Doulou Dalu: Reborn As Tang San - Chapter 3

Douluo Continent, Heaven Dou Empire, Holy Spirit Village

Three months have gone by since my birth. My dad and I have settled down on a remote village on the outskirts of the Heaven Dou empire.

I have slowly been strengthening myself by trying to move around, so I could start crawling and stretching my limbs after every ‘workout’; in hopes of maintaining my flexible baby body. As for my energy experiments, I started noticing that my Spirit Energy is easier to control and have started to implement some of it into my real body.

Although I worked quite meticulously and cautiously for fear of accidentally crippling myself. Well not like there is a chance of that happening anyways, for I have only been nourishing my skin spirit energy up until now; as I’m still not brave enough to move the energy into my body.

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Once I turned one, I allowed myself to start talking and said my first words; which was naturally ‘Tang San’ for I was still in the process of learning chinese. Which wasn’t hard at all as I was learning pretty quickly and I can only thank  my baby brain for this incredible feat.

For you see, since I regress back as a baby, my brain has been reset and my neural pathways along with it. Now this is where it gets interesting, as the brain develops, it becomes more specialized, reinforcing the neural pathways that are regularly used. This is a good thing because it makes the brain more efficient, but it also makes learning new things more challenging. But now that it has reset, I am able to form neural connections at a rapid pace, thereby learning things more quickly.

Well that should be enough flaunting the things I learned during my bio courses… for now at least. Anyways whether it was the Spirit Energy nourishing my body or what not. Surprisingly, I was able to start walking around too.

After that day, I had managed to convince my dad in allowing me to explore the village and surrounding woods with the excuse of playing. He agreed and I was promptly introduced to some of the other children in the village during elders story time; although I didn’t really make friends with them as I felt like they were all untalented and will probably turn out to be as good as cannon fodder.

Rude as it may be, but there is no way in hell that I would entertain a group of toddlers when I could be doing something more important, like planning for my future.

So instead of wasting my time on that friendship nonsense, I started my foundation training which mainly consists of walking/jogging to build up my muscle and bone strength, while also increasing my cardiovascular, pulmonary (heart and lung) fitness for better sustainability. I have also put my 1-year experience in mixed martial arts (or mma as what you ‘non practitioners’ call it) to good use and shadow boxed whenever I was able; to further hone my body control.

Finally, I finish it off by strengthening my main muscle groups with all the standard exercise that I could remember, such as push-ups, squats, crunches, etc. Paying close attention to my core muscles especially. Making sure that I do them moderately as I don’t wanna ruin my toddler body.

Since the surrounding woods don’t have any vicious animals, I started exploring it slowly filling up my realm with any known herbs that I find. Occasionally asking the grown-up whether a new flora that I discovered is valuable or not.

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Another year has passed. By now I have grown enough to start training my body using weights, so today I brought a basket and filled it with a kg of rocks, carrying it along with my morning runs. By now I have thought up and implemented  2 running regimes.

As for my fighting regime, I have slowly incorporated the iron palm training that I have seen on youtube one time, strengthening the striking limbs by developing the tendons and ligaments from the shoulders to the fingertips, then striking or slapping relatively hard objects enclosed in a bag filled with sand. With this, I also took up a monk hand conditioning exercise; which involves striking a sack full of beans with fingertip thrust. Following every conditioning session, I carefully treat my hands with a medicinal ointment made from the crushed up medical herbs I grew in my realm.

During the year I also gained a bit of reputation by helping the women bring back water to the village from the nearby river. Which is a ‘killing two birds’ scenario for me, with it being a great exercise and also improving my reputation in the town; There is also the added benefit of being able to take a swim, while the woman are filling up the containers. Swimming is great as it not only feels refreshing on a hot day, but also tones your entire body; Although I made sure to in the eddies of the river, as I’m not strong enough to swim against the current.

For nutrition, I’m sad to announce that I have in fact became a vegetarian as meat products were too costly in the village, well costly for a town blacksmith anyways. Thankfully I was able to replant different kinds of vegetables in my realm; courtesy of the village women that I help out with the water run on a daily basis, whom happily given to me some vegetables seeds.

Also the meat problem should be solved soon as I’ve been able to acquire a couple of fish and turtles that live in the river, with the help from the older kids. So hopefully I should be able to eat the fish soon with the help of my realm.

On the cultivation department, I can now expertly channel my spirit energy to circulate on my skin, I’m now in the process of trying out the chakra exercises on Naruto, trying to hover leaves over my fingers via spirit energy.

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Another year of training, eating and cultivating, I was now a very healthy 3-year-old.

The fishes and turtles I put into my Realm have grown enough and repopulated to the point of being self-sustained, so I can start eating them. Because of the excellent environment they now live in, these fish are much larger than their tiny cousins found in the River.

Although I have never cooked anything special in this life apart from rice porridge and boiled vegetables, I used to cook all the time for myself in my previous life. I also knew a lot of recipes and ways to cook things, thanks to my Asian heritage. I started a fire to try out my harvest, cleaning up the insides of the fish and filling it up with herbs. Quickly roasting some fish over the fire, I then took a bite.

Unto my training progression, I can now comfortably run up the mountain trail with 5kgs strapped to my back. I have also got a couple on 1kg ankle weights I receive from my dad, due to me almost burning myself from trying to forge them myself. He has also agreed to teach me his arts when I turned 5.

As for my Iron palm training, I have clearly underestimated the nourishment I get from the spirit energy and I’ve moved on to striking birch-like trees (ones that don’t have a rough bark) further strengthening my hands greatly.

For agility training, I have started slowly jumping from branch to branch on the treetops. Improving mainly balance and judgement, but also agility and foot placement.

On the cultivation side, I can now hover 1 leaf using my spirit energy and am working on hovering one on each finger.

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