The sky clock over the Jiuzhou Plane had ticked down to its final two minutes.
High above the borderlands, the purple void storm was no longer merely whistling. It was contracting inward with the violent suction of a collapsing star. Air pressure had dropped to the critical living limit. Mortal conscripts on the distant castle walls fell to their knees, blood trickling from their noses as their chests heaved desperately for oxygen that was no longer there.
In the traditional training world of the Jiuzhou Plane, advancing from Golden Core to Nascent Soul was considered the most dangerous crossing in a fighter’s mortal life. A high master had to retreat into a secluded spiritual grotto for forty-nine days, consuming soul-cleansing spirit pills while burning old family incense. He had to sever his mortal desires, face thirty-six rounds of inner heart-demons, and endure the painful process of shattering his own Golden Core to birth a fragile, infant-like spiritual soul. One wrong breath, one stray thought. The core would wildly scatter, reducing the fighter to a withered corpse of dried blood.
Grandmaster Feng, his topknot disheveled and his ritual robes torn, crawled across the gravel toward Frank’s metal toolbox. “Senior Lu!” Feng gasped, his vision darkening from the choking void empty pocket. “The sky is closing! The Faraday Cage needs fifteen million current units of nonstop solar current right now! But breaking through to Nascent Soul needs forty-nine days of quiet focus! If you try to force the breakthrough in three minutes…
