Shi Chen hit like a truck that had been raised by wolves.
The first sparring session happened the morning after the enrollment hearing. Nox's ribs were still taped. His left arm was still in a sling. His right hand's fingers were splinted together in pairs. None of this mattered to Shi Chen, who took one look at the injuries and said, "Good. You'll learn to fight hurt. Hurt is where you'll be most of the time."
"That's not the motivational speech I was hoping for."
"I don't do speeches. Feet apart. Wider. Now move."
The footwork drills were brutal in their simplicity. Step left. Step right. Forward. Back. Diagonal. Each step had a correct distance, a correct angle, a correct weight distribution. Nox's body, the dead boy's body, had none of the muscle memory these patterns required. His legs moved like they were controlled by a lag-ridden remote connection.
Shi Chen corrected by demonstration. He put his feet where Nox's feet should be and moved through the pattern at half speed, his body low, center of gravity anchored, each step landing with the solidity of someone who'd been drilling this since childhood. Then he watched Nox try it and said "Wrong" and showed it again.
No explanations. No theory. Just the correct movement, repeated until the body learned it. The opposite of how Nox processed the world, and the opposite was exactly what he needed.
By the end of the hour, his calves were burning and his footwork had improved by roughly ten percent. Shi Chen called this "acceptable" and left.
Nox sat on the training yard bench and wrote in his notebook: *Footwork is the physical layer. I've been building applications (skill edits, tactics) on top of a transport protocol (body movement) that drops packets. Shi Chen is fixing the transport layer. This is the correct order of operations, even if I started from the wrong end.*
---
Mira's office looked the same. URGENT stack. IGNORE stack. Coffee ring. Tactical manuals arranged by spine color. She was grading papers when Nox knocked.
"Come in."
He placed Commander Renn's staff on her desk. The dark wood caught the window light. The single empty gem socket sat above the three-socket intermediate staff that Nox carried in his other hand.
"I'm returning your staff," Nox said. "I have my own now."
Mira looked at the staff on her desk. Looked at the three-socket staff in his hand. Looked at Nox.
"That's Renn's staff. I told you."
"I know. And I'm returning it. It belongs with someone who knew him."
"It belongs with his son."
"His son is dead."
The words came out flat. Not harsh. Just accurate. The dead boy had died before Nox arrived in his body. The staff belonged to a person who didn't exist anymore, handed to Nox by a woman who thought she was honoring a promise to a man she'd served with.
Mira's jaw tightened. The scar on her neck shifted. She picked up the staff. Held it the way she'd held it the first time, balanced across both palms, the care of someone handling something that carried twenty years of accumulated meaning.
"I held this for Commander Renn," she said. "I gave it to you because you needed a weapon and because I saw something in the hallway that reminded me of him. The way you looked at that shield. Like you were reading something nobody else could see." She set the staff down. "Renn looked at the Spirit Plane the same way."
"You knew him well enough to recognize that?"
"I knew him well enough to know that the perception he had was rare. One in a million. Maybe less. He could see the architecture beneath the surface of the Spirit Plane. Patterns. Structures. He couldn't edit them the way you apparently can, but he could read them. The Guard called it 'transcendent insight.' Dean Tong at the Research Institute has been studying it for sixty years."
Dean Tong. The name appeared in Nox's mental index. Head of the Daxia Advanced Spirit Research Institute. A former S-rank. Nox hadn't met him.
"Take the staff back," Mira said. She pushed it across the desk. "Carry both. Use Renn's for channeling when you need A-rank throughput. Use your three-socket for everyday combat. A Weaver with two staffs has options. Options keep you alive."
Nox looked at the staff. The dark wood. The empty socket. A dead man's weapon.
He picked it up.
"Thank you," he said.
Mira grunted. It was the closest she came to acknowledging gratitude. "Now get out. I have papers to grade."
---
The Spirit Plane Expedition notice went up at noon.
**ADVANCED TRAINING EXPEDITION — SPIRIT PLANE B-RANK ZONES**
**Open to all Junior and Intermediate students with C-rank combat certification.**
**Duration: 5 days. Supervised entry. Team registration required (minimum 3 members).**
**Available resources: B-rank spirit materials, B-rank Skill Altars (confirmed in deep zones), credit rewards based on zone completion.**
**Registration deadline: 3 days.**
**NOTE: Students seeking intermediate class promotion must demonstrate a B-rank skill and accumulate 10,000 credits. This expedition provides opportunity for both.**
Ten thousand credits. Nox checked his balance at the academy office. 1,540 credits remaining after the forge materials and gem purchases. He needed 8,460 more. Plus a B-rank skill.
The B-rank skill required finding an altar in the B-rank zones. The same zones where he'd nearly died during the secret realm expedition. Except this time, the zones would be the real Spirit Plane, not the training realm. Stronger monsters. Rarer altars. Higher stakes.
And the registration required a team of three. No solo entry.
He stood in front of the notice board and considered his options. Lin Mei would come. Shi Chen might, if he could register cross-class. Guo Feng was willing but his D-rank Flash Step wouldn't survive B-rank monsters. Tan Yi was a healer, useful but fragile.
"You're staring at that notice like it owes you money."
Nox turned. A girl stood behind him, reading the notice over his shoulder. Medium height. Slim build. Hair pulled into a practical bun with a pen stuck through it. Ink stains on her fingers. She carried a satchel that bulged with notebooks and what looked like recording crystals. She was reading the notice with the speed of someone who consumed text for a living.
"B-rank expedition," Nox said. "I need a team."
"Everyone needs a team. That's why it says 'minimum 3 members' in bold." She pulled the pen from her hair, jotted something in a notebook she'd produced from the satchel without Nox noticing, and looked at him. Her eyes were bright. Alert. The eyes of someone who was always recording. "You're Nox Renn."
"I am."
"The class battle. Sea of Fire. Zero mana cost with effects that shouldn't exist on a C-rank base skill." She said this the way other people said hello. "I'm Sera Wan. I'm registering for the expedition as a research observer."
"Research observer?"
"I study spirit skill mechanics. How skills work, not just what they do. I'm attached to the Institute, not the academy proper, but I need B-rank zone access for field data and the expedition is the fastest way to get it." She tapped the pen against the notebook. "I saw your class battle recordings. Your skill parameters don't match any documented variant of Sea of Fire. I've been trying to figure out how a C-rank skill produces zero-cost sustained damage with composite first-contact effects for three days and I can't make the numbers work."
She spoke fast. Each sentence flowed into the next without pause, like someone who had too many thoughts for the bandwidth available. When she got to the end of a sequence, she stopped abruptly and waited for a response with the patience of someone who knew most people needed a moment to catch up.
"The numbers don't work," Nox agreed. "That's because the base skill isn't producing those effects. The base skill was modified."
Sera's pen stopped moving. Her eyes locked onto his.
"Modified how?"
This was the moment where he should deflect. Where he should say "natural variant" or "altar anomaly" or any of the cover stories he'd used before. But Sera Wan was looking at him with the specific hunger of a researcher who'd found a data point that didn't fit her model, and lying to that look felt like deleting a test case because it failed.
"I'll tell you on the expedition," he said. "If you register with my team."
Sera's pen resumed its tapping. She was thinking. Running calculations. Weighing the value of field data against the risk of partnering with a D-class student who'd nearly been expelled twice.
"I'm not a combat type," she said. "Fire affinity, B-rank, but I'm a theorist. I observe. I record. In combat, I'm the person standing in the back with a crystal, documenting how everyone else fights."
"I have a tank for the front. I need someone who can see what I see."
"What do you see?"
"Register with my team and find out."
Sera closed her notebook. Tucked the pen behind her ear instead of back in her bun. She held out her hand.
"Sera Wan. Research observer. Fire affinity B-rank. My grandfather is Dean Tong, so if you're wondering whether I got my institute position through merit or nepotism, the answer is both, and I'm aware of it, and I don't pretend otherwise."
Nox shook her hand. Her grip was firm. The ink stains on her fingers were fresh.
"Nox Renn. D-rank. Fire affinity C-rank. My enrollment was forged by a general and I can do things with spirit skills that I can't explain yet."
"That's a terrible introduction."
"It's an honest one."
Sera's mouth twitched. Not a smile. The precursor to one. She pulled the notebook back out.
"I'm going to need to document everything you do in the Spirit Plane. Everything. Skill activations, combat decisions, parameter outputs, energy consumption. I'll be recording constantly. Is that a problem?"
"Only if you share the data without asking."
"I don't share raw data. Ever. Preliminary findings go through peer review at the Institute before publication. Your identity would be anonymized."
"Then we have a deal."
She wrote something in the notebook. Fast. Two lines. Closed it.
"Registration office closes at five. I'll file the team paperwork. You bring the third member."
She walked away. Her stride was quick, purposeful, the walk of someone who was always on their way to document something. The satchel bounced against her hip. The pen was still behind her ear.
---
Nox found Shi Chen in Training Yard A, running footwork drills alone. The same patterns he'd taught Nox that morning, but at full speed. His feet struck the stone with the precision of a metronome. Left. Right. Forward. Back. Diagonal. Each step identical to the last.
"Spirit Plane expedition," Nox said. "B-rank zones. Five days. I need a third team member."
Shi Chen finished his drill pattern. Wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. "When?"
"Three days."
"I'm in."
"You don't want to know the details?"
"You fight smart. You make good decisions under pressure. The details don't matter if the person calling the shots knows what they're doing." He started another drill pattern. "Tell me when and where."
Nox registered the team that afternoon. Three members: Nox Renn (Class 3, D-rank), Shi Chen (Class 2, C-rank), Sera Wan (Research Institute, B-rank observer). The registration officer looked at the roster, looked at Nox, and said, "Your team has a D-rank, a C-rank, and a non-combat researcher. In B-rank zones."
"That's correct."
"The academy assumes no liability for—"
"I know."
The officer stamped the form. Three days until departure.
That evening, Nox sat on the bench by the Spirit Plane portal. His new routine. The evening check. Compiler perception active, reading what he could of the portal's layered code.
He held the perception for fifty-one seconds. New record. In that time, he mapped another layer of the portal's architecture. The transport protocol. The synchronization handshake. The authentication exchange.
And something new. Deep in the code, below the transport layer, in a region he hadn't been able to reach before: a data stream. Continuous. Flowing from the Spirit Plane into the portal and back. Not a single transmission. A sustained connection. The portal wasn't just a door that opened and closed. It was a live link. A persistent socket connection between two systems, continuously exchanging data.
The Spirit Plane was sending information to the physical world. Through the portal. All the time.
What was it sending?
His perception faded. Fifty-one seconds exhausted. But the question remained, and the question was the kind that made a programmer sit up straight in his chair and cancel his dinner plans.
He opened his notebook. Wrote:
*The portal maintains a persistent connection with the Spirit Plane. Continuous bidirectional data stream. The Plane is actively communicating with the physical world through every open portal. Not just passively waiting for Weavers to enter. Sending data. Receiving data.*
*What data?*
*And who, on the Spirit Plane's side, is reading it?*
He closed the notebook and stared at the portal's blue shimmer until the guards changed shifts and the courtyard went dark.
