AN: Might be a double release today and Friday depending on how I feel. On Saturday i'll being going to Spain for a week so don't expect a new chapter for a week or two starting from then. Besides that I note on the story, while this story will be dark and serious it will also have its silly humorous points as well. This is part due to my belief that it helps illustrate the MC's madness and also in part because I feel to much seriousness can be a bad thing for a fic.

Hope you enjoy the chapter,

Ren Waya

Chapter 5: Train like a Deranged Machine

So the help menu ended up having a large amount of information, unfortunately most of it was pretty much useless at the moment.  Don't get me wrong reading through it all was definitely worth it and some of the stuff I read had me as giddy as a child on Christmas Eve.  The problem was almost all of the features talked about haven't had the appropriate patches added to make them available.  

Take the character sheet for instance, I could pull it up and see my stats as decided on by the system but I couldn't do anything about it.  Levels, experience points, skill acquisition and all that kind of stuff haven't been implemented yet so my near death experience with eating a magical marble was currently pointless.  Well maybe not pointless as I couldn't die anymore and I'd get the features I was looking forward to before others.

Still I was salivating in anticipation for one particular feature, the ability to alter your very being with both cosmetic and practical enhancements.  Supposedly the system would only be available during the down period that every official update would have, ever two weeks, and the points used for the system were a little vague in the description of their acquisition.  It was something along the lines of "at the discretion of the system", so probably completely random.

One very important thing I had managed to figure out through some rather vague references in the "special" section of the help menu was that my stats could be improved through training and that my "base" stats would be permanent once the official update for that feature was added.  I don't know when that update would happen but I assumed such an important part of the new set of rules the world operated by would be fairly soon, either the first or second update.  This meant that it was time to ignore everything other than training my body unfortunately.

Also I managed to figure out why I healed every time I went to sleep.  Apparently everyone had been given the ability to heal completely from everything but fatal wounds after a few hours of sleep.  While the system is fairly cutthroat, in that it’s very unforgiving, it doesn't seem to want to completely wipe out humanity so it gave us a slight advantage so that a higher percentage could survive.  

There would be no automatic revives like I had though except for in rare cases as it wouldn't be balanced.  Revival items and abilities were supposedly going to be a feature at some point but I have no idea when that would be, so for now it seemed like I was the only immortal at this point.  Speaking of re-spawns apparently my first conjecture was correct; every time I die there is a price to be had to re-spawn.  That price was that I was reset at to my base state, meaning stats and level reset to beginnings, upon my return.

Since neither the revival system nor stat system has been implemented yet I have apparently been resetting to the default average stats of humans, in general for mental stats and for my size group for physical ones.  I had no idea if this was a good thing for me or not as I hadn't known what my stats were before I died for the first time, a bit of an oversight but I didn't care too much.  While I knew I lost some strength for all I knew I had increased in all my other stats, or possibly been downgraded in everything.

Guess no more experimenting for me, and I had so many ideas too such a shame.  Still with my new understanding of the world mechanics I vowed to do my very best to abuse the fuck out of them.  If stats can be increased through training and all non-fatal damage is fixed after a few hours of sleep then I can do near suicidal training and possibly get extreme amounts of benefits from it.  Although if my guess is correct I'd also likely require an insane amount of food intake to fuel my growth, good thing no one else seems to be alive in the area.

The system wouldn't punish me for my actions right?  The help menu didn't mention anything about potential "bugs", exploits or fixing them.  Then again I was also a "Beta Tester" now so maybe that's something I was supposed to find and draw attention to.  Even if that was the case I doubt I'd be penalized considering it would technically be in my duty...right?  Ah well no use worrying about it, I'll deal with shit as it hits the fan not before, more than that way.

Course set and mind resolved I set about seeing just how far I could push my body before it gave out on me and forced me to recuperate.  Thus began the most intense four hours of my life, side note apparently while nutrition didn't seem to matter you still had to be careful about what you ate as throwing up a large amount of dissolved Gummy Bears wasn't nearly as enjoyable as eating them was.

I had focused almost entirely on trying to increase my strength during this session as it was the simplest stat for me to figure out training for to improve, I had ideas for the others but wanted to test my theory on the easiest one first.  The result: I had over straining, tearing or snapping nearly every muscle in my body.  Oddly enough when you do that it makes you lose control of your basic functions, such as bowel control....it wasn't pretty.  For the second time in less than twenty four hours I passed out again in my own filth.

When I woke up I was on one hand grateful that it was actual healing you get when you slept instead of just something like injury reversal (or something similar) and on the other hand not as much.  I was grateful as it did mean that physical training could be augmented since it relied on the healing, and subsequent strengthening, of damaged muscles.  I was a bit less grateful as I took in the sight of my body.

The results of my workout while not extreme were actually noticeable, there in lied the problem.  I had trained my muscles unevenly, something that should have been obvious to happen but I didn't really think about it, and as a result I was looking like a mix between a thin action figure and a lumpy ken doll.  Sighing to myself I checked my stat menu and noticed a peculiarity.  While my strength stat had indeed increased it had increased by a non-whole number.  Instead of the base 10 that all my stats had been set to it was now a very odd 10.8 points.  The only conclusion I could think of is that it had something to do with the....unevenness of my body.

Still it could be worse; I could be even more uneven and have a super-giant right arm or something and be mistaken for the world's most enthusiastic masturbator.  All this meant was that I had to make sure to train myself as uniformly as possible.  Throughout this entire train of thought I had been scarfing down food, proving my early theory correct.  There was still light out but the sun was no more than an hour or so from setting by this point.  I figured I'd just keep the cycle of training myself to the point that I broke, sleeping, eating then doing it all again until I had to restock on supplies or something else happened.

I first worked on trying to work out my muscles to get a more uniform shape, though this was a bit hard with just relying on body weight exercises since it was my unconscious tendencies doing those that caused my problem in the first place.  Still I think I managed well enough that after two hours I felt I could move on to trying to improve my agility stat.  The way I decided to do this was to work on my flexibility, and boy did it hurt.  

While the pain from strengthening my muscles, even if I abused them to the point they broke, was faintly pleasurable in its own way training my flexibility just made me incredibly uncomfortable.  Probably because I once more went overboard and ended up snapping a few ligaments, at least I think I did (I've never been good at biology), trying to go beyond limits.  I think trying to do the splits was the worse as I was unused to feeling such pain in my groin.  Much like before I ended up unable to move and quickly passed out on the ground once more, thankfully not in a pool of my own filth this time.

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I groaned when I woke up, phantom groin pain still oddly lingering despite being physically healed.  It was night now and I had no idea what time it was but it mattered little and I quickly took to satisfying my already complaining stomach.  My efforts to balance myself out were mostly successful as I was a lot less uneven with my strength now at 11.1.  My agility had increased evenly apparently having gone from 10 all the way to 12 which was only half as surprising to me as it should have been.

I only say half as surprising as I was currently absentmindedly scratching my crotch with my foot, something I had neither been able to do before nor realized that I was doing so.  Continuing to eat I attempted to do the splits and was surprised that I almost could having about as fourth as much distance to the ground then when I first tried, although it was slightly uncomfortable still.  I stayed in the same position as I figured that the any training I could get would be beneficial while I thought over my findings, limited as they were, so far.

Currently physical stats seemed to be very easy to train up although there was a danger of making the increase uneven if you weren't careful.  I wasn't sure if either the difficulty or danger of lopsided results would be a feature in the official update but it was something to keep in mind for now.  Another thing was that unless I was mistaken the amount of sleep you had and the time it took to heal was entirely unrelated.  The first couples times I slept I had gotten at least the normal 8 hours and had healed completely by the time I woke up.  When I "slept" after training I got no more than half that amount and still woke up completely healed.

I wasn't certain if this meant the amount of time it took to heal my body was simply smaller than the amount of time I slept or if it was instantaneous but regardless it gave me options.  Not having an alarm clock was annoying as it meant I couldn't really run any comprehensive tests but I don't think it'd be very practical to find and use one even if I so desired.

With that final line of though I moved on to my new stat training idea, this time the focus was vitality.  I wasn't sure exactly what vitality did as neither the stat screen nor the help menu gave a description for them.  There were no Hit Points, at least not yet, so currently that left either regeneration speed or physical toughness (it wasn't stamina as I was pretty certain that's what endurance was for).  Either way the training would be the same....hurt myself, a lot.  I knew I had some masochistic leanings but I always thought I was more a sadist but considering how much I've been hurting myself lately I guess not, I at least hoped they were equal.

So good news was my training worked, bad news was I beat myself into unconsciousness.  Maybe it wasn't such a good idea to run repeatedly into the chimney stack, though I was curious why they had one in the first place.  Still it got results as my vitality was up by a whole point.  Probably only because I ran flat out into the wall a half dozen times as I certainly didn't train for very long.  I did notice however that my endurance hadn't increased at all despite all my long activities.  This led me to the conclusion that only certain activities increase each stat.

I did wonder why that was as the stats seemed to serve no real purpose; they were basically just random numbers.  Despite the actual improvements I had made I was still very much in the realm of a normal human, the only difference was the speed in which my body improved.  On that note I tested it and vitality seems to be a mix of both toughness and regeneration at the moment.  Pulled myself out of my thoughts I decide to move on to my next training session.  Possibly because as a result of training for such a short time all I needed to eat was a single power bar before I was full although I had no idea how long I was out (it was still dark out but that's all I could tell).

The next stat I would try would be endurance and my plan?  To run around in circles until I literally collapsed due to lack of oxygen.  While this was my plan I absolutely despised running.  It was useful and necessary, especially for keeping my body in shape, but I hate it.  It was just too boring to do nothing but move my body for a long period of time, not even music helped all that much and I didn't even have that.  I could and would suck it up for the sake of training but that didn't mean I wouldn't do something to alleviate my boredom.  

Since my options were very limited I decided to practice juggling with some of my canned food.  I had never been very coordinated before so juggling was always hard for me but it was the only activity I could think of, besides it was going to be my training for dexterity anyways (although I had no idea how to super charge training it).  Imagine my surprise then when I was actually capable of running at a decent pace while juggling, granted it was a bit clumsy, three cans at a time.  I couldn't even do that standing still before.

My conclusion was that I had lower than "average" dexterity before and the reset was actually favorable for me in that regard.  Still as the minutes and eventually hours wore on it became increasingly difficult to concentrate on keeping the cans in motion.  About two hours in I eventually reached a state that I had only had happen twice before.  It was a state where I felt like I was actively burning up my body in order to keep moving.   Before when this had happened I had promptly stopped as it had felt like I was burning up my life in my efforts, cheesy I know but both times happened when I was young and overly obsessed with anime.  

This time however I kept going as I believed that any potential damage would be healed when next I slept.  The interesting thing about this state was that I no longer felt tired or short of breath when I reached it, all I felt was the burning sensation and a sharpening of my mind.  I don't know how long I continued to run for exactly but my best guess was a similar length of time as my two early sessions.  Once I reached that point my body just shut down and I passed out before I even hit the ground.  The last thing I noted before I lost consciousness was the fact that I had apparently kept juggling the cans without even noticing.

When I woke up again I was nearly delirious with hunger and I wasn't able to think rationally until after a few solid minutes of scarfing down food.  When I regained control the first thing I did was make a mental note to bring up more supplies, I had almost finished all the perishable food and non-bottled water I had.  The second thing I did was bring up my stat menu.  What I was brought a wild and partially maniacal smile to my face.

I know exactly how I'm going to train from now own MWUAHAHAHAHA.   OK maybe laughing evilly in my head is not as cool as I thought it'd be.   It’s kind of sad really.  I'll make sure to do it out loud from now on.

NameTitleLevelMaxBeta TesterSTR11.1VIT11AGI13END14DEX13WIL14CNC14INT10RCT10WIS10