SWNOVELXO Chapter 8: Woke Up Different Part Three
"…Status Window."
A low chime resonated through the room.
A blue system window materialized.
⟡ STATUS WINDOW ⟡
Name: Riven Cael
Age: 22
Level: 3
Race: Human
Tier: 8
Attributes
Strength: 483
Agility: 481
Endurance: 485
Intelligence: 486
Luck: 452
Mana: 497 / 497
Mana Regen: 1.0/sec
Skill(s):
• Continuous Growth – D-Rank [Evolveable]
A passive, compounding trait. All core attributes increase by 5 points every 24 hours.
Growth applies uniformly regardless of health state, activity, or environment.
Affects Strength, Agility, Endurance, Intelligence, Luck, Mana Pool, Mana Regeneration, and adaptive neural faculties.
Immune to buff/debuff interference.
Growth is accumulative, permanent, and scales with user tier.
Trait may evolve further under extreme or unknown conditions.
The room fell silent.
Agent Virell's eyes narrowed at the panel, scanning it twice over as though expecting hidden text to appear. Her brows furrowed deeper with every second.
But Dr. Kel…
Dr. Kel's mouth hung slightly open. He took one trembling step forward, his eyes darting between the stats and the [Race: Human] line as if it were a personal insult to science itself.
"This… This isn't right," he breathed.
Virell shot him a glance. "What is it?"
Kel slowly removed his glasses, cleaning them with a shaking hand before putting them back on, as if the problem might vanish if he looked again.
"We ran three separate mana tomography scans. Full-spectrum soul-thread imaging. Baseline x-rays. Neural lattice mapping. All of them showed inconsistencies—nonhuman integrations. And yet…"
He gestured wildly at the floating panel.
"His status window is calling him human."
Virell frowned. "And there's no secondary skill?"
Kel stared harder. "None. No active mutations. No passive anomalies except his already registered skill Continuous Growth. Nothing to explain why his stats are this far beyond any Tier Eight baseline."
Dr. Kel's expression twisted into something halfway between outrage and fascination.
"This is ridiculous," he said at last, his voice cracking with disbelief. "The system never—never—makes classification errors. It doesn't matter how incomplete the visible data is. The system might hide deep, fundamental traits, yes, but it has never been outright wrong!"
He jabbed a finger at the hovering panel like it had personally insulted him.
"And yet, here it is, labeling you as human—with no new skills, no mutations, nothing to account for any of this!"
Virell's eyes narrowed. "Are you saying the panel is faulty?"
Kel spun toward her, incredulous. "Faulty? This is the core system interface of reality as we know it! You might as well accuse the laws of gravity of misfiring! No, the system isn't broken. This… he is broken."
For a moment there was silence.
Then Virell glanced at Riven, and for a moment she noticed it—he looked utterly shocked, somewhat pale, like he alone had seen something different. She could make out some sort of orange rectangular shape reflecting in his eyes next to a blue one. It almost looked like another system window.
She narrowed her eyes for a moment.
"Mr. Cael, is something the matter? You seem lost?"
"W-what? Me… I… I'm fine, completely fine. I guess the doc was wrong about everything all along."
Kel ignored him, running a trembling hand down his face before suddenly snapping his fingers.
"Another scan. We need another full-body mana tomography, a deep soul-thread x-ray, the whole damn thing. I want layered mana resonance imaging and a Class-S spectrum analysis this time!"
Virell's brow furrowed. "You've already scanned him three times. What do you expect to find?"
Kel's eyes widened as if a revelation had just struck him.
"You don't understand," he said, his voice rising with manic urgency. "The system isn't just disagreeing with us—it's invalidating everything we recorded before!"
He spun back toward the status window, pointing at it like it was rewriting the laws of reality right in front of them.
"All the scans, all the inconsistencies we picked up earlier—void! The system is overwriting them, saying none of it matters. Don't you get it? If this panel says he's human, then every single piece of data we collected is now obsolete!"
Virell's frown deepened, her jaw tightening. "And you think another scan will change that?"
Kel's hands shook as he snapped at the assistants lingering by the door.
"We're not just scanning him again. We're scanning him until something finally makes sense! Prep the chamber, reconfigure the resonance layers, bring me every mana spectrum filter we've got—now!"
The assistants hesitated, unsure whether to obey.
Kel slammed his clipboard on the nearest counter, his eyes wild. "Move! Every second we stand here, reality is telling us we're wrong!"
Virell's cold gaze shifted back to Riven, her expression hard to read.
Riven just stared at them all, deadpan.
"So what you're saying," he muttered, "is that your super-perfect scans mean absolutely nothing now. Great use of taxpayer money, doc."
Kel didn't even flinch. He was too busy glaring at the status window like it had just personally declared war on science.
"Get him to the chamber," Kel barked. "We're doing this again. And this time, reality doesn't get to laugh in my face."
...
The scanning chamber was cold and clinical, a perfect circle of smooth white walls broken only by vertical seams where faint blue light pulsed through mana conduits. In the center stood a cylindrical scanner, its rune-lined rings slowly rotating with a low, resonant hum that filled the room. The air smelled faintly of sterilized metal and ozone, a byproduct of the arcane machinery at work.
Riven stood inside the chamber, barefoot, dressed in the thin, white facility-issued clothes that felt like stiff paper against his skin. Mana currents brushed over him in rhythmic waves as the scanner activated, each pass of the rings sending faint ripples of energy across his body.
Outside the glass enclosure, Dr. Kel hovered over a bank of holo-screens, eyes darting frantically as the readouts came in. Graphs, mana charts, and soul-thread overlays flickered across the displays, each one pristine and unremarkable.
"No…" Kel muttered, his voice rising in disbelief. "No, this isn't right. It's as if every anomaly we recorded before never existed."
His hands gripped the edge of the console so tightly his knuckles turned white. "His tissue structure… cell composition… mana flow… even his soul-thread density—all baseline human!"
Kel's expression twisted, frustration bleeding into fury as his voice dropped to a venomous whisper.
"I should have sliced you open when I had the chance…"
Behind him, Agent Virell and two Union officers watched in silence, their eyes fixed on the screens. The shock on their faces was unmistakable, but none of them could argue with the results displayed so clearly.
Virell exhaled slowly, her tone level but edged with steel.
"The scans are clean. The system says human. The scanners say human. By law, if these results stand, he cannot be detained any longer."
Kel spun toward her, eyes wide with disbelief. "You can't just let him walk out! Look at those stats! No one with numbers like that is normal!"
"The law doesn't care about numbers," Virell replied coldly. "Only classification. And right now, he is legally human."
The scanner powered down with a final chime. The rings slowed to a stop, and the chamber door hissed open.
Riven stepped out casually, brushing at the white fabric of his clothes like the whole ordeal had been a waste of time.
He glanced at Virell with his usual flat expression. "So… that's it? I get to leave?"
Virell met his gaze, her jaw tight.
"You're free to go. For now."
Kel glared at Riven from behind the console, seething, muttering under his breath as if the words were too bitter to say out loud.
"For now…"