14: Chapter 14 Mental Breakthrough

The next morning, just past ten o'clock.

Chen Mo summoned the system panel.

Name: Chen Mo

Age: 22

Ability: Infinite Growth

Fist Strength: 543kg

Mental Power: 1.9

This number had not moved for a long time.

Since acquiring his ability, his Fist Strength had soared from 200 kilograms to 543 kilograms, more than doubling.

However, the Mental Power attribute had only increased from 1.2 to 1.9.

Moreover, in the past few days, no matter how hard or how long he trained, the Mental Power value remained stuck at 1.9, as if locked by something.

Yet, it didn't feel like a stagnation.

It was a kind of indescribable brewing.

He had a premonition.

When his Mental Power reached a Breakthrough to 2.0, something would happen.

This feeling had no basis; there were no instructions on the system panel, and he had no precedents to refer to.

He closed his eyes and began the routine step after completing his daily training: body perception.

This was a new habit he had developed since gaining his ability.

After his Mental Power increased, his perception of the interior of his body became much sharper.

Before, he could only vaguely feel which muscle was sore or which tendon was tight, but now he could focus his attention precisely on a single muscle fiber and faintly feel its natural tremors in a relaxed state.

He started from the soles of his feet and slowly felt his way up.

The flexor muscles of his toes, the fascia of his soles, and the ligaments around his ankles were all normal.

The gastrocnemius and soleus muscles on the back of his calves felt slightly sore and swollen; the muscle fibers were contracting and relaxing at an extremely tiny amplitude, with warmth repairing the micro-injuries left behind from his sprint just now.

The flow of synovial fluid in his knee joints was smooth, with no sensation of friction.

The quadriceps on the front of his thighs were full and powerful, with every muscle fiber arranged neatly like a bundle of precision steel cables.

Then, he felt his rectus abdominis; this muscle had been repeatedly pushed during his crunches on the tree trunk earlier and was now recovering rapidly.

It wasn't truly seeing with his eyes, but a sensory signal coming from inside the muscles.

This signal used to be blurry and dim, but now it was becoming clearer and clearer, and the sense of imagery was getting stronger.

He tried focusing his attention on an even smaller unit—not a single fiber, but the smallest contractile unit within a bundle of fibers.

He had studied histology; in textbooks, that thing was called a sarcomere.

But in his perception, it was just a tiny, rhythmically contracting node, not clearly perceived.

He only knew that countless such nodes arranged together constituted the muscle he knew.

Would this level of perception turn into something clearer when his Mental Power reached a higher value?

What if he went a step further?

With a Mental Power Breakthrough to 2.0, would he be able to see more clearly?

Not just his own muscles; perhaps he could perceive even subtler things in the outside world—the sense of direction of the wind, the tiny vibrations of the ground.

He even suspected that if he went deeper, what he might "see" wouldn't just be muscles, but cells, blood, and bone marrow.

He made a judgment about his body and then completely rearranged his schedule for the afternoon.

Two o'clock in the afternoon.

Chen Mo shouldered a larger-than-usual hiking backpack to go mountain climbing.

Everything in the bag was replaced with higher-calorie sugar-oil mixtures: two bottles of peanut oil, three bags of glucose powder, and a large amount of chocolate and compressed biscuits.

Two large water bottles were tucked into the side pockets of the backpack, each liter of water pre-mixed with glucose powder.

All energy expenditure today would be replenished by these high-density nutritional products he carried; every bite was pure energy.

The training content was not the regular cycle either.

His goal for today was very clear: to apply continuous pressure to his Mental Power.

Starting with a weighted long-distance run.

He used climbing ropes and a rigid weighted backboard to secure the large rock, estimated to weigh about two hundred kilograms, onto his back, and ran laps around the open ground with his back hunched; each lap was about 500 meters.

The rock pressed onto his back and shoulders; with every step he landed, the impact force traveled from the soles of his feet to his knees, and then from his knees to his spine, while the rock on his spine reflected the pressure back, causing every bone in his body to bear a double load.

Weighted running was different from ordinary endurance running; it required keeping the spine stable and the core tight throughout, without a single half-second of relaxation.

Once his waist collapsed, the rock would slide to one side.

Once his footsteps became chaotic, he would sprain something.

This continuous, uninterrupted sense of tension gripped his Mental Power tightly.

After one lap, he felt tired, and his heartbeat began to accelerate.

He did not stop.

By the fifth lap, his legs began to tremble, his attention began to scatter, and his brain was protesting.

His brain had never operated for so long under such high-intensity continuous output.

Previously, after strength training, there would be set intervals, with at least a minute or two of buffer time.

Now the buffer was removed, replaced by an entire stretch of time without giving himself any rest.

By the time he reached the tenth lap, he suddenly felt a strange clarity.

It wasn't that he was sleepy.

Nor was it that he was no longer tired.

His body was still operating under overload, and pain signals from his legs were constantly being transmitted to his brain, but the pain sensation became clear rather than chaotic.

It was like tuning the same radio from a channel with only static to the right frequency; the volume didn't decrease, but the crackling noises were gone.

In an instant, there was a feeling of something cracking open from inside his forehead.

His perception suddenly extended outward.

He felt the direction of the wind turning at the tip of every branch, clearly sensing the flow of the wind.

He could hear the friction of wild grass being slightly pressed down by the airflow tens of meters away, and the tiny sound of a small animal placing its claws on another tree trunk.

Then, all of this receded back into his body like a retreating tide.

He could clearly see his muscles, blood, and bones.

The sliding of every tendon, the path of every fascia transmitting force between different muscle bundles.

The path of the Meridians, the pulsation of blood vessels, and the alveoli opening and expanding one after another.

His heart was tightening, and the mitral and tricuspid valves were opening and closing rhythmically.

The images he had faintly seen before were now clear.

Chen Mo slowly exhaled and took off the weight.

After returning to the old house in the afternoon, he opened his notebook and wrote under the date on the latest page:

Day 15.

Mental Power Breakthrough 2.0.

Confirmed that after a perception Breakthrough, Inner Vision is achievable.

The precision reaches a level where the contraction of a single muscle fiber, the activity of a single heart valve, and bone marrow hematopoiesis are all clearly visible.

Then, he began to carefully study the changes after the Breakthrough.