In the far north of the continent, where the cold winds never cease, lies Dragon Valley, one of the world's three great secret realms.
Legends say the roar of a giant dragon can tear the sky apart, and its breath is enough to freeze all things.
However, a hundred miles away from this perilous land, there is a small village almost forgotten by the world.
The afternoon sunlight pierced through the sparse clouds, casting a warm glow.
The large tree at the village entrance was lush with leaves, casting mottled shadows on the ground.
A boy with white hair and blue eyes was lying under the tree, a blade of grass in his mouth, squinting his eyes with a look of utter boredom.
"Eight years already."
The boy muttered to himself, his gaze focusing on a translucent blue panel in front of him, where the slowly scrolling loading bar had barely changed.
"I say, System, are you actually going to work? You're not some pathetic system that's just a knockoff, are you?"
The boy's name was Burning Feather.
To him, this world was both familiar and strange.
Eight years ago, he was still struggling for a living in another world. As a Natural-Born Corporate Slave, he worked overtime until late at night. On his way home, he encountered a 'hundred-ton king' truck. Despite his best efforts, he couldn't win, and the truck's quota increased by one.
Then he transmigrated and came to this different world. For some unknown reason, he had rejuvenated, his body returning to the state of a one or two-year-old, and even his hair and eye color had changed.
He also had the standard perk of a transmigrator—a 'Golden Finger.'
A system called 'entangled fate,' which claimed it could summon fictional characters, weapons, and even abilities from his memories once it finished charging.
But this system was truly unreliable.
In eight years, it had only successfully activated once at the very beginning. Furthermore, due to an unknown error, it had dropped the summoned character into a completely different time and place.
According to the system's only feedback, the other party seemed to have been sent to the distant past and was born in the 'Heavenly Realm.'
Heavenly Realm... Burning Feather chewed on those words, a bitter smile surfacing on his lips.
He naturally knew what this meant.
This was a world where gods, feeling bored, descended to the lower world to live with mortals and form 'Familias.'
Wasn't this the setting of the anime he watched in his past life, 'Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?'
The reason he was so certain was because of the person who picked him up from the wilderness eight years ago.
He still remembered that his consciousness was blurred back then, and he only felt a pair of slightly cool hands picking him up.
He struggled to open his eyes and saw a cold and beautiful face. Her long silver hair moved slightly in the wind, and her eyes were always closed, as if she were unwilling to see even a fraction of this world.
She wore an intricate black Gothic dress, her temperament so noble she didn't seem like a mortal.
Her name was Alphea.
Eight years was enough for Burning Feather to match his memories with reality one by one.
Whether it was 'Orario,' the center of the world that Adventurers yearned for, or the thousand-meter-high rock wall in the distance that separated the village from Dragon Valley, both proved his hypothesis.
And Alphea was precisely that monster of talent the gods spoke of in his memories, a member of the Hera Familia, the Level 7 known as 'The Silence.'
Coupled with that hearty uncle in the village named Chaldo, who was always wiping his greatsword, Burning Feather had completely given up his struggle.
He had indeed come to this world full of danger, yet also full of opportunity.
The lazy time under the tree shade soon came to an end.
Burning Feather spat out the grass stem that had been chewed white, sat up from the grass, and patted the dust and grass clippings off his pants.
The sunlight filtered through the gaps in the leaves, casting dancing spots of light on him, feeling warm and cozy.
"Time to go back."
He talked to himself, his voice carrying a hint of familiarity that even he hadn't noticed.
"If I don't go cook soon, that woman is going to lose her temper again."
Alphea's temper was practically harder and colder than the ten-thousand-year-old ice deep within Dragon Valley.
She never showed mercy just because Burning Feather was only a ten-year-old child.
Those seemingly slender palms carried a terrifying force when swung; every strike felt like it was going to shatter his bones.
But Burning Feather also admitted that through time after time of 'discipline,' he had learned to dodge, to observe, and to find openings in the opponent's attacks amidst the intense pain.
Now, the children of the same age in the village, even those beastman children known for their strength, were no match for him even if they banded together.
But he wasn't a masochist.
If one could eat a meal peacefully, who would want to get beaten up for no reason?
Sometimes, especially in the dead of night when his whole body ached too much to sleep, a flame of resentment would burn in his chest.
He would clench his fists and vow to himself: Just you wait, Alphea. When I grow up, when I become an Adventurer, one day, I will defeat you and pin you down.
His greatest wish was to one day stand before her as a strong person and defeat her fair and square.
He longed intensely to see an expression of bewilderment and shock on that eternally unchanging icy face.
She was his savior and the person who raised him.
This debt of gratitude was as heavy as a mountain, but this desire for challenge was like a prairie fire, burning more and more fiercely.
However, reality was a bucket of cold water.
"It's this damn system again..."
Burning Feather sighed.
He seemed to be bound by some kind of rule, unable to receive any god's 'favor.'
'favor' was a specialty of this world and one of the few ways for mortals to become stronger.
By using their own divine blood as a medium, the gods of the lower world would engrave sacred characters on a mortal's back, thereby stimulating the dormant potential within the mortal's body.
Only those who received favor could become Adventurers, accumulating 'experience points' through life-and-death battles with monsters to continuously level up and climb toward peaks unimaginable to commoners.
Having survived eight years of Alphea's hellish 'training,' Burning Feather's physical fitness had long surpassed the scope of his peers.
This talent was enough to make any god eager to expand their Familia's eyes light up.
In the past few years, quite a few gods traveling through had indeed taken an interest in him.
They were full of praise for him, considering him a natural-born Adventurer.
But without exception, when their fingertips brushed across his back, attempting to engrave the favor, the divine blood was like water droplets on a lotus leaf, unable to penetrate no matter what.
His body seemed to have an invisible membrane, rejecting the most fundamental laws of this world.
After repeated failures, those gods could only give up with regret.
Burning Feather gradually became known as the 'freak who cannot receive favor' in the surrounding area, and no more gods came to bother him.
He guessed that this was mostly the work of his half-dead 'entangled fate' system.
Perhaps, only when it activated again would he have the chance to set foot on that dream-filled path...