The panel hovering in front of him did not come with an instruction manual.
Hoju sat in the ash for a long while after Strength registered as a skill, staring at the words **Input Points required for full proficiency: 500,000**, turning the number over in his head without any real understanding of what spending it would actually do.
He tried the simplest thing first.
He thought the word *allocate* at the panel, the same way he’d apparently thought the sword should swing and had it obey, and a second, smaller window unfolded beneath the first.
**Strength (Passive) — Proficiency Level 0/10**
**Cost per level: 50,000 IP**
**Current stat bonus: Strength +0**
He hesitated, some old habit of scarcity refusing to let go even now, with a fortune sitting in his chest that no one in Teria could have imagined existed.
Spending anything, even something this abstract, felt reckless after ten years of never having enough to spend at all.
He pushed a single unit of proficiency into it anyway, the smallest amount the panel would allow, and felt fifty thousand input points drain out of the pool Gogohut had left him.
**Strength Proficiency Level 0 → 1.**
**Strength stat: +0 → +4.**
He blinked.
Then he stood, picked the sword back up, and nearly dropped it a second time, not from weight this time but from how suddenly, dramatically lighter it felt compared to a minute earlier.
He spent the next stretch of time, however long it actually was in a place with no sun to count by, doing nothing but pushing proficiency levels into that single skill, watching the stat bonus climb with each one, four points, then eight, then twelve, the blade in his hands growing easier to hold with every increment until it finally felt less like fighting the weapon itself and more like simply moving his own arm.
By the time he’d sunk two hundred thousand input points into it, four full proficiency levels, the panel showed him something new sitting quietly beneath the stat bonus. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
**Strength stat: +16**
**Base Strength: 4**
**Current Strength: 20/100**
So that was the ceiling, then.
A hundred points, same as every stat any awakened soul in Astra carried, mage or warrior or otherwise.
He was still nowhere close to it, but for the first time since the monument had branded him level one in front of an entire village, the number in front of him was climbing upward instead of sitting frozen at the bottom where everyone had already decided he belonged.
He made himself stop there, eight hundred thousand input points still sitting untouched in reserve, some instinct telling him not to burn everything on a single skill before he understood what else the system might eventually ask of him.
The rest came slower, and harder, exactly the way Gogohut’s advice implied it should.
*Try a different direction,* the star had told him, one of the last fragments of guidance offered before the conversation turned to things neither of them had wanted to say out loud.
Hoju had assumed, wrongly, that meant simply repeating the same motion until his body memorized it.
It took him longer than he wanted to admit to realize the instruction meant something closer to intention, that the sword responded not merely to repetition but to genuine, focused effort toward a specific outcome.
He picked a vertical strike next, standing before a jagged spur of blackened rock that had survived the battle mostly intact, and began cutting downward through the air in front of it, over and over, adjusting his stance slightly each time based on nothing more than instinct and the faint, growing sense that some attempts felt marginally more correct than others.
His new strength made the motion itself easier than the first days of struggling just to lift the blade at all, but easier did not mean simple.
He mistimed his footing constantly, overextended on nearly every third swing, and more than once sent himself sprawling face first into ash when a strike carried more momentum than his balance could account for. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
He kept at it anyway.
He had nothing else to spend his time on in a place with no food, no shelter beyond the crater’s shadow, and no company except the memory of a promise made to a dying star and a growing, stubborn need to prove it had not been made to someone unworthy of the gift.
Days folded into each other, marked only by exhaustion and the dull persistent ache that never fully left his shoulders no matter how much stronger he grew.
He allocated more input points into Strength during rest periods, careful and incremental, watching the stat climb past thirty, past forty, each increase making the next stretch of practice marginally more bearable than the one before it.
Somewhere around what he guessed was his sixth day working the vertical strike specifically, something in the motion finally clicked into place, not gradually this time but all at once, the way understanding sometimes arrives after enough failed attempts have quietly built the foundation for it.
His blade came down clean, controlled, exactly on the line he’d been chasing for days, and the familiar golden panel began unfolding in front of him before the motion had even finished.
**Condition met.**
**Skill created: Vertical Slash**
Hoju’s chest tightened with something close to triumph, exhaustion momentarily forgotten, and he reached to pull the panel’s details fully into view.
The ground shook beneath him before he could read another word.
It was not the tremor of his own footing giving out, nor the aftershock of some memory of the earlier battle.
This was new, distant but building, a rhythmic pressure rolling across the scorched black plain from somewhere beyond the ridge where Deatharo and Gogohut had once traded blows powerful enough to bend the sky itself.
Hoju turned toward it slowly, sword still gripped in one raw, blistered hand, and felt every instinct that had once kept him alive in the forest below Teria’s mountain scream the exact same warning it had screamed the moment he first laid eyes on the six armed being crossing that ridge.
Something else was coming, and this time, there was no crater deep enough to hide him from it.