"Yo, that must have been one hell of a party. You look like a zombie right now." Akira said.

  Yuji sighed as he placed the box down on the conveyor belt. "I feel like a zombie..."

  Upon waking up in the morning, he discovered that both his sister and uncle were gone. They had already left for the mall center where they spent their weekdays, which meant that Yuji was late for work. Normally, he would've been heading out the door just as those two were waking up.

  "H-Holy shit...!" Akira said as his knees buckled from the weight of the hard plastic box he and Yuji were picking up. They had to catch themselves from falling a few times before they were able to get it on the trolley next to them. "What is with these fucking boxes lately?!"

  "Some of them are way too heavy, that's for sure," Yuji replied nonchalantly.

  As annoying as the random super-heavy box had been for the past half a year, he had far more serious issues at the moment. Like the fact that there were currently two Protectors in the head office talking to Ryu's Father.

  When the new day arrived and Ryu was still missing, the lack of urgency surrounding the Protectors the night before had entirely turned around. They were out in full force now, and another dropship had arrived just as Yuji was walking toward the warehouse where he worked.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Akira staring at the next waist-high box, "What is it? You find something off?"

  "... Aren't you curious? Come on man, there's no way these are food supplies. We're all still eating the same shit even though we're importing a hundred or more of these new boxes five times a week?"

  "Whoa, hang on! You better not be thinking about opening it up." Yuji continued, "And how would you even get it open? If you know how to trick the scanners then that's news to me."

  "I don't know, but there's a lot of powerful tools around here, so, you know..."

  The sound of a door slamming cut off Yuji before he could respond. He and Akira looked in the direction of the Monarch's office, which had two Protectors descending the staircase away from it.

  Inside the office they could see the Monarch, Ryu's Father, yelling at his assistant with a beet-red face.

  As the two Protectors reached the factory floor, one of them spotted Yuji and pointed him out to his partner as he pulled out a datapad.

  "......"

  Doing his best to ignore it, Yuji knelt down by the waist-high box, which prompted Akira to do the same. After putting it on the belt, they continued scanning and placing boxes on the correct belts until they were certain the Protectors were long gone.

  "Y-Yeah, let's just chalk that up to a really bad idea of mine and leave it at that," Akira said nervously.

  "That was the king of bad ideas. There is Protectorate everywhere and you were about to crack open a box of supplies right here on the main floor?"

  "It's just really fuckin weird, man, and why are we the ones who have to carry them around?! My back is seriously dying here... It's so bad that I feel a wave of pain go up my spine whenever my tail bumps into anything lately." He picked up a small box and scanned it, "But yeah, don't worry. I won't be doing that again."

  "Typical house cat, always complaining."

  Akira laughed, "Shut up, 'Box carrier'."

  From there, they continued working for another four hours before it was time to go home. Their hours had been reduced after they'd been assigned to take care of the new wave of supplies, but their pay remained the same, which left them with a lot of free time lately.

  "O-Oh god, just end me. I'm not gonna make it..." Akira said as he laid down sideways on a bench near the exit to the warehouse.

  Yuji laid down in the same way, but on the ground in front of him, "Why are we the ones who have to care for those stupid heavy boxes? Have you ever heard of this happening before?"

  "Fuck if I know, man. I've never seen anyone assigned to specific cargo before. I want to punch the naive me from a month ago who thought we were being rewarded." He pulled a slip out of his left pocket and tossed it onto the ground in front of Yuji, who promptly picked it up and froze when he saw what it was.

  "What is this...?"

  "What else? A currency transfer order from me and Irene to you." He smiled, "Now go get Lisa's legs healed."

  "Why would you---No, really, why would you do this?! You have a baby on the way, and plans to move away as well! There's no way you can afford all of this..."

  "But we can? We've been saving up for far longer than you, and we always planned on helping Lisa before we left this dreary place anyway."

  Yuji stared at the slip incredulously. He had so many different emotions swirling in him that he wasn't even sure how to feel. It was amazing that his childhood friends were helping him with such a large amount of coins, but there was the timing of it too. Normally he'd want to jump for joy, but between Ryu, the Protectorate, and his Awakening, it seemed like a horrible time to bring in a highly ascended Awakened individual.

  "......"

  But the longer he stared at the slip, the more he realized he was just too paranoid thanks to everything going on. This was clearly a very good thing, and he couldn't wait to share the news with his family.

  "Thanks, Akira... And thank Irene for me too. I'll make it up to the two of you someday, I promise!"

  "I'm sure you will, buddy." Akira groaned as he forced himself off the bench and into a standing position, "Now go to the Archive and find a good healer, yeah? I'm gonna head home and pass out."

  Yuji's eyes widened for a moment when he heard the word 'Archives'.

  The Archives... I completely forgot about them.

  He'd only used them twice in his entire life, and the last time was almost a decade ago, so he hadn't even considered using them for any information on the Awakened.

  After Akira exited out of a nearby door, Yuji stood up and walked over to the hangers, pulling his light jacket off of them and slipping it on before leaving through the same door Akira had.

  Outside the warehouse, it was both bright and somewhat warm. Contrasting the three-day blizzard they just had was a five-day reprieve that the outpost's citizens were taking full advantage of. There were people everywhere, and he could tell that most of them were heading for the mall.

  For a second, he thought about following the crowd and locating his family to tell them the good news, but he knew that finding information about himself really wasn't something he could put off. And that was made even clearer by the heavy presence of Protectors, who were, for some reason, still centered around the abandoned Crystal Factory that Yuji used to work at.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Did they find something there that caught their attention? That's a lucky coincidence for me, I guess.

  He was shocked as he passed by two humanoid Drakir females and a fully corrupted Drakir male. Just like everyone else there, he immediately knew they were the Hargraven siblings, even though he'd never actually seen them before now.

  The girls looked normal enough, just Humans with a pair of horns and Clan markings on their faces, which for the Hargravens looked like blackened tears.

  The male however, was far from normal. He stood at around fifteen feet tall and looked like some type of Demonic Lizard. It was Yuji's first time seeing one in the flesh, and he had to admit he was pretty impressed.

  That's definitely not the kind of person you want to be enemies with.

  As he turned down the alley leading to the Archive, he noticed that the Hargraven siblings were stopping in front of the Abandoned Crystal Factory.

  Ahh, right. The Hargravens owned that place. So if the Protectorate did find something, the Hargravens would have to answer to them.

  A few minutes later he reached the Archives and promptly walked inside. It was a tiny building with twenty data booths that could only fit a single person in each one.

  He approached the lady in a white engineering coat that was staring at him from the front desk. She had a small TV blasting music loud enough to hurt his ears, so he yelled, "I'D LIKE TO USE ONE OF THE BOOTHS!"

  The lady waved him off and went back to reading her graphic novel.

  ... This place sure is different from the last time I was here. Even as a kid they wouldn't let me access anything without scanning my ID and soul.

  Yuji walked to the booth near the wall and sat down. Immediately, a transparent window and keypad appeared in front of him.

  I think it was this right here?

  He reached out and slid a bar at the bottom right of the screen that adjusted the transparency until it was at zero percent. He never liked how you could see through any of the data equipment. It just seemed like a pointless aesthetic.

  'Awakened' was the only word he put into the search bar, and as soon as he hit enter he was flooded with responses. Even without scrolling he already saw a few he wanted to look at, with the 'What do you do if you Awaken?' one being his first choice.

  However, after bringing it up, the first thing he read made him narrow his eyes suspiciously.

  What the? There's no way in hell I'm connecting my soul to this hardware.

  According to the entry, there were only two ways to know what your current trial mission was, and any future missions you would be undertaking if you didn't die during the trial.

  The first option simply required you to confirm through the system that you had awakened, which looked like the most obvious trap in the world to him.

  And the second option said that you could view your missions anytime if you had a soul realm, but very few Awakened had those. If the Archive wasn't lying, there was only one person at the highest tier of ascendancy that had a soul realm, and it was outright unheard of for a newly Awakened to have one, so there was a zero percent chance Yuji would. Still though, he made a mental note of how to 'Enter' it and moved on to the 'Why did this happen?' section.

  'Your Awakening is highly dependent on which types of grimoires you read, and whether you worshiped a specific God beforehand. There is no way to tell how an individual will Awaken unless you chose two specific Gods to follow, and not one.'

  Well, I definitely didn't do any of that... And I didn't read any grimoires either.

  The next section was about mission selection, timers, and what determined your 'Path', but as interesting as it all was, none of it meant anything to him at the moment. What he did know was that he had to complete his trial and then choose which 'Path' he was going to go down, but if he couldn't even see what his trial was, then he was going to fail regardless. Unless he just so happened to do exactly what was required of him by pure chance, but that obviously wasn't something worth considering.

  It's looking like I really do have to link myself to this system, but that sounds like the worst idea imaginable damnit. If the other Awakened do come to kill you if you fail, I really don't want my recently Awakened soul entered into a freaking database.

  He looked around a bit more, especially to see if the Awakened truly did kill one another, but that kind of information was locked until you registered. And the remaining non-locked information all looked like things he didn't need to know yet. How 'Magicite' worked and any other advanced knowledge was literally useless for him at the moment.

  He stood up and left the Archive building, saying nothing to the attendant on the way out. She clearly didn't want to be taken away from her novel after all.

  Ahh shit, I forgot about... Eh, I'll find a healer for Lisa tomorrow. It's probably best if we look something like that up together anyway.

  There was a line for the elevator since the main platform out of the city had far more people waiting for it. That one took a while to ferry people since it was really slow, and it moved at an angle, which meant that the impatient ones among the citizenry usually chose to walk to the part of the city that was on the ground level, by going through the trailer area.

  Yuji's eyes started to drift downward as he waited in line. The swirling yellow lights on the elevator felt like they were hypnotizing him to sleep right then and there.

  He waited for over ten minutes, listening to the people around him discuss their plans for the next five days. What they were watching, who they were dating, etc. It was all so benign, and he was fine with that.

  The elevator arrived and locked into place in front of him. He walked to the back of it after the gate opened up, then waited again as his back and sides were crushed by the throng of people filling the somewhat small elevator.

  Yuji never had any great aspirations, but the more he thought about it, the more he wondered if that was because he never thought about what was going to happen after he fixed his sister's legs. That was always the goal, and now that he was there, he couldn't imagine a future where he was able to live a simple life anymore. That choice was probably gone for good.

  The elevator slowed to a crawl as it reached the top. Moments later, the gate opened and Yuji walked toward the right with everyone else. When he broke off to enter one of the trailers, it actually took the people there by surprise. Most of the trailer folk stuck to themselves, so anyone in the other parts of the city rarely interacted with them on a personal level. So his people were kind of seen as rare creatures.

  Yuji pressed his thumb up against the worn-out scanner, and a few seconds later he heard the lock come undone. He always got a good chuckle out of the trailer's somewhat high-tech locks on their front doors, since anyone who wanted to break in could easily do it through the windows.

  After entering the trailer and closing the door behind him, he hit the couch and drifted off to sleep as the persistent fatigue from the night before overtook him again.

  "Wake up, boy. Delivery for you." His Uncle Gavin said as something was dropped onto his chest.

  Yuji slowly opened his eyes and looked down to see a brown square envelope on his chest.

  "It's rare for you to get a package. Come on, open it up!" His sister said from his right, clearly intending to see what was inside with him.

  "Lisa..." Gavin said from the dining area where he was placing the food the two of them brought home, which was enough to get her to back off.

  "Boo, fine. I'll just ask him to tell me what was in it later." She said as she rolled herself over to the dining table.

  Slowly but surely, Yuji righted himself into a sitting position.

  "I haven't seen you nap like that in ages. You worn out from your new workload?" Gavin asked, placing the last plate down in front of his chair.

  Yuji opened the envelope and grabbed the top of the photos inside. He then pulled them up and felt his blood run cold when he saw what was on the first one. It was a photo of the night before, clearly showing him dry heaving in the water depository.

  "Yeah, those heavy boxes are killing me and Akira." He answered mindlessly. He was completely focused on the photos that he was spreading out with his fingers.

  "I was going to ask Ryu to do something about that..." Lisa said, opening up the wrapper Gavin had handed her.

  "I'm sure they'll find him soon," Gavin said.

  He was barely registering anything they were saying. All of the photos were of him burning Ryu's body. The idea that someone might have put a hidden camera in an unused water depository had never even entered his mind. Who would even do that and why?

  When he tried putting the photos back into the envelope so his family wouldn't see them, he noticed there was something at the bottom of the envelope. He dug it out and found that it was a letter.

  Yuji quickly shoved the photos into the envelope and placed it beside him before opening up the letter.

  'Hello, Yuji~. May I begin this letter by saying Wow, I didn't know you had that in you! A polite and hard worker like you killing someone? Who would have seen that coming?! SURELY NOT ME!!!

  I don't know what spurred you to kill your sister's fake lover, but color me impressed, my boy! Which is why I kind of feel bad for what I'm about to do... Yuji, you probably won't believe me, but if you kill Dai Murakami for me, I'll destroy all of the evidence I have on you, and give you one million Tetra coins. Do you know how many people would die for that kind of money? A lot of them, that's for sure!

  So what do you say, young chap? Do you mind killing that fat Kitsune for me who is long past his expiration date? PRETTY PLEASE WITH SUGAR ON TOP?! HAHAHAHAHAHA----

  Yuji crinkled the paper up and shoved it into the envelope. His uncle was saying something to him, but he couldn't hear any of it. All he could think about at the moment was how he was right on the money earlier. His simple life was gone. This was all that awaited him now, whether he wanted it or not.

  And Yuji was all covers instead of personal images lol. I forgot to make normal ones for him. Here's one of him I strongly considered for a cover (and may still use for volume 1).