Abyssal AER Jail.
Day 2.
The opalescent barrier shimmered in the dim light, indifferent to my existence. I stood before it, my fists clenched at my sides, and I remembered the plan. Three years. Three years of this. Three years of pounding against an unyielding surface, hoping that my nothingness would eventually become something powerful enough to break through.
I started punching the barrier.
Thump. A tiny hole. Healed.
Thump. Another.
My hands started to hurt after half an hour. The barrier didn't care. It just healed and waited for the next impact.
I decided to use my legs too. I stepped back, measured the distance, and drove my heel into the shimmering surface.
BANG!
A hole, slightly larger than my fist, appeared and vanished. Progress. Microscopic, but progress.
The food came, I ate, slept then continued punching and kicking the barrier.
The routine established itself with the grim efficiency of a prison sentence. Wake. Eat. Punch. Kick. Sleep. Repeat. There was no variation, no distraction, no relief. Just me, the stone walls, the opalescent glow, and the endless, mind-numbing repetition of impact.
Slowly slowly as the days passed… my mind adapted to the surroundings. Now I don't need much noise to distract me from my heartbeat and breathing.
The silence became a companion rather than an enemy. I learned to listen to it, to find the subtle variations within—the distant drip of water somewhere in the stone, the faint hum of the barrier's regeneration, the soft scuff of my own feet on the floor. The heartbeat and breathing became background music, a rhythm to train by rather than a torment to escape.
But it was a long way. The same routine continued.
---
Day 205.
The monotony shattered.
I heard footsteps.
My body froze mid-punch, every muscle tensed, every sense straining toward the sound. It was real. Not a hallucination born of isolation. Actual footsteps, approaching from somewhere beyond my cell.
I noticed someone outside the jail.
Through the opalescent barrier, I could see a shape—a man, dressed in the dark armor of the jailers. He walked slowly, his gaze sweeping the corridor, checking each cell with casual disinterest. When he reached mine, he paused.
What? Who is that?
The man looked at the surroundings and continued to walk. His eyes passed over me without recognition, without interest. I was just another prisoner, another forgotten soul at the bottom of the world. Then he returned back to where he came from.
I waited, barely breathing, until the footsteps faded completely.
Is this a regular checkup? Hmm, might be… then I must be careful.
The realization was a cold splash of clarity. If the guards saw me damaging the barrier, they would reinforce it. Add layers. Make escape impossible. My training, my secret weapon, would be discovered and neutralized.
To counter this when the three-year mark arrives, I need to break through with a single punch.
A new parameter. A new challenge. I couldn't weaken it gradually anymore. I had to condition myself to deliver a single, devastating blow that would overwhelm the barrier's regeneration entirely. One punch. Everything I had, focused into a single point of impact.
The routine changed. I no longer pounded mindlessly. I practiced precision. I studied the barrier's regeneration patterns, the way the light flowed to heal each tiny wound. I aimed for the same spot, over and over, creating a point of accumulated weakness that would, at the critical moment, fail completely.
---
Day 365.
It was 1 year. My physique grew a lot.
The changes were visible even in the dim light. My muscles had hardened, defined by endless repetition. My endurance had stretched beyond anything I'd achieved in the tower. I could train for hours without rest, my body a machine optimized for a single purpose.
I did a lot of practice in my free time. Running. Climbing the wall. Punching. Kicking.
The cell became my gymnasium. I ran in place for hours, building cardiovascular endurance. I climbed the rough stone walls, strengthening my grip, my arms, my back. I practiced forms in the dark, moving through the kata I had learned from the dojo in another life, the sword techniques I had studied in the hidden library, the unarmed combat styles I had pieced together from military treatises.
I can now do precision attacks on imagined holes, jumping attacks and close attacks too.
The confined space forced creativity. I couldn't take a full run-up for a punch, so I learned to generate power from a standstill, using rotation, weight transfer, the explosive contraction of every muscle simultaneously.
As a baseball player puts his legs ahead to throw the ball, I also put my leg ahead instead of what a baseball does—I punch, putting all of the potential energy in my body to the punch.
The technique became second nature. Step forward with the left, rotate the hips, drive through the shoulder, extend the arm, all the body's force channeled into a single point of contact. The barrier shuddered with each impact, the holes growing slightly larger, slightly slower to heal.
I can approximately kick 185cm in the air.
The ceiling was pretty high, so I had space for vertical movement. I practiced jumping kicks, launching myself toward the barrier's upper reaches, striking at angles that would be unexpected, hard to defend against. I jump at a specific point and kick in the air. Since this happens in a very closed area, I had to control the timing at the moment and power perfectly or I would hit the wall hard.
I hit the wall. Many times. Bruises bloomed and faded, bones ached and healed. But gradually, I learned. My body became a precision instrument, capable of delivering maximum force in minimum space.
I have perfected these.
The voices of heartbeat and breathing were no problem now. They were simply part of the environment, no more distracting than the hum of the barrier or the distant drip of water.
My body grew. The hole when I kicked and punched also grew. Each impact left a slightly larger void, a slightly longer delay before the barrier could seal it. The cumulative damage was invisible to casual observation, but I could feel it. The barrier was weakening.
At this pace I could easily break the barrier at the end of three years.
Since there were no distractions I could totally focus on my training.
---
Day 730.
2 years have passed.
I was now 11. Still a child… but my physique now greatly surpassed the strongest of the earth.
The comparison was meaningless here, but it grounded me. In another world, I would be an Olympic athlete, a superhuman phenomenon. Here, I was just a prisoner getting stronger.
From my understanding the toughness of my body increased a lot in these 2 years. I could now take a punch without getting hurt.
I tested myself against the walls, driving my fist into stone until the stone cracked and my knuckles remained unbroken. The conditioning was complete. My body was a weapon.
That man regularly checked after some 200 days.
The guard's visits became predictable. Every two hundred days, he would walk the corridor, check the cells, and leave. He would not check the barrier.
I marked each visit on the wall with a scratch, synchronizing my internal clock with his routine.
I acted like I was depressed whenever he visited. I sat on the bed, head down, shoulders slumped, the picture of a broken child. He never looked twice. Never suspected that behind the defeated posture was a coiled spring, waiting for the exact moment to strike.
---
Day 1090 (approaching towards 3rd year)
The darkness had become my ally. I no longer needed light to navigate my cell, to train, to exist. My other senses had sharpened to compensate, honed by years of deprivation.
I would focus on my hearing and motion detecting skills since it was very dark. I could now walk in a dark environment without my eyes. My senses became sharper too.
I could hear the guard's heartbeat before he reached my cell. I could feel the subtle vibrations of his footsteps through the stone floor. I could sense the barrier's regeneration pattern through the faint changes in air pressure it created.
My overall strength increased again like a parabola graph. Rising straight up.
The progress was exponential now. Each day built on the last, each workout pushing me further than the one before. The plateau I had feared never came.
In the end I did 21 million punches and kicks in these 3 years. It was a massive number. So was my increase in physique.
Twenty-one million impacts. Each one a declaration of intent. Each one a small death for the barrier that held me.
But this has a limit too. My body was not getting sunlight, fresh air and mental peace. If this continued it could backfire and ruin my progress.
The warning signs were there. Occasional dizziness. Moments of dissociation where I forgot where I was, who I was. The creeping sense that the walls were closing in, that the darkness was seeping into my soul.
Fortunately it was coming to an end.
The third year approached.
My freedom was coming.
I will never ever return to that house again.
The thought was a flame in the darkness. Not back to the tower. Not back to the golden-haired puppets. Not back to the man who had used me as bait, as a weapon, as a pawn in a game I never chose to play.
That bastard. He totally used me. Going there means getting used again. I don't have any power. I can't revolt.
The truth was bitter but undeniable. Against my father's armies, my siblings' magic, I was still nothing. A strong body meant nothing against an Aether-user. I couldn't fight them. I couldn't defeat them. I couldn't even hope to match them.
So I must escape in the chaos. And run in another kingdom.
The plan was simple. When the war erupted, when the world was consumed by fire and confusion, I would slip away. Not toward freedom—there was no freedom in this world. But toward somewhere else. Anywhere else. A kingdom where no one knew my face, where no one expected anything from me, where I could simply exist without being a tool.
Because I would be much, much weaker than the other siblings and would live under the control of them... Becoming a pawn once again.
I didn't scrape my life off in training just to serve my shitty siblings.
Returning means betraying and killing the hard work I did for years and years.
The vow was absolute. I would not be their weapon. I would not be their pawn. I would not be anything to them ever again.
---
Day 1100.
It was time.
The air felt different. Charged. Something was happening above, beyond the stone and barriers and darkness. I couldn't hear it, couldn't sense it directly, but I knew.
The war had begun.
But I didn't need to hear it. I could feel it in the faint tremors through the stone, the distant rumble of something massive shifting far above. The world was breaking apart, and in the chaos, I would find my moment.
I knew a war was happening, even if it didn't I had to escape… or my sanity would crumble.
The three years had taken their toll. I couldn't wait any longer. If the war hadn't started, I would make my own chaos.
I positioned my leg ahead the same like a baseballer does and put all my energy in my punch.
Three years of training. Twenty-one million impacts. Every repetition, every hour, every day—all of it focused into this single moment. My body coiled, every muscle, every tendon, every fiber of my being aligned toward a single point on the shimmering barrier.
BANG!!!
The impact was thunderous in the confined space. My fist drove into the opalescent surface, and for a microsecond, nothing happened. Then—
The hole appeared. Not a pinprick this time. Not a tiny flaw. The barrier was already weakened due to my punches. A gaping wound in the barrier's fabric, edges crackling with unstable energy, the opalescent light flickering and dying.
Now a massive hole was made. The barrier tried to regenerate but it failed.
I watched as the light attempted to flow back, to seal the breach as it had done thousands of times before. But the damage was too extensive. The accumulated weakness of three years of assault had created a structural failure the barrier couldn't repair. The edges of the hole crumbled, the light dimmed, and with a final, despairing flicker, the barrier collapsed entirely.
The silence that followed was different. No hum. No pulse. Just the open air of the corridor beyond, stale and cold, but free.
I am free.
I stepped through the opening, my bare feet touching the stone floor of the corridor for the first time in three years. The space felt enormous after my cell. The darkness was absolute, but my senses, honed by years of deprivation, mapped it instantly. The corridor sloped upward. The guard station was somewhere ahead. The surface was somewhere above.
My journey begins.
I took a breath—the first breath of truly free air since the day I entered this hole—and began to walk.
Behind me, the broken barrier flickered one last time and went dark. Ahead, the unknown waited.
I didn't look back.