Chapter 1: The Worst Day to Be Right
Everyone gets their Class at seventeen. Most people pray for Warrior, Mage, or Rogue. Kael prayed for anything but what he got.
The Awakening Hall smelled like nervous sweat and cheap candle wax, which Kael thought was an appropriate atmosphere for what was essentially a government-mandated life-ruining ceremony.
Three hundred seventeen-year-olds stood in neat rows, each waiting for the Appraisal Crystal to decide their fate. The air buzzed with poorly concealed excitement. Kael's childhood friend Mira was already vibrating beside him, certain she would get Enchantress. Bram, the big lad on his left, was quietly mouthing prayers to the God of Blades.
Kael was the only one who already knew what he was getting. Or thought he did. He'd spent the past year running quiet diagnostic experiments — tracking how his mana responded to different stimuli, measuring its resonance frequencies against published Class signatures. The data was annoyingly clear: Support-type affinity, healing sub-branch.
He'd made peace with it. Healers were useful. Not glamorous, but useful.
What he had not accounted for was the qualifier.
"Kael Dawnhart." The Assessor's voice was aggressively bored. "Approach."
Kael placed his palm on the crystal. It pulsed once, gold, then faded to a dim, embarrassed amber.
The readout materialized in glowing script above his head for the entire hall to see:
CLASS: HEALER — RANK F
MANA CAPACITY: 12 / 100
COMBAT APTITUDE: NONE DETECTED
Twelve mana. The average house cat had more latent energy than that.
Mira made a sound like a stepped-on cat. Bram winced. The Assessor looked at Kael the way a doctor looks at a terminal diagnosis — professionally sympathetic, personally unmoved.
"You're... in the Support Registry," the Assessor said. "Report to the East Wing. There's a pamphlet."
There was, indeed, a pamphlet. It was titled: SO YOU'RE A NON-COMBAT CLASS! with an exclamation mark doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Kael tucked it under his arm and walked to the East Wing.
He was not particularly upset. He had twelve mana — fine. He had no combat aptitude — also fine. What he had, which the Appraisal Crystal couldn't measure and the pamphlet certainly didn't account for, was six years of memories from another life.
A life where he had been a trauma surgeon.
He remembered the smell of operating theatres. The weight of a scalpel. The specific, terrible concentration required to repair a severed brachial artery in under four minutes. Twelve years of education compressed into six years of practice, all of it sitting in his skull like a library no one had thought to burn down.
The System had arrived three years ago — reality restructuring itself around mana and Classes and dungeons like a game overlay someone had slapped onto physics without asking permission. Kael had been fourteen when it happened. Young enough to be assigned a Reincarnator status: a soul with memories of another world, given a fresh body and dropped back in at birth.
The kingdom treated Reincarnators as a curiosity at best, a security risk at worst. Their old-world knowledge was usually irrelevant — what use was chemistry or engineering in a world that ran on mana? Most Reincarnators kept quiet about what they remembered.
Kael kept quiet too.
But as he sat in the East Wing, reading a pamphlet that cheerfully explained the many ways a Rank F Healer could "contribute to party morale," he found himself doing the same thing he'd done in his first life whenever a problem seemed impossible.
He started thinking about the anatomy.