Sunlight poured into Yuki's room as if someone had tipped a bucket of gold over the world. It flooded across the tatami, slid up the shoji, and laid a warm hand on his face until he woke with a slow, satisfied grin. For a long breath he just lay there, enjoying the small, ridiculous luxury of being warm and alive in a place that still felt only half his and half borrowed.
By habit — and because the System's polite little nudges still echoed in the back of his head — he rolled out of bed and started with the same barebones routine he'd done in the other life: push-ups until his shoulders burned, sit-ups until his ribs complained, a few leg raises, then slow, deliberate stretches. The motions were comforting, familiar, a small island of control in a day that kept handing him new identities to wear.
When he finished, sweat cooling on his skin, he padded to the bath. Water was religion. He sank into the steaming basin and let the heat pull the stiffness out of his limbs. He let his mind wander, thinking of the System's blunt little messages and the way the training yesterday had bent him into something new. There was a part of him that still felt like a lazy twenty-three-year-old from a cramped apartment somewhere else, but another part — the part that moved when someone struck at him — hummed awake. That part liked how the world now smelled of incense and warm rice.
"Vanishing Movement… Vanishing Palm," he rehearsed under his breath, tasting the names like new candy. They felt bigger than him and smaller at the same time: a promise and a command. The System had told him what they were. It hadn't shown him everything — beginner stage only — but the names were enough to make his fingers tingle.
By eight-o'clock the house had come to life. Servants moved like clockwork outside his room; shadows of footsteps crossed the hall. Yuki dressed quickly in light training robes, hair damp from the bath, and made his way toward the training hall with the practiced, expectant stride of someone who had decided to make today matter.
Shadow materialized from a niche like a whisper. He never announced himself; he simply was. The man's dark eyes flicked over Yuki with an unreadable calm.
"Good morning," Shadow said, voice low. "You requested training at eight."
"Yep," Yuki said, grinning. "Let's make this a thing. Same time every day when you're free. I want progress I can point at."
Shadow inclined his head. "It is my duty."
Yuki sighed and rolled his eyes before he could stop himself. "I told you — stop with the 'duty' line. Call me like my parents do."
Shadow gave a tiny, almost invisible shrug. "I cannot. The household maintains certain forms." He paused, then added, less like a man repeating training protocol and more like a human being: "You said you wanted school. Are you still thinking that?"
"Yeah." Yuki's grin softened. "I miss classrooms sometimes. The noise, the exams, the stupid cafeteria food… It's weird. Here I've got a family and a mansion and a system, and I still want school."
Shadow's expression — always a stone mask — loosened by the smallest degree. "You would leave the clan for school?"
"Maybe," Yuki said. "If it helps me get stronger and less annoying, sure. I want to measure myself against people my age, not against my own reflection."
That was all Shadow needed. He moved, quick and precise, and led Yuki out to the training grounds.
The hall smelled of oil and old wood. Sunlight cut slats across the wooden floor. Training dummies lined one side; the other was empty save for a low practice ring. The two of them faced off with the easy ritual of people who had done this more times than they could remember.
"Warm up," Shadow said.
"Warm up," Yuki echoed, and they began.
They hit each other with measured blows at first — testing range, watching weight shifts, listening for the small sounds that told a fighter where his opponent's weight was going to go. Yuki felt different almost immediately: his timing was a fraction tighter, his breathing a fraction steadier, like someone had come along in the night and tightened all the screws inside him.
After maneuvers and feints and a dozen exchanged grips, Yuki's lungs begged for air.
"Huff…huff…" he panted, but there was a light in his eyes he couldn't fake. Shadow noted it. It was the same light he'd seen yesterday: hunger that had been educated into skill.
Then Yuki stopped, closed his eyes for one sharp moment, and whispered, "Vanishing Ghost Movement."
It wasn't a magic incantation so much as a command for his body to do something unusual. He shifted his weight onto the balls of his feet, let breath and balance find a new center, and moved. Shadow blinked — and Yuki had already slid out of sight.
Not invisible in the sense of ghosts in stories. Not that. He became a blur at the corner of perception, a shadow that wasn't where it should be at the exact moment your eyes decided it was there. The trick was timing: a fraction of a second to erase the impression of a person's location and plant it somewhere else. Think of a candle blown out, then instantly relit across the room. The eye is fooled if the mind is ready to be fooled.
Shadow's first reaction was fascination, not fear. "Movement technique," he murmured. "A displacement trick. It isn't raw magic." His analysis came fast. "It's—"
Yuki snapped into view behind him.
"Surprise!" he shouted, fists up, but the word was nearly swallowed when he felt Shadow's hand clamp around the wrist of his striking arm. There was pressure there — not just strength but an old, practiced skill at immobilization.
Yuki realized with a jolt that Vanishing Movement did not guarantee a free strike. It gave you a chance to reposition; it did not make you invincible. Shadow's guard had been lower, distracted by analysis, but his fundamentals were steel. He had watched Yuki's patterning long enough to anticipate the new variable.
"Vanishing Palm," Yuki breathed next, testing the other technique — the one that was supposed to render a strike difficult to track by compressing weight and speed into a single, sudden vector of force.
He launched the palm, aiming for a point under Shadow's ribs. The motion was clean and efficient. It should have been unseen, should have felt like an air slap to anyone who didn't watch for it.
Shadow's elbow rose. The block was not a flashy save; it was just the right arm in the right place, bone meeting bone, wrist locking around the incoming strike with a snap that left both men breathing hard. Yuki's hand stung where it met Shadow's forearm; he had expected to surprise, not be met so solidly.
He blinked, more amused than upset. "Okay," he said, smiling despite the ache. "So you're not a practice dummy."
Shadow's expression never changed outwardly, but the small tilt of his head and the silent respect in his eyes said more than words ever could. "You are improving," he said. "Rapidly."
Yuki felt that truth warm him like a hearth. Progress was addictive. It made the rest of the world — the names, the duties, the odd, polite system messages — shrink to the size of problems he could punch through.
They traded strikes for another hour. Yuki tried to string the movement and the palm together: vanish, reappear, palm in a line, vanish again, change angle. Sometimes it worked; sometimes Shadow read him and countered. Always, something small clicked: a hip adjustment that made a move cleaner, a breath timed to delay a step, a tiny weight shift that made a whole strike land truer.
By the time they stopped, both men were sweating and smiling in a way that could only be earned in honest combat. Shadow finally spoke, voice soft in the quiet hall.
"Rest. We will resume tomorrow."
Yuki laughed, the sound bright and boyish. "Tomorrow, then. And the next day. And the next."
Shadow only watched him leave, eyes shadowed and unreadable, as if he were cataloguing the boy for some memory that might be needed later.
When Yuki walked back through the sliding doors, his chest felt full of something that had nothing to do with food: possibility. He had a system that measured and noted, a pair of techniques with names that tasted like future fights, and a guardian who would not let him get away with sloppy work. The world outside the training hall was still large and confusing, but inside that ring, motion made sense. Here, he could build a life out of moves.
He tasted that possibility and, for the first time since the crash, let himself plan the next step.
Tomorrow, he would test Vanishing Palm's speed against a live opponent's guard more than once. The day after, he'd try chaining movement and strike into a single flow. For now, he rinsed sweat from his hair, feeling the pleasant ache of a body used right, and walked toward the bath with a grin that wouldn't quit.
The sun still rode high, and the house around him hummed with ordinary life. It was, he decided, a very good morning.