Nova stared at the cascading rainbow text floating before his eyes and said nothing for a long moment.
Then he said, "What tier is this even supposed to be?! Does my soul truly possess such a talent? Is the talent manifestation glitching? Did I accidentally break reality?"
So many questions unanswered.
He paused. "I knew my soul wasn't ordinary."
His hands weren't entirely steady as he mentally selected the notification to read the full details.
[Unlimited Amplification](Primordial Origin)
Effect: Upon activation, randomly amplifies one of the following: comprehension, physical body, origin talent, skills, or equipment. Amplification magnitude is randomized with a minimum multiplier of 100,000x. No upper limit exists. All effects are permanent. Amplified abilities possess a probability of evolving to higher tiers.
Usage: Grants one amplification opportunity per life-level advancement.
Currently Available: 1 use
Evaluation: Unlimited amplification enables unlimited evolution. The power to transcend divinity itself.
Nova read it twice. Then a third time.
A minimum multiplier of one hundred thousand times. No ceiling. Permanent effects. One use per life-level advancement — meaning the further he climbed, the more opportunities accumulated.
He pinched his own cheek hard enough to leave a mark.
Still here. Still real.
"This is," he said quietly to the empty temple, "completely broken."
Before he could think further, the crystal pulsed again.
[Soul Talent Etching will now begin]
[Preparing to etch Origin Talent: Emberwood Flame]
The air in the chamber shifted. Something that wasn't light and wasn't heat gathered around him — a presence without weight, a pressure without force. Then the runes appeared.
They floated before him in a slow, rotating formation — ancient geometric patterns that pulsed with a faint orange warmth. Nova looked at them and felt something strange move through his chest. Not fear. Something closer to recognition, though he had no memory to attach it to.
Looking at those runes was like looking at something fundamental. Not the flame itself, but the rule behind it — the principle that said fire exists, fire transforms, fire consumes and renews. The building blocks of the universe arranged into a language older than any civilization he'd ever read about.
Then they moved toward him and sank in.
The etching was brief. A warmth in his chest that bloomed and faded in seconds, leaving behind a faint ember-glow somewhere beneath his sternum. Simple. Clean.
[Emberwood Flame successfully etched]
[Preparing to etch Origin Talent: Unlimited Amplification]
The chamber changed.
Every surface brightened simultaneously. The galaxies inside the crystal above him accelerated — stars wheeling, colliding, being born and dying in seconds. The rotating runes that appeared this time were nothing like the Emberwood Flame's simple geometric warmth. These were vast. Layered. Each rune contained smaller runes within it, and those contained smaller ones still, recursive and infinite, a pattern that had no bottom and no top.
Nova felt his soul move.
That was the only way to describe it. Not his body, not his mind — something deeper than both shifted, like tectonic plates realigning after a long stillness. And in that shifting, for the first time, he saw it.
His soul.
He had no reference for what a soul was supposed to look like. Whatever he'd expected, it wasn't this.
It was enormous. Incomprehensibly so — not in the way of physical size but in the way of depth, like looking down into something with no floor. The structure was impossibly complex, layered with patterns and geometries that overlapped and interlocked in ways that suggested a kind of internal logic he couldn't begin to decode. And it radiated. Even in stillness, even dormant, it pulsed with a pure, ancient power that felt completely mismatched with the seventeen-year-old body containing it.
He stared at it and thought, with absolute clarity: no god has a soul like this.
He couldn't prove that. But he felt it the way you feel the truth of something before you have the words for it.
Then he noticed the grey.
More than ninety-nine percent of his soul was covered in it — a deep, layered grey that wasn't decay or damage. It was deliberate. A suppression. A seal so thorough and so carefully constructed that it had clearly been placed with intention, by something that understood exactly what it was containing. The remaining fraction — barely a sliver of the whole — was the part that shone, the part that was active, the part that was him as he currently existed.
Nova looked at the grey and understood immediately that it was protecting him.
If that seal lifted entirely, right now, with the consciousness and comprehension he currently possessed — he wouldn't survive it. Not because the power would destroy his body, but because his mind couldn't hold the laws and rules governing whatever he truly was. It would be like pouring an ocean into a paper cup and expecting the cup to remain a cup.
His past selves were in there. He was certain of it. The memories, the experiences, the identities accumulated across however many lifetimes his soul had traveled through — all of it locked behind that grey, kept safely separate from the fragile consciousness of a seventeen-year-old boy on a planet three centuries into its cataclysm.
I'll find a way, he thought. Gradually. Carefully.
The Unlimited Amplification runes completed their etching.
The effect was nothing like the Emberwood Flame. Where that had been a quiet warmth, this was a tide — a profound, pleasant wave of sensation that moved through his entire soul simultaneously, like something long compressed finally being given room to breathe. He felt himself evolve, just slightly, just at the edges. Like a door had been opened one inch in a wall that had been sealed for a very long time.
It faded. He exhaled.
[Unlimited Amplification successfully etched]
[Origin Talent Awakening complete]
[Initiating comprehensive attribute scan... Matching optimal profession options...]
[Match complete]
Six luminous panels materialized in a semicircle around him, each carrying distinct information.
[Shadow Reaper](Common) — A lethal specialist in covert elimination. Exceptional single-target burst damage with emphasis on stealth mechanics.
[Crimson Berserker](Rare) — A warrior who channels lifeforce into devastating offensive power. Bloodsteal and blood-detonation techniques for sustained combat dominance.
[Radiant Sovereign](Epic) — An elemental caster specialized in light-based techniques. Combines offensive capabilities with supportive healing. Excels in area bombardment and precision strikes.
[Essence Flow Master](Legendary) — A martial artist who has comprehended the fundamental principles of vital energy manipulation. All techniques bypass conventional defenses.
[Runic Hierophant](Legendary) — One who commands the primal power contained within language itself. Speaks and reality obeys.
[Martial Cultivation God](Mythical) — ? ? ? ?
Nova's eyes moved across each panel slowly.
Five out of six were rare or above. Two were legendary. And the last one — the one with no description, no listed abilities, nothing but question marks — carried a classification he had never once heard mentioned in three years of academy study.
Mythical tier.
He'd heard of legendary-tier professionals. There were perhaps a handful in the entire Valdris Federation, each one a living landmark, the kind of person cities built defensive strategies around. Mythical wasn't a category that existed in any textbook he'd read. It wasn't a tier students were told to aspire to. It was simply absent from the curriculum, the way things too rare to be useful are quietly omitted.
He stared at the question marks for a long time.
The trial for something like that has to be unreasonable, he thought. Nightmare difficulty at minimum. Maybe something that simply shouldn't be passable at my current level.
Failing the trial meant civilian status. No profession. In a world where Abyssal Spawn could level cities, that was a quiet death sentence stretched across years.
[Please finalize your selection. Countdown initiated: 30... 29...]
His father's voice surfaced from memory, worn and quiet and certain: When faced with impossible odds, the Stern family doesn't retreat. We charge forward.
Nova selected the panel.
[Selection confirmed: Martial Cultivation God (Mythical)]
[Trial challenge required for job awakening]
[Available difficulty tiers: Normal — Hard — Nightmare]
"Nightmare," he said.
[Selection confirmed. Initiating spatial transfer to trial arena...]
The Trial Spire was a vast circular chamber built from luminous white stone — smooth walls, high ceiling, no exits. Clean and featureless in the way of places designed for only one purpose.
[Welcome to the Trial Spire, Floor 1 of 10]
[Complete all ten floors to achieve job awakening]
[Nightmare Difficulty: Duplicates will manifest at Tier 1 combat capability. Defeat all duplicates within sixty seconds or face trial failure.]
Nova read that last line twice.
Tier 1. A duplicate of himself operating at Tier 1 capability — the level of a trained warrior capable of leveling a house with a single strike. His current stats were those of an unawakened civilian who trained hard. The gap between those two things was not a gap. It was a cliff.
The duplicate materialized across from him.
Same face. Same build. Same stance. But the moment its eyes focused, the air around it changed — a faint pressure radiating from its frame, the quiet authority of a body that had crossed the threshold into true warrior territory. It looked at him the way a person looks at something they intend to remove from their path.
Then it moved.
The speed was shocking. Nova's trained reflexes caught the first punch by pure muscle memory — he got his guard up, absorbed the impact — and the force drove him backward three full steps, his arms ringing with the collision. A Tier 1 strike. Even partially blocked, it hit like a car.
The duplicate followed immediately. A low kick to destabilize, a rising elbow to the guard, a grab attempt at his collar. Nova moved on instinct — deflect, pivot, create space — but the duplicate matched every adjustment with mechanical precision. It knew his footwork because it was his footwork. It anticipated his counters because they were its counters.
Twenty seconds gone. Nova hadn't landed a single clean hit.
I can't outfight this. Not conventionally. Not at this level.
Thirty seconds. The duplicate caught him with a straight punch that slipped his guard and snapped his head back. He tasted blood.
Forty seconds.
Now.
He activated Unlimited Amplification mid-pivot, creating half a second of distance with a backward step.
[Ding! Primordial Origin Talent: Unlimited Amplification — activated]
[Random effect determination in progress...]
[Result: Comprehension amplified by 100,000x]
[Evolution triggered: Comprehension has evolved into — Divine-Tier Talent: Absolute Insight]
[Soul Talent Etching initiated]
The runes came fast this time — sharp, radiant, branching structures that spread across his soul like a constellation being drawn in real time. They were nothing like the Emberwood Flame's simple warmth or even Unlimited Amplification's vast recursive patterns. These were alive with motion, constantly updating, constantly processing, like a machine that had just been switched on and was already running at full capacity.
As they etched, Nova felt the grey.
One percent of it cleared.
It happened in an instant — a small section of the vast suppressed territory simply dissolved, and what poured through the gap was not controlled or gentle. Fragmented memories arrived like shards of broken glass — images without context, faces without names, landscapes from worlds he had no framework to place. Intents crashed in behind them, incomplete and urgent. Fragments of laws he couldn't yet read. Combat instincts from bodies he'd never inhabited in this life. Skills attached to no system he recognized.
He clamped down on all of it with everything he had.
Later, he told himself with complete finality, and sealed the flood behind an internal wall.
The etching completed.
[Absolute Insight successfully etched — Divine Tier]
[Nova Stern now possesses 3 Origin Talents]