The stone rubbings from the Third Cleansing Era were three feet wide and smelled of rusted iron and damp slate.
Lin Ke leaned over the stone table in the public wing of the Outer Sect Archive. His brass measuring tongs measured the sharp-angled carvings copied from the underground foundation of the Bone-Crushing Gravity Pagoda.
Around him, a dozen outer students were wildly memorizing standard breathing manuals, muttering mantras about “embracing the earth” and “softening the sinews like willow branches in a gale.”
Traditional dogma, Lin Ke analyzed, shaking his head slightly.
Traditional training doctrine taught that to survive high gravity gaining speed, a fighter had to make their spirit veins and tissues as elastic as possible.
They believed that by expanding and flexing the channels, the human body could act as a fluid cushion. It scattered the crushing downward vector across the soft tissues.
For Lin Ke, that doctrine was a death sentence.
His glass spirit veins (Bing-Mai) had zero stretch. If he tried to “soften and flex,” the rigid quartz-like walls of his channels would be crushed flat against his internal organs under five sea-weights of downward gaining speed.
He needed to understand the machine.
Not the spiritual poetry written by ancient elders.
The raw, clockwork physics of the formation array.
Lin Ke laid both palms flat against the rough paper of the foundation stone rubbing.
Tianfu. Blame.
At double test model speed, Lin Ke’s enhanced blame engine bypassed the ink and parsed the leftover intent engraved into the original stone by the ancient array master builders.
The code underlying the Pagoda’s formation unfolded in his mind:
Lin Ke’s breath caught in his throat.
It isn’t a DC constant field, he realized, his eyes widening in pure technical ecstasy.
It’s an AC pulsed power-coil wave!
The gravity pull inside the Bone-Crushing Gravity Pagoda didn’t apply a nonstop, static downward weight like a stone placed on a table.
It operated on a periodic wave function with a zero-point-four-second back-and-forth swing cycle!
Every four hundred split seconds, the formation spiked to peak wave height (two to ten times gravity), held the peak for one hundred split seconds. Then passed through a ringing zero-node. A momentary cancellation point where the gravity flux dropped to near-normal baseline!
The discovery changed everything.
Why did traditional fighters with elastic spirit veins suffer such total failures on the higher floors?
Deep ringing hum fatigue!
Their living channels and soft tissues were flexible. Because of that, the nonstop two-point-five-hertz pulsing wave induced clockwork deep ring in their blood-flow systems.
Their veins and spirit veins didn’t simply carry weight. They began to sway in sympathy with the formation wave, like a mid-air bridge twisting in a ringing crosswind until the load-bearing cables snapped!
And Lin Ke?
Lin Ke had an Ashen Iron Lattice skeleton.
A rigid, non-elastic, dense metal matrix with a shaking damping smooth speed exceeding ninety-six percent!
And his glass spirit veins were mounted directly onto those metal struts!
His body wasn’t a flexible rope bridge.
His body was a sound and spark ground!
Lin Ke smiled—a quiet, sharp, terrifying smile.
If he stepped in exact timing with the array’s zero-nodes, his rigid Ashen Iron skeleton would ground the downward flux directly into the floor with zero deep ring buildup.
While the geniuses of the outer clans were having their elastic veins shredded by ringing shaking, Lin Ke would experience barely half the saw load!
The machine that was designed to crush fire slaves was, from a building perspective, perfectly matched to his exact hardware stonework!
Lin Ke cut the mental branch.
He slipped his hand into his robe, pricking his left thumb against the iron metal pen.
“Branch checked: main.”
He rolled up the stone rubbing, returned it to the archive attendant. Then he stepped out of the gloomy archive into the bright, windy courtyard.
He took the broad stone stairs leading down toward the central market square, intending to meet Meng Shan at the tool foundry.
As he reached the landing of the Grand Terrace, a cold, heavy shadow fell across his path.
The heat in the courtyard plummeted by ten degrees.
Lin Ke stopped dead.
Fifty paces ahead, leaning against the stone railing of the terrace, stood Zhao Wuji.
The merchant heir was dressed in fresh robes of white damask. But his handsome face was pale, tight, and cold as sculpted lard.
And standing beside Zhao was a figure that made every passing outer student scurry to the opposite side of the road with downcast eyes.
The man stood six feet tall, gaunt as a starving ghoul, clad in ragged, blood-red hemp robes.
Across his back hung a five-foot-long serrated steel sabre. It was wrapped in greasy black leather that leaked the faint, sickening scent of dried copper and slaughtered beasts.
His eyes were fully yellow, with slit-like black pupils that twitched with manic, hungry hunger.
Yan Chuan.
Qi Gathering 6. The “Blood-Saw Demon” of the Blood-Sabre Pavilion.
The undisputed, most vicious butcher among the outer sect students—infamous for having cut the limbs of eleven fellow students in open arena duels under the guise of “training accidents.”
Zhao Wuji turned his head, saw Lin Ke standing on the landing. Then he leaned in to whisper into Yan Chuan’s ear.
Yan Chuan slowly shifted his yellow eyes toward Lin Ke.
The butcher didn’t draw his weapon. He simply reached over his shoulder with a claw-like hand and touched the handle of his serrated sabre.
A wave of choking, bloodthirsty killing intent washed across the stone terrace, sharp enough to raise the hair on the back of Lin Ke’s neck.
Yan Chuan bared his filed, needle-sharp teeth in a jagged grin. That made a slow, deliberate slitting motion across his own throat with an iron-sheathed thumb.
Beside him, Zhao Wuji gave Lin Ke a mocking, elegant bow, his lips moving silently to frame four words:
You’re already dead.
Lin Ke didn’t reach for his tools. He didn’t drop his chin.
He stood on the stone landing, his stance straight as an iron pillar, his pitch-black eyes meeting Yan Chuan’s yellow gaze with bored, cold, calm focus.
Qi Gathering 6. Blood-Sabre intent. High moving shaking.
Lin Ke adjusted his canvas satchel over his shoulder, turned on his heel, and walked down the stairs.
One butcher, Lin Ke thought, feeling the dense Ashen Iron bones humming steadily in his shins.
Let him sharpen his saw.
He doesn’t know yet what happens when high-speed steel strikes an unbending anvil.