Foundation of Steadfast Stone

Tower City's mornings had always been quiet.

The sun had yet to rise. Only the scattered footsteps of workers leaving home echoed through the alleys, along with the clatter of buckets as old residents drew water from the wells. At this hour, most children were still asleep beneath their blankets, lost in morning dreams. Yet in the small rooftop courtyard of an old three-story building in the western district, five-year-old Ryan had already put on his coat and stepped onto a wooden platform, beginning his first round of morning training.

His starting point today was neither running nor flexibility stretches, but—punching a sandbag.

It was a sandbag he had sewn himself, made from old bedsheets, thick thread, and partially filled with fine sand. It reached just to his chest and hung beneath the eaves, swaying slightly with every punch. At first, his mother had assumed it was a "toy." It was not until she saw him throw twenty consecutive punches at it one day, his expression as calm as water after retracting his fist, that she realized he was not "playing."

He was tempering himself.

This training regimen had been adjusted after he intervened in that bullying incident at school. He understood that although he had "taken control of the situation" that day, he had essentially "suppressed the conflict with judgment," rather than "controlled the scene with strength." If he encountered a more violent, more unreasonable opponent, or a situation that gave him no room to think—then he would need absolute physical support.

So from that day onward, he turned every morning into a period for strengthening his body.

He woke at five, began punching the sandbag at five fifteen, and completed three sets of basic punching movements, with no fewer than thirty punches per set.

His punches were not blind strikes, but standardized training centered on "keeping the elbows tucked," "stabilizing the wrists," and "coordinating the shoulders and arms for force." After working the sandbag, he would quickly record the degree of contact deviation in every punch, analyzing whether he had made one of four damaging mistakes: "striking off target, losing force, flicking the wrist, or swaying the shoulder." He then drew correction models in his notebook using "simulated projection diagrams."

That was his style.

It was not about training more, but training precisely.

After the sandbag, he moved into the "weighted training phase."

He had found two old iron kettle lids in his father's repair room. Their weights differed, but both were structurally intact. He wrapped cloth strips around them and tied them to either end of an iron rod, creating a simple pair of dumbbells, each weighing roughly 2.3 kilograms. For a five-year-old child, that was no light weight.

But he did not blindly pursue "heavy lifting." His goal was "controlled weight activation." What he trained was not explosive power, but slow lifts, slow descents, stable paths, and a steady core. He called this kind of training "coordination-based strength forging."

He knew that powerful Hunters had never won through brute strength alone. They won through the ability to achieve the most precise control with the fewest movements.

After finishing his morning training, he would warm his knees and wrists with a hot towel, then spend ten minutes sitting quietly in meditation. He was not sitting in meditation to cultivate Qi, but rather—to review whether any of his movements contained "cognitive deviations" while in a resting state, then actively adjust his physical awareness.

When his parents got up, they often saw him return from the courtyard drenched in sweat, change his clothes, sit at the dining table, and eat breakfast bite by bite as if nothing had happened.

"This child has far too much energy," his mother sighed.

"I was nowhere near this disciplined when I was in school." His father was proud instead. "No idea who he takes after. Neither of us was ever the training type."

"Isn't he starting this stuff too early?"

"We didn't have the conditions when we were young. Now that he knows how to exercise, it's not a bad thing."

His mother did not argue further. In truth, they had long since gone from "trying to stop him" to "tacit approval," then to "moderate tolerance." They had indeed seen that their son was steady every day. He was neither willful nor reckless, and nothing had ever gone wrong. He was like a quietly operating machine of gears, advancing methodically at his own pace.

What they did not know was that Ryan was calculating at that very moment—

In another year, my skeletal structure will complete its first-stage closure. The upper limit of enhanced muscle coordination training should be reached by the end of age six. If I continue at the current pace, I can meet the entry-level physical standards of an average adult by age seven.

This was not an exaggeration.

He could steadily perform thirty bent-over pulls with two kilograms of weight. He could sprint one hundred meters without running out of breath. He could continuously push off the ground and jump for over forty-five seconds. More importantly—he possessed a precise physical monitoring and feedback system, allowing him to advance his training like an engineering project instead of relying on instinct and desire.

He called this stage:

"Ability Zero Stage: Physical Module Consolidation Phase."

This was not a prelude to Nen Ability, but the foundation leading toward Nen Ability.

Only when his muscles, reflexes, balance, and joint coordination all met the standard would he avoid being held back by his body when he formally entered the realms of "Qi Cultivation—Qi Sealing—Qi Severing" in the future.

He was in no hurry to see results.

What he wanted was to leave all his peers completely behind by the age of seven and reach a level of physical ability comparable to an adult's.

The monthly sports day at the elementary school was a "festival" more exciting than any class in the children's eyes. The sunlight was perfect that day. The teachers had set up a long-jump area, a short-distance sprint starting line, and a basic throwing zone on the field, while the children rotated through them by class.

For most five- and six-year-old students, this day meant they could run legally, shout to their hearts' content, and escape being confined to their desks listening to pinyin and addition and subtraction.

But for Ryan, this day was his first deliberate social experiment to "test" himself.

Test what?

—How to display the physical ability of an "excellent child" without seeming "abnormal."

He had long been able to run thirty meters in just over six seconds, far beyond ordinary children his age. But those were training records, achieved on private brick ground amid the rhythm of sandbags and dumbbells. At school, he had to adjust his output strength, center-of-gravity angle, and burst timing, making "fast" seem "reasonable."

During the long-jump event, several students lunged forward and tumbled over. Even the farthest landing point hovered only around the 1.13-meter mark. As the teacher announced the results, the children excitedly raised their hands, clapped, and played to their hearts' content.

When it was Ryan's turn, he silently walked to the takeoff line, planted his toes precisely, took a run-up—two and a half steps—then jumped and landed.

"...One meter thirty-seven."

The PE teacher paused slightly, then smiled. "Very good, Ryan. Your form is extremely standard!"

Ryan nodded and stepped aside without saying anything. His movements were clean and efficient, without showmanship or unnecessary explanation.

For the following throwing event, he chose a standard overhand throw with his right arm. The light plastic ball traced a clean arc through the air and landed close to the final marker.

"Very stable arm strength," the teacher wrote in the record sheet.

What truly put his "test" into action was the thirty-meter sprint.

He was in the fifth group. Of the first four runners, two had poor balance, while another had a shoelace come loose halfway through the run, drawing a wave of teasing from the crowd. But at the instant he heard the whistle, Ryan switched his stride rhythm.

Not explosive power, but rhythm control.

He precisely set his first four steps as an "energy-storage phase," maintained forty percent sprint output through the middle section, then slightly increased his speed over the final five meters. In the end, he reached the finish line without losing balance, breaking his stride, or veering off course.

Time: 7.3 seconds

The teacher stared at the stopwatch, narrowed his eyes, then looked at Ryan.

After thinking for a moment, he said only one thing. "Your physical coordination is excellent. Come talk to me sometime when you're free."

Ryan nodded politely and stepped aside.

But the other children had already quietly formed their own little circle.

"Has he ever fallen before?"

"Did he learn how to run somewhere?"

"He never says anything, so how does he suddenly seem... so amazing?"

The admiration was genuine, but from that day onward, a sense of "distance" quietly began to grow as well.

No one bullied him, but no one truly approached him either. Ryan saw it clearly. Some of the children admired him, some envied him, but others instinctively kept their distance, as though he had become someone from "another level."

And that was precisely the result he wanted.

—Stronger than his peers, yet still within an explainable range; better than his classmates, yet without provoking rejection.

In his notebook after returning home, he wrote:

[Phased Social Performance Test · ID R-PM01]

Subject: Standard physical events during elementary school sports day

Metrics: Sprint (controlled speed, 7.3s) | Throwing (approximately 1.5m) | Long jump (1.37m)

Feedback:

Teacher-level assessment: "Good+," with a recommendation for further observation;

Student-group feedback: Dual labels of "attention + distance," no conflict triggered, image stable.

Conclusion: Completed phased external-display testing using a "above standard, below astonishment" strategy;

Assessment: Objective achieved. Socially visible behavior level well controlled.

After dinner, he sat in a corner of the courtyard, pressing his wrist to check the slight tightness left from his morning weight training. Then, as usual, he bathed, reviewed his performance, and prepared the movement diagrams for tomorrow.

Looking at the little notebook filled with drawings, his mother finally could not help asking, "You write in that every day... Are you recording your movements?"

"Yeah." He nodded, his tone unchanged. "If I don't write them down, I'll forget."

She did not press him further.

When he lowered his head, the faintest curve crossed his eyes.

"I want this world to gradually grow used to 'me getting stronger,' rather than suddenly realizing that 'I'm already stronger than them.'"

That was the path he wanted to take—steady, precise, weighty, and far-reaching.

Not a single step wasted.

Not a single step back.