The click of the lock reverberated softly in the quiet hall as Leo's hand met the cool, polished surface of his apartment door. He twisted the handle. As the door swung inward, the ambient light sensors immediately registered his presence, and the soft, diffused glow of Elda's advanced lighting system filled the living space. The hum of the city behind him faded as the door closed.
"Dad?" Leo called out, even though he already knew the answer.
He had already registered the subtle lack of another human presence, the undisturbed air, and the absence of his father's unique bio-signature, which he had failed to completely register as such, yesterday.
He checked his comms unit, but there was no message from his dad. He guessed he might not see him for the next few days.
Leo dropped his bag by the door, shrugged off his hoodie, and rolled his neck slowly.
His gaze drifted around the living room, briefly taking in the neat shelves lined with old data pads, the half-folded schematic on the worktable, and the bowl of nutrient wafers still sealed in its preservation wrap on the counter. Everything was still.
At least on the surface, it was, but what he could perceive said otherwise.
Ignoring all this, he walked into his room, stripped down to his underwear, and entered the adjacent home-gym extension.
The home-gym is basically a must-have for any awakened, it was released about a year and a half ago.
The home-gym extension was nothing special, just a reinforced mat area, adjustable resistance rails, a kinetic treadmill, and a body-feedback analyzer that most low-tier awakened used during physical diagnostics.
But now, when he entered that same room that he was already very familiar with, he felt like he was stepping into it for the first time.
It had changed, Not because anything had changed physically, no.... he just sensed what he could not before.
It was he who had changed.
If he had to put it into words, then it is as if he had stepped into something that was whole, like.....an ecosystem?
He paused for a while, but that was all he could discern.
He tapped the wall console.
[Initializing Diagnostic Sequence...]
[Default Parameters? Y/N]
Buzz!
Immediately he confirmed, he felt the whole room 'come alive'
The whole system was like it was layered with invisible pulses and feedback webs that his mind was only now beginning to decode.
Individually, he sensed the surface, every contour of the equipment, even the faint smell of synthetic sweat clinging to the reinforced mats, registered with such precision that it bordered on overwhelming.
The temperature of the floor, the slight compression beneath his weight, the subtle tension in his tendons as his prosthetic leg adjusted its balance.
The subtle waves filled the space. It was as though he was tuning into a frequency he had never known existed. Not through hearing, but through a low, kind of ambient feeling, like the hum of distant electricity under his skin.
The reinforced walls were lined with low-emission dampening panels. Normally, they absorbed kinetic backlash and minimized acoustic bleed, perfect for high-intensity workouts or experimental power techniques.
But now, Leo felt like he could feel their operation, not just hear the dull quiet of the room, but sense the soft pressure they radiated into the space. It was like walking into a muted magnetic field, faint but persistent, it pressed inward, keeping the gym's energy contained within a specific spatial resonance?
More curiously, the floor panels themselves resonated differently than the walls. Each pressure plate in the floor wasn't just reactive to impact, but subtly broadcasted localized tension gradients, likely meant to help the analyzer log, monitor foot pressure and weight distribution in real-time Etc.
Leo could feel them updating under his steps, pinging low-frequency pulses, harmless and unnoticeable to most or rather humans, but now, it was like broadcasting an entire terrain map to his sharpened perception.
He turned his head slightly.
The kinetic treadmill gave off a unique pattern of micro-radio waves. It was equipped with a self-calibrating balance module, designed to detect muscle fatigue and shift traction levels as needed.
The treadmill's core processor communicated with the surrounding rails and wall sensors through a closed-loop WiFi-mesh node.
These pings weren't audible, but Leo could now track their activity, not as data, but as a hum in the air, like watching a sound move through the fog.
Each machine emitted its own rhythm.
The resistance rails had power stabilizers that emitted pulsed EM frequencies every 0.4 seconds, syncing with the gym's main feedback loop to prevent overload during training bursts.
The body-feedback analyzer in the corner, a squat, unassuming unit, gave off short-wave bursts in the GHz ranges, usually meant to scan muscle tension and bio-rhythmic variances.
Before, Leo had never even known that such things were occurring. Now, he could feel the flashes from its emitter-like sonar against his skin.
Even the lighting, those harmless, ambient strips embedded in the ceiling, flickered imperceptibly at 60Hz to the human eye, which means a display update of its image at 60 times per second.
But Leo's perception now tracked every phase transition. The rhythm now no longer vanished into the background, but instead, it became a pulse that synchronized with the room's other systems, like an orchestra.
And strangest of all, there was coordination.
He realized it now. The entire gym wasn't a set of separate machines on its own, No, it was a networked body.
"It's like a fully tech-integrated ecosystem, every tool, the walls, even the lights are all part of a larger circuit that breathes."
A local, intelligent loop where sensors in the walls, equipment, and air processors all shared signals to adjust environmental parameters: temperature, pressure, and even humidity. A closed feedback biome.
The reinforced walls didn't just absorb sound, they subtly vibrated in opposition to echoes, using reverse-phase harmonic dampening to neutralize noise at the quantum edge of human hearing.
He could feel the slight push of those sound-bending pulses against his skull, a whispery pressure he hadn't noticed before.
And then came the moment he moved.
Ping.
He felt a signal. Not just from the machine, but also from his body Or rather, through it.
The pressure panels recognized his shift and responded automatically, adjusting balance calibration.
But more than that, he felt their 'handshake'. The interaction wasn't one-sided.
The things he had been able to perceive from his own body but couldn't understand.
Now it changed,
His muscles twitched in tandem with the recalibration pulse, as if his nervous system had briefly synced with the analyzer's signal relay. The gym responded. And he responded back.
The air changed.
He took a breath.
Then another, deeper one.
Then he moved.
Not to stretch or warm up, but to calibrate.
He didn't need a system prompt to tell him this wasn't about strength testing or grinding stats. This was about feedback,
And it was true feedback. The kind the machine could measure for him but he wouldn't need it to it again for him.
The electromagnetic field running through the kinetic treadmill adjusted slightly to the shift in his center of gravity, and Leo could feel the dip in magnetic resonance as his weight pressed down on the platform.
The resistance rails extended by a fraction of a centimeter, interpreting the movement of his shoulders as a request.
Even the ambient temperature subtly decreased, compensating for projected exertion before it began.
It was like standing in the middle of a biomechanical ecosystem, one where every surface, every piece of equipment, and every quiet hum wasn't just tech, but something close to aware.
And Leo?
He wasn't a user anymore.
He was actively becoming a part of the feedback loop.
He adjusted a resistance rail to mid-load and executed a clean horizontal pull.
Muscle strain: minimal.
Feedback delay: non-existent.
He turned to the kinetic treadmill. As he increased the difficulty, he didn't just run, he adjusted in real-time, narrowing his stride pattern, tracking the shift in gravity through heel pressure.
The analyzer pinged softly in the background, but he didn't look, he already knew it, he didn't need to look.
And even because he didn't need to look at the feedback, he was a little bit faster than it.
He was already calculating, more in sync with the system, that even the response default setting was lagging behind him.
And that's when he felt it again, although with more depth than before,
Still the same thing, the same word - HE had CHANGED.
Not just what he could do…
But how he experienced it.
He pushed through a series of sequence of movements; low, fluid motions that barely raised his heartbeat, yet it engaged his entire musculature with surgical precision. There was no wasted energy. No lags. His body responded as if the air itself had thinned around him to accommodate his intent.
The biofeedback analyzer chimed softly in the background, attempting to log his vitals, but Leo ignored it. Its report was obsolete before it finished reporting. The sense of control he was experiencing told him more than numbers could.
Before he knew it, the sound unconsciously faded from his mind.
Time passed as Leo indulged in the perception of becoming a part of this system that he could sense the whole of.
Then in the whole ecosystem, a wave emitted from him that affected the whole system, creating disharmony in it.
"Damn!"
Immediately, Leo came to his senses and felt a wave of fatigue hit him horribly and he collapsed to the floor.
He had been so immersed in that sensation for a long time, and for him to remain in that state, his body had never stopped.
It has always been moving, trying all sorts of movements he had never thought his body could perform before.
Breathing heavily, it took Leo five minutes lying on the ground before he could gather the strength to get to his feet.
He shut off the room's systems with a verbal command and moved himself barefoot toward his showers, stretched pants, with sweat trailing down his chest and along the artificial seam of his left leg. His thoughts weren't on the training. They were on the strange harmony he'd just felt between himself and the entire home-gym.
He entered his room and headed straight to the shower, voice-commanded, warm, high-pressure. Ignoring the waves radiating from it, he turned it on.
As the water sluiced down his skin, Leo leaned forward, bracing both hands against the wall. The steam thickened, swirling in soft spirals, a soothing contrast to the sharpened clarity still humming under his skin.
Minutes passed.
"Huuhh...." Letting out a breath, he opened his stats.
[Status]
Name: Leo
Level: 2
Current Role: [None]
HP: 75/75
Strength: 12 | Agility: 15 | Endurance: 12 | Intelligence: 15 | Perception: 14
Skills: Basic combat sense Lv 8.
| Bio-Electric Resonance Conditioning Lv 2.
Passives: Neural Efficiency Boost
Point: 1
Unique Energy Attribute: [Absent] | Occupation: [None]
Notes: ...
Hmm?
All my stats apart from perception increased by three.
Leo was not too surprised by this; he could feel it intuitively.
A guaranteed increase?
A body-tempering skill? One that gives a guaranteed stats increase?
Now he was surprised,
Not because he created another skill, at least not the main reason.
He was mainly surprised because it was a skill that guaranteed stats increase no matter how high their attribute is.
It added 3 per stats each, for a total of 12 attributes.
This was not something one could come in contact with before 1st order.
And here he was with one on his system panel, and it was even one that he had created himself.
If he guessed it correctly, then this was a quadratic sequence increase,
That is, +1 at Lv 1....+2 at Lv 2.....+3 at Lv 3...and so on.
If it reaches Lv 5, that is an increase of 15 attributes for one stat for a total of 60 attribute points in 4 stats.
What about when it reaches Lv 10?
Ba-da-bop!!
Leo's heart couldn't help but start pounding loudly.
This was akin to a legendary skill.
He instinctively wanted to add point, but managed to get hold of himself and calm down.
He needed to think and not recklessly squander his point.
He switched the Hot water to cold, using it to calm his boiling blood.
After calming down, he opened the panel again and focused on the 'Notes'
"...."
What's that about?
His brows furrowed, and his thoughts became deeper.