"At this rate," Oliver had grumbled years ago, "I'll be a hundred years old before this thing turns on. What's the point of a legendary system if I'm using it to cure my own gout?"
Worse, the task stated he had to reach 100/100 by the age of eighteen. If he did nothing, the task would fail. The system didn't specify a punishment, but in the world of web novels, "Failure" usually meant "Game Over" in a very permanent sense.
So, Oliver worked. He practiced the only things he had: Chakra extraction, physical conditioning, and the Three-Body Technique.
Chakra was the lifeblood of his hope—a refined blend of physical energy from the cells and mental energy from the spirit. Because Oliver possessed the mind of a twenty-something writer in a young body, his spiritual energy was abnormally high.
His physical energy, bolstered by the "Body Refinement" passive skill from his novice pack, was also far beyond that of a normal human. He recovered from fatigue faster and grew stronger with less effort.
However, he lacked a teacher. He didn't know the legendary Rasengan or any high-level elemental jutsu. He didn't have the Shadow Clone Technique to speed up his training. He was stuck with the basics.
After seventeen years of grueling repetition, he could perform the Substitution, Transformation, and Clone techniques with a delay of only 0.8 seconds.
He could walk on water and climb trees using chakra with perfect ease. But his total chakra pool was pitifully small—only enough to perform about twenty E-rank techniques before running dry.
He eventually realized why: every night at midnight, his hard-earned chakra would vanish. The "evil capitalist" system was siphoning his energy to fuel its own reboot.
"I need a bigger battery," Oliver realized.
In the Marvel world, "batteries" were everywhere if you knew where to look. The Tesseract—the Space Stone—was the obvious choice.
But according to his research, Captain America was still a "Capsicle" somewhere in the Arctic, and the Stone was locked away in a S.H.I.E.L.D. vault.
That left one viable plan: the cosmic energy storm.
The storm that birthed the Fantastic Four was a font of raw, evolutionary power. As a writer, Oliver knew the laws of conservation;
Reed Richards and his crew couldn't just "mutate" into gods without a massive energy input. If he could hitch a ride on that space station, he could gorge the system on cosmic radiation.
But how does an ordinary orphan from Queens get a seat on a multi-billion dollar space flight?
The answer lay in his "Prophecy."
Oliver knew the future. He knew about Tony Stark's kidnapping, the arrival of Thor, and the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D. In a world of spies and geniuses, information was the most valuable currency. If he played his cards right, he could trade his "visions" for a ticket to the stars.
But he had to be careful. If the world found out he could see the future, he wouldn't be a hero; he'd be a resource.
Nick Fury would lock him in a basement, or Hydra would dissect his brain to see how the "precognition" worked.
He needed a middle ground—a way to use his knowledge without painting a target on his back.
To that end, he had already started building his own platform: The Throne Literature Network.
He used his knowledge of his previous life to "author" hits like Harry Potter, building a reputation and a financial nest egg. He was no longer just oliver Parker, the quiet kid from Queens; he was Oliver Throne, the mysterious literary prodigy.
"The board is set," Oliver whispered, looking out his bedroom window at the New York skyline. "Now, I just need the players to start moving."
He was waiting for a specific moment, a specific headline that would signal the start of the Age of Heroes. And he knew exactly which billionaire was about to take a very fateful trip to a desert in Afghanistan.