Chapter 34: First Day in the Training Room

'We're here.'

Eric heard his father's voice and slowly opened his eyes. He got out of the meditative posture he was in and sat normally as he looked out of the carriage. Sure enough, they were right in front of the gates to the Roaring Dragon Mercenary Group's base.

Seeing this, Eric got up and stretched his body a little bit. He was ready and excited for the oncoming training. Before he was able to go any further, however, he was stopped by Blake.

'Take this key with you. It is one of the replicas of the key to the training room. Since you already know the way, now that you have this key, you can go there and come back at your own convenience.' Blake told his son as he handed him a rather normal looking key.

Eric took the key with him and held on to it. Once his father wasn't looking, he acted like putting it inside his clothes while he actually stored it in his inventory.

The carriage soon came to a stop and both Eric and Blake got out of it. After Blake gave Eric some basic words of encouragement for his training, the two parted ways and went to their respective locations.

Blake went inside the main building while Eric sped past it for a short while until he had finally reached the training room. He sensed the area for anybody nearby, took out the key from his inventory and quickly opened the door.

Once he was inside, Eric shut the door and locked it with the key, which he then once again put in his inventory.

"Haah, it's finally the time to start." Eric said rather quietly as he walked over to the weights section.

He was right next the dumbbells and just as he was about to start, the Scam System alerted him with a notification.

Eric opened the notifications and saw that he had gotten a new quest, which he started to read intuitively while also being quick so that he didn't waste much time.

[New Quest: Physical Training (1)

Task: Training the physique is a basic requirement for a body cultivator, but how and how much you train your body is also as important. For body cultivators, the more rigorous the training, the better! The task for the first part of this quest is to-

1) Curl the 15 kilogram dumbbells 250 times in each hand.

2) Bench press with the 60 kilogram barbell 250 times.

3) Punch the sandbag 250 times with each hand and kick it 250 times with each leg.

(This is a daily quest. Daily quests are similar to chain quests as they are not a one-time instance; but unlike chain quests, they refresh every day till a certain point in time or progress in the quest. The terms and rewards of daily quests may or may not change after refreshing depending on the respective quest; however, once the quest progresses, there will be a definite change in that particular quest's terms and rewards.)

Time Limit: 4 hours

Completion Reward: 3 Points in Charm, Progress of the Quest

Failure Penalty: None]

Eric was a bit intrigued seeing a new type of quest appear for the first time, but he was also slightly overwhelmed by the intensity of the quest. He was rather skeptical about his ability, more so the lack of it, to complete the quest.

'The three tasks look outrageous compared to anything else I have seen, but as a body cultivator, I should have higher resistance and stamina than normal people. Along with that, since body cultivators grow in strength by training their bodies way more significantly compared to others, completing this quest could be possible…' Eric thought to himself while still in the midst of doubting his capabilities.

'Well, the fact that this is a quest means that it is most probably possible. I'm going to train here anyways, so let's just try this out. There isn't any failure penalty anyways so even if I'm unable to achieve these exact numbers, it won't be much of a problem. If I aim for getting such insane results, the likelihood that I do get them will slightly increase.'

Rather than being intimidated by the atrocious looking numbers in the quest, Eric took it as a challenge and immediately started with his training.

He picked up the 15 kilogram dumbbells and started to curl them in each arm at a steady pace. Going too fast would tire him out quickly and going too slow would make him lose time, which he only had a limited amount of.

As he kept on exercising his arms, he checked the Scam System to see the number gradually update. In front of the first task, there was now a counter that went up every time he lifted a dumbbell.

Roughly ten minutes passed and Eric was surprisingly not feeling tired at all. Instead, he felt a fire of passion burn inside him. As a cultivator, he had way higher endurance and growth rate for his strength than normal people.

After about ten more minutes, he had successfully curled the dumbbells 100 times in each hand. He was almost half way there and was starting to feel that his arm muscles were being worked and had started to slowly but surely grow. Impressed by his capabilities and motivated by the steady growth, he powered through and in a couple more minutes was at the half way mark for the first part of his training.

[1) Curl the 15 kilogram dumbbells 250 times in each hand. (250/500)]

Eric was satisfied by his fast speed, but didn't become overconfident and continued to keep a steady pace as he continued curling the weights in his hands for another dozen or so minutes.

By the time he was at 400 curls in total, Eric was starting to feel a little bit of stress on his arm muscles, but it was far from enough to make him stop. This pain he felt was part of the results of his training and would be naturally accompanied by an increase in his physical strength.

At 450 curls, the pain intensified quite a bit and Eric was sweating profusely, but he still wasn't near giving up. Eric's speed of curling the dumbbells was now quite a lot slower than when he had started. His skin was slightly reddening but his body was still in good enough shape to finish the last 50 dumbbell curls.

'10…9…8…7…6…5…4…3…2…1!' Eric counted in his head, as he finished the first task of the quest and placed the dumbbells back in their original position.

He had taken a little less than 50 minutes to complete this task and was quite tired and sweaty all over. His arms ached a little bit, but were still in decent shape. He had decided to relax for 10 minutes and get his body back to its peak shape before continuing with the bench press.

He sat down in a meditative posture, cleared his mind and started meditating in an open area in the middle of the room. The serene silence of the room served as a great help for him to keep his mental state calm and devoid of any thoughts, while the cool air that circulated all around him helped his heated up body cool down and regain its original temperature.