Chapter 8: Making The Most Of Things

Date August 13th, 2250

A week later.

"Okay, honey, time for you to take a nap." My mom Jane said to me in an upbeat and positive sounding voice as I was busy roaming around our home's large living room floor, trying to build up, strengthen, and improve my weak but quickly growing baby muscles.

*ahh*

After responding to her with one of my signature baby noises, I continued crawling on the floor for a few more seconds before I found myself being picked up by her and brought to my bedroom to be put down for one of my many scheduled naps.

When she arrived at my bedroom door with me in tow, she opened it and brought me inside my room, which I'm pretty sure was quite a bit larger than the typical bedroom for the average undercity resident. Though I haven't been to another one so I don't know that for sure.

With the two of us entering the room, mom walked over to my crib with me in hand and gently placed me in my crib before tucking me in with my usual blanket and gazing at me with what I perceived as a loving gaze for several seconds.

"Alright, honey, I'll be back when you wake up. Sweet dreams." She said to which I responded with another of my many baby noises that I had in my arsenal, making a smile appear on her face before she reluctantly departed my room, probably to continue her work in the living room.

Now that Mom's out of my room and has left me alone to take a nap, I'm not really feeling all that tired thanks to my Monstrous Physique perk cutting the amount of sleep I need by half. So with that being as it is, I suppose I'll use the time I have available to myself like I've been doing the past couple of days by getting a bit of working out in before she eventually comes back to check up on me since that's all I can really do besides sleeping and sucking on my mom's teet.

Thank god there aren't any baby monitors in my room. If there was one, I wouldn't be able to do much of anything besides normal baby activities.

Done thinking and ready to get to grinding, I set into motion by first removing the very soft and comfy blanket covering me and tossed it to the side of my crib before I then stood up wobbly without holding onto anything. Which no doubt would have left both of my new parents gobsmacked because no newborn baby out of the womb for a single week should be capable of that type of physical feat.

What exercise should I start out with... I'll begin with squats first to continue strengthening my legs and once I feel like I've reached my limits in that exercise, I'll rest for a bit and move on to some of my other bodyweight exercises.

Finished deciding, I got to work on my squats before resting and continuing on to a different exercise.

...

Many reps later.

I think I did more than enough exercise for the time being, don't want to overdo it and end up stressing my newborn body too much. Although, now that I'm giving it some thought, that's probably not possible with just bodyweight exercises since I have 11 endurance. Which is a hell of a lot higher than the 1 to 2 endurance that most normal humans down here should have going off of my game knowledge.

As for the various humans roaming around the wasteland above, they could range anywhere from 1 to 10, however, most will probably range around an average of 3 to 4 endurance. Additionally, there should be a few gifted individuals above that have breached and surpassed the normal human limit of 10, but they're an exception and should be few and far between...

Going back to my previous train of thought, I have many years ahead of me to make a ton of progress, so it's better that I err on the side of caution than to push things too far and end up damaging my body. Plus, if I were to end up injured, that would most definitely make my parents concerned and would likely result in me being put under a microscope, something of which I'd definitely rather avoid for obvious reasons.

With my exercise completed, I laid back down on my bed and brainstormed to see if there was anything else I could do at the moment. After contemplating on it for a bit with both of my thought processes that I was still getting used to, I came up with no other ideas, thus I opened up my status first to see how I was progressing.

As soon as the holographic screen popped into existence, I was on the new screen that was only displaying my completed daily workout quest. Not seeing anything else, I wasted no time and turned that daily quest in, netting myself a nice 16 exp as my reward. Once I had that out of the way, I swapped tabs and checked out my status to see where my exp progress was at.

Hmm, my exp sitting at a total of 112, so with my current rate of progress I should be able to get my first level up in about 56 days, not too bad of a wait honestly.

Moving on from there, I carefully examined the rest of my status in its entirety to see if anything else had appeared or changed that wasn't displayed in the new tab. I completed the task of going through it all in seconds thanks to my new and improved intelligence and didn't notice anything different. So with nothing else to do in any of my system's menus, I exited it, making the system poof out of existence in the blink of an eye.

Well, looks like I've done all I can for now. Guess I'll take that nap like mom wanted.

Happy with the small amount I accomplished, I pulled my comfy blanket back over myself and closed my eyes to get a bit of shuteye for however long I had left before my mom inevitably checked up on me.

...

Time continued on and the next thing I knew, 3 weeks and 4 days had quickly flown by with the date changing to September 7th, 2250. On that day, while I was supposed to be in the midst of taking one of my several daily naps, I was instead training my perception that I had just figured out how to train the prior week.

And as I was training said attribute with my other thought process that I had also grown accustomed to over these last 3 weeks, I couldn't help but be impressed at the usefulness of this attribute and the possibilities it could offer me down the road when it finally surpasses 10 and beyond.

This pseudo-perception field of mine is pretty busted. It kind of reminds me of those xianxia cultivation novels that I used to read back in my previous world. The ones where the cultivators beyond a certain stage would be able to sense everything within a certain distance around them.

Though mine is a hell of a lot weaker than what was described in those books, with what I can sense being pretty fuzzy overall similar to tv static. That aside, the range of this perception field is limited to around 10 feet by my rough estimates, give or take a few inches. So it's like a significantly weakened version of what those books described.

Even with it being a hell of a lot weaker than what cultivators would have, I can for sure see it being very useful in many scenarios, including those that would require me to be sneaking around enemy territories, detecting traps, lock picking, and other such activities. It'll probably end up saving my ass more than a few times in my future adventures.

Furthermore, I bet if I continue this perception training of mine up, I'll reach a similar level to what was detailed in those novels some day. Although I have no idea when and how many years it will take to achieve that kind of ability and mastery thus, I'll just have to keep at it consistently until I do.

On another note, hopefully by the end of the year I'll be able to increase it by a point at the very least. So I can get another perk for surpassing 10 points in a single attribute, which is typically the limit for most humans unless drugs, cybernetics, and mutations are taken into account. There could be other methods available to increase them, but those are the only ones I know of currently for normal humans...

My thinking might be unrealistic and a bit too much on the optimistic side of things, but I think my chances are pretty decent given that I've already noticed a small improvement in my ability to perceive when someone is nearby and or nearing me. Plus, I am almost sure that both my vision and my hearing have improved. However, the changes in those two aren't as blatantly noticeable as the previously mentioned one, hence I might just be imagining that they've improved.

...

That's enough thinking about that. I better redirect my entire focus to my perception training since there's no use in contemplating further on this until I actually start seeing real progress made.

After I set aside my thoughts regarding what I would like to happen in the future, I continued laying down under my comfy blankets in my crib, keeping both eyes shut, and returned my entire focus to my perception training. As soon as my two thought processes teamed up together to focus on their objective, the clarity at which I could perceive and detect things within my surroundings increased by a level or two.

Now with the inclusion of my other thought process, I kept training my perception primarily by focusing my senses on the various objects in my room that consisted of a small amount of furniture that was here since day one of my arrival and an increasing number of toys that my mom and dad got me over the past couple of weeks.

Though they mainly consisted of numerous block toys because that was the only toy I found somewhat enjoyable to entertain myself with when I was in the presence of my parents and new grandparents.

Something they all picked up on immediately, hence the increasing number of blocks I had at my disposal to play with. But besides training off of that, I also allocated some focus to the hallway that connected to my space to keep an eye out for either my mom or dad coming down the hallway.