Driving back home with his bike, he pedaled through the heavy rush hour traffic and didn’t even stop one time to buy something or take a break. His energy was endless, and the adrenaline from having been officially initiated into the world of the supers coursed through him.

In his backpack, he also had a small book detailing all the basic knowledge he had been given during the crash course, so he didn’t worry about forgetting anything.

There were no restrictions in place for this book too, once he finished memorizing it, he could use it as he saw fit, even posting it online if he wanted.

Reaching his building after ten minutes, he stored his bike in his family’s slot and then used the stairs to climb to the 7th floor as if he was being chased.

Once he reached the floor corridor though, he calmed down and walked to his apartment’s door and knew before opening it that it would be open at this hour.

And it was.

Taking off his shoes, he didn’t even need to do anything else as he had headed out only in his t-shirt and no additional layer.

Entering his room, he turned on his computer and started taking out his notepad and writing supplies, setting all of them on his desk for imminent use.

‘Let’s put on some music and then…’

Following what he wanted to do, he put on his favorite music playlist, wrote down the current time, sat down on his bed, focused, and started to accelerate his energy cycle when he felt ready.

Same as when he had done it during the crash course, Aven felt his energy cycle fill his whole body before it started becoming colder and colder, less and less intense.

As he had no reason to stop and Sigurd hadn’t said anything about the existence of something like cultivation overuse, he kept the same cycle until it naturally stopped cycling despite him trying to make it.

“And that’s one session done,” breathing out, he moved to his desk chair and noted down the current time next to the one he had noted down a few minutes earlier.

‘10 minutes. Good or bad? Don’t know. Progress? Don’t know. Regeneration period? Don’t know. SO many things to test. Or maybe all the answers are online.’

Keeping a part of his mind on the hotness and intensity of his energy cycle, he started searching for real stats about grade 0 supers. And he quickly found the result he wanted, though it wasn’t really the one he “wanted”.

‘The downtime period lasts twice as long as the cultivation time. The best cultivation method is going from full energy intensity to downtime at one time. The expected number of cycles before reaching grade 1 is 80…’

Browsing through every somewhat reliable website, Aven quickly confirmed that reaching grade 1 wasn’t hard at all. The timeline of a few weeks given by Sigurd was only true for someone not adopting an optimized cultivation routine.

‘I don’t think I can stay awake for 110 hours straight though… Well, not like I would have done it even if I could.’

110 hours was the theoretical best time someone could take to reach grade 1 from an energy cultivation of 2 out of 10 if grade 0 cultivation resources weren’t used. And Aven certainly did not own any grade 0 cultivation resources.

‘My maximum cultivation time increases with every energy cultivation point I get, eventually peaking at 45 minutes… That’s basically 5 minutes of cultivation to exhaust 1 energy cultivation point. It’s so linear.’

Wondering if energy cultivation could be explained so simply, he switched to grade 1 cultivation and summarily stopped a few minutes later. Grade 1 was another world, and he had other things to worry about.

With the fact that his affinity had been tested to be of the tech energy system, he could now freely push in this direction without any hesitation.

And what could a tech system want more than anything else? After musing over this question for some time, the answer resided in the name of the energy system itself.

‘I need technical knowledge. And to complement that I need to start reading some biographies of successful tech supers. If I do all that while optimizing my cultivation as much as I can, then time will pass very quickly. And when I finally know what my innate ability at grade 1 looks like, I’ll decide what to do with my life.’

Betting on his innate ability being more extraordinary than it looked like now, he was nearly certain his innate ability, “Faction Contribution System”, would start shining very soon.

‘Though as he said…’

“Innate abilities, even extraordinary ones, only amount to as much as their owners are worth,” imitating the grave heavy voice of the grade 3 martial super Sigurd accompanied with the same sentence he had said, Aven smiled in contentment at his successful imitation.

Shaking his head left and right to refocus, he soon realized that 20 minutes had passed while he was searching and thinking, so he wrote down the current time, and without even leaving his chair, he started cycling his energy.

This time, however, he had a thing to test.

The moment he felt his energy cycle start cooling, he tried to move while keeping his cycle active.

As written online though, the moment he moved, his cycle stopped flowing as intensely as before and returned to being a passive one.

‘Yeah, figured.’

Sitting back down, he cycled his energy until it naturally stopped 10 minutes later. Just like that, he had finished the second out of the estimated 80 energy cultivation full cycles needed before reaching grade 1.

Transitioning to online browsing smoothly, he set a timer for 20 minutes later and started his research on the best engineering schools to learn relevant things.

Invisible to him, his father’s previous career as a war reporter subtly influenced his view on what he wanted to learn, and his opinion on supers being supreme killing machines even when they didn’t even try subtly influenced the domains he wanted to make sure he got to learn.

From civilian electrical engineering to optical engineering degrees, Aven quickly arrived at much more military-focused engineering degrees such as weapon engineering… Without him even noticing it, he had fully transitioned from civil engineering degrees to military engineering degrees.

And when he finally noticed it, he didn’t think much of it.

‘It’s inevitable that I’ll end up touching and even wielding weapons. My affinity is the tech energy system, and there’s no way I’ll abandon my affinity when I clearly know what effects it has.’

Coming to terms with his situation sooner rather than later, he kept the civil engineering field on one side and started focusing whole-heartedly on the military engineering one.

The world wasn’t at peace, far from it if Aven had correctly understood what his father had tried to tell him through his numerous stories, and due to that, military engineering wasn’t a field with few career opportunities.

And where there was demand, there was supply, so as the alarm started beeping indicating to him that it was time for another full energy cultivation cycle, his mind was filled with different military engineering fields he could potentially choose.

Finishing his 3rd energy cycle, he pursued his research and learned of alternative supers’ education opportunities in the form of mercenary groups’ employment contracts. Quickly after discovering those, however, he dismissed them in favor of the path of directly entering the Eland’s military as an apprentice.

It was not only clearly more efficient and safer, it also had fewer long-term implications.

When he started feeling hungry, he helped himself with the still-hot dinner in the living room and ate it in his room while catching up on his entertainment. Once he was done, he started his 4th energy cycle.

Establishing this 30-minutes total routine, Aven completely forgot about the fact that he should have been going to sleep soon as he would have needed to replenish his mental endurance for the incoming day of university.

What replaced his student’s mindset was a growing and burning curiosity about all those new things that now concerned him more directly than ever.

Lots of doors had opened themselves for the simple reason that he was now a super. And it was his job to make his choice of which door to pass through.

And so his evening started as he completed a full energy cultivation cycle every 30 minutes, and he only went to sleep when he felt utterly exhausted both physically and mentally past midnight, when he had just finished his 9th cycle.

As for setting up alarms to wake him up every half an hour to have a perfectly optimized grade 0 energy cultivation? He entertained the thought for 5 seconds before squashing it and reducing it to dust.

Sleep was too important.

…

Waking up for the second time as a super, Aven started his day by cycling his energy for the maximum 10 minutes his 2 out of 10 energy points allowed him. After doing that, he brushed his teeth, drank water, and started rousing from his heavy sleep by watching some entertainment.

When 20 minutes had passed, he started cycling his energy again.

‘Hu…?’

Yet, this time, his cycle continued for longer. It remained 15 minutes before naturally entering its downtime period.

‘So, does that mean I…’

To confirm his suspicion, he appraised himself.

Aven Amias

Faction: MIC Serenis University

Energy Grade: 0

Energy Cultivation: 3/10

Energy Affinity: Tech

Physical Talents: None

Energy Talents: Basic Tech Energy Affinity

Spiritual Talents: Inquisitive Spirit

Universal Talents: Unawakened Fairy Ancestry

‘Hoho~ Grade 1, here I come!’

His efforts had been rewarded so quickly that if he maintained this rhythm, he would probably reach grade 1 within a week. And he would reach it without straining himself, it would be a naturally occurring conclusion to an easy routine.

‘Yesterday I didn’t have much time, but today! Today I have as much time as I want until I go to sleep again!’

Motivation untouched, he flipped his notepad to a new blank page and started his day by reminding himself of all the still hot knowledge he had learned about all the different paths he could go onto.

Even the Vow Church wasn’t excluded from his list, it was just relatively lower in likeliness than the other options.

‘In the end, it’s all about whether my innate ability gains something able to boost my growth or not. If it does, I’ll change my plans, if it doesn’t, I’ll start an appraisal tour and hope to find something like a secret society.’

After refreshing all his options though, the option that dwarfed everything else no matter how he looked at it was too evident.

‘Eland’s Military Engineer Corps. Super special admission, with going to a special school to learn the basics before being sent directly onto a super-high paying job once I reach the necessary competency.’

This option was both amazing and easy to find. He only had to spend a few hours with the right keywords to find it.

‘Anyway, let’s just keep that in a corner of my mind while staying open-minded.’

Throwing this amazing option to the side, Aven thought once again about how starved for supers everything was.

From the most optimistic stats he had found online, only 1 out of every 50 000 people awakened naturally. If he transferred this number onto Serenis’s total population of 1.5 million people, it would mean that the super community was only made up of 30 people in total.

The only thing that saved the day was the existence of innate ability awakening serums. The fabrication method of this serum was to just use the blood and guts of super life form, but those same ingredients were already used for something else…

So in the end, to make one, anyone only needed enough money to convince some target people that awakening someone was more worth it than making cultivation resources for grade 3 and 4 supers.

And as this was a very lucrative market with never enough supply to meet the demand, super mercenary groups and government militaries deployed in suitable areas milked the private sector as much as they could and wanted.

‘What else could have happened when the manpower, the resource sources, and the know-how are all gathered together in a select few groups?’

Interrupting him from furthering his stroke of half-indignation half-acceptance, his phone started beeping. It was time for him to start his 11th cycle out of the estimated 80 necessary to reach the next grade.

…

A week quickly passed as Aven spent the great majority of his time secluded in his room, only exiting to go eat something or to go on a bike tour to release his surplus energy. As a result of his somewhat optimized energy cycling routine over this week, grade 1 was now imminent for him who had accomplished 79 cycles.

Aven Amias

Faction: MIC Serenis University

Energy Grade: 0

Energy Cultivation: 9/10

Energy Affinity: Tech

Physical Talents: None

Energy Talents: Basic Tech Energy Affinity

Spiritual Talents: Inquisitive Spirit

Universal Talents: Unawakened Fairy Ancestry

Feeling the flow of energy cycling inside him start reaching its limit after a long 40 minutes of standing still, Aven felt something else begin, as if an invisible threshold had been passed.

‘Is that…?’

Self-appraising himself at that precise moment, he got the confirmation he wanted.

Aven Amias

Faction: MIC Serenis University

Energy Grade: 0

Energy Cultivation: 10/10

Energy Affinity: Tech

Physical Talents: None

Energy Talents: Basic Tech Energy Affinity

Spiritual Talents: Inquisitive Spirit

Universal Talents: Unawakened Fairy Ancestry

‘So now, I only need to wait and observe.’

Same as when his energy cycle settled down, advancing in grade was something that happened naturally. There were no secret manuals or secret techniques, energy cultivation was really that simple seen from that point of view.

As if his energy had found a second breath after a sprint, the cycle that should have slowly come to a stop commenced accelerating.

The more the cycle accelerated, the more diffuse it became, as if it wasn’t a cyclic energy anymore but an omnipresent one filling his whole body at the same time.

‘Energy cloud stage… Does it mean “cloud” in that way?’

Watching the show from a first-class lodge, Aven felt every change of temperature, density, and intensity his energy cycle was undergoing. It wasn’t even close to the mesmerizing scene back from his awakening, but it had a certain charm to it when he linked it to his efforts over the last 7 days.

When the cycle got so carried away that there were no distinctions anymore between anywhere in his body and his energy, knowledge started spawning in his mind.

His innate ability had advanced at the same time his energy cultivation did.

Immersed in the moment, Aven’s brain started absorbing everything it received, or it could better be said that it was awakening something that had always been there to begin with, but whose access to it had always been denied.

‘Faction contribution… Faction contribution… Quests… Contribution… And rewards… Of course rewards.’

Integrating knowledge on something at the same level as his appraisal took a bit over 5 minutes, but once he properly understood what he had gained…

“Sigh…” Resting his back on his chair, a smile slowly appeared on his face as he closed his eyes to enjoy this feeling for longer.

It was a feeling he never had even when he became a super.

It was a feeling that mixed hope, ambition, and confidence at the same time.

It was a feeling that symbolized how he saw his innate ability as not being an assisting tool anymore. What it could do from now on far surpassed the level of help any tool could give him.

“Innate abilities, even extraordinary ones, only amount to as much as their owners are worth… So in the end, everything is on my side,” concluding his edgy monologue, he decided to start his life as a grade 1 super by appraising himself.

Aven Amias

Faction: MIC Serenis University

Energy Grade: 1

Energy Cultivation: 10/100

Energy Affinity: Tech

Physical Talents: None

Energy Talents: Basic Tech Energy Affinity

Spiritual Talents: Inquisitive Spirit

Universal Talents: Unawakened Fairy Ancestry

‘My affinity is still basic and my ancestry is still unawakened. I wonder if my affinity level is relevant as part of my talent in energy cultivation considering it didn’t increase when I graded up… If it is, then my talent would be the lowest if not for my fairy ancestry.’

Reverting back to his inquisitive self as he observed that nothing major had changed in his status other than the energy cultivation and energy grade parts, he opened one of the two new functions of his innate ability.

Faction Contribution Quests: MIC Serenis University

Volunteering: Contribute to the stability of your faction without asking for anything in return. The more time spent and the harder the tasks, the greater the contribution.

Influencing: Get recognition for your faction by showing extraordinary results that can be used for it to grow its influence. The greater the results shown, the greater the contribution.

Donating: Support your faction economically by giving it consequent sums of money. The more money given, the greater the contribution.

Securing: Investigate and resolve problems occurring inside your faction. The more problems resolved and the more difficult their resolutions, the greater the contribution.

Educating: Educate your fellow faction members. The more each fellow faction member learns under your teaching, the greater the contribution.

Participating: Attend your faction’s events to further a good social climate and lead by example. The more harmonious the events end up being, the greater the contribution.

Upon seeing no numbers and only 6 quests, he frowned a bit.

‘Are they customized to each faction? And it seems I’ll have to experiment with each quest to find which has the best time/difficulty/reward ratio. Though I’ll need to find the right faction to start with.’

Plans formed in his mind after he saw how he could gain contribution.

As for the reason why he needed to consider how to gain contribution so carefully…