With the friction provided by the large surface area of his feet, the dry, cracked bark no longer split. Instead, it offered plenty of footholds.

His feet were positioned one above the other, and each push only propelled him up by ten or twenty centimeters.

Even though the branch in the middle was only about three meters away, considering his height and arm length, it still took him a full seven or eight minutes to reach it.

’If it were a thinner tree, it wouldn’t be this much trouble. I’m confident I could reach the top of the canopy in under thirty seconds.’

With this broken branch as a rest stop, the second leg of the climb would be much easier.

He took a short five-minute break to recover some of his stamina and glanced at the stream comments. They were all surprised at how he was climbing the tree.

Since his body had to be pressed against the trunk while climbing, the camera wouldn’t be able to capture anything and might get damaged. So, he had left it on the ground, propped up on a rock to film the entire process.

After his short rest, he placed his feet crosswise on the base of the branch, squatted slightly, and then exploded upward. With his quads and calf tendons firing and his core tight, he jumped over forty centimeters straight up.

At the peak of his jump, he wrapped both arms around the trunk. His fingers dug in, pulling his body diagonally upward. At the same time, his toes found purchase on the bark, and he took several quick, small steps, using the momentum to climb another thirty-plus centimeters before returning to his original climbing posture.

He clung to the trunk like a gecko, took a few deep breaths to regulate his heart rate and breathing, then held his breath and scrambled up the tree.

That initial jump had shortened the distance by nearly a meter, saving him a significant amount of energy.

As he climbed, he continuously adjusted the way different muscles in his body and limbs exerted force. Gradually, these movements started to overlap with the memories in his mind, becoming a kind of physical instinct.

The higher he went, the more skilled his movements became. He almost never missed a foothold or caused the bark to split anymore.

「Finally.」

Through his relentless effort, his hands caught a forked branch. He used his lats to do a pull-up, hooked an arm over, then his legs, and finally flipped himself onto the top. It was the exact same way he’d done it when he was surrounded by wolves.

’In a situation like this, if I could do a Double Strength Arm, I could’ve just flipped myself right up into the tree. But honestly, that move is too damn hard. It’s not something an average person can learn in a short time.’

He already had a habit of working out, but he didn’t chase heavy weights. His focus was mainly on maintaining his physique. He could basically manage about eight bodyweight pull-ups per set and hadn’t pushed for his absolute limit.

After coming back from Alaska last time, he realized that tree climbing was a skill he really needed to have. While practicing, he discovered his grip strength, forearm strength, and lat strength were all lacking, so he had started doing specific exercises to target those areas.

Even training his back twice a week for a month, he had only increased his pull-ups from eight per set to a maximum of ten. And he could only maintain that for the first two sets; the last two would still drop to eight or even seven reps.

’As for the Double Strength Arm, I asked an expert at the gym—a guy who was supposedly a retired special forces soldier. He told me you need to be able to do at least forty consecutive bodyweight pull-ups, or be able to do more than five weighted pull-ups with over sixty percent of your body weight, just to have a chance at unlocking it.’

’To put it bluntly, it’s impossible to unlock without one or two years of dedicated training.’

Standing on the branch, he looked around and soon spotted many huge mangoes hanging from the twigs.

At this height, the air was filled with the rich, sweet fragrance of mangoes. He could even hear the twittering of birds in the canopy above him, wondering if they were having a party up there.

The old tree’s branches were thick, almost as thick as the trunks of ordinary trees. He could walk on them without worrying about them suddenly snapping.

Huge mangoes hung in mid-air, some close enough to reach out and grab.

He didn’t plan on picking too many. The sweet scent would not only attract covetous animals but also troublesome insects and mosquitos.

’But if I pick too few, it’ll feel like a waste of all the energy I spent climbing up here.’

After some thought, he decided to cut down a dozen or so more mangoes, letting them fall to the ground. He kept five mangoes still attached to their stems and tied them one by one to the belt loops of his pants.

He had to use the same technique to get down. After all, he was ten meters off the ground; one careless move could easily result in a broken bone.

Once he got down to the broken branch in the middle, he no longer had to slide down hugging the trunk. He just grabbed the branch, hung down from it, let go, and pushed off the trunk with one foot to land steadily on the ground.

He walked around the area and gathered all the fallen mangoes.

Having fallen from such a height, even with the cushioning from the grass, fallen leaves, moss, and soil, the surfaces of the fruits were still somewhat bruised and dented.

He didn’t plan to take these dozen-or-so mangoes back to eat. Instead, he would drop one every so often on his way back to avoid attracting some clueless monkeys to raid his shelter later.

After stashing the five big mangoes from his waist inside the shelter, he bolted the wooden door securely and then set off for the seaside with peace of mind.

In the distance, he could see that the area covered by the sea last night had revealed a golden beach, which glittered brilliantly under the morning sun.