Orion ran until his lungs burned.
The track blurred at the edges but his legs kept moving anyway.
He noticed he was getting faster while spending less energy.
Every time his breathing settled, the motion felt a little more natural.
His Running had climbed to Level 5, and by the end of the twenty-kilometer run, it hit Level 6.
Orion threw himself to the ground at a spot where Kalista looked down at him. He hugged his water bottle like a lifeline.
"If I wanted to return from the Elite class to the academic staff class, would they accept me?" He gasped between greedy gulps of water. "Maybe I was born to be a genius assistant."
Teacher Remy was intrigued that Orion still had the energy to crack jokes despite being out of breath.
Moreover, his body had eliminated almost all the bruises he received during combat training. But this was something everyone expected from him. They had seen much worse wounds heal in the Maze.
Teacher Remy nudged his shoulder while Orion was practically glued to Kalista's boots, panting like he'd just survived a hunt.
Remy's eyes narrowed as he watched Orion recover. The act didn't match the body. Orion looked like he was dying, but his breathing was already stabilizing.
"Hey!" Remy kicked Orion's shoe lightly.
He looked at Orion with a strange expression, as if he had been personally insulted by Orion's stamina. "Stand up immediately and pick up those weights. Now we start the part you won't like."
"Hey, I didn't do anything." Orion raised his hands defensively. "Why did you get hyped up on your own?"
He didn't get an answer but started conditioning where he felt like he would die under machines he'd never seen before.
Two hours later, they were at the very end of the physical training.
Orion acquired a new skill while lunging a training dummy with a blunted metal sword. He read the description.
[Weapon Mastery (Basic) Level 1]
[Passive Ability. The user's sword-fighting skills develop faster.]
It was simpler than Orion guessed but useful.
But at that moment, despite his improved stats, his entire body was completely drained. He had increased his Endurance with the 1 stat point he gained when he last leveled up, but nothing seemed to change.
Throwing 20-kilo metal balls and swinging a heavy sword for a long time put the final nail in the coffin.
When Orion could barely stand, Remy didn't let him fall. He shoved him onto a leg press.
Then he placed something spring-loaded into Orion's hands, forcing him to keep moving even while his legs shook.
For half an hour, Orion pushed weight with numb thighs and fought thick ropes until his arms felt hollow.
When Remy finally decided Orion was properly ruined, he led him to a special room at the back of the gym.
The room was dark enough to swallow depth. Carpet covered the floor wall to wall. There were no windows or furniture.
It had to be deliberate.
In meditation, you were supposed to have nothing to stare at and nothing to cling to.
"Sit in the middle and do exactly what I tell you from outside." Remy stood by the door, his silhouette framed by the hallway light.
"If you fall asleep, I'll put you back on the machines and we'll repeat today's workload until you learn meditation.
So handle it."
"Understood." Orion nodded wearily.
He saw another student going from the inner parts of the gym to another dark room across the corridor. Just like Orion, this burly girl was being pushed like a sheep by the teacher behind her.
Orion felt a twisted sense of relief realizing he wasn't suffering alone.
Moreover, that girl's entire body was full of real cuts and brutal tears on her clothes.
The tiny black-haired teacher behind her, who looked very harmless and was barely 1.60 tall, looked toward them and nodded.
"Is that girl going to be my classmate?" Orion whispered. "I saw her throw a three-meter Orc ten meters back with a single hit in the Maze."
"Exactly. We haven't taken a warrior into the S-Class for a long time. Though you are there too..."
Orion was ready to forget meditation and lie down on the floor completely when he went inside and the door closed behind him.
But Teacher Remy's threat worked. He held himself back from collapsing.
"Keep your eyes open." Remy's voice came through the door.
"You'll breathe when I give the signal. When I knock once, breathe slow and deep. When I knock twice, breathe sharp and hard. And don't look at the door. Look into the dark."
For the next few minutes, Orion did the strangest meditation attempt of his life.
Sometimes the pattern turned brutal, fast breaths that made his chest ache.
He realized he had closed his eyes without noticing when the blackness around him started to tingle. But his consciousness didn't follow him into sleep.
A whiteness similar to television static covered the inside of his head. He found himself in an area that was half white and half black.
"Fuck! Did it really work?"
Although Orion spoke and his mouth moved, there was no sound here. He didn't even think he had a physical body.
But he was definitely somewhere.
He tried not to move much in this area to avoid breaking the meditation, as Teacher Remy had instructed. He started to imagine himself sitting and tried to feel the energy around him with all his perception.
Everyone in Midka could meditate. Everyone possessed this internal spiritual center connected to the planet in some way. Even humans weren't excluded from this rule.
The real problem was feeling mana.
For most humans, the door existed, but it didn't open. Only one percent of the population managed to feel mana here and draw it inside.
Orion took deep, regular breaths this time. He kept his eyes closed and held the rhythm.
He tried to feel the mana. And faint points of light appeared in the white noise. They drifted toward him as if they recognized something inside him.
Even Teacher Remy and Kalista, who were still knocking on the door from outside, knew he had entered meditation successfully. And they thought it was certain he was doing mana cultivation.
Orion had already developed his body with mana. Not doing it knowingly didn't change anything.
Teacher Remy stopped knocking the moment the first points of light drifted into the space around Orion.
If Orion could hear what he spoke, Remy would have told him to only collect mana for now and not try anything else.
It was the kind of warning he'd given plenty of times. But young people rarely listened.
Orion continued to breathe and draw mana with great concentration. Finally, he gathered a few sparkles and collected them at a point to prevent them from scattering back.
As far as he read in the book, if he fed his body with this mana, he would be a warrior. But if he continued to collect and compress it here, he would be a mage.
He thought to leave the warrior issue directly to the System. And he wondered with great curiosity how much advantage he would get if he could be both a warrior and a mage.
A crooked smile tugged at his mouth while he was still in meditation, struggling to collect mana.
Orion continued mana meditation for an hour with a look that didn't belong on someone meditating and dozens of questions he wanted to test in his head.
When the meditation ended, a small mana core was floating in the air inside his black and white inner world.
Somewhere between one breath and the next, the change settled in.
He had crossed the line.
But the exhaustion finally caught up to him. He had fallen asleep without realizing it.
Orion was already dreaming about flying when Remy and Kalista carried him up to the resting rooms.