Chapter 4 — The Day the Lines Were Drawn
The morning of the aptitude test arrived the way disasters often did — quietly, wrapped in ordinary sunlight.
No ominous clouds. No thunder. No heavenly trumpets.
Just students yawning into sleeves, parents checking watches, buses sighing to a stop, and the soft mechanical rhythm of a city following its routine.
Kim Jae-hwan stood in front of the mirror tying his shoelaces.
His reflection watched him with calm, unblinking eyes.
Nineteen years old.
Forty-seven lives old.
He straightened, adjusted his collar, and noted the small details—creased fabric at the shoulder, faint sleep mark near the temple, heartbeat steady, breath even. Everything felt… balanced.
His mother hovered near the doorway.
She tried not to appear anxious, but it leaked from her anyway — tight hands, restless shifting, forced smile.
"Make sure to eat something," she said.
"I will."
"Don't be nervous."
"I'm not."
"Even if the result isn't good—"
He turned slightly.
She stopped, caught by his gaze.
There was nothing harsh in it, nothing cold on the surface, just calm certainty — the kind that made empty reassurances feel ridiculous.
"I'll be fine," he said.
She nodded, relieved without knowing why.
Behind her, his sister leaned on the wall, arms crossed. "If you awaken as F-rank, I'm telling everyone."
He smiled faintly. "Do as you like."
She clicked her tongue, dissatisfied by his lack of reaction. His father cleared his throat and said something about "stability" and "government benefits," the way he had in every regression.
The same words. The same patterns. The same lives.
He stepped into his shoes.
"I'm heading out."
"Good luck!"
"Call us!"
His mother's voice followed him down the stairwell, shrinking, dissolving into the drone of city sounds. He did not look back.
---
The National Aptitude Center was already crowded.
It towered over the street like a white monolith, glass panels gleaming under the sun. Banners fluttered overhead, volunteers directed lines, cameras flashed as local news crews interviewed nervous teenagers.
A festival atmosphere.
A lottery hall.
A factory line.
Jae-hwan walked through it, cutting through the noise like a fish through water. Around him exploded:
"My brother awakened C-rank last year—" "I'm going to join Platinum Guild!" "Mom said if I'm E-rank I'm still valuable." "What if I don't awaken?"
Fear wrapped in hope. Hope wrapped in ignorance.
He registered at the desk.
Name. Date of birth. Signature.
His hands did not tremble.
The worker — a bored man with drooping eyelids and a badge reading Administrative Support Level 4 — handed him a wristband and gestured him toward the waiting area.
"Room 3C. You'll be called."
He sat where instructed.
Rows of chairs. Students in various stages of panic. Some vibrating with excitement, others pale, one crying silently into her sleeves while her friend patted her back with awkward gentleness.
He leaned back and closed his eyes.
The murmur of voices blended into a single low tide.
He could have recited this building's layout from memory — how many testing rooms on each floor, which machines would malfunction, which examiner would go home humming the theme song to an old cartoon.
He did not need to look to know where the exits were.
Habit.
The announcement chime rang.
"Candidate 3C–119. Kim Jae-hwan."
He stood.
The walk down the hallway was short.
White walls. Sterile smell. Polished floors that reflected slivers of movement. The door to Room 3C slid open with a soft hiss.
Inside: a wide chamber dominated by a cylindrical apparatus of silver metal and reinforced glass. Monitors hummed. Cables snaked across the floor. Two technicians stood nearby with tablets. A woman in a lab coat smiled with practiced assurance.
"Kim Jae-hwan?" she confirmed.
"Yes."
"Relax. This won't hurt."
It always amused him that they said that.
Pain was relative.
"This device will stimulate potential mana pathways," she continued. "If you begin to feel dizzy, focus on your breathing. Simply place your hand on the core surface and don't remove it until instructed."
He stepped toward the cylinder.
At its center floated a pale blue crystal core, pulsing faintly like a sleeping heart. This was not true mana exposure — merely the world's clumsy attempt to measure something it did not yet understand.
He placed his hand on the surface.
Cold.
The machine hummed.
"Beginning measurement," a technician announced. "Baseline normal. Output increase in five… four… three…"
Jae-hwan's vision wavered.
For most students, this moment was sharp — a surge of heat, rush, or sudden vertigo. For him, it was like standing at the edge of a familiar ocean.
Mana brushed against him.
Recognized him.
Whispered, as if across forty-seven overlapping worlds:
—oh. You again.
The hum deepened.
The blue light brightened.
Numbers on the monitors began climbing steadily.
"Heart rate stable," the technician muttered. "Mana conductance reading… normal parameters."
Normal.
Of course.
He never awakened here.
Not in this building.
His power — the genuine awakening — came later, through pain so sharp it rewrote the structure of his soul. This machine could only skim the surface.
Still…
Something unexpected stirred.
Beyond the artificial stimulus of the device, beneath the layers of present time, he felt the faintest ripple — like pressure building behind a closed door. His regressions had compacted his existence into something dense. Reality seemed… thinner around him.
The light intensified.
"Reading spiking," one technician said sharply.
The woman in the lab coat frowned. "Increase tolerance buffer. Don't interrupt."
Numbers rose again.
"Is he manifesting early adaptation?"
"No, the waveform is wrong—"
He blocked out their voices.
He was listening to something else.
A murmur beneath the hum.
A presence brushing against him like an unseen fingertip tracing the edge of his consciousness.
The same thing that watched in the mirror corridor.
The unseen observer.
The dark.
It did not pull him this time.
It simply… leaned closer.
He stared back into the invisible.
They regarded one another without words.
Then, faintly, the machine cracked.
A thin fissure snaked across the inner glass.
Everyone froze.
The technician swore under his breath. "Shut it down—!"
The woman snapped, "Not yet! He's not in distress!"
The machine whined.
Blue light flared.
The crack spread.
He could feel everyone staring now — technicians, observers behind the safety glass, an examiner whose coffee paused halfway to his lips. None of them felt fear.
Not yet.
This wasn't about mana overload.
This was about compatibility.
His existence did not quite fit this reality anymore. Regression had sharpened him into something the world's parameters struggled to measure.
How many iterations does a soul endure before the world starts noticing?
The hum peaked.
Then —
Silence.
The light collapsed back into the core.
The machine powered down.
The crack, as if embarrassed, stopped growing.
Smoke curled faintly from a panel.
The woman exhaled slowly. "Remove your hand."
He did.
His palm left no mark.
"You okay?" she asked, professionalism faltering.
"Yes."
"Dizziness? Nausea?"
"No."
The technicians whispered furiously to each other.
"Record the waveform—" "Save the anomaly log—" "Do not file under equipment malfunction—"
The woman forced her smile back into place.
"The aptitude result will be processed and posted online by tomorrow," she said. "You may go."
He inclined his head.
He left the room.
In the hallway, the fluorescent lights buzzed faintly. Students passed by, some pale, some laughing, some trembling so hard their wristbands shook.
No one looked at him twice.
He walked to the restroom, locked himself in a stall, and sat down.
Not because he needed privacy.
Because he needed stillness.
He closed his eyes.
Inside, deep beneath bone and thought and the structure of self, something pulsed.
Not mana.
Not power.
Accumulation.
Forty-seven lifetimes' worth of cause and effect compressed into a single point. The world had tried to measure him and found the numbers wouldn't sit still.
He opened his eyes.
In the silence of the bathroom stall, he laughed once — quietly, without humor.
"So you noticed," he murmured.
The presence did not answer.
Maybe it didn't need to.
Maybe watching was answer enough.
He stood and washed his hands.
The water ran clear.
His reflection in the mirror looked unchanged — same eyes, same bones, same faintly tired calm. No one would know that a measuring machine had cracked in his presence.
He liked it that way.
Quiet anomalies were more useful than loud miracles.
He left the building.
Outside, the city continued being itself — buses, chatter, pigeons fighting over dropped bread. Across the street, a boy vomited into a trash can while his mother rubbed his back. A girl jumped in place, squealing she felt "something awaken."
Maybe she did.
Maybe she didn't.
It didn't matter.
The lines had already been drawn.
The aptitude test was less about numbers and more about direction. Doors began to close. Others opened. Futures shifted a fraction of a degree, enough that years later they would diverge into entirely different lives.
Jae-hwan walked through the crowd untouched.
His phone buzzed.
Messages flooded in.
[How'd it go???]
[Result tomorrow!!!]
[We're all meeting later!]
[Drinks? Just soda for now lol]
He typed back minimal replies.
[Fine.]
[Tomorrow.]
[Maybe.]
He slipped the device back into his pocket.
He looked up at the sky.
Clear.
Calm.
Blue.
No one else saw the faint, hairline fracture running across it — not literally, but metaphorically, as real to him as breath.
It had begun at the moment the machine cracked.
A symbolic echo.
The world saying, in its own quiet way:
We see you.
He closed his eyes briefly.
"I don't care if you see," he whispered. "Just stay out of my way."
He began walking home.
Each step felt steady, anchored, deliberate — like moving along a path he had paved himself. The results tomorrow didn't matter. The rank didn't matter. He had been everything from F-rank to near-god already.
What mattered was motion.
Preparation.
Design.
By the time he reached his apartment building, evening light had begun to soften the edges of the world. His mother met him at the door with forced calm, his sister hovered pretending indifference, his father pretended to read while not turning the page.
"How was it?" his mother asked.
"Routine."
"Nothing strange?"
He thought briefly of cracking glass.
"No."
They relaxed visibly.
He went to his room.
Closed the door.
Sat at his desk.
Opened the notebook again.
He turned to a fresh page.
At the top, he wrote:
PHASE ONE: ESTABLISH POSITION
Beneath it, he added calmly:
– cultivate trust
– cultivate admiration
– cultivate dependency
– remove alternatives
He paused, letting the outline settle.
Outside, laughter drifted through walls.
Tomorrow his result would be posted.
Students would scream or cry or pretend they didn't care.
Guilds would begin watching.
The future would lean a little further toward its breaking point.
Kim Jae-hwan tapped the pen lightly against the page.
"Let's draw the lines properly," he said to the empty room.
Not tremoring with excitement.
Not heavy with dread.
Simply… ready.
Iteration forty-seven had passed its first threshold.