Chapter 366 - 21: Thirty Days

Chapter 366: Chapter 21: Thirty Days

Ash pulled the spatial bag out of the desk drawer and looked around his room.

It was a small room. Packing it should have taken five minutes. It took forty, mostly because he kept stopping to argue with himself.

The easy things went in first. Three sets of gray academy robes. Towels, soap, toothbrush. A box of ration packs and a case of energy drinks—the kind students lived on when they planned long stretches of cultivation and had no time for the cafeteria. The pouch of low-grade energy crystals, now mostly reduced to dull gray dust due to his rapid devouring of all cosmic energy in a 300 meter radius. His terminal and the charger. He dropped everything in, and the bag swallowed it without complaint.

Then he reached the blanket.

A training room probably doesn’t have bedding, he told himself.

It was the soft one he had kept since his first year. The fabric was a little worn at the edges, but it still smelled faintly of the laundry detergent the dorm used.

Thirty days is a long time.

The blanket went into the bag. The pillow followed right after it.

He was about to seal the bag when his eyes caught the shelf above the desk. Three small figures from Eternal Sovereign’s Return The Movie. A keychain. A limited-edition poster he had never hung up because it was too nice to risk creasing. A few days ago he would have packed every one of them first, carefully, the way a person packs pieces of their own personality. Now he looked at the shelf and felt almost nothing.

He opened his terminal and checked his academy points.

Academy Points: 41.

He checked it again, in case the number had changed. It had not.

Here was the quiet truth about academy points. They were meant for the contribution store—for missions, mission rewards, techniques, and proper gear. Most students spent months carefully building a balance. Ash had treated his like a general allowance. The action figures and all the merch he owned had come out of that balance. So had the keychain. So had the premium Chapters of three different novels, and the locked final episodes of that one show where the last two episodes of every season sat behind a paywall. He had not done a mission in a long time. Missions took time, and he had always preferred to spend that time reading a webnovel or watching something.

I didn’t know I was going to need points.

He stood there a moment longer, and then he understood why the shelf no longer bothered him. A few days ago he had been an ordinary guy with maybe two hundred years to live if everything went well.

Every hour spent on something else had felt like an hour lost. That was no longer true. If he kept growing the way he intended to grow, he would have billions of years. He could binge every series ever made, twice, and still have time left over. The figures and the shows could wait. Cultivation could not. And he wanted that heavenly feeling of refinement again—the quiet, rolling pleasure of the Star Cycles rebuilding him from the inside.

He left the figures where they were.

They can wait. I’ve got time.

He sat down at the desk, opened a blank note on his terminal, and began typing. If he was going to disappear for a month, he wanted a real plan. One with clear goals and numbers.

Thirty days. Goals:

1. Keep rebuilding the foundation. The 9-Cosmic Star technique was at 18%. He wanted to see how far past that he could push it. Every day, every session, as much as the body could take. It also felt incredible, and he wanted to feel that again.

2. Digest everything from the Martial Saint. Not just the battle instincts. Everything. Life experience, comprehension, knowledge of weapon smithing, combat principles—all of it. He had copied a slice of it and it was still sitting in his head half-processed. He remembered the teep that morning, when his body had changed its mind halfway through the kick. That kind of conflict needed sorting out.

3. Practice and master the martial techniques he had copied. Reading about a technique was one thing. Doing it a thousand times until the body owned it was another.

4. Study the Sword, Fire, and Annihilation Intents. They were still sealed fragments—small and out of reach. He wanted to be able to manifest them himself, on purpose, whenever he chose. A manifested Intent would multiply his power in a fight. It would speed up his cultivation. According to the Saint’s memories, it would also give his physique real benefits—resistance, affinity, deeper structural changes. And once one was mastered, the panel would move it under Soul, where it belonged.

5. Recover mental energy to full, then perform another space-time jump. Find a Mage or spiritual cultivator version of himself and copy a proper mental cultivation technique.

He stopped typing and looked at that fifth line for a second.

The reason was simple, and a little embarrassing. Mental recovery techniques in the contribution store started at around two thousand points. He had forty-one.

He was too broke to buy one.

Even if he somehow gathered the points, buying a technique still meant learning it from scratch, which would eat weeks. But if he jumped to a version of himself who already knew a high-level mental method, he could copy the comprehension and understanding right along with it. No buying. No slow studying. He would simply know it.

That solves the points problem, he thought. It saves the study time too.

6. Later: find a reliable way to make money.

Then he added a seventh line so he would not forget the deadline hanging over everything.

7. Genesis Apex Assessment — thirty days. Top ten percent. Quintessence Fluid.

He read the whole list from top to bottom. It was a lot for thirty days, but when he stripped it down it really came to three things: cultivate, get stronger, and live longer. Everything else could wait.

Simple enough, he decided. I can handle it.

He saved the note and closed the terminal.

He had one more thing to do before he left. He opened his messages and found Rylan’s name.

’Going into lockdown cultivation for a month. Won’t be around till next month. Don’t tell anyone where.’

He read the message once, thought about adding something warmer, and sent it as it was.

In the east courtyard, Rylan was sitting cross-legged on the grass with twenty other B-Rank students while Instructor Hale walked up and down the rows, explaining how to feel a martial soul settle. Rylan could feel his own tortoise soul sitting heavy and calm in the middle of his chest. It was a comfortable feeling. He was not paying very much attention to Hale.

His terminal buzzed against his knee.

He checked it under his sleeve, and his eyes went wide.

"A month?"

He read it again. Lockdown cultivation. Won’t be around till next month. Don’t tell anyone where.

He typed back with his thumb, fast.

A MONTH??

We had a dinner deal.

I just said I’d save you a seat at dinner!!

The typing dots appeared and disappeared. Nothing came back. Rylan bit his lip.

He understood, mostly. The vortex this morning, the face, the way Ash had smiled over his soy milk. His friend had found something big. He was going to lock himself in a room and go at it with everything he had, and Rylan—who was a decent B-Rank with a nice sturdy tortoise—was going to sit in the sun and learn about integration.

He felt a little jealous. He was not proud of it, and he told himself to quit it.

He’s my best friend. He got a big break. Be happy.

He typed again.

Fine. Don’t die. Come out even better looking and I’ll forgive you.

A reply popped up almost immediately.

Deal. See you next month.

Rylan smiled down at his terminal.

"Something funny, Rylan?" Instructor Hale asked without looking over.

"No, sir," Rylan said. "Sorry."

"Pay attention."

"Yes, sir."

Hale went back to his lecture. Rylan put the terminal in his pocket and sat very straight, grinning at the grass.

If anyone asked where Ash had gone, he decided, he would say Ash was sulking about the E-Rank.

He could keep a secret.

Ash got the reply, laughed once under his breath, and zipped up the bag.

He took one last look around the room. The bed. The desk. The cracked bathroom mirror. The window with its thin curtains. Over the last two days a lot had happened in here. A system had tried to move in and then run away in terror. He had invented a technique that did not exist anywhere else. He had learned that his own soul was something nobody could measure.

He was going to miss the room a little. He had a feeling he would be back.

He slung the bag over his shoulder, stepped into the corridor, and locked the door behind him.

The corridor was still busy. The excitement from earlier had not completely faded, and small groups of students were still standing around talking in low voices. Ash walked through them with his head down.

The hum of the energy arrays in the walls had returned to normal. The extra supply was gone. A girl by the stairs was complaining that her circulation had gone back to its usual crawl. Ash felt a small flash of guilt and let it go. It was partly his fault. But he had a proper room now, and it would not happen again.

He took the stairs two at a time. His legs did it without any effort at all.

Outside, the late morning had warmed up. Ash crossed the courtyard toward the western training field with the bag on his shoulder and his spiritual sense turned carefully down.

He had figured that out on the way over. Thirty meters in every direction was fine in an empty corridor, but in a crowd it was far too much noise—every heartbeat, every footstep, every breath of every student in range. So he had learned to pull it in tight, down to about five meters. Enough to keep him from bumping into people, and not so much that it gave him a headache. It took a little concentration at first, and then it stayed that way.

The training field was packed. Groups of students ran drills in neat rows while instructors walked between them calling out corrections. Wider stance. Breathe from the belly. Stop looking at the S-Ranks and look at your own feet. In the far corner, a small group of seniors in black training uniforms sparred with an ease that Ash could not help watching for a second.

A few people looked at him as he passed. Two girls whispered. A boy dropped his water bottle. Ash gave them a polite nod and kept walking, trying not to let it go to his head.

It was hard not to.

But there was one thing he had to admit as he cut across the grass. He had not thought about the next episode of any show in hours, which had never happened before. He was not thinking about breakfast, or his forty-one points, or even the Assessment waiting at the end of the month. There was a door at the end of this walk, and behind it waited thirty days of nothing but him and the work.

He found he could not wait.

The western annex was easy to miss. It was a squat gray building tucked behind the far edge of the training field, with a plain steel door and a small sign over the entrance: Western Annex – Private Training Rooms. Nobody was standing around outside. Nobody had any reason to.

Ash went in.

The hallway inside was narrow, cool, and very quiet. The floor was polished concrete. Doors lined both sides, each numbered in small silver digits. Through his spiritual sense he could feel the arrays humming faintly inside every wall. Most of the rooms were empty. One or two held a faint warmth—a student inside, working quietly.

He walked down to the end of the hall.

Training Room Seven was the last door on the right. At first glance it looked like all the others—a plain gray door with a silver number. But there was a thin panel set into the frame beside it, and the edge of the panel glowed a faint, steady violet.

Ash could feel the line under the floor. It ran straight down from this room toward the main reservoir beneath the administrative tower—thick, wide, and quiet, waiting for him.

He took the card out of his pocket and held it up to the panel.

The violet light brightened. Something clicked deep in the lock. He heard the door’s mechanism begin to turn.

He took a deep breath.

Thirty days. Seven goals.

He was ready.

His first real journey toward invincibility had just begun.