The python meat was ready. Nyx pulled the wooden skewers away from the small fire. The outside of the thick steaks was charred black. The fat hissed and popped. The inside was pale white and steaming in the cool night air.
Nyx handed a heavy skewer to Jin. The wood was hot against his palm.
He did not wait for it to cool down. He was starving. He took a large bite. The meat was tough and chewy. It required a lot of jaw strength to tear it apart. But the taste was incredible. It was rich, savory, and incredibly heavy.
As he swallowed the first piece, a strange sensation hit him.
The meat did not just contain calories. It contained raw, biological Aether. The massive black python had spent years absorbing the wild energy of the Zenith jungle. That energy was trapped in its muscle tissue.
Jin felt a wave of warmth travel down his throat. It hit his stomach and immediately mixed with the dark red sap of the Iron-Blood Root he drank earlier. The combination was potent. The raw protein fueled the aggressive cellular repair. The Aether acted like a catalyst, speeding the entire medical process up.
He ate the entire slab of meat in silence. He chewed until his jaw ached. He stripped the wooden skewer clean.
When he finished, a massive wave of exhaustion crashed over him. His body demanded complete shutdown. It needed all his available energy to fix his crushed lower back. His eyelids grew incredibly heavy. He dropped the empty stick onto the moss. He rested his forehead against his crossed arms.
He fell asleep in a matter of seconds. His breathing slowed down and became a deep, steady rhythm.
Nyx sat across the dying fire. She watched him sleep. She confirmed his heart rate was stable. The tight lines of pain on his face were completely gone. The medicine and the meat were doing their job.
She turned her attention away from him. She looked out over the dark jungle canopy.
The heavy night mist settled low between the massive trees. She looked up through a gap in the giant, bioluminescent leaves. The sky was clear. The stars were bright and piercing.
Two full moons hung high above the planet. One was massive and pale white. The other was smaller and tinted slightly blue. They cast a bright, silver light down onto the forest. The light caught the edges of the giant leaves, making the jungle look like it was painted in cold silver.
Nyx did not admire the view. She used it for tactical data.
She analyzed the angle of the two moons in the sky. She calculated the rotation speed of the planet. She possessed an internal biological clock tuned by decades of harsh training. She judged the time perfectly. There were exactly three hours and forty minutes left before the sun would rise.
The jungle below them remained loud and violent. She heard the heavy snapping of distant tree trunks. She heard the sharp, sudden shrieks of prey animals meeting their end in the dark.
But their massive horizontal branch remained entirely safe. Her Aether-seal held tight. It blocked the smell of Jin's sweat and the smell of the cooked meat. The headless carcasses of the panther and the python lay a few yards away. Small, glowing scavenger insects began to crawl over the dead scales and fur, but no larger predators approached the tree. Nyx's Divinity Realm warning aura kept them away.
She needed to finish recovering her strength. A shadow-guard at half capacity was a liability.
Nyx shifted her posture. She sat back in the perfect lotus position. She placed her hands flat on her knees, palms facing the dark sky. She closed her eyes behind her cracked obsidian visor.
She opened her empty core. She reached out with her Aether-sense.
The silver moonlight was thick with ambient energy. Zenith was a wild, untamed world. The Aether here was pure and dense. It was not polluted by billions of humans like the capital city.
Nyx pulled the energy toward her. Because she used a custom Void-Beast legacy created by Jin's mother, she absorbed energy differently than normal cultivators. She did not just breathe it in. She consumed the light around her.
The silver moonlight hitting her branch seemed to dim slightly. The shadows around her black suit grew deeper and thicker. She drew the wild Aether into her lungs and filtered it through her specific genetic pathways. The energy filled her core. It was a steady, silent process.
She sat perfectly still for the next three hours. She did not move a single muscle. She simply existed as a dark void, quietly drinking the power of the Zenith night.
Time passed. The rotation of the planet continued.
The twin moons slowly sank below the distant horizon. The silver light faded away. The sky above the thick canopy turned a pale, watery grey. The nocturnal insects stopped their loud clicking. The jungle grew strangely quiet for a brief period. It was the shift between the night hunters and the day hunters.
Then, the sky turned a brilliant, piercing orange. The sun rose.
It was a massive, bright yellow star. Its light hit the top of the Zenith canopy and immediately started to burn away the thick morning mist. The temperature in the air rose quickly. The cold dampness of the night vanished.
A single, warm ray of golden sunlight cut through the giant green leaves. It fell directly onto the mossy branch. It hit Jin right in the face.
The bright light and the sudden warmth woke him up.
Jin groaned softly. He squeezed his eyes shut against the glare. He took a slow, deep breath. The air smelled like morning dew and wet bark.
He braced himself. He waited for the agonizing fire in his lower back to flare up. He expected the terrible, crippling pain from the night before to return the moment his brain woke up.
It did not happen.
There was no sharp agony. The hot coal resting against his spine was completely gone.
Jin opened his eyes. He blinked against the sunlight. He slowly rolled his shoulders. He felt a dull, tight stiffness in his lower back, similar to waking up after sleeping on a hard floor. But the severe, crippling pain was erased. The Iron-Blood Root and the Aether-rich python meat had repaired the crushed tissue at a miraculous speed.
He placed his hands flat on the rough moss. He pushed his chest up.
His arms did not give out. His spine held firm. He sat up completely straight. He let out a long breath of pure relief. He was not paralyzed. He was not grounded.
He planted his boots on the wood. He stood up slowly. He tested his weight. His legs felt solid. He stretched his arms high over his head. His joints popped loudly in the quiet morning air.
As he stretched, he noticed something else.
He felt entirely different. He felt physically lighter. His muscles felt much denser and tightly coiled. He looked down at his own hands. He clenched his fists. The grip strength in his fingers was noticeably higher than it was yesterday. The physical weakness of his old body was gone.
He closed his eyes. He looked inward, using his limited Aether-sense to check his own meridians.
He saw a bright, solid ring of golden energy resting peacefully inside his stomach. His body had changed. He was no longer stuck at the bottom of the ladder.
He was Foundation Level 4. He broke through while he was sleeping.
Jin opened his eyes and stared at his hands. He understood exactly how it happened. It was simple, undeniable logic.
In the Apex Empire, powerful cultivators used specific Gene Legacies. They used techniques like the Azure Dragon Sequence or the Sanguine Vampire path to guide their evolution. These techniques dictated exactly how they absorbed Aether and mutated their bodies.
Jin did not have a Gene Legacy. Original Jin could not absorb beast DNA. His body violently rejected it. Because he was considered trash, the royal family never gave him an advanced technique.
Instead, original Jin practiced the Universal Breathing Method.
It was the most basic, common Aether absorbing technique in the entire universe. Everyone knew it. Poor factory workers, low-level street guards, and farmers used it. It was a simple, rudimentary method of pulling raw air into the lungs and cycling it through the blood. It had no specific elemental path. It caused no mutations. For a normal person, it was incredibly slow and inefficient. It had a terrible ceiling.
But Earth-Jin was not a normal person anymore.
He had the "Null Gene." His body possessed perfect genetic resonance. His body was a flawless blank slate.
While he slept, his subconscious mind naturally performed the Universal Breathing Method out of pure habit. He steadily breathed in the ambient energy. He processed the dense, high-level Aether trapped inside the python meat he digested.
For a normal cultivator, using a basic technique to process high-level meat would waste ninety percent of the energy. But Jin's perfect resonance meant there was absolutely zero waste. His body absorbed every single drop of pure Aether from the snake. The simple, trash technique worked flawlessly within his perfect genome.
It pushed his physical density past the Level 3 bottleneck without him even trying. He crossed into Level 4 in his sleep.
Jin dropped his hands to his sides. He looked at Nyx. She was still sitting in the lotus position, but her eyes were open now. She was watching him.
"I broke through," Jin said. His voice was steady and clear. The hoarseness from the night before was gone.
"I know," Nyx replied in his mind. "I felt the Aether shift in your core an hour ago. The root healed your tissue. The meat fueled your advancement. You are Level 4."
Jin looked out at the bright green jungle illuminated by the morning sun. He survived the first night. He healed his broken back. He gained a level of power.
The corporate manager finally had some positive numbers on his spreadsheet. He turned back to Nyx.
"We cannot stay here," Jin said. "The imperial pursuit ships stopped at the border, but Kaelen will not give up. He will send mercenaries or assassins who don't wear imperial uniforms. We need to reach the Genesis Zenith Academy before they find us."
"Agreed," Nyx said. She stood up smoothly from the moss. The dark mist around her faded back into her black suit. She was fully recovered. "The Academy is located in the central continent of this planet. We have a long distance to travel."
Jin nodded. He was ready to walk. The game was moving to the next stage.