Luke stood still for a long time.
Snow kept falling outside. The wind had calmed, but the cold remained, pressing against every surface of the small apartment.
He looked down at his palm again. The faint mark was still there—barely visible, like a scar that never fully healed.
Ice Manipulation.
He'd read about this power in the novel. It was never described in detail. The author hadn't cared enough, because this power—and the man who wielded it—were never meant to matter.
Luke exhaled slowly.
His breath didn't turn white. He noticed that.
The room was freezing. Snow had piled on the windowsill. The floor near the window was damp with melted frost. Any normal person would be shivering by now.
But Luke felt nothing.
No—he felt something. Just not discomfort.
The cold felt like it belonged to him. Like an extension of his body. As natural as breathing.
"Let's see what I'm working with…"
Luke raised his right hand. He didn't know the exact method, but the body remembered—muscle memory, instinct carved into nerves he hadn't built.
He focused.
A thin layer of frost spread across his fingertips. Then it grew. Ice crystallised over his knuckles, climbed past his wrist, and formed a thin shell across the back of his hand.
It was cold, but not to him. To Luke, it felt like putting on a glove that had been waiting for him.
He flexed his fingers. The ice cracked slightly, then reformed—obedient.
"So this is what it feels like…"
He turned his hand over. On his open palm, a small shard of ice began to form, rising slowly from his skin like a growing crystal—thin, clear, sharp at the tip, about the length of a finger.
Luke studied it.
According to the original owner's memories, this was roughly the limit of casual generation: small constructs, frost fields within a few meters, shields no larger than an arm, blades no longer than a forearm.
He looked around.
The frost in the room was retreating now—slowly melting, dripping, returning to water.
But the mark on his palm—
Was it brighter than before?
Luke stared.
No. Not brighter.
Different.
Before, the mark had been a simple, faint pattern—like a single snowflake etched under the skin. Now lines were extending from it: thin, barely visible, like cracks spreading from a central point.
And they were moving.
Slowly crawling up his wrist. Branching. Growing.
"What—"
Luke's eyes widened.
Then it hit him.
The sensation came without warning. One moment, he was standing in his apartment, staring at his palm. The next—
The world disappeared.
Not physically. He was still standing, still in the room, still breathing. But everything around him became transparent. The walls, the floor, the furniture, the snow outside—everything faded until it was barely there.
And behind it all—behind the thin skin of reality—he felt something.
A pulse.
Massive. Ancient. Coming from everywhere and nowhere.
It wasn't a sound. It wasn't a light.
It was a presence.
Something alive.
Something aware.
And then a feeling hit him—familiar, but not from his own memory.
From the original.
A memory buried deep, one month ago: the night the original Luke had first awakened his power.
He'd been twenty-six, lying in bed, half asleep, and the room had gone dark—exactly like this. The same heaviness in the air. The same sense of something vast pressing close. The same sensation of the world holding its breath.
Déjà vu.
But not his.
The body's.
The nerves, the muscles, the very cells of this skin remembered. They'd felt this before. And now they were screaming the same thing they had screamed three years ago:
Something is coming.
"This is…" Luke's voice was barely a whisper. "The first awakening… felt like this."
The original had never understood what happened that night. He went to sleep ordinarily. He woke up with frost on his sheets and a mark on his palm. He never knew what had chosen him. Never knew why.
But Luke knew.
Because he had read the novel.
And because right now, he could feel it arriving.
And it was looking at him.
Luke couldn't move. His body locked in place—not from fear, not from force, but from the sheer weight of what was watching him. It pressed against his mind like the gravity of a planet.
Immense. Patient. Curious.
"What… is this…?" His voice came out as a whisper.
The presence didn't answer.
But it moved closer—not physically. It focused, as if a vast, ancient eye that had been watching the entire world suddenly narrowed its gaze and looked only at him.
Luke felt it touch his soul. Not his body. Not his mind. Something deeper—something he didn't even know he had until that moment.
When it touched him, the presence paused, as if it had found something unexpected. Something that didn't belong.
Luke felt it examining him, turning him over like a jeweller inspecting a stone, pressing against the edges of his existence.
And then he understood—not through words or images, but through pure, raw knowing.
The Will of the World.
The consciousness of the planet itself. The force that had purified humanity after the ancient war. The entity that chose individuals and granted them power.
It had chosen the original Luke years ago.
Ice Manipulation.
A gift from the world. A drop of power from an infinite ocean.
But now—
The Will was confused.
Because the soul inside this body was different.
Not entirely foreign. Not entirely the same.
The original soul had merged with his. The core remained, but it had become something new—something carrying fragments the Will had never placed there.
Luke felt it clearly now, buried in his soul: two shards.
One hummed with a rhythm—a pulse that matched the ticking of every clock, the turning of every season, the ageing of every star.
Time.
The other bent the space around it—folding distance, compressing volume, warping the very concept of "here" and "there."
Space.
They were small—tiny, like splinters of glass embedded in flesh.
But they were real.
They had fused with his soul during the crossing between worlds. Not intentionally. Not by design. Debris—fragments from the space between realities—caught in the current of transmigration like dust in a river.
Now they were part of him. Inseparable. Permanent.
The Will studied those fragments for what felt like an eternity. Luke couldn't speak, couldn't move. He could only wait.
Then the presence made a decision.
Luke felt it like a key turning in a lock, a door opening inside him that he didn't know existed.
The Will didn't reject him. It didn't strip his power. It didn't cast him out.
Instead, it accepted him.
And it did something it had only done once before for this body.
It awakened him again.
Then he heard a voice.
Not the Will's.
Something else—cold, flat, completely without emotion. Like words read by a machine: precise, clinical, stripped of anything human.
The original had never heard this voice. Not during the first awakening. Not once in three years. Luke was certain of that.
This was new.
「Current soul power… 62.」
The voice spoke inside his mind, not in his ears—deeper, at the level of the soul itself.
Luke tried to react, to speak, to question, but his body remained locked. The Will held him motionless. All he could do was listen.
Sixty-two.
He didn't fully understand it—yet—but the Will's raw knowing supplied a dim framework.
Soul power was measured simply:
One year of life. One point.
The original Luke had lived twenty-six years. Twenty-six points.
Luke—the transmigrator—had also lived twenty-six years in another world. Another twenty-six points, carried across the void.
And the first awakening three years ago had added its own gift:
Ten points. A seed of power planted by the Will.
Twenty-six. Twenty-six. Ten.
Sixty-two.
Two lives. One awakening—stacked together in a body never meant to hold this much.