They call me powerless.
No mana signature. No aura. No ability registration. No spark in my DNA. In a world where even newborns can light a flame with a yawn or bend metal by sneezing, I was classified as "zero." Blank. Non-magical. Inactive.
It's a pretty efficient label, honestly—saves people the trouble of pretending they care.
The world changed before I was born. Changed again and again until only a sliver of it was left habitable. Supernatural contamination—mana storms, mutagenic anomalies, dimensional breaches. All of it started in the year 2010, long before I ever opened my eyes. It's now the year 2072.
I live in Zone 7–B, one of the last stable urban rings safe for people without mana in what was once the east coast of the United States. Mostly concrete. Mostly dust. Half-ruined towers and blinking mana conduits snake through the skyline like dying veins. We have shields up to block the worst of it, but there are still stories. About people who wander too far and start… changing.
It's been 62 years since the incident that flipped the rules of our world. But to me, it's always just been normal.
My name's Akio. Seventeen. Silver hair—not dyed. It's genetic, or a mutation. Take your pick. I live with my grandmother in an apartment built inside what used to be a subway terminal. She says we should be grateful. It's quiet. Mostly dry. Close to a mana line, so our ration modules always work.
She's all I have left.
My parents died in a dungeon over a decade ago—one of those unstable zones you only hear about in survival forums and academy lectures. They were prospectors, scavenging rare catalysts and unstable relics. They never came back. Sometimes I like to imagine they made it to the core and ascended to some mythical rank, but that's just a bedtime story I tell myself. The truth is probably uglier. Dungeons don't leave bodies.
My grandfather—Mom's father—was one of the strongest rankers in the world before all this. Grandma says he stayed behind at the Port during our family's escape to America, fighting off a sea monster bloated with corrupted mana. No one saw him again. He didn't die with glory. He died stalling.
Maybe being powerless skips a generation.
But I do have something. Something I don't understand yet.
A system.
Not the system, like Arigarata—the multiversal stabilizer council that hovers over every inhabited world like a cosmic social worker. They call themselves R&R—short for "Repair and Regulation," though most just call them the Council. From what we're told, their job is to keep worlds from collapsing. Peacekeepers. Overseers. Cosmic janitors.
But if you ask Kei—my conspiracy-nut classmate—he'll tell you something else entirely.
According to Kei, our world is a mana waste dump. A cleanup sector. One of those isolated spheres in the multiverse where high-grade mana gets recycled through proxy wars and dungeon outbreaks. See, when monsters are sent in—hordes of them—they fight, mutate, and eventually degrade. Their corrupt mana is broken down through conflict and exhaustion into something stable, something controllable That's when the real trick happens: siphoning.
"The mana they extract doesn't even go to us," Kei told me once during lunch, whispering over a half-eaten mana-crisp sandwich. "They drain it out through satellite nexuses and send it to higher-level worlds. We're the compost bin of the multiverse."
I don't know if he's crazy. I also don't know if he's wrong.
What I do know is that I have a different kind of system. Not a clean one. Not a public one.
It's more like a dream. A lucid dream. One I can enter whenever I close my eyes and let my consciousness slip.
They think I'm asleep when I'm in there. Maybe I am. Maybe I'm not.
In this world—my world—time moves differently. Ten seconds inside for every second outside. A 10:1 flow differential. That's not just convenient. That's terrifying. I've spent entire hours in there while my body barely flinched on the outside.
The space itself is… simple. Always the same. It looks like an empty factory at dusk—concrete floors, exposed pipes, yellowish glass reflecting a sky that doesn't change. Dust floats even though there's no wind. There are rooms, stairs, corners that shouldn't connect but do. It's familiar, but wrong.
I can walk. Think. Test. Simulate.
That's all it is: a simulation. Or maybe more. Everything I create inside stays. The scratches I make on a metal wall remain the next time I go back. If I build a table, it's still there. If I burn it, it stays burned. But nothing leaves. Nothing comes out.
I can't bring a pencil from that place into this one. Can't stash food or hack my way into a better life. No cheat codes. No god-mode. Just… memory. And time.
If I see a test beforehand—if I remember the answers—I can rehearse them over and over until my hand moves on its own. That's how I pass school. That's how I practice talking to people. Saying the right thing. Sounding human. It's embarrassing, but it helps.
I've tried experimenting. Changing the rules. You'd think with enough time I'd turn it into something amazing. I haven't. Not yet. I've only managed to shift small things—how the light falls through a window, the speed water flows from a pipe. Things you can dismiss as a dream's randomness, but I know better.
And then there are the records.
Somewhere, hidden in that endless factory, are stacks of books. Crates of data. Catalogs of changes I don't remember making. Entries labeled with things like "Physics Module 02 — Inertial Shift" or "Memory Tag — Rehearsal Loop 01." Sometimes I wake up and realize my handwriting's on all of them.
I've never shown anyone. I don't even think anyone could perceive it. My mana level reads zero on every scan. If my ability uses mana, it's a kind that's either undetectable or… alien. Maybe it's not mana at all. Maybe it's older. Or newer. Something the system hasn't classified.
So I stay quiet.
Because if the Council finds out what I really am… I'm not sure they'll let me stay human.