One Step Ahead

Not long after the two flower poison ginseng plants entered his stomach, a familiar sense of pain surged through Lu Heng's mind.

He then started feeling dizzy.

However, other than that, there were no other reactions from his body.

The headache did not continue to worsen, and he did not fall unconscious.

After only a few minutes, Lu Heng regained his clarity of mind.

'It seems that the dosage isn't high enough. Let's double it.'

Lu Heng picked up the four plants decisively and stuffed them into his mouth one by one while chewing.

Since there were four plants this time, it took some time to eat them.

By the time Lu Heng started eating the fourth one, the effect of the poison had already begun to take effect.

He could only endure the headache while eating the remaining plant.

After eating it, he waited patiently.

He waited for the headache to get worse, and for his consciousness to drift off.

However, the longer he waited, the milder the symptoms became. After ten minutes, all the uncomfortable sensations disappeared.

'Four flower poison ginseng plants are still insufficient!'

Lu Heng frowned.

He did not know whether his previous attempt had inadvertently increased the resistance of the thing in his body, or if the dosage of four ginseng flowers was still not enough.

In short, this attempt ended in failure again.

'If I just double the dosage again, I'll probably fail. I have to eat a few more at once.'

'But, in this case, I'm afraid that before I finish eating all the plants, the ones I ate first would have already started taking effect...'

When he was eating the fourth plant earlier, the symptoms from eating the first had already appeared. Now that he wanted to eat nine or ten of them at once, the same situation would undoubtedly occur again.

Therefore, he had to think of a way to solve this problem.

'Should I boil them in a pot and turn them into a medicinal soup?'

The first thing that came to Lu Heng's mind was to boil the flower poison ginseng using traditional Chinese methods.

However, he quickly rejected this idea.

There were two reasons. The first reason was that he was worried that Xiaoxiao would smell the boiling medicine.

Even if he were to secretly boil it inside this room, the smell would still waft out. After all, this unit was very small.

When the time came, that would still be the smaller issue. He was afraid that Xiaoxiao would be poisoned by the smell.

The second reason was that he did not know what kind of chemical compound had stimulated the thing in his body, thus improving his talent.

Perhaps after cooking it, the chemical compound that was vital to the stimulation of that thing in his body would be broken down, or perhaps even remain inside the plant itself without flowing into the medicinal liquid.

In that case, even if he drank all the medicinal liquid in one go, it would still have no effect.

'The best way is still to eat it directly. There will definitely be no mistakes that way.'

After thinking through it over and over again, Lu Heng finally decided to eat the plants directly.

He would eat the flower poison ginseng plants as quickly as possible later, not stopping until he fainted.

Without any hesitation, Lu Heng decisively picked up a flower poison ginseng plant and stuffed it into his mouth, chewing and swallowing it as quickly as he could.

Just like that, he ate one flower poison ginseng after another at an extremely fast pace.

When he reached the seventh flower poison ginseng plant, the symptoms started appearing.

Lu Heng did not stop and continued to stuff more flower poison ginseng plants into his mouth.

Eight plants, nine plants, ten plants, eleven plants...

As more and more of the plants entered his stomach, Lu Heng's head hurt more and more, and his consciousness became more and more blurred.

By the time he ate the twentieth plant, he could no longer think. He just continued chewing instinctively.

In the end, he did not know how many plants he ate. With a plop, he fell onto the bed and fell unconscious.

After an unknown amount of time, Lu Heng opened his heavy eyelids and woke up.

He slowly sat up and looked at the alarm clock on the bedside.

'It seems to have lasted more than an hour?'

He did not know the exact time that he fell unconscious, so he could only roughly estimate the duration.

Rubbing his temples, he looked at the remaining flower poison ginseng plants on the bedside table.

'One, two, three... there are still six left.'

'I didn't expect to eat a total of twenty-seven flower poison ginseng plants this time. No wonder my stomach feels so bloated.'

He had just eaten lunch, and he had followed it up by eating so many flower poison ginseng plants at once. It would be strange indeed if his stomach had not felt completely stuffed.

Lu Heng rubbed his bloated stomach and immediately picked up the iron box from last time. He put the remaining six flower poison ginseng plants into it and hid it well.

He only fell into a coma after eating twenty-seven ginseng flowers. There was no doubt that eating these six plants would not be effective anymore.

Therefore, he decided to keep these plants first and eat them the next time he managed to obtain more of them.

After hiding the iron box under the bed, Lu Heng sat down on the bed and began to practice the Qi Gathering technique.

He wanted to quickly verify if his talent had improved, and the best way to do this was to guide the qi flow to temper his muscles and see if the speed of the tempering process had increased.

This was because the speed of tempering was related to the body's adaptability to qi.

Therefore, as long as the speed of tempering was faster than the last time, it meant that his physique had improved greatly and his adaptability to qi had also improved by a lot.

Ten minutes later.

After only ten minutes of experimentation, Lu Heng already had the answer.

His physique had indeed improved.

Going by his previous experience, when his physique improved, this also meant that his comprehension ability would also have improved correspondingly.

Therefore, his talent had evolved once again.

After coming to this conclusion, Lu Heng closed his eyes and tried to catch up on his sleep.

However, as soon as he laid down, he found that his bulging stomach made it too uncomfortable for him to sleep. In addition, he was not sleepy at all.

'Forget it. Let's continue tempering my muscles.'

Lu Heng quickly sat up and adjusted his body into a cross-legged sitting posture.

Last night, when he was cultivating the Qi Gathering technique, he had tempered almost 80% of the muscles in his entire body. He had basically encountered no problems doing so.

The rest of the muscles were located at his vital parts, so he had not been in a hurry to temper them.

Now though, he had decided to temper those muscles as well.

According to the normal procedure, these muscles would be tempered last.

After all, a little carelessness could cause many problems.

Even if it was someone as talented as He Bing, the instructor would probably suggest that he start tempering his bones and internal organs before tempering the muscles at the vital parts.

However, Lu Heng felt that, with his current talent, he could definitely give tempering those muscles a go.

After all, it was clearly mentioned in the Qi Induces Internal Strength technique that if all the muscles in the body were tempered at the same time, the effect would be far better than if another part of the body was tempered first.

This was because, when the human body was moving, it would mobilize all of the muscles in the body.

If one section of the muscles was stronger than another, then when the body's owner went all out, the weaker section of the muscles would suffer injuries.

This was one of the reasons.

The other reason was, if the body was tempered separately, there would be a difference in the strength levels of the different muscles in the body. In the end, in order to ensure that all the muscles could exert the same amount of strength, the body's owner would have to stop tempering the stronger muscles and spend time strengthening the weaker ones first.

This would waste a lot of time.

Of course, there were more flaws than just these two. For example, it would impact the coordination of the body, create additional problems when trying to break through a bottleneck, and so on.

In short, it was best to train all the muscles at the same time. The benefits were definitely greater than one could imagine.

For example, Grandmaster Liu, who was a genius that was directly sent to the University of Martial Arts youth class right after junior high school, had started training all his muscles at the same time not long after he started cultivating qi.

Someone like him had achieved such remarkable achievements in martial arts and had become a grandmaster at such a young age.

If Lu Heng wanted to catch up with his peers, he had to think of a way to improve faster than them. Otherwise, how can he compete with them?

Those martial arts students who were about to take the university entrance examination had all started practicing martial arts during their third year of junior high school. If he wanted to catch up with them, he had to put in more effort.

Lu Heng knew this very well, so he decided to take a risk again.

He believed that, given his outstanding talent, there should be a very high chance of success.

Without further ado, Lu Heng devoted himself to cultivation and began to guide the qi flow to temper the muscles at those vital parts.