The smell of singed marrow was a hallucination, but Lin Ke’s gag reflex didn’t care.
He lay curled on his side atop a rotting straw pallet, teeth clamped over the sleeve of his rough hemp tunic. Sweat, greasy with charcoal dust and zinc residue, pooled in the hollow of his collarbone. Every few seconds, a reflex tremor rattled his ribs, sending dull, hardened clicks through his upper-back bones.
The bunkhouse was dark, thick with the sound of seventy exhausted men snoring in wet, rattling rhythms.
Outside, the cold mountain wind whipped down the granite gorge of the Seventh Ward. It whistled through the cracked clay chinks in the timber walls. But inside Lin Ke’s skull, the core heat was reading nine hundred degrees.
* * *
He had been at it for four hours.
Testing a volatile, ungrounded power circuit in production was suicide. The unsafe excerpt of the Nine-Fold Overclocked Crimson Spirit vein made that clear enough. Four hundred and ten corpses out of four hundred and twelve attempts. If he tried to channel the fire’s blasting heat through his physical glassy channels right now, he would be cinder before his heels hit the floorboards.
So he took it to the staging environment.
The straw mat beneath him vanished into an expanse of dark grey void.
In the test model, a phantom duplicate of his seventeen-year-old body hovered in mid-air. Lin Ke’s mind slipped into the build, mapping its nerve bundles and the cold, glass-like waveguides running through its arms and chest.
Unit Test 01: Baseline execution of unpatched text.
Lin Ke opened the simulated Sanjiao triple-burner channel to external Yang fire.
A drop of heat essence entered the channel.
The reaction was instant. The bare fire packet didn’t flow. It blew up. The smooth, non-elastic glass channel conducted the pulse at near-luminal speed, but with no dampening resistor, the heat load shot up fast.
In four seconds, the simulated Sanjiao channel turned white-hot.
In six seconds, the tissue surrounding his heart flashed into steam.
In eight seconds, the phantom’s chest cavity blew out from internal water-pressure excess pressure.
GASP.
Lin Ke snapped back into his real flesh on the straw pallet.
His physical chest heaved wildly. A spike of phantom agony sliced through his chest bone, so vicious and chemically convincing that his lungs locked in mid-breath. His hands clawed into the rotting straw, fingernails breaking against the rough wooden slats.
Phantom Death Syndrome, his mind registered. That forced cold analytical logic against the screaming primal terror in his amygdala. Neuropathic feedback. The meat didn’t burn, but the soul recorded the trauma.
He waited twelve seconds for his pulse to drop below one hundred and forty.
He didn’t wipe the cold sweat from his forehead. He didn’t complain. He reached into his waistband, pulled the four-inch iron metal pen from its cloth sheath. Then he drove the sharp point into the scarred callus of his left thumb.
A bead of dark, sluggish blood welled up. The sharp, physical sting sliced through the illusory smell of burning organs.
“Branch checked,” he whispered silently behind clenched teeth. “Main.”
Then he closed his eyes again.
Unit Test 14: Restrict inlet orifice by sixty percent to prevent first spike.
The phantom Lin Ke drew in a reduced packet of heat.
The flow was slower, entering the subclavian vessel with manageable pushback. But without an active exhaust port, the excess heat wattage had nowhere to fade. It pooled in the hepatic node beneath the right ribs.
The liver cooked like an egg on a red-hot shovel. Blood boiled inside the vena cava, producing steam embolisms that struck the brain within two seconds.
SNAP.
Back on the mat. Lin Ke vomited a mouthful of bitter yellow bile into the dust beside his pallet, swallowing down the dry heaves before the sound could wake the sleeping slaves on either side of him. His left eye twitched with an uncontrollable tremor.
Stylus. Thumb.
Puncture. Bleed.
“Branch checked: main.”
Test again.
Unit Test 47: Divert heat excess into the lower dantian pool.
Traditional training manuals always treated the dantian as an infinite sponge. The phantom Lin Ke routed the boiling red current downward, dumping the runaway energy straight into the energetic center below his navel.
The dantian was an organic vessel. The incoming packet was a high-hum blast wave.
The heat slope between the cold, dormant dantian and the eight-hundred-degree Yang stream generated total heat shock. The dantian walls shattered like frozen fine china dropped into boiling oil.
GAK.
Lin Ke’s real stomach tightened so hard his knees jerked to his chin. Blood trickled from his left nostril, warm and metal, dripping onto his collar.
A high-pitched, permanent whine settled into his left ear—a high-hum tinnitus born from soul tiredness. He was running a mental cluster at one hundred percent CPU load while enduring the gut-deep horror of being disemboweled, burned up. Then he exploded over and over again.
Eighty-two runs.
He lay in the dark, shivering wildly under the threadbare quilt, his fingers slick with blood from repeated metal pen punctures. His vision swirled with phantom gray artifacts, ghostly error codes dancing in the dark corners of the bunkhouse rafters.
Eighty-two distinct ways to die in under six hours.
Eighty-two phantom funerals, attended by a single mourner who had to clean up his own ashes each time.
Yet beneath the pounding headache and the neuropathic tremors, the systems master builder had pulled out the data.
The bug wasn’t in the raw energy. It wasn’t in the speed.
The manual has no negative feedback loop, Lin Ke realized, his mind stripping away the ancient poetic flourishes of the silk text to reveal the bare-metal circuit underneath. Normal spirit veins use elastic vessel walls to expand and absorb heat fluctuations. My glass channels don’t stretch.
In a normal body, heat caused dilation, which lowered speed and allowed fading away. In his non-elastic glass waveguides, heat decreased internal flow pushback. That made speed to spike, which generated more friction. That made more heat.
An open-loop runaway cascade.
To cultivate this manual without turning into a grease smudge, he didn’t need wider channels. He didn’t need to cultivate his dantian into an iron vault.
He needed a counter-current cooling circuit. And he needed physical exhaust valves.
Lin Ke lifted his hands in the dark, staring at the rough calluses of his palms.
The Laogong acupoints, he thought, tracing the center of his right palm. Direct end-post exits to the air. If I end the excess heat wattage there instead of letting it bounce back into the core, I can vent the blow-off.
Before he could spin up branch eighty-three to simulate the liquid-cooling bypass, the heavy wooden door of the bunkhouse groaned on its iron hinges.
Boot leather crunched over melted rock waste dust.
Lin Ke froze, instantly suppressing his ragged breathing.
A circle of orange light swept across the timber rafters. It cast long, distorted shadows across the sleeping slaves. Overseer Fang stepped into the bunkhouse. She held a smoking iron torch in his left hand, his right resting on the coiled handle of his copper whip.
Fang’s nose wrinkled in disgust. He sniffed the stale air, his piggish eyes darting toward the far corner where Lin Ke lay.
“What’s that stench?” Fang muttered, his voice cutting through the snores like a dull blade. “Smells like burned hair and fire ozone.”
The torchlight swung directly toward Lin Ke’s pallet.