The blue light hadn’t even finished fading from his palm before the second notification bloomed into existence, hovering directly above the first.
[Second Reward: Attribute Allocation — 15 Points]
Caius stared at the words until they blurred, his mind racing through every stat-based system novel he’d devoured back on Earth.
Attribute points.
Actual, tangible, world-breaking attribute points.
“Show me the stat screen,” he whispered, half expecting nothing to happen.
The blue tab rippled and reformed, unfurling into something far more detailed.
[Caius Draxos — Age 17]
[Class: None]
[Patron: Ashra, Minor Goddess of Ash and Embers]
[Strength: 6] [Vitality: 7] [Agility: 8] [Mana Affinity: 4] [Willpower: 9]
[Unassigned Points: 15]
He almost laughed.
Six strength.
Seven vitality.
Numbers so pathetic they might as well have been rounding errors next to whatever monstrous totals his brothers carried.
He didn’t know the exact numbers behind a true Blessed of Valerion, but he’d heard the estate guards whisper about his eldest brother Kaelan shattering a boulder with a single unarmed strike during his Exemplar trial.
That wasn’t a six-strength kind of feat.
Fifteen points wouldn’t turn him into a god.
But it was fifteen points he hadn’t had an hour ago, and in a world this unforgiving, that was the difference between breathing and not.
Caius forced himself to think instead of panic-dump everything into Strength like some starving animal.
He was going to be fighting an apocalypse-tier lunatic eventually.
Brute force wasn’t going to save him.
Survival would.
“Ten into Vitality,” he murmured, watching the number climb from seven to seventeen with each mental push.
“Five into Agility.”
[Vitality: 17] [Agility: 13]
[Unassigned Points: 0]
The moment the last point locked in, his entire body seized.
It wasn’t pain exactly.
It was pressure, like his skin had suddenly become too small for what was underneath it.
His veins lit up gold beneath his flesh for half a second, his heartbeat slamming against his ribs like a war drum, and then it was over.
He collapsed forward onto his hands, gasping, sweat beading along his hairline.
“Holy shit,” he wheezed.
He could feel it.
Actually feel it.
His limbs didn’t look any different, no bulging new muscle, no visible transformation, but there was a hum underneath his skin now, a low-grade electricity that hadn’t been there before.
He rose to his feet and his knees didn’t buckle.
His breathing, usually shallow and rationed like everything else about his pathetic body, came deep and even.
He turned back to the floating grimoire-bound light still nestled in his palm.
“Alright,” he said, steadying himself.
“Let’s see what I actually got.”
He focused inward, calling the artifact the way he had when it first bound itself to him.
A soft ripple of blue-white light spilled from his hand and the Grimoire materialized again, this time open, its ancient pages fluttering on a wind that didn’t exist.
The pages were not written in any language he recognized, and yet he understood every symbol instantly, the knowledge pouring directly into his skull like ice water down his spine.
[Grimoire of the Cinder Choir — Bound]
[Contained Skills:]
[- Ashveil (Passive): User’s Ash mana can be shaped into a fine obscuring mist. Reduces detection range of hostile Blessed by 40%.]
[- Ember Lash (Active): Condenses Ash mana into a whip of superheated cinder. Deals minor burn damage. Cooldown: 3 minutes.]
[- Cinder Wraith (Locked – Requires Ash Affinity Lv.10): Summons a temporary construct of ash and flame to fight on the user’s behalf.]
Caius’s grin returned, slower this time, more calculating.
An obscuring mist.
A whip made of literal fire ash.
And a locked summon that, if the naming convention held true to every progression fantasy he’d ever read, was going to be an absolute monster once he leveled it up.
It wasn’t Valerion’s crimson bloodlust.
It wasn’t Isolde’s ability to freeze a courtyard solid.
But it was his.
For the first time since he’d woken up in this nightmare of a body, Caius Draxos actually had a plan that didn’t end with him getting curb-stomped by his own bloodline.
He immediately tried to summon Ember Lash, focusing the strange new hum beneath his skin and pushing it toward his right hand.
Gray-black smoke coiled up from his palm, twisting and hardening in the air, and then, with a faint hiss like a dying coal, a whip of solidified cinder cracked into existence, three feet long, glowing faintly orange at its tightly coiled tip.
“Oh, that’s actually terrifying,” Caius said, staring at the weapon in his hand with something close to reverence.
He gave it an experimental flick and the tip lashed out, biting a scorched line into the stone wall beside his bookshelf.
Real.
Tangible.
Dangerous.
For the first time in seven days, Caius Draxos actually smiled without a trace of bitterness in it.
That was, of course, the exact moment his bedroom door was blasted off its hinges.
The heavy oak slab didn’t just swing open, it exploded inward in a spray of splinters, crashing against his bedframe hard enough to crack the wood.
Caius barely had time to throw an arm up before dust and debris rained down over him.
Standing in the ruined doorway, silhouetted by the corridor’s torchlight, was a mountain of a man wrapped in dark crimson battle leathers, his aura visibly bleeding off him in thick coils of oppressive heat.
Kaelan Draxos.
His eldest brother.
Twenty-two years old, already a Saint-rank Blessed of the God of War, and currently radiating enough killing intent to make the hairs on Caius’s arms stand rigid.
“You ignored the Patriarch’s summons,” Kaelan said, his voice a low, dangerous rumble as he stepped over the wreckage of the door like it was nothing.
His crimson eyes, so like Caius’s own but infinitely more terrifying, swept the room and landed on the smoking whip still coiled in Caius’s fist.
For a heartbeat, something flickered across Kaelan’s face.
Surprise, maybe.
Or contempt.
“What,” Kaelan said slowly, “is that.”
Caius’s mouth went dry.
Every survival instinct honed from a lifetime of self-preservation screamed at him to hide the weapon, to grovel, to play the broken cripple everyone in this house already believed him to be.
But something in him, something new, something that had cracked open the moment those seventeen points of Vitality slammed into his bones, refused to bow.
“It’s mine,” Caius said instead, and even he was surprised by how steady his voice came out.
Kaelan’s expression twisted into something between amusement and disgust.
“You skip dinner. You hide in this room like a rat for seven days. You let the maid stand outside your door begging, and now I find you playing with parlor tricks.” He cracked his neck, the sound like a boulder splitting.
“Father sent me to drag you to the hall by your collar if I had to. I think I’ll enjoy it more now.”
He lunged.
There was no windup, no telegraphed strike, nothing Caius’s Earth-honed instincts could have possibly prepared him for.
One moment Kaelan was six feet away and the next his fist was already a blur of crimson-wrapped force, closing the distance in what felt like less than a quarter second.
Caius’s new Agility screamed at him before his conscious mind even registered the threat, and his body moved on its own, twisting sideways off the edge of his bed.
Kaelan’s fist obliterated the wooden bedpost instead of Caius’s skull, sending shattered fragments spinning across the room in a violent spray.
Thirteen Agility.
It wasn’t enough to fight a Saint-rank Blessed.
It was barely enough to survive being in the same room as one, and Caius knew it with a bone-deep certainty that turned his stomach to ice.
“You dodged,” Kaelan said, and for the first time there was genuine surprise in his voice, quickly swallowed by a wider, hungrier grin.
“Interesting. Let’s see if you can do it twice.”
He came again, faster this time, a brutal cross aimed squarely at Caius’s ribs, the kind of blow that had reportedly cracked stone during his Exemplar trials.
Caius didn’t think.
He simply reacted, throwing his newly summoned whip up in a desperate cross-guard, Ember Lash’s condensed cinder meeting Kaelan’s crimson-wrapped knuckles in an explosion of ash and sparks.
The impact sent Caius flying backward across the room, slamming into the shattered remains of his bookshelf with enough force to knock the breath from his lungs.
Pain screamed up his side, but his ribs, thanks to seventeen points of Vitality he hadn’t had an hour ago, remained miraculously intact.
Kaelan stood in the center of the ruined bedroom, staring down at his own knuckles where a thin line of ash had scorched across his skin, sizzling faintly.
The amusement drained out of his face entirely.
“You burned me,” Kaelan said, his voice dropping into something far quieter, far more dangerous than his earlier mockery.
“A cripple. An Unblessed rat with a dying Ash contract, and you actually burned me.”
The crimson aura around him didn’t just flare, it detonated, rolling off his body in visible waves that cracked the stone floor beneath his boots and sent every remaining book on the shattered shelf tumbling to ash.
Caius scrambled backward, his spine hitting the cold stone wall, his mind screaming that he had made a catastrophic mistake, that pride and petty vindication were about to get him killed on day seven of a hundred-chapter apocalypse he hadn’t even properly started.
Kaelan’s fist ignited, wreathed entirely now in roaring crimson flame, drawn back for a strike that would not simply bruise.
It would end things.
And then, from somewhere deep in the manor, a bell began to toll.
Not the dinner bell.
Not a training bell.
The estate’s war horn, a sound House Draxos had not sounded in over a decade, screamed through the corridors with a note so low it rattled the remaining glass in Caius’s shattered window.
Kaelan’s flaming fist froze inches from Caius’s face, his crimson eyes snapping toward the door, every ounce of his murderous intent instantly redirected.
“That’s the border alarm,” Kaelan said, his voice suddenly tight, all traces of amusement gone.
“That horn hasn’t sounded since the Thornwood Incursion.”
Somewhere far below the estate, something enormous let out a roar that shook dust from the vaulted ceiling, and House Draxos’s militaristic meat grinder of a household exploded into chaos around them both.