The encounter with the Pagoda drone had changed the very nature of Ren's existence. His solitude was no longer just a consequence of his training; it was an active, necessary defense. He spent the next few days perfecting his chameleon's cloak, learning to walk, breathe, and exist under a flawless illusion of powerlessness. The feeling was intoxicating. He moved through the academy's bustling courtyards and corridors not as a pariah, but as a ghost, utterly and completely overlooked. The freedom was absolute.
This newfound invisibility sparked a new kind of curiosity within him. For months, he had been forced to ignore the orthodox path of cultivation. He had been so focused on his own unique, isolated struggle that he had no real understanding of how his peers actually fought or used their powers. He knew their theory from the basic classes, but he had never truly observed them. Driven by a pragmatic need to understand the methods of potential threats, he cloaked himself in the signature of a nobody and made his way to the public training grounds.
He found a quiet, shaded spot beneath a large oak tree at the edge of the grounds, a place where no one would think to look twice at a loitering, low-status student. From here, he watched. And for the first time, he truly saw.
His senses, honed by the need to feel the pressure of invisible walls and the weight of single grains of sand, perceived the Aether Weave in a way he never could have before. He couldn't see the brilliant colors of a Spirit Soul manifestation as others did, but he could feel the process. He could sense the echo of their will in the Weave, the way they gathered and shaped the Prime Aether around them.
He watched an initiate practice a simple "Fire Spit" Soul Skill. Ren couldn't see the flame, but he could feel the clumsy, inefficient way the student drew in ambient Aether, the wasteful "burning" of energy, and the chaotic projection that sent nearly half the gathered power dissipating uselessly as unfocused heat. It was like watching someone try to carry water in a sieve.
His gaze then shifted to Anya Volkov. She stood alone in a far corner, practicing not an attack, but a complex defensive art. She moved her hands in slow, graceful arcs, and Ren could feel her drawing in Aether with breathtaking efficiency. She wove it, thread by perfect thread, into a crystalline lattice in front of her, a shield of pure, harmonized energy. There was almost no wasted power. It was the work of a master weaver, a true genius, and he felt a grudging knot of respect tighten in his chest. She was his polar opposite: a master of the orthodox path, her control as elegant as his was brutally pragmatic.
Then, his attention was drawn by a series of loud, guttural grunts. It was Lin Fei and his cronies, gathered around a reinforced training dummy. Lin Fei was practicing his "Stone Fist" technique. With each punch, his fist would glow with a muddy, yellow-brown Aether, and he would leave a shallow dent in the dummy's hardened torso. He was clearly proud of the display, flexing his power for his sycophantic followers.
But Ren felt the crudeness of it. Lin Fei was drawing far too much Aether for such a simple skill, his control wavering at the moment of impact. With every punch, Ren could feel a huge portion of the energy failing to connect, instead dissipating uselessly through the floorboards and into the ground. It was power without finesse, a display of brute force designed to mask a core of insecurity.
After leaving one final, unimpressive dent, Lin Fei turned, basking in the praise of his friends. His eyes scanned the grounds and locked onto Ren. Seeing the academy's official dud watching him, he saw an opportunity to punctuate his performance. He swaggered over, his friends trailing behind him like vultures.
"Come to admire a real Spirit Master, mud-blood?" Lin Fei sneered, gesturing back at the slightly dented dummy. "This is power. The kind that crushes freaks like you. Why don't you give it a try? Oh, that's right," he laughed, "you can't even light a candle."
Ren didn't respond. He simply pushed himself off the tree and walked calmly towards the battered training dummy, his Aetheric cloak holding perfectly. Lin Fei and his friends watched, their faces filled with amused contempt, expecting nothing.
Ren placed his palm flat against the dummy's chest, right in the center of the cluster of shallow dents. He closed his eyes. He didn't try to use brute force. He didn't create a hammer of air. He remembered the lesson of the granite slab.
He extended his will, not as a blade this time, but as a network of impossibly fine needles. He felt for the internal structure of the dummy—the packed wood, the Aether-infused resin that held it together. And he felt the damage Lin Fei had already done: a web of deep, internal stress fractures and micro-cracks radiating out from every clumsy impact.
He wasn't here to break the dummy. He was just here to push on the cracks.
Using the exquisite control he had spent months honing, he sent a series of tiny, coordinated, oscillating kinetic pulses deep into the material, each one perfectly tuned to the frequency of the existing fractures. It was the precise, targeted application of a minuscule amount of force. From the outside, nothing happened.
Ren removed his hand and turned to walk away, not even giving Lin Fei a second glance.
"It's just inefficient," he said quietly, his voice barely a whisper.
He took one step. Then a second.
On his third step, a low groan emanated from the training dummy behind him. A spiderweb of dark cracks erupted across its entire torso, connecting all of Lin Fei's dents. With a sound like splintering bone, the whole upper half of the heavily reinforced dummy disintegrated, collapsing into a heap of wood chips, dust, and ruined resin.
Lin Fei and his friends stared, their jaws hanging open in slack-jawed horror, at the pile of rubble that had been their testament to "real power." They looked from the ruin to Ren's retreating back, utterly unable to comprehend what they had just witnessed.