Chapter 51: Route core

Makun slowly opened his eyes, his eyelids heavy.

Pain ran through his whole body. His hands, ribs, torso, legs. Everything screamed at him.

He turned his head slowly to look at the state of his body, but all he could see were bandages. From head to toe he was wrapped in them.

He turned his head the other way to take in where he was. A cell. Concrete walls, cold and damp, with a single bulb hanging from the ceiling that flickered every few seconds, casting the room in and out of shadow. No windows. Just a small square hole cut into the metal door, barely large enough to see through.

Where am I this time?

Where did those three take me? Were they after me? Makun questioned himself.

He knew of suppression by the elite but had no idea they had forces to overlook the mystic world.

And he could not guess that instead of being locked here, he should have been dead.

Mark was calculated when it came to fights, but he was also impulsive and emotional.

That was exactly why he could not advance on the Route to the Source. As a practitioner peeled back the layers of reality, as they ascended the different tiers, emotions were considered something that held them back because they influenced comprehension and gave them bias.

Mark had gotten very angry when he saw Makun attack the mom and daughter, and that was justifiable. More than that, he got angry when he realized that someone who had just properly undergone initiation could easily overpower him, a third-grade Initiate.

That he could not accept.

If not for Ryan carefully convincing Mark that the AI would trace them killing Makun when he was no longer a danger, Makun would have died.

Instead they dragged him to the dungeon of the Bureau.

Makun could remember what happened. From when he drank the potion, entered the Deep, felt the formation of the Route Core, was possessed, to when he lost consciousness after expelling those things.

It was the second time in a span of three hours that he had lost consciousness. First was during the Resonant Recall and now after initiation.

He knew after meeting the Presence that things were not going to go well for him, but it had only been five days since he learned of this world and he had already been warned at the Night Market, fainted twice completely unprotected, almost killed a mom and her daughter, and killed a cute dog who had nothing to do with any of this.

Makun’s jaw clenched. His nails bit into his palms beneath the bandages.

Rage bubbled up inside him. Everything happened because something had decided to fuck with him.

Thinking about the cute dog in his hands, his name was Ruffy, he had overheard that girl crying, Makun wanted to vomit.

He was pissed. He would not turn into the monster they wanted him to turn into.

He had to get stronger. Fast.

He closed his eyes and felt his body. The Route Core had finished forming and he wanted to check the effects it had on him.

Makun could feel the presence of it in his chest.

It had grown bigger.

Makun felt the difference. Before it was the size of a grain of rice, but now it had grown to the size of a hazelnut.

Churn.

Makun felt it churn in his chest and then pulse in perfect asynchrony with his heart. He focused and felt it pumping energy through what seemed like a new set of veins that appeared just over the main ones.

Even as weak as he was, he could feel strength in what felt like blood flowing through him.

Spiritual energy. Ashe.

He felt the name of what flowed through him lodge itself inside his head.

This.

Earlier he had felt information about his newly acquired Tier, Grade, and Route appear in his head as if it had always belonged to him. Then he instinctively knew the state he was going to be in if he could not rid himself of the entities.

Why is it that I have such information now? Makun asked.

He did not know yet, but during the process of initiation and the formation of the Route Core, information about Mysticism and his Route were imprinted in him.

Every time a mystic ascended from one grade to another or from one tier to another, they gained such information. It was like opening a door to a whole new layer of reality.

Makun closed his eyes, focused on his thoughts, observing if there was anything new in his memories that was not there before the initiation.

He saw it. He could feel what seemed to be martial arts, knowledge on how to move his body, how to punch effectively, how to dodge, how to make the most of his muscles while moving. Stances that belonged to no modern school. Footwork from forgotten wars. Ways to read an opponent’s weight before they shifted it.

Techniques for breaking joints, redirecting force, turning momentum into leverage. Small things, fundamental things, the kind of knowledge that separated a brawler from a fighter.

After comparing the Route Core’s knowledge to what he’d known as a regular fighter, Makun could see the difference was mostly in efficiency, muscle manipulation and movement. The mechanics were similar, except he had access to basic memories from different epochs.

He concluded that being a first-grade Initiate Warrior granted you power that went just above a top human martial artist.

But. The way I moved earlier, what was that?

He had seen how the entities moved, how they could tell where the bullets were going to go and dodge beforehand, how they made use of improper movement to surprise the opponent.

When was he going to reach that level? Was that something he too could do?

What about the entities, was it a one-time thing?

What did Berserk Warrior mean? He had heard Mark call him that and could deduce it was the sub-route Yime had spoken about.

But now that he was actively searching his head to see if there was information about it, he could not find anything.

He slowly closed his eyes and focused on the energy moving throughout his body.

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