I woke before dawn, still feeling the strange tingle beneath my skin.

  My hands looked normal. No burns, no visible damage. But when I flexed my fingers, I could feel it—a faint buzz running through the muscles, like they were waiting for a signal that hadn't come yet.

  I sat up slowly, testing my body. Everything worked. No pain, no numbness. Just that persistent sense of... readiness and the faint tingling of my skin.

  What the hell had I done?

  I closed my eyes and sank my awareness inward, examining the array I'd constructed in my aether pool. It was still there, barely functional, converting aether to electricity in a stuttering, inefficient rhythm.

  Last night, when it first activated, I'd felt that surge—a wave of direct current that had locked every muscle in my body. For a moment, I'd thought I was dying.

  But I hadn't died.

  Why?

  I replayed the event in my mind, analyzing each step.

  Magic—real magic, not just aether reinforcement—was the interaction between internal oscillating aether and external world aether. The internal aether provided the pattern, the frequency. The external aether provided the fuel.

  When I'd completed the array, it had started drawing on both sources simultaneously. Internal aether to establish the conversion pattern. External world aether to actually convert.

  The problem was, I had almost no unrefined world aether in my body. My strong jing and shen constantly refined it, twisted it, compressed any new stream of it into the structured form I used for reinforcement and techniques, pushing my pool towards crystallization.

  So, when the array activated, it had instantly burned through what little unrefined aether was present. That first surge—the DC wave that locked my muscles—was the array consuming everything available in one go. It was the propagation of the frequency imposed by the array on my aether flow spreading through my body and burning any unrefined aether belonging to the world.

  Then the consumption and influx had stabilized. Sort of.

  The array kept running, but now it was only processing the small trickles of world aether that entered my body naturally. Tiny amounts, converting slowly, releasing as low-level static electricity that dispersed through my tissues, keeping me in a charged state, like a capacitor.

  It wasn’t enough to cause real damage. Just enough to keep my nervous system in a heightened state. I opened my eyes and looked at my hands again. The hair was still standing slightly on end, and the crawling sensation in my palm was still present.

  My nervous system was primed. Every nerve was sitting at a higher baseline voltage than normal, ready to fire at the slightest stimulus.

  That explained why everything felt sharper last night. The candlelight brighter, the wood grain more distinct. My sensory nerves were more reactive, picking up details I'd normally filter out.

  I stood up and walked across the room. Each step felt crisp, precise. The feedback from my feet hitting the floor was immediate, almost overwhelming in its clarity.

  This was going to make training interesting.

  Walking to the Training Hall, I felt the air brush past my face, crisp and bitingly cold as I made my quick steps. With the quickened thinking I started to analyze the air flow and my steps, trying to reduce resistance and achieve better speed.

  By the time I was at the door of the Training Hall, I couldn’t tell if I had any improvements, yet the exercise was fun and left me invigorated, ready for whatever Garrick would throw at me today.

  Garrick was already waiting inside when I opened the door. He tossed me the practice rope without preamble, before I had even closed the door.

  "Morning drills. Let's see if yesterday's beating taught you anything."

  I caught the rope. The texture of the fibers was sharp against my palm, almost painful in its clarity. I forced myself to ignore it and took my starting position.

  "Begin."

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  I swung the rope. The weighted end whipped out—

  —and I felt every tremor, every shift in momentum as it moved. The vibrations traveled back through the rope to my hand with perfect clarity. I could sense exactly where the weight was, how fast it was moving, the angle of the arc.

  I adjusted mid-swing, redirecting the rope's path with a precision I hadn't managed before.

  The weight circled back cleanly, no wild spinning, no loss of control.

  I brought it in and swung again. Same result. Clean arc, perfect control.

  Garrick stopped mid-instruction. "What changed?"

  "I don't know." That was technically true. I knew what had changed physiologically, but I didn't know how to explain it without revealing the array.

  "Do it again."

  I did. The rope responded like it was an extension of my arm. Every input I gave translated immediately into movement. No delay, no fumbling.

  "Huh." Garrick circled me, watching. "Your form hasn't improved. But your control has. It's like you can feel where the rope is without looking."

  I could. The vibrations, the tension, the weight distribution—all of it was feeding back through my nervous system with crystalline clarity.

  "Keep going. Let's see how long you can maintain that."

  I kept swinging. Five minutes. Ten. The control didn't degrade. If anything, I was getting more comfortable with it, learning to process the flood of sensory information without getting overwhelmed.

  But there were downsides.

  When Garrick stepped forward to adjust my stance, his hand on my shoulder felt like a brand. Not painful, exactly. Just intense. Too much pressure, too much sensation.

  We both flinched before we could stop ourselves.

  "What in tarnation!?" he yelped, snatching his hand back and shaking it out. He stared from his hand to me with wide eyes, a mix of surprise and genuine concern. “Are you alright?” He asked, more concerned now that the surprise passed.

  "I’m fine. Just tense."

  He pulled back, frowning. "You're wound tight today. Loosen up. And you’re shocking me."

  Easy for him to say… But I should have warned him about me being charged up. That can’t have been pleasant.

  We moved to sparring. No reinforcement, just movement and basics like before. The difference was immediate.

  I could see his tells coming from a mile away. The slight shift in his weight before he moved. The micro-expression that preceded a feint. The tension in his shoulders before a strike.

  I dodged his first punch with ease. Then the second. The third.

  "Good," Garrick said, pressing harder.

  I blocked, redirected, countered. My body moved before I consciously decided to act, responding to stimuli faster than thought. He was also flinching at each contact, just a bit, enough for me to know that the charge of my body was hurting him.

  His flinches were the only thing keeping it fair. Every time he pulled a punch, the static bit back, and it gave me just enough room to recover from my own sensory stumbles.

  A stray noise from outside the hall—someone dropping something—and I flinched. Not much, just a tiny hitch in my movement. But Garrick caught it, his next strike slipping past my guard to tap my ribs.

  "Focus," he said.

  I tried. But my nervous system wouldn't settle. Every sound was loud. Every touch was sharp. My own heartbeat thundered in my ears. It was excruciatingly difficult to keep myself focused entirely on the mock battle. The exercising from earlier heightened my pulse enough to make it distracting.

  We kept going. I landed more hits than usual, my reactions fast enough to catch openings I'd normally miss. But I also made more mistakes, distracted by sensory inputs I couldn't filter out. Dust in my boots ground against my skin, each grain a glaring, impossible-to-ignore presence.

  Unlike before when I could just tune the sensation out, I was now utterly unable of blocking them out. My mind was split between what I was doing and all the new sensations. It was perhaps for the better, as my reflexes managed to fully kick in, my body moving mainly on its own, exactly what I told Cassia and Magnar to do. Yet my mind wasn’t there to correct mistaken reactions and make up for faints.

  By the end of the session, I was exhausted in a way I'd never experienced before. Not physically tired—my muscles felt fine. But mentally drained, like I'd been processing ten times the normal amount of information for an hour straight.

  “Alright, this is too much. What did you do? I could shake off one or two shocks from you as simple accumulation from movement, but this is ridiculous!”

  “I’d rather not talk about it… How did I do today?”

  "Better…" Garrick said with a sigh, deciding not to pry further for now. "Your reaction time is improving. But you're twitchy. Too reactive. You need to learn to ignore distractions."

  "I'll work on it."

  "See that you do." He studied me. "You sure you're alright? Not just the shocks, but you reacted to nothing a few times."

  "I'm fine. Just didn't sleep well."

  He didn't look convinced but let it drop. "Alright. Same time tomorrow. And Cato? Whatever you did to improve your control—keep doing it. But get some rest too. You're no good to anyone if you burn yourself out."

  I nodded and left.

  Back at the tower, I collapsed into a chair and closed my eyes. My head pulsed and I felt the blood pump painfully behind my eyes. My muscles were sore, more so than usual, not something I expected. It made sense however, I was reacting faster, forcing faster contractions, no wonder they were hurting.

  The primed state was useful. No question. Faster reactions, better sensory feedback, improved control over fine motor movements. But it was also exhausting, distracting and potentially dangerous if I couldn't learn to manage the sensory overload.

  I needed to either stop the array to reduce the static output, or train myself to handle the heightened state without getting overwhelmed. Probably both. I opened my eyes and stared at my hands. Still tingling. Still charged.

  Closing my eyes again I sunk my consciousness and observed the array again. I memorized the positions and decisively disrupted it. Enough for today. I needed to rest my mind and find a way to reduce the leaking static before I did more in that state.

  Three and a half months until the tournament.

  Three and a half months to figure out how to use this without it killing me, driving myself insane or tearing my muscles from someone sneezing.