After the sparring match concluded, Nova found a vending machine near the park entrance and bought two energy drinks. He held the lime-flavored one out to Seraphine without asking — he had remembered from somewhere in their childhood that she always picked lime — and she took it with the expression of someone still processing several things simultaneously.
She cracked it open and took a long pull, her cheeks still puffed with residual annoyance.
"You were cheating," she said.
Nova opened his own drink. "When exactly did I cheat?"
"I don't know yet. But you were." She swung her legs from the low wall she had claimed as a seat, glaring at him with the specific resentment of someone who had spent three years quietly outperforming him academically and physically and had just watched all of that get reorganized without her permission. "This match doesn't count. We'll see who scores higher in the Martial Aptitude Examination."
"Fine by me."
"I'm serious." She pointed the drink can at him. "Whoever scores lower has to be the winner's servant for a full day."
Nova looked at her over his can. "Those are high stakes."
"I want to know if you dare accept."
"I suppose I could—"
He looked at her.
Seraphine had her chin up and her eyes sharp, dark hair loose around her shoulders, the park lamp catching the porcelain quality of her skin. The branded black athletic top and white sports shorts she had worn for sparring did nothing to obscure that she had grown into a genuinely striking young woman at some point over the past three years without him having noticed it happening. Her narrow waist, the surprisingly mature proportions for her 1.55-meter frame, the toned legs from years of serious training. No wonder the class had designated her the class beauty years ago.
"If I win," he said slowly, "I want you to—"
Seraphine's face went red immediately. Her arms crossed over her chest. "W-what?! Be careful what you say! My father is a Tier 3 Warrior now! He will personally find you!"
"What are you thinking?" Nova kept his expression innocent. "If I win, I want you to wear a maid outfit for the day."
She stared at him. Then stared at him more. The red moved up to her ears as she processed what she had assumed he was about to say versus what he had actually said.
"Hmph!" She looked away. "We'll see who wins first."
They finished their drinks and fell into step toward the transit station, the path ahead lit by the park's lamp posts, the city visible beyond the tree line. The conversation moved easily — the way it moved between people who had known each other before they learned to be careful around people.
"How are your parents?" Nova asked.
"Fine. Dad got promoted last month. Mum's practice is still growing." Seraphine glanced at him. "What about your father? Still at the border garrison?"
"Still stationed. Same posting."
A short quiet came between them. The weight of it was familiar to both of them — the specific texture of teenagers who had grown up with parents doing dangerous work far away, parents who sent careful messages and came home less than they should.
Seraphine broke the quiet first. "Which Combat University are you thinking about? With your current strength you'd qualify for somewhere prestigious."
"I'll decide after the examination results."
She nodded. Then she reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a small vial and held it out to him.
He took it and recognized it immediately. Essence Restoration Elixir — high-grade genetic medicine, replenished cultivation potential, increased vitality reserves, repaired accumulated cellular fatigue. Market value above 100,000 points.
"Thank you," he said.
He looked at the vial for a moment. The elixir was completely useless to him. His cellular structure had converted significantly toward a Chaotic Energy Qi lifeform — conventional genetic medicine designed for standard human physiology had nothing meaningful to offer him at this stage. The vial's contents would interact with his current biology roughly the way rain interacted with an ocean.
But she had given it to him with genuine warmth. He could feel the thought behind it — the gesture of a person who cared and was expressing it with the most valuable practical thing she had to hand.
He pocketed it. He would pour it into the soup next time Aunt Mira was cooking. His uncle's knee, his aunt's shoulder — the elixir would do considerably more for them than it would for him, and it would do it quietly, dissolved into a family meal, no questions generated.
"You're really shameless," Seraphine said, her tone carrying affection rather than actual criticism.
"Want me to return it?"
"There's no taking back what I've given. That's final." She lifted her chin with exaggerated dignity.
Nova smiled and was about to respond when something shifted at the edge of his senses.
He stopped walking.
His hand moved without conscious decision, closing around Seraphine's wrist and pulling her gently to a halt beside him.
"?" She turned to him with confusion. "What's wrong?"
He didn't answer immediately. His attention had fixed on a single-family residence to their right — lights off, windows dark, nothing immediately visible about it that should have triggered anything. A normal house on a normal residential street.
But the residual energy signature bleeding through its walls was not normal.
He recognized it.
When he had pushed Absolute Insight into full overload during the Void Cavity incident, capturing one second of Tier 7 through Tier 9 combat at fractions of light speed, he had also captured the signature of the King-Tier entity pressing through the dimensional tear. That signature had burned itself into his comprehension — the specific quality of its presence, the way its energy distorted the space around it, the particular wrongness of its dimensional signature. He had filed it the way Absolute Insight filed everything: completely and permanently.
What was bleeding through the walls of that house was a fragment of that signature. Weakened, degraded, corrupted — but the same fundamental character. They had seen the news reports on the transit screens while leaving the park: escaped contamination from the incident, the Federation advising civilians to report unusual behavior and stay away from affected areas. He had read those reports with the specific attention of someone who had been there and knew exactly what had caused the contamination.
This was exactly that.
The Federation news had been right to issue the warning.
"There's something contaminated in that house," he said quietly. "Residual from the King-Tier entity earlier today. Stay back."
Seraphine's eyes went to the house. "How do you know?"
"I saw the entity's signature during the incident. Recognized it just now."
She processed this and to her credit did not ask how a supposedly E-rank student had been close enough to the Void Cavity to capture a King-Tier entity's signature. She just took a step back.
Simultaneously, his spatial sense detected a distortion approximately fifteen meters away — a subtle fold in local space, the kind produced by someone using a spatial concealment technique to observe the area from concealment. Tier 4 at minimum, based on the sophistication of the spatial manipulation. The fold was clean and well-constructed. Whoever had made it knew what they were doing.
Someone was already investigating. He considered leaving it to them.
Then the house's front door exploded outward.
The figure burst through the wreckage of the door and launched directly toward them.
Seraphine's combat instincts kicked in immediately — her stance dropped, shadow energy rising around her hands, her eyes tracking the creature's trajectory with the focused calculation of someone who had trained for exactly this kind of situation. She was scared, anyone would be scared looking at that thing, but she was scared and ready rather than scared and frozen.
Nova raised one hand.
The Space Law activated with a trace of Chaotic Qi behind it — he released his spatial sense, locked the coordinates of the contaminated warrior's position, and commanded the law to hold them fixed. Space around the creature simply stopped cooperating with its momentum. It slammed into invisible resistance mid-lunge and hung there, suspended, its body twisting and straining against a force it could not perceive or push against. Its multiple eyes rolled. Its maw snapped at nothing. The pulsing tumors across its surface writhed as the abyssal corruption inside it tried to find a way through.
It was going nowhere.
Nova walked toward it.
Inside the spatial fold fifteen meters away, Seris Valthorn had her ice cream halfway to her mouth and had stopped moving entirely.
She was oriented toward the suspended contaminated warrior and the teenager who had locked it in place with spatial law manipulation, and the expression visible below her blindfold was not the polite professional interest she had been wearing since arriving in the area.
*Spatial talent,* she thought. *At that age. At that level of precision.*
She kept watching.
Nova reached the suspended creature and pressed his palm flat against the top of its head.
He channeled Ancient Chaotic Qi through his palm — not as a strike but as a sustained directed flow, the purification property of his Chaotic Qi working its way into the man's body layer by layer. The small Emberwood Flame in his core contributed its own purification character to the flow, the living fire nature of the talent lending the Chaotic Qi an additional cleansing quality as it moved through corrupted tissue. The abyssal contamination had taken root at the cellular level, twisted through muscle and bone and spiritual pathways, and the purifying Chaotic Qi found each tendril of it and dissolved it from the inside out.
The man screamed.
It was not the sound of something being killed. It was the sound of something being unmade from inside a living body, the corruption fighting the purification with the specific desperation of something that understood it was losing. The black tumors on his surface began shrinking, the purple light in the scattered eyes dimming as the abyssal energy sustaining them was consumed. The man's body convulsed under Nova's hand, the battle between what he had been and what the contamination had made him playing out in every muscle simultaneously.
Then the corruption broke.
The man collapsed the moment the last tendril of corruption dissolved. Nova caught him before he hit the ground and lowered him to the pavement. The abyssal contamination was gone — his spiritual pathways were clear, his cellular structure returning to its natural state, the twisted extra eyes already fading from his torso as the biological material that had formed them lost its unnatural sustaining force. He was unconscious and he would stay unconscious for a while, his body and soul exhausted from the purification process, but his breathing was steady and his life force signature was clean.
He would wake up confused and in pain. He would also wake up, which was the outcome that mattered.
Suddenly, although most of it dissolved under the purification flame. But several fragments — microscopic pieces of corrupted abyssal flesh, expelled in the moment the purification overwhelmed the main mass — shot outward from the man's body in different directions. One came toward Nova. He caught it between two fingers and let the Chaotic Qi in his hand dissolve it.
The rest flew toward Seraphine.
He was already moving to intercept when he caught the shift in the spatial fold fifteen meters away — the person inside it had seen the fragments and was already acting.
The spatial distortion he had detected fifteen meters away manifested simultaneously. A void tore open and consumed the fragment heading toward Seraphine, erasing it completely before it reached her.
The person who had been watching had decided to reveal themselves.
A young woman stepped through the spatial fold as though walking through a doorway only she could see. She was holding a three-scoop ice cream cone — she had been licking it throughout whatever she had just observed from concealment, apparently — and her blue hair fell in a gradient fade to her waist, bound at the ends with a silver clasp. A black silk blindfold covered her eyes completely. She was nineteen or twenty, beautiful in a way that her concealed eyes didn't diminish, her features relaxed into a pleasant expression that suggested she found the current situation interesting rather than alarming.
"Ah," she said, with the tone of someone confirming a theory. "Residual spiritual contamination from the King-Tier entity earlier. The fragments that survived the cleanup are corrupting anyone with weak spiritual defenses at the cellular level — twisting body and soul simultaneously into abyssal spawn." She licked her ice cream. "Troublesome."
Seraphine stared at the new arrival. Her brain was clearly working through too many inputs at once.
Nova studied the woman with the analytical attention he had been using for two days to read everything around him. Tier 4. Approximately LV39. Legendary-tier profession built around spatial and ocular abilities — the blindfold was a seal of some kind, limiting her power output to prevent collateral damage in a populated area. If she released it her battle power would spike considerably. The concealment technique she had been using in the spatial fold was sophisticated. She had been watching the entire encounter and had moved to intercept the fragment heading toward Seraphine with the specific timing of someone who had been ready to intervene but chosen to wait.
She had also not realized he had detected her in the fold before he struck. He kept that information to himself.
"Who are you?" he asked.
"Me?" She brightened. "Seris Valthorn! Just a beautiful university student who happened to be in the area investigating a few things." She grinned. "And you two are?"
"Seraphine Vex," Seraphine said immediately, still somewhat dazed.
Nova considered briefly. "Nova Stern."
"Nova Stern and Seraphine Vex!" Seris repeated, committing them to memory with visible cheerfulness. "You two should head home. I'll handle cleanup and continue the investigation. The Inspection Bureau will manage everything officially."
She looked at Nova — or rather, she oriented toward him the way someone without functional sight oriented toward a subject of interest, her awareness clearly operating through something other than her covered eyes. "Actually. Before you go." Her tone shifted slightly, the cheerfulness still present but something more focused underneath it. "Would you be interested in applying to Divine Martial University?"
Nova had already taken Seraphine's hand to guide her away from the contaminated site. He kept walking. "I'll consider it."
He did not look back, but he heard Seris murmur something behind them — quietly, to herself, not intended to carry. His hearing caught it anyway.
"Spatial Talent, Purification Talent? That boy's battle power felt completely wrong..."
Nova glanced at the house beside him. The man probably had a family inside based on the domestic layout visible through the collapsed front wall. They were likely cowering somewhere in the back rooms or most likely dead. The Inspection Bureau would find them dead or alive when they swept the area — Seris was already here, which meant the Bureau's response was close behind her.
---
They walked toward the transit station. Seraphine had not fully recovered from the last five minutes but she was functional, her composure returning in increments, the color coming back to her face as the immediate shock metabolized.
Then the system notifications arrived.
**[Ding! You have slain an LV7 Abyssal Contaminated Warrior]**
**[Life essence extracted and absorbed]**
**[Experience gained: +700]**
**[Stats gained from life essence absorption: +2 all attributes]**
**[Ding! Level increased to LV1! All attributes +10. Free attribute points +10 acquired.]**
**[Ding! Level increased to LV2! All attributes +10. Free attribute points +10 acquired.]**
**[Ding! You have reached Tier 1 Warrior status]**
**[Amplification opportunity available. Select attribute or ability to amplify by minimum 100,000x.]**
The notifications cascaded through his consciousness as they walked. Pure system energy materialized inside him — the planet's conversion of the contaminated warrior's life essence into usable experience, the ancient mechanism of the System Integration doing what it had been doing for three hundred years, rewarding the people who killed the things that threatened the world.
His energy surged outward briefly, the Chaotic Qi responding to the advancement, his life force spiking before he pulled it back down and contained it. It had lasted less than a second but Seraphine felt it — she turned to look at him with wide eyes.
"What just happened?"
"I reached Tier 1," Nova said. "The experience from the contaminated warrior pushed me over the threshold."
He paused.
And I have my first amplification opportunity since the awakening ceremony, he added internally. The first use of Unlimited Amplification since it had given him Absolute Insight in the Trial Spire.
One use per life-level advancement. He was at Tier 1 now.
He needed to choose carefully.
Seraphine had stopped walking entirely. She was staring at him with her mouth slightly open, working through the implications of what he had just said with the expression of someone whose model of events kept requiring revision.
"You just—" She stopped. "You've been LV0 this entire time."
"Yes."
"And you still—" She gestured back in the direction of the house. "With one punch."
"It was a Tier 1 contaminated warrior."
"Nova." She looked at him steadily. "I have been trying very hard not to ask questions tonight. But."
"But?"
"Are you going to be okay? With—" She stopped and started again. "Whatever you are. Whatever this is. Are you managing it safely?"
He looked at her. The genuine concern on her face was uncomplicated and real, the concern of a person who had just watched the gap between what she thought she knew about someone and what was actually true become very large very quickly, and was responding to that gap by asking about his safety rather than demanding explanations.
"Yes," he said. "I'm managing it."
She held his eyes for a moment. Then she nodded.
They walked the rest of the way to the transit station in comfortable quiet, and Nova let the amplification decision settle in his mind, turning it over with the same careful attention he gave everything that mattered.
One use. Minimum 100,000x. Permanent.
The right choice here would change everything that came after it.