Ten-Day Assessment

Three full days had passed since that earth-shattering one-punch kill.

Under the crushing weight of Military Floating Land No. 17, time seemed to stretch infinitely.

But in these three days, Jiang Yue had made no further moves.

He hadn't set foot in the veteran barracks' betting arena even once.

The incident that night—disabling a veteran's mechanical prosthetic and raking in a mountain of points—had been deliberately kept low-key by him, but it had definitely put his name on the radar in veteran circles.

If he went back now, what awaited him wouldn't be easy prey delivered to his doorstep, but an endless stream of probing and attrition battles.

The Federation didn't keep idlers, and it certainly didn't lack battle-hardened veterans.

For now, his top priority was turning the massive resources he'd won into absolute strength, not fighting for momentary pride.

So Jiang Yue vanished into a dead loop of "training ground, cafeteria, dormitory."

Aside from daytime drills, it was nothing but frantic eating.

Evening. Third floor of the new recruit cafeteria.

Jiang Yue sat in a corner with an alloy tray bigger than a washbasin, piled high with exotic beast meat that reeked of a pungent, bloody stench. The meat was as coarse as steel wire, but the blood and qi energy packed inside was violently explosive.

Not far away, a few new recruits were pinching their noses, struggling to swallow palm-sized pieces of the same meat.

One of them had barely taken two bites when his face flushed crimson and twin streams of bright red blood shot from his nostrils. Panicked, he dropped into a crude horse stance on the spot, trying to use his shoddy stance technique to digest the rampaging blood and qi in his body.

For ordinary new recruits, even a small piece of high-grade exotic beast meat required standing in a stance and coordinating with breathing techniques to digest for a while; otherwise, the result was a deficiency that couldn't handle the supplement, with blood and qi surging through the meridians and causing damage.

But Jiang Yue was different.

Expressionless, he grabbed a large chunk of Black Scale Leopard meat, barely bothering to chew, and swallowed it like a wild beast straight into his stomach.

[Action: Eating]—Keyword [Food Digestion] activated!

The moment the meat hit his stomach, a dull roar like a high-pressure engine rumbling echoed faintly from Jiang Yue's abdominal cavity.

His stomach had turned into a terrifying flesh-and-blood furnace. Hyperactive gastric acid and ferocious intestinal peristalsis instantly pulverized the coarse meat into paste!

Violent impurities were mercilessly stripped away and excreted, while the purest, scalding-hot blood energy was forcibly pumped out of his stomach, surging wildly through his blood vessels to every limb and bone.

A dangerous dark red began to spread across Jiang Yue's skin, and even the air he exhaled carried scorching heat.

For an ordinary person, their blood vessels would have burst by now.

But Jiang Yue suddenly stood up and strode toward the training ground.

"Come on."

He slammed his fist into a high-density alloy sandbag used for testing. The powerful recoil shot back up his arm through his finger bones.

[Action: Body Forging]—Keyword [Tough Skin] triggered!

A flash of ruthlessness crossed Jiang Yue's eyes. Instead of unloading the force, he actively leaned into the recoil.

He treated himself like a red-hot piece of raw iron, and the alloy sandbag and gravity were the forging hammer!

Boom! Boom! Boom!

The dull sound of flesh colliding echoed across the training ground.

Jiang Yue, in a near-self-destructive frenzy, used his fists, elbows, shoulders and back, even his chest, to smash violently into the hard alloy pillars.

Every brutal collision squeezed every last shred of potential from his body.

The fixed absorption and conversion efficiency boosted by the [Tough Skin] keyword now showed its heaven-defying effect.

The originally wild and chaotic blood energy of the exotic beast, pumped from his stomach, was forcibly "hammered" deep into his dermis under the high pressure of the impacts.

His skin, in a constant cycle of tearing and regeneration, greedily devoured this energy, locking it tightly beneath the surface and turning it into a denser defensive layer.

He trained relentlessly until late into the night.

When Jiang Yue finally stopped, he looked like he'd just been pulled out of a pool of blood.

Massive tears ran through his muscle fibers; the capillaries under his skin had burst from absorbing too much shock. Fine beads of blood seeped from his pores, dyeing his training uniform into a dark red, hardened shell.

Extreme exhaustion and a tearing, agonizing pain crashed against his nerves like a tidal wave.

For anyone with even slightly weaker willpower, they'd probably be screaming in agony and passing out by now.

But Jiang Yue just dragged his broken body with perfect calm back to the dormitory, collapsed heavily onto the hard wooden bed, and closed his eyes.

[Action: Sleeping]—Keyword [Calm Spirit] instantly triggered!

No tossing and turning, no groaning from pain.

In just one second, Jiang Yue's brainwaves plummeted to an extremely low frequency, dropping straight into the deepest absolute sleep.

All the noise of the outside world, the pain of his torn flesh, the fatigue of his mind—all ceased in that moment.

Silence filled the dormitory.

The [Smooth Breath] keyword took over his breathing rhythm in his subconscious. Jiang Yue's chest rose and fell in an extremely slow but long, steady rhythm.

All his physical energy consumption was no longer used to maintain the neural activity of his waking state; instead, it was one hundred percent diverted to cellular repair.

Within his slumbering body, a miracle was unfolding on a microscopic scale.

Severed capillaries were reconnected at lightning speed, torn muscle fibers, nourished by residual blood energy, healed and tightened once more, growing thicker and stronger than before.

The membrane covering his entire body, through repeated cycles of rupture and regeneration, was quietly increasing in density to an astonishing degree.

Severe internal injuries that would have required an ordinary person to lie in a medical pod for over ten days to recover were, within this body empowered by the panel's rules, mended in just a few short hours.

By the time he opened his eyes tomorrow, he would once again greet a new round of tempering at his peak condition.

The next morning, at dawn.

The sky remained a stifling, iron-gray.

On the central plaza, a dense sea of black figures stirred—over twenty thousand new recruits had already assembled in formation.

The G17 Region had conscripted a total of thirty thousand new soldiers in this great draft.

Yet, after merely ten days of hellish basic training since entering the camp, a full five thousand had already been eliminated!

Those who were weeded out—due to depleted stamina, broken will, or aggravated internal injuries—were silently dragged away in the dead of night. Based on the extent of their physical damage, they were either assigned to logistics or directly shipped off to harsh production planets to serve as the lowest tier of labor.

The brutal law of the jungle was enforced to its extreme on this Floating Land.

The more than twenty thousand people now standing on the plaza, though only ten days into training, had already had the softness of peacetime civilians thoroughly stripped from their eyes. What remained was a sharp edge woven from numbness and ferocity—they had barely begun to take shape.

On the vast plaza, over twenty thousand people gathered, yet there was not a single whisper.

No complaints, no murmuring. The air was filled only with a suffocating, deathly stillness.

On the high platform, the one-eyed instructor in charge of this batch of recruits stood draped in a deep black military coat, his single eye glaring coldly down at the crowd below.

Jiang Yue stood like a pillar within the formation, waiting for his next announcement.

"Today," he thought, "should be the day of the ten-day assessment."

"I've made tremendous progress during this time. I wonder how I compare to the others..."