Tom kept on running deeper into the mountain. And not long after, he spotted another golem. It let out a roar letting the other know where he was.

Tom didn't waste time and closed the distance between them before it could start bombarding him with rocks. He decided to test his limits and ran past it, just barely avoiding it, keeping his hammers on a crash course with it.

The golem tried to dodge, but as it was already running toward Tom, it didn't have the athletic ability to alter its course. It was like a train as it charged forwards, laws of physics working against it, too much mass going forwards to allow it to alter its course in time. And then they connected.

The next moment, the hammers went through the golem, taking a basketball-sized chunk of rock with them. Tom had somehow managed to hold onto his hammers. However, the victory didn't come without its toll, his arms hurt, and not even his improved muscles and bones could withstand that kind of hit without facing some consequences. But to his relief, nothing had broken, and that was all that Tom cared about.

Tom felt like this was the power he had been looking for. He had dominated the battle completely, from start to finish. The enemies that once had forced him to come up with a ridiculously risky attack plan just to defeat one of them, were now hardly standing up to him.

Tom ignored the pain and started dancing around the injured golem, taking full use of his superior speed. Each time he manages to get behind the golem, or it attacked, he delivered a blow to it, chipping away its stony shell, a minute later it fell, and Tom collected another core. At no point did the golem manage to hit Tom nor force him into a situation where he was truly in any danger. He could finally see how his cultivation was truly paying off, in more ways than making his life easier.

The part of him who wanted more power continued only to grow. It could be almost classified as an addiction, he didn't just want to get more powerful, he needed it. He wanted to see how powerful he could get. He wanted to be powerful by the Empire's standards. And most importantly, he wanted to feel all that power in his fingertips, just waiting for him to release it.

The golems were clearly dumb, but they did seem to be capable of learning. So Tom didn't wish to waste this opportunity while they were spread out, just waiting for him to act as a grim reaper and claim their cores.

Sadly Tom's luck had finally reached its end. There wasn't just a single golem coming for him. No, there were five of them rushing toward him from the tunnel that led to the chamber in the center. Tom's newfound confidence nearly got him killed, as he shortly considered truly pushing his limits and throwing himself into the middle of the golems in order to see just how much progress he had made.

However, a rock that grazed his shoulder brought him back to reality. The next moment he immediately rushed out from there, straight back to his camp on the other side of the valley. On his way back, he realized that the rock hadn't just grazed his shoulder, as it was fully broken.

Once he reached his camp, which was just a spot where he had sat before, he continued using the gold-like ore core to heal his newly broken shoulder, as his willpower had somewhat recovered. And he didn't stop there, with his newfound determination he brought the hammer down on his other hand, breaking all the bones in it.

This time he didn't fully block the pain, paying more attention to his willpower expenditure. He kept the pain levels at a stage where he could still operate as the bones broke, but it was more painful than just getting punched. The pain was well worth it, as his willpower depleted at a much slower rate because he didn't fully go against his body's basic functions, only somewhat suppressed them.

The gold-like core was starting to run out of energy. Because Tom had no idea if it made any difference if he used a different kind of core for this procedure, so he decided to use the rest of the core's energy symmetrically on the same bones on both sides of his body. He continued to break his other shoulder, his collarbones, the rest of his ribs, and his breastbone. Drawing and controlling the energy was getting easier and easier. Tom wasn't sure if it was because he was getting used to the energy, or just because the core was basically empty and had stopped resisting.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

After thirty minutes, Tom's upper body's bones had all been broken, excluding his spine. And the core had barely any energy left inside of it. So Tom decided to put it away in order to sell it and find out what the ore it was, and what were its properties. While he had been using the energy, he could tell that it was very resilient, and the ore ball itself didn't weigh that much as he could carry it with one barely functional arm. So Tom was quite sure that it was a perfect candidate for his bones, though but light metal. However, it was too bad he didn't have any more of it, nor had he spotted another one that looked like it down in the lower chamber. As he still had quite a lot of bones left to abuse.

Tom was pretty sure that the different cores affected his body differently.

He could feel how his muscles which had suffered some of the damage as his bones broke, felt much stronger than the ones he had used the iron mana on, as they had gotten some of the gold-like core's energy.

He could clearly tell that the golems he had just defeated were much weaker than the gold-like ore golem had been, even when it didn't have a body to call its own, it still had been much harder to bring down.

And he had seen in the Empire net that even within the same tier, the cores had extreme variations in their prices. It couldn't be just because some of the cores were rarer than others. He was sure that the gold-like core would be one of the more expensive cores. And there would surely be more like it inside the mountain. Not even taking into account the bigger golem, he could only dream about what its core would be like.

So Tom decided that if he was going to do this, he would do it properly. As he didn't wish to have any regrets later, so he retrieved his backpack and put his five cores into the sack within it.

Just to reaffirm that he was on the right track, Tom said status.

____________________

Name Tom Palmer

Awakened mind 2

Awakened body 2

_____________________

And sure enough, his self-harm had born fruit, and he had advanced his body's rank yet again, bringing it to the same level with his mind.

Tom now knew that if he wanted to keep the cores for himself for any length of time, he would have to make sure that they wouldn't be in contact with any stone, and if possible, as far from it as he could manage.

Because there weren't any trees around, he had to improvise. He spend some time collecting the grass in the middle of the valley and made a mount out of them. He placed the sack on top of it and then covered it with some more grass, as he didn't wish for it to be stolen by the first person who spotted some brown in the middle of a green valley. Of course, the mount would be suspicious too, but it was the best he could manage. He could only pray that they were still here when he emerged from the mountain, as he prioritized all the other riches the mountain held over these cores.

After that, Tom approached the mountain looking for his rope. This time there weren't any golems keeping a lookout. They had clearly learned that they couldn't keep watch over this big of a mountain with just the golems they had.

After a while of rummaging through the area under his daring escape route, he reclaimed his rope from under a pile of rubble next to the mountain's wall.

Then Tom went back into the tunnels, and without going too deep, he went for another tunnel that was high above the ground and set his rope up again. "Who knows I might get lucky."

Then Tom started making his way toward the chamber in the center, and sure enough, there were golems standing guard over the four tunnels that led to the chamber. And to Tom's misfortune, they were long straight tunnels, perfect places for the golems to practice their marksman skills.

The moment Tom's head poked out from behind the corner, the golems roared and threw rocks at him. He quickly pulled the back behind the bend. To his dismay, no matter how many times he did it, none of the golems chased after him. Each time he thought that they had enough of his games and would come after him. He heard as much as he felt it, as the biggest golem let out a commanding roar, stopping all the eager golems in their track. Tom had noticed that when he first arrived here, there were only two golems per tunnel, and the other had arrived a minute after the first one had spotted him. But he couldn't do anything with that information. He had no way of completing an over ten-meter sprint toward the golems, while they bombarded him with rocks, without getting hit.

"I truly missed my chance when I didn't throw myself into the middle of the golems." Tom thought. Then at least he could have dodged behind other golems and had a chance to be victorious. Now, however, he could only try his best to dodge the rock and most likely eat so many hits that he would be dead even before he reached the golems.

Tom accepted his faith and made his way out of the cave gloomily. Now the only plan he had left was to get some help. There was only so much a single person could do if they weren't ridiculously powerful.

Tom collected the cores and his backpack. "Well, at least I made something out of this." Tom thought, trying to cheer himself up."And if I had gone for help immediately, I wouldn't have advanced my body and gotten these cores." Tom continued, managing to get a bit of his spirit back, as he started making his way toward the city.