Days passed.
Then weeks.
Life in Neon Eden did not change because Aira had reached Level 1. No hidden doors opened. No opportunities appeared. The undercity did not reward survival—it merely punished failure a little less when you learned how to endure.
Mara continued working herself raw at the fabrication plant, coming home with trembling hands and synthetic grease permanently embedded beneath her nails. The smell followed her everywhere: hot metal, ozone, cheap disinfectant. It clung to the walls, to the bedding, to Aira's clothes. Even as an infant, Aira memorized that smell. It was the scent of exhaustion.
Food came in nutrient blocks and recycled protein slurry. Water was rationed, filtered just enough to keep people functional but never comfortable. Power outages rolled through Sector Thirteen every third or fourth night, plunging entire blocks into darkness while the upper districts glowed like artificial stars in the distance.
Aira learned quickly that crying changed nothing.
So she didn't.
That alone marked her as strange.
Infants in the undercity screamed constantly—hungry, cold, afraid. Aira watched them with quiet eyes, absorbing patterns. Crying drew attention. Attention brought inspections. Inspections brought questions. Questions brought records.
Records were dangerous.
She learned to endure hunger without sound, discomfort without movement. When her muscles cramped from being left too long in one position, she stretched slowly, carefully, timing her motions between Mara's exhausted shifts of sleep.
The system observed everything.
It did not comment.
That, too, was new.
In her first life, the system had narrated every sensation with clinical cruelty, converting pain into metrics, despair into charts. Now, it watched in silence, logging data without judgment.
After twenty-seven consecutive days of sustained deprivation—measured not by hunger alone but by stress markers, environmental instability, and neural suppression—the system spoke again.
[Endurance Milestone Logged.]
[Stability Maintained Under Persistent Disadvantage.]
Aira felt it—not power, but density. As if something within her had compacted, becoming harder to fracture.
"No level yet," she murmured internally.
[Correct.]
"How close?"
The pause this time was shorter.
[Progress: 46.8% toward Level 2.]
Aira exhaled slowly.
So that was how it worked.
Not kills. Not achievements. Not heroic acts.
Time. Suffering. Persistence.
Levels were earned in silence.
By the time Aira's body reached the physical equivalent of six months, her mind had already mapped most of Sector Thirteen.
She listened to conversations through thin walls, cataloging voices, learning names she would pretend not to know later. She memorized the schedules of patrol drones, the rhythm of the city's maintenance cycles, the subtle pitch changes in the hum of the power grid that warned of impending outages.
The system assisted—but only when asked.
"Analyze sound variance," Aira requested one night, as distant sirens echoed unevenly through the district.
[Analyzing…]
[Conclusion: Security drill in Upper Sector. No threat to Sector Thirteen.]
"Pattern?"
[Upper Sectors increase drills quarterly preceding policy shifts or conflict escalations.]
Aira's fingers curled slightly.
"War preparation," she said.
[Probability: 61.3%.]
Three years.
The world had announced it openly—another cyber world beyond Neon Eden's dimensional boundaries had declared intent to annex, assimilate, or erase. The upper districts spoke of it in terms of defense contracts and profit margins. The lower sectors spoke of it in hushed tones, afraid of conscription waves and system audits.
Aira thought of evolution.
Of cyber races.
Of choices that could not be undone.
She was Level 1.
She had nine more levels to go before she could even choose.
Mara noticed the difference eventually.
Not immediately—people who were always tired rarely noticed small changes—but one night, as she rocked Aira after a power outage, she frowned.
"You don't… cry," she said softly.
Aira stared back with wide, unfocused eyes, carefully blank.
"That's not normal," Mara whispered, though there was no fear in her voice. Only confusion. "Babies are supposed to cry."
Aira did not respond.
She let her body relax just enough to mimic sleep.
Mara sighed, pressing her forehead lightly against Aira's.
"Maybe that's a good thing," she murmured. "Less pain for you."
Aira almost corrected her.
No, she thought. Just a different kind.
At eight months, the system flagged a warning.
[Neural Development Anomaly Detected.]
Aira was sitting on the floor, surrounded by scavenged components Mara had brought home—discarded circuit shards, cracked data wafers, useless to anyone else. Aira liked to touch them, to feel the faint residual charge humming beneath inert surfaces.
"What kind of anomaly?" she asked calmly.
[Cognitive processing exceeds expected parameters by 412%.]
Aira tilted her head.
"That's going to get noticed."
[Affirmative.]
"Can you suppress it?"
The system hesitated.
That hesitation carried weight.
[Partial suppression possible. Full suppression would destabilize shared growth trajectory.]
Aira considered.
"Then throttle," she decided. "Limit expression, not capacity."
[Command accepted.]
For the first time since her rebirth, the system responded without qualifiers.
Something shifted.
Not in her body—in the bond between them.
Aira felt it clearly now: the system was no longer merely attached to her soul. It was listening.
Level 2 arrived on a night when the city was burning.
Not all of it—just a block three streets away. A labor riot had turned violent after an automated enforcement unit misclassified a worker as noncompliant and executed him publicly.
The undercity erupted.
Sirens screamed. Drones descended. Gunfire lit the sky in jagged flashes of blue and red.
Mara held Aira tight, crouched beneath a reinforced support beam as the building shook.
Aira felt fear ripple through her body—real fear this time, sharp and immediate. Her heart raced. Her lungs struggled against the dust-choked air.
She endured.
She endured while walls cracked.
She endured while people screamed.
She endured while the system tracked every spike of cortisol, every tremor in her muscles.
And when the noise finally faded, when silence returned like a wound stitched too quickly—
[Level Up Achieved.]
[Level: 2 / 10]
Aira closed her eyes.
There was no euphoria.
Only certainty.
Two chapters of her life.
Two levels earned through survival.
Eight more to go.
And when she reached the end—
She would choose what to become.
And this time, neither the world nor the system would choose for her.