Drai suddenly felt all his organs moving. From the outermost parts of his body, like the skin, to his bone marrows, they were all undergoing a fundamental transformation, changing Drai's very foundation as a human being.
Drai was paying close attention to this. It was truly a bizarre feeling. Drai felt as if his body were made of dough and was being constantly kneaded.
Drai suddenly thought of Vee's explanation earlier about the potential pain during transformation and how countermeasures were in place. Drai was glad that the procedure anticipated this. He had no doubt that he would be screaming out of his lungs if his pain receptors weren't cut off.
After a while, the movements receded until it finally stopped. Drai could sense the feeling of his new body. It felt rather strange to him, like wearing clothes he's not used to.
Drai looked at his System window.
[Transformation complete. Please acclimate to your new body before attempting to move around.]
[Status window is now available.]
Then Drai heard Vee's voice once again.
"Congratulations, Drai Varz. You may now remove your helmet to start acclimating. When you are ready, please head toward the exit as the next batch of participants is ready to enter. Since your time is limited, I recommend you look at your status window and skills during at scouting event area or elsewhere. Good luck."
Drai chuckled. He knew he had wasted a lot of time deliberating over the classes.
'Even if I'm smart, that poem really took a lot of time,' Drai thought.
Drai then moved his arms slowly, adapting to the motoric changes that came with his new body. After getting the hang of it, he removed his helmet, sat up, and looked around.
The chamber was almost void of participants, only a few people were left and they were all staying still, staring at the invisible screens in front of them.
'Looks like I really was the last one to finish,' Drai thought wryly. 'These other students seem to be spending their SP or checking their stats. Let's head out first so I don't get warned again by Vee. I think she might be annoyed with me by now, hehehe.'
Then Drai looked at his body. He was baffled because his muscles seemed to have shrunk!
"My muscles!" Drai cried out, startling several staff and students.
Not noticing that some people were looking at him, Drai started touching his body. His hands glided around, stroking his muscles while occasionally stopping to clench them dubiously.
Seeing this, some people raised their eyebrows.
'Oh my god, not another one of those types again! Why don't these people get a room before fondling their new body?' a male staff thought disgustedly.
'Wait, isn't that Drai? Did he get smaller? Hahaha, it looks like his crazy training didn't pay off! I bet he'll go to the extreme after this. Maybe he'll grill his balls or something, hahaha!' a student merrily thought.
'Ah! What am I doing!? I can't watch this... This guy is just a teenager. But it reminds me of those BL webnovels, so hot…' a young female staff with a red face couldn't seem to hold herself back.
The previous Drai would probably only attract ladies with an acquired taste since his muscles were too intimidating and his body was full of glaring scars. However, after his transformation Drai's muscles became leaner and his previously bronze skin became lighter. His hair also grew longer with white strands of hair flowing among the black.
Unaware of the various onlookers' thoughts, Drai finally stopped touching himself as he discovered that although his muscles did shrink, their density was incomparably solid. Drai then realized that if he were as big as before, doubling his strength would almost be impossible, and even if he could do it, he would probably end up looking like a balloon!
Having this realization, Drai finally relaxed. Feeling his powerful new legs, Drai stepped down carefully from the table before heading to the exit. He then noticed that he had grown slightly taller. Luckily, he didn't wear skin tight clothes or they would've ripped apart. He took a last look around the chamber before going through the exit door.
After a short walk, Drai entered a relatively small room where he saw several staff members sitting at their desks with a few currently attending to participants. Drai walked to the nearest desk.
"Congratulations, participant. You may now register as a new evolver. Please take a scan before filling out the form on the screen," the female staff gestured toward the biometric scanner on the corner of the desk.
After being scanned, Drai filled out his form. Seeing that he was required to state his class, he couldn't' help but ask, "Will our class be monitored by the government, Miss? Am I required to update my data if I get my second class?"
"Of course they are monitored, Mr. Varz, but only at the initial evolution stage. You are not obligated to update your registry at the next stage," the staff replied smilingly after checking Drai's name on her VC. "In the past when our nation only started implementing the Revelation Day system, there used to be many cases of new evolvers using their newfound powers to commit crime. Although most of them were caught because they didn't realize that their powers meant nothing to the police, a minority were particularly powerful or had concealing skills and were able to escape and hid themselves. After several years of such incidents, Central Government seemed fed up and started monitoring new evolvers, especially those who were marked since they were in the Prep."
"Whoa, I didn't know the Prep was secretly looking for potential criminals," Drai said.
"The mentors don't deliberately mark someone just for fun, you know," the staff giggled. "But there's always kids who show harmful tendencies, such as torturing animals or bullying other students. These are the ones who get marked. And there's a rumor that most academies have access to this list, so they would blacklist evolvers to avoid potential troublemakers."
"Well, that seems fine then. I also don't want to meet some edgy kid if I get into an academy."
After finishing his registration, Drai walked through another door before arriving at a large space. Many students had gathered here, standing all over the place. In addition, there were many adults from various backgrounds who were surrounding the students, paying attention to their figures or talking to them. Some students were displaying their skills with caution. Others were asking some questions to the adults. However, not all students received attention as some weren't approached by any scout. Overall, the atmosphere was bustling.
Drai noticed that a lot of students mostly looked the same except for their small details like hair color and size or shape of body parts. There were students that seemed to have grown bigger or taller, seen from their overly tight clothes. A few other students even had non-human features like metallic lusters or protruding body parts. These ones seemed to attract the most attention as all of them were surrounded by scouts.
'I wonder if anybody chose some strange class like that cursed M class,' Drai pondered. 'I guess I need to take a look at my stats and skills first so that I can answer whatever questions these scouts have.'
Opening the System window again, Drai was directly brought to a new menu which shows the sections that he could access.
'Open status window.'
The screen changed, showing an image of Drai's body along with words and numbers beside it.
'Hey, that's me! Why is it naked, though? Luckily nobody else can see this,' Drai thought while inspecting his image.
'Wow, I can turn it around! Staring at my own butt like this feels so strange. Well, look at these scars... The wide one on my back was from when I slipped onto the bonfire during the fire resistance training. And I remember this deep one on my right butt. It was from that stupid beefaro who nailed me with his horn after I fell down when I fought him for the first time. Although I did beat him up later, I haven't avenged my butt. Maybe if I ever grow horns I'll pay him back twice on both his butts, hehehe...
'Hmm? Why does it look like my pee-pee became smaller? Is it for the same reason as my muscles? Can I bash people with my pee-pee now? I haven't trained it though, so I don't know if it's as tough as my balls. Well, it's no problem if it's small. I never use it anyway.'
Drai was filled with many thoughts as he inspected his body from a fresh angle. After some time, he finally had enough.
'I think I became uglier… My muscles shrank and my scars seemed to fade a bit,' Drai slightly lamented. 'I'll try harder to make them bigger again later. And there's those white strands of hair and slightly silver shade on my skin. They remind me of that person. I wonder if all titans have these features?
'Well, at least Mom and Dad can still recognize me later. Now, let's take a look at the stats.'