Will opened his eyes and sat up, a dull ache running through his body. It settled deep in his shoulders, along his lower back, down into his thighs. A good soreness—the kind earned through constant two-a-days. He rolled his neck once, slow and controlled, joints popping quietly, and welcomed it.
The year was 215 PS.
Post System.
The calendar humanity used now, marking the moment Earth phased out of its old universe and entered the Prime Universe. Everything worth counting started there.
Cultivation. Other races. Beasts. A larger world. Enlightenment. Chaos. Nether.
The list kept growing. Will let it run its course, fingers curling and uncurling against the thin blanket, before pushing it aside.
He swung his legs over the edge of the bed and sat upright. The mattress dipped unevenly beneath him, one side softer than the other from years of use. His feet met the cold floor, toes brushing over a faint crack in the concrete that had been sealed twice and still showed. The time read 4:30 a.m., same as every day. Training time.
He didn't operate on seven-day weeks or clean thirty-day months. Those were arbitrary, built for convenience, not function. Will rested one day out of every five instead, shaping his schedule around what his body could handle, what it could recover from, and how hard he could push before diminishing returns set in.
Four days of hard training. One day of rest, focused on recovery and flexibility.
It worked.
He wasn't a cultivator yet. No human started cultivating before sixteen. Until then, this was optimal.
Will drew in a breath and looked around his room. It was small and plainly arranged, everything placed with purpose. The bed had been salvaged, the frame mismatched and slightly warped, one corner reinforced with a strip of welded metal that didn't quite match. The blanket was thin and faded, its color long past whatever it had originally been.
A small table sat beside it, bought secondhand from a holo-mart clearance rack. One leg was shorter than the others, corrected with a folded piece of plastic and a strip of adhesive tape that had yellowed with age. It wobbled if bumped too hard.
The hologram computer resting on top of it was two models behind the current release, its casing scratched and dulled, one corner chipped where it had clearly been dropped before he owned it. The projection field flickered faintly when idle, not enough to matter. It still worked. That was what counted.
It was all his father could afford, which wasn't bad for a D-rank city.
There were books too, stacked against the wall where the plaster had cracked and been painted over more than once. Hardly anyone used physical books anymore. Some were leftovers from before the world went to hell, their pages warped and stiff, spines bent from being packed and unpacked too many times. Most of them were manga.
One Piece.
Fullmetal Alchemist.
Naruto.
The covers were worn smooth at the edges. He stared at them longer than he meant to, thumb brushing over a crease on one spine as if checking it was still there. In his last life, he'd spent what little money he had collecting manga novels. The novels were a reminensce of his past life.
His last life.
The thought used to feel wrong. Now it was just another fact. He rubbed a hand across his face, fingers catching briefly in his hair, and wondered what part of his existence had ever been normal. One day you were stuck in a shit life, in a shit place, with a shit father—
—and the only good thing had been his brother.
Will let out a slow breath and straightened. The mattress creaked faintly as his weight shifted. He planted his feet firmly against the floor, grounding himself in the room as it was, and shut the memories down before they could dig in any deeper.
Will stood up. At fifteen, he was tall for his age, big-boned like his father, broad through the shoulders and hips, his frame naturally larger than most. His head nearly brushed the low shelf mounted above the bed as he straightened. Years of disciplined training showed in the way he carried himself—posture aligned, weight balanced without thought. His body carried definition without stiffness, shaped by routines chosen for range of motion and control as much as strength. Gymnastics for balance and precision. Aquatics for endurance and joint resilience.
He shifted his stance, rolling his weight from heel to toe once, feeling the floor's uneven texture through the thin soles of his socks. A faint pull ran along his calves, leftover tightness from the previous day's work. Acceptable.
He moved toward the table and paused, catching his reflection in the dark surface of the holo screen. His hair was thick and brown, buzzed short along the sides and longer on top. Bed head had it standing unevenly, the top sticking up where it had been pressed flat overnight. The length was uniform, about finger-length. A little water and gel would make it look fine.
Brown eyes met his reflection, steady and alert despite the early hour. His skin was pale by nature, even-toned and clean, the contrast making muscle lines easier to see rather than washing them out.
He took a slow breath.
He had been five when his memories returned and when the band appeared.
Will turned his right wrist toward a lamp he'd just turned on, adjusting the angle until the low light caught. A faint ring encircled it, roughly two inches wide. The surface blended closely with his skin, the edges softened, the markings worn down into shallow lines that formed a continuous pattern. The details never sharpened no matter how long he studied them.
The band remained constant. Its visibility shifted with light and focus, sometimes requiring a second look even from him. No one else ever reacted to it. To others, his wrist passed without comment, nobody but him could see the mark.
In his last life, he receiverd a wrist band that was similar to the faded mark on his wrist as a system merit.
The first dungeon. Humanity's first clear. A coordinated push under pressure, logged and ranked by the system. The moment everything pivoted.
Others walked away altered. Some carried weapons that shaped their growth. Some received techniques that set their trajectory early. Some wore artifacts that defined their paths from that moment forward.
Will had received the band- he put it on expecting some amazing treasure.
Once he put it one he never been able to remove it and worse it had zero application, it had never done anything.
He wore it through twenty-five years. He tested it whenever a new method became available. He presented it to specialists who handled artifacts daily. Each examination ended the same way a cursed useless object, one person even noted that it was fused to his spirit which at the time made Will roll his eyes.
Over time, Will classified it for himself. A cursed item. A merit without application.
The assessment held at least until he had died.
He lowered his arm, rolled his wrist once, and let his hand fall back to his side. He cleared the thought the same way he cleared everything else—by moving.
There were more immediate priorities.
There was no window in the room.
Will turned away from the inactive holo screen and moved toward the small pile of clothes he had prepared the night before, stacked neatly on the edge of the dresser. The room contained exactly what the housing allocation listed and nothing beyond it: a bed, a dresser, a table, and a chair. All of it secondhand but standardized, refurbished and issued rather than scavenged. Surfaces were smooth where they'd been sanded down and resealed. Corners were reinforced. Everything fit tightly into its place.
They were on the seventy-fourth floor.
The building never went fully quiet. He could feel it more than hear it—the low vibration through the floor, steady and constant. Power cycling through the structure. Elevators moving somewhere below. Air systems adjusting output as the city shifted toward morning activity. The sound was familiar enough that he only noticed it when he stopped to think about it.
In the last hundred and twenty five years, humanity had rebuilt.
Not by reclaiming the old world, but by adapting to the new one. Technology hadn't vanished after the System arrived. It had been reshaped. Engineering changed to function alongside ki and the Dao, rewriting assumptions that no longer applied. Power systems accounted for ambient energy. Materials were designed to hold, resist, or ignore ki as needed. Infrastructure followed rules that hadn't existed before.
Once the foundations were in place, growth had come quickly. Mortals adapted faster than anyone had expected. Food production stabilized as soon as cultivation-aware agriculture took hold. Crops grew reliably when managed correctly, yields scaling with technique rather than land alone. Birth rates followed just as easily. As long as civilization held, people lived, ate, and had children without much difficulty.
The cities that emerged afterward were the kind humanity had once imagined in its past. Vertical. Dense. Efficient. Actual cities people lived in. At the same time, every structure was built with survival as a baseline requirement.
This was a D-rank city.
Roughly two hundred thousand people lived here. Residential blocks stacked above transit corridors and industrial levels, all arranged to keep response times short and movement controlled. Small by modern standards. Complete.
The technology reflected that ranking. Everything here was third-rate—reliable, standardized, and proven—but two full generations behind what S- and A-ranked cities operated with. Those cities supported populations in the tens of millions and ran cutting-edge ki-tech, advanced Dao modeling, and adaptive systems that shifted in real time.
Here, systems favored consistency. Updates came slowly. Nothing ran at the edge unless it had to.
The skyscraper itself was constructed from industrial ki-metal alloy refined from D-rank ores. The material was heavier than higher-grade variants, built thick and layered. Structural supports ran through the core in redundant bands, designed to endure long-term strain rather than peak impact.
Defense systems were integrated directly into the city's framework. Anti-air missile arrays were recessed into the upper tiers. Point-defense platforms tracked sky beasts through ki-signature recognition rather than predictive Dao paths. Electrified perimeter walls and automated cannon turrets formed overlapping coverage zones, calibrated for sustained defense.
Everything operated through ki-assisted systems.
Technology alone wasn't what kept the city intact.
That responsibility belonged to the cultivators.
At the mortal grading scale, the city was considered secure. It stood in what had once been the Americas, one of the regions humanity still controlled in a meaningful way. Control now meant fortified population centers—isolated strongholds scattered across the world, holding only a fraction of the land humanity once claimed.
The cultivators stationed here were mortal-grade. Enough to deter incursions. Enough to respond quickly when something slipped through. Enough to keep two hundred thousand people alive. The ambient ki supported basic cultivation, but it was thin compared to high-density zones. Progress here was steady and regulated.
The Ascended didn't remain in places like this.
They gathered in what had once been Australia, where ki density peaked and danger scaled with it. That was also where the Broken Mandate of Earth was located.
Will knew that for a fact.
When they had betrayed him—when she had betrayed him—he had shattered the Mandate in his final moments. The act had been deliberate. Whatever followed hadn't mattered to him then.
He had assumed there wouldn't be an Earth left afterward.
Mandates weren't meant to be broken. What followed when one shattered was rarely documented. By the time outcomes could be measured, he had already been gone.
Or so he had believed.
The fact that Earth still existed registered when his memories returned. Not as relief. Not as something worth lingering on. Just a fact.
It hadn't erased the planet.
It had erased him.
Two hundred years followed.
Then he had been born again.
Will took a slow breath and steadied himself.
Even as a mortal, the laws of heaven still applied. Ki responded to intent. Bloodlust could leak if left unchecked.
He realized he had let it slip.
The air around him felt tighter for a moment, then eased as he brought his thoughts back under control. The day of bonding was approaching. The path to cultivation was opening.
The path ahead was simple.
He would reach the apex again.
Or he would die.
And if he ascended—
there would be blood.
Ascension was only the next step. One of many.
He was still at the beginning.
Will shifted his weight, the movement automatic, aligning his stance without conscious thought. When he had first stepped onto the path of cultivation, he hadn't been prepared for it. He hadn't been one of the blessed children of heaven—the ones the System had whisked away when the world phased, taken somewhere else for a year of guided training and protection.
He had stayed behind.
When cultivation had finally been placed in his hands, it had been done without ceremony. A basic cultivation manual. An F-grade mortal weapon. A short explanation of the rules, followed by an unspoken assumption that he would figure out the rest on his own.
Good fucking luck.
Much of what went wrong after that had come from ignorance. He simply hadn't known what questions to ask, or what mistakes would matter later. Cultivation was something he learned while already under pressure, already fighting to survive.
Not all of it had been accidental.
Some choices had been deliberate. He had taken shortcuts where he thought he could afford them, prioritizing speed and immediate strength over balance and depth. At the time, it had seemed reasonable. Necessary.
His foundation had paid the price.
Those flaws had carried forward anyway—through ascension and beyond—but they had never stopped accumulating.
Will drew in a slow breath and let it out again. Dying had been bad. Painful. Costly. Not something he would ever welcome.
But it had forced a reset.
This time, he had knowledge. Perspective. Time.
This time, he would build it properly.
Something on the table caught his eye.
A lily stood in a reused glass container, placed slightly off-center. The glass was cool to the touch, its rim marked by shallow scratches that caught the overhead light. Water filled the bottom, clear enough to show the stem bending gently near the base.
The petals were white, smooth, and firm. Their surfaces held a soft sheen, and one carried a faint crease from being handled earlier. The flower kept its shape, open and orderly, each petal set where it had settled.
A light scent spread through the room, clean and sharp. It registered as soon as he breathed in and stayed present in the recycled air.
His sister's favorite.
She had given it to him the day before, holding it out with both hands and not letting go until he took it. Seven years old, stubborn and direct, already comfortable telling people what she expected. She'd told him to keep it alive, tone firm, brows drawn together like the matter was already decided. When he hadn't moved quickly enough, she'd reached past him, slid the glass toward the center of the table herself, and nodded once, satisfied.
He remembered the cool dampness of the stem against his palm, the slick transfer of water as he adjusted his grip. She'd watched closely, arms planted on her hips, eyes tracking every movement like she was overseeing something important.
The building's hum carried through the room, steady and layered. Air moved through the vents in measured cycles. The lily stood where she had placed it.
The scent lingered longer than he expected.
The flower brought his thoughts to her first. From there, the association continued, sliding back without effort, past the present and into his first life.
To the girl. Then the woman.
The lily remained on the table, unchanged. His thoughts moved on from it, passing through familiar ground without stopping—the rebuilding, the fighting, the climb.
They kept going.
To the day before things changed.