In the system he possessed, there was a particular setting: every time he practiced martial arts in an open space without targeting an NPC, he would gain a tiny amount of martial arts experience. This experience wouldn’t raise his character level, but it would increase his martial arts skill level. Originally, this was a game mechanic to suppress level growth in order to meet certain plot or martial arts requirements. But here, it had become Henry Harper’s only lifeline. His method was that, at the age of nearly ten, he began practicing a set of moves that many people mocked, calling it trash, a farmer’s routine, and saying it was absolutely impossible to cultivate inner strength with it—a boxing style with a coefficient of only twenty, the lowest tier in the game, but the only Buddhist martial art he could currently practice: Arhat Fist.

At the start of the game, you could choose the protagonist’s attribute: Fist, Sword, Blade, or Unorthodox—these four external martial arts types. Each protagonist would get extra bonuses when practicing their respective external martial arts. For example, the Fist protagonist would increase the power of their fist techniques and reduce stamina and inner strength consumption when using them. The Sword, Blade, and Unorthodox protagonists each had their own enhancements as well.

Besides these four protagonists, there were three special ones: Peerless Tiangang, Miracle Healer, and Invincible Benevolent. It wasn’t that these three were stronger than the four main types, but their special effects were different. For example, Peerless Tiangang could freely practice any type of internal martial arts and use them for attacks... This was the character template that made Henry Harper drool the most. At least in this real world, it was the one he wanted most. Unfortunately, he hadn’t chosen Peerless Tiangang back then...

Then there was Miracle Healer, whose character template could automatically recover health, inner strength, stamina, internal injuries, poison... In the game, this might not seem like much, but if you brought this template into the real world, it would basically make you immortal. No matter how you looked at it, it was ridiculously strong, which also made Henry Harper drool endlessly. Sadly, he hadn’t chosen this template either...

He had chosen the Invincible Benevolent template, a so-called combination of the strongest and the weakest... Before awakening, Invincible Benevolent was considered trash and the weakest in the game—this was practically universally acknowledged. It had no special attributes. At least in the game, Invincible Benevolent started with the highest possible 100 points of morality, but in the real world, that was completely useless; the real world wasn’t some data-driven template, and a person’s morality had nothing to do with numbers. As for other attributes, this template had none at all—a complete blank slate, even worse than an NPC, pure trash and the weakest...

But for this template to bear the word “invincible” was no empty boast. Once Invincible Benevolent awakened, it would gain the strongest title skill in the game: Heroic Deeds Across the World!

Every attack would automatically carry one or more of the Six Aspects special effects, and every defense would also automatically carry one or more of the Six Aspects special effects—truly invincible, which is why it was called Invincible Benevolent!

But again, this was the real world, where there wasn’t even experience points. Henry Harper had no idea how he was supposed to awaken and obtain the protagonist template’s strongest internal martial art, the Six Aspects True Dragon Technique. If Invincible Benevolent couldn’t awaken... he might as well just give up and go to sleep.

No matter what, he still had to survive. Even though Henry Harper had wallowed in self-pity for a long time, he eventually began practicing Arhat Fist. So, day after day, he practiced Arhat Fist. Seasons passed, nine years came and went. The game-turned-reality martial arts, which in the game only required a few hundred empty punches, now required eighteen million empty punches in the real world. If he threw five thousand punches a day, it would take about ten years...

Henry Harper walked down the road, his mind carefully reviewing the system. Although he was already intimately familiar with the system, character templates, and martial arts manuals, he still examined everything with extreme care, not missing a single detail. After a long while, when the cafeteria was finally in sight, he let out a breath, withdrew his consciousness from the system, and returned to the real world.

(Arhat Fist has already reached level ten. To reach the peak, I only need to level up once more. Judging by the time, I should be able to do it right around my nineteenth birthday. In other words, I’ll be able to practice the Muscle-Tendon Changing Classic then. Now I just hope the Muscle-Tendon Changing Classic is as powerful as I need it to be. In the game, internal martial arts didn’t require experience; you just had to equip them to level up. And except for Peerless Tiangang, no other character template could practice internal arts by empty moves... I just hope the system doesn’t screw me over again. If even internal arts require experience now, I might as well just die.)

This was what Henry Harper was thinking as he walked into the cafeteria, patted his flat wallet, sighed, and used his remaining coins to buy a large amount of the cheapest food—steamed buns. He couldn’t afford meat, nor could he afford eggs, but since he was training so much, he still needed to eat more. Besides steamed buns, he chose bean-based foods and bought a lot of soy milk as well...