33: Chapter 33 Mental Breakthrough 3.0

After returning from Taihe Mountain, Chen Mo's life entered an extremely pure rhythm.

Waking up at 4:00 AM every day, eating, training, eating, training, eating, training, sleeping.

No socializing, no going out, no activities unrelated to training.

This week's training focus was on the deepening of Standing Post.

He now officially named this training method "Basic Muscle Tension Control Method" — using Mental Energy to govern the whole body, making agonist and antagonist muscles pull against each other at extreme intensity, achieving an ultra-limit load effect without using any external weights.

A week ago, he could only control seven non-adjacent muscle groups to antagonize simultaneously at most, but now he could cover more than half of the muscles in his whole body.

This degree of progress seemed less intuitive than the growth in strength, but he knew very well that the improvement in control was harder and more precious than the improvement in absolute strength.

Strength had increased from 1,262 kg to over 1,600 kg.

Speed, jumping ability, and defensive power were all climbing synchronously, but the magnitude had slowed slightly compared to when he was at the Deep Pool.

This was within Chen Mo's expectations; after leaving the high-pressure environment of the Deep Pool, the training intensity had indeed dropped, and the growth rate would naturally fall back.

But there was one data point that had been stuck since a week ago.

Force Multiplier, 1.9 times.

This number had remained motionless since returning from Shennongjia.

It just couldn't break through to 2.0.

Chen Mo could feel that the gap between 1.9 and 2.0 was not at the strength level, but at the Mental Power level.

Force Multiplier was essentially a manifestation of the nervous System's precision in controlling the body, and the upper limit of control precision was determined by the Mental Power attribute.

If Mental Power was insufficient, control could not reach a higher level.

He needed a Mental Power Breakthrough to drive the Breakthrough in Force Multiplier.

June 15th, 10:00 PM.

Only a warm yellow lightbulb was lit in the Main Hall, the light dim and soft, shining on Chen Mo's naked upper body, casting shadows of varying depths on the outline of every muscle on him.

He closed his eyes, feet shoulder-width apart, knees slightly bent, spine neutral, arms hanging naturally at his sides.

From the outside, he looked like a quietly standing sculpture, motionless.

But violent changes were happening inside his body.

More than half of his skeletal muscles were simultaneously entering a state of extreme antagonism under his precise neural commands.

The quadriceps and hamstrings were wrestling with each other at the knee joint, the rectus abdominis and erector spinae were in extreme confrontation on both sides of the spine, the pectoralis major and latissimus dorsi were pulling crazily across the chest cavity, and every muscle fiber was bearing tension close to the tearing limit.

The micro-tear signals from deep within the muscles surged toward the brain like a tide; that hot, itchy sensation of being torn and constantly repaired spread throughout his body, and every inch of skin was oozing sweat.

He had maintained this state for nearly thirty minutes.

According to his usual training rhythm, a set of extreme antagonism should have stopped after twenty minutes at most, as neither the body nor the mind could hold up by then.

Precisely controlling hundreds of millions of muscle fibers to exert force independently at the same time consumed an astronomical amount of Mental Energy.

But tonight was different.

Tonight, he deliberately pushed the last set to the limit.

Because he felt a threshold.

A threshold extremely similar to when his Mental Power was stuck at 1.9 a few weeks ago.

That threshold was not far ahead, vague, seemingly present yet absent; he needed stimulation.

He gritted his teeth and pushed the training intensity up another notch.

In an instant, something seemed to crack deep within his brain.

Mental Energy was squeezed to the limit at this moment, then suddenly collapsed, and then re-condensed in a brand new way.

His consciousness became extremely clear in this instant.

He slowly opened his eyes.

Mental Power Breakthrough 3.0.

He did not summon the system panel to confirm, because the change had already arrived.

He just stood there, panting heavily, sweat dripping from his chin onto the concrete floor beneath his feet, slowly raised his right hand, wiped the sweat off his face, and then turned his gaze to the window of the Main Hall.

A night-flying butterfly was passing by outside the window.

It was very small, its gray-white wings almost invisible in the dim night.

But Chen Mo saw it very clearly; not with his eyes, but with perception.

The butterfly's flight path was like a pre-drawn dashed line in his perception, a complete path.

He could feel that the muscles in the butterfly's left wing were exerting slightly more force than the right, so it would definitely veer to the left next.

He thought: "To the left."

The butterfly really did fly to the left.

It wasn't a coincidence, nor was it control.

It was his perception ability that had been elevated to a brand new precision after the Mental Power Breakthrough; he could capture the force-exerting trend of every tiny muscle group on the butterfly's body in an instant, the angle of airflow disturbance on the wing membranes, and could even "feel" the flight choice the butterfly was about to make.

The first new ability brought by Mental Power Breakthrough 3.0 — Prediction.

It was not predicting the future, but an accurate deduction of biological movement trajectories.

It was judging the next trajectory of the opponent before their action occurred through extremely subtle observation: muscle contraction, joint fine-tuning, and center of gravity shift.

Chen Mo stared at the butterfly disappearing into the night, his face expressionless.

Then he walked out of the Main Hall and began to absorb the nearby spirit energy particles.

When absorbing Spiritual Qi, a warm energy poured into both his spirit and body simultaneously. Wrapped in this warm current, his spirit, which had just been exhausted from breaking through the limit, recovered rapidly, and the soreness in his muscles also faded at a speed visible to the naked eye.

When the warmth dissipated and he opened his eyes again, he found that the feeling of Prediction was even clearer.

It wasn't just the movement trajectories of living things.

He could faintly sense some extremely weak warning signal; not a specific image, not a clear sound, but more like a kind of intuition telling him that there was a potential threat in a certain direction.

A sixth sense.

Or rather, a crisis warning.

This feeling was very vague, like a screen that had just been brightened, with the image not yet fully loaded.

But he knew this was the second ability unlocked after Mental Power Breakthrough 3.0: the ability to sense danger in advance.

Chen Mo stood in the courtyard, feeling this brand new perception ability slowly operating deep within his body, a very complex feeling welling up in his heart.

He had always felt that he had paranoia.

Not real delusion, but a lingering vigilance.

He would subconsciously look at every corner when walking on the street, fasten his seatbelt tighter than anyone else when riding in a car, and check where the fire exit was before going anywhere.

These habits were planted when he was fifteen years old.

Since then, he had known one thing: danger never tells you in advance.

That was why he fought desperately to become stronger.

It was because of fear.

Fear that he, too, might be taken away by some muddled accident on some day, at some unpredicted moment.

Fear of disappearing from this world before he even had time to react.

Now, he finally had something — an ability that could sense danger before it took shape.

He could prepare in advance, or even avoid it in advance.

And as his Mental Power continued to improve, this ability would become stronger and stronger.