One year passed.
It felt strange, how fast time moved when one had a plan. Alaric Vane wasn't sure if he had changed, not in any meaningful external way at least. He still looked like the quiet, pale kid with eerie blue eyes and white hair that most others avoided unless prompted. He still kept to himself in the orphanage, answering questions only, when necessary, always polite, always distant. But inside? Inside was an unquenchable fire and ambition, combined with a fanatical desire for knowledge and scripture.
Every night, when the others were asleep, Alaric would train. Silent as a shadow, consistent as the ticking of the cheap alarm clock.
Some nights he focused on breath control and energy circulation, mimicking what he wrote down from the foundational techniques in Douluo Dalu. Other nights, he meditated, not just to cultivate spirit power, but to listen — to feel the Vault's subtle pulses, to sense the rhythmic chaos of the Hammer sleeping within him.
Progress was slow. Infuriatingly so. But it was steady.
He had long come to accept that Earth's energy density was different compared to the world of Douluo Dalu. Not necessarily worse, just different. But he learned how to draw energy the air in this world as well.
He drew symbols he remembered from his past life — carved into ancient artifacts, scribbled in media, scrawled across game UIs — and hoped the Vault might interpret them as primitive runes. Most were ignored. A few caused it to twitch. One even made it spin.
The Axiom Vault was a mystery. Not a weapon, not a soul, but a thing. A principle given form. It shifted constantly, forming impossible angles, folding into shapes that made his eyes ache, his brain pulsed like it was being rewired with each impossible fold.
Sometimes it glowed when he read scientific texts. Sometimes it mirrored the patterns in music or language.
Once, after reading a book on mathematics for university students, he had fallen asleep. When he woke up, a part of the vault that had constantly been active while he was asleep had opened miniscule.
It didn't stay open, but shut in less than a second after he got out of the drowsiness. But in that moment, he had seen something — not a spell, not a technique, but a thing. Like a formula for distilling something, or calculating something.
Just, it wasn't to be used with things like chemicals or numbers, but with energy in the form of magic.
One that didn't fit into the three dimensions he lived in. It hadn't made sense then. It still didn't. But it haunted him in his dreams. Not in a negative way, but more in a possessive way.
He had started calling them "Axioms" — the patterns, the internal structures the Vault revealed when it responded to external stimuli. They weren't spells. They were... blueprints, formulas, Templates.
If soul rings granted active techniques, then the Vault granted potential logic — possibilities.
Meanwhile, the Hammer of Ruin was far more straightforward.
Raw. Violent. Beautiful. It responded best to motion, to effort. He learned to swing it, even if only with soul power at first, tracing phantom arcs through the air, perfecting the flow and grip.
Which he did obviously in the forest in Douluo Dalu. After all who knew what hell would break loose if someone saw him swinging a glowing hammer around.
For weeks he tried to wield the hammer just with physical strength, heavy as a pure block of lead. His arms ached for weeks until the muscles started adjusting.
He tried to mimic the strikes he had seen in the series of Douluo Dalu.
Nigh impossible is what it felt like. After all – go pick up a block of lead and start swinging it around like it was a pencil. Not to even begin with him being a kid and all that.
Nonetheless due to the energy in his body, it started to slowly adapt.
Every week, he pushed a little further. At the start he couldn't even lift the damn hammer.
"It doesn't just look like it's made from a dying star but also feels as heavy as one" he cursed at that point in time. Nonetheless he made progress.
It wasn't fast by any genius standards he assumed, considering he could even now barely do 5 swings with it before his arms felt like they fell off. But it was faster than it should've been. Probably.
His spirit power swirled deeper, cleaner than what he had felt from the villager that swung the hoes he first saw in the Silver Flower Village.
Meanwhile the Vault stored some type of knowledge from the training into itself. He didn't even command it to — it just did. Passively. Yet he had no clue what exactly it would be that it stored.
The high level of his martial souls slowed the accumulation of his foundation, but it also reinforced it. Every advancement felt more permanent, more... real. As if it were filled with more energy than it should.
The best way he could describe it was this: most people's spirit power felt like steam — thin, light, easy to move but not particularly dense. Some advanced cultivators might condense theirs into liquid, or even solid form, gaining power and control.
But his? His still felt gaseous... yet it was more like radioactive vapor — dense, volatile, and so saturated with energy that it could probably power a nuclear plant for years.
He kept records. Dozens of notebooks filled with sketches, theories, frustrations. One was entirely dedicated to merging Earth's understanding of spirituality with Douluo Dalu's soul logic.
He experimented too. Minor sigils drawn on paper and pressed against the Vault. Songs hummed in patterns. Poetic phrases whispered while meditating. He tried to make the Vault respond emotionally, logically, spiritually. Sometimes it worked. More often, it didn't.
Another was just drawings of the few symbols he saw in the Vault — some he could, while not read, barely understand. Or at least he thought that he could understand one aspect of them.
A few times, he caught Miss Leila staring at him when he wrote, eyes full of worry, as if she feared he was going mad. After that he obviously started to only write in his room and tried to socialize a little bit more, so that no caretaker would even think to bother him with useless Psychologist visits.
One night, as winter rolled in he tried something new.
He traced the Axiom symbol that had haunted him since it first opened. Drew it in charcoal on the floor of his room, inside a crude circular array made from cheap chalk. Then he sat cross-legged in the center, Vault in one hand, Hammer resonating silently in the other.
He concentrated. The goal? Connecting the energy flow that fed the Hammer with the Vault's energy flow.
For an hour, nothing happened. Then —
The Vault pulsed.
The Hammer flared.
And Alaric's mind was flooded. Not with images, but with patterns — a technique on how to flow the energy trough his body. Its structure overlaid with a spiritual technique to be combined with. The ying to the yang.
Like the Vault was saying: "Here. This is how you don't break yourself next time you swing. Also don't forget to cultivate me, while you are cultivating, the hammer like an ape going OOGA BOOGA."
He nearly passed out from the sheer overload. But when he came to, he was smiling. He didn't need the whole answer. He just needed the next step.
That night, for the first time, he swung the Hammer of Ruin like it was a normal stick.
He laughed.
One year in, and he had barely scratched the surface.
But Alaric Vane had never been interested in surfaces. He was patient. He was here to understand everything underneath them.