Chapter 348 - 3: Energy Reserve gone

Chapter 348: Chapter 3: Energy Reserve gone

The Boundless Origin Martial Soul pulsed inside Ash’s mindscape.

It beat with a slow, deep heartbeat that echoed through his bones. The swirling nebula of primordial light drank in the cosmic energy with an insatiable, bottomless hunger.

More, his soul seemed to whisper. Give me more.

And the pillar obliged.

The hum in the hall deepened into a deafening, resonant vibration. The air around the platform distorted with heat and pressure. Fine cracks of pure white light raced across the pillar’s surface. For several long seconds, the massive crystal monolith shook violently, groaning as if it might shatter under the strain of the energy it was channeling.

Students and teachers alike stared in stunned, breathless silence. The examiners dropped their datapads. Some students took instinctive steps backward. A few covered their ears as the vibration rattled their bones.

On the elevated observation platform, the principal and the academy’s higher-ups stood frozen.

These were not ordinary cultivators. Their senses stretched far beyond the hall — across the entire campus and even into the surrounding hills. They had helped design and refine the Awakening Pillars decades ago. They understood every frequency, every safety limit, and every fail-safe written into the system.

What they felt now made their hearts tighten.

An obscene amount of cosmic energy was being funneled into the boy on the platform. Not a large amount. Not even an S-rank amount. It was a roaring river that should have been impossible for any human soul to accept without exploding.

One of the vice-principals, a stern woman with sharp eyes, leaned closer to the principal. Her voice was low and tight.

"Uhn... that isn’t right. It shouldn’t be possible. Look at the energy flow. The pillar is pouring everything it has into him. No one should be able to absorb that much."

Another elder, an old man with a long white beard, frowned deeply. "The containment arrays are already straining. If this continues, the crystal will crack."

The principal’s eyes stayed locked on Ash. His expression remained calm on the surface, but his spiritual sense was fully extended, tasting the quality and volume of the energy pouring into the young man’s body.

Then the light collapsed.

The roaring energy cut off with a sharp crack, like breaking glass.

Ash blinked, the euphoric haze slowly receding from his mind. He looked up.

A single glowing letter had materialized above the pillar in dull gray light.

E Rank

The silence in the hall was absolute for a heartbeat. Then the murmurs began.

On the observation platform, the higher-ups stared at the gray letter in disbelief.

"E Rank?" the sharp-eyed vice-principal muttered. "With that amount of energy he absorbed? Impossible. The sensors must have failed."

The white-bearded elder nodded slowly. "The system only measures up to S. When the energy demand exceeds the pillar’s entire reserve, the calibration array overloads and defaults to the lowest error code. E."

The principal’s voice was quiet but certain.

"It looks like humanity has birthed another being with a martial soul above S Rank."

The others fell silent.

For a long moment, none of them spoke. Then the principal continued, still watching Ash step down from the platform.

"We will not act yet. No announcements. No special treatment. We watch him. Let him participate in the upcoming trials like every other student. If what we sensed is true, his performance will reveal itself soon enough. Only then will we decide whether to send him to the Secret Realm for training."

The higher-ups exchanged glances and nodded. The decision was made. For now, they would simply observe.

Below, Ash stared at the gray ’E’.

The goddess’s hands vanished from his soul, leaving behind a cold, hollow drop in his stomach.

E Rank?

His heart hammered against his ribs. A spike of genuine panic and sharp disappointment clawed at his throat. An E-rank martial soul meant a bottleneck. It meant a cultivation path that was grueling and slow. Worst of all, it meant a lifespan capped at maybe a hundred and twenty years. He wouldn’t even live to see the finale of Eternal Sovereign’s Return if the authors kept taking hiatuses. His dream of a long, peaceful life watching his favorite stories was suddenly, brutally derailed.

He felt the eyes of the crowd on him. The whispers were no longer polite.

"After that massive commotion... only E Rank?" someone near the front muttered, just loud enough to be heard. "I thought he was going to awaken a super powerful talent. The pillar was shaking! I guess the display was just a glitch, or his soul just couldn’t hold it."

"What a letdown."

The words stung. Ash felt a flush of heat rise to his cheeks. The cognitive dissonance was maddening — he had just felt like a god, bathed in the ultimate euphoria of the cosmos, and now he was being pitied as a genetic dead-end. He had to bite the inside of his cheek, hard, to stop his facial muscles from crumbling into a mask of devastation. He forced his lips into a smile, but it felt brittle, like thin ice over a deep lake.

Rylan stepped forward, breaking through the crowd. He clapped a heavy, comforting hand on Ash’s shoulder, completely oblivious to the storm of disappointment raging inside his friend.

"Don’t mind it, man," Rylan said with a bright, forced grin. "E Rank just means we’ll have more episodes to watch together while I carry you. Deal?"

Ash looked at Rylan’s earnest face. He swallowed the bitter lump in his throat and pushed the grief for his lost centuries down into a tight, dark box in his mind.

"I’ll think about it," Ash laughed. The sound was a little tight, a little breathy, but it passed. He waved Rylan off and stepped down from the platform.

Outwardly, he looked exactly the same as always — friendly, unbothered, already joking with the next student in line to ease their nerves.

Inwardly, however, as he walked back to his seat, he retreated into his mindscape to investigate.

He expected to see a withered, pathetic E-rank soul. Instead, he was met with the Boundless Origin. It was a breathtaking expanse of swirling, starry qi, vast and deep, pulsing with a power that made his physical body tremble just by observing it.

Ash’s analytical mind, usually reserved for plot holes in his favorite shows, kicked into overdrive. He knew how the Awakening Pillars worked. They didn’t measure the soul’s capacity directly; they measured the amount of cosmic energy the soul could absorb from the pillar’s reserves before reaching saturation.

He looked at the Boundless Origin. It wasn’t saturated. It wasn’t even close. It was still hungrily pulling in the ambient spiritual energy of the room.

It has no bottom, Ash realized, his breath catching in his chest. The pillar didn’t measure my talent. It measured the energy it pumped in. Because my soul has no limit, it drank the pillar dry.

The testing system had only been designed to measure from F to S. When his soul absorbed the absolute maximum the pillar could hold, the internal sensors overloaded. The calibration array had likely shattered from the feedback loop, and the system had crashed, defaulting to the lowest fail-safe error code it had: E.

The crushing disappointment in his chest instantly melted away, replaced by a giddy, breathless relief that made him want to laugh out loud.

He wasn’t an E-rank. He was something entirely off the charts. He wasn’t just going to live to be a hundred and fifty. If he cultivated this, he was going to live forever. He could watch a thousand seasons of a thousand shows.

Ash kept his expression relaxed and his smile easy as he returned to his place in the crowd, but his eyes held a new, quiet spark. No one needed to know yet.

---

Later that night – Awakening Hall Maintenance Bay

Technician Lorn wiped a thick layer of cold sweat from his forehead as he stared at the diagnostic panel. The glowing red numbers made absolutely no sense.

"Captain," Lorn said, his voice trembling slightly. "The primary cosmic energy reserve is at three percent. That’s impossible. We filled it to maximum capacity yesterday morning for the ceremony. There shouldn’t be more than a twelve percent drop even after a full day of continuous awakenings. How the fuck is it less than three percent?"

The older technician, Captain Vance, frowned deeply. He leaned over Lorn’s shoulder and ran the diagnostics again, his fingers flying across the holographic keyboard.

The same result appeared. Reserve: 3.1%.

"Recheck the containment seals," Vance ordered, his voice tight. "Check for micro-leaks in the subterranean pipes. Check the external siphons. Check everything. If word gets out to the Dean that we lost almost an entire planetary reserve in one single ceremony, the Academy will have our heads. They’ll strip us of our cultivation and throw us in the mines."

They searched for hours. They crawled through the ventilation shafts, scanned the crystal housing, and checked the external grounding rods.

No leaks. No malfunctions. No external interference signatures. The energy hadn’t leaked; it had been consumed.

They never found the cause.

They never knew that one quiet, average student with an E-Rank evaluation had absorbed nearly the entire reserve in a single, bottomless breath... and awakened something the system was never built to measure.

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