The notification appeared at kilometer nine.
[Skill Level Up: Novice Runner — Lv2]
Level Movement Speed Acceleration Stamina Reduction Lv2 +6% +6% -6%
Yan Ye slowed to a jog and stared at the panel floating in his peripheral vision. One percent. Each bonus had gone up by exactly one percent from Lv1.
That wasn't what made him swallow hard.
He'd run exactly a hundred kilometers this week to go from Lv1 to Lv2. At Lv1, he'd been gaining about one percent proficiency per kilometer. This morning, after the level-up, the bar had barely moved. He ran four more kilometers just to test it and watched the number crawl from 0.0% to 0.4%.
Ten times slower.
If every level multiplies the requirement by ten...
He didn't finish the thought. He'd done that math once already and the number that came out had made him want to lie down. He closed the panel and picked up his pace for the last stretch home.
Better to think about something else.
He showered, ate, and checked the time. 12:40 PM, perfect.
Iron Gate Training Hall sat on the fourth floor of a commercial building twenty minutes from his apartment by ETT. The place was clean and well-lit, larger than he'd expected. The lobby had a counter staffed by a woman in athletic wear who looked like she could probably throw him through the wall behind her if she wanted to.
"First time?"
"Yeah."
She walked him through the options. Monthly and weekly memberships covered space and equipment, and instructors were booked separately at different rates depending on tier. Most of the stronger ones were locked up for the next two weeks, but a few T1 instructors were available for walk-ins.
He booked a two-hour slot with the first name on the list.
The training floor was an open space with reinforced walls and sections marked off by faintly glowing boundary lines. Two other pairs were already sparring when Yan Ye walked in.
His instructor was waiting in the far section. A man around twenty-five, lean build, short hair, standing with the kind of easy looseness that came from being comfortable in his own body. His name tag read Chen Bowen — T1 | Vanguard | Instructor.
Vanguard, Rank E. A melee class with basic stat scaling and foundational sword techniques, nothing flashy and nothing that would ever make the news. Chen Bowen had been an awakener for seven years, which at T1 meant he'd probably hit his ceiling a while ago. Most awakeners who went into instruction work were in the same position: strong enough to teach, not strong enough to climb.
"What level of experience are you coming in with?" Chen Bowen asked, sizing him up.
"One week of practice."
The instructor's expression didn't change. "Alright. Gear's on the rack. Pick something that feels comfortable."
Yan Ye selected a training sword from the wall, standard weight with a dull edge. Nothing like the sword he'd gotten from the system, but that wasn't the point. He wasn't here for the weapon.
He was here for the person holding the other one.
"Rules?" Yan Ye asked.
"No skills. Pure technique. I'll match your intensity. If I hit something vital, we reset. Ready?"
"Ready."
Chen Bowen moved first.
The gap in attributes hit immediately. Level 39 meant roughly three hundred total stat points distributed across the five main attributes. Yan Ye's total was around fifty, with nearly half in intelligence. Every swing Chen Bowen threw landed harder, arrived faster, and recovered quicker than anything Yan Ye could match physically.
But his eyes worked fine.
Combat Reading had been running from the first exchange, and within thirty seconds Yan Ye started picking apart things he recognized. Chen Bowen's footwork was solid but predictable, a two-step approach with a feint left before committing right. His guard dropped slightly after the third strike in any combination, and his reset stance took half a second longer than it needed to.
He's experienced. Seven years of real combat. And I can read him already.
The Dawnblade would've killed me six times in the last thirty seconds. This guy, I can actually follow.
The realization was strange. He'd spent thirty hours dying to a simulation of one of the strongest swordsmen alive, getting cut down before he could blink, and now he was standing across from a real awakener with seven years of experience and the man's movements felt trackable, readable, almost manageable if it weren't for the raw stat difference making every parry feel like blocking a truck with a broomstick.
He still lost the first exchange. Chen Bowen's sword tapped his ribs before he could finish repositioning. Reading the attack and having the physical ability to respond were still two separate problems.
"Reset. Good instincts though." Chen Bowen stepped back. "You read that feint like you'd seen it before."
I've seen worse.
They went again. Ten minutes of active sparring followed by five minutes of rest, then back in. Yan Ye kept losing, but the way he lost was changing. In the early exchanges Chen Bowen's sword hit wherever it wanted. By the thirty-minute mark, every hit was contested. Yan Ye's parries weren't strong enough to stop the strikes, but they were angled well enough to redirect them.
Around the fifth round something clicked. Chen Bowen stepped in with his usual two-step approach, feint left, commit right. Yan Ye saw it coming before the feint even started. The shoulder angle gave it away, preloaded for a rightward cut the same way the Dawnblade's clone preloaded for a horizontal draw. Different fighter, different tier, same tell.
He didn't try to block. He stepped offline at the exact angle his feet had learned across three hundred deaths, let the sword pass, and tapped Chen Bowen's exposed side with the flat of his blade.
The instructor stopped and looked at him.
"...That was clean."
That was the Dawnblade's footwork. Adapted for someone six times weaker, but the geometry was the same.
It was the only clean hit he landed in two hours, and Chen Bowen made sure it didn't happen again. But it proved something that mattered more than the hit itself: what he'd learned in the Training Grounds transferred. The patterns, the timing, the spatial awareness. All of it carried over into a real fight against a real person with real attributes.
The gap in raw stats still made him lose every exchange after that. But he lost them closer.
Combat Reading was drinking this in. He could feel the proficiency climbing with every exchange, the skill feeding on each new pattern and timing and micro-decision. During the first half hour the growth felt rapid, almost greedy, the skill pulling data from every angle Chen Bowen offered. But somewhere past the forty-minute mark the pace started thinning. He was still learning, but the gains came slower. The patterns were mapping out. Chen Bowen's technical vocabulary was smaller than the Dawnblade's, and Combat Reading had already digested most of it.
By the hour mark the difference was obvious. Each round gave him less than the one before, and the proficiency bar was crawling where it had sprinted earlier.
Same opponent, fewer new patterns, lower returns. Makes sense. If I want to keep growing at the rate from the first thirty minutes, I need fresh data from different fighters with different styles and different habits.
Rotate instructors. Someone new every session.
The second hour was still useful, but more for refining what he already knew than learning anything new. His swordsmanship improved through his own adjustments, finding cleaner angles, tighter parries, better positioning. The instructor was solid, and seven years of experience meant his fundamentals were clean, but the technical depth wasn't there. Not compared to what the Dawnblade's clone had forced him through.
By the time they racked the training swords, Yan Ye was drenched and breathing hard. His arms ached from blocking strikes backed by three times his strength.
"You've really only been practicing for a week?" Chen Bowen asked.
"Intense week."
"Come back. Book someone different next time if you want. Variety helps."
You have no idea how right you are.
He thanked Chen Bowen, paid at the front desk, and took the ETT home.
His arms were still heavy from the training when he got back. He made a quick snack with whatever was in the fridge and sat at his desk with his phone propped against the monitor stand. Time to study.
The video library he'd built over the past week was organized by tier. He started with the T2 fights.
T2 and T3 footage was gold. The fighters were fast enough to demonstrate advanced technique but slow enough for him to actually track decision-making. He could see the moment a T2 swordsman committed to a thrust, the weight shift before a diagonal cut, the micro-adjustments in footwork that separated competent fighters from dangerous ones. Each new fighter was a fresh data set, and Combat Reading processed all of it in the background while he focused on the screen.
T4 fights were harder and faster. He had to slow the footage to half speed and even then some exchanges blurred together. Still useful, but less efficient.
T5 and above was beyond him. Even at quarter speed the movements were too fast and too layered, too many simultaneous decisions happening in fractions of seconds that his current comprehension couldn't unpack. He watched a few clips anyway, more out of respect than expectation.
Novice Swordsman barely moved during the three hours, crawling from 10% to 11%. Watching wasn't the same as doing, and swordsmanship demanded muscle involvement that video couldn't provide. Combat Reading, on the other hand, climbed from 23% to 29%. Pure pattern analysis didn't care whether his hands were holding a sword or a phone.
He was reaching for another video when a recommended clip caught his eye.
[BREAKING — Alliance of Khemetra Dungeon Break: Day 3 — Estimated 3 Million Additional Casualties]
He tapped it.
The footage was clean and sharp, the kind of high-definition aerial capture that Blue Star's military tech made standard. A landscape that had been farmland was now a corridor of destruction stretching south from the Claimant Belt toward the Nile basin. The horde was visible from altitude, a dark mass crawling across the terrain like something alive and spreading.
The anchor reported in a measured tone. The dungeon in the Claimant Belt had broken three days ago. Initial estimates of the horde's composition had been revised upward: confirmed T4 and T5 monsters numbering in the thousands, approximately twelve hundred T6, and eight T7. Total casualties since the break had passed twenty-four million. The Alliance of Khemetra had issued a global call for reinforcements, requesting awakeners from every federation and organization willing to deploy.
Twenty-four million people in three days.
He'd seen the initial report on his first day in this world, a headline about an unstable dungeon in the Claimant Belt expected to break within the week. He'd read it without understanding what those words actually meant. A dungeon breaking had been an abstract concept, something that happened in a world he hadn't yet accepted as real.
Now the abstraction had a body count.
Twenty-four million. And the horde hasn't even reached the population centers.
Bizarre how even in another world, the people in that region can't catch a break.
Eight T7 monsters. Liang Zhenfeng is T7 Low and I couldn't even see him move. Eight things like that, except these ones don't teach classes.
He closed the video, the evening light coming through the windows had gone from gold to orange.
If something like that happened in Tianmu, I wouldn't even make it to the door.
He stood up.
He'd done his 13km run and a hundred and thirty repetitions of each exercise this morning before the training club. The remaining sixty reps to level up the last three daily quest skills had been sitting in the back of his mind all day, a task he'd planned to finish before bed. That plan felt too slow now.
He pulled out the exercise mat. Push-ups first. Sixty to hit the threshold, and then he kept going to seventy because stopping at the minimum felt wrong after what he'd just watched. Sit-ups and squats, same thing, seventy each instead of sixty.
His shoulders burned by the second set. His core had been complaining since the training club and the extra reps turned the complaint into a formal grievance. By the time he finished the last squat his stomach lurched hard enough that he had to stand very still for about ten seconds to convince his body that vomiting was not, in fact, the appropriate response to exercise.
Three notifications appeared as the nausea settled.
[Skill Level Up: Upper Burst — Lv2]
[Skill Level Up: Core Anchor — Lv2]
[Skill Level Up: Deep Foundation — Lv2]
Same pattern as Novice Runner: one percent increase per bonus across the board, and ten times harder to level from here.
He showered and sat on the sofa in the dark apartment. The city hummed outside. Five million people going about their Sunday evening while somewhere on the other side of the world, twenty-four million ordinary evenings had been erased in three days.
He closed his eyes and leaned back. The apartment was dark and quiet, exactly the kind of safe that could disappear in a single afternoon if the wrong dungeon broke in the wrong place.
Faster. I need to get stronger faster.