The Awakening Ceremony made him the laughingstock of the Outer Ring, and Jin Astor accepted the shame with a dead boy's memories. Then the foreign soul rooted deeper, and the Mythic Sovereign Game Engine opened inside him like an unexplored save file. Every menu was locked until he owned a beast. Arthur Astor brought home a gray egg bought with the family's final fifty thousand credits, an Iron-quality Grey Rock Lizard, the lowest tier in the Association chart, mocked in forums as a paperweight and a doorstop. Jin pointed his phone at it and watched the Engine tear through the public data. Hidden Bloodline: Sub-Dragon Mutant. Dormant. Optimization potential: S. The gray joke was a sleeping dragon. The Engine had already marked the egg as eligible for registration because legal ownership and a genuine gift were enough, and the perception filter made the whole deep scan look like a kid playing a free puzzle game. Jin registered the asset, generated a digital avatar, and entered the Mossy Hollow tutorial. The little lizard fought slimes, gathered herbs, and learned dodge timing while the real egg slept. The first boss split in half and murdered the avatar, triggering a two-hour respawn timer, but Jin felt joy instead of panic. Death was free, the beast was safe, and consequences could be mastered. He synced one level of growth into reality, and the egg cracked. Arthur wept over a miracle he could not explain, Elsa declared they would train it until the academy choked on its words, and Jin sat in the dark holding the most dangerous secret in the shelter. The students who laughed at his Awakening would have swallowed their tongues if they had seen the S-grade bloodline. His father kept apologizing for buying a rock, unaware the rock was the most valuable thing an Astor had ever owned. Seven days before the Academy Examination, Jin had nothing in the eyes of the world, but he had a cheat, a plan, and a reason to stop hiding.

The grind taught Jin that the cheat was not a shortcut. Clean fights transferred perfectly; sloppy panics produced corrupt combat data at seventy-one percent. Different actions built different growth: combat instinct, vitality, agility, hide density. The avatar learned footwork, and a line reading Combat Instinct Synchronization three percent crossed the bond before the egg hatched. Soul fatigue appeared as a gray warning, a meter he could not see, and Jin learned to pace himself instead of sprinting into the red. By the time the shell cracked, the gray egg had darkened to slate, then to polished iron, and the incubator's monitor caught a heartbeat four days early. His father's face was fear first, and then came the question Jin could not answer truthfully. The knock came from an Association inspector who had seen the anomalous data and arrived to investigate. Jin gave him the only explanation the world would ever need: he was a C-Rank Data Appraisal kid who optimized heat cycles, humidity, and feed timing. It was all true, and it was completely false. The inspector left impressed, predicting a bright future at a logistics depot, and the neighbors whispered that the Astor boy had been lucky. Lucky was not a word Jin believed in. Lucky was skill that had not been caught yet. The forums still mocked Iron-tier Rock Lizards as paperweights, but Glitch had begun moving on his own, reacting before Jin tapped, a living answer to every joke. In the dungeon, the area boss Moss-Crowned Slime King killed the avatar again and again, and the real Glitch slept through every death, proving the loop was safe and cheap rather than truly free. Then the final sync lit the shell, a dark vein branched across the surface, and the Engine printed Sub-Dragon Bloodline Response 0.7 percent. The sleeping dragon was waking, and the only witness was the father standing in the dark asking what his son had done.

The Academy Entrance Examination began with Glitch clearing an obstacle course so cleanly that the arena forgot to laugh. The readout screamed Excellent, Excellent, Abnormally High, and examiners frowned at an Iron-tier lizard. Phase One happened without drama; Phase Two was not allowed to stay boring. An underground incident collapsed the exam into an emergency survival assessment, and the engineered wilderness turned hostile. Drones abandoned the candidates, the river stopped, and a predator driven by something worse passed overhead. Jin did not fight like a talent cheat. He read terrain, threw rocks, split two coordinated beasts without engaging them, freed a trapped kid from under a pillar, and built a formation from strangers to hold off a wolf pack. He found a seven-year-old Tamer beacon still transmitting, and the Engine pulsed in quiet recognition. Phase Three took his voice and put Glitch in a silent arena against a freight-train monster. Using C-Rank Data Appraisal on the room itself, Jin read the mass, acceleration, and turning radius, then guided his bandaged lizard through all five markers. The crowd called it a tie with Lucian Vale; Lucian was the first to say it was not the same performance. The face-slapping was quiet: the Iron-quality joke had earned an Abnormally High synchrony estimate and a Silver heir's respect. The delay in results stretched every nerve until a national list came out without Jin's name. But an offer came from Meridian Beast High School, a scholarship fragile enough to collapse after one bad term, and a video interview where Glitch corrected itself mid-object and refused a distraction, winning over a veteran examiner who understood what he was seeing. Arthur said he did not care if Jin became a Tamer, only that Jin survived, but Jin had already made a quieter vow: Dad would never apologize for that egg again. On the morning of departure, a transit officer confirmed enrollment, the family gathered for a photograph, and Jin left Shelter 7 with Glitch on his shoulder, his secret intact, and seven dungeon signals glowing on the Engine before he reached the terminal.

Meridian was a bigger map with a sharper server. Before Jin found his dorm, the Engine scanned the sector and flickered seven downloadable dungeon signals, a new region of content waiting behind the same puzzle-game skin. Glitch's real body still had to heal, so Jin used the digital avatar to clear Rustwater Drain, mapping elevated pipes, dodging acid leeches, and watching an elite Caiman drown in a drained channel after he spent eight garbage Corrosive Glands to unmake it. The area boss Rotmist Salamander killed Glitch once, allowed a recording, and then fell to a plan built from data instead of courage: a weakened platform, acid bait, and a strike at the gills after a full breath. Full-Clear Route Optimization made grinding brutally efficient, and stored growth piled up behind a Sync Jin refused to touch until the leg was perfect. When he finally pressed Sync, Glitch woke as a 3-Star beast and immediately tried to test Acid Breath on the apartment dishes. The real problem was visibility. Instructors noticed an absorption curve, so Jin fed them a careful diet-timing story and knew the case was closed because the explanation was boring. The tactical assessment saw him understate his beast, deliberately hide every dangerous skill, and still pass high. Then the random pairing system assigned Lucian Vale as his partner. The top-ranked heir and the scholarship C-Rank were now a team. In the final extraction, Glitch and Lucian's Thunder Falcon barely tolerated each other, but Jin split the roles between ground latch and high release, used their grudging coordination to trigger the extraction gate, and dragged Lucian to safety after he was injured. The final boss was not a monster but a partnership, and it nearly worked. Jin ended the sequence carrying a bruised Glitch, a wary Falcon, and the knowledge that Meridian had already started watching him, while the Engine kept counting new dungeons and the C-Rank disguise kept working.