The Awakening Center in downtown Seoul — Georgia had been built seven years after the surge.
Before that, awakenings happened wherever they happened. In hospitals, in church basements, in government tents erected in parking lots. The process was the same regardless of location, when a person turned eighteen, their mana sensitivity peaked, and either the core formed or it didn't, but the conditions were chaotic and the early years of documentation were a mess of inconsistent data and regional variation.
The Seoul — Georgia center changed that. Built on a plot of land where a shopping mall used to stand, it was the largest awakening facility on the eastern seaboard. Twelve stories of white stone and reinforced mana-resistant glass that caught the morning light and threw it back in ways that made the building look like it was lit from inside. The GHA had spared nothing on the architecture. There was a reason for that. An awakening center wasn't just a processing facility. It was a statement. It was the government telling its citizens that the system worked, that there was structure to what had happened to the world, that the terror of thirty years ago had been organized into something manageable.
Every eighteen year old in a four county radius came here.
Moon had been dreaming about this building for as long as he could remember.
Not the building exactly but what it represented. He had walked past it dozens of times over the years — on the way to the hospital to visit his mother, on grocery runs with Kira sitting on his shoulders when she was small enough for that, once on a detour he took deliberately just to stand outside the glass doors and look in. He remembered being twelve and pressing his palm flat against the exterior wall after hours when no one was around, feeling the faint hum of mana that the building's enchantments gave off and wondering what it would feel like when it was finally his turn.
He had a very specific image in his head of who he would be when he walked out of those doors.
Not S rank. He wasn't delusional. But B, maybe. C at the absolute floor. Enough to join a real guild, enough to take on mid-tier dungeons, enough to send money home every month without counting it first. His mother's treatment fully covered. Kira in a better school. The particular expression his mother wore when she thought no one was watching — that quiet, exhausted worry she tried to hide behind smiles — gone from her face permanently.
That was the dream. It had been the dream since he was old enough to understand what the surge had taken from his family and what an awakening could give back.
He arrived at the center two hours early.
The lobby was already populated when he pushed through the glass doors — other eighteen year olds sitting in rows of clean white chairs, some alone, some in clusters of friends, most of them vibrating with a specific kind of nervous energy that Moon recognized because he was full of it too. Staff in GHA uniforms moved between registration desks with practiced efficiency. The walls displayed rotating screens showing awakening statistics, rank distributions, guild recruitment announcements. Somewhere above a speaker system played ambient music that was presumably meant to be calming and achieved roughly the opposite.
Moon took a number and sat.
He watched.
The ceremony itself was organized in groups of twenty. Each group was called into the main hall, a vast circular room centered around the awakening platform and its crystal orb, and processed in sequence. Moon had read about the orb extensively — had read about everything extensively, in the way people research things they've been waiting for — and knew the mechanics well. The orb acted as a mana conductor and amplifier. When an awakening-age human placed their hands on it, it drew out and measured their nascent core, translating the result into the system display above the pedestal. Affinity, talent, rank. Three numbers that defined the rest of your life, produced in under thirty seconds.
He watched the first group get called in and tried to read their faces when they came back out.
Most looked stunned in varying degrees of pleasant or unpleasant. A girl came out crying and her friends rushed her and from the way they were crying too Moon guessed it was good news. A tall boy came out with the careful blank expression of someone processing something disappointing and sat back down alone. An older staff member brought him water and said something quiet and the boy nodded without really hearing it.
Moon noted the rank boards updating in real time on the wall screens. E ranks, D ranks, a C+ that made a small crowd of waiting family members outside the glass partition erupt. One B rank that drew actual applause from strangers.
He watched all of it and felt the dream solidify in his chest like something physical.
'My turn.'
By the time his number was called he had been sitting for nearly three hours. He stood up, straightened his jacket, and walked to the hall entrance where a staff member with a clipboard checked his name.
"Moon Jae-won?"
"Yes."
"Group seven. Right through here."
The main hall was bigger inside than the lobby suggested. The ceiling climbed high enough that the upper edges blurred into shadow, and the awakening platform at the center was elevated on a shallow stage so that everyone in the surrounding gallery could see clearly. The crystal orb caught the hall's light and held it, perfectly transparent, waiting.
Nineteen other people filed in around him and took positions in the gallery. Moon stood among them and felt his heartbeat in his throat.
The ceremony official introduced herself and began the standard address — the history of the awakening system, the GHA's support resources for newly awakened hunters, the process they were about to undergo. Moon had memorized this speech from recordings online. He didn't hear a word of it.
He was watching the orb.
One by one the names were called. Each person climbed to the platform, placed their hands on the orb, and the display lit up above them. Moon watched each one with the focused attention of someone studying for an exam. Fire affinity, E rank. Water affinity, D rank. Wind affinity, C rank — the boy pumped his fist once, contained himself, stepped down with his jaw tight against a smile. Earth affinity, E+ rank. On and on, the orb pulling color and light from each person in turn, the display faithfully reporting what the mana found inside them.
Every single person walked off that platform with something.
Then the official called his name.
Moon climbed the steps.
Up close the orb was cold in a way that had nothing to do with temperature — a stillness that seemed to come from inside the glass rather than from the air around it. He stood before it and took a breath and placed both hands on the surface.
He waited for the warmth he'd read about. The sensation of mana recognizing mana, the core responding to the orb's draw, the moment of contact that every awakened person described differently but always described as undeniable.
The orb went dark.
Not a weak reading. Not a low color. The light inside it simply stopped existing, as though his hands had switched something off rather than on. The ambient hum of the hall dropped out. Several people in the gallery shifted. The official stepped forward.
The display panel flickered.
[Affinity: Void]
[Talent: Void Step]
[Rank: FFF]
Moon read it once. Read it again. Then he heard the murmuring begin in the gallery behind him like weather moving in from a distance. He heard someone say FFF out loud in the tone of someone repeating a word from a foreign language and the official clear her throat and say his awakening was complete in a voice carefully stripped of everything.
He stepped down from the platform.
He walked out of the hall. Through the lobby. Through the glass doors. Into the afternoon air where the light was ordinary and the city moved around him with complete indifference to what had just happened.
He stood on the sidewalk outside the building he had dreamed about for years and looked at his hands.
His mother's treatment bill was due in eleven days. Kira needed new shoes. The landlord had called twice this week already. Sera wasn't picking up her phone. The dream he'd carried since he was twelve years old had just been handed back to him in pieces and the world had not paused even slightly to acknowledge it.
He stood there for a long time.
Then something settled in him. Not hope exactly. Not anger either. Something quieter and more permanent than both — the particular resolve of someone who has run out of alternatives and found that strangely clarifying.
He looked back at the center one last time. At the rank boards still updating in the lobby windows. At the world that had just told him he had nothing to offer it.
"I will make enough money from them no matter what."