The phantom nausea took two hours to clear.
Lin Ke sat with his spine pressed flat against the cold dark rock wall of the quiet focus chamber, nursing a small clay bowl of salted water. Every sip tasted like zinc and scorched copper. But the electrolyte balance was necessary to stop the micro-tremors in his thigh muscles.
Forty-eight hours remained on the working clock.
His sea of mind couldn’t tolerate another total crash. Phantom Death Syndrome had an accumulative tax on the automatic nervous system. If he endured two more simulated vaporizations in rapid row, his physical sinoatrial node would seize in sympathetic heart arrest.
He needed to isolate the root cause without blowing up the test environment.
Lin Ke set the bowl aside. He reached into his satchel, pulled out three clean sheets of oiled parchment. Then he uncapped a brass drafting compass.
“Why twenty-three split seconds?” he murmured aloud, his voice flat against the unbending stone.
In traditional training doctrine, Qi was treated as a single, homogenous divine medium that simply took on different elemental “aspects” depending on the fighter’s emotional deep ring or intent. Grandmaster Lei Huo had written in the rubbing:
