Chapter 2: Silent Foundations
By the age of three, Ryan occupied the strange space between infant and child. He walked with a steady gait, spoke in clear, clipped sentences, and sought solitude without seeming withdrawn.
Neighbors called him a "little adult," while his parents would laugh and say, "He stopped crying at one and a half. He's so easy to care for." No one knew that behind the quiet facade, a deliberate, relentless process of training was underway.
This was a feat he could never have accomplished in his previous life: treating his own growth as a meticulous project. Every muscle activation, every breath, every nerve reflex—it could all be quantified, recorded, and optimized. He had no coach or template to follow; his only tool was the adult mind he retained. With it, he began to sculpt his new, pliable vessel.
Early morning, before his parents awoke, was for "sensory training." He would begin in bed with slow, controlled finger grips and toe flexes. Then, he would stand and use the edge of his bed to practice static balance, arms extended, eyes closed, holding his core tight for at least a minute.
He didn't imitate the flashy kung fu stances from television, but focused on pure muscle control. When his body could correct a shift in balance with minimal effort, he knew his neural pathways were strengthening.
The rest of the morning was for language and logic. He would watch the local news, its steady, standardized speech a perfect source for vocabulary. He'd silently mimic the pronunciation, cross-referencing words with those his mother used when reading to him.
He was listening for specific terms: Hunter Association, Heavens Arena, the V5. Were they part of everyday language? No. It confirmed a suspicion.
It's an information vacuum— a clear dividing line. Most of the population was kept in the dark about the true nature of power. This meant it was his responsibility to find the border between the mundane world and the world of Hunters.
Afternoons, under the guise of play, were for training instantaneous action. He would kick a rubber ball against a tree, but his internal goals were precise: hit the same spot five out of ten times; control the angle of the kick to within a three-degree deviation; execute the motion without losing his balance. It wasn't a game; it was a drill in body coordination.
He ran and jumped in the small yard, not sprinting, but maintaining a consistent pace for two full laps, mentally noting the impact on his knees and the stability of his breathing. The slightest tightness in a muscle meant an immediate reduction in the volume of exercise, replaced with deep squats or stretches. He knew the greatest danger for a developing body was pushing too hard out of excitement. He prioritized slow and steady, ensuring zero injuries.
One day, his mother found him in the corner of the yard, methodically kicking the tree. "What are you practicing, sweetie?" she asked with a smile. "Is my little Ryan going to be a fighter when he grows up?"
Ryan stopped and tilted his head, feigning a moment of childish thought before offering an innocent smile. "No. I just don't want to get bullied when I'm bigger."
His mother's eyes softened as she hugged him, believing his words to be the simple wish of a small boy wanting to be strong. She couldn't know that the thought behind the smile was far colder: I am building a body for combat, and this is just the beginning.
He continued the training, and he continued the charade.
At night, he would lie in bed and replay the day's movements in his mind's eye, strengthening his mental model of his own body, correcting uncoordinated actions and misjudged timings. He was building a weapon for an inevitable conflict, forged at the lowest possible cost.
That weapon was his own flesh and blood.
He knew that Nen was a distant goal— but if he couldn't even master his own bones, nerves, and reflexes, he had no right to even think about a world defined by aura and killing intent.
So he remained silent. He didn't show off or seek praise.
He was merely laying the foundation— like a deep well beneath a tower; invisible to all, yet supporting everything.
His training soon evolved. The family yard, a small concrete patch with a pomelo tree, became his dojo. He began to practice boxing. Not the wild flailing of a child, but a systematic breakdown of a punch into five stages: stance, setup, rotation, strike, and retraction.
He blended memories of martial arts demonstrations from his past life with what he could glean from television, forging a simple system suited for his small frame— at this stage, he didn't need power or speed, only muscle memory.
His parents never saw him "perform," but his mother would watch from the kitchen window, and his father sometimes stood quietly by the door.
"He's really serious about it," his father whispered to his wife one evening.
"Do you think he's too serious?" she replied, a hint of worry in her voice.
"Better than being glued to a screen," his father sighed. "The kid has drive. He reminds me of me, back in the day."
Their tolerance was his most valuable resource, and he was careful not to abuse it.
To prevent injury, he created a strict, cyclical regimen. Boxing was limited to two sessions a day, never more than twenty minutes each. After three sets of any movement, he forced himself to stop and stretch. Any significant pain meant an automatic reduction in the next day's training. And every fifth day was for review— no new techniques, only refinement.
He also incorporated reaction drills. He'd arrange random objects in the yard and, as he moved between them, would mentally trigger a command—jump, dodge, turn, drop. His father once saw him execute a perfect shoulder roll behind a wooden box and gasped. "Where in the world did he learn that?"
"From a cartoon show?" his mother guessed.
"But his form... it's too clean," his father mused, scratching his head. "He doesn't even stumble. That's better than anything they do in kindergarten."
When Ryan overheard them, he just smiled to himself. He didn't care what they thought. He only cared if he had completed the day's objectives.
At night, clean from his bath, he would lie in bed and quietly update his training log. Unable to write, he used bamboo sticks of different lengths to scratch records onto the dirt floor in the crack behind a flowerpot: a long stroke for a round of striking, a short one for footwork, a curve for reaction drills. Every seven days, he would erase the marks and begin anew, a silent archive known only to him.
To the outside world, he was just a disciplined child.
But Ryan knew he was forging the vessel, laying the groundwork for the moment of his awakening.
Nen would not come early just because he had memories of a past life— Nen was a fundamental source of power; it played no favorites.
And he had to make himself worthy of those rules before he could ever hope to command them.