For the mere handful of Source Points he had paid for the simulation, no matter how he looked at it, it was not enough to cover the cost of restarting.
It was possible that the Panel had shifted that cost onto the parallel timelines that should have existed within the instance.
Huff! Inhale!
Kong breathed fiercely, her skin changing from dark to crimson, like a cooked prawn. She had quite a few wounds on her body, yet very little blood was dripping from them.
This was the effect of that strange breathing technique.
After the Age of Oblivion, humanity's extraordinary paths generally advanced body and spirit side by side, pursuing a harmonious unity of form and spirit.
In the cities, physical evolution mainly relied on genetic modification; in the wastelands, it relied on contamination. The former was controllable, while the latter was random. The former's strength lay in its stability and control, though its effects were slow and its upper limit lower. The latter's advantage was a mad sprint at breakneck speed—thirty percent ordained by Heaven, seventy percent by oneself, and the remaining ninety percent entirely up to luck.
With good luck, one might merely grow a tail or horns. With bad luck, one would lose control completely.
Of those seven points out of a hundred, they referred to spiritual cultivation—using breathing and visualization to communicate with some wondrous power in the void, nourishing the spirit and controlling mutation.
There were many methods in the wastelands. Some had been explored by wasteland dwellers themselves, while others had been released into the wastelands by city folk to gather experimental data.
Kong was highly gifted. If not for the heavy contamination she had suffered upon awakening, she would have counted among the most exceptional geniuses even in the cities. Through a