With a grunt, Blake pressed the barbell off his chest. The barbell was a bundle of sticks glued together with rocks in between. His first attempt at a heavier barbell had involved sticking larger boulders on each end but the glue wasn’t strong enough. Adding lots of smaller stones within and around the wood worked much better by maximizing the surface area for the adhesive to stick to.

  It had been a week since Blake had made his first piece of exercise equipment. Over the following couple of days he had made some more items and resumed his exercise routine. With the proper equipment Blake was able to complete a round of exercise in about half the time while pushing hard enough to grow his physical might.

  Now able to continue his physical training Blake had fallen into a routine. First thing in the morning he worked out. That was followed by a session of herbalism then around noon another workout. He would then spend time going through the obstacle course and training his skills. He wanted to keep the balance between strength and control which meant doing parkour was very important.

  As the sun began to set he would do one last round of physical training before setting up his campsite for the night. Before falling asleep he made sure to meditate. Meditation had become an important daily practice for Blake as it helped him keep control over his own mind while enhancing his connection between mind, body, and Talent.

  After four days of this the bundle of wood that he had been using became insufficient for Blake to use for physical training. That was when he added in the stone to increase its weight further. He also had to drop the noon training at that time as the cooldown period on physical exercise had increased to much. He expected that soon he would be down to only once a day, maybe even less.

  While getting physical training in was becoming exponentially more difficult the gains he had shown were well worth the effort. Blake had never been one for pre-awakening factoids but he believed he was now at the peak of what a mundane human body could do. It had been many years since awakening had been the norm so his only comparison was to those who had reached at least tier 3. By those standards he was still weak but right now, with how fast he was growing, he felt superhuman.

  Blake was confident it would only take a day or two more before he felt confident working with stone. He wasn’t sure how normal human beings had discovered how to use stone tools so long ago. Maybe humans evolved to be physically weaker? He didn’t know but he at the very least required super human strength to break apart the rocks.

  Part of growing so much stronger was that his body had become the epitome of fit. There was no fat to be seen and his muscles were large without bulging. His methods of exercise were rather balance leaving him well proportioned throughout. This meant he could run through his obstacle course with just as much ease as before with no concern of being too inflexible.

  He had run into a problem with food. The change to his physical shape required substinence. While he had been attacked by a rabbicorn once it had been at the begining of the week and would have been rotten by the point he had needed food. Like the other rabbicorn to attack his glade it had fallen on the first spike it had run accross. Blake had been asleep at the time and not even noticed it till morning.

  To manage his food situation Blake had come up with a solution via herbalism. He had found a combination that was not poisnous and technically edible. It was absolutely vile tasting and provided little in the way of nutrients but in the spirit realm that didn’t matter. All that matter was that it could be digested giving him the mass needed to grow.

  Speaking of herbalism, Blake’s skill at predicting new combinations had greatly grown over the week. Every combination of ingredients he tried gave him detailed data points on how everything interacted allowing him to better understand what was needed to create a viable result.

  One of his greatest achievements was substance that could be used to fight mild poisoning effects. Blake’s Talent did not give him enough information to understand how effective it would be but it would have an affect. He made a couple doses of that a soon as he could, the memory of food poisoning clear in his mind.

  He also created a salve that sped up the healing process of small cuts and wounds by around 10%. Blake did not have any way to tell exactly how long the healing process took and wounds were hard to measure for comparison but he had plenty of opportunities to test it after he decided to up his parkour training.

  Blake knew that he would eventually have to leave his glade again. He might safe where he was but over many nights of meditating he had come to accept that help wasn’t coming. He needed to get a better lay of the land to understand whether there even were any other humans in this realm because if not then he had to find a way to ascend.

  So he needed to be able to scout the area, preferably fast and stealthy. He did not want to be caught unawares outside his glade. To that end he decided to try something that he had seen on tv. He was going to run across the branches of the trees. By staying off the ground he could avoid most types of predators.

  In theory his strength and running speed being above the normal human limits while still having a normal amount of weight would allow him to do so. In reality he face planted on his first jump between branches. And on his second attempt. And the third.

  After quite a bit of practice he could jump between branches but that wasn’t running. It was slow and loud and highly dependent on there being branches capable of supporting his weight nearby. Blake would continue practicing but was starting to think there was a reason he had only seen it on tv and never heard of anyone actually running among the treetops to travel.

  This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

  It was the constant cuts and bruises from this training that allowed Blake to test his healing salve so many times. He was proud of the fact that despite the pain he hadn’t stopped. After being attacked by the rabbicorn and then having the worst case of poisoning he had ever heard of his pain tolerance had drastically increased.

  Combined with consistent meditation to process everything and he was almost thankful for the hardship he had endured. Almost. It might have greatly increased his pain tolerance and will but he was still struggling with the trauma. He expected he would be for many years to come.

  Finished with his night time workout Blake set up his camp for the night. His nightly routine involved starting the fire, setting up his bed, then meditating. Starting the fire took less than a minute at this point. A combination of practice and physical might made the whole thing a cinche.

  Preparing his bed took Blake a little longer. As the shape of his body had changed with exercise his bed had also needed to change. He had made the whole thing wider and adjusted the leaves to provide padding in the correct places. It was still a bed made out of leaves so there was only so much he could improve but he had grown used to it and barely felt the discomfort of sleeping on the hard ground each morning.

  Bed prepared, Blake sat down in the grass in front of his fire to meditate. Sometimes he would let his mind wander to a degree not forcing his thoughts to focus on anything specific but tonight was diffrent. He had noticed something strange the last two nights while meditating and wanted to try and figure out what it was.

  As Blake fell into a meditative trance he focused on the memory of the strange feeling. At the time it had felt like a pressure on his mind, a wall almost. It was such a strange phenomena that he had fallen out of his meditation and lost the sensation. He had failed to regain it at all that night.

  The next night he had tried again to no success. It was only after giving up and instead turning his attention to his training and better assimilating everything that the feeling had returned. This time he had not lost it immedietly and tried to figure out what it was. He only managed to keep it for a couple seconds before it faded again however.

  Tonight he was trying again but had a diffrent in mind than the night before. Instead of trying to focus all his attention on the barrier to bring it up he instead split his focus. One part of his mind was still on finding the barrier but the other was on assimilating the experiences of the day. It took a while but he was soon met with success.

  The barrier returned more clear than ever. His focus was shaken for a moment making the feeling waver but he quickly adjusted and kept part of his mind on his experiences for the day. Feeling a barrier with his mind was a strange experience. It was a similar feeling to trying to solve a complex math problem and being completly unable to even start. It was somehow more physical than that though.

  Blake could almost see the barrier in his mind. An imposing wall that repulsed all who approached it. It was somehow related to his analysis of actions throughout the day so he tried to trace the connection. It was only as he was about to give up for the night that he felt it. As he was thinking of optomizations for his attempt at tree running tommorow the barrier weakened slightly.

  If he hadn’t been so focused on it he would have missed it but it definetly weakened. Blake had nothing else to analyze for the day so he would have to stop for now but swore he would come back to this the next night. He hadn’t the faintest clue what was happening but it felt important.

  Two days later he had made no progress figuring out what was happening and had given up on it for now. It was still growing slightly weaker each day but at this rate it would be weeks if not months before coming fully down.

  Blake didn’t put much thought into that at the moment, though, since it was finally time to try and make stone tools. He didn’t have a fancy plan. All he was going to do was use his enhance strength to smash rocks together and hope for the best.

  His goal was to create a knife. A stone knife would be useful for many things but most important for him was it would enhance his wood crafting. Being able to properly carve wood rather than just repeatedly rubbing it against rough stone would make all the diffrence.

  Blake grabbed two pieces of stone the size of his hands. He arbitraly designated one as the knife and began to smash the other stone into it with all his strength. To his suprise both stones broke in half.

  Blake sat there staring at his hands stunned. He had been worried that he still wouldn’t be strong enough to carve out the stone but he had clearly over done it. These were not particularly hard pieces of stone, their weight telling him they were not dense but that had been the point. He had been doing everything he could to ensure he could break off pieces of the stone.

  Trying again, Blake grabbed two more pieces. This time they were heavier for their size and he didn’t use his full strength when smashing them together. It took a few tries to figure out exactly how much force to put into each swing but then it worked beautifuly. The stone he was using as a hammer was quickly breaking apart but the other stone was taking shape.

  In the end another stone had to be used to finish creating the stone knife but it had worked. He had a stone knife. At least a knife head. Blake intended to glue a stick to the blunt end to use as a handle. The knife was not particularly sharp but it was a stone tool.

  Since he considered the wooden handle a key part of the craft, Blake’s Talent had not activated yet. In a rush to better understand how he did he quickly made a handle for it and glued it on. As his Talent activated Blake sighed, a big smile on his face.

  There were many things he could have done better from the angle of each smash to what stones he used in the first place but it had worked. He also had to figure out how to sharpen it but he had an idea for that.

  One of the key pieces of information that Blake learned was how the shape of the stones involved influenced the distribution of force across the object. The stone he was using as a hammer was most effected by this as it was the one Blake did not want to break. If he had to guess based on the information he had recieved combined with his prior knowledge of physics from school he needed a more rounded, smooth stone for a hammer.

  Essentially, he needed a river stone. The smooth surface would also be useful for trying to sharpen the knife. He could run the edge along the river stone to gradually sharpen it. There would be limits, it was still stone after all not metal, but it would far surpass anything wooden.

  The only problem was getting one. He would have to return to the creek to do so and his last trip had not ended well. The combination of meditation and increasing physical strength gave Blake confidence in surviving a monster attack but he was more fearful of a panic attack. His fear would be the most dangerous thing out there for him an he wasn’t sure he was ready for that.

  Blake stared down at his new knife. The surface was pockmarked and rough, the edge dull, the end wasnt even pointed, more rounded, but it was proof he was advancing. He was improving himself one step at a time whether that was through his body or the weapons he carried. He could do this.

  It was time for Blake to return to the creek. Again.

  Patreon