The Street Dojo Circuit wasn't legal.
Wasn't safe.
Wasn't martial in the traditional sense.
But it was real.
Tucked beneath the neon bones of Neo-Ilium's Night Market, hidden behind collapsed train cars and sensor-scrambling incense, it was a testing ground for outcasts, defectors, and dreamers with half-built scrolls. Here, style didn't matter—survival did.
Jian stepped into the threshold, his breath trailing frost from the cooling ducts overhead. Hood up. No badge. No sect seal.
Just a flickering chi-core and a scroll that hadn't been written by anyone but him.
> [ACTIVE STYLE: IGNITED THREAD v0.1]
[STABILITY: 73%]
[SEED PATH SIGNATURE: MASKED]
[RANK: UNREGISTERED]
Perfect.
He was nobody.
---
The arena was a sunken ring of scorched ferrocrete ringed by flickering AR ads and half-drunk fighters yelling bets. At the center stood a woman covered in graft tattoos and jury-rigged style boosters.
A ring manager. A gatekeeper.
"Scroll?" she demanded.
Jian tossed her the entry disc Wren had encoded.
She scanned it. Raised an eyebrow.
"Self-written. Street-forged. No Corp lineage."
Her grin widened. "We love trash."
She tossed him a patch of adhesive smart-cloth. It lit up with a fighter ID:
> [STRAY | UNVERIFIED FORM | ENTRY GRANTED]
The crowd booed. Then cheered. They didn't care who won.
They wanted to see someone break.
---
His first match was against a style-switcher—a fighter with a hacked implant that rotated through five Corp techniques mid-battle. One moment, iron palm. The next, fluid fang-step footwork. Her chi was efficient. Predictable.
Jian moved like fire on thread.
Unstable. Unscanned. Unreadable.
Until he mistimed his final strike.
A flame-kick overextended. His ankle faltered. His system buzzed.
She countered with a Corp-licensed Iron Fang slam to the chest.
He hit the floor hard, coughing sparks.
> [SYSTEM SHOCK | CHI CHANNEL INTERRUPTION]
[RECOVERY: 12s]
He stood before the ten-second knockdown expired.
But he'd lost.
The crowd booed harder. A bottle clinked against his shoulder.
"Another fake monk!" someone yelled.
---
The next fight, he tried adjusting—playing tighter, cleaner. Less flame, more needle-thread. It worked… for a while.
But his opponent—a synth-born lowblood with an illegal ghost stance—adapted. She read the rhythms Jian borrowed from White Needle and broke them with flick-feint elbows and disjointed tempo shifts.
He went down again.
Harder this time.
He tasted blood in his mouth.
---
Third match.
No scroll. No memory. Just instincts.
He forgot Wren's calibration.
He forgot White Needle.
He moved like someone caught between lightning and oil—fluid one second, explosive the next.
When the attack came, he reacted. No form.
Just a strike built from pain, pressure, and adaptation.
A slide-lash elbow followed by a roll-up knee and a flare of flame redirected through the wrong port—turning inward, then outward.
It shouldn't have worked.
It did.
His opponent fell.
The crowd blinked.
Then erupted.
> [IGNITED THREAD v0.1 – COMBAT LOG UPDATED]
[BRANCHING STYLE MUTATION DETECTED]
[NEW SUBSIGNATURE: GLASSFIRE PULSE (EXPERIMENTAL)]
Jian staggered, lungs burning.
But he was still standing.
---
He won his next fight. Then lost the one after.
But every match, something changed. Not just in his chi.
In his mind.
He stopped trying to copy. Stopped trying to remember.
And started to create.
---
At the end of the night, bleeding from his mouth and ear, Jian found a quiet spot behind the scaffolding. Rain—real rain—trickled from a crack in the roof.
His HUD buzzed.
> [QUEST BRANCH COMPLETE: TEST YOUR FORM]
[REWARD: NODE STABILIZATION +4%]
[SEED PATH PROGRESSION: 12% → 14%]
He sat back and exhaled.
For the first time since Yulan, he didn't feel like a student.
He felt like a fighter.
And his scroll?
It had just begun writing itself.
---