The air on Floor Three tasted like melted iron and stale ozone.
At twelve times static gravity, the surrounding spiritual energy had ceased to be an invisible, ghostly vapor. It had condensed into a thick, glowing blue sludge that hung in the air like swamp fog, so heavy that swinging an arm through it created thick, sticky, churning ripples.
Every breath in burned like swallowing hot motor oil.
Around them, thirty outer students had made it to Tier Three, and thirty outer students were currently drowning in their own breath.
Fighters who had spent years cultivating wide, elastic spirit veins—following traditional manuals designed to maximize raw spiritual intake—were suffering total internal failure. Under twelve times normal weight of static air pressure, their dilated energetic channels acted like empty pocket tubes, wildly sucking in the dense spiritual sludge without pushback.
“My chest... It’s tearing open!” a senior student screamed, clawing at his throat.
His neck bulged with ugly, writhing blue veins the thickness of hemp ropes. The churning, raw Qi was rushing into his channels faster than his core could refine it. That created violent internal bubbling blast.
A muffled pop echoed from inside his chest. It was followed by a spray of frothy crimson foam from his nostrils as his major heart spirit vein burst under the deep water pressure.
Lin Ke halted on the landing, his lungs seizing.
The choking blue fog froze into glittering, motionless crystals of spiritual light. The screaming students hung suspended mid-convulsion.
In the mental sandbox, Lin Ke simulated standard cyclical breathing to replenish his internal reserves.
Run 01: Standard deep-belly breath in. The high-thickness surrounding Qi floods his lung pathways. Because Lin Ke’s congenital glassy glass spirit veins possess zero stretch, they can’t expand to accommodate the volume. Within four breaths, the fluid pressure spikes past the load-bearing yield limit. The lateral glass bifurcation in his left arm shatters into thousands of tiny shards. Instant body shock, internal energetic heavy bleeding, heart arrest in twelve seconds.
Run 03: Fully holding his breath. Result: Severe anoxia within two minutes. Muscles freeze under twelve times normal weight. Team is overrun by pursuing mercenary squads.
Lin Ke returned to meatspace, his throat burning from the phantom jagged cut of shattered glass.
He reached into his waistband, drew the iron metal pen. Then he drove the sharp point into his left thumb pad.
The clean, stinging prick released a bead of dark blood, cutting through the choking fog in his skull.
“Branch checked,” he whispered softly. “Main.”
Rate-limiting, he realized, wiping the metal pen on his trousers. When incoming packet volume exceeds bus width, you don’t open the floodgates. You drop incoming packets at the screen and process only discrete, authenticated chunks.
He turned to Meng Shan and Shen Yue.
Meng Shan’s face was turning purple, his massive chest heaving as he fought to filter the dense air through his teeth. Shen Yue was clutching her ribs, her dual soul threads flickering wildly from lack of oxygen.
“Don’t take full breaths,” Lin Ke ordered. His voice crisp and was sharp despite the crushing drag. “Constrict your nasal passages. Swallow the air in sips—one-quarter lung capacity only. Hold each sip in the throat for two seconds to let the pressure equalize before drawing it into the chest.”
Shen Yue blinked through tears of pain, forcing her trembling chest muscle to obey. “Small... Sips?”
“Small sips,” Lin Ke repeated. “Don’t try to draw the spiritual fog into your channels. Reject ninety percent of it. Let your skin vent the excess moisture. We’re not here to feast. We’re here to survive the load.”
Meng Shan clenched his teeth, his heaving chest slowing down to a controlled, measured rhythm. He exhaled a thin, steady jet of steam through pressed lips, his purple complexion slowly receding back to its natural iron-grey hue.
Lin Ke closed his own mouth.
He inhaled through his nostrils in tight, throttled pulses—tiny, discrete packets of air, no more than three cubic inches at a time.
Inside his glassy glass spirit veins, the difference was immediate.
Instead of a churning, crashing tidal wave of sludge blowing out his walls, the throttled Qi arrived in manageable, pre-compiled droplets. His six dantian vortexes seized each droplet with clean, steady care. It spun it into high-thickness Crimson Yang fuel in fractions of a second, venting the fine dust melted rock waste out through the pores of his palms.
Zero rough churning. Zero bubbling blast. Smooth, smooth-flowing flow through glass channels that remained cool and intact.
Across the hall, the scene was a slaughterhouse.
Four students who had tried to absorb the rich spiritual energy to stage a breakthrough were rolling on the floor, their eyes rolling back as their over-swelled spirit veins burst one by one.
The sound of internal tissues tearing was like wet burlap ripping under tension. Pink, aerated blood pooled across the flat stone slabs, mixing with the blue spiritual fog into a sickly lavender sludge.
Lin Ke stepped forward, his boots splashing through the sticky puddle without breaking stride.
Meng Shan and Shen Yue followed in lockstep behind him, breathing in steady, clockwork cadences, unaffected by the invisible poison of excess energy.
One of the dying students reached up from the floor, his trembling, blood-soaked fingers catching on Lin Ke’s iron shin guard.
“Why...” the student gasped, his throat rattling with bloody fluid. “The tower... The tower gave us so much power... Why didn’t you drink...?”
Lin Ke looked down at the dying fighter, his expression cold and deadpan.
“They over-provisioned,” Lin Ke said softly, stepping over the outstretched arm. “In high-load environments, greed is a fatal error.”