He woke up the morning before the trial and the Stage 2 refinement broke through at four forty-seven.
No announcement. No system fanfare. Just the cultivation running its autonomous cycle in the background and then a quality shift in the mana circulating through his core, the same shift as Stage One completing but subtler and deeper, like water that had been clear becoming more clear. You wouldn't notice the difference unless you'd been paying attention to what it looked like before.
He'd been paying attention.
The mana wasn't denser. Denser was a Stage One metric, accumulation of quantity. This was different. The circulation that had been functional was now precise. The same volume doing more with itself because the quality of how it moved had refined into something that wasted almost nothing.
He felt it in Sovereign Step immediately.
