Chapter 363: The Status Panel 2

Cosmic Energy

Capacity: Vast

Refining Speed: Fast

Stored Reserve: 9% (Low)

The description was short. Cosmic Energy was the amount of ambient energy his body could hold, how quickly he could turn it into something useful, and how much was currently sitting in storage. His capacity was Vast, which was a polite way for the panel to say it had stopped trying to measure. His refining speed was Fast. His stored reserve was nine percent.

That line had gone amber too. He could see why. Everything the black holes had pulled in for the last hour had been sent straight to work on his body. He had not saved any of it. His body had spent every drop as quickly as it arrived, which was good for the rebuild and bad for the idea of having something in the bank in case of emergency.

A thought struck him then.

“If I do get into a fight today,” he said, “I’ll be fighting with nine percent. Right.”

He decided to avoid fights for the day. It seemed like the sensible choice.

Abilities

Sword Intent (Fragment, Sealed)

Fire Intent (Fragment, Sealed)

Annihilation Intent (Fragment, Sealed)

Laws(Very fragmented insights)

Note: When an Intent is mastered, it will be moved to Soul.

This one he read slowly, and then he smiled again. The Intents were still sealed. They were sitting in his soul—small, bright, and out of reach—three seeds waiting for him to figure out how to plant them. The panel did not say how long that would take. It only said that once he mastered one, it would leave this section and go under Soul, where it belonged. An Intent came from the soul, after all. It was less a skill than a piece of the person who held it.

It was, he realized, a very good reason to try.

The last section was short.

Techniques

9-Cosmic Star Body Refinement Technique (Original, Ungraded)

Advanced Muay Thai (Practiced)

Martial Saint’s Battle Instincts (Copied, Integrating)

When his eyes landed on the word Original, a quiet, almost childish pride rose in his chest, mixed with a touch of disbelief.

I actually made something that didn’t exist before. Not a fan theory. An actual technique.

He felt his chest swell just a little. There it was, written down in the system’s own handwriting. He had made it. Nobody else had, at least in its record. And for once, a record said so.

Ungraded, the panel noted, because it did not know how to rate something that did not exist anywhere else. Ash decided he liked that even better. ℯ

He sat back, closed the panel with a thought, and then, because he could not help it, opened it again just to see the line one more time.

“Truly useful,” he said, and nodded to himself like a person who had just bought something expensive and felt very smart about it.

There was no point lying about it. For the first time since the pillar had gone dark the day before, he knew exactly where he stood.

The low-grade crystal dust on his desk had settled into a fine gray layer. Outside, he could hear students passing in the corridor, the occasional laugh, the soft whir of a cleaning drone. The light through the thin curtains had moved a little, and a pale stripe was lying across the foot of the bed. It was a perfectly ordinary late morning. And he had an entire panel of numbers in his head telling him that nothing about him was ordinary anymore.

He rolled his shoulders, straightened his back, and closed his eyes.

All right, he thought.

Time for Round two.

He was drawing his first breath to start the loop of the 9-Cosmic Star Body Refinement Technique when a chime rang through the room.

It was a clear, polite, two-note sound, and it was not the terminal. It was the dorm bell, the one mounted beside the door. Someone was outside.

Ash opened his eyes.

“Seriously? I was just getting in the mood.” he said under his breath.

He sat still for a few seconds, hoping it would go away. The bell rang again—the same two notes, patient and unhurried. Whoever was out there was not going anywhere.

Rylan? he wondered. No. Rylan had a soul integration session with Instructor Hale at ten, and he would have sent a message first. One of the students from the corridor, then? Maybe the girl who had asked if he was a transfer student. He considered that possibility for about a second and a half and decided it was unlikely.

He got to his feet and crossed the room. The wall beside the door held a small screen—a thumb-sized panel connected to the security camera in the corridor—and he tapped it awake.

There was a man standing outside his door.

He was tall and lean, in his late forties or early fifties, with iron-gray hair cut short and a face like a ledger—calm, exact, and unlikely to be impressed. His hands were clasped behind his back. He stood absolutely still. And he was wearing a robe of deep violet, with a pattern of fine silver lines running down the sleeves and across the shoulders, and a silver clasp at the collar.

Ash knew that uniform.

Every student at Azure Cloud Martial Academy did, if they had read the handbook. The robes of the academy’s officials were color-coded by department, and the deep violet with silver array-work belonged to only one office: The Cosmic Energy Distribution Office.

They were the people in charge of the great array beneath the administrative tower—the one that gathered cosmic energy from the sky and sent it, in careful measures, to every dormitory, classroom, and training field in the school.

There was exactly one reason someone from that office would be standing at the door of a third-floor room in the western block, in the middle of the morning.

It’s about the vortex, Ash thought. The drain. The news.

His mind began to move quickly.

The bulletin had said the student’s name would be withheld until the cultivation was complete. It was complete now. He had stopped. The array would have registered that the instant he did. They had narrowed the source to his corridor, probably his room, and now they had come to look at him with their own eyes.

He weighed the other possibilities and discarded them one by one. If the academy had wanted to punish him, they would have sent security, not an official from the Distribution Office. If they had wanted to stop him, they would have done it hours ago. They had not interfered once. They had even rerouted the array to make sure the other students were not harmed.

An official like that did not come to arrest a student. He came to see.

Ash felt his pulse pick up, just a little, and waited for the panic to come.

It did not come.

He checked, to be sure. There was a little flutter of nerves, the kind a person might feel before an exam they had studied for. But the fear that would have sat in his stomach yesterday—the helpless dread of an E-Rank whose secret was about to be found out—was gone. In its place was something quiet and steady and slightly amused. He was not a nobody trying to hide anymore. He had a martial soul that had made a system run for its life. He had a technique he had built with his own hands, and a body that had put him in arm’s reach of a Martial Apprentice before he had finished a fifth of the work.

He was a True Martial Genius. A genius did not hide behind a door.

He checked his robes, smoothed a crease in the sleeve, ran a hand through his hair, and then caught himself and grinned. It was a very good head of hair. There was no need to fix it.

The bell rang a third time.

Ash stepped forward, put his hand on the door, and opened it.