"Heh, isn't this truly laughable. The gatekeeper of fate seeking help from the killer of fate," Merlin, a humanoid figure draped in robes and clutching a gnarled staff, spoke with quiet mockery as he bathed in the pale ethereal light surrounding him.
His gaze drifted from the black-haired boy to the great gate of magenta light yawning open behind him, and then back to the one the boy had arrived through.
"Very well. I see no fate written for you, boy, but simply for the thrill of it, I shall allow your entry."
The boy, naked and bewildered, understood none of it. Merlin's words may as well have been wind. He stood in silence as the old figure continued, speaking to no one but himself.
"Welcome to the Cluster of 169 Worlds, the threat to the entire universe. Go. Ascend to the highest reaches of the cosmos, for at its peak lies omnipotence itself."
Merlin swept his staff in a wide arc making the world shift. Light bent and folded, and in an instant the boy was elsewhere, standing beneath the amber glow of a street lamp, an unfamiliar place settling around him.
'Hh...'
He turned slowly, dark eyes scanning his surroundings, understanding nothing, only that everything had changed.
****
Years passed.
"Why are you here?"
Atiya stared at the girl. Zelaine was half-asleep, clearly having just wiped a trail of drool from her chin a moment before.
She offered a massive, unashamed yawn in response.
She seemed to think about the question for a long beat before answering. "Your mother told me to have lunch here, go to KFC, and if time allows, accompany you to the Awakening Center."
"It's for the Awakening? Then let's go." Atiya brushed the rest of her list aside, already moving toward the door.
"Hey, I'm hungry!" Zelaine protested. She snatched his hand. He tried to pull away with a smile, but she didn't budge. He frowned, feeling the pressure of her fingers.
Her grip is really strong.
"We can eat after I've awakened, right? My treat," Atiya tried to compromise.
Zelaine flashed a grin, dragging him back toward the kitchen instead. "And what if you awaken a shitty Yaicraft, babe? What then?"
"Haha, don't worry. I won't be a sore loser. It's just part of life."
"Yeah, right. I remember you failing to awaken two years ago," she shot back. "You scammed me at KFC to mourn your loss."
"You ate thirty buckets! On a Wednesday!" Atiya barked. "What do you think I am, a money-printing machine?"
Despite the complaining, he still ended up at the stove, cooking for her.
It took ten plates of fried rice before she finally agreed to move.
They climbed into the back seat. The driver glanced over his shoulder once the doors had settled, his voice carrying the same even politeness as always.
"Master Atiya, where to?"
"KFC—" Zelaine started.
Thwack.
Atiya's hand flashed out and smacked the back of her scarlet head before the word could fully escape.
"Ugh." Her head twitched with the impact, a short, annoyed grunt slipping out.
"Please, take us to the Awakening Center." Atiya held up his phone toward the driver. "The address is here."
"Understood. Let us depart."
The car pulled away, and the cabin finally fell into the heavy silence Atiya had been waiting for. Zelaine had already logged into a gacha game on her phone to grind through her daily quests.
Atiya, however, couldn't focus. He stared out the window, his jaw tight.
"I will actually kill you if you awaken some bullshit, all-knowing, all-powerful Yaicraft," Zelaine said, without glancing up. Her thumbs never stopped moving across the screen.
Atiya smirked, leaning back into the seat. "My, my, Zelaine, my love. Even if I get that kind of power, don't worry. You'll still have a spot in my harem. One of those girls from the novels whose only job is to scream the main character's name and fall over themselves to please him."
Pfft.
He'd said it specifically to get a reaction, but Zelaine just dissolved into a fit of giggles.
"A harem? You? Hah. Please. I distinctly remember you having a noodle between your legs."
The grin vanished from Atiya's face. He delivered a swift, irritated punch to her shoulder.
"Ugh!" Zelaine recoiled, rubbing her arm, face twisting into a mock pout. "What kind of main character raises his hand against a woman over a comment like that?"
"The kind who's tired of your mouth," Atiya muttered, even as his heart thudded hard in his chest, half from annoyance, half from the Center drawing closer.
After a thirty-minute drive, they pulled up to the Awakening Center, a towering multi-story complex that loomed over the surrounding street.
As they stepped out of the car, Atiya felt the weight of the air shift. He was a natural shut-in, someone who only ventured outside for strict necessity or the rare craving for fresh air, running on a permanently low social battery.
Zelaine had none of that problem. She was wide open, rude, already sweeping her eyes across the crowd as if the place belonged to her.
They approached the reception desk. The air there was cool and carried the sharp, clean scent of expensive floor wax.
"Atiya Pharsa," he said to the man behind the counter. "My mother made an appointment."
The receptionist froze. "...Pharsa?"
He fidgeted, his eyes darting to Atiya for a second longer than was polite, before scrambling to check the digital guest list. "Ah! Yes. Right here."
Atiya didn't flinch.
He was used to that reaction. The name Pharsa carried weight and history that he didn't bothered to know.
They were the ones who had come closest to claiming the title of Eighth Great Family, accumulating power, territory, and the quiet fear of the rest.
Yet in the end they had stalled at seven, because of an incident where except for two people all members perished overnight.
Now the name was a relic of almost.
"This way, sir." Another man appeared, bowing slightly, and moved to escort him toward the awakening rooms.
As they walked away, the man at the counter watched Atiya's back, his thoughts turning. 'There were only two Pharsas left in the entire world. Who is this kid?'
Zelaine trailed behind them, her footsteps echoing softly against the sterile hallway floor.
"Does it feel good?" she whispered, leaning toward Atiya's ear.
"Being treated with the respect befitting a main character? You really shouldn't awaken anything powerful, you know. Remember, I'm the protagonist here. Don't go stealing my spotlight."
Atiya didn't look at her. "You are noisy."
They reached the heavy double doors of the chamber. A guard stepped forward and blocked Zelaine's path.
The rules were strict: only candidates were permitted inside the Awakening Room. Zelaine gave Atiya one last look over her shoulder, something caught between a joke and a dare, before the doors hissed shut and left her alone in the hallway.
The room inside was a large, state-of-the-art lecture hall, outfitted with tiered seating and recessed lighting that bathed everything in a calm, artificial glow.
Atiya slipped into a seat in the very back row and tried to disappear into the air.
Then the lecturer stepped onto the podium.
His stomach did a slow flip.
'Mom is messing with me, isn't she?'
The woman at the front didn't bother with an introduction. She didn't offer a smile or a greeting.
She simply looked out over the students with the same dispassionate care one might use to scan a field of trash.
"What is Yai?" she asked. Her voice was like a scalpel.
Atiya leaned back.
'Starting the lecture without even a hello. How very like you.'
"Yai," the Professor continued, not waiting for a single hand to rise, "is the fundamental energy source that allows a harnesser to manifest a Yaicraft. With it, you become something more than human, able to manipulate the laws of nature."
'If she has enough time to give a lecture here, why couldn't she just drive me?' Atiya wondered, slumping further into his seat.
"And you might wonder what a Yaicraft is..." Inteja's voice cut through the hall. She sighed, looking genuinely exhausted by her own presentation.
"Actually, let's just cut to the chase. This is getting boring. You're here to awaken. Think of a Yaicraft as your own system, like in those litrpg novels. An extension of power with specific attributes. Simple enough."
'Yep. Let's just get on with it.'
The room was packed with candidates, among them at least one scion of the Seven Great Families was there.
Under normal circumstances that alone would have demanded a degree of careful handling, nobody wanted to invite the wrath of a Great House.
But here, even they stayed silent.
Everyone knew who Inteja was.
She wasn't just a legend.
She was a world class pain in the ass.
"Mother." Atiya's voice carried across the hall as he approached the front. "Why am I the first one to take the test?"
He stood a few feet from a glowing glass orb. Inteja leaned against the podium beside it, casually lighting a cigarette.
"Call me Instructor," she snapped, exhaling a slow cloud of gray smoke. "And be grateful, brat. I pulled a lot of strings to get you the lead spot so you wouldn't have to sit through everyone else's failure."
Atiya looked pointedly at the large 'NO SMOKING' sign bolted to the wall behind her. Then he looked back at her, his expression flat.
"I am truly moved by your grace, Lord Mother," he said.
"Hurry up and get to it," she muttered, waving him toward the orb.
He didn't argue. He stepped forward and pressed his palm against the cold, smooth surface.
The green orb flickered, then erupted in blinding light.
'It's about time,' Inteja thought, her eyes narrowing through the cigarette smoke. 'I've invested far too much in you for this to fail now.'
She watched the green light dissolve into a swirling vortex of magenta Yai. The energy glowed and roared around Atiya in a way that felt unnatural, almost violent.
Behind him, the other candidates leaned forward in stunned silence. A swirl of that magnitude and color could only mean one thing, an Abstract Yaicraft.
Complicated and rare.
'Give me a body manipulation Yaicraft,' Atiya commanded silently, his thoughts turning practical the moment they could. 'Then my height will finally increase.'
He was capped at five foot four, and he hated it.
His mother studied the light with a profound stillness. She understood the process better than anyone in the room.
To obtain a skill, a harnesser had to build the framework from scratch on an internal interface, coding it piece by piece before infusing the Yai.
Inteja's smirk deepened as she read the specific frequency of the magenta light dancing across her son's face.
'You really are unlucky, aren't you?' A short, sharp huff of a laugh escaped her. 'Of course you are. You're my son.'
If the formula was perfect, a vision would follow showing the details of a final task, required to lock the skill into reality.
Then, as quickly as it had begun, the swirling stopped. The violent magenta light collapsed inward and vanished into nothing.
The hall fell into a vacuum of silence.
In the observation booth, the examiners were frantic, their faces lit by the scrolling cascade of data across their screens.
"How is this possible?" one stammered. "He just awakened, and he's already clocked at Ascension 2?"
Inteja heard the whispers. Without a word, she reached out and took Atiya by the shoulder, her grip iron-firm.
"You want to leave, don't you?" she asked, her voice low.
Atiya looked at her, expression still blank despite the chaos stirring at his back. "I awakened, didn't I?"
"Yes, you did," Inteja said, her eyes fixed on his. "And it is a peculiar Yaicraft. One that is notoriously, agonizingly difficult to code even a single skill for."
"What is it?"
He wasn't particularly curious. He had no grand ambitions. He liked his shut-in life, the silence of his room, the simple tranquility of a day with nothing to do.
To him, a Yaicraft was a complication.
The vision of his mother who was obsessed with yaicraft.
"Space," Inteja answered.
An uproar broke out in the hall behind them. A boy who had just opened his eyes to the world of Yai had bypassed Ascension 1 entirely.
To the crowd, he was a prodigy. To the experts watching the data scroll, he was something closer to a miracle.
"You are Ascension 2 now, son," Inteja said, but her voice carried no pride in it.
Atiya's confusion sharpened slowly into something colder. In this world, ascension was earned through coding, through accumulating skills and tempering them with practice.
Each stage before the next offered its own set of foundational slots, easier frameworks, simpler formulas that formed the bedrock of everything built afterward.
There was a hard limit to how many skills a harnesser could hold before their next ascension, and that limit was fixed by where they started.
By skipping the first stage entirely, he hadn't gained anything. He had arrived at Ascension 2 with the ceiling of Ascension 2 and none of the floor beneath it.
The slots that should have belonged to him were simply gone.
He stood there, the noise of the hall washing over him, the full shape of it settling in his chest like a stone.
The skills meant for Ascension 1 had been taken from him before he ever had the chance to reach for them.
"I am basically a cripple, then," Atiya said. A small, tight smile touched his lips, but his eyes were beginning to burn with a rare, quiet anger.