Arena Wager Battle

Seven days passed in the blink of an eye.

Inside the vast meat grinder of the Military Floating Land, seven days were enough to utterly shatter a recruit's sanity—but also enough to rough-forge a chunk of raw iron into a deadly killing weapon.

Late at night, in the training room beside the barracks.

Jiang Yue, stripped to the waist, was performing high-frequency deep squats and thrust punches with a savage, explosive intensity.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

Each punch that slammed into the high-density alloy sandbag used for testing erupted with a dull, thunderous roar like a solid cannonball detonating.

The entire shockproof floor of the training room trembled faintly with every movement.

But what had truly driven his transformation over these seven days, as if he had been reborn, was the upgraded trait [Gluttony]!

In these seven days, Jiang Yue had nearly burned through the 100 points the military had awarded him, plus the extra 100 points the One-Eye instructor had gifted him.

A full two hundred military merit points!

For any other recruit, that fortune would have been enough to stretch carefully for months.

But Jiang Yue had spent it all in just seven days, exchanging every point for exotic beast meat saturated with frenzied blood energy.

Black Scale Leopard loin, Iron-Armored Ox marrow, and even a small piece of mildly toxic Venom-Sting Python meat, a luxury he'd splurged on.

If an ordinary quasi-martial artist ate like this, they would have exploded from the energy overload.

But the upgraded [Gluttony] displayed a digestive capacity that bordered on tyrannical.

No matter how violent or hard-to-digest the energy, once it entered his stomach, it was instantly crushed, impurities stripped away, and converted one hundred percent into the purest life foundation!

The excess energy his body couldn't absorb immediately was stubbornly stored in his stomach space by [Gluttony]'s properties, becoming the fuel for his frantic physical tempering in the Gravity Chamber!

"Hah—"

Jiang Yue abruptly stopped moving and exhaled a long, scorching white breath.

In the cold air of the Gravity Chamber, the stream shot out like a straight arrow, traveling over three feet before slowly dissipating.

He walked over to the Combat Power Tester beside him, bent his legs slightly, and settled into a stable stance.

No flashy power-up needed. Jiang Yue's right arm was like a fully drawn great bow; his spine crackled in a rapid series of pops like exploding beans. His fist tore through the air with a piercing sonic boom and slammed into the Force Measurement Target!

The target let out a pained mechanical groan, the red numbers on the screen jumping wildly before freezing on a spine-tingling figure:

[Instant Burst Punch Force: 718 KG!]

Staring at the blood-red number on the screen, Jiang Yue withdrew his fist, casually wiped the sweat from his forehead, and a sharp glint flashed deep in his dark eyes.

"718 kilograms..."

Seven days ago, when he'd first stepped out of the Medical Pod after completing gene optimization, his strength had barely crossed the 500-kilogram threshold of a quasi-martial artist.

In just seven days and nights of frenzied eating and heavy-pressure body forging, his strength had been forcibly boosted by over two hundred kilograms!

If this rate of progress got out, it would send chills through the entire Recruit Camp.

After all, in his first ten days in camp, he'd gone from a bottom-tier 285 kilograms to nearly 500—already absurd.

And martial arts training only gets harder the further you go!

The difficulty of jumping from 500 to 700 kilograms was several times greater than before!

An ordinary recruit, even after injecting Gene Enhancement Serum, would need at least two or three months of slow, painstaking effort to temper their blood energy and cross that 200-kilogram gap.

But Jiang Yue had done it.

"The expansion of the Gene Lock, plus [Gluttony]'s one-hundred-percent absorption ignoring drug resistance... stacked together, it's like terrifying force-fed evolution."

Jiang Yue looked down at his hands.

This seven-day explosive surge hadn't left his body feeling the slightest bit hollow.

On the contrary, his physical density had become even more alarming.

He squeezed his forearm hard.

The skin, which had only been a dull, dark cyan, now faintly showed a rough texture like aged cowhide mixed with metal fibers.

When he pressed a finger into it, he could feel an extremely strong damping rebound, as if a dense polymer armor lay hidden beneath the skin.

This was the core of the first stage of martial arts—[Skin Membrane]!

With over 700 kilograms of violent destructive power, if he hadn't tempered a tough enough skin membrane to contain that force, the moment he threw that punch, the recoil would have shattered his own finger bones and arm muscles.

"At this rate, it won't be long before I truly touch the 1,000-kilogram threshold. Once the skin membrane fully forms and channels this power perfectly through my whole body, that's when I'll truly step into the Skin Tempering realm!"

Jiang Yue walked to the side, unscrewed his water bottle, and gulped down a mouthful of salted water.

Thirteen days remained until the monthly assessment set by the One-Eye instructor.

To break into the top five hundred in that assessment, where the elimination rate was even more brutal, the competition would be fierce.

"Still not enough resources..."

Jiang Yue glanced at the single-digit military merit points left on his terminal and frowned slightly.

The points the instructor had given him were already completely eaten up. To keep pushing forward in the remaining thirteen days, he had to get more resources.

But there was no better option at the moment. Jiang Yue casually grabbed the black training uniform draped over the bench, pulled it on, turned around, and walked out of the Gravity Chamber.

The corridor's motion-sensor lights seemed dim in the dead of night. Jiang Yue's footsteps were steady and silent.

Late that night, the high-intensity extra training finally came to an end.

Jiang Yue dragged his faintly burning, formidable body, draped in the black training uniform, and stepped through a floor of cold moonlight as he headed back to the barracks to rest.

His mind was still churning over where to scrounge up some points to fill the bottomless pit that was Gluttony.

Just then, a figure suddenly emerged from the metal corner ahead.

"Brother Jiang! Just finished extra training?"

The newcomer was none other than Xu Bo.

This kid had only scraped by with a middling-to-low score in the previous gravity exam, failing to qualify for the Gene Enhancement Serum injection. But his razor-sharp information-gathering skills and smooth, adaptable personality had let him thrive in the Recruit Camp, making him something of a know-it-all.

"Mm." Jiang Yue stopped, giving him a faint glance.

Xu Bo looked around, then leaned in mysteriously, lowering his voice. "Brother Jiang, tonight in the Grey Zone over at the Veteran Barracks Area, something big is about to go down!"

Hearing this, Jiang Yue's usually calm eyes flickered slightly.

He hadn't been to the Gambling Arena these past few days—participating required a certain cost, and since he'd been in a rapid growth phase earlier, he naturally wouldn't waste time and energy on gambling.

"What big thing?" Jiang Yue asked with mild interest.

"Lately, there's been this recruit acting like a madman, spending every day at the Gambling Arena over in the veteran section."

Xu Bo swallowed hard, his tone laced with both shock and excitement. "He's won streak after streak on bets like the Thousand-Jin Stake and Extreme Endurance Training! He's practically stripped several veterans down to their underwear, raking it in hand over fist."

"Veterans don't have much fat to begin with. Having some green recruit bleed them dry like that has stirred up a ton of resentment."

"A good chunk of the veteran crowd is seriously pissed off. They feel like a rookie is shitting on their heads and making them lose face."

"So tonight, a few tough guys took the lead and issued a challenge. No more endurance or pressure tests—they're settling it directly with a ring match!"