"One more round," he said. "Modified. Lighter loads. Shorter sets. And the second—the second—I say stop, we stop. No debate. You override me, and I walk. I won't train someone who treats their body like a disposable weapon."

"Understood."

"Will you actually listen?"

Phei met his gaze, unflinching. "When it really matters? Yeah. This matters… differently."

Kieran held the stare for another beat.

Then he snatched up his clipboard with a sharp nod.

"Alright, you absolute madman. Let's find out what you're really made of."

****

The third hour didn't just break him. It dismantled him, piece by trembling piece, and scattered the parts across the gym floor like a warning to anyone else dumb enough to try.

Back to the rower—three hundred meters this time, resistance dialed down to "merciful." Phei's arms responded like overcooked noodles with a grudge. His back had gone radio silent. He finished anyway.

Three minutes forty-two. A time so slow it should've come with a participation ribbon and a therapy referral.

But finished.

Legs. Bodyweight squats only, no bar, no plates. His thighs shook so violently he looked like he was auditioning for a role as "seizure victim #3." Kieran hovered, hands ready to catch the inevitable collapse.

Collapse came on rep six. Phei's knees folded like cheap lawn chairs. He caught the rack, hung there gasping, sweat dripping off his chin in a steady rhythm.

"Done," Kieran said, voice flat, final.

"No."

"Phei—"

"Four more."

He scraped together four more on legs that felt borrowed from a corpse. A corpse that had lost a fight with gravity.

Upper body was farce at this point. Three-kilo dumbbells—"baby weights," Kieran had joked earlier—now felt engineered by NASA for maximum spite. Phei's form had devolved into something resembling a malfunctioning robot. Shoulders cramped mid-rep. Arms jerked like they were controlled by a drunk puppeteer.

But they moved. Five reps. Five more. Five more after that, because apparently the theme of the day was "why not make it worse?"

"Your CNS is toast," Kieran said, clinical as a coroner. "You're running on fumes and spite."

"Good." Phei racked the weights with a clang that echoed like surrender. "Spite's renewable."

Core work was where language failed.

A fifteen-second plank felt like fifteen years in solitary. His body vibrated like a tuning fork dropped down stairs. Abs had given up pretending to be muscles and had rebranded as pure, concentrated suffering.

"Time."

Phei collapsed face-first into the mat, spread-eagled like a chalk outline. He lay there for five solid minutes, staring at the ceiling lights, listening to his heartbeat throttle down from "imminent explosion" to merely "alarming."

This is the price.

This is what real change costs: three hours of voluntary demolition.

Every fiber in his body was filing a complaint. Calling him an idiot. Demanding to know why he hadn't just done a sensible workout, gone home, and lived to lift another day.

But Phei knew something his body hadn't caught up to yet.

Comfort was the enemy. "Reasonable" was just mediocrity wearing a polite mask. The people who actually transformed—the ones who clawed their way out of whatever hole life had dumped them in—were the ones willing to bleed for it.

The Maxtons had spent years teaching him pain as punishment. A tool to shrink him, to keep him obedient and small.

Today he'd taken that tool and turned it into a forge.

The pain you feel now is weakness leaving the body.

Some corny gym poster had said that once. Lying there soaked and shattered, Phei finally got it. The weakness wasn't just the noodle arms or the jelly legs. It was the fear. The hesitation. The decade of learned helplessness that had convinced him a rooftop was the only escape.

That weakness was leaking out of him now, one agonizing drop of sweat at a time.

Eventually Kieran hauled him upright.

"You alive?"

Phei tested his legs. They wobbled like a drunk giraffe, but held. "Define 'alive.'"

"Capable of forward motion without face-planting."

"…Marginally."

Kieran shook his head, but the look on his face had shifted. The professional detachment had cracked, revealing something that looked suspiciously like respect.

"You're either the most dedicated kid I've ever trained," he said, "or the most certifiable. Jury's still out."

"Why not both?"

"Usually is."

He handed Phei a towel and a fresh bottle of water. Phei took them with hands that shook so badly the water sloshed like a tiny, angry ocean.

"Same time tomorrow?" Phei rasped.

Kieran barked a laugh—real, startled, maybe a touch worried. "Hell no. Minimum forty-eight hours recovery. Probably seventy-two. And when you come back, we go light. We're building now, not bulldozing."

Phei nodded. His brain was too mushy for negotiation.

"Go home," Kieran said. "Protein. Water. Sleep. Tomorrow you'll be sorer than you've ever been. Like, 'stairs are war crimes' sore. 'Might need a crane for the toilet' sore."

"Worth it."

Kieran studied him for a long beat, then clapped him gently on the shoulder—the only gentle thing in the last three hours.

"You've got fire in you, Phei. Don't know what you're running from or chasing, but you've got it. Most people tap out the second it stings. You dove headfirst into the fire and kept swimming." Half-smile. "Don't thank me yet. Thank me when you can walk without crying."

Kieran headed off toward reception, leaving Phei alone with his wreckage and a strange, fierce satisfaction.

He shuffled—because walking was ambitious now—toward the private recovery lounge with the big screen.

Time to see what the watch had captured.

Time to find out exactly how much of himself he'd burned away today… and what might grow in its place.

The private lounge recognized him the second he zombie-shuffled through the door—like the booth itself had been waiting to see if he'd actually make it back upright.

The massive screen woke up with a soft chime, syncing to his watch before he'd even collapsed into the nearest chair. Data poured across the display in crisp, merciless lines.

{RESIDENT: PHEI RYUJIN TIAMAT UNIT: 98-A

SESSION DURATION: 187 MINUTES}

One hundred and eighty-seven minutes. Over three solid hours of self-inflicted war crimes against his own musculature. Christ on a cracker.

Graphs bloomed like accusatory flowers. Heart-rate spikes that looked like a seismograph during an earthquake. Calorie burn tallied high enough to power a small village.

CALORIES BURNED: 2,847

AVERAGE HR: 162 BPM

PEAK HR: 198 BPM

One ninety-eight. Fantastic. He'd flirted with cardiac arrest and sent it flowers.

Every set, every rep, every moment he'd told his screaming body to go fuck itself—it was all there, dissected and displayed with the cold precision of a coroner's report.

At the bottom, the system's polite little verdict:

SESSION INTENSITY: EXTREME (NOT RECOMMENDED)

PROJECTED RECOVERY: 48-72 HOURS

PROJECTED SORENESS: SEVERE

Severe. Understatement of the century. Tomorrow he'd probably need a forklift to get off the toilet.

But none of that was what stopped him cold.

It was the notification that had been patiently pulsing in the corner of his vision the entire time, waiting for him to stop trying to kill himself long enough to notice.

[DING!]

[DRAGON RISE ROUTINE: IRON BODY CHALLENGE –

COMPLETED]

[Requirement: 90 minutes full-body (60 min weights + 30 min core)]

[Actual: 187 minutes]

[Status: EXCEEDED LIKE A MADMAN]

[BASE REWARDS: +1 Strength, +5 EXP Visible muscle improvement (onset within 48 hours)

[EXTREME TRAINING BONUS: +0.5 Strength, +7.6 Agility, +2.7 Endurance, +330 EXP

[ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: Iron Will – +50 Points, Pain Junkie – +35 Points, No Surrender – +40 Points]

The numbers rolled across his status window like slot-machine cherries lining up.

[Strength: 65 → 67 (+2 total)

Agility: 60 → 67.6 (+7.6)

Endurance: 67 → 67.7 (+2.7)

Points: 665 → 790 (+125)

EXP: 150 → 485 (+335)]

Still pathetic by any objective standard. Still miles from "impressive."

But compared to the wet-noodle stats he'd woken up with this morning? It was a goddamn revolution.

Phei caught his reflection in the darkened portion of the screen: hair plastered down like a drowned rat, shirt clinging like wet tissue, face flushed the color of a stop sign, eyes bright with something that looked dangerously like triumph.

This is day one, you sorry bastard.

Imagine day thirty. Day ninety. A full year of this.

The watch gave one final, satisfied beep and saved the session.

He peeled himself out of the chair—every joint protesting like rusty hinges—and began the long, humiliating shuffle toward the elevator. Each step sent fresh lightning through his quads. His calves threatened mutiny.

His lower back filed a formal complaint with HR.

He had never, in seventeen years of life, been in this much pain.

And somehow, impossibly, he'd never felt this alive.

The fire in his legs wasn't just agony anymore.

It is proof.

Proof that he'd taken the first real swing at becoming something more than the broken thing the Maxtons had left behind.

Proof that the Dragon wasn't just a title.

It was waking up.

[STATUS

[Name: Phei Ryujin Tiamat Age: 17

Title: Awakened Dragon (Newborn)

STATS

Strength: 67/100

Agility: 67.6/100

Endurance: 67.7/100

Charisma: 75/100

Intelligence: 150/100

Perception: 120/100

RESOURCES Points: 790, EXP: 485

ABILITIES: Charm Speech Lv.3, Dominance Aura Lv.2, Taboo Multiplier Lv.1 (1/3), Cucklord's Dominance Lv.1 (1/3)

PENDING REWARDS: (Brett confrontation) Basketball Skills 60% +15 Charisma

HAREM: Melissa Maxton (Marked)

1ST MAIN QUEST PROGRESS: 10%

A/N: It is probably shameless of me to ask but if you spot a mistake in stats, let me know.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.