Soren stood there for a long moment, letting the mud dry on his knees and the tears streak down his face until there were no more left to cry. His chest still ached, a hollow kind of pain that he suspected would never fully go away, but the initial storm of grief had passed. What remained was something quieter. Heavier. The kind of weight you carry with you, not the kind that crushes you into the ground.

  He got up. Brushed himself off. Took a breath that rattled in his lungs.

  The system window still hovered in front of him, translucent and faintly glowing, waiting for his attention like it always did when something new happened. Soren stared at it. Blinked. Stared some more.

  Something was not adding up.

  If he remembered correctly, and his memory had always been one of the few things he could rely on, he had awakened in his late seventeens. Later than most of his peers. The usual age for awakening was sixteen, give or take. Some kids awakened earlier, at fourteen or fifteen, and while that gave them a head start on training, it did not really provide any significant advantage in the long run. Others awakened later, like him, and while that put them behind initially, it was not considered a disaster or anything. Just meant you had to work harder to catch up.

  The point was, looking at the camp, intact and untouched by the monster tide that would eventually destroy it, looking at his own body, younger and softer and missing all the calluses he had built up over years of combat, he should be around fourteen or fifteen years old right now. Maybe just barely fifteen. How, then, was he able to see the system window?

  Had he awakened only after entering this body? After whatever process had shoved his consciousness into his younger self?

  That would make sense, he supposed. Sort of. If the assimilation mentioned by the system was not just flowery language but an actual merging of two versions of himself, then maybe it had triggered an awakening as a side effect. Or maybe his younger self had been on the verge of awakening anyway, and the process just pushed it over the edge.

  Soren shook his head. Too many questions, not enough answers. He turned his attention to the actual contents of the system window.

  [

  Name: Soren

  Class: None

  Bloodline: None

  Inheritance: ??

  Stats

  Strength: 0.9

  Agility: 0.8

  Constitution: 0.6

  Wisdom: ??

  Mana: 3

  Overall Rank: F-

  Skills

  Active Skills: None

  Passive Skills: ??

  [ASSIMILATION PROGRESS <=========>24%------------------------------>]

  ]

  His name. Just Soren. No last name, because last names were reserved for prominent families, the kind with lineage and legacy and enough political clout to matter. His family had been ordinary. His parents had been ordinary. Good people, loving people, but ordinary all the same. He had never resented them for it. Ordinary was safe, in its own way. Ordinary meant you could walk down the street without someone recognizing your surname and expecting great things from you.

  Class and Bloodline both showed as None. Normal. Expected. Class was determined by the system after you stepped into E rank, which he was nowhere near right now. Bloodline was something you acquired later, Through many different means.

  His attention shifted to the next line and stopped.

  Inheritance.

  Soren frowned. He had never seen that attribute before. Never heard of it, either. In all his years as a Player, in all the briefings and debriefings and strategy sessions where they had reviewed enemy capabilities and ally statistics, he had never come across anyone with an attribute called Inheritance. The system was not supposed to have secret attributes. Everything was documented, catalogued, studied by researchers whose entire job was to figure out how this stuff worked.

  So where had this come from?

  He thought about it for a moment. There were unique attributes, that much he knew. Rare, one-in-a-million attributes that only showed up in certain individuals.

  But Soren himself had never had a unique attribute. His system window had been boring, standard, the kind of thing you expected from a strategist whose value came from his brain rather than any special gift. So where had Inheritance come from? Was this another side effect of being shoved backward through time? A glitch in the system? Or something else entirely?

  He did not know. Could not know, not yet, not with the information available to him. The question marks obscuring the actual value of the Inheritance attribute were particularly frustrating. Like the system knew something it was not ready to tell him yet.

  Put it aside, he told himself. Focus on what you can actually work with.

  His stats. He let out a sigh that was half frustration, half grim amusement. Last time he had awakened, he had already been at E- rank. All that training, all those hours of physical conditioning before his awakening, it had paid off in the form of slightly better starting stats than the average person. But now he had awakened three or four years earlier, and his stats reflected exactly what he was.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  A normal kid in his early teens.

  Strength at 0.9. Agility at 0.8. Constitution at 0.6. All of them exactly what you would expect from someone who had not yet started serious physical training. just terrible.

  Mana at 3.Although higher than others stats its a norm for mana to be 3-5 during awakening even though he understood why. That one stung a little, Soren was forever stuck at 3 last time ,Its your innate capacity for mana and processing spells.

  Wisdom showed as ??, which was strange. The Wisdom stat determined intellectual qualities, sure, but more importantly it reflected your ability to apply knowledge, to make sound judgments, to see patterns and connections that others might miss.

  This assimilation progress which was at 24% did not help much either. he didn't know what it means neither have any idea how to stop it or if its harmful.

  Looking at his skills section .Active Skills: None. Passive Skills: ******. Another unknown, more '??', more questions without answers. He made a mental note to investigate all of this later, when he had more time and more resources, and dismissed the system window with a thought.

  It had only been a few minutes since he arrived in this body. A few minutes since the assimilation, since the system announcements, since his breakdown in the mud. He did not know what time it was exactly, but when he looked up at the sky, through the gaps in the canopy, the sun was still high. Noon, maybe. Or a little after. Still plenty of daylight left.

  Soren did not wait around. He started walking back in the direction his younger self had come from, the path already familiar even though years had passed since he last walked it. His feet knew the way even when his mind was still catching up.

  The camp he and Aldric had built was located just north of the forest area, the portion under the Academy's direct control. The Academy used these woods to help young kids awaken and then guide them through formal training. Controlled environment, supervised exercises, the whole deal. He and Aldric had always found it stifling. Too structured, too safe, too boring for two kids who wanted something more than lectures and practice dummies.

  They used to sneak out during lunch breaks. Restock supplies at the camp, spend a few hours away from the endless droning of instructors who seemed to think that memorizing theory was more important than actually doing anything. Those had been good days, Soren remembered. Before the pressure of the countdown became real, before everything went wrong.

  He kept walking, letting the memories wash over him, not fighting them. 20 minutes passed. Maybe 30. The trees began to thin out, and through the gaps he could see structures rising in the distance. The Academy.

  The building complex looked more like a cluster of corporate headquarters than a school. Blocky, practical, designed for function rather than beauty. Soren had always found it mildly depressing, the way it stripped away any sense of wonder from the process of awakening. You came here to become something more than human, and they put you in a building that looked like it should be processing tax returns.

  But what caught most people's attention about the Academy, what always caught Soren's attention no matter how many times he saw it, was the tower in the center. A mixture of modern architecture and medieval mage tower aesthetics, rising twice as tall as any other building on the grounds. It housed most of the training facilities that had anything to do with mana manipulation, which made sense, and it also served as a teleportation gate connecting to similar mage towers scattered across the first floor.

  That mage tower had been his gateway to adventure, once. To danger, to growth, to everything that had led him eventually to the seventh floor and the end of the world.

  Soren exited the forest entirely and started across the open ground toward the Academy buildings. His feet carried him automatically toward the building on the far left, the section designated for unawakened students. Even though he had awakened now, technically, nobody else knew that yet. He would still have to attend the unawakened session.

  Not that there was any point in hiding his awakening. Even a normal person, someone without any ability to perceive mana directly, could sense something different about an awakened individual. Mana was naturally attracted to the awakened, clustering around them like moths around a flame. You could feel it, standing next to someone who had crossed that threshold. A very faint pressure, a subtle change in the air, something that marked you as different from everyone else.

  So hiding it was impossible. Not that he wanted to, really. Awakening earlier than expected might raise some eyebrows, but it was not unprecedented. Kids awakened early all the time.

  Soren paused in his walking and looked up at the sky.

  Only now, standing in the open with no canopy to block his view, could he see it properly. The timer. That massive, impossible number hanging in the sky like a wound in reality itself, visible from anywhere on the first floor, visible from all seven floors.

  [28 years 6 months 5 days. 12 : 28: 06]

  The number ticked down, second by second, a silent reminder of how little time humanity had left. Twenty-eight years until the countdown reached zero. Twenty-eight years until the sky fell and the world ended and everything Soren cared about was erased.

  But that was not what seized his attention right now. What seized his attention was the calculation running through his head, automatic and cold.

  The monster outbreak, the one that would destroy this camp, kill Aldric's parents, slaughter teachers and students alike, that would happen in six months. He remembered the date clearly.

  Six months. Not twenty-eight years.

  The outbreak was not connected to the final countdown. It was just another disaster in a world full of disasters, another crack opening, another wave of monsters pouring through. But this one was personal. This one had shaped everything that came after. This was the moment Aldric had lost his family, the moment Soren had lost friends and mentors, the moment both of them had stopped being children and started being soldiers.

  And it was only six months away.

  Soren closed his eyes. Drew in a breath. Let it out slowly.

  He had knowledge now that he had not had before. Knowledge of what was coming, of when and where and how. Knowledge of weaknesses and patterns and strategies that had taken years to learn the first time around. He was not the same scared kid who had stumbled through the Academy, grateful just to be allowed to participate, grateful for any scrap of progress.

  He was Soren. The one who had helped lead the Hero's Party to the seventh floor. The man who had watched the world end and been given a chance to do it all again.

  This time he had awakened earlier, had three or four extra years to train, to grow, to become something more than the weakest member of the party. This time he would be ready when the outbreak came. he would save the people he cared about, prepare defenses, warn the right people, do whatever it took to prevent the slaughter that had carved holes in both their lives.

  they would win.

  Soren opened his eyes and started walking again. Not just toward the building in front of him, but toward his goals. Toward the future he was going to build, different from the one he had left behind.

  The unawakened building loomed ahead, and somewhere inside, his past was waiting for him to step back into it. But he was not that young self anymore. He was something new. Something that had gone through countless challenges, that had seen the end of the world and helplessly accepted it.

  But.

  This time, he would not fail.