Kenji stood in the white void, the Seventh Star held in his hand. He felt the rush of victory, the silence of a dismantled world but then, he noticed the locket.
The Rank 0 locket Priya had given him wasn't just a sentimental anchor. As he held the Seventh Star, the locket began to glow with a color he had never seen before: a deep, abyssal crimson that didn't belong to the System's spectrum.
[WARNING: SYSTEM MISMATCH DETECTED]
[CURRENT REALITY: LAYER 1 (VIRTUAL SHELL)]
[TRUE RANKING SYSTEM: INITIALIZING...]
The Architect, who had been fading away, suddenly stopped. His panicked expression smoothed out into a mask of cold, terrifying amusement. He didn't dissolve. He expanded.
"Did you really think it was that simple, Kenji Tanaka?" the Architect's voice boomed, now layered with thousands of different frequencies. "Did you think the creator of a world-tier Rank System would leave the keys to the kingdom in a glass box at the top of a tower?"
The white void began to crack. Not like glass, but like a shedding skin.
Behind the white walls was a sky of churning black gears and stars that looked like unblinking eyes. The "Tower of Ranks" they had climbed was merely a single needle in a haystack of a much larger structure the World-Forge.
"You have conquered the Inner Rim," the Architect said, his form now a titan made of ancient, pre-System bronze. "You have played with the 'Seven Stars' which are merely the safety limiters I placed to keep the primitives from hurting themselves."
[NEW ZONE DISCOVERED: THE OUTER FORGE (RANK SS)]
[LOCAL LAW: REALITY FRICTION (MANA COST x10)]
Kenji felt his power, the power of a Rank 7 Master Apex suddenly feel tiny. In this new environment, his "Master" status was the equivalent of a toddler holding a wooden sword.
"The Seventh Revision wasn't a deletion," the Architect continued, his bronze hand reaching out to pluck the Seventh Star from Kenji's frozen fingers. "It was a Migration. And since you've brought all seven limiters to me in one place... you've just unlocked the door for the real guests."
From the black sky, massive ships organic, chitinous vessels that dwarfed the Architect's Mercy began to descend. They weren't from the System. They were from the Unranked Void beyond.
[THREAT DETECTED: THE VOID-REAPERS (RANK 10+)]
Kenji was thrown back as the Source Gate exploded. He tumbled through the air, falling from the "Top" of the tower, but he wasn't falling toward the Salt Flats. He was falling toward a secondary world hidden beneath the "porcelain" surface of Aethelgard.
He slammed into a pile of junk real, stinking, oil-slicked junk.
"Kenji!" Mateo's voice crackled over a comms-link that sounded like it was being dragged through a meat-grinder. "Everything's changing! The Ranks... they didn't go away. They just... reset. But the numbers are higher now. Much higher."
Kenji sat up, coughing. He looked at his wrist.
[STATUS: KENJI TANAKA]
[RANK: 1 (ASCENDANT)]
[TOTAL CHAPTERS TO ASCENSION: 329 REMAINING]
He wasn't at the end. He was at the beginning of the True Ranking. The first 50 chapters were just the tutorial.