It was pitch black.
Then there was a smell.
It was a thick and sharp stench that he could only think of as industrial antiseptic.
Rain stirred slowly.
A faint groan caught in his throat, dry and scratchy like sand. His eyelids felt glued shut, heavy as slate. When he finally forced them open, a fluorescent light overhead burned straight into his pupils, sending a dull, throbbing spike of pain straight from his forehead to the base of his neck.
He blinked hard, bringing the blurred surroundings into focus. A low ceiling made of stained acoustic tiles. A metal pole holding a bag of pale blue fluid. A coarse, scratchy sheet pulled up to his chest.
A clinic.
Rain sat up instantly.
The movement sent an agonizing wave of fire across his ribs, making his breath hitch sharply. He doubled over, clutching his side, his heart slamming against his ribs like a trapped bird.
’The disks.’
His mind cleared with a terrifying, icy shock. The alley. The three guild kids. The heavy boots. The clatter of plastic against gravel.
His hands shot down to his waist, frantically patting his clothes. He wasn’t wearing his jacket anymore. They had stripped him down to a thin, generic hospital gown. His pants were gone, replaced by loose cotton shorts.
"No, no, no..." Rain muttered, his voice barely a rasp. He swung his legs over the edge of the narrow gurney, his bare feet hitting the freezing linoleum floor.
He searched the small room in a panic. A metal side table. A privacy curtain. A pair of plastic clogs tucked beneath the frame. Nothing else.
’Did the guards take them?’ Rain’s breath came in fast, shallow gasps. ’Did the academy seize them at the door? If they found two disks on an unawakened F-rank, they’re going to pull me into an interrogation room. Theft. Fraud. Contraband.’
He rubbed his face, his trembling palms catching on the raw, scabbed skin along his jawline. If the administration had Sen’s disk, it meant Sen’s family would be notified. It meant the debt collectors would trace the serial code straight back to Rain.
The heavy plastic curtain pulled back with a metallic rattle.
A nurse walked in holding a digital clipboard. She looked middle-aged, her dark hair pulled back into a tight, severe bun, her uniform marked with the utilitarian grey crest of Block C Medical. She didn’t look up from her screen as she stepped beside the bed.
"Sit back down," she said, her voice flat and bored. "Your vitals are still bouncing around."
"Where are my things?" Rain asked immediately. He gripped the edge of the mattress, his knuckles white. "My jacket. My pockets."
The nurse finally raised her eyes, tapping her stylus against the tablet. She gave him a brief, sweeping glance, taking in his bruised face and bloodshot eyes. "Your jacket was torn to shreds and covered in alley mud. We incinerated it. Standard sanitation protocol. You will be given something to wear in the meantime,"
Rain felt the air leave his chest. "And the contents?"
"You had no personal items of value on your person when the custodial drone scraped you off the pavement behind Block C," she said, pressing a cool sensor against his neck. The device beeped twice. "You’re lucky the automated sweeper was on its noon circuit. Another two hours out in the damp, and your body temperature would have dropped past the recovery threshold."
Rain stared at her, his throat completely dry. "How long was I out?"
"Sixteen hours," she replied, checking the reading on her tablet. "You’ve got three cracked ribs, a minor concussion, and severe soft-tissue bruising across your entire midsection. Honestly, for the beating you took, you’ve recovered remarkably well. Your baseline physical restoration is surprisingly resilient for an unawakened."
Rain didn’t care about his ribs. He barely heard her medical assessment.
Sixteen hours. The guild kids were long gone. Sen’s disk was gone.
"You aren’t officially a student yet," the nurse continued, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a small handheld scanner. "You haven’t signed your dorm lease or completed your orientation. But under Academy Policy Section 4, emergency medical intervention is automatically extended to any recruit registered on the ceremony roster."
Rain’s stomach dropped another inch. "Emergency intervention."
"Standard tissue sealant, a low-grade internal mending flush, and overnight stabilization," she said smoothly, waving the scanner over his shoulder. "Total comes to four hundred and fifty credits."
Four hundred and fifty.
Rain let out a bitter, silent laugh inside his head. ’Four hundred and fifty credits just to wake up on a thin mattress with broken ribs. Another line on the tab.’
"What about my paperwork?" Rain managed to ask, his voice tight. "You said there was nothing in my jacket. Was there... anything else found on me?"
"Just the official clearance," she said. She walked over to a small metal locker built into the wall, punched in a three-digit code, and pulled out a single sheet of stiff, laminated white paper. She walked back and handed it to him.
Rain took it with numb fingers.
It was his own debt statement and registration slip. Printed in bold black ink at the top was his name, his assigned dorm unit, and the massive, red-stamped ledger total he owed the municipality for his basic education and screening fees.
That was it. Just his own debt.
"I understand you just passed the awakening exam yesterday," the nurse said, her tone softening slightly, though her face remained neutral. "Look, recruit. I see kids like you pass through these beds every single week. You come from the lower wards, you get a bad pull on the dais, and you think you can make up the difference by cutting corners or wandering into the wrong alleys."
She adjusted the fluid drip on the pole beside him.
"Once your ribs seal up completely in a day or two, you start classes. My advice? Keep your head down. Don’t look at the contract students. Don’t wander behind the service blocks after dark. Just take your F-rank utility assignments, pay off your medical tab, and survive your contract."
She tucked her tablet under her arm and headed for the curtain. "A drone will bring your replacement clothes in ten minutes. Discharge is at noon."
The curtain pulled shut behind her, leaving Rain alone in the white, sterile room.
Silence settled over the cubicle.
Rain sat frozen on the edge of the bed, holding the laminated sheet of paper in his hands. His thumb pressed into the cold plastic until the nail turned white.
’They didn’t find anything else,’ he thought.
His mind raced back to the alley, reconstructing those last agonizing seconds before he lost consciousness. He remembered the heavy boot to his jaw. He remembered the dark sky spinning overhead. He remembered the sound of plastic cases clattering onto the gravel right beside his knuckles.
He remembered hearing muddled voices. Someone shouting. A distraction. The sound of running feet.
’They dropped them,’ Rain realized, his heart hammering against his cracked ribs. ’The bullies dropped the cases when someone came down the alley. They didn’t steal them. The custodial drone sweeping the alley must have cleared the ground.’
He looked down at his bare hands.
’Did the drone threw them into the incinerator along with my jacket?’
A heavy, suffocating weight pressed down on his chest.
Both disks were gone. His own pathetic, unawakened F-rank disk, and Sen’s utility disk. The only things he had to his name, completely wiped out before he even stepped through the academy doors.
He had taken a brutal beating for nothing. He had accumulated four hundred and fifty more credits of debt for nothing. He was sitting in a hospital gown with broken ribs, holding a piece of paper that said he was a broke, useless nobody.
’Was Sen right?’
The thought crept into his head like poison, cold and relentless.
Sen had looked at the numbers, looked at the debt, looked at the hopeless wall of the system, and stepped off the ledge. Rain had judged him for it. Rain had taken his disk, thinking he could be different, thinking he could hustle his way through the meat grinder.
’There’s no hope,’ Rain thought, staring blindly at the white floor tiles. ’No disk. No ability. No money. Just an F-rank baseline and a mountain of credit interest that will follow me until I’m dead.’
What was he supposed to do now? Go to class? Mine raw mana rock in the Western Arch sewers until his lungs rotted out?
BING.
A sharp, crystalline chime echoed directly inside his skull.
Rain flinched, snapping his head up.
A bright, semi-transparent blue screen burst into existence right in front of his face, floating silently in the air above his knees.
Rain blinked hard, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand. The box didn’t vanish. It hovered there, casting a soft, cool glow over his hospital gown.
"What..." Rain stammered, pulling back toward the headboard. "What is this?"
[Synchronization complete.]
[Congratulations, host. You have unlocked THE SYNTHESIS SYSTEM.]
Rain stared at the floating words. The text was sharp, pristine, and rendered in a clean font that flickered faintly like a high-end interface.
’Wait,’ Rain thought, his breath catching. ’In the alley. Right before I went under. I saw something..."
He had assumed it was a fever dream brought on by a concussion. A delusion born from getting his head slammed against a brick wall.
"Is this... a hallucination?" Rain whispered softly, looking nervously toward the curtain. "Did that hit to my jaw give me brain damage?"
[The Synthesis System is not a hallucination,] a crisp, neutral text box replaced the previous message, accompanied by a subtle tone inside his mind. [It is an active interface bound directly to host’s neural pathway. It serves as an ultimate tool designed to process, combine, and elevate baseline structures, enabling host to transcend current physical limitations.]
Rain let out a short, bewildered breath. "Transcend limitations? What are you talking about? A tool to stop being weak?"
[Precisely,] the system responded without delay. [Would host like to view host’s current profile?]
Rain squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. The glowing blue screen was still there, completely stationary.
"Sure," Rain muttered, leaning forward slightly. "Show me."
The screen shifted, the previous text dissolving into a clean, itemized status block.
[Host Profile]
- Name: Rain
- Status: Unawakened (F-Rank baseline)
- HP: 34 / 100 (Severe contusions, cracked ribs)
- Mana Capacity: 10 / 10
[Physical attributes- Average (15)]
- Strength: 8
- Agility: 9
- Endurance: 7
- Intelligence: 16
- Stored Items: [Skill Disk - Unawakened F-Rank] x1, [Skill Disk - Unawakened F-Rank] x1
Rain’s eyes scanned down the list. He read the numbers, the attributes, the physical breakdown. Everything was terrifyingly accurate. His HP was sitting at barely a third because of his broken ribs. Strength, Agility, Endurance, all sitting exactly where he expected them, the rock-bottom baseline of an unawakened kid from the lower wards.
Then he hit Intelligence. Sixteen.
He read it twice, waiting for it to correct itself, to drop down and match the rest of him like it was supposed to.
It didn’t.
Somewhere in the back of every classroom he’d ever sat in, every teacher who’d sighed and moved on, every proctor who hadn’t bothered looking up from a tablet, Rain had built a quiet, permanent conclusion about himself. F-rank wasn’t just a label the scanner gave him yesterday. It was just confirmation of something he’d already decided a long time ago.
Apparently the system disagreed.
’Then again, Sixteen is just one number past 15. It’s not like I’m some genuis or anything,’ he sighed.
Then his eyes locked onto the bottom line.
Stored Items: [Skill Disk - Unawakened F-Rank] x1, [Skill Disk - Unawakened F-Rank] x1.
Rain’s heart stopped.
He leaned straight into the screen, completely forgetting the pain in his side.
"What?" Rain choked out, his voice squeaking. "What the hell? Stored items?"
He reached out a hand, his fingers passing right through the glowing light of the interface.
"The nurse said there was nothing in my jacket!" Rain whispered aggressively, his eyes wide. "She said the drone cleared the alley! How do you have the disks?"
[Upon host losing consciousness, host’s blood came into contact with both state-issued utility cases,] the system replied instantly. [The initialization protocol triggered an emergency absorption process, converting both physical objects into digital data stored directly within host’s system inventory.]
Rain sat frozen, his jaw hanging open.
They weren’t incinerated. They weren’t sitting in an alley puddle. They were inside him. Digitized. Stored inside whatever strange phenomenon was currently sitting in his brain.
"So I still have them," Rain breathed, a sudden surge of heat hitting his chest. "I actually still have both disks."
[Correct,] the system chimed. [Host currently possesses two compatible synthesis materials. Host’s core system function is Synthesis. Would host like to synthesize a new skill?]
Rain gripped the thin sheet over his legs. "Synthesize a skill? You mean... combine them? You can fuse two separate skill disks together?"
[Synthesis takes raw, unawakened, or fully developed skill structures and merges their baseline code to form a singular, superior ability,] the system explained. [Host currently holds two identical unawakened F-Rank baseline utility disks.]
Rain’s mind whirled. Standard procedure in the academy was simple: you took a single disk, slotted it into an activation rig, and absorbed whatever basic, bottom-tier skill was burned onto the chip. Combining two disks was unheard of. If you tried to force two disks into the same neural port at once, the conflicting mana frequencies would cook your brain cells.
"Wait," Rain said, his street-smart instincts kicking in. "What are the odds of this working? If I fuse them, what’s the chance it fails?"
The blue screen flickered, calculating.
[Analyzing material compatibility...]
[Material A: Unawakened F-Rank Utility Disk]
[Material B: Unawakened F-Rank Utility Disk]
[Calculated base success rate for double-disk synthesis: 0.01%]
Rain stared at the numbers. A flat, dead zero point zero one percent.
"Zero point zero one?" Rain scoffed, leaning back against the wall. "Way to go. That’s a ninety-nine point nine nine percent chance my only two assets turn into fried plastic."
[Host may choose to initiate the synthesis process or abandon the materials,] the system stated calmly. [However, stored unawakened materials cannot be extracted back into physical form once digitized. Unused materials will degrade in 60 seconds.]
Rain’s eyes snapped wide. "What? Why?"
[Digitized baseline data requires integration or it collapses. Countdown initiated: 59... 58... 57...]
"Are you kidding me?" Rain hissed, keeping his voice down so he didn’t alert the nurse outside the curtain. "You’re giving me a choice between a fraction-of-a-percent gamble and losing everything right now?"
[51... 50... 49...]
Rain gritted his teeth, his jaw muscles clenching hard enough to ache.
He thought about the three guild kids laughing in the dark, kicking him into the dirt, calling him a scrawny piece of trash. He thought about Sen sitting on his bare mattress, staring at the wall before stepping off the edge.
If he stayed an unawakened F-rank, he was dead anyway. A zero point zero one percent chance was better than the guaranteed zero he’d been handed his entire life.
"Fine!" Rain whispered, sweating pouring down his neck. "Do it! Go ahead!"
BING!
[Synthesis command accepted.]
[Host’s hidden innate passive trait detected: Absolute Desperation.]
[Passive condition met. Activating Luck Multiplier (x10,000).]
[Base success rate updated: 0.01% x 10,000 = 100%.]
[Synthesis success guaranteed.]
Rain’s mouth popped open. "Holy shit..."
[Initiating Synthesis of two Unawakened F-Rank Utility Disks.]
[Processing baseline structures...]
[Time remaining: 59 seconds.]
Before Rain could even process what a ten-thousand-fold luck multiplier meant, a strange sensation bloomed in the center of his chest.
It started as a soft, gentle warmth, right behind his sternum. It felt surprisingly pleasant, like sinking into a deep, hot bath after a cold day in the slums. The dull ache in his cracked ribs seemed to ease up slightly.
"Okay," Rain muttered, relaxing his shoulders. "Okay, this isn’t so bad."
[45 seconds remaining.]
The warmth shifted.
The pleasant bath feeling rapidly turned into a simmering heat. The temperature behind his ribs spiked, going from a warm soak to scalding hot tea in a matter of seconds. Rain’s breath hitched. He touched his chest, feeling his skin growing unnaturally hot through the hospital gown.
[30 seconds remaining.]
The heat turned into a burning fire.
Rain gripped the metal frame of the bed, his head snapping back. His heart pounded like a jackhammer, pumping what felt like liquid lead through his veins. The air in his lungs felt scorching, burning his throat every time he exhaled.
"Ah—" A strangled gasp escaped his lips. He clamped his jaws shut, digging his teeth into his lower lip to keep from screaming.
[15 seconds remaining.]
The fire exploded into pure, unadulterated agony.
It wasn’t just heat anymore. It felt as if someone had plunged two glowing iron hooks into his chest, twisted them around his spine, and began tearing his internal structure apart atom by atom. Every nerve ending in his body fired simultaneously. His muscles locked up so hard his spine arched off the mattress, his feet digging violently into the thin sheet.
Rain’s knuckles turned chalk-white as he held the metal bed rail in his grip. Sweat poured off his forehead, blinding him as his teeth ground together so hard he felt his jaw bone creak.
’Stop... stop...’ his mind shrieked, the world turning blood-red behind his closed eyelids.
[5...]
[4...]
[3...]
[2...]
[1...]
BING!
The agony cut off instantly.
Rain collapsed back onto the mattress, panting violently, his chest heaving up and down. Sweat drenched the white hospital gown, sticking the thin fabric to his skin. He lay there for several seconds, his mouth open, sucking in cool, clinical air like a drowning man reaching the surface.
The pain was completely gone. In its place, a strange, profound sense of weightlessness filled his limb fibers, as if his blood had been cleared of all impurities.
A brilliant gold and blue notification screen bloomed directly above his chest, pulsing with a radiant, humming light.
[Synthesis Complete!]
[Two baseline structures successfully fused and re-coded.]
[Would you like to view the results of the synthesis?]
[YES] / [NO]
Rain lay on his back, his breath slowly evening out. His eyes were wide, fixed on the glowing text.
"Yii...YES" he mouthed breathlessly.
[YES]
The gold and blue light collapsed inward, compressing down into a single, blinding red window that locked directly in front of Rain’s face.
Rain sat frozen on the edge of the gurney, his white-knuckled fingers dug into the thin mattress, his breath stopping dead in his chest.
The text at the top of the screen glowed with an intensity that cast deep red shadows across the sterile clinic walls.
[Synthesis Result]
[Skill Name: Flash Step: Zero Drag]
[Rank: SSS]
....
Rain stared at the floating letters.
He didn’t move. He didn’t blink. He didn’t even breathe.
SSS.
It was a classification meant for the absolute gods of this world. The legendary, untouchable elite who ruled from above. A power tier so astronomically high it wasn’t even supposed to exist for someone like him.
And it had just been forged right in front of his eyes.
From two useless, bottom-tier trash disks.
Rain’s eyes stretched wide, his pupils trembling as the blood drained completely from his face.
"What..." Rain whispered, his voice cracking into a horrified, disbelieving rasp. "What the hell...?"7