"Emperor of Humanity—"
Xavier's voice broke off before the title could fully leave his mouth.
He stood there with his eyes wide open, staring at the empty air in front of him the way a person stares at a space where something impossible has just occurred and the mind is still in the process of deciding whether to accept it. The notification had already faded. The golden light that had accompanied his evolution had already receded. The world around him looked exactly as it had before.
And yet everything had changed.
Just one evolution. A single transition from one sequence to the next. And it had pushed him to the absolute front of humanity — ranked above millions of people in a single, irreversible moment, an achievement so singular that the Infinite Record itself had chosen to acknowledge it. The praise of a system that measured the entirety of humanity's progress was not something dispensed casually. Xavier understood that, even in his current state of incomprehension.
