The white faded slowly, resolving not into the burning sky of the battlefield but into something new entirely, a translucent panel of pale golden light hovering directly in front of Hoju’s eyes, close enough that he instinctively flinched backward before understanding it was not a physical object at all.
**Experience absorbed.**
**Level up.**
**Level 1 → Level 2.**
**Max Level Cap reached.**
**Input Points gained: 1,000,000.**
He read it three times before the words fully settled into meaning.
Then he sat down hard on the scorched black stone, not from any injury, simply because his legs had stopped being willing to hold him upright while his mind tried to process what had just happened.
He was level two now.
His cap, exactly as the monument had shown, sat right there beside it, and technically he had already reached the absolute ceiling of what his body would ever be capable of according to the old system every soul in Astra had lived and died by for generations.
Two levels.
That was all Teria’s monument had ever promised him, and by every rule anyone in his village understood, that should have been the entire story of his life already written.
Except he was holding a million input points that no one else on the continent, as far as Gogohut had suggested, even knew existed as a possibility.
He stood up slowly, brushing ash and grit from his knees, and looked around the empty battlefield, silent except for the faint drift of burning stars overhead.
Gogohut was gone entirely, not even ash left behind to mark where he had died, only the crater and the scorched stone and a curved blade lying abandoned where it had fallen from Hoju’s hand.
He picked the blade up.
It nearly pulled him straight back down to the ground.
The weight of it caught him completely off guard, far heavier than any sword he had ever handled during his years of hunting unleveled game with whatever cast off farm tools the village had let him borrow.
His arms shook almost immediately under the strain, and it took every ounce of effort he had left in him just to keep the tip from dragging through the stone. This chapter is updated first at novelping.com.
*Practice swinging it,* Gogohut’s voice echoed back to him, one of the last things spoken between them before the fight over how to spend his final moments had settled the way it had.
*Any direction.
Just try.*
Hoju had not understood the instruction at the time, too overwhelmed by everything else being said to question it properly.
He understood it slightly better now, standing there struggling under a weight his body had no business supporting even with the strength Gogohut’s skill had apparently lent him just long enough to lift the blade off the ground in the first place.
He gritted his teeth and pulled the sword up into a rough guard position anyway.
It took him nearly a full minute just to get it fully off the ground.
He had no way to track time properly in that place.
There was no sun to mark the hours, no moon to mark the nights, only the same burning stars drifting overhead in their same slow patterns, indifferent to anything happening on the ground beneath them.
He found, after his first attempt at a swing sent him sprawling face first into the ash, that the only honest measure of time available to him was exhaustion, hunger, and the ache building steadily in muscles he had never asked this much of before.
He tried the swing again.
And again.
And again, past the point where his arms shook so badly the blade’s tip carved uneven trenches through the ash with every attempt, past the point where his palms split open along the grip and left dark smears down the hilt, past the point where hunger became a distant, manageable thing rather than an urgent one, because there was nothing to eat in that place regardless of how loudly his stomach complained about it.
He slept when his body finally forced the issue, curled against the same broken stone Gogohut had died against, and woke aching worse than before, and picked the sword back up anyway.
Somewhere in the repetition, something started to shift, not suddenly, not dramatically, but slowly, the way water eventually wears down stone given enough patient, stubborn effort.
The blade felt marginally less impossible on what he guessed, counting the stretches of exhausted sleep, was somewhere around his fourth or fifth day trapped in that place.
His arms still shook.
But the sword no longer dragged the moment it left the ground.
He kept swinging.
He did not know, curled against cold stone counting days by the ache in his own body, that every single one of those days inside this place was translating, back in the world he had come from, into something far smaller and far more precious than he could have guessed.
He did not know that Fragg and his goons, standing outside a dungeon that would not let them follow him in, believed only minutes had passed since the shove that sent him through the portal.
He did not know that ten full days of his own struggle and failure and stubborn repetition amounted, on the other side, to barely ten minutes of a smug young man’s patience wearing thin at the edge of a clearing.
He only knew the sword, and the ache, and the promise he had made to a dying star, and he kept swinging, because stopping had never once solved a single problem in his entire life, and he saw no reason to believe it would start now.
On what he judged to be his tenth day, arms trembling so badly he could barely keep his grip steady, he lifted the blade one more time, pulled it back, and swung.
It moved.
Clean.
Controlled.
Faster and steadier than any swing before it, the weight suddenly, impossibly, sitting right where his instincts told him it should.
A soft golden panel bloomed into existence in front of him before he had even fully processed what had just happened.
**Condition met.**
**Skill created: Strength (Passive).**
**Input Points required for full proficiency: 500,000.**
Hoju stared at the words, breath coming hard, sweat and old blood drying stiff along his palms, and felt something crack open in his chest that had nothing to do with exhaustion at all.
It was working.
Whatever Gogohut had given him, whatever strange, impossible gift had been poured into his body in that flash of white light, it was actually, genuinely working.
He sat down right there in the ash, laughing, half from disbelief and half from the sheer, bone deep relief of finally, after ten years of being told exactly what he was worth, discovering proof that the village had simply never known what they were looking at.