Afghanistan's night wind carried coarse grit against heavily weathered stone pillars, producing a rasping, grinding hiss.
The temperature plummeted after sunset. The difference between day and night turned the desert into a natural cooling chamber.
Wrapped in the silver Optical Camouflage Medical Blanket, Yang Ming moved through the gravel desert on the outskirts of the Hindu Kush Mountains like a ghost without substance.
After confirming that there were no U.S. Army drone patrol routes or Ten Rings infrared detection devices within ten kilometers, he stopped and chose a hollow enclosed on three sides by towering rock walls.
This place was secluded enough.
He pulled off the camouflage blanket, folded it, and returned it to his Storage Ring. Yang Ming removed his dark black windproof coat, followed by his white coat and shirt. The night wind brushed his bare upper body, and fine goose bumps quickly rose across his skin.
Rather than rush into action, he sat cross-legged on the cold sand, closed his eyes, and began sorting through the enormous flood of information that had appeared in his mind out of nowhere.
Taijutsu Secret Technique: Eight Gates.
To Yang Ming, who had been an attending surgeon in his previous life, this combat technique from another world was essentially an utterly insane, inhuman experiment in physiological overload.
The human body was a precision machine. To keep it from burning itself out with the energy it generated, the cerebral cortex imposed extremely strict safety thresholds.
During everyday activities, an ordinary person could only harness around twenty percent of the strength in their muscle fibers.
Once that limit was exceeded, the brain forcibly cut off nerve impulses, resulting in muscle weakness or severe pain. This prevented excessively contracting muscles from tearing bones apart.
What the Eight Gates did was forcibly dismantle those safety