[NR] Double Whammy - Chapter 746

Suffice it to say, Courtney was not the biggest fan of other potential outcomes of opening portals. Though given that both of them knew she tested Jason’s cultivation technique on others first, they both agreed to set the matter to the side. Besides, Jason had a bunch of training to do.

Bones, skin, muscles, organs. That was Jason’s final order for defensive talents to aim for.

Bones are actually a double whammy. So many cultivation novels have bones and blood as separate stages. Things you do one and then the other. Given blood is produced in bone marrow? They’re wrong. You temper the bones and the blood would follow. In fact, by tempering the bones first, later stages will be easier because the new blood penetrates through all living parts of the body.

Skin came next as Jason had seen more than a few who tempered their muscles first and suffered consequences. Those mainly being that putting too much strength into something will rip your skin. Not the most common thing, but will easily happen in a serious fight.

Then came tempering the muscles. Jason’s sect has a strict rule about not doing this step before the bones. Because healing a broken bone sucks enough. You don’t need your muscles giving you more bones to heal.

And last but not least, there is one of those overly general grab-bag categories. The organs. A true mix and match step with some even breaking things down to the specific organs.

Jason’s goal was overall improvement. Also, he wasn’t certain if focusing on his NeoRealm body’s brain would do anything? It was a bit of a controversial pick however you slice it.

If you change your brain, it doesn’t make you “smarter”. What it does, is provide any number of benefits, which allows your mind to work differently. The most common improvement being how fast you natively think. With “natively” being important as that’s what your cultivation builds on.

Which sounds fine, except you can really mess yourself up. From obvious missteps like damaging the brain in ignorance of how it should work. To strange edge cases where someone tries to give themselves photographic memory, but accidentally makes it so they can never form new memories.

And while tempering your body isn’t something you have to actively guide, the more specific you get, the greater the chance you mess it up with your own preconceived notions. So, tempering the skin as a whole? Perfectly fine, and you can even focus the improvements on toughness or flexibility. Try to temper the skin on your knuckles? Well, then you might end up being unable to open your fists, the skin becoming more like porcelain plates covering hands.

All of which worries Jason endlessly as he goes through the steps of being beaten up over and over. His bones broke frequently. A rarity both because his bones are a treasure and also because of his void-like constitution making it such that without the intent, his bones might as well not exist most of the time. Except of course, this training is focused on said bones and so they bloody well do exist.

Though thankfully Jason’s body’s ability to basically forget it has a broken bone still works and doesn’t seem to reset the training. There is one catch. The fix isn’t free. Or rather, it doesn’t actually “fix” things.

Jason hadn’t noticed the quirk before, because bones breaking was both rare and tended to happen on the middle of a fight. Now though? He has the time to watch as his HP dipped when a bone broke and yet it didn’t recover when the bone did.

Which doesn’t make sense if what happens is his void returning the bone to nothingness. Instead, Jason figures what must be happening, is his inner void reabsorbs the bone, damage and all. Handy because it means he doesn’t have to suffer from the debuffs related to a broken bone. Though dangerous because it takes the pain with it.

If all a monster did was break his bones? Jason could 100% see himself tanking it and feeling fine. Only to end up keeling over dead out of nowhere. Never realizing his HP had bottomed out.

This troubled him a little bit. Jason preferred to avoid taking pain medication for minor things for exactly that sort of reason. The body uses pain as a signal and he prefers to listen when his body is screaming at him. There is a reason that one condition that makes it so a person doesn’t have a sense of pain is so crippling.

And this? The worst of both worlds! He gets to feel the bone break and all the pain that comes with it. Only for it to hide itself.

Though memories of the condition he saw once on a doctor drama made Jason reevaluate things just a little. After all, even without a broken bone, his body is clearly still damaged. He should be feeling pain, even if it was more of a full-body ache. 

There must be something getting in the way of the pain and Jason had just the thing to blame. The System was already adjusting everyone’s pain sensitivity. Would not be too far of a leap to assume it had something to do with this as well.

That night, Jason settled down by the fire and went diving into the settings. Or rather, he spent half an hour getting to the point of being able to do so. The basic settings were easy enough to access, but anything modular or non-standard was hidden. A fun setting Jason found while looking for what he needed was one that allowed you to adjust the pain sensitivity of specific parts of the body.

Which felt oddly easy to find until Rosha looked it up. Apparently, that setting is used by people who either end up with extra limbs or have lost a limb irl. Suddenly being able to sense a new body part, even if it doesn’t hurt more, can feel worse.

Then there it is. The setting Jason was looking for. “Pain sensitivity for morphed away body parts” was set to 0, which was a fine default from what Jason could find online. The idea is that if you can transform, you don’t feel pain from anything you’ve removed.