[The next day.]
Kaelen woke up early.
He grabbed two crispy, synthetic dough sticks and a bowl of sweet soy-pudding from a street vendor on his commute. A cheap, simple solution for breakfast.
Stepping through the grand doors of the Neo-Veridia Astral Library, Kaelen navigated straight to his designated workstation.
Sector 1, Ground Floor.
The library was a massive architectural marvel spanning three primary levels, with the ground floor alone divided into eight massive sectors.
The ground floor primarily housed the most foundational Combat Arts and Aetheric manuals. The higher the floor, the more profound and deadly the ancient techniques recorded within.
However, Kaelen didn't have the security clearance to even step foot onto the second floor. His job was to manage his own little patch of low-level turf. The upper floors were naturally heavily guarded by the library's resident powerhouse Adepts.
Rows upon rows of basic combat manuals were arranged neatly on the towering steel shelves.
As a librarian, Kaelen naturally had free rein to browse these foundational texts. Now that he actually possessed the raw stats of a Half-Step Awakened, he planned to pick a combat art to practice seriously.
That way, if he inevitably encountered danger in this chaotic world, he wouldn't just be a durable punching bag.
Aether-Returning Palm...
Void-Tiger Saber Art...
House Vanguard Spear Art...
After his gaze swept over the dusty manuals lining his section, Kaelen finally pulled out an ancient, leather-bound book titled: Zephyr Blade Art.
There were countless techniques in the library, but Kaelen understood the core principle of not biting off more than you can chew. He wasn't greedy. He chose a single, reliable sword foundational text.
As for why he chose a sword art?
For no other reason than the fact that it was incredibly cool!
As a healthy, cultured young man, Kaelen naturally harbored the dream of being a peerless blademaster. Who wouldn't want to look incredibly aesthetic while slicing through problems?
A heart free of romance makes for a god-tier blademaster.
Of course, Kaelen didn't actually own a sword, nor was he allowed to swing live steel around a library filled with priceless artifacts. So, he could only hunker down silently in the corner of his booth and begin memorizing the sword katas and Aetheric circulation routes from the manual.
The original Kaelen had zero experience cultivating martial arts. So, despite his terrifying Half-Step Awakened cultivation base, he was still a complete novice in application.
However, his high-tier stats gave him an undeniable mental advantage. Memorizing and visualizing these basic techniques felt as easy as breathing.
It wasnt until noon that Kaelen finally stretched lazily, his spine popping in satisfaction as he closed the manual.
It was time to eat.
The library had its own subsidized cafeteria. The synthetic meals were surprisingly good and incredibly cheap. Kaelen managed to score a heavy plate of braised synth-pork over rice for less than three credits.
The very definition of a bargain.
"Sigh, when will these days ever end?"
"I feel like I'm going to develop severe clinical depression just scanning barcodes in this library every day."
While Kaelen happily shoveled braised pork into his mouth, his colleagues at the adjacent table looked absolutely miserable.
"What can we do? Our genetic aptitude is garbage. We're destined to be corporate wage slaves for life!"
"Just keep circulating your Aether. If we can somehow scrape our way to Level 3 of the Mortal Tier one day, maybe we can qualify for a decent private security job."
"Level 3 Mortal Tier? With my trash aptitude, my joints will give out before I reach it. I'll probably be stuck checking ID badges at a shopping mall by then."
"Sigh, it is what it is. Nobody asked us to be born with zero talent. The wage cage calls!"
Hearing his colleagues complaining bitterly behind him, Kaelen just shook his head, sipping his water.
He sighed internally. It seems this world is even more cutthroat than my previous one.
The strong dictated everything. Without strength, you were doomed to be crushed at the very bottom of the food chain forever.
Of course, this crushing existential dread had absolutely nothing to do with Kaelen anymore.
He didn't have any grand ideals or burning ambitions to rule the world. As long as he had hot meals, cold drinks, and could live a stable life, he was perfectly content.
Even though he was secretly a Half-Step Awakened master—a tier people literally killed for—Kaelen had zero intention of changing jobs.
He thought staying in the library was the perfect gig.
First, he had no interest in grinding for money. He had toiled in the corporate rat race for decades in his past life. Now that he was reborn, he just wanted to live a peaceful life and heavily embrace the art of slacking off.
Second, according to the System's initial warning, this was a High-Fantasy Dimension with a 'Catastrophic' danger level. Having read countless web novels in his previous life, Kaelen understood just how absurd the power scaling in these worlds could get.
If I go outside and try to show off my Half-Step stats, who knows if some ancient Awakened grandmaster will just pop out of the sky and vaporize me for breathing too loudly?
The outside world is a PvP zone. It's much better for me to stay in the safe zone of this library.
A life of endless fighting and screaming power-ups was not what Kaelen wanted.
Third, his cheat was incredibly unreliable!
Kaelen still hadn't figured out what triggered his glitchy System. His massive power spike had been a complete accident. If he went outside and picked fights, he had no guaranteed way to keep getting stronger.
Yes, the System had force-fed him sixty years of cultivation, but his innate genetic aptitude hadn't improved by a single decimal point. His natural speed of absorbing Astral Flux was still as agonizingly slow as a snail crawling through wet cement.
He was only half a step away from the legendary Awakened Tier, but Kaelen knew perfectly well that with his trash aptitude, crossing that final threshold conventionally would be virtually impossible.
Forget it. As a guy with trash talent, lying flat and doing the bare minimum is the most logical path forward.
Kaelen couldn't be bothered to overthink his existence. After polishing off his plate, he casually strolled back to his workstation and continued reading his sword manual in peace.
[One month passed in the blink of an eye.]
Every single day, Kaelen did nothing but read books, eat cheap cafeteria food, and clock out. Life was exceedingly peaceful.
As for the System? After its grand, awe-inspiring display of giving him an immortal body, it had completely vanished, ghosting him as if it had never existed in the first place.
If it weren't for the fact that Kaelen could effortlessly crush steel with his bare hands, he would have suspected he had hallucinated the whole thing.
He had occasionally tried torturing more small insects in his apartment to test the waters and reawaken the AI, but all his weird experiments ended in complete failure.
Left with no other options, Kaelen just threw his hands up and stopped caring entirely.
He just clocked into work, slacked off, and read his novels every day.
This stupid, buggy AI... I'm honestly better off without the heart attacks!
Kaelen firmly believed that even without the System holding his hand, his current stats were more than enough to let him slack off in extreme comfort.
Of course, alongside his slacking, Kaelen gradually became much more familiar with his coworkers.
The original Kaelen had been painfully introverted, withdrawn, and intensely insecure, which meant he practically had zero friends.
But over the past month, the new Kaelen's laid-back attitude and quiet confidence had subtly changed everyone's impression of him.
The female archivists, in particular, found themselves frequently stealing glances at him over the bookshelves, privately crowning him with the nickname "The Archive Adonis."
Kaelen could only sigh whenever he caught them staring. Being this handsome is such a heavy burden...
"Kaelen, lost in a book again?"
"Come on, man, it's lunch o'clock!"
A figure suddenly materialized beside Kaelen's booth, slapping him hard on the shoulder.
Startled out of his reading trance, Kaelen shot the guy an annoyed glare. "Could you give a guy some warning before you try to dislocate my shoulder, Xander?"
The culprit was Xander Vance. He was the archivist assigned to Sector 2 and the one guy Kaelen had actually gotten relatively close to over the past month.
If Kaelen was slacking off because he was forced by his trash stats and a glitchy system, Xander slacked off purely out of passion.
Xander was the quintessential corpo-heir. His family was obscenely wealthy, possessing several major corporate shares in the city. He was a rich second-generation kid who basically treated the library like a paid vacation.
The only catch was that his genetic aptitude was just as abysmal as Kaelen's, and he was the sole heir to the Vance family fortune. His overprotective parents absolutely refused to let him venture outside the city walls to play hero, so they basically bribed the library to let him sit here and exist safely.
"Hehe, my bad, my bad. Next time I'll send a warning flare," Xander chuckled, casually slinging an arm over Kaelen's shoulder like they owned the place.