The world burned. The air itself had ignited. It choked the shattered ruins of humanity's final stronghold with Abyssal fire.
"Hold the line! For the Citadel!"
A distant dying scream pierced the roar of the inferno. A wet crunch silenced the noise entirely. Lucifer spat a mouthful of blood onto the blackened cobblestones.
The Capital of Obsidian was gone. The grand magical spires were reduced to jagged tombstones jutting into a crimson sky.
Lucifer knelt on the edge of the collapsing courtyard. His lungs felt filled with crushed glass. Every breath tasted of charred meat, and ash.
Around him lay the mutilated remains of his finest soldiers. The advancing wave of shadows had torn them apart limb from limb.
A monstrous figure eclipsed the bruised sky. A demonic giant emerged from the deepest circles of the Abyss. It raised a massive foot wreathed in dark violet lightning.
Lucifer chose not to run. There was nowhere left to go. His mana was drained. His limbs were broken. He closed his eyes and raised his shattered blade one last time in pure, hateful defiance.
'If only… if only I had more power from the beginning.'
"CRUNCH."
The sky vanished. A crushing weight crushed Lucifer's physical form. His bones snapped. His internal organs ruptured in a nanosecond. His consciousness sank into a suffocating freezing void.
Then he gasped and violently lurched upward.
"Ahhhh!"
Lucifer's eyes snapped open. His left hand slapped his side to desperately reach for a sword that wasn't there. His fingers instead dug into soft silk bedsheets.
He breathed heavily. The agonizing absolute cold of the Abyss was completely gone. A damp mild breeze from a quiet summer night replaced the freezing void.
'Wait. Where am I? Is this heaven?' Lucifer frowned. 'No, my chest… it's whole.'
He scrambled out of the bed. He stumbled over a set of polished boots and collided with a full-length mirror leaning against the stone wall.
Lucifer glared at his reflection. The scars crisscrossing his neck and cheek were completely gone.
The haggard exhaustion carved into his thirty-year-old face had vanished. Staring back at him was a nineteen-year-old youth with pale skin, unmarred muscles, and piercing gray eyes widened in shock.
The setting was familiar. He hadn't seen this place since it was turned to slag ten years prior. It was his old bedroom in the original Citadel of Obsidian.
Lucifer darted his eyes around the room. On the desk lay an unwrapped present. It was a cheap steel broadsword from the town's blacksmith.
He looked toward the wall to eye the tattered cloth calendar pinned near his window.
His eyes locked onto the circled date in red ink. The seventh day of the Moon of Falling Leaves.
A chill traced up his spine. Fragmented and overlapping memories flooded his mind like an unleashed tidal wave.
He soon recovered from the shock and knew precisely when he was. It was exactly ten years in the past.
It was the Day of Awakening.
"It can't be," Lucifer whispered. He gripped the edge of the stone window frame until his knuckles turned bone-white.
Regression to the past was scientifically and magically impossible according to all laws known to the Grand Mages of the future. Yet here he was in flesh and blood.
Before his mind could formulate another coherent thought, the world outside ceased making sense. The faint moonlight vanished entirely.
The atmosphere outside thickened rapidly. The air took on a gelatinous texture to suffocate the region under an unimaginable weight.
A translucent wave of blinding azure energy rippled down from the upper limits of the cosmos to collide directly with the planet's surface.
"The Mana Wave!" Lucifer shielded his eyes. "It's starting!"
In the future timeline, they simply called this event the Great Integration. The absolute laws of the physical world were aggressively rewritten by the Soulbound Arcanum.
It converted the essence of reality into numerical values, stats, levels, and talents. It was a baptism of cosmic fire meant to arm the populace.
It gave everyone a standardized fighting Class like a Mage, a Warrior, or a Rogue.
Lucifer closed his eyes and stabilized his breathing to welcome the torrential wave of dimensional energy.
The magical surge slammed into his chest like a physical sledgehammer. Instantly, an overwhelming heat washed over every pore of his skin.
He waited for the familiar sensation of receiving the [Class: Adept Mage]. He knew exactly how the original timeline unfolded. But this time, something felt deeply and catastrophically wrong.
A sharp agony lanced through his skull. The Azure energy currently pouring into his young physical body met with extreme resistance.
It collided with a metaphysical paradox. His physical shell was only nineteen years old. His actual soul was saturated with an entire decade of war, slaughter, and exposure to divine abyssal horrors.
His soul was ten years too old, dense, and corrupted to accept standard celestial formatting.
Suddenly, an alien sound tore through his consciousness. It sounded metallic and divine at the same time.
[Ding!]
[Integration Phase Initialized.]
[Warning: Analyzing host's Soul Resonance.]
[Error! Paradox detected. Host possesses excessive residual timeline energy!]
[Soul Mass cannot be catalogued in standardized Class tiers. Recalculating reality formatting...]
Lucifer collapsed onto one knee and gripped his chest. His veins pulsed with radiant blue light beneath his skin.
The integration magic tried desperately to categorize him and enforce a Class rule. The sheer gravity of his older soul completely shattered the protocol.
[System Error! World Laws localized around Host are fracturing!]
[Anomaly recognized. Class integration abandoned.]
[Congratulations, Regressor! Instead of a Class, your paradox has forced the World Laws to grant you a Divine Talent!]
[Divine Talent Awakened: Apex Multiplier (Passive) (Unranked)]
A barrage of luminous azure interface panels exploded into Lucifer's vision. They were far more detailed and aggressively glowing than the standard dull bronze panels everyone else received in this era.
┏━━━━━━━[ Profile ]━━━━━━━┓
│ Name: Lucifer Obsidian
│ True Age: ??? (Paradox Warning)
│ Path: Lawless Anomaly
│ Lifeform Tier: Level 1 Mortal <0.00%>
┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┛
┏━━━━━━[ Attributes ]━━━━━━┓
│ Strength: 5
│ Agility: 6
│ Vigor: 5
Speed: 5
│ Mana: 12
┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┛
┏━━━━━━[ Talents & Skills ]━━━━━━┓
│ Divine Talent: Apex Multiplier [MAX]
│ > Description: Any material gain, stat increment, summoning luck, construction time, or consumed resource affecting the Host is subject to a 10,000-fold multiplication. This overwrites the baseline reality limits set by the Soulbound Arcanum.
│
│ Active Combat Skills: NONE
┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┛
Lucifer stared utterly paralyzed at the final box floating directly in the center of his vision. "A ten thousand... multiplier?" he rasped out loud. He was unable to stop the wild tremor in his voice. "Everything?"
He immediately shut his eyes and commanded his breathing to test the theory.
Ten years in the future, it took almost an hour of seated absolute meditation just to draw a single droplet of pure free-floating ambient mana into his system to restore internal reserves.
Following that same memory, Lucifer deeply inhaled once. He forcefully focused his core to drag the lingering azure energy from the air into his chest.
The minuscule speck of mana was no bigger than a single teardrop. It trickled past his newly established barriers and sank into his bloodstream. In the original timeline, that microscopic dot would simply settle softly inside him.
Instead, a hum instantly rang out in his brain.
[Ding!]
[Host has absorbed 1 unit of pure ambient mana!]
[Divine Talent 'Apex Multiplier' triggered. Multiplying volume...]
A devastating shockwave originated strictly within his ribcage. The minuscule single unit of absorbed mana erupted violently.
It surged into 10,000 independent streams of compressed energy. It felt like opening the floodgates to an ocean within the confined space of a bathtub.
Lucifer's mouth flew wide open in shock. His entire muscular system cramped wildly as a tsunami of azure light blasted through his expanded cells.
"Guh!" He crashed onto the wooden floorboards as his veins glowed blue-white. He trembled violently under the pressure of an entire week's worth of active cultivation happening inside his physical body within a single span of a breath.
His attributes rapidly flickered before his eyes to recalculate live.
[Warning: Level 1 vessel at mana absorption capacity. Remaining multiplied mana will convert to direct physical strengthening.]
He watched helplessly as his bare Strength and Vigor stats each forcibly climbed from five up to ten. They rocketed all the way to fifteen within literal seconds.
Lucifer clutched his temples. A chaotic cocktail of disbelief, crazy joy, and surging power filled him.
A power boost that should have easily taken his nineteen-year-old self six brutal months to train had just occurred from a single intake of air. It wasn't a glitch.
It was the very fabric of Fate bowing down to a man who had ripped his way out of hell and defied time itself.
Outside his window, horrifying screams suddenly split the silent night. The Great Integration wasn't just a gentle baptism of statistics. It violently introduced the true terrors of the celestial sphere.
Dungeons bloomed across the continents. Roaming packs of rabid beasts mutated instantly into blood-starved nightmares under the wild atmospheric shifts.
The original survival clock was already ticking. Millions began to scream as monsters broke into civilian houses worldwide.
Lucifer forced his strengthened legs under himself and leaped back to his feet. He could worry about celebrating later.
The first hours of the Great Integration determined survival over the following decade. He didn't have minutes to waste.
His eyes flickered down the grand stone hallway leading towards his decaying family estate's underground basement.
Deep beneath the citadel laid the ancient ancestral family altar. It was built on the intersecting ley lines of this territory.
There was a crucial tool he needed to activate immediately before the volatile background magical resonance from the planetary awakening dissipated entirely.
Lucifer charged forward into the dark hallway and abandoned his new cheap sword. He no longer needed ordinary steel.
He had the opportunity to build a legendary legion starting immediately.