You return to Donglin City and continue your daily martial arts training, which revolves around the same routine.

[In the 272nd year of the Great Journey, you are 17 years old, with a foundation of 131%. You discover that the speed at which your internal organs are being tempered is extremely slow—not just slow, but slow beyond imagination.]

[During the third simulation, you achieved first-class status at age 43, and by age 47, your progress in the Internal Organs' Ultimate Victory stage had reached level three. Considering that it might take about a year to stabilize and control your internal energy after a breakthrough, you can probably advance about 10% of your progress in about a year.]

Even if your foundation is not as strong as it was back then, you are young, which is the time when your martial arts progress is the fastest. So after three years, you should have pushed your progress to at least 50%.

[You think this isn't excessive? Even if the difficulty increases as you get closer to perfection in the Internal Organs Ultimate Skill, there's no need to be so stuck in the early stages, because your current progress in the Internal Organs Ultimate Skill is less than 35%.]

[You've considered a possibility; you realize that this time, your true self must choose a foundation.]

Yun Shou also considered that possibility.

He had read a novel before with a similar setting; it was a cultivation novel.

That cultivation novel has a "spiritual energy overflow" setting. Simply put, if you don't cultivate for a long time, your cultivation level will regress!

Just like those muscle-bound guys at the gym, if you don't exercise for a long time, your muscles will automatically turn into fat.

In that cultivation novel, if you rely on consuming pills and spirit stones to forcibly break through to a higher realm...

So, when you lose these external aids, you'll find that the spiritual energy you gather through normal cultivation is less than the amount that automatically dissipates every day—of course, if you don't cultivate, it will dissipate even faster.

so,

If one's martial arts aptitude and foundation are too low, will they be unable to support higher martial arts realms, leading to a decline in strength?