Chapter 42: He Had Found Him
Chapter 42: He Had Found Him
Ethan arrived at a secluded training ground while the sky was still more grey than blue, and ran twenty laps of two hundred and fifty meters each, the cold burning down into his lungs on every fourth breath. He transitioned straight from that into push-ups, then sit-ups, before drawing the Eternal Sovereign Blade from its scabbard.
He followed with horizontal slash, vertical slash, thrust — each one flowing into the next — before moving into Mountain Cleaving Strike, Raven Wing Sweep, and Frozen Battlefield, completing his daily training in full.
As the sun rose above the Winterveil mountain range, Ethan was preparing for something that required, at minimum, becoming a Great Knight. Just as he was closing the door of his room behind him, a familiar voice sounded in his mind.
A dark, golden translucent screen appeared before him.
[Ding!]
Daily Missions Completed: 20
Blood Essence Acquired: +30 (Note: The Blood Essence is acquired from bandits)
Available Attribute Points: 660
Total War Merit: 6,601
He sat on the floor near the edge of his bed and started assigning the stat points to all the attributes evenly.
[System Notice]
Mana Capacity: Hard Ceiling Reached — 150. Cause: Warrior Core Partially Awakened.
Intelligence: Hard Ceiling Reached — 100. Cause: Realm Limitation.
He considered the message for a moment and decided to proceed with the distribution anyway.
I hope it’s enough for a breakthrough.
A current of warmth spread through his body immediately, and with it came the sensation of every cell in his body restructuring itself around the assigned stats, starting from his forearm and moving steadily down through the rest of him.
Strength arrived first — his muscles thickening, growing denser beneath the skin, the kind of density that turned an ordinary grip into something capable of splitting boulders without particular effort. He could feel the change settle into his forearms, his shoulders, the muscle along his back drawing tighter and heavier all at once and Agility followed close behind, and where Strength had felt like weight, this felt like its opposite — his joints loosening, his balance recalibrating itself without him doing anything at all, his whole frame growing lighter even as the rest of him grew stronger.
Vitality and Endurance came almost together, warm and steady, spreading through his chest and down into his legs — the particular sensation of a body being told, on some level deeper than thought, that it could now absorb considerably more attacks than it used to and keep functioning regardless.
Intelligence arrived last, quieter than the others, no physical weight to it at all — just a gradual sharpening at the edges of his thoughts, a clarity settling in where there had been ordinary human static before, right up until it hit the ceiling the System had already warned him about and simply stopped.
[Condition Satisfied — All Core Stats Above 100]
[New Stat Unlocked: Perception]
Perception: 61
Ethan stared at the number longer than he’d stared at anything else on the panel.
His mind went, without quite meaning to, back to the very first status screen he’d ever seen — a ten-year-old’s body, Intelligence sitting at twelve, every number small and forgettable except for the physique grade that had made the rest of it worth reading at all. Perception hadn’t appeared on that panel.
It had existed. It just hadn’t been showing.
The System hadn’t given him Perception today. It had simply stopped hiding a number that had already been true about him since the morning he first woke up in this body.
He sat with that longer than the rest of the panel had asked of him.
———
Ethan Ravencrest
Age: 10
━━━━━━━━━━━━
Warrior Path
Knight Rank: Knight
Warrior Core
Status: Partially Awakened
━━━━━━━━━━━━
Mage Path
Mage Rank: Unawakened
Mage Core
Status: Dormant
━━━━━━━━━━━━
Spirit Path
Spirit Rank: Unawakened
Spirit Core
Status: Dormant
━━━━━━━━━━━━
Talent: Unawakened
Physique: Heavenly Sovereign Physique (SSS)
Cultivation Art: Northern Heaven War Art
━━━━━━━━━━━━
Strength: 197
Agility: 197
Vitality: 197
Endurance: 197
Intelligence: 100 (Hard Ceiling — Realm Limitation)
Mana Capacity: 150 (Hard Ceiling — Warrior Core Partially Awakened)
Perception: 61
War Merit: 6,601
Blood Essence: 41
Available Attribute Points: 0
━━━━━━━━━━━━
Traits:
Cold Resistance — Level 1
• Cold Damage Taken -5%
• Stamina Consumption in Cold Environments -5%
━━━━━━━━━━━━
Eternal Sovereign Blade
Current Rank: Rare | Growth Potential: Unknown
Status: Soul-Bound | Blood Essence Stored: 41
———
The breakthrough hadn’t completed. Mana Capacity had stalled at a hundred and fifty and gone no further, and without it, Great Knight simply wasn’t a door his core could open yet — the limitation belonged to the core itself, not to anything training could fix. Still, he could feel it plainly enough: the strength sitting in his body right now belonged to Peak Great Knight, held back from the rank only by a gate that hadn’t finished opening.
The whole process took nearly three hours, and by the end of it he could feel every impurity leaving his body — driven out through the skin, thick and unpleasant.
A thin layer of sticky black residue clung to him like a second skin when it finished. He smelled faintly of something rotten.
Rune lifted his head, sniffed once, and immediately walked to the other side of the room.
"That’s excessive."
Rune sat with his back to him.
Ethan looked down at the black residue coating his skin.
"Fair."
He bathed for an hour to strip the smell from his skin, then dressed — leather armor over the rest — and went out.
The mission he was about to take would last a few days, and somewhere inside that time he still had to search for the man he’d actually come here for. He ate first. A tavern called the Dancing Spring, on the fifth street of the outer district, famous for its beef stew and stir-fry — he could smell the aroma before he’d even entered. He ordered three servings of each, filled his stomach to the brim.
The second bowl disappeared faster than the first. By the fourth, the serving girl had stopped asking whether he wanted another and simply brought one.
Rune received his own portion beneath the table and finished before Ethan did.
"Glutton," Ethan muttered when the cub began watching his bowl.
Rune continued watching.
Ethan then ordered four extra servings for the road.
After finishing his meal, he went straight to the guild branch.
The clerk was different from yesterday — the shift must have changed. In her place sat an old man with grey hair and rugged features. Ethan recognized him immediately from memory.
Robert.
The old man greeted him politely. Ethan returned it with a nod.
No one here would ever guess that this old-looking man was one of the strongest people in Northwatch, a Knight Lord who’d once served as one of the most trusted people under Evelyn, in a life that no longer existed.
Ethan went to the notice board and looked for something appropriate near Coldvale. He found it — a C-rank posting reporting sightings of a dozen Snowclaw Bears and Ironhounds near Riverwood town and Coldvale village, squarely within Dire Beast and Elite Beast territory.
Reward: Ten gold.
He brought it to Robert for approval. The old man gave it a skeptical look.
"This mission is for a party of three C-rank members."
"I know."
That was when Robert looked down at the small cub sitting at Ethan’s legs. The moment his gaze met those brilliant blue eyes, he immediately understood this was no ordinary beast, and approved the mission without further argument.
Ethan took off from Northwatch shortly after.
He didn’t see Marcus watching from the upper wall of the command building — hadn’t thought to look — but Marcus saw him.
He stood at the edge of the balcony longer than the moment strictly required, watching a boy and a wolf cub disappear down the southern road, toward a mission that had nothing to do with any report crossing his desk that morning.
Marcus watched until the road curved and took both boy and cub from sight. Then he returned to the maps. Ethan had chosen the mission himself. Whatever happened beyond the walls would tell Marcus more than another month of watching him train.
The road to Riverwood town narrowed the further Ethan traveled from the city, the way roads always did once they stopped serving anywhere important. Rune ranged ahead in loose sweeps, nose down, unhurried.
It was well past the second hour when Ethan noticed it — wagon tracks running parallel to the main road rather than on it, cutting through undergrowth that no legitimate cargo route had any reason to pass through. Fresh enough that the frost hadn’t yet reclaimed the impressions. He slowed without stopping outright, reading the spacing between the ruts, the depth, the direction they curved away toward.
He crouched beside the nearest set and let hsi senses expand to the maximum. The increased stats immediately took effect, he could notice the details faster and clearer.
Bandits didn’t bother hiding wagon tracks from a road nobody official traveled anymore. This was someone with a reason to keep a pattern quiet even from other criminals — the particular, careful paranoia of a man used to being hunted by people.
Whoever had left them hadn’t wanted to be seen using the road at all.
The road to Riverwood took the better part of two days. Rune ranged ahead for most of it, doubling back occasionally for no reason Ethan ever bothered asking about. The town came into view a little before dusk on the second day — larger than Coldvale, timber buildings behind a palisade that had gone a long time without repair, smoke rising from hundreds of chimneys.
He didn’t enter the town.
The mine lay a short distance beyond its northern edge, and Ethan had not spent two days traveling here to announce his presence before he knew whether his memory was right.
A low scar of exposed rock and timber scaffolding cut into the hillside, worked by a crew large enough that nobody would think twice about one more tired laborer among them. Ethan settled on a ridge overlooking the site and watched.
The first full day of watching told him mostly shapes — men coming and going in shifts, carts hauling ore down toward a collection yard, the ordinary rhythm of work nobody paid attention to once it started. He logged faces without expecting any of them to matter, the way he’d once logged patrol rotations he never used.
It was near the end of the second day that one of the shapes settled into something specific.
A man near the back of the loading crew, keeping to the edges of every group without ever standing out enough to be noticed for it — quiet where the others were loud, efficient where the others were merely competent, positioned always with a clear line to the treeline behind the mine rather than boxed in by rock or timber. Small things. The kind of small things that meant nothing individually and everything together, if you’d spent enough years learning to read men who didn’t want to be read.
Ethan watched him load a cart, unload it, and disappear into the worker’s barracks at the end of the shift without once looking directly at anyone longer than a glance required.
He stayed on the ridge until full dark, and didn’t move.
He had found him.
Now came the harder part.