The count ended long before the work did.
At some point, Kael stopped marking individual splits. He no longer tracked numbers in his head, no longer carved tallies into wood or scratched days into stone. The only record that mattered was visible and undeniable—the stacked logs arranged in long, ordered rows, shrinking at one end of the clearing and growing at the other.
Not because numbers were meaningless.
Because they had stopped guiding behavior.
Counting had once imposed discipline.Later, it had imposed pressure.Now, it imposed nothing at all.
The axe rose.The axe fell.The log split.
Breath followed.
The sequence no longer required thought.
Years passed this way.
For an ordinary person, such repetition would have been catastrophic.
A man who chopped wood in isolation for years—hundreds of thousands of identical motions—would not become an icon of endurance. He would become a medical failure. Muscles would develop unevenly. Joints would inflame, then degrade. Tendons would thicken, then tear. Micro-fractures would accumulate along the spine until posture collapsed inward under its own weight.
The mind would fail first.
Monotony would strip away context. Isolation would distort time. The task would consume existence until nothing remained but the next swing. Thought would loop. Memory would blur. Dissociation would creep in quietly, followed by emotional numbness or hallucination.
That was the natural outcome.
Kael avoided it for one reason.
The clearing itself transformed alongside him.
What had once been rough forest ground became closer to a work site than wilderness. Logs were stacked according to resistance profile rather than size. Fresh timber occupied one sector. Seasoned wood another. Failed splits—those that revealed error rather than resistance—were isolated, examined, corrected, and returned to the cycle.
Even the ground changed.
Soil compacted beneath hundreds of thousands of impacts until it became dense and load-bearing, pressed flat by repetition rather than design. The earth no longer yielded underfoot.
It resisted.
Kael stood on it without adjustment, his weight settling naturally into a stance refined beyond conscious correction.
He stood easily.
That alone would have alarmed anyone who understood force transfer.
The axe no longer felt like a tool.
It felt like a constant.
Its weight increased without ceremony, bound to completion rather than time. Each escalation was small—insultingly small in isolation—but absolute in accumulation. Early on, the increases meant nothing. Later, they were noticed only through measurement, never sensation. By the time awareness caught up, adaptation had already occurred.
At one hundred thousand completed splits, the axe exceeded a thousand kilograms.At two hundred thousand, it doubled.By four hundred thousand, its mass surpassed four thousand kilograms.
This was not symbolic.
It was mechanical reality.
Accelerating that mass through a controlled chopping arc required force far beyond what an unreinforced human skeleton could tolerate. The impulse transmitted through Kael's arms and shoulders would have caused catastrophic joint failure in minutes for a normal adult.
Kael endured it daily.
Not because the force disappeared.
Because his body had been forced—slowly, relentlessly—to accept it.
This was not cultivation.
There was no circulating energy. No qi. No spiritual reinforcement shielding tissue from consequence.
There was only work.
Muscle fibers thickened through repeated overload and repair—not for size, but for transmission. Bones responded to compressive stress by increasing density along load paths, reinforcing where failure would have occurred. Joints stabilized, sacrificing unnecessary range for reliability. Tendons shortened subtly, reducing elastic loss and improving efficiency.
His body did not grow larger.
It grew denser.
Measured mass increased year by year, far beyond what his frame suggested. His center of mass lowered. His stance required no adjustment even under sudden load shifts. When he stood still, he did not sway. When he moved, there was no wasted motion.
This was not grace.
It was engineering.
Breathing remained the single unchanging constant.
The method Old Master Ren had given him never evolved. It did not increase output. It did not strengthen muscle directly. It existed for one purpose only: preventing internal failure.
Pressure entered the body with every strike. Breath redistributed it, reduced peak stress, delayed cumulative damage. Without it, the training would not have ended in weakness.
It would have ended in permanent injury.
Kael no longer thought about breathing.
The body executed it automatically.
That, too, had been learned.
Food escalated alongside force.
Not dramatically.Not ceremonially.Procedurally.
At first, the animals were simple—wild chicken, sheep, river fish. Their bones were soft. Digestion was quick. Hunger returned rapidly, forcing frequent intake just to maintain recovery.
Then the animals changed.
Deer. Mountain goats. Wild boar. Plains beasts with dense muscle and reinforced joints. Preparation took longer. Digestion produced lingering heat rather than fleeting energy.
Later still came true body-forging stock—catalogued, controlled, bred for physical load rather than aggression. Their flesh resisted the knife. Their bones demanded leverage rather than force. Meals ceased to be responses to hunger and became scheduled events.
Spiritual rice appeared. Medicinal herbs followed. Recovery shortened. Damage repaired faster. Output stabilized.
The 10th Senior Brother prepared food with him often.
He taught anatomy without names. Load paths through joints were revealed by cutting them apart. Structural failure points became obvious under the blade. Efficiency became instinct because inefficiency translated directly into poorer performance the following day.
Appetite transformed.
It was no longer desire.
It was requirement.
Too little intake reduced output.Too much impaired recovery.
Balance mattered.
Everything mattered.
Throughout the years, the 10th Senior Brother remained.
Sometimes close. Sometimes distant. Never absent.
They spoke often—about technique, about movement, about the forest, about nothing at all. When he left to manage allocations or handle requests, Kael was not abandoned.
The axe remained.
At some point, the bond deepened.
Kael stopped recalling the axe.
He carried it instead.
Strapped across his back. Resting against his shoulder. Anchored to his body day and night. The weight itself became training. Walking became conditioning. Standing became resistance.
By the later years, Kael's own mass approached half that of the axe he carried.
It showed.
He had grown tall. Broad. Dense. His build approached that of his Senior Brother. During rare trips beyond the clearing, people moved aside instinctively. No one challenged him anymore.
He wore gloves in public.
Not to hide weakness.
But because his hands no longer looked normal.
Training did not end with logs.
After daily targets were met, Kael conditioned his legs, core, and balance with the axe strapped to his back. He sparred with the 10th Senior Brother every day—punching, kicking, falling, rising.
He never landed a clean strike.
No matter how much he improved, his Senior Brother always beat him thoroughly.
And afterward, patiently, he explained.
Not Dao. Not law.
Realms.
What Kael needed now was foundation. His current foundation, his Senior Brother said, was monstrously flawless. Every muscle fiber, every bone, every vessel had been refined under real load.
This body would not collapse under cultivation.
It would endure it.
But endurance alone was no longer enough.
He needed a sect.
The Desolate Sect.
That was where growth would continue.
That was where the second task waited.
The explanation came only on the final day.
The axe changed as well.
It learned.
It corrected Kael when his stance faltered. It guided motion when fatigue threatened form. Crude techniques emerged—swings that became strikes, strikes that became patterns.
Kael treated the axe like family.
He would have gone insane without it.
When the accumulation became undeniable—when the work slowed not from exhaustion but from completion—Kael laughed once and named it without hesitation.
"All Out of Logs."
The axe was furious.
Their bond deepened.
When the four hundred thousandth log split cleanly, nothing happened.
No announcement marked it. No sensation distinguished it from the split before or after. The axe completed its arc. The log separated. The body absorbed the force.
Routine continued.
Only later, when Kael set the axe down and realized his hands were steady, did he understand.
There was no next increase.
The weight stabilized.
Not because the axe could not grow heavier.
But because the environment had finished enforcing its limit.
That night, Kael sat at the edge of the clearing.
The forest no longer felt like a boundary.
It felt complete.
This place had not made him powerful.
It had made him durable.
Durable enough to survive pressure without support.Durable enough to function under load without collapse.Durable enough to remain sane while repetition tried to erase him.
This was preparation.
At dawn, the logs remained stacked.
The axe lay where he had left it.
For the first time in years, Kael did not lift it immediately.
He stood, breathed once, and understood—without instruction, without explanation—that this phase was complete.
Whatever came next would not be measured in splits.
And it would not be controlled.