SSS-Awakening: I Have Infinite Talents

"There is no growth in the comfort zone, and no comfort in the growth zone." — Roy T. Bennett.

– – –

The Old man needed a framework to believe in, and the framework Micah had given him, while technically meaningless, was at least internally consistent enough to chase.

He would spend months, possibly years, trying to develop a refinement process based on the destruction and rebirth principle.

He would probably fail, because the principle wasn’t real. But the effort might accidentally produce useful discoveries along the way, and the cores were already on the table.

Satisfied that his cryptic nonsense had done its job, Micah reached forward and closed the briefcase with a firm click.

"The cores," he said. "I’ll take them."

Chloe stepped forward immediately, her face all business. She placed a sleek tablet on the table between them, the screen displaying the finalized transaction record.

"The full hundred million credits have been transferred to your anonymous account, minus the Syndicate’s handling fee and the cost of your armory purchases. Your identity remains completely shielded behind the corporate shell account, and from this point forward, you are officially the Syndicate’s most heavily protected asset."

She paused, then added, "I need you to understand what that means. Your protection extends beyond this building. If anyone, anywhere, attempts to trace your identity or threaten your business interests, the Syndicate will respond with its full resources. You are, for all intents and purposes, untouchable within our network."

Micah nodded once. "Good. One more thing."

Chloe leaned forward slightly.

"Never try to track me," he said. He spoke without raising his voice, but his words carried weight.

"No trackers, no tracers, no surveillance. If I find out that anyone in this organization has attempted to follow me, identify me, or monitor my movements, our partnership ends. Permanently."

Chloe’s face went pale. "Absolutely not. We would never—"

"I know you wouldn’t," Micah said, cutting her off.

"I’m making sure everyone in this building understands that."

The Master Appraiser nodded so fast his white beard bounced. "Of course. We would never compromise your trust."

Micah stood up, tucked the metallic briefcase under his arm, and walked toward the elevator without looking back.

The doors opened, and he stepped inside.

"Thank you for your time," he said as the doors closed.

The elevator descended, and Micah allowed himself a single, brief exhale of relief.

He’d just conned a Master Appraiser with forty-three years of experience into giving him three S-rank beast cores in exchange for a paragraph of philosophical nonsense. If anyone ever found out, the embarrassment alone would probably kill him.

– – –

The return trip was smoother than the journey in.

From the spatial compression capsule in his jacket pocket, Micah pulled out a thin, dark grey cloak that he’d purchased from the Syndicate armory during his first visit but hadn’t had occasion to use until now.

The Cloak of Dela was a mid-tier stealth item designed to mask the wearer’s thermal signature and kinetic output, rendering them effectively invisible to electronic surveillance and Flux-based tracking systems.

He pulled it over his shoulders, pulled the hood up, and moved through the city streets like a shadow.

The academy walls were quieter at this hour.

The night patrols were running their loops, but the Cloak of Dela masked his thermal signature completely, turning him into nothing more than a dark shape against a dark wall.

He scaled the perimeter using the same gaps in the concrete he’d used before, the handholds worn familiar by repeated use.

The Cloak absorbed the sound of his movements, and the Shadow Step Boots eliminated any trace of impact.

He dropped over the wall, crossed the open ground in three silent bursts, and reached his quarters without incident.

The steel door closed behind him with a quiet click, and he locked it.

The briefcase went on the desk. He opened it, and the three beast cores glowed up at him, their combined energy radiating outward in waves that made the air in the room feel heavy and electric.

Micah sat at his desk and stared at the three glowing beast cores for a long time.

They were beautiful and incredibly dangerous.

He couldn’t absorb them directly. The raw energy inside these cores was too concentrated, too wild, too unstable for his meridians to handle safely.

If he tried to consume them as-is, the energy would tear through his system like a firehose through a paper cup, and his cultivation base would be permanently damaged.

The worst case was that his meridians would rupture entirely, his cells would collapse under the Flux pressure, and he would die on the floor of his quarters with his face melted into the tiles.

He needed the Daily Gacha System to process them into something his body could actually absorb.

The system had done it before, turning the Stone-Ape’s power crystal into a usable energy source that had pushed his Flux from twenty-two to forty percent.

But that had been a simpler process, because the Stone-Ape’s crystal had been a single, homogeneous energy source.

These three cores were raw, volatile, and completely unprocessed.

And to trigger the system, he needed to get hurt. Badly enough for a high-tier pull, because anything less than critical-tier wouldn’t produce an item capable of safely converting S-rank beast core energy.

Micah stood up from the desk and walked to the center of the room.

He took off his jacket and shirt, leaving his upperbody bare above the Phantom Carapace, which he peeled off and set on the bed.

He needed direct access to his skeletal structure, no armor, no padding.

He reached into his spatial compression capsule and pulled out a thick leather strap.

The type that is used for biting down during field surgery when there was no anesthetic available.

He placed it between his teeth and bit down hard, the leather creaking under the pressure.

Then he activated Kinetic Disruption.

His right hand began to glow with a purple light.

The vibrational frequency locked onto the molecular structure of his own left collarbone, and the talent did what it always did.

It calculated the exact frequency needed to shatter the atomic bonds of the target material.

The target material was his bone.

He pressed his glowing fingers to his left collarbone. The vibration spread through his skin and muscle, reaching the bone beneath. He hesitated for exactly one second.

For one second, reason screamed at him that this was insane. He was about to use a talent powerful enough to destroy solid stone on his own bones.

The pain would be worse than anything he had experienced so far.

Then he pushed.

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