Chapter 9: Chapter 9

Hearing her mother’s heartfelt words, Liya felt a stir in her heart and blurted out, “Then I want to join the territory guard too!”

“What nonsense are you talking about! Having your father in it is already enough to worry me sick. If you leave too, I won’t even know how to go on living!”

These words clearly carried a performative element, but with her mother putting it like that, Liya didn’t press the matter further. After all, she had never particularly liked the life of combat and adventure anyway, which was precisely why she had tried to stop Ron in the first place.

Ron stayed out of the conversation between mother and daughter. At this moment, he couldn’t have gotten a word in even if he wanted to, for his mouth was stuffed full of the beef Liya kept passing his way.

Though Liya was quite displeased with her father’s “betrayal,” since the matter could no longer be stopped, she would do everything she could to help Ron succeed in joining the territory guard.

Her father said Ron needed to eat meat to build up his strength, so she absolutely would not let him slack off for even a moment.

…

Inside Liya’s house, Ron was in agony and ecstasy at the same time. He certainly loved this Fire Beef that was both delicious and accelerated his 【Comprehensive Body Refinement Technique】 progress.

The caveat being:

Don’t treat this Fire Beef like a staple food!

At first, he ate quite happily. Someone else was roasting the meat for him, another person thoughtfully sliced it and handed it over piece by piece. He could feel the warm currents surging through his body while his physique steadily grew stronger.

After eating more than half a cow leg, he could clearly feel that the strength in his hands had increased significantly. His originally frail body had also filled out, and because the exercise was natural, his control over that strength had improved in tandem.

Everything felt as though it were being generated by pure instinct.

Of course, he still couldn’t accurately control some of the more delicate movements, but that wasn’t caused by the increase in strength. Rather, it was simply because he had no prior experience with such actions.

After all, the 【Comprehensive Body Refinement Technique】 was merely a fairly comprehensive and balanced exercise method. It couldn’t conjure up experience out of thin air that never existed.

…

After finishing the remainder of the cow leg at Liya’s house, Ron was already feeling noticeably sick of it. The sore, aching jaw from all the chewing was only a secondary concern. After all, this meat genuinely and tangibly improved his physical condition, and his body was craving and crying out for it.

But psychologically, the resistance from continuously eating the exact same thing grew stronger and stronger. And just then, Jason, who had stepped out earlier, had returned, bringing back even more of the same Fire Beef.

Finally, after receiving yet another small plate of roasted meat from Liya and catching a whiff of that faint but distinctive smell, Ron couldn’t hold back any longer and let out a most undignified dry heave.

“Uncle Jason, I really can’t eat anymore!”

“Can’t eat? Then go outside and shovel snow!”

“Okay.”

The moment he heard that, Ron practically leapt off his low stool. It wasn’t just out of revulsion toward the beef. Right now, he also badly wanted to test how far his body had been trained.

Taking the wooden shovel Aunt Mary handed him, Ron fled the wooden cabin as if escaping for his life. Once outside, the cold wind hit him and the nausea that had crawled up to his throat was quickly suppressed.

With that, rationality reasserted itself. He couldn’t help but mock himself inwardly. Here he had such an excellent opportunity to rapidly improve himself, and he was actually being picky about it. What right did he have to be picky?

Still, since he was already outside, he wasn’t going to rush back in. He had been told to shovel snow, so he would shovel snow.

…

The distance from Liya’s house to Ron’s was roughly a hundred and fifty meters. The snow covering the stone slab road was about half a foot deep. Clearing snow of this depth wasn’t particularly difficult for anyone.

After all, no one had set a rule for how much snow each shovelful had to move.

Ron gripped the wooden shovel and drove it hard into the ground along the roadside outside Liya’s house, pushing all the way down until it struck the surface, then gave a forceful flick, tossing the scooped snow to the side of the road.

He didn’t find the movement strenuous at all.

In truth, although transcendent power was playing a role, the 【Comprehensive Body Refinement Technique】 was ultimately just a balanced, plain exercise method akin to calisthenics. Anyone could figure it out through trial and error; Ron was simply more efficient at it.

It was no secret ultimate technique, nor could it possibly turn someone into Superman overnight.

Ron estimated that the limit of the 【Comprehensive Body Refinement Technique】 was roughly the limit of what a native human could achieve in a natural state. Or to put it another way, the limit was reaching the very threshold of the 【Transcendent】.

With that in mind, he shoveled even harder. Jason telling him to shovel snow when he couldn’t eat anymore was definitely not just messing with him. This was very likely a method that native humans used to digest meat.

Or rather, a foundational training method before stepping into the transcendent!

Abstracted further, the principle was simple: eat hard, then train hard. It didn’t necessarily have to be shoveling snow. After all, Ron didn’t feel there was anything special about shoveling snow itself. The point was probably to engage the entire body as much as possible.

By comparison, the 【Comprehensive Body Refinement Technique】 was practically a bug. It could be driven internally, allowing Ron to sit in one place and continuously produce the effects of exercise.

From that perspective, shoveling snow was actually somewhat redundant for him.

However, he had no intention of deliberately showing off what made him special. Letting the 【Comprehensive Body Refinement Technique】 play the role of “talent” was sufficient. As for training, he could use the snow shoveling to familiarize himself with his strengthened body.

So in his subsequent work, Ron didn’t try to maximize the amount of snow he scooped per stroke, nor did he chase speed. Instead, he used his body to sense and comprehend, striving to scoop the same weight of snow with every single motion.

Through this method, he trained his precise control over strength.

Back home, Ron had often seen butchers at the market casually slice off cuts of meat to an exact weight. In his view, those butchers didn’t possess any special talent. It was simply a matter of practiced familiarity!

It was just that most ordinary people had no need to practice precise meat-cutting, or indeed any need for precise force control at all. Relying on the human body’s instinctive control was more than enough to handle the vast majority of situations.

In a world of transcendence, relying solely on the body’s natural control might also be sufficient for a Transcendent to handle most situations. But to reach the absolute pinnacle in this field, control was something that couldn’t be neglected.

The 【Comprehensive Body Refinement Technique】, and any possible advanced versions to come, had already saved Ron an enormous amount of training time. If he also committed to practicing control on top of that, the combined effect would amount to:

A person who was not only smart but also hardworking. In terms of development, they would undoubtedly hold a far greater advantage than others.

…

What Ron didn’t know was that while he was absorbed in his control training, Jason was watching from the doorway of Liya’s house behind him. Jason first frowned, then his expression shifted to one of sheer astonishment.

“This kid is simply a born Knight Seed!”

But after the surprise faded, a glint of worry flickered in Jason’s eyes. Based on his original estimate, Ron wouldn’t become a Formal Knight until after next summer. That timing would have allowed him to perfectly avoid the most dangerous period of the Aberrant Beast invasion.