The simulation research could fill a week. Finding the right fighters, studying their patterns, building profiles deep enough for the system to replicate. Patient, careful work.
He lasted twenty minutes on the videos before his brain pulled somewhere else.
Ten skills in three days. Every one by accident.
What happens when I try?
He closed the phone, finished eating, and sat on the couch. Two criteria fit what he'd observed so far. Repetition: perform an action enough times. Duration: sustain it past some invisible threshold. Some skills might need both. Some might need conditions he couldn't guess.
Ten data points and a theory built on sand.
Good enough. Start testing.
A hundred punches. His knuckles looked like raw meat. The wall looked fine.
No new skill.
But Pain Tolerance's progression bar had ticked up. The system registered the damage even if it didn't think punching concrete deserved its own category.
"Big Sis."
Nothing.
"Would punching a wall ever generate a skill?"
[No.]
"You could've mentioned that before I started."
[You didn't ask.]
He flexed his fingers. Fair point. Expensive, but fair.
Horse stance. Thighs parallel, back straight. A hundred and twelve seconds before a hundred and seventy-eight kilograms of ambition buckled and hit the floor.
No skill.
Plank. A hundred and five seconds. Face met carpet.
No skill.
The daily quest skills probably covered this territory already. Upper Burst, Core Anchor, Deep Foundation. No point competing with himself.
He needed edges. Skills the system hadn't mapped.
Swimming would work, but it'd take hours. The sword from the ruins was still untouched in his bedroom, but swinging a blade indoors was a fast way to remodel the apartment. Elemental skills, fire or lightning resistance, anything tied to mana. Had to be class-locked. Impossible before Awakening.
Senses? He'd earned Perception through passive awareness in the ruins. Could he force a single sense to produce something?
He sat by the window. Stared at a fixed point on the building across the street. Didn't blink.
Three minutes. Eyes watering. Nothing.
Closed his eyes. Focused on the farthest sound he could isolate.
Five minutes. Nothing.
He stood up. Sat down. Stood up.
Meditation. Every cultivation novel on Earth had the protagonist achieve enlightenment through sitting cross-legged and wanting it enough.
He sat on the living room floor. Closed his eyes.
Twenty minutes in, he'd calculated three synthesis paths, wondered if Jiayi had texted, debated the aerodynamic viability of pigeons, and ranked the ruins monsters by how much he never wanted to see them again.
Forty minutes. He tried harder. Let thoughts pass without chasing them.
A thought about dinner passed. He chased it.
One hour. He opened his eyes.
I'm not meditating. I'm sitting on the floor with extra steps.
His brain didn't do stillness. It did projections, worst-case simulations, and occasional tangents about birds.
"Big Sis. Any hints on how to—"
[You already know. Go do it.]
Half the day gone. Zero new skills. And she was right. He'd known all morning which one would work.
Fine.
Swimming.
The building's pool was Olympic-length and nearly empty at half past three. One elderly man doing backstroke. A woman reading on a lounger.
He got in.
The first laps were ugly. Arms slapping the surface, legs kicking foam, breathing whenever his mouth found air. He'd swum on Earth, a decade ago, sixty kilograms lighter. He hadn't been good then either.
By the fifteenth lap, Breath Control kicked in. Inhales syncing to strokes. The gasping smoothed into rhythm.
By the fortieth, the elderly man was gone. Two teenagers had taken the next lanes, cutting through the water fast enough to make him feel like a cargo barge in a speedboat harbor.
By the eightieth, his shoulders had stopped complaining. They'd gone quiet. The kind of quiet that meant the muscles had given up arguing and started failing without comment.
He stopped counting laps. The pool clock became the only anchor.
Afternoon crawled into evening. People came and went. The teenagers left. A middle-aged couple swam four laps and climbed out, laughing about something. By six he was alone, underwater lights turning the water pale blue.
At some point past the three-hour mark, his body tried to quit. Not dramatically. His arms simply stopped rising above the waterline. Each stroke became a half-stroke, pulling him forward through water that felt like it had thickened. His kick had degraded into a rhythmic twitch. Breath Control was the only reason he hadn't drowned.
He thought about stopping. The thought lasted two seconds. Then the ruins replaced it.
He kept moving.
Stroke. Breathe. Turn. Push. Each push weaker. His calves cramped twice. He hung on the lane divider, kneaded the muscle, pushed off again.
His brain went somewhere past thought. Not the meditation he'd failed at. Something more primitive. Exhaustion so total that the noise ran out of fuel.
6:45. 7:00. 7:15.
At 7:26, the notification appeared.
[Skill Acquired: Novice Swimmer | Lv.1]
He grabbed the pool edge and hung there. Chest heaving so hard the water pulsed.
Common. Passive. Five percent across the board.
He didn't know if the trigger had been time or distance or total effort. Probably couldn't know.
But it was a skill. The first one he'd gone hunting for.
He hauled himself out, limped to the elevator, and pressed the button with a finger that barely cooperated.
He ordered from Noble Leaf. Something high-calorie. Ate at the counter without registering the taste, every thought drifting toward midnight.
Body recovery. His shoulders, his calves, his swollen knuckles. Just a few more hours and the system would iron all of it out. Just a few—
The chopsticks stopped.
His mouth went dry. The food on his tongue turned to paste. He couldn't swallow. His pulse kicked up so fast it hurt.
Midnight. Quest.
He hadn't finished the quest.
His hand shot to his phone. Almost knocked it off the counter.
8:52 PM.
Fifty push-ups. Fifty sit-ups. Fifty squats. Ten kilometers. He'd done the first set that morning, but the run and the second set were sitting there uncompleted. Like a bill he'd forgotten to pay except the late fee was a one-way trip to ruins full of things that wanted him dead.
The ruins. Sand. Darkness. Mandibles clicking in corridors that smelled like centuries of death. Three hours of that. Things that moved faster than he could think.
He was on his feet before the thought finished forming. The nausea from standing didn't matter. Nothing mattered except not going back.
The gym was on the same floor as the pool. He'd walked past it dozens of times and never gone in.
Machines he'd never seen before lined the walls next to standard equipment. Treadmills along the windows. Mirrors everywhere. Three people, each locked in their own world.
He didn't look at the mirrors.
Push-ups. Corner. Floor. Go.
The first fifteen were mechanical. Shoulders howling from the pool, each rep like pressing through wet concrete. Breath Control held his lungs in rhythm. Everything above the lungs was on its own.
At twenty-eight, his arms shook badly enough that the reps turned into half-reps. He pressed up and barely locked out before gravity pulled him back down.
At thirty-six, his elbow buckled. Mat in his face. Metallic taste. Bit his tongue.
He spat. Pushed back up.
Thirty-seven. Thirty-eight.
Each one a negotiation. His brain saying up. His body saying no. The compromise: something that technically counted as a push-up if you didn't look too closely.
Fifty.
Rolled onto his back. Sweat pooling under his neck. The ceiling light buzzed above him like it had opinions.
Sit-ups gutted him. Every crunch folded a body that wasn't built for folding at this weight. He gagged twice during the last ten.
Squats were the worst. First rep, his legs shook so violently on the way up he nearly toppled. At forty he stopped, hands on knees, vision swimming.
Ten more.
He checked the clock on the wall. 10:08 PM.
He got on a treadmill. Set the pace. Eight minutes per kilometer. Pressed start.
[1h 52m remaining.]
Big Sister's timer appeared in his peripheral vision. No commentary. Just the number.
The belt moved. His legs followed.
The first three kilometers were autopilot. One foot, then the other. Pain had flattened into white noise. Breath Control ran his lungs. Everything else was manual.
Kilometer four. His stomach lurched.
He hit pause, bent over the rail, and threw up. Everything from dinner, onto the gym floor.
Someone on the nearest machine glanced over. Looked away.
He cleaned the floor with shaking hands. Dropped the paper towels twice. The treadmill beeped at him. Paused too long.
Back on.
Five. Six.
At six and a half, his vision dimmed. The edges of the gym going gray, brightness leaking out like water through cracks. He gripped the side rails and kept his feet on the belt.
[38m remaining.]
Seven. Eight.
He couldn't feel his legs. They'd crossed from pain to silence somewhere after seven. He didn't know if that was Breath Control helping or something worse. His feet still hit the belt. That was all he had.
Nine.
His left knee buckled. He caught the rail, stumbled, nearly went sideways off the machine. For one second his feet left the belt and the rubber screamed underneath him. He got them back. Got the rhythm back.
Keep going.
Nine point four. Nine point five.
The ruins behind his eyes. Sand and scuttling and stone. Three hours in the dark with things that didn't care if he was tired. He'd rather throw up ten more times than go back. He'd rather run until his bones cracked.
Nine point seven. Nine point eight. Nine point nine.
10.0.
The belt slowed.
He stepped off sideways and sat on the gym floor. His back hit the base of the treadmill and he stayed there. Legs extended in front of him like two objects that used to be limbs.
The gym hummed around him. Somewhere a weight rack clanked. Normal sounds. Normal world. His phone was in his hand. He didn't remember grabbing it.
11:51 PM.
Nine minutes.
He sat there for all nine of them.
At midnight, the system calculated.
Daily quest: Complete.
SP. Attributes. Body recovery spreading warmth through muscles that had forgotten warmth existed. Then the skill notifications.
They stacked up. Pain Tolerance. Breath Control. Basic Stamina. The daily quest skills. Novice Swimmer sitting fresh at the bottom. Progression bars shifting across the board, some by slivers, others by visible jumps. More movement in one day than anything since the ruins.
He stared at the numbers.
Every punch. Every lap. Every rep that should have broken him. The system had tracked all of it. Measured it. Converted it.
Pain had a conversion rate.