Chapter 5: Menu
In the mirror, a young man looked back at him - twenty-seven, maybe twenty-eight. Black hair, slightly disheveled. Brown eyes still faintly red from what felt suspiciously like a lingering hangover.
The face itself wasn’t unattractive.
But the softness around the jaw and midsection suggested a man who had spent a long time indulging every desire while caring very little for himself.
Jin studied the reflection in silence.
"I have transmigrated," he said calmly.
Then he frowned.
"Wait... since I am in another person’s body... is this possession?"
He thought about it carefully.
"But transmigration usually requires dying first... right?" he considered. "Does that mean I’m dead?"
The last thing he recalled was reading the newest Chapter of the novel before going to bed.
’Did the Donald Train finally bomb our country?’
’Did the building collapse?’
A disaster?
Some bizarre cosmic event?
Several possibilities crossed his mind before he eventually sighed.
"...It doesn’t really matter anymore."
He was now inside the novel, and even if he wasn’t dead in his old life and there was a way back, he wasn’t sure he wanted it.
That was something he had never understood when reading other transmigration stories. Why would the protagonist- no, why would anyone, for that matter, want to return to such a boring world?
A world without dragons, magic, power, or even aliens?
If he had to choose between the two, the answer wasn’t difficult.
The only unfortunate part was whose body he had inherited - Encrid Gannon.
It wasn’t ideal, of course. But it wasn’t the worst outcome either.
He still possessed knowledge of the novel. He knew how the story progressed, he knew the major events, and he knew who the important characters were.
He knew the disasters that would shake the world.
The only thing he didn’t know...
...was the ending.
The author had never released the final Chapters.
But that wasn’t enough to stop him.
’There are things I can do,’ Jin thought. ’I just need to think clearly.’
He needed a plan. He needed to understand his resources and his limitations.
His position within the family, his power, everything.
But before any of that -
Jin looked at the line of text floating silently in the air.
[ To access the Main Menu, think of the word "Menu" or say it aloud. ]
Jin stared at it.
Then, quietly, he thought.
’Menu.’
A moment passed, but nothing happened.
"..."
Another moment passed.
"...Menu?"
Still nothing.
Jin stared.
Then suddenly-
[ NARRATIVE UPDATING PROTOCOL SYSTEM ]
The menu exploded into existence, and Jin nearly jumped.
"...Could’ve appeared a little sooner."
The system ignored him.
[ Main Menu ]
[ ▸ Status ]
[ ▸ Skills ]
[ ▸ Narrative Quests ]
[ ▸ ─────── (Locked) ]
[ ▸ ─────── (Locked) ]
[ ▸ Narrative Relevance: 0.11% ]
Jin looked at it.
There were six options. Three of them were unlocked, and two were greyed out without even a hint of what they contained. The last one displayed the narrative relevance percentage, which he had yet to learn more about.
’Status,’ he thought.
The screen flickered.
[ Opening Status... ]
[ Opening Status... ]
[ Opening Status... ]
[ Opening Status... ]
[ Opening Status... ]
The same line repeated five times before vanishing.
Then the actual window appeared.
"Did it really need five loading messages?"
No response.
Apparently the system wasn’t interested in customer feedback.
«« Status »»
[ Host: Encrid Gannon ]
[ Age: 23 ]
[ Realm: Initiate ]
[ Star Level: One-star ]
« Titles »
[ .... ]
Jin read it through once, then again.
He stood up and crossed to the mirror.
’Twenty-three years old?’
The face looking back at him didn’t look twenty-three at all. It looked closer to thirty - not in any specific way he could point to, but he just felt it.
Jin looked at the reflection a moment longer, feeling along his face and jaw. After another moment, he returned to the bed.
’Initiate.’
He turned the word over carefully, pulling from memory everything The Last Age of Radiance had established about how power worked in this world.
The cultivation system was one of the novel’s most celebrated pieces of worldbuilding, and for good reason.
Stars.
They were the sealed nodes of potential energy that every mortal was born with. What differentiated people was how many Stars a person could use and how deeply they could cultivate each one.
Each Star corresponded to a different elemental affinity that shaped everything from fighting style to the kind of cultivator a person could become.
Unsealing a Star was only the beginning. From there, a cultivator developed their Realm, deepening their mastery of that Star’s energy and building toward higher and higher levels of capability.
The Star Realms ascended in stages, starting with the Initiate.
The more Stars unsealed, the broader the arsenal. The higher the Realm, the deeper the strength.
It was simple in concept but brutally demanding in practice.
One-star in the star level was self-explanatory. It just meant only one Star had been unsealed in the host.
To give an idea of how his strength compared to others, every side character in the novel had unsealed at least two Stars and pushed deep into the three or four realms higher than ’initiate’ by the time the story found them. Some had three or four stars.
’Well,’ Jin thought flatly. ’This was expected from this degenerate.’
Still, there was an underline beneath the word Initiate. He focused on it.
[ Loading... ]
[ Loading... ]
[ Error ]
[ Loading... ]
[ Error ]
[ Ignore Previous Error ]
[ Loading Complete ]
"..."
Jin stared at the sequence.
"You’re not exactly inspiring confidence."
The system once again refused to defend itself.
A new screen appeared.
«« Realm »»
«Azure Star»
[ Star Realm: Initiate ]
[ Star Ability: None ]
[ Star Connections: None ]
Jin stared at the Star name for a moment.
Then his eyes widened slightly. "Oh."
The Azure Star.
That wasn’t bad.
Actually, it was surprisingly good.
Among the seven Stars, Azure was considered one of the most difficult to awaken. Many cultivators spent their entire lives trying and failing. The fact that Encrid had already unlocked it suggested he possessed far greater talent than the novel ever mentioned. Maybe the original owner had simply wasted it.
His attention shifted downward, to the Star Ability and Connections fields.
He wasn’t very surprised by them, but it would be a lie to say he wasn’t disappointed.
There were different ways to gain Star abilities.
Some developed them by deepening their understanding of the Star and cultivating it into higher realms. Some, however, absorbed the already developed abilities from Roamers of the wild. Some even inherited them from their bloodlines.
It was a little disappointing that there were no abilities that Encrid had, but then again, Jin would be a fool to expect anything from this degenerate.
As far as the Star connection is concerned, that won’t be possible unless he unlocked another star, so there was no point in thinking about that.
He set that aside with some effort. There was much else to get through first.
"Let’s deal with that later," he said to no one, and turned his attention to the titles.
✦ ✦ ✦