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Chapter Twenty-One: the Lee Sin Template
Daniel arrived at the place where Frank Castle dwelt, known as "The Punisher."
The building stood at the city's edge, in a district easily forgotten. Its cracked façade told the tale of an old struggle with time: peeling paint, walls veiled in layers of dust and smoke, windows shattered except for scraps of glass that reflected daylight like shards of memory. On the roof, a rusted sign was barely legible; the front door hung half-closed, its frayed chains moaning softly whenever a breeze passed.
The structure looked like an old industrial warehouse taken out of service long ago. The path leading to it was littered with dry weeds and shards of glass, and to the right a small courtyard was filled with empty metal crates. From a distance, the creak of an iron door rattling in the wind could be heard.
Daniel stopped a few meters from the entrance, pressed to the corner of the wall near an abandoned cart, watching the place in silence before making his move.
He opened the template system screen — a transparent interface floating before his eyes showing thumbnails of various characters inspired by different worlds and games. Among the faces, the image of "Lee Sin" stood out: the only one already open, in black and white as if waiting for someone to restore its color.
He hesitated for a moment, then tapped. The system shop popped up: template price — 120 gems. He paid without hesitation; he knew other templates, like Vi's, might work in conventional situations, but they wouldn't suit a confrontation with Frank Castle.
Gangs usually made do with small pistols, while Frank dealt in heavy, dangerous firearms, and a template's success depended on matching the fighting style needed.
As soon as the purchase completed, the image shifted from grayscale to vibrant colors, and a soft system chime announced the template activation. He felt something pass through his body: a subtle change in movement, an internal pressure as if a new energy were settling in.
Daniel smiled to himself with satisfaction; "Lee Sin" was a male character — no fear of turning into a woman or a talking beast like the Yordle. What mattered now was applying the template's skills in a way that fit his confrontation with Frank: flexibility, a sensitive sense of balance, and the ability to read lines of motion — all elements essential against an armed target.
Energy flowed through his body, casting a faint golden gleam over his skin. He felt warmth coursing his veins as his features slowly shifted.
[System: "Lee Sin" abilities]
[• Mastery of Chi (internal energy) — enables the body to perform at advanced physical levels: increased strength, speed, and movement sensitivity.
• Superhuman senses — despite loss of sight, the environment can be perceived through hearing, air vibrations, and the flow of kinetic energy around objects.
• Dragon Chi power — a potent inner energy granting chi resistance and destructive force upon powerful strikes.
• Inner Chi Flame — an energy that appears as a spiritual aura around the hand or body and affects an opponent's energies (not physical fire).
• Advanced ionic combat techniques — refined movements, razor-sharp neural timing, and strikes that target energy points in the body.
• Extraordinary will and endurance — the ability to withstand psychological and physical strain under harsh conditions.
Note: These abilities describe his background within a chi-using group and do not imply conventional supernatural magic.]
[Forbidden points — what Lee Sin does not officially have: he does not see the future, does not read minds, does not summon a physical dragon, and does not shoot physical fire from his hands; his power is focused on chi and spiritual-combat skills.]
Daniel's visual sight went dark — yet his perception did not weaken; on the contrary, the world became a map of vibrations and flows. He no longer "saw" in the usual way, but "perceived things almost in black and white": he felt the airlines that guided a bullet, tasted the curves of concrete under his feet, and listened to the tones of tension and heat in a gun barrel. Every movement in the place turned into measurable force and calculable flux.
The cohesion of his muscles and the clarity of his motions improved; it was as if his body had been reprogrammed to a finer timing: tendons contracting and releasing in precise measures, nerves answering before his mind registered. He felt he could carry a load far heavier than his previous capacity as if strength had been coordinated rather than exhausted. He also noticed that chi aided, slightly, in healing minor wounds and dulling sudden pains.
His features hardened, and his hair shortened until it looked tauter. A fighter's attire formed around him: a bare chest revealing taut muscles, a wide red sash at the waist, dark-blue martial trousers wrapped around his legs, and dark leather bands on his forearms completing the professional's look — someone who used his body itself as a weapon.
This was not a simple change but a complete transformation into a form that mirrored "Lee Sin" with the spiritual qualities described by the lore — with the difference that here the background sprang from the system template and the "chi-using group" depicted in the template's base. The lore's boundaries were not removed, and I did not add powers of my own. Alongside all this came memories of the combat techniques Lee Sin himself used. Now, Daniel appeared as a fusion of Daredevil and the Iron Fist, ready for the next step.
Daniel looked at the four locked skills on the screen, each with an arrow above it pointing upward to unlock. He pondered whether to open Q first or E — both had significant mobility ranges. One was more specialized for offense, the other for defense.
After moments, Daniel unlocked Q. The screen pulsed faintly as though confirming activation before the virtual texture vanished, leaving the new sensation entirely inside his body. All his attention focused on a single point — the right hand — while the template's system whispered softly at the edge of his consciousness: Sonic Wave — emit a short sensing wave that reveals motion paths and marks a target for a follow-up dash.
Daniel advanced in measured steps toward the entrance, but these were not ordinary steps. Each stride was being evaluated by the chi within him: sixty little vibrations under his feet, mechanical sounds behind the walls, a metal cage that might collapse if moved, an assumed wire leading to a trap sensor. The system's spirit did not stop at visual assistance; it reshaped his senses into a map of frequencies.
He avoided the first trap his inner eyes spotted before his feet saw it. A thin wire stretched at ankle level between two crates — tightened to trigger a trap either to drag a charge or activate a light sensor. The chi touched the cord like a cold pulse through the air, and his foot slid aside gently as one would brush away a sheet of paper. The clink of metal broke behind him, and the trap did not trigger.
An old surveillance camera above the entrance writhed inside a cracked housing; its lens was partly shattered but a small electric spark still twinkled — a sign of a fluctuating power source. Daniel directed a short Q wave at the lens: it was not an offensive wave but a sensing one, containing a tiny chi pulse that rode the reflected light and traced the camera's electrical circuits. Motion dimmed and the remaining light went out — surveillance would no longer be effective.
His entry into the building was quietly notable, but that very quietness became a weapon against him. In that dust-saturated silence, even Daniel's calculated steps sounded like short stories on a hushed floor. Every creak echoed, every grain of dust striking metal returned its rhythm to his inner hearing.
And the moment he stepped inside — in an instant he hadn't expected — Frank Castle stood by a table piled with heavy tools, his hand already reaching for the back of a chair where he kept his pistol.
It wasn't a total surprise; rather, semi-preparedness — Frank had not sensed Daniel's presence at first, but because the place where he now lived was so quiet and he heard Daniel's footsteps, and after checking the footage from his monitoring camera — which Daniel had disabled — Frank realized he was under attack.