Adrian just looked at the system screen.
He stared at the fifty percent penalty and his eye twitched. He felt like it was not a great trade off at all.
He just shook his head.
"Well I don’t really know how you do your calculations but a fifty percent drop is garbage."
He sat back down on the bed.
"And it’s not like I’m fighting people 24/7 anyway. If I was literally fighting people all day long, then I would actually take that deal in a heartbeat. But I do have a massive tendency of getting distracted by territory management and making random shit just cuz I feel like it..."
He sighed.
"So even if I’m not fighting someone and just training by myself I don’t think I’ll be able to focus that hard to trigger the buff. At least not for days on end. I know myself well enough to see my own mental limits."
He shook his head again to clear the stupid idea.
"I’ll take the first one that you gave me. The one with ninety five percent efficiency. I lose a tiny bit of speed but in return I can train and fight while I increase my rank normally."
[Affirmative.]
[Would you like me to create the physical copy of the book for you to read? Or would you like me to inject the knowledge directly into your mind?]
Adrian didn’t even hesitate. Reading a thick manual on mana breathing would only waste his time.
"Put it directly into my mind."
[Affirmative. Commencing neural upload.]
Adrian immediately felt a really powerful sharp sting right inside the very center of his brain.
"Fuck!"
He dropped straight to the ground on his knees. His hands slammed onto the wooden floorboards and he was completely on all fours like a dog. The pain spiked so hard that his forehead literally touched the ground as he gritted his teeth in agony.
It felt like someone was taking a hot iron rod pushing them into his skull through some sort of magical method.
But the intense pain went away almost as quickly as it came. It just lasted for a few seconds before fading into a dull throb.
And in just those few short seconds, it had Adrian sweating like crazy. His shirt was clinging to his back.
He took a deep shaky breath and slowly sat up straight on the floor before he wiped his face and looked around the room. The knowledge was already in his head. He knew exactly how to move, exactly how to breathe, and exactly how to route his mana for every move he made.
He stood up.
He opened up his dungeon portal right in the middle of his bedroom and walked inside.
Once inside, he stood in the massive open space of his safe zone and took out the staff from his storage. He went with the first sleek design and he decided to use this one as his main weapon for now.
By using the brand new training method that was freshly injected into his mind he went straight for step one.
Step one was nothing too serious or complicated. It was basically just his regular breathing method which was inhaling ambient mana, running all of this raw mana through his mana veins and also his body, and then exhaling the waste.
During this cyclic process, the mana basically acted like a filter. It gathered all of the physical impurities in his body and forcefully expelled it out through his breath.
This specific purification only really happened right after he woke up. It was a very common thing among all of the mages in this world. Whenever they slept, their breathing method reverted to the regular kind. Because they weren’t actively filtering, a very minute amount of impurities from food and air would slowly gather into their bodies overnight.
And whenever they trained and did their mana breathing methods immediately after they woke up the first few rounds would basically just flush all those gathered toxins right out of their system.
Due to this daily cleansing ritual, a lot of mages actually ended up living a much, much longer life than regular normal people. They rarely got sick and their organs degraded slower than normal.
And this is exactly where the knights actually had a massive disadvantage.
Knights had a much lower natural lifespan when compared to regular people. Since they didn’t have separate mana veins they had to use a different method. While they did slightly purify their bodies from toxins by burning energy, they were mostly just poisoning their own physical muscles with raw mana that their bodies weren’t really made to hold.
It was a forceful biological evolution in a way. They were brute forcing their cells to mutate and hold explosive power.
And since it wasn’t a complete or perfected natural process, all it did was slowly destroy their bodies from the inside. It broke down their bodies over decades.
But for Adrian? Thanks to his Mana Veins , it wasn’t too bad for him. It wasn’t too bad at all. He had the perfect body.
This was the reason why he wanted magic knights so bad. The perfect knights were the ones who actually had the mana veins since their bodies wouldn’t be poisoned by the sole thing that made them strong.
Adrian used the new method. He just stood where he was and did the breathing sequence. He could actively sense how the tiny amount of impurities left in his blood were instantly flushed out. The whole cleansing phase was done in just a few seconds. Almost like twenty to thirty seconds of deep exhales.
After that the following breathing cycles shifted into what he was used to. But there was a very slight difference now. It was slightly slower, exactly like the system has told him.
He could sense how the mana he inhaled was actively pushing against the walls of his mana veins. It was minutely expanding them outward slightly with every single breath. But the mana veins acted like a thick elastic rubber pipe. As soon as the pushing ended they would always quickly converge back to their original thickness.
Which only meant one thing.