Next Day.
Inside the medical room, Moon stood in front of a massive wall mirror. His reflection looked back at him with two arms for the first time in what felt like a long time, but had only been about a week.
A big, satisfied smile spread across his face.
He raised his newly attached left arm slowly, testing the range of motion. His shoulder rolled through a full circle.
His elbow bent and straightened. His fingers curled into a fist, then relaxed, then curled again.
His smile lingered for another moment before a small frown crept in.
The movements were correct, but they felt off. Almost unfamiliar in a way, as if the arm belonged to someone slightly different than the person controlling it. The connection was there, but there was a subtle disconnect between his intention and the physical response.
Stacey caught the expression from where she stood behind him.
"I know what you’re thinking. ’It doesn’t feel the same.’ Well, of course it doesn’t."
Moon turned slightly to face her.
"Firstly, your neural system needs time to adapt back to an arm that it had lost. Your brain has spent the past week or so rewiring itself to function without that limb. Now it has to re-map the connections. That process will take a few hours, possibly a full day. You’ll feel it come back in stages."
Her hand gestured toward his body.
"Secondly, your body has been strengthened by the natural treasures over the past week. Your constitution has climbed to a level that would put your previous constitution to shame. All of that has yet to reach an equilibrium. Your body is still calibrating to its own new baseline, and adding a returned limb into the middle of that calibration means the arm will feel like a slightly outdated component until your systems finish reintegrating everything."
She smiled slightly.
"Give it a few days. You’ll forget the arm was ever gone."
Moon nodded slowly.
"That makes sense."
He flexed the fingers again, more slowly this time, and watched them respond in the mirror. The arm looked correct. It moved correctly. His mind would catch up.
He turned back to Stacey and inclined his head.
"Thank you for returning this one."
"No problem."
She waved off the gratitude with her hand, "Tell that old fox I’m busy for the rest of the week. I have significant work to catch up on. If he sends anything my way that isn’t life-threatening, I’m ignoring the notification. If he sends anything life-threatening, I might still ignore the notification, depending on my mood."
Moon smiled.
"Yes, madam."
Stacey nodded once and turned toward the door.
♢♢♢♢
Just as Stacey had said, Moon’s arm began to feel like his own within a few hours of the reattachment.
The neural pathways rewired themselves in the background while he ate breakfast, while he showered, while he chatted briefly with Selene about her plans for the day. He didn’t notice the reintegration happening. He just noticed, at some point around the third hour, that his left arm no longer felt like a slightly outdated component. It felt like his arm.
Training-driven as he was, Moon didn’t waste the newfound functionality by lounging around the estate. He made his way to Tom’s private, old-school gym, which occupied an entire wing of the eastern building and had been stocked with equipment sourced from the best companies.
The gym was empty when he arrived. Tom’s staff kept it that way whenever Moon or the family were expected to use it. Moon appreciated the courtesy.
He began with quick dynamic stretches, mobility drills and basic body weight movements. He kept the tempo casual, focused more on reactivating his form than on producing results.
Once the warmup was done, he moved to the bench press.
Low intensity for him meant a quick set of one thousand pounds. He racked the plates himself, several at a time.
He pressed the bar upward effortlessly, as if it weighed nothing.
The first rep felt easy. So, he did fifteen more.
Once his set was done, he un-racked the bar and moved on.
His combined warm up total across the three lifts of squat, bench and dead-lift came out to four thousand pounds.
Moon exhaled slowly and stood up from the platform.
He wiped his hands with the towel and walked toward the next training area.
The space beyond the weight room was a more modern testing chamber. Reinforced walls lined the room from floor to ceiling, built to withstand Second Order attacks at the bare minimum. In the center stood a line of Evolver-ranked training dummies, arranged like sparring partners waiting for their next assignment. Each dummy was equipped with a display panel above its head, calibrated to measure impact force in the same standardized units the Association used for its official assessments.
Moon walked up to the first dummy.
The last time he had used one of these was shortly after his awakening, back before the first Second Sanctuary trip. His max reading at the time had been around three thousand. He had needed to use lightning Raiju to even reach that number. Without the skill, his baseline had been lower.
He was curious.
Even though his body hadn’t fully recovered, and even though he wasn’t operating at his peak yet, he wanted a benchmark.
He rolled his shoulders and stepped into range.
Moon threw a casual punch with little effort.
His fist connected with the dummy’s chest.
The number on the display panel above the dummy’s head began climbing. It ticked upward fast, faster than Moon had expected, the digits rolling through hundreds, then thousands, quickly.
After a few seconds, the counter stopped.
<15,215>
Moon’s brows rose.
"Not bad."
He shook out his hand and rolled his shoulders again as he prepared to throw a proper strike this time around.
Moon got into a power punch stance, rotating his hips through the correct alignment as he shifted his weight to the back foot and prepared to drive the strike from the ground upward.
It wasn’t his max as he wasn’t willing to risk his recovery.
But it was a proper punch.
His fist came around and connected with the dummy’s face.
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