Nova woke up angry at himself.
He lay in the morning light and ran through what had happened the previous day. The Ancient Chaotic Immortal Ascension Method was supposed to leave him feeling stronger after each revolution, not drained. The technique's design was clear on that point — 50-fold cultivation speed, regeneration that never depleted, stamina that persisted as long as the Chaotic Flame burned. He had cultivated and then needed a nap like a child who had stayed up too late.
He knew why. His stats told the story plainly when he pulled them up in his mind:
[Strength: 2,000]
[Speed: 2,000]
[Spirit: 1,100]
[Energy (Ancient Chaotic Qi): 2,000]
[Luck: 14]
His spirit had been spending itself on control the entire session — gripping the reins of a body and Qi system operating nearly twice its management capacity, compensating constantly for the gap, wearing itself down doing a job it wasn't designed to carry alone. The fatigue wasn't from cultivation. It was from overexertion of the one stat that couldn't keep up.
He got up, drank some water, and started thinking about solutions.
Then Lyanna's knock came before he had dressed.
"Brother Nova! Come watch me practice!"
He came out.
She had pushed the table against the wall and cleared the living room floor with the deliberate preparation of someone who had planned this audience. She was in her academy uniform, hair in a ponytail style, and already bouncing slightly on her heels. She gave him exactly two seconds to position himself in the doorframe before she launched into her martial arts form.
The form was a mid-level academy sequence — three connected movements designed to build rotational power, each one drawing force from the previous the way a wave drew force from the water behind it. Lyanna moved through it with genuine commitment and almost no technical accuracy. Her leading elbow dropped on the entry. Her eyes moved to the third movement's target before the second movement had generated anything. Her rear foot lifted too early, bleeding the third movement's power into the floor instead of channeling it upward.
She finished and turned to him, breathing slightly hard. "Aren't I amazing?" She said boasting.
Nova pushed off the doorframe and walked over. He repositioned her feet without explanation. Adjusted her elbow to level. Said "don't move your eyes until your hips hit ninety degrees" and "rear foot stays down until the finish." Then stepped back.
She looked at him warily but still tried it with the expression of someone who thought they were already doing it correctly and was only humoring him.
The form clicked. The rotation engaged properly, the third movement arrived with force she had never felt from it before, her foot stayed grounded and the energy channeled upward the way it was supposed to. She stopped at the finish and stood still.
Then she turned and looked at him differently than she had a moment ago. Completely short of words.
"Again," Nova said.
She ran it again. He watched. The corrections had cleaned the gross errors but there were subtler ones underneath — the angle of her wrist on the chamber, the breath timing between movements, the way her shoulder was absorbing force that should have passed through to her striking surface. He told her about each one in the order they mattered.
She ran it again. Better.
"Your breath is wrong," he said. "You're holding through the pivot. Exhale at the rotation peak."
"I thought you were supposed to hold for power."
"That's for static force. You're generating rotational force. They work differently."
She tried it with the new breath timing and the difference was immediate enough that she made a sound of genuine surprise. Her eyes went to him again.
"Were you always this good at this?"
Nova picked up a pen from the side table and rolled it between his fingers. "I was always this good at this. You just weren't asking."
She stared at him for a moment. Then she went back to the form.
He kept feeding her corrections — small ones now, refinements rather than structural fixes. But his mind had moved beyond corrections. He was looking at the underlying framework of what she was practicing and comparing it to what that framework could be. The academy form was functional but conservative, designed for the widest possible range of students rather than for a student with Lyanna's specific physical attributes and movement tendencies.
He could see what the technique wanted to become for her specifically. The adjustments weren't arbitrary — they followed from the way she naturally generated power, the lines her body moved most efficiently along, the rhythm that her instincts kept trying to find within the academy form's prescribed choreography. He started guiding her toward those adjustments, not by explaining the theory but by positioning and demonstration, each correction building on the last.
Twenty minutes in, Lyanna was no longer practicing the academy form, which was a D-rank technique.
She was practicing a C-rank technique Nova had constructed around her specific movement pattern while she wasn't paying attention to anything except the corrections. The stance she had settled into was a martial cultivation stance, the energy flow through her body aligned with it in ways that the academy form had never achieved. She had preliminary proficiency in it — rough, unrefined, the form not yet seated in her muscle memory — but even at preliminary proficiency it was a hundred times more powerful than what she had started with.
Her blood and Qi were rising with each run-through. He could see it in the quality of her movement, the increasing speed and crispness of each sequence, the flush in her face that came from energy circulating properly through a body that had found its correct cultivation pattern.
She ran it again and pulled up short in the middle of the third movement, both hands on her knees.
"I am so hungry," she announced to the floor. "Why am I so hungry?"
"Your blood and Qi have been rising for the last forty minutes. Your body needs fuel."
She looked up at him with the expression of someone who had just been told that their tiredness had a name. "Is that normal?"
"It means the technique is working."
She straightened up and pointed at him. "What technique?"
"Oh wait, the technique I am practicing does feel different, oh you modified my technique."
"I improved it."
"Without telling me!"
"Would you have let me?"
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Looked at the space where she had been practicing, then back at him. "It does feel really different."
"Sit down," Nova said. "I'll cook."
She dropped onto the couch immediately, which suggested that the hunger was genuine and the argument could wait.
Nova went to the kitchen, checked that it was empty, and quietly brought out ingredients from his space ring.
Tier 3 beast meat — Moonshadow Rhino, two cuts of the high-density shoulder muscle that held up best to high-heat cooking. Spirit herbs from the market. Spirit rice. Spirit seasoning that he had bought on impulse the previous day and was now glad for. He laid everything on the counter and pulled up the knowledge he needed from his previous life.
Spirit food was a cooking discipline built on a specific principle — that dishes prepared with controlled energy infusion, using the right techniques and the right ingredients, could carry genuine cultivation benefits. The dish became a delivery mechanism, the energy absorbed through consumption rather than cultivation, gentler and more accessible than direct practice but meaningful in the right circumstances. The technique required the cook to imbue the dish with spirit Qi or blood and Qi or true Qi at specific stages of preparation, the energy integrated into the food itself rather than sitting on its surface.
Absolute Insight mapped the principles in his mind as he prepped the ingredients. Temperature control, timing, the specific moments in the cooking process when the dish was most receptive to energy infusion. The way certain ingredients acted as conductors for different types of energy. The relationship between flavor development and energy density — a properly prepared spirit dish tasted extraordinary not as a side effect but as a direct consequence of the same process that made it nutritionally exceptional.
He prepared everything with deliberate care. The spirit herbs went into the broth first, their compounds releasing into the liquid in a sequence that his Absolute Insight-enhanced understanding of chemistry tracked with the same precision he applied to technique construction. The beast meat was seasoned and prepared properly, the dense muscle fibers requiring specific treatment to break down in a way that would make the energy inside them accessible rather than locked.
Then he brought out the Chaotic Flame for the first time. I can't believe I am actually using this for cooking.
A controlled manifestation — small, precise, nothing visible from outside the kitchen. He held it over the dish in a state of careful management, letting the purification property work through the ingredients rather than the annihilation property. The flame found impurities in the cooking food and dissolved them — trace toxins in the beast meat, the bitter alkaloids that made unprepared spirit herbs unpleasant, compounds that served no nutritional purpose and now simply ceased to be. What remained was cleaner and more concentrated than anything a conventional cooking process would have produced.
The energy he infused was calibrated deliberately. He designed the release to be slow — not a flood that would shock the system of someone who wasn't a high-level cultivator, but a steady sustained release that would continue over weeks or months, the body absorbing it gradually at a rate it could integrate without strain. He thought about his aunt's old shoulder injury from a difficult surgery case two years ago. His uncle's knee that had been clicking since a minor incident at work. Lyanna's blood and Qi that had been climbing all morning and needed replenishment and then some.
He built those targets into the dish's energy profile.
The result, when he plated it, looked like it had no business coming from a home kitchen. The colors were too vibrant, the presentation too instinctively correct, the steam rising from each dish carrying an aroma that reached the living room before he had called anyone.
Lyanna appeared in the kitchen doorway with the speed of someone who had been waiting for exactly this signal.
"Dinner," Nova said. "Call Aunt Mira and Uncle Torven."
She was gone before he finished the sentence.
They came to the table and stopped.
Aunt Mira looked at the food spread across the dining table — the dishes arranged and presented in a way that suggested either extensive culinary training or something else entirely — and then looked at Nova with an expression that mixed genuine surprise with the particular suspicion of someone who knows their family member well enough to sense a gap in the story.
"Are you sure," she said carefully, "that it wasn't a spirit chef profession you awakened?"
"I'm pretty sure I didn't awaken anything close to spirit chef," Nova said, sitting down. "Maybe I have a hidden talent in cooking."