The morning air outside the village inn was crisp and bit sharply at my lungs as I made my way toward the training grounds. Tucked behind the stone wall of the garrison, the arena was nothing more than an open clearing of packed, hardened dirt, surrounded by a low wooden fence and a rack of weathered practice weapons. At this hour, it was completely empty. The normal village guards wouldn't report for duty for another hour, leaving the quiet arena shrouded in the long, cool shadows of the surrounding pines.
I stepped into the centre of the ring, the dry dirt crunching softly under my boots. The silence of the dawn was a heavy, tangible thing, broken only by the distant caw of a mountain crow and the rustle of the wind through the high canopy. It was a space I knew intimately. Long before I ever awakened or marched off to the frontlines, I had spent my entire childhood running around this exact clearing, playing with the local village kids and swinging clumsy wooden sticks in the dirt. I walked over to the weapon rack, my eyes skipping past the blunt iron spears and focusing entirely on a standard, weighted wooden greatsword.
I reached out and gripped the leather-wrapped hilt. The moment my fingers closed around the wood, a powerful, familiar surge of muscle memory slammed into my shoulders.
For ten years in the future, Astraea's Edge had been an extension of my own arm. I knew the exact balance point of a heavy blade, the precise angle of a parry, and how to use the momentum of a swing to shatter an opponent's guard. Out of pure instinct, I lifted the wooden blade, dropping my weight into a low, aggressive vanguard stance. My left foot slid back exactly half a meter, my hips squared, and the tip of the sword levelled perfectly with an imaginary opponent's throat. It was an offensive posture forged in the bloodiest sectors of the frontlines, a stance designed to break defensive shields and crush bone through heavy plate.
"Now, flow," my mind commanded.
I stepped forward, executing a standard vertical downward slash—the bread-and-butter opening move of my old heavy blade style. The sword cut through the air with a faint, clean whistle. But the moment the swing passed my chest, a jarring, agonizing ache flared across my shoulders and lower back.
The momentum of the heavy wooden sword violently pulled me off balance. My back foot slipped in the loose dirt, and I had to awkwardly stumble a meter forward just to keep myself from tumbling onto the ground.
I stood there, gasping for breath, my arms trembling from the sheer weight of a weapon that used to feel as light as a feather. A cold, bitter realization settled over my chest. My mind was fully capable of calculating the advanced angles of elite, high-rank swordsmanship, but this unawakened body simply lacked the physical conditioning to back it up. My current strength was at the bare baseline of an ordinary civilian. My agility was heavily restricted, and my current tendons didn't have the density to handle the violent leverage of a veteran's footwork. My mind possessed the hyper-vigilant combat instincts of a veteran vanguard captain, but this unawakened body lacked the dense cellular structure required to break the mundane limits of ordinary flesh.
If I forced my body to fight like a level-eighty vanguard captain right now, I would tear my own muscles directly off the bone before I ever set foot in the academy. The discrepancy between my sharp combat reflexes and my raw physical flesh was vast, a dangerous barrier that could permanently cripple an unconditioned framework if pushed too hard.
I took a slow, deep breath, forcing my heart rate to steady as I raised the wooden sword once more. I couldn't use the high-rank styles yet—not until my mana channels were unsealed at the altar tomorrow. But I could practice the absolute fundamentals. I could condition this frame, building up its raw stamina and basic coordination step by step. If my past life had taught me anything, it was that the body was an adaptable machine. It could be broken, re-forged, and hardened through sheer, unyielding repetition.
For the next two hours, I turned the quiet arena into my own personal battlefield. I completely abandoned the advanced frontline combinations and focused entirely on the basic components of the heavy two-handed blade.
I began with a thousand clean, repetitive horizontal swings. Each arc required me to consciously anchor my core, forcing my soft abdominal muscles to lock to prevent the weight of the timber from pulling my spine out of alignment. The first hundred repetitions were clean, my mind strictly policing the trajectory of the wood. By the three-hundredth swing, a deep, hot glaze of sweat had entirely soaked through my canvas tunic, and the rough leather wrapping of the hilt began to chew mercilessly through the skin of my palms. My shoulders throbbed, an intense, stinging heat building within the deltoids as they struggled to maintain the elevation of the blade.
I didn't stop. I transitioned immediately into a thousand vertical cuts.
Step, drop, slash. Step, drop, slash. The rhythmic thud of my boots hitting the packed earth became the only sound in the clearing. With every downward stroke, the burning fatigue in my young muscles multiplied. My unawakened mana channels remained silent and sealed, offering no internal currents to flush away the rapid accumulation of lactic acid. I could feel my muscles tightening, the fibers straining against the unnatural demands of my veteran combat mind. My adult brain calculated the micro-angles of every parry loop, demanding absolute perfection, while my teenage flesh screamed in agonizing protest. It was a brutal, systematic synchronization, a forced marriage between a mastermind's intent and the unconditioned clay of my youth.
By the time I reached the final phase—a thousand precise lunges across the dirt—my vision was slightly blurring from exhaustion. My breath came in ragged, burning wheezes that scraped against the raw lining of my throat. Every time my lead foot slammed into the loose soil to drive the greatsword forward, a sharp, electric ache shot up my calves and locked into my lower back. My arms were shaking so violently that keeping the tip of the heavy weapon steady felt like balancing a boulder on a sliver of glass. The raw skin on my palms had split, leaving thin, stinging smears of crimson along the wrapped hilt.
I forced myself through the final hundred counts, my jaw clamped together so hard my teeth ached. I didn't care about the pain. The pain was an expected parameter, a necessary friction required to strip away the soft complacency of a civilian life.
By the time the first village guards began to trickle through the garrison gates, the sun had fully cleared the eastern pines, casting long, bright slats of morning light across the blood-flecked dirt. I marched back to the weathered rack with heavy, mechanical steps. My arms shook with absolute exhaustion as I lifted the heavy wooden greatsword one last time and placed it back into its designated slot with a dull, hollow thud.
I turned away from the rack, my knees nearly buckling beneath me as I stumbled over to the low wooden fence. I leaned my weight heavily against the perimeter rail, my head hanging low as thick droplets of sweat fell from my chin into the dry soil. My entire upper body was an absolute knot of burning, trembling soreness. My chest heaved, my lungs desperately drawing in the crisp morning air to cool the internal furnace raging beneath my ribs.
The countdown to the ceremony was still ticking away behind my eyelids. I was physically weak, completely unawakened, and holding nothing but a sore, unconditioned frame. But as I glassily stared down at my raw, bleeding palms, a cold, dangerous sense of satisfaction burned deep beneath my ribs. The foundation was being laid in the dirt. Tomorrow, when the global system finally initialized, I wouldn't just be receiving an unsealed core. I would be unleashing a mastermind who already knew exactly how to conquer it.