Who the fuck knocks on someone's door at ten in the morning on a Saturday?
The knocking came again, polite and patient, the kind that wasn't going to stop on its own. He peeled himself off the couch and crossed the living room with the coordination of someone whose brain had been put through a blender. Grabbed the door handle and pulled.
Wen Jiayi stood in the hallway. Silver hair loose over her shoulders, green eyes, light jacket over a blouse. She had her phone in one hand and a small bag in the other.
His mouth opened. Nothing came out for about three seconds.
"...Hey."
"Hey." She tilted her head. "You look awful."
"Thank you."
"Did you just wake up?"
"Something like that." He stepped aside to let her in. "I was watching Liang Zhenfeng's swordsmanship lectures all morning. Did about seven hours straight and now my head feels like it's full of sand."
She walked in, slipped off her shoes, and looked around the apartment with the easy familiarity of someone who'd been here before.
"I sent you a message three hours ago."
He pulled out his phone. One message from Wen Jiayi, 7:12 AM: "Are you busy today? I was thinking of coming over."
Unlucky.
"I didn't see it. Sorry."
She waved it off. "I figured you were either busy or still asleep. Decided to just come."
He walked to the sofa, collapsed face-first into the cushions, and rolled over to stare at the ceiling. His body had given up pretending it wanted to be vertical.
"Make yourself at home. Anything in the fridge is yours. Just don't rob me or kidnap me."
"I'll try to resist."
Feels like I gained energy just from seeing her. Enough to stay conscious for maybe five more minutes.
Her voice reached him from somewhere near the kitchen, something about a novel she was reading, a character that reminded her of someone at the university. The words made it to his ears but dissolved before they reached anything useful.
"...don't you think?"
Her voice got further away. Or maybe he did.
"Yan Ye."
A hand on his shoulder, gentle. "Yan Ye, food's ready."
He opened his eyes to the smell of garlic and ginger. Afternoon light filled the apartment and the clock on the wall read 12:15.
Two hours. She let me sleep for two hours and cooked lunch.
Rice, stir-fried vegetables, something with eggs that looked better than anything he could produce at Novice Chef Lv4. They sat at the table and the first bite brought his brain back from wherever it had gone.
"This is really good."
"I know."
"One day I'm going to cook for you. Payback."
She looked at him over her chopsticks. "Please don't. I'd like to survive the semester."
"I can cook."
"Can you?"
"I've been cooking every meal for myself this entire week."
"Surviving and cooking are different things."
"Unrelated skills." He pointed his fork at her mid-chew and tried to say "I'll prove it today," but what came out was an unintelligible mess of syllables and rice.
She stared at him for two seconds before the laugh broke through. Quick and bright, the kind she always tried to hold back and never quite managed.
He grinned, chewed, swallowed. "I said I'll prove it today."
"Sure you did."
He loaded another forkful. "Seriously though. Dinner tonight. My kitchen. You'll eat your words."
"I'll eat my words if the food doesn't eat me first."
"My current research is on mana density fluctuations in unstable dungeons."
"Is that why they can't regenerate?"
"That's the theory. The mana flow isn't stable enough to sustain the dungeon's structure after the first clear."
"So what happens to the mana that's left over?"
She paused. "That's actually what I'm trying to figure out."
"See, I ask good questions."
"You ask a lot of questions. Occasionally one of them is good."
After they cleared the table she settled into the sofa and pulled out her phone. "Four more episodes?"
Frieren. They'd watched three together last Thursday and he'd been meaning to continue. He almost said yes before a very specific memory surfaced: the last time they'd watched anime on this sofa, he'd gotten so comfortable that he forgot the daily quest entirely. What followed was the least fun he'd ever had in a desert.
"I need to do my training first."
"Training?"
"Daily exercise routine. Non-negotiable. Last time I skipped it the consequences were..." He searched for a word. "Memorable."
Her eyes lit up. "Can I join?"
He looked at her. Blouse, skirt, delicate shoes. "With what? If I lend you something of mine, the chance of it fitting is zero and the chance of it looking like you're wearing a curtain is a hundred percent."
She already had her phone out. PortalHaul open, thirty seconds of scrolling, and a full workout set with running shoes and an exercise mat was in the cart and purchased before he could blink.
"Twenty-minute delivery."
"That's terrifying."
Eighteen minutes later she came out of the bathroom in a dark blue workout set. He was already changed into his training clothes, black shirt and grey shorts. They looked at each other for a second.
...We look like a matching set.
Neither of them mentioned it.
They started with push-ups in the living room. She rolled out her new mat next to his and her form was clean, but her stamina gave out fast.
"How many are you doing?" she asked at around thirty.
"Seven hundred."
"Seven hun—"
"Minimum."
She made it to sixty before her arms quit. She sat cross-legged on her mat, slightly flushed, watching him keep going with what he chose to interpret as admiration rather than concern.
"This is your daily minimum?"
"This week it is. Goes up every month."
"That's insane."
"Keeps me busy."
They moved to sit-ups and then squats. She kept pace through the sit-ups but the squats broke her around eighty. She sat on the mat with her knees pulled up, breathing hard, while he finished the last set.
Something about having her sitting there watching made his arms refuse to quit. He hit the daily minimum, passed it, and kept going until every exercise was fifty percent over the requirement.
Showing off for a girl. Very mature. Very dignified.
Worth it though.
The run was easier with company. She couldn't match his pace but she kept going on what he suspected was pure stubbornness. They looped through the neighborhood with Tianmu City's evening light filtering through the canopy above, and for thirty minutes he forgot about swords and death counts and pattern libraries.
When they finished she looked like she'd survived something.
"I'm a Tier 2 awakener," she said between breaths, "and I think you just broke me."
"You kept up."
"I kept up for the first ten minutes. The rest was pride."
He laughed. "Come on. I'm making Jiaozi tonight."
She looked at him sideways. "You're actually serious."
"Dead serious."
"This feels like a trap."
They walked to the convenience store and he grabbed what he needed: ground pork, cabbage, ginger, scallions, dumpling wrappers, soy sauce, sesame oil, and vinegar. She followed him through the aisles like she wasn't sure what she was witnessing.
"You actually know what you're buying."
"Don't sound so surprised."
"I'm not surprised. I'm suspicious."
Back at the apartment he handed her a clean towel and pointed her toward the guest bathroom. He showered fast, changed, and went straight to the kitchen.
The filling came together quickly, mixed by hand. He started wrapping, and a week of cooking every meal had built enough muscle memory that his hands moved without waiting for instructions. Fold, press, crimp. He heated oil in the pan, arranged the dumplings flat-side down, and added water for the steam.
Twenty minutes later she emerged in her original clothes with her hair still slightly damp. She leaned against the kitchen doorframe and the expression on her face shifted as the smell hit her.
"That actually smells incredible."
"Go sit. Two minutes."
She set up Frieren on the TV while he finished plating. He brought two plates to the sofa: dumplings golden-brown on the bottom with a small bowl of soy sauce and black vinegar for dipping.
She picked one up, dipped it, and bit into it. Chewed slowly. Her eyes widened.
"Okay."
"Okay?"
"Okay, you can cook."
He leaned back with his arms crossed, deeply satisfied.
Novice Chef Lv4. The skill that climbed the fastest out of all of them. Turns out making every meal yourself for eight straight days does more than dying three hundred times in a simulation.
"The filling is really good. The skin could be thinner but the flavor is..." She ate another one. "Where did you learn this?"
"Self-taught. One week of practice."
"One week?"
"One very motivated week."
They ate and watched four episodes. She got teary at episode five and tried to hide it by taking a very long drink of water. He said nothing. She threw a cushion at him anyway, and he caught it one-handed without looking away from the screen.
Perception really did go up.
Episode six had a fight scene that reminded him of something he didn't want to think about right now, so he pushed it aside. Episode seven was slower and quieter. At some point she tucked her feet under herself and leaned slightly toward his end of the sofa. He noticed but didn't move.
After the fourth episode she checked the time. 8:47 PM.
"I should go." She stretched. "I'm actually exhausted."
"You did seven hundred push-ups worth of exercise today."
"I did sixty push-ups worth of exercise today. The rest was watching you exercise."
They walked to the lobby and he called an ETT. The evening air was warm, the city humming softly around them.
"The Jiaozi were really good," she said. "Genuinely. Not just polite good."
"I'll make them again. Pan-fried version next time."
"Next time?"
"Whenever you want."
She smiled, small and real, the kind that she never seemed to plan.
The ETT descended and she climbed in, turning to face him. "See you Monday."
"See you Monday."
The door closed and the vehicle lifted into the evening sky. He stood there until the lights disappeared behind a row of buildings, hand half-raised in a wave he'd held too long.
Right.
He went back upstairs and sat on the sofa. The apartment was quiet, two plates on the coffee table and a cushion on the floor and the smell of sesame oil still hanging in the air. He stared at the ceiling for a few seconds before calling the system.
"Skills."
Two new entries sat at the bottom of his skill list.
[Combat Reading — Lv1]Rarity: Uncommon (Max Lv5)Type: Passive | Category: Mental / Analysis
Level Pattern Identification Movement Prediction Opening Recognition Lv1 +15% +7% +5%
[Novice Swordsman — Lv1]Rarity: Uncommon (Max Lv5)Type: Passive | Category: Combat / Bladed
Level Efficiency (Bladed) Precision Reaction Speed (Blade) Lv1 +15% +7% +5%
Three hundred deaths, and these two skills were the receipt.
He scrolled further and stopped.
[Breath Control — Lv4]
Lv4? That was Lv3 yesterday.
[Basic Stamina — Lv3]
Also Lv2 yesterday. He'd leveled two skills without even noticing. Thirty hours of combat had done that in the background while he was busy dying.
Pain Tolerance sat at 80% proficiency on Lv3, up from barely past 50% the day before. Thirty percent in one session. And Perception had jumped twenty percent, four times more than eight days of normal training had managed.
He closed the panel and leaned back into the sofa. The cushion she'd thrown was still on the floor, and the plates were still on the table.
Back to work tomorrow.