The world was gray rain and black asphalt.
Pain was a roaring fire inside Leo's head, a merciless inferno threatening to burn away what little consciousness he had left.
The thugs were leaving.
Their casual, ugly laughter was the last sound he ever expected to hear.
A cruel joke at his expense.
The final insult in a life defined by quiet submission.
He was dying in a filthy alley.
Alone.
Forgotten.
Then, he heard it again.
It was a sound that didn't belong in this world of grit, violence, and despair.
A sound that was clean, perfect, and impossibly out of place.
Ding!
The voice that followed was not in his ears.
It was not a product of his damaged brain.
It was imprinted directly onto his soul, a line of code written into his very being.
"Soul-Bound Combat System activated."
The voice was clean.
Digital.
Completely, utterly uncaring.
"Host synchronization in progress…"
The other voice, the ancient, angry one that had screamed its name—Kaelan—roared in his mind.
Its fury was now mixed with a pure, undiluted shock that momentarily silenced its rage.
"What is this?" Kaelan demanded, his ancient anger baffled by the cold, digital intrusion. "What sorcery is this devilry?"
Before Leo could even begin to process the question, a blue screen flared to life in his thoughts.
It was brighter and sharper than any computer monitor he had ever seen.
A translucent window hanging in the darkness of his fading mind.
It was covered in text he could read with perfect clarity, even with his eyes squeezed shut against the throbbing pain.
Two glowing buttons pulsed softly on the screen, drawing his wavering attention like beacons in a raging storm.
The first read "Status Screen."
The second, "One-Click Cultivation."
Leo's mind was a swirling vortex of fear and agony.
He couldn't think straight.
He didn't know what any of this meant.
Was this a hallucination?
A final, bizarre dream as his life slipped away?
"The glowing one, boy!" Kaelan's voice cut through the pain with the sharp edge of a general's command.
The ancient spirit's rage was focused now, transformed into a desperate, razor-sharp intensity.
"Focus! That second one! The path to cultivation!"
Kaelan's voice trembled with a strange, wild hope.
"This… this might be it. Our only chance!"
With the last, ragged dregs of his willpower, Leo forced his swimming thoughts to obey.
He focused his entire being, every last spark of his fading life, on the second button.
The one that read "One-Click Cultivation."
His mental touch was weak, faltering, but the system registered it instantly.
The screen flickered, and a new window popped open.
The words on it were simple, written in the same clean, digital font.
But they carried a weight that seemed to bend reality itself.
[One-Click Cultivation - Level 1]
[Function: Automatically practice a selected cultivation art for the host.]
[Efficiency: 24/7. Flawless execution. No rest, no meditation, no effort required.]
[Activation Cost: 1 Unit of Startup Energy (Provided).]
Kaelan's spirit, which had tasted the bitterness of betrayal and simmered in the hatred of centuries, went completely still.
The sheer, raw impossibility of what he was seeing stunned the ancient warrior into absolute silence for a full second.
"Automatic?" he finally breathed the word, his voice a disbelieving whisper in Leo's mind.
"Impossible."
"This cannot be."
"Even the greatest genius, born under the luckiest stars, with a body forged by the heavens, can only truly train for a few hours a day before their mind and spirit fatigue."
"The channels of Qi become strained. The soul needs rest."
"It is the fundamental law of cultivation!"
The ancient warrior's voice was filled with a sense of profound awe that bordered on religious terror.
"This thing… it never stops. It feels no fatigue. It makes no mistakes."
"This is not the power of a man."
"This is the power of a god."
The system, indifferent to his shock, chimed again with its soft, synthesized voice.
"Please select a cultivation art to begin."
A list appeared on the screen beneath the prompt.
It was completely, utterly empty.
"Use mine," Kaelan said instantly, his voice losing its awe and becoming as hard and unyielding as iron.
"The art they killed my family for."
"The technique that the Cross family coveted above all else."
"The Celestial Unity Scripture."
The name itself felt heavy with a forgotten power.
As Kaelan spoke it, Leo felt the memory of it burn within his soul.
It was not a memory of reading a book.
It was the memory of practicing it, a complex and beautiful pattern of energy flow that he somehow understood on a fundamental level.
The system reacted instantly.
"New art detected: [Celestial Unity Scripture]. Art is fully compatible with host. Sync Ratio: 100.0%. Add to list?"
Kaelan fell silent again, his confusion palpable.
"One hundred percent?" he muttered, the question aimed at himself, not Leo. "How is that possible?"
"The Scripture requires a specific spiritual resonance… a bloodline trait unique to my clan."
"The boy… who is this boy?"
But there was no time for questions.
"Yes," Leo thought, a desperate, silent plea.
He didn't understand what a sync ratio was. He didn't understand any of this.
But he knew, with a certainty that defied all logic, that this was his only hope.
"Art [Celestial Unity Scripture] added."
"Confirm activation of One-Click Cultivation?"
"YES!" Leo screamed in his mind, pouring every last ounce of his desire to live into that single, frantic word.
A switch flipped deep inside him.
It was not a loud noise, not a dramatic explosion.
It was a subtle, fundamental shift in the very fabric of his being.
A tiny stream of warmth bloomed in the center of his chest, in the place where the thug's boot had landed so cruelly.
It was a fragile, delicate thing.
A single drop of water in a vast desert.
But it was real.
It trickled slowly, patiently, through his broken body.
A steady and constant flow.
It felt like the first sip of hot soup after being stranded for days in a winter storm.
It was life.
A new bar appeared on the screen in his mind, a thin blue line that began to fill, pixel by agonizing pixel.
[Cultivating: Celestial Unity Scripture]
[Progress to next realm (Elementary Body Tempering): 3 hours, 58 minutes, 12 seconds.]
Leo stared at the number, his mind, though clearer now, struggling to grasp its monumental significance.
Less than four hours.
"Four… hours?" Kaelan's voice was a choked whisper of pure, unadulterated disbelief.
"To reach the first stage of Body Tempering?"
"A rich man's son, a so-called prodigy, fed priceless elixirs from the moment of his birth, would be lucky to achieve that in four months of grueling, torturous work."
"You are to do it in four hours?"
"While lying broken and bleeding in an alley?"
Hope.
It was a tiny, fragile spark in the vast darkness of his despair.
But it was there.
A path to survival.
A chance.
Then he heard them.
Footsteps.
Splashing aggressively through the puddles.
Coming back.
"I don't care if he's breathing," the leader's voice snarled, dripping with a venom that was even colder and more vicious than before.
"That old noodle-slinger needs to see a real lesson."
"Something he'll never forget."
"We're going back. I want to hear his legs snap."
The tiny spark of hope that had just ignited in Leo's soul was instantly, brutally extinguished.
Cold, absolute, gut-wrenching terror flooded his veins, even more potent and paralyzing than before.
They weren't just going to leave him broken.
They were coming back to cripple him for life.
To make an example of him.
"Quiet," Kaelan commanded, his voice suddenly becoming a shard of ice in Leo's mind.
There was no panic in it, only a terrifying, focused calm that was more unnerving than any rage.
"Let them come."
"Do not make a sound."
"Watch the screen, boy."
"That blue line is your only god now."
Leo locked his entire being onto the progress bar.
It was all that existed in his universe.
The footsteps were right next to him now.
A foul shadow fell over his face.
He could smell stale sweat and the rot of cheap, wet cigarettes.
The countdown on his screen was a silent, frantic whisper.
[0 hours, 0 minutes, 23 seconds]
The timer continued, relentless and uncaring of the horror unfolding around him.
"Look at this piece of trash," the second thug sneered, his voice filled with a casual, bored contempt.
"Still twitching."
[0 hours, 0 minutes, 10 seconds]
The leader grunted, a sound of grim satisfaction. "Not for long. Grab his leg."
A rough, calloused hand seized his ankle.
The grip was like a vise of hot iron.
This was it.
The final, unimaginable pain before a lifetime of being a cripple.
[00:00:09]
He could feel his leg being lifted, positioned over the hard, unforgiving concrete.
[00:00:08]
He squeezed his eyes shut, his mind screaming a silent, unending scream that tore at the edges of his sanity.
[00:00:07]
The countdown was all that mattered.
[00:00:06]
[00:00:05]
He braced himself for the bone-shattering stomp that would change his life forever.
[00:00:04]
Any second now.
[00:00:03]
[00:00:02]
[00:00:01]
The heavy boot started its downward arc, a black shape descending to bring ruin and a lifetime of pain.
Ding!
The chime was the loudest, most beautiful, most holy sound in the history of the universe.
"Cultivation benchmark reached."
"Host is ready for breakthrough."