Alex found an all-night diner. He sat in the corner with his back to the wall and nursed a coffee he paid for with the last of his cash and let Juno talk.The Legacy Warrior System, Juno explained, was not a magical accident. It was designed. Engineered over several years by his father, Dragon Clan Head Vincent Stone, with the purpose of giving Alex a mechanism for rapid power development that would also maintain structural checks on the dangerous energy sealed in his bloodline. His father had anticipated two specific threats: the Zhao Clan, who wanted the Dragon bloodline extinguished, and the Voidlord, which was the ancient force that Dragon Clan bloodline carried and contained and that had been getting less contained with every generation."And the energy signature the system warned about," Alex said. "Zhao's people are already looking."*"Yes. I want to be precise about this, Alex — I don't want to alarm you unnecessarily, but I also won't soften things for your comfort. When a Dr

He spent forty minutes before sunrise learning Harrison Park's layout and identifying every exit. By the time he sat down on the bench by the dry fountain, he had three viable escape routes mapped, two positions from which he could see the park's main entrance without being easily visible himself, and a working knowledge of who else was in the park at this hour: a man walking a dog on the east path, a runner who had been on her third loop when he arrived, and a figure in a parked car on the north street whose engine had not turned off.The old man arrived exactly at sunrise.He was slim and white-haired and moved through the park with the unhurried economy of someone who had been moving through difficult spaces for decades and had made peace with whatever those spaces cost. He carried nothing visible. He wore nothing notable. He sat down at the far end of the bench with a distance between them that suggested both comfort with the space and deliberate respect for it, and he looked at

The compound woke at five. Alex had been training since three.He had found the compound's unlit far courtyard, which was nobody's property at that hour, and he had been running the system's training circuit — harder than the laundromat circuit, calibrated upward by his new level — for two hours. By the time other fighters started emerging into the gray mountain dawn, he had already gained fourteen XP and his Agility had ticked up by one point.It had also cost him.The level two training circuit had been painful in the way of pushing too hard too fast. This one was painful in a different way. His left hand had gone numb twice during the circuit, not from physical impact but from chi flux — the energy moving unevenly through his system during rapid-stress integration. Juno had flagged it each time with a calm and specific alarm that she tried to make sound less serious than it was.*"Chi flow instability in the left dorsal pathways,"* she had said during the second episode. *"This is