Label: Non-Awakened
The small interrogation room smelled of ozone and cheap floor wax. It was furnished with nothing more than a metal table, two hard-backed chairs, and a two-way mirror that Ruyi was entirely certain someone was standing behind right now.
Across from her sat a senior guild investigator named Vance. He was a middle-aged man with sharp gray eyes, a faded scar running through his left eyebrow, and the weary, methodical demeanor of someone who had seen far too many strange things since the dungeons started appearing.
Before Vance could ask his next question, the phone in Ruyi’s jacket pocket began to vibrate violently.
The harsh buzzing shattered the tense silence of the room. Ruyi winced, pulling out the cracked device. The screen illuminated with a single word: Mom.
Vance gestured casually toward the phone. "Go ahead. We aren't monster-hunters without hearts."
Ruyi hesitated, then slid her thumb across the screen and brought the phone to her ear.
"Ruyi? Oh, thank god," her mother’s voice rushed through the speaker, laced with immediate, breathless panic. "Are you alright? You were going to the book convention, as I recall, in Area AAA of City CC. I just saw the news—they said a wild beast broke through the barrier!"
Ruyi’s posture stiffened slightly. She kept her tone flat, modulating her voice to sound as mundane and unbothered as humanly possible, entirely conscious of Vance’s sharp, analytical eyes tracking every micro-expression on her face.
"I am fine. Safe," Ruyi said smoothly, keeping her answers brief and carefully scrubbed of any drama. "I’m just finishing up with a few routine questions at a local administrative office. I will return home as soon as possible."
"Are you sure? The news showed a whole block destroyed! The report said someone killed it, but the district is in total chaos," her mother pressed, background noise rustling over the line. "I’ll have your brother pick you up."
"I am fine. No need for bro to come," Ruyi insisted quickly, imagining her loud, overprotective brother causing an absolute scene in a guild lobby. "Really, Mom. Don't bother him. I’ll take the transit as soon as I'm clear here."
"Alright... but call me the second you get on the bus. Promise me, Ruyi."
"I promise. Love you."
Ruyi hung up the phone and set it face-down on the metal table. She looked up, her expression settling back into a cool, impassive mask as she met the investigator's steady gaze.
"What is it?" she asked dryly.
Vance leaned back, folding his hands over a thick Manila folder. "You're remarkably good at hiding panic. Most civilians who just had a near-death encounter with a Class-3 Boar-Wolf are hyperventilating or crying for their families."
"Panicking doesn't rewrite what happened," Ruyi replied smoothly. "And worrying my mother won't fix the street."
"True," Vance admitted. He tapped his fingers against the table, then pushed a heavy, metallic device into the center of the room. It resembled a sleek, spherical glass orb mounted on a bronze base, wired directly into a diagnostic monitor. "Which brings us to the elephant in the room. A Class-3 beast doesn't just lose a quarter of its torso because it tripped over a curb. And that glaive you were holding didn't have a speck of specialized mana woven into it."
Ruyi stared at the orb. "I told you. I swung, I dodged, I survived. It was chaos."
"And I'm telling you that reality doesn't just scoop itself out of a creature's chest by accident," Vance said quietly. He pointed to the orb. "This is an Evaluator Core—Standard Guild Model 4. It measures mana density, ether fluctuations, and soul-arousal markers. If you awakened today, this machine will register your signature, assign you a grade, and log your primary element."
Ruyi felt a cold knot form in the pit of her stomach. The memory of that terrifying, absolute nothingness floating over her palm resurfaced—the way light bent around it, the way a drop of blood vanished into absolute zero before touching her skin.
If they tested her and found that...
"And if I refuse?" Ruyi asked quietly.
"Then you stay in this room under suspicion of illegal bio-weapon deployment or unregistered dark-craft," Vance said, his tone leaving zero room for negotiation. "Place your hand on the sphere, Ruyi. If you're a civilian who got lucky, you walk out that front door in ten minutes."
Ruyi stared at the orb for three long seconds. She had no choice.
Slowly, she reached out her right hand. Her fingers trembled slightly, the lingering exhaustion weighing heavy on her bones. She pressed her palm against the cool, smooth glass.
"Initiating scan," a neutral automated voice chimed from the diagnostic monitor.
The orb began to glow. A soft, warm blue light pulsed from its center, swirling lazily through the glass matrix.
Please, Ruyi thought fiercely, her teeth grinding together. Just stay normal. Just let me be nothing.
Deep within her chest, that cold, empty place stirred. It didn't ignite like a flame; it drew in. The sensation was subtle—a phantom tug, a tiny vacuum opening somewhere deep beneath her ribs.
The blue light inside the sphere flickered.
Vance leaned forward, his gray eyes narrowing as he watched the diagnostic screen. "Flow rate is... wait."
The blue light suddenly began to bend inward, stretching toward Ruyi’s palm like ink being sucked down a drain. The monitor screen stuttered, lines of green data corrupting into nonsense symbols.
ERR: NULL_SIGNAL ERR: FLUCTUATION_OUT_OF_BOUNDS ERR: INSUFFICIENT_DATA_DENSITY
The orb gave a faint, flat ping. The light inside it snapped off entirely, leaving the glass dark and inert.
The room went dead silent.
Vance stared at the dead monitor, then at the orb, and finally up at Ruyi. "What did you just do?"
"I didn't do anything," Ruyi said, her heart hammering against her ribs, though her face remained stubbornly blank. "It just went dark."
Vance stood up, pulling a handheld diagnostic wand from his belt. He swept it over her hand, then over the machine. The wand beeped twice with a flat, dull tone.
"Zero mana saturation," Vance muttered, reading the display in disbelief. "No ether trail. No elemental residue. The machine didn't even register a baseline human aura—it acted like the circuit wasn't even closed."
He tapped the sphere hard with his knuckle. Nothing happened.
"Is it broken?" Ruyi asked, injecting just a touch of hopeful boredom into her voice.
Vance didn't answer right away. He stared at her hand, his scar twitching slightly.
The ability that had awakened inside Ruyi wasn't a standard element. It wasn't fire, ice, or physical enhancement that generated measurable energy. It was an anomaly—unstable, localized void magic that consumed or warped ambient energy rather than emitting it. To a machine built to measure output, her power registered as an absolute, flatline zero. An error. An absence.
Vance slowly let out a long breath and sat back down. He picked up his pen and opened her file.
"The test is inconclusive due to hardware failure," Vance declared stiffly. "Or, more accurately... you have no detectable awakening markers whatsoever."
Ruyi suppressed the surge of relief that threatened to break through her posture. "So I'm a non-awakener."
"On paper? Yes," Vance said, writing down a brisk note on her official intake sheet. He stamped the top of the page with a red ink seal: NON-AWAKENED / CIVILIAN SURVIVOR. "You are free to leave."
Ruyi didn't hesitate. She immediately pulled her hand back and stood up, taking her phone off the table. "Thank you."
"However," Vance added, his voice catching her just as her hand touched the door handle.
She paused, looking over her shoulder.
"A Class-3 beast doesn't die of nothing, Ruyi," Vance said softly, watching her back. "The official report will state the creature suffered an internal organ rupture due to pre-existing dungeon shock. But the Guild doesn't believe in coincidences."
He capped his pen with a sharp click.
"You'll be placed on the Passive Observation List. Standard protocol for anomalous incidents involving unawakened civilians. Someone will be keeping an eye on your district. If anything... unusual happens around you again, we will know."
Ruyi held his gaze for a second, her jaw tightening.
"I'm just a civilian going home to her family," she said quietly.
"I hope for your sake that's true," Vance replied.
Ruyi pulled open the heavy metal door and stepped out into the bustling corridor of the guild facility, leaving the cold interrogation room behind. As she walked toward the exit, she slipped her hand into her jacket pocket.
Deep inside her palm, hidden beneath her skin, a tiny, invisible ripple folded the air, vanishing the moment she closed her fingers into a fist.
They thought she was powerless. They thought she was ordinary.
Good, Ruyi thought as she pushed through the reinforced glass doors and stepped back out into the late afternoon air, feeling the distant, ominous tremor of the opening dungeon miles away.
Let them keep watching.