Helios wakes from a dream where the ancient Forest of Razar—the oldest and most sacred place in the kingdom—crowned him as its protector and showed him a future of legendary power.

Then he opens his eyes to nothing. No system. No powers. Just a weak, ordinary boy in a world that doesn't need saving.

But the dream felt more real than life itself. So Helios decides to chase it anyway.

For five years, he tries to become the guardian he saw in his vision. He trains his frail body, throws himself into protecting people,  attempts to defend the helpless. And he fails. Catastrophically. The merchants he guards get robbed. Villages burn. Forest creatures flee or attack him. He becomes the kingdom's joke—the delusional boy who thinks he's chosen when fate clearly disagrees.

But Helios won't stop, not because he has proof—it is because he has faith.

Then comes his worst failure yet. In a moment of selfless sacrifice that nearly kills him, he finally hears it—a whisper. A single leaf glows. Words flicker before vanishing: *"Prove yourself worthy. Dreams are not given—they are built."*

The system exists. It was always watching. But it demands something no other power requires: that its chosen earn their strength through character forged in failure.

Now Helios faces impossible quests designed for someone far stronger. Protect without combat skills. Heal without magic. Earn trust from those who want nothing to do with him. He fails most of them. But unknown to him, every attempt plants seeds for something greater.

Meanwhile, the kingdom faces real threats: ancient evils stirring in the deep forest, political schemes that threaten the sacred pact between civilization and nature, and other system users who have gained their power instantly—and look down on him with contempt.

They don't understand what he's becoming. They received power as a gift. However, he is different. He’s forging his way through blood and unshakeable faith.

When the Forest Protector System finally awakens fully, it reveals the truth: the dream never showed his future. It showed what he could become if he earned it.

Every failure was a lesson. Every humiliation is a test. Every moment he chose belief over evidence was building something greater than any instant power could achieve.

The Forest didn't choose Helios because he was strong.

It chose him because he refused to break.

Now, as the kingdom's greatest threats emerge, Helios must claim the destiny he spent years earning. Not as a boy with a dream, but as the Protector he was always meant to become—forged in darkness and suffering, believing in light.

The question was never whether the dream was real.

The question was whether he could make it real.

I tell all this business as it happened without comment, because I have no comment to make. It was all strange to me, strange rather than wonderful, and, it may be, some dream of beauty died for ever in those furtive meetings; it happened to me, and I could scarcely have been more irresponsible in the matter or controlled events less if I had been suddenly pushed over a cliff into water. I swam, of course--finding myself in it. Things tested me, and I reacted, as I have told. The bloom of my innocence, if ever there had been such a thing, was gone. And here is the remarkable thing about it; at the time and for some days I was over-weeningly proud; I have never been so proud before or since; I felt I had been promoted to virility; I was unable to conceal my exultation from Willersley. It was a mood of shining shameless ungracious self-approval. As he and I went along in the cool morning sunshine by the rice fields in the throat of the Val Maggia a silence fell between us.


Chapter 130 - Miserable Life