The last thing Kyle Park ever did was reach into a bag of Flamin' Hot Cheese Puffs at 3 AM.
That's it. He reached, grabbed one, put it in his mouth, and choked. Then he died on his couch in his boxers and a hoodie that hadn't been washed since he'd last had a reason to leave the apartment, which had been about eleven days ago.
His last coherent thought, best as he could reconstruct it later, had been something like huh. Not I should have eaten better. Not I wish I'd called my mom more. Just huh, in the flat tone of someone who drops their phone and watches it fall and doesn't quite reach in time.
Then nothing. Then something.
He woke up on stone.
Cold and gritty under his palms, ceiling above him that was also stone, and the light was wrong, orange and flickering, the kind that came from actual fire instead of a bulb. The room smelled like dust and something vaguely biological he didn't want to think about. He lay there for about four seconds, then sat up.
His hands were different. Smaller and thinner, a kid's hands. He brought one close to his face and looked at it. Someone else's hand. He flexed the fingers and they moved fine, still his in the sense that they were under his control, just not in the sense that he'd ever owned them before.
"Young master." A reedy, urgent voice from across the room. "Young master, you must get up. The ceremony is in two hours and you haven't bathed and your dress clothes need pressing and —"
An old man, white-haired and thin, hovered next to a wardrobe with the expression of someone who had experienced this exact problem too many times to be fully alarmed about it anymore and was now operating at a permanent low-grade crisis frequency.
"Young master," the old man said again. "Please."
Okay. Dead. Obviously dead, because this was not his apartment and that was not his hand and the room was made entirely of stone and predated electricity by a few centuries. Something had happened after the dying part.
He wasn't a stranger to this kind of scenario. He'd watched enough anime to know the shape of it, and he'd played enough games that the phrase new game wasn't as terrifying as it might have been for someone who'd spent less of their life doing exactly this. "Yeah, okay," he said. "Give me a minute."
The old man looked like he wanted to say there weren't minutes to spare but settled for hovering near the wardrobe.
Stone walls, candles, a bed he'd apparently rolled off at some point in the night, a window with wooden shutters cracked open letting in actual bird sounds. Real birds, not recordings, not traffic. He got up. The new body moved fine, a little stiff and underslept but structurally sound. He caught himself in a mirror propped against the wall. A kid, dark-haired, carrying the specific look of someone who hadn't been sleeping well for a while.
"What's your name?" he asked the old man.
"Gren, young master. As it has been for the past nine years."
"Right." He'd known that, or the body had known it. The memories were there, thin and distant, like he'd read a summary of this person's life rather than lived it. Kael Ashford, third son of a minor noble house, sixteen years old. The memories came with a framework for how this world worked too.
At sixteen, every person went through an Awakening ceremony.
A large stone assessed your potential and a Crest manifested on your body, a glowing mark that determined your element, your rank, and your ceiling.
Most people got F through C. An A-Rank was a prodigy. An S-Rank showed up maybe once a generation.
Above that were the SSS-Rank Sovereigns, seven of them on the entire continent, each one running a territory the size of a small country.
The ceremony Gren kept hovering about was that ceremony. Today was that day.
Kael Ashford's family expected nothing from him. From what the memories showed, this had been their working assumption for some time.
He found the bathroom, splashed water on his face, and looked at himself in the small polished mirror above the basin. Tired. He could work with tired.
--------
The Awakening ceremony was held in a stone hall the size of a high school gymnasium, lit by torches and packed with about three hundred teenagers and their families dressed in their best clothes. The air smelled like candle smoke and nervous sweat. He stood in the line for the Ashford household, which was just him.
His father was somewhere in the observation gallery above. His older brother Dalen was there too, already A-Rank from last year's ceremony, already the obvious heir. He hadn't looked up to find either of them.
He watched while he waited. One by one, teenagers stepped up to a raised platform in the center of the hall and placed their hands on a large carved stone. After a few seconds a Crest manifested, a glow on the hand or chest or forehead, and an examiner called out the element and rank. Families in the gallery cheered or went quiet depending on what they heard.
A girl two spots ahead got an A-Rank Wind Crest and the gallery went loud. A boy right ahead got F-Rank Earth and there was polite, brief applause, and his family in the gallery made no sound at all.
The whole system was basically designed to sort people at sixteen and then keep them sorted forever.
You got your rank, you fought monsters to absorb Essence from their cores, and if you wanted to break through to a higher rank you needed a Catalyst material on top of all the grinding.
Catalysts came from dangerous dungeons or noble stockpiles, which meant a commoner who awakened F-Rank would spend their whole life clawing toward C while an A-Rank noble kid lapped them before twenty because the family vault was full of the stuff.
There was definitely a black market for Catalysts operating somewhere in this hall right now, probably run by someone standing close enough to shake hands with the examiners, and whoever it was had probably already made more money today than most F-Rank fighters saw in a year, and
His name was called.
He stepped up to the platform and put both hands on the Awakening Stone. Cold and a little rough under his palms. He waited. The hall went quiet in the way it did when people expected nothing interesting to happen.
The stone didn't glow. No light appeared on his hands or chest. The examiner waited. Still nothing. Whispering started in the gallery.
Then, in the space directly behind his eyes, text appeared.
[Standard Crest Awakening... Failed]
[Anomaly Detected]
[SSS-Rank Talent Awakened: SOVEREIGN GENESIS]
[Ability: Sovereign Mark]
[Evolution Limit: NONE]
[Mark Capacity: INFINITE]
He read it once. Then again.
SSS-Rank. Okay.
Sovereign Mark. Sure.
Evolution Limit: NONE.
Mark Capacity: INFINITE.
The last time he'd seen the word INFINITE on a screen it had been a loading bar for an open-world survival game that crashed before the title screen finished. He'd waited four hours for that download. The developers patched it six months later but he'd already refunded it by then and he'd always been a little annoyed about that actually, the reviews said the late game was genuinely good and
He stepped back from the stone.
Right. SSS-Rank. The same rank as the seven people who ran the entire continent. Obviously he was excited, who wouldn't be, the Sovereign rank was basically the ceiling of the entire power system and his notification had shown NONE where the ceiling was supposed to be and that was genuinely, objectively the best possible outcome of this ceremony by a margin that was difficult to fully describe.
But three hundred people were standing in this hall and half of them were already whispering about the failed awakening and the other half were watching him walk back to his spot and if he came back from a NULL result looking like he'd just won something, that conversation was going to get complicated very fast.
So he kept his face the same as it had been before he stepped up. Which wasn't difficult.
He'd spent four years at a convenience store keeping his face the same while customers did things that warranted a very different face. He had practice.
The examiner looked at his book. "NULL classification," he said, and wrote it down.
From the gallery above, his father's voice came down before the whispering could fully spread. "The arrangements are already in place. Kael will take up residence at the eastern estate. Effective immediately." No particular feeling in it, the tone of someone who had prepared the sentence in advance and was relieved to finally use it.
A woman said something quiet next to him.
"It's decided, Mira."
Two boys standing near the left wall, both wearing pressed noble house coats, watched him step off the platform. One of them leaned toward the other.
"Ashford's third son," the first one said, not bothering much with volume. "Heard he had no talent. Looks like that was right."
"NULL." The second one said the word the way you'd say broken. "And they brought him here for the ceremony. Almost cruel, honestly."
A girl nearby glanced over, then away fast.
The examiner had technically done his job fine. The Crest hadn't shown up on the stone. NULL was the correct call. Both boys had already turned back to watch the next student, the brief topic of Kael Ashford closed and finished.
Something with eggs was coming from outside the hall, rich and warm through the stone walls, and he hadn't eaten since the bread this morning. The bread this morning had been bad in a very committed way, like whoever made it had actively chosen every step of the process with the goal of producing something technically edible and nothing else. Wherever that egg smell was coming from, he was going to find it after this.
He kept walking.
--------
Back in his room that night, he sat on the edge of the bed and pulled up the notification again.
Sovereign Mark. Evolution Limit: NONE. Mark Capacity: INFINITE.
Every other person in that hall today had gotten a Crest with an element, a rank, and a ceiling. The ceiling mattered most. The system was built so people stayed roughly where they started, give or take a few ranks of serious work and expensive Catalyst materials. His notification had displayed NONE where the ceiling was supposed to be, which was either a glitch or the most interesting thing that had ever happened to him, and given that his previous life had ended with a cheese puff at 3 AM, the bar wasn't especially high.
He looked at his hands. Regular kid hands. He poked the wall and nothing happened. So he couldn't just touch random objects and have them transform. There was probably a mechanic to it that he'd figure out eventually.
Gren knocked and entered carrying folded clothes for the morning. The carriage to the borderland estate was leaving at dawn.
"Gren. What's the borderland estate actually like?"
Gren set the clothes down and considered it for a beat too long. "It has considerable potential, young master."
"How bad is it."
"The eastern wing has a roof."
"The eastern wing specifically."
"Yes, young master."
He lay back and looked at the ceiling. His bags were already stacked by the door, two cases with a rope around them, packed before the ceremony. Before anyone knew the result. Already done.
He pulled the notification up one more time. SOVEREIGN GENESIS. Evolution Limit: NONE. Outside, past the shutters, an animal made a sound he didn't recognize, low and carrying through the stone walls, whatever made it considerably larger than the sound suggested.
His stomach made a sound too. He looked down at it. The egg smell from outside the ceremony hall had never turned into actual eggs, and neither had lunch, and neither had dinner because Gren had apparently not been informed that the exile also needed to eat before the exile started.
He closed his eyes.
New game.