55: Chapter 55 Rapid Improvement

August 5th, late at night.

On the cliff at Cape Khoboy, Beier Lake, the oil drums at the cave entrance shimmered with a faint metallic luster under the moonlight.

The lake surface was as calm as a sheet of black glass; there wasn't even a breath of wind.

It was already midnight when Chen Mo finished his final round of training.

He scrambled up the cliff, the water on his body evaporating rapidly in the night breeze.

His skin remained flushed from enduring high pressure for so long, while the soreness deep within his muscles accumulated, faded, and accumulated again through round after round of training.

He sat cross-legged at the cave entrance, the spirit energy particles he absorbed still repairing the micro-injuries caused by that last set of training.

From eight in the morning until now, a full sixteen hours.

Eight rounds of high-intensity training, each involving over an hour of full-effort underwater training, followed by half an hour of surfacing to find and absorb spirit energy particles to recover and replenish calories, before heading back into the water.

It was a cycle that repeated without wasting a single minute.

The deep-water pressure of Beier Lake pushed the efficiency of every Basic Muscle Tension Control Training session to the limit.

He summoned the system panel.

The dark gray, translucent interface lit up in the darkness, with white text appearing line by line.

Strength: 5442 kg.

Mental Power: 5.0.

Force Multiplier: 4.1x.

Chen Mo's gaze lingered on the numbers one by one.

Before his first training session this morning, his strength had been 5261 kg.

Now, it was 5442 kg.

In a single day, he had improved by 181 kg.

Mental Power had increased from 4.9 to 5.0.

The Force Multiplier had risen from 4.0x to 4.1x; although he was still progressing, the resistance to further advancement had noticeably increased.

Chen Mo did not feel the kind of qualitative change he had experienced before when his Mental Power broke through to 5.0.

It was just that his range of perception had expanded a little further, and his sensitivity to the distribution of spirit energy particles in his surroundings had become more refined.

There was likely still a considerable distance to go before reaching the next Breakthrough node.

As for the Force Multiplier.

Chen Mo clenched his fist.

It had taken thirteen days to go from 3.7x to 4.0x, but only one day to go from 4.0x to 4.1x. This wasn't because it had become easier, but because his training intensity had more than doubled.

However, the higher he went, the greater the precision of neuromuscular control required to improve by even 0.1x.

The number of muscle groups he could coordinate simultaneously was already astonishing, but the ceiling for the Force Multiplier lay much further ahead.

The current Bottleneck was not his muscles, but his Mental Power.

The Mental Power value determined the number of muscle groups that could be precisely controlled simultaneously; the higher the Mental Power, the higher the ceiling for the Force Multiplier.

The slowing growth rate of the Force Multiplier now indicated that his Mental Power was beginning to hold him back.

However, this problem did not need to be solved separately.

The training itself was simultaneously improving both his Mental Power and his Force Multiplier.

Training under deep-water high pressure required extreme concentration, and maintaining the limit during each set of training was, in itself, the most thorough form of Mental Energy training.

Mental Power and body were being ground and honed in tandem here.

Chen Mo closed the system panel and stood up to walk to the cave entrance.

Moonlight spilled onto the lake, turning the entire surface of Beier Lake into a sheet of silver-gray.

He looked down at the base of the cliff, where something at the water's edge was reflecting the moonlight.

Filamentous water weeds.

When Chen Mo first arrived here this morning, a layer of fine, filamentous green algae had already covered the surface of the rocks near the waterline at the base of the cliff.

Those algal filaments were short, each only a few centimeters long, but their density was extremely high, hanging from the rocks like freshly grown green fuzz.

Chen Mo knew that the water weeds were also growing wildly.

Originally, the Beier Lake ecosystem was known for its high transparency, with the clarity of its water ranking among the best of all lakes globally.

But that was built on a long-term, stable ecological balance. Now, that balance was being broken by the continuous input of Spiritual Qi.

Chen Mo quickly ran through the implications in his mind.

The endless growth of water weeds would first lead to the problem of sunlight blockage.

The submerged plants at the bottom of the lake would grow denser and denser, intercepting all the light that should have penetrated the water layer at the surface.

Phytoplankton would die in large numbers due to the reduction in light, and the zooplankton that fed on them would decrease accordingly.

The entire base of the food chain would collapse in a short period.

Then there was the issue of dissolved oxygen; during the day, water weeds produced oxygen through photosynthesis, but at night, their respiration would consume a large amount of dissolved oxygen.

The more water weeds there were, the greater the oxygen debt at night.

Fish in the lake would surface at dawn due to oxygen deprivation, and in severe cases, they would simply suffocate.

This was not a slow process of ecological succession.

At the current growth rate of the vegetation, an ecological disaster could occur within a year.

Plants, with their simple structures, had seized the advantage in the Spiritual Energy Revival.

Chen Mo looked up at the surrounding forest.

The canopy of the Taiga Forest merged into a sea of ink-black under the moonlight.

The total amount of photosynthesis was increasing every day, and the oxygen concentration by the lakeside was already slightly higher than normal levels.

This sounded like a good thing, but in a closed lake basin ecosystem, an abnormal rise in oxygen meant that the carbon cycle was becoming unbalanced.

However, animals were not entirely without reaction.

When Chen Mo was training underwater today, he saw several freshwater seals.

Those seals were noticeably larger than he remembered.

A normal freshwater seal had a body length between 1.1 and 1.4 meters, but the ones he saw today were at least 1.5 to 1.6 meters long.

Their swimming speed in the water was faster than before, and their diving depth was also increasing.

One of them even descended to a depth of about 800 meters, only leaving after it sensed him in the dark water layer.

Then there were the viviparous Beier Lake fish.

This type of fish was a species unique to Beier Lake, transparent and scaleless, with internal organs and bones visible, and they were usually around 10 centimeters in size.

Today, as he swam through the middle layers of the lake, the density of the schools of fish around him was shockingly high.

A casual glance was enough to see hundreds of them.

Moreover, they were all larger; by visual estimation, they were generally over 12 centimeters, with some even approaching 15 centimeters.

Forty percent of this fish's body was fat, making it extremely calorie-dense.

In the natural world, this was the base layer of the food chain.

The freshwater seals of Beier Lake fed primarily on this fish.

If both the number and size of the viviparous Beier Lake fish were increasing, then the growth of the freshwater seals could be explained.

The food chain transmitted from the bottom up; as the biomass at the bottom increased, the predators at the top would grow larger accordingly.

But at the same time, the larger size of the predators meant they required more food.

Ecological relationships were being reshuffled; the entire Beier Lake food chain was undergoing a comprehensive reshuffle.

Whoever failed to keep up with the speed of evolution would be eliminated.

Forests, mountains, and rivers were changing at an accelerating pace as well.

The land outside the cities was changing in a trend that far exceeded the speed of human reaction.

For humanity as a whole, the most direct threat at this stage did not come from animals—animals needed more Spiritual Qi to complete a qualitative Breakthrough—but from nature itself.

Infrastructure damage caused by rampant plant growth, the alteration of atmospheric composition by photosynthesis, and the frequency and intensity of extreme weather would all continue to increase.

A single flood could wash away resettlement areas that hadn't yet been reinforced, and a single drought could cause an entire field of crops to fail.

Ecological pressure was the most urgent variable at the moment.

But all he could do was continue to become stronger.

Chen Mo pulled back his thoughts and drew his gaze away from the lake.

After eating, he lay down in the tent.

His body was resting, but his brain was still running.

After his Mental Power broke through to 5.0, he discovered that his need for sleep had further decreased.

Now, he only needed to sleep for three hours a day to eliminate his accumulated mental fatigue.

spirit energy particles could repair muscle damage and replenish physical exertion, but they could not eliminate the weariness of his Mental Power; the deep exhaustion brought on by long-term high concentration still required sleep to reset.

Three hours.

That was enough.

Outside the tent, the surface of Beier Lake remained calm.

The water weeds underwater continued to spread in silence, and the schools of fish in the lake swam slowly through the dark water layers.

When he woke up tomorrow, his second day of training would begin.

The strength numbers on the system panel would continue to climb, with every round of training pushing him deeper and further.

At this speed, it would be even faster.