Chapter 111: Mental Power Training
He had stored them carefully, so if he ever found himself craving something flavorful, he could always take them out and satisfy his appetite.
Joo Joowon was not the kind of person who absolutely needed meat with every meal.
Sometimes, after eating too much meat, he would actually start feeling sick of it and deliberately switch to a vegetarian diet for a while before regaining his appetite for meat again.
Looking back now, it really felt as though he had failed to appreciate how fortunate he had been.
If mutated beast meat also turned out to be inedible in the future, the thought alone was enough to make him feel despair.
He had only been eating his own cooking for five days, yet he was already beginning to miss the classic dishes he used to order through delivery apps, dishes like braised pork belly and steamed pork ribs with rice flour that never seemed to go out of style.
Normally, aside from occasionally preparing homemade cat meals for Byeol, Joo Joowon rarely cooked for himself.
Only during holidays or long weekends would he spend two or three hours preparing a more luxurious meal.
After all, some dishes were surprisingly expensive when ordered through delivery services, and eating them in restaurants meant he could not bring Byeol along.
Buying the ingredients and cooking them himself solved both problems while also being healthier and more nutritious.
Of course, there were also many dishes that Joo Joowon simply did not know how to make.
Things like cola chicken wings, sweet and sour pork ribs, and spicy mouth watering chicken.
Basically, as long as a dish involved even slightly complicated cooking procedures, he could not be bothered to learn it.
Instead, he would simply order takeout or go eat at a restaurant.
After finishing his meal and cleaning up a little afterward, Joo Joowon began trying to adapt to his limbs, which had become slightly difficult to control due to the massive increase in his attributes.
Perhaps because this time his attributes had risen far too quickly, he was experiencing something entirely new.
Previously, every time he leveled up and added attribute points, he had never felt any discomfort whatsoever.
This time, however, he could clearly sense a slight lack of coordination within his body.
Fortunately, it was nowhere near the exaggerated situations often described in novels where characters accidentally crushed smartphones in their hands or shattered floor tiles with a single careless step.
Still, he genuinely found it somewhat difficult to control his own strength.
The force he used often came out either too weak or too strong.
Of course, there was another possible explanation.
Perhaps this subtle imbalance had actually existed every single time he increased his attributes.
The only difference was that he had never been able to notice it before.
Now, however, with the increase in his Mental Power, he had finally become sensitive enough to detect that slight feeling of disharmony.
Joo Joowon had no idea whether this guess was correct or not.
What he did know was that he genuinely felt a certain level of physical imbalance, so he began adapting by repeatedly walking around the room, stopping and starting, picking things up and putting them back down, and performing similar actions over and over again.
At the same time, Joo Joowon did not stop training his Mental Power.
Previously, he had speculated that the awkwardness he experienced with his Mind’s Eye perspective was caused by the fact that his attributes above ten points had all been stacked through equipment bonuses.
Because of that, he had never been able to achieve the kind of perfect responsiveness where his abilities moved exactly as he intended.
Now, however, he wanted to see whether he could improve his control over Mental Power itself.
The way the psychic zombie had used Mental Power had left Joo Joowon extremely envious.
That zombie had only been Level 5.
Of course, boss monsters often possessed attributes several times higher than those of ordinary players, but Joo Joowon had never intended to reach that kind of level immediately.
As long as he could activate his talents more quickly and perform a few small tricks with Mental Power, he would already be satisfied.
Fortunately, because he had spent so much time continuously researching Mental Power before this, Joo Joowon did not feel completely lost about where to begin.
The artificially boosted Mental Power granted through his equipment had already allowed him to experience some methods of using it in advance.
Back then, however, it had always felt as though there was a layer of mist separating him from true understanding.
It had been like looking at flowers through fog.
Now, that sensation had become much clearer.
It was an incredibly difficult feeling to describe.
The closest comparison was that it felt as though he had genuinely grown an entirely new organ inside his body.
It felt just as natural and coordinated as his own hands and feet.
Joo Joowon discovered that he could freely spread Mental Power over any part of his body.
However, it did not provide any improvement to his defenses.
He tested it using several objects and quickly discovered that the layer of Mental Power covering his body could not interfere with physical reality in any way.
Only he himself could sense its existence.
He guessed that this was probably because his Mental Power simply was not high enough yet.
That was why he could not achieve true psychic interference with reality.
Even so, it was far from useless.
Previously, whenever Joo Joowon activated Enhanced Cognition, he had needed to narrow his eyes and stare for quite some time, almost forcing his vision into a state similar to looking at a blurred mosaic image before the talent would activate.
Now things were different.
All he needed to do was cover his eyes with Mental Power.
More importantly, what he saw was no longer merely a faint layer of light surrounding objects.
Even on the same object, the light he saw varied in intensity from one part to another, allowing him to easily identify which components of a tool were made from the highest quality materials.