The last thing Kyle Park ever did was reach into a bag of Flamin' Hot Cheese Puffs at 3 AM.
That's it. He reached, grabbed one, put it in his mouth, and choked, and then he died on his couch in his boxers and a hoodie that hadn't been washed since he'd last had a reason to leave the apartment, which had been about eleven days ago. His last coherent thought, best as he could reconstruct it later, had been something like huh, in the flat tone of someone who drops their phone and watches it fall and doesn't quite reach in time.
Then nothing. Then something.
He woke up on stone.
Cold and gritty under his palms, ceiling above him that was also stone, and the light was wrong, orange and flickering, the kind that came from actual fire instead of a bulb, and the room smelled like dust and something vaguely biological he didn't want to think about. He lay there for about four seconds and then sat up.
His hands were different. Smaller and thinner, a kid's hands, and he brought one close to his face and looked at it. Someone else's hand. He flexed the fingers and they moved fine, still his in the sense that they were under his control, just not in the sense that he'd ever owned them before.
"Young master." A reedy, urgent voice from across the room. "Young master, you must get up, the ceremony is in two hours and you haven't bathed and your dress clothes need pressing and —"
An old man, white-haired and thin, hovered next to a wardrobe with the expression of someone who had experienced this exact problem enough times that full alarm was no longer available to him and he'd settled into a permanent operational anxiety instead.
"Young master," he said again. "Please."
Okay. Dead. Obviously dead, because this was not his apartment and that was not his hand and the room was made entirely of stone and predated electricity by a few centuries. Something had happened after the dying part, and he wasn't a stranger to this kind of scenario because he'd watched enough anime to know the shape of it and played enough games that the phrase new game wasn't as terrifying as it might have been for someone who'd spent less of their life doing exactly this. "Yeah, okay," he said. "Give me a minute."
The old man looked like he wanted to explain that minutes were not available but settled for hovering.
Stone walls, candles, a bed he'd apparently rolled off at some point in the night, a window with wooden shutters cracked open letting in actual bird sounds, real birds, not recordings or traffic. He got up and the new body moved fine, a little stiff and underslept but structurally sound, and he caught himself in a mirror propped against the wall. A kid, dark-haired, carrying the specific look of someone who hadn't been sleeping well for a while.
"What's your name?" he asked the old man.
"Gren, young master. As it has been for the past nine years."
"Right." He'd known that, or the body had known it, the memories sitting there thin and distant like he'd read a summary of this person's life rather than lived it. Kael Ashford, third son of a minor noble house, sixteen years old. The memories came with a framework for this world too. At sixteen, every person went through an Awakening ceremony where a large stone assessed your potential and a Crest manifested on your body, a glowing mark that determined your element, your rank, and your ceiling. Most people got F through C. An A-Rank was a prodigy. An S-Rank showed up maybe once a generation and everyone made a big deal about it. Above that were the SSS-Rank Sovereigns, seven of them on the entire continent, each one running a territory the size of a small country, and the gap between them and everyone else was the kind of gap that entire wars had been fought over and lost.
The ceremony Gren kept hovering about was that ceremony. Today was that day, and Kael Ashford's family expected nothing from him, which from what the memories showed had been their working assumption for some time.
He found the bathroom, splashed water on his face, and looked at himself in the small mirror above the basin. Tired. He could work with tired.
The Awakening ceremony was held in a stone hall the size of a high school gymnasium, lit by torches and packed with about three hundred teenagers and their families all dressed in their best, the air smelling like candle smoke and nervous sweat. He stood in line for the Ashford household, which was just him.
His father was somewhere in the gallery above. His older brother Dalen was there too, already A-Rank from last year's ceremony, already the obvious heir and already carrying the expression of someone who had exceeded expectations his whole life and found it completely natural. He hadn't looked up to find either of them.
One by one, teenagers stepped up to a raised platform in the center of the hall and placed their hands on a large carved stone, and after a few seconds a Crest manifested, a glow on the hand or chest or forehead, and an examiner called out the element and rank while families in the gallery either cheered or went quiet depending on what they heard. A girl two spots ahead got an A-Rank Wind Crest and the gallery went loud. The boy right ahead of him got F-Rank Earth and there was polite, brief applause, and his family in the gallery made no sound at all.
He watched this while he waited and thought about how the whole system was basically designed to sort people at sixteen and then keep them sorted forever, which he'd seen in probably a dozen games and twice as many anime and it was always the same. The ranking was the whole point and everything else was decoration, and there was definitely a black market for the Catalyst materials you needed to break through to higher ranks, probably run by someone in this very hall right now standing close enough to shake hands with the examiners, and whoever it was had probably made more money this morning than most F-Rank fighters saw in a year, and
His name was called.
He stepped up to the platform and put both hands on the Awakening Stone, cold and a little rough under his palms, and waited. The hall went quiet the way it did when people expected nothing interesting to happen.
The stone didn't glow. No light appeared on his hands or chest. The examiner waited. Still nothing, and the whispering started in the gallery.
Then, in the space directly behind his eyes, text appeared.
[Standard Crest Awakening... Failed]
[Anomaly Detected]
[SSS-Rank Talent Awakened: SOVEREIGN GENESIS]
[Ability: Sovereign Mark]
[Evolution Limit: NONE]
[Mark Capacity: INFINITE]
He read it once and then again.
SSS-Rank. Okay. Sovereign Mark. Sure. Evolution Limit: NONE. Mark Capacity: INFINITE.
The last time he'd seen the word INFINITE on a screen it had been a loading bar for an open-world survival game that crashed before the title screen finished, and he'd waited four hours for that download and the developers had eventually patched it but he'd already refunded it by then and he'd always been a little annoyed about that actually, the reviews said the late game was genuinely good and
He stepped back from the stone.
The examiner looked at his book and wrote something. "NULL classification," he said.
From the gallery above, his father's voice came down before the whispering could fully spread. "The arrangements are already in place. Kael will take up residence at the eastern estate, effective immediately." No particular feeling in it, the tone of someone who had prepared the sentence in advance and was relieved to finally use it, and a woman said something quiet next to him and his father said "it's decided, Mira" and that was the end of that.
Two boys standing near the left wall, both wearing the pressed coats of minor noble houses, watched him step off the platform and one of them leaned toward the other. "Ashford's third son," the first one said, not bothering much with volume. "Heard he had no talent. Looks like that was right." The second one said "NULL" the way you'd say broken, and added that bringing him to the ceremony had been almost cruel, and a girl nearby glanced over and then looked away fast.
The examiner had technically done his job fine. The Crest hadn't shown up on the stone and NULL was the correct call and both boys had already turned back to watch the next student, the topic of Kael Ashford closed. Something with eggs was coming through the hall from somewhere outside, rich and warm, and he hadn't eaten since the bread this morning and the bread this morning had been produced by someone who had made a series of active choices at every stage of the process to arrive at something technically edible.
He kept walking.
Back in his room that night he sat on the edge of the bed and pulled up the notification again, clean in his vision like a paused screen.
Sovereign Mark. Evolution Limit: NONE. Mark Capacity: INFINITE.
Every other person in that hall today had gotten a Crest with an element, a rank, and a ceiling, and the ceiling mattered most because the system was built so people stayed roughly where they'd started, give or take a few ranks of serious work and expensive Catalyst materials that commoners couldn't afford anyway. His notification had displayed NONE where the ceiling was supposed to be, which was either a glitch or the most interesting thing that had ever happened to him, and given that his previous life had ended with a cheese puff at 3 AM, the bar wasn't high.
He poked the wall and nothing happened, so touching random objects wasn't the mechanic. There was probably a mechanic. He'd figure it out.
Gren knocked and came in with folded clothes for the morning. The carriage to the borderland estate was leaving at dawn.
"Gren. What's the borderland estate actually like?"
Gren set the clothes down and considered this for a beat that lasted slightly too long. "It has considerable potential, young master."
"How bad is it."
"The eastern wing has a roof."
"The eastern wing specifically."
"Yes, young master."
He lay back and the ceiling looked the same as all the other ceilings he'd looked at today, stone and slightly uneven where the mortar had settled. His bags were already stacked by the door, two cases with a rope around them, packed before the ceremony, before anyone knew the result, because they'd already decided and the ceremony had just been paperwork. He sat with that for a second and then moved on because dwelling wasn't going to change the bags.
He pulled the notification up one more time. SOVEREIGN GENESIS. Evolution Limit: NONE. Outside, past the shutters, something in the night made a sound he didn't recognize, low and carrying through the stone walls, and whatever made it was bigger than it sounded.
His stomach made a sound too. The egg smell from the ceremony hall had never turned into actual eggs and neither had dinner, because Gren had apparently not been informed that the exile also needed to eat before the exile started.
He closed his eyes.
New game.