In the end, the residence Banxia settled on was an old manor with a small courtyard.

According to the merchant, the house had originally belonged to a fallen noble. His descendants couldn't keep up appearances and leased it out cheap.

Money wasn't hard to come by these days, so spending a little more for somewhere comfortable was completely worth it. Besides, the courtyard gave him a place to practice martial arts or work on magic when he felt like it.

As for Roxy, Banxia had mentioned the house was too big for one person and floated the idea of sharing, but she turned him down flat. She ended up renting a reasonably sized place not far away.

With that settled, he went out and bought several sets of new bedding and some basic supplies. By the time the sun was nearly down, the new home was more or less ready.

"Ready" was generous. He'd really just cleared out two rooms on the ground floor for living space. Cookware he hadn't bothered with at all, he was on his own, and going out to eat was easier than wasting time in a kitchen.

Tonight's dinner, as it happened, was Roxy's treat. A celebration for the successful move.

...

The sun dropped below the rooftops, and the streets dimmed.

Both members of the adventurer party waddled out of the tavern with very full stomachs.

"Satisfied." Banxia let out a long, contented breath.

He honestly couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten himself this stuffed with meat. In this world, it was definitely a first.

"If only they'd swapped out the diced green peppers in the side dish for something else..." Roxy muttered from beside him.

Banxia thought back to how she'd been eyeing those few pieces of green pepper at the table like they were about to attack her. He found it a little funny.

"You're scared of green peppers?"

"No, it's not that I'm scared. I just... find them a little bit frightening..."

"Fair enough." Banxia nodded and left it there.

Growing up in an East Asian household, he knew the drill. If you'd never had someone force food down your throat for your own good, you probably hadn't had a real childhood. Over the years he'd come to understand: when someone doesn't like something, they just don't like it. Forcing it on them only makes it worse.

He'd lived two full lifetimes and still wouldn't touch eggplant. Some things didn't change.

He had no interest in becoming that kind of insufferable adult. And honestly, he got it, he completely understood the blue-haired girl's feelings about green peppers.

"Next time, let's find a tavern that doesn't put them in anything."

Roxy went quiet. Then she lowered her head, the brim of her witch hat sliding down to hide most of her face.

"...Mm."

The tavern wasn't far from their rooms. A few steps later, they were standing in front of Roxy's door.

"That's all for tonight then. See you tomorrow, Mr. Banxia." She turned and said her goodbyes with a polite smile.

"Hold on."

"What is it?" She'd already been reaching for the door. She turned back, puzzled.

"Could you lend me the other two magic books? Just for tonight."

"Eh?" Roxy tilted her head.

She wasn't against it. She just genuinely couldn't picture what a warrior was going to get out of a magic book.

"I told you before, didn't I? I've always been a little curious about magic. I actually tried out that meditation method you taught me last night."

Roxy looked him over carefully. Then her eyes went slightly wide.

"Huh? Mr. Banxia — you already have mana in your body. Did you study magic before...?"

"No, not at all. I learned the meditation method last night for the first time. You taught it to me yourself, remember? If anything, calling you Teacher wouldn't be a stretch."

"..." Roxy said nothing.

This wasn't the first time she'd partied with Banxia. She knew perfectly well whether he'd had any mana before now.

What struck her speechless wasn't the question. It was the fact sitting right in front of her.

This man had hunted a Red Mirror Dragon with his bare hands. He was already absurdly strong on the warrior's path. And now it turned out that when he turned his attention to magic, his talent there was just as unreasonable.

She'd given him one rough run-through of the Advanced Meditation Method. One. And he'd cultivated mana in a single night, not a trace amount, either.

She found herself thinking back to her own first time with magic.

How long had it taken her to get anywhere with the meditation method?

It definitely wasn't one night.

"Something wrong?"

"...No, nothing." She snapped back at the sound of his voice.

She looked up at that composed face, those consistently earnest eyes, and quietly exhaled.

She was overthinking it.

Mr. Banxia wasn't the type to learn what he needed and then drop his teammates. And no matter how much raw talent someone had, mana still had to be built up slowly over time. On the path of magic, experience was experience. Seniority counted for something.

That settled it. The girl's smile came back.

"Give me a moment — I'll go grab them."

She returned carrying two magic books and a notebook.

Banxia took them and glanced at the extra notebook. He looked at her questioningly.

"These two books cover a lot of ground," Roxy explained. "A complete beginner reading them straight through would probably get lost in half of it. When I was going through them last night, I jotted down what I understood and a few notes on my own thinking. If you don't mind, it might help to read it alongside."

"Thank you."

"One more thing, though." A slight note of warning entered her voice. "Your talent in magic really is something, Mr. Banxia — but the practice of magic has to build gradually. Step by step."

She didn't think he'd produce results overnight. That was normal, nothing to be embarrassed about. For a mage, years of steady study and slow accumulation of mana was simply the way of things. If you threw yourself at magic chasing a fast breakthrough, you were liable to end up at the bottom of a very dark place. Roxy had seen it happen, people who pushed themselves past the edge and didn't come back from it.

She didn't want that for him.

Banxia nodded seriously.

"I think I've been plenty gradual already."

Getting through the basics of a single meditation method had cost him a full 12 years. At the rate of step by step, what little time he had wouldn't keep up with even his modest aptitude.

Roxy:?

Under her worried gaze, he headed home.

...

"Oh, damn."

Back inside, magic book open in his lap, Banxia suddenly remembered something important.

Transmigrators like him arrived with knowledge of the continent's common written script and spoken language, and that was it. Books with any age to them used characters that had shifted considerably from the modern forms. Without sitting down to cross-reference them, it wouldn't quite be reading hieroglyphics, but it was roughly on par with a native Chinese speaker trying to make sense of Japanese text.

He frowned, flipping through the pages at random.

After a while, the frown slowly eased. Something lit up at the back of his eyes.

On the panel in front of him, a brand-new skill had appeared.

[Wrath of Finality lv.0 (Uninitiated)]

➤ Next: Comprehensive Upgrade — Ascension

Chapter 34 - Comprehensive Upgrade — Ascension

The night was deep and still. The moon hung high overhead.

Banxia set his book down, sat on the edge of the bed, and pulled up his panel.

[Wrath of Finality lv.0 (Uninitiated)] [Hypnosis Resistance lv.0 (Uninitiated)]

[Held Monster Time: 612 years.]

He thought it over briefly, then decided to start with Hypnosis Resistance.

His offensive output was already more than sufficient. Slaying dragons with his bare hands put him firmly in the top tier, even by Alterna's standards. His body's natural physical resistance handled most situations just fine. Magic was the gap.

In a straight fight, he wouldn't fear even a mage like Miss Roxy. Close the distance, and it was over in under a second.

But if someone played dirty from the shadows, that was a different story. Hard to defend against what you couldn't see coming.

Defensive options were always worth stacking.

He wasn't in a rush to start, though. First, he reached over and picked up the notebook where Roxy had recorded her personal insights.

Everything in place, the time on his panel began to bleed away.

[Year 1: You begin cultivating Hypnosis Resistance, breaking down its unfamiliar characters one by one, cross-referencing the notebook in hand to fill the gaps.]

[Year 3: With the notebook's help, many of the passages that initially puzzled you click into place. You have gained a working understanding of this magic's underlying principles.]

[Year 20: Thoroughly prepared, you finally begin your first formal cultivation session. The essence of Hypnosis Resistance is this: cast hypnosis upon yourself through a specific method, then forcibly break it. Repeat the cycle without end, until that unseen, unknowable thing called the "self"—the soul—builds extreme resistance to mental interference.]

[Year 40: Progress is slow. Each cycle of hypnotizing yourself and violently shattering it demands substantial treasures and recovery time for your body. Without a master's guidance, many of the critical steps must be worked out entirely on your own.]

"..."

Banxia let the cultivation lapse. He knew he might not be a natural at magic, but this was a bit much.

He paused and looked at how much time had already drained away.

He set his jaw.

"Keep going. Max it out."

[Year 60: You finally piece together every step. You are at last able to snap awake during the hypnosis itself.]

[Hypnosis Resistance lv.0 → lv.1 (1/1000)]

[Year 124: Through relentless cycles of hypnosis and forced unraveling, you have built a substantial degree of resistance. You can now easily shrug off most hypnosis magic and the mental-control class of folk magic.]

[Hypnosis Resistance lv.1 → lv.2 (1/10,000)]

"Enough, enough—stop there!"

[Held Monster Time: 490 years.]

The moment Banxia called a halt, all the insights and resistances of [Hypnosis Resistance lv.2] settled over him at once.

His gaze went blank.

The years. The lonely, grinding repetition. The confusion and frustration of groping through the unknown. The faint wash of relief when it finally broke through.

Countless emotions crashed into him all at once, then vanished.

The pressure dropped like a weight cut loose. Banxia pressed both hands against the edge of the bed and breathed slowly, several long breaths, until the churning nausea in his chest finally went back down.

"Almost threw up all the meat I ate tonight... that was close."

He muttered a curse, looked up with lingering unease, and scanned the room. Then he looked down at his hands.

Physically, nothing had changed. Not so much as a scratch. And yet the familiar room felt subtly different from how it had a moment ago.

Not clearer, exactly. That wasn't quite it.

In the corner of his vision, a flying insect was beating its wings as it moved away. Outside the window, a dead leaf had just let go of its branch. The two were nowhere near each other. Before, he probably would have only registered the insect right in front of him.

Now, without any effort at all, both registered with complete clarity: where the insect was heading, which way the leaf was falling.

His body hadn't been enhanced in the slightest. But his ability to gather information was undeniably sharper than before.

"A change in the soul, maybe."

...

After a short rest, Banxia decided to keep going.

He'd rather stack his strength now and plow through whatever came than scramble at the last second when danger was already at the door. Whether in bed or out in the field, he preferred to stay on the offensive.

Magic could wait a little longer, though.

He closed Roxy's notebook and set it on the table beside him.

According to her notes, [Wrath of Finality] was a genuinely fearsome military-grade spell, officially forbidden for ordinary people to learn. But its staggering power came with a staggering price. Using Roxy herself as a benchmark: at full mana, she could fire off one shot and then collapse completely, done for the rest of the day.

She had even written it herself: most situations simply didn't call for something like that.

For Banxia, there was an even more practical problem. He currently had only one year's worth of mana to his name. To actually bring out Wrath of Finality's full power, he'd need to dump enormous amounts of time into stacking his meditation techniques alone.

Double the investment, in exchange for an ultimate move he'd almost never get to use.

No matter how much he secretly dreamed of becoming a grand mage, the ledger didn't lie.

The remaining 490 years were better spent elsewhere.

He still had several lv.1 skills sitting on his panel.

He scanned it over.

[Basic Sword Technique lv.1 (1/1000)] [Basic Dodge lv.1 (1/1000)] [Execution Hand Blade lv.1 (1/1000)]

All three fundamentals were starting to fall behind his current physical strength.

Banxia didn't deliberate long. He laid out all three side by side in his head, Execution Hand Blade, Basic Sword Technique, Basic Dodge, weighed them for a moment, and landed on Execution Hand Blade first.

It was his strongest single-target burst right now. During the dragon hunt, it had been the only thing that could punch through the Red Mirror Dragon's defenses.

If it had been one tier stronger back then, he wouldn't have needed to aim for the eye socket at all. He could have just split the skull and been done with it.

He fed his time into Execution Hand Blade.

[Year 1: You reexamine this technique of using the hand as a blade. The slashing, thrusting, and diagonal cuts from Basic Sword Technique are broken down one by one as you work to fold them into the edge of your palm.]

[Year 7: You can now sever with your bare hands timber thick enough to take several men just to wrap their arms around.]

[Year 20: Your palm is no different from a blade. You cleave stone, shatter it, cut into iron and leave the marks to prove it.]

[Year 60: You are no longer bound to the form of a "hand blade." Fingers, elbows, limbs, any point on your body can be the origin of a cut.]

[Year 100: You train beneath a waterfall. The rushing torrent parts under your hand blade again and again, and for the first time, a brief vacuum fissure opens in the curtain of water.]

[Execution Hand Blade lv.3 (1/100,000)]

"Not bad. Keep going."

Banxia shifted his gaze to the two remaining lv.1 fundamentals.

[Year 1...]

➤ Next: The Docks and the Drowned