By the time Jelani hit thirty pushups his arms had stopped shaking.
By forty, something strange was happening. Each pushup felt easier than the last — not because he was getting rest, but because his body was continuously adjusting underneath him, each rep feeding into a cycle of micro-improvement that the system was apparently managing in real time. He could feel it happening. A faint warmth pulsing through his muscles on the downstroke, a quiet click of improvement on each push.
{Your body is adapting faster than a normal cultivator would,} the system told him. {This is intentional. The system accelerates physical conditioning during foundational missions. Don't get used to this pace — it won't always be this easy.}
"Noted," Jelani grunted, hitting forty-five.
By fifty he was sweating hard but his breathing was steady. By seventy he was in a rhythm, head down, mechanical, each pushup precise. He had stopped thinking about his father. He had stopped thinking about the disciples and the city and the wolves and any of it. There was only the count.
Seventy-eight. Seventy-nine. Eighty.
He paused at eighty and sat back on his heels, chest heaving, and looked at the sky. It was midmorning now. He had been out here since before dawn.
"Twenty more," he said out loud.
{Twenty more,} the system agreed.
He went back down.
By the time he hit one hundred, his vision had gone strange — not dark, but bright, like someone had turned up the contrast on everything around him. The trees looked sharper. He could hear the river he'd camped near with a clarity he hadn't noticed before, every individual ripple distinct. He could smell the smoke from the dead fire and the damp earth beneath him and something faintly electric in the air that he had no name for.
He pushed up one last time and held the top position, arms locked, and then the world exploded.
MILESTONE MISSION COMPLETE.
100 Pushups — Completed
Rewards:— Level 5 Body Refinement— System Roulette: 1 Charge— Martial Art Acquired: Mountain Shattering Fist (Beginner)— System Clone: 1 Slot Unlocked
The warmth that hit him this time was nothing like the first four times. This was a flood. It started at his core and detonated outward, and Jelani had just enough time to think oh no before he was flat on his back in the dirt again, staring straight up at the sky, every nerve in his body stinging simultaneously.
When it passed — thirty seconds or thirty minutes, he genuinely couldn't tell — he lay there breathing.
Then he started laughing.
It wasn't the violent, bitter laughter from when the wolves had been circling him. This was different. This was disbelief. Pure, stupid, unfiltered disbelief at what had just happened to him.
{Are you done?} the system asked.
"Not even close," he laughed.
{Level 5 Body Refinement. For reference, that puts you above approximately sixty percent of the practitioners in your former city.}
He stopped laughing. Sat up.
"Sixty percent."
{Sixty percent. And you achieved it by doing pushups in a field.}
He looked at his hands. They looked the same. But when he clenched one into a fist and drove it lightly into the palm of the other hand, the impact resonated up his arm in a way that felt entirely new — like striking a piece of hardwood rather than soft palms.
"The Mountain Shattering Fist," he said. "What is it exactly?"
{A foundational martial art. Beginner level means you have the framework of the technique installed — the form, the basic Qi channeling pattern. Mastery comes through practice. At full mastery it can shatter boulders. At beginner level it will shatter the bones of anyone below Level 5 Body Refinement on impact.}
"And the system clone?"
{Go to your system category. You'll see it there.}
He opened the system screen and navigated, and there it was — a new tab he hadn't seen before.
System Clone: 1 Active Slot
Current Clones: 0
Deploy Clone Cost: 50 Universe Points
He did not have 50 universe points.
"I don't have fifty universe points."
{I know.}
"So I can't use it yet."
{Correct. I did warn you about that.}
He thought about the roulette charge and decided to save it. The system had said the roulette could give him skills. He'd use it when he knew what he needed, not spin it blind.
"Alright," he said, and started packing up camp. "Time to start hunting beasts."