The room they gave him had no identity.
Everything in it existed for a reason — the bed bolted to the floor, the table grown from the wall as a single seamless piece, the sink embedded into smooth paneling with no visible joints, no suggestion of weakness. The lighting was flat and even, engineered to erase shadows rather than cast them. There was no decoration. No personal trace. No indication that anyone had ever been here before him, or that anyone had ever left.
Lucien didn't mistake that for emptiness.
He stood in the center of the room for a moment after the door sealed behind him, letting his senses settle. The air was filtered and faintly chemical. Somewhere behind the walls, machinery hummed at a low, steady frequency. Beneath the floor, something pulsed — rhythmic, almost biological.
He stepped forward and pressed his hand flat against the wall.
Smooth. Reinforced. It didn't give anything back.
He traced the surface slowly, searching for seams or joins. There were none. This wasn't just durable construction — it was deliberate. Built to absorb force without yielding, to contain without showing the effort of containing.
He withdrew his hand and sat on the edge of the bed.
Germa didn't take anything without purpose. There would be a reason for this room, for him specifically being placed in it. So he filed the details away and waited, posture relaxed, attention quiet.
The door opened without warning.
The man who entered wasn't a soldier. Wasn't a scientist either. His stance carried something between the two — precise without being rigid, watchful without being cautious. He looked at Lucien the way someone looks at a variable they haven't yet solved.
"First session," he said. "You'll follow instructions. No questions."
Lucien stood.
That was enough.
The corridors were built to disorient. No windows, no markings, each turn erasing the memory of the last. Lucien didn't fight it. He tracked distance instead — the timing of his steps, the subtle shifts in air pressure between sealed sections, the faint changes in acoustic texture that told him when a room was large or small before he entered it.
By the time they reached the testing area, he already understood something important.
The facility wasn't uniform. It was layered. Each section separated from the last by more than just walls.
The first room looked, at a glance, like a training space. But the floor was marked with overlapping grids and angular paths, some etched into the surface, others illuminated. The walls were lined with sensor nodes — hundreds of them, positioned to track movement from every angle simultaneously. When Lucien stepped inside, the lighting narrowed and followed him.
"Stand on the mark."
He did.
What followed wasn't a test of strength or speed. It was something more precise than either. Commands came in rapid succession — forward, stop, shift left two degrees, hold — and the space between instruction and action was measured down to fractions of a second. The efficiency of each correction. The accuracy of each adjustment. His body reduced to a series of response intervals and deviation margins.
Then the room began to interfere.
The lighting shifted, distorting depth perception by degrees. Shadows appeared where geometry said there should be none. The floor responded to his steps, sections illuminating in sequence to force corrections mid-movement. Lucien adapted — not perfectly, but quickly, reading the system's rhythm even as it tried to break his.
He could feel it recalibrating around him. Learning his patterns in order to disrupt them.
They escalated. Commands overlapped. Margins narrowed until correct and incorrect existed in the same fraction of a second. His breathing was recorded. His balance. The angle of his shoulders on each correction. All of it converted into numbers before the motion had fully completed.
No one praised him. No one corrected him. They only watched.
When it ended, it ended without warning.
"Next room."
The second chamber was smaller. Heavier in some way that had nothing to do with the walls.
Four individuals entered around him, their footsteps deliberate and nearly silent. They positioned themselves at measured distances, forming a loose perimeter — and then they began to move. Not aggressively. Not toward him directly. But close enough that awareness of them became necessary.
Lucien kept his breathing even and let his perception expand.
Just enough Haki. A careful, controlled extension.
The shift was immediate — not in the room, but behind the glass. He felt the attention there sharpen. Someone had noticed the change in him, even though nothing visible had changed.
He extended a fraction further.
The figures around him clarified — not in detail, but in intent. He tracked the tension held differently in each body, the rhythm of their steps, the small hesitation in one of them when his awareness passed too close. One had moved into a position he recognized. Not aggressive. But first, if it came to that.
It didn't.
"That's enough."
The command cut through the room. The movement stopped instantly. Lucien let the Haki recede and returned to stillness, as if the last two minutes had been ordinary.
Behind the glass, someone was writing something down.
The facility's deeper sections felt different before he could see why. The corridors narrowed slightly. The seals on each door were heavier. Even the sound changed — more absorbed, less echo. This wasn't a space designed for broad testing. Everything here was refined, specific.
He heard the impact before he reached the window.
A sharp crack. Clean and final, the sound of metal under concentrated stress. His steps slowed without a conscious decision, drawn toward the observation glass set into the corridor wall.
Inside, a child stood alone.
She was small — too small against the machine in front of her, a structure of layered reinforced alloy built to absorb repeated force without failing. Her arm was still extended from the strike she'd just completed. At the point of contact, the metal had deformed inward — dented, surface warped, not yet broken.
Not yet.
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Remember 1 Chapter For Every 50 Power Stones.