Mo Yangling whistled and hummed a cheery tune as he lazed around in the middle of that small river he found.
After a full 2 days of being out in the wild, he had already established some sort of makeshift shelter, a thatch hut built out of sturdy branches, weaved vines used as rope and leaves/moss mostly for some flimsy isolation.
It was not going to survive the toughest storms, but it was still a good roof over his head for now.
But, his greatest surprise came not with the shelter, but when he discovered that his body didn't actually need food...
It seemed to sustain itself on the Origin Energy. It seemed that his body was filled with said energy already, and any excess was converted into energy.
Sure, his stomach still growled in emptiness from time to time, and his mouth did get dry as all hell, but he felt no need for actual food or water.
'Damn, this cultivation thing is amazing!'
The monk smiled as he rolled around in the lake.
He had no clue as to what he was actually doing, or if he was even cultivating properly.
His body was still as weak as before, but he could at least walk properly after a day or two of rest, hell, Mo Yangling was sure he could even sprint for a minute or two now.
But eventually, his period of laziness needed to end.
'I can't keep living in such a weak body...'
Even if the energy within him seemed to help him recover from fatigue much quicker than was humanly possible, he still got tired at an unprecedented rate.
Mo Yangling was very much used to being physically active in his past life, more so than all of the other monks at the temple.
So, getting short of breath from walking around a bit was starting to get on his nerves. It was unacceptable.
'I think it's fair to say I can start training now since I don't really need to eat or drink... I hope I'm getting enough protein from this so-called 'Origin Energy'.'
The monk was by far the most concerned about how his body would function without food.
Internal cultivation was wonderous indeed. For it to allow a human body to gain all of its required energy for survival... It was simply shocking.
But the monk also noticed an odd thing.
And that was the fact that he had a distinct lack of knowledge and understanding of what Origin Energy actually was.
Sure he had a basic definition of it, but it barely explained anything, and all of the books that the original Mo Yangling had read halfheartedly were not helping him in any way.
All he knew was that it was the energy and essence of the world that cultivators could channel into their meridians through pathways in their bodies to become stronger, those pathways would later on channel energy outwards through martial arts to affect the world around them.
But that didn't really explain much about Origin Energy itself.
It was almost as if the cultivation world had never actually tried to find out more about it, which was quite unlikely in the monk's mind.
People in his world always strived to find explanations for all phenomena around them.
He just found it hard to believe that no one had looked deeper than the surface level when it came to the energy that cultivators used to power themselves up.
'Eh, I guess there's just gaps in my memories... It can't be helped, the young brat that lived in this body didn't care about cultivation much.'
Alas, he was not going to get any answers by simply mulling over his thoughts in the middle of the wilderness.
In the first place, he didn't have the time to worry about such things. He needed to quickly start training and growing stronger if he wanted to leave that forest.
After all, he was in a forest filled with beasts of varying strengths, if he got unlucky and ran into one that could kill him, then it would be the end of his second life...
The first training routine was quite simple.
100 Pushups, 100 Sit-ups, 100 Squats, 100 pull-ups, and a 10 Kilometer Run... Well, at least that was the initial plan.
Not like Mo Yangling had anything to measure how much he ran, so he only ran around the area until his legs were killing him from pain, before he recovered and started the routine all over again.
At first, he could only do the routine around three times a day. From morning to sunset.
Each time he got tired, the Origin Energy within him would imbue his muscles with renewed vigour, helping them recover and strengthen even further.
In the second week, he could do it 5 times a day, with time to spare at that. He used that time to build a more decent hut using whatever wood he could scavenge.
By the third week, the muscles in his body were already growing, becoming visible and sturdier.
But Mo Yangling still didn't feel as if it was enough. Rather, it wasn't even close to what he wanted.
He wanted to live up to the nickname had received in his previous life. He was going to try and become the Ox once more.
'At this rate, I should be able to get there in another year... Growth won't always be this fast though, so from here I'll be toning down and defining my muscles a lot...'
Mo Yangling struggled internally for a bit to find his grip and get used to his new genetics. After all, not all bodies were the same, and his current one certainly could be described as having superior genetics.
After all, not only did it regenerate constantly, allowing it to grow faster. It was also seemingly well-suited for building muscle in general.
The monk could see at least 5 months' worth of progress for a regular person in the 3 weeks he trained.
In the end, he decided that he needed to switch his training around if he was to work on other, smaller muscle groups as well.
And so, the monk cooked up a strategy and yet another training plan. Adding more exercises like dips, different variations of push-ups, chin-ups, one-leg squats, and numerous other exercises to target and grow more groups.
But besides that, he also decided to limit the daily repetitions to around 4. And use the rest of the time that remained in the day to hunt.
Although he didn't feel hungry, he still felt wrong not eating for so long. His stomach also felt empty, which was not pleasant in any way.
It all culminated with a strange feeling of lightheadedness, which rendered him unable to train one day.
"What the fuck..." Was all the monk could say as he lay on the ground, his body suffering from an onset and instantaneous weakened state.
His energy hadn't run out, he could technically still move by expending it, but his body felt much weaker.
It was at that point that he realized... While he didn't need to eat food to sustain himself, his body still needed the nutrients derived from actual food to fuel itself properly.
In retrospect, it was rather obvious. But the monk had let the discovery of Origin Energy, and the possibilities it brought, get in the way of his thinking.
And so, instead of training constantly and burning even more energy, he decided to use his remaining stamina to hunt for a proper source of protein, lest the little muscle he had developed shrivelled up as well...
He had managed to not run into any wildlife besides the countless bugs, occasional grass snakes, or moles that poked out of the ground. So he assumed that he was in a rather safe part of the forest, perfect for a fledgling hunter.
He mostly ignored the few animals he ran into, except for a few grass snakes that bit him. He, naturally, bit them back out of courtesy.
But they were too little to be of any substance. Making a fire to cook them was another issue altogether.
It had taken him a full day to get the fire started. He managed to do it thankfully, and from that point onwards it was just a matter of keeping it going for as long as possible.
In the end, the monk discovered that cooked snake tasted much like chicken. Though it had a very different texture.
The skin of the snakes he hunted was also something he gathered and let out to dry in the sun.
Besides the very occasional small snake, the only other possible sources of protein in the vicinity were insects.
Mo Yangling did his best to avoid those, with a passion. It wasn't even a matter of disgust as much as it was health and safety.
He didn't know much about the critters in question, but he sure as hell didn't want to find out which was or wasn't venomous.
At least with snakes, he knew how to skin them and separate the venom gland if necessary.
Even though he had no way of knowing whether or not venom worked on him, it was better to be safe than dead.
Throughout the following weeks, he was thankfully going to start learning more about the area around him and the animals that inhabited it.
There were plenty of animals around apparently, they just strayed away from him religiously.
The Monk stalked a deer-looking beast for a while. It was unnaturally large, bigger than even the largest truck, and thicker than any bull he had seen in his past life.
Mo Yangling's memories didn't help much in identifying the animal, seems like the Young Master didn't have much of an interest in anything that was brutish.
'So much juicy meat! Thank you Mother Nature for this bountiful harvest!'
The Monk almost kissed the ground as he imagined the macros on the meat of that thick deer.
The monk clutched a long, sharpened stick in his hand and held his breath, trying to conceal his presence as much as he could while approaching the beast from behind.
But the moment he got too close, the gigantic deer twisted its head towards him unnaturally. Its horns glowed for a moment as its twisted neck bent in an odd shape.
'Of course, it can sense me! Mythical bastard creature!'
The beast then roared menacingly, its blue glowing horns rearing up as its legs moved and its gigantic body rushed... In the opposite direction.
The monk blinked a few times as he looked at the creature dash through a few trees as it disappeared in the distance.
Yep, most animals with any smarts to have survival instincts ran away on sight. Well, they ran away as soon as they sensed him.
The Monk found it hard to conceal his presence, it seemed as if they could sniff him out. The deer-like thing was just one example.
It was jarring, especially since most wildlife seemed to be much faster than he was.
The Monk found that odd, so the next thing he decided to do was to try and set up traps. There was, however, one issue with that strategy.
Traps were hard to set up and he didn't have much experience with them.
"But who need trap when man have stick?
Man have stick big, big stick make animal go ouch.
But animal don't come close, so what man do?"
The monk adopted a rather caveman-esque dialect whilst speaking to himself in the middle of the forest.
Why exactly?
Well, he prayed to be able to connect with his ancestors, in the hopes that maybe they'd teach him how to make proper traps and catch some grub.
He figured that, since something as fantastical as origin energy was very much real in his current world, then he'd for sure be able to find some esoteric way of gaining knowledge that he lacked.
As one might guess, it wasn't exactly working.
But it wasn't like he could think of any other more immediate solutions.
Of course, his actions didn't look like those of a sane individual. Any outsider looking in would have likely assumed that the monk was either lobotomized or a lost Neanderthal.
But that was not the case for the sentient demonic beast nearby...
'Is this smelly human trying to communicate with us the way his earliest ancestors did?'