1: Chapter 1: Limitless Growth of Abilities

(This book is a work of fiction. All characters, events, organizations, and locations are fictional. There is no connection to any real-world countries, institutions, or individuals. Any resemblance is purely coincidental.)

[Please keep your brain fresh and stored here before consumption]

(There are no other ability users now, and the Awakening has not yet begun.)

Li City, 10:00 PM.

Chen Mo returned to his rental apartment and tossed his gym bag on the floor. It was a thirty-square-meter room with a bed, a desk, and a computer on the desk.

As usual, he ate his post-workout meal: bread, a banana, and protein powder mixed with milk.

After finishing everything, he was preparing to wash up and go to sleep.

Then, he froze.

Something appeared before his eyes.

It wasn't an illusion.

A translucent system panel appeared out of thin air directly in his line of sight.

It was the size of a tablet, with a dark gray background and white text, every line clear.

Name: Chen Mo

Age: 22

Ability: Infinite Growth

Strength (Punch Power): 200kg

Mental Power: 1.2 (Normal person is 1)

He blinked, but the system panel remained.

He rubbed his eyes and patted his face; it was still there.

"What is going on..." he muttered, standing up and taking two steps in the room.

He reached out to touch it, but his fingers passed through; he touched nothing.

Chen Mo took a deep breath, sat back on the bed, and began to study the system panel carefully.

The name and age were correct.

He was 22, 180cm tall, and weighed 85kg, though the system panel didn't list his height and weight.

Then there was the ability: Infinite Growth.

He stared at these four words and tried to tap them with his finger.

The system panel popped up a line of small text:

"The body has no limits. Any form of Strength Training will produce permanent, stackable, positive effects.

This includes but is not limited to: strength, speed, endurance, strike resistance, flexibility, and Mental Energy.

The effects cannot regress. However, you can still become exhausted."

He read it three times.

The first time, he thought he had misread it.

The second time, he suspected that one of his students had added hallucinogens to his protein powder.

The third time, a chill went down his spine, followed by a surge of excitement from the base of his spine to his limbs.

Infinite. Irreversible.

He certainly knew what these two words meant.

Who hadn't fantasized about being a superman? Who hadn't thought when exhausted, "If only my muscles could grow infinitely"?

But those were just fantasies.

Four years of training made him know better than anyone: humans have limits.

Muscles reach a ceiling, joints wear out, and the body ages.

This is a program written into the genes; it cannot be changed.

And now, the system panel told him: "You can."

He continued reading.

Strength (Punch Power): 200kg.

There was a small note in parentheses: "The data is the peak force output of the current full-power strike."

200 kilograms of punch power.

Chen Mo pondered this.

A normal person's punch power is 50 to 80 kilograms, and professional fighters are over two or three hundred.

He had never measured his punch power; he was into Strength Training, not boxing.

Chen Mo practiced a relatively comprehensive direction of Strength Training, combining power and form.

Bench press: 150kg.

Squat: 240kg.

Deadlift: 260kg.

These numbers were indeed at the level of a strong man in an ordinary gym.

But this 200kg punch power still surprised him a bit.

"It's probably because of my foundation in strength," he muttered to himself. "If I practice punching techniques specifically in the future, this number should rise quite a bit."

Mental Power: 1.2 (Normal person is 1).

The explanation was very vague: it affects pain resistance, endurance, concentration, etc.

Chen Mo thought for a long time; it probably meant he could endure a bit more than the average person.

After four years of systematic fitness, his tolerance for soreness and fatigue was indeed stronger than that of ordinary people.

The system panel showed no status.

He fiddled with it for a while and found it could only be collapsed or closed. The only interactive point was "Infinite Growth," which would pop up that line of explanation.

No tasks, no progress bars, no shop.

Simple, clean, silent.

Chen Mo sat for a while, countless thoughts running through his mind.

One of them was: Is this world still the world he thought it was?

Did the appearance of the system panel mean...

He didn't continue that line of thought.

But another idea bubbled up like bubbles in boiling water, impossible to suppress.

Go test the ability on the system panel.

Go now.

Pull-ups are the litmus test for upper body strength and endurance, and they were also one of the first Strength Training exercises he encountered.

With his weight of 85kg and a level of 15 reps, he was not bad among ordinary people, but he was far from the masters of street workout who could easily do twenty or thirty.

He walked to the horizontal bar on the door frame.

He took a deep breath, jumped up, and grabbed the bar.

The first one was easy. The second was easy. The third, the fourth, the fifth...

By the tenth, his condition was about the same as usual.

At the eleventh, it started to get difficult.

At the twelfth, his latissimus dorsi was engorged and swelling, and there was a slight soreness in the posterior deltoids.

At the thirteenth, his breathing began to get heavy.

At the fourteenth, his muscles were sore and weak.

According to past experience, he should have stopped at this step.

If he continued to pull, his form would break, the risk to his shoulder joints would increase, and the lactic acid accumulation would make the recovery period for the next two days extra difficult.

But he didn't stop today.

Because from the eleventh onwards, he felt something different.

He couldn't say what it was.

The soreness was still there, the fatigue was still there.

But deep within the muscles, there was a faint, tingling, itching sensation, like countless needle tips gently probing.

Tense, but not out of control; painful, but with clear boundaries.

The fifteenth.

The fifteenth pull-up, which should have required all his effort to pull up, he actually pulled until his chest touched the bar.

Chen Mo was stunned, and then he tried the sixteenth.

It went up.

His arms were shaking, his whole body like a rubber band stretched to the limit.

And he could feel that his muscles hadn't reached the point of collapse.

The soreness and numbness in his forearms were fading at an almost imperceptible speed, and the muscles around his shoulder blades were redistributing the load.

The seventeenth.

He gritted his teeth and pulled his chin over the horizontal bar. The movement was clearly not as clean and crisp as the first few, and his body swayed slightly, but it went up—a complete, standard pull-up.

Then he let go.

It wasn't that he suddenly lost strength and fell; it was his judgment that he should stop there.

This was an instinct; anyone who has pushed their limits knows when they can do one more.

Chen Mo was confident in this instinct.

Standing on the ground, he gasped for air, his arms hanging at his sides, trembling slightly.

But the soreness was significantly reduced compared to before.

He looked down at his arms.

The pump in his muscles was still full, his veins were still bulging, but what came from deep inside was not the excruciating pain that made it impossible to lift, but a warm, dull sense of operation.

He could even feel that warmth transporting something deep into the muscle fibers, repairing, reconstructing, and then strengthening.

He could really feel it.

His body was already telling him.

Chen Mo stood under the horizontal bar, his breathing calming down bit by bit.

From the time he started doing pull-ups until now, it had been no more than two minutes.

Two minutes ago, he thought he was just a fitness coach who trained well.

Now.

He stood in this thirty-square-meter rental room, shirtless, sweat dripping down his neck, his heart thumping against his sternum.

He tried to keep his expression calm, but the excitement surging from the base of his spine mixed with his heartbeat, forcing him to press his right hand against his chest, as if that could press back what was about to jump out.

Infinite Growth.

As long as he exercised, he could be stronger forever.

For someone who had trained for four years, these two sentences were heavier than any fantasy.

He knew clearly what a normal person's progress trajectory looked like, so he clearly knew that the gap between the fifteenth and seventeenth pull-ups was not two months; it was a wall.

And he had just pushed that wall away.

Chen Mo stood there for a long time.

When the sweat cooled, he realized one thing: he was hungry.

He felt his stomach had been hollowed out.

The post-workout meal had just been eaten, and now it was all digested.

His body was recovering at an eerie speed, and the price was an equally huge energy consumption.

He had no System shop, only a normal digestive System.

The energy consumed for strengthening all had to come from this mouth.

He opened the refrigerator and took out everything he could eat.

He stuffed cold chicken directly into his mouth, broke the bread in half, and swallowed it after chewing four times.

In twenty minutes, Chen Mo swept through the refrigerator's stock.

He poured half a bottle of ice water again before he felt like a living person.

He leaned back on the chair and closed his eyes.

What happened in the past hour had blown up part of the foundation of his twenty-two-year worldview.

He planned to start a systematic test tomorrow.

At the same time, he must not be ostentatious, go to work as usual, and not show abilities that exceed cognition to the outside world.

Did only he have the system panel?

Was the world still the same world as before?

There were no answers to these questions tonight, and he was not in a hurry to get them.

The key was only one thing: the system panel was real.

The effect was real.

The infinite was real.

Understanding these three "reals," everything else would come in time.

There was a piece of peeling paint on the ceiling.

He stared at it and suddenly smiled.

Even though everything was as usual, everything was different.

The neon lights outside the window rippled on the glass, and occasionally the sound of cars drove by in the distance.

This night was as quiet as usual, but there was something hidden in the silence.

He was also the first person in this world, at least within his knowledge, to know that he could grow infinitely.

And this world had just begun.