The book was now sitting on the table, and I was sitting across from it, pinching the bridge of my nose while we had a little staring contest that the book was winning.

The concept was simple enough, going by the first few paragraphs, but the more I read it, the more unhinged the whole thing became.

Here’s what you do. You take mana from your own pool, spread it through your body, and then you infuse it.

That’s the basic principle behind it.

But you gotta infuse it inside each individual cell, simultaneously.

Not reinforce, no, you push the mana through the cell wall and into the interior, and you hold it there, and you coax it inward even more until the cell has absorbed it, and over time the cell adapts and strengthens, and your baseline physical capacity increases permanently from the inside out rather than just on the surface.

Which sounds somehow manageable until you get to the part where it says the distribution has to be perfectly uniform across your entire body simultaneously, with every single cell receiving the same amount of mana at the same rate.

Because if one part of you gets more than another part, that part enhances faster than everything around it, and the book’s section on what that produces over time used the word "cancer".

That damn word keeps popping up, no matter how hard I try to forget it even exists.

And then, the book spent three full pages on case studies of practitioners who had over-enhanced specific muscle groups without the surrounding connective tissue keeping pace, and then went into details about what the structural outcomes of that were, and I read that page twice and then turned forward and decided I had enough information on that particular topic.

The worst part, the book’s guidance on how to actually do it was: go by feeling.

That was the whole guidance. Four words. For a process that requires perfect simultaneous mana distribution into every cell of the human body. Go. By. Feeling.

I finished the rest of the Grade 8 potion in three pulls, set it down, and looked at the ceiling.

"Is there an easier way to do this... Or at least a safer one?"

-Ding!

{There is. Immortal Cultivation.}

"Yeah, no," I said immediately. "Hard pass."

The full breakdown of why I would never touch Immortal Cultivation was something I had worked through once, in a bathtub in the middle of a dungeon, listening to System’s extremely enthusiastic sales pitch for the Heaven-Devouring Tyrant Scripture or something like that.

I had arrived at the same conclusion I arrived at every time I thought about it, which was that every single cultivation technique came with a psychological drift section in the description, and every single sequence of the technique moved you toward something the technique had decided what the ideal you should be, rather than anything you had chosen for yourself.

Reduced guilt response. Elevated aggression. Intolerance toward disorder. Diminished emotional range.

I’m keeping all of those, thanks.

"Right... Privilege of the strong... to do things your way..." I said, sitting cross-legged. "Assimilation. Let’s go."

I drew five MP from my pool and began spreading it outward from the core in my stomach, feeling it move through my chest and shoulders, down my arms, up my neck, and into my abdomen and down through my legs, slowly directing the flow until it felt roughly even before I tried the next part.

Then I started infusing.

And the moment I focused on actually pushing the mana inside rather than just circulating it, the even distribution immediately stopped being even.

The second I concentrated on my right arm, I felt the mana in my legs thin out, as though the attention going one direction took resources from everywhere I was not actively thinking about.

So I spread my attention back to the legs. The slow Infusion on everything else slowed.

Even tried just holding the mana, just keeping it spread across my body, to get used to the feeling. Sat there for half an hour straight, yet the results were the same.

I could not even use Ice Reinforcement to enhance my cognition because the two systems running through my body at the same time created interference, competing and disrupting each other, which meant I was trying to do the most precise mana work I had ever attempted in my life with baseline cognition.

And believe me, my baseline cognition is what most would call dumb.

After an hour of trying and failing, I opened my eye and just sighed, having accomplished approximately nothing.

"This isn’t working... How does anyone actually do this?"

-Ding!

{Months of practice.}

"I don’t have months."

I leaned back and stared at the window, where the light had gone orange, while I thought about the problem the way I thought about every problem, which was to look for the angle that my specific situation opened up rather than the angle everyone else used.

The book assumed a practitioner who sat in meditation daily, for months, building body-wide mana awareness through repetition until equal distribution became reflex.

The book was written by people who had been taught by people who had been taught by people, and the skill came through demonstration and correction over time.

I had a book, a persistent headache, and two international organizations after me.

But I had something none of those practitioners had, which was the ability to measure mana in exact units.

5 MP was not an approximation.

I could feel the difference between 4 and 5 the same way I could feel the difference between day and night.

Those practitioners went by feel because feel was their only instrument. While I had feel and numbers running simultaneously.

And once I realized that, the proverbial light bulb lit up with the intensity of a flashbang

[Maybe I can do this like a gym bro...]

Nobody at a gym trains every single muscle group at the same time and expects clean results.

You have leg days. Chest days. Back days. You cycle through body sections over time, focus fully on each one, and cover the whole body through rotation rather than simultaneous diffuse effort.

[Five MP into the left leg... Just the left leg. Full attention, full infusion, cap at five, stop the moment it’s done... Then five into the right thigh, I guess.... Then up through the groin, abdomen, chest, neck, head, and each arm separately... Nab the whole body in sections...]

Pretty sure it would be slower than full-body assimilation done correctly.

But full-body assimilation done correctly was apparently months away on this trajectory, and five MP into my left leg done correctly was something I might actually be able to manage right now.

"System," I said. "Can assimilation be done one body section at a time? Go through the full body in sequence rather than raw dogging it all at once?"

-Ding!

{Technically.

Section-by-section assimilation is not the conventional approach. It has been attempted by practitioners who lacked the mana capabilities for full-body distribution.

Results varied. Some achieved measurable improvements. Many produced localized over-enhancement inconsistencies.}

"So I could accidentally build a superhuman left leg on an otherwise normal body," I said.

-Ding!

{Yes.}

I looked at my left leg.

My left leg had done nothing wrong.

"Then we do five MP per section, then move to the next... cover the whole body in one pass, and then repeat."

-Ding!

{This is either a clever adaptation of assimilation to your specific capabilities or an extremely efficient method of producing one very strong left leg.

I genuinely cannot determine which yet.}

"Well," I said, closing my eye and focusing on my only leg, "I can use a strong leg...