He chose the river.
Specifically, the stretch of the Caldren tributary that ran behind the old fulling mill at the edge of Valdenmere's southern district — a quarter-mile of embankment that nobody used after the mill shut down four years ago, accessible by a gap in the fence that the city had been meaning to repair since before Amaron was born the first time. He had discovered it at nineteen, in his first life, while looking for somewhere to eat lunch alone. He had never told anyone about it. It had stayed exactly as useless and overlooked as everything else he kept to himself.
He arrived an hour before dawn on the third day after his Awakening, when the city was at its quietest and the air still held the cool weight of a night not quite finished. The embankment was exactly as he remembered — long grass, soft ground near the water's edge, the mill's collapsed roof visible against the pre-dawn sky like a broken sentence. He set down the small bag he'd packed the night before and stood in the dark for a moment, listening.
Nothing. Just the river and a distant cart and the city breathing in its sleep.
Good.
— ◆ —
He had spent the previous two days doing what any newly-ranked F-grade in Valdenmere would reasonably do: registering his result with the district office, visiting the Hunter Guild's intake desk to be logged in their auxiliary rolls — the list kept for low-ranks who might serve as dungeon support staff — and returning to his part-time work at the cartographer's shop on Mender Lane where he had been employed since fourteen. He had done all of this with the unremarkable efficiency of someone who had accepted their lot and was getting on with it.
He had also been cataloguing.
The Memory Index — the Void System's term for the organized archive of his first life's knowledge — was not quite like remembering. It was more like having access to a library he had built without knowing he was building it, every observation and overheard conversation and idle piece of research filed and cross-referenced and retrievable with a precision his living memory had never possessed. He could locate information the way you locate a book you know is on a specific shelf: not with effort, but with direction.
He had spent two days pulling everything relevant to the first year of the original story.
Now he needed to know what his body could actually do.
— ◆ —
The first thing he established was baseline.
He stood at the center of the embankment, away from the water's edge, and simply breathed. The Void System's mana absorption worked passively — he didn't need to do anything to trigger it, it ran beneath conscious action the way a heartbeat did. But he wanted to understand what it felt like from the inside, wanted a sensory vocabulary for his own capacity before he began working with it.
It felt like warmth, as he'd noticed on the walk home from the Hall. But more precisely than that — it felt like warmth with direction. The ambient mana in the air didn't distribute evenly inside him. It settled, accumulated in a specific internal space that he had no anatomical word for, somewhere in the upper chest and extending along the arms. He filed this away. The sensation would become important later, when he needed to know exactly how full that space was without consulting the system.
He checked the system anyway.
[ VOID SYSTEM — STATUS ]
[ MANA RESERVE: 43 units ]
[ ABSORPTION RATE: 20 units / day (passive) ]
[ NULL SIGNATURE: ACTIVE ]
[ ITERATION POINTS: 0 ]
Forty-three units in three days. Slightly above projected rate — the river proximity likely helped, moving water tended to carry ambient mana at higher concentrations than still air. He noted this and moved on.
The second thing he established was control.
— ◆ —
This was harder.
Mana control — the ability to direct internal mana deliberately, to shape and channel it for a specific purpose — was something that F-ranks were considered incapable of. Not because F-ranks lacked the sensitivity to feel their own mana, but because an F-rank's natural reserve was so small that attempting to manipulate it was like trying to redirect a trickle of water with a dam built for a river. By the time you finished building the infrastructure, the water was gone.
Amaron's situation was different. His registered capacity was F. His actual reserve, accumulating at twenty units a day, was already larger than many D-ranks. But the control architecture — the mental and physical pathways through which a Hunter learned to direct mana — was not something the Void System gave him. That had to be built.
He had read about the process extensively in his first life. Had watched other Hunters practice it. Had understood it theoretically in the abstract, unembodied way of someone who knew the shape of a skill they would never personally use.
Now he had to learn it in his hands.
He started with the simplest exercise in the standard cultivation literature: concentration. Push a small, defined amount of mana to the fingertips. Hold it. Release it. Repeat until the pathway feels natural. An exercise designed for D-ranks to spend their first three months on.
He attempted it.
The mana moved — sluggishly, imprecisely, more like pushing mud than directing water, his mental grip on it uncertain and clumsy. It reached approximately his wrist before losing coherence and dispersing back into his general reserve. Not his fingertips. His wrist.
He tried again.
Wrist.
Again.
Mid-forearm, briefly, before it scattered.
He worked through the pre-dawn hour and into the grey light of early morning, methodical and without frustration. Frustration was a first-life habit he had left in the rubble of Dungeon Gate Seventeen. He had twelve years. He had twenty units of mana accumulating every day whether he practiced or not. He had a Memory Index full of cultivation theory that most F-ranks never got to read because why would they bother. He had all the time in the world to be bad at this before he got good at it.
By the time the sun cleared the mill's broken roofline, he could reliably reach his wrist.
He packed his bag and walked home feeling something he recognized after a moment as satisfaction — not at the result, which was objectively minor, but at the quality of the work. Clean. Deliberate. Entirely his.
— ◆ —
He returned to the embankment every morning for the next week.
The progress was not dramatic. It was not the kind of montage a story would skip past, the weeks compressed into a single paragraph of advancement. It was slow and specific and full of small failures that taught him things the theory hadn't. He discovered that mana control was partly a physical skill — that the pathways he was building had a muscular component, a quality of trained tension in the hands and forearms that improved with repetition the way any fine motor skill did. He discovered that his particular reserve, being Void-type rather than any of the standard elemental affinities, had a texture different from what the cultivation manuals described. Where fire mana was described as pushing, and water mana as flowing, his was neither. It was more like weight. Dense, directionless until given direction, with a tendency to settle rather than move.
He adjusted his technique accordingly.
By the end of the week he could reach his fingertips. By the end of two weeks, he could hold the concentration there for a count of thirty before it dispersed. By the end of the third week, he could push a small, controlled thread of it outside his body — not a visible manifestation, not anything that would register on a mana detector, just the faintest extension of his own presence into the air an inch beyond his skin.
[ ITERATION POINT AWARDED: +1 ]
[ CONDITION MET: FIRST EXTERNAL MANA EXPRESSION ]
[ TOTAL ITERATION POINTS: 1 ]
[ NOTE: PROGRESS RATE EXCEEDS FIRST-ITERATION BASELINE BY 340%. ]
He read that last line twice.
Three hundred and forty percent. His first-life self, if somehow given the same starting conditions, would have taken nearly four times as long to reach this point. The difference was the knowledge — not just the cultivation theory, but the accumulated understanding of how his own body worked, what it responded to, where it resisted. The second iteration wasn't just a second chance. It was a second chance with all the answers from the first exam.
He allowed himself one moment to appreciate this.
Then he went back to work.