At MIT's quantum physics laboratory, Leon Winchester was staring at the stream of data on the holographic screen, a slight frown on his face.
It was already nine in the evening. He was alone in the lab; occasionally the footsteps of security guards patrolling echoed in the hallway, and beyond that, only the low hum of the equipment.
"Experiment No. 137 failed."
Leon rubbed his temples and archived the data from the holographic display, tagging it "for analysis." Floating at the center of the experimental platform before him was a blue crystal the size of a grain of rice—a prototype of the "quantum entangled state memory storage" his team had spent three years synthesizing.
In theory, this tiny crystal could hold information equivalent to the entire Library of Congress and complete cross‑continental transmission in an instant. But theory was theory. In reality, the thing had crashed 137 times, each failure seeming to mock humanity's understanding of quantum mechanics.
"Dr. Winchester, aren't you leaving yet?"
The lab door opened and his assistant, Emily Wang, poked her head in. She was holding a Starbucks latte, her face wearing that expression of "I've already clocked out but seeing my boss still at work makes me feel too guilty to leave."
"You go ahead," Leon said without looking up. "I'll look at the data a bit more."
"But…" Emily hesitated. "Tonight there's the Leonid meteor shower—the once‑in‑five‑hundred‑years kind. Everyone in Boston is out looking at the stars. Aren't you going to take a night off?"
Leon finally lifted his gaze from the screen and glanced at her.
"Meteors are just space debris burning up in the atmosphere. Seeing them once is no different from seeing them a hundred times."
Emily's mouth twitched. "Dr. Winchester, if a science magazine interviews you, they'll definitely portray you as the poster child for 'scientists who don't understand romance.'"
"Science doesn't need romance," Leon said flatly. "Science needs precision and reproducibility."
"All right, all right, you stay precise. I'm off." Emily rolled her eyes and set the coffee on the table. "I brought you a latte. Don't stay too late."
The door closed, and the lab fell quiet again.
Leon picked up the coffee and took a sip, but his gaze drifted unconsciously toward the window.
From this height, the Boston nightscape stretched out below. The Charles River glinted silver in the moonlight; far off, Back Bay was ablaze with lights, and he could faintly hear the clamor of the crowd.
Today was September 17, 2147.
A once‑in‑five‑hundred‑years Leonid meteor shower—it was indeed big news. The news channels had been covering it nonstop for three days, and NASA had even adjusted the orbits of two satellites just to capture the celestial spectacle.
Leon pulled out his phone. Several push notifications lit up the screen:
[Leonid Meteor Shower Set to Peak Tonight, Expected Zenithal Hourly Rate Exceeds 1,000!]
[Stargazing Events Across the U.S.; Boston Common Expected to Draw Over 100,000 People!]
[Astronomers Warn: Unusually High Density of Meteor Debris, Possible Risk of Large Meteorite Impact—]
The last notification made Leon pause for a second, then he turned off his phone.
The probability of a large meteorite impact was roughly the same as his chance of successfully running Experiment No. 138—infinitely close to zero.
He stood and walked to the floor‑to‑ceiling window.
The night sky was improbably clear, the stars so sharp they looked like someone had Photoshopped out all the noise. High overhead, a few thin streaks of light were slowly tracing their way across—the precursors of the meteor shower.
Beautiful, Leon admitted.
But beauty couldn't be written into a paper. Beauty couldn't be patented. Beauty couldn't earn him a cover story in Nature.
He was twenty‑eight years old.
Twenty‑eight: MIT's youngest professor of quantum physics, a prodigy who had earned his doctorate from Stanford at twenty‑two, the academic world's consensus "next strong contender for a Nobel Prize."
Yet he knew how hollow those titles were.
When he'd joined MIT three years ago, he thought he was going to change the world. Quantum entanglement, faster‑than‑light communication, interstellar travel—these were the problems he wanted to solve.
Reality had been three years of repeated failure on a grain‑sized crystal. He'd published over a dozen papers and filed a slew of patents, but real breakthrough? Zero.
Sometimes, late at night, Leon asked himself: Is this the life you want? Repeating the same experiments in the lab, writing papers no one really reads, waiting for a promotion that may or may not come?
He wanted more.
He wanted real challenges, uncharted territory, that feeling of adrenaline surging, heart racing—the feeling that he might have discovered something that could change the world.
That feeling hadn't visited him in a long time.
"Maybe I really should go out for a bit," Leon muttered, picking up his coffee cup.
Then the sky changed.
At first it was just a faint light, kindling at the edge of the night. Leon thought it was an illusion, but the light grew brighter, expanding at a rate that defied any celestial motion.
He squinted, trying to make out what it was.
Then he saw it.
A green meteor.
No, that was not a meteor. Meteors were white, trailing long tails, here and gone in an instant.
This "meteor" was emerald green, like a colossal gem falling from the sky. It had no tail—or rather, its tail was blue, like an electric arc spreading across the night.
And it was falling.
Not burning up, not evaporating—it was falling.
Straight toward Boston.
Leon's brain completed its analysis in 0.3 seconds: size roughly ten meters cubed, speed about five kilometers per second, trajectory at about forty‑five degrees to the horizon. According to these parameters, the impact point would be…
His blood turned to ice.
"At MIT."
No sooner had the words left his lips than the green mass filled the entire sky. The light was so blinding that Leon had to shut his eyes, but he could still feel the heat—as if someone had shoved the sun into his face.
Then the world went silent.
Not that sound disappeared—it was sucked away. Everything—the car engines below, the distant cheers of the crowd, the hum of the lab equipment—was swallowed in an instant by some force.
Leon opened his eyes to an impossible sight.
The green "meteor" was hovering in midair, less than five hundred meters away. The green was fading from its surface, revealing something beneath… some kind of material? Metal? Crystal? He couldn't tell.
Even stranger: the space around it was warping.
Not a metaphor, not an illusion—Leon could see with his own eyes that the light around the object was bending, as if spacetime itself was being twisted like a pretzel.
"That's impossible…" His voice was stark in the silence. "No known material could produce gravitational lensing of this magnitude…"
His words were cut off by a sudden tremor.
It was a vibration that came from deep inside his bones—not a physical shaking, but something more fundamental. As if something had struck a hammer blow to his consciousness, making everything inside him… loosen.
Leon felt a wave of energy pass through his body.
Not heat, not electricity—something he had never experienced, something no physical model could describe. It poured in through the crown of his head, traveled down his spine, seeped into every nerve ending, and converged in his chest.
Pain.
Not the pain of tearing, not the pain of burning—the pain of something that shouldn't be there now being there. Like a seed had been planted in his soul, and that seed was taking root.
Leon opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out.
His vision blurred. The sky, the meteor, the lab—everything spun. He felt like he was falling, but also like he was rising; his sense of direction was completely scrambled.
In the last second before consciousness slipped away, he saw the green meteor explode.
Not a physical explosion—no shockwave, no fragments, no flames. Instead, it suddenly cracked apart, dissolving into countless points of light that scattered like fireflies in all directions across the city.
One of those points flew straight toward him.
Leon tried to dodge, but his body wouldn't obey. The light point sank into his chest, merging with that energy.
Then he heard a voice.
Not through his ears—it appeared directly in his mind. A neutral, emotionless, machine‑synthesized voice:
[Abnormal host vital signs detected…]
[Initiating emergency adaptation procedure…]
[Adaptation progress: 7%… 23%… 58%… 100%…]
[The Book of Truth system has been activated.]
[Welcome back, Inheritor.]
Leon Winchester's last shred of awareness dissolved into darkness.
His body collapsed onto the cold lab floor. Outside, the green light still spread across the sky, and the distant city descended into chaos—screams, sirens, the sound of collapsing buildings, all rising together.
On his chest, a golden book emblem slowly emerged, glowing with a faint but steady light.
This was destined to be a night that changed everything.
Only at this moment, Leon did not yet know that what was changing was not just his own fate—it was the course of human civilization.
Boston Common, Stargazing Event
"What in the world is that?!"
Hundreds of thousands of people looked up at the same time, watching the green meteor streak across the sky. Some screamed, some prayed, some pulled out their phones to record, and others—the quickest to react—had already begun to run.
But the meteor didn't strike.
It exploded mid‑air.
Countless green points of light burst like fireworks, then scattered in all directions, defying physics. Some points fell to the ground, some passed through buildings, and some vanished directly into people's bodies.
"Ah—!"
A young woman clutched her chest and collapsed; her eyes were glowing.
An old man stood in place, the wrinkles on his face disappearing at a visible rate.
An infant suddenly stopped crying, its pupils turning gold.
Chaos spread, fear spread, but something else—something indefinable—also spread.
Inside the bodies of those touched by the light points, something was changing. Some gained strength far beyond ordinary humans. Some could control fire or water. And some—they could simply "see." See the energy flowing through the air, see the weaknesses in buildings, see what others could not.
Magic.
In the thousands of years of human history, this word had been mentioned repeatedly, mythologized, demonized, mocked by science, embraced by religion.
But on this night, September 17, 2147, magic was no longer a myth.
It was back.
It had crashed into the heart of human civilization in the most violent, direct, unreasonable way.
And humanity was not ready.
Leon didn't know how long he had been unconscious.
Maybe minutes, maybe hours. When he opened his eyes again, the lab was a wreck.
Half the ceiling had caved in, cracks crisscrossed the walls, equipment lay strewn about. Outside the window, the sky had grown light—no, that wasn't daylight; that was the city burning.
Red firelight reflected on Leon's face. He pushed himself up from the floor, feeling like he'd been run over by a truck.
But oddly, he wasn't hurt.
Not only was he not hurt—he felt better than ever before?
It was hard to describe. Like wearing prescription glasses for twenty‑eight years and suddenly having them taken off; the world had become unbearably sharp. He could see the dust floating in the air, hear screams several blocks away, and smell… magic?
Magic.
The word popped into his mind as if it had been there all along.
Leon frowned, trying to understand what had happened. His scientist's instinct kicked in—analyze the situation, gather data, form hypotheses.
Step one: assess his own condition.
He looked down at his chest. A golden book emblem was now visible there, its edges still glowing, as if freshly branded.
He touched it—no pain, but he felt a faint energy pulsing from the emblem through his whole body.
Step two: analyze the environment.
The lab was badly damaged, but the main structure was intact. The view outside was grim—he saw at least three major fires, heard gunfire and explosions, and… something that shouldn't exist.
A low, metallic roar, like some kind of large animal.
But how could there be large animals in downtown Boston?
Step three: find tools.
Leon stood and retrieved a still‑functioning tablet from the wreckage. The screen was cracked but still usable. He opened a live news feed and the image made his pupils contract.
The anchor was no longer in the studio; she was in a helicopter. The camera pointed at Boston—or rather, at what had once been Boston.
Streets were littered with overturned cars and shattered buildings. People were running, screaming, fighting…?
Yes, fighting.
Leon saw some people's hands glowing, projecting fire or ice against creatures that should not exist. Some were as big as trucks, some as small as cats or dogs, but all had one thing in common—they did not belong to this world.
"We don't know what happened…" The anchor's voice trembled. "These… these creatures started appearing last night. They…"
The picture shook violently. After a loud crash, the signal died.
Leon turned off the tablet and took a deep breath.
He needed more information. He needed to understand what had happened. He needed…
The voice in his mind returned, clearer this time:
[Host has awakened. Book of Truth system version 1.0 is ready.]
[Currently unlockable functions: Mana Sense (Basic), Data Analysis (Basic), Knowledge Storage (Basic).]
[Begin new user tutorial? Yes / No]
Leon was silent for three seconds.
Then he made a choice that would determine the fate of human civilization.
"Yes."
Outside, the firelight painted his face. The golden book emblem on his chest glowed faintly.
The youngest professor of quantum physics at MIT, twenty‑eight‑year‑old Leon Winchester, had stepped onto a path no one had ever walked before.
He didn't know where it would lead, or what awaited him.
But he did know one thing—
The world needed his rationality.