We use X-Ray Photon Correlation Spectroscopy to investigate the structural relaxation process in a metallic glass on the atomic length scale. We report evidence for a dynamical crossover between the supercooled liquid phase and the metastable glassy state, suggesting different origins of the relaxation process across the transition. Furthermore, using different cooling rates we observe a complex hierarchy of dynamic processes characterized by distinct aging regimes. Strong analogies with the aging dynamics of soft glassy materials, such as gels and concentrated colloidal suspensions, point at stress relaxation as a universal mechanism driving the relaxation dynamics of out-of-equilibrium systems.PACS numbers: 64.70.pe,65.60.+a,64.70.pv Glasses are usually defined as liquids that are trapped in a metastable state from which they slowly evolve toward the corresponding equilibrium phase [1,2]. Although aging is known since centuries, a clear picture of the dynamics in the glassy state is still missing [3,4]. Most of the experimental information available on aging concerns macroscopic quantities, such as viscosity or elastic moduli [5][6][7][8][9][10][11], or focuses on dielectric relaxation [12][13][14][15][16][17], a quantity that is often difficult to relate directly to the particle-level dynamics. From these measurements, a characteristic time for the evolution towards equilibrium can be extracted, but no direct information on the connection between aging and the underlying microscopic dynamics is available. By contrast, a full understanding of aging requires a detailed description of the particle-level dynamics, and in particular of the structural relaxation time τ , the characteristic time for a system to rearrange its structure on the length scale of its constituents. While the structural relaxation has been widely investigated in the liquid phase, only a few studies report on the behaviour of τ below the glass transition temperature, T g [14-16, 18]. Molecular dynamics simulations show that τ increases linearly or sub-linearly with the waiting time, t w , and suggest the possibility of rescaling the measured quantities on a single master curve (time-waiting time superposition principle) [18]. Studies in this direction, however, have led to debated results [5,12,13,17,19]. Consequently, several key questions remain unanswered: what is the fate of the structural relaxation process when the system falls out of equilibrium in the glassy state? How does it depend on the thermal history and the waiting time? What physical mechanism is responsible for structural relaxation? Here, we address these questions by presenting an experimental investigation of the structural relaxation on the atomic length scale in a metallic glass former, in both the supercooled liquid and the glassy state, as a function of temperature and waiting time, and for different thermal histories. We use X-Ray Photon Correlation Spectroscopy (XPCS) to study Mg 65 Cu 25 Y 10 , a well-known glass former with a relatively low T g ∼ 405 K and a st...