Siderius held the bottle of dark tonic inside his hand. It was the Deer Anabolism created from the buck's antlers.

He chugged the entire bottle down his throat. The burning sensation of the tonic spread to every single tissue inside his mouth. Its energy was absorbed by his body.

Siderius could feel a heat slowly formed inside his body and the feeling of fullness.

[TOXICITY +50]

[TOXICITY LEVEL: 50/125]

Development tonic usually had a very high toxicity level. That was why normal humans couldn't drink development tonic. For them, it wouldn't be much different from poison.

While Stamina Anabolism used nutrition and transformed that into persistence of the flesh. Strength Anabolism focused on muscle and strength growth.

Siderius squatted down and picked up a particular piece of rock. The rock was shaped by Mercury into a disc shape. He made many rock discs and unique wooden tools that could hold these discs.

The discs had different sizes with their own weight level. Siderius could freely distribute the weight that he would be training with by removing or adding more rock discs.

Ashe stood nearby and observed him with great curiosity. She had seen Siderius use quite a good amount of Mercury to make these weird tools and rock discs.

Siderius was currently using a long wooden pole to hold the rock discs on two sides. He didn't do too many complicated tasks with the pole. He simply picked it up and placed it down, over and over again.

"What are you doing, Master?" Ashe's eyes perked up.

"Train my strength."

"But why are you doing it like this, Master? Why don't you just practice with your sword or chopping wood like you always do?"

Siderius took a deep breath in to lift the weight up. His muscle strained under the flesh and his body screamed of overloading power. The tonic also made everything much more unbearable by causing the muscle to be tired much quicker than usual.

He slowly breathed out once the muscle reached its maximum stretch and lowered the weight down.

Siderius could finally spare a breath to answer Ashe's question.

"Practice with your sword or doing physical labors developed your functional strength. But it is not the best use when developing muscles. Muscles are created with hypertrophy."

"What is hypertrophy, Master?"

Siderius took another deep breath in and did another repetition before answering Ashe.

"A cycle. A process. With a heavy load and high volume of physical activities, it created tiny tears in your muscles. These tears signal the body to heal and strengthen the damaged muscles.

It'll make your muscles bigger, thicker, and stronger."

Siderius lifted the weight again. He grunted deeply. Beads of sweat appeared on his forehead. His muscles screamed of scorching heat. It felt like they were being burned on a campfire.

Once he finished with his set, Siderius continued.

"Physical labors aren't the best stimulation to cause hypertrophy. Repetition of certain movements with resistance does. This is what I'm doing."

"Oh!" Ashe's eyes lit up with excitement.

"I'm calling you here so that you can study how I do these movements. You will have to do strength training too in the future." Siderius said.

Ashe gulped. She saw the pain and suffering Siderius had to go through. She was secretly dreading inside. The flexibility was a sky of pain, and the split still gave her nightmare. Now, he told her that there were a lot of different kinds of pain waiting for her.

Ashe lost all the power in her body when she thought about that.

"Each muscle group requires different movements and techniques to stimulate. Our goal is to create as much hypertrophy as possible with the least amount of injury.

We train everything from the upper body to the lower body.

The upper body has chest, back, shoulder, arm, and abdominals. We can also train our neck muscles to better brace ourselves for damage in battle. The rotator cuff of our shoulders can also greatly increase your prowess with weapons.

As for the lower body, we train legs, glutes and hips. Each takes an important role in our balance and footwork.

Each of these muscle groups also has individual muscle. So, the chest isn't one entire muscle, it is split between Pectoralis Major, Pectoralis Minor and a few more. The same goes for any other muscle group.

And you have to target each individual muscle for it to grow effectively."

Ashe felt her mouth become a bit dry. She could already imagine the kind of pain these training would give her. Not to mention, according to what Siderius was saying, there were a lot of different muscles.

Many muscles meant many types of training sessions, meaning many kinds of pain. Ashe's body shivered slightly from the thought of it.

"Come. Let me show you how to do a bench press."

"Yes, Master..."

Body building was a necessary component for a witch hunter. They needed that to build a strong and capable frame for fighting witches and monsters. However, there were quite a lot of witch hunters that just liked to have huge muscles. Either for aesthetic or other more intimate reasons.

Siderius' original training regime was split into Strength, Agility, Stamina, Endurance, and Mentality. He adjusted it a little bit when using the Strength Anabolism Tonic.

So instead of targeting each aspect of a witch hunter, Siderius changed it to targeting each group of muscle. Chest, Back, Biceps, Triceps, Legs, and Abdominals.

Siderius trained Chest and Triceps on day one and three. Then trained Back and Biceps on his second and fourth day. The Legs and Abdominals took the third and sixth day. As for the seventh day, it was Mentality day.

Mentality day was to entirely focus on psychosis meditation and Aether conversion. He still did meditation and Aether conversion every day, two hours each. But on Mentality day, he did it for twelve hours straight, six hours for psychosis and six hours for conversion.

He kept the muscle training closed together, making sure there wasn't much rest for that particular muscle group between each day. This maximized the state of hypertrophy and always made sure the body knew to pump more protein to build up the muscle.

The Strength Tonic helped greatly as the hypertrophy state could be easily reached. The Earth element inside made sure Siderius had plenty of energy to convert into muscle. And the Fire element burned him like a boiler, turning all that nutrition and protein into the explosive power of Fire.

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