The night of Day Nine stretched long and quiet inside Training Room Seven.
Ash sat in the center of the silver array and kept working. The scanning step he had added earlier still guided every cycle. The nine black holes formed in their familiar star pattern, pulled cosmic energy from the floor lines, refined it, and released clean Nova pulses through his body. Progress moved, but it moved slowly. Each new layer now took roughly six hours from start to finish. The easy gains of the early days were gone. What remained was careful, expensive work that demanded patience more than raw force.
He did not complain. He simply continued.
