The days blurred together in a rhythm of exhaustion and purpose:
4:45 AM – Training
Every morning, Rei woke before dawn and climbed through his window into the alley. The weighted practice shaft felt lighter now, not because it had changed, but because his body had adapted.
Forward stance. Weight distributed. Economy of motion.
Each movement flowed into the next. Defense became offense. Retreat became repositioning. The lessons from Darius, learned in a future hospital room with a broken body, manifested in a past alley with working legs.
Think three moves ahead. Control the conversation.
He practiced the displaced guard technique, creating false openings. Worked on reading invisible opponents, predicting their responses. Trained his body to react before his conscious mind caught up.
Sweat soaked his clothes as the sun rose. His hands developed calluses over calluses. His muscles learned the language of combat, not through fighting, but through repetition that bordered on meditation.
The blade is just how you translate thought into consequence.
Night – Future Training
When he slept, darkness pulled him forward to the hospital room where Darius waited.
"Footwork again," the former bodyguard would say, and they'd spend hours discussing weight distribution, pivot mechanics, how to move across uneven terrain.
"Threat assessment," and Rei would learn to read body language, identify attack patterns before they fully formed, understand the mathematics of reach and timing.
"Psychological warfare," and Darius taught him how words could be weapons, how intimidation could end fights before they started, how controlling an opponent's fear was half the battle.
Each night, theory. Each morning, practice. The two timelines feeding into each other, creating something greater than either alone.
8:00 AM - 6:00 PM – Castell Trading Company
Rei arrived early every day after that first disaster. Built a reputation for reliability that slowly erased the memory of his initial failure.
Mira Castell gave him progressively complex tasks:
Week One: Inventory cross-referencing. Tedious but essential. He found three suppliers who'd been padding their counts by 5-8%. Mira's expression when he presented the evidence was almost approving.
Week Two: Route optimization analysis. Which shipping lanes were efficient, which were vulnerable to delays, where bottlenecks formed. Rei used future knowledge carefully, suggesting "intuitive" improvements that he knew would pay off.
Week Three: Supplier negotiations observation. Mira brought him to meetings, teaching him how merchants spoke in codes, how prices were really determined, where leverage existed beneath polite conversation.
"You're learning fast," she commented one afternoon. "Too fast, almost. Like you've done this before."
"Good memory," Rei replied, which was perhaps the most literal truth he could offer. "I pay attention."
He learned the rhythm of commerce, how goods flowed through the city like blood through veins, how the Order's regulations shaped everything, how smart merchants operated in the spaces between laws.
And he learned which merchants were vulnerable. Which ones made mistakes. Which ones might, in the future, lose everything to debt or poor decisions.
Information for later. Seeds planted for harvests years away.
Evenings – Family Time
Rei made a conscious effort to be present, to eat dinner with his family, to help Mira with homework, to have conversations that felt normal even though his mind was always calculating three moves ahead.
"You seem happier," his mother observed one night.
I'm not. I'm just better at pretending.
"The work is good," he said instead. "I like having purpose."
Mira kicked him under the table—their old signal for I see through your bullshit but I'll let it slide.
He kicked back—I know you know, and thank you for not pushing.
Some conversations didn't need words.
The Days Blur
June became July. Two weeks became one week became three days.
The Awakening Ceremony loomed closer with each sunrise, inevitable, terrifying, the moment when everything would change.
Rei pushed harder. Trained longer. Worked later.
The prototype underwent more modifications, power cell upgraded, containment field stabilized, the lethal mode carefully hidden behind safety protocols he'd built in.
Never again without control. Never again pure desperation.
His body transformed, still lean, but harder now. Muscles defined by repetition. Reactions sharpened by Darius' teachings. Balance internalized until movement became instinct.
At Castell Trading, he'd proven himself valuable enough that Mira started asking his opinion on actual decisions, not just analysis, but strategy.
"What do you think about the Ironvale contract?" she'd ask, and Rei would offer insights that seemed intuitive but were actually memories of which deals succeeded and which collapsed.
He was building something. Slowly. Carefully.
A reputation. Skills. Connections. Foundation for everything that would come after.
But beneath it all, the countdown ticked relentlessly forward:
Thirteen days until awakening.
Ten days.
Five days.
Three days.
And with each passing day, Rei felt the weight of what was coming, the moment when Mira would manifest powers two years early, when the Order would take notice, when the timeline he remembered would either hold or shatter completely.
442 A.R. – Evening (Past Timeline)
Rei sat in his room, staring at the calendar marked with red ink.
Tomorrow was supposed to be a vacation day, the city's traditional break before the Awakening Ceremony. Schools closed. Most businesses shut down. Families spent time together, preparing for the moment when some of their children would transform into something more.
The day after tomorrow, was the ceremony itself.
And if Rei's memories were accurate, Mira would awaken during the night before the ceremony. July 10th, sometime around 3 AM, her power would manifest spontaneously, violently, two years before anyone expected.
That's when the Order would notice.
That's when everything accelerated.
Twenty-four hours. I have twenty-four hours of relative peace left.