Michael stepped into his house and found it unusually quiet. Looking at the time, it was early enough that his parents wouldn't be home yet. He didn't hear anyone in the living room, and after calling, he didn't get a response. Still, the door had been unlocked and his sisters' shoes were by the door, so he figured they were probably in their rooms. Seeing that that was the case, Michael shrugged and made his way to his own room.
He quickly noticed that the walls were up around the bathroom. He took a peek inside and saw that other than the actual equipment like the tub, toilet, and sink, the work seemed to be going quite well. He nodded, satisfied with the progress and figured that they'd be done by the end of the week.
"System, is there any way I can get a head start on picking up the ingredients for the renovation rewards?"
<
He shrugged and went over to his computer to begin his work for the evening. The project was moving along quickly - faster than he'd originally expected. This was actually a bit concerning, since if it ended too quickly, he wouldn't get paid as much. "Maybe I need to consider switching to a fixed cost," he mused. Regardless, there was still a limit on time in this context for making money - he couldn't work on the projects as they were available, after all.
He did have the meeting the following evening to discuss the project plan with Jeremy and Ben, which would lead to some additional income, but even that had diminishing returns. If he wanted to make more money, he either needed to spend more time or charge more. Sadly, not many people were willing to pay a 14 year old kid more than 25 dollars an hour. He knew that more experienced people in this field could make more, but they'd need to have the portfolio to prove it.
He decided not to worry about this too much for the time being and went back to working on the project. He'd be able to squeeze in about an hour's worth before he needed to go upstairs and help with dinner. The time passed quickly, and he went upstairs to greet the family, prep dinner, and share the meal as usual.
The conversation went around as usual, without any major announcements. Michael briefed his parents on the progress and mentioned that it looked like he'd be finished earlier than expected. Flavius and Rowena were quite pleased to hear this, especially when he mentioned that it was largely due to the realizations he'd made after reading the books he'd been sent. He also mentioned that he'd be meeting with the two owners at the cafe the next day, which his parents encouraged while also cautioning him to not take on too much.
Michael smiled a bit wanly at this. He did feel like he had a lot on his plate - at least, his schedule was such right now that he didn't really have any room for leisure. Even as it was he had a number of things that hadn't been tackled but were still on his to-do list, notwithstanding the ongoing work he had to do. Despite the fact that he had now optimized his sleep down to 6 hours, and he could use that time in Lucid Space to read, his days were already pretty full - morning workouts, run to school, shifts at the library, classes, homework, and actual work. He needed money to get training equipment, for food, for training supplements, for ingredients for the bath solutions that System was teasing him with... he needed money for a lot of things. Figuring out how to put all of that together was quite challenging.
He decided to broach the subject of potentially working fixed-fee projects in the future to his parents. They looked at each other, and then suggested that they discuss this at a later date, after the current project was wrapped up. Michael agreed. Soon, dinner was finished, and cleanup proceeded. Michael said goodnight and went back downstairs to get some more work done on the project.
Around 9pm, he stepped away from the computer. He went upstairs to clean himself up, grateful that he was only a few days away from being able to skip this step. He then went back downstairs and decided to practice the breathing with the System until it was time to enter his Lucid Space. As he followed the rhythm described, breathing deeply through his diaphragm instead of into his lungs, his mind started to wander to the conversation he'd had with the System earlier in the day about understanding the body and being able to sense its movements. As he breathed, he felt the air filling his torso, starting from his stomach. The cyclical ins and outs became almost hypnotic as he felt his pulse slow down.
He almost felt like he was an old fashioned spinning top, with each breath in being another press down on the plunger. He knew this was just his imagination, but the sensation was very realistic. Soon he couldn't feel the different parts of his body at all, like he was just a mass of spinning force. After what felt like just a brief moment, almost and hour had already passed, and it was time to rest. He switched out of the seated position he'd been in and laid back on his pillow before shutting his eyes.
---
<
Willpower-??? => +0.001.>>
"Hello to you, too, System. Was that from the breathing session?"
<
Michael 'nodded' in his lucid form. "Is there anything to that spinning sensation I was feeling? It seemed... odd."
<
"Got it. Forget I asked," he thought as he made his way over to his work desk. Since he was caught up on his English assignment, had finished the programming books his parents had sent him, and had a free period tomorrow for his Algebra and Chemistry homework, he was at a bit of a loss. There were so many options for what he could focus on, now - he could spend more time reading the yoga and internal martial arts texts he'd picked up, even if he couldn't feel his body to practice them, or dig deeper into the fitness and physique books he'd retrieved. He could also read some more programming books to potentially speed up his work on the current project.
Ultimately, he was a little tired of working on all of those pieces, and decided that he needed a break from the work he'd been dealing with. He instead decided to work on the first tier of the fundamental reading list the system had sent him. The first book he selected was a fundamental text of philosophy. He decided to follow the syntopic approach, and pulled a set of fresh sheets of paper from the corner of the desk to somewhere right at hand for taking notes and then started to dig into the first one.
"The Apology, huh? Okay, let's see what this is about."
---
4:00am, September 12th, 2000 CE
Michael woke up, stretched, made his bed and walked over to the exercise mat. His mind seemed to still be mulling over his reading from the evening. He started to get himself into position to begin the first exercise before he paused and took a step back. He closed his eyes, adjusted his breathing, and then re-opened his eyes, now focused on the task at hand. He followed through the exercise, paying attention to the muscle groups that each exercise was meant to be activating. At the same time, he focused on his breathing and tried to maintain the proper cycle he'd been working on.
This certainly took longer than it had when he was simply trying to rush through it, and it was also much more difficult, but he was able to get a vague sense of each of what was happening inside his body when he completed it. This type of body awareness was something new to him, but when he was reading overnight, he'd started to wonder. What was the purpose of exercise? To train the body and get stronger? But how? The general answer was a combination of putting the body under stress so that it would recover and rebuild, as well as training the associated pathways to properly perform these movements in the correct way - at least, this was how it had been described in the fitness books he'd read.
If so, then it wasn't just a matter of performing the exercise, or performing the exercise with the correct form as enforced by the System. Rather, it was about training the body to understand that when you wanted to perform this motion, using these muscle groups to do it in this configuration was the correct and efficient way to do so. Breaking things down into the smallest components of each exercise - each muscle within the group, each fiber within that muscle - seemed impossible and exhausting, but Michael had a vague sense that that was the ultimate goal. Do it right, then do it fast, as he'd discussed with the System the day before. Trying to get to the essence - or the Form, as described in the book - would probably get him closer to improving.
Quieting his mind through his breathing and focusing on the movements was slowly bringing him to a deeper sense of his own body.