027: A Hundred-Meter Record—9.99 Seconds!

After taking a bus, it took nearly an hour for Chen Jue to return to Panlong Town. This time, he didn’t take the seven-yuan minibus back to the village; instead, he jogged all the way home to Chen Village.

Chen Village was situated halfway up the mountainside, and the winding, sloping mountain road made the return journey challenging. In the past, when Chen Jue worked, he would have found it impossible to walk home, but since awakening his attribute panel, he was able to jog five kilometers without stopping once. Not only did he run the whole way, but he didn’t feel the need to rest at all.

“My stamina is almost abnormal now!” he marveled. “Five kilometers of mountain road, and I didn’t feel a thing?”

Although this time he wasn’t carrying any weight, Chen Jue felt as if his body possessed an inexhaustible supply of energy. Even after a five-kilometer run and a hot shower, he felt he still had strength to spare.

“So 1.58 in Constitution is really this freakish?” he wondered. “What if I push it even higher…”

Chen Jue took a deep breath and glanced at his attribute panel, realizing he had underestimated the so-called ‘1’ point for a standard adult male. It seemed the standard ‘1’ was not what he had imagined.

“Maybe I should find a place to test it out?”

Looking at the time—it was only a little past three in the afternoon—Chen Jue packed a backpack with all the athletic equipment he'd bought for physical testing, then headed out again. After a ten-minute walk, he arrived at his old school, Shannan Elementary.

Shannan Elementary was located at the entrance to Linjia Village. Having fallen into disrepair and with too few students in the area, it had been closed for nearly a decade. Still, the school had a simple athletics field—not a rubberized track, but a basic cinder track—which was good enough for local villagers to use for daily exercise.

The sandpit for the long jump, the hundred-meter track, and the shot put area were all marked with clear white lines. The field didn’t look abandoned at all; evidently, the villagers of Linjia Village regularly maintained it.

The iron gate to the school wasn’t locked, so Chen Jue pushed it open and entered. He set his backpack down on the concrete platform where the flag was raised, grabbed a stopwatch, and prepared to test his hundred-meter sprint.

When chasing a thief that morning, Chen Jue had noticed he was running much faster than before, though he hadn’t had a chance to measure it.

“They say hand-timed results are at least 0.2 seconds faster than electronic timing,” he mused. “Let’s see how fast I can run a hundred meters with 0.98 in Agility!”

Chen Jue held the stopwatch, set the time, and, using a regular standing start—not a crouched one—dashed from the starting line and pressed the stopwatch.

On the cinder track, a figure shot forward at lightning speed. The terrain was flat and the ground gripped his feet well, making him feel even more explosive than he had that morning.

When he crossed the finish line, he instinctively pressed the stopwatch. The three-digit number that appeared stunned him.

“Hand-timed 9.99 seconds?!”

“What… the… hell?!”

Three question marks flashed through Chen Jue’s mind as he stared in disbelief, then glanced back at the cinder track. It was indeed a standard hundred meters.

To confirm the distance, he took out the tape measure for the long jump and measured along the edge of the track, meter by meter.

“It’s definitely a standard hundred meters. A few centimeters’ error is normal for measuring.”

“So that 9.99 seconds I just got is real?”

Still suspicious, Chen Jue put away the tape and stood at the starting line again. Once he felt his body had recovered, he grabbed the stopwatch and sprinted once more.

His second hand-timed hundred meters was 10.02 seconds—a bit slower, probably due to some fatigue and his muscles not being fully relaxed yet.

After all, sprinting a hundred meters at full effort is extremely taxing; even professional athletes need a long time to recover after a race. Only thanks to his formidable Constitution attribute was Chen Jue able to sprint twice with similar results.

“Hand-timed 10.02 seconds, so electronically timed that’s about 10.22 seconds.”

“That meets the national athlete standard?”

Before testing, Chen Jue had searched online for the standards: the national athlete standard for the hundred meters was 10.25 seconds.

With his results, if he wanted, Chen Jue could represent his region in the National Games.

And he was running on a cinder track, not a rubberized one, with a regular standing start and wearing ordinary sneakers. With some professional training, he could probably break the 10-second barrier with ease!

To black athletes gifted with speed, a ten-second hundred meters is almost routine, but for someone of East Asian descent, it’s akin to a curse.

Looking at the current Rabbit Country, only the much-discussed Su God had broken the East Asian record with 9.83 seconds; worldwide, fewer than five East Asian athletes had run under ten seconds.

Wait—more than five now!

There was one more: Chen Jue, standing absent-mindedly on the cinder track at Shannan Elementary!

And Chen Jue wasn’t even an athlete, just an ordinary village homebody, perhaps with the added title of a martial arts novice.

“My Agility isn’t even above 1 and I can run like this?”

“If I level up my attributes, could I break the world record of 9.58 seconds?” Chen Jue felt his mind spinning.

He’d thought the ‘1’ point for a standard adult male was just a passing grade, but he’d misunderstood: ‘1’ was actually the upper limit for normal human attributes!

Anything above ‘1’ meant breaking the human limit.

With 0.98 in Agility, almost reaching ‘1’, he was already producing astonishing sprint results.

“Incredible!”

When he first saw the attribute panel’s ‘standard adult male’ label, Chen Jue felt something was off. Now, thinking it over, it was like a thunderclap to his mind.

Apparently, the ‘standard adult male’ was not just a reference to East Asians, but a composite value encompassing East Asians, Caucasians, Africans, and even all males across history and the future.

Otherwise, there was no way to explain how he, with Agility just below ‘1’, could achieve such extraordinary sprint times.

“Maybe I should sign up as an athlete?”

“Compete for the country, win prizes, get a house…”

His mind was a whirlwind of thoughts as he stood on the cinder track for a long time before finally collecting himself.