He remembered moving through it in a daze, pain blurring the edges of everything, like someone had smeared his vision and thoughts at the same time.
People were screaming, kids were crying. High, cracking voices cut through the air—names shouted, choked sobs, the hiccuping cries of children who didn't understand what happened, only that everything felt wrong. A baby wailed somewhere near the food trucks, a sharp, rhythmic sound that kept resetting his nerves. A man cursed as he tried to lift a bent metal bar off someone. Gravel scraped under running shoes as people moved without any clear direction. The mix of noise, motion, and fear pressed in from every side and crawled under his skin.
The thought hit him how bad this all was for humanity, especially for kids and the old. The ones with the least to fight with always got hit hardest, and the System hadn't shown any sign it cared about that.
Life didn't get any fairer when the law of the jungle ruled.
Seventeen years old, ribs screaming, head light, he stood in the middle of it and tried to think past the pain. He needed a plan, even a rough one, something more than just standing there while the world fell apart.
In hindsight the meteor apocalypse sounded terrible—because it was—but looking back it would prepare humanity. The System hadn't dropped this on them for drama. It framed the whole thing as pressure, a way to force growth whether people wanted it or not.
The "meteors" weren't even real meteors—they would deliver Earth's apocalypse.
Elias shuddered at the memory. When he thought about that spinning wheel, he felt a strange, uncomfortable relief they hadn't landed on the ghost slot or the insect slot. Both of those promised a level of nightmare humanity wasn't ready for.
He wanted to go home.
Home sat thirty miles west, small town, small house, his family. In his head he could trace the route automatically, but reality sat between him and that line on the map. He stood here without a car. He would find out that anything electric was fried.
Modern cars wouldn't work unless they were aligned to Ki tech.
Cold guns still worked, and some basic tech like simple batteries and flashlights, but phones, internet, engines—most of the old world's convenience—was dead. The tools everyone relied on had vanished in a single breath.
Ki was now Earth's science.
His date had driven them, and her body still lay in the wreck behind him. He didn't yet know everything was fried and wouldn't start even if he reached her keys, but the idea of turning her over and searching her pockets brought a tight, sour twist to his stomach.
He wasn't cold enough to dig through her pockets for keys.
At least not yet.
Eventually he remembered the System had said he had a STATUS, and his thoughts shifted toward it.
CULTIVATION ASSIST STATUS
STATUS
Name: Elias Harper
Race: Human
Rank: Less than E-
CULTIVATION: check tab for more details
BOND: check tab for more details
ENLIGHTENMENT: check tab for more details
POWERS: check tab for more details
EQUIPMENT: check tab for more details
OATHS: check tab for more details
The panel hovered in his vision, sharp white letters framed by a thin border. Behind it, he could still see tilted booths, broken railings, and patches of trampled grass, all slightly washed out by the overlay.
Name and Race were straightforward; nothing there needed explanation.
Rank: Less than E-.
Rank was how the System measured your power. It didn't give the full story, but it worked as a loose guide to your base level—how strong you were in raw terms. The plus and minus signs shifted you up or down within a grade, yet Rank by itself only accounted for base power, nothing about precision, insight, or how you used it.
That was where Enlightenment came in.
Enlightenment was basically your understanding of the laws—the deeper rules under Ki and reality. With enough understanding, you counted as enlightened at your rank. You could be an enlightened E, or even a greatly enlightened E as an example. Almost nobody showed signs of Enlightenment at the very bottom; in rare cases people comprehended a sliver of it at G rank, while most only began to touch very minor Enlightenment around D rank.
If your Rank climbed too high while your understanding stayed shallow, you were said to be unenlightened—strong on paper, weak in terms of grasping how anything truly worked.
Rank grade itself came from three pillars working together: your bond, your powers, and your cultivation.
CULTIVATION was the part that measured how far you'd pushed yourself with Ki—how much energy you carried, how stable it was, how deep your foundation went. There was more than one way to cultivate. Some paths focused on the body, using martial methods or elemental body-refinement to harden muscles, bones, and skin under Ki pressure. Others focused inward, on inner Ki and meridians, building dense, controlled energy inside the body first and letting physical strength follow later. Some people tried to walk both paths—body and elemental together—but the resource cost to develop two full systems made it extremely impractical.
BOND sat at the center of humanity's system.
Humanity had no bloodlines and was considered unenlightened. Bonds filled that gap. All creatures in the System fell under three alignments: Nature, Order, and Chaos.
Nature covered the more "normal" offensive and defensive traits—claws, fangs, hides, poison, regeneration, elemental breath, and similar things.
Order creatures had less tendency toward destruction and their Enlightenments were usually seen as beneficial: healing, cleansing, purification, resistance, stabilization.
Chaos creatures leaned the other way, with more violent tendencies and Enlightenments that were outright debilitating and unnatural, like corruption, blight, rot, withering, and related effects.
Bonds allowed people to gain something close to a bloodline ability, or awaken a talent linked to whatever the creature held Enlightenment for. They also gave you a battle partner. In rare cases, when person and creature matched extremely well, the two could meld, fighting as a single unit for short bursts.
Humanity was the only race that could form bonds. Typically you started with one, and only later—after your Rank rose and your soul grew stronger—could you handle multiple bonds at once.
POWERS were, simply put, superpowers. You earned them from relics found in dungeons and similar places. Most people only ever had one power slot. Some rare individuals managed two. Three was incredibly rare.
Powers could grow if your Enlightenment lined up with them. If you gained Enlightenment in flame, for example, and your ability let you produce or manipulate fire, that ability could evolve along with your understanding.
OATHS were promises sworn to the System. People were careful with them, since every oath strained the soul. Permanent oaths were very, very rare. Most oaths people used were temporary—bound to a fixed amount of time and/or a specific task. When the set time passed, or the task was completed, the oath ended.
A person could carry a few oaths with no real problem, as long as they didn't break them. Breaking an oath was fatal. The System enforced the exact wording of the promise, nothing else. Whatever any spirit or other party thought the oath meant didn't matter. If both parties agreed to the words, that was what the System locked in. Each oath was restricted to twenty words or less, so loopholes existed.
For example: I swear not to kill your children.
If you later led those children into a cave and a bear killed them, you hadn't broken your oath. The System cared about the letter of the words, not the intention behind them.
EQUIPMENT was its own category, and the System treated it very literally.
A person had the following slots:
Main hand
Off hand
Head
Head auxiliary
Body
Legs
Feet
Auxiliary 1
——
Alternate: none
Everyone started with those slots. That was the fixed framework. The System got strange with equipment; it acted like an all-seeing eye about what you tried to do with it.
Auxiliary items sat in their own category. They were miscellaneous battle support tools—AI implants, potions, enchanted amulets, force field generators, and similar gear that didn't fit cleanly into weapon or armor slots. All of that fell under the Auxiliary slot, the catch-all space the System gave you for extra tricks.
When it came to alternates, humans could store alternate sets and switch them mid-battle, but only within timed restrictions. If you didn't have alternates unlocked, you were limited to what fit into that listed set and had to wait to be in a safe area to swap gear, which felt unfair.
But as some races said, the heavens—or the System—were unfair.
Personally, the System was a bit of an ass in Elias's opinion. Some people got all the advantages, and if you entered a ruin, you could only bring and swap what the System allowed.
This was an overall look of the cultivation assist system.
But there was was thing the cultivation assist system didn't measure your soul.
Because Elias had a problem he would only learn about much later, as humanity slowly gained more understanding about cultivation.
Everyone had the same three components tied to their soul: a soul space, a soul pool, and soul slots.
The way people explained it later was simple enough. The soul space was the boundary, the fixed room you had to work with for your entire life. Inside that space sat the soul pool, small at first, but able to swell and eventually fill that room. It could grow, darken, thicken with power, yet it would never spill beyond the size of the soul space that contained it. Set within that pool were the soul slots.
The soul slots were the structured parts. Each one was a "place" in the pool, and each place could hold one bond. As you grew stronger, more of those slots unlocked, but they always stayed rooted inside whatever pool and space you started with.
The deeper someone stepped into cultivation, the more all of this mattered. At the beginning, people worried about muscles, Ki circulation, techniques. The higher ranks climbed, the more cultivation leaned on the soul, and the more abstract things became from rank to rank.
As Ki Tech improved, humanity figured out how to test for all three pieces: how many slots a person had, how large their soul space was, and how much potential their soul pool carried. Results came back with separate rankings—soul space, soul pool, soul slots—each scored from zero to five stars, with two stars counted as a practical average.
Elias's testing fell far below that.
Before those tests, people had called him a prodigy of humanity. He had shown promise early: good instincts, quick learning, enough potential that leadership watched him. After his soul evaluation, those same people looked at numbers instead of behavior. Without any defining ability to offset the results, they grew reluctant to pour further resources into him.
Elias was born with only one soul slot.
Half a star in each category.
His soul space rated tiny, his soul pool rated tiny, and his single slot sat at the bottom of what the System recognized. On paper he looked like a case study in limitations.
Around ninety-five percent of humanity had two or three slots. Some people turned up with four or five.
Then there were freaks like the hero of humanity—six slots, with two of them opened at less than E rank.
Next to that, Elias's soul was tagged as trash. With a single, undersized slot and cramped ratings, he was considered cripple, even if that word didn't match the truth sitting underneath, something he would only uncover much later.
It became one of the tribulations he had to work through in his first life. His soul was different in a way that quietly bent things around him—odds, survivals, resistances—just enough that people started assuming he carried some strange, relic-granted power. Even now, in his second life, he still didn't fully understand what the System had actually done there.
A bond did more than raise your strength; it gave you a battle partner and could pass along something like a bloodline power or a talent for whatever laws that beast was attuned to. Beast and partner advanced together, climbing toward Enlightenment along the same track.
He, at the time, was a clueless seventeen-year-old kid who didn't have a fucking clue what was going on.