Chapter 364: Supervisor Marsh

Ash opened the door.

The man standing outside looked exactly like what he had expected: an official.

Gray hair cut short and neat. A deep violet robe with fine silver stitching running down the sleeves and across the shoulders. A thin datapad held loosely in one hand. His face was calm, exact, and faintly tired, the kind of face that spent most of its days reading reports and invoices. He was tall, but he did not look intimidating. He looked like he had come to discuss an unpaid dorm fee.

Distribution Office, Ash thought, recognizing the violet from the academy handbook. Okay. This is about this morning. Definitely about this morning.

He kept his face as blank as he could. Rylan always said he was terrible at hiding things, so he tried extra hard.

The man glanced at the datapad, then at Ash’s face, then back at the datapad again.

“Ash Apeiron.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Supervisor Marsh, Cosmic Energy Distribution Office. I won’t take long, and I won’t come in.” He paused for a fraction of a second. “The photo in your file appears to be out of date.”

“Growth spurt,” Ash said.

“Evidently.” One gray eyebrow rose a millimeter and settled again. Ash got the distinct feeling that was a large reaction for this man.

Marsh studied the boy’s face a moment longer. The change was striking—cleaner lines, clearer skin, a quiet sharpness that hadn’t been there in the file photo. For a second he was mildly surprised. Then the feeling faded. He had seen far more dramatic transformations after a martial soul awakening. Once, years ago, he had watched a quiet first-year student grow actual dragon scales across his arms and shoulders the moment the pillar finished its work. That same student was now one of the rising champions of humanity, currently leading assaults on other worlds with defense and raw strength that most Martial Kings preferred not to test directly. Compared to that, a handsomer face was hardly worth noting.

Strenght was power in this world not beauty, well unless you are a woman.

Still, the boy in front of him was interesting for other reasons.

Marsh had read the file twice on the way up the stairs. It was very short.

Ash Apeiron

Eighteen years old.

E-Rank as of yesterday afternoon—though that classification was known to be completely false after viewing the abnormal near-total drainage of the Awakening Pillar.

Nothing else worth mentioning.

He had been Supervisor of the Cosmic Energy Distribution Office for eleven years. Connecting the dots had taken almost no effort at all.

Yesterday, an Awakening Pillar had drained down to three percent residual energy and overloaded under this boy’s hand. The technicians had spent the entire evening failing to explain it. This morning, a single room in the western block had emptied a dormitory’s worth of cosmic energy in under an hour. The room assignment list had taken about four seconds to produce a name, and it was the same name from the pillar report. Two strange events, less than a day apart, one boy. The Academic Council had settled the matter before midnight.

Their conclusion had been simple. Strong soul, certainly. Unusual, yes. A first-year who had somehow taken in an enormous amount of energy and made something of it—that was promising.

But Azure Cloud was full of promising first-years. A few rose and earned names. Most were interesting for a month and then settled into ordinary excellence.

To Marsh, a man who could level a large city with a single serious strike, Ash Apeiron and the every student in the academy were basically ants.

Maybe Ash was a slightly larger ant than the rest or from how he had looked yesterday. But ultimately still an ant.

Marsh still wanted to see for himself. Reports never told you how a soul held up under pressure.

So he let a little of his aura out.

A blue aura rushed out from him, Not much. A thousandth of it, maybe less, squeezed thin enough to stay contained inside the corridor of Ash Dorm room.

The doorframe groaned softly. Down the hall, somebody’s door rattled in its track. He was being extremely careful. If he was even a bit careless, the third floor would be flattened into a parking lot.

But surprisingly the boy did not drop or move one bit.

Any Rank 9 student in his position would have dropped to both knees.

He did not even step back. His eyes went slightly unfocused for a second, and he took one slow, controlled breath.

The moment Marsh’s aura seeped out of his body and touched the air, something at the back of Ash’s head switched on by itself.

He had not done anything. It was passive, and it simply started working. And what it told him made his stomach drop.

That’s not a man. That’s a mountain wearing a robe.

It did not feel dangerous the way a fighter feels dangerous. It felt big. Heavy. Huge. Completely still. Everything in the corridor seemed to lean toward him—the air, the energy in the walls, even the light.

He felt like this man could drop from above onto a whole city and leave a crater where the city used to be, and this same man was standing there holding a datapad as if he were checking a utility bill.

Ash had read plenty of novels where the author wrote “pressure like a mountain,” and he had always figured they were padding the chapter and increasing word counts. Turns out they weren’t.

He finally felt was they were saying.

The pressure itself finally anded on him and it was enormous. He felt every bit of it. He knew exactly how much weight was sitting in that corridor. It just did not press on him. It was there. He was fully aware of it. And that was all. His chest did not tighten. His knees did not shake.

Huh. That should hurt. Why doesn’t it hurt?

He had a few guesses. His soul was one of them. His mental strength was another. And there was a third reason that was just as important: his body itself. After the Star Cycles, his physique was already sitting near the level of an early Martial Apprentice. A body that strong simply refused to buckle under pressure that would have forced most Rank 9 students to their knees. The weight was still there—he could feel every bit of it—but it no longer had anything soft left to crush.

But first he had to deal with the other thing— His spiritual sense.

[AN: Some Backstory, i forgot to add in previous chapter, sorry.]

He had only properly discovered it a couple of hours ago.

It had started right after the first cultivation session. He had hung up on Rylan, washed off the grime, and run toward the cafeteria. On the way he kept noticing small things that should not have been noticeable. He could hear his own footsteps echo off a building he had not yet passed. In the cafeteria he had known exactly which table Rylan was sitting at before he even got through the doors. He had blamed it on sharper senses and hunger, and moved on.

Then he had sat down in the dorm to read the Status Panel, and the Mental Strength note had explained it. Mental Strength covered the size of his mental energy pool, how fast he thought, and how far his mind could reach. Spiritual sense was that reach, pushed outward.

Normal martial artists did not develop spiritual sense until the Martial Master realm—if they developed it at all. Only spiritual cultivators had it from the beginning, because they trained the mind first. Ash was a martial artist who had not even left the Body Refining Realm. He should not have had it yet.

But his mental strength was level with his body. His soul was something the panel could not put a number on. And the 9-Cosmic Star technique had refined his brain and spinal cord along with everything else. Between all of that, he had gotten it years early.

So he had closed his eyes and carefully pushed on it, just to see what would happen.

It had opened up like a door.

The range was about thirty meters in every direction, and everything inside that range he simply knew. He did not have to look or listen. He knew the exact condition of the dorm floor. He knew the cleaning drone three floors down was running low on oil in its left axle. He could feel cosmic energy moving through the walls—thick along the main array lines and thin near the corners—and the big new supply line the Distribution Office had opened into his own room, still wide open and still hungry. Outside, on the lawn behind the western block, he could feel every single blade of grass. A beetle was climbing the third one from the left. Two doors down, a fly was stuck against a window, and he could feel both of its wings beating. The left one had a tiny nick in it.

It had felt amazing. Honestly, it was one of the best things he had felt all week, and this week included awakening a martial soul that reached across the multiverse.

Then he had pointed the sense inward, and that had been even better. His whole body was there in full, living detail in perfect clarity. He could watch his blood moving, slow and warm. He could see the new muscle fibers tighten and relax with every heartbeat. He could feel the places where the star-crystal structure was still settling into the marrow of his bones. The Status Panel had told him what was happening. Spiritual sense showed him why.

It also showed him what still needed work. The blood really was the slowest, just like the panel said. Its refinement ran thinner down the left side of his body, near an old bruise from pad work that had never healed properly. His right shin still carried a hairline weak spot from a kick he had checked badly in his second year. One tendon in his left shoulder was a few percent tighter than the other. Nothing serious. But a day ago he would not have known any of it existed, and a year from now those tiny flaws would have cost him in a real fight. ℴ𝗆

Now I’ve got a to-do list, he had thought at the time. Nice.

That had all been two hours ago. He had been using the sense casually ever since. He had not expected the first truly large thing it caught to be a person.

The pressure lifted, clean and sudden. The doorframe stopped groaning.ℓ.