56: Chapter 56 30 Days

Time passed quickly in the day-after-day training.

On the cliff face of Cape Khoboy, the oil drums in the cave were emptied one after another.

Chen Mo's daily life was compressed to the extreme: entering the water, training, exhaustion, surfacing, absorbing spirit energy particles to recover, replenishing calories, and entering the water again.

It was a repeating cycle, over and over again.

He trained at high intensity for eighteen hours a day, sometimes even approaching twenty hours.

Aside from training, there was only recovery; aside from recovery, there was only training.

But the results of the training were tangible.

Every time he summoned the system panel and saw the number in the Strength column increase, that feeling was hard to describe in words.

He knew he was getting stronger; every set of movements, every moment of exhaustion, and every round of recovery was pushing him toward greater strength.

This visible progress was the sole motivation for him to train from dawn until late at night every day.

September 5th, late at night.

Chen Mo completed the final round of training and climbed onto the cliff face.

The water on his body evaporated faster in the night wind than it had a month ago; his thermoregulation ability was increasing in sync with the improvement of his Physique.

He sat cross-legged at the cave entrance and summoned the system panel.

The dark gray, translucent interface lit up in the darkness.

[Name: Chen Mo]

[Age: 22]

[Height: 187cm]

[Weight: 152kg]

[Ability: Infinite Growth]

[Strength: 12132kg]

[Mental Power: 6.8]

[Force Multiplier: 4.9x]

A month ago, his Strength was 5442kg.

Now it is 12132kg.

In thirty days, it increased by over 6690kg, an average daily increase of over 220kg.

This speed was already nearly four times faster than when he was at the Deep Pool in the Shennong Mountain Range.

The reason was simple: the concentration of Spiritual Qi was continuously climbing, and the training intensity was increasing in sync.

He remembered very clearly.

Twenty-two days ago, around August 13th, the concentration of Spiritual Qi had increased by about thirty percent compared to July 20th.

At that time, when he was training underwater, he felt that the rate at which his Human Breathing Method absorbed stray spirit energy particles had noticeably increased, and the recovery time after each training session had also shortened significantly.

Then, by today, September 5th, the concentration of Spiritual Qi had increased by another forty percent.

The current concentration of Spiritual Qi was already about seven times what it was at the very beginning of the Spiritual Energy Revival.

Seven times.

It sounded like a lot.

But Chen Mo knew that the starting point had been too low.

At the very beginning of the Spiritual Energy Revival, the density of spirit energy particles was extremely low, so low that even when he used his system panel ability to search with full effort, he could barely find enough particles to support one day of training.

A sevenfold increase, in absolute terms, was still not enough to cause a qualitative leap for the entire ecosystem.

Plants were still growing wildly, and the size of animals was slowly increasing.

But the thing he had been looking for—plants capable of storing large amounts of Spiritual Qi, or in other words, true Spirit Medicine—had yet to appear.

For his consumption, the current concentration of Spiritual Qi was still too low.

He consumed forty to fifty thousand calories per day training; the spirit energy particles only replenished the recovery portion, so the caloric deficit still had to be covered by cooking oil.

Once the concentration of Spiritual Qi doubled a few more times, perhaps he would be able to cover most of his consumption by relying solely on absorbing spirit energy particles.

But that day had not yet arrived.

Chen Mo shifted his gaze to Mental Power.

6.8.

A month ago it was 5.0, an increase of a full 1.8.

There were no shortcuts to increasing Mental Power; extreme training under high-pressure deep water required highly concentrated attention, and maintaining full effort during every set of training was in itself the most thorough Mental Energy training.

After his Mental Power Breakthrough to 6.8, his perception range had expanded to nearly two hundred meters.

His crisis warning was also more acute than before.

Force Multiplier, 4.9x, an increase of 0.8x over 30 days.

This progress mainly came from the Basic Muscle Tension Control Method training under the immense water pressure at the bottom of the lake; the dual load of water pressure and his own muscle resistance had an effect on improving muscle control precision that was several times greater than a single load.

But the higher he went, the harder it was to increase by even 0.1x. He could feel that there was a hurdle between 4.9x and 5.0x.

Chen Mo stood up, walked to the edge of the cliff, and looked down at the surface of the lake below.

The moonlight illuminated Beier Lake into a sheet of silver-gray.

He raised his right arm and looked at his fist.

With a weight of 152kg and a height of 1.87 meters, his thickness was now comparable to a wall.

He threw a punch at the lake surface.

No wind-up.

Just a twist of the waist, a rotation of the hips, and the fist shot out from his shoulder.

The moment his fist broke through the air, a sharp sonic boom exploded; the crisp, explosive sound caused the loose rocks on the cliff to tumble down.

The surface of the lake was split by the wind of his punch, creating a straight white wave that rolled outward to both sides.

Even more blinding was the surface of his fist at the moment of the punch, because the punch speed was too fast.

The air in front of his fist was adiabatically compressed, and the temperature soared to thousands of degrees in a microsecond, emitting a dazzling white light like a meteor streaking through the atmosphere.

That light lasted for an extremely short time, too short for an ordinary person to catch, but Chen Mo saw it clearly.

Sonic boom. Air luminescence. Adiabatic compression.

He retracted his fist, the residual heat from the high temperature still lingering on his fingers.

If this punch hit tank armor, it could punch straight through.

Nearly 60 tons of instantaneous impact force released from a small cross-section of his fist.

The pressure per unit area was great enough to penetrate homogeneous steel plate.

Chen Mo looked at the lake surface below.

Then he leaped up, twisted in mid-air, head down and feet up, and smashed a full-power punch toward the water surface.

The moment his fist touched the water surface, the kinetic energy was released.

An instantaneous cavity several meters in diameter was blasted into the water surface.

The entire water surface caved downward, forming a huge hemispherical void more than ten meters deep.

The water around the void was instantly vaporized, and the water vapor triggered a steam explosion under high pressure; a giant ring-shaped wave, carrying white steam, surged outward crazily.

A deep, rumbling sound came up from underwater, shaking the cliff face until it trembled slightly.

From a distance, it looked like a meteorite had crashed into a shallow sea.

Fish within dozens of meters of the cavity were all wiped out.

Chen Mo surfaced after the splashes subsided and jumped back onto the cliff.

He shook the water off his hands, walked to the cave entrance, and sat down on the rock.

Chen Mo could now easily break the sound barrier when running at full speed, with a peak speed approaching 400 meters per second.

His vertical jump height exceeded two hundred and fifty meters.

If he jumped from flat ground, he could clear the roof of a super-tall office building.

His physical protection had also improved in sync with the growth of his strength; under the continuous grinding of deep-water high pressure, his bone density, muscle toughness, and skin strength were all a grade higher than they had been thirty days ago.

After testing this punch, it took a long time for the lake surface to return to calm.

Chen Mo watched the reflection of the moon on the water in the distance being shattered by ripples and then reformed.

A moment later, he took out his phone.

This was a habit he had formed over the past thirty days.

During breaks in training, he would sometimes climb to the north shore of Olkhon Island, walk to the edge of the forest where there was a signal, connect to the internet, and spend a while browsing the latest developments in Xia Country and the world.

It wasn't for entertainment; it was for intelligence.

He needed to know what stage the world had reached.

He had already seen this before.

On August 7th, the United States released an official statement.

They didn't use the term "Spiritual Energy Revival" but instead called it the "Era of Great Biological Evolution."

The wording was similar to Xia Country's, acknowledging that some unknown energy existed in the air and admitting that plants and human Physiques were changing, but they also had not detected the entity of the energy.

The next day, the United Kingdom released their statement, calling it "Demonic Energy Revival."

Other countries followed suit, with various descriptions; some called it the "New Era," some called it the "Global Energy Tide," and some simply called it an "Unknown Phenomenon."

The names were different, but the conclusion was completely consistent.

It couldn't be detected, it couldn't be explained, but the changes were real. Bodies were evolving, recovery abilities were strengthening, and life spans were slowly increasing.

The point about increased life span sparked the largest scale of discussion online.

Someone did the math on a forum: if life spans were really extending, what about the retirement age? What about pensions? What about inheritance?

The discussion burned from the science section to the social section, and from the social section to the legal section.

When Chen Mo browsed these discussions, the corners of his mouth twitched slightly.

Official announcements from various countries followed one after another, and although the names were different, no one could hide the core facts.

Then came August 12th.

Xia Country released a new finding.

Chen Mo saw the full text in a pinned post on a scientific research forum.

The Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences had conducted extensive comparative experiments and screened out one species from dozens of common plants that was most suitable as a biological detector for Spiritual Qi concentration: the Pothos.

The post explained in detail the five reasons for choosing the Pothos.

Shade-tolerant, extremely sensitive to water and fertilizer, and controllable conditions.

When lacking fertilizer, the leaves are small, have yellow spots, the stem nodes become longer, and etiolation is obvious.

When nutrients are sufficient, the leaves are large, oily, the stem nodes are short, and growth is dense.

The aerial roots are well-developed, and changes in growth rate can be precisely measured by the daily growth increment of the rhizomes.

This meant that Xia Country had found a detector.

A detector that could be used to observe changes in the concentration of Spiritual Qi.

By placing the same Pothos in various cities, at various altitudes, and at various latitudes across the country, and measuring the growth rate of the rhizomes every day, they could map out the distribution of Spiritual Qi concentration across the country.

And the results were out: the growth rate of the Pothos at all monitoring points was completely consistent.

There were no regional differences, no altitude differences, and no urban-rural differences.

The Spiritual Qi in all regions was uniform, with a consistent concentration.

This finding meant that Xia Country could now use the growth data of the Pothos to calculate the change curve of the Spiritual Qi concentration.

Although the Pothos could only detect the indirect effects of stray Spiritual Qi, and its precision was far inferior to his system panel ability, at least there was now a biological tool that could be deployed on a large scale.

This had direct reference value for the next steps of policy formulation: when to expand cities, when to close off forests, and when to launch a nationwide training plan.