The screen came back.
Not all at once. Piece by piece. Like a machine reassembling itself from the inside.
The pale blue interface he'd spent three days staring at was gone. In its place, something sharper. Cleaner. The tabs across the top had reformed into something new.
Main Panel / Quests / Skills / Training Grounds / System Shop / ??? / ...
Two question marks left. And that "..." at the end, still suggesting more existed beyond what he could see.
He exhaled slowly.
Okay. Let's see what you've been hiding.
He tapped Skills first.
The tab he'd been using since Thursday night was unrecognizable. Before: skill name, level, short description. That was it. A grocery list with no prices.
Now each skill had a full breakdown. Stats. Percentages. Progression bars.
He found Novice Runner at the top and read the numbers.
Movement Speed: +5%. Acceleration: +5%. Stamina Reduction: -5%.
He sat with that for a second.
Five percent. That's why I couldn't feel the difference when I ran on Friday. Five percent on a body with Agility 3 was rounding error. He'd been lapped by an elderly man in slippers and the skill had been quietly contributing a five percent improvement the entire time.
He swiped to Breath Control. The highest progression bar of anything he owned. Twenty-eight percent. Made sense — he'd been using it constantly. Every rep. Every kilometer. His body had kept the pattern going even when he hadn't been thinking about it.
Then the daily quest trio. Novice Upper Burst, Novice Core Anchor, Novice Deep Foundation. All sitting at fifteen percent. Identical. He'd been doing the same number of reps for each, and the system had apparently been paying attention to the exact ratio.
Efficient little thing.
Seven Common skills. Two Uncommon — Basic Stamina and Basic Pain Tolerance, earned during the ruins. The difference in their stat columns was obvious. Higher base bonuses. Better returns at every level. He'd earned those the hard way and it showed.
And then, at the bottom of the list:
Hero Dive — Lv.1 [0%] — Rarity: Rare.
He stared at the rarity tag.
Rare.
His belly-flop skill. The one with "Foorrrr Deeeemaaaa" in the flavor text. The thing he'd earned by divebombing a scorpion from eight meters up the side of an ancient portal while screaming a meme.
He read the actual numbers.
-50% all damage during a fall. +0.10x impact damage per meter fallen.
He did the math on reflex. A thirty-meter fall at Lv1 would already deal 3x impact damage while halving the damage to himself. At max level, with the scaling —
That's not a skill. That's a war crime with elevation requirements.
And it was sitting at zero percent because he hadn't used it since the desert. Because he was a rational, self-preserving human being who didn't routinely throw himself off of eight-meter structures.
He closed the skill and looked at the full picture. Ten skills. One free simulation. Three days of training. And a progression system that was starting to feel less like a game mechanic and more like something that actually rewarded how he used his body.
Skills I use daily grow. Skills I don't stagnate. Simple enough.
Then he pulled up the full progression chart.
Lv1 to Lv2: ten quests.
Lv2 to Lv3: a hundred quests.
Lv3 to Lv4: a thousand.
Lv4 to Lv5: ten thousand.
He stared at the numbers.
Added them up.
Stared at the ceiling.
Thirty years.
Eleven thousand, one hundred and ten daily quests to max a single Common skill. At ten kilometers a day, that was a hundred and eleven thousand kilometers of running. For Novice Runner alone. And the same math applied to Upper Burst, Core Anchor, Deep Foundation — a hundred reps a day, times eleven thousand days.
Over a million repetitions. Each.
The number sat in his head like something dropped from a great height.
"Hey. Big Sis."
Nothing.
"Thirty years to max four Common skills. Four. And that's assuming I never miss a single day."
[Dramatic.]
"I'm being realistic."
[You're being dramatic. As usual.]
"Easy for you to say. You're not the one doing a million push-ups."
A pause. Then:
[Would you prefer to stop doing the daily quests?]
His spine straightened involuntarily.
[I'm sure the next punishment location will be very educational.]
"...That's not what I said."
[Then what's the problem?]
"The problem is that thirty years is a long time to be doing the same four exercises every single day!"
Another pause. Longer this time.
[You won't need thirty years.]
He opened his eyes.
[Total progression time for those skills will be less than one year.]
The relief lasted exactly half a second before his brain caught up.
Less than one year. The math says thirty. She says one.
Which means either the progression accelerates…
He looked at the daily quest counter. Still sitting at the same numbers it had been since day one.
...or the daily quest gets harder.
He thought about the Ironman Triathlon. 3.8 kilometers of swimming, 180 kilometers of cycling, a full marathon. He thought about doing that. Every day.
He thought about it very carefully.
I should have kept my mouth shut.
[Anything else?]
"No," he said. "We're good."
He pushed the thirty-year crisis to the back of his head and kept moving.
Skill Synthesis was a short explanation. Two conditions. All skills involved must be at maximum level, and they must be compatible. The result: a higher rarity skill that started fresh at Lv1 with zero proficiency.
He read that twice.
So maxing Common skills wasn't a dead end. It was raw material. The same way an ore wasn't worthless just because it wasn't a sword yet. Max two or three compatible Commons, feed them into the system, and what came out would be Uncommon at minimum. With better base numbers at every level than anything that went in.
He looked at the daily quest skills. Upper Burst, Core Anchor, Deep Foundation, Breath Control. All Common. All being trained simultaneously.
They should be compatible. They'd better be compatible.
He didn't know what a synthesis of those four would produce. But the possibility alone made every rep feel different. Not just a hundred squats for a quarter point of Physique. Building material for something he couldn't see yet.
Synthesis needs Lv5. Lv5 needs time. Focus on what's in front of you.
He opened the System Shop.
The name told him everything. "Starter Shop." Not just "Shop." Starter. The kind of name that existed specifically to tell you this wasn't the final version. That the real thing was still locked behind something he hadn't reached yet.
He scrolled through the inventory anyway.
Potions. Weapons. Armor. Energy stones. Materials with names he couldn't pronounce. All priced in System Points.
Minor Recovery Potion — 500 SP. Basic Energy Stone — 800 SP. Iron Fang Short Sword (T1 Common) — 5,000 SP. Reinforced Leather Guard (T1 Common) — 4,500 SP.
He had 4,200 SP. Enough for potions and stones. Not enough for equipment.
The prices scaled fast. T1 Uncommon weapons started at twelve thousand. Above that, five digits minimum. Some items at the back of the list had prices that would take months of daily quests to reach.
He was about to close the tab when he saw it.
Near the bottom of the materials section. Small icon. Unassuming.
Synthesis Card — 10,000 SP. Required for skill synthesis.
He read it twice.
Then a third time.
"...You're joking."
The system didn't respond.
"Synthesis requires multiple skills at Lv5. That takes months of daily grinding. And when I finally get there — after all of that — I need to pay ten thousand points just to use it?"
Nothing.
"You gave me a television and now you're charging me for electricity."
[You're welcome for the television.]
"That wasn't a compliment!"
[Sounded like one.]
He pressed his palm flat against his forehead. Ten thousand SP. Seventeen days of daily quest rewards. For a single card. And he'd need multiple cards if he wanted to synthesize more than one set of skills. Which meant the real timeline wasn't max the skills, then synthesize. It was max the skills, save for the card, then synthesize, with the saving happening in parallel.
The system had turned long-term planning into a financial instrument and he was the one paying interest.
...This system is extortion with a blue interface.
He closed the Shop.
The Training Grounds tab felt different the moment he opened it.
Every other tab had been lists. Numbers. Clean data. This one had weight to it. Like opening a door into a room that was somehow bigger than the building it was built into.
A description loaded.
Training Grounds — Virtual Simulation Space.
Simulate combat against any target the user has directly observed in battle.
He read it again. Directly observed. Not footage. Not recordings. In person. The system needed to see what he'd seen — attack patterns, fighting style, the specific way a person moved when they were committing to a strike versus when they were baiting. The things that didn't show up cleanly on video.
Simulation accuracy depends on depth of information. Insufficient data — impossible simulation.
Death in simulation causes no real damage. All combat experience and skill development are retained.
First simulation: complimentary. Additional simulations: cost varies.
He sat with the last two lines for a long moment.
Die as many times as it takes. Keep everything he learned from every death. Start again. Die again. Keep learning.
He'd burned through the desert for three hours running from things that could kill him without noticing and come out with five skills. Imagine what he could extract from dying to an actual fighter, over and over, in a space where dying didn't matter.
He read the cost structure.
Base rate: approximately 1 SP per 3 seconds for a T1 target.
That was twenty SP per minute. Six hundred SP for thirty minutes. One full day of quest rewards for half an hour of simulated combat.
"What about higher tiers?"
[You can't beat a T1 and you're already looking up.]
"I'm asking a question."
[Focus on surviving the first ten seconds against a T1 before worrying about anything above it.]
He opened the simulation target list.
Empty.
Of course it was. He hadn't observed anyone fight. Not in person. Not closely enough for the system to build something real from it. The monsters in the desert didn't qualify — they weren't fighters. They were animals with threat ranges and instincts. The system needed technique. Intention. The patterns a trained person built over years.
One free simulation.
He stared at the empty target list.
No data.
One free simulation.
He closed the tab.
It would be a waste to use this opportunity on just anyone.
If the system could replicate what he saw—
Then he just needed something worth seeing.
He opened his phone.
Search.
Top powerhouses. Combat footage.
The screen filled instantly.
Names. Titles. Fights that didn't look real.
He watched for a few seconds.
Paused.
Replayed.
His eyes narrowed slightly.
…Yeah.
If he was going to use that simulation—
He wasn't starting at the bottom.