By the third night, I'd stopped feeling like a boy hiding in a tower and started feeling like a man with a job.
The days went to Spirit. I sat cross-legged on the cold concrete, the chill working up through my trousers until I stopped noticing it, and drew in Aether and Void and Anima through the Nine-Rotations Primordial Harmonization Method. With every cycle, my Primordial Core grew denser, heavier, hotter. The nights went to the hunt. I cleared Drainage Canal 4, then Canal 5, then pushed deeper into the unmonitored fields near the central fissures, and I hunted anything that carried a feral glow: Void Rats, mutated hounds, copper-scaled scrap vipers, wandering goblins. Every one of them was a number waiting to be banked.
Every morning at six, the district horn rolled across the wasteland, thin and distant. I came to wait for it. It was the only voice I heard all day, and in some strange way it still sounded like someone calling me in for breakfast.
By the end of the third day, my Spirit Cultivation had climbed to Qi Condensation, Level 5. I'd stopped counting kills. I'd also stopped talking to myself and started talking to the thread on my wrist instead. Rats tonight, I'd tell it. Lots of rats. It never answered, which made it the best listener I'd ever had.
The little ceramic bottle sat against my ribs under my shirt. I felt the hard curve of it every time I breathed.
On the third night, I stopped pretending.
"It isn't coming back," I told the thread, climbing down the ladder of Rift Watch Post 14 at one in the morning, the rungs icy under my palms. "It's a delivery. There's a difference."
The thread said nothing. I decided that meant it agreed.
It took me ninety minutes to cross the wasteland, and I spent every one of them watching the sky.
I'd learned the drones' rhythm by now: one sphere every four minutes along the eastern fence, a longer sweep on the half hour. I slipped through the collapsed breach near Drainage Canal 4 in the gap between sweeps and came up into the lower sector the way a cat comes into a kitchen.
District 9 at half past two in the morning was a different animal. Empty streets, iron shutters pulled down, the ventilation turbines humming up through the cobblestones in a slow, steady drone I could feel in my heels. A lone street-sweeper trundled past on the next block, humming to himself. I flattened against a wall, brick damp against my shoulder blades, until he turned the corner.
And at the corner of 4th and Market, under the yellow light of a flickering streetlamp, I saw the notice.
It was pasted to the iron frame of the municipal board, still wet at the corners. A stamped sheet, official, with a photo I didn't recognize at first: a grainy, blurry picture of a thin, hollow-eyed kid in a collar two sizes too big, lifted from some shelter record years ago.
NOTICE OF LABOR DRAFT EVASION
REGISTRATION No. 4092 — ADRIAN (NO FAMILY NAME)
FAILURE TO REPORT. REPORT TO SECTOR 4 BUREAU IMMEDIATELY OR FACE DETENTION.
I stood in front of it for a long time.
It was strange to see my name written down as something someone wanted. For fifteen years, nobody had ever wanted it. Now the Bureau did, enough to spend paste and paper on it.
Then I saw the chalk.
Under the official stamp, scrawled in lopsided capitals with the S written backward, someone had added:
HE IS NOT A EVADER. HE IS JUST SLOW.
I clapped a hand over my mouth. My shoulders shook, and a breath squeaked out between my fingers, and for a moment I couldn't tell whether I was laughing or something else. I had to turn around and press my forehead to the cold brick until it passed.
A nine-year-old vandalizing a municipal notice, I thought. If anyone catches her, I'll have to come back and burn the district down.
When I could see straight again, I wiped my face on my sleeve and crept the last two blocks to the stall.
It was dark. The shutters were drawn tight and chained, the vat cold, the sign above the counter swinging a little in the draft. Ling's. Beneath it sat the overturned crate, exactly where it had always been.
I knelt in front of it. I took the bottle out of my shirt, still warm from my skin, and wrapped it in a scrap of oiled cloth. I tore a strip from the hem of my spare shirt, broke off a cold stub of spirit-coal from the bin beside the vat, and wrote slowly, my letters coming out cramped and uneven:
For Lin's mum. Before her shift. Make her take it. Don't ask where it's from. —A.
I tucked the note under the cloth, slid the bundle beneath the crate, and set the crate back down over it.
It had taken ten seconds. It had taken three days. My hand stayed on the rough wood a moment longer than it needed to.
"Don't," said a voice from the other side of the shutter, "touch my crate."
I froze so hard my knees locked.
The voice was thick with sleep and about as friendly as a rusty saw. A cot creaked in the dark alcove behind the stall. A chain rattled. "If that's a rat," Chen said, "I'll skin it. And if it's a boy who can't follow a simple instruction..."
He stopped. I could hear him breathing through the iron.
"I said," he went on, much more quietly, "not until you can look anyone in the eye."
I swallowed. My voice came out as a whisper. "It's not coming back. It's a delivery."
There was a very long silence. Then a sound came through the shutter that I'd never heard from him in all the years I'd known him: a short, dry exhale, as close to a laugh as Old Man Chen ever got.
He asked about the boots first, and I told him they were dry. Then whether I was eating. "Chalk pills," I said, and through the iron I heard his lip curl. "Disgusting." The cot creaked. "Go. Patrols come at three."
I started to say his name, and he cut me off. "Go, idiot. And Adrian." I waited. "Whatever's under my crate," he said gruffly, "I'll see she takes it."
I didn't trust myself to speak. I put my palm flat against the cold iron of the shutter for a second, the way you'd lay a hand on someone's shoulder, and then I was gone, up the alley and over the fence, running low and fast through the dark.
I didn't look back. I'd already decided that.
When I got back to the tower, a few hours before dawn, I sat down in the corner of the top room, closed my eyes, and went into the Mind Palace. I looked at my little room with its cot and its crate and its round window.
Then I built a counter, a rough wooden one, with a steaming iron pot on it. I put a stool beside it.
"Okay," I whispered, in the quiet of my own head. "That's better."
By the middle of the fourth night, the number in my head read 4,250 points, and I had a problem.
Spirit was climbing. Mind and Soul were slowly filling toward their next levels. My body wasn't moving at all. The Primordial Tyrant Body Art sat in my mind like a locked door, and no amount of sitting in a tower was going to open it. Cells needed matter. Matter cost points.
I set the shop filter to [BODY REFINING — ENTRY TIER] and bought two things.
[Bottle of Vajra Blood-Nourishing Pills (Grade 1)] — 300 Points
Medicinal pills forged from the blood essence of iron-tier beasts. Delivers dense biological matter straight into bone marrow and muscle.
[Iron-Skin Mineral Earth Essence] — 200 Points
A dark elixir distilled from metallic rift ores. Hardens cellular walls against physical impact.
Five hundred points, gone in two taps. A flash of gold, and a pill bottle and a heavy obsidian vial lay on the floor in front of me.
I popped the wax seal and tipped a single red pill into my hand. It was the size of a hazelnut and warm, and it smelled of raw iron, roasted herbs, and marrow. I swallowed it and chased it with a long pull from the vial, which tasted like licking a rusted pipe.
For a second, nothing happened.
Then the heat hit.
It started in my stomach and burst outward, as if I'd swallowed a live coal and it had split open inside me. A wave of raw, molten force slammed into my bloodstream. I staggered, caught myself on the wall, and my vision went white.
Don't wait. The manual had been very clear. Form at once.
I dropped into a deep horse stance on the cold floor, knees locked, elbows tucked to my ribs, shoulder blades pulled together, and started the first form of the Primordial Tyrant Body Art.
PAK.
My muscles locked so tight that my sleeves snapped against my skin.
Then the pain began.
I'd known pain. I'd torn my knuckles open on training posts and boiled my arms in Blood-Root. This was another country. The molten heat tore out of my stomach and drove itself into every fiber of me, muscle and tendon and marrow and skin, and the Primordial Physique grabbed at it greedily and began to rebuild me from the inside out. I felt my bones ring, a deep bell-note vibrating through the long ones in my legs. I felt my skin tighten and thicken, drawing close, like a hide stretched over a drum.
I bit down on my sleeve and screamed into it.
My eyes streamed. My legs shook. Sweat poured off me and hissed where it hit the concrete. Hold the stance, the manual said, and I held it, through the first hour and the second, through the long, dark middle of the night when my body begged me to fall over and be done.
I thought of Dugan's brass-and-crystal device. The cold black slate. The needle lying dead against the left stop.
Come on, I thought, teeth grinding. Give me one notch. Just one.
It was the same prayer. I'd said it over a testing slate in District 9, over a pot of boiling Blood-Root, against a dark window. Years of praying for one tiny click.
Somewhere around the fourth hour, the pain stopped being a wall and became a tide.
And then, deep in my chest, something went click.
It didn't sound like a needle on a dial. It sounded like a lock turning in a heavy door. The heat folded itself into my bones and was gone, and I was on my knees on the floor, shaking, soaked to the skin, with no memory of how to stand.
[BODY CULTIVATION: IRONHIDE REALM — LEVEL 1 UNLOCKED]
I stared at the floor.
There, I thought. There you go.
I flexed my hand. Every tendon moved smooth and heavy, like a cable under load. I held my arm up in the moonlight and slapped it hard against the wall, and the concrete cracked while my skin didn't so much as redden.
"Dugan," I whispered, and I was laughing, wet and out of breath and a little bit crying. "Dugan. You should've seen it."
I'd never get to show him. I knew that. But for the first time in years, I thought that somewhere in District 9 a brass needle was waiting to click, and that it wouldn't have to wait forever.
On the fifth night, I went to Rift Zone 3.
It was a sunken valley three miles outside the perimeter, where a secondary fissure had torn open five years ago and never closed. The air there was so thick with Void that the sky looked permanently bruised, and the ground was littered with shattered concrete beams and twisted iron from an old processing plant. Even through Chen's boots, I could feel the ground humming.
I crouched on the slag ridge above it, and Soul Sight showed me what I was walking into.
A dozen goblins, orange and sullen. A pack of twenty Void Rats scrabbling over the rubble. And in the center of the valley, guarding a three-foot spatial tear that hung in the air like an open wound, a single shape so large and dark that my aura-sense had to stretch to hold it.
[TARGET IDENTIFIED: RIFT TROLL (F-RANK PEAK — REALM 1 LEVEL 12 BEAST)]
Eight feet tall. Grey, stonelike hide. Arms as thick as tree trunks, dragging two rusted steel axle-rods through the dirt. Glowing purple eyes that moved over the valley with a slow, sullen intelligence.
Level twelve, I thought, and my mouth went dry. More than twice what the goblin was.
You can walk away.
I looked down at my knuckles, and at the thread on my wrist.
I dropped off the slag ridge into the middle of the valley.
BOOM.
I hit the mud already moving. Goblins hissed. Rats screeched. I swept through them in a storm of short, brutal strikes, a palm to a throat, a heel to a spine, an elbow that spun a goblin into a girder. The vermin went down in a ring around me, and for twelve heartbeats I was a hurricane.
Then the troll roared.
The sound shook loose iron off the girders. It reared up, swinging its two axle-rods overhead, and charged across the valley, the whole ground jolting under each stride.
I met it in the middle. I flooded my right arm with Essence and drove a punch into its chest, expecting it to shatter the way the goblin had.
BOOM!
It was like punching a concrete wall. The sound rang across the valley, and the troll rocked back two steps, and that was all. Its stone hide drank the shock. My Essence scattered across its chest like water flicked onto a hot stove, and my hand went numb to the elbow.
It didn't break.
The troll grinned.
An axle-rod came at my head faster than I'd have believed anything that size could move. I threw up my forearms and poured everything I had into my fresh Ironhide.
CLANG!
It hit me like a runaway train. My feet left the ground. I flew thirty feet, my boots plowing furrows through the mud when I came down, and slammed into a collapsed girder hard enough to bend it. All the air left my chest.
I lay there for a second, staring at the sky.
My forearms rang. My wrists were numb. The inside of my mouth tasted of copper.
And for the first time since the goblin, I was really, truly afraid.
Not the clean, quick fear of the rats. This was heavy and cold, and it sat on my chest like a stone. I could die here. In a ditch, in the dark, in the dirt, and nobody would ever know. Lin would wait on that landing, and keep waiting, and nobody would ever come up the stairs to tell her why.
The troll's feet thudded closer. It was walking now, unhurried, dragging its axles behind it.
Get up.
I rolled to my feet. My legs shook. I raised my fists, and they looked very small.
I'm fighting like an idiot, I realized.
All that Essence in my core, all that power in my bones, and I was flinging it around like a street brawler hurling buckets of water. Shelter punch drills and brute strength had worked on rats and goblins. Against hide like this, they were wasting half of everything I had. I didn't have a technique. I didn't have an art. I had a very strong, very stupid fist.
Then stop swinging, said the cold, clear voice behind my eyes, the one that had learned to live in the palace. Start looking.
The troll raised both axles and leaped.
I didn't block. I opened Soul Sight and Hyper-Cognition together, and the whole valley slowed to a drip.
The troll's aura blazed orange over its grey hide, a roaring column of feral Qi. I watched it pulse along its arms, its shoulders, its spine, and where my first punch had landed, under its left ribs, I saw it.
A hairline crack. A thin, bright fracture in the aura, glowing where the stone hide had strained and almost given way.
There.
The axles came down, two black blurs. I stepped sideways two inches, no more, and felt them split the air beside my ear. They smashed into the mud with a thunderous THUMMM that shook dirt down onto my shoulders.
Before the troll could heave them free, I was inside its guard.
I didn't throw a punch. I narrowed all of it, every scrap of Essence in my right arm, down into a tight, shining point on the first two knuckles of my fist, and I struck that hairline crack.
PAK!
The troll grunted.
PAK!
Stone creaked.
PAK!
The third strike went through the crack like a nail through wet paper.
The force didn't scatter. It drove straight in and detonated inside the troll's chest, and I felt its heart stop under my knuckles. Its purple eyes widened. For a long second, it just stood there, still holding its axles. Then it toppled forward with a slow, heavy thud that shook the whole valley, and went still.
Behind it, the micro-rift shuddered, flickered wildly, and collapsed inward with a loud POP, sealing the spatial tear for good.
I sat down in the mud, because my legs had stopped working.
My knuckles were raw and swelling. My forearms throbbed. My hands wouldn't stop trembling, and I didn't try to make them. I sat there in the quiet, breathing, letting the cold wind dry the sweat on my face.
It had been a messy, inefficient win. With a real martial art, a piercing style or a force-projection skill, I could have ended it in two seconds without getting thrown into a girder. I'd paid for this one in bruises because I hadn't paid for it in points.
I let that settle. Then I let the System tell me what I'd earned.
[COMBAT ENGAGEMENT CONCLUDED]
1× Rift Troll (F-Rank Peak): 150 Qi Units × 10 = 1,500 Points
12× Rift Goblins: 480 Qi Units × 10 = 4,800 Points
20× Void Rats: 50 Qi Units × 10 = 500 Points
Rift Sealing Bonus: 1,000 Points
[TOTAL PAYOUT: 7,800 CELESTIAL POINTS]
I looked at my swollen hands and the glowing number.
"First thing I buy tomorrow," I told the dark, "is a real martial technique."
By four-thirty on the sixth morning, I was back in the tower, leaning against the wall with a headache in my knuckles and a strange, quiet pride in my chest.
Five days. Four micro-rifts cleared. Over two hundred Void Beasts dead. My Spirit Cultivation had climbed to Level 7.
I pulled up my status.
[STATUS PANEL]
Name: Adrian (Andaras Celestia)
Race: Celestial
Age: 15
Spirit Cultivation: Qi Condensation Realm — Level 7
Body Cultivation: Ironhide Realm — Level 1
Mind Cultivation: Hyper-Cognition Realm — Level 1
Soul Cultivation: Astral Awoken Realm — Level 1
Talent: Primordial Echo (Unique)
Physique: Primordial Physique (Primordial Grade)
Bloodline: Primordial Bloodline (Primordial Grade)
Affinity: All (Universal Harmonization)
Skills:
Inspect (Basic)
Soul Sight (Basic)
Hyper-Cognition (Basic)
Martial Techniques: None
Inspect. So that was the name for whatever had been labeling every beast for me since the drainage trench. And under it, the line that mattered: Martial Techniques: None. A hole in the ledger, and I'd just been thrown into a girder because of it.
I closed the screen and let out a long breath of pale silver mist.
Out the window, far across the misty scrap fields, the searchlights of Checkpoint 9-B were sweeping back and forth along the outer wall, frantic and wide. Patrol craft hovered over the garbage rifts, red alert lights flashing against the grey clouds.
I watched them for a while. I knew I should have felt uneasy.
Mostly I felt tired. And underneath that, a small, stubborn warmth. Somewhere in a dark alcove behind a soup stall, an old man was going to make sure a woman on the fourth floor swallowed one small pill before her shift.
"Let them search," I whispered to the thread on my wrist. "We're just getting started."