“Begin training.”
“Very good. Please say it again.”
“……” Though this was his first time using a product from this world’s Dayan, Feng Xue somehow found that familiar feeling in the span of a single sentence.
“Begin training.”
“Understood. Voiceprint recorded. A combat power assessment is now required. This unit possesses real-time learning capabilities and can revise data at any time. This assessment will only serve as an initial reference for training output. Please remain calm. May I ask, is it convenient for you to undergo the assessment now?”
“You can tell at once there are a lot of stories behind that line.” Feng Xue raised his brows, already picturing some idiot who, out of sheer competitiveness, had put all his strength into punching the iron man dummy, causing a misjudgment, getting beaten senseless by it, and then filing a complaint.
“It’s convenient.”
“Understood. Please punch me.” Along with the prompt, the iron man dummy’s height slowly rose. At the same time, at a position level with Feng Xue’s chest, a round target whose meaning was obvious at a glance appeared.
“Bang!”
Without any special exertion or restraint, Feng Xue threw an ordinary straight punch. Along with a sensation no different from striking a real person, the synthesized voice rang out again:
“Very good. Please kick me.”
The round target immediately shifted downward, dropping to a position near the crotch.
“Bang!”
“Very good. Next, we will conduct a two-minute actual-combat calibration. I will dodge and block, but will not counterattack. Please launch attacks against me.”
Hearing this, Feng Xue immediately swung his fist. He had to admit, this thing really was quite interesting. Feng Xue could clearly feel that with every attack he launched, the iron man dummy grew a little more familiar with him. At first, it was still somewhat stiff, but by the fortieth second, Feng Xue could already sense that it had begun coordinating with his speed and strength, always maintaining a state where it took some effort to catch up, yet was not so far out of reach that he could not touch it.
After two minutes like this, Feng Xue was already covered in a thin sheen of sweat. He instinctively wanted to use source energy to reset himself, only then remembering that all of his source energy had already been used on Kong Wu’s strike, “Hell Piercing Heart Sword.”
For the first time since transmigrating, he had “depleted” his source energy. Though some had recovered by now, it was still somewhat insufficient for resetting his body.
“Tsk. I got used to spending it extravagantly in places where it hadn’t mattered before. I’ll have to pay attention to this kind of consumption in the future too.”
Feng Xue reflected inwardly, but did not immediately test the iron man dummy’s actual training functions. Instead, he took out the portable operating table, preparing to perform his first surgery on himself.
He did not plan to install the Second Son Arm. The other prosthetic bodies were not urgent either. But the installation of the four prosthetic bodies—Benevolent Chest, Talented Shoulders, Virtuous Back, and Flesh Maitreya—was something that should be done as early as possible.
Unfortunately, he did not have the corresponding four-star blueprints on hand, so he could only first make a lower-spec version.
A torso exoskeleton loaded with Benevolent Chest and Nigerundayo; shoulder interfaces loaded with Talented Shoulders and Great Strength; back muscle groups loaded with Virtuous Back and Spinosaurus Form; and a Tai Sui high-energy fat synthesis unit made specially using Flesh Maitreya, loaded with Envy and Great Strength.
Mm, Tai Sui was the prosthetic body that had yielded Flesh Maitreya.
The main reason he used Envy was that he did not have any particularly suitable traits on hand, so he simply slotted in Envy. At least it could carry one more skill.
Mm, though for the time being, there weren’t really any skills worth memorizing.
……
Performing surgery on himself was far simpler than Feng Xue had imagined. After transferring his consciousness into the Demon Sword’s body, the rest was no different from operating on someone else—he even administered several types of deep anesthesia and temporary nerve blockers on himself to test the reliability of consciousness transfer.
The only problem was that his current source energy was insufficient to complete the assimilation of the prosthetic bodies. As a result, the plan to test the iron man dummy had to be set aside for now, and Feng Xue could only obediently lie in bed, enduring the postoperative throbbing pain.
“Unless it’s absolutely unavoidable, I must never use up all my source energy!”
……
Bang, bang, bang…
Early in the morning, muffled impacts rang out from the warehouse beside the prosthetic clinic. Unlike the usual sound of gunfire, they carried instead the solid texture of fists striking flesh.
After finally waiting for his source energy to fully recover, Feng Xue had bounced out of bed before dawn, unable to wait as he vented the frustration accumulated over a night of torment.
“Effective hit rate increased by seventeen percent. Your progress is very fast.”
The iron man dummy’s movements slowed slightly as it issued a compliment devoid of any inflection. Feng Xue rolled his eyes and ignored this artificial idiocy that was trying to provide him with emotional value. He stretched his body and said:
“Continue training.”
“It has been detected that you have already undergone twenty minutes of Extreme Mode. It is recommended that you replenish fluids and adjust Extreme Mode to Evenly Matched Mode.”
The iron man dummy gave its suggestion, but Feng Xue only listened to half of it. He picked up his water bottle and took a few gulps, then once again circulated the Benevolent Chest, Talented Shoulders, Virtuous Back Body-Tempering Art, spreading his stance and preparing to continue.
It was not that he had become inflated with confidence. Rather, the set effect of this “Benevolent Chest, Talented Shoulders, Virtuous Back” was truly extraordinary. There was no need to elaborate on how the Virtuous Back’s body-tempering art continuously fine-tuned the quality of his body. The Talented Shoulders’ trait of “greatly increasing proficiency” had given Feng Xue an unexpected surprise as well.
When he had fought Richard earlier, the time had been too short for him to pay much attention to it. But when he truly began training, this description that would have seemed perfectly ordinary in a game finally revealed itself. Even the Benevolent Chest, armor that looked like a useless component, provided him with stronger resistance, allowing him to recover rapidly in his head-on clashes with the iron man dummy.
Seeing that Feng Xue had not changed his command, the iron man dummy’s camera flickered twice, then spoke again:
“The user command contains potential risks. Activating health monitoring function. Scanning. Judgment complete. Your condition is extremely excellent. Executing command… This unit will enter 1v1 Extreme Training Mode in five seconds. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…”
As the countdown ended, the iron man dummy suddenly began to rotate. Feng Xue dodged sideways, his right hand forming a blade as he chopped toward the target representing a vital point.
However, Feng Xue had already used this move before. The iron man dummy did not retreat “half a step” as it had last time. Instead, it abruptly rose by a section, and its two metal rods came smashing toward his chest!
Feng Xue’s pupils constricted, his body reacting swiftly. He forcibly cut off his sweeping kick, braced one arm against the metal rods, and used the force that numbed the webbing between his thumb and forefinger to retreat at high speed.
“Adaptive reaction speed increased by 0.12 seconds.” The iron man dummy retracted to its normal height and delivered its evaluation in a rigid, methodical tone. But Feng Xue did not relax, because the previous twenty minutes of training had already made him realize that every time this thing said he had improved, it meant it was about to increase its output again!
Feng Xue swiftly adjusted his posture, and as expected, the metal rods arrived before him once more.
The iron man dummy’s control over strength was extremely precise. Every increase was perfectly set at a level Feng Xue could just barely cope with. Under this high pressure, the progress of the Benevolent Chest, Talented Shoulders, Virtuous Back Body-Tempering Art advanced rapidly. His muscle fibers, fascial tissues, and even skeletal structure were all being continuously optimized. Every training session became a reshaping of his body.
That feeling of his body improving with every breath and every pulse was truly intoxicating.
Note ①: The protagonist’s source energy consumption is rather high, so he has not yet reestablished contact with Kong Wu.
P.S.: As for why the protagonist doesn’t buy blueprints on the black market…
If you can ask that question, I feel like you’re somewhat lacking common sense.
In this book, only the Gelian and Dayan can mass-produce five-star prosthetic bodies. For other countries, four-star is already the peak.
Buying a four-star prosthetic body is like buying a fighter jet. If you offer enough money, it’s not hard to buy one. Whether it’s an export version or performance-locked, in any case, as long as you don’t compare it to the big brother’s newest model, it’s definitely at an internationally leading level.
But if you want to buy the full set of design blueprints… even the Indians wouldn’t sell those, all right?
You have to understand, blueprints don’t just concern a single type of weapon. They themselves also contain an entire design philosophy and the matching material formulas. If you can obtain the design blueprints for one type of main battle equipment, it’s equivalent to obtaining the complete development logic for that entire series of equipment, as well as the resource list required for that set of equipment. What’s involved isn’t just whether or not you can produce that set of weapons.
This is also different from the crystals the protagonist sells.
Crystals are equivalent to yellowcake. Those with ambition do indeed need them, but in the end, they are still raw materials. Before the technology has truly been transformed into results, they are merely an investment, a gamble. But blueprints are genuinely core results.
Even if there were really some lunatic on the black market who dared to sell them, the price would not be something the protagonist could even think about. Unless he truly courted death and trafficked regulated materials by the ton, no one would sell this thing off. Of course, there are certainly people selling outdated three-star ones, but the protagonist can learn those just by dismantling one.