Gray’s actions of punching a metal block and breaking his hand might seem insane to others, but nobody was watching and he didn’t care in the slightest.

He looked at his hand, which was limply hanging at the end of his wrist, with a weird expression that was a mix of disappointment, amusement, and insanity.

‘It hurts. But it doesn’t hurt nearly as bad as evolving.’

He then waved his still broken hand, collecting the metal block into the spatial ring once again.

He had at one point had two rings, but the first, the one which contained weapons, talismans, one-time-use items, and other things, was forcefully removed from his body when he was captured, and the second, which contained only his wealth, wasn’t worth the massive amount of effort it took to remove the ring.

That metal block wasn’t part of his wealth, but it wasn’t a weapon, so he kept it in his second ring as a method of training and measuring progress.

At the peak of his previous life, he would be able to shatter that metal block with a single punch and be unharmed. And after, he would be able to melt it down and reforge it stronger with nothing but his own power.

Now, he was so weak that it instead shattered his bones when he punched it.

But that didn’t mean there was nothing gained when he punched it and shattered his hand. It was just that others wouldn’t understand what he had gained.

He quickly headed back to his room after collecting the metal block.

When he got there, he quickly undressed, got in the tub, and waved his hand, a glass vial filled with blood appearing in it.

He wasn’t surprised to see that the blood had rotted and dried up over the forty years he was trapped in his mind, but that likely didn’t matter for this.

He opened up the vial, and a horrible stench came out of it. However, he just ignored it and cut open his palm, allowing his own blood to flow into the vial.

The rotted and dried up blood was soaked by his blood, and he waited for a few minutes before pouring the blood from the vial into his hand, absorbing the power within it and triggering the evolution ability.

But the moment he did this, the pain was so intense that he almost passed out in seconds, his body being so badly injured and torn apart that it essentially looked like he had exploded with blood.

His limbs twisted awkwardly, his bones essentially exploding as his skin was torn all over his body. The only aspect of himself that remained almost unharmed was his eyes.

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The pain was so intense that he couldn’t even process enough to be able to scream, and even if he could, his muscles were far too damaged to do so anyway.

The cells in his body were undergoing such drastic changes that they couldn’t properly maintain their connections to each other, and his body was quite literally falling apart as he watched.

All over his body, blood was spurting out, and chunks of his flesh would occasionally fall off, revealing chunks of shattered bone underneath.

And occasionally, those chunks of bone would fall out as well, leaving his body looking like a rapidly decaying corpse that had been dropped off a thousand foot cliff onto razor sharp rocks.

His heart was barely able to keep beating, and his brain was also subjected to the forceful reconstruction.

It was made extremely clear to him at this moment that he had severely underestimated the quality of the blood in the vial and the changes it would bring to his body.

Either that or he had underestimated just how weak his body currently was.

Either way, right now, he was teetering on the edge of death due to his own stupidity.

However, just as he was about to die, a sudden wave of clarity and lifeforce overwhelmed his body, and he felt as if his life itself had been elevated to a level past a simple biologically living body.

Due to this power, his wounds instantly started to heal, even if slowly, his mind regained clarity, and he felt as if the process of evolution had sped up by an absolutely insane amount.

He watched as his body rapidly healed, putting itself back together piece by piece and, despite being covered in blood and that tar-like substance, coming back to its original shape as if nothing had happened to it before.

This was a slow process, and it took over an hour before the evolution finally finished.

However, when the evolution did finish, that weird wave of lifeforce also vanished entirely, as if it had never existed in the first place.

After it vanished, he felt incredibly tired, more tired than he had ever felt before, and he couldn’t resist for even five seconds before completely passing out.

And how exhausted he was could be shown by the fact that he slept for a whole two days before even waking up!

However, when he woke up, he instantly felt the immense difference compared to before. It seemed that he had underestimated just how much stronger the blood and body of a genius was compared to an average person.

The blood had come from the tenth ranked genius of his past life, so it was needless to say that he was powerful.

However, he didn’t realize that the difference was a matter of ten times! Every aspect except those that were originally stronger than a genius had increased by ten times!

His blood, bones, muscles, senses, speed, and flexibility, among many other things, had all increased in quality and strength by an astonishing amount.

Even his compatibility with Qi had increased. Overall, he felt as if his power had increased by ten times.

‘Just the tenth ranked genius is like this? I guess I never really took advantage of the body of a genius in my previous life.’

It was the truth that he had totally wasted his body’s potential, and since he was ranked first among the geniuses, it was exceedingly obvious to him that he had wasted his talent while thinking that he hadn’t.

‘Now, to work my way up the rankings.’