The next morning, I held a plank on the mats, elbows planted, legs locked, toes down, core tight, every muscle in my body strung like cable — sweat cracking off my forehead in fat drops.
I'd been in that position for the better part of an hour, drenched like something pulled out of a tank.
Ten days of this — eating three cooker-pots of food daily — and I had gotten smaller. Not lighter: tighter. Everything on me had drawn in a full size, muscle lines cut clean, body fat in free fall, abs showing where softness used to be. Loose flesh gone, replaced by coiled power on a hair trigger.
My whole presence had changed with it. Motion keeps the mind bright, and I had always been a predator wearing a person's face — now my eyes alone, bright and level and hard, put me in a different category from the frightened, hollowed-out people outside. One look from me could quiet a crowd. The difference between the beast and the flock.
I ground my teeth through the last hold. Every muscle weighed a thousand pounds; the burn ran down my face in rain. Pain. Pain until the muscles shook. But no. Hold. HOLD. Every extra second was a breakthrough — and more than that, the reward window was closing.
Right as my jaw went numb and my body hit the edge of breaking, the familiar voice arrived.
Ding — physical enhancement window: closed.
I dropped onto the mat with a thud, lungs heaving. Over. I could finally rest. There wasn't a finger on my body that still worked.
The pain had paid.
Speed: 100%. Endurance: 100%. Strength: 100%.
Congratulations: S-Rank reward!
Physical capability ×2. Speed ×2. Endurance ×2. Healing ×2 (barring catastrophic injury). Bonus: beyond-era combat manual ×1. Natural lifespan: one hundred years.
The moment the rewards landed, I felt my body change — the wrung-out, hollowed feeling refilled in a blink, strength without bottom.
I came off the floor in one spring — and everything moved faster than I aimed it. Out to the yard, face to face with my beautiful armored vehicle, an absurd urge rose in my arms. So I tried it. Feet planted in a horse stance, hands on the frame, one pull —
— and the corner of an eight-by-eight, twenty-plus-ton, state-of-the-art armored vehicle came off the ground. One centimeter. Don't laugh at one centimeter; twenty tons don't move for anyone.
Speed next. Flat-out sprint: I could run with the world champions and make it look easy. At the physical ceiling, each tiny step forward is usually a canyon wide — the system had just handed me a double across the board. My strength and speed now sat at the absolute ceiling of the human body. When the Awakening era came, I'd already be matching the ordinary speed-types and strength-types without a single power of my own.
That reward was the real thing. Then I stepped into my storage space, where a single book lay waiting.
I opened it, ran through a few forms, and my eyes lit. Every technique precise and vicious, built to end a fight with a human body or a turned one — full of openings nobody would see coming. No wonder it was called beyond-era: every move held decades of dead masters' conclusions.
I treasured it and started learning on the spot.
Five more days went by. My days were all the same, and I loved every one of them: morning run around the hill perimeter, warm-up, combat forms. Rice in the cooker; meals with Summer; feed and water for the birds and the lambs; a walk down the vegetable rows. The hens were laying twenty-plus eggs a day — I took a handful for the table and left the rest under the mothers to hatch. The garden was thriving; in another ten days the quick crops — chives, baby bok choy — would be ready to cut. Inside the wire, everything leaned toward the light.
The evening before, I'd stood on my tower and watched City A off in the distance. Just past eight, the scattered lights of the city had gone out in a black tide, rolling from the near blocks to the far. Early. The grid had died ahead of schedule.
In my first life the power had lasted months. This time: about two weeks. The virus had broken out early — every variable had shifted — and the grid, I judged, was gone for good. Which raised the difficulty of everything. Power was the base resource: in my first life, with the gas long off, I'd cooked and lived on electricity, watched the dead through the porch light and cameras at night. Without it, every survivor in the city just got knocked down another full tier.
Standing on the tower, I could almost hear it — the far-off screaming, the horns.
RUMBLE. At the far edge of my infrared cameras, down where my trail met the highway, vehicles came tearing out of the city — drivers insane with panic, a long tail of running dead streaming after them. In the dark, crashes bloomed one after another, and the sound carried.
Half a month had been enough for everyone to accept the truth — above all, that rescue was not coming. Tonight's citywide blackout was the last straw. Now they weren't planning anymore. They were just leaving.
I knew what I was watching: the next exodus, beginning.
At dawn I climbed the tower again. The highway beyond my trail had turned into one long accident scene. The dead were thickening on the main road — some clustered at the wrecked cars, feeding; some wandering nowhere in particular. Quite a few had already drifted into the edge of my territory.
I took up my crossbow, sighted on one of the trespassers — and stopped.