I uncorked the obsidian bottle, held my breath, and drank the Primordial Iron-Skin Liquefaction in one swallow. It went down thick and cold and tasted like licking a fresh-forged nail. Then I chased it with three of the crimson Tyrant Muscle-Forging Pills.
For one heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then my whole body lit up like a furnace.
It wasn't a gentle warmth. It was liquid copper pumped straight into my arteries, racing out to every inch of skin and tendon and muscle. I folded down onto the bed in a cross-legged seat, closed my eyes, and let the Nine-Rotations Primordial Harmonization Method take over. The harmonized energy in my core surged out to seize the beast blood and the metallic Aether and steer them into my outer tissue.
SZZZZT.
Thick vapor rose off my arms and chest.
Down at the cellular level, my muscle fibers were being torn apart, compressed, and rewoven into dense, interlocking lattices. It hurt in a deep, dull, grinding way, like being kneaded by enormous hands. And with it came something I hadn't expected: a long, slow wave of release. Every trace of deep-seated waste in my body was being forced out through my pores. Fifteen years of stale steam-buns and dirty tap water. Sulfur fog and Blood-Root and the smoke of a thousand burnt spirit-coal fires.
A thin, dark grey film oozed over my skin, and it smelled of old iron and soot.
I knew that smell. I'd breathed it every day of my life.
It sat on my forearms for a moment, grey and greasy. And I realized, with a strange pang, that I was sweating out District 9. Every alley, every winter, every long night on a cold cot, leaving my body in little beads that I was going to wash down a drain.
I held very still and let it go.
When the film dried, a wave of profound lightness rolled through me. My lungs opened wider than they ever had. My blood ran clean. The fatigue that had lived in my muscles for as long as I could remember simply wasn't there anymore. I felt as if I could sprint for three days straight.
A chime rang in my mind.
[BODY REFINING COMPLETE]
[BODY CULTIVATION RANK UPDATED]
Body Cultivation: Ironhide Realm — Level 3
I opened my eyes, scrubbed the grey residue off my forearm with a towel, and stared at the golden-black screen.
"Level three?" My voice sounded flat in the padded quiet of the room. "I just spent five and a half thousand points on two levels?"
It was an absurd amount of money. Two-thirds of an entire quarry's payout: fifty-five snakes and a mutated python, gone in one swallow. To any ordinary hunter, it was a lifetime's earnings.
I ran the numbers, and a cold sweat broke out along the back of my neck. My cap wasn't ten, like a human's. It wasn't twenty, like an ordinary Celestial's. It was twenty-five, and the cost climbed with every level. If two levels cost five and a half thousand at the bottom, taking my skin and muscle all the way to the top, before I even touched my bones, was going to cost hundreds of thousands of points.
"Well, crap," I said, and fell back against the headboard with a dry laugh. "I'm going to have to slaughter half the rifts on this planet just to pay for my skin."
District 3 became my hunting ground for the next two weeks.
I kept to a strict routine. Every morning at six, I woke in the Golden Lotus Pavilion, pulled on the navy tunic and the charcoal jacket, and walked to the Association Hall. Every morning, Ruan at the registration counter glanced up from her slate and asked, with studied casualness, "Radish?" I'd tell her radish, and she'd nod and go back to work. By the third day, the noodle stall outside had started setting a bowl aside when they saw me coming, steam already curling off it.
Under the name Andaras, I took every dense F-Rank contract on the board. Shadow-wolves in the western forests. Scrap-vipers in the old drainage pipes. Iron-jaw ghouls in the stone catacombs outside the sector wall. Soul Sight tracked their auras through solid granite. Phantom Steps carried me across cavern floors in blinks of silver. I turned raid zones into lightning solo runs and swept every core and carcass into my Void Storage.
By the end of each afternoon, I'd dump a mountain of cores on the exchange scales and walk out with a velvet pouch of gold.
The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
I spent it. Some of it. The rest went into the corner of Chen's pouch, tied off with string. Five gold. Then ten. Then fifteen. I kept a ledger in my head, and every night I added a line to it.
Chen. Lin's mother. Dugan.
On the fifth day, with a little over seven thousand points in the bank, I bought a proper weapon: a sleek, three-foot Grade-1 Qi-Steel Straight Sword, forged from lunar steel with no energy resistance at all, so that Primordial Essence could run through the blade like warm water through a pipe. A Royal-Grade manual came with it, the Celestial Star-Shattering Blade Art, and when the data touched my soul-anchor, the Primordial Echo dissolved the comprehension barrier and the sword forms settled into my muscle memory as if they'd always been there.
I tried the blade for the first time in the Iron-Jaw Catacombs.
They were a maze of ruined stone corridors, low-ceilinged and cold, where a pack of two dozen ghouls had made their nest. Iron-jaw ghouls were bad news in tight quarters: fast, rangy, grey-skinned things with mandibles that could crunch through a steel greave, and they hunted in swarms. The air down there smelled of wet stone and something long dead.
I drew the sword in the first corridor, and it came out of the scabbard with a clean, ringing note.
The first ghoul came out of the dark at a dead run, jaws gaping. I stepped inside its lunge and cut up and across in a short silver arc. The blade went through its neck like paper. Primordial Essence ran down the steel in a soft gold-and-black shimmer, and the ghoul's head hit the stone before its body did.
Three more came at once. The corridor was too narrow to dodge, so I didn't try. I flowed down the center of it with the blade, cutting where Soul Sight and Hyper-Cognition said the next jaw would be, each stroke running into the next. A thrust. A sweep. A reversal over my shoulder that took a ghoul off the ceiling. I blinked twice with Phantom Steps to slip a pincer and came out of the second blink with a spinning cut that opened two of them to the spine.
It was fluid. It was fast. It was, I realized somewhere around the tenth ghoul, almost beautiful. The Blade Art didn't waste a motion. Every stroke ended exactly where the next one began.
I came out of the catacombs an hour later with nothing on my jacket but dust.
Dugan, I thought, cleaning the steel on a rag. You'd have hated how easy it looked. And then you'd have asked me to show you the grip.
On the tenth night, I bought a set of Grade-1 reinforced black leather combat armor lined with Qi-deflecting mesh, light enough that I forgot I had it on. Every spare point beyond that went straight back into more Iron-Skin Liquefaction and Muscle-Forging Pills, to feed a body that never stopped being hungry.
And every night, after the pills and the drills and the long, quiet exercises, I sat down at the mahogany desk with a sheet of cheap Association paper and wrote a letter I couldn't send.
I didn't write to Chen. He couldn't read well, and anyway, he'd have snorted at anything longer than three sentences. I wrote to Lin.
Dear Lin, the first one began, in my cramped, uneven hand. I promised you every word. I can't tell you all of them yet, so here are some.
I wrote about the noodles, and the radish, and the lamps that stayed lit all night. I wrote about a snake that bit me and lost its teeth. I wrote that it was slow, but it was moving. I left out the Envoy and the nets and whatever was missing from my family tree. I made it sound like an adventure.
When I finished each one, I folded it small and sent it into the dark pocket beside my dantian, to rest on top of a folded tunic, a red ribbon, a thick grey wool cap, and three red apples. By the end of the second week there were thirteen letters. I didn't know how I'd ever deliver them. I wrote them anyway.
On the night of the fourteenth day, I stood on the private balcony of my suite, looking out over the quiet, glittering skyline of District 3.
The cool night wind ruffled my jacket and raised the hair on my arms. My Qi-steel sword hung across my back, its hilt gleaming faintly in the moonlight.
Fourteen days of fighting, absorbing Qi, refining pills, practicing stances. I closed my eyes and pulled up my status.
[STATUS PANEL]
Name: Adrian (Andaras Celestia)
Race: Celestial
Age: 15
Spirit: Qi Condensation Realm — Level 9
Body: Ironhide Realm — Level 7
Mind: Hyper-Cognition Realm — Level 1
Soul: Astral Awoken Realm — Level 1
Talent: Primordial Echo (Unique)
Physique: Primordial Physique (Primordial Grade)
Bloodline: Primordial Bloodline (Primordial Grade)
Affinity: All (Universal Harmonization)
Martial Techniques:
Tyrant Shattering Strike (Basic)
Void-Shifting Phantom Steps (Basic)
Celestial Star-Shattering Blade Art (Basic)
Skills:
Inspect (Basic)
Soul Sight (Basic)
Hyper-Cognition (Basic)
Void Storage (Basic)
I read the numbers twice.
Spirit, Level 9. My core sat one level short of a human's absolute peak. Body, Level 7. Iron blades skidded off my skin.
Then my eyes dropped to the next two lines.
Mind: Level 1. Soul: Level 1.
I leaned my forearms on the cool balcony stone and let out a long breath of white vapor.
"Nine and seven," I murmured. "And my mind and my soul are still sitting exactly where I left them."
I'd let them rot. It had been so easy. Spirit and Body were loud. You felt them in your fists. You watched a core swell in your belly and a monster fall under your blade, and a number on a scale told you what it had been worth. Mind and Soul were quiet and painful and slow, and nobody clapped for them, and no exchange desk paid for them.
But I didn't want to be a regional guild brute. I was carrying an ancient bloodline in my chest. If I meant to build a foundation that could outclass every genius in the cosmos, I couldn't let it stand on two legs. I needed four, rising together.
Someone, somewhere, had tried to kill me when I was too small to know my own name. The only answer to that was to become someone nobody could throw away.
I stepped back inside and closed the glass doors behind me.
"No rifts tomorrow," I said softly, and sat down cross-legged on the plush bed. "Tomorrow, we build the Mind Palace. And we forge the Astral Anchor."