The heavy oak doors of Director Gregory Vane's private office clicked shut behind me, plunging the narrow stone corridor into a quiet, cool stillness. I stood there for a brief moment, my fingers gently brushing against the smooth, silver-plated surface of the academy ledger token resting inside my cloak. The metal carried a distinct, heavy weight—the physical proof of a completely disrupted timeline.
As I turned and began walking down the stone corridor toward the central recruitment hall, a cold sense of satisfaction settled deep beneath my ribs. I quietly reflected on how entirely my fate had just shifted within the span of thirty minutes. In my past life, the noble families had successfully hijacked my readout, kept me completely blind to high-tier common knowledge, and dropped me straight into a brainwashed military training camp to bleed on the frontlines as an uneducated vanguard tank. But in this timeline, their trap had been entirely demolished before the game even started. I had not only saved myself from the trenches, but I had secured a path for Lysander as well. Together, two commoners from the outer rim were marching straight into their sovereign territory.
But as my boots clicked steadily against the stone floor, a sudden, deep ache resonated from the very centre of my chest. It wasn't an injury; it was the initial activation sequence of a newly unsealed mana core.
Every single fresh Awakener across Aethelon underwent a mandatory five-day physiological transformation phase following their ceremony. The global system grid initialized a baseline status screen instantly, but the human body was a fragile biological vessel; it required exactly five days for the physical anatomy to adapt to the unsealed current. For an ordinary F-Rank or D-Rank commoner, this transition was almost unnoticeable—perhaps a mild fever or a slight tightening in the muscles as their cells adjusted to hosting a trickle of raw atmospheric power.
But the planetary engine operated on a strict rule of proportion: the higher the initialized rank of the awakening, the more extensive and demanding the structural changes to the physical frame would be.
The system grid didn't execute these changes through cartoonish, superficial mutations like dramatically altering a hunter's hair colour or shifting their eyes into glowing fantasy shades. The transformation was entirely internal, brutal, and scientifically optimized. To support a high-tier core, the body's internal architecture had to be systematically re-engineered from the inside out. Over the course of the next five days, my internal mana veins would physically grow, expand, and thicken, carving deeper channels through my flesh and wrapping tightly around my skeletal structure to meet the massive conduit requirements of my new attributes.
A flat twenty-five across my physical metrics, and a wisdom stat of thirty, I calculated silently, my jaw clenching as a sharp, burning heat began to slowly ripple outward from my sternum. My unawakened seventeen-year-old body has the physical capacity of a civilian, but my soul is currently hosting an unprecedented EX-Rank Cosmic core. The internal friction over the next five days is going to be an absolute forge.
I could already feel the dense, raw current of cosmic force beginning to scrape against the walls of my natural circulatory pathways. My veins were expanding micro-meter by micro-meter, forcing themselves to widen to accommodate a tide of mana that felt as heavy as molten lead. It was a silent, agonizing process that would occur continuously while I slept, walked, and travelled toward the central sector, systematically rebuilding my tendons and bone density until my body was perfectly optimized to handle the explosive speed of a magic swordsman.
By the time I reached the heavy iron archway leading into the main cathedral recruitment hall, I had completely forced the internal burning beneath a calm, expressionless mask.
The recruitment hall was a chaotic swarm of noise. Hundreds of newly registered Awakeners were being sorted into different transit zones, their voices a mix of celebratory shouting and anxious murmuring. Standing near the western pillars, looking entirely out of place among the crowd, was Lysander. His massive frame was tense, his knuckles white as he anxiously kept his hand shoved into his pocket, gripping his token while his eyes frantically scanned the exit tunnels.
The second his gaze landed on me walking out of the director's corridor, a massive wave of visible relief washed over his face, and he marched forward to meet me.
"Astraeus!" Lysander breathed, his voice low as he stepped into my path, checking my posture with protective, childhood-friend scrutiny. "The guards wouldn't let me down that hall. I thought for sure the administrative clerks found a problem with your file. Are you alright? What did the director want?"
I looked at his open, unscarred face, keeping the burning heat in my chest completely hidden as I held up the silver-plated academy token.
"We aren't going to the frontline military barracks, Lysander," I said softly, letting a rare, genuine calm touch my voice. "Director Vane cleared the monolith's system error. We've been officially assigned to the Elite Imperial Academy in the capital sector. Our carriage leaves at dusk."
Lysander froze, his eyes widening to the size of saucers as he stared down at the razor-sharp silver runes etched into the token. "The Elite Academy? The one the high-tier noble heirs go to? Astraeus... how is that even possible for commoners like us?"
"We met the minimum threshold," I replied smoothly, turning my head toward the high arched exit gates of the plaza as the first orange hues of dusk began to bleed across the sky. "Let's go collect our gear. The real grind starts tonight."