One thousand two hundred pure spirit stones looked like a mountain of chipped green ice.
Lin Ke stood in the vault beneath the South Mountain Guild’s newly rented quarry office. He watched Meng Shan stack the final linen bag of raw stones onto the cedar shelves.
Between the fifteen-hundred-stone trial settlement and the ongoing spot sales of Feather-Pattern Essence Iron, the Seventh Ward and their proxy guild had amassed a liquidity reserve that rivaled mid-tier merchant houses.
Elder Wu had taken his three-hundred-stone pension bounty and locked himself in his private residence, weeping tears of joy over his retirement ledgers.
The furnaces were running smoothly. The coal supply was restored through independent northern wagon drivers.
But capital in a bank was dead weight if it couldn’t be converted into compute capacity.
In thirty days, the Annual Outer-Sect Check would open its iron gates.
And Zhao Wuji’s parting threat in the marble trial hall was not an empty boast.
In the arena of the Gravity Pagoda, rule-book filings, biosecurity forms, and elder signed names were stripped away. Only raw moving mass, load-bearing yield limits, and spirit vein throughput dictated survival.
Lin Ke’s training was consolidated at Qi Gathering 4.
His Ashen Iron skeleton was stable, dense, and shaking-damped. But his glass spirit veins were still running near sixty percent of their theoretical packet capacity.
To survive the escalating gravity fields of the higher floors—and the bloodthirsty hired blades Zhao Wuji was undoubtedly assembling—Lin Ke needed to push his training to Qi Gathering 5.
He sat on an empty wooden chest, leaning back against the cool dark rock wall.
Tianfu. Branch.
At double test model speed, Lin Ke ran sixty resource share-out algorithms.
Algorithm One: Brute-force ingestion of high-grade Core-Condensing Pills.
In test model, Lin Ke spent eight hundred spirit stones buying three Grade-3 Golden-Core pills from the Grand Alchemy Pavilion.
He swallowed the pills.
The explosive influx of potion-made fire overwhelmed his narrow, non-elastic glass spirit veins. The man-made binders in the pills precipitated as toxic potion-made waste scum, coating the inner walls of his waveguides and causing total sight scattering.
Result: permanent spirit vein occlusion and training regression.
Never use man-made performance enhancers on high-hum waveguides, Lin Ke noted coldly. Pills are optimized for elastic living channels that can flush toxins through sweat. My glass channels need high-purity liquid distillates with zero fine dust residue.
He iterated through five alternative training protocols.
The optimal solution needed an integrated biophysical regimen:
First: Spirit-Marrow Cleansing Dew.
A rare, cold-distilled herbal extract derived from thousand-year frost-lotus and spirit-spring marrow. It carried zero heavy metal waste scum, functioning as a high-thickness liquid carrier that lubricated the screen between his glass spirit veins and his Ashen Iron skeleton.
Second: Cold-Iron Micro-Acupuncture.
Using magnetic iron needles charged with Nine-Fold Crimson Yang fire to create micro-channels in the bone-skin sleeves. It stretched the heat fading away capacity of his bones by forty percent.
Third: Progressive gravity acclimatization.
Lin Ke cut the mental branch.
He opened his physical eyes, pricking his left thumb pad with his iron metal pen.
“Branch checked: main.”
He picked up a heavy velvet pouch from the shelf, scooping three hundred clean, flawless spirit stones into the inside.
He tied the drawstring with a neat clove hitch and slung it over his shoulder.
“Meng Shan,” Lin Ke called. “Keep the ward guards posted. I have an account to settle with the medical sector.”
Twenty minutes later, Lin Ke pushed open the door of Apothecary He’s clinic.
The bell chimed with its usual dry, hollow rattle.
The clinic was unusually quiet. The five simmering cooking pots on the hearth were gone, replaced by three gleaming copper reflux condensers Lin Ke had built for the old healer, silently dripping pure, crystal-clear distillates into rows of glass carboys.
Apothecary He was sitting behind the sandalwood counter, carefully counting a stack of golden sector tokens.
The old man looked up, his quartz glasses perched on the tip of his nose.
He took one look at Lin Ke’s neat clerk robes, his broad shoulders. The dense, grounded silence streaming from his frame, and let out a dry, raspy chuckle.
“Well, well,” He muttered, leaning back in his chair. “The Grand Fortune killer returns. I heard the gossip from the Commerce Trial, Lin Ke. You slapped Young Master Zhao with fifteen hundred stones in punitive damages and stripped his forward monopoly. Half the merchant elders in the outer court are still wetting their beds.”
Lin Ke didn’t smile. He stepped up to the counter and set the velvet pouch down with a heavy, metal CLINK.
The pouch fell open, spilling thirty radiant, flawless spirit stones across the polished red wood.
Apothecary He’s cynical smile froze.
He stared at the pile of glowing jade pebbles.
In forty years of treating dying fire slaves, coughing miners, and bankrupt outer students, He had seen men trade their cloaks for a pinch of bitter root, and sell their sisters for a jar of bone salve.
He had never seen a fire hand drop three hundred spirit stones onto his counter in cash.
“Three hundred stones,” Lin Ke said, his voice level and steady. “I need your private vault, He.”
The old man slowly took off his quartz glasses. He wiped them on the hem of his grease-stained apron with trembling fingers.
“What do you need?” He asked, his raspy voice dropping into a tone of quiet, genuine skilled deference.
“Ten jars of Grade-2 Foundation-Soothing Dew,” Lin Ke recited. “Three stalks of northern Thousand-Year Frost-Lotus. And two vials of pure, pure Spirit-Marrow Dew—the batch you keep locked behind the iron floorboards in your bedroom.”
He stared at Lin Ke for a long, silent moment.
Then, the old healer let out a long, wheezing sigh that carried the weight of four decades of disillusionment.
“You really are a monster, Lin Ke,” He said softly. “You came into this shop three weeks ago with four dirty pebbles and a cracked forearm. And now... You’re the only fire slave who ever walked out of the Seventh Ward with all his teeth, an iron skeleton. A mountain of jade.”
He pushed his chair back, walked to the corner of his private medicine room. Then he lifted three heavy floorboards secured with iron deadbolts.
From the underground vault below, He brought out three velvet-lined ebony boxes.
He set them on the counter and opened the lids.
Inside lay three crystal flasks filled with a glowing, rainbow-bright sky-blue liquid that shone with deep, sky water drops. Beside them lay three clean stalks of crystal-clear frost-lotus, surrounded by a faint, sub-zero mist that frosted the sandalwood surface.
“Pure Spirit-Marrow Dew,” He said, his voice respectful. “Distilled from deep-earth stone springs in the frozen north. Zero toxins. Zero heavy waste scum. Drink half a flask every morning, and your spirit veins will conduct spiritual fire like mountain runoff.”
Lin Ke picked up one of the crystal flasks.
The liquid was freezing to the touch. But the moment his fingers brushed the glass, his glass spirit veins rang with a clean, hungry hum.
“This is what I need,” Lin Ke said, carefully packing the ebony boxes into his satchel.
He pushed the pile of three hundred spirit stones toward the old man.
“Keep the change, Apothecary. Your reflux condensers will need copper replacement fittings by the end of the month.”
He took the stones, his gnarled hands trembling slightly as he swept them into his drawer.
“Lin Ke,” the old man called out as Lin Ke reached the doorway.
Lin Ke paused, looking back over his shoulder.
“The Gravity Pagoda,” He said, his watery old eyes dead serious. “The proclamation was nailed to the Grand Hall gates an hour ago.”
Lin Ke tilted his head. “The terms?”
“Thirty days,” He said quietly. “Nine stories of solid black meteor-dark rock. The gravity arrays will scale from two times normal mountain gravity on the first floor... To ten times on the fifth. Only the top ten finishers earn promotion to the Inner Sect.”
The old healer gripped the counter edge, his voice hoarse with dread.
“And Zhao Wuji has already mobilized his clan’s wealth. He’s hiring the most vicious killer in the Outer Sect to hunt you inside the tower.”
Lin Ke looked down at his slate-grey knuckles. He felt the dense, iron-hard mass of the Ashen Iron Lattice humming beneath his skin.
“Let him hire who he wants,” Lin Ke said.
He stepped out into the mountain sunlight.
“Gravity is just another physical force to balance.”