John didn’t fall asleep. He stayed awake through the whole train ride, the walk from the station, and the entire first hour back in the penthouse, arms crossed the whole time while Damien ate, took Daria’s recovery potion, and pretended not to be measuring the distance between nearby shadows.
At seven in the evening, John’s eyes finally closed.
At seven-oh-one, the snoring started.
Damien stood up.
His injuries had improved considerably. The potion had closed the thinner cuts and taken most of the swelling out of his knee. His back still pulled whenever he lifted his left arm, and a deep breath reminded him the tenth-floor guardian had cracked at least one rib on the way out.
Pain’s just information. It doesn’t get to run the show.
He opened the balcony doors and stepped onto the private rooftop terrace. Viremont glowed under the evening sky, with aerial trains crossing between towers in thin lines of blue light. The terrace held a garden, a shallow pool, and enough decorative stone to throw far more shadow than any architect had probably intended.
He set ten empty bottles at measured distances, the nearest twenty meters off, the farthest sitting almost ninety meters away against the opposite wall.
Shadow Dash topped out at a hundred meters. Until now he’d treated it purely as emergency movement: pick a shadow, close the gap, deal with whatever waited on the other side. Walk of Night suggested the movement was supposed to start before the step ever happened.
He lowered his center of weight and circulated mana toward his feet, following the pathways Xuan Wuye’s manual described. The energy hit the same locked door it always hit and piled up behind it instead of settling.
He picked the shadow under the first bottle.
➤[Skill Activated: Shadow Dash]
The terrace blurred into a black line. He came out beside the bottle and touched its neck before his injured leg had fully agreed to take his weight.
Not elegant. Upright, though.
➤[Cooldown: 01:00:00]
He logged the distance, the mana cost, the pain, the time it took to find his balance again. Then he stepped into the shadow under a stone bench.
➤[Skill Activated: Shadow Imitation]
➤[Duration: 00:01:00]
His outline faded into the bench’s shadow, the skill hiding him by matching the dark around him instead of erasing him outright. He’d always stayed nearly motionless while using it before, since movement broke the illusion apart.
This time he shifted one foot on purpose.
The shadow rippled.
He stopped, let it settle, moved again. Three careful steps carried him along the bench. On the fourth, his shoulder crossed past the edge of the dark, and the whole thing collapsed.
➤[Skill Deactivated: Shadow Imitation]
➤[Cooldown: 01:00:00]
"Seven seconds," he muttered.
"And one violation."
John stood at the balcony doors.
Damien looked out at the city instead of at him. "You were asleep."
"I sensed irresponsibility."
"Legendary skill?"
"Experience."
John walked out onto the terrace and studied the row of bottles. "If I carry you back inside, will you stay there?"
"No."
"Honesty isn’t helping your case."
"It saves time, though."
John sighed. "Then I’ll supervise."
That was how the next two days started.
Every hour, both shadow skills. Between activations, Walk of Night, mana circulation, rest whether he wanted it or not. John enforced meals with a prison guard’s discipline and a festival cook’s portions.
The girls sent updates from their gate.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
DeluluGirl_404: Floor boss went offline. Loot was meh. Vibes are violent.
Doctor Smoke: Translation: successful clear, no casualties, Hamari stole a helmet.
DeluluGirl_404: It chose me.
Madam Marvel: The helmet is cursed!!
Naked Nun: That improved it.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Damien replied with a photo of the training bottles lined up across the terrace.
DeluluGirl_404: Bro is grinding movement tech in a luxury garden while injured. Main-character insurance claim incoming.
Doctor Smoke told him to stop. Daria sent an even stronger recovery potion. Naked Nun asked whether the movement training involved anyone hitting him.
Imran requested precise skill data and sent back a schedule balancing proficiency growth against mana recovery. It included sleep. Damien deleted that part before John could see it.
Rahul sent a black training outfit with flexible support sewn into the knees and ribs. He hated admitting how useful it turned out to be.
On the second morning, his Doppelganger cooldown cleared.
He summoned the duplicate out on the terrace. It came out carrying his exact injuries and his exhausted face, though its movements lagged behind his full strength. When he dropped into the first stance of Walk of Night, the copy mirrored him, and its balance failed a full three seconds before his own did.
"You’re not helpful."
The duplicate looked at him and echoed it back. "You’re not helpful."
John laughed loud enough to startle birds off the neighboring tower.
Damien dismissed it early and got back to work.
Shadow Dash got less violent with every repetition. He started choosing the exact angle of arrival instead of just the destination: coming out beside one bottle facing left, behind another facing the balcony, under a tree with one hand already reaching for the trunk before his feet had even landed. The skill still carried him. It no longer decided how he showed up on the other end.
Shadow Imitation grew differently. He practiced matching connected patches of dark: bench to planter, planter to wall, wall to the shadow thrown by a tree. Small movements stopped breaking the disguise instantly. He learned to move only when the darkness itself moved, when wind stirred the leaves, when a passing train shifted the terrace lighting, when a cloud crossed the sun overhead.
Every use cost mana. Every circulation exercise cost more on top of that.
By the second night, his reserves dropped under ten percent.
➤[Warning: Mana reserves critically low.]
➤[Current Mana: 8%.]
➤[Continued skill activation may cause physical collapse.]
He sat down beside the pool and waited out the cooldown.
John set a plate down next to him. "The system’s joined me in telling you to stop now."
"It used more respectful language."
"I can add brackets if that helps."
"It might."
John sat down nearby. "Has the manual said anything back?"
Damien looked at the status line hovering over the closed book.
➤[Walk of Night, First Section]
➤[Comprehension: Insufficient.]
"No."
"Then rest."
"The skills are close to something."
"Close to what?"
He didn’t actually know. No visible progress bar existed for a skill. He just felt it: Shadow Dash requiring less conscious effort to trigger, Shadow Imitation holding together more naturally around his body than it used to.
The cooldown hit zero. He stood.
John muttered something unkind about stubborn children and moved into position beside the terrace rail anyway.
Damien picked the farthest shadow, ninety-eight meters out, and gathered mana in his feet first. The resistance sat there, same as always. Instead of forcing through it this time, he just held the energy against the door and triggered the skill anyway.
➤[Skill Activated: Shadow Dash]
The dark stretched out around him. The crossing felt different this time, the pull on his wounded body gentler than before. For one strange instant he sensed other shadows past his actual destination: a narrow line under a distant tower, the dark side of a passing train, an alley almost three hundred meters off that he had no business perceiving at all.
He came out beside the final bottle.
A chain of notifications followed.
➤[Skill proficiency threshold reached.]
➤[Shadow Dash has advanced.]
➤[Maximum range increased: 100 meters → 300 meters.]
➤[Transit speed increased.]
➤[Cooldown reduced: 01:00:00 → 00:50:00.]
He smiled.
John reached him a second later. "That crooked smile means trouble."
"Three hundred meters."
"That number means more trouble than the face did."
Damien turned toward the shadow thrown by the terrace wall. His mana sat at three percent. Shadow Imitation was still available.
One more use left in him.
He stepped into the dark.
➤[Skill Activated: Shadow Imitation]
The shadow closed over him more completely than it ever had before, not just covering his outline this time but pulling him down into it, fitting his presence into the darkness the way water settles into whatever holds it.
He moved along the wall.
Ten seconds passed. Then thirty. Then a full minute.
The old duration limit came and went, and the skill stayed active anyway.
➤[Skill proficiency threshold reached.]
➤[Shadow Imitation has advanced.]
➤[Maximum duration increased: 00:01:00 → 00:10:00.]
➤[Shadow integration improved.]
➤[Movement distortion reduced.]
➤[Cooldown reduced: 01:00:00 → 00:50:00.]
He let the skill go. The terrace snapped back into focus around him. His mana bottomed out at zero, his knees folded, and the ground rushed up fast.
John caught him before he hit it.
"Worth it."
"You say that far too often."
John carried him inside while the upgraded skill windows trailed along behind them both.
Walk of Night hadn’t moved an inch. Two shadow skills had leveled up. His mana sat completely empty, and his body needed yet another recovery potion. The manual’s first section still rated his comprehension insufficient.
He should have felt frustrated by that.
Instead, he thought back to the final dash, to the exact instant that locked door under his feet had shifted, not opened, not broken, just moved, for the first time since he’d started reading that manual.
Xuan Wuye told me to master the first section.
I think I just found where it actually starts.
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