This information, laying out Fang Yu's Life Tier, his martial skill and his soul level so clearly, was not one of those "attain it once and it is yours forever" system panels you read about in novels.
It was more that the sleeping Aspect looked through Fang Yu's body and soul and passed what it saw back to him.
Like a precise life-detection scanner, letting Fang Yu know his own condition whenever he wished.
Beyond that it offered no direct help.
"I wonder just how high my Life Tier has to go before I can see this Void Star Aspect clearly." Fang Yu turned it over in his mind.
The Void Star Aspect was the fountainhead of the last hundred-odd years — of the flourishing of starry-sky martial arts, of the martial path reaching the divine.
According to the Martial Path General Studies course Fang Yu had taken since primary school:
Before the Great Sky-Burning Era.
Among the ancient martial arts there had been a few unimaginable grandmasters whose skill surpassed Inner Vista and reached the realm where the cicada feels the autumn wind before it stirs; they could lock the blood and qi of the whole body, send it up to scour the brain and marrow, turn heaven and earth over, and carry their own lifespans past two hundred years with ease.
And yet!
Their punch force came to two or three thousand kilograms at the very most — a match for a Mid-Rank Warrior of this age, no more.
Why?
What they lacked was a Void Star Aspect.
"By the science of it, as the general studies course puts it, there is a mysterious energy in this universe of stars called Star Force, and we humans find it near impossible to absorb by ourselves," Fang Yu thought. "Only when the Life Tier reaches Level 10, and only after awakening a Void Star Aspect, can a person visualize that Aspect, use it to cast its light across the hundred stars of the body, open the Star Apertures, and gradually absorb the Star Force of the universe."
"This is Star Force entering the body."
Star Force fused into every cell of the body and drove its evolution on every front — bone density, membrane toughness, cellular vigour, explosive muscular power, the resilience of the skin — all of it climbing without pause, breaking the limits of life again and again.
It even set the very nature of the genes shifting.
That was the reason human life had evolved at such speed across the century and more since the Great Sky-Burning Era.
Until, some decades ago, there was born a life that could take a nuclear blast on its bare flesh — the Starry Sky Warrior!
"On martial skill alone, a Sky-Patrol Warrior may not match some of the grandmasters thrown up by several thousand years of ancient martial history." Fang Yu sighed inwardly. "But those grandmasters would have died to an ordinary firearm."
Whereas a Sky-Patrol Warrior could fly at supersonic speed, and even live briefly in outer space.
The two were no longer the same species.
The difference was the Void Star Aspect.
"If I have no Void Star Aspect, or if I awaken a Lower Aspect." Fang Yu thought it through quietly. "Then I won't ask so much of the martial path either."
Not everyone in the Blue Moon Alliance could visualize a Void Star Aspect.
A considerable number of people simply had none.
And even among those who could visualize one, most people's Void Star Aspects were utterly ordinary, offering little help; the Star Apertures they cast light on were often weak, and absorbed Star Force at a pitifully low rate.
In a warrior's training, age mattered enormously.
If you could not reach a fairly high level of martial attainment before the Silver Age Bracket closed at thirty, then from there on, your prospects on the martial path would only dim.
That was why warriors were comparatively few.
Parents and children alike had to think about the return on the investment.
Even with the state's massive support, it was normal for a student to need several hundred thousand Star Coins put into him to test into a martial junior college, and getting into a martial university took only more.
If in the end he could not even reach Level 15, and had not studied any academic speciality either, the whole outlay was lost.
And so.
A great many parents, once they saw their child showing no great talent in middle or high school, gave up on the martial road for them, and asked only that the child reach Level 10 and earn a Parenthood Certificate.
"And yet I can visualize a Void Star Aspect," Fang Yu thought.
Except that Fang Yu's Void Star Aspect was not merely asleep.
In Fang Yu's visualization the Aspect was also extremely blurred... over the years, as his strength rose, the Aspect had gradually grown clearer, and only recently had he been able to see the whole of it.
"This Void Star Aspect of mine — asleep, and it already has the power to monitor how my training is going," Fang Yu thought. "And it can grant me an Innate Divine Ability as well?"
"Even of the Twelve Upper Aspects, I've never heard of anything so miraculous."
The Void Star Aspects warriors awakened were strange and various.
Each with its own strengths.
But over the past several decades, as technology advanced and every kind of data was gathered, the Blue Moon Alliance had gradually recorded, organised and ranked the different Void Star Aspects.
Today.
Void Star Aspects were divided into Lower Aspects, Middle Aspects and Upper Aspects... The higher the grade the rarer it was, and generally the greater its power. Twelve Upper Aspects were publicly known.
There were more than eighty Middle Aspects, and Lower Aspects were far more numerous still... In 《The Hundred Void Aspects》, a required course at martial junior colleges, the Lower Aspects recorded ran to nearly a thousand.
Memorising every Aspect in 《The Hundred Void Aspects》 and knowing the lore of Aspects was compulsory for every martial junior-college student.
An Innate Divine Ability was standard equipment for an Upper Aspect.
And judging Fang Yu's Void Star Aspect purely by the outline he could dimly make out, and by the Innate Divine Ability it carried... it belonged to none of the Twelve Upper Aspects.
It was an unknown Aspect.
Beyond the Hundred Aspects.
Consider this.
By 《The Hundred Void Aspects》, even a warrior who had awakened an Upper Aspect had to reach Level 30 before he could begin to awaken his Innate Divine Ability; before that he had at most a few Innate Traits.
Greater cellular vigour, for instance; more strength, more speed, a stronger soul, stronger Star Apertures, that sort of thing.
"And I had the Innate Divine Ability Devour at Level 8."
For a moment Fang Yu's thoughts wandered. "Without that ability, with nothing but the money my father gives me and my martial skill... there is no way I could have trained my Life Tier to 15.9 on the Twenty-Four Basic Fist Forms alone."
"Level 12 at the most, probably. Level 13."
The New Calendar era was not like the ancient world.
After the great excavation of the Primordial Star, a flood of unimaginable natural treasures had appeared, so that many of the wealthy could push their bodies to Level 20, even Level 30, without a Void Star Aspect and without any deep martial skill.
Only.
Without Star Force entering the body to strengthen the flesh, raising the body's strength on rare resources alone cost a staggering amount. The money required was astronomical.
Which was precisely why Fang Yu had concluded, early on, that this sleeping Void Star Aspect of his was no ordinary thing.
"But however extraordinary the Aspect is, if it never truly wakes, it's a flower in a mirror, a moon on the water," Fang Yu thought. "Even with an Innate Divine Ability helping me, the Blood-Qi Compound and the Bone-Strengthening Pills are doing less and less for my training."
"Dad's business is being squeezed harder every year by the internet."
"My brother and sister are fifteen, near enough ready to start training the martial path properly. The household's costs are about to climb steeply..." Fang Yu's brow furrowed slightly. He had been carrying a certain anxiety for some time.
His visualization of the Void Star Aspect was growing clearer, true.
But who could say how many levels it would take before it awakened? Eighteen? Twenty? Thirty, even?
"Great Completion in Subtlety has improved my chances a good deal," Fang Yu thought. "I hope the transfer application succeeds... If I can get into a university, with state resources behind me."
"And it would take a great deal of pressure off my father, too."
While Fang Yu sat lost in thought.
"Dear passenger, this is Shenzhou Autonomous Vehicles reminding you that you have arrived at your destination. Please check your belongings..." The taxi's chime sounded.
Only then did Fang Yu come back to himself.
He got out.
He lifted his head to look at the compound of detached villas a little way ahead — Zhonglin Royal View.
It sat on the outer edge of Wuling City proper, a relatively out-of-the-way villa compound, and most of the people living in it were middle-class households: some money, but not a great deal of it... This was where Fang Yu's home was.