Lucien sat at the edge of the beach, arms resting on his knees, staring at nothing in particular. The island was small enough that he had finished mapping it in three days, which meant it had exactly one thing going for it: nobody else was on it.
"I should probably stay another month or two," he murmured to himself. "Maybe increase the pressure after that." He flexed one hand absently and considered it. He already felt different. Heavier in a useful way. It had only been a week, which was either a good sign or a sign that he had been in genuinely terrible shape before, and he wasn't sure which answer he preferred.
He looked down at his father's notebook, open across his knees. It had started normally enough. The early pages were written in the voice of a man thinking out loud, working through the logic of physical conditioning the same methodical way his father approached everything. Notes on how the body responded to repeated stress. Observations on recovery. Thoughts on building a foundation before adding complexity. His father's handwriting was dense and considered, the margins occasionally annotated in a slightly different shade of ink, as though he had returned to old entries and found something worth adding years later.
Then, about a third of the way through, he had apparently arrived at a conclusion.
The page was written more deliberately than the rest, as though his father had known it would be read by someone else eventually.
EVERY SINGLE DAY WITHOUT FAIL:
100 PUSH-UPS
100 SQUATS
100 SIT-UPS
10KM RUN
Below the list, his father had written out his reasoning in the same careful hand. The argument was, Lucien had to admit, internally consistent. No equipment required. Scalable over time. Sustainable anywhere, including a small boat in the middle of the ocean. The muscle groups engaged, the recovery logic, the reasoning behind daily repetition rather than alternating rest days. It was thorough and it was coherent and it was also, by any honest assessment, completely insane.
The page ended with a single line.
Just trust me.
Lucien had stared at that line for a while before deciding to give it a fair trial. His father was not a man who wasted words, and he was also not a man whose physical condition had ever needed explaining until now. The old man at the shipyard was built like a ship himself, and Lucien had genuinely never once seen him exercise. He had always assumed it was simply how shipbuilders were made. Now he was less certain.
He had stopped at this island three days into the journey, when it became clear that attempting the run portion aboard a boat barely large enough to lie down in was not going to produce the intended results. The island had no name that he could find, no inhabitants, and a coastline that formed a rough enough loop to make the distance workable. It was, in every respect, a perfectly boring place to be, which made it ideal.
A week in, he could say with full honesty that the regime was difficult in a way that felt almost personal. His arms had given out on the push-ups twice on the first day. The run on day three had ended with him sitting in the sand for forty minutes before he could seriously consider standing again. He had written all of this down in the notebook's margins in the same way his father had, noting what failed and why, thinking about what the body was telling him versus what it was simply complaining about. The distinction, he was finding, mattered.
He wasn't there yet. But he was less far away than he had been.
He closed the notebook and looked out at the water. Flevance was still a few days' sailing from here. He had been curious about it since reading its name in one of the old man's books. The White City, they called it. Built on an island rich in a metal called Amber Lead, which the nobility processed into everything from paint to medicine. The book had made it sound remarkable, and remarkable things, in Lucien's experience, had a tendency to also be worth understanding.
He stood up, tucked the notebook under his arm, and looked at the stretch of coastline ahead of him.
Ten kilometres.
He started running.
************************************
ONE MONTH LATER
The rock was roughly three quarters of his own height, which he had estimated by standing next to it the morning he decided to start dragging it. He had found it near the treeline on his fourth week on the island and spent a while looking at it before going to find thick vines to use as rope. Tying one end around his waist and the other around the rock had taken longer than he expected. The first attempt at running with it had lasted approximately forty seconds before his legs made their position on the matter very clear.
That had been two weeks ago.
"Should I add more weight?" he muttered now, barely breathing hard, glancing back at the boulder trailing behind him across the sand. "It's not feeling as difficult as it did last week." He filed the observation the way he filed most things, neutrally and without pride. His body was simply adapting faster than expected. The notebook had mentioned this possibility in one of the later annotated entries. When the load becomes comfortable, the load is no longer the load. He had thought at the time that it sounded like something a person said to avoid being questioned. He was starting to think his father had simply been right.
The changes were visible in practical ways. His clothes were tight across the shoulders and short at the wrists, which meant he had grown in multiple directions over the past six weeks. He had been eating almost entirely fish, which he caught each morning before training, supplemented by the small berries that grew in scattered patches near the island's interior. He had begun to miss meat with a specificity he found mildly embarrassing. Not food in general. Meat specifically. He made a note of this in the margin of the notebook under the heading observations on deprivation and left it at that.
He finished the run, untied the rope from his waist, and stood looking at the rock for a moment. Then he bent down, got his grip underneath it, and straightened his legs. It came up with effort, which was the right amount of effort. He carried it to the treeline and set it down among the roots, then stood back and looked at it as though it had done something worth acknowledging.
It hadn't. It was a rock.
He turned back toward the small clearing he had been using as a camp and began taking it apart methodically. The lean-to he had built from branches came down first, then the firepit was scattered and covered, and the flat stone he had been using as a writing surface was returned to where he had found it near the water. He had a habit of leaving places the way he found them, not out of sentiment but because leaving traces was a kind of carelessness he had no patience for.
By the time the sun was beginning to drop toward the horizon, there was nothing left to indicate anyone had been there. Lucien looked around the clearing once, satisfied, and walked back down to the beach where his boat was pulled up on the sand.
"Flevance," he said to no one. "And after that, money."
He pushed the boat into the shallows and climbed in.