The guards didn’t give anyone time to think. The moment that the horn stopped echoing, the overseers went into a panic, kicking and shoving everyone out of the dark tunnels and up toward the Grand Ascent Platform. Julian could barely keep his feet under him. His broken hand was throbbing to the rhythm of his heartbeat, a sharp, white-hot pulse that made his stomach turn every time he accidentally jarred his arm.When they finally hit the upper platform, the change was blinding.Massive, artificial light crystals flooded the open cavern, cutting through the smog with a harsh, surgical brightness. Julian blinked against the glare, his eyes watering. All around him, thousands of miners were already dropping to their knees, their faces pressed against the cold, grease-stained stone.Then Julian saw him, and his breath caught.Victor was descending from a floating transport platform, surrounded by a dozen high-level cultivators. He wore pristine white robes that didn't have a single speck

Julian didn't feel like a hero when he made the trade. He just felt cold.Over the next three weeks, his life became a blur of dark numbers and physical pain. Every few nights, sitting alone in the freezing mud of the drainage trench while the other miners slept inside, he would open that pitch-black screen. He traded three days for a point of strength. Then another three days. Then he started trading weeks.He didn't know if he was being incredibly brave or just completely stupid. Sometimes, staring at his reflection in a puddle of greasy csworeater, he swore he could see new gray hairs at his temples. His face looked a bit leaner, his eyes darker. But underneath the skin, something was happening.Victor’s red seal still sat squarely over his soul, keeping his spiritual energy locked at an absolute, mocking zero. If anyone checked his stats on a standard Ledger reader, he still looked like a talentless nobody. But his muscles were changing. They weren't getting bigger—if anything, he

30... 29... 28...The countdown kept ticking. Julian’s lungs felt like they were coated in hot glue. Every time he tried to suck in air, his chest just spasmed, drawing in nothing but dry, toxic dust that made him want to vomit. His head was pounding so hard he could hear his own pulse thudding like a hammer against a hollow wall.He couldn't feel his feet anymore. The cold numbness from the fallen pillar had crawled up past his knees, turning his lower half into a dead weight.Is this really how it ends? Julian thought, his mind slipping, drifting back to the clean, normal streets of Earth before all this madness. He’d survived a cosmic relocation just to get squashed in a hole like a beetle. The thought made something hot twist in his stomach. It wasn't fear anymore. It was pure, unfiltered frustration.He looked at the red text of Victor’s seal, still floating stubbornly in his vision. If he died right here, the system would just tally it up. Victor would get a tiny bump in his luc

The frontier trading post was a miserable little cluster of wooden shacks, built right where the black volcanic stone of the badlands melted into the gray, waterlogged mud of the mortal fringes. It had been raining for three days straight. Not the heavy, cleansing kind of rain, either—just a constant, greasy drizzle that made everything slick and smelled like wet rust.Julian pulled the hood of his stolen cloak lower over his face. The fabric was stiff with dried mud, but it kept the dampness off the raw, stinging patches of acid burn on his neck. Every time his collar rubbed against his skin, it felt like someone was scraping a dull razor blade across a sunburn. He needed a healing salve. Badly. If these chemical burns got infected out here in the fringes, he wouldn't even need Victor’s hounds to finish him off.He walked down the main dirt track, his boots sinking an inch into the muck with every step.The settlement was populated by what this world considered losers. Low-tier wande