Chapter 359 - 14: Cosmic Star Body Refinement 4

Chapter 359: Chapter 14: Cosmic Star Body Refinement 4

In the Energy Array Control Center beneath the administrative tower, the amber alarm suddenly stopped flashing.

The technician leaned forward, eyes locked on the holographic map. "Sir... the drain has stalled. Completely. The western block is stabilizing."

Supervisor Marsh straightened. On the main display the single bottomless room that had been swallowing energy like a black hole had gone quiet. The thick blue supply lines that had been feeding it were no longer being drained at an abnormal rate. The entire western wing was returning to normal density.

Elder Corwin set his teacup down with a soft click.

"Pull the room number," he said calmly. "And the student file."

The technician’s fingers flew across the interface. A moment later a student profile expanded in the air above the console.

Name: Ash Apeiron

Class: C

Martial Soul Rank: E

Last Recorded Realm: Body Refining Rank 7

Dormitory: Western Block, Third Floor, Room 314

Awakening Time: Yesterday, main ceremony

Marsh raised an eyebrow. "E-Rank. In the low block. And he just caused a phenomenon that pulled energy from half the western wing."

Corwin’s smile returned, smaller this time but sharper. "The pillar showed E. The energy reading yesterday said otherwise. It seems our quiet diamond has started polishing himself."

He turned to Marsh. "Prepare a preliminary benefit package. Priority access to a mid-grade private cultivation room for the next month, and a one-time allocation of Quintessence Fluid—standard first-tier amount. Enough to keep him from emptying the public arrays again, and enough to accelerate his foundation without drawing too much attention."

Marsh nodded. "I’ll have someone deliver it quietly this afternoon. We can’t have another morning like this. The other students in that corridor lost almost an hour of cultivation."

"Exactly," Corwin said. "Make sure it doesn’t happen again. At least not without warning."

Meanwhile, in the western dormitory corridor, the pressure that had blanketed the entire floor finally lifted.

Doors slid open one after another. Students stepped out looking pale and relieved.

"It’s gone," a girl whispered, pressing a hand to her chest. "Whatever it was... it stopped."

A boy from the room next to Ash’s leaned against the wall and let out a long breath. "I thought I was going to pass out. The energy just vanished. I couldn’t even hold a single cycle."

Tessa stood in her doorway, still in her training clothes, staring at the ceiling as if she expected the spiral to return. "The academy better figure out what that was. If it happens every morning, none of us in the western block will get any cultivation done."

An older student further down the hall shook his head. "They’ll handle it. They always do. But yeah... that was not normal."

Quiet conversations continued as the students slowly returned to their rooms or headed toward the cafeteria, the strange weight finally gone from the air.

Back in Room 314, Ash tilted his head in front of the narrow mirror. The effect improved.

Then his terminal chimed again, and he remembered the rice.

"Later," he told his reflection. "I’ll admire you later."

He ran.

The path from the western wing to the cafeteria was busy with students heading to breakfast. Every one of them turned to look as he went past. At first they only glanced. Then they looked again.

"Who is that?"

"Is he a new transfer? I’ve never seen him before."

"Look at his face. He doesn’t even need to be an awakener. With a face like that, he’s set for life with brand deals alone."

"Was there a guy like that in our year? I’d remember."

A boy walking toward him slowed, frowning, then stopped dead in the middle of the path. "Why does he look strangely familiar?"

A girl beside him gasped. "My god. It’s Ash."

"Ash? Ash Ash? From Class C?"

"That’s the greatest change in appearance I’ve ever seen after an awakening!"

Ash heard all of it and kept running.

He was a little too hungry to be embarrassed, and a little too well-mannered to stop and explain. After that first serious cultivation session with the 9-Cosmic Star Body Refinement Technique, his overall physique had already evolved far beyond what it had been only an hour earlier. Every muscle felt denser and more responsive. His bones carried a quiet strength that made each step land lighter and more powerful at the same time. The control he now held over his body felt countless times higher than before—so precise that the old, clumsy habits of Rank 7 body refined movement had simply vanished.

Without meaning to, he accelerated.

In every step he was utilizing every cell. Tiny adjustments in muscle fiber, tendon tension, and weight distribution happened automatically, guided by instincts that no longer felt foreign. Fragments of movement techniques he had copied from the Martial Saint—half-remembered principles of efficient force transfer and minimal wasted motion—slipped into his running form as if they had always belonged there. His body flowed forward with a smooth, explosive grace that made ordinary running look clumsy by comparison.

To the students around him he became little more than a blur. A sharp gust of wind followed in his wake as he shot past the path, ruffling clothes and scattering a few loose leaves. A first-year girl walking in the opposite direction dropped her stack of datapads in surprise. Ash’s hand moved almost on its own. He caught two of the falling pads without breaking stride, handed them back with a quick, apologetic smile, and was already several meters gone before she could even thank him.

Behind him, a small collective sound went through the crowd—half gasp, half murmur—like wind moving through tall grass.

His senses had expanded as well. The world felt sharper, clearer, and somehow slower, but there was no time to examine any of that now. Right now he needed to eat. He would investigate every change properly once he returned to the dorm.

In just a few seconds, the cafeteria doors came into view.

The cafeteria doors slid open, and the noise of five hundred students at breakfast rolled over him. He scanned the long rows of tables and spotted Rylan almost at once, in their usual place by the east window. A tray of cooling rice sat in front of him, and a second tray waited beside it with a bowl, a roll, and a cup of soy milk.

Ash started toward him.

The noise in the hall began to thin. It started near the doors and spread outward, table by table, as students looked up from their trays and forgot to put their spoons down. A boy at the nearest table stopped chewing with a dumpling halfway to his mouth. Two girls who had been arguing about something stopped in the middle of a sentence. A server stood motionless with a pitcher in his hand.

Ash, who had spent his whole life being perfectly pleasant and perfectly forgettable, felt the weight of a few hundred eyes settle on his shoulders. For the first time he understood what the beautiful people in his shows had been complaining about.

He kept walking.

Rylan looked up from his bread roll, saw him, and froze.

"Ash?" He put the roll down very slowly. "Is that you?"

"Sorry I’m late," Ash said, and sat. "Is that my tray? Thanks. I’m starving."

Rylan kept looking at him. He leaned over the table. He tilted his head from one side to the other, like someone checking a statue for cracks.

"What happened to your face?"

"Nothing happened to my face."

"Something absolutely happened to your face. Your face got an upgrade." Rylan narrowed his eyes. "Did you awaken a Beauty martial soul? Is that what this is? You got an E on the pillar and an S on the face?"

Ash nearly choked on his soy milk. "There’s no such thing as a beauty martial soul."

"There might be. You don’t know." Rylan sat back, shaking his head, though he was grinning. "I knew it. I knew something was off yesterday. Nobody takes an E that well. Now it makes sense. You were hiding a face. You definitely awakened a Beauty Martial Soul."

He did not look completely surprised when Ash studied him more closely. It was only a mild kind of astonishment, the kind a person might have at an unexpectedly good haircut.

Awakening changed people, and every student in the hall knew it. The martial soul rewrote the body in small, strange ways as it settled in. Rylan’s own shoulders had broadened since yesterday. A girl two tables over had eyes that had faded from brown to amber overnight. The twins from Class B had woken with matching streaks of white in their hair and were now deeply proud of it. A handful of people turned prettier, a few turned stranger, and nobody thought much of it.

But nobody had ever turned this much prettier, and Rylan knew it.

"Seriously, though," Rylan said, lowering his voice and leaning in. "Half the hall is staring at you. If you get any more handsome, I’m going to need a bodyguard just to sit next to you."

"You’re a B-Rank with a tortoise soul," Ash said. "You’re the bodyguard."

"Right. I forgot." Rylan nodded, deeply satisfied, and pushed the tray of rice across the table. "Eat. You look like you haven’t had a meal in ten years. Why do you look so thin?"

Ash picked up his spoon. Across the hall, a few hundred students were still watching him. To his mild surprise, he found that he did not mind it as much as he had expected.

He took his first bite of the rice.

It tasted like the best thing he had ever eaten.