Chapter 76: The Ninth Pass

Two guards died before midsummer.

Joe knew neither well.

That did not stop him from recognizing their names.

He had seen them on the western assignment board.

One had joined four years earlier.

The other had been among the twenty recruits selected two springs before Joe entered Blackwood.

Their patrol had gone beyond the regular timber markers after a logging camp failed to send its scheduled signal. Six guards went out.

Four returned.

The compound did not stop because of it.

That struck Joe more than the deaths themselves.

Morning drills continued.

The canteen opened.

Patrol assignments were posted.

Halven shouted at new recruits.

Two names disappeared from one board and appeared on another list near the administrative hall.

Blackwood had procedures for death because death happened often enough to require them.

Simon stood beside Joe during the short memorial.

Neither spoke until they were walking back.

Then Simon said, “Daren knew one of them.”

Joe looked toward where Daren had remained behind.

“Yes.”

“They had children.”

Joe had already heard.

“One did.”

Simon was quiet.

Months earlier, twenty new recruits had looked like an administrative number.

Now Joe understood the arithmetic more clearly.

Retirement.

Disability.

Transfers.

Deaths.

Then another spring.

Another twenty.

-----------

Their own routes kept moving west.

Not every assignment.

That would have made the pattern too obvious.

A market patrol occasionally appeared between two timber circuits. A warehouse shift followed a forest-marker inspection. Then three days later Simon's team would be sent to check a forestry shelter almost a full day from the wall.

Garrick understood moderation.

Joe respected that intellectually.

He disliked it personally.

Simon had stopped complaining.

That was probably the most useful result of the entire affair.

He read the board, gathered the team and did the work.

Mira disliked the western assignments more openly than Simon did.

“You just recovered.”

“That was months ago.”

“You were carried home.”

“Technically I was carried part of the way.”

Mira stared.

Simon looked toward Joe for support.

Joe continued eating.

He had survived seventeen years by occasionally recognizing battles that belonged to other people.

-----------

His sixth Muscle tempering finished in early summer.

The seventh followed faster.

Not because the body had become easier to improve.

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The opposite.

Each additional pass found fewer obvious weaknesses.

Early tempering had changed broad things: force, endurance, control, recovery.

Later passes worked on differences that would once have escaped Joe entirely.

One side contracting slightly before the other.

A region near the hip carrying less efficiently under rotation.

The deep muscles around the shoulder tiring sooner during repeated weapon work.

Tiny inconsistencies.

Every Hard Work Pays Off made valid practice meaningful.

One Effort Equals a Hundred turned that meaning into terrifying accumulation.

Perfect Body integrated the gains instead of allowing one region to outgrow another, while Perfect Health let him recover from workloads that would have slowly damaged ordinary people.

No Regression ensured legitimate improvement stayed.

But none of those talents created food.

Or medicine.

Or time.

Joe's monthly expenses climbed again.

Edwin noticed immediately.

“You are eating my profit.”

“My share pays for it.”

“Emotionally, that does not help.”

Joe smiled.

Edwin increased his access to several strengthening medicines anyway.

Business had become more tense since Renford became a true Martial Artist, but Edwin's actual medicine operation remained profitable.

His political weight had fallen.

His competence had not.

------------

By late summer, the eighth pass settled.

Joe returned to the old freight warehouse after midnight.

He had not tested seriously since Muscle IV.

The loading frame there had changed little.

He began carefully.

Six hundred kilograms no longer felt like a test.

Six hundred fifty demanded attention.

At seven hundred, his muscles still had more.

His skeleton objected first.

Not with injury.

With warning.

Pressure through the wrists.

The knees.

The spine under load.

Joe stopped.

He did not need a number badly enough to damage himself discovering it.

That was the important result.

His Muscle had grown beyond what his current frame could fully express.

The problem was becoming structural.

Bone.

Joe lowered the weight and stood still for several breaths.

The greyhorn returned to mind.

Powerful muscle supported by a frame evolved to carry it.

His own body had reached the opposite arrangement.

The engine was beginning to exceed the chassis.

He smiled faintly.

That was useful information.

----------

The ninth tempering began during the first cool nights before Starlight.

It felt different almost immediately.

Not stronger in the simple sense.

More difficult.

Blood Energy moved through tissue that had already been refined repeatedly and found fewer places capable of meaningful change.

For several days Joe wondered whether the eighth pass had been the practical limit.

Then something shifted.

Instead of individual regions improving separately, the body began correcting transitions between them.

Hip into thigh.

Shoulder into back.

Abdominal wall into pelvis.

The small places where one chain of movement became another.

Joe understood.

The ninth pass was not merely refining muscle again.

It was integrating everything the previous eight had produced.

That explained why progress slowed despite his talents.

There was less raw weakness left to remove.

The work had become precision.

---------

The forest tested it before completion.

Simon’s team was returning from a boundary shelter near dusk when Daren raised a fist.

Everyone stopped.

Movement passed through brush ahead.

Not one animal.

Several.

Cole whispered, “Wolves?”

“No,” Daren said.

Joe heard the difference before he saw them.

Heavier.

Shorter breaths.

Three lean forest predators emerged between the trees, low-bodied with dark mottled coats and shoulders built heavier than ordinary wolves.

A fourth moved farther left.

Pack behavior.

Simon drew his weapon.

“Stay together.”

Correct.

The animals spread.

One forestry worker started backing away too quickly.

“Stop,” Simon said.

He stopped.

The first animal rushed.

The encounter became fast.

Daren intercepted one.

Simon and Cole drove another aside.

The third circled toward the worker.

Joe stepped across its path.

It changed direction.

So did he.

Dynamic Foundation Perfection made the adjustment almost effortless.

The animal sprang.

Joe struck once.

It hit the ground and did not rise.

The fourth broke immediately.

The others followed after several seconds of pressure.

No pursuit.

Simon did not even consider it.

Good.

They waited until the forest was quiet for several minutes before moving again.

Cole looked at the dead animal.

Then at Joe.

“You do that far too quickly.”

Joe wiped his weapon.

“It came directly at me.”

“That happened with the stag too.”

“Animals are cooperative.”

Daren laughed.

Simon did not.

He was studying Joe.

Joe met his eyes.

His brother looked away first.

That was new.

----------

The ninth pass completed three nights later.

There was no explosion of strength.

No dramatic sound.

Joe sat in his room, finished the circulation, and felt the final uneven region settle.

Then nothing.

He ran Blood Energy through the muscles again.

No meaningful refinement.

He changed the route slightly.

Still nothing.

Another attempt.

Nothing.

Joe stopped.

Not because he was tired.

Because there was no longer a useful place for the energy to go.

He stood.

The body felt unusually unified.

Muscles tightened without regions competing against one another. Force moved through the torso more cleanly. Balance changes occurred with less internal resistance. Even simple movements carried a compactness he had not possessed after the eighth pass.

Joe performed several controlled motions.

Slow first.

Then faster.

The limitation became obvious almost immediately.

Bone.

His muscles could produce more than his skeleton should safely transmit.

Pushing harder now would not improve the body.

It would misuse it.

Joe opened the panel.

Age: 17

Static Foundation — Lv5 — Perfection

Dynamic Foundation — Lv5 — Perfection

Muscle Tempering — Lv5 — Perfection

He stared at the last line for a while.

The panel's Perfection and the ninth physical tempering arrived together this time.

That did not make them the same thing.

One described mastery of the method.

The other described what he had done to his body with it.

Joe closed his eyes and considered the entire progression.

First tempering.

Second.

Third.

All the way to nine.

The ordinary Muscle Completion used by Blackwood was somewhere far behind him now.

Privately, he finally had a name for the state.

Muscle Great Completion.

No tenth pass suggested itself.

No hidden weakness responded when he searched.

For the first time since entering Muscle, that layer felt finished.

Joe stood near the window.

Outside, Blackwood had gone quiet.

The next step was Bone.

And unlike Muscle, he did not possess a complete Bone method.

Alex had been given one.

Garrick had one.

The Black family certainly possessed several.

The guard held fragments, principles and public instruction.

Joe had memory, medicine, observation, Foundations at Perfection and talents that rewarded legitimate effort.

He did not have the missing knowledge.

That distinction mattered.

Every Hard Work Pays Off could deepen what he genuinely practiced.

It could not teach something he had never learned.

One Effort Equals a Hundred multiplied valid progress.

It could not multiply nothing.

Joe smiled.

For once, strength was not the immediate problem.

Information was.

And information could be acquired.