Timeline: July 14, 1987

  Location: Baltonia City — Vancleef's Remedies

  Age: 11

  ?The ledger resting on my makeshift desk showed a final, highly satisfying number: 450,000 Jenny.

  ?I closed the book, setting my charcoal pencil down. It had been exactly three months since I arrived in Baltonia. Through aggressive frugality and living rent-free in the back storage room of Mr. Vancleef's apothecary, I had managed to save 250,000 Jenny strictly from my hourly wages.

  ?The other 200,000 Jenny had come from a calculated exploitation of my open aura nodes.

  ?Two weeks ago, while running a delivery through the city's antique district, my eyes had caught the faint, lingering trace of Ten radiating from a rusted ceremonial dagger in a pawn shop window. Normal humans couldn't see the aura, so the shop owner had priced it as simple junk. I bought it for a thousand Jenny, cleaned it, and sold it to a private high-end collector across town as a genuine, aura-imbued artifact from a deceased Nen user.

  ?At my current rate, in exactly one more month, I would have the absolute minimum required to purchase my airship ticket to Padokea and cover my immediate living expenses.

  ?But I had already decided to adjust my timeline. I would stay in Baltonia for a total of six months—meaning three more months of grinding.

  ?There were two reasons. First, I needed a larger financial buffer before stepping into Heaven's Arena. Second, Professor Vance had offered me a position.

  ?Following my consistent presence in the university library and a few highly calculated diagnostic observations I had dropped during his open office hours, Vance had informally asked me to assist him as an uncredited data analyst for his upcoming paper on biomechanical stress limits. Getting hands-on access to his laboratory data was the ultimate catalyst for Project 3. I needed to map the exact cellular limits of the human body before I could safely design a Hatsu that pushed past them.

  ?I stood up from the desk, stretching my arms overhead.

  ?My living space was spartan—just a cot, a desk, and a washbasin—but it gave me absolute privacy. I stripped off my heavy courier jacket, leaving on just a thin undershirt and trousers. I closed my eyes and breathed, pulling my aura tight against my skin. The flawless, invisible shroud of Ten settled over me, humming with latent power.

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  ?Then, I walked over to the far corner of the room to power on the machine.

  ?It was a crude, makeshift contraption I had built from scrapped industrial fan motors, PVC piping, and thick rubber surgical tubing I had salvaged from the university's disposal bins. I had wired the motor to a rotary feeding mechanism, using a crude variable resistor made from coiled wire to constantly alter the electrical current. This randomized the motor's speed, making the firing intervals completely unpredictable.

  ?I loaded a hopper full of dense, compressed rubber balls. I flipped the heavy switch, immediately stepping back into the center of the cramped ten-by-ten room.

  ?The machine whirred to life. Thwack. The first rubber ball shot out at roughly eighty kilometers per hour, aimed squarely at my chest. I didn't block it. I simply tilted my torso two inches to the left. The ball whipped past me, rebounding violently off the reinforced wooden wall behind me.

  ?Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.

  ?The machine began to spit projectiles in rapid, chaotic succession. Some aimed for my knees, others for my head. I moved with absolute minimal effort, treating my body's reaction time like a closed control system. I didn't jump or dive; I merely shifted my weight, stepping inside the tightest possible vectors to let the rubber balls pass within millimeters of my skin.

  ?Over the last three months, I had completely overhauled my diet to support this level of sustained kinetic output. I spent a portion of my earnings at the local butchers, consuming massive quantities of iron-rich organ meats, raw proteins, and bone marrow. I was deliberately thickening my blood, spiking my red blood cell count to carry more oxygen to my incredibly dense muscle fibers.

  ?Thwack-thwack-thwack!

  ?A three-burst volley shot toward my face and abdomen. I dropped my center of gravity, pivoting on the ball of my foot to let the first two fly past, then snapped my neck to the side to dodge the third.

  ?By the fifth minute of the drill, my Ten was still perfectly maintained, and my kinetic vision hadn't dropped a single frame. My brain was tracking the projectiles flawlessly.

  ?But my body was beginning to fail.

  ?A sharp, burning sensation flooded my calves and obliques. Lactic acid. I shifted to dodge a low projectile, but my muscle fiber response was a fraction of a second delayed. The rubber ball grazed my thigh, the friction stinging through my trousers.

  ?I reached out and slammed the kill switch on the machine. The motor spun down into silence.

  ?I stood in the center of the room, my chest heaving as I analyzed the failure. I had reached a biological plateau. My base strength was hovering around seven tons, and my reaction speed was optimal, but my sustained stamina in high-speed combat scenarios was redlining.

  ?The bottleneck wasn't my muscle density or my neural pathways. It was my lungs.

  ?My current breathing technique simply couldn't absorb and distribute oxygen fast enough to feed the rapid, micro-contractions required for high-speed evasion. My muscles were suffocating under the kinetic load. If I was going to fight Nen users in Heaven's Arena, people who could move faster than the human eye could track, I needed to drastically increase my alveolar capacity. I needed a pulmonary override.

  ?I wiped the sweat from my forehead and looked toward my desk, where Professor Vance's advanced research files sat in a neat stack.

  ?Tomorrow, I would begin cross-referencing his data on forced hypercapnia. It was time to push the human respiratory system past its breaking point.