Divine-Class Awakening: I Can Steal From Gods!-Chapter 26: A Place of His Own
Neo finally turned his attention back to the woman.
She had been speaking for the last minute in that same smooth voice of hers, the kind that sounded polite on the surface while carrying something colder underneath. He had only been half listening until the number reached him properly.
"So, to secure the apartment, the initial payment will be one hundred thousand Creds," she said, holding the tablet in front of her. "After that, the monthly fee will be ten thousand since Richards recommended you, you will receive special treatment."
Neo looked at her.
For the first time since entering the place, something in his expression almost shifted.
One hundred thousand.
And ten thousand every month after that.
It was far more than he had expected. Even after selling the Epic relic, even after seeing that absurd number in his account, hearing a woman say that amount so lightly made it feel different. Real in a way numbers in a store never did. It was not just money anymore. It was money leaving.
His first thought was simple.
That was almost everything.
His second came right after.
The woman was watching him.
That same look had returned to her eyes, faint but obvious once he noticed it. The expectation that he would hesitate. The assumption that this was the moment reality would catch up to him. That she had shown him something above his level, let him walk through it for a while, and now they would both return to the part where he accepted that this kind of place was not meant for someone like him.
Neo held her gaze, then reached into his pocket and pulled out his identification card.
"Where do I sign?"
The look on her face vanished so quickly it almost amused him.
Her whole tone changed at once. The distance disappeared. The false softness became something warmer, brighter, much more professional now that she knew the money was real.
"Of course," she said, stepping closer and turning the tablet toward him. "Right here."
Neo took it from her and began entering the required details one by one.
Name.
Account confirmation.
Rental agreement.
Identity verification.
The whole process moved quickly after that. A few taps, one final scan, another signature. The apartment became his with the quiet finality of a screen changing color and a transaction confirming successfully.
Just like that, he had rented his first home.
The thought rested strangely in his mind.
Home.
The woman handed him a slim black card a moment later. "This will handle entry and exit access. The building doesn’t use traditional keys."
Neo took it and glanced at it once.
A card.
The surprise almost reached his face. He stopped it before it could. The last thing he wanted was to give her another reason to look at him like he had crawled into the wrong part of the city by accident.
She kept talking after that, explaining building rules, maintenance requests, security response times, floor access, visitor procedure. Neo listened just enough to understand the important parts. By the time she finally left, her voice had already blurred into the background.
The door closed behind her.
Silence fell over the apartment.
It was the first real silence he had heard all day.
Neo stood there with the card still in his hand, then walked back into the main room and dropped onto the sofa without ceremony. The cushions gave way under him more softly than he expected. He stretched out and looked up at the ceiling.
So this was it.
He had a place of his own now.
A real one.
Not some abandoned space with half-broken walls and the constant risk of someone else deciding they wanted it more. Not a corner borrowed from somebody else’s life. Not a temporary roof. This place was his, at least as long as the money kept flowing.
Ten thousand a month.
Now he understood Snot better.
Bills.
Rent.
The kind of things that kept dragging people’s feet back to the ground no matter how much stronger they wanted to become.
In Zone 0, most people did not talk about rent like this because places like this barely existed. You found somewhere broken, somewhere forgotten, somewhere no one bothered claiming yet, and you stayed there until somebody stronger pushed you out or the place fell apart around you. Here, the city did not force you out with collapsing roofs and desperate people. It did it with numbers.
Neo let out a slow breath and stared at the ceiling a little longer.
He should have felt satisfied.
A few days ago, he had nothing. No certainty that he would still be alive by the end of the week. Now he had money, a home, two secondary classes, and a path opening in front of him.
Yet satisfaction never came.
Because the more he learned about this world, the less he liked it.
The city looked clean, ordered, safe. Beneath that order was the same thing he had always hated. Control. Structures built by other people. Gates. Permissions. Roads owned before you even reached them. Families deciding which ruins mattered and who could enter them. Government branches measuring lives by usefulness. Institutions handing out access as if power itself were something to be leased.
He hated that.
No one had ever been allowed to guide his life. No one had ever put a hand on his shoulder and steered him where they wanted without meeting resistance sooner or later. The moment Nep tried, Neo had killed him for it. That line was not new. It had always been there, only clearer now.
Neo sat up slowly and reached for the necklace around his neck.
His fingers closed around the ring hanging there.
Cold metal.
The same ring that had taken him into the mountain. The same ring that had reacted when nothing else should have. The same ring that had opened a hidden Godscar Ruin no one seemed to know existed.
He looked at it in silence.
Questions had been piling up before he even noticed they had started.
Who was the chained man inside that place?
Why had something like that been hidden in the middle of a mountain where no one had found it?
Or had someone found it once and buried the knowledge afterward?
Why did the ring react to that place?
Why had it been with him from the start?
What exactly had he inherited when he took that class?
Soul Reaver.
A divine class.
A class that could steal from monsters, humans, and even gods.
No matter how many times he looked at it, the answer stayed the same.
That kind of power did not appear for no reason.
The room stayed quiet around him. Beyond the windows, the city stretched wide and bright, all those towers, roads, and lights looking stable from up here. He stood and walked toward the glass, the card still in one hand, the ring now resting in the other.
From a distance, everything looked like it held together.
Up close, it never did.
Neo looked at his reflection in the glass, faintly laid over the city lights.
He had wanted a place of his own. He had it now. It changed less than it should have.
He still needed power.
More than before, if anything.
What he had now would keep a roof over his head and buy him time, but time was all it really bought.
Time to keep moving through government Breaches.
Time to take careful steps through a world where the best paths were already fenced off and guarded by people who had been born with names, power, or both.
That was not what he wanted.
Neo needed strength great enough that those fences stopped meaning anything. Great enough that names like Duplain and Mourne became no heavier than any other. Great enough that if the government decided where he was allowed to go, he could walk past that decision without slowing. Great enough that if answers were buried in Godscar Ruins, old temples, dead fortresses, or the scars left behind by divine wars, he could step inside and take them with his own hands.
He had never wanted comfort for its own sake.
What he wanted was freedom.
Freedom wide enough that no one could close a hand around his path and call it order. Sharp enough to cut through every structure that tried to place him where it found him most convenient. Freedom to choose where he went, what he took, and what he became.
Neo tightened his grip on the ring.
Three months until Gray Hand’s test.
That was one road, and he would walk it.
But it would not be the only one.
There were still government Breaches. There were still neglected places beyond the city, ruined stretches of land that mattered less to the people sitting at the top. And above all, there were still classes waiting to be taken.
His path was ugly, but it was simple.
Grow stronger. Take more. Keep climbing until the world no longer had the weight to press down on him.
The thought locked into place with the same cold clarity that had carried him this far. It was not a burst of emotion. It felt closer to alignment, as if everything ahead had narrowed into a single direction.
Neo opened his Soul Window and let it hang before him in the reflection of the glass.
[Soul-Window]
Name: Neo
Age: 16
Soul Core: Ember
[391/1000]
His attention stayed on the number.
It was a beginning.
Behind the faint glow of the window, the city stretched wide under the night, bright enough to fool people into thinking it belonged to everyone equally. Neo knew better now. Every clean tower, every controlled street and every promise sat inside a structure built and owned by others.
The apartment behind him was proof of that as much as anything else. A good place. A real place. A place he had paid for. Yet even here, all it took was time running out and the money drying up for the city to remind him what ownership really meant.
He looked once more at the ring in his hand.
One day, he would learn what it truly was.
One day, he would understand who the chained figure beneath the mountain had been.
One day, he would know why that hidden ruin had existed where no one should have known to search.
And when that day came, no one would be in a position to keep the truth from him. 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺
Neo closed the Soul Window.
The room fell quiet again. Outside, the city went on breathing in light and motion.
Tomorrow, he would continue.
And next time, he would climb with clearer intent than before.
