Chapter 03: Kent Reacher Life Before System.
[Year 2727, Earth Calendar.]
Kent Reacher drifted in the weightless expanse of space, his silhouette stark against the blinding radiance of the sun.
Tethered to the spacecraft by a carbon fiber lifeline, he moved cautiously, each gesture deliberate as he approached the damaged segment of the ship.
The universe around him was both silent and deafening a paradox of vast emptiness filled with the oppressive presence of the star dominating the horizon.
His advanced spacesuit glimmered faintly, reflecting the golden light of the sun.
It was a marvel of human engineering, designed to endure the harshest conditions imaginable.
Yet, despite its thermal shielding and climate control, Kent could feel the unrelenting heat.
Sweat trickled down his face, pooling uncomfortably against the skin tight interior of the suit.
It was a suffocating reminder of how close he was to failure.
“Almost there,” he muttered, his voice swallowed by the vacuum around him.
His grip tightened on the maintenance tool, its metallic surface cold even through his insulated gloves.
This was his first solo repair mission in space, a task that seemed simple in the training simulations but now felt monumental against the sheer scale of the cosmos.
As he locked the tool onto the panel, his mind drifted back to the events that had led him here.
?? ?? ?? ?? Of past. Seven hundred years of unchecked consumption had drained Earth dry.
Oil reserves ran out, forests vanished, and the soil became barren.
The planet that once teemed with life had transformed into a wasteland, its skies choked with ash and dust.
Crops withered, oceans receded, and the last remnants of civilization clung desperately to survival.
The wealthy and powerful, unwilling to perish alongside the planet they had ravaged, turned their gaze to the stars.
Mars became their salvation. A coalition of elites pooled their resources, commissioning a new frontier: a domed city beneath the crimson skies of the Red Planet.
At the heart of this exodus stood SpaceXla, a technological empire forged by the visionary Elon Musk. If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Over centuries, Musk’s companies SpaceX and Tesla had merged, evolving into a monolithic force that pioneered interplanetary travel.
Though Musk himself had died long ago, his essence persisted as a sentient AI.
More than a program, Musk was an architect of progress and control, ruling Mars with calculated precision.
On Mars, life thrived. Its inhabitants lived in luxury, their needs met by advanced technology powered by a revolutionary energy source: planetary core siphoning.
Meanwhile, Earth’s remaining population suffered. Those left behind were condemned to a single nation state called Earth Lander.
A melting pot of all races and cultures, it was a place of despair where the only currency was survival.
The only crop that could grow in Earth’s poisoned soil was corn, cultivated in sprawling greenhouse farms.
It wasn’t enough. Fights over food were common, and death was a routine occurrence.
Kent had grown up in this hellscape, his family among the millions struggling to survive.
When the recruiter arrived, it felt like salvation.
Clad in a sleek black uniform bearing the SpaceXla insignia, the man’s voice carried promises of hope.
The mission was dangerous, he explained, but the rewards were unparalleled.
The objective: extract energy directly from the sun’s surface, a task that required human intervention.
The risks were immense. The heat, the radiation, the unknown challenges of working so close to a star.
Yet the rewards were impossible to ignore.
Families of recruits would receive full citizenship on Mars, financial security, and a future free of Earth’s suffering.
Kent didn’t hesitate. His family’s desperate faces were all the motivation he needed.
He signed up that very day, knowing that this mission could be his only chance to save them.
A physical test was taken. Only a handful full of people were chosen for the mission. Kent was one of them.
The next ten years were grueling. Selected at fifteen, Reacher was thrust into a world of relentless discipline and rigorous education.
He was reshaped, both physically and mentally, by a program designed to forge astronauts capable of facing the sun itself.
By the time he was twenty five, he was unrecognizable, a man honed by hardship but burdened by the weight of what lay ahead.
—
Now, here he was, floating just a hundred kilometers from the sun.
The spacecraft groaned under the strain of its proximity, its reinforced hull shimmering with the heat of solar radiation.
The star’s fiery tendrils lashed out intermittently, arcs of plasma dancing like serpents across its surface.
“Damn this heat,” Kent muttered, wiping his brow inside the helmet.
His suit’s thermal regulators were pushed to their limits, yet it felt as though the sun’s fury was clawing at him, determined to breach his fragile sanctuary.
“If this suit can barely handle it here,” he thought grimly, “what’s going to happen when I’m on the surface?”
Clank Clank!
The maintenance panel finally clicked into place, and Kent allowed himself a moment of relief.
His task was complete. He turned to make his way back to the ship, his movements slow and methodical.
“But as he began to retreat, a glimmer caught his eye.”
It began as a faint distortion in the distance, a ripple in the fabric of space itself.
Kent froze, his heart pounding as the anomaly grew.
The ripple expanded, twisting and warping reality until it erupted into a brilliant cascade of light.
Beep Beep!
“Warning! Unidentified object approaching,” the ship’s AI blared in his helmet. But it was too late.
The object struck with blinding speed a meteor like force that tore through the solar system with unimaginable power.
In the instant it collided with Kent , time seemed to shatter.
The "meteor" wasn’t a rock but something far more profound: a droplet of blood, glowing with divine energy.
Some unknown energy was created by the blood of chaos god and divine energy of water goddess.
It radiated power, a fragment of a divine entity by chaos god and water goddess Divine energy whose very essence defied comprehension.
The impact was instantaneous. Kent ’s body disintegrated, reduced to atoms by the force of the collision.
But as quickly as he was destroyed, he was remade. The divine energy and Chaos blood enveloped him, its energy reshaping him on a cellular level.
Inside the cocoon of energy, Kent ’s body underwent a cycle of destruction and rebirth.
His cells were torn apart and reconstructed, each iteration stronger and more refined than the last.
The blood of the Chaos God fused with his essence, rewriting his DNA and infusing him with power beyond mortal understanding.
As his transformation continued, a crystalline shell formed around him, the divine energy solidifying into the hardest substance known to existence.
The cocoon glowed faintly, a beacon of otherworldly power.
When the light finally faded, Kent was gone.
The ship’s cameras captured a single flash before he vanished, leaving no trace of his presence.
On Mars, his mission was declared a failure.
Investigators scoured the data, but the anomaly defied explanation.
His family waited in vain, clinging to the faint hope that he might return.
Far beyond the reach of human technology, the crystalline cocoon drifted through the void.
Within it, Kent was no longer human.
He was something new, a fusion of mortal and divine, a being whose potential had no limits.
He slept, his consciousness filled with dreams of stars
and galaxies, of power and purpose.
The universe had whispered its secrets to him, and when he awoke, he would change the course of history forever.