Rapid Progress

Time flew.

Only three days remained until the first ten-day assessment of the recruit camp.

For the tens of thousands of recruits on Floating Continent 17, these five days had been a hell with no room to breathe.

One-Eye had shed the pretense of routine physical training and brought out the genuine high-pressure body-tempering methods of the interstellar military.

[Gravity Chamber], [Electric Shock Alley], [Puppet Combat].

Each training course had its own scoring points, and those who met the standards would receive merit rewards.

After five days, the medical ward was completely overflowing.

Nearly a thousand people, their foundations damaged or their spirits broken, had voluntarily pressed the surrender button, stripped of their military status and sent ahead to the sunless Mining Star.

A thick stench of blood and despair hung over the entire recruit camp.

But amid this suffocating elimination rate, Jiang Yue survived.

The high-pressure training brought not only exhaustion and mental strain; the physical improvement was also tangible.

At five in the morning, the barracks lights flicked on as usual.

Li Tai crawled out of his capsule pod like a zombie.

He had shrunk significantly, his eyes sunken and bloodshot.

If not for the Muscle Relaxant Spray keeping him going every day, he would have been crippled in the Gravity Chamber long ago.

He turned his stiff neck and looked to the side.

Jiang Yue was calmly pulling on his gray training uniform.

His eyes were clear, his breathing long and steady.

His joints made no grating or stiff sounds as he moved.

"You bastard..."

Li Tai's voice carried a deep, hollow numbness. "Are you secretly some kind of cyborg in human skin?"

Over these five days, Li Tai had watched Jiang Yue squat in the Gravity Chamber until blood seeped from his legs, get electrocuted black in Electric Shock Alley, and get pounded into the ground by Iron-Skin Puppets in Puppet Combat.

Yet every morning when he woke up, the hidden injuries on Jiang Yue's body had miraculously scabbed over and faded.

That originally thin, scrawny flesh seemed to be inflating, visibly thickening and toughening before his eyes.

Li Tai didn't understand.

He couldn't see how, in the dead of night, the [Calm Spirit] trait forcibly severed pain signals in Jiang Yue's brain, using just four hours of deep sleep to achieve cellular regeneration that would take ordinary people over ten hours.

He also couldn't see how, during the day's hellish training, the [Tough Skin] trait repeatedly deflected external pressure.

The fragile outer layer of epidermis had already shed, replaced by an extremely thin, yet dense, rubber-like dark blue fascia.

Over these five days, Jiang Yue hadn't topped any single training course.

He never fought for first place, but he always managed to last until two batches after the passing line before collapsing.

This "can't be killed, can't be worn down" performance naturally caught the instructors' attention.

The military didn't skimp on rewards.

The passing lines and endurance records for each individual training course were converted into basic military merits.

In these five days, Jiang Yue had steadily earned 5 to 10 points each day.

Over five days, he had accumulated a total of thirty-five points.

On this floating continent, where even a sip of clean water had to be carefully budgeted, this was a considerable fortune.

But Jiang Yue was a madman with no concept of saving.

Every day at noon, he would show up on time at the B-zone cafeteria, unwaveringly spending 5 points for the most basic serving of bone-in exotic beast meat.

Five days, 5 points each day.

A full twenty-five points, all turned into high-energy flesh and blood, stuffed into his stomach.

The [Food Digestion] trait ran at full throttle.

Jiang Yue went from wolfing it down to chewing slowly and deliberately.

His stomach acid concentration and intestinal absorption rate kept evolving under the nourishment of the meat. Every last shred of energy was squeezed from each bite, feeding back into his desperately hungry skin and bones.

Food supplementation and Body Forging formed a perfectly closed positive loop.

By now.

Jiang Yue stood before the metal mirror in the washing area.

The youth in the mirror had shoulders a full size broader.

The muscle lines on his back were sharp as if carved by knife and axe. With each rise and fall of his breath, a faint, fierce pressure seeped through from beneath his skin.

The proficiency of [Action: Body Forging] had skyrocketed. Although no new trait had been unlocked, the absorption and conversion rate of [Tough Skin] had quietly climbed from the initial 30% to 39%.

He could clearly feel that his punching power had definitely broken through the five-hundred-kilogram mark.

Such progress could only be called lightning-fast!

"Jiang Yue."

A lowered voice came from behind him.

Jiang Yue turned around. It was Xu Bo, sporting two heavy dark circles under his eyes.

Over these five days, Xu Bo's constitution had been too poor. He'd nearly been eliminated several times, and had only barely scraped by thanks to Jiang Yue silently sharing part of his burden during group training.

In return, Xu Bo had used his data terminal to perform extremely rigorous micro-corrections on every single one of Jiang Yue's power-generation movements.

"Looking for me?"

Jiang Yue asked.

Xu Bo shot a wary glance around them, then leaned half a step closer and shook the old data terminal in his hand. Behind his lenses, his eyes burned with bloodshot excitement.

"The model ran through."

Xu Bo lowered his voice, his tone urgent. "Over these five days, I collected the breathing frequency and muscle contraction waveforms from that one-legged veteran's 'Thousand-Jin Stake' one hundred and twenty times. I refined it into a formula."

He flipped the terminal screen around. On it was an extremely complex set of rhythmic curves.

"As long as you breathe and tense your muscles in strict accordance with this waveform, you can achieve perfect resonance with the hydraulic pillar. At the very least, you can shed forty percent of the pillar's dead weight!"

Jiang Yue's gaze landed on that curve. In an instant, it was etched into his mind.

The blessing brought by the [Smooth Breath] entry gave him a level of control ordinary people could hardly reach.

With just a single glance, his chest instinctively began to simulate that breathing rhythm.

"Tonight, there's a big betting pool in the veteran barracks."

Xu Bo swallowed a mouthful of saliva. "Butcher Zhang is running the bank himself. And that one-legged veteran has won three days straight. He'll definitely be in the ring again tonight. New recruits betting against veterans—the odds have already been driven to a staggering one-to-ten."

Jiang Yue withdrew his gaze and looked down at his wristband.

[Current Balance: 10 points.]

This was the last card he had left, deliberately saved over these five days, not spent on trading for meat to eat.

But these ten points were no longer enough if he went to District B to buy the cheapest kind of bone-in meat chunks as usual.

Jiang Yue was very clear on his current physical condition.

After five days of brutal squeezing, his [Skin Tempering] had hit a bottleneck.

The meager energy provided by ordinary beast meat chunks was insufficient to support any greater progress in the final three days.

He needed higher-grade resources.

He needed the fierce beast's vital blood, brimming with violent energy, or even a military-controlled basic gene serum.

And those cost at least a hundred points.

There was absolutely no way to scrape that together through routine training.

"Are you going?"

Xu Bo looked at Jiang Yue nervously. "If you don't go, I'll have wasted these past few days. This formula can only be perfectly executed by you."

Jiang Yue raised his head.

In his eyes, which had been as calm as still water, a flame of utterly rational madness now kindled.

Five days of lying low and taking hits. Five days of scraping together every last point. It wasn't to become an ordinary grunt struggling on the edge of passing.

It was to solidify his foundation, so he could gamble on a way out.

He clenched his right fist.

The knuckles beneath his dark-green skin membrane let out a rapid series of crackling sounds, like popping beans.

"Tonight, after lights out."

Jiang Yue walked past Xu Bo, heading for the barracks door. His cold voice echoed through the corridor.

"Bring the terminal. Let's go probe that Thousand-Jin Stake again."