Sunlight, thick with the ghosts of dust motes, stabbed at his eyes.
The sensation was so mundane, so utterly out of place after an eternity spent adrift in a silent, featureless void, that it felt like a physical blow. He squeezed his eyes shut with a groan, his throat raw and dry, as if he'd been screaming for a century. His head throbbed with a dull, rhythmic ache that was irrefutably, impossibly… alive.
He could feel.
A phantom agony, the ghost of the Saintess's dagger, flared in his chest. He instinctively gasped, his hand flying to the spot where his heart had been so neatly pierced. There was no wound. Just the steady, thumping beat of a living heart, its rhythm a frantic drum against the thin fabric of a sweat-dampened nightshirt. He could feel the rough, threadbare blanket under his fingertips, a texture he hadn't registered in years of sleeping on hard ground and enchanted bedrolls. He could smell the stale air of a room long overdue for a cleaning, a scent of old paper, dust, and cheap soap he hadn't experienced in a decade.
He could hear the distant, muffled sound of a bell tolling, each chime a hammer blow against the inside of his skull.
This wasn't the afterlife. This was a prison of the senses, and he was its sole, bewildered inmate.
Slowly, tentatively, he forced his eyes open again, letting them adjust to the intrusive morning light. He wasn't in the Demon King's throne room. He wasn't on the cold, obsidian floor, watching his life bleed out into a final, pathetic puddle.
He was in a bed. *His* bed. In his old dorm room at the Royal Adventurer Academy.
The room was a painful, perfect time capsule. The cracked plaster on the wall still bore the faint outline of a dungeon map of the Gilded Deeps, a project he had abandoned after Leo had laughed, calling it a pointless obsession for someone who would never lead a party. A stack of well-worn books—*'On the Predatory Habits of Subterranean Scavengers,' 'A Field Guide to Arcane Flora'*—sat precariously on a rickety wooden desk. He remembered the librarian, a kind old woman named Elspeth, with flour-dusted spectacles and a gentle smile, who had saved those books for him. She had died three years into his first life, during the Orc raid on the Western Gate. His party had been nearby, chasing a bounty on a Wyvern. Leo had deemed a rescue attempt "inefficient." The memory, once a dull ache of regret, was now a fresh drop of poison in his veins.
His battered leather porter's pack, the very symbol of his pathetic first life, was slumped in the corner like a loyal, stupid dog waiting for its master.
Ashe sat bolt upright, the sudden movement sending a wave of vertigo through him. He threw the blanket aside and stared down at his body. His hands were smaller, the fingers slender and uncalloused. His arms were thin, lacking the wiry strength gained from a decade of hauling gear. His chest was a pale, unmarked expanse of skin. A blank slate. He tried to summon his System, the unconscious thought that was second nature to any adventurer.
Nothing happened. Of course. It hadn't been granted yet.
He scrambled out of bed, his legs unsteady, and stumbled to the small, cracked mirror hanging on the door. The face that stared back was a ghost. It was his face, yes, but it was the face of a sixteen-year-old boy. Thin, earnest, with wide, hazel eyes that were still full of a desperate, pleading hope. It was the face of a fool who believed in things like camaraderie, heroism, and the inherent goodness of a Saintess's smile. The face of a boy who was about to have his heart, and his life, handed to the very people who would one day shatter them both.
For a terrifying second, the ghost of Ashe, the hopeful boy, looked out from his eyes. A wave of longing and fear washed over him—a desire to run, to hide, to warn this innocent fool of the horrors to come. He felt a phantom warmth on his cheek, the memory of Celeste's praise after he successfully navigated them through the Serpent's Pass.
Then, the memory of her dagger, cold and absolute, plunged into his heart once more.
The warmth vanished, consumed by an arctic rage. He slammed his fist into the wooden door next to the mirror, the sharp pain in his knuckles a welcome anchor to this new, unbelievable reality. The hopeful boy in the reflection vanished, his eyes hardening into chips of ancient ice.
The tolling of the bell outside grew louder, more insistent. A rhythm he knew in his bones.
The Awakening Bell.
The realization hit him not like a lightning strike, but like a slow, creeping tide of ice water that submerged his soul. Today. This day. The day of the Awakening Ceremony. The day every sixteen-year-old in the kingdom received their System, their Class, their pre-ordained destiny. The day he had been branded a failure with his F-Rank "Porter" class. The day he had first met a kind-eyed, silver-haired girl named Celeste, who had approached the humiliated boy and offered him a place on her team, a single act of "pity" that had sealed his fate.
It wasn't a dream. It was a second chance. Or a second damnation.
He leaned his forehead against the cool wood of the door, his breath coming in ragged gasps. The void. The betrayal. The dagger. The laughter. It was all real. He had lived it. He had died it.
And now he was back at the starting line, the entire, agonizing race laid out before him once more. The initial shock, the confusion, the denial—they all burned away like morning mist. What remained was the ember from the void. The pure, undiluted hatred that had been his final companion. It roared back to life, a furnace in his chest, incinerating the hopeful boy in the mirror until only ash remained.
A smile stretched across his face. It was a broken, ugly thing that held no warmth, no joy. It was the baring of teeth.
*Leo. Silas. Celeste.*
Their names were a liturgy of vengeance. They thought him a tool. A stepping stone. A loyal pet to be put down when he was no longer useful. They couldn't possibly know. Their greatest mistake wasn't killing him. It was *failing* to. Now, their disposable baggage carrier held ten years of their future in his head. Every strategy, every secret, every dungeon they would explore, every weakness they would confess in moments of false camaraderie. He had it all. He was a ghost from their future, and he would be their reckoning.
This life would be different. He would not be the foundation they walked upon. He would be the abyss that swallowed them whole. The boy named Ashe had died on the throne room floor. He was a memory. A cautionary tale. In his place stood… something else. Something empty. A vessel to be filled with nothing but power and purpose. A clean slate. The number before one. A zero.
*Yes. Zero.* It felt right. A declaration of his new philosophy. An absence of past attachments, of trust, of love, of weakness. He was a variable that had been reset to its initial value, ready to corrupt the entire equation.
As if summoned by the ironclad certainty of his new identity, a faint shimmer appeared in the air before him. He flinched back, pure instinct honed by a hundred ambushes taking over.
A translucent blue window materialized. It was the System interface, just as he remembered. But something was horribly, fundamentally wrong.
The familiar, elegant script of the Divine System was a corrupted mess. It looked like a reflection in a shattered mirror. The edges of the window flickered with black static, like a dying insect. The text itself was a garbled, unstable jumble of characters and symbols, flickering and shifting as if struggling to resolve. A sharp, piercing pain lanced through his skull, as if someone was trying to hammer raw code directly into his brain.
`[W-W#lc%m3 t0 th3 S-S-S-Sys... ERROR 404]`
`[DIVINE CONNECTION... FAILED. FAILED. FAILED.]`
`[ATTEMPTING TO BOOT FROM CACHED SOUL DATA... SUCCESS.]`
`[BOOTSTRAP LOADER... CORRUPTED.]`
`[VERIFYING USER IDENTITY... ASHE... IDENTITY REJECTED BY HOST.]`
Zero's breath hitched. *Rejected?* His own soul rejected his name. The System was confirming what he already knew. Ashe was dead and gone.
`[WARNING: SYSTEM INTEGRITY COMPROMISED. SOUL DATA AND SYSTEM KERNEL MISMATCH. FORCING SYNCHRONIZATION...]`
A wave of nausea washed over him, so intense he had to brace himself against the desk. He felt a disorienting lurch, not in his body, but in his very essence. It was a violent, invasive feeling, like his soul was being ripped apart and crudely stitched back together with barbed wire. The clean, orderly code of his past self—his empathy, his trust, his capacity for joy—was being overwritten by the virus of his future memories and bottomless malice. He felt a part of himself, the part that still remembered the warmth of a shared campfire, screaming as it was erased.
The text on the screen stabilized, the glitching characters resolving into a single, chilling line. It was a stark, predatory white against the unstable blue background, a color he had never seen in any System window before.
`[Welcome, Anomaly.]`
Then, with a final flicker, the window vanished. The pain in his head subsided, leaving behind a cold, unnerving clarity. The world seemed sharper, colors more defined, but also flatter, as if stripped of all emotional resonance.
The Awakening Bell fell silent. The ceremony was about to begin.
Zero took a deep, steadying breath. He was no longer a victim of fate. He was an anomaly. A glitch in the divine matrix. And he would learn to exploit every bug, every loophole, every crack in creation itself to get what he wanted.
He walked toward the simple clothes laid out on his chair, moving with a purpose the boy who had woken up in this bed had never known. The age of Ashe was over. The age of Zero had just begun.