My god, he understood physical limits, he understood mental outbursts—humans can indeed unleash extraordinary strength in times of danger—but he’d never heard of actually training for this.

Tightly shutting his eyes, maybe when he opened them, everything would be back to normal!

Chapter Twelve: This Is Still Called Basic Training?

Three seconds. It wasn’t David Thompson who opened his eyes on his own; it was his body, after being hit by the laser, that felt his flesh and bones melting, making him realize that, according to Little James, this kind of pain was still within his mental tolerance.

David Thompson learned a new idiom—“a fate worse than death”!

He experienced firsthand the terror of an advanced civilization. This was practically an experiment on the edge of physical and mental collapse. David Thompson began a true hellish ordeal.

But don’t think this was just a robot rigidly following orders. If it were another civilization, maybe so, but the Maya civilization was itself a branch of Earth’s civilization—just the most advanced one. If military experts saw this training method, they’d treat it as a priceless treasure and worship Little James as an ancestor, because this was the ultimate dream they’d pursued all their lives. But due to various limitations, they were still far from achieving it.

Born into fortune, David Thompson wasn’t ungrateful, but he was just a high school student, not a real soldier. If he hadn’t started self-training since junior high, he might really have collapsed. This was also a miscalculation on Little James’s part—the calculated breaking point actually varies randomly.

But David Thompson was indeed different from ordinary people. A high schooler from an average family would never be obsessed with such monotonous training, but David Thompson managed it. When he felt even a slight benefit from the pain, he gritted his teeth and pushed through. He knew very well: either survive and finish, or die here and become a vegetable!

He didn’t want to die yet. He had parents, friends... and he was still a virgin!

What Little James called the simplest basics was actually the tempering of every part of the body and mastering them with skill. For example, before, David Thompson’s kicks could at most reach near his head, which was already impressive, but now he had to kick straight up, perpendicular to the ground, and do it in 0.3 to 0.4 seconds—otherwise... whack!

The most basic training took a whole month, and in the first week alone, David Thompson thought of suicide three times and came close to collapse twice. But he made it through. Even he was surprised he survived. But it was true—he didn’t die from Little James’s so-called simple basic training, and he even gave Little James a new name: Devil James (Devil Jin).

For a month of training, Little James gave David Thompson a barely passing grade—by Earth standards, a 61, with one point as a consolation prize.

The result of the basic training was that David Thompson could fully and precisely use every part of his body, and could react accurately under ten times gravity. But these were still just the basics. In Devil James’s words, this was just mechanical movement—the bare minimum for a warrior... Being called “mechanical” by a robot felt especially bizarre. In addition, there was resistance to various attacks. After being constantly subjected to lasers, electric shocks, radiation, and other assaults, David Thompson’s mind became very familiar with the effects of these attacks. After experiencing them countless times, he lost all fear and gained a thorough understanding of their strengths and weaknesses.

This training came from the simplest story: someone attacking you with a wooden sword versus a sharp blade produces completely different visual and psychological effects, leading to different counterattacks. Because of tension and fear, the latter often causes you to underperform. The laser training, besides tempering the body, was also meant to completely eliminate this fear, so that in any situation, you could make the calmest and best judgment.

In Devil James’s view, David Thompson barely managed it. It wasn’t that Little James was too devilish, but that its emotional system was severely damaged, making it so rigid. Whether this was lucky or unlucky for David Thompson was anyone’s guess.

As for mental reactions, the system directly connected them to David Thompson’s body, while simultaneously enabling all-around genetic self-evolution. This evolution wasn’t passive like the Eventians, but initiated entirely from within, meaning that with current Earth technology, it was completely undetectable.

In principle, the environment determines the direction of evolution, and Little James simply used the power of Maya civilization to accelerate this process. Of course, to a robot, this was just common sense, but to others... it was practically godlike creativity.

Unfortunately, David Thompson didn’t feel any of this, nor was he in the mood to think about it. Every day, all he did was train and sleep—he even skipped eating, drinking, and using the bathroom. The only reason he slept was because it was necessary; the mental world also needed rest, and eight hours was optimal—more was useless, less was insufficient.