Three full days had passed since the punch that had shocked everyone and ended the fight in an instant.
Under the crushing pressure of Military Floating Land No. 17, time seemed to stretch without end.
Yet Jiang Yue had caused no further stir during those three days.
He had not visited the Gambling Arena in the Veteran Barracks Area even once.
He had tried to keep a low profile after wrecking a veteran's Mechanical Prosthetic and raking in Points that night, but the veterans had definitely taken notice.
If he went back now, he would not find easy prey waiting for him. He would face endless probes and a succession of opponents.
The Federation did not support idlers, and it had no shortage of battle-hardened veterans.
His priority now was to turn the vast resources he had won into real strength, not fight for a moment's pride.
Aside from the daytime drills, he did little but eat voraciously.
That evening, on the third floor of the recruits' Cafeteria.
Jiang Yue sat in a corner with an Alloy tray bigger than a washbasin. It was piled with pungent Exotic Beast Meat, tough as wire and packed with ferocious Blood Energy.
Not far away, several recruits pinched their noses as they struggled to swallow palm-sized portions of Exotic Beast Meat.
One had barely taken two bites when his face flushed and two streams of dark red blood burst from his nose. Panicking, he dropped into a horse stance and tried to digest the rampaging Blood Energy in his body with his clumsy stance training.
For an ordinary recruit, even a small piece of high-grade Exotic Beast Meat required time in a stance, paired with breathing exercises, to digest. Otherwise, the body could not bear the nourishment, and the surge of Blood Energy would damage the meridians.
But Jiang Yue was different.
Expressionless, he grabbed a large chunk of Black Scale Leopard meat and swallowed it like a beast, barely bothering to chew.
[Action: Eating] — entry [Food Digestion] activated!
The moment the meat hit his stomach, a muffled rumble like a high-pressure engine came from deep in his abdomen.
His stomach had become a terrifying furnace of flesh. Hyperactive acid and powerful contractions ground the tough meat to pulp in an instant!
Harsh impurities were stripped away and expelled without mercy, while the purest, scalding Blood Energy was pumped from his stomach and surged through his blood vessels into every corner of his body.
A dangerous dark red spread across Jiang Yue's skin. Even his breath carried a searing heat.
An ordinary person's blood vessels would already have burst.
But Jiang Yue sprang up and strode toward the training ground.
"Come on."
He slammed a fist into a high-density Alloy sandbag used for testing. The powerful recoil shot back through his knuckles and up his arm.
[Action: Body Forging] — entry [Tough Skin] triggered!
A ruthless glint flashed in Jiang Yue's eyes. Instead of using Force Unloading, he leaned into the recoil.
He treated himself as a piece of red-hot iron, with the Alloy sandbag and gravity as his forging hammers!
Boom! Boom! Boom!
The dull thuds of flesh striking metal echoed across the training ground.
With almost self-destructive ferocity, Jiang Yue drove his fists, elbows, shoulders, back, and even his chest against the hard Alloy pillars.
Every violent impact wrung another sliver of potential from his body.
The fixed boost to absorption and conversion granted by [Tough Skin] proved almost miraculous.
Under the pressure of those blows, the wild, chaotic Exotic Beast Blood Energy pumped from his stomach was hammered deep into his Skin Membrane.
As his skin tore and reformed again and again, it greedily absorbed that energy, locking it beneath the surface and turning it into a denser layer of defense.
He kept hammering away until late into the night.
When Jiang Yue finally stopped, he looked as though he had been pulled from a pool of blood.
Muscle fibers throughout his body had torn, and capillaries beneath his skin had ruptured under the repeated shocks. Fine beads of blood seeped from his pores, staining his Training Uniform into a dark red shell.
Overwhelming exhaustion and tearing pain battered his Nerves like waves.
Anyone with even slightly less resolve would have been screaming before passing out.
Jiang Yue merely dragged his battered body back to the dormitory and collapsed onto the hard wooden bed.
He closed his eyes.
[Action: Sleeping] — entry [Calm Spirit] activated instantly!
He did not toss or turn. He did not groan from the pain.
In a single second, Jiang Yue's brain waves dropped straight to an extremely low frequency, and he plunged into the deepest sleep.
The noise outside, the agony of torn flesh, and his mental exhaustion all fell away.
The dormitory was silent.
[Smooth Breath] took over his breathing beneath the threshold of consciousness. Jiang Yue's chest rose and fell in slow, deep rhythms.
None of his energy was spent keeping his waking mind running. Every bit of it went toward repairing his cells.
Inside his sleeping body, a miracle unfolded on a microscopic scale.
Severed capillaries reconnected at speed. Torn muscle fibers healed and tightened under the nourishment of the Blood Energy that remained, growing thicker than before.
The Skin Membrane covering his body quietly gained astonishing density through each cycle of destruction and renewal.
Severe internal injuries that would keep an ordinary person in a Medical Pod for more than ten days needed only a few hours in this body, reinforced by the panel's rules.
When he opened his eyes tomorrow, he would be back at full strength, ready for another round of tempering.
The next morning.
The sky was still an oppressive iron gray.
Central Plaza was a sea of heads. More than twenty thousand recruits had assembled in Square Formation.
The G17 Region had recruited thirty thousand people during this mass enlistment.
Yet the first ten days of hellish basic drills alone had already eliminated five thousand!
Those eliminated by exhaustion, broken resolve, or old injuries had all been quietly dragged away at night. Depending on how badly their bodies were damaged, they were assigned to logistics or sent straight to harsh production planets as bottom-rung laborers.
The brutal law of the jungle ruled this Floating Land in full.
The more than twenty thousand who remained in the plaza had trained for only ten days, but the softness of civilians from peaceful times had been stripped from their eyes. In its place was a hard edge, equal parts numbness and savagery. They were beginning to look like soldiers.
More than twenty thousand people stood in the vast plaza, yet not a whisper could be heard.
There were no complaints, no murmured conversations. Only a suffocating stillness hung in the air.
On the raised platform, One-Eye, the instructor in charge of this batch of recruits, wore a black military greatcoat. His single eye swept coldly over the crowd below.
Jiang Yue stood motionless in his Square Formation, waiting for One-Eye's announcement.
Today should be the day of the ten-day trial.
I've made tremendous progress, but I wonder how I compare with the others...
Before you continue