Born of fire and hunger

In the greater part of human kind there resides an instinct for survival. It is this which can clutch at straws and affect a rescue from them. It is this which can, now and then, outwit fate : Tanith Lee There are moments in life when you don't know what to do. Some of these moments can be good, like when a father holds his first newborn baby for the first time and realises he has no idea what to do. Or when somoene who has worked his entire life without stop finally retires and doesn't know what to do with his free time cause he's never had any. An then there's me, somoene about to have possibly the first of many so called "worst day of my life" as I stare at what is most likely a death sentence. You see for contexe, the world I am in is a little strange. Before you make any assumptions, this isn't an isekai where I get whisked off to some fantasy world to fixe some other peoples problems. At least not completely. The world I am in is strange in the fact that about 75 years ago, give or take one or two, a massive portion of the population vanished without a trace. Freaky I know, but not as freaky as when they came back and brought with them "magic". The laws of physics seemed useless and easy to ignore for these people. They could do incredible things. Flying through the air at unimaginable speeds, shooting fire from their fingers, moving mountains with their power. Even freezing time was within their reach. It was safe to say at this point that the world was going to change forever. Now listening to all this you'd probably say, wait Lucien isn't this awesome? Magic powers and all you have to do is dissapear for a while, isn't that a pretty good trade of? And normally you'd be right, but of the approximately 100 million who dissapeared, only 13 million came back. Not very good odds. Those that came back told stories of what they had to do. The trials they had to pass. Now this isn't some tower climbing story like you probably read in those webnovels. Every trial was unique to the person. Some where easy and some landed you in the 83 million that didn't come back. And naturally like any good fantasy story, the great dissapearance, as we came to call it, didn't happen just once. And so my story begins here, in the middle of the road, 75 years after the first great disappearance, staring into dead space. I would guess that the people who saw me would find me weird, after all I was staring at nothing. But I couldn't be bothered with them right now, and the reason was that I was indeed staring at something. Something that would change my fate forever. [Congratulations challenger] [You have been selected for the trial] [You will be transported in 30 seconds] ... Fuck. Author : this novel does have a system but it's not a leveling system, so if that's what you're looking for, this might not be for you.