Rain was up early. And for good reason. He wanted to get his daily quest done and out of the way early today because he officially started classes. Not to mention, yesterday’s quest rewards felt substantial.
The blue window lit up the dark corner of the room the moment his feet hit the floorboards.
[Daily Quest Available]
[Quest: Body Before Power]
[Objective: Complete 100 push-ups, 100 sit-ups, and a 5km run within 24 hours.]
[Reward: +1 Strength, +1 Endurance]
[Failure Penalty: None. Quest resets in 24 hours.]
[Accept? Y/N]
’Huh,’ Rain thought, reading it over. ’Same quest as yesterday.’ He turned the thought over for a second, rubbing the back of his neck. ’Is this just going to be my routine now? Every single day, same three things, until I level out of it?’
He didn’t have an answer, and it didn’t really matter either way.
’Yes,’ Rain thought, stepping over to the narrow clear patch of floor between his bed and the door.
He dropped straight down onto his palms. His ribs gave a sharp, familiar pinch, but the blinding heat from yesterday wasn’t there. His core felt slightly tighter, the muscle across his back taking the weight without his elbows wobbling on the first drop.
"One," he muttered under his breath, keeping his eyes on the floorboard grain.
He didn’t rush. He kept his hips level, knocking out the first set of thirty before his arms began to burn. The sweat didn’t pour into his eyes until he hit fifty-five, and when his chest hit the floor at eighty, his shoulders didn’t give out completely. His recovery time felt marginally faster than the day before, a small, earned sign of progress rather than a dramatic leap. He pushed through the last twenty with his teeth gritted, his breath coming in steady, harsh rasps until the counter clicked over.
[Push-ups: 100/100]
He rolled over, hooked his heels under the desk frame, and drove straight into the sit-ups. The strain on his midsection pulled at his bruising, but his stomach held firm. He finished the hundredth rep, hauled himself up off the floor, and pulled his boots on.
Outside, the dirt track was cold and quiet under the gray early-morning sky. He ran with a shorter, more deliberate stride today, keeping his elbows tucked close to his sides to protect his ribs. The first three laps hurt, his calves burning with the lingering memory of the kinetic recoil, but by lap seven he found a rhythm. He didn’t drop to his knees at the finish line this time. He crossed the mark on his feet, bending over with his hands resting on his knees while his chest heaved.
[Quest Complete: Body Before Power]
[Rewards Granted: +1 Strength, +1 Endurance]
[Host Attributes Updated:]
[Strength: 9 -> 10]
[Endurance: 8 -> 9]
A warm, prickling wave washed down through his neck and back, dulling the ache in his joints. Rain let out a long, ragged exhale, wiped his forehead with his sleeve, and walked back to Block C.
Twenty minutes later, he stepped out of the shared bathroom stripped to his dark gray sweatpants and matching hoodie, his hair still damp from the cold shower. Jansen was already gone, his side of the room pristine, his bed made with military precision.
Rain grabbed his paper map and black student ID card, shutting the door behind him as he headed out for his first official lecture: Monster Anatomy.
The lecture hall for Monster Anatomy was a massive, tiered amphitheater built from dark polished stone. Rows of curved wooden desks swept down toward a wide stage at the bottom, where a massive projection screen hovered in the air. The room was already half-full when Rain stepped inside, filled with the loud, chaotic hum of sixty first-year students arguing, laughing, and shuffling papers.
Rain climbed the steps, finding a seat near the middle aisle. He pulled out a notebook and a pen, looking down at the stage.
A woman walked out from the side door, setting a thick leather-bound binder onto the podium. Her name tag on her breast pocket : S.Ebony.
Miss Ebony looked less like an academic researcher and more like someone who walked out of a high-end corporate office. She wore a tailored black pencil skirt that fell just to her knees, accentuating her long legs, and a crisp white silk blouse tucked neatly into her waist. A pair of red-framed glasses sat on the bridge of her small nose, resting just above a wide, naturally charming smile that immediately pulled the attention of every teenager in the room. Her dark hair was styled in soft, loose waves over her shoulders, and as she leaned against the podium, half the boys in the front three rows visibly sat up straighter.
"Good morning, everyone," she said, her voice rich, clear, and effortlessly carrying to the back row without a microphone. "Welcome to Monster Anatomy and Resource Extraction. Put your personal devices away, please."
The room quieted down fast, a few rustling bags snapping shut.
"We begin today with rift-monster classification," she said, tapping a button on the podium. The screen behind her lit up with a high-definition rendering of a hulking, six-legged beast covered in jagged stone plates. "Specifically, why rift beasts develop specialized traits, and why those traits are so dangerously volatile when harvested."
A student in the front row raised his hand. "Miss Ebony, why do F-rank rift beasts have physical armor like that, but lower-tier skill disks from them only give us basic barrier buffs?"
"A great question," Miss Ebony said, walking out from behind the podium. Her heels clicked sharply against the stone floor, her pencil skirt swaying slightly as she moved toward the edge of the stage. She smiled at the student, her dark eyes flashing behind her glasses. "Because a living beast isn’t a collection of separate skills. It’s a closed, living ecosystem. A Titan-Crawler’s shell isn’t just an ability; it’s integrated into its bone structure, its blood density, and its core output. Which brings us to a fundamental concept you all need to understand before we ever step into a dissection lab."
She turned, her eyes scanning the tiered rows of desks. They passed over a group of students in jackets, swept across the middle aisle, and locked directly onto Rain.
"You," she said, pointing a slender finger toward him. "New student, correct? Please introduce yourself,"
"Rain, ma’am," Rain said, standing up slightly from his chair.
"Rain, tell the class: why can’t a human simply harvest a monster’s Core and absorb its raw power directly into their own system? Why must every beast Core go through the expensive, complex disk-refining process first?"
A few students turned in their seats to look at Rain.
Rain didn’t freeze. He rested his hands flat on his wooden desk, his mind moving fast as he pulled the logic together.
"It comes down to two main reasons, ma’am," Rain said, his voice steady, carrying clearly across the quiet room. "The first is biological compatibility and core calibration. A beast’s Core holds power in a raw, chaotic, and highly impure state. It’s tuned specifically to that creature’s unique physiology, its massive bodily scale, its metabolism, and its high innate tolerance for dense mana. A human Core is much smaller, calibrated strictly to a human nervous system and physical frame. Trying to absorb a raw beast Core directly would be like trying to plug a high-voltage industrial power line straight into a basic phone battery. It would flood the host’s pathway, cause instant core overload, and cook their internal organs from the inside out."
Miss Ebony raised her eyebrows, a bright, genuine smile spreading across her lips. She leaned against the edge of her desk, nodding for him to continue. "Go on."
"The second reason is resource efficiency and market control," Rain continued, his blue eyes bright as he warmed up to the logic. "The refining process uses ether-baths and single-construct etching to strip away the chaotic totality of what the beast could do. A raw Core might hold ten messy, overlapping survival traits, most of which are completely useless or actively fatal to a human frame. Refining isolates the one single, stable, and repeatable function that a human can actually cast without dying. And cynically speaking, that’s how the guilds maintain their monopoly. They aren’t just harvesting power out in the rifts; they’re taking a raw, wild resource and manufacturing a limited, branded, resellable product that can be bought and sold in pieces."
The room stayed completely silent for two full seconds. A few students sitting nearby blinked at him in surprise, and a girl two rows down actually took a note on her pad.
Miss Ebony beamed, taking off her red glasses and holding them between her fingers. "An absolute textbook answer. Excellent depth, Rain. Biological reality paired with economic awareness. Full marks for that response."
Rain felt a small flush of pride in his chest. He offered a quick, humble nod and prepared to sit back down.
"Now," Miss Ebony added, her tone light, almost pleasant as an afterthought while she put her glasses back on. "Out of curiosity, Rain, what baseline rank did your core initialize as during testing?"
Rain didn’t hesitate. "F-rank, ma’am."
The atmosphere in the room shifted instantly.
It wasn’t a loud reaction. There were no gasps or sudden laughter. Instead, it was a quiet, cold recalibration. The girl who had been taking notes stopped her pen mid-sentence. Two guys sitting to Rain’s left turned their heads back toward the stage, their postures slumping slightly.
Miss Ebony’s smile didn’t turn mean, but her eyes lost that sharp, bright spark of interest. Her shoulders adjusted, her posture straightening as she looked back down at her lesson notes on the podium.
"I see," she said smoothly, her voice dropping back into a standard neutral lecture tone. "F-rank baseline. Well. Moving on to section two..."
She turned back to the projection screen, clicking to the next slide without another glance toward his row.
Rain sat down slowly. The praise from ten seconds ago hung in the air like smoke, completely meaningless. His intelligence stat was real, his understanding of the mechanics was sharp, but in the eyes of the room, an F-rank label meant the ceiling was already fixed.
So what if he understood what made a phone able to make calls across different states. He still wasn’t a billionaire.
That was the reality of being an F rank. One minute you were looked at like a human being and the next, a complete ghost.
He kept his face blank, picked up his pen, and began writing down the diagram on the board.
"Before we dismiss," Miss Ebony said as the hour mark approached, tapping her papers into a neat stack against the podium, "a quick administrative reminder. Class assignments will be finalized by the end of this week. Based on your entry scores and baseline evaluations, all first-years will be sorted into Class A, B, or C. As we all know, Class A receives primary guild sponsorship considerations and advanced combat access quicker than most, but remember, classes aren’t fixed. One can always move up. Check your portal notices on Friday."
Rain turned the announcement over in his head while the room shuffled around him.
He understood the logic behind it well enough. Class A moved fast because Class A students could actually keep pace, high-rank cores meant faster physical recovery, higher baseline mana, bodies built to absorb a harder curriculum without falling apart. Dropping an F-rank kid into that pace wasn’t cruelty, it was just math, he’d be dead weight holding back students who could genuinely handle more. And the lower classes existed for the opposite reason, not to warehouse anyone, but so nobody drowned trying to learn at a speed their body couldn’t support yet. It was, as far as Rain could tell, about the only part of this entire system that wasn’t rigged to be predatory. Just pacing.
Which meant Friday’s placement wasn’t a verdict. It was a starting line, decided by where he tested, not where he’d end up.
’Move up,’ Rain thought, tucking his pen back into his notebook. If class placement responded to actual performance, actual results, then hard work had somewhere real to go. Every rep, every hour he put in outside of class hours, every point he clawed onto his stat sheet, all of it fed directly into something that could change his standing on paper, not just how he felt about himself. His chances weren’t fixed the way his F-rank grant made it look. They were growing, a little more every day he refused to stop.
The bell rang, a low bronze chime echoing through the stone walls, and the room exploded into motion as students packed their bags.