"F**k these dreams..." Yohan breathed in dessicated whisper.
After a fleeting moment of empty thoughts, He scrubbed his eyes with his palm carelessly and rose from the bed on which he was lying — immaculate and tidy unlike the previous morning.
He casted a brief glance around his somber room—a storeroom of the house, where he carved out a seperate clean space for himself amid the room's dimly lingering shabbiness. Then he stepped outside.
To the left of the doorway, a flight of stairs descended to the ground floor, opening into the vestibule below. Three steps ahead, to the right, stood a small lavatory. Beyond all that, the place had no ceiling at all. It was an open rooftop, crudely claimed for a storeroom and a lavatory, leaving the sky fully exposed above him. Dawn was still a little while away.
He hushed in the lavatory and rinsed his face in the basin then faced the mirror for a while in front with darkened eyes and flat smile.
Seconds later, a muffled chuckle slipped with a crooked smile. Simultaneously, lowering his head to the basin, palms gripping the porcelain, his faint laughter started sounding something ugly, hysterical and wrong. He gradually landed to his knees, hands still cradling the basin and touched the floor. Now his concocted laughing sound became a little steady and lucid.
He was repressingly bawling with tears streaming down as emotions cannibalized each other, leaving him stripped of meaning, stripped of resistance, feeling guilty, feeling resentful, feeling pity, feeling regretful, feeling hopeless and feeling... a little alone.
After a few minutes, he rose, splashed water onto his face, and pressed his palms against his eyes, trying to cool the static buzzing inside his skull. Then he returned to the room, he unlocked his phone and checked the time and date.
[5:44; 17 June, 1316]
He snatched a sweatshirt the color of dust and fog from the corner by the door and pulled it over his dark, wide-cut trousers. He shuffled toward the main door, slipping into his only pair of gray shoes—separate from the school ones. Behind him, his mother appeared, her voice trailing his back as if she had just risen from sleep.
"Where are you going... without informing?"
"Nowhere..." he sighed. "Just for a walk, I'll be back in an hour."
"Why today?" she asked, confused. "I mean you never go out like this."
Yohan squeezed his eyes, rubbed his face once, then glanced at her over his shoulder.
" 'cause I happened to be awake early and... Is it a crime to build a decent habit? And no—I'm not going anywhere. I just need air."
"But you could go tomorrow. Why today?"
"Mom…"
He turned fully this time, opened his mouth, hesitated—then softened his voice.
"Please. I'm your son. I know what I'm doing."
The sentence landed heavier than it sounded.
She said nothing more, only reminded him not to be late for school.
Yohan stepped onto a wide street already stirring with life—joggers moving in clusters, some tugged along by pets, some solitary like him. The street itself was wide and quiet, stretching forward without urgency, washed in a soft amber glow. Wooden benches sit untouched, still holding the night's coolness. Above, dense trees knot together, their leaves filtering the early sun into thin gold threads that spill onto the road.
'From today let's begin our new journey from the nearest end.' Yohan mumbled in his head peering at the rising sun. 'Aren't you excited, X?'
His mind drifted back to the previous evening—his mother calling him downstairs just as he'd wandered onto a site he never meant to open. When he read the curriculum and the revised examination rules, he was baffled for a minute. The changes this year were anything but subtle, and the most drastic of them all was clear—no personal weaponry or artifacts were permitted in this session of the exam.
The precise pattern of the exam remained unrevealed, as it changed every year, leaving no reliable way to predict what—if anything—might repeat.
In the initial phase, participants would compete at the school level, and from each school only the top three performers would qualify to advance. The final phase was scheduled after the students' annual examinations, while the first phase was set for October—leaving Yohan with barely three months to prepare.
However, sheer willpower and relentless hard work wouldn't be enough to clear this examination. Effort without direction was nothing but wasted motion.
There were other forces at play—first, luck, which governed nearly half of a person's fate. And second, time. Three months were nowhere near sufficient for Yohan to awaken his Dormant Core, a feat that bordered on the impossible even under ideal circumstances.
Even if he somehow scraped through the initial phase, the later stages would crush him without mercy. He knew that. He accepted it. And still—he didn't care.
This time, he was ready to tear himself apart if that's what it took. He already felt half-dead inside; the difference was intention. If the end was inevitable, then he'd rather meet it sprinting toward the edge than rotting in place. Push until something breaks—his limits, his fate, or himself.
So far that it would offer him one of two endings: the death he had already accepted, or a hope so distant it had almost been erased.
Either outcome felt like victory. At least, that's what he had planned.
Yohan had grown up steeped in borrowed wisdom—hard work eclipses talent, until raw, god-gifted talent crushes effort without breaking a sweat; and then there are the rare beasts who wield both, outpacing everyone who clings to only one crutch. This examination, he knew, would swarm with such hybrids, those who fused gift and grind into something lethal. About his own talent, though, Yohan felt only doubt.
There was, however, one thing he claimed without hesitation: obsession. Not discipline. Not motivation. Obsession—the kind that corrodes comfort, that sharpens focus until the world narrows to a single, merciless objective. He believed this hunger could outstrip even the neat equation of talent plus hard work. If he ground whatever faint aptitude he possessed against that obsessive will, polishing it to the edge, it would grant him something rarer than brilliance—clarity. And in a world crowded with extraordinary talents, clarity was the only weapon that truly survived.
The prohibition on personal accessories in any combat-pertaining phase only sharpened Yohan's resolve. Any required equipment would be issued by the proctors themselves, stripping away wealth, preparation tricks, and unfair advantages. He no longer had to bleed money on weapons before even securing a place in the academy.
For the first time, he wondered if the government—careless as it often seemed—had finally chosen to curb corruption and gamble on something rarer: unfiltered talent.
In the past, seats often slipped into the hands of those who knew how to grease the right palms, bought not by merit but by money. That uneasy, almost ecstatic curiosity pushed Yohan to dig deeper—and that was when he learned the reason.The Iystoria Association of Martial Military, the shadowed authority that governed covert laws, classified agendas, assassins, spies, and the ruthless filtration of national talent through specialized examinations and a lot more, had appointed a new chairman. And this time, the changes weren't cosmetic. They were seismic.
The association operated as an autonomous power, detached from conventional governance, entrusted to function and decide independently—much like the judiciary of the nation, answerable to none but its own doctrine. Yet, in quiet irony, its members were still appointed by the highest echelons of the central government.
In Yohan's eyes, the new chairman resembled a fallen angel—wings scorched, yet hands still extended, as if offering him a chance to rise from the wreckage. Until—he read further and his fragile admiration for that man thinned. What dragged his gaze down was the entrance fee—tripled compared to previous years—payable after clearing the first phase. Hope, it seemed, still demanded a price.
'What did they even mean by that rule... Or am I just overthinking?' Yohan couldn't stop pondering about another certain rule — The Association will take no accountability for any loss incurred during the examination — he couldn't tell if it hinted at hidden dangers or simply stripped the illusion of safety bare.
By now, Yohan had a rough map of the examination—and of the wall standing in front of him.
Rebuilding his rusted body was feasible. Refining his skills was within reach. But everything hinged on one thing: awakening his dormant core. Without it, Qi was nothing more than a rumor inside his flesh.
In this world, every being was born with a Qi core—an innate yet intangible source of power, yet faintly perceptible from within. In humans, it was said to rest just above the solar plexus. It existed from birth, but laid Dormant. An average person's core matured around the age of eleven or twelve, entering what was known as the Dormant Core, or Order Six Core.
This stage subtly elevated the senses beyond the ordinary—an expanded sixth sense that could feel the presence and vitality of other living beings. It allowed minor self-healing, subtle recovery from internal damage, the kind of power people dismissed as intuition or coincidence. Without training, these abilities were little more than latent potential.
Those who chose to harness this power were called Seekers.They were named not for what they possessed, but for what they pursued — the essence of their own core, attempting to awaken it.
Although most humans matured a Dormant Core, only a fraction chose to cultivate it. There were several simple reasons in Yohan's perception. The Dormant Core offered no obvious combat strength for offence or defence. And in an age of advanced medical technology, internal Qi assistance had become largely obsolete and unnecessary.
To break past Order Six, Seekers had to cultivate relentlessly for one or two years. Only then could they step into Order Five: the Awakened Core. The process was dangerous without guidance. A single mistake could shatter the core permanently.
Wealthy families avoided this risk by hiring elite mentors, accelerating the process safely. For legacies born into Awakened bloodlines, Order Five was merely a challenge.
Order Four marked a transition, granting the Seeker a Fractured Core.
Beyond that, Order three marked a turning point.
At this stage, the core deviated, revealing its hidden nature and branching into one of three paths:
•Pure
•Corrupted
•Hollow
As Seekers climbed higher, these paths evolved.
At Order Two:
•Sacred
•Cursed
•Void
And finally, at Order One—the summit of humanity—they crystallized into:
•Divine
•Fallen
•Null
That was everything Yohan had managed to gather last night — layered with fragments of knowledge he already possessed. Just understanding the foundational system felt exhausting. So he did the only sensible thing. He slept.
"Cough…cough…haa…" He hacked into the choking morning air, gagging slightly. "Damn…this city's air…Helid, huh? A fitting name…closer to hell than the capital of Iystoria." He staggered forward, the acrid air clawing at his throat, nausea twisting his stomach.
The streets stretched ahead in gray, lined with idle cars haphazardly parked along the sides, a crossroad barely a hundred meters away shimmering through the haze. With a ragged inhale he sprinted planning a pivot at the crossroad and sprint back home.
He had barely covered a dozen meters when he passed a parked car. What lay beyond it was hidden by metal and chance—a cluster of stray dogs, invisible until it was too late. The moment they saw him sprint, something primal stirred in them. Instinct older than hunger snapped awake, and they lunged and flashed their teeth.
Yohan moved on reflex alone. His body cut sideways, throwing itself into the middle of the road, escaping their snapping jaws by a hair's breadth.
He hadn't even found his balance when catastrophe arrived.
A bus bore down on him at speed, too sudden to process, too close to avoid. Thought collapsed. His legs petrified mid-step. His mind short-circuited, screaming both fight and flight at once—and failing at both. One word flared before his eyes.
Death.