Aron slowly blinked his eyes as he felt the changes to his body. He was feeling refreshed, with no soreness despite having laid perfectly still for quite a long time.

He remained in a daze, though, thinking back on the brief conversation he’d had with the system’s so-called consciousness. Though the actual time they had spoken was short, the weighty information he’d received made it feel like the conversation had taken hours, rather than moments. The memory was as clear and fresh as if it had been carved directly into his mind.historical

The pod he was in released a soft hiss as the sealed door slid aside and he sat up. He dropped his feet to the ground and stood up, slightly bouncing up and down in place to accustom his body to moving again after his long sleep.

Nova greeted him with new clothes, as the clothes he was wearing when the unexpected upgrade began had been disintegrated during the process. “Welcome back, sir.”

“Thanks. Did anything important happen while I was asleep?” he asked as he dressed. He was curious to know if the awakening process had begun yet, or if he still had time to prepare for it.

“Unfortunately, yes, sir,” Nova replied. “It’s probably best if you get an update in the simulation. The briefing may take quite some time.”.

Aron froze for a moment, then silently finished putting on his clothes. He logged into the simulation and appeared in the library, where all of the AIs were waiting. Nova appeared seconds after him and cranked up the time dilation in the library to the maximum that his body could handle, as he was most definitely urgently required to be present in reality as soon as possible.

....

The table Aron was resting his hands on cracked by the end of the briefing his AIs gave him. His sheer rage was palpable and everything in the library practically came to a standstill from the pressure he exerted on his surroundings. Soon, though, the pressure disappeared as if it had never existed in the first place. Nova repaired the table and, without a mention of the momentary loss of control on Aron’s part, continued the conversation.

[Miss Rina also seems to be facing a problem. She was right next to your pod when the mana vortex formed and I’m not sure why, but she was affected by it as well. From the pod’s diagnosis, she seems to be undergoing something similar to your evolution or is perhaps suffering a backlash from exposure to a supersaturated mana environment. Either way, we aren’t sure what to do as this is the first time we’ve experienced anything like this.]

The danger Rina was facing wasn’t an immediate threat to her life, so Nova had deemed it of secondary importance to the rest of the things that had happened while Aron was in the process of evolving.

But before Aron could say anything, Gaia froze for a moment, then turned to him. [I know you’ve only just received notice of yesterday’s wave of attacks, but now we’re facing another problem,] she interjected.

“Go on,” Aron said and almost visibly braced himself for the news. It seemed that there were a lot of shoes dropping all at once, as if what he had already heard wasn’t bad enough and the universe wanted to make sure he knew just how terrible it could be.

[Approximately three percent of the population is currently undergoing the same process as Her Highness. We have most of them in medical pods, or at least on the way to one, but there’s already reports of some of those who waived their citizenship suffering the same situation. Panoptes is keeping an eye on it and tracking their condition so we have a control group to compare the outcomes of those with access to medical pods to those without.

[It seems to be an age-related phenomenon as, in most cases, those affected are in the process of undergoing puberty. But there are a few outliers, though none are over fifty years old. The initial diagnosis they’ve all received is that their DNA is being modified by mana. But we can’t be sure of that, either, as the modifications, or perhaps mutations, are landing on different genes.]

Aron audibly sighed in relief, thankful that it wasn’t a new problem dumped on the pile of old ones. The system consciousness had already warned him of what was to come, and this could act as a trial run for handling it when the “problem” spread to all of humanity.

“It isn’t a sickness,” he said. “They’re undergoing evolution, triggered by the rapid increase of Earth’s mana density. Although I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, one thing I’m sure of is that, should they survive the process, those undergoing evolution will have an ability to use mana when they wake up. So monitor them and record every bit of data we can collect from them.”

Changing subjects, he asked, “What are the plans for the state funeral? When’s that scheduled?”

[We tentatively scheduled it for the twenty-fifth of January. Nova informed us you should be awake by then, but if you weren’t, we were going to have Nova handle it on your behalf using the nanite colony body we developed,] Gaia replied.

“Good. Since I woke up before then, I should probably address the ‘sickness’ people are coming down with,” Aron said with an internal sigh. It hadn’t even been ten minutes of real time since he finished his system upgrade, yet he had already been buried under a pile of problems. If the alternative wasn’t also the worst-case scenario, he would never have taken his place as the emperor of the Terran Empire; thankfully, he had competent subordinates to help him do the job of ruling.

“First, though, I’m going to go visit Rina and see if there’s something I can do to help hasten the process for her.” Aron had been holding himself back from rushing to her side immediately after Nova told him that she was among the “three percenters”, and now that he knew what he had to do, he would begin by prioritizing her.

He would do his best to keep humanity from burning down, but if one hair on Rina’s head was out of place, he would likely be the first person to light the match.