Chapter 368 - 23: The Mental Energy Problem

Chapter 368: Chapter 23: The Mental Energy Problem

Ash woke up and did not know where he was for about two seconds.

The ceiling was wrong. The light was wrong. Then he heard the soft, steady hum of the array under the floor and remembered.

Training Room Seven.

Day two.

It was completely silent otherwise. In the dorm there had always been something going on—doors sliding open, footsteps in the corridor, someone’s music leaking through the wall, the cleaning drone doing its slow rounds. Here there was nothing. The sealed walls kept everything out. He lay under his blanket for a full minute just listening to the quiet.

He had slept well, though. Better than he had in weeks.

He got up, washed his face with cool water, and went to the kitchen. The stove was basic but worked fine. He heated a ration pack of rice and vegetables, poured an energy drink into a glass, and sat at the little table to eat. It was a decent breakfast. It was also very quiet.

He thought about the cafeteria. Rylan would be at their usual table right about now, probably complaining about something minor. Uncle Bao would have the dumpling steamer open, steam rising in soft clouds. Ash picked up his terminal, looked at Rylan’s name for a second, and then put it back down face-down. Rylan knew he was busy. He would see him in a month.

He finished the rice and sat there a little longer. It had only been two days, and he already felt a quiet urge to walk out the door and see other people.

So this is what seclusion feels like.

He wondered how the cultivators in the old stories had spent thousands of years shut away without going mad. Maybe some of them hadn’t. That would explain why so many of them had such strange tempers. Still, the loneliness was not heavy. He felt content enough. He decided it was fine for now.

Then he called up the Status Panel.

Foundation Rebuild: 30%

Mental Strength: 94

Mental energy: 63%

Recovery rate: Slow

The first line made him smile. Thirty percent after one long session and a night’s sleep. The Mental Strength number had gone up too—from 92 to 94. His mental pool was getting bigger.

The last two lines were amber again.

Ash looked at them for a while.

He had noticed the problem yesterday and let it go. This time he wanted to think it through properly.

The pool was growing. That was clear. But the recovery rate had not changed at all. He had finished yesterday’s session at forty-five percent and had only climbed back to sixty-three overnight. That was a lot of sleep for a very small gain. And it did not make sense.

He was refining his brain. It was one of the nine parts—the ninth black hole—and it was progressing at about the same percentage as everything else. A refined brain should mean more mental strength, energy and faster recovery. Everything he had ever read about it said so. The academy handbook said martial artists had very little mental energy because they never trained the mind, and training the brain was the direct fix.

So why wasn’t it working?

"Is something wrong with my technique" He said out loud.

So he decided to go through it again and he sat back in the chair and went through what he actually knew about brain refining. It turned out to be a lot less than he knew about everything else.

It was a real practice. The academy even sold techniques for it in the contribution store. A few basic ones were free. A few better ones were on sale this term. Instructors always brought it up in first-year orientation, and they always brought it up as a warning. Brain refining was serious. If you did it wrong, the best outcome was permanent brain damage. The worst was that your brain simply exploded. Nobody in his year had tried it, and the ones who talked about trying it had been told very firmly to stop.

Ash had never had the nerve either. He had not even considered it.

But he was doing it now, on purpose, nine times a day, without a single problem. He knew exactly why. It was the Martial Saint talents.

The talents he had copied were mostly about control. Absolute control over cosmic energy. Absolute control over his own cells. Technique mastery at a level he could not have reached in fifty years on his own. There were other things too, but they all came down to the same foundation. The Saint had been able to control everything inside himself at a level where nothing went wrong. Ash had copied a fragment of that control, and it was the only reason he could run this technique at all.

It was a little scary to think about. If he had tried this before copying the talent, he would probably be dead.

He pushed that thought aside. He was alive, and the technique worked. The question was why his mental energy was not recovering the way it should.

The old Ash would have skipped this.

He knew that about himself. Before yesterday, if something was working well enough, he took the win and moved on. If it was too complicated, he found someone else to ask or simply stopped caring. That approach had worked well enough for eighteen years.

But he could not ask anyone about this. There was no one who could tell him what was happening inside his own body. He had to work it out himself.

He was a little surprised to find that he wanted to. He was curious, and he was stubborn about it. The mental energy problem was something he did not understand, and he did not like not understanding it.

He stood up, stretched until his shoulders cracked, and walked to the middle of the array.

Okay. Let’s see what’s actually going on.

He sat down on the platform, closed his eyes, and turned his spiritual sense inward—all the way down to the smallest scale he could reach. He had not done this properly before. He had been too busy using the technique to study what it was actually doing to him.

What he saw was a body being rebuilt from the cells up.

The cells themselves were changing. They were becoming denser, more flexible, and more energy-efficient all at once. Their walls were reshaping too. In his flesh, the cell walls had taken on clean hexagonal shapes that fit against each other with almost no wasted space, each one linked tightly to its neighbors. In his tendons, the cells had formed triangles—the strongest shape for handling compression and tension at the same time. He watched one tendon take the load of his own weight and spread it across thousands of tiny triangles without any visible strain.

His bones were the part that surprised him most. They were getting denser with every cycle, and the internal structure had started to take on a crystalline order close to diamond. He could feel how hard they were becoming. Bones like that would survive hits that would snap an ordinary person’s skeleton in half.

Then there was everything else, and there was a lot of it:

Muscle fibers were lining up in tighter, more organized bundles, with more contracting units and far more of the small structures that produced energy inside each cell.

Blood cells were becoming more flexible and carrying more oxygen, and they lasted longer before breaking down.

Skin cells were packing tighter and growing tougher, with pores that cleared themselves more efficiently.

The heart and lungs were developing thicker walls and a larger surface area for taking in air.

Nerve cells were growing thicker insulating coatings, so signals traveled faster and with less loss.

Brain cells were forming more connections and passing signals more quickly.

Liver and kidney tissue was becoming more efficient at filtering.

Cell repair was speeding up dramatically, so damage from training healed almost as it happened.

The deepest change was the one he could not see directly but could feel clearly. His DNA was being rewritten. In every cycle, weak or inefficient sequences were replaced with stronger ones, and every new cell that formed was an improved copy of the one before it. It was not one big dramatic change. It was thousands of small corrections happening all the time.

He stayed there looking for a long time. The technique was his own work, and this was what it was doing to him.

Then he opened the Status Panel at the edge of his vision, where he could watch the mental energy number without looking straight at it, and started the technique with his spiritual sense still turned fully inward.

But he did not run all nine loops at once.

He started with one.

He ran the skin loop alone—the first and simplest of the nine—and watched the mental energy number. It dropped slowly and steadily. After five minutes it had gone from sixty-three to sixty-two. That was almost nothing.

He added the flesh loop. The drain became a little faster. He added the blood loop, and it sped up again. He added the muscles, then the tendons, then the bones. Each time the number dropped faster than the last. By the time he had six loops running, he was losing about one percent every two minutes.

Then he added the three organ loops, and the drain jumped hard.

He watched the number fall. It went from sixty to fifty-five in what felt like almost no time at all. He kept all nine running for ten full minutes and then stopped. He sat there with his eyes open, looking at the panel.

Mental energy: 41%

He had lost more than twenty percent in ten minutes. He waited. The number started to climb again, slowly. It crept up about one percent in the time it took him to drink a glass of water.

He did the math. It did not need much math.

The technique was spending mental energy far faster than his brain could replace it. Every loop required him to actively guide it. Every loop covered every cell in its part of the body, and there were trillions of cells. He had asked himself to manage trillions of tiny processes at the same time, for hours on end, and every single one of them cost a little mental force. The cost added up. The brain refinement was improving his recovery, but only a little at a time, and the technique was draining the pool much faster than the refinement could fill it.

So the technique is eating it.

He leaned back on his hands and let out a long breath.

He was not upset. If anything, he felt a little relieved. It was a real problem with a real cause, and that meant it could be solved.

He stayed in the array for a while after that, thinking quietly.

There was one more thing that bothered him. He went back through the Martial Saint’s memories—the parts he had copied—and searched for anything about how techniques on this scale were meant to be run.

It took time. The memories were not organized neatly, and he had to move through them by feel. But he found it eventually: a scattering of pieces from the Saint’s life, all pointing in the same direction.

Techniques at this scale were meant to be run by a Master-level mind.

He understood why right away. A Master was not simply stronger than an Apprentice. A Master’s entire body was different, and that included the brain. The mind had grown along with everything else. The mental pool was large enough to carry a technique like this one without strain. It was part of the life evolution itself.

Ash was not a Master. He was a martial artist who had not even left the Body Refining Realm. He was running a Master-scale technique with an Apprentice-scale pool.

He thought about that for a long moment.

He had built something that was bigger than he was ready for. That was a strange thing to realize about his own work. He was still proud. A little worried. A little amused.

Then he made up his mind.

He was not going to give up the technique. He had built it. It was working. It was the best thing he had ever made. And he was not going to wait until he became a Master either. That would take far too long.

He would change the way he ran it.

He stood up, picked up the empty ration pack and the glass, and cleaned the kitchen with quiet efficiency. Then he walked back to the array, sat down on the platform, and rolled his shoulders once.

The technique is the problem, he thought. It’s also the whole point.

He started again, and this time he paid attention to everything.