The next morning, Neo sat in the passenger seat with one arm resting against the door, watching the city move past the window.
Daylight made Arandom City feel even farther from anything Neo knew.
The roads were wide, the buildings stood straight, and even the people outside seemed to move with less urgency, as if they had never learned to keep one eye over their shoulder while walking.
Neo kept his gaze on the glass.
'Sixteen years old, and it seems my life is already changing; it seems it's true that my mother never lied. She was right even about the ring.'
He was wearing clothes Richards had lent him, and they fit well enough. Better than what he owned, anyway. His ribs no longer dragged behind him the way it had yesterday, though there was still a faint ache there if he shifted wrong. The healer had fixed more than Neo would have expected. The rest came from something else, from whatever was inside him now.
Richards drove with one hand on the wheel, relaxed in a way Neo still did not fully trust. After a while, he glanced at him and said, "It's simple, so don't overthink it."
Neo turned his head slightly. "The identification?"
Richards nodded. "Yeah, when you go in, put your hand on the device, let it read your soul, and it prints the basics. Identity, stage, class, age, bla bla bla, all that stuff. Then they register you in the system."
Neo let that sit for a moment. That sounded far too easy for something that could ruin his life.
Richards caught the look that crossed his face and let out a short breath through his nose. "You're acting like I'm driving you to your execution, you can chill out."
Neo looked back out the window. "Maybe you are."
That earned him a brief laugh.
"I'm not saying it's harmless," Richards said. "But it's not all bad either. A good class opens doors. The government likes talent, and the big families and big factions like it even more."
Neo's eyes shifted back to him.
Richards kept driving as he spoke. "A lot of awakened people don't even stay with the government if they've got something valuable. Powerful families are always looking for new talent. Better pay. Better training. Better protection. Better everything, usually."
Neo absorbed that in silence.
That part, at least, made sense. Of course powerful people wanted more powerful people around them. That was how everything worked. The powerful always kept useful things close.
After a few moments, Richards spoke again.
"So," he said, glancing at him briefly, "what's your plan now, Neo?"
Neo did not answer at once.
Outside, the streets kept passing by in neat lines of glass, steel, and clean stone. People walked with bags in hand, coffee cups, pressed shirts, things that belonged to lives with structure. It felt so far away from Zone 0 that it might as well have been another country.
Then he said, "Money."
Richards's brow lifted slightly.
Neo kept looking ahead. "I want enough of it to stop living the way I did until now. I want to grow. I want things."
Richards laughed, not mockingly, but enough that Neo turned his head and looked at him.
"What?" Neo asked.
Richards shook his head, still smiling a little. "Nothing. It's just a very honest answer."
"It's the real one."
"I know." Richards tapped the wheel lightly with his thumb. "But isn't there anything you want more than that?"
Neo went quiet.
For most of his life, money had never meant greed. It meant heat, food, fewer broken things, one less reason to wake up already tired. Even now, that still sat at the front of everything. Money meant distance from the life he hated. Money meant choices. Money meant never needing to beg someone for a job just to keep his stomach from chewing through him.
Still, after a few seconds, he said, "I don't know."
Richards did not interrupt.
Neo's eyes drifted back toward the passing city.
"For now, money," he said. "Short term, that's what I want."
A moment later, more quietly, he said:
"Maybe a home too. A real one would be nice."
The words hung in the car for a second.
Richards did not smile at that. He did not make it awkward either. He only nodded once, as if he understood more from that answer than from the first one.
"That's a better goal than most people have."
Neo did not reply.
A little while later, Richards turned the wheel and slowed the car.
"We're here."
Neo looked up.
At first, all he really registered was glass.
Then height.
The building rising in front of him was enormous, a sheer column of glass and metal that climbed high enough to make his eyes pause on the way up. Sunlight flashed across the windows. People moved in and out through broad front doors beneath it like they belonged there.
Neo stepped out of the car and stared.
He had seen tall buildings before, from far away, in projections, in pictures on public screens that sometimes worked and sometimes did not. That was not the same as standing in front of one.
This one felt like something built to remind people how small they were.
Richards came around the car, caught the look on Neo's face, and laughed.
"Incredible, right?"
He was still looking up.
At that exact moment, he probably looked like someone who had no business standing there.
Richards seemed to enjoy that thought on his behalf.
"Come on," he said, gesturing toward the entrance. "Stick close to me. You don't have to wait in line today."
Neo finally dragged his gaze back down and looked at him.
"Why not?"
Richards started walking.
"Because, you see," he said over his shoulder, "you're lucky enough to know me."
Neo followed him toward the entrance.
From outside, the building had already looked ridiculous. Inside, it felt worse.
The first thing that hit him was the noise.
Voices layered over one another. Shoes against the marble floor. The sharp bursts of camera flashes. Security trying to keep order without quite managing it. The lobby was wide enough to swallow the old man's place whole, yet even that space felt crowded now.
Neo slowed for half a second, his eyes moving across the scene.
There were reporters everywhere.
Cameras, microphones, people leaning forward for a better angle, all of them focused toward the far side of the hall as if they were waiting for someone important enough to bend the whole building around them.
Neo frowned faintly. "What the hell is going on?"
Richards glanced that way, then gave a short breath that sounded almost amused.
"Oh," he said, lowering his voice a little as he kept walking. "Looks like she already arrived."
Neo's eyes narrowed. "She?"
Richards tilted his head toward the crowd. "Vivienne Mourne."
Neo recognized the name instantly.
That was the sort of name you heard even in Zone 0, whether you wanted to or not. The Mournes were one of those families that stood above almost everyone else, the kind people talked about like they belonged in another layer of the world entirely. Wealth, power, influence, all of it packed into a single surname.
He murmured it under his breath.
"Vivienne Mourne..."
Richards noticed and nodded once. "Yeah. Today was her evaluation too, so naturally the whole place decided to lose its mind."
They kept moving, slipping past the edge of the crowd rather than into it.
Richards's voice dropped a little more. "She's your age, more or less, maybe some more months older. She also just came in to do the registration like you. Poor girl hasn't had it easy either."
Neo glanced at him.
Richards kept his eyes ahead as he spoke. "Her parents died a few years ago. After that, she ended up carrying the family."
Neo had heard about that. It had been big enough news that even broken public screens in bad districts had talked about it for days. The deaths had made noise. The cause had not. Nobody seemed to know exactly what had happened, or at least nobody important had wanted to say it plainly.
Movement rippled through the far side of the lobby.
He saw her only for a second.
Red hair.
Red eyes.
The color caught first. Enough to stand out even in all that noise, bright in a way that made the rest of the room feel washed out for an instant. Her face was only half-visible between shoulders and cameras.
"Like rubies..." Neo murmured, even though he had never seen one in his life.
Still, that was the word his mind reached for.
Then the press surged harder around her, and the view disappeared.
Richards caught that pause and jerked his chin forward.
"Keep up," he said. "You keep staring like that and you'll get swallowed by the crowd."
Neo looked back at him and started moving again.
"Wasn't planning to join them," he muttered.
Richards gave a quiet snort and guided him toward a side passage guarded by two uniformed officers. One of them glanced at Richards, saw who he was, and stepped aside without a word.
The noise of the lobby dulled the moment they crossed through.
Neo looked back once at the flood of cameras and bodies, then ahead again as the corridor stretched out in cleaner, quieter lines.
Richards did not slow.
"Stay close," he said over his shoulder. "This part's restricted, and I'm not wasting half my morning explaining why a stray wandered off."
'Stray?'
The corridor ended at a room that looked nothing like an office.
Neo slowed at the doorway.
Panels, switches, glass surfaces, small lights pulsing in ordered rhythms, mechanisms built into the walls with too much precision for anything handmade. It looked closer to the control room of some machine than a place where people got registered.
A woman stood beside the main device, adjusting something on a side panel. She looked up when Richards entered, then at Neo.
"This him?" she asked.
Richards nodded. "Yeah."
Neo said nothing. His eyes stayed on the machine in the center.
It had a curved metal frame, a dark plate where he was supposed to place his hand, and a smooth sphere set into the structure just above it. It had to be the work of Soul Engineers. He could tell that much even without understanding how any of it functioned.
Richards noticed the way he stopped.
"It's fine," he said, quieter now. "Just do what she tells you."
Neo walked closer.
His face stayed flat. His thoughts were not nearly as calm.
'Shit... if they find the truth, I'm fucked.'
The woman activated the device with a few practiced motions. Light ran through the frame.
"Hand there," she said, pointing. "Then touch the sphere."
Neo obeyed.
For one second, nothing happened.
Then the machine hummed.
A pale panel unfolded above it.
Age: 16
Soul Core: Ember
Progress: 125/1000
Class: Primal Beast - Ascendant
Neo stared.
He made sure not to react.
It had hidden Soul Reaver, and put a random name on his other class.
Richards, on the other hand, smiled openly.
"Oh," he said, sounding genuinely pleased as he glanced from the panel to Neo. "Ascendant. That's not bad at all. If you grow it properly, you'll live well." His eyes dropped once more to the display. "Though one hundred twenty-five Souls already..." He stopped there, flicking a glance toward the woman, then let it go. "We can talk later."
Neo only nodded.
After that came forms, signatures, routine questions, details entered into the system one by one. By the time they were done, a slim identification card rested in Neo's hand.
He turned it once between his fingers.
For the first time in his life, the system had somewhere to put his name.
Neo looked at it a second longer, then slid it away.
Soul Reaver had stayed hidden.
Good.
It would stay that way.