The panel still glowed in the dark.
[Weekly Conclusion — Week 1]
Weekly?
Yan Ye sat up.
There's a weekly too? Is there a punishment?
The daily quest punishment had nearly killed him. If the weekly scaled up from that—
The panel updated.
[Weekly Quest — Week 1 Complete]
[Rewards][System Points: 3,100 SP][Full Body Recovery][Special Attribute Points: 5.0]
[Distribution][Luck: +1.7 | Charm: +1.1 | Comprehension: +0.8 | Stamina: +1.4]
No punishment. Just rewards.
He exhaled. Good. Fine. No death trap.
Then the last two lines registered.
Special attributes?
He read the distribution again.
Five points. Five special attribute points.
His brain went quiet. The kind of quiet that only happened when something was too big to react to immediately.
Every awakener on Blue Star knew hidden attributes existed. Luck, Charm, Comprehension, Stamina. The GAS didn't display them. No reliable method to raise them had ever been found. Some people claimed breakthroughs through extreme circumstances, rare encounters, things that happened once in a lifetime. Even Stamina, the easiest of the four, was considered incredibly difficult to move.
The system had just handed him five points for finishing his first week.
And there's a monthly evaluation too, probably. If the weekly gives this much...
The normal attribute gains from daily quests mattered now, at his level. In a year they wouldn't. At higher tiers, the difference between 12 and 13 Strength was nothing. But Luck? Comprehension? Those didn't stop mattering. Ever. A point of Luck at T1 was still a point of Luck at T7.
Something in his chest tightened. Not anxiety. Something closer to vertigo. Like looking down from a height and realizing the ground was much further away than he'd thought, except in the wrong direction. Not falling. Rising.
The daily quests keep me alive. The weekly quests build something permanent.
"System. Full attribute panel."
[Attribute Panel — Yan Ye]
Attribute Value Strength 12.81 Physique 5.85 Defense 8.57 Intelligence 23.00 Agility 5.03 Luck 4.70 Charm 15.30 Comprehension 17.80 Stamina 4.90
This doesn't add up.
Seven days. System gains: 1.79 for Strength. Should be 12.79. It was 12.81. Natural growth on top of the system. Same pattern across every physical stat.
Huh. So this body actually responds to training. Seventeen years of doing absolutely nothing and a week of exercise is enough to squeeze out free stats.
Won't last, though. A body this neglected has a lot of easy ground to cover. Once that runs out, it's just the system.
He looked at the numbers again. 1.79 per week from system alone. Four months and Strength would pass 40. That sounded good until he thought about what 40 actually meant in a world where T1 started at Level 20 and a T1 Low could probably fold him in half without trying.
Fast enough?
No idea. No one else has this system. No benchmark. No way to compare.
Guess I'll find out.
Charm and Stamina had bumped beyond the weekly bonus too. Ten kilograms lost in one week. 170 kilos was still 170 kilos, but apparently losing the first ten registered as improvement.
Everything increased except Intelligence. Makes sense. 23 is already high for any attribute, especially Intelligence. Probably the hardest one to raise naturally before Awakening. And the daily quest doesn't have anything targeting it.
...Yet.
"Why Friday?"
The bedroom was quiet.
"I transmigrated on Thursday. The weekly should trigger on Thursday midnight, not Friday."
Silence. Two seconds. Three. Then text appeared on the panel, materializing character by character with that deliberate pace she used when she wanted him to squirm.
[You've been a good boy these past few days. I decided to give you a little reward.]
Good boy.
A reward.
His jaw tightened. There were at least eight things he wanted to say back. Every single one of them would make his life worse.
Pick your battles.
"...Thanks."
A small ♡ appeared after "good boy" for one second, then vanished.
He closed the panel and rolled over. His mind kept running numbers. Weekly special attributes times fifty-two. Compounding. Scaling.
He was asleep before he finished the year.
Saturday.
Up before the alarm. Breakfast was automatic at this point. Three eggs, rice, vegetables. His hands moved through prep with a rhythm that hadn't existed five days ago. Novice Chef Level 3 was less a skill and more a habit now.
He cleaned up, sat at his desk, and opened the system.
The familiar tabs floated at the edge of his vision. Main Panel. Quests. Skills. Training Grounds. System Shop. A few more, locked, question marks he'd stopped poking at.
Training Grounds.
He'd saved this all week. First session free. Every session after cost SP, which meant preparation mattered more than enthusiasm. So he'd spent five days building a library. Forums, video platforms, combat archives, official federation recordings released for educational purposes. Anything with high-tier awakeners performing real technique in enough detail for the system to replicate.
He'd found a solid roster. A T5 Mid specialist. Several T4s covering different combat styles. All useful.
But the reason his chest was tight right now had nothing to do with T4s.
Liang Zhenfeng. The Dawnblade.
Every awakener in Hunxia knew the name. T7 Low. Professor of Combat Theory at Tsinghua, and a permanent fixture in the Federation's Rapid Response Division, stationed in the capital. The kind of person who could be deployed to any city in the country within minutes if something went catastrophically wrong. He taught because he wanted to. He stayed in the capital because they needed him to.
The man had been making history for more than two centuries. But the moment that defined him happened early. T3. A dungeon break on a border city. The local garrison collapsed in minutes. Reinforcements were forty minutes out. Liang Zhenfeng, still a student, held an entire district by himself until dawn. Zero civilian casualties in his sector. His core skill evolved mid-battle, and he ascended to T4 with a class that had never been recorded before.
Dawn Sword Master.
The Dawnblade. A title earned in a single night that he'd spent two hundred years living up to.
And I'm about to step into a ring with a copy of this man.
He selected Training Grounds. Tapped [Enter].
The transition was instant. No loading, no fade, no warning. One moment he was sitting at his desk with morning light on his face. The next he was standing somewhere else entirely.
He forgot about Liang Zhenfeng for a second.
The space stretched in every direction. No walls. No ceiling. No horizon. Just flat ground under soft white light, extending endlessly, like the inside of something that hadn't finished being built. The air felt real. The ground under his feet felt solid. His own breathing echoed faintly, which meant there was air and there was acoustics and the system had bothered to simulate both.
This is inside the system?
It didn't feel virtual. It didn't feel like anything. It just felt like a place.
Then he looked ahead, and everything else stopped mattering.
Thirty meters away, a man stood waiting.
He looked real. Not "realistic." Not "well-rendered." Real. Yan Ye had spent hours watching this man on screens this week, and standing thirty meters from him now was a completely different experience. The dark hair. The dark eyes. The posture that belonged to someone who had stopped needing to prove anything a very long time ago.
And pressure. Faint, invisible, sourceless. Not a skill, not an aura. Just the simple, crushing fact of standing in the same space as something that shouldn't be stood next to.
His sword hung at his left hip. Sheathed.
Okay.
Yan Ye's mouth was dry. He swallowed once.
Okay.
He took a step forward.
He was back at the starting point.
He blinked.
What?
He looked around. Same empty space. Same white light. Same flat ground. He was standing exactly where he'd started, facing the same direction. Nothing hurt. Nothing felt different. He patted his chest, touched his face, looked at his hands.
What just happened? Did the system glitch? Did it reset?
He looked up.
Liang Zhenfeng stood thirty meters ahead. Same position. Same posture. Sword sheathed.
As if nothing had happened.
Wait.
Did I die?
He replayed it. One step. And then here. No gap, no transition, no sensation of any kind between the two moments.
I didn't see him move. I didn't see a sword. I didn't feel anything. Not even the moment I died.
I can understand dying in one second. I expected that. But I didn't even see what killed me.
There's no way the gap is this big.
Liang Zhenfeng waited. Same calm. Same sheathed sword.
Yan Ye walked forward.