So the first thing that this new Leo had to do was clean up the mess in his room that the old Leo had left behind, including the poison splattered on the floor that fell out of his mouth. After cleaning up properly, Leo focused on figuring out what his body could and could not take. So he tried doing some traditional exercising in order to get a base point on where he was starting out from and he quickly realized that his body was lacking any kind of endurance and was very average for a twelve year old.
Back in his previous life, ten years old was the starting point for those wanting to train to become soldiers or even who were interested in becoming personally stronger for themselves. From what he was feeling, this body was equivalent to a normal child who had just turned ten years old. Frustration began to surface because Leo was unsure why the previous Leo did not even try to work on himself physically. Was it because of the bullying, or was the previous Leo so hopeless that just trying to appear strong for his mother was all he wanted to accomplish?
For the remainder of the day, this previous hero worked very diligently in his physical body training and realized that the only way for him to continue moving forward was to push himself to his limits which was something he did not have to do in many years as well as completely from scratch. This served as its own little mental blow, but due to his determination, he was not just going to give up since he had to figure out how to return to his own world and save the remaining humans there one day.
At first, it was hard for him to interact with the old Leo's mother, but due to the warmness he had felt through the memories, Leo's mother started to become his own and he would do anything in his power to protect her just as her own son would. And after one week, the former hero started to feel some slight changes to his body thanks to his persistence but also thanks to being in an environment where all he needed to worry about was becoming stronger.
Several weeks went by, and slowly but surely, Leo was able to visually see some changes on his body. However, his physical exhaustion was at an all-time high at this point and all he could do was lay down on his bed while pondering over what his end of the year goal would be as well as what changes he could make in his training in order to maximize this time to its fullest. As he was staring up at his ceiling still covered in sweat, Leo thought that it would be a good idea to look through the small storage ring that was his fathers in which his mother gave to him for safe keeping.
Quickly, Leo put the ring on his finger and activated it and chose to just take every single item out at once instead of mentally looking through it since his current mental state was a little shaken due to all of his hard training during this time period. There was nothing of importance in the storage ring other than some basic items used by cultivators and one by one Leo placed each item back into the storage ring. It seemed that his mother took everything that could be considered to have some form of value out of it already before handing it to him which was not something to be unexpected since she was once a cultivator herself and did not want Leo to sell anything out of desperation or out of just not knowing any better.
As he was about to crawl back onto his bed, now slightly depressed because he was hoping that there would be some type of medical ingredient which he could break down to use as a type of endurance booster of sorts, at the corner of his eyes he spotted something still on the floor. He was unsure why he would miss this, but it was an item that obviously came out of the storage ring when he initially took everything out.
The item seemed to be a strange looking marble with a strange shine to it which the moonlight reflected off of. There were some ancient looking words surrounding this marble but in his memories, he had no idea what this item could even be which more than likely meant that it was special in some way. Without hesitating, Leo immediately stood up and walked towards the marble to pick it up to examine it a little closer.
As he began to stand up with the marble now in the palm of his hand, the marble disappeared into this palm as if it merged with his body. This took him aback because there were no memories of any kind of item that a cultivator would use to do this. Following this course of events, Leo feels a deep pain all throughout his body and begins to concentrate while laying down breathing heavily onto his bed.
This pain would not entirely stop until the following morning and all throughout the process, Leo felt as if his brain was about to burst and that his body was about to explode from sheer agony. But, once morning came the pain began to finally drift away as his breathing became normal once more while his body started to radiate some energy, more energy than he had from the fruits of his labor of training these several weeks.
Looking in the mirror in his room, Leo notices that he grew some actual muscles all over his body and even his face looked to be slightly more chiseled. It was as if he had gone through a life altering change and he quickly ran towards the storage ring that had an item specifically to be used in this moment.
Pulling out a rank identifier artifact, Leo's entire body began to shake uncontrollably. He was unsure if he had become a cultivator, but whatever the marble had done to him, he at the very least knew that his training moving forward would both be easier and show faster progress so he was extremely pleased.
After taking a deep breath, Leo had begun to pour his energy into the rank identifier artifact which was an extremely common artifact used by every cultivator across the world to see what rank that they have achieved as either a warrior or a mage. And sure enough, in big bold letters, Leo saw that he had broken into Rank 1 as a warrior!
