Ren woke to the sensation of frost on his eyelashes and a stiffness in his body that felt indistinguishable from rigor mortis.
He opened his eyes. The sky above the valley was a pale, bruised grey, signaling the dawn of his second day in the Realm of Peace. He tried to roll over, but his chest and triceps screamed in immediate, fiery protest. The lactic acid from yesterday's one hundred and eighty-nine pushups had settled deep into his unconditioned muscle fibers, crystallizing overnight. Every microscopic tear ached with a dull, throbbing heat. His arms were locked at rigid angles, the joints swollen and unyielding.
He looked at the holographic counter hovering faintly in his peripheral vision.
[Task 1: Pushups (189 / 200)]
[Task 2: 15-Mile Mountain Run (3.7 / 15 Miles)]
[Task 3: Hunt and kill one wild rabbit (0 / 1)]
"Eleven," Ren rasped. His throat was so dry it felt like it was lined with crushed glass.
He didn't waste energy feeling sorry for himself. Complaining burned calories he didn't have. He forced his body to roll onto his stomach. The simple act of placing his palms flat against the freezing dirt sent a shockwave of agony up to his shoulders.
He braced his core. He pushed.
His body didn't move. His arms trembled violently, but the muscles simply refused to contract. It took him ten minutes of agonizing mental command just to bend his elbows enough to lower his chest to the grass.
One hundred and ninety.
He pushed up. It wasn't a fluid motion; it was a jagged, shuddering heave. He collapsed immediately after, pressing his face into the frost-covered dirt, gasping for air.
He waited five minutes. He did another.
One hundred and ninety-one.
It took him nearly an hour to complete the final eleven repetitions. By the time he locked his elbows for the two-hundredth time, tears of pure, involuntary physical exertion were stinging the corners of his eyes. He collapsed, his arms completely dead.
[Task 1: Completed.]
The text flickered and vanished. One down. Two to go.
Ren didn't stay on the ground. If he let his body cool down, he would never get back up. He rolled onto his back, kicked his legs to build momentum, and forced himself into a standing position. His bare feet were already bruised and cut from the previous night's three-mile jog, the soles tender and raw.
He looked up at the jagged mountain peak piercing the clouds. Eleven point three miles left. All uphill.
Ren began to walk. He couldn't jog anymore. His cardiovascular system, stripped of its Stamina (40) stat, was operating on the fumes of a malnourished seventeen-year-old boy.
The incline grew steeper with every passing hour. The soft soil of the valley gave way to loose shale and jagged flint. Every step was a calculated risk. The sharp rocks sliced into the soles of his feet, leaving faint, bloody footprints on the grey stone.
By midday, the sun was a relentless hammer beating down on his neck. He was severely dehydrated. His vision swam with dark spots.
'This is what it means to be human,' Ren thought, his mind stripped of its high-speed processing, leaving only raw, primal determination. 'No magic. No glitches. Just meat and bone.'
By mile ten, he was using his hands to scramble up the steeper inclines, his fingernails cracking against the stone. The air grew thin, starving his already burning lungs. He began to hallucinate from the exhaustion. In the shadows of the boulders, he saw the glowing red eyes of the wolves from Batch Two. He heard the arrogant, mocking laughter of Prince Valerius. He saw Lord Zilton's sneering face.
'You are a commoner,' the phantom voices whispered in the wind. 'You are a glitch. You don't belong with the Pillars.'
"Shut up," Ren hissed, his voice a dry croak.
He used the anger. He used the hatred for the "Gilded Cage" and his own physical weakness as fuel. He dragged his broken body upward, inch by agonizing inch.
As the sun began to dip toward the western horizon, painting the sky in shades of blood and rust, Ren pulled himself over the final, jagged ridge.
He collapsed onto the flat stone summit. He lay on his back, staring up at the darkening sky, his chest rising and falling in violent, shuddering heaves. His feet were ruined. His hands were bloody.
[Task 2: Completed.]
Ren closed his eyes, allowing himself exactly ten minutes of rest. He couldn't sleep. He was starving. His stomach was a hollow, aching void that gnawed at his insides. He hadn't eaten since the stew in the capital, which felt like a lifetime ago.
He forced himself to sit up and look down the opposite side of the mountain.
[Task 3: Hunt and kill one wild rabbit. (Bare hands only).]
Ren began the agonizing descent. Halfway down the mountain, the rocky terrain leveled out into a wide, grassy plateau dotted with small shrubs and dirt mounds. It was a hunting ground.
He spotted his target almost immediately. A wild rabbit, large and muscular, nibbling on a patch of clover near a burrow.
Ren's stomach gave a violent, painful lurch. He crept forward, trying to be quiet, but his stiff, exhausted muscles betrayed him. His foot dragged against a patch of dry brush.
Rustle.
The rabbit's long ears twitched. In a fraction of a second, it bolted. It was a blur of brown fur, darting in a chaotic zigzag pattern, vanishing into a burrow thirty yards away before Ren could even take a second step.
Ren fell to his knees in the grass, frustration boiling over into a quiet, desperate rage.
Without his 89 Speed, he was a statue compared to the rabbit. Without his 142 Intelligence, he couldn't predict its exact trajectory. He couldn't outrun it. He couldn't overpower it. And the rules explicitly forbade traps.
'I have to catch it with my bare hands,' Ren analyzed, forcing his human brain to work through the exhaustion. 'That means I have to be where it is, before it knows I'm there.'
He needed to become the environment.
Ren dragged himself to a small, muddy spring trickling down the mountainside. He stripped off his ruined tunic. The evening air was freezing, biting into his bare skin, but he ignored the shivers. He scooped up handfuls of the freezing, dark mud and smeared it over his chest, arms, face, and hair, masking his human scent. He gathered clumps of tall, dry grass and wove them loosely around his shoulders and back.
He found a spot downwind from a cluster of active burrows. He lay down flat on his stomach in the dirt, perfectly still, blending into the earth.
And he waited.
The second night passed in a blur of freezing agony. The temperature plummeted. Ren's muscles cramped so violently he had to bite his own tongue to keep from crying out. Insects crawled over his arms and face, biting his skin. He didn't twitch. He slowed his breathing until it was almost imperceptible. He buried his bloodlust, projecting nothing but the aura of a dead log.
This was the true essence of an Assassin. It wasn't about flashy dagger skills or teleportation. It was about absolute, terrifying patience.
The sun rose on the third day.
Ren was fading. He was severely dehydrated, starving, and hypothermic. His consciousness was slipping in and out. The line between reality and the void was blurring.
Hours ticked by. The sun climbed to its peak and began its slow descent.
Still, no rabbit emerged within his reach. They appeared in the distance, mocking him, but none came close enough for a bare-handed strike.
The sky began to turn a deep, bruised purple. The third day was ending.
Suddenly, a harsh, glowing red notification shattered the peaceful illusion of the valley, hovering directly in front of Ren's mud-caked face.
[WARNING: REALM COLLAPSE IMMINENT.]
[Time Remaining: 01:00:00]
[Failure to complete mandatory tasks will result in permanent vessel rejection.]
One hour.
Sixty minutes left before the System deemed his body unworthy of his stats. If he failed, he wouldn't just lose the realm; he would lose his ability to hold the power he had bought. He would be sent back to face Kage, the Shadow Monarch, as a crippled, stat-less boy. He would die in the arena. Erna would be reclaimed.
Ren's heart hammered a weak, frantic rhythm against the cold earth. His arms, buried in the mud, were trembling so badly he wasn't sure he could even close his hands, let alone snatch a lightning-fast animal.
Rustle.
Ren's eyes, bloodshot and sunken, shifted a fraction of an inch.
Less than three feet away, a large brown rabbit cautiously poked its head out of a burrow. Its nose twitched, testing the air. It took one hop forward. Then another.
It was within striking distance.
But Ren's body was a ruined, frozen shell. He had one hour left. He had one shot. If he missed, he wouldn't have the energy to try again.
The rabbit lowered its head to nibble on a blade of grass, completely unaware of the predator lying in the mud.
Ren stared at it, his vision swimming, his muscles screaming in silent agony, waiting for the perfect micro-second to strike.