The 500 Stat Explosion
For two whole months, the forum post titled “Is This a Bug?” had been blowing up.
“Five hundred stats and instant death…”
Once I learned the keyword, confirming it was easy. And my impression was incredibly simple.
“It’s a miracle I didn’t die that day.”
Probably because I hadn’t used it directly. I had only come into indirect contact through training sword forms. I realized all over again how lucky it was that my sister had suggested we check it out that day. If I hadn’t known and learned some other training method, or worse, enrolled in the academy without realizing, exploding to death wouldn’t have been strange at all.
But that was that, and this was this…
“Why the hell is it so high?”
“……”
Stats were like density. The higher they climbed, the harder they were to raise, and their effects multiplied accordingly. Just like how Earth’s inner core, due to its extreme density, exceeded thousands of degrees and melted rock into flowing magma. A high stat had already become something closer to a supernatural ability in itself.
And even that is nothing more than the kind of transformation caused by the density of Earth’s inner core.
The maximum stat a single individual could possess was 999. In other words, my Mana of 999 was essentially like carrying a black hole—the ultimate pinnacle of density—inside my body. It was only natural that problems would arise from harboring a black hole within a human frame.
“Do you happen to know something about this?”
So this was far too sudden. At that level, being born at all was difficult, and even if one were born, problems were inevitable. Just as black holes were immensely powerful but did not form easily. According to Oh Ji-o’s knowledge, the minimum mass required for a black hole to form was between 2.5 and 3 times the mass of the sun—and that was only counting the core mass, not the entire celestial body. When you factored in the full mass of the surrounding star, it required roughly twenty to twenty-five suns.
But I’ve never heard anything like that from when I was young.
So far, even if the game couldn’t reflect every single truth, none of the facts it did reflect had been wildly off. There were only two exceptions.
Me and her.
“I’m sorry. I cannot answer that.”
“Is it restricted information?”
“……”
And unfortunately, she—who should have known the truth—kept her mouth shut. It was the price she paid in exchange for strengthening her Regression.
“Very well. The solution is more important than the cause in this matter. You do know the solution, correct?”
“Of course I do. That’s why I brought you here.”
“‘Brought’ feels a little too forceful…”
“Hehe. It’s still better than persuading you and then watching you die, right?”
It was a statement I understood instantly.
“This way.”
Diana smiled brightly and took my hand, leading me along.
Her hand is incredibly soft.
I knew it was a somewhat creepy reaction, but I couldn’t help it. The girl I had been crushing on for my entire life was holding my hand. Still, I made a conscious effort not to sniff it, so I was safe.
“Here’s the solution!”
Contrary to my expectation that we would go somewhere far, the place she led me to was just a corner of an empty training ground. She proudly showed me the object there, but I squeezed my eyes shut.
“Is this for real?”
“Yes, of course!”
When she said there was a solution, the first things that came to mind were some incredible elixir, a divine technique that could control mana, or perhaps an external mana tank that could draw the mana out of my body. But what stood before my cautiously reopened eyes was none of those things.
“No matter how I look at it, that’s a barbell?”
What had actually appeared was a piece of workout equipment. And one with a very, very familiar design.
Why does it even smell like sweat?
“Maybe it’s a magic tool that just looks like that?”
I asked while clinging to a sliver of hope. Surely not. Even if it looked crude, maybe it was actually some magic tool I didn’t know about?
“No, it is exactly what it looks like.”
My hope was crushed.
“You just need to train your body with this.”
And then came the finishing blow.
“…Is this another thing you can’t explain the reason for?”
I stared at her with gloomy eyes. I wanted to use mana, not build muscle. I didn’t want to believe that the only method left to me was iron pumping.
She smiled awkwardly and spoke.
“Um… You know that the human body is organically connected, right?”
“Of course.”
The idea that the body was like a precision machine was already common knowledge. That was why a problem in one area easily affected others. An ankle injury could lead to back pain, which in turn caused neck pain.
“If one element protrudes excessively, the other parts will naturally try to catch up. Your mana is overflowing, so in order to contain it, your vessel is expanding easily.”
“So… muscle?”
“More precisely, the physical body. Your spiritual senses have been sharpened through Descent, and your potential is overflowing thanks to mana that has surpassed its limits. Therefore, the body follows suit naturally. Above all…”
She paused for a moment, then smiled sweetly.
“It’s already been proven.”
So just do it. I accepted the true meaning hidden behind her smile.
Strength training is difficult for one simple reason.
First, it hurts. By the principle that muscle fibers tear and then recover to grow larger, if it doesn’t hurt, it isn’t exercise. Second, the visible growth feels disproportionately small compared to the effort. No matter how brutally you train, the actual increase in muscle mass isn’t that large.
And there was a reason it was considered limited in our world. The ceiling was simply too low. No matter how hard or how long you trained your muscles, both the efficiency and the upper limit were far lower than training mana.
The power of mana was reinforcement and support. Simply circulating it could raise physical ability without limit. In comparison, basic strength training was usually enough.
That fact applied to Oh Ji-o, who had lived in a machine civilization, as well. He had always considered reading another book far more beneficial than building muscle.
Plus, it’s not even using mana in the end.
That was why I didn’t exactly start in a great mood.
“…It really works like this?”
“I told you so, didn’t I?”
Diana’s smug smile was annoying, but I couldn’t argue. It had only been an hour since I first picked up the barbell, yet she was already adding 10kg plates to both sides.
“No, this doesn’t make any sense…”
There was no recovery period needed. The weight was increasing not by the day, but by the hour. It was a biologically impossible rate of progress.
“It’s the process of your body automatically adapting to contain the overflowing mana. It’s not a biological result or process.”
“Ha…”
“How do you feel? Has your mind changed even a little?”
Changed my mind? Even if I were the ultimate hikikomori who hated going outside, let alone exercising, if my muscles grew at this insane rate, I would have gone crazy training. It felt like playing one of those mass-produced Chinese games where the numbers inflated all the way up to quadrillions and quintillions.
My muscles grow infinitely.
I let out a small laugh at the situation that sounded like a web novel title.
“I’ll work hard.”
“I’m glad!”
Under Diana’s guidance, my serious training lifestyle officially began.
“Alright, one more lap left!”
“Uaaaaah!”
The basics were cardio—running. Just like with muscle, my lung capacity and stamina skyrocketed after only a few runs.
“Six… six… six…”
“Wait, why isn’t the number going up…”
“Six… six…”
Next came weight training. What used to be an ordinary body was now filling out with dense muscle all over my limbs.
“Faster! You can go even faster!”
“Hngh.”
Once my muscles had filled out to a certain degree, we began training agility. Reflexive movement and decision-making were honed through lateral agility drills.
“Okay, let’s stretch all the way. There we go~”
“Uaaaagh!”
We trained flexibility,
“You can do it! You can climb higher!”
“Krrraaaagh!”
built grip strength through rock climbing,
“Then I’ll throw it!”
“I’m seriously going to die!”
and even trained dynamic visual acuity.
“How is it? They say the warriors of the plains have excellent eyesight because they always look at the sky.”
“…This actually works?”
“Part two.”
It was insane that even long-distance vision training improved my eyesight. Come to think of it, even when I was buried in work and had no time, I never felt tired. I had thought it was simply the boundless stamina of a child, but that wasn’t the case.
“Haha, you worked hard again today.”
“Thanks.”
As we trained together, we gradually grew closer. More precisely, the more time she spent with me, the more her friendly attitude was unlocked. It felt like I was interacting with an NPC.
So this is what a regressor is like.
I drank the beverage she handed me and recalled everything I had observed while staying by her side.
“Ah, that thing… Well…”
She usually answered most questions well, but she never answered anything about the future. At the same time, I got the feeling that she found this entire question-and-answer session somewhat boring.
“It’s mealtime! Let’s eat together.”
She clearly held goodwill toward me, but it was obvious that the origin of that goodwill wasn’t me.
“Is this what the emotions of a regressor heroine feel like?”
It was said as a joke, but the fact that it wasn’t entirely wrong left a slightly bitter taste. Still, she was my benefactor. In the academy, they wouldn’t have even found the cause, let alone a recovery method.
Wait, maybe they would have found the cause?
However, stat overflow was fundamentally an anti-cheat system. Even with Oh Ji-o’s knowledge, there was no solution. The only option was to start over from scratch. And in the physical world, what did a reset mean?
It meant death.
She probably would have gone insane.
It was an easily predictable ending. That was why my feelings toward her were a tangled mess of affection, gratitude, jealousy, complexity, and a sense of bondage. How this knot would eventually unravel was something even she probably didn’t know.
“…Let’s just keep training.”
Amid those complicated emotions, strength and stamina training continued to show clear results. And now, after two months had passed.
“Uh… um… You’ve gotten quite… big.”
I had become a walking mountain of muscle.