If Uncle Muhtar has other ideas, it's impossible to resist him. Building a relationship should be based on mutual benefit, and Victor should currently be on the receiving end. This is too passive and increases dependence. Small favors accumulate and could eventually lead to him working like a donkey for Uncle Muhtar. The ratio needs to be carefully balanced.
If the boat hadn't appeared, perhaps this wouldn't be harmful, and Victor might even actively try to approach Uncle Muhtar. However, he has an opportunity for his own path, and if he uses it well and gets lucky, there's no need for these small calculations. He also doesn't need to keep people around him who make these small calculations or cling to them. Therefore, staying away from Uncle Muhtar is better for him right now.
After Uncle Muhtar left, Victor waited a bit and went to the window, watching him walk away in the distance. He continued watching until Uncle Muhtar completely disappeared from sight and waited another five minutes before running to the woodshed. Although he tried not to show it, his mind was entirely on that wooden box while sitting with Uncle Muhtar, and he was secretly praying for Uncle Muhtar to leave early.
Once Victor was sure that Uncle Muhtar was gone, he immediately darted towards the woodshed and retrieved the wooden box he had hidden among the logs. He wedged the wooden box between the two branches he had adjusted and headed back to the house, quickly going inside. He placed the box against the wall of the house and finally began trying to open it.
He used one of the branches to stabilize the box while using the other to try and open its lid. After all, he had found this box in a place he was completely unfamiliar with, and it was unclear what kind of protection method it might have.
If there was a trap mechanism inside, it would be an unfair death. Victor wondered if he was being a bit paranoid, but he quickly dismissed the thought. In the novels he had read in his past life, trap mechanisms in boxes were standard, so being a little careful wouldn't hurt. After all, if there wasn't a trap, he wouldn't lose anything, but if there was and he wasn't careful, he could lose his precious life. When it came to his own life, taking such a risk at this moment was unnecessary for him.
While fiddling with the box's lid with the branches, he realized there was no lock, and it didn't take long for the lid to open. The lid made a strange sound as if rusty metal was rubbing against rusty metal as it opened. Apparently, the box had been drifting in the void for quite some time.
When the lid opened, a mechanism like a poisoned arrow shooting into the air, as Victor had expected, did not appear. Victor wasn't upset about this; in fact, he could even be said to be relieved. He thought that no trap was better than having one. Perhaps the owner of the box had never considered losing it this way. When Victor fully opened the lid of the box with the branch in his hand, he breathed a sigh of relief. Apparently, there really wasn't any mechanism in the box.
Victor still felt it necessary to be cautious. He held the two branches on either side of the box, turned it upside down, and began to shake it. Only a small ring fell to the ground from inside the box. He shook the box a few more times with the branches in his hand, but nothing else fell out. Apparently, this ring was the only thing in the box.
Victor pushed the box away a little with the branches and moved towards the ring. After moving the box away, it was finally time to examine the ring. However, before Victor picked up the ring, he thought for a moment and wrapped one of his old clothes around his hand several times. He picked up the ring with his wrapped hand and held it up to the light coming from the window, looking at it.
He picked up the ring on the ground with his wrapped hand and began to examine it. He turned it to the left and right. However, there was no apparent difference. It looked like an ordinary ring. No special features were noticeable.
Since he couldn't see any difference from the outside, he immediately thought that he should direct dark energy towards the ring. However, his dark energy reserves had hit rock bottom while saving the boat. Therefore, he needed to replenish his dark energy by using the breathing technique again. However, there was no need to fully replenish it. He placed the ring on the table, sat on the bed, and gathered his focus. He regulated himself according to his breathing rhythm, and Victor practiced the basic breathing method for half an hour. During this time, his spiritual sense had also recovered somewhat.
When Victor had gathered a little dark energy, he immediately lifted his focus. He stretched and wrapped the old cloth around his hand again. He took the ring with his wrapped hand and directed the dark energy he had gathered towards the ring in his hand. However, the ring did not react to the dark energy in any way.
When the dark energy didn't react, he directed his spiritual sense, but he didn't get any reaction from the ring to his spiritual sense either. Victor sighed and finally realized it was time to try ownership with blood.
His friend had actually tried this when he was little. He had hoped that by dripping blood onto an old object, he could awaken its superpowers, but this ended with a tetanus shot at the hospital. That day, he learned the hard way that there was nothing extraordinary in the world, and he remembered that experience until he tried to get a spider to bite him in the same way. The spider incident didn't end happily either, but it wasn't bad to remember it as a nice childhood memory. Who hadn't thought about having superpowers as a child? Victor also remembered these as little mischiefs.
However, this time, the possibility of it being real seemed more likely than ever, which excited him greatly. He was more inclined to think of it as a childhood dream coming true.
He found a small knife in the room, pricked his finger, and slowly let a drop of blood fall onto the ring. The ring instantly absorbed the drop of blood, and he finally felt a connection with the ring. However, this connection was much stronger than the connection with the boat. It was as if he had bought the ring with his own money, while the boat was like the house he lived in for rent. Although the metaphor didn't explain it exactly, that was roughly the situation.
The moment the connection was established, his spiritual sense felt something strange. The existence of an area in the ring that belonged only to him and that only he could see was felt. The existence of this area was quite similar to the storage equipment described in novels. The internal area wasn't perfectly linear, but with his spiritual sense, he saw that it was approximately 10 cubic meters.
Inside the ring's internal space, there were only a few books and another smaller wooden box similar to the wooden box that carried the ring. With his spiritual sense, he first looked at the books because he had never seen books here before. Or rather, he hadn't seen an informative book for the public to read. Otherwise, things like the mukhtar's contribution point book were used in the mukhtar's house. However, it couldn't be said that they were widely used.
Victor examined the books a little. Among them were varieties with some animal and plant pictures, and each was the size of an encyclopedia. However, he couldn't find any animals or plants he recognized in the pictures. He also didn't understand the language they were written in at all. Victor shook his head and gave up examining the books.
This matter required a systematic examination of the language, and he had no background in it. Perhaps it might have been possible to distinguish something from the pictures, but he didn't recognize the things in the pictures either. These things still seemed distant to him, so he picked up the books. While picking up the books, he noticed that one book was much heavier than it should have been. Perhaps something was hidden in the book.
Victor put the other books back into the ring and kept that book. He turned the pages one by one but couldn't find anything extraordinary. He began to touch the cover of the book with his hands and checked it roughly. When he forced it a little, it became clear that there should be another mezzanine floor on the back cover.
Victor began to cut the back cover with the small knife without damaging it too much and revealed what was hidden behind it. However, his excitement didn't last long because even though what was hidden behind was a map, all the signs and explanations were in the same language as the books, and nothing was understood. A map in a book found in the space layer didn't conjure anything in Victor's mind. It was like a problem with infinite possibilities.
Victor sighed, picked up the book along with the map folded into the mezzanine, and placed them in the ring. Now it was time to focus on the only thing he hadn't looked at yet: the small wooden box.
He focused his spiritual sense on the wooden box, and suddenly the wooden box appeared in his hand. When he opened the wooden box with his hand, a strangely shaped fruit appeared inside, but he paused because he didn't know what the fruit was for. He had spent very little spiritual sense to take out the wooden box.
Despite the spiritual fatigue on him, using the ring didn't put too much pressure on his soul. The ring, which initially didn't react to his spiritual sense, was working with very little spiritual sense consumption once the ownership was completed with blood.
When Victor focused on the fruit, he smelled a strange odor. That odor seemed to activate all of Victor's cells. Without exception, all the cells in his body craved that fruit. Victor hesitated for only a moment and finished the fruit completely in three bites. This was quite unbelievable for someone as cautious as him, but the instinct of his body, bypassing his will, was controlling him at the moment.
The fruit dissolved instantly in his mouth, and the juice went down to his stomach. A few seconds later, he felt a warmth spreading from his stomach to his body. His body felt as if it was burning and roasting from the inside out. As his body temperature increased, steam was coming off his skin. Since he had just gone through a test of pain, he was prepared and had braced himself to endure the pain. However, his brain suddenly shut down without giving him any chance, but the changes in his body continued.
All the cells in his body were rapidly maturing, dividing, dying, and being replaced by new cells. Dead cells were being shed from the skin, and this cycle was repeating. The organs in his body were being nourished with energy, becoming more harmonious with the energy, and becoming more robust. However, these changes in his body were secondary.
A large portion of the energy in the fruit was gathering towards a dark area in the nuclei of his cells and was being used to break down what seemed like a restriction there.
This process continued for two hours, and finally, when all the energy of the fruit was gone, a clicking sound was heard in Victor's body, and the changes slowly stopped. After all this, a layer of dark dead cells had accumulated on Victor's body. No part of Victor, including his face, was visible due to this layer.
Victor woke up to this smell an hour later, and after waking up, he almost fainted again. He quickly got up and had to take a shower again. Within half an hour, he scrubbed his body several times and finally managed to get clean. However, after cleaning himself and seeing the body under the layer of dead cells, he was astonished. He looked at his own body of ten years and wondered if he had transmigrated again. It was as if he was in someone else's body.
His old skinny body was gone. In its place was a six-pack ab body similar to the one he had in his past life. He also seemed to have gained weight, but this weight wasn't fat. It was entirely added muscle. He felt quite strengthened and healthy. He had also grown taller, but there was no coordination problem. He tried punching the air a few times. He also felt that the speed of his punch had increased, but there was no opportunity to test how much stronger and faster he had become in this confined space.
When he woke up from the excitement of his body's exaggerated transformation, he felt something completely different being nourished and awakening in his body, but this thing wasn't strong enough to awaken yet. This thing might be his ability, but since his body wasn't strong enough, it couldn't manifest at the moment.