Chapter 3
"HAAAAAAAAAA!" A scream echoed through the forest. A boy, appearing to be about the age of ten or eleven, could be seen screaming angrily as he kicked a wolf in its face. The wolf was obviously not expecting to be attacked by the child, so it was caught off guard and sent flying into a nearby tree.
The strength required to send a full-grown wolf flying more than three meters into a tree was more than even a trained adult man would have. There was obviously no way in hell that the wolf was going to stay after being kicked that hard, so it immediately got up and ran, not even looking back as it fled.
"Hahahahahahahaha! That was amazing! I actually just kicked a wolf into a tree! It's only been a month and I'm already this strong. And I haven't even started any actually difficult training regimen yet." The boy started laughing after seeing his own power.
This was obviously Kaz. He hadn't encountered any predators at all in the past month since he first came to this forest as he had stayed mostly at or near his house and rarely ventured out. During this time he found that the training he did was extremely effective.
Kaz had always dreamed of being a martial artist, or an MMA fighter, and he had watched all kinds of training videos, memorizing hundreds of training methods for different parts of his body, but never had the discipline or motivation to make himself actually train. However, all of that changed when he came to this forest, and he was left with the choice of either getting stronger and training or dying. This motivation was enough to make him train consistently every day for the past month without missing a day once, and the results were amazing.
'Alright, now that I've scared the wolf off, I'd better get back to punching wood.' He thought as he stood in front of a large oak tree that was broken in one place as if someone had taken a sledgehammer and swung at it. Kaz then raised his fists, and punched, taking off another piece of the tree.
He had been punching trees for the past week. As soon as he was able to do a hundred fist pushups in a row without stopping once, he decided that it would be best if he found some other way to train their toughness, otherwise, he would be killing his gains. Now, at first when he saw the quick results of his training he had thought that it was just because of his bodies talent, however, he wasn't an idiot and as soon as he was able to increase his max amount of pushup reps by ninety in under a month, even he could tell that something was going on.
Over the past month, he had also been trying his best to understand his healing power, however, even after a month, he was still never able to actually see it in action. He did come to understand what it does though. First, he found that the power only seems to activate when he is sleeping and during that time it will heal and recover all abnormalities in his body. It works on everything as far as he could tell, wounds, torn muscle tissue from training, exhaustion, and even poison. He found that last one out when he ate a weird yellow berry and it gave him stomach pain for hours, only to find that after he slept and woke up all that pain was gone, and he could even eat the berries now without worrying as if his body had become immune to them overnight.
Another effect of the power that he had found, and perhaps the most beneficial effect, is its ability to replenish any hunger or thirst he may have had. At first, he had thought that the power just made him not get hungry or thirsty, however, he found that to be incorrect after he worked himself to death one day after training and working on his cave house for the entire day. So he can still get hungry and thirsty, but he has to exert himself for an entire day before he starts to feel it, and by then he will have been ready to sleep anyway and will be fully replenished by the time he wakes up.
He suspected that the healing of his sore muscles from training and always having enough nutrients to strengthen the muscles was what caused his body to grow at such an unnatural speed. This was even more beneficial to him when he did something extremely strenuous for a long time, as he found that his endurance and stamina benefit the most from his power instead of explosive power. For example, when he started punching trees a week ago, he could punch it for maybe a minute without stopping and it hurt like hell, however after only a week his fists had become strong enough to endure him punching the tree at full strength without so much as a slight sting.
He figured that, if this healing power was really this effective, then he would start training with more advanced exercises. He may be in the body of a child still, but if his theory was correct, then even if he were to do some more extreme calisthenics or weight training, his body would be fine by the next day, and no negative effects would appear. So after finishing up his tree punching, he started to head back to his cave, ready to start his next phase of training.
The end results of his first phase of training were as follows, a max of 180 fist pushups with good form, 10 minutes of punching a tree before his arm muscles got too tired, 17 minutes in a horse stance, 20 minutes of shadow boxing, and 19 rounds of the Wim Hof Method.
He ended with a limit of 19 rounds of the Wim Hof Method, first because after finishing it, his body wouldn't be able to get strained or exhausted for an entire day, even if he were to redo his training multiple times his body still wouldn't get strained at all from it. And since his goal was to train to strengthen his body, he had to stop doing it for a while otherwise his body wouldn't become strained enough to increase in strength when he slept.
The second issue was that his body seemed to reach a bottleneck. For every round of the Wim Hof Method you do, you have to increase the amount of time you hold your breath, starting with one minute. By the time he reached the nineteenth round, he had to hold his breath for ten minutes now after completing it, and he could even hold it normally for three minutes while moving. However, no matter how much he tried, he could not go pat that ten minutes, and if he forced himself he would just pass out.
At first, Kaz thought that this was because this was the limit of his human body, however then he realized that if his healing power worked like he thought it did, then he shouldn't have a limit on anything and the healing should allow him to go past the ten minutes, and yet he couldn't. So he then thought that maybe it was something else, maybe the world itself was putting a limit on him. Ever since coming here and finding out about his healing power, he figured that he was most likely in a magic world, and one with a soft magic system as the animals would be a lot stronger if it was a hard magic world. He figured that this world's magic was limiting him, or maybe a god of some sort had to stop him before he got too powerful.
He had tried to break this limit by meditating, hoping to sense something that would lead him down the right path, however, that instead lead him to find one of his weaknesses. His attention span was either equal to or worse than that of a goldfish when he was sitting still.
"With phase two of my training starting, Id better try to overcome that limit a different way, otherwise I'll be stuck at this level for the rest of my life." Kaz said to himself as he finally arrived at his cave. Over the past month, his cave had transformed completely. There was now a robe that led up to it instead of the ladder as he found that it was good for grip strength training. This rope led up to a small wooden deck outside his entrance, which was now a wooden wall with a primitive wooden door and window. Inside there was a bed he made by weaving together grass, then filling it with more grass. There was also a wooden box to hold his things, a small fire pit with a clay chimney leading to outside the house, and a table with a chair.
He threw his bag full of wooden pieces onto the table and took his shirt off. "For phase two Ill do all of the basic Chris Heria workouts. For now, I'll do the back, leg, arm, ab, and chest workouts, and then I can go to the lake and do my shadow boxing underwater. I should also swim a few laps around the lake, and do some sprinting. With all of these, the results should show themselves pretty quick, but on top of these, I guess I'd better train my mind as well. I may not want to, but I have to meditate."
When Kaz had tried to meditate, he found that no matter what he focused on, he could not concentrate on anything for more than ten seconds. Normally when he was training, or making things for his house, he was moving or at least straining his body, so that distracted him from the fact that he was doing the same thing over and over again, but with meditation his inability to focus showed itself. He also found that he hated doing it, so much so that he would strangle it if it ever decided to incarnate itself as a living being. He didn't know why he hated it, he just knew he did.
However, even if he despised it with every part of his being, he knew that he still had to do it if he wished to overcome his limit.
So he started his training.
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"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!" Kaz screamed through his teeth as he swam at full speed away from a massive fish. He had just finished his other training and was going to start swimming laps in the lake, however after swimming for about twenty meters, he noticed a dark shadow emerging from the bottom of the lake. When it surfaced, he saw, to his dismay, a fish that was at least three meters tall and seven meters long, it had long, extremely sharp teeth and a hungry expression on its face.
Kaz immediately started swimming away as fast as he could. He may have been able to "defeat" a wolf, however this thing was the size of over twenty of those and seemed twice as fierce, so there was no way he was even going to attempt fighting it. Now normally a person would want to go to land to escape a fish, however people don't make the best decisions when they are in a crisis, and that also applied to Kaz.
Never having the motivation to do anything or achieve your dream, but still desiring it more then your own life, and finally being put into a situation where your life is on the line and you actually have to achieve that goal in order to survive can do a lot of things to a persons mind, both good and bad. The first thing Kaz thought as he swam away, doing his best to ignore the extreme soreness in his body from his prior training, was, 'This will be great for training, forcing me to break my physical limits in order to survive, Ill definitely become stronger after this!' Kaz then proceeded to swim away like that for an entire hour, laughing at the top of his lungs the entire time.