The road from the frontier village stretched out for sixteen kilometres, a winding rib of frozen gravel cutting through the endless, towering pines of the outer rim. For hours, the journey was a quiet, cold slog, our leather boots crunching systematically against the frosted stones as the morning wind swept down from the northern peaks. Lysander and I marched in relative silence, each of us consumed by the impending gravity of the unsealing. By midday, the thick, choking treeline finally began to clear, the ancient pines dropping away to give way to the sprawling, stone-walled perimeter of the regional capital. Towering twenty-meter fortifications of dark grey rock loomed ahead, the battlements lined with heavily armed vanguard guards patrolling the high iron gates.
The city inside was a chaotic, suffocating hive of constant movement. Thousands of young men and women from every outlying settlement, farming outpost, and mining village across the frontier were pouring through the massive iron gates, their faces a uniform mask of anxious terror and desperate hope. For commoners, the Awakening Ceremony wasn't just an administrative registration; it was the single day that decided whether you spent the rest of your life breaking rocks in a localized mana-mine or earning a coveted spot inside an elite training academy. It was the only escape from a brutal lifetime of manual labour under the empire's strict social hierarchies.
We waded into the packed cobblestone streets, following the dense, slow-moving flow of the massive crowd. The air was thick with the scent of cheap coal smoke, wet wool, and the unmistakable, sour odour of collective fear. Lysander kept his head down, his unusually broad shoulders rigid and tense as desperate people jostled unthinkingly against him. I kept my own gaze constantly shifting, my eyes automatically scanning the alleyways, rooftops, and crossing points out of pure muscle memory. My mind operated on the conditioned threat-assessment loops of a frontline captain, treating the civilian crowd as a highly volatile operational environment.
Most of these kids won't even rank past a First Echelon Stone-Grade talent, I calculated silently, noting the unconditioned frameworks, soft muscle density, and erratic, shallow breathing of the unawakened crowd moving beside me. They were looking for a life of simple safety, entirely blind to the horrific Rift breakouts and mutated horrors waiting for them in the years ahead. They had been raised on the grand lie of the empire, conditioned to obey the high walls without ever questioning what truly lay beyond the perimeter.
Eventually, the narrow, winding alleyways opened up, spilling the entire suffocating crowd into the grand central plaza. Towering over the massive square was the Cathedral of the First Interface—a colossal, ancient structure built entirely from smooth, pristine blocks of white star-stone. The majestic white arches rose hundreds of feet into the chilly air, seeming to actively absorb the natural sunlight rather than reflect it, radiating a faint, cool hum of raw energy that vibrated directly through the soles of our leather boots.
It was the unmistakable, heavy pressure of the global system framework pulsing from the bedrock. Even though the interface was completely offline inside our individual minds, the massive planetary engine itself was active, humming right beneath the white stone floor, waiting to read our baseline parameters and unseal our dormant channels. The sheer scale of the building was designed to make commoners feel completely insignificant, a physical manifestation of an unyielding, absolute authority.
"Look at the size of this place," Lysander whispered, his voice catching in his throat as we came to a halt at the base of the massive marble stairs. He stared up at the vaulted iron doors of the sanctuary, his knuckles turning entirely white as his fingers anxiously checked the smooth edges of his bronze token one more time inside his pocket. "There are thousands of them here, Astraeus. What if... what if the system doesn't find anything inside me? What if my channels are completely calcified? What if I'm just a civilian forever?"
"You won't be," I replied smoothly, keeping my voice calm, steady, and entirely level to anchor his rising panic. I didn't need a status board to know his worth. I remembered his original baseline numbers from the old timeline—he had awakened with a high Fourth Echelon Silver-Rank physical talent, a natural foundation that simply needed the altar to ignite his channels. He was a born protector, a man whose endurance would eventually anchor entire frontline squads.
The real variable on the board was me.
If that strange dream state inside the forest clearing was nothing more than a psychological hallucination born from the trauma of my execution, the system would unseal my channels today and hand me the exact same Fifth Echelon Gold-Rank heavy blade talent I had received in my past life. If that happened, my plan was already set: I would take their evaluation, drop the greatsword permanently, and force my unconditioned muscles to master a light shortsword style to break their future traps. But if the entity in that dream was a real, physical anomaly... if that burning heat had genuinely rewired the internal geometry of my soul... the global network was about to read a physical glitch it had never encountered before. I didn't know what that dream truly meant, but as I looked up at the white stone spires, my pulse ran steady and cold.
A sudden, deep chime echoed from the top of the white stairs, the heavy sound waves rolling across the plaza and instantly silencing the murmuring crowd. With a slow, grinding roar of iron gears, the massive vaulted doors of the cathedral began to swing open, revealing a dark, yawning sanctuary filled with the soft, glowing blue light of active altar circles.
"The countdown is over," I muttered, a cold, calculated calm settling deep beneath my ribs as my boots took their first definitive step up the marble stairs. "Let's go find out what the dream left behind."