The dull throb in Lin Ke’s right hand had finally subsided into an itch.
He sat cross-legged on his narrow cot in the third-floor record archive, the night wind rattling the oiled paper screens. On the pine writing desk beside him, three empty ledger scrolls lay rolled and tied with hemp string. Three days of office auditing that proved Ward Seven was now running at a never seen before eighteen-percent profit margin.
The supply choke had failed.
Elder Wu was walking around the office pavilion with his silk chest puffed out like a mating pigeon, boasting to every elder who would listen about his “ingenious heat-powered heat reclamation initiative.”
Lin Ke knew better.
When an aggressive enemy fails to choke your network through upstream transit providers, they don’t give up. They escalate to direct application-layer attacks.
Steward Qian and the Zhao Clan were coming. And when they came, they wouldn’t bring accounting ledgers. They would bring flying steel.
* * *
Lin Ke closed his eyes and unrolled his internal tracking data.
At Qi Gathering Stage 1, his glassy glass channels were running at total capacity.
Running tianfu diff on Meng Shan’s massive tripartite spine had burned up sixty percent of his total working Qi pool. If an ambush struck. Meanwhile, he was diagnosing a clockwork failure, his energetic pool would drain in three seconds. That left him a brittle mortal with zero defenses.
He needed more bandwidth. He needed higher throughput.
Forking the development branch.
In the mental sandbox, the phantom build rotated slowly against the grey void.
The patch needed two major stone-built upgrades:
Upgrade One: Chong Spirit vein Spreading.
The current liquid cooling jacket only wrapped around the Sanjiao triple-burner channel in the chest. To support higher heat wattage, Lin Ke routed a backup bypass loop down into the Chong spirit vein—the central energetic highway of the torso.
By using the Chong channel as a backup radiator, the heat fading away surface area increased by two hundred percent. The cooling loop could absorb four times the heat energy without boiling kidney fluid.
Upgrade Two: Dual-Stage Pulsed Regulator.
The single-stage Laogong palm vent had blown his skin off in the old chimney pipe. That was because it released all the pressure in a single, unthrottled explosion.
Lin Ke redesigned the end-post exhaust port into a dual-stage nozzle. A main pressure-relief valve that bled off excess moving recoil over twelve split seconds. It was followed by a backup focused jet that packed the heat wave into an aimed cone.
Lin Ke’s phantom eyes snapped open in the test model.
A stash slot.
In systems programming, a stash was a temporary cache. A clean, isolated register where you could set aside uncommitted work without polluting your active working tree.
In body terms, the Tian Fu had engineered a tiny energetic buffer outside his active spirit vein circuit.
He could pre-compile, compress, and cache one discrete packet of high-pressure heat Qi in this isolated buffer. When combat began, he wouldn’t need to draw surrounding energy, circulate it through his organs, or modulate the cooling loop.
He could simply pop the stash.
Zero casting latency. Instant bare-metal execution.
Lin Ke exited the mental sandbox.
* * *
He pulled the iron metal pen from his sash. He pressed the sharp tip into his thumb callus until the blood welled up. Then he grounded his mind.
“Branch checked: main.”
He laid his hands flat against his knees and started the physical deployment.
The fire hit his forearms like molten bronze poured directly into his bone marrow.
Lin Ke’s teeth clenched so hard his gums bled.
His skin didn’t blister this time. Instead, the tiny stone layers deposited by the Iron Marrow Manual were purged, forced outward through his sweat glands in a greasy, dark brown sludge that smelled of iron filings.
Beneath his skin, his glassy glass channels hummed at an octave higher.
The rigid, non-porous walls swelled by a fraction of a tiny fraction of an inch—not by stretching, but by undergoing crystal-clear annealing under the intense heat of the Chong spirit vein bypass.
His skin took on a deeper, hardened bronze sheen, dense and tight against the muscle. His cardiovascular system tightened, tiny blood vessels knitting tighter to handle the increased speed.
The fever peaked, crested, and broke into a cool, crystal-clear hum that echoed through his teeth.
Lin Ke exhaled a long plume of warm, dry steam into the freezing archive air.
Qi Gathering Stage 2.
His internal Qi pool had doubled. The thread of crimson fire running through his chest was thicker, brighter, and entirely stable, moving through the counter-current cooling loop like silk over ice.
Before he could reach for a towel to wipe the body-energy grease from his arms, the night was shattered.
BOOOOOOOM!
A violent, ear-splitting explosion rocked the outer courtyard below.
The blast wave rattled the heavy oak window frames of the archive, knocking three bamboo scrolls from the desk. A brilliant flash of emerald-green and red stone-red fire lit up the fog outside, followed right away by the sound of shattering clay pot. It screamed voices, and wild footsteps.
“Put it out! The spirit ink caught the sulfur bins!”
“Get the water vats! That crazy girl blew up another batch!”
Lin Ke stood up from his cot. His grey clerk robes fell smooth. His eyes turned toward the window overlooking the Magic charm Crafting Pavilion across the courtyard.
A young woman’s wild voice rose above the chaos:
“I didn’t mean to! The ink... The ink raced!”