It was just after 8:00 AM. The sun was up, casting a bright, clear light over the university campus.
Lin Hao walked through the main gates.
He had eaten. After setting up his formation flags, which had seamlessly blended into the warehouse's concrete walls, already making the massive building feel "invisible," he had walked to an all-night diner. He had ordered three full-stack breakfast platters, the ones with eggs, bacon, sausage, and pancakes. He had eaten all of it, and he was still hungry. His new, purified [Level 6] body was a high-performance furnace, and his hunger was a physical, demanding void.
He had also bought new clothes with his mortal money: simple black cargo pants, a plain gray t-shirt, and a dark, nondescript zip-up hoodie. He looked like any other student, just one who was incredibly, preternaturally, clean.
He was back on campus for one reason: to tie up his last loose end. He couldn't just vanish. The "Lin Hao, student" identity was his cover. He needed to clear out his dorm room, pack his laptop and his few personal items, like the photo of his family, and then file for a "leave of absence," citing family or health reasons. He would become a ghost, but a registered, accounted-for ghost.
But the moment he stepped onto the familiar brick-lined pathways, he realized "normal" was a concept that no longer existed.
The world was loud.
His new, [Level 6: Marrow Cleansed] senses were overwhelming. He had thought his Level 5 senses were sharp; this was a different reality.
His sight was the first thing. He could see the air. The Reiki, which had been a faint, sparse mist of blue motes before, was now a visible, swirling river. It was still thin, like a fine, shimmering fog, but he could see the currents. He saw how it flowed from the earth, how it was drawn to the living, the trees, the grass, the people.
And he saw how badly they handled it.
The campus was tense. The chaos of the "Awakening" two nights ago had settled into a nervous, buzzing anxiety. At the front gate, the old, pot-bellied campus security guards were gone. In their place stood two men in new, crisp black uniforms with the silver BSA dragon-and-sword emblem on their shoulders.
They looked intimidating. They were both tall, fit, and wearing sunglasses. They were clearly "Awakened."
But Lin Hao could smell them.
As he walked past, flashing his student ID, the wind shifted. He didn't just smell their sweat or the cheap coffee on their breath. He smelled the sharp, coppery, acrid tang of fear. It was an animalistic scent, a pheromone he could now detect as easily as cheap cologne.
These new "protectors," these BSA agents, were terrified. They were [Level 1: Novice] at best, their power a shallow, flaring spark. They had been given a gun, a uniform, and a mission to police a world that could now produce monsters, and they were in way over their heads.
Then, there was the sound.
He walked onto the main quad, and it was like being hit by a tidal wave of noise. He could hear everything.
From a dorm room window on the third floor, a hundred meters away, he heard a girl whispering into her phone. "I'm telling you, Mom, I'm fine. I just... I don't need my glasses anymore. My vision just... fixed itself."
From a bench across the quad, he heard a professor arguing with a BSA agent. "...a full list of every student who reported an 'anomaly'? That's a gross violation of medical privacy!"
He heard a dozen different conversations, the rustle of a hundred different leaves, the thumping of a hundred different hearts, all at once. The world was a cacophony. He had to physically focus, to build a mental wall, to filter out the ocean of noise and shrink his world back down to a manageable bubble.
This was the world he now lived in. He was a god, walking among a species of terrified, newly-deaf children who had all just had their volume turned up to eleven.
He cut across the grass, a familiar shortcut to his dorm. He just wanted to get his laptop, get the picture of his family, and leave.
He stopped.
His eyes, which had been filtering the macro-world, now focused on a micro-one.
A patch of sun-drenched grass, near the main cafeteria's dumpsters.
He remembered the campus strays. A small, sad-looking pack of four or five dogs. A scruffy terrier mix was the unofficial leader, a floppy-eared hound was his lieutenant. They had always been shy, timid, and thin, surviving on scraps, their tails always wagging, begging for a kind pat or a piece of a sandwich.
They were there now. Four of them.
But they were not the same.
They were not thin. Their fur was matted and patchy, but the bodies underneath were dense. Their muscles were visible, coiled and hard. They weren't begging. They weren't looking for scraps.
They were patrolling.
They had formed a tight, military-like half-circle around a large, gray squirrel. The squirrel, for its part, was not running. It was backed against an oak tree, its tail puffed up to three times its normal size, chittering in a series of high-pitched, furious barks. Lin Hao could see the squirrel's own, tiny, Level 1 energy flaring, a spark of defiance.
The dogs were silent. They weren't barking or growling. They were just staring.
Lin Hao looked at their eyes.
They were not the soft, brown, hopeful eyes of a stray. They were red. Not glowing, not demonic, but shot through with a feverish, bloody, unsettling glint.
This was it. The "minor mutation" from his outline. The Reiki wasn't just strengthening them; it was warping them. It was amplifying their base, animal instincts, their hunger, their pack mentality, their predatory drive, to an unnatural, ferocious degree.
The standoff broke.
The squirrel, in a burst of [Level 1]-infused agility, darted to the right.
The dogs moved.
It wasn't a clumsy, yapping chase. It was a tactic. The floppy-eared hound shot to the right, cutting off the squirrel's escape. The scruffy terrier, the leader, lunged.
It was fast. Unnaturally fast. A brown-and-gray blur.
The squirrel didn't even have time to scream. The terrier's jaws clamped down.
CRUNCH.
Lin Hao heard the sound with perfect, sickening clarity. He heard the small, "Awakened" bones of the squirrel snap.
But the dogs didn't stop. This wasn't a clean, simple kill for food.
The other two dogs were on it in an instant. A terrible, wet, tearing sound filled the air. They weren't just eating the squirrel. They were tearing it apart. It was a display of dominance, a savage, primal, and completely unnecessary explosion of violence.
In ten seconds, it was over. There was almost nothing left but a patch of blood and gray fur on the grass.
The campus was silent. Students on the pathways nearby hadn't even noticed.
The four dogs stood over their kill, their muzzles dark and wet.
Then, the scruffy terrier leader lifted his head. He looked, with his new, red-glinting eyes, across the fifty feet of grass.
He looked directly at Lin Hao.
The dog did not wag its tail. It did not look away in fear.
It bared its bloody fangs, and a low, guttural, undog-like growl rumbled from its chest.
It sensed his power. It sensed the concentrated Reiki that was Lin Hao. But its new, feral, corrupted instincts weren't telling it to run.
They were telling it that it had just found a new, bigger, and more interesting challenge.