“That means the intermittent nature of the exercise is able to stress the body more while keeping actual damage to a minimum resulting in more impetus to increase your stats.”

“What was your job before this?” I ask curious about how he was so familiar with all of this and had in a couple of months learned so much about how stats worked.

“Ahhh… which one?” He asks going from a confused face to a sly grin.

“You tell me.”

“I think I see what made you ask. There were two how You may have picked up, for a couple of years I was a drill instructor in the Army but the regimented nature wasn’t for me, and then I became a trainer. I never worked with national level athletes, but I liked to study.”

“It shows with the way you approach training. But how is it that intermittent training will help with stamina? I’m fairly balanced, but that is my bread and butter of the physical stats.”

“It isn’t all about keeping a consistent pace, but to increase the body's ability to send oxygen and nutrients the muscles need to continue working, and the muscles speed in transforming those nutrients into the right chemistry for use along with dozens of other minor alterations. Even with all the changes the system brought to our body, the resources like stamina and magic, there are some fundamentals you can’t escape.”

“Yeah, I noticed that. Like my injury, even after my Hp bar refilled, after I was almost severed in half and it took a while for me to heal.”

“Yes, there is some small aspects that the system just waves the limitations of the physics we are accustomed to dealing with but it is not an infinite capability.”

“Ok, now run me again through the reasoning behind choosing to stress a single attribute until you see an increase instead of going for multiples ones.”

“Sure, I have another five minutes before I need to go back out there.” He says before going to lecture mode, and looking almost like Merlin giving a class in the academy. “For starters, we have to acknowledge that it’s not simply about not stressing the others, but to concentrate the efforts…”

For hours anytime he has a few minutes in between one of the exercises he has the soldiers outside running, he comes in and I try to parse the meaning from what I read in his disorganized, though still illuminating notes.

He may downplay the effect his taring was having, but Greg was almost reaching an average of 30 in his physical stats with 37 points as his base strength. Even without discounting the help that Aether was, that is less than what I could have managed, but this increase was on someone without my strange physiology.

Even before the system, there was something different about me. I arrived with about 50 percent more stamina than anyone else in the world and until now reflecting on the reason didn’t give me an answer.

Most would just assume that is all about Pando and my interactions with him, and though that probably was the catalyst, there was something more to it. Something fundamental about me, something that drove my perception field and all the other irregularities.

Today didn’t look like the day I would find the answers, but I don’t give up, and one day, I will find out more and start to explore the capabilities that my body, that I myself had even without the system.

Though as much as I tend to think I had a different body, I didn’t know was if I was actually different, or if everyone could repeat what I did only they believed hard enough. That was a crucial difference, which had always been in the back of my mind, that I would succeed if I only tried. Perhaps not on the first try, but holding in my mind that all was possible.

I read through the very last note, seeing that it is a copy of another page with only a single different line and I put it in the appropriate pile before gathering them together and replacing them in the two binders, now properly organized before getting up and stretching.

As I turn around Richard heads my way and I wait for him.

“Did you finish already?” He asks me furrowing his brows.

“Yeap, I’m a quick reader and quite a few of the notes were mostly copies of each other.”

He shrugs and takes the binders putting them back on the shelf.

“Now what are planning to do?”

“What else could I do? Increase my stats.”

He looks at me pensively and then asks:

“Are you certain it’s worth your time? You already have much higher stats than anyone else I trained.”

“Are you offering?”

“It only makes sense. If you are going to put in the time, I should be loaning my expertise whenever possible.”

“Ok drill sergeant, where do we start?”

“Follow me.” He says and I do so, we pass the formation of sparing spear users in the front and to the turn around to the side on a smaller but large enough area. About 10 by 10 meters with something akin to an open-air gym that you find on parks or beaches.

The same dirt floor as we find all over the village but the central square with its stone on the ground. Barbells and bars to lift weights, though the weights were of an almost comical size, something that pure strength builds would allow them to toy with.

Rocks, ropes, and raised bars for people to use their own body as a weight, though unless they were just starting and very weak or wearing weighted clothes using the body's mass was far too light to put enough stress to trigger the system to make any changes.

“Ok, I will assume the first stat you want to train is strength.”

“Sure.”

“We are working with…. A bit over fifty am I correct?”

I grin and say: “And here I thought I was the only one that could do that. Yes a little over fifty strength”

He waves his hands and then says.

“Then let's start with four standard weights on each side for a deadlift. With your muscles crosssection, 4 seems like most of your limit.”

I move over to a stack of weights and grab one of the so-called stand weights in each hand. Heaving my arms, I ook down and feel the slight burn from it. Each one must weigh a good 150 to 200 kilograms. So I will be lifting well over a ton from the ground.

“Do a lot of people have a problem understanding the biomechanical differences in people with the same stats?”

“A few, but we were already used to the bigger guys on Earth being stronger from more muscle mass. In the end, I just explain to people that the strength stat is about how much strength each pound of muscle has, not how many tons they can lift.”

“Are people trying to increase their muscle mass after hearing that?” I ask if there is anyone trying to go that route.

“Kinda. A few did spend a little time in the beginning, but especially since our identity as spear wielders started to take hold and the village started to ‘trade’ people, everybody realized that strength is not the main focus. And even those that put in the time had minimal changes. Nobody can gain any weight in fat, and less than a pound of muscle for a month trying is slow. Everybody just kept their rough body proportions. The one change that has gotten easier is losing body fat, much easier.”

“Well, I don’t think our village had a single actually obese person, but I did notice even those a little more rotund are slimmer now,” I say, as I finish putting the last weight, I get in front of the bar.

“Do you know the proper position to lift it?” He asks me.

“No. Never went to a gym, I was more of an outdoors kind of guy.”

“No problem. Pay attention to my back’s movement.” He says getting in position as I move aside and to my surprise, though it probably shouldn’t, he lifts the bar with all eight weights on it much more easily than I had expected. He repeats it a couple more times explaining each time and my attention on a different body part.

On my turn, I get in position.

With feet at shoulder width, keeping my back straight and after exhaling all the air in my lungs, I pull with all my strength, which sees me almost losing balance as the bar lifts way faster than I expected.

“Careful.” He says putting an arm in my back so I keep my balance and I relax at the surprisingly lightweight, all things considered. I lower it flexing my knees and hip in the exact sequence h showed me.

With a step back I look at him.

“You are more used to your stats than most people, and you have very little muscle. Now with five weights, it should be a closer match.”

I wait for another 30 seconds after we each place another disk on the end of the bar, and I put my back into lifting it.

This time, it is still not my limit, but I go at it more gradually and lift the bar without a problem. Every thirty seconds a few more small weights are added, as he calls for an assistant until I realize we are close to six weights, and I can feel the limits just over the corner.

“Are you certain I shouldn’t use Mana infusion for training?”

“So far we saw no benefit, the damage it causes outweigh any benefits, at least for training purposes, but if that changes we will let you know. Why, do you want to just let mana help you lift twice this much?” he says with a large grin on his face.

“Well, It wouldn't hurt,” I say with a big grin.

“Ohh, it would and that is the entire point. The fact that any small changes in the mana flow cause big changes in strength and speed makes the job of finding the actual limits harder and more inconsistent. Just stick to training without mana infusion.”

“Ok, don’t you worry, I will train as you instruct me.”

“Now come on, three more reps at maximum load should be enough for today.”

And so I follow his instructions. Get in position, set my back, and heave lifting almost 6 standards weights on each side and the deep steel bar flexes ever so slightly but manages to hold strong. Moving in reverse, I set I in the ground, as gently as I can, and watch as in a pair of seconds my stamina goes down a few percent, but it quickly recharges after eating a small stamina regen fruit.

I lift it from the ground two more times, each time ever so slightly easier as I get used to this movement, something that Richard told was the main factor holding back other people. But as they started from 70 or 80 % of the theoretical limit calculated from their muscle cross-section and stats, I was already so close to 100 that any difference is a rounding error.

As he follows back to his other trainees and whatever else is on his plate I sit on the ground and start a meditation session. This time focusing on what changes I affected in my body after this session.

I allow my connection to Aspen to strengthen, my perception field to follow all my actions, most important of all, my proprioception, the very capability of feeling my own body with senses that I always had, though improved a lot to come to the front of my mind. I start to look through every inch looking for any changes, no matter how minute they look.

I can’t actually feel each of the torn muscle fibers in my body, or the chemical compounds or the cells trying to repair and make my muscles ever so slightly stronger, and stronger in a way that would reduce or prevent future injuries from a similar load. But I can imagine all of that I can always imagine all of these processes. Processes that I believed were happening, that I allowed to gravitate in my awareness for years, for most of my life as I started to learn about them.

My imagination runs wild, in full view, something that I knew would not be representative of my actual body, for it was closer to a mock-up you would see in anatomy class, not anything that happened in reality. But I ground myself in that this is just that, a mock-up, a map to what is happening on my body as I try to place the mixed sensations from large swathes on my legs, arms, and back. The interconnective tissue, tendons and ligaments. The disks and bones. It all comes together in my mind’s eye shifting again and again in a full picture of not only what I believed is happening, but also what I wish would happen. What I wish I could affect change in.

And as I’m almost finished and ready to get up, something that on the last few weeks had still come, but was rarer than any other time, a familiar sensation that I welcome and dreaded at the same time, an Aether construct that meant I increased in physical or mental capability, but that also meant inviting even more of the system to live within arrives from somewhere and heads straight to my soul and deeper, for whatever place the system’s constructs went within me.

I don’t even need to open my stat screen to know what has happened.

+1 Strength

Now I only need to set apart a small portion of each day to increase my stats again.