Ravian had never realized that the countless hours he had spent holding an entire world within his consciousness, refusing to allow any sound, movement, or sensation to destroy it, were forging something no ordinary human would ever possess.
He had believed he was merely escaping—escaping from a reality he desperately wished had been nothing more than a dream.
This continued until he entered middle school.
One night, Ryan emerged from his room and found his mother asleep in a chair, her upper body slumped across a small table in utter exhaustion. A pen remained between her fingers, while hospital, rent, and food bills lay scattered before her.
She had not developed cancer yet. Their lives had not yet reached rock bottom.
But exhaustion had begun devouring her years before the disease ever did.
Ryan stood before his sleeping mother for a long time that night before realizing a simple truth: no matter how much effort he poured into his imaginary world, it would never change reality. It was merely a temporary refuge from it.
He was only a child on the threshold of adolescence, yet he was already beginning to understand these truths.
His father would not suddenly open the door, walk inside, and embrace them.
The bills spread across the table before his exhausted mother would not disappear merely because Ryan imagined a better life.
And every minute he spent inside that illusory world would not grant his mother even a single minute of rest.
Ryan continued looking at her for several more seconds before turning away and heading upstairs. He returned moments later with a small blanket, gently draped it across his sleeping mother’s back, and softly stroked her head.
"Don’t worry, Mom," young Ryan whispered into her ear. "It’s time for me to take some of the burden off your shoulders."
The very next day, young Ryan abandoned his daydreams, and the innocent smile disappeared from his face, never to return.
How could he face the cruel world his mother lived in while wearing that familiar smile? Wouldn’t people underestimate him if he continued like that? Wouldn’t his mother believe he was still too young to shoulder any responsibility?
That was why young Ryan abandoned that smile.
However, he did not abandon the ability that had created those dreams and preserved that innocent smile until the day before. Instead, he directed it toward reality.
He began focusing on his studies in the same way he had once constructed his worlds, holding dozens of problems and theories within his mind simultaneously, comparing and reshaping them while identifying their flaws before ever writing them down. He would then modify them and derive new principles that made the process of thinking easier.
Concepts that should have required years to understand began taking months, then weeks.
He graduated with a degree in nuclear engineering at fifteen and received exceptional authorization to work at a government nuclear power plant at seventeen.
To his mother, all of this felt like a dream.
Those were the happiest moments of Ryan’s life, because he could finally watch his mother smile and laugh as she witnessed him succeed and become the best in every field he entered. The effect his achievements had on her became the primary reason he pursued success so relentlessly, because they made her happier than she had ever been.
Unfortunately, none of that made him a superhuman teenager.
He possessed a mind capable of accomplishing what thousands of scientists could not, yet he still had the body of a boy whose life could be ended by a single bullet.
He possessed extraordinary focus, but neither the time nor the strength required to protect himself from exploitation.
His government saw him as a resource before it saw him as a human being.
He spent most of his days inside the nuclear power plant, surrounded by constant surveillance. His communications and movements were tracked, and he could not disappear for several hours without someone demanding to know where he had gone and why.
He could not even devote enough time to Soul Ascension, the technique he had discovered during that period and begun practicing and developing through visualization and concentration exercises.
He imagined his consciousness separating from his body, then reconstructed a complete image of every nerve, heartbeat, and sensation within it as he searched for the point where the "self" existed apart from flesh and blood.
He did not know that he was actually drawing closer to his soul.
He regarded it as nothing more than another exercise meant to expand his ability to focus—an ability that would grant him greater authority and influence while providing his mother with sufficient security—but he could practice it only during the rare periods when the government’s eyes were not directly watching him.
Then, after a long period of happiness, the greatest setback of his life arrived.
His mother was diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer.
Ryan possessed enough knowledge to understand how dire the situation was from the moment he saw the initial reports.
And he had ideas—dozens of them, even hundreds.
Incomplete treatment approaches, methods that might slow the disease, and possibilities that needed to be tested before he could determine whether any of them would succeed.
But ideas alone were not a cure.
He needed equipment, laboratories, samples, experiments, and a team capable of accomplishing what no single person could achieve alone, no matter how intelligent he was.
The government refused to grant him access to any of it. They did not want him distracted from his work at the plant, nor did they want him using his extraordinary mind on research they had not authorized. They would not permit him to conduct experiments that might create political or legal complications or reduce his productivity on the work they demanded of him.
They gave him enough money to pay the hospital bills, then ensured that he would remain dependent upon that money.
Ryan could have refused them.
But he did not—not because he feared for himself.
If they disposed of him, there would be no one left to pay for his mother’s treatment, and the hospital would remove her from her room the moment his payments stopped arriving.
That was why he submitted, and for the first time, he experienced true helplessness—a feeling that completely transformed the way he thought, shifting his mindset from offering his abilities in exchange for fair compensation to treating every exchange according to what served his own greatest interests, and from forgiveness to an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, with the one who struck first bearing the greater blame.
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