Week three brought a new project: his own body.
He'd noticed from day one that his physical abilities were wrong. Not wrong as in damaged — wrong as in enhanced. He was tougher than he should have been. The rock-against-skin test had proven that early on, and further experiments confirmed it. He could fall from the top of a dead tree and land without injury. He could punch a boulder and the boulder cracked. His skin didn't bruise, didn't cut, didn't burn.
But that was passive. A baseline his body had settled into after the chain reaction. He wanted to know if he could push it further.
The answer was yes.
He figured it out by accident. He'd been running — actual running, because even with magic he needed to stay in shape and also because sitting cross-legged in dust for days on end was making him stir-crazy. He pushed off hard from a standing start and felt mana surge through his legs without conscious direction. The ground cratered under his feet and he launched forward so fast his vision blurred.
He covered fifty metres in what felt like a single step, tripped over a dead root, and ate dirt at a speed that would have killed a normal person. He skidded for another twenty metres, ploughing a furrow through the ash, and came to a stop against a petrified tree trunk.
He lay there for a moment, face-down in grey dust, and started laughing.
Mana reinforcement. Channelling mana through your body to enhance physical ability. I've read about this in literally every isekai ever written.
He got up, dusted himself off, and spent the rest of the day figuring out the mechanics.
It was straightforward in concept. Push mana into your muscles — they get stronger. Push mana into your bones — they get harder. Push mana into your eyes — vision sharpens. Push mana into your nervous system — reflexes accelerate. The more mana, the greater the enhancement.
In practice, it was like learning to walk again. Full-body reinforcement meant managing mana flow to every muscle group simultaneously, balancing the output so he didn't end up with superstrong legs and normal arms, or enhanced reflexes but unreinforced joints that would shatter under the stress.
The first few days were a mess. He'd reinforce his legs and forget his ankles, then push off and nearly snap his own feet. He'd enhance his arms for a punch and forget his shoulder — the force travelled up the chain and almost dislocated it. Every system had to be balanced with every other system, and the human body had a lot of systems.
He got there through repetition. Hours of running, jumping, striking, landing. He started at low reinforcement — maybe ten percent above his baseline — and built up gradually. Twenty percent. Fifty. Double.
At double reinforcement, he could cross the dead zone's radius in under a minute at a dead sprint. His steps cracked the hardened ground. His punches shattered stone. He jumped and cleared the tops of dead trees — thirty, forty metres — hanging in the air for a long, weightless moment before gravity remembered he existed.
He kept pushing. Triple. Quadruple.
At four times baseline, he moved fast enough that the air around him compressed into visible distortions. He threw a punch at a cliff face on the dead zone's edge and the entire section collapsed. His feet left craters deep enough to stand in.
And this still isn't my limit.
He could feel it. There was room for more. Much more. The mana wanted to flow — it pressed against his insides like water behind a dam, eager to fill whatever channel he opened. He could probably push his reinforcement to ten times baseline. Twenty. Maybe higher.
He didn't. Not yet. Because every increase demanded finer control to avoid tearing himself apart, and he wasn't confident enough in his precision to risk it.
Don't break yourself showing off for an audience of zero.
By the end of week four, he had a routine that didn't feel like fumbling anymore.
Mornings: elemental cycling. Wind, fire, water, earth, cycling through at increasing speeds, focusing on precision and efficiency. He could produce a candle flame in a hurricane and a gale in a sealed room. He could freeze a single droplet of water mid-air and boil it a second later. He could raise a stone pillar, reshape it into a wall, then crumble it back to dust — all in under three seconds.
Afternoons: physical reinforcement drills. Running, jumping, striking, grappling with tree trunks and boulders. Building up his control ceiling, learning to modulate his enhancement mid-movement. He got to the point where he could shift reinforcement between muscle groups on the fly — legs for a burst of speed, arms for an impact, full body for a landing.
Evenings: he sat in the dust and stared at the stars and tried not to think about home.
He wasn't good at that last part.
But the training was working. He could feel the difference — not just in his power, which had always been absurd, but in his control. The gap between thought and result was nearly gone. He could cast without conscious effort now, the way you throw a ball without thinking about which muscles to contract. Mana moved when he wanted it to move, became what he wanted it to become, stopped when he wanted it to stop.
He wasn't a blunt instrument anymore. He was still learning, still rough around the edges, still capable of catastrophic mistakes if he got careless. But the kid who'd accidentally flattened a ring of shrubs by sneezing was gone. In his place was someone who could fight, move, and cast with genuine competence.
Not mastery. He wasn't arrogant enough to call it that. But competence. A foundation to build on.
Okay. Basics are covered. Time to get creative.