Chapter 367 - 22: Day One

Chapter 367: Chapter 22: Day One

The door slid open with a soft mechanical click, and Ash stepped into Training Room Seven.

It was bigger than he had expected.

The floor was pale stone, so clean that he felt a little guilty about the dust on his shoes. The walls had a plain gray finish with no marks or decorations of any kind. The ceiling rose high enough for any technique he could think of, or any he had ever watched other students practice. There was almost no smell at all—only the faint dryness of air that had been filtered again and again until nothing remained but stillness.

He took it in slowly, one piece at a time.

On the left side of the room sat a simple resting area: a bed with a plain mattress, a small table, a chair, and a narrow shelf. Behind a short partition was a kitchen with a basic stove, a cold storage unit, and a sink. Next to that was a bathroom with a real shower instead of the narrow stall in his dorm. On the right wall stood the training equipment—a row of weighted dummies, a strength tester with a glowing readout stand, a speed track marked off in clear meters, and a few testing stations with panels he did not yet recognize.

And in the exact center of the floor lay the array.

It was a wide circle of silver lines set into the stone, about ten meters across, with a low platform resting in the middle. The pattern was complicated—many rings inside rings, each one precise and deliberate. Every line of it hummed faintly, as if the floor itself were breathing.

Ash let his spiritual sense sink down into the stone. He could feel the energy line Marsh had mentioned. It ran straight down under the building, thick and full and already waiting. He also noticed something else. His sense reached the walls and stopped cleanly there. A thin, seamless seal ran around the entire room. Nothing went out, and nothing came in. Nobody outside could see him or listen to him, and he could not sense anyone else either. That was a very good thing. He would not have to worry about anything leaking.

Ash nodded slowly to himself.

Okay. This is a lot better than my dorm.

He set the spatial bag down and began unpacking with quiet efficiency. The blanket and pillow went on the bed. The ration packs and energy drinks went into the cold storage. Soap and towels went into the bathroom. His terminal went face-down on the small table. He had already decided he would not touch it unless he truly needed it.

Then he took out one of the academy’s gray training sets—the plain top and pants with the small crest on the chest—and changed into it. It was an ordinary uniform, but it fit well across his newly refined shoulders. He rolled them once, shook out his arms, and felt the quiet density of muscle and tendon answer the movement.

Day one, he thought. Thirty days.

He walked to the center of the array and sat down on the low platform.

He closed his eyes and began.

Now no more disturbances.

Using his mental force, he guided the cosmic energy already present in his body and the air around him according to the 9-Cosmic Star Body Refinement Technique, one path at a time. The first loop closed cleanly. The second followed. By the time he reached the third, the nine black holes had already appeared around him in the same star-shaped diagram as before—each one flat and absolute black, each one ringed by a thin halo of bent light, each singularity stretched into a fine needle pointed straight at him.

The room answered them.

The silver lines in the floor lit up one ring after another, starting from the outermost circle and moving inward. Cosmic energy began to flow out of the array and into the chamber in a steady, rising tide. The air grew thick, then thicker still. The black holes spun faster, pulling the energy in as quickly as it arrived. What came out through the singularities was already purified to an extreme degree. All of it poured into his body without resistance.

There was no one to disturb him and nothing to hold back. He took a slow breath and went with it completely.

In the Cosmic Energy Distribution Office, Supervisor Marsh stood at the main console when the number on the central monitor jumped.

Training Room Seven: 0% ... 12% ... 29% ... 41%.

"Sir," the young technician said, a little too loudly. "The line is active. He’s started."

"I can see that."

"Forty-one percent of the ceiling in under thirty seconds."

"I can see that too. I have eyes too."

"uhm hmn, sorry sir."

The number kept rising. It slowed at 63 percent and held there, steady as a heartbeat. Marsh watched it without speaking.

The door to the control room opened, and Elder Corwin walked in with a cup of tea already in one hand. He was a small, round man with white eyebrows and a calm, almost grandfatherly face. He looked at the monitor for a long moment.

"He’s begun," Corwin said.

"Four minutes ago."

"I brought my own tea. You still owe me one, by the way." Corwin took a quiet sip. "Can we see inside?"

"No." Marsh did not turn around. "Private rooms are sealed. That’s the policy, and I’m not going to break it for one student. We can see the energy line and nothing else."

"Such a bummer, so we just guess."

"Yes, we estimate. The draw tells us how much he’s taking in. From that we can work out roughly how far along he is."

The technician pulled up a secondary chart. "At this rate, sir, he’s taking in what the entire eastern block uses in a day. Every hour."

"And how much of it is he actually using?" Corwin asked.

Nobody answered. They all knew the answer was that they simply did not know.

Corwin shrugged and drank his tea. "Well. We’ll see what he looks like in a month."

Inside the sealed room, Ash was five Star Cycles in when he noticed the problem again.

It was the blood.

The refinement of his blood was still running behind everything else, and it remained thinnest down the left side of his body, near the old bruise that had never healed properly. The Status Panel had flagged it that morning. His spiritual sense had shown him the exact location. In the dorm the limitation had not mattered much, because he had been working with whatever thin ambient energy the western block could give him. Now he had more than enough energy, and the blood loop had become the single thing holding the entire system back.

He slowed the technique for a moment and examined the flow carefully.

The pulse from the flesh stage was reaching the blood stage too late, and by the time it arrived on the left side it had already weakened. He rewrote the path with calm precision. He sent a branch of the pulse down the left side first, ahead of the main flow, and moved the joining point a fraction earlier. It was a small change. He tested it for three full cycles. The left side of his blood caught up with the right side, then pulled slightly ahead.

The entire refinement sped up. All nine parts moved faster because the slowest link had been corrected, and every other stage depended on the blood.

Good.

He continued. A few cycles later he found another small inefficiency, this time in the timing between the tendons and the bones. Their pulses overlapped for a fraction of a second, and the overlap was wasting a thin stream of energy. He shifted the tendon pulse a little earlier. That fixed it. The next cycle was noticeably cleaner.

He kept finding things. A regulating valve that opened a heartbeat too early. A secondary loop that could be shortened by a few centimeters of path. Each adjustment was small, and each one made the following cycle better. The technique was not finished. He did not think it ever would be fully finished. It was the best thing he had ever made, and he wanted to keep making it better.

Several hours passed in that quiet, focused state.

His mental energy had dropped to about forty-five percent when he finally allowed the cycle to wind down. He opened his eyes, called up the Status Panel with a thought, and read the first line.

Foundation Rebuild: 27%.

Nine percent higher than that morning, in a single uninterrupted session. He looked at the number for a long time.

That’s a big jump.

He closed the panel, ate a ration pack at the kitchen table without tasting much of it, and drank an energy drink. Then he returned to the platform, sat down again, and simply let his mental energy recover while the array continued to hum softly around him. There was no point in rushing. He still had twenty-nine days.

Six hours later, in the control room, the monitor had settled into a steady, unchanging number. The technician had left to get something to eat and returned. Marsh had not moved from the console. Corwin was on his third cup of tea.

"He hasn’t stopped," the technician said. "Not once. There was a small dip a while ago—probably a short break—then it went right back up. We’ve drawn more from the main reservoir today than the entire western block used last week."

"How’s the reservoir?" Corwin asked.

"Fine, sir. It’s just a lot."

Marsh pulled up another list on a side screen. Four names appeared. The fourth was Ash Apeiron.

Corwin looked at the other three. "How are the others getting on?"

"Calder is the one who worries me," Marsh said. "The pillar ranked her soul E-minus. It’s about the worst soul of the year. But she’s been lifting training blocks with her mind since yesterday, and the last one weighed ten tons. She doesn’t use her martial soul for any of it. She says she forgets she has one."

"And Brandt?"

"Cut a steel beam in half on his first day with a plain practice sword. No soul activation at all. His soul is E-rank too. The instructors were holding their breath for the entire test."

"And Wen?"

"His senses already cover the whole eastern block, and he’s completely untrained. He says it’s like having a second pair of ears." Marsh shook his head once. "Three of the worst martial souls the pillar has ever ranked, and three of the best raw talents I’ve seen in three years. They don’t need their souls. Their talents alone are stronger than most of the S-ranks’ souls."

"The pillar measures the soul capacity," Corwin said quietly. "It doesn’t measure what matters. The Soul Quality."

"That’s why we’re doing this."

The technician cleared his throat. "Sir, if I may. Should we draw up an agreement for the boy? Something with terms. All four of them are using a lot of resources, and none of them have signed anything."

"No," Marsh said.

"No," Corwin said at the same time.

The technician blinked. "Not even a basic one?"

"A contract is for someone you don’t trust to come back," Corwin said. "If those four are what we think they are, they’ll remember who gave them the room. If they’re not, a signature won’t change that."

Marsh did not add anything. He was still looking at the steady line on the monitor—the line that had not changed in six hours. They were pouring resources into a first-year with no questions asked and nothing in writing. If the Council asked about it later, he would have to explain. If this went wrong, it would be his name on the report.

He was not worried about that.

He was still looking at the line.

"Don’t disappoint us, boy," Marsh said quietly.

The control room stayed silent for a few seconds. The steady line on the monitor continued without change.

Elder Corwin took another slow sip of tea and set the cup down with a soft click.

"We really need a better process," he said. "Some reliable way to spot students who have weak martial soul capacity but heaven-defying soul quality. Otherwise we’re going to keep missing diamonds in the rough."

Marsh gave a small nod. "You don’t need to worry too much, Elder. I heard there’s already ongoing research to upgrade the Awakening Pillars. The goal is to make them detect soul quality, attributes, and even the true name of the martial soul."

Corwin raised one white eyebrow. "Is that so?"

"Yes, they recovered rune technology from one of the ruins on the other side," Marsh continued. "A specialized team is still cracking it. Once they succeed, we can expect another wave of technological and martial/immortal boom/advancement."

Corwin looked at the monitor again, where the energy line feeding Training Room Seven remained perfectly steady.

"That’s good news," he said. "If they succeed, the future of our civilization is looking brighter than it has in a long time."

"I Couldnt agree more Elder Coewin" Marsh said in agreement nodding his head.