Rain.
That was the first thing Kim Woo Jin remembered.
The sound of it, the feel of it, the way it slammed down from the heavens like judgment itself. The streets of Seoul were drenched, the neon lights blurred by the downpour, the sky pulsing with streaks of electric white. He'd just been walking. No—running. Through the storm, tired from class, annoyed by deadlines, desperate to get home before the power cut out. His sneakers slapped through puddles, bag clutched to his chest, hair flattened by wind and rain.
Then, everything stopped.
There was no warning.
No time to react.
Just a single, blinding flash—and silence.
A bolt of lightning tore from the clouds and struck him like a divine spear.
Pain bloomed for the briefest moment, then darkness.
Nothingness.
He didn't wake up.
He was born.
That was the horrifying truth.
His eyes fluttered open not in a hospital, but in a dimly lit chamber filled with floating crystals and metallic inlays embedded into carved stone walls. The first sound he made wasn't a word, but a cry—sharp, raw, and entirely beyond his control. Arms lifted him. Blurry faces leaned close, murmuring excitedly. He couldn't move properly. His limbs were small. His voice unformed.
Kim Woo Jin had been reborn as a baby.
Panic surged in his newborn lungs. He screamed again, louder this time. He tried to speak, to think, to grasp what was happening, but everything was a blur. He couldn't stop crying, not because he was in pain, but because nothing—nothing—made sense.
Days passed. Weeks. Maybe more.
And slowly, pieces began to fit.
Words filtered through the chaos. Names. Places. Statuses.
Hades.
They called him Hades Draker.
He was the only son of House Draker.
And this wasn't Earth.
This world was something else entirely—an impossible blend of medieval nobility and futuristic invention. Swords and spellcraft walked hand in hand with mechanical constructs powered by mana cores. Magical towers were designed with reinforced alloys, and enchanted weaponry lined the walls of noble households. Hades' own crib was built into a floating mana-conduction unit that rotated every hour to maintain spinal alignment. His nanny carried a sword at her hip and a crystal-powered feeding vial in her pouch.
He wasn't dreaming.
This was real.
He had reincarnated.
As months rolled by, his mind sharpened while his body slowly caught up. He could barely move, yet he absorbed everything. He listened, watched, learned. And gradually, the details of House Draker came into focus.
The Drakers were once legends.
A noble house revered across the continent for their mastery of all things that defined civilization—combat, engineering, architecture, spellcraft, technomancy, and the forging of magical relics. Where other houses specialized in one or two disciplines, the Drakers excelled in everything. They built armies, designed fortresses, conjured runic pathways, and engineered the first inter-kingdom communication orbs. Their name had once inspired fear, awe, and envy.
Now, however, they were fading.
Their influence had waned. Their rivals circled like vultures. Political sabotage, economic betrayal, and internal family losses had whittled their estate down to shadowed corridors and dusty libraries.
But he—Hades—was still their future.
And even as a baby, they whispered of his potential.
"Mana signature is remarkable…"
"Even in infancy, his eyes glow with inherited power…"
"A true Draker, finally..."
But none of them knew the truth.
Inside that child's body was not the soul of a highborn noble.
It was Kim Woo Jin—engineering student, son of a salaryman, who had been killed by lightning and flung into a world of blades and mana.
And inside that new body, something else stirred.
DING.
A soft chime echoed through his consciousness one night while he lay in a crib of enchanted wood.
A faint blue screen blinked open in his vision—transparent and elegant, bordered with arcane glyphs that pulsed like circuits.
[System Notification]
System Code: P_REX Initialized
Soul Sync: Complete
Seraphim Core Status: Awakening
User Identity: Hades Draker
Age: 0.3 Years
Core Type: Unique — Seraphim (Mana Core + Vital Organ)
Core Function: Combat Amplification | Energy Regulation | Evolutionary Growth
Welcome, User.
His heart—both of them—skipped a beat.
The second pulse throbbed deep inside his chest. Not metaphorical. Real. He could feel it—strong, silent, steady. The Seraphim, as the system called it. His second heart. His mana core. A living energy source exclusive to him, woven into the very cells of his being.
It didn't speak. It didn't think. It just was.
Alive. Dormant now, but growing.
It would evolve with him—he knew that instinctively. It would strengthen as he did. Feed off his training. Expand alongside his will. A living core, bound by fate and thunder.
And the system—P_REX—would guide him.
A cold, mechanical interface without emotion, but full of functions. Status. Quests. Inventory. Skills. All the classic structure of an RPG interface… but refined. Clean. Real.
He couldn't move much now.
But one day, he would.
And when he did, the world wouldn't be ready.
Years passed, and so did the silence of childhood.
By the time he could walk and speak, the estate was already whispering of his mind—how quickly he understood spell matrices, how intuitively he solved engineering puzzles meant for master artificers. Hades Draker, at five, was already being called "the heir of a lost golden age."
But behind his cold blue eyes was the mind of a man who had lived once before.
Kim Woo Jin didn't forget who he was.
But now, he embraced who he had become.
And soon, the doors to his future would open wide.
[System Status Panel]
Name: Hades Draker
Age: 5
Core: Seraphim (Synced: 21%)
Level: 1
HP: 180/180
MP: 160/160
Stamina: 190/190
Stats:
Strength: 12
Agility: 13
Endurance: 15
Intelligence: 22
Charisma: 19
Luck: 10
Skills:
• Seraphim Resonance (Lv. 1)
• Arcane Theory (Lv. 2)
• Mana Structure Mapping (Lv. 1)
• P_REX System Link (Lv. 1)
Quests:
• Prepare for Astralis Academy — In Progress
• Restore the Draker Legacy — In Progress
At ten, he would enter Astralis Academy—the peak of noble education and combat design.
And when he did, the storm that made him would finally return…
But this time, he would be the one striking.