It's been about a month since I woke up as Marzensky.
Time moves differently here. The system calls it "turns." One turn equals one month. So technically, I've already lived through a full turn.
I'm still adjusting. My legs feel strong now, but controlling them precisely is harder than I thought. Running feels natural, but every corner, every stride, I have to remind my body how to move. My arms swing the wrong way sometimes. Tiny mistakes make my whole rhythm wobble.
Training has been… frustrating.
I expected gains of ten, fifteen, maybe twenty points per session, like in the game. Realistically, I've only managed four and a half points. That's it. Tiny improvements that barely add up. I try to remind myself that this is a real body. Real muscles. Not pixels and numbers. But man, it's hard to keep patience.
The other Uma Musume are… weird.
I thought I'd be training alongside real people, like in the anime. But every girl I see is robotic. Eyes sometimes drift in the same direction, expressions flicker between blank and sharp on cue, and movements repeat like loops. They hit their marks, they trigger skills, but there's no real thought. No nuance. Like they were puppets in the system.
It's unnerving.
I can't even tell if they notice me. They respond just enough to keep the training scene "real." I try to talk to them. Tazuna glances my way. Yayoi nods when she passes by. But it feels empty. I'm pretty sure these are the system's NPCs, not the actual personalities I've seen in the anime.
My own training is progressing slowly. Stamina and speed rise, but every gain feels minuscule. Four and a half points in a month. I was expecting double or triple that. The system seems to throttle improvement for first-month players, maybe to adjust to the real-body mechanics. Every run leaves me sore, legs tight, lungs burning. Even the ultimate skill inheritance only sparks subtly.
The schedule mirrors the game perfectly. One month, one race cycle. Next month, another skill checkpoint. The pacing is insane compared to my real-life experience. I'm learning to manage it, but it's exhausting.
Still… there's something satisfying about controlling this body. Even slowly, even with tiny gains, I can feel the potential. If I can push through this first turn, learn the nuances, and start chaining skills, maybe I can actually dominate.
Right now, it's just me, Yayoi's body, and this mechanical world.
But I have a plan.
Slow steps. Adjust. Train. Learn the system. And one day, I'll turn these tiny four-and-a-half-point gains into a career no one will forget.