Eighteen years after a mob enforcer's bullet ended his life on Earth, Ezra's consciousness transmigrated into a new, infant body.
He woke in a stranger's arms, learned this new world's rules. A place subtly identical, yet wildly different from his old life and quickly found plenty he liked and plenty more he didn't like.
At first, he thought he'd been reborn. But no. This wasn't reincarnation. This was something else entirely. A cosmic hijacking.
A teenager now, he sat alone in a classroom, long after the others had left, hunched over a codex he wasn't supposed to have. Its worn pages smelled of dust and forgotten knowledge.
The faint hum of arcane energy in the classroom, usually a calming presence, now felt like a buzzing alarm.
His eyes remained on the book in front of him. It was about magic. Specifically; how a man, rare, fading, and considered obsolete, might awaken powers in a world that insisted he couldn't, and should never even try.
Ezra's gaze traced the ancient script, lips moving silently. But within seconds, he groaned.
"Ugh. What does this even have to do with magic? Who doesn't already know this history crap?"
He debated skipping ahead. Maybe the cool stuff was buried deeper, past the boring lore dump. But knowing his luck, he'd miss the one critical line like, 'Don't skip this or your eyeballs explode.'
"Fine, whatever," he muttered. "Guess I'm reading it."
He resumed:
'A thousand years ago, this world wasn't ruled by the Matriarchy. Nor were they at war with the monsters and beasts now raining from the stars…
Men and women shared the weight of survival, bleeding and building side by side. Then the Scorch Fall War tore it all apart.
Empires like Crassia and Delmond, names now whispered like curses, unleashed their nuclear arsenals on one another. Skies blackened. Cities crumbled. Billions burned.
From the ashes, a few million survivors clawed their way through poisoned soil and endless winters. Humanity teetered on the edge of oblivion. Until she returned.
The Goddess Marea hit the reset button on humanity's wiring. Women got super strength, healing like comic book heroes, senses sharper than a debt collector's nose.
Men? They got a cosmic middle finger. Or maybe they just weren't so lucky. Radiation twisted their biology, fraying their strength, clouding their minds. Male births dwindled. Many were stillborn.
Hell, even the newborn whose body Ezra transmigrated into didn't survive. And that was the norm; the few who survived were anomalies: healthy, but forever marked as less.
A few centuries later, after Goddess Marea's intervention, the world found its new shape. Queendoms rose.
War-Ladys led the defense of Sectors, commanding battalions against the beasts that prowled the shattered wilds. They were more than soldiers–tacticians, priestesses, queens. Icons of feminine perfection, genetically blessed by the Goddess herself.
Magic and tech were no longer separate, they were married, fused in a union that defied nature.
It was breathtaking, dangerous, and undeniably alive.
Ezra, a transmigrated soul now inhabiting a new body, should've been thrilled. He'd read enough isekai web novels to expect a cheat code: a glowing interface, a snarky talking sword, maybe a shady spirit guide.
Instead, he got a world where women punched through steel, and men were barred from owning land, or much else.
At 18, Ezra had mostly adjusted. (He still called himself Ezra privately. The name Zaeryn was given to him by his adopted mom, Ysmeine, but he still liked to refer to himself with the name he had in his last life, because, the name he was given in this world sounded a bit weird.
One would say it has a feminine vibe to it.
Transmigrating into a baby was weirdly nice, at least compared to dodging mobsters over forty grand back on Earth.
But the upsides were not much compared to the downsides sometimes. Here, he was still broke, still unlucky, but the stakes felt higher. On Earth, he'd had a shot to be something.
Here? Well… here, the world simply smiled kindly and told him he didn't matter.
He couldn't train with a blade. Couldn't join the Sectors to fight the monsters that roared beyond the city's barriers, and threatened civilization—not that he was itching to die, but the choice would've been nice.
To be fair, it wasn't all bad. This planet was breathtaking, and being surrounded by women who looked like they walked off the cover of an isekai smut novel? Not exactly a complaint.
Danger was thrilling, from a safe distance. And he wasn't escaping crippling debts anymore.
Still, in all the worst ways, this place felt the same, yet at the same time better.
Academies were off-limits unless a High Matron vouched for you, and they never did that ever, unless you were someone very exceptional, particularly those with the rare ability to sire children. Marea's cosmic rewrite had rendered most men infertile, forcing women to rely on alternative methods for procreation.
Most men worked fields, kept their heads down, and obeyed.
Ezra or Zaeryn as he was known here, wasn't built for obedience, though.
Ezra stopped reading the book and blew air through his lips, muttering, "Where's my damn system?"
In those old stories he used to read on Earth, a hero like him would've stumbled across a hidden power by now, a forgotten relic, a god's whisper, something game-breaking.
But this world's rules were ironclad.
Still, Ezra wasn't just rare, he was sharp. Stronger than most men, quick-witted, with reflexes that had saved him from a collapsing scaffold last summer. He wasn't useless. He just needed a crack in the system, a way to bend the rules.
And he had already found one. Recently he'd read about a "restricted archive" in the city's lower spire, a vault of pre-Scorch texts, maybe even relics from before Marea's return.
If magic and tech could rewrite biology, maybe something in there could rewrite him. He didn't have a system like he hoped for, but perhaps, if he could be a bit more powerful, he would be okay with that.
A forbidden book. A hidden spark. Something to make him more than what he was right now.
If any of this was true if any part of it could be real it meant there was a crack in the foundation of everything the Matrons believed.
Ezra continued reading. That was when the electric door hissed open behind him.
He slammed the codex shut and slid it beneath his e-devices.
Professor Tiffany strode in, her presence filling the room. Her braided hair, usually pulled back, cascaded over one shoulder, showing off the curves of her fitted, knee-length skirt and the soft fabric of her top that hugged her ample chest.
The scent of her perfume, warm, spicy, and distinctly feminine, drifted to him, making the air suddenly feel pleasant.
Her gaze, sharp and assessing, locked onto him with a look that showed how pleased she was to see him. "Still here, Zaeryn? Class ended ages ago."
Ezra adjusted his posture, feigning casualness, his eyes fixed on the tablet in his hand, as if he'd been studying for the longest time. "Just catching up, Tiffany. Exams are coming up, and I want high grades," he muttered.
Tiffany's brow arched, her lips twitching into a smile that said she wasn't buying his bullshit for a second. "Catching up, huh? That wouldn't include the banned book you're practically sitting on, would it?"
Well, crap. He didn't hide the codex properly and she saw it! Now what? Was he in trouble?
Oh yes he was.