(Mortal, come have your supper.)

The angel called out from the open backyard.

The sun sat in the same spot it always did, giving off no heat, no warmth. There was no wind, yet her voice carried easily through the still air.

(‘He better not be thinking of skipping again.’)

She thought as she flew up toward the second floor.

Eight years had passed since the time stop, and over those years Hou Yi had started having trouble keeping to his own routine.

The training and the reading he had never once skipped.

Proper meals were another matter.

At some point he had stopped preparing his carefully balanced diet and replaced it with snacks and instant noodles. With the sun never setting, his mind had quietly stopped distinguishing between meals, treating every eating occasion as some vague middle-of-the-day thing.

When the angel noticed, she warned him. No proper food meant slower gains in training and a shorter attention span during reading.

Hou Yi could feel it himself. His endurance and strength had plateaued. So he went back to his old routine, prepping balanced meals and following through with it.

That lasted a few months before he slipped again, back to noodles and rice cakes.

As the saying goes, once a man steps into comfort he rarely steps back out, not unless his resolve is pointed in that direction.

Hou Yi's resolve was fixed on knowledge and staying physically capable. He could still chase both without eating perfectly, just not as effectively. His reading speed stayed the same, and even if his stamina was not improving, he was still picking up new techniques, so he counted it as enough.

The angel did not agree.

She decided he needed more than words, he needed someone to actually make the food and put it in front of him. So her weekly visits became daily ones, and she began cooking for him twice a day.

What had started as visits born from curiosity and a vague guilt had shifted into something else entirely. She was now, whether she admitted it or not, dedicated to making sure he came out of this time stop with his mind still intact.

When she flew up to the first floor she found Hou Yi exactly where she expected, sitting in a chair with a book open in his lap.

(I know you heard me. Come have the meal I prepared.)

She folded her arms, which by now Hou Yi had learned to read as annoyance.

He pointed toward the table without looking up.

"But I already prepared something—"

Fssshhh

The angel raised her hand and the bowls of instant noodles and pork sausages he had laid out were flattened in an instant, compressed into thin plastic discs, without a single drop of liquid spilling, the broth simply dissipating into nothing.

Preparing instant noodles during a time stop had its own efficiency to it. Boil the water, pour the right amount into each container, and leave them sitting in a ready state for however long you want. Hou Yi had turned it into something of a life hack, prepping several at once so eating became as frictionless as possible.

None of that mattered now.

(Pardon me, but I see nothing edible here unless you intend to eat the plastic. And even then, I would like to think the meal I prepared would taste considerably better AND be better for you, so I will ask once more that you come down for supper.)

She said it with a completely straight face, though the words were clearly no longer a request.

Thud

Hou Yi closed his book with as much deliberate weight as he could manage, just to set the tone.

"What exactly are you doing?"

He looked directly at her.

(Pardon?)

"This whole performance. Healing my leg, watching over me, now cooking for me every day..."

He did not feel any particular motive behind it, and that was precisely the problem. A divine being he had assumed was irritated with him for not complying with her request had come back unprompted to fix his disability, check in on him weekly, and now cook for him daily, after explicitly saying she would not be coming back.

"Is it pity? Guilt for letting me get left behind? Or do you know something about what's coming and you feel bad about it?"

Deep down Hou Yi did appreciate all of it. But an action without a motive did not sit right with him. He had never fully believed charity came without some kind of return, and a divine being acting out of pure goodness was an even harder sell.

It was clear he had been sitting with this for a long time. Trusting people was not something that came naturally when it had never been modeled for him.

The angel held his gaze without flinching.

(None of those.)

She answered.

(Consider my actions the selfish impulses of someone who simply wanted to sort out your routine before departing for good.)

Her tone was so flat and her expression so unchanged that Hou Yi could not get a clear read on whether she was telling the truth or not.

Still, it was enough of an answer. For now.

"Hmm."

He looked away, letting the tension settle.

"Consider how hard it is to change yourself, and only then will you understand how foolish it is to think you could change someone else."

The angel stared at him, thoroughly unimpressed.

(Wise words. I applaud you.)

After this long together she had no trouble spotting the move. Hou Yi would pull out a philosophical quote whenever he wanted to win an argument, muddy the waters, or simply get the last word in. It rarely worked on her.

She drifted toward him, lifted him smoothly from his chair, carried him downstairs, and set him in front of the meal, which was still just as hot as when she had left it.

Smoked brisket, avocado on the side.

Hou Yi, with no ground left to argue from, ate without further complaint.

"Thanks for the food."

The angel stood beside him, watching to make sure he actually ate it.

Like a mother waiting for a child to finish their vegetables.

As she watched, her thoughts drifted back to what he had asked her.

She knew it was not pity. She knew it was not guilt either. Those were not emotions she had ever felt. When she had called her actions selfish, she had not been lying to Hou Yi.

She had been lying to herself.

Because she genuinely did not know what was driving her to keep coming back.

...

Clang

"Thanks for the food."

Hou Yi set his plate down on the steps of a villa he had not been staying in for long, different from the last one. Breakfast, even though the sun was already high overhead where it always sat.

The angel floated beside him in her usual attendant-like way.

Her expression gave nothing away, but after years of having only her around Hou Yi had learned to read the small things. The way her wings sat high and spread wide meant she was pleased by the thanks, even if she would never say so.

Fourteen years since the time stop. The tenth convenience store emptied out.

Over the years Hou Yi had moved from district to district, clearing out stores one by one, reading whatever was on the shelves, and moving on when the stock ran dry. The angel followed wherever he went without being asked.

"You mentioned that the time stop could be double, maybe even triple the time they spend in the other realm. Is that still what you think?"

Hou Yi asked as he changed into his training clothes.

(That is correct. Due to time deviation, the duration here will certainly be stretched beyond the original, but given that the baseline is only five years it is unlikely to reach a hundred. Fifty years at the upper end, I would estimate.)

Still a fairly significant number.

He thought, and caught himself before it came out of his mouth. He knew the angel would immediately pivot to reminding him this was entirely his own doing.

"Ehem."

"But what about everything I have consumed over the years? Moving from store to store, clearing most of the stock. Would that cause a shortage once time resumes?"

(Everything will be restored to exactly the state it was in before the stop.)

"But wouldn't that contradict basic logic?"

The angel looked at him with something close to disbelief.

(You witnessed the entire human population get transmigrated into another dimension and time itself grind to a halt across the whole world, and this is the point at which you decide to question logic?)

Hou Yi, feeling the weight of how that must have sounded, dropped it.

"I suppose it only just occurred to me."

(Regardless, restoring the world's resources is the more logical outcome.)

(Time, space, and matter have to act in concert for any action to take effect. In this case, time has been removed from that equation.)

"But I did consume all that food."

(When?)

"...Fair enough."

...

In the years that followed Hou Yi had worked through Jeet Kune Do and Krav Maga thoroughly, drilling both until the movements lived in his reflexes rather than just his memory. The results showed, even without his body being able to grow stronger.

His footwork for power attacks, his evasions, his side steps, all of it had sharpened. His physical ceiling stayed fixed, but his instincts kept adapting, and that part held because the mental strain behind it carried over in a way the physical did not.

After laying down the basics of those two he had branched into Eskrima, sword arts, and stealth techniques, picking up whatever seemed useful and drilling it the same way.

Then he hit a wall.

Martial arts, he had come to understand, were not books. When he read something he did not fully grasp, he could read more until it clicked. That did not work here. Understanding a technique in his head and being able to perform it cleanly were completely different problems. The flexibility, the timing, the control required, it went far beyond anything a page could actually teach.

Crackkk

The spear he had been using snapped, sending the head spinning off to the side.

Hou Yi looked at the broken half still in his hand, then at the wooden dummy in front of him, covered head to base in impact marks.

He sat down, pressed his fingers to his temples, and let out a long breath.

(You seem frustrated.)

The angel called out from a short distance away where she had been watching.

Hou Yi dropped flat onto his back, arms and legs spread wide, staring up at the motionless sky while cold sweat ran down his sides.

"That's because I am."

(What is it that is bothering you?)

Sigh.

"Have you ever heard the word stagnation?"

(...I believe it refers to a state of no movement, growth, or development. Often marked by inactivity or slow decline.)

"That's exactly what these past few weeks have felt like. Months, maybe. I genuinely can't tell anymore. I feel like I have not moved forward at all in terms of actual combat ability."

It was something both of them already understood. Hou Yi was never going to get physically stronger here, that much was settled. But mastery of technique was supposed to be its own kind of edge, a way to make up for raw physical limits through precision and timing. He had felt that ceiling hit him on every art he had worked through, and every time he had just moved to a new discipline. Now that he had covered the basics of everything he thought was worth learning, the stagnation had nowhere left to hide.

(That makes sense. Unlike reading, things like martial arts require real experience to keep developing. Either to find the cracks in your own game or to actually test what you have built. There is no way around it.)

Her way of saying he was book smart but had never taken a real hit in a real exchange.

Hou Yi knew it already. Every martial arts text he had read made the same point. Real application was not optional.

"And what remarkable timing that is. A whole planet to myself and not a single person to spar with."

Robots had existed before the transmigration, but nothing practical enough for this. Roombas and drones had been around for years, and the newer combat-capable models that had started emerging could barely withstand a firm shove before they went down, let alone a proper exchange. Sparring with a machine was off the table.

The angel drifted closer and hovered over him, looking down at his face. Then she pointed to herself.

(...I believe I may be able to help with that.)

Hou Yi sat up immediately, eyes sharp.

"Explain."

(Though I may not appear so at a glance, I am a battle angel. A higher existence. My combat ability is well beyond what any human could fully comprehend, and if you would like, I am willing to serve as your sparring partner.)

"Wait. Seriously?"

He straightened up fully.

Why did I never think of that?! Have I gone completely dull over the years? No, that can't be it. It's just that she has been here from such an early point that she stopped registering as a variable. She just became part of the background.

(‘This mortal really does not know how to think poorly of himself.’)

The angel observed, genuinely a little caught off guard by how his mind worked.

A real path forward. Finally

Hou Yi was already on his feet and heading inside before the thought had fully settled.

"I'm going to get my weapon. Don't change your mind before I get back. And thank you!!!"

Behind him, the angel's expression had shifted into something quieter. A look that sat somewhere between worry and something she had not yet found the right word for.