The cold damp of the underground forge smelled of wet dark rock and sulfur flux.
Lin Ke sat with his spine pressed flat against an unbending slab of dressed granite, his boots planted firmly in the gravel. A small clay dish of cold lard burned with a sputtering rush wick on the floor beside him. It cast sharp, jittery shadows across the low stone vault.
Inside his chest, the Nine-Turn Rebased Golden Core spun at a steady, suppressed idle. Forty-two thousand turns a minute, streaming a constant sixty-two watts of excess body-energy heat.
He closed his eyes.
Seven days was not a long upkeep window. If he tried to cleave the core on bare metal without a tested comms channel, the newly cut child process would scream into an empty void, drop its connection packets, and induce an immediate split-brain coma.
Initiate network test bench, his thoughts commanded.
In the silent sandbox of his Sea of Mind, Lin Ke brought up the energetic blueprint of his central nervous system.
Traditional training treated the Ren-Du spirit veins—the Conception vessel running down the throat to the pelvis, and the Governor vessel tracing the spine from the tailbone to the crown—as a single, sluggish irrigation ditch. Massive stone Qi surged back and forth like mud sloshing in an open wooden trough.
