The pressure in his belly was the pressure of a bare steam turbine spinning at ten thousand turns a minute.
Sitting cross-legged on the dirt floor of the dead-house cellar, Lin Ke could feel the rhythmic, expanding pulse of his 9th-Layer dantian pushing against the internal lining of his peritoneum. It wasn’t gentle.
Every heartbeat was with a heard, metal tink. The sound of his Ashen Iron skeletal lattice absorbing the water-pressure spreading of spiritual vapor packed to ninety-nine percent of critical thickness.
He was at the physical ceiling of mortal Qi water drops.
To advance further—to cross the deep pit into Foundation Establishment—that super-dense vapor had to undergo phase shift: collapsing from a compressible gas into an incompressible, persistent liquid spiritual essence.
And in the traditional world, that phase shift needed a spark: the Zhubang Dan.
Lin Ke placed a single, lead-wrapped practice pellet on the rough stone before him. It was a lower-tier foundation pill taken away from a rogue fighter during their black market run—matching in chemical formulation to the Azure Cloud Sect’s standard product.
He had to test the stomach execution pipeline.
