Harem Training System: Every Girl I Train Makes Me Stronger!

Chapter 66: 66. Tried to Read One Chapter Before Bed (And... It Was A Good Mistake)

The book sat on William’s desk exactly where he’d left it the night before, a thick, unassuming volume with a cracked leather spine that looked like it had survived several minor wars. His original intention had been simple: skim through a single Chapter on basic footwork before turning in for some much-needed sleep.

A quick reference check, nothing more.

That had been the plan, anyway. That plan had quietly dissolved into something far more consuming somewhere around midnight, when the dry academic prose began to feel less like reading and more like remembering.

He had started with Ember, prompted by the specific way Selena had referenced it during their charged encounter in the library. As he read through the opening description of forward pressure and controlled aggression, something in the back of his skull didn’t just click; it snapped into place.

The sensation was visceral, a phantom ache in his shoulders as if his muscles were already bracing for the stance. The philosophy was unmistakable: aggressive, relentless, front-footed.

It was a style designed to suffocate an opponent, denying them the precious half second of oxygen needed to think, let alone react.

’I’ve seen this before,’ he thought, his fingers tightening around the edge of the page. ’I’ve taught this to broken recruits in mud-slicked trenches until their bones screamed...’

’Different name, same killing intent...’

Then came Tide. That one landed like a physical blow to his gut.

Tide was the art of redirection, the mastery of flow, and the principle of letting an opponent’s overwhelming force pass through you like water around a stone rather than meeting it with brittle resistance.

William had spent decades of his previous life teaching that exact principle under dozens of different names, in dozens of different contexts. Reading the book’s careful, formal explanation felt less like learning something new and more like being handed a translation key for a language he already spoke fluently.

His mind began to automatically simulate movements: the pivot of a hip, the subtle shift of weight, and the precise moment to yield to gain momentum.

By the time he reached Stone, his comprehension had transcended mere understanding. It became instinct.

His body seemed to recognize the physical geometry of each stance before his eyes had even finished scanning the paragraph. It was a haunting, eerie sensation—muscle memory from an entirely different life rising up to greet the theory that had, apparently, always been reaching toward the same fundamental truths of violence, regardless of which world he inhabited.

’Is this a coincidence?’ he wondered, his pulse quickening. ’Or is combat itself a universal constant?’

’No matter the world, the bones break the same way... and the blood, of course, spills the same way.’

He pushed forward anyway, driven by a cocktail of genuine fascination and a deep, gnawing suspicion. He needed to prove himself wrong, and he needed to find the flaw.

Wind came next, all about unpredictable repositioning and deceptive footwork. It wasn’t about outmuscling the enemy; it was about denying them the ability to predict where your center of gravity would be half a second from now.

William found himself nodding along, a faint, unsettling smile touching his lips. It was like rereading his own old training manuals written by some anonymous scholar who had clearly been watching him from the shadows.

Then came Ash. Misdirection and false openings.

The deliberate, cruel art of presenting a weakness that was nothing more than a trap designed to lure an opponent into a fatal mistake. As he read about the psychology of feinting and how to exploit the split second of hope an opponent feels when they think they’ve found a gap, William actually laughed out loud.

It was a quiet, disbelieving sound that echoed off the lonely walls of his room at nearly one in the morning.

"Fuck me," he whispered to the shadows. "That’s almost exactly how I used to break them."

But it was Thorn that forced him to stop. He read the section once, then twice, his breathing becoming shallow.

The book’s description of Thorn was brutally honest about its cost. It was a close-quarters engagement built around a terrifying calculus: absorbing damage in exchange for guaranteed lethal openings.

It was a stance that assumed you were willing to take a broken rib or a punctured lung in exchange for the chance to drive a blade through your enemy’s throat. It was the art of trading blood for victory.

He stared at the text, his mind flashing to memories he usually kept buried behind iron doors: the wet crunch of cartilage, the hot spray of arterial blood across his face, the sickening feeling of a blade sliding between ribs.

He recognized the brutal mathematics of it, the grim reality that sometimes, to kill the monster, you had to become something equally monstrous.

"This is ridiculous," he muttered, his voice rough in the silence of the room.

His hands were shaking slightly as he flipped back several pages, his eyes scanning the text with desperate intensity, trying to find the contradiction he knew had to be there. "This should not be this easy..."

"This shouldn’t make sense."

He tested Ember first, standing up from his desk and running through the opening guard position in the cramped space of his room, weight shifted forward, shoulders low, and the specific coiled tension of a stance built for immediate, decisive aggression.

It felt right the moment he settled into it, disturbingly right, and without fully thinking it through, he shifted his weight into the first strike the stance implied.

His elbow caught the edge of his desk lamp on the follow-through, sending it clattering sideways in a shower of sparks and startled cursing, and William only barely managed to catch it before it hit the floor entirely, setting it back upright with the sheepish caution of a man who had just remembered, rather belatedly, that his room was not, in fact, a training ground.

"Right," he said, glancing around at the narrow walls, the overstuffed bookshelf, and the general lack of anything resembling adequate space for full range of motion. "Not doing that in here..."

He tried Tide next anyway, because apparently the lesson from the lamp hadn’t fully sunk in yet, and the looser, more flowing footwork the stance required sent him stumbling directly into his own bookshelf, three volumes tumbling free and landing with a series of unceremonious thuds against the floor.

"Okay," William said to nobody, stepping carefully over the fallen books. "The training ground..."

"I’m going to the training ground before I actually break something."

He gathered up the scattered books, straightened the lamp one final time, and made the sensible decision to relocate the rest of his experimentation somewhere his own furniture wasn’t at direct risk, but even as he made his way outside under the cool early morning air, still hours before his students were due to arrive, he found himself turning the book’s remaining pages over in his mind, cataloging what he’d absorbed with a kind of quiet, private disbelief.

Six stances. In a single night, mostly by accident, he’d developed a working, functional understanding of six formal sword stances that the book itself claimed took most knights years of dedicated practice to properly internalize, most swordsmen managing only two or three across an entire career.

He wasn’t foolish enough to think he’d truly mastered any of them yet, not in the deep, bone-level way that came from actual combat experience with each individual style. But the foundation, the instinctive shape of how each one moved and thought and reacted, was already sitting comfortably in his head like it had always belonged there.

"Guess decades of teaching people how to fight actually does something," he murmured, tucking the book under one arm as he crossed the quiet training ground, the morning light still soft and grey overhead. "Should’ve expected that, honestly."

He spent the better part of an hour alone on the empty field, running through each stance’s opening forms with careful, deliberate attention, adjusting his grip on Aetherion to suit whichever configuration paired best with whichever stance he was testing, and by the time the sun had properly climbed and the first of his students began trickling in for the morning session, William had built up a considerable, and entirely unearned, amount of quiet self-satisfaction about the whole thing.