Victor wiped the remaining tears from his eyes with the back of his sleeve, staring blankly at his palms.
They were the hands of a seventeen-year-old, yet they carried the phantom muscle memory of conducting orchestras, adjusting audio levels on digital boards, and plucking strings until his fingers bled.
There was no magical chime in his head.
No glowing holographic text boxes arrived to offer him a cheat code or a quick fix for his depression.
The universe had thrown him into the deep end of a sonic civilization, and it was entirely up to him to figure out how to swim without drowning a second time.
His gaze drifted across the messy studio apartment, eventually landing on a dusty, neglected instrument case tucked away in the corner of his closet, a gift that he had received from someone.
It had been sitting there for so long, untouched, a physical manifestation of his subconscious avoidance.
He didn’t rush over to open it.
He didn’t have a sudden, miraculous surge of inspiration.
His heart was still frozen, and the scars from Earth still throbbed with a dull, psychological ache.
But for the first time in seventeen years, Victor didn’t look away from it.
He just stared at the case, listening to the muffled, ambient music drifting through the window that he forgot it open, from the city outside, realizing that the quiet war between his trauma and his passion had a reason.
“No, I can’t accept this!” Victor suddenly exclaimed, his face twisting into a mask of desperate, frantic determination.
“I won’t go back to music! I can’t relive those things… I won’t!”
He tried to sound unshakeable, but the raw panic in his voice betrayed him.
He looked like someone who had been deeply, irreparably broken, blindly reaching out in the dark for a lifeline to hold on to.
Yet, to his credit, the storm didn’t last forever.
After a few agonizing minutes, his breathing slowed, and he forced himself back to normal—at least from the outside; what his mind was doing to process the wreckage was a completely different story.
Victor possessed a terrifyingly effective, natural ability to compartmentalize his sadness.
He could pack his grief into a tight, dark box and slide it away into the corner of his mind.
It wasn’t by accident that he had developed such a snappy, sarcastic personality; his wit wasn’t just a trait; it was the armor that kept him from falling apart.
Victor collapsed heavily onto his bed with a deep, exhaustive sigh, eventually reaching into his backpack to pull out his smartphone.
He held the sleek device in his palm—the one that would only unlock if he funneled his bio-sound ability directly through his touch.
‘Using my ability for basic utility doesn’t count as going back to music,’ he thought, trying to rationalize the action to himself.
‘I’m just checking my messages.
It’s fine.’
After all, he knew he had to use his resonance just to function normally in this society.
There was no escaping that undeniable, irritating fact.
He directed his sound energy through his hand and easily unlocked his phone.
But even after his phone successfully blinked to life, Victor’s mind remained entirely elsewhere.
For the first time in seventeen years, he found himself actively analyzing the Sound-to-Image Ability—a phenomenon he had taken completely for granted until his Earth memories unlocked.
Looking at it now through his newly expanded perspective, he realized this world’s magic system had rigid, stratified rankings.
It wasn’t like just any random person on the street could effortlessly conjure high-definition, moving cinema with their melodies.
‘How incredibly cliché,’ Victor snorted internally.
‘It’s practically a Xianxia progression system.’
In this universe, the ranking system was officially known as the Seven Tiers of Sound-to-Image Mastery.
The mechanics behind the entire system were monstrously complex, with every single tier containing multiple nuances, sub-phases, and technical aspects.
However, the first three tiers could be broken down simply enough without dwelling on them for too long—otherwise, he’d be stuck explaining the world-building manual instead of resting his aching head.
The first tier was labeled the Child (or Fledgling Wave) phase.
At this initial stage, human resonance was characterized by an erratic, raw, and entirely uncontrolled emotional static.
Because a child’s internal rhythm had not yet matured, their acoustic frequencies fluctuated constantly, making it physically impossible for them to interface with standard consumer technology.
Instead of clear signals, a child’s natural output acted like a localized disruptor to the sensitive audio networks around them.
Consequently, the primary focus of early education in this world wasn’t just about reading or writing; it was a rigorous process of training children how to steady their internal rhythm, tame their chaotic emotional spikes, and eventually smooth their erratic waves into a predictable, manageable frequency.
Even so, children still constantly poured their chaotic energy into art, manifesting abstract, vibrant splashes of color and wild emotional static whenever they sang.
The second tier was known as the Citizen or Adult (the Standard Pulse).
Upon reaching physical maturity, every human naturally stabilized into this universal biological milestone.
At this level, any adult could live a normal life and interact with technology without any frequency instability.
Though the raw images an untrained adult produced were technically low quality, they were distinct enough for daily life, and high clarity wasn’t exactly necessary sometimes.
After all, sometimes someone just wanted to sing their favorite song and form some fun shapes in the air.
Reaching this milestone was a massive deal in the Resonance Federation, signaling that a teenager had finally attained their natural, destined state.
If you are paying attention, you will notice that between the child and adult tiers, we have teenagers; they should be more mature than children, but not as much as adults.
So, how are they classified?
Well, the scientists of this world defined teenagers as being in the half-tier between Child and Adult, a 1.5 tier, if you will.
That’s because 1.5-tier teenagers could normally use the day-to-day instruments and technologies that demanded the sonic touch ability, but they couldn’t form distinct images with their ability.
Finally, the third tier was the Skilled or Scholar (the Graduate) phase.
Achieving this tier required formal higher education, as college was where a human explicitly studied how to transform their blurry, citizen-level pulse into high-definition, crisp, but completely static 3D imagery.
Anyone who attended university could reach this level by training their voice and/or tactile pitch to synchronize perfectly with the specialized, non-musical Sound-Imagery Instruments (SIIs) of their chosen profession.
These professions could be artistic or non-artistic; someone could graduate with a Piano Graduation, but also with an Engineering Graduation.
Both would use their ability in their own respective areas.
A graduate in medicine, for instance, could effortlessly project a razor-sharp, still 3D view of a bone fracture using a clinic’s diagnostic tablet, while an engineering graduate could manifest a perfectly detailed, stationary holographic blueprint of an engine.
But a graduate with a musical degree learned how to use their ability to enhance the artistic sense of their images.
All in all, any profession had its own particularities.
This tier formed the literal backbone of the Federation’s advanced workforce.
These first three tiers covered the basic, non-artistic baseline of society, with plenty of finer nuances left to be discovered down the road.
But as far as the official records were concerned, Victor was just a standard seventeen-year-old high school student, currently at Tier 1.5.
Victor knew about the remaining four upper tiers of mastery, but he wasn’t in the mood to dig into them right now.
They were far too complex, and his brain was already running dangerously low on processing power.
His only real focus at the moment was to figure out what he was supposed to do from here on out.
Currently seventeen, he would be turning eighteen in just a couple of months.
In this society, reaching eighteen meant stepping into legal adulthood and, consequently, naturally unlocking the Tier 2 Standard Pulse.
For a Resonant Human, achieving maturity was one of the most critical milestones of their existence, if not the absolute most important.
It was a massive rite of passage traditionally celebrated with grand parties, family, and friends.
The thing was, Victor didn’t have parents to celebrate with.
History had repeated itself with brutal precision.
He was an orphan once again.
His mother had passed away giving birth to him, and his father had died when he was still just a baby.
He had been taken in and raised by his aunt’s family instead.
Victor honestly didn’t know how to feel about it.
Part of him wondered if he should feel a dark sense of relief that he didn’t have to deal with parental expectations this time around.
Another part wondered if he should feel actively traumatized by the fact that the universe had managed to make him an orphan twice, or if he should just be profoundly sad.
But after staring at the ceiling for a while, he let it go.
He had spent all seventeen years of this current life navigating the world without parents; a sudden influx of Earth memories didn’t change the reality of his present.
But there was one major difference between this life and his past one: he wasn’t entirely alone.
His aunt’s family had raised him as if he were their own flesh and blood, showering him with genuine, unshakeable love.
And Victor loved them fiercely in return.
It was just that his naturally introverted, slightly antisocial tendencies—combined with a lingering, subconscious feeling of being an intruder in their home—had eventually driven him to move out.
That was the real reason he was currently living alone in this small apartment near his school.
Even so, he was on a very strict leash.
He was practically obligated to pack a bag and head back to their house every single weekend; otherwise, his aunt would physically show up at his doorstep and drag him back by his ear.
She had done it before, and Victor had zero doubt she would cheerfully do it again.
In just over a month, he would hit adulthood.
In six months, he would graduate from high school and be expected to choose a path for college.
So many decisions to make, and so many traumas to get over…