Awakened State

Awakened State is the condition of possessing and using mana, and it functions as both a supernatural capability and a political classification. Awakened people are powerful enough to determine battles, threaten governments, or become targets of state violence; yet their power is not purely innate or mystical. The Infinity Machine reads the world’s material processes as data, translates that data into mana, and distributes it across a connected global system. Awakened State therefore joins body, technology, warfare, and authority: to be Awakened is to inhabit a world whose deepest energies can be measured, manipulated, withheld, or restored.

Definition and Origins

Awakened State emerges from the relationship between living beings and the Infinity Machine. Sahaqiel explains that the machine taps into all data flow, reading the molecules of matter and translating them into the energy people call mana. In her computer analogy, the Infinity Machine is a vast server and router moving data around the world. Mana users are consequently connected to a planetary infrastructure rather than merely drawing on an isolated personal gift.

That infrastructure also explains why Awakened State can be attacked at the level of an entire population. During the original outbreak, the angels used the Infinity Machine to halt the flow of mana and reverse it, drawing in a spectrum of data designed to eliminate those who displayed magical capability. The first intervention used a broad targeting sequence because the angels did not yet understand the disaster and feared that Awakened potential would spread through future generations. It did more than kill active mana users: it robbed people of their potential and eliminated those carrying the genes capable of producing true Awakened individuals.

The distinction between earlier and later Awakened people is crucial. Sahaqiel says that the Awakened of the present are not the same as those of the past, which means that the state has a history of changing thresholds rather than a single stable definition. The old purge was deliberately indiscriminate. By contrast, Sahaqiel believes that a later sequence could target only demonspawn and pure-blooded angels, sparing other modern Awakened people. Awakened State is thus presented as a condition that can be biologically inherited, technologically identified, and politically reclassified.

Power, War, and Rule

Awakened State gives individuals direct military and governmental significance. Jack’s campaigns repeatedly place him among commanders and rulers who must decide how supernatural force should be used. Before the assault on Roland, he orders that the enemy be offered a call to surrender and that a dedicated unit receive and house prisoners. His position makes the demand consequential: he is officially in charge of the campaign, even though operational command belongs to Admiral Skirita, and his power exists alongside an attempt to limit casualties rather than simply overwhelm the opposing army.

The same condition enables coercive rule. During a purge across the empire, Selfia admits that three hundred and sixty-nine people, possibly more, are being killed because they are political opponents, rivals, or dissidents who might obstruct the creation of the New Republic. She presents the operation as necessary for human survival and the consolidation of power, but Jack sees the result as mass murder. He points out that bystanders and innocents have died and that the operation placed Ada’s pregnancy and his child in danger. Awakened power therefore does not automatically produce moral authority; it enlarges the consequences of whoever controls it.

Jack’s response to the Theocracy reveals another side of this exceptional condition. Facing citizens without adequate food, shelter, or ammunition while demonspawn approach, he orders their evacuation to the Holy City’s flying refuge and relocation within the empire. He frames the command as an ultimatum—accept rescue or die—but also as an attempt to save lives. In this setting, emergency protection and coercion occupy the same political space. Awakened rulers can claim to preserve humanity while suspending ordinary consent, and the distinction between rescue and domination depends on how their power is exercised.

Systemic Expression and Escalation

The Angel System makes Awakened State visible as a sequence of measurable permissions, levels, titles, and skills. When Jack awakens amid dead and decaying plants, electrical sparks radiating across his body, a system notification records the increase of his Authority of Gehenna from Level 2 to Level 3. The scene translates bodily transformation into an administrative display: a change in supernatural status becomes an explicit upgrade that can be read, ranked, and used.

His later interface identifies him as a Nephilim and grants Regeneration and Mana Synthesis at Level 10. This title places Jack beyond an ordinary mana user while still connecting his body to the same progression logic. The system does not merely describe what he is; it organizes what he can become. Power is presented as a combination of identity, numerical advancement, and functional abilities, making growth legible in the language of a game while keeping its consequences physical and political.

The system can also break down. When Jack reaches toward Jill’s corrupted mask, pain and a storm of voices answer him, followed by a warning of data corruption. The warning makes the material vulnerability of the supposedly universal mana infrastructure visible. Awakened State is not an effortless gift: its interfaces can fail, its data can become corrupted, and attempts to repair another person can expose the user to violence. Yet the system also responds to crisis with new authorization. When Jack needs a power capable of saving people facing destruction, a Radiant Skill unlocks and an Anti-Army Class Skill becomes available. The revelation converts desperation into a newly granted capability while preserving the pattern in which survival depends on system permissions.

Shutdown and Loss of Mana

The global shutdown reverses the social order built around Awakened State. After victory, Kenichi discovers that his system will not respond. Tenno cannot feel the energy that once moved through his veins, and Selfia finds that her mana has disappeared as well. These are not merely individual injuries. The loss reaches across different kinds of users and removes the common medium through which their abilities operated.

Ada later identifies the anniversary as the day humanity defeated the demonspawn and lost all its mana. The day has several names—V-day, Resurrection Day, and the Shutdown—but every name points to the same contradiction: humanity survives by surrendering the power that had made the conflict possible. The beach at Jacksonville becomes a peaceful public space where families play and fishermen work, yet the landscape remains tied to the catastrophe. For Ada, the anniversary is also the day Jack disappeared, so the disappearance of mana and the disappearance of a loved one are held together in collective memory.

The shutdown changes the meaning of Awakened State from an everyday social reality into a lost historical condition. Systems fail, abilities vanish, and former users must occupy a world no longer structured by the energy they once took for granted. The aftermath is not presented as simple liberation. The same force that enabled oppression, warfare, and supernatural catastrophe was also part of the characters’ identities, relationships, and capacity to protect one another.

Restoration and Significance

Five years after the shutdown, Jack returns with a different relationship to Awakened State. In the ruins, he commands the Angel System to awaken, and golden translucent interfaces appear before the gathered witnesses. His interface is marked Administrator, distinguishing his restored access from the systems once possessed by ordinary users. Selfia immediately recognizes the resemblance to the abilities she lost, while Jack’s body radiates a reassuring warmth.

This restoration does not simply undo the Shutdown. It establishes a new hierarchy. Earlier Awakened State depended on a world-spanning system that could distribute mana or erase it through mass targeting; Jack’s Administrator status suggests direct authority over that system’s renewed operation. The ending therefore leaves the state suspended between resurrection and governance. Mana may return, but it returns through a figure who has become both participant and administrator, carrying the memory of what systemic power did to humanity.

Awakened State is consequently central to the book’s political and technological imagination. It is a source of heroic action, a basis for military command, a marker used to identify enemies, and a condition vulnerable to institutional extermination. Its history exposes the gap between protective language and actual violence: governments and angels repeatedly justify killing, relocation, or targeting as necessary for mankind’s survival. At the same time, the system’s interfaces turn transformation into data, allowing the narrative to stage identity and moral choice as changes in status, access, and capability. The final Administrator display does not close that contradiction. It makes the future of Awakened State depend on whether restored power will reproduce the old logic of control or become accountable to the people who survived its loss.