Leon woke with a jolt.For a moment, he had no idea where he was. His eyes darted around the dim storage room—the stacked boxes, the rusted metal shelves, the thin mattress beneath him. His heart hammered once, hard, as if expecting pain, cold, or the familiar weight of exhaustion.But none came.Instead, he felt—Light.Not fully restored, not powerful, not even comfortable…but awake. Alert. Present.His body didn’t ache like before. The stabbing pain in his ribs had dulled. His breathing was smoother. His limbs felt connected to him again—not foreign, not frozen, not heavy like sandbags.He rubbed a hand across his face and froze.His skin was warm.He hadn’t felt warmth in days.Leon sat up slowly, blinking as the early morning sunlight filtered through the dusty window. It caught the edges of the floating System interface that hovered faintly at the side of his vision.The same one he had seen last night.He hadn’t dreamed it.The System was real.He let out a soft, disbelieving

The next morning, the warehouse buzzed with the usual chaos—forklifts whining, crates slamming, workers shouting across the aisles. But for the first time in a long time, Leon didn’t walk in like a ghost drifting into the background.He walked in with purpose.It wasn’t dramatic. He wasn’t suddenly muscular or glowing or confident. But something had shifted—subtle, quiet, but unmistakable.His eyes were clear.His steps steady.And the heaviness that used to drag behind him like a shadow… was gone.He entered through the side door, the early light cutting across his face, and several workers turned without meaning to, sensing something different. Leon usually shuffled with his shoulders caved and head down, as if bracing for a hit. Now he stood straighter. His breathing was calm. He didn’t look like he’d barely survived another night.He looked… alive.Not strong.Not dominant.But alive in a way that made people blink.The system’s vitality boost still hummed faintly in his muscles.

The warehouse evening shift dragged on with its usual noise, but Leon’s mind wasn’t on crates or schedules or the ache in his arms.It was on Mason.Every shove.Every insult.Every time he’d been forced to swallow humiliation just to survive.He thought he’d buried all of it.He thought he’d learned to endure it silently.But today… something was different.Because today, for the first time, Leon wasn’t too weak to feel anger.He was strong enough to notice it—and strong enough to want to do something about it.A dangerous thing.---It started when Mason “accidentally” knocked over a stack of metal pipes right beside Leon’s leg. The clang was loud enough to shake dust from the rafters. Leon instinctively jumped back, heart hammering.Mason smirked.“Oops.”Leon felt something hot coil inside him—sharp, bright, violent.His hands clenched before he realized.“You could’ve injured someone,” Leon said quietly.“Oh, calm down,” Mason said, rolling his eyes. “You’re fine.”Leon wasn’t f

Leon didn’t sleep that night.Not because of nightmares, hunger, or the cold concrete beneath the thin mattress.He couldn’t sleep because his body ached—a deep, pulsing ache that radiated from his bones outward, the kind that felt carved into him. His muscles twitched with microscopic spasms, nerves tingling as if electricity threaded through them.It wasn’t normal pain.It was transformation.The system had rewarded him with strength before.Now it had sharpened his mind.And his entire body felt caught between destruction and rebirth.He sat up slowly, breath steady, eyes fixed on the darkness.[Residual Strain Detected. Host is undergoing accelerated adaptation.]The system’s voice was calm, clinical—nothing like the chaos inside him.Leon exhaled shakily.“So this is what it takes to change a man,” he murmured.The old Leon would have cursed the pain.The old Leon would have curled up and prayed for relief.But the old Leon had died on that bridge.This pain…was proof he was bec

The warehouse was finally quiet.Most of the workers had clocked out, leaving only the faint hum of forklifts charging in the corner and the distant drip of water leaking from a pipe overhead. Leon sat on an overturned crate behind the shelving racks, his hands trembling, his breath shallow and uneven.His muscles throbbed. His lower back pulsed with sharp, stabbing pain. His arms felt like concrete pillars about to crumble. Every joint in his body screamed from the sabotage earlier—the hidden heavy boxes, the forced lifting, the traps set just to make him break.He wiped sweat from his forehead, staring at the floor where tiny drops of blood dotted the concrete.He hadn’t even noticed his skin tearing from the strain.His vision swayed for a moment.“Not again…” he whispered.He feared collapsing. He feared blacking out. He feared failing.And then—A cold chime echoed inside his skull.[SYSTEM ALERT]Reward Unlocked: MINOR RECOVERYActivating healing sub-function…Leon jerked uprigh