The blossoming of the dead peach trees threw Hongwu Academy into a state of covert hysteria.
Throughout the afternoon, shadowy figures lurked along the outer edge of the western ridge. Several inner court deacons and punishment overseers peered through brass spyglasses from behind distant boulders. Their faces were pale with shock.
“It defies all natural laws,” one elder whispered, his gray beard twitching as he watched pink petals flutter through the blizzard. “Those trees have been stone-hard charcoal since the Great Beast Tide forty years ago. For wood to bloom in the dead of winter needs at least a Spirit-Severing array master or an Earth-grade spirit vein resurgence!”
“Could that disgraced Teacher Lu be hiding a sky ancient object?” another deacon hissed, his eyes gleaming with suspicion. “He has no training base, yet suddenly his shack blooms with spring flowers while our elite pavilions freeze!”
While the elders panicked and plotted in the snowdrifts, Frank was standing on the fourth rung of a wooden stepladder.
He held a cast-iron pot of heated pine pitch and boiled linseed oil in one hand, and a flat horn scraper in the other. He wore his heavy leather work apron, a pair of wire-rimmed safety glasses perched on his nose.
Scrape. Smooth.
“A double-hung sash window is only as good as its glazing,” Frank remarked to the empty courtyard, carefully smoothing a bead of warm resin into the outside mullion joint. “If cold air infiltrates through the frame, your heat-rising envelope collapses. You lose twelve percent of your radiant smooth speed right through the outer edge gaps. An airtight envelope is the foundation of any respectable heat boundary.”
Inside Classroom 404, the three students were sitting in a neat triangle on the warm cedar floorboards.
The radiant hydronic heating kept the floor at a steady, soothing seventy-two degrees. The eight-foot copper grounding rod driven into the quarry bedrock channeled away every trace of uneven static interference. That left the room soaked with a surrounding spiritual thickness four hundred percent higher than anywhere else on Mount Hongwu.
It was an environment that not even the Sect Master’s personal training cave could match.
Shitou sat upright, his yellow gourd hard hat resting neatly beside him. His eyes were closed, his breathing deep, slow, and measured.
Inside his dantian, the vast pool of Earth-Vein Qi—purified and tightly packed to total zero-defect tolerances by Frank’s sledgehammer moving drills—was spinning like a heavy grindstone.
Every cubic tiny fraction of an inch of Qi was matching in thickness. There were no jagged spikes, no stray churning eddies, and no toxic spirit vein silt.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
His internal pressure reached the critical phase-change threshold.
To ordinary fighters, the breakthrough from Mortal Tier 1 (Qi Refining Layer 9) to Mortal Tier 2 (Qi Sea Realm Layer 1) was a terrifying ordeal. It needed condensing gaseous spiritual Qi into liquid drop by drop, often causing painful spirit vein tears and violent dantian convulsions. Nearly forty percent of students suffered permanent damage during this bottleneck.
But for Shitou, there was no violence.
Following Frank’s high-pressure squeezing principles, the dense gaseous Qi tightened with smooth, smooth-flowing care.
DRIP.
The first drop of liquid Qi fell into the center of his dantian.
It wasn’t murky or churning. It was crystal clear, shimmering with the dense golden amber of condensed mountain stone!
Drip. Drip. Whoosh!
A golden wave erupted within his chest. A tiny ocean of liquid Earth-Vein Qi swelled smoothly across his lower dantian, washing through all twelve main spirit veins in a zero-drag circuit!
At that exact same second, Ling’er’s dantian also reached critical squeezing.
The lingering frost that had choked her vessels for years had been fully eradicated by the hydronic radiant floor. Her Frost-Flame Qi—perfectly balanced in a seventy-thirty heat ratio—condensed into a shimmering azure-and-crimson liquid sea.
Beside them, Niu Mang let out a deep, deep-throated breath out. His bull-like spirit veins swelled like iron aqueducts as a roaring river of liquid bronze Qi poured into his newly formed Qi Sea!
Three students.
Three same-time, flawless breakthroughs to Mortal Tier 2!
Because all three cultivate the Zero-Defect Foundational Scripture, their internal frequencies lined up in perfect deep ringing hum. And because the classroom was bonded to the solid mountain bedrock via the nonstop twelve-gauge copper ground loop, the collective blast wave of their same-time phase shift didn’t explode outward into destructive chaos.
Instead, the huge shaking surge was channeled straight into the earth!
THUMMMMMMMMMMMMM!
The bedrock of Mount Hongwu acted like a huge sound amplifier.
The ringing pulse raced up the mountain’s granite spine, bypassing stone walls, courtyards, and pavilion roofs, straight to the highest cliff edge of the central peak.
There, suspended inside the ancient old family pavilion beneath ninety-nine yellow magic charms, hung the Grand Founding Bell.
Cast three hundred years ago from nine-thousand-pound Star-Iron by the founding patriarch, the bell was enchanted to respond only to the most peerless, pure-grade Qi resonances in the world. It had hung silent for over a century. Not even when the City Lord’s eldest son reached Tier 2 had the bell stirred by a fraction of a tiny fraction of an inch.
Suddenly—
CLANGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!
An ear-splitting, majestic bell chime erupted across Mount Hongwu!
The sound rolled across the peaks like rolling thunder, shaking loose avalanches of snow from the pine trees.
Every single fighter in the academy froze in their tracks.
“The Grand Founding Bell?!” an elder in the inner courtyard dropped his fine china tea bowl. He watched it shatter on the flat stone slabs. “The bell has rung?!”
Before anyone could take another breath—
CLANGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!
A second chime, even clearer and more deep than the first, echoed through the clouds, rattling the roof tiles of every pavilion!
“Two rings?!” a teacher screamed, grabbing his hair. “Two rings indicates a Supreme-grade Qi Sea foundation! A heavenly genius has emerged in our academy! Who’s it?! Is it Lu Yan?!”
Inside the Class 1 hall, Lu Yan was still sitting by the smoky fire bowl. He rubbed his frozen ankles. He looked up at the ceiling, his eyes wide with trembling excitement. ‘Could... Could my spirit vein pressure have triggered the ancient bell from afar?!’
And then—
CLANGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!
A third chime blew up across the heavens!
Three rings!
The entire sky above Mount Hongwu turned faintly golden as sky spiritual energy rippled in nested waves! In the entire three-hundred-year history of Hongwu Academy, the Grand Founding Bell had rung three times only once. When the founding Ancestor himself broke through to the Qi Sea Realm!
“THREE RINGS!”
Doors across the academy slammed open.
Dean Shang leaped from the window of the Grand Pavilion, his white robes billowing like sails as he landed on the courtyard tiles. Behind him, twelve senior elders rushed out into the blizzard, their spiritual senses wildly scanning every corner of the mountain.
“Where is the phenomenon coming from?!” Dean Shang roared, his voice shaking with desperate urgency. “Locate the student right away! Bring the Academy Crest! A dragon has showed up among our youth!”
“Dean!” the chief scout gasped, pointing with a trembling finger toward the west. “The shaking vector... The earth deep ring didn’t come from the elite dormitories! It came from... From the abandoned western cliff!”
“The western cliff?!” Dean Shang’s eyes widened. “Classroom 404?!”
Meanwhile, on the western ridge.
Frank had just finished smoothing the last bead of pine pitch along the upper sash of the southern window. He wiped his horn scraper on a piece of scrap rag, climbed down the stepladder. Then he set his iron pot on the porch railing.
“There,” Frank said, inspecting the joint with a critical eye. “Clean ninety-degree edge. No voids, no sagging. That will cure into a flexible waterproof seal by tomorrow morning.”
He opened the heavy pine door and stepped inside Classroom 404.
Inside, Shitou, Ling’er, and Niu Mang were still seated on the floorboards. She was surrounded by faint halos of shimmering liquid Qi. Their skin radiated the clean, semi-clear luster of polished jade. Their breathing was so deep and steady it seemed to harmonize with the very rotation of the earth.
Seeing Frank enter, the three students opened their eyes.
They rose to their feet all at once and bowed deeply over the warm cedar planks with tears of pure devotion.
“Teacher!” Shitou choked out, his voice thick with emotion. “Students have successfully condensed the Qi Sea! All twelve spirit veins are open, and our spiritual energy has turned entirely to liquid! We have stepped across the sky threshold into Mortal Tier 2!”
“We owe our new lives entirely to Teacher’s divine guidance!” Ling’er whispered, her silver eyes glowing with deep light.
Frank looked at them, then glanced down at the floorboards where droplets of sweat had dripped onto the freshly sanded wood.
Frank sighed, shaking his head.
“Tier 2 is just the backup working baseline, kids,” Frank said mildly. He unhooked a mop from behind the door and tossing it to Niu Mang. “Don’t get cocky. All you’ve done is convert low-thickness vapor into high-pressure high-pressure fluid. Your pump smooth speed is slightly better, but your line pressure is still amateur grade.”
Niu Mang caught the mop with both hands, nodding solemnly. “Teacher speaks the ultimate truth! Our high-pressure pump is merely at the starting phase!”
“And what did I say about moisture on unfinished cedar?” Frank pointed at the sweat spots. “Human sweat contains sodium chloride. Salt will etch the grain if you leave it to soak. Grab the dry rag, Niu Mang. Wipe down those water marks before they oxidize.”
“Yes, Teacher! Right away, Teacher!” Niu Mang dropped to all fours and began vigorously polishing the cedar boards with total religious fervor.
Frank walked over to his wooden desk, picked up a fresh stick of chalk. Then he drew three nested circles on the black slate board.
“Tomorrow morning, five-thirty sharp,” Frank said, tapping the slate. “We start fluid-flow throttling drills. I want to see forty gallons per minute through your main vessels without a single pressure spike. If I see one drop of rough churning, you’re doing fifty laps around the quarry with full wheelbarrows.”
“Students accept the order!” the three roared in thunderous all at once, their voices shaking the freshly caulked windows.
Outside in the falling snow, Dean Shang and a dozen breathless elders came skidding to a halt at the edge of the western courtyard.
They stared at the blooming peach trees. They stared at the newly squared, clean building with its gleaming glass windows. And through the open doorway, they saw three discarded ‘trash’ students casually mopping the floor while streaming the terrifying, flawless aura of pure Tier 2 Qi Sea masters.
Dean Shang stood frozen in the blizzard, his mouth opening and closing like a stranded carp.