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  ‘In through the nostrils, pull the breath down through my chest, hold it in my stomach, and pull the energy from the air through my Diantian, feel it flow through my legs and feet, and finally exhale back through my nostrils.’

  I didn’t actually have a Diantian anymore, but the rest of the mantra still held true, and in the three weeks I had been staying with the pair of engineer siblings, I hadn’t bothered to amend it.

  Just as I had as a teen, training among Ding Yuan’s elites, I ran with a water-filled cup resting on each palm and a mouth full of the liquid to stop myself panting like a hound through my mouth. Unlike when I had trained among Ding Yuan’s elite warriors, no one was trying to mortally wound me with a varied host of elemental techniques.

  In fact, the people I encountered on my morning run either got out of my way entirely or offered friendly waves and called greetings. I might not be able to use Qi to forcibly keep the cups resting on my hands secure anymore, but I was still Lu Bu. Obviously, my sense of balance and physical control of my limbs was still excellent enough that I needed to take to the streets if I wanted an element of challenge added to the exercise.

  Despite the broken and prideless nature of the people who dwelled in these slums, there was a real sense of community among the denizens of those dark and cramped streets. Don’t get me wrong, there was crime and criminals, I’m pretty sure everyone down here was breaking some sort of law. It wasn’t my city, and they weren’t my laws, so it mattered not to me.

  Keeping my hands as steady as possible whilst sprinting, I passed through a collection of shanties inside an abandoned manufacturing plant of some sort. The front and rear walls of the rusty metal building had long since been torn away for use in local construction,turning the former factory into a thin street of its own.

  I nodded in response to a call from Carvi, a blonde woman who lived elsewhere on the tier but travelled to the shanty town at least once every two days to look after her parents. I think she was in her late twenties, but I had a hard time telling with the folk whose skin was so pale.

  Carvi had been my very first customer, and her mother’s heart only continued to function because of a set of unique valves I had salvaged from a foray into the hunting grounds. Granted it had been Ji-Ho who had installed the machinery inside her, but it was me the woman kept forcing plates of unbearably sweet muffins upon.

  We had saved her life a week and a half ago, and she had given me close to thirty muffins in that time. My HUD assured me they were different flavors of fruit, but they all just tasted like overwhelming amounts of sugarcane to me.

  Rather than risk being burdened with more of the teeth-aching desserts, I actually sped up after nodding back to the woman. My path widened as I exited the former factory and was no longer being boxed in by dormant machines of incredible size. The increased space came with additional pedestrian traffic in the form of street vendors who sold everything from food cooked on the spot to tiny drones that cleaned your home for you. They were setting up for the day in the same spots they always did. I found myself nodding to a number of greetings once more as I ran past.

  A flashing notification on my HUD alerted me that I had entered the range of the open invite call that all the vendors on this block spent the day chatting in, and passersby could temporarily join so they didn’t need to go to each stand individually.

  I had spent a few ‘minutes’ in the call earlier the previous week, and to my surprise the chattering of the street vendors was so similar to the conversations of such hawkers in my homeland that I could have closed my eyes and not even known I was in the afterlife.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  Of course, that meant actually being in the call was an utter waste of my time unless I wanted to listen to crotchety old men who had never amounted to anything espouse their views on the world like they were a pack of sages debating the nature of the heavenly bureaucracy.

  As I did not in fact want to entertain inane claims about how the great and powerful of the world would create a utopia for all if they would but do what was so very obvious to a group of street vendors, I didn’t accept the open invite to the call.

  After informing Ji-Ho and Ha-Rin that they would be playing host to me until such time as I had built myself an army or had once more become so overwhelmingly powerful that I was an army, I had begun a training regimen intended to return my body to something resembling my previous power.

  Without cultivation, I was restricted to more mundane exercises, but I had always believed in their value anyway. Besides that, the Class System, which most people were introduced to on their seventeenth birthday, was more challenging to make use of than it first appeared.

  Simply by hunting the Over-Surge Drones, I would be able to increase my level, which would make me stronger, but only by a small margin each time. The true advantages of gaining levels and expanding the amount of my soul my body could access were increasing not my current power, but my body’s potential.

  This was both in the sense of my own flesh’s upper limit and my ability to fuel more powerful equipment and cybernetics. I still needed to actually get stronger, faster, smarter, etc, the old-fashioned way if I didn’t want to fall behind people of my own level. It almost reminded me of making sure one had a solid foundation before they began seeking higher realms.

  Of course, unlike when I cultivated, the Class system wouldn’t lock you out of gaining that strength and solidity later if you did happen to level up. That was good news as I expected to reach level two today, and despite my efforts over the last few weeks, I still had a lot of potential growth to go before I reached my ‘stat ceiling’ for this first level.

  I turned whilst still balancing the cups, I cut into a thin alley with metal grating for its ground. The water in each vessel sloshed a little, not anywhere near enough to actually spill over the lip, but I still had to slow down a little when I made the turn.

  ‘I need more control.’

  Despite not having a choice in the matter, Ji-Ho and Ha-Rin had been more than happy to have me stick around. Both because of the drone parts I could provide them with and because, after the beating I gave the two riders on their behalf, they needed extra protection against reprisal.

  I had struck out on six hunts in the past weeks, returning from the zone transformed by the Green Over-Surge with drone corpses and an increased Soul Expansion gauge. With the Mule robot damaged after we’d had to abandon it, I could only carry three drone bodies back with me per hunt when I went alone, which was most of the time.

  Still, Ji-Ho paid me for the corpses. After which, he would salvage whatever parts he could use or convert into something useful. According to the siblings, Surge-Made machines were of a higher quality than anything that could be produced on this tier of the city. So anything that could be successfully salvaged from a Surge drone was a prized commodity.

  Of course, life, even the afterlife, steadfastly refuses to be a straightforward matter. So I soon discovered that different Over-Surges were compatible with different machinery. Drones produced by a green surge would only ever be a source for abdomen-based cybernetics.

  If I wanted Surge-Made weapons, armor, limbs, or vehicles, I was going to need to find and gain access to areas that had been conquered by different kinds of surges. That was a problem for tomorrow, today I had a run to finish, a hunt to go on, and perhaps most importantly, an appointment to keep.

  The siblings took the price of housing and feeding me out of the cybernetic spoils I brought them, though the value of the drone bodies was such that I was also given a small fee for each body. Now that I had a few Digi-Creds to my name, I had booked myself in to see a barber, and then had Diaochan plot my morning route to end there.

  I had opted to start small since I was still getting used to this body. As such, my runs only consisted of approximately fifty-six miles each morning. It is a pitifully small distance, I know. Still, I feel I deserve some understanding. I was in a new body and hadn’t forced myself to practice the water holding exercise in years.

  He's just not in the shape he once was lol

  Amazon