Aunt Mira left for the hospital at seven thirty with a packed lunch and a reminder about dinner. Lyanna followed twenty minutes later in full academy uniform, ponytail bouncing, already talking at full volume about something that had happened at school the day before she was even fully through the door. Uncle also left for work.
The apartment went quiet.
Nova changed into comfortable street clothes, checked his status panel once, and left. Time to tick off some task of his list.
Crimson-Peak Martial Hall sat on a quiet side street well away from the commercial district's prestigious gymnasiums — the kind of establishment that survived on reputation and dedication rather than foot traffic and marketing. The sign above the door was clean but not new. Inside, the practice floor was polished and the equipment well-maintained, the kind of care that said someone loved this place even if the membership numbers didn't reflect it. He entered the establishment.
A young woman stood barefoot at the center of the floor, eyes closed, both hands settled on an alloy spear in a meditation grip. Early twenties. Raven black hair pulled into a high ponytail that accentuated features that were sharp and martial and genuinely striking — beautiful in the way of someone who had never once considered whether they were being approachable, because approachability had simply never ranked highly on her list of priorities. Her posture carried eleven years of dedicated cultivation without advertising it.
The door chime ended her meditation.
Her eyes opened. She crossed to the front desk with the unhurried economy of someone who knew exactly how fast she needed to move to cover any distance, spear still in hand. The nameplate on the desk read Tory Ashford.
Looking at the teenager waiting at the desk, Tory felt the familiar small drop of disappointment that had become her default response to visitors over the past six months. Not a student again. Nobody who walked in looking like that was here to enroll.
Two years ago her father, Roderic Ashford, had walked into an Abyssal Rift on an expedition and had not walked back out. The martial hall had passed to her by default — she had the cultivation level to run it, the technical knowledge, and the dedication. What she didn't have, and had never had, was any meaningful ability to socialize and to make strangers feel welcome enough to hand over monthly tuition fees. Six months of sole proprietorship had produced exactly zero new student enrollments. The bankruptcy timeline was something she had stopped calculating precisely because the number was uncomfortable.
"Can I help you," she said. Statement, not question. Warmth was a resource she was rationing.
"I need to test my combat power," Nova said.
Another kid who just awakened and wants to see his numbers. She had seen this category before. They came, they tested, they left, they never came back, and she collected the testing fee and felt slightly worse about the hall's bankruptcy trajectory each time.
She led him to a corner of the hall where the Combat Power Analyzer and this was done without further a single conversation.
Nova thought to himself 'Is she this cold to all her customers?'
Before long they walked to a sleek metallic pillar approximately two meters tall with a crystalline impact surface, rated to absorb attacks up to Tier 8 without structural failure. This machine was freaking expensive.
The machine alone could buy the whole hall five times over, she was even contemplating if she should sell it, buy a cheaper one and use the rest to buy up resources for her advancement to tier 3. She didn't know why her father spent his whole fortune to buy this Tier 8 one, when he could have just bought a tier 5 or 6 Analyzer. This tier 8 analyzer was made of tier 8 materials from monster parts that was shock absorbent.
"Strike with full force. Fee is 500 points." She collected her payment through transfer and turned around.
She walked back to the practice floor.
"The display above the analyzer gives you your battle power — attack force multiplied by one hundred(AP x 100 = BP/CP)." She said as she left.
[AP – Attack Power]
[CP – Combat Power]
[BP – Battle Power ]
She returned to her spear form with her back to him. There was no reason to watch.
Nova stood alone in front of the machine and thought about what he had been doing since the physique evolution in the Trial Space.
He had been suppressing himself. He wasn't doing it deliberately, but instinctively, the way a person grips something new and powerful tightly before they understand how to hold it properly. The sudden restructuring had outpaced his control, and his body had responded by clamping everything down, filtering his output through limits it understood until the rest of him caught up. He hadn't let himself breathe fully since he woke up in this new body.
He decided to breathe now.
He released the suppression.
And my god what a suppression it was.
From the inside it felt like unclenching a fist he hadn't realized was closed.
From the outside — Tory felt it before she understood what she was feeling. Mid-spear-form, her foot planted for a pivot, every hair on her body stood up simultaneously. Her survival instincts — sharpened across years of Peak Tier 2 cultivation, calibrated to detect threats before her conscious mind finished processing — fired without giving her a specific target.
She turned around.
The teenager she had dismissed as another test-and-leave visitor was standing at her analyzer in a strike stance, and the aura coming off him was not the aura of a teenager.
It was the aura of a freaking monster.
It pressed against the air of the training hall like something dense and patient that had been waiting for permission to exist, and it was not asking for her opinion about it.
She watched him strike the machine.
Then she watched him keep striking it.
The first impact produced a sound that was wrong — too solid, too authoritative for the frame that had delivered it. Before she could finish processing that wrongness, the second impact came. Then the third. He wasn't testing. He was working — methodically, systematically, varying between his hands and his legs, every strike placed with the deliberate precision of someone trying to establish relationship between intention and output. The whole chamber picked up the vibration of it, the floor humming faintly beneath her feet, the weapons on the wall beginning to resonate in their racks.
Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.
The sound was rhythmic and relentless and deeply, fundamentally incorrect for what she was watching. That was a high school student. That was someone who had walked in off the street with no visible equipment, no cultivation aura that announced itself, nothing that should have been producing the kind of sustained impact she was currently feeling through the soles of her bare feet.
He stopped. Stood back. Rolled both his shoulder twice, apparently feeling satisfied with something.
The display on the analyzer read 67,300. That was tier 3 combat power and she knew it.
Tory walked toward him. Her professional composure made it approximately three steps before it gave up entirely.
"How— what is your energy stat? What cultivation method are you using? Your profession — what did you awaken? Your talent—"
Nova looked at her with genuine confusion. He had been in this hall for less than five minutes. He had met this person for the first time four minutes and thirty seconds ago. She ran an establishment with apparently no students in it and had just abandoned all pretense of professional distance to interrogate a stranger about his private cultivation details.
No wonder the hall is empty, he thought, not unkindly. She cannot talk to people at all.
"I have other things to do," he said. "Thank you for—"
"Wait—"
She moved. Tier 2 speed, faster than a civilian could track, her hand reaching for his arm before the word had fully left her mouth.
His body answered before his mind finished the instruction. He pivoted, the grab found nothing, and the counter came up naturally — a rising uppercut wrapped in the crimson shimmer of true Qi threading through blood and Qi, aimed at the point of her chin with the clean geometric efficiency of someone whose martial technique had moved past thought entirely.
She caught it.
The shockwave from the collision moved outward through the training hall in a visible concussive ring. Every weapon on the wall vibrated in its rack. The polished floor transmitted the impact in a wave that reached the walls and came back. Tory's hand absorbed it but her arm registered the experience and filed a report about it. It was freaking painful. But she reeled in the pain and kept a straight face.
She looked at her palm with genuine delight and pain.
"Perfect counter-technique," she said. "And the instinct behind it—"
Nova's expression had developed complications. He could feel no killing intent. This was not an attack. Which meant the situation had moved in a direction he had not anticipated, and his immediate working theory about where it was headed was something he was actively hoping to be wrong about.