Trion didn't hesitate.
The golden prompt still hovered in front of him, bright and impatient.
Accept.
He spoke the word without a second glance at the flaw.
Capacity locked at 1 forever? So what. In a world where most people dreamed of just one more core, one more chance he had been handed eternity.
A blessing beyond reason.
How? How the hell did I awaken a Uniqueness?
As far as he knew no one had.
Not in the slums, not in the academies, not even in the whispered legends traded between desperate gate-hoppers.
Uniqueness was myth. A fairy tale for children who still believed the Origin Realm cared about fairness.
And yet here it was.
More importantly: side effects removed. Completely.
A slow, crooked smile cracked across his blood-streaked face.
"Fuck being stuck at one capacity forever," he muttered under his breath.
"I can just… swap. Fuse something better. Throw the weak one away. No backlash. No rotting insides. No screaming nights."
The thought lit something dangerous inside his chest.
He pushed off the wall and limped sideways into the narrow alley beside the main road. The crowd didn't follow.
People never did. In this city, everyone carried their own wounds; no one had time for anyone else's.
The alley smelled of rust, old piss, and rotting garbage.
A single flickering neon sign from a shuttered noodle stall painted the bricks sickly green every few seconds.
Trion slid down against the damp wall until he sat on the cracked concrete, legs splayed.
He exhalednlong, shaky and willed the inventory open.
A smaller panel shimmered into existence beside the Interference.
Inventory – Stored Cores
×2 Rank 1 Makrot Cores
Two miserable little orbs of dull red light.
Hours of crawling through the weakest zones of the Origin Realm, dodging things that still almost killed him, bleeding from a dozen places just to drag these home.
All because of that first, idiotic choice.
When the free-entry beginners lined up at the school recruitment gate last year, they'd been handed a mixed pool of Rank 1 beast cores.
Hundreds of options. Everything from venom-spitters to armored burrowers. Trion had reached in blind pure luck, they said.
His luck had fucked him from the start.
He pulled Starmok.
The weakest fusion beast anyone had ever heard of. Potential ceiling: Rank 3 at best.
One single, pathetic ability: Devour eat anything, break it down slowly, gain trace nutrients.
Useless in combat. Useless for ranking. Just enough to keep a starving kid from dying if he was desperate.
The mockery had lasted months.
Not just from the instructors. From the other kids who'd pulled the same trash-tier core and somehow still blamed him for making them look bad by association.
Trion shook his head. No point chewing on old shit now.
He had to rise. At least enough to scrape into a ninth-grade academy. In this world, if you weren't a Core Transformer by nineteen, you were prey.
Everyone else was already growing claws, scales, wings while you stayed soft meat.
He focused on the command.
"Remove Starmok core. Fuse Makrot core."
The words left his mouth like a prayer.
Instantly, heat bloomed in his chest not pain, not agony, just… pressure.
Normally, defusing ripped people apart. Veterans described it like someone tearing their skeleton out through their skin.
Blood vomiting. Screams that never quite stopped echoing in the mind. Most who tried it without high-grade stabilizers ended up crippled or dead.
Trion felt nothing.
A soft crack like glass underfoot and the Starmok core materialized back in his inventory, whole and untouched.
At the same instant, the first Makrot core sank into the empty socket in his soul.
This time there was sensation: a brief, electric sting that raced down his arms and legs, like pins-and-needles after sleeping wrong.
His body was reshaping itself. Bones shifting a fraction.
Muscles tightening. Skin prickling as faint, silvery-blue lines Makrot markings etched themselves across the backs of his hands and forearms.
He lifted his right hand and stared.
The deep gashes from earlier the ones still oozing when he sat down were already gone. Not scarred. Not faded. Gone. Smooth, unmarked skin where blood had been pouring minutes ago.
"So I heal instantly now, huh?" he whispered.
He flexed his fingers. Stronger. Quicker. The ache in his ribs had vanished too.
Fusing always accelerated healing that was one of the few mercies of the Origin Realm.
But the side effects usually canceled it out: internal bleeding, organ failure, madness from incompatible essences fighting inside you.
Not anymore.
Trion leaned his head back against the brick and let out a long, trembling breath that was almost a laugh.
Two Makrot cores left.
One already fused.
One waiting.
And an entire lifetime of entries into the Origin Realm anytime, anywhere still sitting in his future like an unopened gift.