The drive home felt agonisingly long.
Emily kept both hands locked on the wheel, but her mind was stuck in that quiet, dim apartment. Luke is standing at the door. His unreadable expression. And herself—crying into his chest like a fool on the same night their divorce was finalised.
She exhaled sharply, her breath trembling in the cold car. She was a field agent. She dealt with things professionally. She did not cry in front of suspects, and she absolutely did not almost kiss her ex-husband.
But it wasn't just the embarrassment that bothered her. It was the alley.
She had walked through that scene carefully. She knew what a sanitised crime scene looked like. Something violent had happened there, and Luke had lied to her with a terrifying, absolute calm. The man she remembered would have panicked, deflected with sarcasm, or tried to pull her back in. He wouldn't have stood as still as a stone wall.
He was hiding something. But right now, she had to protect him anyway.
She parked outside her building, pulled out her phone, and dialled the Bureau's secure night desk.
"Officer Chen," she said, forcing her tone flat. "I'm closing out the energy detection alert. Eastern residential district, block fourteen. I completed the field check. Unlicensed practice. Verbal warning issued. No further action required."
"Noted. Closing the alert under your credentials. Have a good night, Agent Emily."
She ended the call. The trace was buried.
Emily locked her car and went upstairs. Her mother had taken Sara and Sera for a few days, and stepping into the silent, empty flat felt suffocating. She dropped her keys, poured a glass of water, and leaned heavily against the kitchen counter.
Her eyes drifted to a small photograph taped to the cabinet. Sara and Sera, squinting into the summer sun, laughing at something just out of frame.
The dam she had been holding up all night finally cracked.
A heavy exhaustion crushed her shoulders. Her family was shattered. The man who had stood beside her when they had nothing had chosen a corporation and a bloodline family over them. And now, she was being shipped off to a new, highly dangerous strike team—the Phoenix Order—because the Bureau was bracing for an escalating war in the shadows.
Emily closed her eyes, letting her head drop forward.
Just give me a minute, she thought tiredly. Just one minute of peace.
But peace didn't come.
Instead, a sudden, searing heat bloomed directly in the centre of her chest. It wasn't physical exertion, and it wasn’t her own awakened energy. It felt like a blinding star had just ignited right next to her heart.
Emily gasped, her eyes flying open. She pushed off the counter, her field instincts snapping awake.
The heat surged outward through her veins. Then, a sharp, mechanical chime rang directly inside her head, followed by the sudden manifestation of a semi-transparent, glowing blue screen floating right in front of her eyes.
[System Initialisation Complete.]
[Host Confirmed: Emily.]
[Welcome to the World Protector System.]
Emily froze, her hand instinctively dropping toward where her holster would be. A holographic interface? Was this a psychic attack? An illusion artifact?
The blue screen flickered, text scrolling rapidly across the floating panel.
[The world is approaching its evolutionary threshold. The 10th Trial of Tribulation is imminent.]
Emily’s brows drew together in sharp confusion. The 10th Trial of Tribulation? She had access to the Bureau's highest classified archives, and she had never heard of anything by that name. What Trial?
As if sensing her confusion, the blue screen flashed crimson.
[Host lacks contextual data. Transmitting visual projection.]
Gravity vanished.
The quiet walls of her kitchen were violently ripped away. Emily staggered, finding herself suddenly standing high above a sprawling, unrecognizable landscape.
The sky above her was bleeding, torn open in jagged rifts of violet and fractured silver. Below, the earth was splitting apart. In the center of the ruined city, a colossal, obsidian tower pierced the clouds, pulsing with a sickly, dark energy.
Massive, nightmarish monsters were pouring out of the tower's gates like a flood of locusts. She saw horrors larger than skyscrapers crushing the indestructible steel fortress of the Bureau headquarters. She saw millions of lives extinguished in a single breath. The air was thick with ash and the metallic scent of blood. It was absolute, inescapable extinction.
Emily tried to scream, to reach for her weapon, to fight—but she was entirely paralysed, forced to watch the end of the world.
Then, reality snapped back.
Emily collapsed hard onto her kitchen floor, gasping for air, cold sweat soaking through her uniform. Her heart hammered against her ribs so violently it hurt. It hadn't been a hallucination. It was a psychic imprint. A promise of the future.
The blue screen hovered calmly in front of her face once more, text scrolling rapidly to explain what she had just seen.
[Data Archive Unlocked: The Cosmic Threshold.]
[The world is not stationary. It moves through the universe, crossing a specific cosmic region once every 10,000 years.]
[Each crossing triggers a forced stage of planetary evolution. It brings awakening, but also mass destruction. Entire civilisations and ancient species have been erased or buried during these past events.]
[The world has already passed through nine levels of evolution. The impending threshold is the tenth and final stage: The 10th Trial of Tribulation.]
Emily stared at the glowing blue text, her mind racing. Ten thousand years. Nine extinct civilisations. And now, it was their turn.
[Current probability of world survival: 1%.]
One percent.
Emily slowly lifted her head, her trembling eyes locking onto the taped photograph of her daughters on the cabinet. The whole world. Every ordinary person. Her beautiful, innocent girls, completely unaware that their future was a dying ember.
[The world requires a guide. A point of intervention. A force capable of altering the probability of extinction.]
[You have been selected.]
Her throat tightened painfully. The Bureau trained its agents to handle rogue awakeners and syndicate wars. They didn't train them to stop the apocalypse.
[Your role: Reduce damage. Protect critical individuals. Prevent key origin treasures from falling into the wrong hands. Shift the probability of survival upward.]
[System capabilities will expand as your strength increases and tasks are completed.]
[New Mission Available. Do you wish to view?]
[ YES / NO ]
Emily sat on the floor for a long time. The shock was still vibrating through her bones, but the tears from earlier were completely gone.
If there was a one percent chance, then the one percent existed. And if it existed, someone had to fight for it. She was a mother, and she was a Bureau agent. She didn't know how to do anything else but fight for the people standing behind her.
With a deep, steadying breath, Emily reached out a trembling finger and tapped [ YES ] on the floating blue screen.
[First Mission — Priority: High]
[Designation: Protect the Path of the Guide]
[Details: Within the coming week, a newly registered awakener named Jack with rare hidden potential will come under threat from a hostile faction. This individual has been identified as a key figure necessary for the world's survival probability. Intervene before the threat eliminates this individual. Protect their path.]
[Reward: First power awakening]
[Time limit: 30 days.]
Emily read the text carefully, her sharp, analytical mind immediately shifting gears to treat the floating box like a standard Bureau briefing.
A newly registered awakener named Jack. Rare hidden potential. Hostile factions.
The pieces clicked together. Director Vale had just transferred her to the Phoenix Order, a specialised, cross-branch strike team built for an impending storm. It was highly probable this "Jack" was someone she was about to meet on that very team. Someone the Bureau—and now the world itself—needed her to protect.
Then, her eyes dropped to the next line.
And first power awakening...
Emily stared at the words. Is it going to make me a power user?
She had spent years in the Bureau relying on her mind, her training, and her sheer grit to survive in a world ruled by those with supernatural abilities. The idea that this bizarre interface could suddenly grant her what nature hadn't was staggering.
She tapped the screen to close the prompt, filing the information away with cold, measured precision.
Emily pulled herself up from the floor. She walked over to the sink, splashed freezing water on her face, and looked at herself in the mirror.
She was the same woman she had been yesterday. But everything around her had changed. She had a system now, a bizarre, magical interface feeding her the secrets of the universe.
Outside her window, the last clouds of the storm broke apart. The first pale, piercing light of dawn began to touch the edges of the winter sky.
Emily didn't go to sleep. She stood in the quiet kitchen, her mind moving steadily through the impossible task ahead, planning the way she always did when the odds were fatal.
One step. Then the next.
It was the only way forward.