The abandoned quarry floor was forty paces wide, hemmed in by sheer cliffs of fractured dark rock.
A freezing mountain drizzle slicked the rocks, pooling in gravel-choked trenches that smelled of moss and blasting powder.
In the center of the clearing, Lin Ke stood between Meng Shan and Shen Yue, his pocket ledger open, sketching an equilateral triangle across the damp paper with an iron metal pen.
“Five against three,” Lin Ke said, his voice flat as the quarry wall. “Yan Chuan leads the vanguard with his high-hum shaking sabre. Zhao Wuji commands the rear with four Qi Gathering 5 hired blades armed with iron chains and crossbows. If we fight as three uncoordinated individuals, the casualty rate is sixty-five percent.”
Meng Shan adjusted the leather straps on his heavy stone shield. “I can take Yan Chuan’s charge, Brother Lin. But if the crossbowmen flank us while I’m grounded, I can’t turn fast enough.”
“And if I deploy the Iron-Flame Wall Magic charms too early,” Shen Yue added, holding three paper scrolls between her bandaged fingers, “the bone-shaking blast will blind Meng Shan’s grounding channels.”
“Because you’re treating combat like an emotional brawl,” Lin Ke said. He set down the metal pen with a sharp click. “Combat isn’t a heroic duel. It’s a shared division of heat load.”
He pointed to the three vertices of the triangle on his ledger.
“In high-throughput computing, you never let single nodes make uncoordinated decisions under heavy load. You assign strict, deterministic divided channels.”
Tianfu. Branch.
At double test model speed, Lin Ke ran ninety combat iterations through the sandbox.
If Meng Shan operated as a solitary tank, his bandwidth was soaked by the third second. The flanking hired blades overwhelmed his blind spots.
If Shen Yue threw magic charms based on visual sightlines, smoke and dust caused packet drop. Her artillery hit friendly lines thirty percent of the time.
Lin Ke patched the cluster stonework:
Node One: Shen Yue — Asynchronous Sensor & Artillery Battery. Shen Yue’s dual soul-threads allowed her to monitor two tracking data streams at the same time.
Thread A: Monitor outer edge sound and heat gradients, tracking enemy movement behind walls and through smoke.
Thread B: Pre-load and deploy high-balance Iron-Flame Wall and Magnetic Flashbang magic charms into crushing weight halls, channeling enemy movement into narrow bottlenecks.
Node Two: Meng Shan — Distributed Load-Balancer & Kinetic Firewall. Meng Shan’s Distributed Earth-Core Stance was refactored into a dynamic moving bus.
He didn’t advance. He didn’t chase.
He locked down the central ground, presenting a multi-angle bending shield that absorbed blunt moving blast waves and grounded them through his parallel channels into the bedrock, preventing any hostile force from piercing the core.
Node Three: Lin Ke — Single-Threaded Headsman. With the outer edge secured by Shen Yue and the moving load absorbed by Meng Shan, Lin Ke was free to operate as an unencumbered, high-priority headsman.
Using his $2\times$ test model speed and Ashen Iron skeletal thickness, Lin Ke would hunt the enemy’s load-bearing race conditions. Striking when the enemy’s Qi was over-extended, breaking weapons against his bare bones, and venting Nine-Fold Crimson heat purges into unguarded centers.
Lin Ke cut the mental branch.
He opened his physical eyes, pricking his thumb pad against the iron metal pen.
“Branch checked: main.”
He looked at his companions.
“In the Gravity Pagoda, screams and shouts will be swallowed by the sky roar of the gravity arrays,” Lin Ke said. “We can’t use verbal commands. We use sound pulse tapping.”
Lin Ke showed. He tapped the flat side of his iron measuring tongs against the handle knob of Meng Shan’s shield.
Tap. Tap-tap.
“One tap: execute thirty-degree rightward bending. Hold ground.”
Tap-tap. Tap.
“Two taps, pause, one tap: Shen Yue detonates outer edge flashbang at twelve paces. Meng Shan drops to low knee. Lin Ke advances through the blind spot.”
Over the next fourteen days, the abandoned quarry became a high-intensity validation suite.
From dawn until long past midnight, the three students drilled with clockwork, unrelenting care.
Lin Ke rigged a fifty-foot timber derrick above the quarry floor, hoisting eight-hundred-pound granite boulders on hemp ropes.
Without warning, Lin Ke would cut the release cord.
The massive boulder would plunge through the air at thirty miles per hour. It screamed toward the center of the clearing.
Tap. Tap-tap.
Meng Shan’s boots locked to the dark rock bedrock.
His wide earth channels flared with a deep, underground hum, splitting the incoming load into three parallel paths down his spine and legs.
He raised his heavy stone shield, presenting the thirty-degree bending slope Lin Ke had tuned.
BOOM!
The eight-hundred-pound boulder struck the sloped shield.
The stone didn’t crush Meng Shan. It ricocheted wildly off the angled face. It turned aside fifty feet into the quarry cliff. Meanwhile, Meng Shan’s boots sank two inches into the fractured gravel. His chest rose and fell in calm, unbroken rhythm.
At the same time, from twenty paces behind him, Shen Yue didn’t look with her eyes.
Her dual soul-threads felt the sound shifted weight of the boulder’s bending.
Her wrist flicked.
A single crimson-black magic charm sliced through the drizzle, attaching itself to the ricocheting boulder in mid-air.
CRACK-FLASH!
A bone-shaking, magnetic-iron fireball blew up, crumbling the boulder into fist-sized gravel before the fragments could touch the ground!
And through the smoking shower of stone, Lin Ke surged forward.
His bare feet stepped on the zero-crossing nodes of the terrain, his slate-grey bones humming with silent, terrifying mass.
He closed the distance in two tenths of a second, driving his bare left hand through a two-inch oak target board with a clean, splintering CRACK, venting a pulse of flash-heat that charred the exit hole black.
The drill ended.
Silence returned to the quarry.
The rain dripped steadily from the dark rock cliffs.
Meng Shan lowered his shield, his broad face drenched in sweat, but his eyes glowing with a rock-steady, terrifying confidence.
Beside him, Shen Yue’s fingers twitched around her brush, her breathing light and perfectly timed together with Meng Shan’s pulse.
The exact timing smooth speed was sitting at ninety-four percent.
They were no longer an apprentice clerk, an exiled quarry laborer, and a frightened magic charm scribe.
They were an integrated, fault-tolerant, high-availability combat cluster.
Lin Ke picked up his linen shirt. He pulled it over his head and tied the hemp sash around his waist.
“The team is ready,” Lin Ke said.
He turned toward the narrow cliff path leading down to the Seventh Ward’s forge cellar.
“Brother Lin?” Meng Shan called out. “Where are you going?”
Lin Ke paused at the edge of the descent, looking back over his shoulder.
The sky above the mountain peaks was darkening to the deep, bruise-purple of twilight.
In seven days, the bronze gates of the Gravity Pagoda would swing open.
“The stonework is sound,” Lin Ke said, his voice quiet, steady, and carrying the cold finality of forged steel.
“Now I must upgrade the central processor.”
He stepped down the path into the dark.
“It’s time to breakthrough to Qi Gathering 5.”