Chapter 3: 10,000 SwingsDawn on the Ambira countryside was a muted, gray affair. The rain had stopped sometime in the small hours, leaving behind a world that squelched and dripped. The air smelled of wet earth, chicken dung, and the faint, sweet rot of overripe mulberries. Lin Wu stood in the muddy yard behind the farmhouse, barefoot, holding a woodcutter's axe. It was a crude tool—a heavy iron head lashed to a splintered hickory handle with strips of dried leather. The blade was chipped in three places. It was, by any objective measure, a piece of junk.
The glitched text scrolled across his vision like a lazy news ticker. He blinked it away. The HUD was still a mess, but the core functionality was there. He could see the numbers. And numbers could be optimized. His father had watched him walk out into the yard with a mixture of hope and deep, paternal concern. The boy had declared he was going to "train." Lin He had expected to see him sitting cross-legged, straining to feel Qi that wasn't there. Instead, the boy had picked up the axe, walked to the woodpile, and just... stood there. "You need firewood for the stove?" Lin He had asked, hopeful for a normal answer. "No," Lin Wu had replied without looking back. "I need experience points." Lin He had no idea what that meant. He decided it was best to let the boy work through his grief in his own way. He retreated into the house to finish his cold congee. Lin Wu took a deep breath. The air was clean, at least. No smog, no gunpowder residue. Just the honest stench of farm life. Okay. Tutorial grind. How do you level up Strength in a game where the skill tree is offline? You swing the damn axe. He lifted the axe. It was heavy. His arms, still thin and corded with the lean muscle of a starving farmhand, trembled slightly. He focused on the woodpile. A thick round of ironwood, dense enough to dull a lesser blade in ten strikes, sat waiting. He swung. Thwack. The blade bit into the wood, sinking maybe an inch. The shock traveled up the handle and into his palms, a jarring sting that made his teeth click together.
He stared at the notification. Zero point one percent. That meant one thousand swings for a single skill level. And that was just for Novice. He could already imagine the grind to Axe Master or Axe God. It would be tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. A normal person would have despaired. A normal cultivator would have scoffed at the sheer, bone-deep tedium of it. Why spend a year swinging an axe when you could spend a year absorbing a wisp of Heaven and Earth Qi and punch through a boulder? But Lin Wu was not a normal person. He was a gamer. And gamers loved grinding. Ten thousand swings to max out the beginner tier, he calculated. At two seconds per swing, accounting for stamina recovery... that's roughly five and a half hours of non-stop work. Let's call it six with breaks. I can do that before sundown. He swung again. Thwack. The rhythm consumed him. The world narrowed to the grain of the wood, the weight of the axe, and the burning protest of his untrained muscles. His mind, the part of him that was still the battle-hardened Combat Battle Royale veteran, drifted into a meditative state. It was like looting a thousand boxes. Tedious, but necessary. By the hundredth swing, his palms were raw. A blister had formed and popped on the webbing between his thumb and forefinger, leaving a sticky smear of blood on the handle.
Of course there's a debuff, he thought grimly. He ignored it. He adjusted his grip, favoring the right hand, and kept swinging. Pain was just another status effect to be managed. By the five hundredth swing, the neighbors had started to notice. The Wu family farm was on the outskirts of the village, but sound traveled in the quiet countryside. The steady, rhythmic thwack-thwack-thwack was like a strange, industrious heartbeat. Old Widow Guo, who lived a quarter-mile down the lane, paused in her weeding to squint toward the Lin property. "Is that boy chopping wood?" she muttered to her mangy dog. "In the mud? Barefoot? Has he lost his mind as well as his mother?" She wasn't the only one. A group of village youths, led by a stocky, pimple-faced teenager named Chen Gou, wandered past the farm's boundary stones. Chen Gou was the son of the village's only butcher. He was also a 1st Stage Qi Condensation cultivator—a fact he reminded everyone of at least three times a day. He could lift a full-grown pig with one hand. He was, by the standards of this backwater, a "genius." He saw Lin Wu, the talentless orphan, swinging an axe at a log like a madman. The boy's back was drenched in sweat, his hands were bloody, and his breathing was ragged. "Look at the trash," Chen Gou sneered, loud enough for his companions to snicker. "What are you doing, Lin Wu? Trying to chop your way to immortality? You can't cultivate, so you're going to become a lumberjack?" The others laughed. It was a hollow, mean sound. Lin Wu didn't stop swinging. Thwack. "Hey! I'm talking to you, noob!" Chen Gou stepped forward, his Qi flaring slightly. A faint, almost imperceptible pressure pushed against Lin Wu's back. It was meant to intimidate, to make him stumble. Lin Wu felt it. It was like a faint static charge on his skin. But his focus didn't waver. His eyes were locked on the wood.
Ignore the NPC banter. Focus on the objective. The silence stretched, broken only by the axe. Chen Gou's face reddened. Being ignored was a greater insult than any retort. "Fine! Waste your life! When the next beast tide comes, don't come crying to me for protection!" He stormed off, his cronies trailing behind him. Lin Wu allowed himself a small, grim smile. Beast tide, huh? That's a scheduled event. Good to know. As the sun began to dip below the treeline, casting long, orange shadows across the muddy yard, Lin Wu delivered the final blow.
Lin Wu dropped the axe. His arms felt like they were filled with molten lead. Every muscle fiber screamed. He looked down at his hands. The blood had dried into a cracked, brown crust. And yet, beneath the exhaustion, he felt something else. A faint, warm hum. It wasn't Qi. It was something deeper, more primal. It was the satisfaction of a progress bar filling up. It was the knowledge that this body, this broken, talentless shell, was capable of growth. He looked over at the corner of the woodpile, where the dull, blackened metal fragment sat half-buried in mud. He had moved it outside earlier, wanting it close. As his eyes fell on it, the glitched System flickered.
One percent, Lin Wu thought, a tired but genuine smile spreading across his face. A thousand swings for a skill level, and a day of hard work for one percent of soul sync. This game's economy is brutal. He liked it. He picked up the axe and the black fragment and walked back toward the farmhouse. His father was standing in the doorway, a bowl of cold congee in his hands. The old man looked at his son's ruined hands and exhausted face, and his eyes welled with tears. "Son... you don't have to do this. Your mother... she wouldn't want you to suffer like this." Lin Wu took the bowl of congee with his bloody, trembling hands. He took a bite. It was bland and watery. It was the best thing he had ever tasted. "This isn't suffering, Father," he said, his voice hoarse but steady. "This is leveling up." He walked inside, leaving Lin He staring at the muddy footprints on the threshold, more confused and more hopeful than he had been in twenty years. |
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Chapter 11: The Mortal Who Broke the Rules DAY 30 OF 30 — THE DUEL Lin Wu woke before the sun, as he had every morning for a month. But today was different. Today, the grind ended. Today, the boss fight began. He lay still for a moment, cataloguing his body. The hairline fracture in his right forearm from the boar hunt had healed to a dull ache. His muscles were loose, warm from sleep. The Numbroot paste, applied the night before and sealed under cloth wraps, had left his hands and forearms comfortably distant—a buffer against the pain to come. STATUS REPORT HP: 100/100 Stamina: 100/100 Soul Sync: 29% ...
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