CHAPTER 91: BACKGROUND THREAD AND THE BASALT ROAD

A cold autumn wind from the north sliced across the stone road, carrying the scent of settled dew, damp earth, and burnt timber from distant charcoal kilns. The oak forest lining the roadside hills was slowly losing its leaves, and heavy merchant wagons rolled lazily along the cracked, bumpy thoroughfare. Wheels creaked against grey gravel, teamsters swore under their breath, and exhausted oxen snorted dense plumes of steam.

I walked along the shoulder at a slow, measured pace, hands buried deep in the pockets of my black leather coat.

My movement was devoid of the slightest exertion. After months of grueling training in the basalt valley under Sensei, my Vessel was operating at a quiet hum. The mana weaves in my chest, cleared of internal friction through laminar flow, distributed sapphire energy with silent fluidity. A distance of a dozen kilometers, which meant half a day of exhausting march for an ordinary merchant, was merely a light warm-up for my biomechanics before entering a metropolis.

I raised my right hand in front of my face without slowing down.

In a fraction of a second, I commanded the soul essence to leak through the pores of my skin. The black, glossy, matte coating of Gōtai covered my fingers and forearm, absorbing sunlight like a dense, tar-like monolith. I examined the black paw with cool, analytical detachment.

"Visually unappealing among the populace... and way too telegraphed for opponents," I muttered under my breath, turning my hand in the air. "Plus it gives an unnecessary, tonnage-level boost to strength."

By common sense, full Gōtai was the perfect battering ram for shattering thick plate armor, but in daily routine, it had its blatantly inefficient drawbacks. The black gauntlet stood out from a kilometer away. If I was entering Crossgard, where guild outposts and city guards stood at every intersection, glowing with a black aura was asking for free trouble and pointless investigations.

"It'd be nice to pull this off so that the mechanical durability is insane, but the strength isn't necessarily boosted," I analyzed further in my mind, staring at the black coating. "My Vessel's natural post-isekai density is more than enough for everyday brawls anyway. What if I pulled off... Gotai-lite?"

A brazen, predatory smirk tugged at the corners of my mouth.

The concept was engineered simply: instead of pumping KAI outward to form a thick, tarry armor around the skin, shift the entire weave directly into the internal tissues. Create a micro-layer reinforced with Gotai KAI bonds hidden right beneath the epidermis. Visually, the skin would look completely normal — no black aura, no tipping my hand. But when an assassin tried to sink a dagger into my back in a crowded market, the steel blade would simply stop or slide off the tissue without penetrating, as if hitting a hardened alloy plate.

"Just gotta handle it with cool precision," I grumbled, fading the black coating back under my skin. "Need to reinforce not just the skin itself, but the internal structures too. Tendons, ligaments, muscles, and bones. Because if I harden just the epidermis and the shock travels to the unhardened bone underneath, it'll shatter my musculoskeletal apparatus from the inside and that'd be a mess. Hm... actually a solid idea. I'll have to experiment with this at the manor soon."

The term Gotai-lite fit my vocabulary perfectly. It was a pure R&D project I intended to polish during quiet evenings in the back.

I shifted my gaze to the horizon, where the massive, black contours of Crossgard's defensive walls were slowly taking shape in the leaden fog. My hyperactive mind, freed from constant sparring with Sensei, instantly jumped to the next engineering thread: telekinesis.

I was contemplating process automation. The human brain manages heart rate, lung function, and arterial pressure spikes without conscious input. The autonomic nervous system ensures the biological engine doesn't stall while the human thinks about daydreams.

Since my Soul was generating a passive grip of will around my body anyway, why not delegate micro-kinetic actions directly to a background subconscious thread?

Create a zap-looped background thread in my head — an autonomous process that would constantly maintain a passive barrier around my Vessel without my active focus. I didn't need to spoil all my cards to myself or the reader. I left the theory as an open project in cache memory, knowing that when that loop clicked in practice, the effect in combat would be downright lethal.

And to top it off — the matter of my eyes. I folded a brief, frugal structure around my retinas. The passive sapphire glow, a byproduct of pure Soul essence, was masked beneath a layer of ordinary, deep blue. To an outside observer, I now had completely ordinary blue eyes. In Crossgard, crawling with agents and scouts from local clans, glowing sapphire from a mile away was asking for stupid questions. This way — cool, composed peace of mind.

I slipped my hand back into my coat pocket and yawned briefly, cracking my stiff neck.

And then, the thoughts that had been smoothly aligning into engineering formulas and tactical balances suddenly slammed into a hard, emotional wall.

"Oh, bloody hell..." I groaned softly under my breath.

Ahead lay the return to the manor. The reunion with the family.

And right here, my analytical mind hit a massive, rude system lag.

I could deconstruct twenty armored mercenaries in three seconds on pure common sense, I could rewrite magic physics on the fly, create Gotai-lite, and design a new theory of KAI flow, but the prospect of standing in the doorway of my own manor in front of the girls induced genuine social paralysis.

Unbearably stiff, embarrassing scenarios began looping in my head: What am I even supposed to say to them after a year of grueling woods training? "Hey, I'm back"? That sounds like a script from the worst sitcom ever. Should I drop some wise, distinguished quote? Hug them all at once or one by one? What if Shnee starts staring at me with that possessive, icy gaze and asks why I took so long? What if Karys lags again and huffs under her breath, while Mina runs out with a frying pan?

This content has been unlawfully taken from NovelPhoenix; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

I rubbed my face with my palm, feeling a sharp rise in temperature beneath my collar.

I was never good at these moments. Social conventions, effusive greetings, and emotional speeches had always been black magic to me. I'd vastly prefer getting whacked across the ribs with Sensei's bamboo staff than delivering tearful speeches on a doorstep.

Yet beneath all that consternation lay the bedrock, absolute foundation of my world.

The outside world — Aristocracy, Guilds, Cechs, and gutter gangs — was purely transactional. That was a realm of brutal market games, cold calculators, and the economics of force. There, targets were recycled or stripped of assets.

But the manor in Crossgard and the girls — Shnee, Karys, Elena, Luthia, Mina, Ria, and Kaede — belonged to an entirely different category of reality.

That was my Sanctuary. The only thing on this planet that had no market value and on which I ran zero margin. My Red Line.

I outlined the coming days in my head to regain control over my thoughts: Tonight: arrival at the manor, the greeting (I'll fucking survive it somehow), and a nice, quiet evening over Mina's good food.Tomorrow: clean registration of my documents at the local guild, followed by hard, beefy training at the manor with the pillars. I'll check their level — what Karys is squeezing out of her new techniques and how much Shnee has developed during this year in my absence.Day after tomorrow: clearing the rest of the Crossgard Dungeon with the girls. They probably cleared around 80 floors on a rough estimate — I doubt they hit all ten zones because this dungeon is significantly tougher than the Oakhaven one, and I cleared most of that one myself. We'll help them clear out the remainder.And after that: a few paid quests for budget stabilization, a banquet with the aristocracy, and twisting new, useful connections in the city...

And where did this calculation and foresight come from? Because it's logical and probably going to happen. And if not, then fuck it.

Before I could close the plan list, I released a brazenly quiet pulse of Yomi Rank I.

I didn't even have to blink or close my eyes. A pure wave of KAI spread along the road exactly like Odin's Sight works — sweeping across the oak trunks and bumpy thoroughfare, laying crystal-clear, glowing outlines and full environmental details onto my normal vision a kilometer ahead.

My perception instantly caught the tactical situation with sharp details:

In the middle of the road stood an immobilized, luxurious wagon with gilded fittings and a shattered axle. Around it lay the corpses of three guardsmen in parade armor. And at the edge of the ditch, a formation of fifteen bandits in worn chainmail pressed two surviving guards and a wealthy, distinguished noble in a fine coat to the dirt.

The Yomi I pulse highlighted every detail — the rust on their cleavers, the lack of plate armor, and their primitive physics. None of them wore heavy steel.

I didn't rush to the rescue out of a warm heart or cheap isekai heroism. I looked at the mess and evaluated the situation briefly:

"Why the hell not... Might as well test Quick style and Yomi in practice."

I didn't accelerate my stride. I walked at the exact same lazy, strolling pace, rounding the bend of the road with my hands in my pockets.

The bandits caught my footstep in a second. The group leader — a bulky guy with a scar across his mug and a heavy, rusted cleaver — turned over his shoulder, grinning wickedly.

"Oho, another wandering vagrant!" he chortled coarsely. "Halt right there, or I'll..."

I didn't let him finish.

I engaged the rigor of Quick style. The weaves in my chest remained completely empty, silent, and cold. The "White Room" protocol extinguished any signature — to their senses, I was completely invisible.

I didn't engage Gōtai. By common sense, KAI reinforcement here would be an unnecessary waste of energy. Why stain my coat with blood and make a spectacle of tearing bodies apart when they could be neutralized surgically?

The world around me slowed down. To read intentions and attack trajectories in close contact, I closed my eyes for a split second, letting pure Yomi I dictate their every movement to me.

The first thug swung a rusted sword. Instead of a full dodge, I shifted my shoulder two centimeters. Steel whistled right next to my leather collar. Before the thug realized he had hit air, my fingers shaped into a wedge struck short straight into his brachial plexus.

Click.

A microscopic pulse cut the neural signal in his arm. The sword slipped from his helpless hand, and before he could scream, my foot swept his knee at a forty-five-degree angle, and the heel of my palm struck precisely into his neck.

Clinical reset. The thug collapsed limply into the mud before he could even think about fighting.

Second, third, fourth...

This wasn't a battle; it was pure, bloodless pacification.

I moved among them with my hands in my coat pockets, operating solely on body balance, foot rotation, and surgical pressure on nerve points. In less than fifteen seconds, all fifteen lay on the thoroughfare with their nervous systems reset — no deep wounds, no severed limbs, simply unconscious.

I opened my eyes and flicked a speck of dust from my cuff.

A dead silence fell over the edge of the road.

The two surviving guards stared at me open-mouthed, holding bloody swords. And the noble himself — an exquisite, wealthy guy in a velvet coat — stood by the shattered wagon axle, adjusting his cuffs and staring at me like a phenomenon from another world.

They saw a guy in a leather coat who, without taking his hands out of his pockets, casually took down fifteen thugs in a matter of seconds.

I walked up to them at a slow pace.

"Well, that's that," I said calmly, looking at the stunned noble. "Good day."

The noble twitched sharply, trying to regain his distinguished composure.

"W-who are you, young man?" he stammered, swallowing hard. "You neutralized them... without weapons? Without magic? I am Lord Lucian Artois..."

Listening to his long, pompous dignity and aristocratic title, I knew one thing: I wasn't going to remember that complicated name anyway.

"Just ordinary trash disposal on the road, Lucek," I cut short, slipping my hand back into my pocket. "No need to deliver a speech. Common sense dictates a simple arrangement. I saved your ass, and in return, I need one thing."

The count blinked rapidly at the word "Lucek," but quickly recovered from his astonishment.

"What thing?" he asked cautiously.

"Your wagon is stuck on a broken axle, but the spare horse is intact," I summarized, pointing at the stallion. "You're heading to Crossgard. I need a quick entry through the main gate without the guards hassling and recording me. You act as my paper certificate, I act as your escort. Fair deal?"

Lord Lucian Artois stared at me for a moment, weighing my words, then nodded gravely.

"Fair. My House Artois has its leverage at the gates. We'll pass without a single question."

"Fucking great," I concluded with a smile.

The journey to Crossgard itself flew by in a flash. Lucek kept his word — at the sight of his pass, the guards at the gate bowed and let us through without a second of inspection.

I parted ways with him at the market square, dismissing his repeated thanks with a wave of my hand and a promise that I'd stop by when it was time for business.

Half an hour later, I was standing on a quiet street on the outskirts of the residential district.

In front of me rose a stone fence, behind which the familiar outline of the manor was visible. A warm light glowed in the shutters, and a thin wisp of smoke drifted from the chimney, carrying the scent of Mina's roasted meat.

I stopped two steps before the oak gate.

I hovered my hand over the brass knocker and froze in place.

My analytical mind, which ten minutes ago had easily calculated the movements of fifteen bandits, now entered a phase of complete consternation.

"Fuck..." I muttered under my breath, staring at the grain of the oak wood. "Now the part I hate the most... Fuck knows what to say at the door."