Chapter 35: The Real Rhaevia Wasn’t Trash

The faint, mocking curve of Rhaevia’s lips lingered for several seconds before slowly fading into a sharp line. The terminal screen continued to glow with translucent blue light, casting cold shadows across her pale features.

"They attempted to erase a threat to the throne," Raevor stated. His words lingered in the air like a localized storm.

Rhaevia did not offer an immediate response; instead, she turned her body back toward the glowing interface, her dark eyes locking onto the fragmented system ledger.

"Show me everything," she commanded softly, though an unmistakable, razor-sharp edge cut beneath her calm tone.

Raevor’s dark eyes narrowed slightly as he stepped up beside her, his towering frame casting a long shadow over the console. "The file is heavily corrupted," he warned, his tone grave as he brought up the primary diagnostic tools. "We may not be able to recover much of the raw data."

"Then recover whatever remains," Rhaevia countered without a single second of hesitation.

Raevor didn’t waste time arguing. His long, calloused fingers moved across the holographic interface with practiced, lethal efficiency, bypassing standard protocols to activate several layers of military-grade decryption. Lines of garbled, red-and-white corrupted data flickered violently across the glass screen before slowly reconstructing themselves into legible text.

A newly unsealed medical record materialized floating in the air.

[PATIENT: RHAEVIA RYTHUNDEIR] [AGE: 7] [MENTAL DEVELOPMENT ASSESSMENT: ABNORMAL]

Rhaevia’s impassive expression subtly shifted, her brows drawing together as she read the top banner. "Seven?" she murmured, her voice laced with quiet disbelief.

"This is a childhood medical examination from seven years ago," Raevor confirmed, his eyes tracking the scrolling metrics.

The historical report continued to unspool line by line, rendering details that had been buried for over a decade.

[BASELINE MENTAL ENERGY: UNSTABLE] [NEURAL RESPONSE: ABOVE STANDARD HUMAN PARAMETERS] [MENTAL FLUCTUATION: UNEXPLAINED] [AWAKENING INDICATORS: DETECTED]

Rhaevia stared silently at the glowing diagnostic text. She had been a mere seven-year-old child when this file was generated. Yet even back then, the original girl’s physical body had already demonstrated a volatile, abnormal mental signature.

That meant her incredible Guide capability was never something that randomly materialized when she turned sixteen. The foundation had been there all along, lurking deep beneath her biological framework.

The heavy realization settled inside her chest like a weight. Beneath that log, the subsequent section of the file was almost entirely corrupted by high-level military data-burners.

Raevor tapped a secondary command line, forcing his terminal to run an aggressive reconstruction sequence. A small, damaged fragment slowly cleared.

[SUPPRESSION PROTOCOL—] [AUTHORIZED BY: ███████] [OBJECTIVE: STABILIZE SUBJECT] [REASON: PREMATURE AWAKENING RISK]

Rhaevia’s eyes sharpened into icy slits. "Premature awakening?" she repeated, her tone dropping into a cold whisper.

Raevor’s jaw tightened visibly, his dark gaze fixed on the redacted authorization code. "Someone discovered her true potential when she was just a child," he stated, the air around him growing tense with a Sentinel’s rising anger.

"And they systematically suppressed it," Rhaevia finished flatly.

"Yes," Raevor said grimly.

He swiped his hand across the console, prompting another archived medical file to surface from the dark servers. Age nine. Then eleven. Then thirteen. Every single entry contained variations of the exact same clinical reporting:

[ABNORMAL MENTAL ACTIVITY DETECTED.] [SUPPRESSION TREATMENT ADMINISTERED.] [NEURAL PATHWAYS STABILIZED.] [AWAKENING DELAYED.]

Rhaevia’s slender fingers slowly curled into tight, pale fists against her sides. The shadowy figures controlling this operation had been watching the original girl for years like an experimental subject. Not once. Not twice. Repeatedly.

Every single time her dormant mental energy attempted to naturally break through its artificial boundaries, someone had intervened with extreme medical force. At age thirteen, the neural suppression protocols had become far more aggressive, utilizing heavy chemical agents to crush her growth.

[MENTAL ENERGY SPIKE DETECTED.] [SUBJECT DISPLAYING UNAUTHORIZED AWAKENING RESPONSE.] [IMMEDIATE SUPPRESSION REQUIRED.]

A follow-up log entry appeared directly beneath the warning timestamp.

[SUPPRESSION SUCCESSFUL.]

Rhaevia’s gaze grew increasingly frigid as she digested the horrific timeline. The tragic girl who had originally inhabited this body had never been an E-rank failure. She had simply been engineered to believe she was trash by the very people overseeing her life.

Someone had taken a naturally gifted, potentially abnormal Guide, repeatedly suppressed her biological awakening, falsified her official registry files, and allowed the entire Imperial military academy system to brand her as a useless failure.

Why go to such extreme, elaborate lengths? What could an unknown military faction possibly be so terrified of?

Raevor’s fingers suddenly froze over the console, halting the automated scroll. "There," he growled low in his chest.

A faint, partially corrupted line of text had materialized directly beneath the final childhood medical record.

Rhaevia leaned closer to the glowing screen, her dark pupils tracking the small script. "What does it say?" she asked.

Raevor quickly enlarged the damaged fragment, expanding the holographic text to fill the central display.

[AGE: 16] [FINAL SUPPRESSION PROCEDURE: COMPLETED] [MENTAL SIGNATURE: SUCCESSFULLY MASKED] [OFFICIAL CLASSIFICATION: E-RANK GUIDE] [MONITORING STATUS: CONTINUOUS]

Rhaevia’s eyes narrowed into sharp, lethal slits as she read the final status tag. "Continuous monitoring," she repeated softly.

"They didn’t simply falsify your academic records and walk away," Raevor noted grimly, his expression darkening. "They continued active monitoring of your physical coordinates long after the procedure was finished."

Rhaevia turned her head slightly to look directly into his eyes. "Then whoever authorized this knew exactly where I was at all times."

The horrifying implication hung heavily in the air between them.

The sudden kidnapping. The illegal transfer to Planet V-17. The abandoned, restricted wilderness. The ancient underground facility. The sudden awakening.

None of those catastrophic events had happened independently or by mere chance.

Perhaps the original Rhaevia had been forcibly relocated to Planet V-17 because the heavy suppression field was finally beginning to fail after four years. Perhaps someone in High Command had known that the unique environmental conditions of that restricted world would forcibly trigger whatever ancient force had been sealed inside her core.

Or perhaps—

Rhaevia’s calm expression hardened into absolute, battle-hardened steel.

They wanted to observe the results. They wanted to see what would happen when the container finally broke.

Raevor seemed to arrive at the exact same logical conclusion at the exact same microsecond. "The planet itself may have been part of their deliberate experiment," he stated, his voice tight with cold rage.

The heavy words hung in the space between them, thick with danger. 𝑓𝑟ℯℴ𝓂

Rhaevia slowly exhaled a quiet, measured breath, steadying her heart rate. She had spent days wondering whether her sudden transmigration into this interstellar era had been nothing more than a bizarre, impossible twist of universal fate.

Now, a far more terrifying possibility emerged from the shadows.

Perhaps the original girl had possessed something truly extraordinary and dangerous from the very moment of her birth. Perhaps that vast, unclassifiable power had been forcibly locked away beneath artificial seals.

And perhaps the exact moment her battle-hardened soul entered this physical frame, whatever mechanical lock had been restraining it finally shattered under the weight of her presence.

Her transmigration might not have created the awakening out of thin air. It might simply have triggered an ancient, sleeping force that had been waiting in the dark for years.

"Can you trace the original authorization code back to its source?" she asked, her voice steady and demanding.

Raevor’s fingers immediately flew across the interface, inputting advanced bypass scripts. "Trying now," he replied shortly.

The military terminal flashed violently with a harsh crimson warning light.

[ACCESS DENIED: CLEARANCE INSUFFICIENT]

Raevor didn’t hesitate. He executed a manual override sequence, forcing his personal command codes into the primary firewall. Another impenetrable security layer immediately materialized across the screen.

[LEVEL BLACK CLEARANCE REQUIRED FOR ACCESS]

Raevor’s expression turned utterly stone-cold. "Whoever created these historical files possessed authority far above normal military command structures," he stated grimly.

Rhaevia’s eyes remained locked on the blinking screen. "Then keep digging until you break it," she instructed.

"I will," Raevor answered flatly.

Before he could execute his next cracking protocol, the main terminal display suddenly flickered erratically. A high-frequency electronic whine echoed through the chamber speakers as the light distorted.

Every single recovered medical record, diagnostic graph, and historical log vanished from the screen in an instant.

Rhaevia’s eyes narrowed into sharp slits. "Raevor," she called out warningly.

"I didn’t trigger that purge," Raevor replied, his hands hovering over the dark controls.

The glowing holographic interface went completely black, plunging their faces into deep shadow.

Then, a single line of stark, radiant text materialized in the exact center of the dark glass.

It was not a medical classification code. It was not a military rank designation. It was not a name belonging to any known Imperial officer or noble family.

Just two simple, ominous words:

[PROJECT GENESIS]

Rhaevia stared silently at the glowing white letters, her breathing perfectly measured.

For the very first time since she had stepped onto his flagship, even Raevor’s rigidly controlled expression cracked, displaying a flicker of genuine shock.

The primary terminal emitted one final, high-pitched warning chime that cut through the silence.

[ALL RELATED RECORDS: LEVEL BLACK SANCTUARY PROTOCOL ENGAGED]

With a soft pop of terminating circuits, the entire file self-erased, purging itself completely from the flagship’s local data vault.

Rhaevia remained entirely motionless in the dark room, her gaze fixed on the blank screen.

[Project Genesis.]