Chapter 170

His lecture proved popular enough that he had to do it two more times. Most of the other tenants couldn’t make it work in the end, but a handful were able to adopt his method of cable formation. They lacked his speed with it, so he didn’t think they would be able to use it in combat situations without significant practice, but that wasn’t his concern.

What was his concern was that he was now training several of his neighbors on the cold forged method. He’d advised one person that they were doing it wrong, which almost sparked an argument. When he explained how the metabolic demands of enhanced tissue would tax the circulatory, respiratory, and digestive systems if those were not first brought up to speed, several people had overheard and decided he was the local expert on body enhancement.

The time lost from cultivating would normally have annoyed him, but Esther made up for the inconvenience by making him complimentary restoration elixirs. She was also good to Riley, who loved her new job. And like every other man in the building – and even a few women – he had a crush on Esther. All of that made it hard for him to be too bothered by the instructor role he’d been thrust into against his will.

Even if he was being taken advantage of to some extent, Hector was also benefiting from the arrangement. His aura statistic improved by point two in as many weeks from the training sessions in the basement. He also learned how to more effectively train his domain. Apparently he was too efficient with the way he formed his cables.

So when he wished to train his domain, Hector now created sloppy cables composed of single massive strands that leaked like crazy. It wasn’t wasteful, though, because forcing those sloppy cables to move things about was insane exercise. Come to think of it, there was some similarity to weight training. Being good at an exercise trained for hypertrophy was different than a functional movement. Curling properly placed all of the strain on the biceps muscles, which was essentially performing an inefficient movement for the purpose of stimulating size and strength gains.