novel-bin Chapter 2, First Liver
Chapter 2, First Liver
The moment Su Xinpei pressed "Yes," he regretted it.
It wasn't the kind of regret that comes after careful consideration; it was an instinctive regret—like being unable to sleep in the middle of the night, opening a shopping website, clicking to pay, and then starting to doubt yourself before the item even shipped. He stared at the newly appeared item on the semi-transparent panel in his mind, and a thought popped into his head: What if they ask for money?
The words "Iron Bone Body Forging Technique (Fragment)" hung steadily at the top of the skill list, followed by a gray progress bar and a note—[Beginner: 0/100]. There was no payment window, no billing notification, not even any extra notification sounds. The panel simply lit up quietly, like a sticky note stuck to one's mind.
Su Xinpei sat on the edge of the bed for about two minutes, then stood up and walked to the center of the living room. He took a deep breath and began to recall the basic fitness exercises his instructor had demonstrated in his high school biochemistry class—planks, squats, and push-ups. He decided to try a set of push-ups first.
The first one felt normal. The second one, I could feel my chest muscles working. When I got to the seventh one, the number on the panel jumped.
[Basic Physical Fitness Experience +1]
Su Xinpei stopped what he was doing and stared at the line of text for a long time. He had just entered Iron Bone Body Tempering Technique, but the experience points that popped up were listed under an entry called "Basic Physical Fitness." He recalled the notification when he entered the skill—the system said "Skills that can be entered have been detected," but it didn't say that the skill itself was already on the panel. In other words, the panel automatically recognized and categorized his physical activities during his daily training, classifying push-ups as part of Basic Physical Fitness.
He continued doing push-ups. He did twenty, gaining four experience points. He cursed inwardly, rolled over, and lay on the floor, panting. Twenty push-ups, four experience points; one hundred points would require five hundred. Five hundred push-ups.
This cheat code really doesn't tolerate anyone's bad behavior.
Su Xinpei got up from the floor, went to the kitchen to drink some water, thought for a moment, then went back to the living room and did ten squats.
[Basic Physical Fitness Experience +2]
Ten squats, two points of experience. He then did ten jumping jacks, one point. And ten sit-ups, one point.
The pattern was quickly figured out: after a certain number of repetitions of a single movement, the rate of experience gain would decrease. The first ten push-ups gave three points, but the eleventh to twentieth only gave one. It wasn't that the stat sheet was stingy; it was that the body was telling it—doing it half-heartedly here is useless. You had to change the movements, increase the difficulty, and increase the duration to truly push your body out of its comfort zone before the experience points would start to accumulate.
Su Xinpei wiped his sweat, thinking to himself that this panel was even more sophisticated than the street office's assessment system.
He draped the towel around his neck, then suddenly remembered something else. He hesitated for a moment in the living room, then finally went into the kitchen, pulled a dusty notepad from a drawer, and found a ballpoint pen with a cracked nib. He wrote a few lines on the notepad.
Push-ups 20, EXP +4; Squats 10, EXP +2; Jumping Jacks 10, EXP +1; Sit-ups 10, EXP +1
After writing it down, he slammed the note on the table, feeling like a self-taught scientist who couldn't even get into a lab. But a bad pen is worse than a good memory; the dashboard wouldn't tell him the underlying logic of gaining experience, he had to figure it out himself.
The next morning, Su Xinpei woke up half an hour earlier than usual. He struggled for a full half minute when the alarm rang, finally being pulled out of bed by a single thought—the control panel was still there. It wasn't a dream.
He did another set of push-ups, and the experience points faithfully jumped up on the screen. It wasn't a dream.
When I arrived at the neighborhood office, only Aunt He was there. She was watering the clivia on the windowsill, water droplets rolling off the leaves and dripping onto the old newspapers on the windowsill. Hearing footsteps, Aunt He said without turning around, "Xiao Su, remember to submit the investigation report today."
"Okay." Su Xinpei hung up his coat, then paused for a moment at his workstation—a potted green plant had appeared on the desk, housed in an old white teacup, the soil still damp. Aunt He's voice came from behind him: "That potted plant on the windowsill in the hallway was taken from there. Your workstation is too plain, like an empty space." Su Xinpei moved the green plant next to the monitor, straightened it, and said, "Thank you, Aunt He." Aunt He didn't respond; she had already gone into the archives.
He turned on his computer and began writing yesterday's investigation report for the Beihe Old District. When he got to the situation with the altar and talismans in apartment 401, he deleted the words "altar" and "talismans," thought for a moment, then typed "abnormalities in the indoor furnishings," and then deleted more. In the end, he left only: "It is recommended that the electrical safety of this resident be followed up and inspected." Safety, vague, and unnoticed.
He learned this from Aunt He. Aunt He had been doing paperwork for thirty years, and her greatest skill wasn't writing reports, but writing reports that "could pass review." She neither concealed the facts nor revealed details, ensuring that those who should read it could understand it, while those who shouldn't would feel that nothing had been said.
After finishing the report, Su Xinpei began his daily work—reviewing applications for renewal of minimum living allowance, entering information on new tenants, and replying to residents' complaint emails. Beihe District is an old urban area, mostly inhabited by low-income families and casual laborers. The complaints were mostly trivial and specific: leaks from upstairs neighbors, noise from downstairs neighbors, and neighbors raising chickens. Su Xinpei replied to each one politely but formulaically, but added a sentence at the end of each: "Forwarded to the relevant department for follow-up."
At 10 a.m., the document review was finished. Su Xinpei stood up and stretched his shoulders, glancing towards the archives room—Aunt He's footsteps were still there, occasionally punctuated by the sound of drawers opening and closing. He returned to his workstation, first checking the printing room and the break room, then, while the printer was jammed, he did ten inconspicuous squats by the water dispenser. The panel's notification popped up as usual, but the value wasn't high. Once the printer stopped clicking, he helped Aunt He move bundles of file boxes off the shelves one by one—the panel showed three experience points during the squatting, lifting, and shelving sequence. Aunt He glanced at him, adjusting her reading glasses: "Just move them, don't bend your back like that." Su Xinpei said, "Aunt He, I've been moving files for three years." Aunt He ignored him and pushed the next bundle of boxes over.
While organizing files at his workstation, Su Xinpei noticed a strange phenomenon: the more he deliberately pursued experience points, the more it seemed like he was doing useless work. The three experience points he gained while moving files earlier occurred twice when he stood up to lift them, and once when he suddenly jumped up while placing the file box back on the shelf—the common thread wasn't in performing the movements perfectly, but rather in his focus on "stabilizing the file box" and "preventing Aunt He from nagging again." He wrote a line on the back of his notepad: Less experience when distracted, more experience when focused.
This discovery surprised him somewhat. The panel wasn't testing physical strength, but rather concentration. As he entered the file number, he silently calculated in his mind: if concentration affects the efficiency of experience gain, then the most efficient way to gain experience isn't to do actions whenever possible, but to set aside a complete period of time each day, isolated from distractions, to concentrate on practicing one skill.
In other words, he needs to start seriously planning his evenings.
After get off work, Su Xinpei didn't go straight back to his apartment. He went to the only community gym in Beihe District—it was actually a converted activity room in a ground-floor shop of an old residential building, with a few rusty machines and a cracked full-length mirror. A monthly membership cost fifty South African dollars. When Su Xinpei signed up for the membership, the old man who managed the room glanced at him and said, "Little Su, you're the third person to sign up."
Su Xinpei changed into an old T-shirt and began his systematic training. He started with three sets of push-ups, twenty per set, resting for half a minute between sets. Then came three sets of squats, three sets of sit-ups, and three sets of planks. After each set, he stopped to check the changes in his experience points on the panel and made a few notes in his notebook. By the time he finished the last set of planks, his arms and legs felt like lead. He collapsed onto the yoga mat, staring at the ever-spinning ceiling fan, thinking: This is nothing.
[Basic physical fitness experience points: 47/100]
Forty-seven points. Since he started testing the panel yesterday, he has accumulated forty-seven experience points. He's still fifty-three points away from the beginner level. At this rate, he should be able to break through the threshold in another night or two of practice.
Su Xinpei sat up from the mat and wiped away his sweat. The person in the mirror had wet hair plastered to his forehead, a dark sweat stain around the collar of his T-shirt, and his complexion wasn't good, but his eyes were brighter than yesterday.
It was almost nine o'clock when Su Xinpei got home. He took a shower, cooked a bowl of instant rice noodles, and sat down at the table to eat while scrolling through his phone. The news was the same old stuff—the Northern Alliance military exercise, the new product launch of Tianheng Heavy Industry, and a gas leak at a demolition site in the lower part of Tieji City. He turned his phone face down on the table and focused on eating.
As he finished the last sip of the soup from his instant rice noodles, he suddenly remembered something.
That thing we found.
He put down the bowl, took the metallic ring from his coat pocket, and examined it closely under the light. The inner ring of the ring still had fine, intricate patterns, indistinguishable as either writing or decoration, but each engraving resembled a regularly arranged geometric line, interconnected yet seemingly broken, subtly refracting a faint bluish-gray light under illumination. Touching it, his fingertips felt a faint coolness, not the icy coolness of metal, but rather like a slowly released, dry chill. Apart from that, there was nothing unusual.
He placed the item on the table, thought for a moment, then picked it up again and examined it closely. The inner patterns reflected slightly under the light, like some kind of extremely fine metal wire embedded within. He scratched at it with his fingernail, but the patterns didn't budge. A not uncommon technique involves first wrapping the hard engravings with a softer base, then covering the outside with a different material, thus protecting the inner engravings well—similar layered structures can be seen in many antique-style jewelry pieces at flea markets, nothing to be surprised about. He put the ring back on the table and continued eating his noodles.
But he noticed something: when he leaned closer just now, the Iron Bone Forging Technique entry on the panel seemed to flash for a moment—just a fleeting instant, so fast that he wasn't sure if he was seeing things.
At 11 p.m., Su Xinpei lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. He had to go to work tomorrow, the day after, and for the entire year to come. His salary at the neighborhood committee wouldn't increase, the complaints from those on welfare wouldn't decrease, and there would be another round of safety inspections in the old Beihe district. Life was like a stagnant pool; he'd been soaking in it for three years, and it was already quite brittle.
But now, something else has appeared in this stagnant pool.
A panel. A counter. The outline of a door he didn't know where it led.
Su Xinpei closed his eyes and mentally did something he had never done before: he opened the control panel. A semi-transparent interface appeared in the darkness, clean and uncluttered, without any unnecessary information. The skill list contained only two lonely lines:
[Basic Physical Fitness: Not Yet a Beginner 47/100][Iron Bones Body Strengthening Technique (Incomplete): Not Yet a Beginner 0/100]
His gaze settled on the second line. Next to the Iron Bone Forging Exercise, there were no training instructions, no pictures or text, and no explanation of "what level constitutes the beginner's level." It just hung there quietly, like an old lock that hadn't yet been keyed.
He took a deep breath and turned off the panel.
He didn't continue studying it tonight. The panel only recorded "Iron Bone Body Forging Technique," which didn't mean he had already learned it. Just like buying a book doesn't mean you've read it—he only got a library card; he still had to find the books on the shelves himself. Before figuring out the relationship between those patterns, that relic, and this fragment, he didn't plan to rashly try to practice it according to the panel's records.
The sound of a light rail train rumbling past the window drifted in from afar, then disappeared.
Su Xinpei turned over and pulled the blanket up to his shoulders.
The investigation report is due tomorrow.
I'm going to the gym tomorrow.
The panel is still lit up, so let's keep grinding.