I stood in the dust-choked air of the incinerator, staring at the five-foot crater in the brick wall. Grit had settled on my lips, and it tasted of soot and old mortar.
Under the cracked masonry and bent girders, the goblin didn't move. Its energy signature had gone out so completely it felt as if someone had pinched out the only candle in a dark room.
I looked at my right hand. A faint dusting of brick powder. No blood, no swelling, not a single broken bone. For years, every time I'd hit a training post at the shelter, my knuckles had split and my wrist had throbbed for three days afterward. And now three inches of movement had turned a Realm 1, Level 5 monster into wall plaster.
"Unawakened muscle memory," I muttered, flexing my fingers one at a time. "Well. Looks like those thousand hours of shelter drills weren't completely useless."
I'd never told anyone I'd kept doing them. Not Chen, not Dugan. Nobody had asked why a kid with zero density kept hitting a post at dawn. It had just been something I did, stubbornly, alone, because stopping would have meant admitting that all of it had been for nothing.
The Celestial System was still floating in front of me, the number hanging in the dust.
[CURRENT CELESTIAL SYSTEM BANK BALANCE: 1,000 POINTS]
I leaned my hip against a collapsed boiler, the rusted plate cold through my trousers. In the lower markets of District 9, two coppers wouldn't buy a bowl of Chen's broth, and ten coppers kept the lights on in a tenement room for a week. A thousand points was nothing like that. It was a fortune, handed to the boy at the very bottom of the pile.
An ordinary cultivator killing the same creatures would have kept maybe five or six units of Qi out of those fifty, once their body had bled off the rest as waste. Three months of dangerous hunting for one cheap warming pill. My talent didn't bleed anything. It harmonized all of it, multiplied it by ten, and banked it as clean currency.
A soft scratching came from the drainage pipe at the back of the chamber.
My sense found three twitchy pulses in the sludge. More Void Rats, drawn by the smell of goblin blood.
I left the broken knife in the mud and the axle in the trough. I stepped over a pile of bricks, crossed the damp floor without a sound, and waited beside the mouth of the pipe. The stink of it, wet rot and chemical runoff, sat at the back of my throat.
The first rat poked its snout out, red eyes glowing. Before it could flare its quills, my left hand shot out, grabbed it by the scruff, and slammed its head against the concrete rim.
CRACK.
The other two hissed and scrambled backward into the pipe. I reached in with both arms up to the elbow in cold sludge, hauled them out by their bone-spiked tails, and knocked their skulls together.
BANG.
[TARGET ELIMINATED: VOID RAT (F-RANK ZERO-GRADE) ×3]
[QI ABSORBED: 7.5 UNITS → 75 POINTS BANKED]
[NEW BANK BALANCE: 1,075 CELESTIAL POINTS]
I wiped my palms and forearms on my patched trousers, which didn't help much.
"Easier than shoveling spirit-coal," I muttered. It was true. It also didn't feel as satisfying as I'd expected. It felt more like closing a door.
I climbed an old iron ladder to the abandoned crane control booth that overlooked the garbage field. The rungs were slick with rust and Void-moss, and flakes of both came away under my palms, but my grip held like stone. I squeezed through the broken window, the jagged edge snagging my jacket, and dropped onto a dusty metal bench in the dark.
From up there, I could see all three spatial fissures hanging in the sky over the scrap fields, pulsing with bruised light and every so often spitting a stray rat out into the fog. Down at the base of the crane, everything was quiet.
I pulled my knees up, leaned my back against the cold iron frame, and thought, System. Open the Celestial Shop. Beginner tier.
The marketplace unfolded across my vision with a soft golden hum. It was nothing like the monochrome public terminals the Bureau used. This was a sprawling royal catalog that seemed to reach across a thousand star systems, its tabs floating in rows: Martial Arts, Cultivation Manuals, Pill Formulas, Sovereign Weapons, Array Plates, Spatial Artifacts, Bloodline Drops, Rare Ores.
[ROYAL CLEARANCE ACTIVE: ANDARAS CELESTIA]
[DIRECT ACCESS: IMPERIAL CELESTIAL NETWORK LISTINGS]
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[FILTER APPLIED: ENTRY TIER — FOUNDATIONAL MANUALS]
I skipped the Sovereign-Grade weapons. I didn't need a sword that could cleave a moon. I needed a foundation.
Each of the four paths had a basic manual, ten to twenty points apiece, the kind of thing a human cultivator on Azure Star would have given a finger for. They were fine. But just below each one, in a different color, sat something else.
[Nine-Rotations Celestial Aether Method (Royal Grade)] (Spirit) — 250 PointsAn entry-level imperial manual reserved for royal Celestia kin. Rather than a gaseous Qi vortex, it condenses world energy directly into liquid Aether-threads and expands dantian capacity by five hundred percent.
[Primordial Tyrant Body Art (Royal Grade)] (Body) — 250 PointsThe foundational body-tempering art of the ancient Celestial vanguard. Tempers skin, muscle, bone, and organs simultaneously, unlocking absolute density without added bulk.
[Sovereign Mind Palace Construction (Royal Grade)] (Mind) — 250 PointsAn imperial mental fortification technique. Builds a layered psychic sanctuary in the brain and grants high-grade telekinetic control and immunity to lower-realm illusions.
[Astral Anchor & Soul Sealing Art (Royal Grade)] (Soul) — 250 PointsThe foundational soul manual of the Celestial Royal House. Detaches consciousness from the body to perceive spatial nodes and karmic threads, and to strike incorporeal things directly.
Four paths. On Azure Star, a cultivator chose one and spent thirty years reaching Realm 2. Anyone with a dual affinity got called a generational talent by the regional guilds. Mind and Soul weren't taught at all. Nobody even knew there were manuals for them.
And I had the Primordial Echo. Bypass all comprehension bottlenecks. A genius from the Celestial court might need months of seclusion and an elder at their shoulder to get through the first chapter of one of these. I'd read it, and it would simply be understood.
Four manuals at 250 apiece. One thousand points.
I looked at my balance. 1,075.
Without those last three rats, the set would have taken every point I had. With them, I'd walk away with seventy-five to spare.
"Sometimes being thorough pays off," I said, with a small smirk.
My thumb hovered over the gold purchase button. Something else on the screen had caught the corner of my eye, and I scrolled back to look at it.
Under Pill Formulas, in the plainest listing in the whole shop:
[Lung-Clearing Pill (Mortal Grade)] — 150 Points
Purges Void miasma residue and respiratory scarring from the lungs. Standard issue for rift-filter laborers.
I read it twice.
I thought of the sanitation workers I'd seen cough into their sleeves after a shift, and the ones who stopped coming back. I thought of a deep, tired cough through the thin wood of a door on the fourth floor, and a woman who went to work every night in air that was killing her.
A hundred and fifty points. If I bought the pill instead of one manual, I could hand it to Lin's mother by sundown.
I sat there with that for a long moment, the bench's cold metal working its way into my legs. It would have been the easy kind of good, the kind that felt warm in the chest and paid off by dinner.
But one pill was one pill. If I spent my points on pills, I'd be chasing rats with my bare hands for another week, scraping together little jars of kindness while my own power stayed small. If I bought the manuals now, the next thousand points would take me a day. And the next, an hour.
Investment, not selfishness, I told myself.
I told myself that twice. I wasn't sure I believed it either time.
So I did what I could. I memorized the name and the price. Lung-Clearing Pill. 150 points. After the manuals, I'd be seventy-five short: three more drains like that one. I put it on a list in my head, a short list, the first of its kind, and underneath it I wrote Chen and Lin.
"The second thing I buy," I murmured. "Promise."
Then I selected all four Royal-Grade manuals and pressed the gold button.
[TRANSACTION CONFIRMED]
[DEDUCTED: 1,000 CELESTIAL POINTS]
[REMAINING BALANCE: 75 CELESTIAL POINTS]
[TRANSFERRING MANUAL DATA TO USER SOUL-ANCHOR...]
Four streams of light, gold, deep red, silver-blue, and black, shot out of the screen and into the space between my eyebrows.
WHOOSH.
A tide of knowledge flooded my skull. Meridian routes, cellular blueprints, neural firing sequences, invisible soul-node maps, all of it forcing its way open at once, a pressure building behind my eyes like a held breath. It was enough raw data to melt the mind of a normal teenager.
Before the pressure could even turn into a headache, the Primordial Echo flared in my chest. The conflicting energies of Aether and Void harmonized, and the dense, ancient runes dissolved into clean understanding. I didn't have to study. I didn't have to decipher metaphors or guess at breathing rhythms. I understood every stance and every flow of energy as if I'd practiced all four arts for a hundred years.
[COMPREHENSION BOTTLENECK BYPASSED]
[INSTANT INSIGHT GRANTED:]
Nine-Rotations Celestial Aether Method (Uninitiated)
Primordial Tyrant Body Art (Uninitiated)
Sovereign Mind Palace Construction (Uninitiated)
Astral Anchor & Soul Sealing Art (Uninitiated)
I closed my eyes and let it settle into my body, my mind, and my soul. I lost track of time.
When I came back to myself, the six o'clock horn was rolling across the rooftops of District 9, announcing another day for the lower sectors, and thin grey light was creeping through the fog outside the crane booth. My legs had gone stiff from sitting, and the cold of the iron frame had soaked into my spine.
I opened my eyes. In a jagged shard of glass still clinging to the window frame, my reflection stared back. My left pupil flared with a bright golden spark of Creation. My right burned with a deep black ring of Void.
I looked at it for a long moment. It was a strange face to find in a window. But it wasn't a stranger's.
As I watched, the gold and the black sank back into my irises and dimmed, until the eyes in the glass were only my own again. I let out a breath I hadn't noticed holding. Mismatched eyes were the kind of thing people remembered, and being remembered was a cost I couldn't afford yet.
"Step one," I whispered, resting my hands on my knees as my body prepared to draw its first real breath of world energy. "Let's see how fast this planet can feed me."