Life was the same for poor seventeen-year-old Drew Li.

He would wake up at around six, being greeted by the two suns that rose to the east of Planet Kraus in his old room residing on the sixth floor of the old Star Military Academy Dormitories.

For a poor orphan like himself, a salary of around 3800 Kalas a month was sufficient as it could cover a majority of his expenses with sometimes ten or twenty Kalas left over, which were invested into gene-enhancing medicines or put into savings. Of course, that only happens sometimes due to recent inflation.

The room Drew stayed in was part of Star Military Academy's Dorms, one of the many Academies part of the Intergalactic Alliance in the Cerber System. It was a metal bunker of about 27 square meters consisting of a large glass window that opened up to a small balcony encircled with an old wire fence, with enough space for a person to take three or four paces, where Drew placed his outdated hoverboard and a couple of cheap house plants he bought from the nursery below.

On the balcony was the perfect view of the capital city of Planet Kraus, Ozwarth, with its towering glass skyscrapers and vivid holograms projecting the news, weather, latest celebrity scandals, and even the current rankings of Intergalactic Warriors, beings who've enhanced their Abilities to the max, military heroes in short.

The interior of the room was simple: a bed, more of a futon though, with one pillow and a thick plaid blanket, a kitchen equipped with a double burner, a closet, a small wooden coffee table with a desk lamp, and a small door leading to a wet bath.

After having a simple breakfast consisting of watered-down congee made of miscellaneous grains, Drew fetched his hoverboard, slipped on a navy green windbreaker, and left the dorm. Since the dorm was constructed during humanity's settlement on Planet Kraus five hundred years ago, it didn't have an electronic lock but a physical lock to save costs and key mechanism that was seemingly getting rustier by the day. With a jerk and a hard twist, Drew shut the door, placing the half-rusted keys in his breast pocket, and left the dormitory, ready to begin another day.

His workplace, the military base's soup kitchen, was a ten-minute hoverboard ride from the dorms. Sometimes, if he were earlier, the old cook, Uncle Winter, would occasionally give him a lift.

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Uncle Winter was a mysterious man.

Everyone at the base knew he was the head chef at the cafeteria and that he was single, but other than that, no one knew anything about him. His name, age, origin, previous occupation, and all that information was classified, and that's what made him mysterious.

He was also the man who offered Drew a position in the kitchen as a cook after Drew finished his Compulsory Education, the minimum requirement for education by Interstellar Law to be completed half a year prior. The man even negotiated with the head of the base to provide him with complimentary lodging at the dorms.

To Drew, Uncle Winter was the parental figure he never had.

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Drew rode his outdated hoverboard and set off to his new, tedious work day.

Weaving through the crowds of people, Drew would often find others his age with carefree smiles on their faces, wearing their spotless blue and gold uniforms representing Star Military Academy's next generation. He was envious that they could live their lives in such a carefree manner while he, on the other hand, had to work a minimum-wage job to get by. If only he had the resources, he could be like them.

He could have awoken his first Subsidiary Ability.

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In the Interstellar Era, your Ability, a special skill you are born with, dictates your status.

With an Ability, one could be considered an Intergalactic Warrior. These Abilities are classified by letter Ranks: F, E, D, C, B, A, S, SS, SSS, and L, with F being the lowest and L being the highest, respectively. These rankings also corresponded to a Warriors Ranking.

Those who possess Abilities are guaranteed to awaken Subsidiary Abilities. These additional characteristics can enhance an existing Ability, such as increased power or defense, when they rank up. Besides Subsidiary Abilities, which are classified under a single more considerable Ability, there is a chance for an Intergalactic Warrior to awaken a Secondary Ability, which will have its own Subsidiary Abilities, or even more rare, a Tertiary or even a Quaternary Ability. There were also Bloodline Abilities, which were in a category of their own as they were race-exclusive.

The first Intergalactic Warriors, who've all ascended to L-Rank, were said to possess Quaternary Abilities. No one knows what happened to them upon ascension, but the general assumption is that they attained godhood or something along those lines.

Aside from them, there were those without an Ability called Untouchables, a class deriving from human society on planet Earth. Most lived quietly away from the glimmering center of Ozwarth, closer to the towering city walls. Not that it was any of Drew's business.

Drew was lucky to have an Ability; unfortunately, it was classified as one of the weakest. It was called [Aegis] five hundred years ago, the ultimate shield. However, as the years progressed, new Abilities appeared, rendering this ultimate shield useless; an S-rank Ability was now an F-rank Ability.

While he understood the downgrade, for it to be that much was a bit too ridiculous. Well, it didn't matter what he thought of it anyway. He was stuck with Aegis for the rest of his life, whether he liked it or not.

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Drew ignored these people and continued on his way to the cafeteria.

The city streets and towering skyscrapers soon faded into dusty dirt paths where military vehicles and soldiers armed with deadly plasma weapons passed with no attention to anything else, crushing the small genome beasts below their feet.

A frail guy, no taller nor older than Drew, with long pointy ears and tattered clothes, trailed behind the soldiers. With a leather pouch at his waist, he bent down to the corpse of a small white cat-like genome beast who had been crushed by the armored foot of a soldier. With his sharp fingernails, he pierces the fresh corpse, crimson blood splattering over his pale, human-like face. A moment later, the guy yanks out a small blue orb the size of a bead and smiles.

Opening his pouch, he tucks the blue orb away and shuffles to the next corpse, leaving the previous one with its innards spilling out. That guy is from Kraus's native race, Llelfs, a mix between what humans would call an elf and a wolf, and from the looks of it, he seemed to be a Cleaner, a sort of janitor that picks up Cores, such as the blue bead, from dead beasts corpses.

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Cores are condensed orbs of natural energy that all organisms possess called Otrio which is measured in units called Krasos. These Cores can be refined into medicines, enhance one's Ability, or be embedded in Artifacts, weapons more powerful than plasma weapons that utilize the Otrio in Cores. The darker the color of the Core, the more Krasos of Otrio are contained in it.

Besides Krasos being the measurement for Artifacts, it is also used to assign Ranks to Intergalactic Warriors, with each rank requiring more Krasos of Otrio to advance.

To qualify as an Intergalactic Warrior, one must possess at least 100 Krasos of Otrio. The more Otrio one has, the more powerful they are. However, a person can only contain so much Otrio in their body before they explode. As such, medicines known as regiments were created utilizing ancient human cultivation methods to refine Cores and herbs to expand a person's Otrio capacity. Simultaneously, the medication can also evolve a Ability or, in rare cases, induce the development of another Ability.

But these regiments, as miraculous as they were, were expensive and could only be obtained by the wealthy. Most of the ones accessible to the public were just enhanced versions of traditional pre-Otrio medicine, and even those still cost an arm and a leg.

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Drew would have rather been a Cleaner than a Cook since Cleaners are compensated in Cores in which each one was worth about half his monthly salary, but it would require him to be an F-rank Warrior.

Sadly, Drew only possessed a meager fifty Krasos of Otrio, making him slightly better than an Untouchable. He would be nothing more than a bug to an Intergalactic Warrior. Furthermore, for an orphan who could not afford to even attend a low-ranking military academy, his only options were to slave away at a minimum wage job like this or die on the streets.

If only he had better circumstances, maybe he could have become a full-fledged student at a Military Academy like Star after graduating from Compulsory Education.

Sighing to himself, knowing this was merely a pipe dream, Drew accelerated to the cafeteria.

Today was another ordinary day on Planet Kraus.