Chapter 362: The Status Panel 1

The panel was still hanging in the air where the system had left it—a clean rectangle of pale blue light with thin silver edges. Ash sat cross-legged on the floor and looked at it for a long moment without doing anything.

He did not know how to use it. There were no buttons. There was no handle. When he reached out with one finger and tried to tap the corner, his hand passed straight through without so much as a ripple. That was a little disappointing. In the novels, the protagonist always seemed to know exactly how to operate his system on the first try, as if somebody had handed him a manual at birth.

It probably runs on thought, he decided. Everything else in my life does now.

So he tried.

He pictured the panel closing. It vanished.

He blinked, then thought of it again, and it reappeared.

He closed it, opened it, closed it once more.

He thought of it a little bigger and it grew.

He thought of it smaller and it shrank to the size of a playing card.

He experimented with the brightness until he settled on a soft blue that did not hurt his eyes.

After about two minutes of playing with it, a sudden thought made him stand up and walk to the narrow mirror beside the door. He opened the panel again and turned so he could see both himself and the space in front of him.

The pale blue rectangle was nowhere in the reflection.

Ash let out a quiet sigh of relief. Good. What kind of system panel would that be if anyone could just peep and see all my stats and abilities? The thought of walking around with his entire foundation floating in the air for everyone to peep and read was somehow more terrifying than the vortex he had created earlier. All his abilities and weaknesses will be leaked and potentially exploited by enemies.

He returned to the middle of the floor, made the panel full size again, took a slow breath, and began to read.

The panel was not complicated. It opened with a plain header at the top, and below it, in neat columns, everything the system had managed to learn about him in the three seconds it had spent inside his soul.

Host: Ash Apeiron

Age: 18

Realm: Body Refining Realm, Rank 7 (Middle Stage)

Foundation Rebuild: 18%

Ash stopped on the last line.

Eighteen percent. He had been cultivating for roughly an hour and ten minutes. In a little over an hour he had finished almost a fifth of an entire rebuild of his body. He had expected the number to be single digits, if the panel was kind.

Underneath that sat a breakdown. When he focused on it, the line expanded into nine smaller bars, each with a percentage beside it.

Body Refinement (9-Cosmic Star)

Skin: 19%

Flesh: 18%

Blood: 17%

Muscles: 18%

Tendons: 18%

Bones: 17%

Heart and Lungs: 18%

Liver, Kidneys, and Digestive Organs: 18%

Brain and Spinal Cord: 19%

The numbers were almost the same, which made sense. The nine black holes had refined all of them at once, and each part had pulled the others forward. The skin and the brain had gotten a few points ahead. The blood and the bones had lagged slightly behind. A faint marker beside the blood read slowest. He made a quiet note of it. He liked knowing which of his nine parts was a little lazy.

He scrolled down with a thought, and the next section opened.

Physical

Strength: 91

Speed: 87

Endurance: 96

Reference:

Ordinary adult – 10.

Standard early Martial Apprentice – 100.

Ash looked at the three numbers for a long time.

The descriptions appeared as he focused on each one. Strength was the greatest force his body could put into a single action—whether a punch, a lift, or a kick. Speed covered how fast he could move, how fast he could react, and how quickly the signal from his brain could reach the part of him that needed it. Endurance measured how long he could keep going before his body gave out, and how much damage he could take before that happened.

The reference line at the bottom was the part that mattered. An ordinary adult sat at ten. A freshly broken-through Martial Apprentice—a cultivator who had completed the whole Body Refining Realm and stepped across into the next—was standardized at one hundred. Ash knew from the academy’s physical assessments that most Rank 9 peak students at his school sat somewhere in the sixties. The best of the S-Ranks might scrape seventy to eighty. The numbers on the panel put him beyond all of them. They were within arm’s reach of a Martial Apprentice, from a body that was still only a fifth of the way through its rebuild.

“That’s ridiculous,” he said to nobody. “I haven’t even finished or even reached quarter yet.”

For a brief moment he wondered what Kael Draven’s or Lira Voss’s numbers would look like right now. Then he smiled faintly and let the thought go. Their paths were their own. His was clearly heading somewhere else.

He moved down to the next section, and the layout changed.

Mental Strength: 92

Mental energy: 71% ℯ

Recovery rate: Slow

Note: Among martial artists, Mental Strength is usually far lower than physical stats, often less than half. Only spiritual cultivators or mages exceed their physical strength with their mental strength.

Ash read the note carefully, then read it again.

Mental Strength, the panel explained, measured the size of his mental energy pool, how fast he could think, and how quickly the pool refilled after use. That was the part he understood. The rest took a little longer to sink in.

It was a plain fact in the cultivation world that martial artists did not have a great deal of mental strength. A fighter who spent his life on bones, tendons, and muscle ended up with a body of iron and a mind of ordinary quality, and the gap between the two tended to widen the higher they climbed. A Rank 9 student who tested at sixty in Strength would probably test at twenty-five in Mental Strength, if that. The academy even had a saying for it: fists first, thoughts later. Only spiritual cultivators—the ones who trained the soul and mind first and the body later or never—had numbers that ran the other way around.

Ash’s numbers did not run either way. They ran level.

He sat back and thought about it. The reasons were not hard to find. His martial soul was one of them. The Boundless Origin was constantly feeding him energy and refining his soul in the background, and a stronger soul meant a stronger mind. The 9-Cosmic Star technique was another, because it refined every cell in his body, and the cells of his brain were no exception. The talents he had copied from the Martial Saint were a third, since a fragment of that man’s comprehension had come with them. None of these things would be enough on their own. Together, they made him something the cultivation world did not have a good word for. He was a martial artist whose mind kept pace with his body. He was an all-rounder.

“All-rounder,” he said, and rolled the word around in his mouth. “That sounds like a job title.”

He felt a little flicker of pride, then noticed the two lines below the number—Mental energy: 71% and Recovery rate: Slow. They had turned faintly amber. He frowned at them.

They were the only two lines on the panel that had changed color. The rest of the page was pale blue, and these two glowed softly, like a warning light on a dashboard. He did not need the panel to explain what that meant. He had known it since the moment he woke up. His mental stat was high, and his pool was large, and it refilled at the speed of a leaking bucket. It was by far his biggest weakness, and now it was written in amber for him to look at all day.

“Fine,” Ash told it. “I get it. I’m working on it.”

The panel did not reply. It was, after all, only a panel.

The next section was the one he had been waiting for. It did not open the way the others had. When he focused on it, the pale blue deepened to something nearer silver, and the text came slowly, as if the panel itself were being careful.

Soul

Value: ???

Unable to measure.

Martial Soul: Boundless Origin

? Multiversal Self-Resonance

? Soul Devouring

? Dual Cultivation Resonance

? Future Observation (Currently inaccessible – insufficient realm and mental strength)

Comprehension: ???

Ash read the line at the top again. Value: ???

He could not help smiling. He thought about the system’s last message—the one with the apology and the words “freakish monster” in it. It had gotten three seconds into a merge, and it had left so fast that it had forgotten to finish measuring. Of course the panel could not give him a number. The only thing in the world that could have measured his soul was the thing that had bolted out of it.

He read the description beneath it. Soul was the foundation of everything a cultivator was, it explained: martial soul, intent, comprehension, the strength to endure, and the bright core of a person that remained when the body was gone. It was where martial souls lived. It was where Intents were born. And it was where understanding came from—the quiet, wordless ability to see how a thing worked and why. Everything he had copied from the Martial Saint that had to do with understanding had landed here.

The martial soul was listed first. The Boundless Origin’s three known functions sat in a column beneath it. The fourth ability was not locked—it was simply beyond his current reach. His realm and mental strength were still too low to activate Future Observation. When he focused on the line, he felt a very faint, distant pull, like something on the other side of a closed door was waiting patiently. It would open when he was ready. Not before.

Comprehension had its own line. The panel simply listed it as ???, without a number or rank. A smaller note beside it said that the talent was still being integrated. He thought of the three-point-two percent he had managed to copy and decided he could live with that for now.

He went down to the next section.