"Wait a minute," Kai whispered. His voice sounded small and hollow as it echoed off the high, dark ceilings of the library.
He leaned in closer, his eyes narrowing as he traced his finger over the fancy, elegant writing in the old book. The ink was faded, but the words were clear. "If I'm reading this right," he muttered to himself, "then in this 'new world,' the gift of awakening is almost entirely a female trait."
It was a massive realization that changed everything. It reframed every interaction he'd had since waking up, especially his run-in with Aria. He finally understood why she looked at him with that calm, annoying pity.
To her, a man without magic wasn't a failure or a "dud" by mistake; it was just the biological standard. In her eyes, he was exactly what a man was supposed to be: powerless.
He pulled the heavy book even closer to his face, his eyes darting across the pages as he searched for a loophole.
Deep in the notes at the bottom of a page, buried in a section about early genetic changes, he found a tiny sentence that made his heart skip a beat: "...occurring almost exclusively within the XX chromosomal pairing."
"Okay, so 'almost' is the key word," Kai said. He leaned back in his heavy wooden chair until it made a loud, sharp creak that broke the silence of the room.
"That means men with magic do exist. They aren't impossible; they're just very rare—like a glitch in the system or a statistical error."
He paused, resting his chin on his hand as he started to think. In the stories and webnovels he had read in his old life, numbers didn't matter. One super-strong hero, an S-rank hunter, or a powerful cultivator could destroy an entire army by themselves. They were like walking nuclear bombs. If even a small number of men had magic, why weren't any of them in charge? Why wasn't there at least one man at the top of the mountain?
"Why is the social order so one-sided?" he asked the empty, shadow-filled room.
Then, a cold, logical thought hit him, and his expression darkened.
"Unless men have a lower 'ceiling' for power," he realized. "Maybe the male body just can't handle the highest levels of mana. It's like trying to put a high-powered engine into a weak frame—it would just fall apart."
He felt a chill run down his spine as the pieces of the puzzle clicked together. "Women didn't just win a war of numbers; they won because they monopolized the top. Men can be the foot soldiers or the low-level workers, but the 'Apex' spots? The spots for the real rulers? Those are gated by biology. Women are the only ones who can reach the absolute top of the ladder."
The weight of this truth felt heavy on his chest. He had been hoping for a classic "zero-to-hero" story where he could just train hard and become the strongest. But this world was different. The very rules of nature were rigged against him from the day he was born.
He felt a heavy weight in his chest. He had hoped for an easy journey to the top, but the rules of this world were rigged against him from the start. He shook his head to clear his mind.
"Focus, Kai. You can't change the world's biology tonight. Just survive the week."
He pushed the history book away and pulled over a thick, silver book titled The Hunter's Ledger.
"So, people with magic are called 'Hunters' because they hunt 'Monsters.' Very original," he said with a dry laugh.
But as he read further, his sarcasm faded. This world was a strange mix of the middle ages and the future. He saw pictures of knights in glowing, magical armor, yet the book said they used smartphones and encrypted apps to talk to each other. It was a place where a farmer might plow a field by hand while a high-tech maglev train zoomed past in the background.
At the center of it all were the Noble Clans. These families were like genetic dynasties. They had spent hundreds of years carefully matching bloodlines together. Their goal was simple: they wanted to make sure their children were born with the strongest magic possible. In this world, you didn't just inherit a fortune; you inherited a biological weapon.
"And if there are nobles," Kai whispered, "there has to be a ruler to keep them in line."
He flipped to the back of the book and found a map. The Ashford land sat in the frozen north of the Kingdom of Avalon. The book described Avalon as a powerhouse ruled by a line of Queens.
These Queens weren't just politicians; they were the apex predators of the world. In a society where magic was everything, the person with the most power was the one who wore the crown. The Queen wasn't just a leader—she was the strongest fighter in the kingdom.
Kai stared at the map for a long time. He touched the lines of rivers and mountains he had never heard of until today. Finally, he closed the book with a loud thud.
He looked up at the dark ceiling. The shadows of the bookshelves looked like long, thin fingers reaching out for him. The silence of the house felt heavy, like it was pressing against his chest. It reminded him just how far away his old life really was.
"Well, damn," he breathed. "This is real. There's no waking up from this."
For the first time, he really felt the truth. Alexis Chase was dead. That life of MMA fights and big business was a ghost. He was in a world of monsters and magic, trapped in a body that everyone thought was weak.
He wasn't Alexis anymore. He was Kai. He looked at his pale hands in the dim light and realized he had a very long, very dangerous path ahead of him.