The Black Marrow Broth tasted of bitter iron filings, cold river muck, and sulfur.
Lin Ke tilted his head back in the dark, cold depths of the disused chimney pipe, swallowing the thick, sticky black liquid down in three long, burning gulps. The broth hit his stomach like a cup of molten lead. It sent a cold, heavy ache streaming through his mesenteric arteries into his spine.
Outside, the freezing mountain wind howled down the granite gorge of the Seventh Ward.
The trial was three days away.
Four thousand spirit stones sat in his leather satchel. Enough to pay the principal, but one thousand short of the full made usury claim. If the legal defense failed, Zhao Wuji’s private guards wouldn’t hesitate to draw steel.
At Qi Gathering Stage 2, Lin Ke had bandwidth, but he lacked burst throughput.
In a multi-target combat engagement against three Stage 3 peak swordsmen, drawing, modulating, and venting heat packets in real time carried a fatal latency penalty.
He needed an active hardware cache. He needed a fully working stash slot.
* * *
Lin Ke sat with his spine pressed flat against the soot-stained heat-proof brick, his hands resting on his knees.
In the mental sandbox, the phantom build absorbed the healing fluid.
The black broth was not spiritual energy. It was an organic stone surfactant.
It circulated through the tiny blood vessel network. Then, it coated the outside surface of his glassy glass spirit veins in a microscopically thin, flexible sheath of living liquid silver and dragon-bone connective tissue.
The glass remained rigid and non-porous on the inside, maintaining its near-instant signal speed. But the outside sheath acted as a high-thickness shock absorber, preventing blunt-force moving impacts from shattering the brittle channel walls.
Chassis heavy. Now compile the cache.
Lin Ke focused his thoughts on the backup energetic buffer he had mapped during his last breakthrough.
In standard training, Qi was either stored in the lower dantian as passive reserves or circulated through the active spirit veins as living current. Storing pre-high-pressure, white-hot heat energy inside an active vein was suicide. It would burn the vessel walls out in minutes.
The stash stonework bypassed the rule entirely.
By isolating a tiny sub-branch of the Chong spirit vein using dual counter-current gates, Lin Ke created a closed-loop pressure vessel outside the main breath flow tree.
He could draw a full packet of high-thickness Nine-Fold Overclocked Crimson heat Qi, compress it to four crushing deep-sea pressure, pre-compile its vector counts, and stash it directly into this isolated buffer.
The packet would sit in frozen stillness, cold and dormant.
When combat needed an instant response, he wouldn’t need to circulate energy from his belly or modulate the cooling loop. He could pop the stash directly into the Laogong palm vent.
Zero latency. Pure hardware interrupt.
Lin Ke pulled his iron metal pen from his sash.
He didn’t hesitate. He jammed the needle point into his left thumb callus. That let the real, stinging pain slice through the cold stillness of the chimney pipe.
“Branch checked: main.”
He closed his eyes and committed the code to the flesh.
* * *
The live merge was an inferno.
The Black Marrow Broth inside his stomach ignited with a dull, underground roar. The organic stone compounds were forced into his bloodstream at terrifying pressure, fusing with the outer bone of his skeleton.
Lin Ke’s ribs locked.
His teeth ground together as a wave of boiling, metal heat surged from his collarbones down to his ankles.
Beneath his semi-clear skin, his glassy glass channels flared with blinding ruby light, lighting up the black soot on his chest like a blazing bright lantern. Sweat flashed into steam the instant it reached his pores. It filled the upright chimney shaft with a dense, white fog that hissed against the cold brickwork.
His fever spiked to forty-one degrees.
Tiny blood vessels strained, but this time, the dragon-bone connective tissue sheath held.
The glass channels didn’t crack. They absorbed the heat surge, their walls annealing into a deep, flawless crimson crystal that hummed with total clockwork balance.
The energy crested in his lower belly, surged through the Chong spirit vein. Then it settled into a calm, smooth-flowing, rhythmic roar.
A clean, crystal-clear chime rang through his marrow.
Lin Ke exhaled.
A long plume of dry, scalding steam escaped his lips, curling toward the sky thirty feet above.
Qi Gathering Stage 3.
His internal Qi pool was three times larger than. Just then, he had arrived in the Seventh Ward. His glassy waveguides were armored, tough, and capable of sustaining nonstop high-hum operations.
He reached inward, gathered a high-thickness packet of tightly packed heat Qi. Then he routed it into the newly opened buffer.
The high-pressure charge settled into the Chong pocket, stable, cold, and ready to deploy at the speed of a neural impulse.
THUNK.
A violent impact rattled the heavy oak door of his clerk quarters at the base of the tower.
Lin Ke opened his eyes.
A slender, ash-wood arrow had punched through the two-inch oak doorframe. It shook with high-hum spiritual energy. Fastened to the shaft was a scarlet silk ribbon stamped with the black iron wax seal of the Outer Punishment Trial.
The writ was clear:
Case 912: Grand Fortune Clan vs. Meng Shan. Debt Promise 409. The court convenes at sunrise.