SSS Talent: I Can Rewrite Reality

Jackson wasn’t someone who dwelled in the past. But for some reason, no matter how many

times he tried to let it go, Grace’s face kept surfacing — her words replaying on a quiet loop he couldn’t silence.

Just someone I used to know.

"Someone she used to know." He said it aloud, tasting the shape of it. "Was that all it ever was?"

He raised his head and looked at the sky. It stretched above him in a deep, unbroken blue — not a single cloud to interrupt it, vast and indifferent and somehow beautiful in a way that felt almost cruel against everything the world below it had become.

After a long moment, he exhaled. A slow, deliberate breath, released all at once — and with it, the tangled mess of thoughts unraveled and drifted away like smoke.

His mother had taught him that. Whenever the weight became too much, look up. Let the sky remind you how small your troubles are. Breathe it out. It was a simple thing, nothing mystical about it, but it had never once failed him.

His shoulders dropped. The chaos in him settled.

If he was someone that she used to know then so be it...somethings weren’t meant to last forever anyways.

Without looking back, Jackson turned and walked off the school grounds toward home.

The afternoon streets were busy. Around him, people moved with the casual alertness of a world that had learned — the hard way — to stay ready. Most were dressed in light battle armor, weapons hanging at their sides like ordinary accessories, because for most of them, they were. The arrival of mana had changed everything. It hadn’t just rewritten the rules of human ability — it had torn open gates to other worlds, letting through creatures that had once existed only in the darkest corners of mythology. Humanity had paid for that intrusion with more than ninety percent of its population. Extinction had felt inevitable.

Then the awakeners had emerged. And slowly, painfully, they had pushed the monsters back.

The world that remained was harder and stranger than the one before it, but it had also moved fast. Magic-powered cars hummed along the road beside him, sleek and efficient, technology leaping forward in decades what might have taken centuries. Jackson watched them pass, something complicated moving through his expression.

Out of catastrophe came acceleration. That part, at least, was true.

Before he realized how far he’d walked, he was standing in front of a three-story building — the place he had called home his entire life. His family occupied the first floor. The two above them belonged to other families.

He pressed the bell.

Hurried footsteps came pattering from behind the gate before the echo had faded, and a smile found his face without him deciding to put it there.

The door swung open.

His younger sister stood in the doorway — ten years old, black hair pulled into a single ponytail, eyes wide with the particular energy of someone who had been waiting. Aella Vona Jackson. She looked up at him with an expression that contained absolutely no patience.

"Brother, you’re finally back! How did the awakening ceremony go? Did you win?" She craned her neck to look past him. "And where’s big sister Grace? She didn’t come with you this time?"

Jackson’s frame stiffened at the name. He kept the smile in place, thin but steady.

"She had urgent business today. Couldn’t make it." He stepped inside, pulling the door shut behind him. "Anyway — never mind that. Where’s Mother? I need to tell her the good news."

At the mention of their mother, Aella’s face fell immediately.

"She went to a party with her friends and Mrs. Laker."

Jackson frowned. Their mother wasn’t the type to spend money on parties — frugal to a fault, careful with every stone. It had to be her friends who had pulled her out. But the mention of Mrs. Laker left a different kind of feeling in his chest, quieter and harder to name.

Mrs. Laker owned the building. She was a sharp woman who moved entirely according to her own interests — everyone who knew her understood that. Lately she had been unusually close to their mother, calling her sister, showing up with small gifts and warmer smiles than her nature usually produced. What made Jackson uneasy wasn’t the friendliness itself. It was the rent. The other two tenants in the building had seen their rates climb steadily. Theirs hadn’t moved once.

People like Mrs. Laker didn’t offer kindness without a reason. He just hadn’t figured out the reason yet.

Aella tugged his sleeve, pulling him back to the present.

"Brother, let’s eat. I’m hungry."

Maybe she genuinely was, or maybe she simply had no interest in the details of an awakening ceremony she trusted her brother to have handled. Either way, she didn’t ask how it had gone — and somehow, that was the kindest thing anyone had done for him all day.

Their mother had cooked before leaving. The table was covered in dishes, more than the two of them could finish, even a cut of monster meat placed at the center like a small celebration waiting to happen. Jackson looked at it and felt guilt settle quietly in his stomach.

He had raised their expectations too high. His physical conditioning had been exceptional — that part was real. But he hadn’t awakened six resonances. He had awakened five, and a brush at that. He didn’t want to think about his mother’s face when she found out.

He sat down and ate. The food should have been good. It tasted like nothing in particular.

Across the table, Aella ate with complete dedication, both cheeks full, oil and sauce decorating the corners of her mouth with impressive thoroughness. Jackson watched her and felt something loosen in his chest — a quiet, involuntary warmth.

He reached over and wiped her mouth with a handkerchief.

"Slow down, little Aella. You’ll choke."

She pulled back, pouting with considerable dignity. "Let me eat in peace. Don’t nag like Mother."

After dinner, he walked her to her room and sat beside her bed, making up a story until her eyes stopped fighting and stayed closed.

The apartment was quiet. Jackson sat alone, the weight of the day fully present now that there was nothing left to distract from it.

There has to be another way. I need to get into that academy. There has to be something.

He turned on the magic-powered computer and started searching. One click led to another, and soon a possible answer appeared on the screen.

Peak of the First Resonance Realm — eligible for direct admission.

He almost said something out loud. The First Resonance Realm was divided into three stages — Iron, Silver, and Gold. Gold rank was the peak. Each stage took months of dedicated training under normal circumstances. For a newly awakened cultivator to reach Gold rank quickly enough to matter was not difficult. It was simply not possible.

He shook his head and kept searching.

The other methods he found weren’t any better.

Tuition payment in full: one million mana stones.

Grandmaster-level knowledge in the path of potion-making.

Grandmaster-level mastery in any of the recognized weapon disciplines.

Compared to these, awakening six resonance talent had been the easy route. He had failed the easy route.

His expression darkened. He leaned back and stared at the screen, something stubborn and tired sitting behind his eyes.

I’m not giving up. Not yet.

He leaned forward again — and stopped.

The air directly above the monitor rippled, subtle and wrong, like heat rising from summer pavement. A line of blue-tinted text materialized in front of him, floating in the open air with perfect clarity.

[Highly Intelligent Machine]

Jackson blinked. Closed his eyes. Opened them.

The text was still there.

Am I losing it? Did I push myself too hard today?

He closed his eyes four more times. Opened them each time. The words didn’t flicker or fade. They simply waited.

They were real.

Before he could begin to process what that meant, something else shifted. Without warning, the golden brush — his awakened talent — materialized in his hand. On its own, as if it had decided. It moved in a short, smooth arc across the floating text, and the moment it made contact, the words lifted off the screen entirely, rising upward before dissolving into light and flooding into his body.

Then the headache hit.

Sharp, immediate, deep — as if something very small and very precise had been driven straight into the center of his skull.

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