In this place, repetition was not a technique.
It was a condition.
The forest did not change as the years passed. The same trees stood in the same positions, their shadows falling at familiar angles. The clearing remained flat and scarred, its surface packed hard by countless impacts that no longer left visible marks. If not for Kael's body, it would have been impossible to tell how much time had gone by.
Time did not announce itself here.
It accumulated.
Kael no longer remembered when he had stopped counting days.
That habit had ended early, discarded without ceremony when it became useless. Days blurred together once the routine stabilized, once the body learned what would be demanded of it and stopped protesting every demand as something new.
Logs were what remained measurable.
Logs split cleanly.
Logs that resisted longer than expected.
Logs that failed him when his breathing slipped or his stance loosened by a fraction too much.
The count had passed into the thousands long ago.
Kael did not know the exact number.
He only knew that it was not enough.
The axe rose and fell.
There was no hesitation in the movement anymore. No visible preparation. Breath, grip, stance, and strike existed as a single action, so tightly bound together that separating them would have been artificial. The blade met the wood at the same angle every time. The resistance traveled through his arms, into his shoulders, down his spine, and into the ground beneath his feet.
The log split.
Kael stepped back, planted the axe, and stood still.
Waiting was not rest.
Waiting was containment.
His breathing fractured on impact, then recovered immediately, settling into the familiar rhythm he had learned to maintain under pressure. The heat in his chest receded slowly, controlled rather than forced away.
Only when his breath stabilized did he move again.
This, too, was repetition.
His body had changed in ways that no mirror could fully capture.
Kael was taller now, though the growth had come so gradually that he could not say when it had happened. His frame remained compact, but the density beneath the skin had increased year by year. Muscle lay tight against bone, deeply striated, built not for display but for transfer of force.
There was no excess.
Every part of him served a purpose.
His mass had increased far beyond what his appearance suggested. When he stood still, the ground felt firmer beneath his feet, as though it acknowledged his presence more readily than it once had. When he moved, there was a sense of inevitability to it — not speed, not aggression, but certainty.
His hands bore the clearest record of the years.
Scar tissue layered over scar tissue, thickened skin broken and reforged countless times. His grip was precise, unyielding, able to adjust without conscious thought. Pain still existed there, but it no longer interrupted function.
Pain had become information.
The axe, when weighed, had become something else entirely.
Kael no longer checked it often.
The first time he had noticed the difference, years ago, the number had unsettled him. The second time, it had prompted recalculation. After that, it became background knowledge, no more urgent than the fact that the sun would rise the next day.
The weapon's mass now exceeded what any ordinary body should have been able to lift repeatedly.
Kael did not think about that.
He thought about the next log.
The 10th Senior Brother was still there.
That was not something Kael took for granted.
The man had been present for so long that his absence would have felt like a violation of routine rather than a loss. He arrived each day with the same quiet consistency, carrying animals selected according to a schedule Kael never saw and never questioned.
Sometimes deer.
Sometimes boar.
Sometimes creatures whose names Kael never learned, their hides thick and their muscles dense enough that preparation took most of the afternoon.
They worked together without ceremony.
Corrections were rare now.
A glance.
A shift of posture.
A single word, spoken without urgency.
Kael adjusted immediately.
There was no frustration in these exchanges. No impatience. The 10th Senior Brother did not push Kael to hurry, and Kael did not need to be told when to stop. They had passed beyond instruction and into shared understanding.
Years of repetition had carved that into both of them.
Food had become an operation rather than a meal.
Kael ate more now than he had ever imagined possible, and even so, the hunger rarely disappeared entirely. It dulled, retreated, then returned with quiet insistence once the body began repairing itself again.
The 10th Senior Brother monitored this without comment.
Portions increased.
Cuts changed.
Organs that Kael had once struggled to swallow were now consumed without hesitation. Fat that would have sickened him early on was now necessary to keep the pressure from rising too quickly during recovery.
There was no indulgence in this.
Food was not pleasure.
Food was maintenance.
It was on a day that differed in no obvious way from any other that Old Master Ren finally spoke.
The log split.
Kael stepped back.
He waited.
Ren stood at the edge of the clearing, his presence so familiar that Kael had learned to register it without looking. The old man's gaze rested on the split wood, not on Kael.
"What you are doing has a name," Ren said.
Kael did not react immediately.
Names had come late to many things in this place.
Ren continued, his voice even.
"You are forging your body."
Kael turned his head slightly, acknowledging the words without interrupting his breathing.
"This is not metaphor," Ren said. "It is process."
He gestured toward the axe.
"You apply load. The structure fails. You consume. You rest. The structure repairs itself more densely. Then the load increases."
Ren's eyes lifted briefly, assessing Kael's posture, the distribution of weight through his stance.
"You have repeated this cycle thousands of times."
There was no pride in the statement.
No warning either.
"You did not need to understand it for it to work," Ren said. "Understanding is not a prerequisite for endurance."
Kael absorbed this silently.
"There is no completion," Ren continued. "No moment when this becomes finished. Only increasing tolerance. When this ends, it will not be because you have reached an ideal state."
He turned away from the clearing.
"It will end because this place can no longer add anything meaningful."
The words settled heavily, not because they revealed something new, but because they framed what Kael had already lived.
Ren left without further explanation.
That, too, was familiar.
The 10th Senior Brother approached after Ren departed, handing Kael water without comment. Kael drank, letting the coolness settle the heat in his chest before it rose again.
"You heard him," the Senior Brother said eventually.
Kael nodded.
The man studied him for a moment, then looked back toward the clearing.
"You don't look surprised," he added.
"I'm not," Kael replied.
The Senior Brother huffed quietly, something like a laugh.
"Good," he said. "That would've worried me."
They stood together in silence for a time, watching the light shift through the trees.
"You've changed," the Senior Brother said after a while.
Kael considered the statement. "So have you."
The man did not deny it.
That night, Kael ate until his stomach ached and his breathing grew difficult to control. He lay still afterward, focusing on the rhythm Ren had taught him long ago, keeping the pressure from rising too fast as his body began repairing itself again.
Strike.
Fail.
Consume.
Repair.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Somewhere far ahead lay a number he had not yet reached.
Four hundred thousand.
Kael did not think of it as a goal.
Only as work that remained.
And tomorrow, when the axe rose again, the count would continue.