The locker rooms of the Normal Tier were a cathedral of rust and cooling steam. Roman collapsed onto a bench, the metal groaning under his weight. Every breath felt like inhaling shards of glass, and his left shoulder was a mangled mess of nerve-endings screaming in protest. Yet, as the heavy door hissed shut, locking out the prying eyes of the other students, Roman didn't cry out. He didn't even wince.
He reached inside his tattered uniform and pulled out the necklace.
The soot-blackened metal had changed. The grime of years had been burned away by the heat of the combat, revealing a metal that was neither gold nor steel. It was a matte, starlight-grey substance that seemed to absorb the dim fluorescent light of the room. At its center was a single, cracked gem that now pulsed with a rhythmic, violet heartbeat.
It was no longer drinking his blood. It was breathing with him.
"Internal Diagnostic," Roman whispered, his voice cracking.
His internal optical chip flickered, struggling to keep up with the data influx. The necklace wasn't just a trinket; it was a Bio-NeuralInterface of a grade that shouldn't exist in Sector D. As he held it, a stream of ancient, encrypted data began to bypass his optic nerve, projecting directly into his consciousness.
[Identity: The Solstice Core (Damaged)]
[Status: Synchronizing with Host...]
[Warning: Host Body Integrity at 42%. Initiating Star-Manual Protocol: Celestial Marrow Mending.]
The pain intensified. It was no longer a dull ache but a sharp, localized heat. Roman watched in morbid fascination as the violet light from the gem traveled up his fingers, seeping into his skin like glowing ink.
The Star Cultivation Manual in his mind began to spin. In standard cultivation, a broken bone took weeks of medical gel and rest to heal. But Roman's theory in Thorne's class—the one about "Rewriting Conductivity"—was being put to the test.
He felt his fractured ribs begin to grind against one another. The necklace was using the energy it had siphoned from Kaelen's kinetic impact to fuse the bone back together. But it wasn't just mending them; it was weaving the Lightning Snake's static electricity into the very calcium of his skeleton.
He bit down on a piece of leather from his satchel to keep from screaming. The sound of his bones shifting was like dry wood snapping in a fire.
Stage 2, he thought through the haze of agony. I'm not just mending. I'm hardening.
In this world, a Level 2's bones were like pine—flexible but easily snapped. An Elite's were like oak or reinforced steel. But as the Solstice Core pulsed, Roman's bones were being tempered into something closer to Earth-rank Titanium.
After twenty minutes of agonizing reconstruction, the heat subsided. Roman slumped against the lockers, drenched in sweat, his breath coming in ragged gasps. He tested his shoulder. It rotated with a silent, terrifyingly smooth precision. The pain was gone, replaced by a cold, dense weight.
He looked at his hands. They were still the hands of a lanky, pale teenager. To anyone else, he still looked like the "pitiful Level 2." But when he clenched his fist, he could feel a subterranean power thrumming just beneath the surface.
He quickly tucked the necklace back beneath his shirt. The gem had gone dark again, returning to its soot-covered disguise, but the metal felt warm against his heart—a silent promise of protection.
He couldn't stay here. Sergeant Vane would likely report the "accidental" power surge to the Academy administration, and Brent would be looking for blood. He needed to disappear into the one place where the Academy's drones couldn't follow: the Neon Underbelly of Sector D.
Roman dressed in a fresh, nondescript grey hoodie, pulling the cowl low to hide his tinted eyes. He slipped out of the Academy's back service entrance, bypassing the Maglev station in favor of the dark, rain-slicked alleyways that smelled of burnt circuits and synthetic grease.
His destination was a shop tucked between a grav-cycle repair bay and a black-market organ clinic. A flickering sign above the door read: ,"THE DROSS PILE."
Inside, the air was thick with the scent of soldering flux and ancient incense. The walls were lined with "Mortal-rank" junk—broken drones, cracked energy cells, and rusted exoskeleton frames.
Behind a counter cluttered with a dismantled Profound-rank rifle sat a girl no older than Roman. She had oil-smudged cheeks, goggles pushed up onto a nest of messy blue hair, and a mechanical third arm protruding from her shoulder that was currently fine-tuning a micro-chip.
She didn't look up. "We don't buy scrap from Academy brats, kid. Beat it."
"I'm not here to sell," Roman said, his voice low and steady. He pulled a single, cracked Profound-rank Energy Cell from his bag—the one he had "scavenged" earlier. "I need a High-Frequency Attenuator and three liters of Conductive Bone-Marrow Catalyst."
The girl's third arm stopped mid-motion. She pushed her goggles down, her eyes—augmented with digital zoom lenses—scanning Roman from head to toe.
"Those are Stage 3 materials," she said, her voice dropping its dismissive tone. "A Level 2 from the Normal Class asking for those... you're either looking to blow yourself up or you're building something illegal."
"I'm just fixing a 'glitch' in my system," Roman replied, placing the cell on the counter.
The girl picked up the cell, her mechanical arm whisking it into a diagnostic slot. "This cell is drained. It's worthless."
"Look closer," Roman whispered.
She squinted at the readout. Her eyes widened. The cell wasn't empty; it had been re-coded. The chaotic spiritual energy inside had been organized into a perfect, geometric Star-pattern—a feat of energy manipulation that should have been impossible for anyone below the PlanetaryStage.
"Who are you?" she asked, her voice hushed with a mix of fear and greed.
"Just a customer," Roman said. "Do you have the materials, or do I need to find another shop?"
The girl looked at the re-coded cell, then at Roman's hooded face. She knew a goldmine when she saw one. "I'm Xylia. And yeah, I've got your catalyst. But for work like this... you're going to owe me more than just one cell."
"I'm counting on it," Roman said.
As Xylia disappeared into the back of the shop, the necklace against Roman's chest gave a faint, approving thrum. He had his tech-specialist. He had his materials. Now, he just had to survive the night before his bones turned into something the world wasn't ready to witness.