Novel Full Chapter 83: Gloves Off
Chapter 83: Gloves Off
A week of Selene’s new training changed everything.
She had pushed Ren through Seedling-stage techniques daily — private sessions after the group drills, each one harder than the last. He absorbed them all. By the end of the week his combat toolkit had nearly doubled, his ground-sensing range had stretched past fifty meters, and his root-channel reinforcement was solid enough to take hits that would have cracked his old Germination channels like glass.
But the private sessions were private. The group had seen him train openly since the breakthrough, and they knew he was strong. They hadn’t seen exactly how strong.
Today they would.
— • —
Selene built the combat gauntlet after the morning drills. Twelve reinforced dummies arranged across the training hall in a three-dimensional pattern, each programmed to fire energy bursts at random intervals while moving on independent tracks. Upper Tier 1 combat speed. Hard enough to bruise through standard shielding, fast enough to punish slow reactions.
"One at a time," she said. "Full power. I want your real ceiling."
She looked at the group when she said it. But Ren knew who the words were really for.
Kaelen went first. Cold, disciplined, efficient. Two minutes fifteen seconds, two hits taken, all twelve dummies destroyed. An excellent run.
Yuelan went second. Two minutes flat, four hits taken because she always chose offense over defense. She stepped off grinning. "Record?"
"Record," Selene confirmed.
Iris finished in two twenty. Lin Yueying in two eighteen. Cassian in two thirty-five, his leg finally back to full strength. Lyra ran a separate energy-stabilization drill that played to her real ability.
Then Ren stepped onto the course.
— • —
Twelve dummies. Lights blinking. Energy cores humming. He settled his weight, took one breath, and stopped holding back.
The first dummy fired from the right. Ren sidestepped the blast, closed the distance in one stride, and hit it center mass. The reinforced dummy — rated for Stage 4 — crumpled and flew off its track. One second.
Two and three came from both sides. He dropped under their energy bursts, let them cross above him, and took both out with a spinning combination that landed twice in half a heartbeat.
Then he moved for real.
His Version 3.0 combat techniques ran clean through his upgraded channels. He flowed through the gauntlet without stopping — finding gaps, filling spaces, hitting everything in his path. Four and five went down to fast strikes. Six and seven he took out mid-dodge, hitting them while slipping past two incoming blasts. Eight tried to flank and he destroyed it with a back-fist thrown without looking, guided by his ground-sensing technique.
Nine, ten, eleven fell in a three-second burst that nobody could fully follow. He moved between them so fast the targeting systems couldn’t lock on.
The twelfth was shielded. He hit it with a straight palm at eighty percent. The shield cracked and the dummy slammed into the wall hard enough to dent the stone.
Total time: fifty-three seconds. Zero hits taken.
— • —
Yuelan broke the silence. "What the hell was that."
She was staring at the course with wide eyes. She had just set the record at two minutes. Ren had beaten it by sixty-seven seconds without being touched.
"Fifty-three seconds," Iris said, her voice flat and precise. "The gauntlet is calibrated for upper Tier 1." She looked at Selene. "Accurate?"
"Accurate enough," Selene said. Her face gave away nothing, but her stylus was moving fast on the tablet.
Cassian sat on a supply crate shaking his head with a grin. "Fifty-three seconds. And he was holding back during the assessment. I’ve been telling you all for weeks."
Kaelen hadn’t spoken. He was looking at the destroyed dummies, the cracked wall, the dent in the stone. His time had been two fifteen — the best in any normal class. Ren had beaten it by eighty-two seconds. His jaw was set in the way it got when something fundamental about his world needed recalculating.
— • —
The rest of the day, Ren trained at full speed in front of everyone. No calibration, no careful management. Every drill showed the real gap between where he had been pretending and where he actually was. His footwork was faster. His strikes were harder. His reactions made the rest of the group look like they were moving through water.
And nobody resented it. That was the part Ren hadn’t expected. Yuelan wanted to spar because fighting someone better made her better. Iris wanted to study his technique because understanding excellence was how she improved. Cassian was proud of his friend. Lyra was smiling. And Kaelen had fire in his eyes — the kind that said I will catch up instead of this isn’t fair.
The group had built something real in the corruption zone. Ren being the strongest didn’t break it. It gave it a center to build around.
— • —
That evening, walking through the annex corridor toward the exit, Ren’s System pinged.
SCAN — passive alert.
Anomalous energy signature detected.
Source: approximately 800 meters northeast. Does not match corruption, natural energy, or any registered cultivation type.
Duration: 4 seconds. Then gone.
Classification: unknown. Recommendation: log and monitor.
Ren stopped walking. Eight hundred meters out, just past the school grounds. An energy signature that didn’t match anything the System knew, appearing for four seconds and vanishing.
Could be nothing. A passing cultivator with an unusual technique. A glitch.
But his instincts — sharpened by a dead realm, a corruption zone, and months of learning to read danger before it arrived — said it wasn’t nothing.
He logged the alert, set SCAN to track any repeat, and walked home.
Kaia was quiet. Alert. Watching in a direction he couldn’t see.
Something was out there.
— • —
Thank you so much for reading "Bloodline Plant Lord."
I truly appreciate everyone who has taken the time to start this story and follow Ren’s journey. This is only the beginning, and there is still a much bigger world, deeper mysteries, stronger enemies, and many powerful bloodline plants waiting to be revealed.
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Thank you again for your support.
See you in the next Chapter — Ren’s journey has only just begun.