When an Awakened Lord survived the crucible of their first descent and returned to their native dimension, the heavy radiation they had absorbed in the Sovereign Realm translated into reality.

That was the official textbook definition they drilled into your head at Valoria Academy...

What it actually meant was that the human body was forced to violently realign, shedding its mortal frailties to match the pinnacle of its genetic potential.

The extent of the transformation was scaled directly to the grade of the Lord’s Core you managed to awaken.

For a standard Red Core, the shift was mild.

You might get a bit taller, your skin blemishes would clear up, and bad eyesight would fix itself.

It was basically a really good spa day mixed with a high-end chiropractic adjustment...

But for a Mythic Gold Core?

It was a fundamental restructuring of his entire biology... or at least that was what Silas felt right now.

Silas squeezed his eyes shut as a wave of blinding heat erupted from the center of his chest.

"Ah, for fuck’s sake," Silas groaned with his teeth gritting together so hard his jaw popped.

The golden star burning near his heart wasn’t just giving him a warm fuzzy feeling.

It was pumping raw energy directly into his bloodstream like literal liquid fire!

He could practically hear the sound of his own bones micro-fracturing.

They were cracking, splintering, and instantly calcifying right inside his flesh.

They were becoming vastly denser, heavier, fundamentally changing their cellular makeup to support the output he had utilized in the Umbral Basin.

’Of course it couldn’t just be easy...’ he thought bitterly as his vision swam with red and gold spots. ’I survive seven days in a rotting hellhole, and my reward is getting my skeleton tossed into a blender.’

He had been jumping thirty feet into the air.

He had been swinging a Tier 3 mythril greatsword that weighed as much as a small car, clashing against monsters the size of buildings.

A regular human skeleton couldn’t handle that kind of ridiculous torque and pressure long-term without shattering into fine dust.

But knowing the logic behind it didn’t make it hurt any less.

"Holy shit," he hissed.

His hands flew out, grabbing the edge of the heavy wooden dresser beside his bed.

His knuckles turned stark white, and he squeezed so hard the expensive imported wood actually started to crack and splinter under his fingers.

The tendons in his arms and legs snapped...

It felt exactly like thick guitar strings snapping under too much tension but the moment they broke, they aggressively re-knit themselves, coming back thicker and turning into unyielding biological steel cables.

The muscle fibers across his chest, back, and shoulders tore themselves apart. It was a rapid, violent destruction, followed by an immediate reconstruction that happened in a matter of seconds.

It felt like his skin was being stretched impossibly tight over a frame that was rapidly expanding from the inside out.

The world was packing on dense terrifying mass, building a physique meant for war without compromising a single fraction of his explosive speed.

The pain was absolutely suffocating... It burned the oxygen right out of his lungs, leaving him gasping and choking on empty air...

But beneath the blinding agony, there was something else.

It was accompanied by a rushing intoxicating wave of raw vitality.

He wasn’t dying at all... Silas was shedding the last pathetic remnants of the handsome slum kid who had walked onto that awakening altar hoping for a miracle.

The transformation lasted for two agonizing minutes.

One hundred and twenty seconds of pure hell before the burning heat slowly receded, sinking deep into his bone marrow where it settled into a low pulse.

Silas slowly opened his eyes.

His breathing was heavy and ragged with his chest heaving like he had just sprinted ten miles.

His skin was slick with a layer of cold sweat.

He let out a long, shaky exhale, completely letting go of the dresser, and stood there, just waiting for the lingering pain to hit him.

He waited for the delayed soreness from the phantom aches of a body that had just been torn apart.

It didn’t.

The dull, lingering ache in his joints faded completely.

Silas didn’t just feel healthy... He felt indestructible!

He lifted his right hand and slowly flexed his fingers, watching the thick cords of muscle shift and glide effortlessly under his skin.

The power contained in his forearm alone was staggering.

’Alright then,’ he thought, rolling his shoulders back and hearing a satisfying, heavy pop. ’That sucked ass... Let’s really hope I don’t have to do that every single time I come back.’

He let go of the ruined dresser, standing perfectly upright.

His posture had completely changed.

He walked into the master bathroom with his bare feet silent against the cold tile. Silas stopped in front of the wide vanity mirror.

He rested his hands on the cool marble counter, leaning forward slightly, and stared at his own reflection.

He blinked, genuinely taken aback by the stranger looking back at him.

He hadn’t grown any taller... he remained exactly at his original height but the exhausted guy who had stepped onto the awakening altar a week ago was completely dead and buried.

His physique was corded with the muscle of a frontline warlord.

The kind of muscle that wasn’t built in an expensive city gym, but forged through swinging heavy steel and surviving attacks, that kind of thing.

Every single line of his body spoke of violence as he looked like he was carved out of marble and wrapped tightly in steel wire.

But it was his face that actually made him freeze.

In Valoria City, physical beauty was cheap. It was a commodity.

Anyone with a measly ten thousand Spirit Credits could walk into an inner-ring clinic, buy an Alchemical Restructuring Elixir, and wake up the next morning looking like a symmetrical, plastic-surgery model.

The city was full of fake, polished people who all looked like variations of the exact same boring, artificial perfection. High cheekbones, straight noses, flawless skin... it was all mass-produced garbage.

Silas looked absolutely nothing like them.

He had always been an above decent-looking guy before the awakening, even when he was practically starving in the lower districts, busting his ass at garbage jobs just to eat.

But this?

This was completely absurd!

He was insanely handsome.

Beyond handsome, honestly. He was straight-up beautiful, but not in a delicate fragile way like some princesses.

It was an intensely masculine perfection that completely defied natural genetics and made all those clinic-bought faces look like cheap plastic toys.

"Is it a stretch to say I look perfect?"

His jawline was sharp and defined, framing a face of terrifying symmetry.

His skin had lost all the sickly sallowness of the slums, taking on a flawless healthy tone that looked like it had never seen a day of stress or smog in its life.

His dark hair was thick and messy, falling perfectly across his forehead in a way that looked effortlessly deliberate.

He reached a hand up, touching his own cheek. He rubbed his thumb against his jawbone, almost half-expecting it to peel off like a mask.

"Are you kidding me?" Silas muttered, leaning closer to the mirror with his voice dropping into a lower tone that even sounded different to his own ears.

Because as crazy as his new face was, his eyes were what really threw him off.

Before the trial, his eyes had just been a standard, unremarkable shade of blue.

Nothing to write home about.

Now? They were a piercing crystalline blue that seemed to actually catch and hold the ambient light in the bathroom.

They were intense like looking into a freezing ocean but that wasn’t the weird part.

Surrounding the pupil of each eye was a distinct, glowing ring of pure gold.

Silas went completely stiff.

He leaned in until his nose was almost touching the glass, staring at the golden rings, absolutely mesmerized.

"What the fuck?" he breathed. "Did I mutate?"

He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand, convinced he was just imagining things, or that the radiation was causing a visual hallucination.

But when he opened them again, the color didn’t change.

It wasn’t a trick of the light. The physical manifestation of his Mythic Gold Core had literally etched itself into his irises.

The golden rings gave his gaze an incredibly unique otherworldly depth.

When he looked at his own reflection, he felt a strange sense of gravity... a feeling that practically demanded submission.

They were the eyes of a guy who actually commanded an army and killed monsters for a living.

"Well," Silas whispered to himself with a grin creeping onto his face as he stared at the golden rings. "That’s definitely going to draw some unwanted attention."

He stepped back from the mirror, running a hand through his dark hair, pulling the strands away from his forehead.

He looked down at his own hands.

The hands that had touched a literal Goddess and the hands that had built a Level 10 territory from the ground up.

He flexed his fingers again, feeling the raw strength hidden just beneath his flawless skin.

It was hilarious to think about.

He had gone into the Sovereign Realm as a guy with a System and now, he had come out as a warlord.

He was a king with seventy fiercely loyal, lethal soldiers waiting for him in another dimension, and he possessed a physical body that felt like it belonged to a god.

"Sigh... I seriously have to remember that this isn’t a dream." he grumbled, shaking his head at the sheer absurdity of his own existence.

He turned away from the mirror, grabbing the hem of the simple, sweat-soaked hood he had worn to sleep on Day One which now felt incredibly tight across his chest and pulled it over his head, tossing it into the corner.

’So my robes didn’t come back? Quite strange though.’

He stepped into the massive, glass-enclosed shower. He reached out and turned the sleek metal dial all the way to cold.

The freezing water cascaded down from the oversized showerhead, hitting his broad shoulders and washing away the cold sweat of the metamorphosis.

He stood there for a long time, letting the physical sensation ground him.

His mind kept flashing back to the Umbral Basin.

The heavy sickening crunch of the Gore-Fiend’s spine giving way under his greatsword.

The deafening crash of Brida’s Shieldmaidens locking their formation and the smell of burning from Rowena’s magic.

Compared to that, the sterile, perfectly clean tiles of his shower felt completely fake.

He was back on Earth.

The corporate guilds who bought and sold human lives, the corrupt aristocrats playing their political games, the smog-choked Lower Wards where people starved to death in the gutters... it was all waiting for him outside these reinforced windows.

"Ah, for fuck’s sake," Silas groaned, leaning his head against the cold glass. "I can barely stand this city as it is and now, on top of that, I have to go out there and pretend I’m just another fresh rookie who barely survived the week."

He stayed under the freezing water for another five minutes before stepping out, grabbing a thick white towel, and drying off.

He walked into his sprawling walk-in closet, the automatic lights flicking on to reveal rows of perfectly organized clothing.

He pulled out fresh civilian clothes while putting his sword in the Inventory.

He wasn’t about to walk around Valoria City holding his sword... that was just asking for the Association to flag him for questioning.

He dressed in a minimalist, tailored black long-sleeved shirt that stretched tightly across his broad, newly expanded chest, and a pair of dark durable trousers.

The fabric felt incredibly light.

It felt almost as fragile as wet paper compared to the heavy iron plating, the thick leather Eluned made, and the dense mythril weaves he had worn for the past week.

He felt entirely unprotected, even though he knew his skin could probably deflect a low-caliber bullet right now.

He strapped a sturdy black leather belt around his waist, adjusting the buckle.

He walked out of the closet, stepping into the empty, expansive living room, and grabbed his new Spirit Phone off the sleek marble kitchen counter.

The dark glass screen was entirely flooded with notifications.

Thousands of alerts from global news feeds, banking apps, and the Valoria City Lord Association were stacked on his lock screen in an endless, scrolling list, practically pushing the device’s processing power to its limit.

He tapped the screen.

The biometric scanner instantly read his thumbprint, flashing green and unlocking the device despite the massive genetic shift his body had just undergone.

The time in the upper right corner read exactly 1:00 PM.

He casually swiped past the frantic global news alerts.

[BREAKING: Novice Trial Concludes! Global Survival Rates Plummet to Historic Lows!]

[MARKET WATCH: Spirit Credit Inflation Expected as Low-Tier Lords Return Empty-Handed!]

[LOCAL: Mayor Verinda to Address Valoria City on the Tragic Losses of the Senior Cohort.]

"Yeah, whatever," Silas muttered, dismissing the doom-and-gloom headlines.