With his hands mangled from punching the ground, dried blood all around him, and the Essence saturated to over 3 thousand times.

Mack woke up.

He felt tired, and with pain all over his body. He could not move. The Essence density was so strong that he barely could move his lungs to breathe.

His vision blurred from the dried tears that involuntarily escaped during the self-harming session from before.

“Argh! My head hurts. I guess I lost too much blood.”

Said Mack, feeling a severe headache. .

He looked at his hands to see the result of his crazy endeavor.

Broken bones. The skin all dilacerated and pain. A lot of pain.

Mack tried to move a finger, but the finger barely moved.

His hands were completely disfigured.

He knew it was a risky strategy. But he needed to gamble.

Mack was not a doctor nor he had advanced knowledge in anything. He didn’t even went to school because him and his father were hunted all around the globe.

But Mack knew a few things, be it learning from his father or reading online. And one of those things was that the human body changed all its cells, except for the brain, at an interval of seven years.

In other words, the human body completely changed in a span of seven years.

And with Mack’s last test, the knife cut, he confirmed that Essence influenced his body’s normal healing process.

Mack was gambling his life that if he could accelerate the process of healing, while outside the safe zone, his ‘new body cells’ would be adapted to the increased density of Essence.

It was a risky gamble because Mack could not be sure of this until he tried.

He could go several ways to test this, but all of them would be hard to measure and would take much more time. The time that he didn’t have. He barely had food for five more days and he was unsure how much time this gate will take him or if at the end he would have any kind of food or a Cube for resupply.

And the best way to trigger the healing process of the body was to cause harm to it. The more harm was done, the more new red cells would be produced by the blood.

Mack woke up not even half-hour after passing out, but even with the disgusting sight of his hands, he knew they were healing super fast. He could not see clearly because of the dried blood in his hands but he could feel that at each passing minute his hands were becoming better.

‘Another shitty day’

He would love to have some music to pass the time. These lonely days were truly boring without some kind of entertainment for the mind.

He did find music devices on the Cube. But all of them came with alien music. He could barely hear that kind of music so he just left outside. He preferred to not carry excessive weight. Even if it was just a few grams. A few grams equaled to minus one fruit that he could carry in his backpack.

Mack was not sure if his strategy would work, because he had no way to know if his body would adapt to the new Essence density or not.

But one thing he knew for sure. If he just dumbly run forward he would eventually be dead. Sometimes progress is made when you took a step back.

Or in Mack’s case, when you punched the ground and self-harmed your own body.