I Awakened the World's Worst Class, Then Became Unstoppable

"No way. No freaking way. Our class golden boy—top of the scoreboard—and he awakens that?"

Laughter bounced off the cinder-block walls of Classroom 9. A cluster of seniors had formed a loose half-circle around one desk, phones out, voices pitched high with the particular glee that comes from watching someone taller than you trip on the stairs.

"Farmer? Dude, are you serious?" someone called. "You gonna go till the dirt outside the walls? The Aberrations love a side salad."

"Farmer Class, E-rank talent. I swear, in a hundred and twenty years of Awakening, nobody's ever pulled Farmer. He's a historical first. Congratulations."

Ethan Su stared through the ring of faces without really seeing them. Summer heat pressed through the open windows, thick and slow, and somewhere a ceiling fan rattled like it was about to give up. His ears rang.

Last thing he remembered, he'd been up at three in the morning grinding a crafting event in an MMO he'd played for years. He'd finally farmed enough materials to build a full furniture set—high-tier stuff, worth a fortune on the player market. He'd been about to list it when the screen flared white.

Then this.

A parallel world. A planet called Earth, but not his Earth. Here, every human who turned eighteen underwent the Awakening—a lottery that etched a Class into your soul and a rank beside it. Warriors. Mages. Healers. Chefs. Drivers. Teachers. Security guards. Combat Classes got into the elite academies and climbed to power. Production Classes got recruited by corporations. The useless ones became a punchline.

And Ethan had drawn Farmer.

He ignored the laughter and pulled up his status panel, the translucent interface hanging in his field of vision where only he could see it.

NAME: Ethan Su

Ethan read it twice. Then a third time, slower.

On the surface it looked like garbage. E-rank. Farmer. A hoe. But Evolvable appeared four times, and the abilities themselves—tenfold harvest, guaranteed growth, a domain where nothing could hurt him—didn't read like a dead-end Class. They read like a seed.

He liked it. He actually liked it.

"Ethan." A voice cut through the noise, smooth and amused, the kind of voice that belonged to someone who'd never had to raise it to be heard. "My family's estate could use a groundskeeper. You know—tilling, weeding, that sort of thing. Five thousand a month, room and board included. You'd be set. Think about it."

Ethan lowered his gaze from the panel. Brandon White stood at the front of the cluster, tailored uniform jacket slung over one shoulder, a watch on his wrist that probably cost more than Ethan's yearly rent. His Class—Brawler, B-rank—had been announced that morning to polite applause. Not spectacular, but respectable. Respectable enough that he thought it gave him the right to smile like he was doing charity.

They'd been in the same class for three years. Brandon had always been polite to his face, the way you're polite to someone you don't consider a threat. Now that the threat was gone, the politeness had curdled into something sharper.

"No thanks," Ethan said.

Brandon's smile didn't falter, but his eyes narrowed, just slightly. "Come on, don't be proud. You're an orphan. No family, no money, and now you've got the worst Class in recorded history. What are you gonna do? Go farm outside the walls? You know what's out there. The Aberrations don't care if you're holding a hoe or a rifle."

The laughter picked up again, nervous this time. Nobody joked about the Aberrations for long.

"Could be fun," Ethan said. He meant it. "Thanks for the offer, Brandon."

He'd seen this exact arc a hundred times in the web novels he'd binged in his old life. Rich antagonist kicks the protagonist when he's down. Protagonist smiles and walks away. Three hundred chapters later, the antagonist is begging for mercy.

He wasn't worried. He was patient.

Brandon opened his mouth to press the attack, but a voice cut him off from the doorway, flat and annoyed.

"Give it a rest, White. We all know why you're over here. Michelle turned you down last semester and you've been looking for a reason to feel bigger than Ethan ever since. This is just sad."

The classroom went quiet.

Felix Chen leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, the dark fabric of his uniform stretched across shoulders that had filled out over the summer. His Class announcement had been the highlight of the morning—Swordsman, A-rank. Rare enough that Combat Academy scouts had been waiting by the stage before the ceremony ended. A-rank Swordsman meant a future. Meant power. Meant nobody messed with his friends.

He pushed off the doorframe and walked straight through the cluster of boys like they weren't there, dropped into the seat beside Ethan, and slung an arm over his shoulder.

"Yo," he said, quieter now, just for Ethan. "You good?"

"Fine."

"Good. 'Cause Farmer's not useless, no matter what these clowns think." Felix raised his voice just enough for the room to hear. "You think food grows on trees? Oh wait—it does, and nobody can grow any. The soil outside the walls is dead. The soil inside the walls is rationed by the Agricultural Consortium and still barely produces. Nutrient paste keeps us alive, but nobody's had a real meal in three generations. If Ethan here can actually make things grow? Corporations will be throwing money at him. He'll be the most popular guy in the city."

It was true, and everyone in the room knew it.

Ethan had pieced the history together from the original owner's memories, and it was bleak. A hundred and twenty years ago, dimensional rifts had torn open across the planet. Things had come through—things that didn't belong, that didn't die easy, that hunted humans for sport. Cities fell. Billions died. It took five years and a handful of Awakened warriors to push the Aberrations back and establish the Walled Cities—twelve of them in the Chinese Federation alone, while most other nations clung to one or two.

Humanity had survived, but the land hadn't. The rifts had poisoned the soil. Crops wouldn't grow. For two years the world starved while scientists raced to develop a synthetic caloric serum—nutrient paste, the gray sludge every citizen drank three times a day. It kept you breathing. It didn't taste like anything.

Then the Awakening had spread, and a handful of people had drawn the Chef Class. They could produce real food through their talent. Not much—a Chef might cook a single meal a day—but in a world that had forgotten the taste of vegetables, that meal sold for enough money to buy a house.

Chefs were celebrities. Farmers, historically, didn't exist. Until today.

So yeah—if Ethan could actually grow something, he'd be rich. If.

Brandon's jaw worked. He looked from Felix to Ethan, and the smile came back, colder now.

"E-rank," he said, like the word itself was a punchline. "His talent is E-rank. You really think that's gonna amount to anything?" He didn't wait for an answer. "I'll be at the Combat Academy by next month. You'll be... where, exactly? Digging in the dirt in the Outer District?"

He turned and walked back to his side of the classroom, and the cluster followed him, snickering.

Ethan watched him go. Brandon was already thinking about Michelle Liu—Ethan could see it in the set of his shoulders, the way he kept glancing toward the front row where she sat. Michelle had never given Brandon the time of day, and she'd been... friendly, with Ethan. Friendly enough that Brandon had noticed. Friendly enough that it ate at him.

Brandon thought that with a B-rank Class and a family fortune, Michelle would finally see what was good for her.

Ethan looked down at his status panel again, at the words Unique and Evolvable, and smiled.

He couldn't wait to prove him wrong.