Chapter 6: Initial Assessment

His body arrived before his mind did.

He knew this place. The Assessment chamber. In his first life he'd stood here for maybe ninety seconds: a brief scan, a forgettable set of starting stats, a class assignment he'd accepted without thinking. He hadn't understood what was happening. He'd been too busy marveling at the full-dive experience to realize the System was reading him.

A voice spoke. It came from no direction, carried no echo, and had no gender or warmth. It was simply present, the way the white light was present.

It wasn't. The pressure returned to his chest and started again.

At what he estimated was the four-and-a-half-minute mark, the pressure lifted. The silence stretched for another ten seconds. Then the voice spoke again.

These were different. The lowest stat on the screen was Luck at eleven, which was already above his previous life's highest. Intelligence and Wisdom, the two stats most directly tied to mana capacity and control, were at eighteen and seventeen. Dexterity and Perception were both sixteen, which meant his body training had registered too, not just the mana work.

The word that caught his attention was Advanced. In his first life, he'd heard about Latent Mana Affinity from a high-level player who discovered it after spending months grinding meditation skills, unlocking the basic version in the process. Advanced was a tier above that, something most players never saw at all.

The clinical nature of the language didn't bother him; he'd gotten used to the system in his past life.

Mana Sight was a perception skill that most players didn't encounter until they'd advanced past their first class evolution, usually around level forty or fifty, and even then only if they'd invested heavily in magical progression. Having it at level one meant he could see what other players couldn't: mana concentrations in the environment, the energy signatures of hidden objects and NPCs, the flow patterns that revealed dungeon mechanics before they triggered.

Felix read each description carefully, then read them again. He let the triumph settle for exactly two seconds, then dismissed the notifications and turned his attention to what came next.

[A versatile melee-caster hybrid specializing in channeling mana through physical combat techniques. Bladecallers augment weapon strikes with mana-infused abilities and maintain high mobility through short-range spatial manipulation. Scales primarily with Strength, Dexterity, and Intelligence.]

A map of the continent materialized, dotted with labeled starting zones. Felix tapped Valdris without hesitation. Frontier town, northeastern edge of the Ashenmere region. Low population density at launch, moderate monster levels in the surrounding wilderness, and most importantly, home to three hidden opportunities that the majority of the playerbase wouldn't discover for weeks.

Color came next, bleeding in from the edges of his vision like a photograph developing. Green. Deep, saturated green, the kind Earth's cities hadn't produced in Felix's lifetime. Grass covered the hillside beneath him, thick and wild, bending under the same wind he felt on his face. Beyond the grass, trees climbed the surrounding hills in dense clusters, their canopies heavy with leaves that caught a golden afternoon light.

For a moment Felix just stood on the hilltop and let it wash through him. The richness of it was staggering. His Aether Conduit skill hummed quietly in his chest, already pulling ambient mana in, and the rate was nothing like Earth's painful trickle. This was a current. A steady, generous current that filled the gaps his three days of training had carved, and he could feel his reserves climbing in real time.

His eyes tracked east along the river. There: the tanner's workshop, identifiable by its position near the water and the drying racks visible even from this distance. The shrine would be beyond it, tucked into a wooded hollow that most players would walk past without a second glance. The blind priestess who tended it didn't register on the minimap. You had to know she was there.