The air turned into wet lead.
It didn’t drop from the ceiling. It permeated every cubic inch of the hall at the same time. It seized the marrow of Lin Ke’s bones. Then he pulled down with five times the force of the natural world.
Around him, three hundred students shrieked in ragged all at once as their knees gave out.
The sound of bodies hitting the dark rock floor was like sacks of wet grain falling from a cart—thud, thud, thud, crack.
Blood tore downward through human blood-flow systems like river water through an open water gate. Faces drained instantly from flushed red to sickly chalk-white as brain blood pressure cratered. Fighters with soft, spongy spirit veins—the standard living vessels cultivated by traditional manuals—suffered violent water-pressure shock, their swelled channels ballooning and throbbing under the sudden column of downward fluid pressure.
A boy to Lin Ke’s right vomited bile and dark blood, his chest muscle unable to expand against the crushing weight pressing against his ribs.
Lin Ke stood still.
The 5x static load slammed into his shoulders like a pair of iron anvils. His muscles trembled once, the living meat groaning under the sheer downward vector.
Then, his Ashen Iron Lattice locked into place.
Forged through brutal fire labor, his skeleton possessed zero porous marrow, zero ductile sponginess. It was an incompressible silver-steel-fiber stone-built truss.
The crushing load bypassed his soft tissues, transferring directly down his neck spine, through the heavy lower-back arch, into the femurs, and straight out the soles of his boots into the dark rock floor.
His skeleton held. But inside his chest, his heart stuttered.
The hall fell into neural frozen stillness. The students convulsing in pools of vomit hung frozen in mid-burst.
In the mental sandbox, Lin Ke ran his blood-flow models under five sea-weights of static downward pull.
Run 01: Standard walking pace. After six paces, dark-blood pooling in the lower hands and feet starves the main neck blood vessels. Blood pressure to the brain cortex drops below forty tiny fractions of an inch of liquid silver. Outer vision blackouts, energetic brownout, total syncope and blackout in 8.2 seconds.
Run 03: Full muscle tensing to force dark-blood return. Result: Severe lactic acidosis within thirty seconds. Glass channels in the calf suffer micro-fractures from lateral muscular bulge.
Lin Ke let the test model collapse.
The groans of dying and choking fighters flooded back into the hall.
He slipped his hand into his sleeve, found the iron metal pen. Then he drove the needle point deep into his left thumb pad until blood beaded against the iron.
“Branch checked,” he whispered through gritted teeth. “Main.”
The sharp sting restored crisp mental focus.
He reached into his dantian, waking the Crimson Yang cooling loop—not to vent heat outward, but to run the circuit in reverse.
He directed micro-pulses of focused heat exhaust into his deep belly veins and the thigh blood-vessel junction.
The nearby heat swelled the vessel walls, increasing fluid speed and driving pooled dark blood upward against the gravity slope like steam rising up a heavy-duty boiler chimney pipe.
His main neck blood vessels surged with warm, oxygen-rich blood. His vision cleared, the grey edges of hypoxia vanishing into razor-sharp focus.
Lin Ke exhaled a steady plume of grey vapor, turning to his squad.
Meng Shan was kneeling on one knee, his teeth bared in an ugly grimace, his Distributed Earth-Core Stance humming loudly as he grounded his increased mass into the bedrock. Shen Yue was pale, leaning heavily against Meng Shan’s shield, her breathing shallow and rapid.
“Adjust your belly pressure,” Lin Ke commanded, his voice low and clockwork. “Tighten the chest muscle. Don’t allow your blood to settle in your boots. Small, shallow breaths. Three seconds in, three seconds out.”
Meng Shan nodded, his jaw clenched, and forced himself upright with a grinding click of knee joints. Shen Yue swallowed hard, focusing her intent to constrict her vessels, her color slowly returning.
“Advance,” Lin Ke said.
He stepped forward.
His stride was measured, economical, and unnervingly upright. While other fighters crawled across the slick stones on their bellies like worms. It dragged their useless limbs with broken fingernails, Lin Ke walked with the rhythmic, steady, unrushed pace of an iron clockwork iron-puppet.
Every step was a masterclass in static load-balancing: heel strike, weight transfer through the rigid shin bone, instant toe-off.
Two students from the West Ward—veteran outer fighters who had boasted of their physical conditioning in the courtyard—were dragging themselves across his path, their faces smeared with vomit and stone dust.
They looked up at the sound of Lin Ke’s boots.
Their bloodshot eyes widened in sheer, blank horror. They saw Lin Ke walking past them, his spine straight as a headsman’s spear, not a single muscle trembling beneath his linen tunic.
“He... He isn’t even bending his back,” one of them choked, clawing weakly at Lin Ke’s boot leather as bile dribbled from his lips. “Is that monster made of solid iron?!”