[ ⚠️ Important Note: Feel free to totally skip Volume 2 (Ch 52 to Ch 90) entirely if you aren’t interested in slow-paced, slice-of-life Chapters.
The main plot picks up in Volume 3, which begins at [Chapter 91: Old Friends, Old Debts] with the conversation between Alessio and Cassian. ]
***
The forest behind the palace was always quiet.
That was the entire point of it, Alex understood, a buffer of trees thick enough to swallow sound, deliberately left wild so that whatever happened inside it stayed inside it, no echoes carrying back to the wrong ears.
He stepped through the treeline and stopped.
For a second he didn’t say anything at all. He just looked.
The clearing had been transformed.
Where two days ago there had been nothing but undisturbed forest floor, ferns and fallen leaves and the occasional startled bird, there was now a sprawling, deliberate landscape of obstacles and structures laid out with a precision that told him the construction crew had taken his specifications seriously, down to the last measurement on the last page.
To the left, a narrow dirt track wound between the trees and out of sight, the kind clearly meant for running, and along certain stretches of it he could see small iron weights bolted to low stakes, the kind a person might strap to their legs before a dawn run, waiting like patient little anchors.
Past that, a rock face.
Not natural, he was fairly sure, the stone too deliberately placed, too perfectly suited for handholds and footholds at varying difficulty, rising maybe thirty feet before leveling off into a flat platform that caught the morning light.
Beyond the rock face, the sound of moving water.
A diverted channel from the river, cutting through a section of the clearing with visible current, strong enough to fight against, with handrails set at the edges for safety, the water dark and quick where it passed under the shadow of the trees.
Hills, gentle but real, with a row of full water buckets sitting at the base of the nearest one, waiting, the surface of each one trembling faintly in the breeze.
Sandbag dummies, weighted and hanging from sturdy frames, the canvas dark with damp where they’d clearly been filled with wet sand rather than dry, swaying slightly even when nothing touched them.
Low rope obstacles strung between posts at knee height, the kind designed to be crawled under rather than stepped over, the rope itself coarse and unforgiving looking.
Unstable balance logs laid across short drops, and a rope bridge further along that swayed slightly even in the still air, creaking with a sound like something patient.
And near the edge closest to the water channel, a stone basin that had been carved and filled, the surface of the water inside it catching the light with the particular stillness of something deliberately kept cold.
Zara whistled low beside him, a single drawn out note of genuine surprise.
"They actually built all of it," she said, scanning the clearing the way a soldier scans a battlefield. "I read the list and assumed half of it was aspirational. Royalty asks for a lot of things that exist purely on paper."
"It’s all functional," Alex said, walking the perimeter slowly, cataloguing each section with the methodical attention of a man doing inventory. "Nothing here is decoration. I didn’t ask for decoration."
He felt the warmth stir at the edge of his perception, the quiet presence of his Aspect responding to his attention the way it always did when he focused on something deliberately, like a dog perking its ears at the sound of its leash.
’Let’s get to work,’ he thought.
He started with the dawn runs first, even though it wasn’t dawn, because the order mattered less than the principle behind it. He strapped the weighted bands to his legs, felt the immediate, honest protest of muscles that had never carried that kind of resistance before, and began.
’Stamina first,’ he thought, settling into a rhythm.
’Everything else depends on stamina. You can have the best technique in the world and it means nothing if your body gives out in minute three of a fight that takes five. I’ve seen it happen. Talented people, dead on the third minute, because nobody told them stamina was the boring foundation everything else gets built on.’
The weights dragged at every step.
His legs, which had felt perfectly serviceable a minute ago, suddenly felt like they belonged to someone else, someone less coordinated, someone who hadn’t quite finished learning how gravity worked and resented being asked to figure it out under load.
He kept running.
Zara watched from the edge of the track, arms folded, her expression unreadable in the particular way she’d perfected over the last few days, the look of someone observing carefully while pretending to be only mildly interested, a performance Alex had stopped being fooled by around the second day of knowing her.
’This is the part nobody glamorizes,’ Alex thought, breathing harder than he wanted to admit, the air starting to burn a little on the way in.
’Nobody writes songs about the boring repetition that makes the impressive stuff possible later. They write about the duel, the breakthrough, the moment the hero turns the tide. Nobody writes about lap eleven of a weighted run where your lungs are starting to file a formal complaint and your legs are threatening to unionize.’
He activated his Aspect quietly, channeling a thread of mana through his system, and felt the familiar, useless warmth settle over him like a blanket that didn’t actually keep anyone warm, just sat there being present.
Nothing happened.
No flash of insight, no sudden surge of capability.
But he kept the activation running anyway, because if the Aspect was going to learn anything from this, it needed data to learn from, and data meant doing the thing, consistently, with the system switched on and watching, the way a tutor watches a student even when the student isn’t doing anything remarkable yet.
’You don’t get to skip the boring part,’ he thought, pushing through the last stretch, sweat starting to sting at his eyes.
’Not even if you remember an entire previous life. Especially not if you remember an entire previous life. I know exactly how this works. I know that talent without grinding is a story people tell themselves to avoid grinding.’
He finished the lap.
His legs were shaking in a way that had nothing to do with the weights and everything to do with muscles meeting their actual limits for what felt like the first time in this body, a genuine, unfamiliar tremor running from ankle to thigh.
Zara approached with a waterskin, watching him with something that had shifted slightly from idle interest into actual attention.
"You’re not stopping," she observed, holding the waterskin out.
"I have around nine more of these on the list," Alex said, accepting the water and drinking before handing it back, the cool of it almost shocking against the back of his throat.
"The run was one item."
"Right." She studied him for a second longer, head tilted, something calculating behind her eyes.
"You know most five year olds would have stopped after the first lap and cried about it, and I want you to know that’s not an insult, that’s just biology doing what biology does."
"I’m aware," Alex said, already moving toward the rock face, his legs still complaining with every step.
"I’m choosing not to participate in that particular biological tradition."