Chapter 354 - 9: Body Refining Rebirth 1

Chapter 354: Chapter 9: Body Refining Rebirth 1

Morning light filtered through the thin curtains of the western dormitory, laying pale stripes across the floorboards. The academy’s day-cycle energy field had already shifted. The soft nocturnal hum was gone, replaced by a cleaner, brighter frequency designed to gently nudge sleeping bodies toward wakefulness.

Ash opened his eyes and found himself looking at the ceiling.

He was lying diagonally across the bed. One foot still hung off the edge. One arm was folded beneath his chest, completely numb from the shoulder down. There was a damp patch on the pillow where his face had been pressed all night. He lay there for a long moment, taking inventory of the situation, and reached a single firm conclusion.

Nobody could ever find out how he had gone to sleep.

The heavy mental fog from the night before had thinned. His thoughts moved with more clarity now, though a dull ache still sat at the edges of his consciousness—like the memory of a headache rather than the headache itself. He estimated his mental energy had recovered to roughly sixty percent.

The Boundless Origin Martial Soul had worked through the night without pause. It had drawn in the ambient cosmic energy that saturated every corner of the academy, filtered it, and steadily refined his soul. The recovery was reliable and constant. It was also far too slow for what he now wanted to do.

He carefully peeled his arm out from under his chest and waited for the pins and needles to finish their sharp, prickling journey down to his fingertips. When he finally sat up, the motion came out smooth and controlled in a way it never had before. His body felt light yet densely packed, as if every muscle fiber now carried more substance than it used to. Balance cost him no effort at all. Each breath drew in a satisfying volume of air that seemed to reach deeper into his lungs than before.

His skin, however, felt strange.

He ran a thumb along his forearm. It came away gritty. A thin film of gray powder coated his arms, his neck, and the back of his hands. Last night the Boundless Origin had continued dissolving impurities while he slept. Some of the mist had dissipated into the air. The rest had dried on him like fine ash. A flake of old, dried blood still clung under his left nostril.

Ash wrinkled his nose.

Great. I look like I spent the night rolling in a fireplace.

He checked his personal terminal. The holographic screen blinked awake above the desk with a soft chime. The time read 6:42 a.m. Two messages from Rylan sat at the top of the list, sent hours apart.

You alive? I didn’t see you at the cafeteria for dinner yesterday night.

Saving you a seat at breakfast. If you skip it I’m telling everyone you cried about the E Rank.

Ash snorted under his breath, tapped out a quick reply, and sent it before he could think too hard about the small lie inside it.

Alive. Just sleeping off the news. Save me the seat. I’ll be there soon.

Below Rylan’s messages sat a pinned notification for Eternal Sovereign’s Return. The next episode was still six days away. He found it oddly comforting that some things in the world had not changed.

He stood up. This time his body behaved. No swaying. No lurching sideways like a drunken master.

Encouraged, he pushed the desk chair aside, found a clear patch of floor, and tried a lazy teep—the straight push kick he had drilled for years in Advanced Muay Thai classes back home.

Halfway through the motion, his body changed its mind.

His hips turned a few degrees more than he had intended. His standing foot pivoted before he told it to. The knee came up along a path that was shorter, sharper, and so obviously correct that the old version of the kick suddenly felt like a child’s drawing. The strike stopped a hand’s width from the wall. The air it displaced rattled the cheap curtain.

Ash stared at his own foot.

"Okay," he said quietly. "That’s rude."

The Martial Saint’s instincts were not waiting for permission. They were quietly correcting every habit he had built over the years. Some of those old habits were tangled so deeply with the new instincts that his body now hesitated between two different ways of moving. That hesitation would get him hurt in a real fight. He filed the problem away for later. He really needed to sit down and properly comprehend everything he had received.

He washed in the tiny bathroom, scrubbing the gray grit from his skin until the water finally ran clear. When he caught his reflection in the cracked mirror, the same ordinary, friendly face looked back at him. The same messy hair. The same slightly tired eyes.

Only the eyes themselves looked different, though he could not have said exactly how. They seemed to be paying closer attention than they used to.

Back at the window, he spoke to the empty room, voice still rough from sleep.

"I need a proper way to restore mental energy. This passive recovery isn’t going to be enough."

Several options surfaced at once.

The most straightforward was to save his monthly stipend and eventually buy a dedicated soul cultivation or mental force recovery technique from the academy’s contribution store. Such methods existed, and they were available to any student who accumulated enough points. The trouble was that an E-Rank’s allocation barely covered the basics. The good techniques were priced like vehicles, not like snacks. They were still cheap compared to the astronomical prices he had read about in novels, but he simply did not have that kind of money on hand right now.

I guess that isn’t all, he thought. I still need to find a reliable way to make money. My list of problems keeps getting longer.

Another route was to resonate with the Martial Saint version of himself again. That version almost certainly possessed refined methods for restoring mental force after heavy soul exertion. But the knowledge that had come with the awakening carried a quiet warning: the strongest parallel selves might sense a faint ripple when touched. He had no idea whether the Martial Saint Ash had noticed anything. Returning to the same string too soon, while he was still weak and the connection still raw, felt like knocking on the door of a very large, very dangerous house.

A third, short-term option was more elegant. When he fully recovered his mental energy, he could break space-time again through his martial soul and deliberately search for a parallel self who had walked the Mage Path. From that version he could copy a high-level mental cultivation technique designed specifically to sustain large expenditures of mental energy.

Any of the three could solve the problem eventually. For the moment he set the issue aside.

Priority number one was beginning true cultivation.

Outside the window, the western training fields were already filling with newly awakened students. Instructors moved among them, sorting groups and calling out basic instructions. A few students stood a little too straight, still carrying the quiet glow of yesterday’s results. Others stretched in quiet clusters, comparing notes in low voices. Every single one of them—whether they possessed an S-Rank soul, a High-Grade Spirit Root, or an E-Rank like himself—remained firmly within the Body Refining Realm.

That universal restriction was not arbitrary.

In the present era, no human under eighteen was permitted to begin true cosmic energy cultivation or undergo Martial Soul Awakening. The rule existed for grim historical reasons. The human body and soul did not reach full maturity until the age of eighteen. In the chaotic decades after the portals first opened, scientists and early cultivators had tried to accelerate the process. They used prototype Awakening Pillars on children and teenagers, hoping to produce a generation of powerhouses ahead of schedule.

The results had been catastrophic.

Many of the underage subjects died the moment the cosmic energy entered them. Their immature meridians and souls ruptured under the strain. Others underwent horrific mutations, twisting into unstable, mindless monsters that the first-generation awakeners had been forced to put down.

The experiments were shut down on the very first day and banned under the harshest penalties. Every schoolchild learned the story, usually with photographs that left a lasting impression. From that day forward, both Martial Soul Awakening and the official start of true cultivation were strictly limited to those who had reached eighteen years of age.

Ash watched the students below for another moment, then turned away from the window.

He was eighteen now. The restriction no longer applied to him.

It was time to begin.