At nine sharp, the halls of Starlight Seventh High rang with the hourly chime.
Right after it, the usual soft female voice drifted through the corridor, calm and precise as ever—
[Today’s civilization data update:]
[Current contained anomalies: 147,892. Divine faith index: 86.7%. Technological development index: 92.3%. Civilization safety index: 73.9%, up 0.02% from yesterday...]
[Reminder: the lunar eclipse is approaching. Anomaly activity is expected to rise. All academies are to strengthen protective measures.]
[Thank you to every pioneer who fights to defend human civilization.]
[May the gods show mercy. May humanity endure.]
Sophia Everhart leaned against the wall outside the teachers’ office, listening to the broadcast like it belonged to somebody else’s world.
Her eyes dropped to the fine pleats of her uniform skirt.
She was Sophia Everhart.
And she wasn’t.
Because she had crossed over.
Ten years after graduation, she had somehow ended up back in high school. Not just back, either—back as one of the worst students in class, standing outside the office and waiting to be lectured by her homeroom teacher.
Damn fate. It had a vicious sense of humor.
And this was no ordinary world.
This was an interstellar age already breached by anomalies.
She lifted her head and looked out the window.
Beyond the glass stood the vast academy complex, heavy and solemn, wrapped beneath a translucent protective barrier. The light over it shimmered like a thin shell of water, fragile at a glance, yet holding up the last scraps of peace.
Even here, at a God Academy on the outermost edge of the Milky Way, this place was still the final safe fortress in the region.
Outside the barrier, warped shadows slid along the dark like living things. Black mist rolled and coiled, nosing again and again at the weak points of the protective net, as if hunting for a crack to tear open.
That was what they called “anomalies.”
Sophia let out a slow breath.
Anomalies spread like plague.
Once they descended, they would quietly twist every rule inside the affected area. Bit by bit, law, order, common sense—everything would be distorted, corrupted, devoured. Then they would spread wider, swallowing more.
The only thing that could stand against anomalies was the gods.
Humans, through faith in the gods, could borrow power enough to resist them.
And so the God Academies had risen with the times, becoming the final bastions of human civilization.
Those anomalies that could be detected and kept on a leash were folded into one thing—
exam papers.
Every single paper was a real battlefield from an actual anomalous invasion.
Getting transmigrated was bad enough. Getting tossed into a world like this, where danger crouched behind every breath, was worse.
And from the original host’s memories, Sophia Everhart knew one thing clear as iron—
her final exam was about to begin.
Inside those papers, the place was crawling with anomalies that could snap her up like a crunchy little snack.
If she wanted to stay alive, there was only one road.
She had to obtain the power of the gods.
The problem was, the original Sophia had never successfully summoned even one deity. Not one. As for divine skills, she had none at all.
And by the academy’s rules, if she failed this assessment again, there would be no makeup exam waiting for her.
What waited for her was forced expulsion.
Once she lost her student status, forget entering exam papers, forget gaining divine power.
To put it plain, it felt like her grave was already dug right outside the door.
What a damn ruin of an opening.
No wonder the homeroom teacher had called her in for a talk.
…
But Sophia Everhart had no intention of dying.
If this life had to be restarted, then fine, restart it. The opening hand was rotten to the core, but it still beat being dead.
Besides, for all the threat of anomalies, this was also a blazing age where gods had returned to the mortal world.
The gods walked the earth, granting believers supreme divine power, casting immortal miracles over ordinary men.
And the figures from Huaxia mythology she had studied in her previous life—
they might truly appear before her here.
That thought made her heart stir despite herself.
Could she summon the Great Sage Equal to Heaven,
and seize the divine skill of the Ruyi Jingu Bang, powerful enough to churn rivers and overturn seas?
Or she could invite Erlang Zhenjun and beg for that Heavenly Eye that saw through all things.
Then have Xiaotian Quan at her side, the hound that could track anything under heaven.
And that was saying nothing of gods like Nuwa and Pangu, beings who split heaven and earth and shaped the world with their own hands.
In an age of gods like that, so what if the start was hard?
Besides, there was a reason the original Sophia Everhart had never managed to summon a god.
The heart of summoning lay in one thing:
“Call the name. Know the title.”
To put it plain, one had to recognize the god’s true identity first, then use that god’s divine title to draw down their power.
It should have been simple.
But before the abnormal invasion, the gods had slumbered. Faith had thinned out. Knowledge of every pantheon had broken apart, piece by piece.
Only after the abnormalities descended did the gods begin to wake.
Humanity had no choice but to dig through ruins and holy grounds, piecing together the lost myths bit by bit.
After years of struggle, most pantheons had been restored.
Take the Greek or Norse systems. Few gods, clear images, simple titles. You could almost pick them right with your eyes shut.
But the Huaxia pantheon the original host believed in was another beast entirely.
Huaxia civilization ran deep, and its mythic system was tangled beyond belief.