The dark rock floor beneath Lin Ke’s knees had chilled to the heat of river ice.
Six hours remained before the rotating sky vortex reached its critical discharge threshold. His physical body was running in a state of severe body-energy deficit. Seventy-two hours of fasting, five days in damp, freezing mountain air, and the lingering mental poison of four hundred simulated deaths had reduced his resting heart rate to a sluggish forty beats per minute.
His ribs showed sharply beneath his pale skin. His outward micro-crack throbbed with a dull, rhythmic ache.
Entering the Foundation breakthrough with drained living registers was suicide. The first starting of the Crimson Yang needed five hundred units of instant, high-heat spiritual energy within the first two split seconds. If his empty body tried to draw that energy directly from surrounding air during the strike, the flow pushback lag would stall his heart.
He needed a pre-loaded energetic payload. But storing five hundred units of active Qi in his fragile, non-elastic glass spirit veins would trigger the very rupture he had fought to prevent.
Lin Ke closed his eyes and summoned the deepest memory management layer of the Tian Fu engine.
In earlier realms of Qi Gathering, stash had been a rudimentary scratchpad—a fragile mental pocket capable of hiding half a breath of intention or a single magic charm stroke from enemy spiritual senses. But at peak Realm Nine, the memory registers had broadened.
