That afternoon, their homeroom teacher brought up warrior-track registration again.
Sunhaven First High was not the worst school in the city. In past years, it had still managed to send a few students into the warrior track.
Last year had been a minor miracle.
Five admits in one shot.
Even better, two of those five had come out of ordinary classes rather than the elite prep groups.
That alone had been enough to change the administration's attitude.
Whether students made it or not was one thing.
At least signing up gave them a chance.
Not signing up meant they had none.
Of course, the registration fee was still there to end the conversation before it even started.
Ten thousand just to apply.
Unless you thought you had a real shot, nobody with a normal family was going to throw that kind of money into the fire for fun.
So when the teacher raised the subject, the room's response was about what Evan expected by now: thin, awkward, and mostly limited to the same handful of students who had some reason to hope.
Still, even the ones keeping quiet were listening.
After that, she added one more announcement.
"Students planning to apply for the warrior track should stay available next Wednesday afternoon. The school will hold a pre-exam Q and A session."
That got a little more attention.
She straightened slightly, letting the importance of the next sentence do some of the work for her.
"We've gone to considerable effort to invite Julian Ward back from Southriver Martial University to speak with everyone. He enrolled at Southriver last year, and this is a valuable opportunity. If you're attending, the school will notify you. Dress properly and take it seriously."
She kept talking after that, but the message was clear enough.
Show respect.
Act grateful.
Don't embarrass the school in front of somebody who had already crossed over.
Julian Ward was only a first-year warrior-track student.
That was all.
One freshman from Southriver Martial University.
And yet the teachers were treating his visit like somebody important had agreed to honor the school.
Evan felt the gap again.
Not the abstract one.
The real one.
The kind ordinary people were expected to carry in their bodies.
Beside him, Caleb's reaction went in a different direction entirely.
He stared at the front of the room and muttered under his breath, "The school's really spending this year. His appearance fee has to be at least fifty or sixty grand."
Evan's eyebrow twitched.
"Wait. He comes back to his old school, talks to a bunch of students for a couple of hours, and they still pay him?"
Caleb gave him a look that said he had somehow managed to ask a stupid question three chapters too late.
"Of course they pay him," he said. "You think warrior-track students are easy to book?"
He adjusted his glasses and kept going, voice low and matter-of-fact.
"Their schedules are packed way tighter than ours. We get winter and summer break. They get training. Or work. Or training that is work. If you don't pay them, why would they waste the time?"
He paused, then added, "Even if Senior Ward didn't ask for money, the school would still offer it."
"Why?"
"Because favors run out," Caleb said. "Once or twice, sure. But if the school keeps dragging alumni back every year to do free talks, eventually that goodwill gets burned up. Pay them now, show respect now, and later, if they actually make something of themselves, maybe they'll remember the school kindly."
That landed harder than Evan expected.
It was not some cynical adult explanation.
It was a perfectly normal high school student's understanding of how the world worked.
Which meant it really was how the world worked.
Evan looked at him sideways.
"You know, for a guy who spends all day looking like he wants to merge with his desk, you've got a disturbingly clear view of human nature."
"This isn't deep," Caleb said with a small, self-mocking smile. "It's just obvious."
Then he stopped talking.
Evan did not press him.
He was too busy doing the math.
A first-year warrior-track student came back to campus, stood there for two or three hours, answered questions, and walked away with fifty or sixty thousand.
Maybe that was not an everyday number.
Maybe Julian Ward was unusually valuable.
It did not matter.
Fifty or sixty thousand was still more money than his parents could grind themselves bloody for over the better part of a year.
And the man earning it was basically a sophomore by real-world standards.
The warrior track did not merely lead upward.
It started paying before ordinary people had even begun adult life.
...
When the last bell finally rang, Evan felt as if he had served a sentence rather than attended school.
There was no evening study session on Saturdays.
With the college entrance exam getting close, the school had become even looser about warrior-track hopefuls coming and going. The administration cared far more about a handful of possible warrior-track admits than a mountain of ordinary academic students.
That, too, was normal here.
He left with Caleb and a few other classmates he was familiar enough with to walk beside without needing to perform friendship too hard.
At the school gate, they split off one by one.
Then Evan was alone.
He followed the route his feet remembered better than his thoughts did.
Only halfway home did it hit him that he had been taking something for granted.
This world shared a lot with the one in his memory.
It also did not.
So what about his house?
Was it still in the same place?
And if the house was still there, what about the people inside it?
That thought stopped him for half a beat.
As a man whose mental age was brushing thirty, he did not feel emotionally equipped to open a familiar door and discover he'd been assigned an entirely different set of parents.
"It should be fine," he muttered to himself.
His classmates had not changed.
His teachers had not changed.
It would be absurd if only his parents had been swapped out for some alternate-world edition.
Then again, if the world really wanted to apologize for the inconvenience, it could at least change the household circumstances.
Best-case scenario, he got home and discovered the Harts were secretly the richest family in Sunhaven.
Even better, maybe both his parents were terrifying high-rank martial artists who had simply been keeping it quiet for eighteen years for reasons known only to bad fiction.
He snorted at himself.
That was not going to happen.
As far as Evan could tell, the universe had developed a personal dislike of him.
...
More than twenty minutes later, he reached his neighborhood.
Lakeview Gardens.
The name sounded nicer than the place had any right to.
In reality, it was one of the oldest residential compounds left in Sunhaven, the kind of aging block cities kept meaning to deal with and never quite did.
The moment he saw the familiar weathered buildings, the cracked walls, and the general air of stubborn decline, his brief fantasy of coming home to hidden wealth died on the spot.
He had carried one specific grievance about this neighborhood for years.
Lakeview Gardens had supposedly been "about to be demolished" since the turn of the century.
The rumor came back every year.
The demolition crews never did.
As far as he remembered, the place was still standing in 2018.
So much for becoming the lucky child of a redevelopment payout.
Oddly, he did not feel much of the emotional turbulence people liked to attach to scenes like this.
He had seen his parents only a few days before his rebirth.
Now they were younger, not gone.
That was enough.
Building Six. Apartment 101.
Evan stopped outside the door, reached into his pocket, found the key by feel, and let himself in.
The moment the door opened, a cramped living room came into view.
The apartment was old.
More than thirty years old.
Back when these units had first gone up, small floor plans had been the rule rather than the exception, and time had not improved that decision.
The Harts had a two-bedroom place in theory.
In reality, the whole apartment was barely sixty square meters, and years of normal family accumulation had left every surface with something on it.
The room was crowded but not messy.
Someone had taken pains with it.
That someone was obviously his mother.
Being on the ground floor came with all the usual miseries.
Damp.
Dust.
Bugs when the weather turned.
Other people's footsteps booming overhead.
The one advantage was the little yard out back.
And because Lakeview Gardens was so old the property management might as well have died before the millennium, nobody much cared what residents did with their own additions anymore.
So the Hart family had enclosed the rear space and pushed the kitchen and bathroom out there, reclaiming the original indoor utility area as an extra room.
Which, in turn, was how a family of four had managed to keep functioning inside a place this small.
His sister, for example, was apparently functioning just fine.
Evan had barely crouched down to change his shoes when a voice shot out from the small room to the right.
"Evan Hart, you have the nerve to come home?"
He looked up.
Then she charged out.
Mia Hart was thirteen, short, round-faced, and still carrying the last stubborn traces of baby fat. At the moment she looked furious, but it was the kind of furious that only made her seem smaller and more offended, not remotely intimidating.
The sight of her hit something immediate and ridiculous in him.
He did not ask why she was mad.
He did not defend himself.
He just stood up, stepped forward with the confidence of long practice, grabbed both her cheeks, and gave them a gentle but deeply satisfying pinch.
Mia froze in outrage.
Evan closed his eyes for half a second, almost reverent.
"God, I missed this."
She stared at him as if he had personally offended the natural order.
In a few years, the round face would sharpen and the cheek softness would disappear, a development he still considered deeply unnecessary.
At least for now, the cheeks were still here.
Mia slapped his hands away.
"Mom! Evan's pinching my face again!"
From the yard, where the kitchen had been built, his mother answered without even turning around.
"Enough, both of you. Your father's almost home. Dinner's nearly ready. I made something good tonight."
"Mom!"
Mia's protest carried all the injustice a thirteen-year-old could fit into one syllable.
When no rescue arrived, she turned back to Evan with renewed fury.
Then she remembered what had really brought her out in the first place.
"Pay me back."
Evan blinked.
"What?"
"Don't play dumb!" she snapped. "Mom gave us fifty. We were supposed to split it. Why were there only five on my desk? Where's the rest?"
He stared at her.
His brain, belatedly and with poor grace, reconstructed the situation.
So the twenty-eight yuan he'd gone to school with had not actually all been his.
After lunch and everything else, he was down to fifteen.
Which meant, technically speaking, part of the money in his pocket belonged to the furious middle-school tyrant in front of him.
Evan considered this.
Then he immediately discarded any intention of justice.
A grown man could not go around with absolutely no cash on him.
That would be undignified.
He shook his head with complete shamelessness.
"No idea what you're talking about. Maybe you spent it and forgot. Look again."
"Evan!"
"Say 'big brother.'"
"Big brother my foot! All you ever do is bully girls! Mom, are you hearing this?"
His mother, traitor that she was, continued cooking.
The siblings bickered for another minute before Mia finally lost ground by virtue of being thirteen and underfunded.
She stood there with the expression of someone who had discovered both injustice and poor customer service on the same day.
Evan almost laughed.
Then the laugh caught halfway.
This was what his life had come to.
He was stealing twenty yuan from his kid sister because he was broke.
That was not a sentence he had expected to think after getting reborn.
Under Mia's deeply suspicious stare, he promised her several vague future benefits, none of which had any immediate cash value. Somehow, against all reason, that was enough to calm her down.
He even had the sudden, shameful confidence that if he really put his mind to it, he could probably trick the remaining five out of her too.
He decided not to test that theory.
Barely.
After dealing with Mia, he stepped into the yard kitchen and greeted his mother.
Linda Hart was busy over the stove, moving with the efficient rhythm of someone who had cooked thousands of family dinners in spaces too small for comfort.
They exchanged only a few ordinary lines.
How was school.
Fine.
How much homework.
Normal.
Wash up before dinner.
Mm.
Nothing dramatic.
Nothing that opened the door he needed.
On the way back out of the kitchen, one thought kept knocking around in his head:
Money could stop a man colder than fear.
He had almost brought up the warrior track just now.
Almost.
Then memory caught up with him.
This was the year his mother had cut back to half-day work to look after him and Mia while he pushed through senior year.
She did not have specialized skills.
Sunhaven was not some booming city.
Half-days for her meant eight hundred a month.
Eight hundred.
Over a full year, she barely made ten thousand.
The registration fee was sitting right there inside that number like a knife.
He rubbed his face hard.
How was he supposed to open his mouth now?
He could ask for the fee.
He could explain that the warrior track was the only real path up.
He could say all the things he'd spent the last two chapters learning.
And what then?
His grades were not good enough yet.
His body was not ready.
His odds were terrible.
The money, on the other hand, was real.
Painfully real.
If he asked, he would not be asking for some vague investment from a faceless institution.
He would be asking this kitchen.
This apartment.
His mother's half-day wages.
His father's grind.
The whole thin, crowded machinery of the house to bend around one expensive possibility.
The words that had seemed difficult before now felt impossible.
He let his hand fall and muttered to himself, "Of course."
Then, quieter:
"There's never a version of life where I'm not short on money."
And sooner or later, he was still going to have to ask.