With the friction provided by the large surface area of his feet, the dry, cracked bark no longer split. Instead, it offered plenty of footholds.
His feet were positioned one above the other, and each push only propelled him up by ten or twenty centimeters.
Even though the branch in the middle was only about three meters away, considering his height and arm length, it still took him a full seven or eight minutes to reach it.
'If it were a thinner tree, it wouldn't be this much trouble. I'm confident I could reach the top of the canopy in under thirty seconds.'
With this broken branch as a rest stop, the second leg of the climb would be much easier.
He took a short five-minute break to recover some of his stamina and glanced at the stream comments. They were all surprised at how he was climbing the tree.
