[NR] A Sometimes Exercise - Chapter 596

Back in NeoRealm, Jason stands up and stretches. He had been sitting motionless for a while to get everything sorted and now felt like moving a bit. The connection between stamina and two of his realizations also meant he wanted to feel what that means.

First, Jason uses one of the cleared areas to go through a few katas. Nothing too complex, this was more of a stretching routine than anything else. Of course, this is nowhere near enough to touch his stamina. The recovery rate is much too high.

So, Jason moved onto more strenuous exercise. This mostly involved running around while carrying heavy rocks. It looked silly, but with his strength score, what counts as a heavy rock has grown considerably in size. He actually had to pause to carve handholds as it got too awkward to carry them.

He even went so far as to train until he started to take HP damage. That wasn’t required, but it got him to the point the stamina drain was noticeable a lot quicker. Also, it seemed that stamina also played a part in natural healing, which made sense when Jason actually thought about it.

Though that might just be him as he hadn’t seen such a phenomenon mentioned before. Stamina was always just the stat that let you fight extended battles, work all day, and more effectively make use of the magic roads. It was possible in connecting his concepts to his stats, what they did were enhanced and broadened in the same way he had just expanded ascendance to stamina.

However, Jason put this to the back of his mind for later. At the moment, he wants to get a good bit of exercise in and wasn’t going to let a few points of damage get in the way. Though if Rosha or Courtney had been there, they might have had words for him.

With how his body worked, it wasn’t like there were veins to burst or anything. However, the System clearly believed he should be bleeding in some manner and parts of his skin were bruising up and even oozing blood. Quite a shocking sight to see and on anyone else would be quite serious. For Jason, though, it just represented the System wanting him to bleed. Which when said that way, doesn’t exactly sound any better, but that’s life sometimes.

Whatever the case, it was quite the productive day as he gained five points of strength, two toughness, seven stamina, and even managed to get twelve health. Though that last one pointed to his exercise being a tad too intense to keep up.

It was definitely a sometimes exercise. Anymore and Jason would likely take permanent damage of some sort. Well, as permanent as the System can enforce on him. Still, better safe than sorry.

More important to Jason was his earlier realization and what he felt as his stamina drained. Why was healing connected to stamina and did that come about because of him connecting his body concept to stamina? Jason was willing to admit that maybe stamina always had something to do with health and you needed to awaken a concept that touched both to notice it.

For now, Jason only had himself and so couldn’t compare with anyone else. Though the girls might be able to feel something themselves. There was also the possibility that it happened because of his inner void revealing what would otherwise be hidden.

Jason shakes his head as he recognizes that his thoughts have started to spiral. He needed to focus on the here and now.

When exercising and his stamina was draining what did it feel like? Of course, it partly felt like normal, except that wasn’t normal. Well, it was normal for irl and people who haven’t unlocked the stamina stat.

Jason had personally felt the transition himself. Before the stat unlocked, you were limited by your body and, in fact, he would say that “natural” stamina was actually debuffed by the System.

After you unlocked the stat? Though he hadn’t really paid attention to it at the time, his natural stamina was kind of absurd even with System meddling, the transition placed it on the same level of HP. What did that mean? It meant that as long as you had any left; you were perfectly fine.

Well, obviously if you broke a limb or had some kind of curse affecting your stamina, you’d feel worse. However, the stats were very much classic video game physics. Except Jason now had a more natural feel for his stamina. Which might be a bad thing?

He hadn’t had a chance to see what it felt like to bottom out his stamina stat with the new changes. Maybe it would only feel like he was exercising hard irl and not actually sap him. Jason didn’t particularly care as he had experience fighting through exhaustion.

In fact, it might be beneficial in the long run since you can fight through exhaustion. A thing you can’t do with a bottomed out stamina pool. The System just won’t let you.

Though this brought him to the question of health. After all, it was a similar sort of stat to stamina, except in NeoRealm there is never a chance to not have the stat. The System makes sure everything has HP and you have to dance to its tune.

But what if Jason was to attach ascendance to health in the same way he did stamina? Right now, he was probably feeling the connection because of stamina. It might even be a phantom feeling that will go away with time. However, Jason felt he might be able to use this feeling to accelerate the development of his concepts.

And the reverse wasn’t out of the question. Toughness was already seen as a stat connected to health, despite it not literally being connected. There had to be a reason for that and Jason felt that if he could hook up health to ascendance, then it should be simple to hook up substance to toughness.