Looking at his stats, he was truly shocked. After saturating his muscles with mana his stats jumped from 75.75 to an impressive 98.98, 23 point per stat increase. That was even more so than with his bones and didn't take up anywhere near as much time.
"Holy shit, the power I feel right now is almost intoxicating. I bet I could kill those two goblin f*ckers if I blew on them the wrong way now." As he was reveling in his new found power, he suddenly remembered John and his stats.
His lowest value, speed, was just about 3,100. When he moved Ray couldn't even see his shadow and the fact that John's weakest link was so much above all of his states, he was immediately humbled.
"Look at me being an idiot, I haven't even gotten to one hundred yet and I'm here acting like tough sit." Shaking his head he looked at his body once again.
Unlike with his bones, his muscles didn't become blue. Instead they became an even more vibrant red, so much so that they looked like they were permanently soaked in blood.
"I want to do other parts of my body, but I don't know where to start. Ligaments, lymph vessels, blood vessels, organs, skin? All of them seem like an obvious choice." It took a long time to saturate a part of the body and as he was being actively pursued, he didn't think that he would have the time to do all of them.
"I'll go with my ligaments, they are like the bridge between the bones and muscles so that should be the natural next step." Quickly making up his mind he identified the ligaments in his body and flooded them with mana. Not only were they the next in line, but they could be done quickly in case he decided to do another part.
As there were naturally less ligaments in the body compared to muscles and bones, it didn't take long for them to be saturated. But, to his disappointment, it didn't increase his stats.
Instead, what he got was a different benefit.
The saturation of his ligaments lead to a more qualitative increase in strength than a quantitative. Instead of being stronger, he could control his strength better and bring out more of it.
His throughput increased, not his capacity. Bigger hose, more pressure, same tank.
And this served to be the same when he saturated his skin and internal organs. Almost no extra power, but his body was more stable with his control increasing. And with the case of his skin, the rate of absorption of mana also increased, an unexpected benefit but certainly a welcomed one.
There were a few things that he didn't try as he wasn't confident that he could do them properly, including his heart, lungs, brain, nerves, and blood and lymph vessels. The vessels and nerves were too small and numerous so he wasn't confident in doing it properly and the others were too important to sloppily shove mana into.
If something went wrong and his muscles, bones or skin got damaged then simple regeneration could fix it. Even his internal organs could be fixed if he had the time. But as far as he knew, if something went wrong and his heart, lungs or brain got damaged beyond repair, he would certainly die.
Last time he checked he still needed to breath and blood still needed to flow, not to mention the importance of his brain.
He was 90% sure that his talent would fix anything that could go wrong but that 10% chance of instant death wasn't something that he was going to entertain. Those 3 organs were fundamentally more significant than the others so he wanted to wait until his control over mana was significantly higher than now.
With his saturation being finished for now, his stats stagnated at 99.99. Ne had expected it to at least reach one hundred after all that work but there seemed to be some sort of barrier to breaking through 100. He was sure that even with the saturation of his heart, lungs or brain it still wouldn't break through so he didn't' know what was stopping him.
It took a lot of time and effort to saturate his body to the extent that he did, and he was naturally getting a bit bored. When he looked at the timer it was already 11 hours since it turned dark and from his experience it was going to be much longer until it was daytime again.
"What do I do now? My ass hurts from sitting for so long and I'm bored." Taking out a bit of barbequed chima meat, he was considering venturing out of the cave to observe his surroundings.
He focused more on mana sense to make sure that there wasn't a beast directly outside of the cave and he was stepping into its mouth when he saw something interesting behind the cave walls.
Before he couldn't see through them because the mana was too dense, but with his increase in control as well as him being more accustomed with mana sense in such dense mana, he could see through it just like any other object. He had used mana sense for 11 straight hours, by far the longest time he had it active, and naturally was getting better at it.
Just behind the back wall of the cave was another much larger cave, with a boulder separating the two of them. Inside the cave were interesting looking flowers that had a strange interaction with mana.
Unlike every other thing that he had seen so far, it didn't absorb mana, or hold mana, or not interact with it, but seemed to generate it. He had never heard of something like this nor did he think anyone else did, as he had known that humans had engineered many different ways of generating mana for their own use.
From converting electricity or heat to mana and extracting it from mana stones, people have been looking for more and more efficient ways of generating mana to be used in various machines and appliances.
Collecting it in the old world wasn't viable as it was so thin and in the new world it was so thick that it would be many times easier to just search for mana stone mines.
If it was found out that a flower could do so then it would lead to a frenzy bigger than if people found out he discovered flow.
"No one has to know about this, they would surely kill me. They would keep me alive to study flow but they wouldn't hesitate to destroy my very soul to get their hands on this."
If there was a natural way of generating mana, then that means that it could be extracted and easily replicated. Anyone who discovered this and was strong enough to keep their life was certain to become the richest man in all of history.
"But how exactly do I get in there? The boulder is too big to move and I can't just phase through walls. Unless I can cut a doorway into it there's nothing that I can do, the flames I can make are certainly not hot enough to melt new world stone. But I'm not just going to leave this here for someone else to find."
He was stuck between a rock and a hard place in deciding what to do about the flowers. If he left it now to come back strong enough to move the boulder then someone or something else might find it before he returned, and if he stayed until he managed to slowly claw through the boulder then there was no telling how long that was going to take.
"To hell with it, I can't leave the cave now anyway, so I might as well try."
Using steel skin on his arm he poured even more mana into it to strengthen it even more. He would have used body strengthening, but after reaching 99.99 in his stats it seemed to have lost its effect. Besides using mana and making him glow a faint white nothing else happened.
Opening his palm in a like claw , he swung with all his might at the boulder, and to his surprise he cut out a sizable gash in the stone.
"Alright now we are getting somewhere." With nothing better to do he started to make a passageway through the boulder.