Chương 97: Grow Faster

Dororo's words stayed with me longer than I expected — grow faster, rather than despair — enough that I found myself standing in the training yard before dawn the next morning, well before Ember had properly finished waking up against my collar. Ellia found me there an hour later, unsurprised.

"I wondered how long it would take you," she said, settling into her own warm-up stretches beside me.

"You get a certain look, when something's actually frightened you properly. Last time it was Vashe. This time I suppose it's whatever's hunting that old network."

"I keep thinking about what the guardian said," I admitted, working through the opening forms of Cosmic Confluence with more intensity than the technique strictly required.

"That it's never recovered a fragment once one of these things claimed it. I don't want to be the reason it loses count of something it's already lost too much of."

"Then let's actually train properly," Ellia said, no hesitation in it.

"Not the ordinary kind. The kind that actually pushes past where you usually stop." Kalio arrived partway through the morning, still visibly adjusting to the rhythm of sect duties layered atop everything else the season had asked of him.

"Room for one more?" he asked, already stretching out the stiffness from yesterday's council meeting.

"Always," I said.

"Though I should warn you, Ellia's decided this week is about pushing past comfortable limits. I don't think either of us is getting an easy morning."

"Good," Kalio said, surprising me slightly with how readily he embraced the idea.

"I've had entirely too many comfortable mornings lately, buried in paperwork about grazing rights and border tariffs. I'll take a hard training session over another dispute about fence lines any day." We spent the better part of the week that way, mornings bleeding into afternoons bleeding into evenings, Kalio joining when his sect duties allowed, Dororo occasionally observing from the colonnade with the careful, assessing eye of someone genuinely trying to help rather than merely watching.

No word arrived from Rethven's scholars during that stretch — the manuscript's remaining pages apparently resisting translation as stubbornly as the shard itself resisted scrying — and the quiet, for once, felt earned rather than ominous, a genuine window to actually prepare rather than another lull before the next blow landed.

Cosmic Confluence responded to the pressure the way it always had, smoothing and sharpening with every repetition, but I found myself, several days in, reaching for something beyond its ordinary rhythm — not a new technique, exactly, just a deeper, more demanding application of everything I already knew, the way a musician might finally push past technical competence into something closer to genuine mastery.

"You're close to something," Ellia observed, watching me finish a particularly demanding sequence, breathing hard but steady.

"I can see it in your footwork. It's not the same as it was a week ago."

"I feel it too," I admitted.

"Like something's been sitting just past where I usually stop, and I've never actually pushed hard enough to properly reach it before now." [STATUS — Len Fan] Cultivation: Heaven-Reaching Realm, Sixth Leaf — Breakthrough threshold detected Synchronization: 51. 40% Avatar (Kromitos): Heaven-Reaching Realm, First Leaf — hum steadying slightly with continued training focus Note: First breakthrough proximity warning since Ch.

58 The notification arrived mid-sequence, startling enough that I nearly broke form entirely, Ember's wings snapping open against my collar in immediate alarm before settling once it registered the shift as opportunity rather than danger.

"What is it?" Ellia asked, catching my expression.

"I think I'm close," I said slowly, reading the words again to be certain I hadn't misunderstood them.

"Seventh Leaf. I haven't felt this particular kind of pressure building since before the isolation training, years ago." If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. Dororo, who'd been observing quietly from the colonnade, crossed the yard with more urgency than his usual measured pace typically allowed.

"Show me," he said.

"Carefully. Breakthroughs demand proper conditions, and I'd rather we managed this one deliberately than let it catch you somewhere less controlled." We cleared the yard within the hour, Kalio and Ellia forming a careful perimeter more out of habit than genuine expectation of danger, Dororo settling into the watchful, patient stance of someone who'd guided exactly this kind of moment before.

"Whenever you're ready," he said.

"Don't force it. Let it arrive on its own terms, the way every genuine breakthrough eventually does." I closed my eyes, reaching inward past Cosmic Confluence's ordinary rhythm toward the pressure I'd felt building all week, and found it there waiting — not urgent, not painful, just patient in the way growth always eventually became once genuinely earned rather than merely wished for.

I let it come, breath by careful breath, Kromitos humming low and steady beneath my ribs in something that felt, for the first time in days, less like wariness and more like quiet anticipation. The breakthrough arrived gently, considerably gentler than I remembered previous ones feeling, Qi resettling through newly opened channels with a smoothness that spoke more of patient preparation than sudden violent change.

When I finally opened my eyes, the training yard looked exactly the same as it had a moment earlier, and yet everything about how I stood within it felt subtly, unmistakably different. [Breakthrough Achieved: Heaven-Reaching Realm, Seventh Leaf]"There it is," Dororo said, something quietly proud settling into his tired, watchful expression.

"Well earned, child. Considerably better timing than most of your previous breakthroughs have managed, if I'm honest — arriving from disciplined preparation rather than desperate crisis, for once."

"Feels different," I admitted, testing the new, steadier weight of my own cultivation.

"Calmer. Like I actually chose this one, instead of the world forcing it out of me."

"That's precisely the difference," Dororo said.

"I'd hoped you'd notice it eventually. Growth chosen deliberately tends to hold considerably steadier than growth forced by circumstance, in my experience." He allowed himself a small, genuine smile.

"Whatever the Unmoored ultimately demands of all of us, I believe you've just made yourself measurably more ready to face it — exactly the way I'd hoped this week's work would manage."

"Does this change anything about Kromitos?" I asked, curious despite the exhaustion beginning to settle in.

"The debt, the suppressed growth — does a breakthrough on my side move any of that?"

"I don't know," Dororo admitted honestly.

"That's a question worth asking the guardian directly, once you've had a chance to properly rest. I'd guess not, given everything it's told you about trust being earned gradually rather than unlocked all at once. But I've been wrong about the guardian's exact mechanics before, and I'd rather you hear the answer from it than from my own uncertain speculation."

Ellia crossed the distance between us without hesitation, pulling me into an embrace that Kromitos's steady hum seemed, for once, entirely content to simply witness rather than interrupt.

"Seventh Leaf," she said, warm and genuinely proud.

"Finally."

"Finally," I agreed, and found, standing there with Ember settling contentedly back against my collar, that the quiet week's work had given me something I hadn't fully expected going into it — not just a breakthrough, but the steady, hard-won confidence that whatever waited beyond this training yard's walls, I was, at last, properly ready to meet it. Kalio clapped me on the shoulder, grinning despite the sweat and exhaustion of the morning's earlier training.

"I don't suppose this means I finally get a fair sparring match out of you again," he said.

"You've been unbearably efficient all week. I was starting to take it personally."

"Give me a day to properly settle into it," I said, laughing despite myself.

"Then we'll see whether 'unbearably efficient' gets worse or better."

"Wonderful," Kalio said dryly, though the grin never left his face.

"Something to look forward to." Dororo watched the three of us with the particular quiet satisfaction of someone who'd spent considerably longer than any of us worrying whether this exact moment would ever properly arrive.

"I intend to write to Rethven tonight," he said, "and tell him plainly that whatever the manuscript's translation ultimately reveals, we're facing it from stronger ground than we were a week ago. I think that's worth him knowing, given how much weight he's been carrying on his own end of this alliance."

"Tell him thank you as well," I said.

"For trusting us with this, from the very beginning. I don't think any of this — the training, the breakthrough, any of it — would have felt half as steady without knowing we weren't facing it alone."

"I'll tell him," Dororo said, something warm settling into his tired, weathered features.

"Though I suspect, knowing him even this briefly, he'll simply say the gratitude runs both directions equally. That tends to be how these things work, once trust is actually given honestly rather than merely offered as a formality."

We stayed in the training yard a while longer as the afternoon light began to soften, no urgency left in the moment for once, simply four people — five, counting Ember's small warm weight against my collar — genuinely glad of a hard week's work finally paying off exactly the way it was meant to.