She couldn't sleep.
The bed wasn't at fault. In fact, the mattress was obscenely comfortable, the kind that swallowed you whole and held you there.
It wasn't the temperature either, or the noise, or any of the reasons a person might ordinarily cite. The bed was large, clearly meant for two, the extra side still dressed and waiting, and that was precisely the problem.
She rolled to her left.
Then her right.
The nightgown clung in ways that felt unnecessary, and she tugged at it with irritation. She didn't normally sleep in anything when he was here. The security of his warmth made clothing feel redundant. But without him, some irrational instinct insisted on the nightgown, as if the fabric was trying to substitute for something it obviously couldn't.
She hugged the pillow tighter, but it was obviously failing miserably at being the substitute.
Finally, she gave up the pretense of sleep and opened her eyes, staring at the ceiling with a dull expression.
'Damn you… Can't you at least come back for a couple of hours a day? Does it have to be like this?'
She hadn't complained when he asked her if he could leave for a month for his next phase of training, and even offered to cover for his duty as the territory's lord.
…but it didn't mean that she liked it. In fact, she was hopelessly addicted to Ashen, so much so that only three days of separation made her too restless to properly sleep at night.
This addiction seemed to get worse after the one year of separation that happened between them.
'I miss you…'
⛧
⛧
⛧
'Intertwine the threads…'
'Five thousand.'
'Six thousand.'
'Seven.'
'Eight.'
"Humpff—!"
Bomm—!
The light of mana blazed across his body, his arms shaking as his will hammered against the rock's resistance, but his bent hands refused to straighten. The force of his physical enhancement met the new weight the rock generated to match it, and they collided in the middle in a resonant detonation that rattled his bones.
Five minutes, then his will gave out first.
"Haaah… haaah… haaah…"
'Again.'
He waited for his mind to settle and his mana to regenerate.
Then he started over.
⛧
Ten thousand threads, then fifty thousand, then a hundred.
His mind split and re-split the mana with increasing precision, weaving each thread through skin and muscle and bone. What had once demanded his complete concentration, he eventually did the way he breathed: without thought.
The mental architecture built up through sheer repetition until it became reflexive.
Exertion, recovery, exertion again.
The closed loop went on and on until his mind went on autopilot.
And the rock was always there to match him. The moment his ceiling rose, the weight rose with it. But his ceiling kept rising regardless, because there was nothing else here. There was no way to spend his time except for this.
At a hundred thousand threads, he could feel the enhancement taking shape, but unevenly. But he didn't care. It will fix itself in the countless future repetitions anyway.
At a million, something changed. The threads had become fine enough to reach places they hadn't before. He could feel his nervous system lighting up differently, and signals traveling faster. Above all, his body was beginning to operate as a single coordinated system rather than components working in rough concert.
It was as if the threads were connecting everything about him and making him more whole, if that made any sense.
At a hundred million, the brute power generated by bulging muscles was gone entirely, replaced by a cleaner and more total force. Every fiber was reinforced uniformly, and every bone carried its share.
Ashen felt like there were no weak points or overdeveloped clusters. Which meant that there would be no need to compensate for gaps. It was akin to the whole structure operating at once, each part a pillar holding the same ceiling.
But Ashen didn't show any signs of stopping. He kept going.
⛧
⛧
⛧
At a billion threads, the mana was so finely divided, so completely interwoven with every inch of him, that the distinction between body and mana began to feel arbitrary. He wasn't infusing himself. He simply was, all at once, entirely.
The dramatic expansion of his muscles had completely receded now, not even the tiny tells were spared. In fact, there was no visible change after the enhancement. Just a soft aura that settled around him, and even that was barely perceptible.
The most obvious tell was the way his clothes and hair were shifting in a current that had no wind behind it.
I'm on top of the world.
That was the closest he could get to describing it using mere words.
Crack—
The rock brought him back, matching his new ceiling before he'd finished arriving at it. The sound was sharp but brief.
It felt for a single instant as if something had actually given, like the rock had held a fraction of a second longer than it should have before responding.
Then it was gone, and Ashen dismissed it as a figment of his imagination.
He came down from that height slowly, and what remained once the feeling had cleared was a despondency so quiet it barely registered as an emotion anymore.
'So even with this, it's still not enough.'
He checked his status.
[3. Physical Level]
Strength: C+ | Endurance: C+ | Agility: C+
Perception: C+ | Stamina: C+ | Mana: E+
C+. Still.
Everything was stuck at C+ for a while, but Ashen didn't have the motivation to seek an answer now.
It might have looked like he was making progress at first glance, but after ten years of trying… after ten years of standing in the same position, doing the same thing over and over again…
It made him feel like what he was doing was meaningless.
His stats hadn't moved for the last eight years. The rock had also never moved.
And the thing about meaninglessness wasn't that it hurt. It was that it wore, slowly and continuously. The struggle against it was its own exhaustion, added on top of everything else, and lately the struggle was losing.
His spirit was just exhausted. He was tired… too tired.
The sun was already up, bathing his face with its light. Ashen numbly manipulated a thread of mana and allowed it to drift to the smiling spear beside him.
The thread snaked on the shaft and craved another point on it.
If one looked closely, they'd be able to see thousands of such points already.
3652 to be precise. Each one representing a day.
'Ten years, huh…'
Ashen looked at the smiling face near the base of the blade.
It still looked like it was smiling.
'I miss them.'