‘I remember that despite my body being fine in the Training Room, hunger gnawed at my stomach immediately after I got out, and extreme thirst also hit me… Why is that?’

Riyue put his hand to his chin in thought.

He didn’t know for how long he had trained exactly in the Training Room, but he deduced that it must’ve been several hours.

‘...Right, come to think of it, if I had spent several hours in the Training Room, why was it still night when I came back from it?’

Riyue remembered that the moonlight was still shining when he finished his training session, meaning that it was still nighttime, as if only one or two hours had passed despite his training for several more hours inside the Training Room.

‘Is the time here and the outside reality different?’

Riyue’s eyes lit up.

If that is the case, then it was a huge advantage. However, Riyue soon remembered his hunger and thirst and concluded:

‘If my hypothesis is correct, although I am in perfect form every time I am in the Training Room, the burdens of the training, food, and water are transferred over to my real body. For example, if I spend 8 hours in this Training Room in perfect form, my real body will feel as if it had been deprived of water for 8 hours even if only 2-3 hours have passed in the real world.’

Riyue frowned, realizing something.

‘Wait… Does that mean I could just unknowingly die of starvation and water deprivation?’

Riyue then felt chills on his body.

‘Damn it, things would be easy if there was a time tracker here somewhere!’

Ding!

“Hm?”

[00:00:00]

[Start]

“Oh… Right, you are not a hyperbolic time chamber but rather a system.”

Riyue felt his frustrations immediately fly away after the time tracker appeared, and he grinned.

‘...Hmm, this is good, very good. But after confirming that the state of exhaustion, hunger, and thirst of the Training Room version of me is transferred to the one in reality, I cannot really test the system now. After all, I need to sle-!’

Riyue's eyes widened before he slapped his thighs in excitement.

“Can’t I just sleep here!?”

Wouldn’t the benefits of sleep transfer to the real world if he did so?

‘Holy shit, this is the workaholic’s dream!’

Riyue didn’t spend any more time before he immediately lay on the white floor and started the time tracker. Though his body was always energized in the Training Room, after he decided to sleep, as if a switch was flipped, his body immediately felt heavier and warmer until Riyue fell asleep.

***

Waking up in the white room, Riyue immediately checked the time tracker.

[08:32:07]

Immediately after checking the time, Riyue exited the Training Room while internally praying that his real body didn’t die while he was sleeping.

After he went back into reality, he felt extremely refreshed. The familiar campfire came into his sight, and Riyue exited the room. Since he didn’t have a clock, he looked at the moon’s position to roughly tell the time. Though he wasn’t an astrologer, he was able to roughly tell the time—well, at least he thought so before looking at the moon in confusion.

‘Hmm, I really can’t tell. The moon didn’t move as much as I thought it would.’

As he slept just when nighttime arrived, it was normal for it to still be nighttime when he woke up 8 hours later. However, the moon in his sight had only moved a little bit, meaning only a few hours had passed as opposed to 8 hours, or at least that was his theory.

‘For a more precise calculation, I would need to have a clock… Come to think of it, I don’t really need to check it now.’

He had gotten so excited at the advantage he discovered that he didn’t think of checking it later.

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‘I also need to check whether the system has some sort of danger sense or not. Or if my body can react when there is danger or not. I can just use other people to emit hostility toward me when I’m sleeping. Surely in this world, there is such a thing as hostile intent, right?’

Riyue chuckled before he got up. Confirming that he could reduce his sleep time was good enough already.

‘Though it does makes me hungry and thirsty, gosh.’

Despite that, Riyue decided to fast and save his water and continued walking through the night. Considering how there were roughly 2 days' worth of journey left, Riyue intended on arriving as fast as possible, preferably within one day if he also traveled during the nighttime. After all, the Mi Ying Forest, the forest he was in currently, is not the most comfortable place out there, and as a former modern man in the 20th century, the feeling of discomfort was even stronger than normal.

‘Fortunately, I haven’t encountered any monsters that were too strong nor any assassins… Shit, did I just curse myself?’

As if confirming his thoughts, the surrounding fog suddenly grew thicker, and to his side, a male figure clad in a black robe and hood appeared, with a sword in hand.

‘Fucking hell!’

The figure looked around in confusion, but once he laid eyes on Riyue, his sword suddenly shined with a blue hue as he dashed toward Riyue. Without hesitation, Riyue converged his Sun and Moon Qi onto both of his legs and immediately ran toward the path to the Qilin.

His legs trembled in agony as pain coursed through them, but pain be damned, he was about to die if he didn’t run. Every figure dispatched by the Jin Family was at least a Stage 3, with some even at Stage 4 or Stage 5! The reason for the high level was due to them being elite assassins trained by the Shen Lei Kingdom personally. Fortunately, the one he encountered was a Stage 3, but he still cursed his luck. After all, the chances of an assassin becoming ‘lost’ in the forest and appearing right next to him were abysmal, yet that was what happened.

At the subtle sound of wind being cut, goosebumps appeared throughout his body as he immediately threw himself down. An energy blade swished past and cut the tree in front of him. Immediately after that, he rolled sideways and dodged the assailant’s blade.

While rolling, Riyue grabbed a handful of dirt and threw it toward the assassin’s eyes. The assassin flicked the dirt away as he chased after Riyue, his figure closing in on him. Seeing this, Riyue clicked his tongue. At this rate, he would get caught and killed. Dodging the energy blades themselves was feasible, but fighting and running from someone two stages higher was almost impossible.

Emphasis on almost.

Riyue swerved around the trees, with the assassin trailing behind him. Once the assassin got close, he used a sword style specialized for assassination as he aimed toward Riyue’s vitals. However, unlike the movements of a regular assassin, this guy’s movements were somewhat weird, funky, and messed up due to the sense disruption of the fog. Because of it, Riyue managed to barely dodge, but shallow cuts appeared on his neck and shoulder, as blood dripped from them.

“Damned demon worshipper.”

The assassin clicked his tongue as he resumed the catch-the-mouse game. Riyue didn’t reply as he climbed up a tree fast and used the branches as a foothold to jump around. The assassin seemed quite surprised at his movements, but he managed to follow effortlessly with his superior Qi amount and stage.

As the assassin jumped from branch to branch while spewing energy blades many times, he got closer again. Right after Riyue landed on the next branch at the same time as the assassin jumped, Riyue crushed the branch before jumping toward another tree, making the assassin’s foothold fall to the ground alongside the assassin himself.

“Damn you!” In a last-ditch effort, the assassin’s blade glowed the brightest it had been before firing toward Riyue. The fog below was thickening, and Riyue also dropped from the tree to the ground to dodge the energy blade and hid himself from the assassin. As the fog covered both him and the assassin, the latter mysteriously disappeared while Riyue stayed in the same position.

After confirming the assassin was lost again through the fog and the surroundings were safe without any monsters, Riyue gasped for breath, trying to calm himself down and his relentless heartbeat.

“F-fuck, that was scary as hell.”

If he didn’t have the Mountain Tiger Martial Technique, which specialized in leaping and movements akin to an agile tiger, the Convergence of the Sun and Moon Qi, as well as the fog that disturbed the other’s senses in combat and made them lost, he wouldn’t have been able to escape the assassin.

Riyue then collapsed, his butt smashing into the ground, his legs shivering, trembling, before they got a cramp due to overuse. If he had pushed any longer, perhaps a muscle would’ve been ripped off. However, without minding it, Riyue looked toward his own hands, which were trembling and dripping with cold sweat. It was the closest he had been to death by another and not some terminal illness.

Riyue placed his hands to his rapidly beating heart before he took a deep breath and exhaled.

‘This is that kind of world after all. I have to get used to it. This is a precious second chance I have gotten, and I cannot afford to waste it by being a coward!’

Riyue then placated himself by remembering the close bouts with death he had throughout his entire life. After all, whether it was death by starvation, cancer, or by a blade, all of them were death in the same meaning. Therefore, why should he fear death when he was already familiar with being close to it?

After calming himself down and stifling the fear inside, Riyue crawled to a nearby tree and leaned back on it before checking his Qi amount and Martial Art Mastery.

Qi Amount: 54/514 (recovery 3/minute), (Next Stage requires 2000)

Martial Arts and Mastery Gauge:

* Mountain Tiger Martial Technique: 8%

‘Wow, running away from a life-threatening danger increased the mastery by a whole lot.’

As for the Qi amount, Riyue thought it would probably increase once he recovered it fully. After all, one of the ways to consistently increase Qi bit by bit is to expend it all before waiting for it to recover and steadily build it up.

‘I should rest here for an hour or two and wait until my Qi recovers. The same for my legs.’

Riyue sat down as he covered his legs with an expensive balm that the Original Riyue always carried with him. He didn’t use it for his hands due to wanting to save it up for more serious injuries or usage, such as the current condition of his legs.

Riyue laughed bitterly at the sorry state he was in right now.

‘...Perhaps this wasn’t the best world to get a second chance in.’

Still, what else could be done? At least he still got a second chance. Riyue rested for an hour or so before he began moving again.