Ryan had advanced to Transcendent, and there was no longer any need to hide it.
After daybreak, he heard movement stirring in the laboratory next door and stepped out.
The lab was fairly large — a little over a hundred square meters, already the most extravagant structure in the Weasel Bandit Gang's base.
The interior was split into two halves. One side held all manner of test tubes, crucibles, distillation flasks, and other vessels for serum work; the other was a surgical suite lined with scalpels, hemostatic forceps, syringes, and various pieces of medical equipment.
Dense rings of bookshelves lined the walls, stacked mostly with foundational texts on medicine and serumcraft.
Overhead, incandescent lamps burned bright.
At that moment, the early-rising Pisces was dissecting a "Sawtooth Rat" carcass on the operating table.
Whether physician or serum master, both professions demanded enormous amounts of hands-on practice — a class no easier than any combat Transcendent path.
The old man watched Ryan walk out, his gaze flicking briefly over those swollen, corded muscles. His brow twitched slightly as he asked, "Successfully advanced to Transcendent?"
Ryan nodded, not bothering to hide his pleasure. "Yes! It was all thanks to the high-quality serum Teacher gave me — that's how I managed to advance..."
"Mm."
Pisces nodded, expressionless, though the corner of his eye twitched involuntarily.
Wasting a top-grade serum on a man who was as good as dead, and still not getting what he wanted out of it — that stung a little.
He looked at Ryan and said, "Since you're my disciple, then starting today I'll begin teaching you the fundamentals of medicine..."
He paused, then pointed at the blood-soaked rat on the dissection table. "All surgical technique is built on an understanding of anatomical structure. So dissection and suturing are the basic skills a physician must master..."
The old man figured that, having agreed to take on this newcomer as a disciple, he ought to at least go through the motions.
Both medicine and serumcraft were oceans of knowledge as vast as the stars — a single basics-of-anatomy course alone could keep a medical apprentice occupied for months.
He thought he'd fob the boy off with something simple for the next few days. "Anatomy" was an easy, day-one sort of lesson — good enough to keep the kid from getting bored and stirring up trouble out of idle thoughts.
"Watch closely..."
"Mm-hm."
At that, Ryan stepped up to the dissection table and looked at the gutted rat, his expression perfectly composed. "Please, Teacher, instruct me..."
No skill was ever wasted, and since his future lay along the Combat Physician path, medical knowledge was something he'd need regardless. The old man was willing to teach; he was naturally willing to learn.
All the while, the AI Core kept chiming with system prompts.
【Ding! Automatically recording 'Basic Dissection Technique' — capturing visual detail...】
...
The more dangerous the situation, the less he could afford to look eager.
And so Ryan settled comfortably into the role of Pisces's obedient disciple, becoming a fixture of the laboratory.
The lab wasn't large, and whether Pisces was mixing serums or doing his research, Ryan was always somewhere in view.
The old man wasn't worried about being spied on — he didn't hide any of his work. As far as he was concerned, this newcomer wouldn't be alive much longer anyway.
Besides, what could a green apprentice — one who still had to learn how to hold a scalpel — possibly pick up by watching?
What he hadn't counted on was the AI Core recording everything.
Whenever Pisces was in the lab, Ryan played the model apprentice — fetching things, assisting, uncomplaining.
Of course, Ryan hadn't forgotten his real purpose. The whole reason he'd become Pisces's disciple was to gain legitimate access to the laboratory!
Pisces did have a storage ring, but a space of only one cubic meter couldn't hold everything. The lab itself still housed a huge stock of serum materials and professional texts.
So whenever Pisces stepped out, Ryan would tear through the bookshelves like a man possessed!
A fist-thick professional tome could be flipped through in a minute or two — and whatever his eyes passed over, the AI Core would automatically scan and record!
In less than a single day, the thousand-odd medical and serumcraft texts Pisces had spent years collecting had all been "read" by Ryan.
*Foundations of Anatomy*, *Introduction to Alchemy*, *Surgical Skills*, *A Hundred Thousand Species of Monsters, Explained*, *Introductory Serumcraft*, *Basic Techniques for Refining Serum Materials*...
Under normal circumstances, these were the standard texts of the "Surgeon" line — heavy on support and healing, with almost no combat techniques.
The texts were meticulously categorized, encompassing the foundational works compiled by both the Ormar Empire's Serum Masters' Guild and its Royal Academy of Medicine.
These weren't just books — together they formed a nearly complete curriculum for medicine and serumcraft, structured like a proper textbook, moving from simple to advanced, designed to let someone master the basics quickly.
Ryan had no idea that this was, in fact, Pisces's personal collection as a Royal Two-Star Serum Master and senior physician — nothing like the disorganized, unsystematic professional manuals found out in the wider world.
This was material meant exclusively for Royal Academy students and nobility — professional medical texts that simply couldn't be bought anywhere in the outside world.
And now, Ryan had swallowed it all whole, recording every page.
...
Ryan hadn't bothered concealing his "book-flipping," and Pisces easily noticed the traces of his books having been disturbed.
But even having spotted the signs, the old man didn't much care. Never mind that Ryan was, in his eyes, a dead man walking — even finishing these texts would take enormous time and effort.
Under ordinary circumstances, an apprentice would need at least a year and a half just to get through them, and years — even decades — of hard study to truly grasp the knowledge inside.
Clearly, every book on the shelf had been flipped through — just casually, once through.
The old man assumed Ryan was probably hunting for a cure for the Zombie Serum.
Heh. How naive.
...
"Just as I thought — none of these texts mention the Zombie Serum at all..."
With the AI Core's search function, Ryan didn't need to comb through anything by hand. A single pass was enough to confirm that not one of the thousand-odd texts contained any record of the Zombie Serum.
Of course, that was expected. His "reading" of these texts wasn't just about hunting for clues to a cure — the main purpose was genuine learning!
Because the AI Core, the greatest invention of the twenty-first century, had one more ability that bordered on a glitch: deep-memory learning!
This was, in fact, the single most essential function it had served for people back on Earth.
Research had shown that time in deep sleep passed at roughly a 1:20 ratio compared to waking life. Making full use of that dream-time was like extending a person's effective lifespan by nearly twentyfold.
But in almost every case, you woke up remembering nothing of what happened in the dream. Those memories weren't actually gone — they were simply stored in the brain's deep memory layer.
And the AI Core's function was to actively intervene in a person's deep dreams, activating those "vanished memories"!
With a program preset in advance, once the host fell into deep sleep, the AI Core would guide them into a scripted dream — studying knowledge, for instance.
Then, upon waking, the AI Core would activate the contents of that deep memory, letting the person recall exactly what had "happened" in last night's dream.
This was exactly why, over a single year of training with the Weasel Bandit Gang, Ryan had managed to push nearly every basic thief skill to "max level."
By day he trained under the instructors; the AI Core would automatically record their technique — the moves, the angles, the sequence of muscle engagement. By night, Ryan would keep practicing those same moves in his dreams.
With a full video record from the AI Core, the system automatically compared and corrected his form — the equivalent of having an instructor guiding him hand over hand, every single moment.
By morning, once his deep memory was reactivated, his mind held theoretical experience worth twenty times more hours than anyone else's.
In reality, all he had to do was practice a little to let his muscles catch up with what his brain already "knew," and it would quickly settle into true muscle memory — a technique he'd genuinely mastered.
Take an example: suppose you'd once been a champion swimmer, and your soul transmigrated into a body that couldn't swim a stroke. The moment you hit the water, the motions might feel unfamiliar, but you'd still fundamentally know how to swim. Your muscles just needed a little time to catch up with what your mind already understood, and soon you'd be gliding through the water with ease.
Twenty times the study time — even a fool would improve several times faster than anyone else.
This was the greatest "golden finger" that had let Ryan survive that training cohort with a death rate above sixty percent — because every hour of basic thief-skill practice he'd logged was worth ten or twenty times as much as anyone else's.
A full year of relentless training, right up to today. Setting aside actual combat experience, in raw technique alone, he wasn't inferior to a single instructor in the whole gang — let alone his fellow recruits.
If he hadn't deliberately hidden his abilities, Ryan would unquestionably have stood out as the single greatest prodigy in the entire Weasel training cohort — not the quiet, unremarkable nobody everyone assumed him to be.