The first few minutes were just walking.
Honestly, that was enough to notice things he hadn't seen from the air that morning. The city felt different at ground level. Less like a polished postcard, more like a real place with layers.
Clean stone sidewalks. Trees arching overhead in canopies so thick the sunlight came through in scattered coins. Shops with minimalist glass fronts tucked between residential towers. Small cafés with outdoor seating, half-hidden behind planters taller than he was. People in school uniforms, office clothes, light armor, casual wear that looked normal until you noticed the faint glow of mana-threaded fabric or reinforced seams at the joints.
A little boy passed him carrying what looked like a floating schoolbag trailing obediently behind him like a well-trained pet.
He stared at it for two full seconds.
"Okay," he muttered. "Rude."
The streets got quieter the farther he moved from the academy district. The breeze carried the smell of leaves, distant water, and somewhere, grilled meat.
He checked the quest screen.
Run: 0/10,000 m
Still waiting. Of course. The quest required a pace of at least one kilometer every eight minutes. Walking didn't count.
He looked at the long road ahead. Then down at his body.
"This is going to be disgusting."
He started jogging. If you could call it that.
The first hundred meters were humiliation with forward momentum. Heavy footfalls. Breathing turning rough too early. Shoulders tensing. His entire body trying to negotiate a retreat before the war even started.
He checked the quest.
Run: 94/10,000
Good. It was counting.
He kept going. Not well. Not gracefully. But going.
Somewhere around the three hundred meter mark, a thought nudged him. Novice Runner. He'd earned the skill after twelve kilometers of running for his life in the ruins. It was supposed to increase running efficiency and reduce stamina drain. In theory.
In practice, he felt exactly the same.
His lungs still burned. His legs still weighed a thousand kilograms each. If the skill was doing anything, it was hiding it well.
Maybe it's too low level. Maybe it only matters at higher tiers. Maybe I'm just too out of shape for a five percent boost to register on whatever disaster this body is.
He didn't know. He shelved it.
By the time he reached the next major intersection, his lungs were already on fire. Sweat crawled down his neck in itchy lines. His thighs felt like they'd been packed with wet sand. Every step sent a dull shock through his knees.
People overtook him.
A middle-aged office worker overtook him.
A woman carrying groceries overtook him.
Then an old man in slippers passed him with the kind of casual speed that felt personally insulting.
He refused to let that break him emotionally.
The city blurred into fragments. Green canopy overhead. White pavement underfoot. A fountain flashing silver in his peripheral vision. His own breathing. People turning to look. His pulse hammering inside his skull.
17:21Run: 1,738/10,000
Not enough. He kept going.
At some point the academy district gave way to a more commercial zone. Larger storefronts. Outdoor seating. A few cleaner-looking food streets. A low pedestrian bridge crossing a narrow canal lined with stone and lamps that hadn't lit yet, their crystals dormant in the daylight. The sort of place he would have appreciated a lot more if his lungs weren't trying to crawl out through his throat.
He slowed for a few seconds.
The quest counter stopped.
Of course it did.
"Wow," he wheezed. "So generous."
He forced himself back up to pace.
He was not giving the system another excuse to drop him into that place. The desert wasn't just a punishment. It was a death sentence with a timer. Three hours of monsters that could have torn him apart if he'd been slower, weaker, unluckier. He'd survived it once. The idea of going back, or somewhere worse, made his stomach twist in a way that had nothing to do with the running.
Not again. Never by choice.
He made a turn that deliberately took him away from the shortest route home. If he had to suffer anyway, he might as well milk the distance.
The sun dipped lower. The city went gold. Shadows stretched across the road. Leaves rustled overhead. Somewhere in the distance, music from a shopfront speaker. Somewhere closer, a pair of students laughed at something that probably had nothing to do with him.
Probably.
He didn't check. He was too busy not dying.
17:49Run: 4,289/10,000
Halfway to home. Not halfway to the quest.
He cut through a quieter residential lane and nearly tripped over his own feet when the road sloped upward.
His body was done negotiating. His calves were tight. His lower back ached. Sweat had soaked through the collar of his uniform shirt and turned the fabric into a punishment device. Every inhale felt hot. Every exhale tasted faintly metallic.
He slowed again.
The counter froze again.
"Fuck you too," he muttered.
Then pushed forward.
The next stretch took him alongside a long greenbelt lined with absurdly well-maintained trees and jogging paths. The wealthy district's idea of public fitness. The kind of place designed to make exercise look noble and elegant.
He was ruining the aesthetic with every desperate step.
Still, it gave him what he needed. Distance.
He ran loops through it. One long curve. Then another. Then a shorter one when his body started negotiating surrender terms.
Each time he checked, the number had climbed. That was enough.
18:16Run: 7,123/10,000
Better. Still disgusting.
The sky was cooling now. Not cold. Just less cruel. The temperature dropping with the light. Comfortable weather for a normal person.
He was a portable heat disaster.
By the time he finally turned toward his apartment district, his shirt was plastered to his back and his vision had narrowed slightly around the edges. The clean evening air smelled like leaves, water, and distant dinner.
His stomach growled.
"Shut up."
It did not shut up.
He kept running. At this point his form had become something between jogging and tactical collapse. His pace dipped. The quest stopped counting. He forced it back up. It started again.
So that was the game. Fine. He could play.
The last stretch was pure spite. No dignity. No rhythm. No technique. Just sweat, bad breathing, and a growing hatred of blue windows.
He passed his apartment building once. Kept going. Looped the block.
Run: 9,462/10,000
"Are you kidding me?"
A woman walking a tiny white dog gave him a concerned look.
He ignored both her and the dog.
One more loop.
This one was ugly. His knees hurt. His chest hurt. His feet hurt. His own shirt felt malicious. His entire body had been downgraded from "human" to "resentful wet machine."
He hit the final corner half-stumbling, half-running.
Then the window appeared.
18:43Run: 10,000/10,000
He stopped so abruptly he almost folded in half. For a second, all he could do was stand there, chest heaving, sweat dripping off his jaw.
The rest of the quest lit up beneath it.
Push-ups: 0/100Sit-ups: 0/100Squats: 0/100Run: CompleteTime until reset: 05:17:02
Five hours. Still three hundred reps.
A laugh escaped him. Thin. Breathless. Slightly unhinged.
He stepped into the lobby on legs that no longer felt like a reliable concept. Cold air hit him from the building's climate control. His overheated skin almost cried from gratitude.
The elevator's mirrored wall showed him exactly how bad he looked. Hair damp. Face flushed. Shirt stuck to him. Eyes half-dead.
He looked like a man who had just discovered cardio as a hostile force of nature.
The elevator doors opened. He crossed the hall, unlocked the apartment, and collapsed onto the sofa.
For a minute he just lay there. Breathing. The apartment was quiet. The last of the daylight spilled through the windows in amber strips.
Running's done. Three hundred reps to go. Five hours.
I can do this.
He sat up. Kicked off his shoes. Changed out of the destroyed uniform.
Then got to work.
Squats first.
One. His thighs protested immediately. Two. His knees joined the complaint. Three. Already sweating again.
This body is seventeen years old. Seventeen. And three squats feel like this.
He kept going. Ten. Twenty. Break. Thirty-five. Break. His legs were shaking. Each rep was slower than the last. His form was collapsing. His spine was making sounds that spines should not make.
Between reps, a thought surfaced.
Running gave me Novice Runner. Twelve kilometers of survival in the ruins. Repeated action.
He dropped into another squat. Forty-one. Forty-two.
Push-ups work the upper body. Sit-ups work the core. Squats work the legs.
Forty-six. Break. Gasping on the floor.
If running can produce a skill through repeated action...
He stared at the ceiling.
Then maybe these can too.
The idea sat in his head like a small, stubborn flame. He didn't know if it was true. Big Sis had said "not everything meets the criteria." But push-ups, sit-ups, and squats were fundamental physical exercises. If running at sufficient volume counted, why wouldn't these?
It wasn't a guarantee. But it was a reason.
He got back up.
Fifty. Fifty-one.
By sixty, his legs felt like they were made of hot sand. By eighty, his vision was tunneling. By ninety, he was holding onto the kitchen counter between reps just to stay upright.
Squats: 100/100
He almost collapsed. Almost.
One down. Two to go.
Push-ups.
His arms shook after five. His gut touched the floor before his chest did.
"Come on."
Eight. Nine. Ten. Break. Face against the cold floor. Heart pounding.
His breathing was a mess. Ragged and shallow, his chest hitching on every rep. That wasn't going to work. Not for a hundred.
He forced himself to slow it down. Inhale on the way down. Exhale on the push. Steady. Deliberate. It didn't make the push-ups easier, but the rhythm of it gave his body something to hold onto between the burning.
If this works, I get three new skills today. Three. On top of the five from the ruins.
Eight skills in three days. Before awakening.
Never heard of this before.
Fifteen. Sixteen.
His phone buzzed on the counter.
He ignored it. Seventeen. Eighteen.
It buzzed again.
He stopped. Breathing hard. Reached up and pulled the phone down to eye level.
A message from a contact he'd never messaged before.
Wen Jiayi: Are you free tomorrow morning? I was thinking we could go to the shopping district. There's something I want to check, and I need a second opinion.
He stared at the screen. Lying face-down on the floor, arms trembling, sweat pooling beneath his chin.
A slow, stupid grin spread across his face.
Yan Ye: Sure. What time?
The reply came in less than thirty seconds.
Wen Jiayi: 10 AM? I'll send you the location.
Yan Ye: I'll be there.
He put the phone down.
The push-ups suddenly felt lighter.
They weren't.
But they felt like it.
Twenty-five. Thirty. Thirty-eight. Break. Forty-five. Break. Every break was shorter now. Not because his body had recovered. Because his brain had been given a reason to keep going that had nothing to do with the system.
Push-ups: 100/100
He rolled onto his back. Stared at the ceiling. His arms felt like they'd been replaced with warm rubber.
One more.
Sit-ups.
His stomach was a mountain. Every curl upward felt like folding a mattress in half using only his spine. His abs burned by fifteen. By thirty, he was making sounds that didn't qualify as human language. By sixty, he'd stopped counting and was just moving. Up. Down. Up. Down.
Somewhere around seventy, he noticed his breathing had settled into the same rhythm he'd forced during push-ups. Inhale down. Exhale up. He hadn't decided to do it. His body had just kept it going, like muscle memory building itself in real time. It felt like the only thing keeping him from blacking out, so he leaned into it. Kept the pace. Kept the pattern.
By the time the counter hit ninety, he was shaking so hard the floor beneath him was vibrating.
Ninety-five.
His core seized. Pain shot across his abdomen.
Ninety-six.
Come on.
Ninety-seven.
His vision blurred.
Ninety-eight.
Every muscle in his torso was screaming.
Ninety-nine.
He couldn't feel his abs anymore. Just heat and pressure and a distant awareness that his body wanted to stop existing.
One hundred.
Sit-ups: 100/100
...
He lay on the floor. Spread-eagled. Breathing like he'd been pulled from underwater.
Done.
I actually did it.
He waited.
Nothing happened.
No reward screen. No attribute gains. No fanfare. The quest window just sat there with every counter filled and a single line at the bottom:
Time remaining: 1:23:7..6...5..
He stared at it for a long moment, then let his head drop back against the floor.
Right. Yesterday the system calculated everything at midnight. The quest resets at midnight. So the rewards come then too.
The clock on his phone read 22:36.
Less than an hour and a half left
He dragged himself to the sofa. Ordered food. Ate slowly, barely tasting it. His body was wrecked. His mind was foggy. But underneath all of that was something restless. Anticipation that wouldn't let him sink all the way into exhaustion.
If I'm right about the skills...
He shook his head. No point speculating. He'd know in an hour.
He set an alarm for 23:55. Just in case. Then leaned back and let his eyes close.
Not to sleep. Just to wait.
The minutes crawled.
He tried watching something on his phone. Couldn't focus. Tried reviewing what he knew about the awakening exam. The words blurred together. His body kept trying to pull him under, but every time he started drifting, a small spike of adrenaline dragged him back.
Stay awake. You need to see this.
The alarm pulled him back from the edge of sleep at 23:55. He hadn't fully gone under, but close enough that the sound made him flinch.
He sat up. Rubbed his face. Stared at the quest window still floating in the corner of his vision.
Awaiting reset for calculation.
Five minutes.
He counted them. Not literally. But close.
00:00
The quest window flickered.
Daily Quest — Calculating results.
Push-ups: 100/100 — CompleteSit-ups: 100/100 — CompleteSquats: 100/100 — CompleteRun: 10,000/10,000 — Complete
Result: Success.
Rewards:600 System PointsBody Recovery
The moment the words appeared, warmth spread through his body. Not from the outside. From the inside. Deep. Clean. Every sore muscle loosened. Every ache faded. The exhaustion that had been pressing against his skull all day lifted like fog burning off in the morning.
His body felt… reset. Not only restored, but clearly stronger. Like everything he'd destroyed today had been carefully rebuilt and upgraded.
He flexed his fingers.
That wasn't just recovery.
"Body Recovery," he murmured. "So that's what it does."
Then the next notification appeared.
Attribute Gains:Strength: +0.25Agility: +0.25Physique: +0.25Defense: +0.20
Huh?
He read it twice. Then a third time.
The numbers looked small. They were not small.
The average person before awakening sat at around 10 in each physical attribute. That was the baseline. Just being alive and reasonably active.
Getting to 14 meant regular training. Consistent effort.
Fifteen was where things started to break apart.
Past that, balance didn't last. People naturally leaned into one attribute. Strength. Agility. Physique. Whatever suited them. The rest lagged behind. Trying to keep everything even became hard and inefficient.
Eighteen meant years of intense training, disciplined nutrition, and good genetics.
Twenty was elite. Not just because of the numbers, but because people who reached that level had already learned how to use them. Years of training and combat experience.
And past twenty…
Every single point became exponentially harder. Special diets. Extreme training regimens. Diminishing returns that turned each fraction of a point into months of grinding.
Thirty points in any attribute before awakening should be impossible.
Right now, his Physique was 4. His Agility was 3.
But, if the daily quest kept giving him 0.25 per day...
In thirty days, that was 7.5 points. In sixty, fifteen. In ninety days… over twenty-two points added to each stat.
His Physique would go from 4 to over 26. His Agility from 3 to over 25.
Those weren't "catching up" numbers. Those were "leaving everyone behind" numbers.
The awakening exam is more than one year away. If he completed the quest every day until then, he wouldn't just match the students who'd been training for years. He'd blow past them.
By awakening day, his raw physical stats alone would put him at least the level of a T1 Mid, while every other student in his year was still fighting over scraps in T0.
His hands were shaking. Not from exhaustion this time.
That's insane. That's actually insane.
He paused.
Unless the gains decrease over time. Or cap out. Or the system decides I'm getting too much for free and adjusts.
He glanced at the quest window. Still there. Quiet. Unhelpful as always.
"Wouldn't cut my rewards after I've been so diligent. So obedient."
He kept his voice casual. Friendly. The tone of someone definitely not trying to get on the system's good side. "Your favorite host? The one who finishes every quest? Who never complains?"
Silence.
Big Sis didn't respond.
He snorted. Of course. She only talked when she wanted to. When it entertained her. When it served whatever agenda was ticking behind those blue windows.
Fine. Keep your secrets for now.
Then the final notification appeared, and he sat up straight.
[Skills Learned]
Novice Upper Burst — Lv.1 Increases pushing/impact force with arms and frontal strike potency.
Novice Core Anchor — Lv.1 Increases core stability, knockback resistance, and force transfer between legs and torso.
Novice Deep Foundation — Lv.1 Increases lower body explosive power. Jump force, sprint acceleration, kick potency.
Breath Control — Lv.1 Improves breathing efficiency. Reduces stamina consumption during sustained activity and accelerates stamina recovery during rest.
Four skills.
Not three.
He stared at the last one. Breath Control. That wasn't from push-ups, sit-ups, or squats. Those were accounted for, one each, just like he'd predicted.
So where did the fourth one come from?
He thought back. The push-ups. The sit-ups. Somewhere around the midpoint he'd started deliberately controlling his breathing. Inhale down. Exhale up. Not because he'd planned it. Because his body had been falling apart and it was the only thing keeping him going.
And then during sit-ups, the pattern had continued on its own. Smooth. Consistent. Like his body had been learning it in real time.
So that counted? Breath control during exercise was enough to trigger a skill?
He looked at the description again. Stamina consumption. Stamina recovery. That was genuinely useful. Not flashy. Not powerful. But the kind of thing that compounded over time, that made everything else slightly cheaper.
Nine skills. Three days.
He let the number sit for a second. Then a thought hit him.
"Okay wait. These descriptions. 'Increases pushing force.' 'Reduces stamina consumption.' By how much? Like, is Novice Upper Burst giving me one percent more punch? Ten? Is it a flat number? Can I see actual stats somewhere?"
Nothing.
"Come on. You gave me these skills. You can't just hand someone a weapon and not tell them the caliber."
The system window pulsed once. Faintly. Like a blink.
Patience.
One word. Then it went still again.
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
"Patience? Patience? From the system that dropped me into a desert with zero warning on the fucking first day?"
No response.
"Y-you're unbelievable."
Still nothing. But he could have sworn, for just a second, the quest window glowed a shade brighter. Like she was laughing.
He shook his head. But the frustration didn't stick. Because "patience" meant the information existed. It wasn't that the system couldn't show him. It wouldn't. Not yet.
Which meant something was coming. An update. An evolution. Something.
He could work with that.
He leaned back into the sofa. Closed his eyes for a second.
Nine skills in three days. Four of them tonight. Attribute gains that made his head spin when he ran the math. A system that was still evolving, still hiding features behind whatever internal logic it ran on.
And the daily quest resets in twenty-four hours.
He opened his eyes.
0.25 Strength per day. 0.25 Agility. 0.25 Physique. 0.20 Defense. Compounding. Every single day.
My Physique is 4. In two months, it'll be over 19. In three months, over 26.
Twenty-six. When the pre-awakening elite tops out at twenty.
His pulse was doing something stupid. He could feel it in his neck, in his wrists, that dumb restless buzz that came before something big. Like the night before a trip. Like the moment before opening an exam result.
Except this wasn't a one-time thing. This was every day. Starting now. Starting yesterday.
He looked at his hands. Thick. Heavy. Soft in all the wrong places. The hands of a kid who hadn't moved in years.
Two months from now, these hands wouldn't be the same.
The kid who got lapped by an old man in slippers today would be a completely different person by awakening day. Faster, stronger, and more durable than students who'd been training their entire lives. And not one of them would have a clue how it happened.
He stood up. The body recovery had washed everything clean, but his muscles still flinched at the idea of moving again.
He ignored them.
Twenty squats. Twenty push-ups. Twenty sit-ups. Quick. Sloppy. Not for the quest. Twenty reps wasn't going to move any counter. He did them because he wanted the pattern in his body. Wanted the last thing his muscles remembered before sleep to be movement.
Then he showered. Changed. Set the alarm for early enough to get the run done before meeting Wen Jiayi.
The moment his head hit the pillow, one thought circled back.
Nine skills. Daily attribute gains. A system that's still growing.
And I'm only on day two.
He was asleep in under a minute.