Monster

Xu Wuyi stood in the training room for a long time.

Morning light streamed in through the window, falling across the training mat at his feet and revealing every mark stamped into it with perfect clarity.

The marks varied in depth, crisscrossing one another like some kind of script only he could read, recording every exertion of force over the past year, every turn, every repeated refinement from unfamiliarity to mastery.

He lowered his head to look at those marks and suddenly remembered something.

Over the past year, he had taken apart and optimized every part of his body.

The arrangement of his muscle fibers, the microscopic structure of his bones, the distribution network of his blood vessels and meridians, the strengthening of his internal organs, the neural transmission pathways in his brain.

Every part had cost him enormous time and effort. Every part had been pushed to the utmost limit of what he could achieve at the time.

But those optimizations had been done separately.

He had optimized his muscles first. Once they had fully adapted, he optimized his bones. Once his bones had adapted, he optimized his blood vessels and meridians.

One after another, like assembling a precision machine—polishing each component to perfection first, then putting them together.

The parts truly were excellent. Taken out individually, every single one was perfect.

But once assembled together, were they truly perfect?

Xu Wuyi closed his eyes, and his awareness sank into his body.

The power of Order flowed through his entire body, from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet, from his skin to his marrow. Every cell appeared distinctly within his perception.

This time, he did not focus on any one part. Instead, he raised the scope of his perception and examined his body from