Modern Awakening - A cultivation, LitRPG, apocalyptic novel

One thing pleased Robert more than anything in the tutorial: he always called himself Bob, so the system had taken to call him Bob too. Bob Timothy Junior, marksman extraordinaire.

He was currently on top of a tall tree, checking the surroundings, his new F- bow in hand. In the clearing below, his people awaited his report.

Bob was the second to last person he would trust to lead anyone, but they had stupidly elected him leader, and he had accepted the position. Better than letting the second place in the poll, that Mark dude, lead them all. He was the last person he wanted bossing him around. Not that he was evil or anything, but the crazy look in his eyes made Bob sure he would do anything to achieve his goals, whatever they might be.

Fortunately, the boy had left as soon as Bob said he wouldn't refuse the post. Unfortunately, that left him as the leader.

He focused on the surrounding area. For a while now, he had noticed the world shift a little. It was so, so very subtle that he had doubted his sight in the beginning. One less tree here, one more there. The mountain range that had been so distant looking a bit closer. The very clearing they were standing on getting slightly larger.

He had learned to trust his instincts and vision in the past fights though. The world was changing. That also explained how he had nothing less than thirty people under his command who hadn't died even once, an impossible coincidence in such a vast world.

He wondered if someone had more people and if it would come to war.

For now, he found new prey close to them. A huge rock castle right in the middle of the forest. A place to raid.

"Let's go farm ourselves some AP," he said after going down the tree.

His people followed.

"Not bad for a G-rank," the dark elf said in their mysterious, whispery, and death-promising language.

Uk'Gaar had trouble visiting the blacksmith. He was an orc, which meant a particular taste in his partners, mostly meaning he liked them green or red, but beautiful Liya was an exception. Her dark bluish skin was so full of beautiful muscles in her arms that he couldn't look away or stop imagining if she had a twelve-pack under the very expensive, yet simple-looking smith garb she wore.

"But?" he asked in his own enlightened language.

"But I don't do apprentices," she replied and crossed her arms, tantalizing him with her power. He was the Rising Star of the orc race, yet even he didn't have such beautiful form. What did she eat?

"He won't be your apprentice," he said, barely managing to raise his eyes from her biceps to her silvery eyes. "He'll be mine. I'll hire you as an assistant spear instructor."

They were in her personal storage, and he prided himself on being one of the few orcs she allowed in there. It was cozy, only containing a couple of cushioned chairs and the tens of thousands of weapons she had forged but had found no owner for. She had once told him she often came to meditate and try to feel whether an owner had been born in the Alliance for any of the weapons. At least half of them were spears, the weapon she specialized in.

"He's no drow," she insisted. "His body will break if I try to teach him a drow spear technique."

He had expected that and come prepared. "Take Pure Yin-Yang Water from Inventory," he ordered the system, and it obeyed. A flask containing a liquid so transparent it was hard to see materialized in his hand.

"You're investing a lot in him," she said, taking the liquid from his hand. "Do you truly believe he deserves this much?"

"I checked the deal I made with the system. The Dreamer wrote the damn thing. I'm doing the least I must."

Her eyes widened a little. "The Dreamer is administering the new planet's tutorial? The new race is screwed. Is he doing the fake trial thing again? I heard someone complain about it only three and a half orc years ago."

She had said last year, but the system automatically translated it for him. An orc year was roughly three and a half times a dark elven year.

The dark elves had been the last people whose tutorial the Dreamer had administered. They had benefitted greatly from it, but the pioneers of the very first tutorial session never recovered from learning how much they had lost in not completing the fake trial.

"He's not, the higher ups forbade him," Uk'Gaar said. "He's doing something similar, but not as terrible. Will you take the boy?"

She didn't reply at once. Instead, she uncorked the flask and took a sniff of the water. It smelled of nothing. She corked it again and put it in a pocket that was larger on the inside. "With this, I can rebuild his body from the ground up into something useful and pay my bills for thirty-five orc years. I'm not humble or arrogant enough to refuse it. Send him to me when you can."

The orc sighed in relief. That was one less problem to deal with. Now, he had to train Tuk'Yarl for a few days, then start accepting other apprentices now that he was back on the game. He had heard the young orc was a womanizer like his father.

That would be the very first thing Uk'Gaar would beat out of him.

The Immortal Emperor stepped ahead and left the hidden dimension he had created at the corner of the galaxy. His sworn brother, an Abyssal Dragon the size of a few stars, appeared beside him.

They could see the invisible, artificial blue energy approaching in the distance.

"Earth is theirs," the dragon, Long Hei, said.

"So it is," the emperor replied. "Make sure all preparations are complete."

Only the two of them would remember where they had come from because only they were strong enough to resist any mind-reading attempts from the Alliance's leaders.

He had no way to explaining how he removed the Void's influence over his people, or how he didn't appear on Earth's history. At least, not without also revealing his strength, and he needed it hidden for their plans to succeed. He wanted nothing drastic like the destruction of the Alliance, but he certainly wanted more than they would offer him without some leverage, and that required him to "grow stronger" at the perfect time. Showing his true power now would only attract jealousy and suspicion.

"What about the Feng boy?" the dragon asked, his unwillingness clear in his voice.

"The son must pay for the father's sins, even if such sins allowed us to save so many. The boy belongs to them now. Go, finish the preparations."

"As you will, Your Imperial Majesty." The dragon's voice was strained, but he would obey.

It was unfortunate, but his brother's resentment was important. If the dragon knew the emperor's plans for the only innocent they had left behind, he wouldn't play his part convincingly enough.

The dragon disappeared, and the emperor looked in the direction of his abandoned imperial seat. He wondered how many of the traitors he had left behind had survived the test of time, to distract the Alliance. He could check if he wanted, but that would risk getting discovered.

In any case, the blue energy was fast approaching. He entered the hidden dimension where he ruled over two trillion sapient beings, most of them humans, and awaited first contact.

Stage Overseer Si'shi'sha'ma'pi'ka'mi'aah'ta was floating in the void, surrounded by tens of thousands of system screens on all sides. Some showed a few lines of text, others were filled with charts, others thousand-page-long essays, and some had pictures or videos of what was going on in the second stage's world.

Her ninety-six heads moved around in a frenzy to take in everything she could. She gave out commands with each head's thoughts, causing some screens to disappear while more popped up. The screens closest to her were the ones both the and her assistants had deemed priorities, while the others were less important.

One of them showed trainee Feng Shen killing werewolves. The head watching over it was waiting to talk to someone much more important than them all.

'Yes, Sishi?' an androgynous voice finally said lazily from the other side of the magic connection. 'This better be good, little lady. I was asleep.'

Every single one of the hydra's heads froze for a moment in fright. The Dreamer wouldn't have woken up unless they believed her words were important. They had certainly already dreamed about them. But that might either mean her words were wise, or that they would get her demoted or fired.

'We have a talented cultivator in the tutorial,' she reported.

'How talented?' Earth's Tutorial Administrator asked.

The Dreamer had already had that talk in his dreams, but they had once revealed to her that they rehearsed conversations in the real world for four reasons:

First, people sometimes defied the fate they dreamed about, and it was possible to preview big deviations from the small ones in people's words.

Second, some abilities might interfere with their dreams, and they wanted to make sure everything was going accordingly.

Third, they did it out of respect for the other party, who hadn't lived through the dream's actions yet.

Fourth, because not having a conversation they had dreamed about might change a lot of things. She had found humans called it butterfly effect—and the Multiverse Alliance called it the Phoenix Prerogative.

'At least third-class,' she said. She was being conservative in her estimations, but this wasn't the first tutorial she worked on, and seemingly talented people had disappointed her before.

'Not second-class?' the Dreamer asked with surprise in their voice. 'Fate changed. That's interesting. Let me review his data.'

She shuddered upon realizing that in his dream, she had given the boy a different evaluation. Because of that, the Dreamer would order her investigated, the Guardian System would scrutinize her past, and the Multiverse Alliance would judge her threat potential. That might end up with her exiled to a terrible corner of the multiverse.

And there was nothing she could do about it but wait.

'Interesting, so interesting,' they said after a while. 'This differs from what I saw in my dream. Hmm... Let me look into— Ah, here. Do you remember the Void Worshipper who screwed this planet about a hundred thousand local years ago? We missed something in the preliminary research. All five cultivators we found are only alive because of his direct intervention.'

The Dreamer could see anything untainted by the Void. Unfortunately, the Void Worshipper had left the planet devoid of qi for the past ninety thousand local years in a stupid attempt to "elevate" it to the Void. Therefore, the entire world and its creatures had become Void-touched. That was too long ago, so the remaining touch of the Void was indirect, and the Alliance had cleansed it all.

Direct intervention in people's lives was different though.

The five cultivators were put on the Guardian System's watch list as soon as the Dreamer said those words.

She relaxed a little at that. If the boy was the problem, she wasn't. She was relatively safe.

They continued talking, 'He killed two middle bosses already? The minotaur was supposed to defeat about five hundred trainees in the secret ending. I'm glad you woke me up.'

One of the Dreamer's greatest weaknesses was that when they dreamed, it was about the future that could happen from the moment they had started sleeping. If something happened outside their predictions while they were asleep, their dreams wouldn't adapt to the additional facts.

Together with the Void's taint, it made their presence here crucial in preventing bigger issues.

'What should I do?' she asked.

'I'm reporting the four others to the Cultivator's Association, as the rules demand,' the Administrator said.

'Four? Not five?'

'The boy was frozen as a mortal, so he's technically out of their jurisdiction, according to Alliance vs. Divine Sword Clan. The cultivators will go nuts over the other four Void-touched people— Wait, one of them is the former ruler of the world?! How did we miss that? This requires further investigation. Someone infiltrated the Alliance's Planet Analysis team and blindsided the Guardian System. Give me a moment.'

She froze in fright again. Reporting an analysis as wrong meant—

All thought left her body as a presence so powerful it tried to tear reality itself apart, manifested only a few local light-years away from there. The tutorial trainees were protected, but she wasn't.

She lost track of time, but when she could think again, she checked the stage's clock. Two seconds had passed by.

One more and Earth's galaxy might've unraveled onto itself.

'They hid well,' the Dreamer said, 'but the Universe's Superintendent found them all. Let's hope him bringing his attention to this pitiful place for so long didn't cause too many lives to be lost to the Void on the front lines. Damn traitors.'

As she had expected, that was the Superintendent herself! A true S-rank being! She was blessed to have been graced with her domain for such a long period. Once she had the time to train, she would try to glimpse some truths about the Laws from the little she could remember of this moment.

'As I was saying, the Cultivator's Association will use the Void-touched cultivators we reported for their benefit. We'll use the boy for ours. Together with the Guardian System, we should break even.'

'His profile says he would respond poorly to manipulation,' the hydra interjected.

The Dreamer laughed through the connection. 'We'll worry about his poor response when he gets to A rank.' Their voice made it clear how likely they believed that to be. Only one in every hundred trillion first-class talents made it so far, and the boy was on second-class even in her optimistic evaluation in their dreams. 'Here, this girl should do,' they said and a new screen appeared in front of her. 'She's one of the people he helped in the first stage. Change space around them so they meet. They are very compatible, and she'll be grateful to us when we put her in an advanced magic class during the third stage. Too much hatred for humanity in that one. I have other things to take care of now, then I'll go back to the Dream. Send me an urgent ping if she refuses to spy on him for us or if her profile changes. We're dealing with a Void-touched, after all.'

They cut the connection, and the Stage Overseer got to work, wondering why they didn't just kill all Void-touched before realizing how stupid that question was. Anyone who fought on the front lines for too long became touched by the Void. Killing their surviving Guardians wouldn't instill too much loyalty among the troops, and it was even worse when some of them came back very, very strong.

The work soon overwhelmed the head that had wondered about that though.

Si'shi'sha'ma'pi'ka'mi'aah'ta had no more time for idle thoughts.