The first thing Varek felt was cold.
Not the divine cold of the Abyss. That was something else entirely, something that had teeth and memory.
This was just ordinary cold. Wooden floor.
Thin mattress. A window with a gap in it that let the morning wind do whatever it wanted.
His eyes opened preceded with two blinks just make sure he saw clearly. Rafters. Straw. Faint smell of rust and old smoke. He lay still for three full seconds, which was three seconds longer than he would have allowed himself in any life before this one.
Then he sat up, looked at his hands, and understood immediately what had happened.
Small. Uncalloused. Trembling slightly from nothing more than the cold.
A child's hands. He pressed two fingers to his temple and reached inward the way he had ten thousand times already, feeling for the ocean that had lived behind his sternum since before recorded history, the divine reservoir that had powered every seal, every war, every last desperate act that kept this world breathing. But.... nothing.
A puddle. Barely enough to light a candle. Varek exhaled. Fine.
The screen appeared without warning. It blinked into existence directly in front of his face - luminous, blue-white, the clean geometric interface he recognized immediately from three hundred chapters of reading on a phone screen while waiting to die in a hospital bed in a life that no longer existed.
*A Sequence*
[SYSTEM INITIALIZING…]
[NEW SOUL REGISTERED — WELCOME TO ASTRABORNE]
[Assigning starting class…]
[!! ANOMALY DETECTED]
[ Soul Origin: TIER ??? — Data Corrupted]
[Auto-class assignment: FAILED]
[Defaulting to: CLASSLESS]
He exclaimed, trying to make sense out of what he saw as he watched a translucent screen right in front of him.
He read it twice. "Classless." He laughed and shook his head.
In Astraborne, that was the absolute floor. Beneath Warrior. Beneath Peasant-tier
Forager. Classless meant no skill trees, no stat bonuses on level-up, no faction
recognition, no guild entry. Other players - real people who had logged into this world
as a fantasy, uploading their consciousness for the full-immersion experience would
see the word floating above his head and immediately put him at the bottom of every
calculation they made without a drop of respect.
He knew because he'd read it. Every forum thread. Every Astraborne wiki page. Every
desperate Classless player who'd posted guides on how to survive the first month before quitting entirely because the System simply did not account for them.
He touched the interface. It expanded with a soft chime.
[CHARACTER STATUS]
Name: Varek | Class: CLASSLESS | Level: 1
HP: 120/120 | MP: 15/15
STR: 4 | AGI: 5 | INT: 6 | VIT: 4
Titles: NONE | Skills: NONE
Skill Points: 0
He looked at the information in front of him.
"What the hell?!" Varek muttered, his voice cracking.
The stats of a child who'd never trained a day in his life. Which, technically speaking, this body hadn't.
He stood. Crossed to the cracked mirror on the wall. A boy of about sixteen stared back
with sharp eyes, dark circles and a face that hadn't decided yet what it was going to become.
Nothing remarkable about it. Nothing that would make anyone look twice.
Good. He pressed his palm flat against the mirror's surface. He didn't reach for the System. He didn't form a spell. He just spoke one word. Barely above a breath, from a language that predated every kingdom in this world by at least eight thousand years.
The mirror split down the center. Clean. Surgical. Both halves stayed in place, held by nothing, but refusing to fall.
[ !! UNREGISTERED ACTION DETECTED]
[Source: UNKNOWN | Skill generated: DRAIN ECHO (Unclassified)]
[The System cannot process this action.]
[Please contact support.]
Varek looked at the notification then he dismissed it and turned away from the mirror.
"Contact support." He scoffed. "Pssft, yeah right."
He picked up the wool coat hanging by the door, shrugged it on, and moved to the
window.
Outside: a village. Small, quiet, the kind of place that exists on the edge of maps
because cartographers don't think it's worth the ink.
Beautiful morning. A few merchants setting up stalls. A dog sleeping in the middle of the road because nothing moved fast enough here to bother it.
Vel's Crossing.
Population: four hundred and something. Located seventeen kilometers
east of the kingdom's second city, tucked between a dead quarry and a river that flooded every spring and ruined someone's livelihood without fail.
He knew this village. He knew the name of the chapel on the north end, the name of the
family that ran the only inn, the name of the guard captain who took bribes on
Wednesdays and was honest on every other day.
He knew what was buried twenty feet
beneath the chapel floor - an unregistered divine relic the Astraborne plot called the
Ashen Shard, which the novel's hero,
desperately chasing.
He knew because he'd hidden it there himself. Many, many years ago. Ten thousand years ago perhaps.
Doan Solace would arrive in this village in three days.
Varek had three days. He pulled the coat tighter, opened the door, and stepped outside.
Level 1. Classless. Sixteen years old. A complete joke. But he'd started with less before.
Far above the world in a space that existed between server architecture and something far older than servers - a monitoring process that called itself
The soul in question had registered as [Level 1, Classless, with base stats averaging 4.75].
By every metric The Index used to evaluate threats, this soul ranked below one percent of the current player population. It had also just performed an action with a calculated difficulty ceiling of 94,000,000. The Index looked at those two numbers carefully for a while.
Then it opened a priority channel, stroke the keys and sent four words to every sub-process it managed:
[He's back. Wake everyone.] ...