He had held so much rage and hatred towards them for so long, nursing those dark feelings through countless sleepless nights and bitter days. But as death crept over him in this moment, he found himself oddly at peace. It was as if all of that hatred and anger wasn't meant for him to carry into whatever came next—a weight his soul refused to bear any longer. So he let go, choosing to die in peace rather than clinging to hurt that no longer served any purpose.
[Achievement completed. Die not by your own hands.]
His eyes snapped open. He found himself floating in an endless void, darkness stretching in every direction without limit or landmark. Those glowing words hovered before him, casting pale light across his face. Confusion gripped him for a moment before something stirred in the depths of his memory—recollections from over forty years ago, when he had been just a child.
He had been running home that day, eager to return before dark. But he stopped when he spotted an old man slumped against a wall, looking as if he were merely a blink away from death's embrace. Being the child he was, he tried to help, only for the old man to look up at him with eyes filled with profound regret. The dying stranger held something out to him, and he thought it looked cool—it was glowing with soft, inviting light—so he took it without hesitation. The moment his fingers closed around it, the thing dissolved and disappeared into his palm.
[Mission started. Die not by your own hands. Good things are to come your way, but they will be cruelly taken away. You have 24 hours to reject the mission. Reward: Create Your Own System.]
That was what had appeared before him that day, and the old man had vanished without a trace moments later. The whole thing was strange, but he had been too young to read back then, so the message meant nothing to him. He assumed he had been dreaming or imagining things, and simply went on with his life, the memory fading into the background noise of childhood.
"What is this?" he asked the void, anger blooming hot in his chest as the realization struck him. This was the thing responsible for everything. This was what had given him his perfect life only to rip it away.
[I'm the system that gave you your perfect life. You accepted the mission; your anger has nothing to do with me. Now, create your own system.]
The words materialized before him, cold and matter-of-fact. His eyes widened as the meaning sank in. The power to create his own system? Excitement sparked through him as he grasped the magnitude of what lay before him. But he gritted his teeth, struggling with the bitter truth that this thing had orchestrated the destruction of everything he loved. In the end, though, he had to confront an uncomfortable question—was any of it ever truly real? Did his wife ever genuinely love him, or had it all been manufactured?
[I only controlled possibilities, increasing the chances of good things coming your way. Once I stopped, naturally, you suffered the backlash, causing the worst possible outcomes to manifest. Meaning, they did love you. Life just happened.]
He gritted his teeth harder. As much as he tried to reason with himself, to accept this explanation, he found nothing but hatred for whatever this thing was. Still, he wasn't foolish enough to pass up the opportunity laid before him. Hatred could wait. Revenge could wait. Power came first.
"The Omni System," he said, a hint of excitement breaking through his anger.
[The system must be fixed to a specific element, path, or concept. You cannot create a system capable of doing everything. The Omni System has been rejected.]
He paused, considering his options more carefully. "I have a question. Are there others who have created their own system?"
[I am one of a kind. There is none like me. I can become any system you desire.]
"I see." His mind raced through possibilities. "How about the Anime and Comic System? A system that allows me to gain powers from those worlds?"
[No. You may only choose anime or comics. Not both.]
"Then anime," he said without hesitation. "All forms of anime. The Anime System—it shall allow me to do anything related to that medium. Gaining bloodlines, powers, abilities, even summoning characters. I want this system to start by letting me choose what I receive in my Starter Pack. And for every reward going forward, I want to be able to pick what I get."
[Unable to summon anime characters. The power required to recreate them with their memories and personalities intact exceeds acceptable parameters.]
A limitation, but one he could live with. Before he could respond, he suddenly found himself gasping as his eyes flew open. He was back in his body—no, not his old broken body. This one was changing, flesh and bone reversing their decay, muscle returning, skin tightening. He was reverting to his prime. Joy surged through him as he felt strength flooding back into limbs that had been weak for years. Then he froze, his attention captured by the screen materializing in his vision.
[Your System Has Awakened. System Name: Anime System Description: This is the ultimate Anime System, allowing its user to one day embody every anime's abilities, powers, and more. This system's goal is to make its user become the very embodiment of Anime.]
[You have been given a Starter Pack. Please open it.]
Everyone who awakened a system received a Starter Pack—a gift to set them on their path. These typically contained four things prepared specifically for the user: an ability, an item, or in rare and fortunate cases, a bloodline. These were the foundations that launched a user on their journey toward power.
He called up his system storage with a thought, finding the Starter Pack waiting for him. He opened it without delay.
[You have been given the choice to pick one item, one ability, and one bloodline of your choice. Note that the stronger the ability or item, the weaker it shall start. This limitation can be overcome through mastery. Not all powerful abilities and items face such restrictions. Note that some abilities and items may require unique methods to level up.]
Three choices. He already knew exactly what he wanted.
"The Gate of Babylon, The End, and the Grand Minister Bloodline from Dragon Ball," he said calmly.
[Congratulations. You have gained the Gate of Babylon Lv.1, The End, and the Grand Minister Bloodline.]
[Gate of Babylon Lv.1] — At level one, this conceptual treasury allows the user to store an infinite quantity of treasures. It is the supreme vault capable of holding all the wealth of the world and beyond. Requirement to Upgrade: Collect sufficient treasures.
[The End] — The user is capable of learning abilities and mastering them completely, to the extent of wielding them at one hundred and twenty percent of their original capability—surpassing even their creators in skill. This ability allows one to learn any technique rapidly, from mundane skills like baseball to powers capable of erasing universes. Limitations: This ability is always active and cannot be turned off. The user must directly witness an ability to copy it. Physical attributes cannot be replicated.
[Grand Minister Bloodline] — This bloodline grants the user a perpetual, instinctive command over divine reaction and perception, allowing their body to automatically respond to any threat or stimulus without conscious thought. In essence, it places them in an Ultra Instinct state at all times, their movements guided by something far beyond mere reflex—a fundamental attunement to the flow of combat itself.
Angels do not require sleep or sustenance, can survive unaided in the cold vacuum of space, and cannot be killed by conventional means. This grants them immortality of types 1, 2, 3, 5, and 8. The only method by which they can be removed from existence is by breaking their sacred laws—rules woven into the very fabric of their being.
[Name: Steven Thomas
Age: 58 Years Old /Immortal
Race: Human
Bloodline: Grand Minister Bloodline
Level: 1
System: Anime System
Abilities: [The End], [Basic Ultra Instincts], [God Ki], [Immortality (type 1, 2, 3, 5,8)], Regeneration (Mid Godly)], [Self-Sustenance], [Laws Manipulation (limited)], [Cosmic Awareness (Limited)], [Infinite Energy], [Gate of Babylon (lvl1)]
There were different classifications of immortality recognized across the tower. Steven currently possesses types 1, 2, 3, 5, and 8:
Type 1 — Eternal Life: Characters gifted with this cannot die from natural causes such as old age or conventional illness, but can still be killed by unnatural means. This includes both those who do not age at all and those who continue to grow old but will never actually die from the passage of time.
Type 2 — Resilient Immortality: Characters with this degree can indefinitely survive injuries that would prove instantly lethal to a normal person, continuing to function without needing to heal from such wounds.
Type 3 — Immortality via Regeneration: Characters can simply regenerate from otherwise fatal wounds, their bodies knitting back together no matter the damage, though the effectiveness depends entirely on the degree and speed of their regeneration.
Type 4 — Immortality via Reincarnation or Resurrection: Whenever these characters die, they will simply reincarnate within another body or resurrect themselves at a later point in time, death serving as little more than a temporary inconvenience.
Type 5 — Deathless Immortality: Characters who exist unbound by conventional concepts of life or death, or who do not exist in the traditional sense at all. Typically, esoteric abilities such as Existence Erasure are required to destroy them permanently.
Type 6 — Parasitic: The character attains a form of immortality by abandoning bodies when necessary, transferring their consciousness to another host through possession or switching to carefully prepared backup bodies.
Type 7 — Undead: Characters who cannot die due to technically being already dead, a state that often overlaps with other forms of immortality. This includes those who continue existing as spiritual entities upon the death of their physical forms.
Type 8 — Reliant Immortality: The character benefits from one or more other types of immortality as long as a certain being, object, place, or concept continues to grant them those benefits, losing all such protections otherwise.
Type 9 — Transcendental Immortality: Characters whose true selves exist independently from the plane where their physical forms can be killed, their essence dwelling somewhere beyond reach.
Of course, his newfound powers came with limitations that tempered his excitement. He could sense the laws that governed reality itself, feel them humming and pulsing at the edges of his expanded perception like distant music, but he remained far too weak to actually control or manipulate them in any meaningful way.
He possessed Cosmic Awareness as well, an ability to perceive events and beings across vast distances, but his current strength constrained its scale to a mere fraction of what it could eventually become with time and growth.
He also felt like he could master Ultra Instinct… but he stopped himself; he wasn't sure if his body could handle all that power.
'I feel so much stronger, and I'm only level one?' he thought, marveling at the vitality and power surging through his restored body. It was intoxicating, this sensation of strength after so many years of weakness and decay.
He raised his hand and pointed toward a heap of rusted trash, curiosity and eagerness driving him to test the limits of his new abilities. Ki gathered in his palm, the energy swirling and condensing into a bright point of concentrated power that cast harsh shadows across the junkyard. He fired.
The trash exploded like it was nothing, debris scattering violently in all directions as the blast tore through metal and refuse alike. The shockwave stirred up clouds of dust and sent smaller pieces of garbage tumbling across the ground.
A wide grin spread across his face, genuine joy lighting up features that had known nothing but misery for so long. He could sense his current power level with perfect clarity—five thousand.
At this moment, standing amid the garbage that had been his prison, if he wanted, he could reach up and destroy the moon with a single concentrated blast. Ki from Dragon Ball was simply that overwhelming in its destructive potential, and this wasn't even God Ki he was wielding. In that world, a power level of only 139 had been sufficient to obliterate the moon entirely.
The commonly cited threshold was ten thousand to destroy a planet, but that figure was misleading at best. If Steven focused every ounce of his power into a single attack, channeling everything he had into one devastating strike, planetary destruction was already well within his reach.
'Take me to the tower,' he thought, and reality shifted around him.
Everyone who possessed a system could enter the Omniversal Tower. It served as a nexus point, a place where users from across countless worlds went to grow stronger through the time-honored method of slaughtering monsters. Every five levels a user reached earned them a reward from their system, incentive to keep pushing forward and climbing higher.
Steven materialized on the first floor, his body reconstituting within a vast and sprawling forest that seemed to stretch endlessly in every direction. He wasted no time taking in the scenery, immediately setting upon the monsters that spawned throughout the shadowed undergrowth.
He wasn't remotely surprised to discover that he required far more experience points than others to level up—it was the expected cost of possessing such a powerful bloodline. But that disadvantage was easily offset by his unique capabilities.
Thanks to his ability to sense the underlying laws of this place, he could detect unique locations hidden throughout each floor, secret areas that held rare treasures and valuable opportunities that other users would walk right past without ever noticing their presence.
'I should change my name,' he mused while raising his hand casually, not breaking stride as monsters began converging on his position from the treeline. 'What name would suit me now?'
He sent a beam of ki flying forward with a thought, and it pierced clean through a cluster of approaching creatures, their bodies bursting apart in sprays of light and dissolving essence.
But the beam didn't dissipate after striking its targets—it curved sharply through the air, changing direction with almost sentient precision as it hunted down more prey. It moved like the Omega Beams from Darkseid, relentless and utterly unavoidable, bending around trees and obstacles to find its marks.
He walked forward at a leisurely pace, hands clasped behind his back, paying little attention to the small notification window hovering in the corner of his vision as it tracked his rapidly accumulating experience.
His mind was elsewhere, contemplating the shape of his new existence and the possibilities that stretched out before him. Behind him, without any conscious direction on his part, the loot from slain monsters floated up from their dissolving corpses, drifting through the air like leaves caught in an unseen current before vanishing one by one into the Gate of Babylon.
[You have been renamed by the system, for your name is not worthy of your status. Your new name is Zenryū Voidex.]
'Oh. Okay.' He accepted the declaration with an easy shrug, feeling no particular attachment to his old identity. He had wanted a new name anyway, something to serve as a clear marker for the beginning of this second life he had been granted.
Although he had been planning to name himself Itachi... what a missed opportunity that was. The thought sparked another memory—his ex-wife had never let him have any say in naming their children, always dismissing his suggestions without consideration.
He wanted to name his son Goku, but she had rejected him. He had wanted to name his daughter Erza or even Mereoleona Vermillion… but again she so cruelly stopped him. She was a walking red flag now that he thought about it.
But if he ever had children again in this new life, he had plenty of names ready and waiting.
He shifted his attention to the cave looming ahead, its mouth a yawning darkness that promised danger and reward in equal measure. The monsters prowling near its entrance were level ten, the highest tier of creature that spawned on this introductory floor. Some of them, he could sense, were powerful enough to challenge fighters at level twelve and beyond—mini-bosses in their own right.
A massive wolf launched itself at him from behind, its fangs bared and muscles coiled with lethal intent, moving in perfect silence as it aimed for his exposed back. But that beam of ki Zenryū had fired earlier still hadn't disappeared.
It curved through the air in a graceful arc and punched through the wolf mid-leap—the alpha predator of this entire area—killing it instantly before it could come within ten feet of him. Its body burst apart into motes of light and experience points.
Zenryū didn't even glance back at the notification of its death. He hadn't been paying attention in the first place.