The heavy wooden gates of Wu-Tan Outpost loomed ahead, fortified with sharpened iron spikes and guarded by men whose thick necks and broad shoulders spoke of rigorous, low-tier muscle tempering.
Ethan Vale rode up smoothly on his heavy black mount, his posture relaxed yet alert. Thanks to the brutal data dump from the dead guard's mind, he knew exactly how to act. He wasn't a panicked modern man; he was a cynical rogue traveler who had seen too much.
"Halt. Entry fee is three iron scraps, or show your resident token," a guard grunted, leaning heavily on a crude halberd.
Ethan didn't speak a word more than necessary. Mimicking the local dialect flawlessly, he flipped three weathered iron pieces from the dead merchant's pouch into the guard's calloused palm. The guard caught them, weighed them with a practiced flick of his wrist, and swept a careless glance over Ethan's fine silk traveling robes and his robust horse.
"Pass," the guard muttered, losing interest. An ordinary wandering martial artist or a minor merchant's son—this town saw dozens of them a day. Ethan trotted through the arched stone gateway, officially slipping into the human world without leaving a single ripple behind.
The town was a chaotic, gritty tapestry straight out of an ancient Xianxia chronicle.
The air smelled of roasted beast meat, cheap liquor, and the metallic tang of open-air smithies. The streets were packed with rough mercenaries carrying massive iron broadswords, wandering cultivators wrapped in faded robes, and shouting vendors selling common herbs and basic iron weapons. Everything was amplified by the world's dense 2.4x gravity—the stone buildings were short and incredibly thick, built to withstand immense weight, and even the footsteps of the citizens sounded heavy against the packed earth.
Ethan found a bustling, noisy tavern on the main street. He ordered a simple meal of dense, dark bread and stewed meat, sitting in a dim corner with his back to the wall. As he ate, he kept his head low, but his ears were wide open.
His brain, coordinated by the faint, background processing of his dormant neural chip, filtered the chaotic bar chatter. He listened to the mercenaries cursing about rising bandit activity, the merchants complaining about the steep taxes levied by the local Tyrant Clan, and gossip about an upcoming recruitment drive by a minor martial sect in the region. Piece by piece, the socio-political layout of the area formed a clear map in his mind.
After gathering enough baseline data, Ethan paid the innkeeper, booked a private room for the night, and headed upstairs. The luxury of a hot bath was his first priority. As the steaming water washed away the blood, grime, and dust of the primal forest, Ethan closed his eyes, feeling the sheer weight of this world settling into his muscles. He was adapting.
Changing into a set of clean, inconspicuous grey robes he had scavenged, he lay down on the hard wooden bed and let his consciousness drift into a deep, recuperative sleep.
The next morning, Ethan set out to solve his biggest bottleneck: his lack of local power.
He tracked down the town's primary bookstore—a cramped, dust-choked shop filled with yellowing parchment rolls and bound bamboo scripts. He spent hours sifting through the shelves, looking for anything related to body-tempering or martial arts.
But his cold, calculating expectations were quickly met with a grim reality.
The books available to the public were nothing but garbage. They contained basic, crude information—simple breathing patterns to increase stamina, rudimentary stretching stances, and low-tier dietary guidelines to strengthen bone density. The store owner chuckled dryly when Ethan questioned him further.
"Proper techniques? True body-tempering manuals that can break a man past the mortal limit?" the old man scoffed, wiping dust off a shelf. "Young man, those are the lifeblood of the great Clans, the Sects, and the wealthy Aristocrat families. Normal people can't buy those with mere gold or iron pieces. You either sell your life to a Master, or you don't get them at all."
Ethan didn't show his disappointment. He calmly purchased a few of the basic informational texts anyway. To an ordinary person, these basic manuals were useless. But to Ethan, they were raw data. Even a flawed, primitive technique could be scanned, reverse-engineered, and optimized by Chronos once his system fully recovered.
He knew he couldn't stay at an inn forever if he wanted to conduct his research in secret. Using a significant portion of the silver and iron coins he had plundered from the dead merchant, Ethan managed to secure a lease on a small, sturdy stone property near the secondary market street.
It was a modest, functional setup: a two-room sized shop space at the front facing the street, and a private living area in the back.
Standing in the empty shop front, looking out at the heavy, brutal world moving past his door, Ethan smiled a cold, anticipating smile. He had a base of operations now. It was time to figure out how to exploit this world's primitive logic with the ultimate power of evolutionary science.