Chapter 374 - 29: Levels Three to Seven

Chapter 374: Chapter 29: Levels Three to Seven

By the evening of Day Four, Ash had a routine.

He woke up in short blocks of three or four hours, whenever his body said it was done. He ate a ration pack and drank an energy drink while standing at the counter. He did a few stretches. Then he sat in the array and cultivated for five or six hours, took a break, ate again, and went straight back in.

On the second night he washed his robes in the bathroom sink because he was running out of clean ones and didn’t want to waste time asking for more. He hung them over the shower rail and stood there looking at them for a moment.

"Laundry," he said to the empty room. "I’m doing laundry in a sealed training room. Okay."

He talked to himself a lot now. It wasn’t because he was going strange. The room was so quiet that his own voice was the only sound he could add to it, and talking helped him think. He said good morning to the array. He gave himself short pep talks. He counted levels out loud.

"Layer two, done. Layer three, starting."

He had stopped checking the terminal completely. Most of the time he didn’t even know what hour it was. The only clock he used was the Status Panel.

Level three was the first one that felt different.

It wasn’t harder. The technique still ran smoothly, and the cycles went just as deep. But when he started the first loop, the array in the floor changed its sound. The low hum he had gotten used to dropped a whole tone, and the floor under his legs began to vibrate.

He turned his spiritual sense down into the stone and looked at the energy line. It was wider than it had been the day before. A lot wider.

"It’s pulling more," he said slowly. "Because I need more."

That was the rule he had worked out earlier, and now he could see it clearly. Every new layer needed almost double the energy of the one before it. Layer two had used a certain amount. Layer three used about twice that. He wasn’t working harder. His body was simply taking in more.

He did the math in his head to see where it was going.

"Layer four, double again. Five, double again. Six. Seven." He counted on his fingers. "By layer seven, that’s roughly thirty-two times what layer two took."

He let that number sit in the air for a moment.

"Okay," he said. "That’s a lot."

Then he shrugged and went back to work. There wasn’t much he could do about it. The array was there. The energy was there. He might as well use it.

Level three finished late that night.

Level four brought something he hadn’t expected.

He finished it around noon on Day Five and stood up to stretch. His heel came down on the stone floor.

There was a sharp crack.

He looked down. A thin line ran across the floor beside his foot. It wasn’t big, but it was real. He had just stood up. He hadn’t stomped or jumped. He had simply put his weight down normally.

His bones were so dense now that his own body was hard on the floor.

"I need to be more careful where I walk," he said, and carefully shifted his foot.

That was the new thing about level four. His body had gotten heavy in a way that had nothing to do with actual weight. The mass was the same, but his bones carried more material per inch and his muscles pushed with more force, so the floor felt it. He walked to the kitchen on the sides of his feet after that, just to be safe. It felt a bit silly. He did it anyway. He didn’t want to end up paying for extra damages.

Level five changed the technique itself.

He noticed it around the third hour. He was running the nine loops, keeping half an eye on the mental energy number, when he realized he hadn’t actively guided anything in a long time. The loops weren’t just running. They were adjusting each other.

The pulse from the skin loop was slightly ahead of the flesh loop. In earlier layers he had always fixed that by hand. Now the flesh loop noticed on its own and shifted its timing to match. The same thing was happening everywhere. The black holes were making small corrections by themselves, and the nine parts of the technique were fitting themselves together more tightly.

"It’s syncing up," he said, surprised. "By itself."

He checked the panel. Mental energy was falling so slowly he wasn’t sure it was falling at all. For the first time since he had built the technique, he was barely doing anything. He sat there with his hands on his knees while the whole system ran itself.

He thought about what that meant. He had built something, and it was learning. It wasn’t intelligent exactly. But the more he refined it, the better it worked, and the less it needed him.

"Good," Ash said. "That’s what I wanted."

He used the spare mental energy to push even harder.

Level six was the one where his senses came alive.

It happened while he was finishing the layer. He was resting between sessions, lying on the bed with his eyes closed, when he heard something. It was a thin, high, steady tone, so soft he could barely tell it was there.

He sat up and listened carefully. The sound was coming from the floor.

"That’s the energy line," he said. "I can hear it."

It wasn’t exactly hearing. It was more like a sense of vibration, somewhere between sound and touch, but it came through clearly. He could tell how full the line was, how fast the energy was flowing, and how much was coming in. He could feel the array breathing.

And it wasn’t the only thing. When he looked around the room he could see individual specks of dust floating in the light. He could see a single thread coming off the edge of the blanket. He could feel the temperature of the air against every inch of his skin, and it changed the moment he moved his hand.

His spiritual sense had grown too. Before, it had reached about forty-five meters. Now it was over a hundred. He could feel the whole annex, the training field beyond it, and a few people moving at the far edge of the grounds.

That last part made him pause. The training field was almost empty. A few weeks ago, at this hour, it would have been full of students running drills. Now there were hardly any.

Settling week, he thought. Everyone’s resting.

He didn’t think about it for long. He went back to the array.

By the time he reached level seven, the room itself had changed.

It had been getting louder for days, but now it was a steady, deep roar that he felt more in his chest than in his ears. The silver lines in the floor, which had been a soft glow at the beginning, were now white and almost too bright to look at directly. The air in the room grew hot. He took off his top, then his shoes, and sat in the middle of the array in just his training pants.

The energy line was as wide as he had ever felt it. It poured into the array and out through the nine black holes. The black holes spun so fast he couldn’t see their edges. The array was running at its absolute limit. It would stay there, he could tell, for the next few hours at least.

He stayed in it for nearly a whole day.

It wasn’t painful. It wasn’t even hard. It was just enormous. He sat there, calm and steady, while more energy than he had ever imagined moved through his body. The Star Cycles rebuilt him from the inside, layer after layer, denser and cleaner each time.

And while he sat there, he started to think about where it was all coming from.

It was the middle of the night. He was alone in a roaring room, with the line pouring cosmic energy into him at a rate that would have emptied an entire dormitory in minutes.

"This is the school’s energy," he said quietly.

He had thought about that before. But now, with the numbers so big, it felt different. The reservoir under the administrative tower was shared. It fed every dorm, every classroom, every training field. Students all over the academy were drawing from it right now, taking small amounts for their own work. And here he was, taking more in a single day than most of them would use in a year.

He felt a little sick about it.

He thought about Marsh standing at his door with a datapad, saying he would rather lose a room than a dormitory. He thought about Elder Corwin, who he had never even met, sending his regards. They had given him this room. They had set the line without asking for anything in return. He hadn’t signed a paper. He hadn’t promised a thing.

They had just trusted him.

"That’s a lot to give someone you don’t know," he said.

He thought about it for a long time. He didn’t feel guilty exactly. Guilt would have meant he thought he was doing something wrong. This was different. It was a weight—a good one—that he didn’t want to put down.

"I’m going to be worth it," he said. He said it out loud, slowly, so he would remember it. "Whatever this costs them, I’m going to be worth it."

Then he closed his eyes and kept going.

The level finished early the next morning.

He stopped the technique. The roar in the room dropped away. The black holes shrank and vanished. The white lines in the floor faded back to a soft glow, and the air slowly cooled. Ash sat in the silence for a full minute, breathing slowly, and then he did something he hadn’t done in days.

He thought about the outside.

He had been in this room for almost a week. He had used more cosmic energy than he could easily count. And in all that time, nobody had come.

Nobody had knocked on the door. Nobody had sent a message. Nobody had said "That’s enough," or "Slow down," or even "How are you doing?" He knew the room was sealed, and he knew Marsh had said the output would be monitored but not interfered with. But he had thought somebody would check on him by now. It had been six days.

In the dorm, somebody would have knocked on day two.

"Maybe they’re just being generous," he said.

It didn’t sound convincing, even to him.

He thought about it a little longer. There were a lot of possible reasons. Maybe the academy was just busy. Maybe it was settling week and everyone was being left alone. Maybe they trusted him, like Marsh had said. Or maybe they were watching.

He had no way to tell. And it made him a little uneasy to be using this much with nobody saying a word.

But nobody had told him to stop. So he wasn’t going to stop.

He got up and tested himself.

He walked to the wall of practice dummies and chose a new one—one of the first-stage Martial Apprentice models, the same kind he had cracked on Day Three with a single plain punch. He stood in front of it, shifted his weight, and threw the same punch with no energy and no technique.

The dummy didn’t crack.

It burst. The chest and shoulders came apart in a spray of fragments, and the rest of it fell over in three pieces. The force of the punch kept going and hit the wall behind it. A shallow dent appeared in the reinforced surface that had been built to take hits from Martial Apprentices.

Ash stared at the pieces.

"Right," he said. "I’ll... clean that up."

He swept up the fragments carefully, then sat down in the array and called up the panel.

Foundation Rebuild: Layer 7 (Complete)

Strength: 1,900

Speed: 1,700

Endurance: 2,100

Mental Strength: 950

Spiritual sense range: 110 m

He read the numbers slowly, and he read them twice.

A peak Martial Apprentice was around a thousand. That was the standard for someone who could level a few city blocks. Ash’s strength was almost twice that, and he was still, officially, in the Body Refining Realm. He had never even broken through.

"That’s not possible," he said.

But the number didn’t change.

He looked at it for a while. Then, for the first time in a few days, he allowed himself a small, quiet smile. Seven layers. Six days. He had done it all in a sealed room, alone, with nothing but a technique he had made himself.

It was a very big step, and he was still only at the beginning.

He closed the panel, took a drink of water, and started level eight.