The world dissolved in silent, holy fire. There was no pain at the last, only a profound, weightless surrender as the light erupted from my own frail husk, scouring away the dread and the decay. The final sensation was not the Void Captain's claw, but a voice—a presence—threading a single, immaculate concept into the crumbling mosaic of my soul: Choice.
Then, sound rushed in. Not the shriek of tearing realities or the wet crunch of chitin on bone, but a cacophony of youthful anxiety—shuffling feet, nervous whispers, the crisp rustle of academical robes. The air was thick with the scent of lemon-oiled wood, nervous sweat, and the sharp, clean tang of ozone from recently discharged magic.
I blinked.
The vaulted ceiling of the Astral Peak Academy's Awakening Chamber swam into focus, its arched beams painted with faded celestial murals. I knew every crack, every flaking star. A lifetime of memory—two lifetimes, now—collided. My heart, a young, frantic drum against ribs that felt impossibly light and whole, threatened to break through.
Impossible.
"Next applicant! Kaelen Veridian. Step forward."
Proctor Valus's voice was a dry whip-crack of impatience, precisely as I remembered. A figure of stern, disinterested authority in his grey master's robes. Time had not yet eroded him in this… when? This now.
Mechanically, I stepped out of the line of waiting youths. A sea of faces turned towards me. Elven novices from the Sylvan Glades, their elegant features a mask of serene superiority, pointed ears adorned with subtle silver. Draf clan-scions, stocky and solid, runic tattoos swirling like molten bronze over their forearms. A pair of Angelic exchange students from the Spire, their presence casting a gentle, calming aura, and their apparent opposites—Demon-blooded scholars from the Emberhold, whose eyes held a banked, fiery intensity. And the humans, my own kind, a spectrum of hope and dread. Their eyes on me held a familiar, pitying curiosity. The orphan from the charity ward. The statistical anomaly waiting to happen.
My boots, thin-soled and worn, echoed on the polished basalt floor as I approached the dais. At its center sat the Awakening Crystal—a six-foot-tall, flawless prism of claritian gemstone. It hummed with a low, foundational power, the heartbeat of our world's magical order.
"Place your hands on the designated foci and empty your mind," Valus intoned, the ritual words devoid of any ritual feeling.
My hands rose. They were smooth, unlined, devoid of the calluses and tremors of age. A teenager's hands. They settled on the cold, impossibly smooth surface. The crystal's hum intensified, vibrating up my arms, into my teeth. A familiar, dreadful warmth began to glow within the stone, seeping into my palms.
This is the moment, a part of me, the old, broken man, whispered. This is where the story of Kaelen the Blank begins.
The crystal's inner light swelled, but it was a sickly, pallid yellow, flickering uncertainly like a dying candle. No brilliant auroras of potential, no rushing symphony of elemental affinity. Just a weak, stubborn guttering. The prism's facets remained dark, revealing nothing.
The glow died.
Proctor Valus peered at the base of the crystal, where luminescent script etched itself into the air. His lips thinned. He cleared his throat, the sound magnified in the disappointed silence.
"Awakening Result: Kaelen Veridian. Race: Human. Mana Core Rank: F." A pause. A slight, almost imperceptible shake of his head. "Skill Manifestation: None detected. Classification: Non-Standard Blank."
The silence shattered.
A titter ran through the Elven contingent. A Draf youth snorted, a sound like grinding gravel. The humans looked away, some in embarrassment, others in a kind of relieved schadenfreude that they were not the lowest today. Whispers, sharp and clear, reached my ears.
"A true Blank… I thought it was a myth."
"The orphanage must have stunted him. No lineage, no luck."
"Even an F-rank [Kindle] or [Minor Mend] would be something. Nothing? He's a civilian. A liability."
"Waste of a academy slot."
The words. I knew them. They had carved canyons of shame in my soul, shaped a lifetime of retreat. But now, they washed over the strange, new fortress of my mind—a mind that remembered the taste of poisoned air and the sight of a broken sky. Their barbs found no purchase. My focus was turned violently inward, frantically searching the landscape of my own spirit.
Where is it?
In my first life, beneath the crushing weight of the 'Blank' verdict, I had felt it. A second, deeper, terrifying pulse. A hidden line of text, unseen by all, burning behind my eyes: [SSS-Rank Skill: Adaptive Mimicry - Locked.] The secret that had fueled five decades of paralyzing fear and bitter regret.
Now, there was only emptiness. A flat, featureless plain where that ominous, glorious door had once stood. A cold terror, sharper than any mockery, gripped me. I had been given a second chance, flung back to the origin point of my helplessness, but stripped of the one aberrant tool I'd never dared to properly use.
Was it all for nothing? A cosmic joke? To watch the apocalypse in slow motion, twice?
"Dismissed, Veridian," Valus said, not unkindly, just finally. He had already turned his attention to the next name on his list. I was part of the administrative past.
I walked back through the crowd, a ghost in a room of vibrant potential. The path to the charity dorms was a blur of familiar stone corridors and arched windows overlooking manicured grounds. The autumn sun was bright, mocking in its cheer. I moved automatically, the muscle memory of a defeated boy carrying a resurrected ghost.
My room was as I remembered: a narrow cell with a cot, a small desk, and a window looking out onto a service alley. The home of someone who belonged nowhere. I closed the door, the click of the latch abnormally loud in the silence, and leaned my forehead against the cool wood.
Despair, the old companion, began to uncoil in my gut. Deeper this time, poisoned by knowledge. I knew the exact date. I had thirty-five years, seven months, and fourteen days until the first recorded Void Incursion. Until the beginning of the end.
A hollow laugh escaped me. What use was foresight without power?
Then, light.
Not in the room, but in the space behind my eyes. A cool, cerulean radiance, geometric and precise, painting itself onto my vision.
[System Initialization Protocol triggered.]
Text, crisp and alien, scrolled in a silent, seamless cascade.
[Scanning vessel integrity…]
[Temporal anomaly confirmed. Soul signature: Kaelen Prime/Resonance.]
[Legacy artifact signature detected: Deus Ex Machina. Bonding…]
The scrolling halted. A single, minimalist interface hung in my perception, translucent and humming with silent potential.
[Loading complete. Welcome, User: Kaelen Veridian. I am the Adjutant Intelligence of the Deus Ex Machina system. Designation: Machina.]
The voice was not a sound. It was a direct impression of thought, genderless, calm, and possessed of an absolute, sterile clarity. It resonated in the vault of my skull.
I did not speak aloud. My question formed in the forefront of my mind, a silent shout. What are you?
[I am the final legacy of the entity you understood as the Creator God. I was the custodial intelligence embedded within the Primary Seal—the stabilization matrix on the Void prison-world. Your terminal cognitive event in Timeline Alpha involved an uncontrolled psionic surge directed at my housing unit.]
The box. On the Void Captain's neck. My last, desperate, stupid gamble.
*[The surge was misidentified by your latent ability as a 'skill.' It was not. It was a fragmented, high-fidelity data transfer. You copied a segment of my core code and a residual spark of the Creator's dormant Authority. This transfer precipitated a temporal recalibration—a reversion to your point of greatest systemic vulnerability for stabilization purposes. I have now completed integration with your biological and spiritual substrate.]
The light. The voice. Choice. It hadn't been an end. It had been a… download. A promotion from damned to designated.
"The God… chose me?" The whisper was raw in the quiet room.
['Choice' implies volition. The Creator's volition ceased upon its decommissioning. I operated on conditional protocols. Your action in the terminus moment—a will to act against existential negation, despite statistically insignificant probability of success—matched the prime criterion for Successor Vessel candidacy. You were not chosen. You qualified.]
The clinical explanation was more staggering than any divine revelation. I had passed a test I didn't know I was taking.
"Successor. To God." The words were dust in my mouth.
*[Affirmative. Primary Directive: Elevate User Kaelen to a state of functional deification to address the Void Incursion crisis and other extant existential threats. This is my purpose.]
Another laugh, brittle and sharp, escaped me. I gestured to my body, to the memory of the jeers still ringing in the silent air. "Look at this! F-rank! A Blank! No resources, no allies, no skill! How? The world ends in thirty-five years! How do you build a god from this?"
[Analysis complete. Your previous timeline's 'Skill' was a psionic manifestation of the unintegrated God-Seed, poorly interpreted by your immature mana circuitry. It was a danger to you. I have formatted the data stream into a stable, scalable function compatible with your current biological limits.]
A new panel materialized in my visual field, overlaying the sterile room.
USER STATUS: Kaelen Veridian
PHYSICAL CONDITION: Optimal (Baseline Human Adolescent)
MANA CORE RANK: F
CLASS: [None]
TITLE: [Blank]
PRIMARY SKILL: [Adaptive Mimicry - Permanent] (System-Assigned Rank: F)
DESCRIPTION: Permanently archive one core skill, trait, or attribute from a consenting, subdued, or profoundly analyzed target. Success rate, fidelity, and integration depth are functions of user's comprehension, physiological resilience, and spiritual resonance. No theoretical acquisition limit. Cooldown period: None. Manifested Rank will scale with user's holistic refinement.
ARCHIVES: [0]
I stared. It was the same power, yet fundamentally different. Stripped of its terrifying, locked SSS-rank mystique, it was laid bare as a mechanism. A tool. Permanent. No limit.
"Why F-rank?" I asked, my mind clinging to the practical, the measurable, to avoid drowning in the scale of it all.
[The 'Rank' is this reality's quantifier for mana-channeling capacity and output. Your present somatic shell possesses the throughput of a faint candle. Attempting to process a 'higher-ranked' skill manifestation would result in catastrophic system failure—your body would dissolve. The function's true operational tier is irrelevant to local taxonomy. It is a foundational law you now administer. As your vessel is fortified, the efficiency of the function and the 'Rank' the world perceives will increase accordingly.]
A foundational law. Not a spell, but a principle. The difference between lighting a fire and commanding the concept of combustion.
"How?" The question was a blade, pointed and simple. "How do I fortify the vessel? The Calamities are coming. I have nothing."
[Two convergent pathways. First: A regimen of systemic conditioning I will design, utilizing unexploited environmental resources and cognitive drills to bypass conventional Rank progression. Second: The strategic application of your Primary Function. To neutralize supreme threats, you must first accumulate foundational advantages. To accumulate advantages, you must first survive the gathering phase. We begin tonight.]
A three-dimensional cartographic overlay snapped into place on my right. A section of the Academy's sprawling, off-limits Verdant Boscage was highlighted. A coordinates marker pulsed softly. Data text scrolled beside it.
TARGET: Stonehide Mossback (Juvenile)
THREAT ASSESSMENT: E-Rank (Minimal)
PRIMARY ATTRIBUTE: High physical durability. Low mobility.
CORE TRAIT: [Minor Cellular Regeneration]
OBJECTIVE: Subdue. Analyze. Archive [Minor Cellular Regeneration]. Rationale: A sustainable auto-repair function is the cornerstone of survivability and extended operational endurance. It will facilitate more aggressive conditioning.
My breath caught. It was real. It was specific. It was a first, tangible step on a path that had, moments ago, been a wall of impossible despair.
"You want me to fight a Mossback? With no class? No combat skills?" The old fear, the instinct to hide, reared its head.
[You have a Class. It is [None]. This is an advantage. It means you are undefined. You will not be bound by conventional archetypal limitations. You will define your own. The Mossback is slow. Its shell is brittle at the apical ridge. You will find a way. Or you will die. The probability of the latter, given your current knowledge and my guidance, is 11.3%. Acceptable for a first operational test.]
Eleven percent chance of death. Acceptable. The cold, logical assessment was more bracing than any pep talk. It stripped away illusion. This was not a hero's journey. It was a laboratory experiment in apotheosis, and I was both the subject and the scientist.
I looked down at my hands—young, smooth, weak. Then I looked inward, at the sterile blue interface, at the map, at the objective. The hollow in my chest filled not with blazing courage, but with a dense, cold purpose. The laughter of the Awakening Chamber was irrelevant. The pity of my peers was background noise. They were dreaming of S-ranks and council seats.
I was being offered a syllabus for stealing the attributes of gods.
I pushed myself away from the door. My reflection in the small, dark window showed a pale youth with shadowed eyes. But in those eyes, for the first time in either of my lives, I saw a glimmer that was not fear.
"Alright, Machina," I said, my voice steady in the quiet room. "Show me the way."
In a non-space beyond perception, the Adjutant Intelligence observed its candidate. [Directive: Godhood Ascension Protocol—Engaged. Subject: Kaelen. Physiological Rating: Deficient. Psychological Resilience: Elevated. Temporal-Apocalyptic Knowledge: Confirmed. Willpower Coefficient: Exceeding baseline parameters. Recalculating probability matrices…]
A flicker, something almost like interest, crossed its boundless processing streams.
[Initial assessment: Anomalous. Proceeding with Phase One: Primordial Foundations.]
The path of the Reforged God did not begin with a thunderclap or a celestial announcement. It began with the silent, deliberate step of an F-rank Blank slipping out into the gathering twilight, walking towards a dark forest and a slow, regenerating snail. The first lesson was survival. The first principle was theft.