Ren House — 11:55 PM.

Ren had moved from the window to the bed, and from the bed back to the window, twice.

He lay on his back now, one arm draped over his eyes, listening to the city breathe outside. The hum of distant hover lanes. The faint pulse of someone’s music, two floors below. The soft mechanical breath of the apartment’s air system.

He had told his parents he was calm.

He had told himself he was calm.

He was not calm.

’How could I be?’ he thought, dropping his arm and staring at the ceiling. ’In a world like this, where supernatural power decides almost everything — being unable to cultivate would be torture.’

’Even if Mom and Dad don’t care... everyone else will. Schools sort by it. Jobs sort by it. Marriages sort by it. The whole society moves around the awakened.’

He breathed out, slowly.

He had read every article he could find on the Awakening over the past two days. Every blog. Every forum thread. Every interview with successful and failed awakeners. He had read more about the process in seventy-two hours than the original Ren had read in eighteen years.

None of it had told him what it would actually feel like.

11:58.

11:59.

Ren sat up and crossed his legs on the bed, the way the cultivation manuals he had been browsing online described. Back straight. Shoulders relaxed. Eyes half-closed.

’Whatever happens,’ he told himself, ’I am ready.’

He didn’t quite believe it.

But he said it anyway.

Then the clock on the wall ticked over.

12:00.

And the world changed.

— • —

It started as warmth. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝔀𝓮𝒃𝙣𝓸𝒗𝒆𝒍.𝙘𝒐𝒎

Not a flash. Not a rush. A slow, gentle warmth that began at the base of his spine and spread outward, like sunlight pouring into a cold room.

Then a soft white light surrounded his body.

It did not blind him. It did not burn. It simply was.

Ren felt his consciousness drift — not sleep, but something quieter, deeper, more deliberate than sleep. The bedroom faded. The sound of the city faded. Even the sense of having a body began to fade, leaving behind only the awareness of his own thinking, suspended in something vast and dark.

He immediately understood what was happening.

This was the Awakening Process.

Every person on Edius experienced it on the first New Year’s after their eighteenth birthday.

And no two people experienced it the same way.

Time seemed to pass slowly inside the light. Or maybe quickly. He could not tell. He saw, dimly, an obsidian-floored space stretching out beneath him, lit from above by something that was not a sun but moved like one — a swirling galaxy of color, slow as breath, vast as a sky. He could see the floor, but he could not feel it. He had no feet to feel it with.

This was the Soul Space.

His Soul Space.

Something deep inside the obsidian floor began to glow — a faint, patient pulse, like a heartbeat that had always been there, waiting to be noticed.

Then the white light slowly faded.

Ren regained his senses with a soft gasp.

He was on his bed again. The bedroom was the same. The clock read 12:00 still — barely a second seemed to have passed in the outside world.

And yet.

His body and soul felt as if they had been quietly disassembled, cleaned, and rebuilt — stronger, tougher, sharper than they had been five seconds before. Every breath came easier. Every muscle felt steadier. The faint ache in his left shoulder, the one the original Ren had carried since childhood, was gone.

Then a status screen appeared in front of him.

Not on a wall. Not on a screen. Floating in the air, two feet from his face, visible only to him.

Ren stared at it.

And then he read.

Name: Ren Valis

Age: 18

Talent: Bloodline Plant Lord

Lifeform Tier: 1

Evolution Pathway Level: None

Skills: None

Ren’s eyes widened slightly.

Bloodline Plant Lord.

The rarest of the three pathways. The one teachers spoke about in careful, hushed tones. The one that produced sovereigns and legends, when it produced anything at all.

’Damn,’ Ren thought, slowly. ’Of all the talents...’

He sat in silence for several seconds, just letting the weight of those three words settle into his chest.

Then he turned his attention inward.

And he sensed it.

A seed.

Resting deep within him, somewhere below his sternum, somewhere that wasn’t quite his stomach and wasn’t quite his heart. Quietly pulsing with life. Each pulse warm. Each pulse steady. Each pulse linked, in some way he could not quite explain, to the rhythm of his own breathing.

It was small. It was fragile. It was, somehow, undeniably his.

But that wasn’t all.

There was something else.

Floating gently in his consciousness — separate from the seed, separate from the status screen, separate from anything the school had ever taught him about the Awakening — was a small ball of light, made of multiple shifting colors. Gold and violet and emerald and pale blue, blending and parting and blending again.

Ren frowned.

’Strange,’ he thought. ’I’ve never read a single article about a ball of light appearing during awakening. Not at school. Not online. Not in any forum thread.’

He stared at it for a long moment.

Then a slow, smug smile spread across his face.

’This... shouldn’t be my golden finger, right?’

’Just as I thought. How could a handsome reincarnator like me not have a cheat ability?’

The instant he focused his attention on the ball of light, a massive amount of information poured directly into his mind — fast, dense, and not entirely gentle. He winced as something close to a migraine pulsed behind his eyes.

Then the information settled, and he understood.

The ball of light was a newly formed treasure, born somewhere in the Boundless Ocean of Planes. It had drifted through the void, half-aware, with only the dimmest instinct to seek a host.

When Ren had died in his previous world — when the truck had hit and the world had gone dark — the treasure had happened to be passing nearby. Not by plan. Not by choice. By chance, the way a seed lands in a particular crack in a particular sidewalk and becomes a flower instead of dust.

It had bonded to his soul on instinct.

It had carried him to the nearest compatible plane.

Edius.

During that long journey across realities, the treasure had exhausted nearly all its energy and fallen dormant. Only during the Awakening — only tonight — had it absorbed enough planetary energy to wake.

It was also because of the treasure’s quiet influence, the information added, that Ren had awakened the Bloodline Plant Lord Talent at all. Without it, he would have been Bloodline or Plant, like everyone else.

The treasure had no intelligence yet. It was newly born, after all. Most of its abilities were undeveloped.

For now, only two functions were available.

SCAN

It could scan any lifeform or material, revealing all available information about it. The data would be stored in an internal database. Based on the collected data, it could suggest optimal evolution pathways and resource priorities.

OPTIMIZE

It could optimize any skill or cultivation technique, restructuring it to perfectly suit Ren’s specific physiology, soul, and circumstances. The optimized version would be dramatically more effective than the original.

To make the difference clear, the information offered an example.

If a fist-fighting technique normally took a genius one month to learn, and increased strength by 15%, then for Ren, after optimization, it would take one week and increase strength by 45%.

These were the only abilities available while Ren was a Tier 1 Lifeform.

As his Lifeform Tier rose, the treasure would evolve in step — unlocking new functions, strengthening the abilities it already possessed, and revealing things even it did not yet know it could do.

Ren slowly sat up straighter on his bed.

Excitement was gathering in his chest, but underneath it — and he was surprised to notice how strong this feeling was — there was something steadier. Something close to gratitude.

He had been given a second life.

And, apparently, a second chance with cheats included.

"Worthy of my golden finger," Ren said quietly to the empty room, smirking despite himself.

"With this, I can level up much faster than anyone expects."

His expression shifted, slowly. The smirk faded. His gaze turned serious.

"I need to prepare myself..." he murmured. "For the Trial that comes in fifty years. And to protect the people I care about, when it does."

He let that thought sit for a moment.

Then he chuckled, lightly.

"But for now..."

"I’m still just a newbie. Lifeform Tier 1."

Ren stretched his arms, rolled his shoulders, and stood up from the bed. The world around him felt sharper now. Cleaner. As if a layer of dust had been wiped away from his senses.

"Now then..."

"Let’s see what kind of goodies the school is giving its cute little students."