Peter's eyes opened in the darkness.
The house was perfectly quiet. That deep kind of silence that only existed in the hours before dawn. Down the hall, Uncle Ben's soft snoring mixed with the gentle creaks of the old house settling. Aunt May's lighter breathing came from the same room. Safe sounds. Home sounds.
Peter stared at the ceiling of his small bedroom. The glow-in-the-dark stars Uncle Ben had stuck up there last week were starting to fade. In a few hours, the sun would come up. Uncle Ben would make coffee. Aunt May would start breakfast. Another normal day would begin.
But first, he had work to do.
He closed his eyes again. 'System. Temporal Acceleration.'
The world shifted.
One second he was lying in his warm bed, blanket pulled up to his chin. The next second he stood in the middle of his bedroom in the empty dimension. Same room. Same bed. Same everything. Just silent. Completely alone.
Peter looked around. No sounds from outside. No cars passing on the street. No distant sirens or barking dogs or anything. Just him and twenty-four hours that didn't exist for anyone else.
'Twenty-four hours,' he thought. 'Every single day. Nobody else gets this. Nobody else even knows this is possible.'
He walked out of his bedroom and down the hallway. His small feet made no sound on the carpet. The family photos on the walls watched him pass. Uncle Ben and Aunt May on their wedding day. Some old pictures of people he didn't recognize. Probably family from before his parents left him here.
Peter pushed those thoughts away. Not helpful. Not now.
He reached Uncle Ben's office. The door was already open. It always was in this dimension. Everything stayed exactly how it was in the real world when he activated the system.
The office was small. A desk cluttered with papers and bills. A bookshelf that took up the entire back wall. Books crammed into every available space. Some stacked horizontally on top of other books. Uncle Ben kept saying he'd organize them. He never did.
Peter had already read most of them. The history books about World War Two and the Civil War. The science books that explained how engines worked and why the sky was blue. The old novels with yellowed pages about soldiers and lovers and people making impossible choices when everything went wrong.
But there were still more. Always more to learn.
He grabbed a thick book from the middle shelf. Engineering principles. The cover was worn smooth from handling. Uncle Ben's handwriting filled the margins on some pages. Notes and questions and little sketches of mechanical parts.
'He really loved this stuff,' Peter thought. 'Before he had to take that job at the factory. Before bills and mortgages and life got in the way.'
Peter sat down cross-legged on the floor. He opened the book to the first page he hadn't read yet. Chapter seven. Structural load distribution.
'Let's see what I can learn today.'
The hours began to pass.
Peter read without stopping. Page after page. His three-year-old eyes tracked across dense paragraphs filled with technical terms and mathematical formulas. His small hands turned pages with steady rhythm.
No hunger came. No tiredness crept in. The system kept its promise. Twenty-four hours of pure, uninterrupted focus. No distractions. No needs. Just learning.
The engineering book explained how bridges stayed up. How buildings didn't fall down. How forces distributed through materials in ways that seemed obvious once you understood them but were invisible before that moment of comprehension.
Peter finished it after six hours. He put it back on the shelf and grabbed the next one. Physics. Classical mechanics. Newton's laws explained in detail with examples and practice problems.
He worked through problems in his head. An object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. Force equals mass times acceleration. For every action there's an equal and opposite reaction.
Simple concepts. Fundamental truths about how the universe worked. But understanding them deeply meant seeing the world differently. Seeing the invisible rules that governed everything.
The physics textbook gave way to chemistry. Atomic structure. Chemical bonds. How elements combined and separated. How energy moved through reactions. How everything was just atoms arranged in different patterns.
Then biology. Cells and DNA and how life organized itself from basic components into complex systems. How a single cell could divide and grow into a complete human being. How information encoded in molecules could create consciousness and thought and everything that made a person real.
'Everything connects,' Peter realized. 'Engineering uses physics. Chemistry explains biology. It's all the same thing from different angles.'
[Reading: 2/10]
[Mind: 1.0 → 1.2]
The notification appeared in his vision. Floating there. Tracking his progress with cold mathematical precision.
Peter smiled. Progress felt good. Real and measurable. Slow but steady. That's what the system promised him. No shortcuts. No cheap tricks. Just work equals results. Effort equals growth.
'I can live with that,' he thought. 'I've got time. Lots of time.'
When the twenty-four hours finally ended, reality snapped back.
Peter blinked. He was lying in his bed again. Still dark outside. The clock on his nightstand showed 5:47 AM. Exactly one second had passed since he'd activated the system.
But he was different now. His mind held information it didn't have before. Engineering principles. Physics concepts. Chemical reactions. Biological processes. All of it organized and accessible. Ready to use.
He got out of bed. His small body moved through the dark room easily. He walked downstairs quietly. The old steps creaked under his weight but not enough to wake anyone.
The kitchen was empty. Peter climbed onto his chair at the small dining table. The one with the wobbly leg that Uncle Ben kept meaning to fix. He sat there in the dark. Waiting.
A few minutes later, light flooded the kitchen. Uncle Ben stood in the doorway, one hand still on the switch. He jumped a little when he saw Peter.
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