Chapter 7: Going to Cafeteria

Chapter 7: Going to Cafeteria

Ding!

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A small ceramic jar materialized in his palm.

It was roughly the size of a plum, sealed with a wax plug.

Rhain pried the wax free and sniffed.

He immediately regretted it.

The paste inside was dark — nearly black, with a viscous, tar-like consistency and smelled like rotten fruits.

This stuff was meant to be applied to the skin during cultivation—absorbed through the pores, carried into the meridian channels by circulating essence.

It broke down impurities, strengthened the body’s pathways, made them more resilient to the strain of higher-level techniques.

For most cultivators at the Essence Awakening stage, this was a treasured resource.

For Rhain who had Sovereign Physique—a body already restructuring itself at the foundational level—it was the equivalent of giving medicine to someone who wasn’t sick.

But marginal was not zero.

A one percent improvement was still an improvement. Repeated enough times, one percent became significant.

Rhain sealed the jar and set it aside. He would apply it tonight, during his evening cultivation session. No resource would be wasted. Not a single drop.

Knock! Knock! Knock!

Someone knocked on the door.

Three quick raps. Light. Familiar.

"Rhain?"

Seris.

Rhain stood up and opened the door.

She stood in the corridor, dressed in her disciple blues, her silver-white hair pulled back in its usual practical knot.

"Morning," she said. Then she paused.

"You feel... different."

Rhain leaned against the doorframe. "Different how?"

Seris tilted her head slightly, the way she did when she was concentrating on something she couldn’t quite articulate.

She searched for the word for a while. "Oppressive."

She wasn’t wrong.

The suppression aura was a passive effect of the Abyssal Sovereign Physique, and it scaled with his cultivation.

"I broke through last night," Rhain said.

Seris stared at him.

The silence stretched for three full seconds.

He was level 1 just a day ago.

In normal circumstances, a breakthrough from Level 1 to Level 2 of the Essence Awakening Realm took months at minimum.

Rhain had done it in a single night.

But Seris didn’t ask how.

She knew that if Rhain intended to tell her then he will eventually.

Instead, she exhaled through her nose and said, "Are you coming to cafeteria?"

The word landed with unexpected weight.

The original Rhain hadn’t eaten there in months.

He’d collect his portion from the serving counter and take it back to his cell, eating alone in the dark.

Rhain felt the humiliation in the borrowed memories.

"Yes," Rhain said. "Let’s go."

........

The mess hall was exactly as the memories described it.

Long wooden tables arranged in parallel rows.

The smell of overcooked rice and boiled root vegetables — a smell so persistent it had probably seeped into the grain of the wood itself.

Roughly sixty outer disciples were present today.

Rhain collected his bowl of congee and his piece of flatbread from the serving counter.

Callum, the wiry boy doing the serving, gave him the same too-long stare as usual. Rhain met it with flat, dark eyes and held it until Callum looked away.

Then he walked to a table near the center of the room—not tucked against the wall, not hidden in a corner—center—and sat down.

Straightened his spine.

And began to eat. Slowly.

Seris slid onto the bench across from him, her own bowl in hand. She moved with the practiced casualness of someone who understood exactly what was happening and had decided to be part of it anyway.

"Subtle," she murmured.

"I’m eating breakfast."

"You’re making a statement."

"I’m eating breakfast," Rhain repeated. He tore a piece of flatbread and dipped it in the congee. "The statement makes itself."

Every eye in the room found Rhain.

Rhain Voss was sitting in the middle of the mess hall.

Rhain Voss was eating his breakfast like a human being.

Around them, the whisper network ignited.

Rhain didn’t need enhanced hearing to know what they were saying.

"—broke Fennick’s wrist, I heard the bone shattered—"

"—wasn’t even trying, Hale said he moved so fast—"

"—always hiding his strength? But why would he let them beat him for a year—"

"—found something. A treasure. Has to be—"

"—spirit possession, I’m telling you. Look at his eyes. Those aren’t the same eyes—"

The theories were flying. Treasure discovery. Spirit possession. Hidden cultivation. Secret technique.

Each theory was someone’s attempt to impose a rational framework on an irrational event — to make sense of the impossible gap between what Rhain Voss was and what he had suddenly become.

And all of them were equally absurd.

Rhain sipped his water.

Let them theorize.

Rumors were useful. They filled the vacuum that truth left behind, and people feared what they couldn’t explain far more than what they could.

A weak disciple who suddenly became strong was terrifying precisely because it defied their framework.

Twenty minutes passed. The meal was nearly finished.

A shadow suddenly fell across his table like a blade.

Rhain didn’t look up immediately. He finished chewing. Swallowed. Set down his chopsticks with a faint click against the wooden tray.

Then he raised his eyes.

The man standing at the edge of his table was tall. Broad. Built like someone who had spent years filling out a frame designed for violence.

Most distinctively, he was wearing purple robes.

Inner disciple.

Essence Awakening Level 8.

The gap between EA Level 2 and EA Level 8 wasn’t simply quantitative.

It was categorical.

At Level 8, a cultivator’s essence had been refined through six additional cycles of compression and expansion.

Their meridians were wider, more robust. Their physical capabilities, enhanced by essence circulation, approached the boundary of what the Awakening Realm could contain.

In concrete terms: this man could likely kill an ordinary person at Essence Awakening Level 2 with a single serious strike.

Good to know.

The hall had gone silent again.

Not the slow, hushed silence as before.

It was complete pin drop silence.

"You’re the one who broke my cousin’s wrist."