Reminiscing about the past, Juno slightly scowled as the memories were quite unpleasant.
He remembered it with the clean precision his brain now applied to everything, storing detail with a completeness the old version of himself would have found excessive. The room had been around twenty-one degrees. The chair to his left had a slight creak in its left front leg. Jet had been sitting in it, black hair, straight-backed, forty beats per minute, and that heartbeat had been the first thing his newly sharpened hearing had found and refused to release.
The voices outside had arrived next, clear and specific and uninvited, a conversation down the hall arriving in full whether he wanted it or not. The street had been worse. NSQC had delivered itself in layers simultaneously, each one detailed, present, and demanding processing. His vision had been catching micro-movements he hadn't asked to notice. The sheets beneath him had been communicating their thread count directly to his fingertips. The room had smelled of twelve distinct things he could identify and two he couldn't.
Right after Awakening, all of these things hit him at once. It was all too strong, so he just passed out from the overload. The difference between before and after wasn't dramatic in any single dimension; it was cumulative, like the difference between being slightly drunk and being fully sober. He perceived things completely now, and everything he perceived completely required processing, and the processing had had no filter yet for relevance.
He explained this to Jet, too. It was quite hard, but he tried his best, of course.
He had managed to explain well enough for her to understand the gist. It helped that she could kind of figure it out since she was a Master with lots of experience, but it wasn't perfect. She spoke at some point, a bit too loudly. Juno had to ask her to whisper instead. She seemed extremely willing. The conversation Juno brought up next was done quickly.
He had asked her to knock him out again.
Jet had looked at him for a moment with an expression his enhanced perception had catalogued fully and his conscious mind had been too overwhelmed to interpret, and then she had done it, cleanly and without comment, and he had been grateful in the wordless way of someone who currently lacked the capacity for proper gratitude.
He had woken the next day considerably better.
His mind had apparently begun to naturally adapt to the disastrous situation. It had spent the night building filters it hadn't had time to build while conscious, and Jet's heartbeat had been relegated to the background by morning. The whole situation massively reminded Juno of how Sunny had to spend almost a week recuperating after becoming a Saint, since his Shadow Sense grew to cover dozens of kilometers and was able to sense things much better.
Everything else settled into something genuinely useful. His vision caught things now: the wear on Jet's left boot compared to her right, the tension at the corner of her jaw when she chose words carefully, the way the light changed during the day in patterns he mapped without intending to. His skin felt the faint vibration of footsteps before he heard them. The smell of the room told him who had been in it and roughly when.
This was useful in daily life, knowing who was where and what they were talking about. In combat, however, this would be even better. Luckily, Juno hadn't been in combat yet, so he didn't really know how much more useful his Innate Ability would be.
He could guess, though. Especially so because of another benefit his [Piercing Mind] gave him.
Perception.
He noticed things. Things that would have slid past him before simply didn't anymore.
On the morning of the second day, he had decided to do what Sunny had done, in the novel he had read in a different life. Meditate. Build the control manually that his brain hadn't yet built automatically, layer by layer, until the passive management became something close to instinct.
It had been the most tedious and genuinely painful thing he had ever done, not because of the meditation itself but because of what ran alongside it. His [Constellation of Avarice] decided to rear its ugly head when he was trying to concentrate. He would sometimes catch himself wanting random things, like to steal from the police, or worse yet, try to get Jet to "join" him. Whatever that meant.
It was beyond annoying, but at the same time, not too bad. Since he has always been a greedy person, simply becoming greedier was not a major Flaw. He couldn't guess how bad it was going to be later, but that was for future Juno to figure out.
On the second day, Jet had come by and mentioned, in the careful quiet voice she had adopted around him, that another Aspirant had arrived. A boy from the outskirts, currently under the Nightmare Spell, is down the hall. She wanted Juno in the same room as a precaution.
Juno had looked at the ceiling for a moment when she said that.
He knew who the boy was. He had known the moment Jet had mentioned the outskirts, the Nightmare Spell, the timing of it all. He had read about this boy. Had spent evenings in Bucharest following his story through thousands of chapters with his face three inches from a screen. And now that boy was two meters away in an enchanted sleep, and Juno was in the same room as him, and the universe apparently had a sense of humor.
No, not the universe.
Fate.
Fate had pulled its ugly and damned strings to make sure the body Juno woke up in was coincidentally in the same police station as Jet. The same one Sunny would end up in.
He had decided not to interfere. Not out of altruism — Juno was honest enough with himself to know that altruism was not his primary mode — but because the boy had a [Fated] attribute, and [Fated] meant the important things would happen the way they were supposed to happen regardless of Juno's involvement. The story would find its shape. It always did.
He would let it.
"Quietly," he had said to Jet, before she could continue. "Please."
She had nodded and adjusted without making a fuss, and he had majorly liked her for it.
He was truly beyond thankful for her. Jet had done so much for him without any complaint or trying to pull her status above him. She had gotten him water, food, and anything else he had needed.
Now, sitting cross-legged on the bed with his eyes open, Juno ran a quiet assessment.
His hearing was present and sharp and largely under control, the filters holding with only occasional maintenance required. He thought clearly. He noticed things. He was, finally, almost completely fine. Well, technically, he was way better than fine, but whatever.
'Alright,' he thought, with the quiet, focused anticipation of someone who had been waiting days for a specific moment and had absolutely no intention of waiting any longer.
'Memory, Attributes, and Aspect time, baby.'