"Dreams...are meant to be forgotten."
Yohan let the words settle, then closed his eyes.
Thirty seconds passed. He opened them again, and pulled the sweatshirt over his head. The fabric hit the floor without sound. Beneath it, a white tank clung faintly to his back.
The floor was cold and white.
He dropped down, palms flat, arms aligned the way he remembered. Muscle memory woke first,
breath in through the nose and out through the teeth.
One...Two...Three...Four...
He moved into pushups with practiced precision. Training wasn't foreign to him—discipline never was. He'd always chased strength, studied form, learned his limits. What broke wasn't habit but motive. A year ago, purpose went vagrant and consistency followed it into silence. When he had a reason, he endured but without one, even resolve went dormant.
Minutes flew away.
At fifty, heat began to bloom inside his body.
At a hundred, his arms trembled. Sweat slipped down his spine and soaked into the tank.
At two hundred, his shoulders burned with a dull, spreading ache.
Haa...huff...huff...tsk—damn it. So this what happens when you take a year of hiatus, huh! I can't do a single more rep.
Yohan stayed locked in position, lungs on fire. His arms shook, sweat slicked the floor, his body trembling under its own weight. A thousand used to be nothing. Now even three hundred felt obscene. His jaw clenched with every descent, vision smearing at the edges—yet he refused to break form, refused to drop. Not even for a breath.
Not yet!
What kind of delusion is this—thinking I can outpace geniuses and lifers with one reckless burst of effort? That's childish. Borderline stupid. They grind every day. They push until their limits rot and then keep going.
I'll keep doing it. I want to die anyway. I will do it!!!
So get up.
Move.
Again!
Muscles shrieked in rebellion with raggy breath and the floor felt miles away.
Move, damn it. Move—haa—
He dragged himself into one more push-up, muscle and will grinding past failure as the voices rampaged unchecked inside his skull.
Die.... don't give a crap. Kill yourself! No one needs you. You can't save yourself like this. You can't live like this.
Please! Please! Please... Please don't give up! Please one more!
Please, dying isn't that bad nor living while giving everything you've to achieve your purpose.
Not because it's heroic. Not because it's impressive. But because stopping here would mean admitting this version of me is all there is.
I won't have a regret if I lose the remaining me. But I sure will regret if I didn't die nor changed this self of mine.
Somehow, he forced himself through four hundred and twenty and stopped. Even then, his knees never touched the floor. His breathing came apart—ragged, uneven and barely controlled. Vision swam at the edges, senses blunted, throat scraped raw. His tank top clung to him, damp and heavy with sweat. His arms finally gave him a warning he couldn't ignore.
"Dying while bleeding is better than dying while coughing."
You're coughing.
"Ugh...no," he muttered, "I'm panting. And, I ain't dying, moron." dropping to his knees.
'I think, I need water.'
He tried to stand but his legs refused. The room tilted, vision smeared, nausea curling low in his gut. He staggered to the sink, dry heaving, but nothing came.
He dragged himself back, drank straight from the bottle. Cold water burned its way down. He breathed shallow, controlled, forcing his pulse to settle—already preparing to move again.
I'm doing it wrong. All wrong maybe. Strength isn't in the chaos; it's in the stillness of mind.
He rested his spine on the bed frame.
This is why training feels like performing a farce when someone else is watching. I look like a cracked villain, voice muttering nonsense I don't even remember saying. If anyone saw me, they'd pen a damn novel: "Villains are not born, they are forged by the world's indifference."
Villains sound poetic until we face the consequences. The world doesn't care about cool postures, about grand gestures. Heroes are those who follow the rules blindly; villains are those who question them. Morality isn't absolute—it's a lens warped by favor, by the applause of the masses.
He let his gaze drift to his left hand. A faint crackle whispered from the joints as he folded his fingers in sequence—pinky to index—guiding them into a loose fist. Before it could fully close, he released it and began again, the motion looping in a steady, deliberate rhythm, keeping his thoughts in line.
Then there are the ones who neither obey nor defy, the unseen players, the side characters, seemingly insignificant, yet they shape the story in ways the "main cast" can't even perceive. They are either bound by restraint or liberated beyond reckoning.
I can be a side character, a main character, an anti-hero. These are not roles—they are states of perception. Truth is disempowered, perception is despot. Being a villain isn't about choice; it's about clarity. And how could I solely blame the world for creating villains when I am as much a part of it as anyone else?
He paused his loop and clenched his fist.
Everyone has their reasons and so I've, I don't mind being a villain in someone's let alone in my own story. I won't be what this world describes me, I'll be what my ambitions mold me into.
Soon after, he returned to training with no rush. Minutes evolved into hours. He moved until his strength was spent cleanly, until the last reserve was wrung dry. A thousand push-ups, finished not with triumph, but with quiet finality.
He collapsed onto the cold floor, sweat stippling the concrete, his tank top dark and heavy against his skin. His lungs worked like bellows starved of rhythm, each breath scraped together on instinct alone. Thought dulled, then emptied. For a while, even existing felt like effort.
Brr-ring-ring!
Concurrently, his phone rang. He didn't even have the strength to shift his gaze. Still, he dragged himself to the bed and checked the screen—Neon.
Eyes closed as he answered.
"Where were you, man? Did you do what I asked?" Neon said, rushed.
"…Yeah. I'll send it tonight." Yohan's voice came thin, breath wavering.
"You okay? You sound off." Concern slipped into Neon's tone.
"I'm good. Just working... I'll talk later."
Yohan ended the call and let himself fall back, eyes drifting to the clock.
"Dusk already… great."
He exhaled. "I still have to edit his work. All I did was analyze what he sent last evening."
After a while, he pushed himself upright. Mildly cold water eased his parched throat, a quick splash cleared his face. He pulled his sweatshirt back on.
'Gotta complete his work first.'
He slumped into the chair, chin resting on his palm, eyes locking onto the screen. An hour slipped by unnoticed. He leaned back and released a deep breath.
Scouting seekers and martial artists wouldn't hurt. I need patterns more than inspiration to engineer my training. Efforts without structure is just a slow self-sabotage.
History has already filtered humanity into outcomes—legends, prodigies, mediocrities, failures and none of them are useless. Their lives are records of choices and consequences. Each path carries lessons and their records are publicly archived. If I study them properly, I can move forward with intent instead of guesses.
In the end, a focused fool is greater than a procrastinative prodigy.
Stated by a procrastinative fool.
Ah, c'mon. I don't procastinate.
Yohan sent Neon the project, then sank into hours of precise yet aimless scrolling—tabs piling into tabs.
He watched, read, dissected fragments of intel: top Qi users of the present, legends of the past, half-proven training methods, buried anecdotes, discarded theories. Patterns emerged, contradictions stacked, noise masqueraded as wisdom and so on.
Somewhere between obsession and study, a faint dissonance crept in — leaving him quietly uneasy.
"Why I never experienced this?" He uttered under his breath. "For real? How come I didn't know about it yet? Holy hell!"
He knew the baselines: the Dormant Core typically awakened around twelve. Nature played favorites, as it always had. Some were born ahead of the curve—prodigies whose Cores bloomed at seven or eight, absurdly early. That gap alone rewrote unfair destiny.
Earlier maturation meant sharper focus, denser Qi, finer control—advantages that compounded year after year until effort itself began to look unfair.
What unsettled Yohan wasn't nature's bias.
Talent gaps were old news. Inequality was the rule, not the exception.
What gnawed at him was something else entirely—the sign, at the night before the completion of Dormant core.
When a Dormant Core fully matured, there was always a phenomenon.
People spoke of a dream. Not a dream that could be recalled with imagery or words, but something stranger and more invasive. Upon waking, the images evaporated no matter how fiercely one chases them. No matter how fiercely one tried to chase it, nothing surfaced—only a residue remained with a lingering sensation. A certainty that something had been watching.
That was the only common thread.
Then when they wake up, something would begin to flow from the core point—quiet, cool and soothing—branching through the body like rivers spilling from a mountain's heart.
Qi, yes, but more than that: warmth without heat, weight without pressure. Muscles loosened, breath deepened and the mind cleared. The body felt newly issued, as if the old shell had been discarded overnight. People described it as rebirth, though none could explain what had died.
That was the standard case.
But there were deviations.
In rare records—some subjects reported sleep paralysis just before completion. Conscious, awake, unable to move, trapped between waking and sleep.
According to experiments and testimonies, they remembered nothing afterward. No faces, voices, forms or any hostility.
Only this:
Something had been sitting on their chest.
Not a creature or a figure to be precise. Just a heavy, intimate and undeniable presence. The kind of certainty that bypassed logic entirely. Even years later, when every other detail had rotted away, that feeling persisted.
Something was there.
No one knew what it was nor agreed on why it appeared.
Science dismissed it as neurological misfiring while theology called it a test. Cultists whispered other things and stopped there.
Yohan stared at the screen, fingers motionless.
Yohan was bewildered for a far simpler, far more disturbing reason.