The Innkeeper - Chapter 25: Epiphany

It burned an entire kingdom to the ground for petty revenge against the humans.

It ransacked the Board of Sorcery, hoarding all the cores in their treasury to ease its greed.

It killed and destroyed a God for entering its territory without its permission.

In a cavern within the Great Aeternus Labyrinth, a reptile seemly like any other hatched from its egg.

With a growing intellect it shouldn’t have and adaptability traits that is impossible for its current tier of evolution, it began its life surviving and growing stronger.

Read as this reptile mutate and evolve. Watch as it change the world of Atinen, as it usher the world into a new age of chaos and destruction as well as prosperity and hope.

In a distant future, the empires of mankind span the galaxy, and glorious Earth has devolved into a peripheral backwater.

In Shanjing city in the Asian region, Wang Zheng’s dreams of becoming a mech pilot are crushed when his college entrance exam genetic score turns out a pathetic twenty eight, barely above an animal.

To make things worse, people get the impression he attempted suicide after being rejected by the campus beauty.

Then the closest thing to a family he has, the old man in the book store across the road, goes missing, leaving him only a mysterious birthday present.

I was some twenty-something woman dying of stage four cancer.I got obliterated by the “Truck-kun” you nerds are always joking about. Turns out it's a lot less funny when it's your guts splattered on the pavement. Crap.Next thing I know, I'm floating in the dark and this thing pops up in my face.[A choice is now available to you.][Option One: Fade.Cease to exist.][Option Two: Reforge.Begin anew.]You think you can just erase me? Hah. As if.Fueled by pure, uncut spite, I slammed the reforge button. Turns out the universe has a totally sick sense of humor, though.I woke up as a male elf. A seriously hot elf —a mage, of all things. Let's just say I was working with some… unfamiliar hardware downstairs.And Jonny? My best friend, my bro, my lifelong meat shield? The universe decided he'd look better as Yael—a stunningly beautiful elf chick with a charisma stat that was probably maxed out.For a while, we weren't just getting by. We were crushing it. It was awesome.Our new life was shattered by the arrival of Vex, an overpowered demigod who saw our world as a resource to be harvested. He was a cosmic-level threat.My pride, the same stupid pride that always gets me into trouble, wouldn't let me kneel. So I told him where he could stick it.Big mistake.The price for my big mouth was paid in her blood. Vex decided to make an example of her. He didn't just defeat her; he shattered her legs into pulp right in front of me.After that, she just… erased me. Walled me off. I went from being her best friend to a ghost she looks right through. Her hatred isn’t loud; it's a permanent debuff, and the silence is a thousand times worse than her screaming would have been.Broken by my failure and rage, the System offered me another choice.I accepted. The System laid out the cost in cold, hard code:The friendly blue “Overwhelming Pride” interface shattered, overwritten by a brutal, blood-red OS running one program: The 'Overlord Slayer'. My personality was stripped for parts. My charm and pride were forged into an 'Aura of Dread.' My guilt became a damage buff called 'Pain Eater.' My grief is now, literally, my mana pool.My quest is no longer about survival. It is brutally simple: Kill Vex. Absorb his power. Fix what I broke.But to become strong enough, I have to grind this new 'Slayer' class, and every level up feels like I'm deleting a piece of myself.The real question is, by the time I'm strong enough to squash him, will there be anything left of the person Yael knew?And even if I can fix her legs… what's she going to think of the monster who comes back?

A thousand years have passed since the Variants first appeared from the Rifts. God answered the prayers of the human race and gave them a chance to fight back.He bestowed special marks called crests upon twelve who were worthy, granting them unfathomable power to fend off the wave of attacks.Well… that's what the church wants us to think.Man, being man, found a way. And in the present day, large numbers of the population have crests, and those that don't are treated as second-rate.This was the case with Marcus, who spent most of his life doing odd jobs—until one of those jobs led to his demise.At the hands of whom??The son of a major crest-bearing house.Marcus is reincarnated into the body of his killer and soon finds that despite being from a major house, the boy did not have a crest.At least, not one that was bestowed upon him by God.