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The wasteland stretched before Lein Thorn like the corpse of civilization itself—a graveyard of human excess where mountains of refuse rotted beneath a sky choked with ash and chemical haze. The stench was a living thing here, a miasma of decomposing organic matter, industrial runoff, and the particular sweetness of decay that clung to the back of the throat like a film. Most who came to this place wore masks, rags wrapped around their faces to filter the poison air. Lein wore nothing. After five months in the slums, his lungs had learned to process what would make others retch and collapse. Adaptation was the first lesson of survival. The body learned, or the body died.
Beside him, a mangy dog—all ribs and matted fur—sniffed at a pile of corroded metal, its tail wagging with the simple joy of having found something interesting in this ocean of garbage. Lein had found the animal three months ago, half-dead from starvation, and had shared what little food he could scavenge. The creature had attached itself to him with the desperate loyalty of something that understood kindness was rarer than clean water in this new world. He'd never named it. Names implied permanence, and in the slums, permanence was a luxury afforded only to the powerful.
In Lein's hand, cold against his calloused palm, rested a mana stone.
It was the size of a child's fist, crystalline and pulsing with an inner light the color of deep ocean water. Beautiful. Deadly. The surface felt like ice even in the humid warmth of the wasteland, and he could feel something emanating from it—a pressure, a radiation that made his skin prickle and his teeth ache. For normal humans, mana stones were poison. Pure, concentrated evolutionary energy that would tear through unenhanced cellular structure like acid through paper. Absorbing one meant agony, mutation, and death—in that order. The Evolved used them as fuel, crushing them to powder and consuming them to replenish their reserves or accelerate their advancement. For the powerless, they were beautiful executioners.
The System had told him to find this stone. Had guided him here, to this specific coordinate in the wasteland, had shown him where to dig through the wreckage until his fingers bled and his back screamed. *Beneath the collapsed transport frame,* the mechanical voice had instructed in his mind. *Three meters down, wrapped in industrial polymer. A miner's oversight. The trash collectors never knew what they were burying.*
Lein had questioned nothing. The System had awakened in him just yesterday—a golden finger from beyond this world, a cheat ability that defied the rules of this reality. After five months of powerlessness, of being prey, he would not waste time with doubt. The System had given him a path. He would walk it, even if it led through hell.
*"Break it,"* the System had said. *"Absorb the energy. Your physiology is different from the natives of this world. The mana will not reject you. It will elevate you."*
Lein looked at the stone, then at his dog. The animal had stopped sniffing and was watching him with dark, intelligent eyes. As if it knew something momentous was about to occur.
"If this kills me," Lein said softly, his voice calm as still water, "eat well. Find someone else to follow."
The dog tilted its head.
Lein smiled—a cold expression that never reached his eyes—and squeezed.
The mana stone shattered.
Not cracked. Not fractured. It *exploded* in his grip, crystalline fragments dissolving into pure light that poured into his skin like liquid fire. The sensation was immediate and overwhelming—every nerve in his body ignited at once, a supernova of pain that would have dropped a lesser man to his knees screaming. Lein's jaw clenched hard enough to crack teeth. His vision whited out. His muscles locked, tendons standing out like steel cables beneath his skin as the energy flooded through his circulatory system, his nervous system, his very cellular structure.
This was evolution. This was ascension. This was the universe rewriting his genetic code in real-time, tearing down what he had been and building something *more* from the ruins.
He felt his bones densifying, marrow transforming into something that could channel supernatural forces. His muscles restructured themselves, fibers multiplying and weaving into patterns that defied natural biology. His senses sharpened until he could hear the individual heartbeats of insects in the garbage around him, could smell the chemical composition of the air, could feel the electromagnetic fields generated by the distant power grid that fed the upper city. His brain sparked with new neural pathways, synapses firing at speeds that would have caused hemorrhaging in a normal human.
The pain lasted an eternity. The pain lasted three seconds.
When Lein opened his eyes, the world had changed. Colors were more vivid, sounds more distinct, the very texture of reality seeming sharper, more *real* than it had been moments before. He looked at his hands—still scarred, still calloused, but now thrumming with energy that hadn't existed before. He could feel it moving through him like a second bloodstream, a reservoir of power that responded to his will.
Tier 1. Beginner Evolved. The same level as academy students in their first year of training in the cities above. The same level as the guards who lorded over the slums with casual brutality.
The same level as his first targets.
Lein flexed his fingers and the air around them shimmered. He turned to a pile of concrete rubble—massive chunks that had once been part of a building's foundation—and struck out with his fist. Not a wild swing. A measured, controlled punch that connected with precision.
The concrete *exploded*.
Fragments sprayed outward like shrapnel as the section he'd struck disintegrated into powder and gravel. The sound echoed across the wasteland like a gunshot. Lein stared at his unmarked knuckles, then at the destruction he'd caused with a casual blow. In his old life, that punch would have broken every bone in his hand. Now, he could demolish walls. Could shatter steel. Could kill.
The dog barked—sharp and excited—dancing around him with renewed energy, as if it could sense the change in him, could smell the power that now radiated from his body.
Lein crouched and scratched behind the animal's ears. "Let's go find you food," he said, his voice carrying a new edge, a quiet confidence that came from crossing the threshold from prey to predator. "We have work to do."
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They found food an hour later in one of the semi-collapsed storage facilities that dotted the wasteland's perimeter. These places were technically off-limits to slum dwellers—property of the waste management corporations that served the upper city—but enforcement was sporadic at best. The guards didn't care if the poor stole from garbage, as long as they didn't interfere with the actual operations. Lein had learned the patrol patterns months ago. Tuesday afternoons, the western sector was clear for ninety minutes. Enough time to scavenge.
He jimmied open a corroded storage locker and found sealed ration packs—expired by three years but still edible if you weren't particular about taste or texture. He tore one open and split the contents with the dog, watching as the animal devoured the processed protein with savage enthusiasm. Lein ate mechanically, his mind already moving past the present moment to the future, to the plan that would determine whether he survived the next week or died in an anonymous ditch.
The System had given him power. Tier 1 evolution. But the System's true gift—the Soul Reaver ability—remained dormant, useless, until he claimed his first soul. And souls could only be harvested from the Evolved. Killing a normal human would yield nothing. The System required supernatural prey.
Which meant he needed to kill a guard.
The guards who monitored the mining operations in the eastern slums were all Tier 1 Evolved, bottom-tier perhaps in the greater hierarchy of power, but gods among the powerless workers who broke their backs extracting raw materials for the upper city's endless consumption. Most of the day-to-day supervision was handled by collaborators—normal humans who had sold out their own kind for scraps of favor, who used their positions to bully and terrorize their fellow powerless with the implicit backing of the Evolved. But the guards themselves were always present, stationed at checkpoints, patrolling the perimeters, ready to crush any hint of rebellion or theft with overwhelming force.
They were untouchable. Until now.
Lein finished his meal and pulled out a scrap of paper he'd been carrying—a crude map of the eastern mining sector, annotated with times, patrol routes, and guard positions. He'd spent weeks observing, memorizing, preparing for an opportunity he hadn't yet possessed the means to exploit. Now, with Tier 1 power flowing through his veins, the opportunity had arrived.
The map showed six primary checkpoints around Mine Seven, one of the deeper excavation sites where workers dug for rare earth minerals under brutal conditions. Three guards rotated through eight-hour shifts, never less than two on duty at any given time. They were bored, complacent, secure in their superiority over the cattle they supervised. Most were young, fresh from the academies, assigned to slum duty as a rite of passage before moving on to more prestigious positions. They saw the work as beneath them. They didn't expect threats.
That complacency would kill one of them.
Lein's finger traced a route on the map—from Checkpoint Three to the waste processing facility, a hundred-meter stretch of access tunnel that connected the mining operation to the city's disposal system. Guards walked this route solo twice per shift, conducting perfunctory inspections that had become rote routine. The tunnel was narrow, enclosed, isolated from direct surveillance. The worker collaborators never accompanied the guards on these walks; they considered it the Evolved's job, beneath their own stolen authority.
Perfect.
"The target is Guard Unit Seven-Three," Lein said aloud, speaking to himself, to the dog, to the universe. His voice was clinical, detached, as if discussing a mathematical problem rather than premeditated murder. "Chen Wei. Male. Age twenty-two. Tier 1 Evolved, earth manipulation specialty. He walks the waste tunnel inspection at 1400 hours every day. Alone. He's done it for four months without incident. He thinks himself safe because he has power and we have none."
Lein paused, his dark eyes fixed on the map with laser focus. The plan unfolded in his mind like clockwork, each component clicking into place with mechanical precision. Intelligence was the true weapon. Power without strategy was just noise.
"The tunnel has three ventilation shafts," he continued, his finger tapping each marked position. "Maintenance access points that workers use when the air circulation fails. They're too small for a full-grown man to enter from above, but large enough to drop objects through. At the second shaft—thirty meters into the inspection route—there's a structural weakness. Corroded support beam, documented in maintenance logs but never repaired because it's not critical. Not yet."
The dog watched him with those intelligent eyes, head cocked as if actually listening.
"I'll be waiting in the ventilation crawlspace above the second shaft. Chen Wei walks beneath at exactly 1400 hours. His attention will be on his datapad—he always checks messages during the inspection, thinks no one notices. I drop an industrial weight through the shaft. Forty kilograms of scrap metal I've been assembling for three days. It strikes the corroded support beam, which gives way and collapses. Not enough to kill him—he's Evolved, his body can tank that kind of impact—but enough to stun, to create chaos and dust and confusion."
Lein's lips curved into something that might have been a smile in a world where smiles meant something other than the baring of teeth.
"He'll activate his earth manipulation reflexively, trying to stabilize the collapse. That will consume his attention, his energy. He won't be looking up. Won't sense the second attack. While he's focused on the ceiling, I drop through the shaft myself. Land behind him. Strike the base of his skull with a sharpened rebar spike—Tier 1 durability doesn't extend to specialized cranial trauma if you know the weak points. The System downloaded combat data while I was evolving. I know where to hit. I know how hard."
He folded the map carefully, precisely, each crease exact. "The entire engagement will last less than ten seconds. His body will be buried under the collapse, and the official report will call it a structural failure accident. Mining operation hazard. They'll write it off, assign a new guard, and continue operations. No one investigates when a Tier 1 dies in the slums. They're replaceable. We're all replaceable."
Lein stood, brushing dust from his ragged clothes. The dog stood with him, tail wagging slowly, sensing the change in his demeanor. The calm before the storm.
"Tomorrow at 1400 hours," Lein said softly, his voice carrying the absolute certainty of someone who had already watched the future play out in his mind, "I become a killer. I harvest my first soul. I take the first step on a path that will either lead me to the summit of this world's power structure or to an anonymous grave in this wasteland."
He looked down at the dog and scratched its ears one more time. "Either way, I'm done being prey."
The dog barked once, sharp and approving.
Lein Thorn smiled, and for the first time since waking in this nightmare world, the smile reached his eyes. But there was nothing warm in that expression. Nothing human.
Only hunger