Night settled over Base City 5 like a drawn curtain. The dome lights dimmed to their evening hue, and the constant traffic of hoverbikes thinned to a soft, distant murmur. In the Cross household, the rooms were quiet—the kind of silence that made Aiden aware of the small things: the refrigerator's hum, the faint tick of a wall display switching modes, the subtle pressure of the city's air filters.
He shut his bedroom door, crossed into the adjoining practice alcove, and sat.
The floor was a textured composite that didn't complain under weight. A training dummy waited in the corner, its polymer "ribs" scarred by thousands of student fists. The impact gauge glowed an idle blue. Aiden ignored both. He wasn't here to hit anything.
He folded his legs, let his hands rest lightly on his knees, and closed his eyes.
The Primordial Breathing Technique didn't feel like something learned. It felt remembered. Thirty-six breaths, precise and even. Inhale through the nose, expand from the lower abdomen, spine lengthening fractionally, shoulders loose. Hold just long enough for the heartbeat to sync to the count. Exhale without force, let the diaphragm fall. Repeat.
He began.
The first ten breaths were quiet, almost disappointingly ordinary. Air entered, air left. On the eleventh, something in his chest shifted—as if a piece had clicked into a groove that had always existed, just a half-millimeter to the side.
The air seemed heavier on the twelfth breath, sweeter on the thirteenth. By the fifteenth, Aiden realized he could feel the air's shape: the cool line along the nose bridge, the swirl at the back of the throat, the way the lungs spread like opening hands. Detail without effort. His jaw unclenched on its own. A muscle under his right shoulder blade released with a soft, almost audible sigh.
Breath twenty-one brought the first strain. Not pain—resistance. His body felt full, but in a layered way: muscle, then bone, then something under both that was not tissue and yet carried weight. The technique had warned him not to force past that feeling. He didn't push. He aligned. He shifted his pelvis a few millimeters, softened the tongue's root, adjusted the angle of his head—tiny corrections that rolled out like a perfectly placed shim under a heavy machine. The resistance eased.
His mind emptied without going blank. Thoughts lost their edges and turned to shapes: a memory of the park path, the profile of a street vendor's cart, the bright arc of Selene's hair under a market sign two nights ago. Even those dissolved.
On the thirty-sixth exhale, a subtle ring moved outward from his chest. The hairs on his arms lifted. Curtain edges quivered though the windows were sealed. The air density in the room changed the way water changes when it starts to warm—hard to describe, impossible to miss.
A sound arrived that wasn't a sound: the tiniest, lowest hum—alive—like distant turbines under the city turning one revolution slower and somehow syncing to his lungs.
The System did not intrude with fanfare. It slid a single line across the inside of his vision, neat and unemotional.
[Primordial Breathing Technique: Synchronization Achieved]Energy Intake Efficiency +320%Circulation Error: 0.0%
Aiden stayed still. He could have chased the feeling, driven the breath harder. He didn't. The technique's notes were clear—balance before volume. He carried the second cycle as gently as the first.
By the fourth, energy wasn't just entering; it was circling—a clean loop from the lower abdomen to the spine, up the back, over the crown, down the front, two finger-widths beneath the skin. The loop drew in ambient "cosmic" particles as if they'd been trained to line up.
Aiden's skin prickled. His bones pulsed—not with heartbeat, but with something slower, deeper. When a rush of heat flared in his forearms, a thread of worry surfaced—too fast? Overload?—and disappeared when the heat dispersed exactly where it should, in the tendons of the wrist, like a river settling into a floodplain designed for it.
His lips parted on the next exhale. A faint ribbon of white mist threaded into the room and vanished. The impact gauge flicked from idle blue to a soft amber, as if a weight had leaned against it from across the air.
The panel appeared at his call:
[Host: Aiden Cross]Physique: 102.4Spirit: 102.4Technique: Primordial Breathing (Complete)
He didn't chase numbers. He closed the panel and kept breathing.
On the seventh cycle, Infinite Comprehension stirred—no words, no advice, just certainty. His left knee was folded a degree too sharp. He eased it open. The breath slid cleaner. His sternum had the slightest forward tilt. He settled it back; the hum deepened half a tone. A tiny muscle in the neck that he'd never noticed in his life released, and the room felt like it had exhaled with him.
By the ninth cycle, the room's temperature had dropped two degrees. His sweat evaporated as fast as it formed. He could hear the water line in the wall: a pressurized murmur, then nothing, then a click somewhere three apartments down and two floors over as a neighbor turned a valve. The city wasn't louder; it was clearer.
He stopped after the twelfth cycle—not because he had to, but because stopping felt correct. The technique had cadence written into it like a song; overplaying would smear the notes.
He opened his eyes. The world had a new edge.
The impact gauge pulsed, curious, and then settled. Aiden flexed his hand. No tremor. No ache. His chest felt spacious, like a room with a wall knocked out and sunlight installed.
He stood and crossed to the dummy. No dramatics. No "all out." He placed his feet, rotated through the hips, and threw a clean, straight punch.
The sound wasn't loud. The number that flashed was.
[6,182 kg]
The dummy shuddered, internal frame creaking but holding. Aiden stared—not at the digits, but at his fist. He hadn't felt the "hit" in the usual way. Force hadn't traveled to the target; it had arrived there and stepped forward through it, as if space had cooperated.
He shook out his hand. No pain.
A line from the System slid through quietly.
[Doubling Protocol remains active. Technique refinement may accelerate cycle resolution.]
He ate late.
Mira had left a warm container and a note in her slanted hand: Late meeting. Don't stay up too late. Proud of you. —Mom He smiled at it longer than he meant to. In his old life, no one had left him food. No one had left him notes. He ate, cleaned up, rinsed the bowl until it was absurdly spotless, and put it back to dry.
On the way to bed, he paused at the window. Base City 5 breathed under the dome—slow, steady, a city that had almost died once and had learned to tuck itself in at night. Aiden set a hand against the glass. His palm warmed the pane; his reflection looked back, familiar and not.
He lay down and slept without trying to. The last thing he noticed was the hum—not outside, not in the building, but under everything. The world had a motor. It was running.
The System's chime arrived sometime near dawn.
[Doubling Cycle: Resolved]Physique: 204.8 → 409.6Spirit: 204.8 → 409.6
He woke rested, not startled, not greedy for the numbers. He breathed once the Primordial way as his feet found the floor. The breath caught the new strength and set it precisely where it belonged. No waste.
At school, life pretended to be normal. Darius dozed through first period, then swore he'd go jogging that night and immediately bought two iced buns. Selene passed them in the hall with a stack of student union reports under her arm. She paused.
"You're steadier," she said—like she was noting the weather. "Whatever you did—keep doing it."
Aiden blinked. "Training."
She nodded like that answer fit in a file she already had and moved on.
Instructor Kellan's lecture on gene locks was the same one he'd given for years, but to Aiden it opened like a diagram rendered in light. He could see the nine sub-locks as choke points in a flow system, each with a relief valve if you knew where to listen. When Kellan described the risks of brute-forcing the first lock, Aiden's shoulders tightened—not in fear, but in recognition. The technique he'd learned wasn't a hammer. It was a key.
He kept quiet. He took notes he didn't need. He laughed at Darius's jokes. He went home, ate, told his mother dinner was perfect, told his father the certification halls were impressive, and meant all of it.
Then, when the apartment had gone soft with evening, he returned to the alcove, sat, and began again.