In the classroom, Evan sat with his nerves pulled tight.
He waited until the discussion around him finally started to die down, then nudged Caleb with an elbow and pitched his voice low.
"Grandmaster Mason," he whispered. "You mean... Mason? The Blackwing guy?"
Caleb's expression changed at once.
He straightened, face suddenly severe.
"Evan, you can't say a Grandmaster's name like that. It's disrespectful."
Evan stared at him.
For a second, he wanted to cry.
Great. Just great.
The man was so important you apparently could not even say his name wrong in public. The founder of Blackwing had somehow become scarier than a head of state.
Still, he had learned one useful thing.
The company matched.
The man at the top matched.
The only thing that didn't match was the martial nonsense wrapped around all of it, turning a familiar world into something he didn't know how to read.
He swallowed the urge to argue and aimed for casual instead.
"Been busy with exam prep lately," he said. "Didn't really keep up with the news. Anything interesting besides that?"
Caleb shrugged.
"Not much. Same old stuff. The only real shock was Grandmaster Mason breaking into Tier Eight."
Caleb was not much of a gossip, but Derek was.
The bell still hadn't rung, and Derek had obviously been listening in.
He twisted around in his seat, lowered his voice, and launched in eagerly.
"Nothing confirmed, but I've seen a few rumor posts lately. Might be real, might not. Over at Argent, Master Mercer is supposedly close to breaking into Tier Seven. If he makes it, he'll step into Grandmaster territory."
He barely paused for breath.
"And Grandmaster Lane from Beacon might be going into seclusion to push for Tier Eight. He hit Tier Seven around the same time Mason did, but his progress hasn't been as fast the past few years. Hard to say if he'll pull it off."
Derek leaned closer, getting more animated by the second. Evan kept his face blank and let him run.
"Oh, and Governor Shaw from Southriver Province might break through soon too. If that happens, it'll be huge. Southriver's been weak for years. We've only got a few older Tier Seven powerhouses holding things up. But Governor Shaw's still young. If he gets there, he might go even higher and drag Southriver martial culture out of the gutter."
He was rolling now.
"And I heard the school might bring in a senior from Southriver Martial University to give us a talk before the warrior-track exam this year..."
Derek kept going, rumor after rumor, but to Evan it all sounded like scripture in a dead language.
Most of it was about martial artists.
Who was about to break through.
Who had gone into seclusion.
Who was expected to rise.
Some of the names were familiar to him, not just from business but from entertainment, politics, public life in general.
And in the middle of Derek's excited rambling, something ugly and important finally clicked into place.
In this world, martial artists stood above everyone else.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
Derek casually used Master for anyone below Tier Seven and Grandmaster for anyone above it. He did it the way people in Evan's old life might have said senator or CEO.
And there was another pattern too.
Every famous person seemed to be strong.
Maybe that was backwards.
Maybe in this world, if you weren't strong, you never got famous at all.
Evan asked the question as lightly as he could.
"So how strong are we talking?"
Derek snorted.
"Any random martial artist could turn the lot of us into meat with their bare hands."
That shut Evan up.
The class bell rang a moment later. The teacher still hadn't come in, and Derek sank back with a sigh that sounded much too old for seventeen.
"If you don't get into the warrior track, if you don't become a martial artist, this is it," he muttered. "Your whole life is basically set right here. Doesn't matter if you go into government or business. For regular people, there's barely any way to climb."
Evan froze again.
Beside him, Caleb finally spoke, his voice low and a little tired.
"Martial artists are rare to begin with. And for people like us, we're probably never getting anywhere near the top in politics or business anyway. No point torturing ourselves over it."
Between the two of them, Evan felt the shape of the world becoming clearer.
And every version of it was bad.
Bad for him.
If he never became a martial artist, never became strong, then being reborn might not matter at all.
He could have all the future knowledge in the world and still spend this whole life grinding along the bottom.
Worse, he was no longer even sure this counted as rebirth.
His classmates looked the same.
Their names were the same.
The companies were the same.
The public figures were the same.
But if the world had somehow produced an entirely separate power class and built society around it, then how much of the rest still matched his memory?
He wanted to keep asking questions, but the teacher had already entered the room. Everyone turned back to face front. The conversation dissolved.
And anyway, all of this was basic common knowledge to everyone except him.
If he kept pressing, somebody really was going to start wondering whether he'd taken a hit to the head.
He waited until the teacher turned to write on the board, then leaned toward Caleb again.
"Hey," he murmured. "There's still an internet cafe near school, right?"
Caleb gave him a strange look.
"Of course there is. Don't tell me you forgot Blue Sky. You used to go there all the time."
Evan let out a breath.
Good.
Something still lined up.
If Blue Sky was still there, then at least parts of the old map hadn't changed.
He could check for himself after school. Search. Compare. Find out exactly what kind of place he'd landed in.
Caleb misread the relief on his face and offered the warning of a boy trying hard to be practical.
"Even if we can't make the warrior track, that doesn't mean we should just give up. If your academic scores are good, you can still get somewhere. Maybe even find a way into martial training later. College entrance exams are right around the corner. You should probably stay out of internet cafes."
Evan smiled and nodded.
Caleb did not talk much, but as a fellow member of the so-called Forgettable Duo, he looked out for him in his own way.
That much, at least, felt normal.
...
By the time he survived the rest of the morning classes, Evan felt like his skull was full of broken glass.
The lunch bell rang, and he was out of his seat almost before it finished.
He had too many questions and exactly one way to start answering them.
Caleb hurried after him into the hall.
"You getting food or heading to Blue Sky?"
"Blue Sky."
"Get back early," Caleb said. "First class after lunch is homeroom."
Evan lifted a hand without looking back.
His parents would both be at work at this hour anyway. In this period of his life, lunch usually meant a cheap place near school, not going home.
And right now, curiosity had him by the throat. If there were answers waiting in that internet cafe, he wanted them immediately.
He walked fast, scanning the school grounds as he went.
At first glance, Sunhaven First High looked exactly the same as it had in his memory.
Same campus.
Same students.
Same teachers.
Nobody was leaping onto rooftops or sprinting up walls.
But the differences were there if he actually looked.
The campus had sprouted signs.
Banners.
Advertisements.
The kind of visual noise he'd dismissed earlier because his brain had been busy screaming.
Prepare for the exams. Warrior Track, here I come!
One last push. Fight for Warrior Track!
Want the warrior exam? Try Bluebird Combat Prep, your best choice!
One blood-boost pill and you're guaranteed a shot at Warrior Track!
Evan slowed for half a step.
If those things had been hanging there in his old world, he would have assumed a cult, a pyramid scheme, and a traveling snake-oil salesman had joined forces and somehow infiltrated the school.
But nobody else even glanced at them.
Students passed beneath those banners as if they were as ordinary as exam schedules and cafeteria menus.
That was the part he couldn't argue with anymore.
This world wasn't merely different.
It was different in ways everybody else considered obvious.
How different?
He still didn't know.
But he intended to find out.
...
Ten minutes later, Evan arrived at Blue Sky Net Cafe, a short walk from school.
The sign was still there.
The smell was still there.
The whole place still carried the exact shabby atmosphere he remembered, which was almost comforting until he realized how much nicer he'd thought it looked back then.
In 2008, it had once seemed sleek.
Now it looked like it might collapse if somebody leaned on the walls too hard.
He stepped inside.
The girl at the front counter was still there too, familiar and strangely unfamiliar at the same time. Young. Bored. Exactly the kind of internet cafe clerk his teenage self had apparently considered worth noticing.
Looking at her now, Evan came to an unpleasant conclusion.
His standards in high school must have been badly compromised.
Then again, if she had really been stunning, she probably wouldn't have been working the front desk at Blue Sky.
He gave her one glance and immediately lost interest.
Not that he had time to flirt anyway.
And even if he had, this was not the moment.
That thought lasted all of two seconds before Grandmaster Mason came crashing back into his head and stomped it flat.
Sure, being reborn sounded impressive.
It helped if you got reborn into the right world.
He pushed the thought aside and got to the point.
"One machine. What's the hourly rate?"
"Three."
She said it without looking up for long, then added automatically, "You a member? If not, sign up now. Load fifty, get ten free."
Evan gave her the kind of lofty look only poor people ever truly perfected.
Fifty to get ten free?
Pathetic.
Also, what part of him looked like he had fifty on hand?
He'd already done the math during class. His total assets came to twenty-eight.
That had to cover lunch too.
Ignoring the sales pitch, he fished out a five, slapped it onto the counter, and tried to make it look deliberate.
The clerk ignored his attitude just as thoroughly as he ignored her pitch.
She tossed him a temporary card and moved on with her life.
Evan had the sudden urge to say something dramatic about not underestimating poor kids.
Then he dropped it. Not here. Not for her.
He pocketed the card and headed for a corner machine.
...
The moment the computer booted up, he started searching.
Fast.
Hungry.
One query after another.
The blue light from the monitor washed over his face as result after result filled the screen. If anyone had been sitting nearby, they would have noticed something was wrong with him.
His expression kept changing.
Disbelief.
Anger.
Confusion.
Grim understanding.
Every now and then, a curse slipped out under his breath. He might have been swearing at heaven. He might have been swearing at the world. At that point, the distinction barely mattered.
Search result after search result told the same story.
Rankings. Training schools. Public bios. Provincial news. Exam guides.
Different sites, same answer.
Martial rank came first.
Status followed it. Opportunity followed it. Money followed it.
An hour later, the machine shut itself off.
He'd run out of time.
Evan didn't even consider paying for more.
He walked out of Blue Sky with two things settled hard inside him:
certainty and pressure.
He stopped just outside the door.
His jaw tightened.
"Warrior track," he said through his teeth.
Then, because saying it once didn't feel like enough:
"I have to make warrior track."