The moment I stepped out of the bathtub, I knew something was different.
Not just different.
Fundamentally changed.
I clenched my right fist slowly.
Then without thinking I swung.
The air cracked.
A sharp, violent sound split through the quiet room like a whip. The shockwave alone sent the wooden table beside me skidding two feet across the floor. I stared at my fist, then at the table, then back at my fist again.
...What.
I hit again. Harder this time.
CRACK.
The wall shuddered. A thin spiderweb fracture spread from the point where my knuckles had barely grazed the surface.
Barely grazed.
Something wild ignited in my chest. A grin spread across my face before I could stop it.
I could kill a bull with this. No I could cave its skull in with one clean hit.
The energy coursing through my body felt endless. Like a dam had broken somewhere deep inside me and the floodwaters had no intention of stopping. My muscles hummed. My bones felt like iron rods wrapped in coiled springs. Every breath I took seemed to charge me further rather than exhaust me.
I laughed quiet, almost disbelieving.
For a brief, intoxicating moment, I felt invincible.
Then I stopped.
Closed my eyes.
And thought.
The giddiness didn't vanish immediately, but I forced it aside pushed it behind the calm, measured part of my mind that had kept me alive and steady for two years.
This is real. But this feeling… isn't.
The surge of power, the overflowing energy, the sense that I could tear through anything in my path it was a natural response. My body had just undergone a violent and fundamental transformation. My muscles had been shredded and reforged. My bones had been pressurized and densified. Of course everything felt sharp and electric and limitless right now.
But I was not limitless.
I was simply at a new baseline.
A significantly higher one but a baseline nonetheless.
I sat down on the edge of the bed, breathing slowly, methodically, the way my teachers had drilled into me from the very first week at the academy.
Assess. Don't celebrate. Assess.
I turned inward, running a careful mental scan through my body.
My physical strength had increased sharply there was no doubt about that. The whale glue had done exactly what it promised. But more importantly, what I felt was stability. Not the chaotic, volatile surge of someone who had forced a breakthrough too quickly. This was clean. Settled. Like a building that had been reinforced at its very foundation rather than just built taller.
Which meant one thing
I could handle a significantly older spirit ring than most Spirit Masters at my level would dare attempt.
Seven hundred years. Maybe eight hundred.
Where most newly ranked Spirit Masters trembled at the thought of absorbing anything beyond a hundred-year ring afraid their bodies would collapse under the pressure my foundation had been laid differently. Carefully. Over two years of quiet, deliberate work.
No one had pushed me toward this path. No teacher had suggested it. Most of my peers hadn't even considered that the body and the spirit needed to grow together, not one chasing the other.
But I had understood from the beginning.
The door doesn't care how powerful your spirit is if the person walking through it is too fragile to survive the other side.
I leaned back, staring at the cracked ceiling of the inn room.
My mind drifted not aimlessly, but with purpose.
Because physical strength, as satisfying as it was, had never been my true goal.
What I needed what my Dimensional Door demanded was something far more difficult to cultivate than muscle or bone.
Mental capacity.
Comprehension. Adaptability. The ability to observe an entirely foreign world, absorb its logic, and extract something useful from it before the environment itself tried to kill me. The ability to learn a new language from context alone, to read intent behind unfamiliar expressions, to map a world's power structure within hours of arrival.
Most people thought of mental cultivation as secondary. Abstract. Something that happened naturally alongside spirit power growth.
They were wrong.
When I stepped through my Dimensional Door into another world and I would, sooner than most people realized I wouldn't have a guide. I wouldn't have a teacher. I wouldn't have a familiar face or a safe starting point.
I would have only what I carried inside my own mind.
So starting now, I would sharpen it.
Meditation. Memory techniques. Accelerated learning exercises. Study of languages, history, and power systems far beyond what the academy curriculum required. Not because a teacher assigned it but because survival in the unknown demanded it.
The body was the vessel.
The spirit was the weapon.
But the mind?
The mind was the one holding everything together.
I exhaled slowly, and behind me as if it had been listening all along the faint shadow of a dark door flickered silently against the wall.
Patient.
Waiting.
Almost ready.