The Sovereign Veil Chapter 1: Chapter 1: The Deadbeat, The Awakened, and The Sovereign Veil

Read chapter 1 of The Sovereign Veil by GodEmperor on NovelPedia.

Aether Era, Year 2135. May 31st. I closed the leather bound journal with a heavy sigh, tossing it onto the sleek glass desk. In an era where humanity was busy slaughtering each other over Aether Crystals or holding the line against Abyssal Demons, hand writing your feelings was a dead art. But I was irritable, broke, and desperately needed a drink. It had taken me half a day to process the reality of my situation. My name was still Lucian Croft. I still had the same sharp, angular jawline and a face I’d solidly rate a nine out of ten. But I was no longer the successful, thirty something corporate shark from Earth. I had woken up from a dream to find myself shoved into the body of an eighteen year old high school senior in a brutal, hyper advanced world the Terra Nova Sector. Having two lifetimes of memories crammed into one skull felt like trying to uncompress a terabyte of raw data on a rusted hard drive. It gave me a migraine, but it also gave me the unvarnished truth about my immediate future: I was about to get dumped. My childhood sweetheart, Quinn Sterling, had just awakened her Aether core. In this universe, the Awakened didn't just get a shiny badge; they manipulated raw Qi, evolved biologically, and became literal weapons of mass destruction. They were drafted by the Neo European Alliance or the Americas Republic to fight on the bleeding edge of the geopolitical meat grinder. They were the elite. I, on the other hand, was an unawakened civilian whose combat potential peaked at parallel parking. We were now two entirely different species. My smart comm vibrated against my wrist, projecting a crisp holographic text. [Quinn Sterling: Lucian, you said you’d pick me up at 1600 hours. Where are you? Hmph!] Panic, cold and sharp, spiked in my chest. Half the journal I’d just read was dedicated to this girl. They had grown up in the same sector, attended the same academy, and promised to conquer the world together. My family wasn't destitute my father, Arthur Croft, was a mid level logistics officer for the Pan Asian Coalition, and my mother ran a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant. We had credits. But credits couldn't buy an Aether core. According to every trope I knew, this date was an execution. She was going to break my heart, tell me I was dead weight, and ascend to the Obsidian Citadel to cultivate her Qi. I briefly considered striking first dumping her and screaming something defiant about my untapped potential. But she was an Awakened now. If I pissed her off, she could probably snap my femur with a localized gravity well. "I'll just let her dump me," I muttered to the mirror, adjusting my collar. "Keep a low profile. Survive." Five minutes later, the smart comm buzzed again. This time, it was a live projection. Quinn stood in the hologram, her raven hair catching the ambient light. She was devastatingly beautiful far beyond the memories implanted in my head. Her pale blue dress fluttered around her, emphasizing the lethal, lithe curves of a body newly refined by Aether cultivation. There was a seductive, magnetic pull to her now, an intoxicating mix of innocence and predatory grace. "Lucian! You stood me up!" she pouted, a flush of anger coloring her porcelain cheeks. "I was... waiting," I stammered, caught completely off guard. Waiting for the guillotine to drop. "Oh, it's Quinn," a deep, authoritative voice echoed from the hallway. My father, Arthur, stepped into the room, tossing me a sleek black keycard. "I'll have Lucian down in a second. Take the mag lev, son. Be a gentleman." "Yes, sir," I replied, catching the card. Ten minutes later, the autonomous mag lev glided to a halt in Sector 4 the Onyx City slums. The architecture here was a claustrophobic nightmare of hyper dense steel towers reaching into the smog, a stark contrast to my family's low density, fortified villa. This was where the Coalition housed the impoverished, the collateral damage of the resource wars. Quinn’s father had died a