15: Chapter 15 Human Body Control

After his Mental Power reached 2.0, Chen Mo spent an entire night feeling the changes in his body.

He sat on a mat in the Main Hall, closed his eyes, and probed his attention layer by layer deep into his body.

Previously, when scanning with body perception, he could only see a rough outline.

Muscles were muscles, bones were bones; it was like a sketch drawn with thick lines.

Now, it was completely different.

Now, what he saw was an anatomical diagram of extremely high precision.

The direction of every single muscle fiber was clearly visible.

From origin to insertion, from tendon to muscle belly, how the fibers ran parallel, how they intertwined, and how they slid past each other during contraction.

This information flooded into his brain in a form of perception that wasn't quite visual, yet was incredibly real.

He could even feel the even more subtle structures within the muscle fibers, shortening and lengthening segment by segment.

It was a strange feeling that was hard to describe.

It was like living in a dark room your whole life, and suddenly, someone turned on the lights.

You didn't see anything new; you were seeing the room you had always lived in clearly for the first time.

Chen Mo began to attempt control.

He placed his attention on his right index finger.

Not moving the whole index finger together, but moving only that small bundle of muscle fibers at the furthest end of the flexor digitorum profundus.

In the past, such a command would have been impossible to issue.

You could bend your index finger, but you couldn't just contract the third bundle of fibers of the flexor digitorum profundus while keeping the other fibers completely relaxed.

Now, this command was as simple as typing on a keyboard.

He could feel that small bundle of fibers contracting.

Only that bundle.

The muscle fibers next to it remained motionless.

Then he expanded the command layer by layer.

First the entire flexor digitorum profundus, then the flexor digitorum superficialis, and then the entire forearm flexor group.

Every layer was precise down to the single fiber.

After tightening everything, he did it in reverse, retreating from the whole to the parts, relaxing layer by layer until the fiber in the deepest part was completely relaxed.

The whole process took about twenty minutes.

After finishing, he looked at his right hand, slowly making a fist, releasing it, and making a fist again.

This was true control.

He switched to his left hand, then his feet, calves, thighs, glutes, waist and abdomen, back, and shoulders.

It took over an hour to go through his entire muscle group from head to toe.

Every muscle was activated and relaxed individually, just like performing a thorough debugging of his nervous System.

After the debugging was finished, he discovered a second change.

He could mobilize more muscles.

When a normal person throws a punch with full force, the muscle fibers the body can mobilize only account for about thirty percent of the total.

This is the nervous System's self-protection mechanism; if all muscle fibers were activated at once, the resulting force would be great enough to tear bones and tendons apart.

Therefore, the human body sets a hard limit on power output, like a rev limiter on an engine.

Professional boxers, after years of specialized training, can increase the mobilization ratio to nearly forty percent.

But Chen Mo discovered that the ratio he could mobilize was far higher than this number.

He stood up and performed a punching motion on the spot.

Not a full-force punch, just testing his force exertion.

The right fist started from the waist; pushing off the ground, rotating the hips, twisting the waist, thrusting the shoulder, and extending the arm—in every link of the entire motion chain, he could feel that the mobilized muscle fibers were significantly more than before.

The core area was almost completely activated the moment he exerted force; the back muscle groups, which previously could only passively participate in stabilization when punching, now allowed him to actively contract the latissimus dorsi and serratus anterior to provide a boost.

The pectoralis major, anterior deltoid, and triceps erupted with maximum efficiency simultaneously.

He estimated that the muscle mobilization ratio of this punch was about fifty percent.

The efficiency of muscle usage had also significantly increased.

He remembered a sports science paper he had read on the computer earlier: the muscle mobilization rate for ordinary people is between twenty and thirty percent, and for professional fighters, it is between thirty-five and forty percent.

And now, with a casual punch, his was fifty percent.

What did this mean?

It meant that with the same muscle mass and strength, the force he could punch with was already more than double that of an ordinary person, and he could even utilize 1.5 times his own strength.

And his strength was now 567 kilograms.

Chen Mo quickly calculated in his mind.

567kg multiplied by 1.5 times is 850 kilograms.

This number made him silent for a long time.

He stood in the Main Hall, looking down at his fist.

An ordinary fist, the knuckles somewhat enlarged due to years of Strength Training, with a few veins slightly protruding on the back of the hand.

It looked no different from yesterday.

But the force this hand could strike with already exceeded the impact force of most small cars on the market traveling at medium speed.

He wanted to verify it.

Early the next morning, Chen Mo walked behind the old house and chose a red brick wall.

This wall was a courtyard wall built in the past, using the most common red bricks and cement mortar in town, about thirty centimeters thick.

He stood in front of the wall, took a deep breath, and focused his attention on his right fist.

A full-force punch.

Pushing off the ground, the force sprang up from the ground; his knees, hips, and waist rotated in sequence, his shoulder and back muscle groups were instantly activated, and his right fist, wrapped in the force of his entire body, smashed into the brick wall.

With a boom.

The red brick wall was punched through, leaving a hole.

Broken bricks and cement debris splashed outward, pattering against the ground on the opposite side.

His fist went through the wall and emerged from the other side.

Chen Mo retracted his fist, shook the dust off his fingers, and looked down at his hand.

There were a few white scratches on his knuckles, the skin was not broken, and the bones did not hurt.

He didn't even have the real sensation of exerting force.

That punch just now felt light, as if he had punched through a piece of foam board.

He went to the abandoned quarry outside the town again.

There was a reinforced concrete retaining wall there, left over from when stones were mined, with a thickness of over half a meter.

He punched the wall surface.

It didn't punch through.

But it left a clearly visible fist print on the wall surface.

The cement surface was struck with radial cracks; in the center of the cracks was a sunken fist print, about two or three centimeters deep.

His finger knuckles were embedded in the wall, just like pressing a handprint into wet mud.

He stared at that fist print for a long time, then retracted his fist and took a few deep breaths toward the air.

It wasn't fear.

It was shock.

He realized a very serious fact: at this strength level, he could no longer view his body in terms of fighting other people.

His fist was no longer a weapon for fighting, but a piece of engineering-grade physical impact equipment.

What would happen if this punch hit a human body?

The human skeleton, in front of his punch force, was no different in essence from an eggshell.

The skull, ribs, and spine, which are considered the hardest bones in combat, would be no sturdier than a cookie under his fist.

He had to be more careful.

Not careful not to get hurt, but careful not to hurt anyone.

A careless strike, and a life would be gone.

A heavy sense of sobriety rose in his heart.

If it were someone else, possessing this level of strength, they would likely get carried away.

They would think they were invincible, couldn't help but show off to others, and would use this power to be arrogant and indulgent.

But the first thing Chen Mo thought of was restraint.

It was to control himself even more strictly.

Strength is just strength.

It won't help you judge when you should throw a punch and when you shouldn't.

It won't help you see the consequences.

Strength is just a blade; the sharper the blade, the more the person holding it needs to be calm.

He took a deep breath and carved this thought into his heart.

He continued to test other abilities.

Speed.

He sprinted at full speed on the flat ground of the quarry.

When his feet pushed off the ground, the ground reaction force was much stronger than before; every step he pushed off could propel him seven or eight meters away.

He finished the one-hundred-meter distance in less than seven seconds.

Peak speed, about sixteen meters per second.

This speed was only a short distance away from the top speed of a cheetah.

Jumping.

He jumped vertically on the spot, bending his knees to store power, and then his whole body shot upward as if it had been catapulted.

His feet were nearly four meters off the ground, and he easily touched the edge of the roof of the abandoned two-story factory building next to the quarry.

He reached out and grabbed the eaves, pulling himself up with a pull-up.

Standing on the roof, the wind blew, and he looked down at the ground.

The roof of the second floor, a height of six meters, and he had jumped up from the spot.

What if he added a run-up?

He didn't try.

It wasn't necessary.

He already had a clear judgment of his current physical capabilities.

After coming down from the roof, Chen Mo sat on the large rock he was most familiar with and stayed for a long time.

He had been back for almost half a month.

From a fitness coach with a punch force of two hundred kilograms to now, with a punch force of eight hundred and fifty kilograms, a speed of sixteen meters per second, and a vertical jump of three meters.

If this rate of progress were written in a table and placed in front of any professional, no one would believe it.

But he knew that this was far from the end.

The Breakthrough in Mental Power gave him two things: Inner Vision and control.

Inner Vision allowed him to "see" every detail of his body, and control allowed him to precisely mobilize every fiber of his body.

Combining these two things was a clear path.

Complete control of the body.

He could now control a single muscle fiber, but there was still a long way to go to "completely control every bit of muscle in his whole body."

Once he brought all the muscles in his body into the scope of precise control, his force exertion efficiency would rise to another level, and the proportion of muscles he could mobilize during a full-force punch would also continue to climb.

What about after that?

He closed his eyes and pushed the focus of his Inner Vision deeper.

Muscles are made of cells.

He remembered the textbook saying that the human body has about six hundred skeletal muscles, each muscle composed of thousands of muscle fibers, and each muscle fiber is formed by the Fusion of hundreds or thousands of muscle cells.

If he could control down to the cellular level—no, that was too difficult—but he could start with larger functional units.

Going one layer deeper, it was hormones.

Inside the human body, there is a precise endocrine System.

Adrenaline, noradrenaline, growth hormone, testosterone—these hormones are the chemical switches for the body's strength, speed, recovery, and growth.

Ordinary people's hormone secretion is automatically regulated, limited by genes and the body's quantitative System.

But if he could precisely control his own body, could he also control the secretion of glands?

If he could actively secrete growth hormone, his recovery speed would be faster.

If he could actively secrete adrenaline, his explosive power would be stronger.

If he could control cortisol, he could even keep his body in an optimal anabolic state forever, with no more concept of fatigue or overtraining.

This idea was bold.

To achieve it, he would likely need further Breakthroughs on the Mental Power level.

But he faintly felt that this was his path.

Strengthen himself, control himself.

From muscles to hormones, from hormones to cells, until finally becoming the god of his own body.

Not summoning wind and rain or destroying the world.

It was complete, absolute autonomy that did not rely on any external objects.

It was holding his own destiny completely in his own hands.

Before gaining his abilities, what did he fear most?

He feared car accidents.

He feared accidents.

He feared that, just like his parents left back then, he would be taken away by some muddled accident on an unremarkable day.

So he worked out desperately, piling muscle onto his body, as if as long as he was strong enough, he could withstand any harm.

But he knew that was just psychological comfort.

In the face of real danger, muscle is nothing.

Now it was different.

Now he was truly becoming stronger.

Strong enough to jump from the third floor without injury, strong enough to punch through a wall, strong enough that no ordinary person could hurt him.

Once he completely finished controlling every level of his body, life, health, and even the process of aging might one day be in his own hands.

True safety is not relying on order; it is possessing the power to deal with most disorder.

He stood up, patted his clothes, put on his hiking backpack, and walked down the mountain.

It was getting dark, the evening glow on the ridge line turned from orange-red to gray-purple, and the forest was already beginning to darken.