Completion of Strongman

After Baron Bob helped me resocket my arm, I went straight to bed. I don't know if It was the adrenaline wearing off, the sun draining me of my energy, or my injury taking its toll on me, but when I reached my bed I flipped facedown onto the straw and out like a light. Then in the evening I woke up, ate what I was later told was 4 pounds of meat, and went straight back to bed.

The following morning, after an unusually hearty breakfast, I looked around and saw everyone staring at me. When I saw baron Bob, he immediately exclaimed "What happened to you? Yesterday evening you looked like a boy with muscles, but yet now you look like a short man." I stood there stunned for a bit, but then the baron pulled me up to a mirror and I saw that I had put on a lot of muscles.

I looked like a statue chiseled by an artist. While I still had fat that looked like muscle, my body had reached the ideal muscle-to-fat ratio. This was as good as the body of mortal man can get. It is also the bare minimum requirement to start storing qi. In this stage I have to start storing qi within myself until it reaches the threshold where it is forced into my muscles. Without enough qi compression I had no control over the qi. I cannot yet force it anywhere but inwards. This is where my technique enters uncharted territory. What if you gathered qi from others instead of gathering it yourself. The normal answer is that the qi is out of control and kills the practitioner from the inside out. Most such cases result in said person either being crippled for life or being left with an incomplete corpse, depending on the source. However, this technique modifies both the source of the qi and the person receiving the qi so that both benefit. The only problem is that I don't know how to yet.

The next stage of the Rulers Formula is Baron. This stage is to help me harvest faith, the energy released by all things to those they believe in. Currently, this is restricted to those within the hamlet. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. Because the faith I can collect is limited, it is both harder to sense and easier to control. If I were in the capital, I'd work hard to obtain faith, but I did I would "sense" the faith almost instantly as it ate me from the inside out. But here I already had a miniscule fragment of faith in me. All I had to do was gather more faith and then take the time to feel it out. After that I have to condense the faith into qi.

I respond to the barons question, "My technique advanced, so I am now a strongman." "I guess it is understandable, that fight yesterday may not have been anything to a warrior, but as not even a strongman, you dislocated your own arm. That is as intense as that level of fighting gets." He mulled over the development for a while, but eventually said "So is the end of your stay? You only needed to stay here to gain experience for when you become an advisor, but now you can directly become a viscount." I respond "Well, seeing as how the next chapter of the manual I used requires an environment I have already found here, and is titled baron, I think I will stay. Don't worry, I won't be taking your title. All I need is an understanding of how a baron operates. Rather, I need to maintain upwards mobility. I need to move up the chain of command to get every chapter in order. Seeing as how I will be there for only about a year for each chapter, I should not take over at any point in time." After letting baron Bob know my intentions, he seemed to smile just a bit. "Okay, I will look after you for a while longer."