"Yan Ye. Step forward."
The vice director's voice cut across the plaza.
Thousands of students. One name. And every head in the crowd turned at once.
Some looked tense. A few whispered to each other without taking their eyes off him. And more than a few… afraid.
A year ago, nobody would have bothered looking.
Now, most of them were just hoping for a reason to despise him again, something to wash away the helplessness of the past year.
Why?
It's the only thing they can do now.
Because they remember who he was a year ago.
And they know exactly what he is now.
Yan Ye walked toward the awakening formation with both hands in his pockets, and the voice inside his head chose that exact moment to speak.
[Don't forget the items.]
Right.
His fingers were already closed around them. One in each hand, pulled from his inventory before his name was even called.
An Aether Core in his right.
The Empyrean Crystal in his left. The one a divine being had thrown to him a month ago, after saving his life inside a dungeon.
He still didn't fully understand why she'd done it.
But Yan Ye wasn't the type to question a gift.
The formation was close now. A circular platform floating two meters above the ground, ancient runes humming across its surface. Beneath it, embedded crystals fed energy into the formation.
The system that decided everything.
Power. Class. The rest of your life.
Then.
DING.
A window appeared in his vision. He only had time to read the top.
Global Awakening System.
The system that decided everything.
Power. Class. The rest of your life.
Before anything else registered, his own system moved.
The GAS window was ripped from his vision and dragged toward his system screen. Fast. Too fast to process.
Not fused. Not integrated.
Devoured.
Like something higher on the food chain had swallowed it whole.
A new message replaced it.
[System evolving.]
The Aether Core in his right hand started draining. Not slowly. Not gradually. The energy was being ripped out of it at a rate that made his fingers go numb.
The formation crystals were being consumed too, but compared to his core, they were almost nothing.
Seconds. That was all it took.
The enormous reserve inside the Aether Core was nearly dry.
Then the evolution finished.
[Irregular Class Awakened: Archetype Summoner]
The principal's voice rang out from outside the formation.
"Use your summon skill!"
He activated it immediately.
The Empyrean Crystal reacted. Golden light burst from his hand as a portal started forming in front of him. A tear in the air that pulled at the space around it.
At the same time, the last scraps of energy inside his crystal were ripped away and poured into the summoning.
The portal flickered.
Then the Aether Core in his right hand cracked.
The fracture spread in an instant. Before he could react, the core shattered and evaporated between his fingers, its entire reserve consumed down to nothing.
Energy draining too fast.
The portal still wasn't complete.
One crystal was gone. The other was almost empty. And the summoning was still pulling.
This wasn't something he could redo. There was no second Empyrean Crystal. If the energy ran out before the portal finished forming, he didn't know what would happen. And he wasn't willing to find out.
If it collapsed now...
Yan Ye didn't hesitate. He bought a second Aether Core from the system store and crushed it.
A violent influx of energy slammed into the portal.
And that was when it changed.
The portal expanded. Its color shifted from yellow to gold. The pressure in the air became suffocating. Students near the formation staggered backward. The runes beneath the platform flared white.
Five seconds later, someone stepped through.
A woman.
Long blonde hair. Blue eyes that carried a calm so absolute it looked like indifference. Divine armor. A sword at her side.
Two pairs of wings.
Then the sky went dark.
In an instant, the phenomenon of Yan Ye's awakening was wiped away. Overwhelmed. Erased by something on a completely different level.
A colossal figure appeared above the academy. A woman at least ten kilometers tall, with wings so vast they seemed to cover the world. Her face was blurred, as if mortals had no right to look upon it.
But Yan Ye recognized the armor.
Aelythra Valtherion.
[IMAGE]
The same divine being who had saved his life. Or more precisely, her Incarnation. A projection of power so immense that even this fraction of it darkened the sky.
At the same time, something snapped into place inside his mind. A bond. Deep and absolute.
The winged woman standing before him had become his summon.
Her four wings had reduced to a single pair.
And then the bond hit him.
Not pain. Not information. Something stranger. A flood of emotion that didn't belong to him. The woman standing before him looked like carved marble. Cold. Untouchable. A face so still it could have been sculpted by someone who had never seen a human smile.
But through the bond, she was screaming.
Not in distress. In excitement. Raw, unfiltered, electric. Curiosity so intense it felt like being stared at by a thousand eyes at once. And underneath all of it, buried but unmistakable, something that felt absurdly close to joy.
The contrast almost gave him whiplash.
Then the weight of the Incarnation above shifted. The pressure that had been crushing the plaza, diffuse and directionless, narrowed. Focused.
On him.
Like the sky itself had turned its attention to a single point.
He opened the summon's information.
Isabella Valtherion.
Same surname.
"System."
No response.
"System."
[I'm here.]
"What happened?"
A pause.
[The portal mutated after you crushed the second Aether Core.]
"Explain."
[The portal should have opened somewhere random in the Empyrean Realm. But the influx of energy from the second core caused it to mutate.]
"And?"
Another pause.
Then.
[You accidentally kidnapped a princess.]
He stopped breathing.
One second. Two.
"...From where?"
[The House of Valtherion.]
Same surname.
The pieces clicked together.
And he didn't like what they told him.
"So I'm in danger?"
[Yes.]
He slowly looked up at the colossal figure still hovering above the academy.
"Can she kill me?"
[She has enough power to erase this world in an instant.]
His fingers tightened inside his pockets.
[But the laws governing lower worlds are stronger than her authority here. She cannot attack you, touch you, or destroy anything unless those laws are broken.]
He exhaled.
"Thank god."
[Her grandfather is beyond that restriction.]
"...How strong is he?"
[Strong enough to erase your entire Star Field with a thought.]
His knees buckled half an inch before he caught himself.
"...Even with the rules?"
[Yes.]
Yan Ye looked at the princess standing in front of him.
Then at the ten-kilometer incarnation hovering above the academy.
Then at the thousands of students frozen across the plaza, most of them too terrified to breathe.
And he understood, with perfect clarity, that his life had just become very, very complicated.
Fuck.