Can't do shit. Can't even sleep well.
Yan Ye sat on the edge of his bed at 6:14 AM and stared at his hands.
He'd gone to bed last night with the determination of someone who'd just made a decision. Note open. Two words at the top. Luo Meiyin. He'd start there. Whatever "starting there" meant.
By 4:30 AM he'd figured out exactly what it meant.
Nothing. It meant nothing.
That bitch is dangerous, he thought, with the particular flatness of someone who'd been thinking the same thing in different ways for ninety minutes. And the only thing dangerous about her that I can actually see is that she's a T2 Awakener and I am not. The rest of it. The connections, the school placement, whatever invisible structure put her in that classroom. I have no way to look at any of it. No way to investigate. No way to even confirm any of it exists.
I just know.
And knowing isn't a plan. Knowing is just a problem with no solution attached.
He sat with that for a moment.
Filed under: problems for a stronger version of me.
The thought was supposed to help him stop thinking about it.
It did not.
He stood up.
The daily quest had done its usual work overnight. Body fresh, recovery complete, every muscle reset to baseline like the previous day's punishment had been a rough draft the system decided to delete. His mind, unfortunately, did not come with the same feature.
He got dressed and started the routine.
The school day passed without incident. Luo Meiyin wasn't teaching that block. By the time the afternoon bell rang, Yan Ye had a duffel bag over one shoulder and a destination in mind.
Iron Gate Training Club looked exactly the same as it had on his first visit, which was either a sign of consistency or evidence that the décor budget had been redirected toward equipment that could actually hurt people. The reception area was clean, open, and staffed by the same woman who looked like she could disassemble him with moderate enthusiasm.
She glanced up when he walked in. Recognition this time, instead of assessment.
"Returning client," she said. Not a question.
"Trying to make it a habit."
"Good. Most people quit after the first session."
Probably because you terrify them into reconsidering their life choices at the front desk.
He kept that one internal and moved to the instructor selection tablet on the counter. He flipped through the T1 afternoon roster. Wrestling and grappling focus today. He wanted someone who would make him work for every exchange, someone with enough technique to make his weight advantage irrelevant.
He found one. T1, D-rank Bulwark class, afternoon availability, and a profile photo suggesting the man had been constructed rather than born.
He booked the slot.
The training floor was sectioned off by colored mats, each area sized for different combat styles. Yan Ye found his assigned section and the instructor waiting in it.
Instructor Gao. Because of course the man built like a structural support would have a surname that meant "tall."
He was somewhere around 195 centimeters and solid in a way that had nothing to do with excess. Where Yan Ye carried his 167 kilograms like a body still arguing with its own proportions, Gao wore his 120 like architecture. Every kilogram placed with intent.
He's lighter than me. Significantly. And I have the distinct feeling that's not going to matter even a little.
Gao looked down at him. The height difference alone was almost comedic.
"Rules," Gao said. Voice like gravel settling. "Hand-to-hand. No skills. No weapons. I match your intensity. If I hit anything vital, we reset. Questions?"
"Just one. How often does the lighter person win in grappling?"
"When they know what they're doing."
Cool. And I very much do not.
The first exchange lasted four seconds. Gao redirected his momentum with a hip shift that used Yan Ye's own weight as the engine, and he was looking at the ceiling before his brain had finished mapping the movement.
He got back up.
The second exchange lasted six seconds. Progress.
By the ten-minute mark, Yan Ye had identified the core problem: technique. Not mass, not speed, not reach. Pure technique. He outweighed Gao by almost fifty kilograms, and it meant nothing, because Gao understood leverage the way a locksmith understands tumblers. Every grab redirected Yan Ye's weight into the throw. Every clinch used his mass against him. The heavier he was, the harder he fell, and Gao seemed entirely comfortable with that arrangement.
He's turning my own body into the weapon that beats me. That's either brilliant or insulting. Probably both.
But Combat Reading was doing something.
It had been sharper since the upgrade in the Training Grounds, and against a live opponent with real body language, it was almost distractingly useful. Gao shifted his weight to his left hip before every grab attempt. His right shoulder dropped a fraction of a second before a clinch. When he was going to throw instead of pin, his rear foot turned outward first.
Yan Ye could see all of it. Read the setup, predict the movement, map the counter before Gao's hands made contact.
And then Gao's hands made contact and none of it mattered, because reading a technique and countering a technique were two entirely different skills, and he had exactly one of them.
This is exactly what the Dawnblade felt like. He peeled himself off the mat for the eighth time in fifteen minutes. Seeing the answer and being physically incapable of writing it down.
Lower stakes, though. Significantly fewer deaths. The Dawnblade clone had killed him over three hundred times. Instructor Gao was just rearranging him like furniture that kept ending up in the wrong spot.
During one exchange he caught the setup two full seconds early. Left hip loading, right shoulder dropping, weight shifting forward. He disengaged laterally, slid past Gao's reaching arm, and for one clean moment had open space at the instructor's flank.
Gao adjusted in half a second and threw him anyway.
Two seconds of reading. Half a second of reality. The ratio is improving, though. At the start of the session it was zero and zero.
By the thirty-minute mark, Yan Ye had found exactly one reliable strategy: use his weight to anchor and force Gao to work harder for every exchange. Don't lunge. Don't overcommit. Make Gao come to him, and use the extra mass to slow down the redirection.
It worked about one time in five.
Better than zero out of five. I'll take the improvement.
Forty minutes in, mid-exchange, with Gao's hand closing on his collar and his body already rotating into a response he'd practiced nine times in the last ten minutes, the notification appeared.
[Skill Acquired: Basic Hand-to-Hand Combat — Lv.1]
Wait, alread—
The world rotated ninety degrees. The mat met his back with the polite firmness of an old friend.
Yan Ye lay there for a moment. Arms out. Legs out. Staring at the ceiling.
The position triggered something. Some old corner of his brain pulled up a memory from age seven without asking permission.
Backyard. Fresh snow. Falling backward with arms already in this exact—
His arms started to move.
Huh?
Wait.
Oh fuck.
He clamped his hands flat against the mat half a second before his body could complete the motion. His shoulders jerked once with the unspent momentum.
I almost did a fucking snow angel. This traitor body almost started a generational embarrassment without consulting management.
He stared at the ceiling for another second.
Tactical recovery. Just gonna lie here. Look like I meant it.
Gao's shadow fell over him. The instructor stood at the edge of the mat, arms crossed, looking down with the professional detachment of someone who had seen plenty of people lie on floors.
"You alive?"
"Technically." Yan Ye sat up. "Just reconsidering my relationship with gravity."
"Three-minute break."
"Accepted. Enthusiastically."
He sat on the edge of the mat and pulled up the skill description.
[Basic Hand-to-Hand Combat — Lv.1] [Rarity: Common (max Lv.5)] [Type: Passive | Category: Combat / Unarmed] [Lv.1: Unarmed Strike Efficiency +5%, Grapple Effectiveness +3%]
Common rarity, passive type, modest scaling. He compared it mentally to Novice Swordsman, which had taken approximately three hundred deaths against the Dawnblade clone, came in at Uncommon rarity, and scaled significantly better. Hand-to-Hand had taken forty minutes of getting thrown around by a man with no special techniques.
Easier to obtain. Weaker payoff. Makes sense.
But something else was bothering him. He pulled up his full skill list and counted.
Nineteen passive. One active.
He counted again.
Same result.
Nineteen. One. Hero Dive, acquired during a moment of genuine panic in the Ruins. Everything else came from repetition. Practice. Exposure. The body learning through time until the system decided it counted.
One active skill out of twenty.
That ratio was wrong. Not wrong in a "this is unfair" way. Wrong in a "this is a pattern I don't understand" way.
"Big Sis."
Silence.
"I know you can hear me. How do I get more active skills?"
[Figure it out.]
"That's not an answer."
[It's the only one you're getting.]
"Why?"
Silence.
"Big Sis. Why?"
[Because the answer matters more than the information.]
He turned that one over in his head a few times.
...She's fucking with me.
He waited for the follow-up. Some clarification. Some hint. Even a sarcastic elaboration would've been useful.
Nothing.
Fine. She's not fucking with me. She's withholding on purpose, which is worse, because it means there's actually something to withhold.
Long-term puzzle, then.
"Break's over!" Gao called from across the mat.
Yan Ye stood up.
Add it to the queue.
The remaining hour and twenty minutes passed in a rhythm of impact and recovery. Gao threw him. He got up. Gao threw him differently. He adjusted.
During the water breaks, he tried Big Sister twice more. Silence both times. By the second attempt he'd stopped expecting a response, and the third time a pause came around he didn't bother asking. She'd made her position clear enough.
Combat Reading kept working, though. Not another level, not a notification, just a gradual tightening of his reads. By the final half hour he could identify Gao's setups a full second earlier than he had at the start of the session. Still couldn't do much about most of them. But the gap between seeing and responding was narrowing, and the narrowing was measurable.
He learned small things. How to use his weight as an anchor instead of letting it become a liability. When to go limp instead of bracing, because resisting a redirect just gave Gao more energy to work with. How to turn a bad position into a merely terrible one, which in grappling terms qualified as progress.
By the two-hour mark, his body had compiled a comprehensive list of complaints and was presenting them simultaneously. Nothing was injured. Iron Gate's matching protocols and the cushioned mats made sure of that. But every muscle from his neck to his calves was broadcasting a unified message of enough.
Gao offered him a hand up after the final exchange.
"You learn fast," Gao said. "For someone who spent two hours being thrown around."
"I prefer 'repeatedly repositioned against my will.' Sounds more dignified."
Something shifted in Gao's expression. Not a smile. The suggestion of the possibility of a smile, if the conditions were right and nobody was watching.
At the front desk, Yan Ye pulled up the instructor list on the tablet again. He was already thinking ahead. Combat exam in two and a half weeks. The exam included an archery component, and the old Big Ye's performance with a bow had been catastrophic enough to keep him pinned near the bottom of the rankings for years.
If I can pick up a Basic Archery skill before the exam, that's a free bracket of points I wouldn't otherwise have. T2 instructor for that. Better technique, faster acquisition.
He flipped to the T2 archery roster. One name. He recognized the profile from his first visit. She'd stood out from the rest of the instructor list for reasons that were not, technically, related to any combat-relevant criteria.
He scheduled the earliest available slot. Thursday, next week.
"Contact number," the receptionist said. "In case of cancellations."
He gave it to her and walked out.
The ETT hummed beneath him. Yan Ye leaned his head against the window and let his body catalog its grievances in peace. His shoulders had developed strong feelings. His ribs were composing a strongly worded letter. His lower back had moved past complaints and into quiet resentment.
He pulled up the skill panel.
Twenty skills. Nineteen passive, one active.
He stared at the list the way he'd stared at his notes that morning. Looking for the shape of something he couldn't quite see yet.
Hero Dive. The only active. He'd gotten it in the Ruins of Zarathen, during a moment that still didn't make complete sense to him. Panic, instinct, something his body had committed to before his brain could object. The system had registered it as an active skill, but he'd never fully understood why that moment and not any of the others.
Everything else had come from repetition. Practice. Time. Body learning through exposure until the system said "fine, that counts."
So what's different about actives? Why that one moment in the Ruins? What was in it that wasn't in everything else I've done since?
He'd made choices since then. He walked back into the Ruins. He drank venom. He put his hand on a stove. He confronted Luo Meiyin. None of those gave him an active skill.
Which means it's not just decisions under pressure. There's something else. A condition I can't see yet.
He didn't have the answer. But the question was sharper than it had been this morning, and sharper was still a direction.
He closed the panel.
One more thing to figure out.
The ETT slowed for his stop.
Add it to the list.