Ren closed the system screen and took a deep breath.

His heart was still beating faster than usual, and the memory of those two giant snakes rushing through the tunnels had not faded even a little. Even now, if he closed his eyes, he could still picture the cave shaking, the stone breaking, and the way the black and white bodies had torn through the mountain like it was made of dirt.

He stood still for a few more seconds and forced himself to calm down.

After steadying his breathing, Ren walked toward the exit of the return area.

There were several machines there, along with Explorer Guild staff handling the people who had just come back from the Secret Realm. The process moved quickly. No one was asking where people had gone, what they found, or whether they had succeeded or failed. That part was their own business.

The staff and machines only cared about one thing.

Whether anyone had come back carrying something inside them.

Parasites. Possession. Hidden contamination. Abnormal spiritual residue.

Anything dangerous enough to spread from a Secret Realm into the outside world.

Ren stepped into line without saying a word. He was in no mood to talk to anyone — not after what had just happened.

When his turn came, he stepped into the scanning area. Thin lights moved over his body once, then twice. One of the staff members glanced at the screen, nodded, and waved him through.

That was it.

’Good thing the system’s storage doesn’t register on biological scans,’ Ren thought, very quietly, very privately, as he walked past. ’Whatever law it operates on, it doesn’t trip the parasitism detectors. That’s... extremely convenient.’

He filed that observation away as a piece of information he might need to remember someday.

— • —

Ren left the return section and walked back through the market.

When he had first arrived here, the place had seemed lively and interesting. There had been stalls, adventurers, strange materials, weapons, maps, odd beasts in cages, and all kinds of things that would normally catch his eye.

Now he barely looked at any of it. He was tired.

Not physically alone. Mentally too.

His body had already begun coming down from the pressure and danger, and once that happened, the exhaustion underneath it became more obvious.

So he didn’t stop. He walked straight through the market, entered the Explorer Guild outpost again, and used the transport system to return to the main branch in the city.

The whole process felt blurry.

He only remembered stepping onto the platform, the cold pull of teleportation, the familiar shift from frontier outpost to clean guild infrastructure. But his thoughts were somewhere else.

Mostly on the Rare Substance.

And on the Spatial Storage Space.

That new system function still felt unreal.

He extended his awareness toward it once, briefly, just to confirm. The crystalized Life and Death Beetle was still there — silent, untouched, motionless. Time stopped inside the storage exactly as the system had said. It felt strange. Reassuring and bizarre at the same time.

By the time he stepped out of the guild building and called a hover taxi, the city had already started settling into evening. The lights outside were brighter now, and the roads in the air carried long streams of moving vehicles.

Ren got into the taxi and gave his address.

Then he leaned back and stayed quiet during the whole ride.

The city slipped past outside the window — bright, ordinary, alive. The kind of place where people argued about dinner and worried about exams and went home to small apartments without ever once thinking about catastrophic-tier serpents waking up in underground caves.

Three hours ago, he had been standing in front of a Rare Substance. Two ancient monsters had been racing toward him through tunnels strong enough to crack stone. He had escaped by maybe a single second.

Now he was sitting in a quiet hover taxi watching a man argue with his wife on a corner two streets below.

It felt unreal.

But that was kind of the point of cultivation worlds, wasn’t it? The ordinary kept going. Whether you were a Stage 1 student or a Stage 5 sovereign, dinner still needed cooking somewhere. People still complained about traffic. Children still ran past their parents in shopping districts. The strange and the mundane stacked on top of each other and never really touched.

Ren let out a small breath and closed his eyes for a moment.

’Mom and Dad would lose their minds if they knew what just happened,’ he thought. ’Which is exactly why I am never telling them. Not for at least three or four years. Maybe five. Possibly never.’

He could imagine Elena’s reaction with perfect clarity. The held-still moment. The hand drifting halfway to her mouth. Then the rapid escalation through several emotions before settling on something between fury and tears.

Adrian would be quieter about it. He would just look very tired and ask very specific questions in a very calm voice. Which was somehow worse.

Ren smiled faintly to himself.

’I’ll figure out how to phrase the Rare Substance part later. Maybe much later. After it’s already absorbed and there’s nothing they can do but accept it.’

— • —

When he finally reached home, he paid, stepped out, and went inside.

The moment the door closed behind him, he felt the last bit of tension in his shoulders loosen.

He was home. Safe.

Ren did not do anything dramatic after that. He didn’t immediately sit down and start studying the Rare Substance. He didn’t check messages. He didn’t even try cultivating.

First, he went straight to the washroom and cleaned himself properly.

It was, he realized as the warm water hit his shoulders, the first proper shower he had taken in five days. The Secret Realm had a stream he had washed in, but it had been quick and cold and necessary, not actually a shower. This was different. This was the kind of small luxury you didn’t appreciate until you had been without it for a while.

He stood there for a long minute just letting the water run.

The forest dirt washed out of his hair in pale streaks. The faint chemical smell of the Venom Blade Mantis’s corrosive residue, which had soaked into his gloves and through to his sleeves during the harvesting, finally rinsed away properly. A small bruise across his ribs — left over from the boar charge — stung when the water hit it directly.

By the time he finished washing away the dirt, sweat, and stale smell of the forest, his mind felt much clearer.

He changed clothes, dried his hair, and returned to his room.

Only then did he sit down and open his status screen again.

Name: Ren Valis

Age: 18

Talent: Bloodline Plant Lord

Lifeform Tier: 1

Evolution Pathway Level: Germination Stage

Skills: Basic Fist Technique (Expert), Basic Footwork Technique (Expert), Basic Evasion Technique (Expert)

Ren blinked once.

Then a small smile appeared on his face.

"Nice."

That was genuinely good.

He had expected improvement, especially after the repeated fights inside the Secret Realm. Real combat always gave more than practice alone. But even so, seeing both the Basic Fist Technique and Basic Footwork Technique reach Expert — and even the Basic Evasion Technique catching up to the same level — still felt satisfying.

That meant all three of his basic combat skills had reached the point where he could properly display around 75% of what they were capable of. Not Master. But already far beyond what a newly awakened beginner should normally have.

The realm trip had been dangerous. Too dangerous, honestly.

But it had not been a waste.

Ren closed the status screen. His mood improved a little after that. Not enough to start smiling around like an idiot, but enough to let him relax.

He sat on the edge of the bed for a few moments, just feeling the strange quietness of being home.

Tomorrow was school.

That thought almost made him laugh. After two weeks of cultivation, awakening, training, registration, secret realms, near-death fights, and stealing from catastrophic-tier monsters — he was going to walk back into a classroom tomorrow and pretend to be a normal eighteen-year-old.

’Imagine sitting at my desk listening to Allen talk about historical Awakening patterns,’ Ren thought, ’while a Rare Substance hums quietly inside an infinite storage space I shouldn’t technically have access to.’

’Yeah. That’s going to be a fun double life.’

For tonight, that was enough.

He lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling for a few seconds.

Then, without any ceremony, he went to sleep.

A real sleep this time. Not meditation.

And he fell asleep almost as soon as his face touched the pillow.

Outside, the city kept moving. Lights flickered. Hover lanes pulsed. Somewhere far away, in a place he could not see and would not know about for another few hours, decisions were already being made that would change his next year completely.

But for tonight, Ren slept.