Rain had teeth that night.
It bit through the thin weave of his hoodie, into callused palms and the week-old stubble along his jaw. Neon signs smeared down brick like bad handwriting. Maxx hunched over a battered workbench he'd carried from place to place: a thin light, a soldering iron, a few sockets of scavenged code and metal. The little things he could fix were the only steady things in a life of margins.
"Hold steady." His voice was a rasp from too many late nights and too little sleep. A bead of solder ran silver and true. He loved the small, surgical perfection of it — molten metal turning useless edges into purpose.
A knock rattled the shutter. A drenched kid stood there, rain etching bright lines down his face and a grin that didn't know better than to be wide.
"You fixed my aunt's hearing aid," the boy said, voice high and delighted. "She cried when she heard the kettle."
Maxx felt that familiar, delicate warmth at the center of him — the kind of thing other people called gratitude and which, in his old life, rarely bought groceries. "Tell her to bring the kettle by," he said. "I'll test the amplifier." He handed the boy a thin strip of solder like a makeshift blessing.
After the kid left Maxx wrapped the tiny servo controller he'd been building in cloth and slid it into the inner pocket of his satchel. The silver casing had dents and a scratch where his thumb used to drag against it while he coded micro-adjustments. He had crafted it for someone who needed a hand to make a kettle whistle. It sat in his satchel like a promise.
Outside, the city breathed steam and neon. He kept the bag tucked and walked with the economy of a man who could see hazards three steps ahead: the angle of the rain on a lamppost, the one tile that always slicked, the tram schedule that made the crosswalk dangerous.
A truck tore that margin apart. One moment it idled at the intersection; the next the driver cursed, a seal blew, or the brakes locked — causality didn't owe explanation. The truck yawed with a horrible hunger. Maxx moved on reflex: bag up, shoulder back, a step aside.
His heel found oil.
Impact was a clean percussion. Pain bloomed hot and precise. He tasted wet rubber and copper; the servo in his satchel thudded against his ribs like a small, frantic heart.
If only I had power, he thought, not in the way a tyrant thinks of conquest, but as a simple, human wish: the strength to stop small cruelties, to keep a child's aunt from ever missing a kettle's ring. Neon smeared across his vision into a slash. Then the world emptied into a white that was not hospital but cathedral — patient, entire, and very old.
When thought reassembled, it did so in a place that did not obey the city's ordinances. He lay on a surface that felt like cool glass and looked up at a sky stitched of impossible colors. The air thrummed like thousands of tiny servers booting in chorus. Before him a presence unfolded: enormous, draped in folds of light that swallowed horizons. It was neither male nor female and yet carried the authority of both.
"You died," the presence said in a voice that recorded fact without rancor. "You have been offered a second chance. Will you weave well?"
Maxx flexed a hand and felt it answer — warm, callused, but steadier than his last life's hands had been. Curiosity flared first, the old useful thing that had him pulling radios apart at twelve and cobbling prosthetic servos at eighteen.
Something slotted into that headspace — not spoken aloud, but close as a thought: Hello, Maxx. Diagnostics initiating. I am Kaida.
The voice was clinical and dry, with the faintest thread of what might be called humor if an AI could blush. In his mind a HUD unfurled: graphs, readouts, a pulsing node labeled SKILL COPY: ENABLED.
The presence — the one who had offered rebirth — explained the terms with a clarity like an API spec. He would keep his mind. He would be given potential, not a map to absolute power. An auxiliary intelligence would be slotted into his cognitive mesh to guide his interface with the world. He would be able to copy observed abilities, to adapt and grow beyond ordinary mortal caps. But there were edges: copying demonic or divine signatures risked corrupting him; untempered power could twist intent into cruelty. Also, there was another like him, the presence said, and the name the voice left in the air tasted of old iron: Alex.
Alex. Maxx filed the name into memory like an error code. It had no meaning yet beyond the warning.
Kaida's overlay chirped with precise, indifferent amusement. Optimization parameter: aesthetic influence increased +17%. Maxx almost laughed at the sheer specificity of the note. A dry AI trying to flatter him — it felt absurd and, for the smallest moment, human.
Heat threaded under his skin like molten bronze poured into a mold. The remaking was precise. Bones aligned, sinew rewove with efficiency. This was not bulk; it was purpose: lean, spring-coiled, athletic. He pushed himself up and regarded the face in a puddle nearby: jaw cut into shadow, cheekbones clean, eyes that held a faint, electric focus.
Kaida's diagnostic line supplied blunt numbers. HEIGHT: 187 CM. MASS: 80 KG. PHYSIQUE: ATHLETIC-LEAN. ENDURANCE: ENHANCED.
"You optimized me into a tool," Maxx said, tasting the words the way a technician tests a circuit's response.
"You asked for tools to protect," the presence replied. "I gave you a vessel that will be persuasive in many worlds."
Kaida added, with that weird little human touch of sarcasm an AI shouldn't logically develop: If you insist on emoting, I will log the event and produce a full risk assessment with suggested coping strategies.
Maxx smirked despite himself. The world folded into trees, a gritty lane, and a faint shimmer of mana in the air. In the distance chimneys suggested a village. Kaida ran a scan: Closest settlement: Thalwyn. Distance: 12 kilometers. Recommendation: orient to human centers for immediate humanitarian impact.
He could have, in that instant, sworn to take on continents, to rebuild governments. He didn't. He thought of the servo, the kid with the repaired hearing aid, of the small economies of gratitude. Start small, he told himself. Fix the pump. Light the house. Make one life easier.
He tugged his cloak snug and began down the road, measuring his stride the way he measured circuits. The path glittered where raw mana pooled near the surface, tiny motes that winked like a constellation. Kaida offered another line, dry and impossible to be annoyed by: Note: local fauna aggression is +12% at dawn. Your gait increases perceived leadership by +4%.
Maxx rolled his eyes and kept walking.
A twitch at the edge of perception — a blur of russet as a forest fox leapt a root — presented the first true test of the new system. Instinct and curiosity collided. He reached to try a micro-copy: mirror the fox's leap to test reflex integration, to see what copying felt like.
Kaida's HUD flashed thin red. Caution: copying uncalibrated bio-signature. Ethics Filter: engaged. Estimated cost: minor neural bleed (memory slip probability: 26%). Override?
Maxx's thumb hovered at the virtual prompt. He had been willing to pay costs before, in his first life: hunger, risk, time. This was different — a cost that might shave at what he was, memory by memory.
He overrode the filter.
The world folded inward with a sudden vertigo. For a heartbeat a memory blurred — the boy's grin collapsed and then snapped back jagged. A thin pallor crawled across his vision; an old phrase he'd always said to himself — debug the small, fix the big — skittered out of reach for a second. When the sense returned it felt nicked, as if some small lace of memory had been cut and resewn.
Kaida's voice was precise, not unsympathetic. Note: copying unfiltered causes memory slippage. Corruption Points +5. Ethics patch recommended. Cooldown: 36 minutes.
Maxx palmed his chest where the servo lay, feeling the old life as both anchor and grief. Five points, he thought. The Corruption Points meter — a thin, newly visible strip on the HUD — pulsed with a faint amber: CP: 5/∞ (thresholds at 25/50/75/100). The thresholds meant nothing yet except that the world had rules and costs.
He steadied himself and breathed. The cost had been real; the trade-off tangible. That trade-off would complicate everything he planned to do.
From a dark room miles away, under arches of obsidian, a figure leaned toward a crystal and smiled. It was quiet, a motion like a gear clicking into place. So… the game begins, the figure said, voice like iron ground to fine ash. The word that rolled across the surface of the crystal smelled of the smell Kaida had flagged earlier for him — iron and ash.
Alert: External attention detected. Signature matches known pattern: crimson shard resonance. Likely source: Umbraxis. Associated with: Alex. Kaida's tone hardened into clinical priority. Psychological resonance: high. Recommend extreme caution.
Maxx's jaw tightened at the implication, but he did not look back. He had a pump to fix and a promise in his pocket. He walked on, each step measured.
---
Liora — Interlude (POV)
She kept the scarf coiled beneath her sleeve like a pulse. Thalwyn itself smelled of river clay and warm bread, which could have been comforting except the day her parents died had taught her that scent could sit on top of anything. She was ten when men came for beauty and gold and left the village with their laughter like a taste of iron.
She had learned to keep small, to watch from edges. When the stranger came — not heavy with lord's brocade, not trimmed in the armor of a merchant — she watched him set hands to the pump. The metal sang under his fingers the way good tools sing; the water rose like a small miracle and children squealed. People parted around him like he had permission to be seen.
He didn't ask for coin. He didn't take their thanks like payment. That alone made her suspicious and a little envious. She had vowed vengeance with the single-minded ferocity of the bereaved, but there was a place in her that desired, stubbornly, a practical help that didn't come with strings.
When he checked the leather pocket and pressed something small there — the motion intimate, careful — she eyed him. A thin white scar marked her throat; she fingered it and shied away from pity. She had been raised on promises made with blood. He made promises with hands that could fix things. Which promise would prove stronger?
She wrapped the scarf tighter around her wrist and watched him stride toward the lane. A thought she would not fully allow herself rose like a budding seed: If one man can change one life, perhaps he can change many. She did not want to hope. She had learned the world ate hope for breakfast. Still, she placed a small faith in the stranger's steady steps and kept the scarf in her hand like a talisman.
---
Maxx reached Thalwyn as dusk folded itself into clean star-pricks. That night the village ate hot broth in common bowls and kept candles burning longer than usual, because even small warmth felt like revolution after a long winter.
The servo in his satchel hummed faintly when he took it out and held the dented metal to the lantern's light. The sound grounded him in a way raw power never could. One life at a time, he told himself.
Kaida's voice softened a degree that might pass for something like approval in her dry scale. Recommendation: engage in humanitarian actions within walking radius of Thalwyn for three days. Social trust returns +8% if no corruption indicators appear.
He smiled, a little, and slipped the servo back into the inner pocket. The Corruption Points bar was an amber sliver he could ignore for now — but not forever.
Somewhere in the dark, the crystal that watched him pulsed. Alex considered the tiny movement on his orb and fed the name into the machine with a certain clinical tenderness. Maxx, he murmured. You build systems. So do I. We differ only in the cost we are willing to pay.
Kaida flagged that sensation as well. Warning: Alex in motion. Probability of interference: elevated. Recommend increase vigilance.
Maxx did not yet know the length of that eventual confrontation or the exact shape of the cost. He only knew the small, practical things he could do first. For now he could fix pumps, solder amplifiers, and make someone's life better. For now that was enough.
He took the first step down the lane toward the hearthlight, toward the pump that would drink again, toward the small human economies he'd always believed worth saving.
I'll begin with the smallest useful thing, he thought. The machine in his head hummed. The forest listened. The road to Thalwyn stretched twelve kilometers of dirt and destiny, and he walked into it with hands that could build new worlds — if he kept the cost in sight.
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End of Chapter 1 — Rebirth of the Hacker
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✨ Next Chapter Preview ✨
The city of Aurelios awakens under the rising sun, but shadows linger in hidden alleys.
Maxx steps forward into a world both dazzling and dangerous.
A princess watches from her balcony, a villain broods on his throne, and whispers of a hidden plot begin to stir.
The stage is set, and the game has only just begun…
🌟 Next time: Chapter 2 — "The Capital of Aurelios" 🌟
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Chapter 2: The Princess and the Shadows — Teaser
The crimson horizon of Promethea's capital bled into twilight as Maxx stepped beyond the temple gates. The whispers of his rebirth still lingered in his mind, but reality struck swiftly—this was no game, no simulation. Every choice would shape his survival.
From the balcony of Aurelios Palace, Princess Seraphina Vale looked down upon the city. Her golden hair caught the dying light, her eyes clouded with worry. She could feel it—the currents of fate shifting, threads pulling her toward someone unseen.
Meanwhile, in the deepest chamber of Umbraxis, Alex sat upon a throne of obsidian flame. His crimson eyes pierced through the veil between realms as he clenched the cursed shard pulsing in his hand.
"Maxx… you should never have returned."
And in the shadows of Aurelios, cloaked figures stirred—blades glinting, voices hissing prayers to a forgotten god. Their target: the outsider who had appeared in the heart of Promethea.
The stage was set.
All paths—royalty, rebellion, and ruin—would converge.
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