The forest was quiet save for the whisper of wind through stone-hard trees. I sat cross-legged on a flat boulder, bare skin kissed by frost and moonlight, unmoving. Hours slipped away without notice. Snow gathered around me, and still I did not stir.
Twelve hours. That was how long I had been here—breathing slow, mind turning endlessly.
At last, I opened my eyes. The world came back in muted color: the pale bark of the rock-trees, the distant shuffle of a stone lizard, the faint crackle of frost. I exhaled, mist curling from my lips.
"I guess I'm doing this."
I had spent the entire night turning the story over in my head. Every scene, every death, every prophecy. The canon wasn't a tale anymore, and now I had to figure out how to live inside them.
The closest canon event to me, a major one at that, would be ACT I: Loki's Descent. And, from it, there were three events I could not escape.
The first was the Hero awakening, which was just yesterday. The second would be the Hero, Leon arriving here, in the Academy for the new semester where he'd meet, interact and make new friends who will also later be a part of his party.
The third was an event that I couldn't stop, despite knowing how it'd turn out. Where, the Hero would be betrayed by one of his friends, and through his blood, a ritualistic descent of the tenth Evil God, Loki would be attempted, thus starting an emergency quest to stop it. They'd succeed, but at the cost of nearly half the Academy being wrecked to shreds.
I had written an early descent of Loki, an Evil God, to show just how strong they exactly are, but now that I was living in the world I'd created, I wanted to slap myself. Hard.
But no amount of self-loathing changed the truth: these events had to happen.
"I can't kill him," I said to myself, reminding myself of the future traitor's identity. "The betrayal needs to happen. I need a part of Loki's divinity if I'm going to have any hopes of actually saving this world."
"Even if it means, she'd have to die," I whispered.
My "quest" wasn't to prevent any of the canon events from happening, no, it was to make sure the world survived them. And to do that, I needed more than aura, more than mana. I needed something absolute.
So I made my decision. This was an investment for the future. Sure, mana and aura were good to have but they won't hurt the evil gods.
I need something more.
I need the world's energy.
"Fuck," I bit down hard on my finger, tasting iron, and pressed the blood against my chest. Slowly, I drew lines in the shape I remembered. A rune older than any spell, older than the gods themselves.
One of the six [Original Runes] of creation. If one is chosen, you couldn't choose any other for it's powers are deemed too strong for any one being to possess more than one [Original Rune].
The lines burned the moment they formed, searing across my skin like molten wire. I hissed, but kept going, dragging the shape to completion until it circled my heart.
"With the Original Rune sewn through my own blood," I kneeled before the sky, and prayed. "I invoke one of the six [Original Runes]: The Rune Of Oath to appear before me."
My vision swam. I dared to place my head back up, and saw that time had stopped. It worked. While the Rune Of Oath was the weakest out of all of the six Original Runes, it was also the easiest to invoke, requiring only one's knowledge of the rune, and blood for it to be summoned.
Then the prompt came in the form of burning fire, each word burning into existence one by one.
[You have summoned the Rune of Oath. What is your oath?]
I nodded, before solemnly making my oath. This was a huge gamble, but a gamble that I would need to take.
"I swear… to never again use either aura or mana, and in return, I ask for an equivalent exchange."
The rune pulsed.
[Your Oath has been heard. Brace yourself now, young warrior.]
The pain came like a thunderclap.
"AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"
Every nerve in my chest lit up at once, sharp and searing. My heart hammered like it was trying to escape. My body convulsed, muscles tearing in spasms. I gasped, cursed, screamed, and still it didn't stop. It was worse than any torture.
Worse than that one time I'd splice my skin from it's bones in that car-crash. Worse than death.
Then darkness took me.
—
Something wet and rough dragged across my cheek. I groaned. When I cracked open my eyes, a rock deer loomed over me, tongue lolling.
"Get off," I muttered, shoving its stony muzzle away. The creature bounded off with a snort, leaving me sprawled in the snow.
My limbs felt like lead. Every breath rattled. I pushed myself upright and croaked the only word that mattered.
"Status."
The screen appeared, and I scrolled down to where it mattered.
Strength: Null
Endurance: Null
Vitality: Null
Agility: Null
Wisdom: Null
Intellect: Null
Mana: [Sealed]
Aura: [Sealed]
I let out a bitter laugh. It looked like my gamble had failed, and I was truly, truly fucked right now.
The Oath Rune was the easiest rune out of the six to invoke, but it's effects weren't guaranteed. Sometimes, you got exactly equal to what you'd sworn off, and other times, you received something even greater.
And, sometimes, you'd be unlucky enough to not gain anything at all and anything you'd sworn off stayed that way. Forever.
"So much for equivalent exchang-Huh?"
Ding!
[The [Messiah]'s trait has been activated. An enormous amount of luck has been applied to rectify the current situation. Primordial Rune Of Oath has been detected. Reversing the current situation. . ..Complete!]
[Congratulations! You have received the Primordial Energy - (Qi).]
"Wait. . what?"
I blinked. Once. Then twice, then an infinite amount of times until the system's words fully registered inside my head.
Tears dropped from my eyes, before I wiped them off. "Thank you. . .Oh my god, thank you [Messiah]!" I dropped on my knees and thanked the almighty god that was the title [Messiah] from inexplicably saving me from my very, very otherwise fucked situation.
"Clutching in at the last moment," I pumped my fist up in victory. "HELL YEAH!"
Grinding aura? Grinding mana? Please. That was the rookie's route, the path of wide-eyed protagonists who thought the difference between living and being turned into cosmic paste was a few more stat points. No matter how much aura you polished, no matter how dense your mana or aura circuits became, they wouldn't even scratch the Ten Evil Gods. I should know. I wrote them that way.
But me? I knew the cheat code buried seven hundred chapters into the narrative.
Qi.
Back then, I'd thrown it in half out of desperation to keep the word count going and half because some reader accused me of running out of ideas. "Leon's going back to zero again? Lame!" they had whined in the comments.
And, now I've received one of the best and most versatile energy sources ever from my book. One that solved my immediate problem of trying to construct circuits as well, since all this primordial energy source required was a core.
Sure, that core had to be one of divine rank, but guess who had one serving of a divine ranked core belonging to an ancient sun god?
That's right. Me.
"And, how can you forget how well it works with, or against divinities & authorities?" I smiled widely. "The original source of energy the gods themselves drew their power from, before the God Of Knowledge & Wisdom invented an alternative."
"Bah, they can keep their alternative," I said. "I got mine!"
Oh, I felt better than good right now.
"Alright," I muttered, cracking my neck. "Time to see if this wasn't just filler."
I switched my title back to [Interdimensional Wanderer], the runes flickering faintly across my vision. Immediately the world bled color differently—the snow hummed, the trees whispered, the stones themselves thrummed with a low, stubborn beat. Energies. Threads I had never noticed before, brushing against my skin like spider silk.
I drew a breath and reached out.
The wind wrapped around me first. Cool. Playful. Flowing in unpredictable currents like a school of fish. Then the sun—warm, radiant even in the thin winter light. Its heat pressed down like a hand on my shoulder, steadying. The earth beneath me was heavier, stubborn, resonant—like a heartbeat I could lean on. Even the frost glimmering on the rocks gave off a sharp, brittle edge, a fragment of stillness turned into power.
Too much. It was like falling into a river without knowing how to swim. The strands tangled, clashed, slid out of my grasp. My breathing hitched as pain lanced through my chest.
"No," I hissed through my teeth. "Not force… balance."
So I adjusted. Matched my rhythm to the wind. Let the warmth of the sun calm the frost. Rooted myself against the stone, steady as the earth itself.
It took minutes. Maybe hours. But finally, the streams stopped fighting. For one fragile heartbeat, they moved together—inside me.
And then the dam burst.
Qi flooded my body. Wild, raw, primal. My veins lit with it, my bones thrummed, my skin prickled with the weight of a thousand unseen eyes.
[Congratulations! You are among the earliest in this realm to discover Qi.]
The message blinked across my mind, but I barely registered it. Because the Sun God's Core in my chest was moving.
It drank the Qi greedily, pulling every drop into itself like a black hole. Then it spat it back out—purer, sharper, blazing as if I had swallowed a star. The circulation looped through me, over and over, until I felt my body creak under the pressure.
My stomach lurched.
I gagged, eyes snapping open to find the sky already dark. I rolled off the boulder and vomited into the snow, my whole body trembling with the effort.
[Congratulations! You have broken through to the 1st Circle of Cultivation. You are now a 1st Circle Cultivator.]
The glowing text hovered smugly in front of me. "So, this is what it feels like to become a cultivator."
I looked into the distant sky, and felt it looking back at me, while the world hugged around my being, as if I was it's newborn, cradling me like a proud mother would to it's baby.
It felt. . .good.
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and groaned when I sniffed a stench so putrid, it would have made my old maths professor smell good.
"I stink like ass, goddamn."
The cold air hit the sweat and vomit clinging to my skin, and I grimaced, before rushing to my home to take a looooong, very much needed shower.