The other two were already there when he finally looked for them. They’d come up one at a time as Can and Jane crossed, and he’d been too busy catching his fainting mother and walking his father through to read either one.

[New Entity Detected: Can Teya]

[Species: Human (Unawakened)]

[New Entity Detected: Jane Teya]

[Species: Human (Unawakened)]

Three names in the corner of his eye now, blue, just sitting there. Eren had been reading his own panel for half a year and it had never once shown him somebody else’s. The clones didn’t count. The clones were him. This was his mother’s actual name floating over the grass of another planet and it said human underneath like that was news to anybody.

Unawakened huh..

So, because they can’t get exp and even the system somehow knows it, they can’t level up to 1 and just stay as unawakaned. Or I am just bullshitting..

"You’re doing the thing," Can said.

"What thing."

"The thing where your eyes follow something that isn’t there." His father had his hands back in his pockets and he wasn’t looking at the trees or the moons anymore. He was looking at Eren’s face. "Your mother does it when she’s lying to me about what the butcher charged. You’re reading something. What is it."

Eren rubbed the back of his neck. There was no clean way to say "the planet just put you in a database, Dad" so he didn’t even try.

"It’s a kind of screen," he said. "Only I can see it. It tells me about people and animals on this side. Right now it’s telling me you exist." He tipped his head at his mother, who was upright again and gripping Emily’s arm and watching the second moon like it owed her money. "Says you both exist too. Welcome to the database."

"What does it have on me." Can said it flat, but his jaw had stopped working side to side, which with Can meant he’d already decided the thing was real and worth filing.

"Name. That you’re human." Eren paused. "And that you’re ’Unawakened.’"

"Unawakened." Can repeated it back, flat. "Is that an insult."

"I don’t think the system does insults, Dad."

"Everything does insults if you read it in the right tone."

..

He sat them down in the grass to tell them, because there was no version of it that worked standing up.

The clearing was the one he’d cleared himself weeks back, a worn flat circle ringed by trees that ran a third again taller than anything in Turkey, and the spring light came down through them softer and greener than the light he’d grown up under. Emily lowered herself beside Jane with both hands under her belly and a small grunt she’d never have made a year ago. Can sat like a man at a meeting he hadn’t agreed to attend. Sofie wouldn’t sit at all. She planted her cane at the edge of the circle and looked out into the trees with that flat pricing stare, and Eren let her, because telling Sofie to sit had never worked once in the history of the family.

He told them about the levels.

He kept it simple, the way he’d kept the elves simple in the Zekeriyaköy kitchen. There was a system. It ran on energy you got from beating dangerous things. Every level made the body better, not in a fairy-tale way but in a boring, measurable way, the lungs, the heart, the immune system, the way a cut closed up. He didn’t say fountain of youth out loud because that’s a thing a man says right before he sells you a timeshare, but that was the shape of it and his mother got there on her own.

"That’s why your wife moves like that," Jane said quietly. She’d been watching Emily butcher vegetables two days running and clearly hadn’t let it go. "Like the air is easier for her than it is for the rest of us."

"She’s a Level 51 hunter, Mom." Eren glanced at Emily, and Emily gave his mother a small proud tip of the chin, like she’d been waiting her whole life for somebody to notice. "Oldir’s parents are over two hundred years old and they walk like they’re sixty. Because they fought beasts their whole lives. That’s not a story. That’s just how the body works here."

Can did the math first, because Can always did the math first.

"You didn’t buy a farm for the sea air." He said it without heat, looking at the grass between his shoes. "You bought a door. And you put your sick grandmother through six hours of highway and a hole in the wall because you think this place does what the Istanbul doctors couldn’t."

The clearing went quiet. Even the birds up top seemed to hold off a second.

"Yeah," Eren said. There wasn’t a smaller word for it. "Yeah, Dad. That’s exactly what I think."

Sofie still hadn’t turned around. She stood at the edge of the circle with both spotted hands stacked on the head of her cane, and when she finally spoke her voice came out low and even and not surprised at all.

"Your grandfather went somewhere for almost a year." She kept her back to them. "Fifty years ago, near enough. Walked out of the house one autumn and was gone so long the priest told me to start grieving. Then one morning he was at the door." Her thumb moved slow over the worn wood. "And he came back wrong. Bigger. Healthier. He left a tired man of forty and came home looking thirty and built like a docker, and his ears had come back small and bloody at the edges, and his eyes." She stopped. "His eyes were lit up wrong for weeks. Like somebody left a lamp on behind them and walked off."

"Grandma-"

"Let me finish, boy." She turned then, and her eyes had gone sharp the way they did at the dinner table the night she said she’d come. "He was strong as an ox and out of his mind, both at once. Talked about trees that thought, plants that glowed, things that walked on two legs and ate people. The doctors gave him pills for the rest of his life and everyone agreed he was sick, and I agreed too, because what else do you do. He drew it all in a notebook. I burned the notebook the year he died. I’ve told you that part."

"You have."

"I’m telling you the rest so you understand who you brought here." She lifted the cane an inch off the ground and set it down again, hard. "So don’t stand in your alien field and sell me on how your world makes a body strong. I married a man it made strong. I also washed his pills into his hand every night for forty years and I buried him. Strong wasn’t the problem." She breathed the thick green air in, slow, and the rattle in it went soft at the edges the way it had at the door. "Now. I’m ninety-one and I’m not precious about it. You think a few of these levels buys me time. Show me where to start."

She’s terrifying. I want to be exactly like her when I’m old.

He almost said it out loud. He didn’t, because she’d have hit him with the cane.

Eren went and got a slime. after he told them to stay in the circle and stepped just past the treeline where the ferns grew thick along a wet seam in the ground, because the boring green ones liked damp and there were always a couple of them down there wobbling around with no plan and no enemies and apparently no point.

He found one the size of a fist and a half. The exact dumb species that nearly cooked him alive his first week, back when he’d tripped over a root and one dropped onto his chest and he’d flailed in the dirt like a man on fire while a piece of jelly tried to digest him. He could laugh about it now. He kind of did.

He pinched it up by the cool jelly of its back where it couldn’t reach to melt him and carried it to the circle held out at arm’s length, the way a kid carries a frog to the dinner table.

"That’s a monster?" Jane said.

"This is the easiest monster on the entire planet, Mom. A baby could lose to it, but only barely."

"It’s adorable." Jane leaned in and the slime jiggled at her. "Look at it. It’s a little jelly."

"It put a hole through my favorite shirt and most of the skin under it, so hold your sympathy."

He set it down in the middle of the worn grass and put his boot near it so it couldn’t wobble off, and then he weakened it with two quick scimitar taps, splitting it down to almost nothing without popping it, until it was a flat shivering green smear that still technically counted as alive. He’d done the ugly math on the walk back. Sofie at ninety-one with cancer in her lungs couldn’t kill a healthy slime on her own, so he’d do the work and leave her the last touch, and the system would still log it as her kill. An assisted kill counted. He just needed the thing to count her in it at all.

He folded his knife open and held it out handle-first.

"Tap it," he said. "Right in the middle. Don’t lean on it, just push down. I’ve got the weight."

Sofie took the knife in a hand that shook and looked at it like she was reading a price off the blade. Then she planted her cane, lowered herself with a slowness that cost her something she’d never admit to, and set the point against the green smear in the grass.

Nobody in the circle was breathing. Eren caught himself going still the way his father went still, and made himself stop it.

Please. Just this once. Please be a number that isn’t zeros.

Sofie pushed and the small slime burst with a wet little nothing of a sound and lay flat and dead, and Eren’s own panel never moved because it wasn’t his kill, but the other one came up from the Observe.

[Sofie Teya gained 000% energy..

Fuck me..