He settled into a cushioned chair at a low table, spreading out the books Librarian Chen had recommended. The first tome he opened was titled "Hunter Classification and Advancement: A Comprehensive Guide." As he began reading,
Ren realized this chapter was going to be one hell of an information dump.
Sorry, readers.
But he needed this knowledge, so he dove in.
Hunters, the book explained, liked to talk about strength the way doctors discussed diseases—categories, classifications, stages. You climbed up one rung at a time, and if you were unlucky, you died before you ever reached the next level.
At the start of the ladder were the basic ranks: F through A.
The system was simple in its brutality. If you were F-rank and wanted to become E-rank, you went out, killed monsters, and gathered 100 mana cores of E-rank quality. That was it. No shortcuts, no alternatives. You repeated the same bloody process from E to D, D to C, all the way up to B to A. Each step was paid for in blood, sweat, and the corpses of both monsters and failed hunters.
Most hunters never made it beyond C-rank, and honestly, most didn't need to. These low and mid-tier ranks were the people who handled the smaller Gates, the regional infestations, the "local problems."
They were the firefighters of this world, always putting out flames before they could turn into infernos. Their powers were rough around the edges, unpolished. They were still learning how to use what the Rift had given them.
Ren paused in his reading, thinking about his own situation. He was technically B-rank, but that classification felt like a cruel joke considering his power level.
But if you were one of the insane few who made it all the way to A-rank, congratulations. That's where the real nightmare began.
A-rank hunters were the ones with the power to protect cities. The key word being "protect," not "save." There was a crucial difference that most people didn't understand. Protection meant holding the line, buying time for evacuations, keeping disasters from spreading. Saving implied you could actually fix the problem.
Most hunters who weren't naturally S-rank awakened, the ones who had used cores to advance, got stuck at A-rank. Although they represented only a few percent of the human population, they formed the backbone of humanity's defense against the supernatural.
If an A-rank hunter wanted to advance to S-rank, well, good luck. They were essentially asking to die.
S-rank monsters were called Calamities for a reason. One of them could destroy an entire city if left alone, sometimes even an entire province. But hunting S-rank monsters wasn't even the most difficult part of advancement.
Even if you somehow managed to collect an S-rank core, reaching S-rank wasn't just about the core itself. The advancement came with something far worse: the Second Awakening.
That's when the world system took you apart—body, mind, and soul—and decided whether you deserved to live as something greater. Most hunters didn't survive the process. Their hearts gave out, their mana circuits collapsed, or their sanity burned away like paper in a furnace. But those who survived were granted an Advanced Job.
It was like being promoted to a specialist in a medical field, except instead of "cardiologist" or "neurosurgeon," you received titles like Sword Saint, Fire Archmagus, or Shadow Queen. In Ren's case, he was just a B-rank hunter with an overpowered one-shot skill, but he was essentially a glass cannon. If something that wasn't vulnerable to horror-based attacks appeared, he would just fucking die.
Still, S-rank was called "the peak of mortals" for good reason. It was the highest a hunter could reach through brute force and perseverance alone. Beyond that, you weren't climbing steps anymore—you were leaping into an entirely different hierarchy.
That next stage was called the Global Ranking Stage.
The first level there was Challenger. It's where you entered the world's top 300 hunters. People who couldn't be ignored by governments or major organizations. Reaching Challenger didn't follow a neat recipe like "collect a hundred cores."
The world system didn't provide instructions or guidance. It just decided, usually when someone pushed beyond what should be mortal limits. Like in Brother Lu's case, for example. Although he wasn't a Challenger anymore, Ren could guess from his class that he needed to cultivate specific techniques to advance further.
Then came the Masters. The top 200 hunters globally. To be a Master meant you were recognized as an authority in your class. If you were a swordsman, you weren't just a good swordsman—you were the person other swordsmen studied under. Master Swordsman. Master Necromancer. Master Healer. At this level, you were capable of flattening armies or wiping out calamity-level monsters singlehandedly.
Above them were the Grandmasters. Top 100. These represented the absolute pinnacle of their respective classes. If someone was called the Grandmaster of Monks, then every other monk-class hunter on the planet lived in their shadow. They didn't just win battles; they dictated how battles were fought. Entire war strategies shifted depending on whether a Grandmaster was present on the battlefield.
But the line between "hunter" and "something else entirely" truly started with the Myths. Only the top 50 hunters in the world could claim that title. A Myth no longer possessed a regular unique class. Instead, they evolved into something unprecedented—something nobody else could ever replicate. The Archmagus of Elements. The Daoist Tribulation Transcendent. These titles weren't just class names. They were living concepts, each one exclusive. If someone already held that Mythical Class, nobody else ever could.
And finally, there were the Legends.
Legends didn't have a fixed number. They weren't bound by "top 50" or "top 100" constraints. The world system simply acknowledged them when they reached a point no one else could touch. Legends didn't just wield power—they bent the fundamental Laws of Reality themselves. Time, death, chaos, order—these were the forces they manipulated like craftsmen wielding tools. Gregory Hood, for example, was called the Divine Hierophant. He embodied divine law and order so completely that his mere presence changed the rules governing religion itself.
The world system enforced hierarchy even at these godlike levels. When the first Legend appeared, the weakest Challenger was forcibly demoted back to S-rank. No exceptions. No mercy. The ladder was strict and unforgiving, and there was no such thing as participation trophies.
So that was the grand system everyone worshiped and feared.
F through A: the locals, grinding cores and protecting their neighborhoods from mundane threats.
S-rank: the so-called peak of mortals, risking their lives in the Second Awakening for a chance at true power.
Challenger through Grandmaster: the global elites, shaping wars and nations through their individual might.
Myths: one-of-a-kind living archetypes, walking embodiments of concepts made flesh.
Legends: the ones who bent reality itself to their will, operating on a level beyond normal human comprehension.
It looked neat and orderly on paper, like a corporate promotion structure. But in reality, every step up was carved from corpses. Every title cost rivers of blood. Every rank meant countless others hadn't survived long enough to claim it.
Ren leaned back in his chair, processing what he'd learned. The book had more technical details—specific requirements for certain advancement paths, historical examples of successful and failed attempts, statistical breakdowns of survival rates—but the core message was clear. This wasn't just a ranking system; it was a meat grinder disguised as a ladder.
He thought about his own position in this hierarchy. Technically B-rank, but with a skill that could potentially kill S-rank targets under the right circumstances. Where did that place him? Was he climbing the ladder normally, or was he some kind of anomaly the system hadn't accounted for?
And what about his hidden skill, the Dominion of the Crawling Madness? That power felt different from anything described in these books. It didn't fit neatly into the categories of sword techniques or elemental magic. It was something alien, something that operated by rules the current system might not understand.
The more he learned about how the world worked, the more he realized how much of an outsider he truly was. Not just because he was new to this reality, but because his powers seemed to come from a completely different paradigm. The hunters in these books fought with techniques that enhanced human capability, even at the highest levels. They became faster, stronger, more skilled versions of what humans could theoretically achieve.
But his power? His power reached into dimensions of existence that had nothing to do with human potential. It touched on cosmic horror, on the kind of forces that existed in the spaces between rational thought.
Ren wondered if that made him more dangerous or more vulnerable. In a system built around measurable advancement and predictable power scaling, what happened when someone wielded forces that operated outside those parameters entirely?
He flipped to the next section of the book, which detailed common advancement bottlenecks and failure points. The text was dense with descriptions of what happened when hunters overreached their capabilities. Heart failure during mana circuit expansion. Psychological breaks during skill integration. Physical dissolution when the body couldn't contain enhanced power levels.
All very systematic. Very understandable, in a grim way.
But nowhere did the book mention what happened when someone's power came from sources the system didn't recognize. Nowhere did it discuss the potential consequences of wielding abilities that predated or existed outside the Rift's influence entirely.
That absence felt significant. Either such cases were so rare they weren't worth documenting, or they were so dangerous that information about them was deliberately suppressed.
Given his luck, Ren suspected it was probably both.
He was likely the infection the world system hadn't planned for—the one that had slipped past triage and was now potentially rotting the whole structure from the inside. The question was whether he could figure out how to use that to his advantage before it killed him.
Or worse, before it killed everyone else.