Timeline: October 24, 1987

  Location: The Highwind Airship / Republic of Padokea

  Age: 11 (Weeks until 12)

  The Highwind was a masterpiece of alternate engineering.

  In my old life, airships—giant zeppelins and dirigibles—were essentially a failed experiment. We eventually abandoned them in favor of sleek metal jets that screamed through the clouds at the speed of sound. But here, humanity had taken the concept of the rigid gas-envelope ship and pushed it to absolute perfection.

  I spent my first few hours just staring out the reinforced observation window, listening to the deep, rumbling hum of the propulsion engines. It didn't defy physics; it just mastered them. The sheer buoyancy required to keep a floating city in the air, combined with the incredibly advanced material science needed to make it fast and commercially viable, was mind-boggling. It was a beautiful reminder of how differently technology had evolved in this world.

  But the marvel of the floating city wore off quickly once you stepped into economy class.

  It was cramped, hot, and smelled faintly of cheap tobacco and unwashed bodies. For the first two days, I sat wedged between a snoring merchant and a bulkhead, using the miserable environment as a training crucible. My goal was simple: keep my Ten perfectly smooth and unbroken while slipping into a light sleep, regardless of the crying children or the violent turbulence rattling my teeth.

  On the second night, my training was interrupted.

  The cabin pressure didn't change, but the hair on the back of my neck stood up. A heavy, jagged pressure bled through the steel ceiling from the first-class observation deck above us. Someone was flaring their Ren.

  I opened my eyes in the dim cabin. I immediately collapsed my Ten, pulling my aura completely inward until I was a total void. Zetsu.

  Moving carefully so I wouldn't wake the merchant next to me, I slipped out into the aisle. The five hundred kilograms of lead plates strapped securely under my clothes felt like a comforting anchor. I moved completely silently, bypassing the sleepy attendants and picking the mechanical lock on the stairwell door that led to the VIP decks.

  I eased the heavy door open just a crack, letting the freezing high-altitude wind hit my face.

  Standing out on the open-air observation lounge was a massive, heavily scarred man in a tailored suit. He looked like an underworld enforcer, probably hired to guard one of the wealthy politicians sleeping in the staterooms below.

  He was in a wide combat stance, throwing slow, deliberate punches into the empty air, his body cloaked in a blazing shroud of life energy.

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  To a normal person, he just looked like a big guy shadowboxing. To me, he looked like a leaking pipe.

  I watched him from the shadows, fascinated. His aura was dense—he was likely an Enhancer, judging by how the energy pooled around his fists—but it was incredibly sloppy. It bled off his shoulders and back like steam rising from a boiling kettle. He was wasting more energy than he was using.

  More importantly, his physical kinetic chain was a mess. He was throwing his weight around, relying entirely on the supernatural power of his Ren to make his punches lethal, completely neglecting his actual skeletal leverage.

  I leaned against the cold steel of the doorframe, calculating the gap between us.

  If I had to fight him right now, I realized, I wouldn't even need to open my Nen nodes. With the hyper-oxygenated blood currently feeding my dense muscle fibers, and my base strength sitting comfortably at twelve tons, my physical reaction speed was on a completely different level. If I simply stepped inside his guard, my natural speed would bypass his clunky movements entirely. I could shatter his jaw before his brain even registered that I had moved.

  Having Nen didn't automatically make you a god. It just gave you a bigger weapon. If you didn't know how to swing it, a sharper, faster blade would still cut you down.

  Suddenly, the bodyguard shivered. He stopped punching and rubbed the back of his massive neck, looking around the empty, wind-swept deck with a confused scowl. He couldn't sense my Zetsu, but his animal instincts had picked up on the fact that he was being watched.

  I quietly let the door click shut and headed back down to economy.

  Two days later, the Highwind finally descended through the smog and docked in the Republic of Padokea.

  Stepping off the boarding ramp into Arena City was like walking into a neon-lit fever dream. It was a sprawling, hyper-modern metropolis entirely dedicated to one thing: the colossal, 251-floor monolith standing in the absolute center of the skyline. Heaven's Arena pierced the clouds like a concrete needle.

  But I didn't march straight to the front doors like the hundreds of eager rookies pouring off the airships. Rushing into an unknown ecosystem was a good way to get yourself killed.

  Instead, I melted into the crowd. I spent my first three days just walking the districts, adjusting to the gravity of the city. I found a cramped, heavily-locked motel room ten blocks from the Arena, mapped out the local transit lines, and watched the tourist broadcasts on the massive city screens to catch glimpses of the fighting meta on the lower floors.

  It was on the third afternoon, while buying a simple bowl of pork noodles from a street vendor, that reality hit me.

  "That'll be eight hundred Jenny, kid," the vendor grunted, holding out his hand.

  I handed him the bills, hiding my grimace. Eight hundred Jenny for street food. Back in Baltonia, that would have bought me three days' worth of high-protein groceries.

  I sat on the edge of my motel bed that night and dumped my leather pouch onto the thin mattress. Three hundred and fifty thousand Jenny. It had felt like a small fortune when I left the apothecary. But here, in a city built to bleed tourists dry, my hyper-metabolic diet and the daily motel fees were going to drain me dry.

  I did the math in my head. At this rate, I'll be sleeping on the street in exactly fourteen days.

  The six months of grinding in Baltonia had just bought me a two-week window. If I wanted to eat, if I wanted a roof over my head, and if I wanted to eventually fund my medical research, I had to climb the tower. Now.

  The next morning, I woke up before the sun. I checked the straps on my five hundred kilograms of lead weights, making sure they were perfectly concealed beneath my green woolen cloak. I wanted to test my physical baseline against the fighters here without taking the weights off.

  I left the motel, joined the chaotic sea of martial artists and tourists, and walked through the massive glass doors of Heaven's Arena.

  I stepped up to the brightly lit reception desk, grabbed a standardized paper form, and picked up a pen.