Chapter 1
An S-Rank [Thunder Tyrant]?
I watched coldly as the "good brother" who had betrayed me in my past life strutted around, stealing my woman and humiliating my F-Rank skill.
What he didn't know was that every time he channeled his lightning, his talent was draining his lifespan. In our past life, I was the one who used my skill, [Status Reset], to restore his life force time and time again.
Reborn for another lifetime, I decided I was done playing the saint.
When the crimson behemoth shattered the dome, Brad laughed maniacally, summoning a storm of lightning. But in an instant, the fierce backlash turned his arms into brittle charcoal, shattering in pieces across the ground. I stepped over his rolling, mutilated body and picked up a piece of rusty scrap metal.
"Reset."
The dead rust was eradicated. The scrap metal instantly reverted to a fully charged, high-frequency combat blade.
Gripping the blade in one hand, I faced the overwhelming tide of corpses and carved out a path of blood.
Chapter 1
The agonizing pain of my chest being ripped open by a Cyber-Behemoth still seemed to linger in my nerve endings.
Stinging blood flooded my windpipe. Ringing in my ears was Emma’s piercing laughter and Brad’s condescending mockery—
"Arthur, go buy me a minute and a half to escape."
BEEP!!!
The next second, an ear-piercing electronic buzz exploded deep within my skull, jolting my eyes open.
No crimson rain. No mechanical chewing sounds.
Filling my vision was the glass dome of the grand auditorium at Manhattan's Brownstone Academy. The afternoon sun spilled over the faces of the panicked chaebol heirs around me, lazy and hypocritical.
Above New York hung a colossal, blue holographic pillar of light. An undeniably cold, mechanical female voice projected a blood-red countdown directly onto the retinas of all seven billion humans on Earth:
[Global Announcement: Doomsday System Loading Complete. Commencing Mandatory Initial Talent Extraction.]
[Time until Disaster Module "Crimson Descent": 00:03:00]
I looked down at my intact hands, suppressing a wild smirk.
I was reborn! Back to the first day of the system's descent, exactly three minutes before the complete collapse of order.
BOOM—!!!
A massive pillar of lightning erupted from the center of the auditorium, its violent currents shattering the glass dome. The lightning converged onto a blond youth surrounded by sycophants—Brad Warren, heir to a Wall Street syndicate, and the "good brother" who shoved me into the horde of monsters in my past life.
He spread his arms, bathing in the lightning, looking like a god descending upon the earth.
[Extraction Complete! Talent: Thunder Tyrant (S-Rank)]
"S-Rank! Young Master Brad!"
"An ability literally born to rule the new world!"
The crowd surged toward Brad like maniacs, some even crawling to kiss the scorched earth at his feet. In the center of the frenzy, a figure in a haute couture dress eagerly let go of my shirt hem, swaying her hips as she threw herself into Brad's arms.
Emma.
My ex-girlfriend of three years. Just like in my previous life, the moment Brad drew an S-Rank ability, she abandoned me without a second thought.
She wrapped her arms around Brad's neck, turned her head, and looked at me with a sickening mix of pity and disgust. "Sorry, Arthur. I can't bet my life on a piece of trash like you. Water flows downward, but people move upward. If you really love me, you should let me go."
I stared at the bitch without a single ripple of emotion in my heart, as if I were looking at a paramecium about to be crushed by high voltage.
Brad held Emma, arcs of electricity dancing on his fingertips as he looked down at me. "Arthur, my best roomie. I'll give you a chance to live—crawl over here, kiss the tip of my shoes, and swear your loyalty. I just might leave a dog's crawling space for you inside this Young Master's lightning barrier."
The crowd parted, hundreds of eyes waiting with mocking anticipation for my humiliating submission.
I said nothing. I calmly walked through the jeering rich kids straight to the talent extraction terminal.
My fingertips swiped across the holographic screen. Completely ignoring all the dazzling golden and purple lights, I scrolled furiously to the very bottom—to a frame covered in gray static, entirely devoid of any visual elemental effects.
Confirm.
[WARNING: You have selected an F-Rank bottom-tier talent. Confirm? This action is irreversible!]
"Confirm."
A pale gray light vanished between my brows.
[Extraction Complete: Status Reset (F-Rank · Auxiliary Bottom Tier)]
Three seconds of dead silence gripped the hall. Then, a roar of laughter erupted, nearly tearing the roof off!
"F-Rank? Hahaha, he gave up on himself and picked F-Rank?!"
"Is this the former commoner genius? Scared out of his wits by Young Master Brad!"
Emma covered her nose in disgust. "Mud is just mud. You're only fit to be monster rations."
Brad laughed until tears streamed down his face, pointing a finger at me. "Do you hear that, Arthur! This is your destiny! You are only fit to be lowborn trash abandoned by the new world!"
A king? A god?
I stood amid the mockery, the ridicule in my eyes freezing over like a glacier.
Fools.
Do you really think you drew a god-tier talent?
In my previous life, I was also deceived by this flashy interface. It wasn't until the moment before my death that I understood the terrifying truth. The most vicious underlying logic of this system was this: All S-Rank elemental talents came with a fatal price.
[Thunder Tyrant]. Every single cast drained the host's life essence. The more you used it, the faster your genes disintegrated.
In my past life, the only reason Brad could build a survivor empire wasn't because his lightning was unstoppable—it was because of me. Every single day, I overexerted my mental energy to use my F-Rank [Status Reset] to roll back his carbonized, over-loaded cells to a healthy state. I acted as his invisible blood bag for three years.
And my reward? They slashed my wrists and shoved me into the zombie tide just to buy themselves time to escape.
I still vividly remember the agonizing pain of being chewed and swallowed alive by those monstrosities!
What you owe me from the last life, I will wring out of your desperate wails in this one, with interest.
At the exact second I pressed Confirm, I accessed the system's underlying code and permanently locked Brad out of [Status Reset]'s genetic repair whitelist.
Without me as your blood bag, you don't even have the right to endure your own power.
DING—
The countdown on our retinas abruptly hit zero.
[Disaster Module: Crimson Descent, officially launched.]
Just as the system’s teasing mechanical voice faded—CRACK!
The blue sky over Manhattan shattered like a cheap glass dome. An abyssal rift tore open above the city, pouring blood-red light into the world.
A rapidly flashing red pixel of rain fell, cleanly landing on the tip of the nose of the rich kid who had been laughing the loudest.
The next second, the pixel burrowed into his pores.
Hiss— AAAAARGH!!!
A blood-curdling scream tore through his vocal cords! The boy's jaw dislocated with a sickening crunch, tearing all the way to his earlobes. Both of his eyeballs burst outright! But what spewed out wasn't blood—it was a frantic swarm of writhing, ethereal-blue nano-mechanical tentacles. His spine pierced through his tailored suit, morphing into metallic sawteeth. In just three seconds, the suited corporate elite mutated into a half-machine, half-zombie monster! A Cyber-Ghoul. It lunged blindly at the girl next to it, alloy claws effortlessly piercing her throat. Boiling blood sprayed like a high-pressure fountain, splashing dead onto Brad's pale face.
And this was just the prelude.
Outside the auditorium, the crimson rain poured down in sheets.
Brownstone Academy instantly turned into a living hell. The sickening sounds of tearing flesh and clashing metal skeletons echoed everywhere. The students who were too slow to run were immediately pinned down and shredded to pieces.
Brad's legs trembled in sheer terror. He pushed his body to its absolute limits but only managed to conjure a feeble web of electricity. A Ghoul crashed into the net, sending sparks flying, but only took a half-step back. Instead, the smell of burnt blood attracted even more monsters.
"Brad! Take me with you!" Emma slumped in a puddle of blood, desperately hugging his leather shoes.
"Get lost! Stupid bitch!" Brad brutally kicked her in the face, breaking her nose, before scrambling on all fours toward the underground garage.
Order was completely wiped out within ten seconds of the red rain's descent.
Amidst the extreme chaos of the fleeing crowds, only I stood perfectly still, with my hands casually shoved in my pockets. Then, moving against the panicked tide, stepping over a floor of blood, I walked toward the porch.
A few drops of crimson pixel-rain were about to land on my shoulder.
"[Ability Activated: Status Reset]."
No grand sounds. No flashy lights. No sparks. The moment the red rain touched the fabric of my school uniform, it vanished into thin air. It was reset on a causal level back to "the void state before it fell."
This was the true power hidden within the underlying logic of [Status Reset]: a causality-level cheat code capable of erasing even the rules of the apocalypse.
I stepped over a wailing Emma and stopped by the half-eaten corpse of a heavily armored security guard. Reaching into the mangled flesh, I fished out his privately smuggled Colt Anaconda revolver.
With a flick of my wrist, the cylinder swung open.
Empty. The barrel was coated in rust.
[Detected inferior unpowered weapon: Rusted Empty Revolver. Lethality: 0]
"ROAR—!!!"
Right at that moment, ten meters away, a Cyber-Ghoul locked its crimson eyes on me. It instantly shattered the marble floor under its feet, launching itself like a fired cannonball, flying straight for my neck!
Five meters... Three meters...
A sickening stench of blood slammed into my face!
