Lian sat at a corner table with the others, a stack of books spread out like he actually planned to read them.
Sunny stared at him like he'd just witnessed a crime.
"Damn, bro," Sunny said. "You're actually insane. I knew you were unhinged, but yesterday? Whole new level."
Lin Ling clicked his tongue. "Whatever. I'm not getting dragged into this bullying crap again. What if he comes back with his Class D goons?"
Nox cracked his knuckles. "Then we beat the shit out of him again."
"I don't think he'll do anything," Lian replied.
Lin Ling squinted. "And how are you so sure?"
"We made a pinky promise." Lian said with a goofy expression.
The table went silent.
Lin Ling slowly closed his book. "Are you fucking kidding me."
Lian stood. "Anyway. Let's go train for combat."
Sunny sighed and followed. "Yeah, you need it the most. You're still stuck at Sequence One, initial stage. Most people already hit middle or peak. Some freaks even ascended to Sequence Two."
That part wasn't exaggeration.
In this world, power was divided into five sequences.
Each sequence was divided into three stages—initial, middle, and peak. On paper, they were labeled as minor progressions. In reality, each step was a wall that crushed thousands.
Sequence One barely retained ether. The flow was thin and unstable, enough to activate basic runes but not sustain them for long. The body remained largely unrefined—stronger than an ordinary human but still useless on battlefield. Most people never made it past this stage in their entire lives.
Ascending to a higher sequence wasn't just "more power."
It was refinement.
Higher sequences stored denser, more refined ether, and that single difference changed everything. With refinement came stability—runes activated faster, lasted longer, and hit harder. Ether no longer leaked wastefully; it obeyed. Every ascent also reforged the body itself—bones hardened, muscles condensed, nerves sharpened. Strength, speed, endurance, perception—everything rose together. A higher sequence wasn't just stronger. It was built different.
If Sequence 1 was a knife—dangerous up close but unreliable, limited by reach and the user's skill—
then Sequence 2 was a gun. Lethal, efficient, and overwhelming against anything below it.
Sequence 3 was a grenade—wide-area destruction, capable of wiping out groups in seconds.
Sequence 4 was a missile—overkill incarnate, able to reshape battlefields and decide wars alone.
And Sequence 5?
No confirmed records. No living witnesses. Only fragmented stories and ruined landscapes that suggested something far beyond human limits. Legends whispered that reaching it meant stepping out of the mortal framework entirely—no longer just wielding power, but becoming it.
And unlike games leveling up wasn't killing monsters and watching numbers go up, no shortcuts baked into the system.
You train.
Relentlessly.
The body had to be hardened until it could endure ether flow without tearing itself apart.
The mind had to stay sharp under strain.
Ether pathways needed to be widened and reinforced.
Endurance determined how long you could fight.
Control decided whether your power hit—or backfired.
And pain tolerance? That was the entry fee.
Progress only came from suffering—the right way. Too little, and nothing changed. Too much, and you crippled yourself.
That was the real problem.
Lian wasn't gifted genetically.
He was just normal—like the most population.
And "normal" meant garbage in an academy stuffed with monsters.
Students born with perfect ether circuits. Abnormal physiques. Natural talent so overwhelming they ascended as easily as breathing.
While others broke limits effortlessly, Lian had to fight for every fraction of progress.
The gap which looked small at Starting only grew as time passed.
Talent compounded. Early advantages snowballed.
Those ahead surged farther ahead, while those behind were left choking on dust.
He needed to reach the middle stage—no matter what—otherwise, he wouldn't survive the practical combat.
--
The Training Week
They trained like lunatics.
Mornings began with ether circulation drills until Lian's pathways burned like glass filled with lava. He forced ether through blockages that had stalled him for years, ignoring nausea, tremors, and nosebleeds.
Afternoons were physical—sparring until muscles failed.
Evenings were worse.
Rune activation under stress. Ether depletion recovery. Precision control with near-empty reserves.
Lian pushed himself to collapse every day.
Sleep became optional.
Pain became background noise.
By the fourth day, his ether pool expanded—barely, but enough to notice. Control sharpened. Circulation smoothed. His body stopped rejecting the pressure.
By the sixth day, something clicked.
The ether flowed without resistance.
Stable. Dense.
He reached the Middle stage.
Barely—but enough.
On the seventh day, he didn't train.
Rest was just as essential—allowing his body to recover, stabilise, and return to peak condition before the real battle.
--
In this world, Sequence One to Sequence Two was a smooth road.
No luck. No destiny. Just grind.
As long as you trained properly and didn't slack, anyone could do it.
Over half the population **could** reach Sequence Two if they truly committed.
That was the easy part.
--
Sequence Two to Sequence Three?
That's where reality slapped you.
No amount of grinding could brute-force it—it depended on talent.
Only one in several thousand succeeded.
--
Sequence Three to Sequence Four?
That wasn't talent anymore.
You had to be chosen by fate itself.
People at Sequence Four didn't just serve nations—they defined them. Their words outweighed laws, their presence reshaped borders.
A single one could decide wars, enforce stability, and drag an entire country into prosperity through raw strength alone. Most smaller nations didn't even have one. The ones that did either rose fast—or survived longer than they had any right to.
Yet Sequence Four was still a mystery.
Lian had tried piecing together every scrap of information he could find, approaching it from every angle—historical records, military reports, academic theories. None of it lined up. Everything was vague. Contradictory. Carefully incomplete.
It was as if no one wanted the truth out there.
Details about ascension were missing, misdirected, or outright buried. Key steps were glossed over. Firsthand accounts vanished. The deeper he dug, the more it felt intentional—like the knowledge itself was being gatekept.
Shrouded in secrecy.
Filtered through lies.
Selected from the shadows.
Almost like Sequence Four wasn't reached.
It was granted.
As for Sequence Five—
No verified cases. Only myths. Stories whispered like superstition.
For most people, reaching Sequence Two was enough. It guaranteed a future—rank, wealth, security—as long as you didn't die in a war. And wars weren't fought every other year like a new anime season dropping. They happened once every ten or twenty years. Most of the time, Sequence Two soldiers patrolled borders, suppressed threats, and lived comfortably.
Death was rare.
Even severe injuries weren't the end. Military medical squads were stacked—top-tier surgeons backed by medical runes. Healing wasn't some green light, full-HP nonsense. They still had to perform actual surgeries. Bones had to be set. Organs repaired. Limbs reattached by people who actually knew medicine. Runes just made the process faster, cleaner, more efficient than normal medical equipment.
And the higher your Sequence, the faster you healed.
--
Practical Combat Exam — Battle Royale
All four classes were deployed at once into a ruined city.
Inside the city stood four towers, each marked with a red flag. The objective was simple: seize a flag and place it atop the central tower in the middle of the city.
Just reaching the central tower earned 20 points.
Eliminating another student earned 10 points.
Each student was issued a bracelet-rune. When activated, it deployed a Sequence One translucent body shield—glowing faintly like glass wrapped around the body. Once the shield absorbed enough damage, the bracelet shattered and the student was immediately eliminated. Deactivating the shield counted as surrender.
Students were advised to form squads of three to four and each squad was given a different starting point along the edge of the city.
All students received their bracelets and registered squads by bringing them close to each other, the runes syncing automatically—ether signatures locking in as a single unit.
Lian stood with Sunny, Lin Ling, and Nox at the edge of the city.
Lian began to observe the city.
In this world, countless civilisations had risen before the present one—thriving for ages before being erased by a catastrophic calamity that struck every thousand or two thousand years. When it came, it left almost nothing behind. A handful of survivors at best, forced to rebuild from ashes and fragments.
Maybe that was how ether evolved. Lian thought to himself.
Survival of the fittest.
Only those who adapted—who learned to sense and cultivate ether—survived the calamities. The rest were wiped out. The survivors passed on their genes, again and again, cycle after cycle.
Enough extinctions later, and ether wasn't special anymore.
What remained of those eras existed only as ruined cities like this one, or as domains—which are kinda like dungeons from video games. They were deliberately created by ancient civilisations to pass on knowledge, history, and the fruits of their labour: an inheritance of runes belonging to various aspects for next civilisation to develop smoothly.
To claim that inheritance, one had to clear the trials set by the ancestors. Combat, traps, puzzles, critical reasoning—sometimes brutal, sometimes absurdly simple. In some cases, the domain would grant its reward after nothing more than a conversation.
Like a job interview.
People called it the will of the ancestors, speaking through runes and relics.
Lian didn't buy it.
To him, it felt far more like artificial intelligence—autonomous systems designed to evaluate worth long after their creators were gone. No spirits. No gods. Just machines doing their job.
Most of these were fragmented domains—small, unstable spaces embedded directly into the real world, occupying physical territory rather than existing in some separate dimension.
And this ruined city was built around one where Lian's transmigration secret lay.
--
As they moved deeper inside, Lian began to realise something—this place was too advanced. The layout, the symmetry, the architecture behind the streets… it all felt eerily familiar. Uncomfortably so.
Compared to this, the current civilisation felt underdeveloped. If he had to place it, their world sat somewhere around late–19th century tech—industrial, functional, but crude. Something like Earth's early post–World War II era. The 90s, if you really stretched it.
But this city?
This was different.
Collapsed buildings lined the streets, not worn down by time but torn apart by violence. Massive craters scarred the ground. Missile strikes, or something close enough that the difference didn't matter. Whatever war had been fought here wasn't primitive.
Even in ruin, the architecture remained elegant—designed to outlast time itself.
Lian couldn't help but admire it.
A tower stood at the city's outskirts, almost unnoticeable due to its small height—but Lian knew it was far more than a forgotten, dust-covered building.
A fragmented domain.
From the outside, it didn't look tall at all. Primitive stone. Almost crude. Most of its structure descended underground, layers upon layers sinking deep into the earth. Its interior felt ancient in design, almost regal, like a king's hall frozen in time. Lian had long suspected that this single structure had nurtured an entire civilisation… maybe more than one.
The more he thought about it, the clearer it became.
That tower held more secrets than anyone realised.
And he was the only one who knew.
During the academy expedition—when students were allowed to accompany professional military units for real-world experience—Lian had gone along with a group of Sequence Two elites.
Things went wrong fast.
sudden surge of water hit. Chaos broke out. Visibility vanished, and the squad scattered.
The current dragged him away, slamming him into darkness as his consciousness began to fade.
By the time they found him, he was unconscious near the entrance.
Everyone assumed the same thing: near-drowning. A lucky idiot who survived by chance.
They were wrong.
Only Lian remembered in fractured, half-buried pieces—was that he had been pulled into a hidden layer of the tower.
A level that wasn't on any map or a place no one else had ever reached.
Or come back from.
Whatever had happened that day…
That was where everything began.
--
An uneasy sense of nostalgia crept into Lian's chest.
Faint. Distorted.
Like remembering a dream you weren't supposed to have.
But this wasn't the time to dig into mysteries.
Not yet.
Lian forcefully brushed the feeling aside and shifted his focus to the present.
He gathered the team and outlined the plan quickly.
They chose a half-collapsed building near the outskirts. Lian climbed to the roof and sat cross-legged at the centre, calm and deliberate. Sunny and Nox were sent to opposite edges to keep watch.
"Alright, time to do some hacking" Lian said.
From his bag, Lian pulled out a compact rune device—metallic, angular, etched with pale-blue lines. A thin antenna rose from its corner, faintly humming as ether flowed through it. It looked like a radio receiver.
Lian placed it near Lin Ling's bracelet as it began to pick up signal and print random gibberish on a small screen attached to its side.
"Are you trying to reverse-engineer the bracelets?" Lin Ling asked.
"Not fully," Lian replied.
"The bracelets auto-register squads through proximity, track eliminations, flags, positions, and have an SOS channel tied directly to the exam overseers. All of it runs on layered rune communication—bracelet to bracelet, bracelet to flag"
"So?" Lin Ling asked.
"So I don't need to break it," Lian said. "I just need to listen."
He tapped the antenna.
"Every rune communicates through ether waves. Fixed ranges. Repeating handshakes. I'm copying the communication pattern and injecting a fake response—something close enough that the system accepts it."
Lin Ling's eyes narrowed. "Like—"
"A man-in-the-middle attack," Lian finished. "I'm not changing scores. I'm sending signals to every single bracelet and force them to reveal positions."
The rune's screen glowed, lines of gibberish racing across it.
Lin Ling leaned in. "Encryption pattern's messy… but it's repeating. Give me a minute."
Several minutes passed.
Time bled away. Nox and Sunny grew increasingly frustrated, knowing every moment wasted was another squad getting ahead.