The pressure inside Lin Ke’s lower belly felt like a steam boiler with the safety valve pinned shut.
After the audit team fled, Lin Ke returned to the deepest nook of Cellar Four, seating himself upon the cold dark rock dais.
The body stress of the four-day Ashen merge, the complete purification of his marrow canals, and the dense stone Qi released by the dissolved calcifications had flooded his system.
His dantian was churning.
The spiritual essence inside was no longer a gentle pool of liquid mist. It had condensed into four roaring vortexes of high-thickness Yang fire. It spun with faster-than-sound angular speed and pressed outward against the belly wall.
In traditional training, the path from Qi Gathering 3 to Qi Gathering 4 was known as the “Broadening of the Tributaries.”
A standard fighter would channel their spiritual reserve outward, using the pressure to forcefully dilate their elastic spirit vein walls, doubling their channel volume to accommodate the fourth vortex.
Lin Ke couldn’t do that.
His congenital glass spirit veins (Bing-Mai) had zero stretch. They were non-dilating, rigid sight waveguides.
If he tried the traditional method and tried to force his spirit vein walls to expand, the glass channels would shatter like frozen ampoules under crushing pressure.
Traditional training assumes elastic rubber tubing, Lin Ke analyzed coldly.
I’m running rigid quartz-fiber waveguides.
You don’t expand a sight fiber. You upgrade the packet modulation.
He closed his eyes.
Tianfu. Branch.
In the grey sandbox of his mind, Lin Ke mapped the breakthrough stonework.
Orthodox Method: Increase volume throughput ($V \times 2$).
Result in test model: All twelve main spirit veins suffered total micro-fissures within three seconds. Total training crippled.
Lin Ke refactored the pipeline logic.
If channel volume ($V$) is a constant, how do you increase data throughput ($T$)?
Two variables remained: Packet Crushing and Flow Speed.
In the past, high speed was lethal. That was because the high-pressure shaking would shake his brittle bones and shatter his joints.
But his skeleton was no longer brittle bone.
His entire skeletal framework was now the Ashen Iron Lattice—dense, rigid, shaking-damping metal alloy. His glass spirit veins were no longer suspended in soft, trembling living tissue. They were mounted securely onto load-bearing iron beams!
The Ashen Iron bones could act as a sound and moving dampener, absorbing high-hum ringing flutter and grounding every high-pressure blast wave straight into the skeleton!
Instead of expanding channel width, he would compress the spiritual packets into ultra-dense, aligned solitons, increasing flow speed fourfold while maintaining smooth-flowing, non-churning signal.
Lin Ke cut the mental branch.
He opened his physical eyes.
He didn’t draw his iron metal pen this time. His mind was already razor-sharp, anchored by the dense gravity of his refactored skeleton.
Deploy to production.
Nine-Fold Crimson. Packet squeezing engaged.
Lin Ke opened the throttle in his lower dantian.
The four roaring vortexes of Yang fire were drawn into the central core, squeezed by sheer mental will into tight, packed nodules of pure, liquid energy.
Then, he released the stream into the main governing vessel running up his spine.
WHOOSH.
There was no sound in the room.
There was no blinding pillar of golden light erupting through the roof, no sky music, no dramatic display of divine arrogance.
The energy moved with terrifying, silent speed.
Like data packets pulsing through a fiber-optic trunk line, the tightly packed Qi shot through his glass spirit veins.
The crushing pressure was sky-high. But the high-hum shaking began to build. Then, the Ashen Iron Lattice along his spine and ribs hummed with a deep, low, deep ring.
The metal bones absorbed the flutter instantly, damping the blast waves and holding the glass channels perfectly rigid, perfectly stable, perfectly lined up.
The flow completed its first macro-cosmic orbit.
Then the second.
On the third orbit, the stream plunged back into his lower dantian with the force of a high-pressure ram.
CLICK.
A clean, crisp, load-bearing lock engaged deep within his belly.
The four vortexes bifurcated, re-balancing into four perfectly even, high-speed rings of condensed crimson fire, orbiting a dense, central core of purified stone essence.
Breakthrough: Qi Gathering 4!
Lin Ke opened his eyes.
The world had not changed. But his senses of it had shifted into an entirely new resolution.
The air in the cellar was rendered in razor-sharp gradients of heat, airflow speed, and stone dust thickness. He could hear the drip of water drops thirty paces away. He could feel the underground magma currents pulsing through the dark rock bedrock beneath his boots.
Across his eyes, a cascade of gold-grey system text scrolled into view:
Branch Simulation Speed: Two Times.
Lin Ke’s breath caught in his throat.
Until now, every mental branch had run at one-to-one real-time speed. A ten-second tactical test model took ten subjective seconds of mental time.
Now, with his heavy Ashen Iron skull acting as a heat sink and his tightly packed glass spirit veins conducting neural signals at twice the speed, his mental sandbox resolved in half the time!
A twenty-second combat exchange could be analyzed, debugged, and optimized in ten seconds.
In a high-stakes duel, a two-to-one time advantage was not an edge. It was an execution warrant.
Lin Ke right away tested the upgraded engine.
Tianfu. Branch.
The mental grey space initialized with blinding, instant snap.
He ran a complex five-phase heat-powered math on Crucible Four’s airflow dynamics.
The entire math resolved, compiled, and outputted its results in exactly six seconds. It normally needed twelve seconds of mental staging.
Lin Ke cut the branch.
He exhaled slowly. The shift was seamless. Zero mental latency. Zero mental drag.
He stood up, walking across the cellar to the small, barred watching window that overlooked the valley between the Seventh Ward and the central commercial precinct.
The morning sun was rising over the Iron Sword Province. It cast long, sharp shadows across the mountain terraces.
Across the valley, at the grand red-lacquered pavilion belonging to the Grand Fortune Merchant Clan, a lavish silk-curtained carriage arrived, escorted by eight mounted outer sect guards.
The curtains parted.
A young man stepped down onto the marble mounting block.
He was eighteen years old, clad in luxurious robes of midnight-blue silk stitched with gold crane magic charms, wearing a coronet of polished white jade.
His face was handsome, pale, and arrogant. But his jaw was clenched with cold, poisonous fury.
Zhao Wuji.
The heir to the Grand Fortune Merchant Clan.
Lin Ke watched from the shadowed cellar slit as Zhao Wuji threw a shattered piece of an iron heavy club—Chai Gang’s bent weapon—directly into the face of a bowing steward, kicking the man down the marble stairs.
Zhao Wuji had failed with the coal blockade.
He had failed with the flux embargo.
He had failed with the backdated audit.
And now, Zhao was stepping into the commercial trading pavilion to unleash his ultimate weapon: total financial and contractual monopsony.
Lin Ke leaned his hands against the stone doorstep, his slate-grey knuckles cool against the morning rock.
“You have the gold, Senior Brother Zhao,” Lin Ke murmured. His lips curved into a deadpan, merciless line.
“Let’s see how your margins handle a spot-market collapse.”