Blake decided that he would still go on his expedition but would delay it a few days. Even if it was possible to ascend by training hard he wasn’t there yet. Who knew how long that would take or if it was even possible to accomplish with his current training methods.

  That was the reason he was delaying his expedition. Before reaching the tipping point in his physical training the cooldown period on exercising was up to three days. He expected it would be even worse now. By waiting for his expedition, Blake was getting a read on how difficult it would be to continue increasing his Strength.

  The cooldown increased exponentially if he pushed himself too hard which would be a concern when traveling. He might need to run from an angry monster, climb up a cliff, or something else equally demanding. Since he couldn’t tell exactly when he pushed too hard it would be next to impossible for him to judge accurately how long his training cooldown was now.

  Three days passed quickly with no signs of change. Blake continued his daily meditation practice and had actually added another round of meditation in the morning to take the place of his exercises.

  It was clear to him that developing his spiritual senses would become increasingly important if he wanted to ascend. Meditation was a key way for him to improve that. It also helped that while he didn’t fully understand what was improving something was advancing while he meditated. Spiritual senses might be what the supernatural warmth was upgrading but he felt it wasn’t that, at least not only that.

  After the fourth day passed with no sign of the cooldown dropping Blake became worried. He couldn’t sit around forever hoping it would become available again. He knew it was possible to enhance his Strength further, the chain was still there, but it might require natural treasures that he had no way of identifying.

  On the seventh day, it clicked into place. He could train again. Blake had been about to give up if it hadn’t become available within the next day so he was overjoyed it finally had. The past week hadn’t been a complete waste, he had kept himself working, but it could have been better.

  Careful not to strain himself too hard Blake avoided any task that he hadn’t done before in case it increased his training cooldown. He also avoided the training course for the same reason. Instead, all his time had gone to simple crafts, meditation, and a round of food poisoning after another rabbicorn attack.

  The knife Blake had been making with the rabbicorn horn was now finished. It had taken almost two weeks, twice the time of an equivalent spear, but since he only needed one it was worth it. Carving wood, skinning animals and many other tasks became many times easier with a better knife.

  Before heading out Blake decided to knock out a round of exercising. If it was going to take longer and longer between rounds he need to make sure to be as prompt as possible. It was going to take ages to max out his potential already.

  There was a problem, however. No matter how hard he trained Blake could not trigger the supernatural growth he was used to. He worked himself to the bone, physically exhausted to the point he couldn’t stand, and still no supernatural warmth.

  Concerned that he might have been wrong and was still on cooldown Blake fell into meditation. His senses confirmed once again that his cooldown was over. Despite having pushed himself so hard he hadn’t even triggered the cooldown. That was almost stranger than having no supernatural growth. Intense exercise had always extended the cooldown when done too soon, to be able to push himself so hard with no cooldown was weird to Blake.

  Despite wanting to spend more time experimenting with his training and trying to trigger growth Blake knew deep down that there was nothing he could do for the moment. There was something he was missing and waiting around was just a waste of time. He had delayed his expedition enough already.

  With a heavy heart, Blake set out to explore the realm. He brought with him one of every tool he had made with the exception of the stone claws. Those were more detrimental than helpful. Attached to the leather belt that was the top part of his skirt Blake glued a small loop of leather to attach his knife to.

  On his back, Blake had a hollowed-out log the size of his torso filled with his variety of tools and in his hand was his spear. The log was kept attached to his back via two loops of leather wrapped around his chest.

  The log had been more time-consuming than difficult to hollow out. Since he didn’t plan to store any liquids in it there had no need to prevent holes. To make the whole craft easier Blake had chopped the log in half length-wise before carving out the two halfs. He then glued the whole thing back together along with some twine wrapped around it to keep it steady.

  Blake left the clearing he called home at a light jog. While it was a light jog for the current Blake the Blake that first arrived in the spirit realm would have called it an all-out sprint. He moved quickly through the forest for hours without a hint of exhaustion.

  One of the benefits of his physical training that had been hard to see within the limits of his glade was his endurance. Blake didn’t know if his capacity for exercise had just grown to the point where he had to fall alseep well before his body grew tired or if he was actively recovering faster than his body spent energy to move but at the speed he was moving he felt no need to stop for a break.

  Running like this was actually quite peaceful to Blake. He found himself falling into a meditative trance only a small portion of his mind keeping track of his movement and surroundings. His movement was a little awkward as he had to keep shifting his head so that it didn’t get hit by the stone heads of his tools.

  The log he used as a backpack wasn’t big enough to hold the tools in their entirety so instead only their handles rested inside while the, often very sharp, heads of the tools stuck out the top banging into him. Moving in a way not to jostle them had taken some getting used to.

  In his half-meditative state, Blake kept working to improve his perception of the chains holding him back from ascending. If he could identify what each chain represented he would be able to train more effectively. Right now he had no way to continue his physical training which meant his primary avenue of growth was cut off.

  Without physical training, he had to reach the tipping point in the other chains if he wanted to ascend. Right now he had four types of training besides physical exercise. One was his immune system training. He had continued to give himself food poisoning and could now consume meat that had spent a day in the sun without problem. It was disgusting but he could do it.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  The second kind of training was his physical resilience. Stabbing, bludgeoning, and other forms of self-harm had gradually hardened his body against harm. This shows much less obvious improvement but Blake suspected that had more to do with how weak humans were to that type of thing rather than his training being insufficient.

  The growth he had was clearly scaled off of his base potential. His body naturally had the ability to fight off germs so the supernatural growth had no problem enhancing his ability to do that. The human body was not able to resist a stab wound however so the supernatural growth did not immediately provide him the ability to do that. It might eventually happen but it would be a much longer road.

  The third form of training Blake did was meditation. This enhanced his mind as well as something more nebulous that he couldn’t identify. The final type of training was his Talent.

  Blake didn’t know whether it was something his Talent did specifically or if it was just a byproduct of the strain his Talent put on him but every time it activated the warmth centered around his mind and then spread through his body via the nervous system.

  The specifics didn’t matter to Blake. Training his mind without his Talent would have been the most difficult part as whatever meditation did had minimal effect on his mind at best. With the Talent expanding his mind Blake was starting to see noticeable improvement.

  The most obvious component was his memory. Despite the sheer amount of information provided by his Talent Blake was still able to recall almost everything he had learned since arriving in the spirit realm with perfect clarity. Some details overlapped and blurred together but only in the earliest memories before he had improved his mind much.

  Memory was a hard thing to measure so Blake didn’t know how he compared to an unawakened human but if he wasn’t at the peak of normal human potential he was close. He didn’t think for a moment that he was in the supernatural realm yet, however. He had heard of people with photographic memory and he was by no means at that level in terms of detail.

  The other component of his mental improvement that Blake had noted was his ability to process information. When he had first used his Talent it had taken a few minutes to process everything from even the simplest of crafts.

  Now his more complicated creations that his Talent provided him with much more information on could be processed within half a minute. If he were to receive an equivalent amount of information as his first craft, the leaf bed, it would be a matter of moments to process and sort through.

  This wasn’t just helpful for working through the information provided by his Talent. When going through his obstacle course with the new swinging traps, Blake found the improved processing efficiency made all the difference when it came to mentally mapping out his path forward. His Talent-provided observation skills were enhanced by the growth of his mind.

  Meditating in a potentially dangerous environment might not have been the best idea but Blake couldn’t regret it when he noticed the shift only because he was meditating. The sensation that he had begun to associate with his spiritual senses picked up a shift in the atmosphere.

  Blake was immediately on high alert. He scanned the surroundings for danger prepared for a monster to jump out at him. Slowly, he crept away from the nearest bushes into a more empty area to get clear sight lines.

  It took a moment for him to realize what had happened. He had crossed over into a different region. Realms were broken up into regions that denoted monster spawning patterns and energy density.

  So far Blake had only ever stayed in the region he had started in. Now he had crossed into a new one. Those who had already awakened said that crossing into a higher-density region was obvious so it must have the same density as the region he had started in which was a relief.

  The region Blake had lived in until now was the low-density region, the weakest possible. The scale was; low, medium, high, and peak. Monsters and other sources of danger scaled with the region’s density so crossing over to a medium-density region could spell disaster if he wasn’t ready.

  It was interesting that he had been able to sense the change between two low-density regions at all. Typically it was only through the change in density that it was possible to detect the borders of a region but apparently, spiritual senses could do the same.

  The question for Blake was whether or not to keep moving forward and if he did was meditating on the move a good idea. Different regions usually had different kinds of threats so there was something to say about staying with the dangers he knew.

  On the other hand that might not apply between neighboring regions of the same density. He hadn’t known it was possible to detect such a thing so maybe it wasn’t common knowledge and everyone would just assume they were one region.

  Blake decided to keep moving forward. He was already terrified. What difference did an unknown danger make to a known one? He didn’t even know that much about the danger of his starting region.

  That just left whether or not to meditate while moving. Trying to meditate took away from his awareness of his surroundings but that only applied to his mundane senses. Blake did not have a firm enough control of his spiritual senses to use them without at least half meditating and it was those senses that let him detect the change in region.

  Was knowing when he changed regions worth potentially missing something with his mundane senses. His first instinct was to say yes. Knowing if he had crossed over to a high-density region could save his life.

  As he thought about it, however, Blake changed his mind. Information on spiritual senses was not common knowledge so it must be obvious when crossing into a higher-density region. Meditation wouldn’t be necessary in that case. His meditation training even when not actively doing it would probably provide a boost to make it even easier to sense anyway.

  If he only needed to meditate to sense a change between equal-density regionss it was no longer worth it. Blake had already decided that he didn’t care if he wasn’t in the same region anymore only if the area was going to be more dangerous so why would he risk being snuck up on for information that didn’t matter.

  Deciding to pay more attention to his surroundings and not meditate, Blake set off at a light jog once again. Despite being in a new zone the surroundings stayed painfully consistent. Endless forest surrounded him in every direction with no sign of anything different.

  There were no mountains in the distance or the sound of running water just trees, trees, and more trees. In hopes of not getting too lost Blake paused every now and then to carve arrows pointed back toward his glade. The uniformity of his surroundings would make it easy to get lost.

  As the sun began to set Blake stopped for the night. Before setting off he had planned how he wanted to approach his exploration. One of his decisions was to go in a straight line until he could no more, whether due to running into a higher density zone or the edge of the realm.

  Another decision he had made was that while he could get by sleeping on the hard ground in the dark after running through most of the night he wouldn’t. Blake had enough mental anguish going into this trip, he did not need to add more.

  So every night, the moment the sun began to set, he would stop. There would be no running in the dark or sleeping wherever he could. Instead, he spent the time needed to get a fire started and create a leaf bed.

  It would take too long to make a leaf bed to the standard he did back in his glade but Blake still made something that would be better than the hard ground. A proper stone shovel made all the difference in his digging speed letting him finish the bed quickly.

  The axe Blake brought provided him with plenty of well-prepared fire wood and a place to sit by the fire. He also spent time creating a ring of defensive spikes around his campsite. With a rabbicorn horn knife to help make the pointed ends of the wooden spikes it took less than an hour to prepare.

  He was now defended enough to kill a rabbicorn. If anything bigger wanted to attack him in the night they would at least be delayed long enough for him to wake up. Unlike back home, Blake did not dig a trench behind the spikes. It would have been too time-consuming to accomplish. The spike barrier was thicker to compensate.

  Before going to bed Blake spent time meditating. The day had gone well, better than he had expected, but he still felt scared away from his glade. Meditation helped him calm down for the night while being productive for his training.

  Meditation done Blake lay down in his bed. Tomorrow he would continue his journey in search of civilization or, if that wasn’t possible, a way to ascend should his current methods of training prove insufficient.

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