The breakthrough arrived not with a sky flash of light, but with a deep, internal tearing sensation that rippled through every muscle bundle in Pei Jing’s body.
It began three hours before dawn on the sixtieth day of his ledger.
Pei Jing sat cross-legged on the straw pallet in his dark room, his breathing suspended in a slow, four-stage hypoxic rhythm. Outside, a heavy blizzard had blanketed Cloudford Town in eight inches of silent snow, muffling the distant clatter of the night smelters.
Inside his torso, the engine was undergoing a complete clockwork overhaul.
In an ordinary human body, muscle fibers run side by side in loose bundles wrapped in thin tissue. That works fine for everyday walking and light lifting, but under extreme weight those straight fibers tear, strain, and give out fast.
The Daily Accumulation Ledger operated on an uncompromising building blueprint.
The hundred percent buildup of deliberate physical equity, combined with fifty days of uninterrupted surplus nutrition and the load-bearing hull of Tier 5 Skin Tempering, triggered the deepest threshold of Flesh Forging.
A sharp, burning sensation—like boiling oil injected directly into the deep muscle layer—spread from his spinal erectors outward into his broad back muscles, chest muscles, biceps, and thigh muscles.
Satellite cells within the muscle tissue, activated by the forced body rebuilding, divided at never seen before speed.
Microscopically, the loose straight bundles were unraveled. The muscle strands—the actin and myosin contractile proteins—doubled in cross-sectional width. More critically, the connective tissue sheaths were rewoven. Instead of running in simple parallel tracks, the newly blended connective tissue fibers crisscrossed at sixty-degree angles, braiding the muscle fibers together like high-pulling steel cables.
Pei Jing’s teeth locked together. He didn’t groan.
He sat motionless as his body heat spiked to thirty-nine degrees. Sweat poured from his brow, sizzling as it dripped onto the cold flat stone slabs between his knees.
His heart rate climbed to one hundred and twenty beats per minute, pumping high-pressure bright red blood packed with free fatty acids, calcium, and amino acids into the rebuilding tissue.
Ten minutes. Thirty minutes. One hour.
The deep burning slowly subsided, replaced by a deep, terrifying sensation of unbending crushing pressure.
Every muscle group across his shoulders, chest, and thighs felt dense, heavy, and tightly wound, resembling bundles of coiled steel wire dipped in vulcanized pitch. His body weight had increased by four pounds of pure, dry contractile mass. But his dark shape remained deceptively slender, without the bloated, water-logged bulk of common heavy laborers.
The floating sight screen materialized in brilliant, unbending clarity:
Pei Jing opened his eyes.
The world looked unchanged, but his relationship to gravity had fundamentally shifted.
When he stood up from the pallet, the floorboards beneath his bare feet didn’t creak with the light tread of a youth. The movement was silent. But carrying the heavy, anchored driving force of a bronze statue sliding along oiled tracks.
He walked out into the courtyard.
The snow was flawless, a clean blanket of white lit up by the cold crescent moon.
Pei Jing walked toward the neglected eastern corner of the yard. There, an ancient stone water trough sat half-buried in the frozen mud beneath a dead locust tree.
The trough was carved from a single box-shaped block of dense mountain granite. It had been chiseled seventy years ago during the peak of the second branch’s smelting prosperity to cool hot forge tongs. It was four feet long, two feet wide, eighteen inches deep, with stone walls four inches thick.
Inside the trough lay three inches of frozen mud and ice.
Calculated volume of granite: three point two cubic feet. Thickness of mountain granite: two point seven grams per cubic half-inch. The stone trough weighed five hundred and twenty-eight pounds.
In Cloudford Town, moving such an object needed four adult wagon drivers armed with heavy ash pry-bars, timber skids, and an ox team.
Pei Jing stopped before the trough.
He didn’t pray. He didn’t yell to summon courage.
He spread his feet thirty inches apart. He lowered his hips until his thighs formed a ninety-degree angle with his shins—the classic power-lifting stance. He slid his thick, horn-hard fingers beneath the rough granite base. He felt the ice-cold pink rock crystals bite into his skin.
He engaged his moving chain.
Feet anchored into the frozen earth. Knees locked into forty-five-degree posture. Pelvis tucked to flatten the lower-back curve. Lats, rhomboids, and upper back muscle tightened at the same time, binding his spine into a solid bone pillar.
“Lift,” Pei Jing whispered.
His thigh muscles and glutes fired.
The five-hundred-and-twenty-eight-pound block of granite broke free of the frozen mud with a wet, sucking gasp of air.
Pei Jing didn’t tremble. His knees didn’t buckle.
The cross-woven muscle cables of his back and thighs tightened with unrelenting high-pressure force, channeling the five-hundred-pound load cleanly through his skeletal column into the earth.
He raised the trough to knee height.
He drove his hips forward, sliding the stone onto his upper thighs.
Then, with an explosive contraction of his biceps and upper back, he hoisted the massive granite block to his chest bone. He wrapped both arms around the rough stone sides.
The five-hundred-pound weight rested against his chest.
His Tier 5 rhino-leather skin tightly packed by a tiny fraction of an inch. He took in the jagged stone edges without tearing. His ribs held rigid under the crushing load, the woven bone calluses from his Iron Cloth training bearing the weight effortlessly.
Pei Jing took a step forward.
Crunch.
His right foot drove into the snow, crushing the frozen crust down to the flat stone slabs.
He took a second step.
Crunch.
A third step.
He crossed ten paces across the courtyard. He carried over five hundred pounds of solid granite in his bare arms like a sack of grain, his breathing leftover slow, rhythmic, and nasal.
He reached the center of the yard, lowered his hips. Then he set the trough down upon the flat stone slabs.
THUD.
The stone met the granite with a dull, heavy boom that shook the snow from the roof edges of the West Pavilion.
Pei Jing stood upright, shaking out his forearms.
He tested the turning force of his wrists. The pronator and supinator muscles felt thick, dense as seasoned oak roots, capable of clamping onto an opponent’s forearm and crushing bone with pure crushing torque. His heart rate had climbed to ninety beats per minute. But there was zero tremor in his fingers, zero burning in his biceps, and zero lower-back burst.
“Static lift capacity: five hundred and twenty-eight pounds,” he recorded. His voice was calm in the freezing air. “Flesh Forging Tier One checked.”
Then came the living invoice.
A violent, hollow pang ripped through his stomach. A body-energy hunger so ferocious that his belly muscles clamped into a hard knot against his spine.
The synthesis of four pounds of high-thickness cross-woven muscle tissue, combined with the heavy physical hard effort of the stone lift, had fully burned up every leftover gram of glucose, stored energy, and circulating food fats in his blood-vessel system.
His blood sugar plummeted. A cold sweat broke out across his temples.
Pei Jing turned back toward his quarters, moving with steady, urgent strides.
In the kitchen shed, he threw three dry pine logs into the hearth. He took the leftover two pounds of cured pork fat, four dried beef bones, and a double handful of coarse millet, dumping them into the boiling cooking pot with half a jar of wild ginger balm.
When the broth began to bubble, he didn’t wait for it to cool.
He drank the boiling soup with the wooden ladle, swallowing mouthfuls of scalding animal fat, melted connective tissue, and dense carbohydrates.
Within three minutes, the hot rich fat stream hit his upper gut.
His closed vessel absorbed the hydrocarbons with total chemical smooth speed, pumping glucose directly into the starved muscle strands. The cold sweat stopped. The belly knot uncoiled.
Pei Jing set the ladle down, breathing in the steam.
He sat at the table and reviewed his working runway.
At ten thousand five hundred calories per day, his current stock of butcher pork belly and cracked bones would last less than six days. His liquid cash of five silver coins could purchase another forty days of ordinary pork. But ordinary pork lacked the spiritual life-force and stone thickness necessary to push Flesh Forging through Tier 2 and Tier 3.
“Five hundred pounds of lifting power is a huge offensive asset,” he murmured, his gaze resting on the three-foot mountain saber hanging on the timber wall. “But the burn rate has doubled. Ten thousand calories a day can’t be kept up with town butcher scraps.”
He needed monster beast meat. Packed, spirit-dense flesh from the high crags of Mount Cang. Two-tailed horned boars whose marrow was soaked with mountain life-force.
He retrieved the Black Mountain Whetstone from its box, poured three drops of water across the dark stone. Then he sharpened the edge of his skinning knife with fifty careful strokes. He listened to the clean, crisp hum of steel.
Tomorrow, he had an appointment behind Fragrant Cloud Pavilion. It was time to audit the intelligence Su Mei’er had promised regarding the mountain passes.