I Shall Pervert the Heavens

This world was cruel in its honesty. From the very moment Alex was dragged into it, the rules of survival had been laid bare: fight, grow, or die.

Every living being here possessed a status window, a manifestation of numbers and titles that reduced lives into measurable potential. Say the word status within the mind, and the truth of one's existence was revealed—level, skills, class, strengths, and weaknesses. A summary of your worth, laid out without mercy.

When Alex saw his, despair hit like a hammer.

---

[Status Window]

Species: Human (Otherworld Traveller)

Name: Arkanis Reed

Class: Compounder

Age: 17

Mana: 40/40

Exp: 0/70

Level: 1

Str: 5

Dex: 6

End: 5

Vit: 6

Int: 8

Skills:

Otherworld Traveller (Racial) <Lv. MAX>

Appraisal <Lv. 1>

Basic Alchemy <Lv. 1>

Herb Processing <Lv. 1>

Titles:

Otherworld Hero

Otherworld Traveller

---

[Title: Otherworld Hero]

One summoned by prayer to become a savior of this world.

Effects:

Double base stat points on level up

Double skill experience gained

[Title: Otherworld Traveller]

One who crossed a world's boundary without dying first.

Effects:

Automatic translation into the native tongue

20% less experience required to level up

---

At first glance, these titles looked glorious—stat bonuses, doubled skill growth, shortcuts toward strength. But the cruel joke hid in the details.

Alex's class was not Hero, not Blademaster, not Holy Maiden, not anything drenched in the glory of combat. He was a Compounder. A production class. The kind of background role that supported warriors from the shadows, never standing in the spotlight. Alchemy, processing, mixing herbs—useful, yes. But useful was not heroic.

Where others might raise swords and carve legends, he would be left grinding plants into paste. A craftsman in a kingdom that demanded soldiers.

The inferiority hit fast, like a rot spreading through his chest. He imagined how the king had looked at him—probably dismissed him as a wasted summon.

But then again, kingdoms didn't waste. If Alex was here, even his mediocrity had been calculated into their plans. That thought was worse than irrelevance: it was entrapment.

---

The royal mage had explained earlier that every race had its own hurdles. Elves took forever to level thanks to their long lives. Beastmen carried advantages in bloodlines but slower growth. Demons, formidable yet costly in progression. Humans, by contrast, were fragile but efficient: fast growth, high fertility, easy replacement.

It was a cruel equation. Humans were not valued for what they were, but for how easily they could be produced and thrown into the grinder of war.

And Alex was the lowest denominator among them.

---

The king, Wallanther XII, had spoken of training regimens, diets, and growth. He had ordered each "hero" to reveal their class so the kingdom could decide how best to mold them. Alex stayed silent as long as he could, praying someone would forget him. Nobody did.

When his turn came, the truth tasted bitter on his tongue.

"…Compounder."

That single word condemned him. He could feel it in the air—the invisible stamp of lesser branding itself into his forehead. No one spoke. No one scoffed aloud. But he didn't need their voices to know what they thought.

A weak class. A wasted summon.

His chest tightened. An inferiority complex was a quiet poison—it didn't strike in the open but burrowed deep, whispering that every step you took was smaller than everyone else's. That every gaze was a sneer. That your existence was a mistake.

And perhaps here, in this foreign kingdom under the weight of fate, it wasn't wrong.

---

When the audience ended, maids guided him to the western wing of the castle, alongside gilded halls of impossible scale. Alex trailed at the back, separated from the others not by physical distance, but by a gap of worth.

The castle stretched higher than any tower he had seen in his old world, buttressed with stone monsters carved along the ceiling and walls. Beyond its windows sprawled a vast circular city, rooftops tiled red in endless rows, people moving like ants in a hive. It was civilization on a scale Earth had long forgotten, built upon war, blood, and levels.

A maid bowed gracefully, her voice calm and trained.

"Hero, these will be your quarters. All rooms are alike. Please choose whichever suits you."

Alex nodded silently. To him, it didn't matter. A room was just another cage, no matter how lavish.

Arkanis sat on the bed, staring at the faintly glowing panel before him again and again, staring hard into the word compounder as if wishing to see it warp and turn into a cooler class. His fingers clenched and unclenched against the sheets, as he kept looking at the words which seems to be mocking him. Compounder. A class for servants, apothecaries, and faceless assistants. Not a hero's class. Not a savior's.

His jaw tightened as finally the thought which he has been holding back finally spill out of his mouth. "But… what if," he muttered, his voice low, trembling between despair and a spark of defiance, "what if I don't just brew for others? What if I brew for myself? A tonic to harden the body… one to sharpen the mind… even one to awaken strength beyond bloodlines?" His eyes widened as if hit by a bolt of lightning, "Hell, if I can dismantle herbs and merge them into something new, what's stopping me from breaking down the essence of monsters or even humans—and remaking it into mine?"

The more he thought, the more his pulse thundered, as if his body itself agreed with the insanity. A background character? No. A background character accepts the role given. But what if I write my own?

Indeed, he was not wrong. The title of "Compounder" had long been misunderstood in the annals of recorded history. Among scholars, it was dismissed as a failed branch of alchemy, a discipline that lacked the refinement of transmutation or the elegance of potioncraft. Yet buried in forbidden treatises, one finds hear say of the "Great Synthesis." A legend of men who, by merging essence with essence, did not merely create potions but restructured the very framework of their being.

The world feared such figures. Kingdoms buried their names, churches called them heretics, and guilds struck their practices from records. Why? Because a true Compounder could steal divinity from a god's blood, fuse it with mortal flesh, and become something the world could neither control nor define.

This in turn makes such class special. As the saying goes, no job, class or human is useless. What truly defines one is nothing but the path, as long as one sees the light and take the right path then one is bond to succeed.