Nation-Power-Class Alchemist

I snapped back to my senses only after a violent gust nearly tore me off my feet.

It felt like standing face-to-face with an industrial-grade wind tunnel. Dirt, grit, and tiny stones came flying with the blast, stinging every inch of exposed skin. The wind died after only a few seconds, but my thoughts surged up in its place—wilder than the gale itself.

What the hell just happened?

Am I dreaming?

Is this really the Destroyed Kingdom?

Calm down. Even if you walk into a tiger’s den, you can get out alive as long as you keep your head.

I drew a deep breath, forced the chaos in my chest into something manageable, and surveyed my surroundings with deliberate care.

First: this was not a dream. The sudden wind had left my clothes flapping and my skin still burning where gravel had scraped it. Those sensations were too sharp, too stubborn, to be imaginary.

Second: the question of where I was had an answer. This place was a perfect, spine-chilling match for the official art of the Destroyed Kingdom. The ruins jutted from the earth as if buildings had simply fallen out of the sky, and above them a purple sky churned with black clouds. No film set could ever reproduce the landscape or the phenomena unfolding in front of me. I was certain.

I was in the Destroyed Kingdom. This was not a dream.

So how, exactly, was any of this possible?

The answer came faster than I expected.

Possession?

It sounded absurd, but nothing else explained it. This was the classic opening of a hundred stories—the sudden flare of a monitor, the familiar game world unfurling around you. Everything was screaming that I had been dropped into the game itself.

If this is the Destroyed Kingdom… whose body am I in?

I looked down at myself and tried my voice. What I saw was my own familiar frame. The voice that came out was mine as well.

So I hadn’t possessed someone else. I had been brought into the game world as myself—whole. Game possession, sure, but a half-baked version of it.

“Oh, hell no.”

A curse almost slipped out. If I had entered this world in an ordinary Earth body, and if I was standing somewhere in the Destroyed Kingdom, the situation was not merely bad. It was catastrophic.

The Destroyed Kingdom was endgame territory. Even the publicly released lore painted it as a hell on ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠earth—completely transformed into an inhuman demonscape by the Abyss’s corrosion. Monsters that could wipe out armies alone roamed like common trash mobs, and natural disasters that shredded even those monsters into confetti struck without warning.

If that earlier gust hadn’t been ordinary wind… the thought of my entire body being reduced to ground meat in a blender sent a chill straight through me.

Don’t I have anything? Possession protagonists always get at least a status window.

I was a transmigrator—specifically, a transmigrator into a game world. Status windows were non-negotiable. Skipping one would be a flagrant violation of every cliché in the book.

Status window. Please. Status window.

I called for it again and again inside my head. And as if the world itself wanted to reward my faith, a familiar interface bloomed into view.

I barely had time to celebrate the status window’s existence before something about its layout made me frown.

What is this?

The interface looked like the character screen from the game, but every numerical field was gone. Level, stats—all the quantified entries had simply vanished. Maybe because this was reality now, and simple number-crunching no longer applied.

I accepted the change and focused on what remained.

Four entries. That’s all it’s showing me.

Race at the top was unsurprising. Having no Ability was normal too. But Gift and Skill were… off.

Alchemy I can understand. But what the hell are these Gifts?

Alchemy sitting in the Skill slot made sense. The developers ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠had already cast my character as the Alchemy Workshop NPC of the Destroyed Kingdom; if that choice somehow overlapped with why I was here, the pieces almost fit. The problem was the Gifts.

If this world followed the game’s lore, a Gift was a power born of innate talent—a unique personal ability. And I had never, in all my hours of play, seen Gifts like these.

It wasn’t just the fact that I had Gifts at all. Two of them occupied a proud place on my status screen: Universal Transmutation and Dual Spiritual Rank. Both were complete unknowns to me.

Still, I stayed calm and worked the interface. If the system mirrored the game, I should be able to inspect whatever these mysterious Gifts actually did. I focused on them with the same intent I’d used to open the status window in the first place.

The display cleared everything else and laid out the details.

Jackpot.

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

That was the first thought that cracked through my skull. Universal Transmutation maximized the only skill I had—Alchemy—while Dual Spiritual Rank packed abilities useful from the opening hours all the way to the endgame. The “absolute success modifier” alone ranked among the most broken corrections in the entire game. Dual Spiritual Rank’s talk of “elevating the soul’s rank” was a little vague, but mental resistance plus higher-quality mana? There was nothing to discard there.

If I play this right…

I might actually get out of the Destroyed Kingdom alive.

The moment that thought landed, my mouth curved into a grin so wide it nearly reached my ears. After staring death in the face, finding a real path to survival was the only reasonable reaction.

And then—

Wait.

Far off, at the edge of the horizon, something began to spiral and thrash across the sky. A roar that could have torn eardrums open rolled over me, and a second gale slammed through my body as if trying to punch straight through.

The Destroyed Kingdom hadn’t even been released yet, so public information was scarce compared to other regions. But I knew exactly what I was looking at.

An Ether Storm.

Exactly as the name promised: Ether whipping itself into a storm and scouring everything in its path. In the game it had only ever appeared as a brief cutscene. Now it was unfolding right in front of me. The sheer scale of it made my skin crawl, and every survival instinct I had started screaming for a way out.

What do I do?

In this world, humans used Ether the way Earth used oil and coal—or refined it through Ether cultivation methods into mana. Mana built that way became the fuel for magic, alchemy, and every other technique people used to keep their bodies from being torn apart. Ether was fundamentally a beneficial force… but nature was rarely kind forever. Rain became floods. Wind became ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠typhoons. Ether, too, sometimes turned lethal.

I have to avoid an Ether Storm. No exceptions.

The one racing toward me was among the nastiest of those natural disasters—ultra-dense Ether spinning into a tornado that reduced everything nearby to ash. Calling it a storm was almost polite. In truth it was a swirling mass of hyper-concentrated energy sweeping the surface clean.

To survive an Ether Storm…

Hiding inside a building was pointless. An Ether Storm crumpled steel like paper and shredded it to ribbons. Duck into a ruined structure and you’d just get ground up along with the walls. Running was even stupider. The storm was already coming this way; no pair of legs was going to outpace it forever. Cover got pulverized with you. Flight only delayed the moment you were caught.

That left exactly one answer.

“Time to show what an alchemist can do.”

Maybe it was the Gifts and the skill listed on my status, but my head already knew how to work alchemy. From drawing Ether out of the air, to casting, to expanding the effect—the entire sequence surfaced in order, as if it had always been there.

An Ether Storm only scours the surface. Get underground and the damage is minimal.

I dropped to one knee and pressed both palms to the ground. When I inhaled, ambient Ether rode the air into my lungs. It spread through my body, gathered in my hands at my will, and flowed into the earth—rewriting the structure of matter as it went.

Alchemy was understanding a material’s structure, breaking it down with power, and rebuilding it. Universal Transmutation let me use Ether instead of mana, but the principle was identical. I deconstructed the hard-packed dirt into a descending stairwell, dropped to a safe depth, and sealed the entrance behind me.

Ordinarily, burying yourself alive in a bunker like this risked suffocation. But with matter lying everywhere just waiting to be transmuted into oxygen, that was a non-issue.

Oxygen poisoning is a bigger worry than running out of air.

While I waited for the Ether Storm to pass, I called up the status window again. It didn’t glow, yet somehow it remained perfectly legible even in the lightless dark underground.

I’d been too distracted by the Gifts to look closely before, but Alchemy was no less absurd.

In the game’s system, nearly every skill entered a mastery track the moment you learned it. There were caveats—potential, special conditions—but the baseline was simple: the more you used a skill, the higher its rank climbed, and the stronger its effects became. The lowest rank granted at acquisition was E-Rank. Push mastery all the way to the ceiling through talent and countless lucky breaks, and you reached S-Rank—after which the skill stopped growing.

And I got EX the second I acquired it.

A memory surfaced—something a developer had said during an official broadcast.

—So what would happen if someone had an EX-Rank skill, something higher than S-Rank?

Skills covered combat and non-combat fields alike; you couldn’t judge every one of them by raw destructive power alone. Influence, though—that was a measuring stick you could apply to all of them equally. In the game’s story, every character with an S-Rank skill wielded enormous influence. A single person’s desire could override the limits of institutionalized law. One individual’s actions could force an entire organization to reconsider its choices.

—If there were a character with an EX-Rank skill…

If S-Rank holders already stood that high, how much more overwhelming would an EX-Rank holder be?

—They’d basically be a nation in human form, wouldn’t they? If S-Rank is a walking strategic weapon, then EX-Rank is a walking nation.

My eyes refused to leave the EX-Rank Alchemy entry. This wasn’t a skill I’d ground up through practice. It had been EX from the moment of birth.

The alchemist boom is finally here.

A true king’s return. The long years of scorn and persecution had, at last, reached their end. All those days of being beaten into the dirt by every other profession until the dust flew…

My beginning may have been humble, but my end will be magnificent.

With EX-Rank Alchemy and Universal Transmutation at my back, I had become a nation-power-class alchemist.