Hyun Joo waited three days after building his shelter before he allowed himself to think
long-term.
The first days had been a scramble—water, a place to sleep, food he wouldn't regret eating
in the last moments of his life. But once he had those, the next problem took shape with
ugly clarity.
He was alone.
And if the welcome message was even half honest, Aetheris wasn't the kind of place where
a weak man could wander around asking strangers for directions.
He had thirty points sitting in his status window like a bag of coins in a country whose
language he didn't speak. He could spend them and become something right now… or
spend them wrong and regret it until he died.
So he chose a third option.
He would train. He would see if the world itself had a way to make him grow.
The idea wasn't heroic. It was almost petty in its stubbornness—like refusing to sign a
contract until he understood the fine print. But Hyun Joo had lived long enough to know
that impatience could ruin years.
And he'd watched enough stories to know: if a world gave you a "Status," it probably had a
"System." And systems rewarded effort.
The first week: suffering with structure
He started the next morning.
He warmed up by walking the stream's edge and swinging his arms, trying to remember
what people did before workouts. Then he dropped to the ground in a patch of leaf litter and
tried pushups.
The first set was humiliating.
He wasn't weak in the way an elderly man was weak—his joints didn't scream, his lungs
didn't burn out immediately—but his muscles weren't conditioned. He could do pushups,
yes. Just not many. And each one felt like dragging his body through mud.
He counted softly.
"One… two… three…"
By fifteen his arms shook. By twenty his elbows started to wobble outward. He forced two
more and collapsed face-first into leaves, chest heaving.
He lay there and stared at the dirt. Then, because he had nothing else to do and because
he was terrified of dying, he rolled onto his back and started situps.
After that came squats. Lunges. Planks. Anything he'd seen in workout clips, military
training scenes, sports anime montages. He even tried pullups by jumping for a low branch.
The branch was thick and sturdy; his grip was not.
He managed three ugly pullups—chin barely above bark—before his fingers gave out and
he dropped, landing in a crouch with a jolt up his legs.
"Again," he told himself.
He did it every day.
He ate what he could safely forage and gradually added fish when hunger overpowered
reluctance. The first time he tried to catch one, he learned that "spear fishing" wasn't just
stabbing—it was reading currents and refraction and timing. His first attempts were
pathetic splashes that sent fish darting away like insults.
Still, he tried.
Each night, he dragged himself into the moss bed, muscles trembling in that satisfying,
miserable way that meant he'd pushed too hard. He slept deeply, waking up with soreness
and the strange certainty that soreness was better than helplessness.
Every morning and every night, he checked his status.
At first, nothing changed.
Then, on the seventh day, he opened the window and froze so hard his breath caught.
Kim Hyun Joo — Lv. 1 (10/1000 EXP)
Str: 1 (95%)
Agi: 1 (—%)
Int: 1 (—%)
Dex: 1 (—%)
Chr: 1 (—%)
Vit: 1 (—%)
Mag: 5 (—%)
Available points: 40
Talent: Appraisal Lv. 1
His eyes went straight to the new numbers and labels. Level. Experience. Appraisal level.
And most shocking of all—percentages.
He blinked hard, then leaned closer as if proximity would make the meaning clearer.
"Forty points," he whispered. "It gave me ten."
So leveling was real. Training mattered. This wasn't just a character sheet; it was a ledger of
effort.
He looked at Strength: (95%).
Ninety-five percent of what? Of a point? Of improvement? Of… progress toward Str
becoming 2?
His heart sped up with excitement so sharp it almost hurt. He got down and did pushups
immediately, right there in the dirt, like an addict who'd just learned there was a counter for
his craving.
He pushed until his arms burned, until the shaking returned, until he collapsed again.
He checked his status.
Still (95%).
Hyun Joo stared at it, the excitement souring into confusion. He trained harder. He did more
sets throughout the day, splitting them up, trying different grips, trying slow pushups, trying
explosive ones.
Still (95%).
By evening, frustration crawled under his skin. The part of him that had worked for decades
with little reward whispered, Of course. Of course it doesn't move. Of course it lies.
He forced that voice down.
He ate. Slept. Woke sore.
The next morning, he did pushups again, slower, focusing on form like he'd heard trainers
say—straight back, controlled descent, full extension.
He checked his status.
Str: 1 (100%)
His breath caught in his throat. He didn't move for a second, afraid it would flicker away like
a mistake.
He did one more pushup.
The moment his arms extended, it happened.
The numbers shifted.
Str: 2 (0%)
And a jolt ran through him—warm and bright, like someone had poured clean electricity
into his blood. He gasped, sitting back hard. It wasn't painful. It was… invigorating. Like a
fatigue he'd been carrying without noticing had been peeled off his muscles.
He stood, stunned, and picked up his training stick. It felt lighter. Not imaginary lighter—
actually lighter, as if his grip had improved and his arms had more authority.
He dropped and tried pushups again.
Thirty. Then forty. His arms still burned, but the burn came later. His body obeyed more
cleanly. The movement felt less like survival and more like capability.
Hyun Joo laughed once, sharp and disbelieving.
"So that's what a point is," he said.
Not a number.
A change.
The first month: learning the rhythm of growth
After that, training became structured in a way it hadn't been before. Hyun Joo began to
treat the percentages like gauges. He learned, by stubborn repetition, that pushing past his
limit in a single session didn't always move the gauge. But steady strain, recovery, and
consistency did.
He built a simple routine around the day:
Morning: strength work (pushups, squats, pullups, carries with heavy rocks)
Midday: skill work (throwing stones at targets, balancing on logs, sprinting short distances)
Evening: endurance (longer walks, uphill climbs, breathing control)
He also discovered something he hadn't expected: his mind was… sharper about
remembering.
Not smarter in the sense of suddenly understanding calculus. But clearer. It was as if every
survival scene he'd ever watched had been stored behind fogged glass, and now someone
was wiping the glass clean.
He remembered details he'd never thought he'd retained—how to layer debris for
insulation, how to check wind direction using leaves, how to read animal trails by disturbed
grass. He remembered a line from a wilderness instructor about not relying on willpower
but on routine.
And he had routine now.
Appraisal helped in quiet ways too. It didn't give him names or descriptions, only that
simple mouth or skull, but that was enough. It let him expand his diet safely. It let him test
new plants cautiously. It let him stop living on pure fear.
Still, hunger remained a teacher.
During the first month, he tried fishing again and again. He fashioned a better spear by
hardening the tip in a small fire he finally managed to coax out of friction and persistence.
The first time he saw smoke, he'd nearly cried. The first time a flame took, he sat watching it
like it was holy.
Even with a hardened spear, fishing was exhausting. He failed more than he succeeded.
When he did catch one, it felt like winning a fight.
He learned quickly to respect calories.
Some days he trained too hard and became shaky, irritable, and clumsy. Those days taught
him to rest. To eat. To accept that recovery was part of growth.
At the end of the month, he checked his status and found a new kind of satisfaction:
The numbers had moved. Not drastically, but undeniably.
And beneath Mag, the percentage had begun to appear too—slowly, like something waking
up.
Finding the "inside" (Day 31)
He'd been trying to "feel magic" since the first week, mostly by copying what characters
did—sitting cross-legged, breathing slow, focusing inward like there was a light inside his
stomach.
At first it had felt silly. He would sit until his legs went numb and his thoughts wandered to
hunger, to fear, to his old bed, to the face of a coworker he hadn't thought about in years.
But on the thirty-first day, after a morning of training and a meal of fish and berries, he sat
by the stream with his back against the hill and did it again.
He inhaled slowly, then exhaled, trying to imagine his breath sinking down.
His mind was quieter than usual. Maybe exhaustion helped. Maybe routine did.
And then he felt it.
Not a dramatic explosion. Not a sudden glow.
A thread.
A faint, cool sensation beneath his ribs, like a current moving through still water. When he
focused on it, it responded—subtle, but real. It was as if he'd found a muscle he'd never
known existed.
Hyun Joo's eyes opened wide.
"There you are," he whispered.
He tried to guide it the way he'd seen in cultivation stories—circulating, drawing it through
the body, settling it into a "core" he couldn't actually locate but could imagine.
The thread resisted, then followed, then slipped away when his concentration broke.
He practiced anyway.
The next day he practiced again.
Soon he realized something important: even when he wasn't actively meditating, if he kept
a small part of his attention on that "thread," it would move on its own—slow, steady, like
breathing. Cultivating while resting. Accumulating without effort, as long as he didn't let his
mind scatter completely.
It became his new habit: a quiet background focus while he repaired his shelter, walked for
water, even while lying on the moss bed at night.
Mag didn't just represent "spells."
It represented capacity.
And capacity could be trained.
A year of turning effort into numbers
Time changed shape after that.
Days became cycles of strain and recovery. Weeks became milestones measured by how
many pullups he could do without falling, how far he could run before his lungs demanded
mercy, how precisely he could throw a stone into a chosen patch of mud.
His status became his journal.
He learned the pattern: percentages climbed, stalled, then surged when he hit 100%—and
each time a stat increased by one, the same jolt of energy came with it. Not just strength;
agility made his steps lighter, dexterity made his hands steadier, vitality made illness and
fatigue less threatening, intelligence made learning and recall smoother, charisma—
oddly—changed the way his voice carried and the way his body held itself. Even alone, he
could feel the difference in posture and confidence, as if the world would be more willing to
listen.
He didn't spend the level-up points right away. Not at first. He wanted to see how far he
could go through "natural" growth.
But as months passed, he realized something else: points were not only for shortcuts. They
were for balance. He could raise Strength through training, yes—but if Agility lagged behind,
his body moved like a powerful tool with a loose handle. If Intelligence and Charisma
stayed low, he might survive in the forest but fail the moment he met people.
So he began to distribute points cautiously, smoothing weaknesses rather than creating a
single spike.
His year broke into phases.
Month 1–3: survival competence
He became efficient at basics. He improved his spear. He learned where fish gathered and
how to approach without casting a shadow that sent them fleeing. He made a simple fish
trap using woven branches and placed it in a narrow section of the stream where currents
funneled movement. It didn't always work, but it worked often enough.
Hunting was uglier. He started with small animals—quick, nervous creatures he could trap
rather than chase. The first time he killed something for meat, he sat for a long time
afterward, hands shaking—not from fear, but from the reality of it. Then he forced himself
to process it the way he'd seen done: clean cuts, minimal waste, using sinew for bindings,
using hide as crude insulation.
By the third month, fishing no longer felt like a desperate gamble. It felt like a chore. Hard,
but manageable. He could catch enough to eat without spending his entire day failing.
Month 4–8: deliberate training and system mastery
He built simple "stations" near his shelter: a heavy log he could lift and carry, a sturdy
branch set between two trees for pullups, a marked stretch of ground for sprints. He
practiced footwork on uneven stones near the stream, improving balance. He threw
sharpened sticks at a target on a tree trunk to train dexterity. He talked out loud to
himself—telling stories, arguing, rehearsing introductions—because he refused to let
charisma remain an unknown stat.
Appraisal stayed at level 1 for a long time, but he used it constantly, testing plants, testing
animal parts, even testing water from different sources to see if anything changed. He
didn't know what triggered its growth, but he suspected use mattered.
Month 9–12: refinement and readiness
By then, his body was no longer the body that had woken up at Str 1. His movements were
controlled. His breathing during exertion was measured. His muscles had the dense,
practical strength of someone who lived outdoors, not the decorative strength of a gym
mirror.
He could jog along the stream carrying a load and still speak without gasping. He could
climb trees without panicking at every shift of bark. He could wrestle a struggling animal
without losing control.
And most importantly—his mind stopped treating every unknown sound in the night as a
death sentence. He was still wary. He was not foolish.
But he was not helpless.
Throughout it all, the "thread" inside him thickened. What began as a faint cool sensation
became a slow, reliable pool of energy he could circulate with practice. He didn't know
what it could do yet—no spells had appeared, no fireballs, no lightning—but he felt the
difference in endurance and recovery, like his body had an extra reservoir to draw from.
At the one-year mark, Hyun Joo sat in his shelter and opened his status window with a
steady hand.
He stared at the numbers for a long time, letting the reality settle.
All of them—Strength, Agility, Intelligence, Dexterity, Charisma, Vitality, Magic—had
reached 20.
Every one.
He didn't look like a different person so much as a completed version of the one he'd been
given: lean, capable, alert. A man shaped by necessity and repetition, hardened not by
tragedy but by relentless practice.
He closed the window and listened to the stream, to the forest that had been his entire
world for a year.
He thought about the welcome message again. Please enjoy this world to your heart's
content.
He exhaled.
"I've enjoyed living," he said softly. "That's enough."
He packed what he could: dried fish, a bundle of safe foraged food, a hardened spear, a
stone knife he'd painstakingly chipped into usefulness, bindings made from twisted fibers
and sinew. He checked his shelter one last time, not with sentimentality, but with
appreciation. It had kept him alive.
At the edge of the clearing, he paused and looked back.
A year ago, he'd been a confused man waking in a forest with ones across his stats and a
handful of fear.
Now he was something else.
He turned away from the stream and the hill and began walking in the direction he hadn't
dared to take before—toward the unknown, toward roads or villages or monsters or people
who might not welcome him at all.
He held his spear easily, like it belonged in his hand.
And as he walked, he kept a small part of his attention on the quiet current inside him—
steady, cultivated, patient—ready to find out what Aetheris would demand next.