After the infuriating combat and marksmanship training ended, Keran was led by two expressionless guards to a tank filled with glowing pale blue healing fluid.
He was shoved roughly inside.
As the hatch sealed shut, the cold, slightly stinging healing fluid flooded over him instantly.
The bruises from Darien’s heavy punches and the burns from Rufina’s energy bolts scabbed over and healed rapidly under the fluid’s stimulation.
He could move around just fine now, but every time he flexed a muscle, it pulled at the fresh, unhealed tissue beneath his skin, sending waves of annoying, dull nerve pain through his body.
Two hours later, a soaking wet Keran was taken to a semi-abandoned armor maintenance bay.
After his astonishing display of mechanical and armor engineer talent in the testing chamber, Rufina had permitted him to stay here alone.
The room was cluttered with high-precision mini lathes, scrapped alloy casings, electronic components, and all kinds of power tools.
He could use anything he wanted, as long as he didn’t leave the room.
A single security camera, glowing with that same pale blue light, rotated slowly in the corner.
Keran wasn’t surprised.
He knew Cyrus and Rufina were probably sitting behind their screens right now, watching his every move closely.
The metal bookshelf against the wall was packed with cold, technical textbooks.
Keran found several copies of Introduction to Basic Energy Circuits and Beginner Alloy Smelting and Forging Techniques among them.
In the Star Abyss, Azure City was a member of the Hundred Cities Federation.
While they possessed dome defense technology, their scientific advancement barely scraped the edge of interstellar civilization.
The armor technology they could access was, at best, intermediate level.
The Armor Engineer skill tree was divided into three main branches.
Defense, Materials, and Modifications.
Each branch contained twenty core skills, spread across five tiers from basic to ultimate.
To Keran, this wasn’t just a set of class skills.
It was the foundation he would build his future on in this world.
His first-class knowledge had unlocked his Junior Armor Engineer class.
Any further class knowledge or upgrades would require spending extremely valuable Potential Points.
There were only three ways to earn Potential Points.
Leveling up, maxing out a skill, or completing certain extremely rare objectives.
Staring at the single Potential Point left on his panel, Keran forced himself to calm down.
Engineering knowledge could wait.
He had other uses for that point.
“Besides getting beaten up in the training room every day, the rest of my time is mine,” Keran lowered his eyes, hiding the sharp glint in them.
“I need to stockpile enough experience to escape this research department before they lose patience with me. It looks peaceful on the surface, but it’s nothing more than a life sentence.”
…
Time passed quickly.
Over the next two months, Keran transformed completely into a quiet, harmless tech nerd.
He gained experience relentlessly in the maintenance bay using his Simple Armor Repair and Structural Analysis skills.
As his technique improved, he consistently achieved a perfection rating of 92% or higher on every scrapped armor plate he worked on, earning him substantial experience every time.
Repairing the same lightweight alloy too many times would cause the experience gain to decrease steadily until it hit zero.
Luckily, the research base had a massive scrap yard filled with damaged power armor and exoskeleton fragments retired after battles with mutated creatures outside the walls.
It gave him an endless supply of materials to gain experience on.
Thanks to Rufina and Darien’s daily hellish training, his Basic Hand-to-Hand Combat and Basic Marksmanship skills finally reached Level 6 after countless beatings and near misses.
Because he was so obedient, even taking Darien’s punches without complaint, the security guards at the research department gradually let their guard down around him.
To them, Keran had accepted his fate.
He was nothing more than a talking piece of experimental material.
Not just the low-level guards.
Even the scientists watching from behind the security screens had started paying far less attention to him.
In the scientific community of the Star Abyss, Otherworld Lifeforms summoned via transdimensional tractor were supposed to be miraculous beings of immense interest.
According to historical records, these humanoid beings always underwent a violent energy mutation within a specific timeframe after arrival.
Their power levels would skyrocket, and their bodies would spontaneously develop a never-before-seen, unique superpower.
But for two whole months, Keran’s energy levels had remained completely flat.
Forget earth-shattering superpowers.
He hadn’t even manifested the most basic ability particles.
Every day, he just banged away in the maintenance bay like the most mediocre mechanical laborer.
No mutation.
No superpowers.
Zero power level.
“Genetically dormant. A useless dud that can’t awaken.”
The last shred of patience from the higher-ups had completely evaporated.
The base cut his food and high-energy resource rations by a full eighty percent.
They even turned down the rotation frequency on the security camera in the corner.
No one bothered watching the dud around the clock anymore.
But this was exactly what Keran had been hoping for.
Free from constant surveillance, he was happy to lie low.
He played the part of the meek background character perfectly, all while his hands moved faster and faster as he took apart exoskeletons in secret.
Until the night of his third month in Azure City.
Wail!
Without warning, a shrill, blood-red alarm tore through the silence of the entire base.
The ground began to shake violently.
Above them, the massive defense dome covering the entire city rumbled with a deafening roar.
Bang!
The maintenance bay door was slammed open.
Two fully armed elite Azure City guards, their faces pale, rushed in with high-voltage stun guns and kinetic rifles.
Their gun barrels locked onto Keran, who was sitting by the lathe.
“Sit still! Don’t move an inch from that seat, or we’ll shoot you on sight!”
Clearly, even in the midst of this sudden chaos, Rufina had kept her cold, calculating vigilance.
She was worried this unknown Otherworld Lifeform would try to escape in the confusion, so she’d sent her most trusted men to guard him closely.
But Keran didn’t even feel like standing up.
He stared past the nervous guards in front of him, his eyes fixed on the window.
Beyond the dome, the night sky was being torn apart by blood and fire.
Azure City was under a surprise attack by a terrifying native mutated behemoth.
Roar!
The silhouette of the massive beast slowly came into focus in the darkness.
It was the size of a building, covered in black-purple irradiated armor plating, with hundreds of compound eyes glowing faintly in the night.
Every time it slammed into the dome, the blue defensive shield rippled violently, and the entire ground shook.
Then the counterattack began.
The Lord of Azure City personally led the Azure City Defense Corps to the front lines.
An armed airship hovered in the sky.
A tall figure stood on its bow, facing the wind.
Even from this distance, Keran could feel that the entire battlefield revolved around that one person.
The Lord’s voice boomed across the entire defense line.
“First Artillery Regiment, concentrate fire on the seam in its right side armor. Mech Beast Battalion, move in and lock down its hind legs. Don’t let it advance. Energy Class Holders, conserve your strength. Wait for my signal.”
The laser cannon arrays fired simultaneously.
A dozen white beams shot out from the defense line turrets, hitting the seam in the beast’s right armor with pinpoint accuracy and erupting into massive fireballs.
The beast howled and shifted sideways, but it didn’t stop.
The Mech Beast Battalion charged from the flank.
These modified giant mechanical beasts were fitted with alloy fangs and tracking missile launchers.
They clamped down on the beast’s hind legs and dragged it back, firing missiles at point-blank range that blew a crack in its armor.
“Energy Class Holders. Now.”
At the Lord’s command, several figures moved at once along the defense line.
Visible energy waves rippled around their bodies.
They raised their hands, and the light gathered in their palms compressed for a split second before slamming into the cracked armor in a dense barrage of energy bolts.
The explosion lit up that side of the night sky bright white for a moment.
The beast let out a deep, rumbling howl and stumbled back two steps.
The Lord spoke again, his tone unchanged.
“Don’t give it a chance to recover. Keep pushing.”
…..
Standing at the maintenance bay window, Keran wiped the cold sweat from his forehead.
His heart was pounding wildly in his chest.
He stared at the godlike battle unfolding outside and muttered in shock.
“So it’s… that dangerous out there.”
That battle hit him like a sledgehammer, shattering the last shred of hope he’d been clinging to.
He’d been planning to escape the base and run outside the walls.
But now he saw that without absolute power, leaving Azure City would be far worse than dying on a dissection table.
Even Otherworld Lifeforms who naturally awakened superpowers could end up as cannon fodder out there.
A regular human with zero power level like him would just be walking to his death.
“When in Rome, do as the Romans do. If outside is hell, then this place… is my safe little XP farm. I’m not leaving until I’ve squeezed every last drop out of this place!”
After the surprise attack, Azure City repelled the beast, and life at the research base returned to its usual monotony.
Over the next three months, Keran became the most obedient and hardworking repair laborer in the entire base.
When guards passed him in the hallways, they didn’t even spare his gray work uniform a glance.
He was completely invisible to them, nothing more than a moving piece of background.
This total invisibility gave him an incredible advantage.
He was like a mistletoe creeping along the main artery of Azure City, quietly draining nutrients right under everyone’s noses.
The beast attack had brought back a mountain of damaged equipment.
Scrapped power armor fragments from the front lines, destroyed illegal energy weapons, and even dead power cores.
They were all dumped into the maintenance bay.
And they all became Keran’s absolute feast — a banquet he intended to devour completely.
He got his hands on every single piece of high-end gear.
Every time he finished an upgrade and earned a huge chunk of experience, he used his skills to perform a masterful “negative optimization” on the weapons and armor.
He deliberately left a little rust, a slight jam, or a tiny imperfection.
To Cyrus and the arrogant researchers, the equipment was still just a pile of barely patched scrap metal.
And Keran was still an unawakened genetic dud who could only do manual labor.
Six months passed in the blink of an eye.
After countless hours of disassembly, repair, and analysis, both his Structural Analysis and Simple Armor Repair skills reached Level 8.
When the last batch of scrap equipment in the maintenance bay was processed, Keran put down his tools and opened his personal panel.
He scrolled down.
At the very bottom of the panel, a string of dark gold numbers glowed quietly.
[Current Stored Experience: 500,000]
Five hundred thousand experience points.
For someone who had barely left the research base and never killed a single mutated creature outside the walls, this was an absolutely staggering amount.
And it had all come from six months of patience, deception, and ruthlessly squeezing every last drop of value out of scrap machinery.