(Shinmyung Hunter Academy. Three weeks later)
His intake assessment scored him F Rank across the board, with a single D in Tactical Analysis. The D was unintentional, he had been thinking about something else and answered on reflex.
He noted this and corrected course. In future assessments he would be more careful.
The Academy occupied the top five floors of a building that had been a corporate tower until two years ago, when the government's Awakening Response Committee had began quietly converting civilian infrastructure ahead of projections about the supernatural incidents that had been occurring in seventeen countries.
The instructors presented this as forward thinking. Ryu Seok knew it was a response to intelligence they hadn't yet shared with the public, intelligence he intended to access within the year.
He was assigned to the Scholarship Division: forty-eight students from outside the standard social networks of the Hunter community, recruited on potential scores or academic merit or, in a few cases, circumstance. He was given Room 412, a single with a window facing north, and a meal card loaded with the minimum scholarship stipend.
He spent his first night cataloguing the building.
Not exploring. Cataloguing. Exits, camera positions, maintenance access points, the eighteen-second gap in the east corridor's motion sensors caused by a faulty receiver that, in his original life, had not been repaired for three years. The sub-basement mechanical room, no cameras, ambient noise sufficient to mask activity, accessible via a maintenance hatch in the stairwell.
He was in that room training by two in the morning.
The first thing he worked on was not power. It was concealment. He had spent years, in his original life, developing cultivation techniques that produced zero detectable external mana signature. Every system that could track an awakened's energy output would see, at most, a slightly elevated heart rate. The techniques were locked behind the Iron Veil skill at 1.2% unlock, but the foundational principles were in his head, and he could build toward them with what his current body supported.
In the original timeline, visible power was a leash. Guilds found you, assessed you, offered you contracts that became cages. The Hunter Association filed you, graded you, used you where it served them. He had been a known quantity at twenty-two and a political problem at thirty and a symbol at fifty, and none of it had happened on his terms.
Not this time.
He slept from five to seven, attended every class, and was precisely mediocre.
The class structure was what he remembered: theory in the mornings, practical assessment in the afternoons, supplemental combat drills three times a week. The practical segments were the challenge. It was easy to score low on written theory, he simply answered with the framework of someone who was learning, not someone who had lived it. The physical drills required more craft. He had fifty-one years of muscle memory in a body with sixteen years of physical development, and the gap between what his instincts wanted to do and what his current frame could plausibly execute required constant, careful calibration.
He made two acquaintances in the first week.
Park Jiho: Room 408, tall and broadly built for sixteen, B-Rank potential in spatial affinity, the kind of uncomplicated warmth that Ryu Seok had learned, over decades, to recognize as genuinely rare. In the original timeline Jiho had died at nineteen in the Fourth Gate Siege, a casualty of a commander's poor positioning. Ryu Seok had not been in that unit. He had read the casualty report two weeks after the fact and moved on, because in those years that was all you could do.
That was not what he was going to do this time.
"You take a lot of notes for someone who scored thirty-eighth," Jiho said, appearing at his shoulder after the first theory lecture with the air of a person who has decided you are interesting without asking permission.
"I retain things better when I write them down," Ryu Seok said.
"That's not what those are, though." Jiho nodded at the margin of the notebook, where Ryu Seok had been sketching a spatial compression diagram from memory. "That's advanced spatial theory. We don't cover that until third semester."
A beat of silence. Ryu Seok closed the notebook.
"I read ahead," he said.
Jiho looked at him for a long moment with the expression of someone adding something to a mental file.
"Okay," he said, easily. "Want to get lunch?"
The second acquaintance was less voluntary.
Ha Serin: top of the entire incoming cohort, Rank A Potential, an organizational mind that he had once, in another life, in a war room above a burning city, come to regard as the finest strategic intelligence in the Hunter world. She had been twenty-six then, commanding thirty thousand personnel. She was seventeen now and already watching everyone in the room with the quiet precision of someone who categorizes before they connect.
She had noticed his notebook.
She said nothing about it. But he saw her look, and he saw her file it, and he knew from long experience that filed things had a way of being retrieved.
He let it stand.
He had time. What he needed now was not allies, not yet. What he needed was for the next six months to pass without him becoming visible, while he built a foundation in this body that would hold the weight of everything he intended to do with it.
The System flickered at the edge of his vision that evening.
[Iron Veil Unlock Rate: 1.2% → 1.9%]
Small. But it was moving.
He turned off his light at ten and lay in the dark listening to the ordinary sounds of the city, the city that was still whole, still unaware, still living in the last normal months it would ever have, and thought about all the things he was going to change.
He fell asleep before he reached the end of the list.
That was new. In his first life he had not slept well at sixteen. He supposed fifty-one years had taught him something about rest too.