Chapter 414: Awakening in Strange Land

Luke felt his body dissolve as he drifted through a space flooded with blue light. A sharp headache bloomed behind his eyes, the kind that came from knowledge being forced into his mind all at once. He remembered leaping into the portal… and then being somewhere else entirely, yet somehow still caught mid teleportation.

The brightness thinned, surrendering to darkness. His body began to reappear. He didn’t understand how he could see anything in that pitch black void, but when he focused, he noticed a glow, soft and white, pulsing like a heartbeat. His soul core. He recognized it instantly; it was the same vision he’d experienced when learning how to strip marks from a soul.

The sphere throbbed, and from its radiance, matter began to bloom. Flesh sprouted like a seedling pushing out of soil. Veins formed. Red blood. Black blood. Tissue knitting itself together around the glowing center. He watched from outside his own body as it built itself layer by layer. This was the Rank advancement… and it was literal. His body was being rebuilt from nothing, sculpted into something new, seamless, without flaws, born entirely from that strange living light within his core.

Suddenly the perspective shifted. He was back inside his own head, seeing through his own eyes. He looked down just in time to watch his hands forming: bones first, then tendons, then muscles, then flesh rising like a tide to cover them.

Mana coursed through him. He felt it moving the same way he felt blood in his veins, warm, alive, aware. When he tried to step forward, the darkness shattered around him and gravity returned violently.

He fell. Branches slapped into him on the way down, snapping beneath his weight. He crashed from one tree to another until he finally hit the ground in a thud that should have broken bones. It didn’t hurt. Not even a little.

Only a lingering headache throbbed behind his temples. He felt, distinctly, his brain finishing its reconstruction… then silence. A faint buzzing lingered for a few seconds, and then even that faded.

He was back. Somewhere new. Somewhere real. Not a dream, because he could finally breathe again.

“Oh gods, finally. Finally we’re somewhere safe where nothing is actively trying to kill us,” Artemis said.

Luke pushed himself up. “Where am I?”

This wasn’t his room in Maine. Not even close. For a wild moment he wondered if his house had somehow been demolished during the teleportation. But one glance at the endless forest around him killed that idea instantly. Too many trees. Too dense. Too old. Nothing human built could hide this much wilderness.

He looked down at his hand and saw the item he’d bought: the wand ring, resting against his skin like an ordinary piece of jewelry.

“At least that wasn’t a dream…” He rose to his feet and immediately felt odd.

His body was heavy. Very heavy. But when he moved, that heaviness flipped into something featherlight. He took a step, then another, and suddenly he was much farther from where he meant to be. His body responded too quickly, as if overclocked. Luke stumbled straight into a tree. The trunk shuddered.

What?

He stepped back, heartbeat picking up as the realization hit him: he was stronger. Much stronger. His vision sharpened with a clarity he didn’t even have words for. It was like he’d gone his whole life with HD and someone had just switched him to 8K. He could see every detail, every texture, every microscopic crease on his own knuckles. When he focused, his pores became crisp points of detail, each one distinct.

“That’s… creepy,” he whispered.

When he glanced at his fingernails, he noticed they were a bit long. Then a curtain of hair slid into his vision as he looked down. That caught him off guard. His hair had grown during the tutorial, sure, but not this much. He figured it made sense, though. This was an entirely new body, restored and rebuilt from the old one. His skin looked paler too.

A faint burn pulsed in his abdomen, and he became aware of the core nestled within his soul. Along with that sensation came an instinctive understanding of his mana, how it flowed through him. The core was the heart of the soul. It didn’t pump blood, but mana. From it came his stamina, his HP, his mana pool. Every part of his power originated there. The System lived there as well. Every notification, every window he saw, all of it was a translation of that strange internal energy.

And he understood even more. The core was like a small flame. A divine spark sitting inside him. Now that he could see it naturally, see the very nucleus of his soul, he realized he had actually taken a step forward in evolution. He wasn’t just a mortal anymore. He was an apprentice on the path toward becoming a god.

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“Okay, something is very wrong,” Artemis said. “This does not look like a suburban house with a welcome-back party waiting. I think your cosmic bad luck is acting up again.”

Luke heard voices echoing from deeper in the forest. He pulled up his bars for stamina, mana, and HP. Everything was full. He took off running through the trees with a throwing knife drawn from the holster on his leg.

“You’re seriously going to run around with a knife in your hand? What if you landed in someone’s backyard? You’re going to sprint around like a lunatic holding a weapon? And that hair—along with the branches and leaves stuck in it—does not scream friendly neighbor,” Artemis muttered.

Luke slid the knife back into its holster.

“I think we ended up in the wrong place,” he said.

“Oh no,” Artemis whispered. “Gods, please don’t tell me this unlucky brat dropped us into an alternate world.”

“This isn’t my house. Or my street,” Luke called back as he kept running. “And there wasn’t a forest this big anywhere near the Baumanns’ place.”

“It’s your fault! All of this is your fault,” Artemis snapped.

“My fault?” He stopped and looked around, listening. Even his hearing had changed; he was picking up dozens of new sounds.

“Everything turned out fine. We escaped the tutorial,” he said, focusing again.