Cayden’s first childhood is less than fortunate. Bounced around between foster homes, it doesn’t take long for him to fall in with bad company. Peer pressure, the foolishness of teenagers, and a desire to rebel against the system that abandoned him result in bad choices that lead to even worse situations for Cayden. Until finally, it reaches a tipping point.
Ten years is his sentence. For many, it could have been a pipeline to even worse decisions, but for Cayden it’s a wake-up call. He couldn’t undo his previous choices, but he could control where he went from there. He was determined to do better. To be better.
And, finally, he was succeeding. After only five years, he was scheduled to be released early for parole. But before he had a chance to enjoy his newfound freedom – he found himself reborn in an entirely new world.
A baby of an ent and a house elf in a rural village, Cayden’s second childhood is everything his first wasn’t. He has love from his parents, a reliable best friend in the form of the hyper-intelligent Elise from the nearby town of Avernon, and even a little sister to love and protect.
It couldn’t last forever, though.
At only seven years of age, a wave of ferocious monsters attack his small village, killing everyone except Cayden and his sister, Tiana. Legionnaires from the capital rescue them afterward, leaving them in the orphanage in Avernon, before departing just as quickly.
Though his life is upended, not everything changes. Elise is closer than she’d ever been, and Cayden daily works with her to explore the magic behind the system that governs this world. At age twelve, every child would unlock the system and choose from a list of possible races, those races determined by their actions up to that point in their life. Though everyone else around them was apathetic to the process, Cayden and Elise are determined to unlock as many races as possible, so that Elise could publish an encyclopedia of the different races and their requirements to unlock.
And it worked out. Because he unlocked over one hundred different races, Cayden qualifies for the gargoyle race. The gargoyle race looked no different from a base human and came with only one racial skill – [Boost Passive] – but came with six general skill slots. General skills could be combined with each other to form higher tiers of skills, and forming a tier-three [Resistance] general skill becomes the focus of Cayden and Elise’s lives.
For several years, life continues along this vein while Cayden works for essentially minimum wage at a forge – until Tiana turns twelve and chooses the fateweaver race, a race whose unlock requirement is to survive a calamity that has less than a one percent chance of survival.
Immediately after becoming a fateweaver, several legionnaires show up and recruit Tiana to train with other fateweavers in the capital, Valtane, to eventually work for the royal family. Tiana accepts, and Cayden is left in Avernon without any family.
This serves as a wake-up call, and he decides to push for the final general skills needed to get his tier-three [Resistance] skill by delving a dungeon, the source of the monsters that wiped out his village. Elise joins him on his first dungeon run, and they almost die – but in the process, they discover that Cayden has the ability to gain new racial skills by molding the enchanting material ‘primordial mud’ onto his body, which he uses to gain [Clawed Grasp] and fight his way free of the dungeon.
Even almost dying, they made more money from the failed dungeon run in the form of experience crystals than Cayden would have made in months working at the forge, so Cayden decides to pursue adventuring full-time. Gaining the [Athlete] class, he joins the adventurers’ guild, and Elise joins the guild as an affiliate to pursue enchanting, and they better themselves with each delve.
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Six months pass.
During that time, they continue to delve dungeons, both with other adventuring teams and solo, and Cayden finds another patch of primordial mud which he uses to get the racial skill [Skin of Stone]. The letters from Tiana from the capital, which were already sparse, had dried up completely by this point, and Cayden worried for his absent sister.
Unbeknownst to him, the fateweaver compound has essentially trapped Tiana, intercepting any letters in and out, training the fateweavers to be loyal servants of the crown. Eventually, TIana realizes the deception, and in a desperate attempt to reunite with her brother uses one of her fateweaver skills to [Strengthen Fate] between Cayden and Princess Valeria.
As Cayden and Elise leave their latest dungeon delve, they encounter Valeria and another noble being attacked by monsters. They help fight off the monsters and travel with the princess and her entourage to Avernon, during which the princess offers Cayden a sponsored slot at Delver’s Academy in the capital, the premier adventurer-training location in the kingdom. Desperate to be closer to his sister, Cayden accepts and travels to the capital with Elise, who decides to try out for the affiliate academy, the academy for affiliate adventurers attached to Delver’s Academy. Showing off her method of alternatingly enchanting boost-potion enchantments and crafting boost-enchantment potions to create iteratively stronger enchantments, Elise is readily admitted to the affiliate academy.
At the academy, Cayden is assigned the role of ‘frontliner’ for his four-person team of Velic – noble son of the powerful Duke Vass – Marvenal – bodyguard to Velic – and Delphia – lesser noble and shy healer who is always shrouded in a voluminous cloak. He makes friends with Jeremy, a fellow frontliner and one of the few other non-nobles at the academy.
His team of four competes will compete in several ‘tests’ over the course of the semester for the first-place prize among the first-years at the academy. The first major test involves a supervised delve of an extensive dungeon, where Cayden happens to stumble into another attack against the princess’ team, this time by a terrifying eldritch monster. Working with the princess, her teammates, and Delphia, they barely manage to hold off the monster long enough for academy instructors to rescue them, though at the cost of Cayden’s arm.
Afterward, Princess Valeria offers Cayden secret employment in exchange for her attempting to free Tiana from the fateweaver compound, which he accepts. Afterward, he chooses a new class, this time choosing to become a [Test Subject], which allows him steal any skill used on him, as well as store the progress of one of his other skills to learn another in its place.
Life at the academy continues, and Cayden’s team does well on the second test, despite their team’s cohesion faltering as Velic’s pompous and overbearing personality wears on Cayden. This comes to a head when he finds out that Velic had been encouraging others to bully Elise at the library, preventing her from publishing her encyclopedia of race requirements. He confronts his roommate, only to learn the nobles already have all the information in Elise’s book – including the requirements for the fateweaver race. He realizes that the fateweaver race could very easily be manufactured by those in power, and that the calamity that took his parents was likely orchestrated to create loyal fateweavers for use by the royal family.
In his anger, he goes to confront Princess Valeria, stopped by Delphia at the last minute, at which point he’s persuaded to go about his investigation more stealthily.
He attempts to covertly surveil Velic and the princess and becomes curious when he notices a secret meeting outside of the academy between the two noble children, along with some of their followers. He follows, only to find a secret dungeon, where Duke Vass is threatening Princess Valeria. The duke states that Valeria’s parents and older brother are dead and that she would die too if she doesn’t swear loyalty to him, courtesy of a bomb the duke somehow created.
Cayden intervenes, learning that Duke Vass was also responsible for the fateweaver compound and the creation of more fateweavers. Enraged, Cayden attacks the duke, supported by the princess and her three teammates. The duke’s powerful command of light magic is almost too much for him, but his newest racial skill, which prevents the duke from using an escape enchantment, coupled with a new tier-three durability skill, enables him to keep the duke occupied just long enough for the bomb to detonate.
Carried back to the academy by the princess and healed by Delphia, Cayden barely survives the blast that killed the duke, at the cost of his eyes. But through his actions, Tiana is granted her freedom, and finally, he, Elise, and Tiana are reunited once more.