The house was finally quiet.
Soobin didn't even turn on the light. He pushed the door shut behind him, kicked off his shoes, and dropped onto the edge of his bed.
He let out a long, ragged exhale.
Through the gap in the curtains, the city was still awake. The faint, neon orange glow of hovering billboards and the soft, distant blue hum of the Tree of Life bled into the dark room. It was breathtaking. A sci-fi skyline mashed up with fantasy, glowing like something straight out of an illustration. He was really here. He was actually living in it.
But as he sat there, staring at the faint reflections on his floor, he pressed a hand against his ribs.
There was no pain. His bones were whole. But his brain still remembered the sickening crunch, the suffocating pressure, the way the edges of his vision had frayed into static black. In his old life, he'd never broken a bone. He'd never been in a real fight.
Knowing this world was dangerous was one thing. Feeling an S-Rank hero casually crush your chest was another.
That wasn't pain from a story, he thought, dragging a hand down his face. That was just pain.
He dropped backward onto the mattress, staring up at the dark ceiling.
"Status window."
The blue screen flared to life, floating softly above him in the dark.
=========================================
[LEGACY STATUS WINDOW]
=========================================
Name: Shin Soobin
Level: 5
Spirit: ELYNDRIS, THE AZURE PHOENIX (Platinum)
Hero Rank: [Unranked]
Experience: 0 / 250
-----------------------------------------
[ ATTRIBUTES ]
*Active Limit: 25 (Basic Bond Stage)*
Strength: 10 / 25
Defense: 7 / 25
Agility: 9 / 25
Intelligence: 10 / 25
Unallocated Status Points: 22
*(Note: Maximum allocation limit strictly enforced by current Bond Stage).*
-----------------------------------------
[ BOND STRENGTH ]
Level: Basic (0–25)
State: Initial Resonance
-----------------------------------------
[ SKILLS ]
▼ Luminous Conduit (Passive)
Description: The user's vascular system acts as an open circuit, continuously absorbing and cycling ambient Spirit Energy. Processing bandwidth is directly governed by the Intelligence stat.
▼ Luminous Blade (Active)
Description: Imbues a weapon or physical strike with unrefined Luminous Flames.
▼ Phoenix's Flicker (Active)
Description: A high-speed forward dash that leaves a trail of blue ash.
↳ [Hidden: Phoenix's Resurgence] (Passive)
Description: Upon fatal damage, the user dissolves into blue particles and instantly reforms.
Status: [ON COOLDOWN - 20:59:12 remaining]
-----------------------------------------
[ QUESTS ]
No active quests at this time.
-----------------------------------------
[ INVENTORY ]
1. S-Rank Spirit Blade [Active]
2. Hyper-Dense Spirit Beast Nucleus
3. Shadowfang Wolf Nucleus [Low-Grade]
4. Mana-Infused Metal Ring [Unbound]
=========================================
He opened the skills section properly, reading through the text.
"Wow... Luminous Blade... Luminous Conduit... Phoenix's Flicker..." he muttered. "Sounds cool."
So he had a pure attack skill with a blade, a movement skill, and...
His eyes caught the nested text under Flicker. Phoenix's Resurgence. On cooldown.
Soobin blinked. So that's what happened. Fatal damage triggers an instant reform. "Kind of broken," he whispered. "Makes sense why the cooldown is so long." Without it, he'd be in a hospital right now. Or a morgue.
He moved his focus to Luminous Conduit. Absorbing ambient energy from the surroundings to fuel abilities? He frowned slightly. Did that mean it was for helping him train a core? But he didnt have any internal core. Usually, Awakeners had to spend years pulling natural spirit energy in compress them and store them in their cores, although a small percentage of the energy taken in is always stored, training like this continuously help build and increase their internal core's volume and output and also how fast it regenarates.A well trained core will have higher amounts of compressed spirit energy in it and if used all, it replinishes within a day. It was basically impossible to just grab surrounding spirit energy and use it instantly for skills. Thats why training cores and incresing their regenaration capabilities is needed to create an ecosystem inside the core that produces and replenishes the said capacity of spirit energy within that time frame, That's why Crafting Awakeners were so insanely popular and wealthy—they were the only ones who could somehow take surrounding energy and store it into objects or nuclei cores used for batteries for powering everything.
"Ugh, I'll see to it later," he sighed.
He glanced over his setup. His skills were a bit spread out—attack, defense, agility. Then he looked at his stats, and the 22 unallocated points sitting at the bottom of the window.
His finger hovered in the air. Should he save them, or should he use them immediately? He'd gotten a massive bonus from the spirit contract quest, but it wasn't going to be this easy to level up later on.
"I should save them for now," he decided, dismissing the prompt.
His thoughts drifted back to the afternoon. That bastard Kim Jinsoo.
Even though Soobin knew from reading the novel that Jinsoo wouldn't have actually killed him—he was a calculating, eccentric psychopath, sure, but he wasn't a rabid dog—it didn't make the experience any better. Knowing you aren't going to die doesn't make it hurt any less.
He looked at the inventory list. Jinsoo's Dark Metal Ring.
"Crazy bastard," Soobin muttered, letting out a heavy breath. "Fine. If you're going to hand me a lifeline, I'll wring every last bit of value out of you when the time comes."
He closed the window. The room plunged back into normal, neon-lit darkness.
Haaahhh.
He was exhausted. His brain felt like it was running on fumes. He turned onto his side, pulling his futuristic watch-phone from his pocket. He should just sleep. But habit took over. He opened ESN—the Esreal Spirit Network app—just to see what the fallout from the ceremony looked like.
He started scrolling.
Then he stopped.
The blue light from the screen illuminated his face as his eyes went wide.
"WTF..."
He scrolled.
And stopped.
His own face looked back at him from about forty different angles.
The trending section was — well. It was something. CEREMONY HIGHLIGHTS — TWO PLATINUMS IN ONE DAY — HISTORIC. SHIN SOOBIN WHO IS HE — EVERYTHING WE KNOW. KANG TAEHYUN FALL COMPILATION (47 EDITS AND COUNTING). THE AZURE PHOENIX MANIFESTATION FULL CLIP — 8.2M VIEWS.
He kept scrolling, slightly horrified.
Someone had caught the exact moment the phoenix had circled the colosseum and come back down. The clip was genuinely beautiful in a way that felt weird to look at when it was him — the arc of blue fire across the sky, the crowd's faces turned upward with their hands over their eyes. The comments underneath it were—
He stopped reading the comments.
There was a dedicated thread on the main hero discussion board that had apparently been live-updating since the ceremony. It was titled: SHIN SOOBIN APPRECIATION THREAD (he doesn't even know this exists yet). It had forty-seven pages.
He put the phone face-down on the mattress.
He lay there in the sudden darkness of a closed screen.
"...what,"