The pain in Lin Ke’s gut was not a dull ache. It was a spinning gyroscope made of broken razor blades.
He stood at the threshold of Floor Four. The sustained fifteen-fold gravity pull was no longer just pressing on his flesh. It had pierced down into his lower dantian. There, his five internal Qi vortexes were spinning at over twelve thousand turns a minute.
Under fifteen times normal weight of external water-pressure shear, the boundaries of the vortexes were warping.
The circular gyroscopes of tightly packed Crimson Yang Qi were wobbling, losing their smooth-flowing symmetry. Each time a vortex precessed out of posture, a violent spike of uncontained heavy outward pull hammered against the inner walls of his glassy glass spirit veins.
His core was experiencing spinning flutter.
If two of the vortexes collided while spinning out of phase, the resulting energetic blast would tear his belly open from the inside like an over-high-pressure boiler.
Lin Ke dropped to one knee on the fractured dark rock. His left hand grabbed his stomach, his knuckles turning chalk-white.
“Lin Ke!” Shen Yue cried, taking half a step toward him before the fifteen-fold gravity forced her down onto her knees beside him.
“Stay back,” Lin Ke wheezed, blood flecking his lips. “Core instability. Don’t touch me.”
The chamber froze. Han’s writhing, blistered form on the floor twenty paces away turned into a motionless statue of burnt meat.
In the mental sandbox, Lin Ke ran the holding models.
Run 01 through 15: Allow the five vortexes to compress naturally under external gravity, hoping they condense into a denser core. Result: The gravity pull compresses the outer edge faster than the core can vent. Hoop stress limits on the central Conception vessel are exceeded. Total glass spirit vein blowout across all fifteen runs.
Run 16 through 38: Vent forty percent of his internal Qi through his palm exhaust ports to relieve pressure. Result: Relieving internal pressure causes external gravity to crush his softened organs like overripe fruit. Immediate chest collapse. Suffocation and massive internal bleeding.
Thirty-eight simulations. Thirty-eight fatal terminations.
Lin Ke returned to meatspace, his throat burning from the phantom taste of shredded viscera.
He drew his iron metal pen, reversed it with shaking fingers. Then he plunged the needle point into his left thumb pad.
The sharp, clean agony cut through the dizziness in his skull. Blood welled over the cold iron.
“Branch checked,” he whispered into the dark rock floor. “Main.”
He looked inward, staring at the tracking data of his dantian.
The fifteen-fold gravity was not an obstacle to be resisted. It was an external high-pressure clamp.
Traditional fighters feared high gravity during a breakthrough. That was because their soft, fleshy bodies collapsed under the load. But Lin Ke had the Ashen Iron Lattice. A rigid, incompressible frame forged from stone-hard stone marrow.
His bones could bear the load. His dantian couldn’t—unless he tied them together.
A six-node linked ring, Lin Ke calculated.
Five spinning nodes were mechanically unstable under external torque. They lacked an odd-even parity lock. But six vortexes arranged in a six-sided ring would create a closed-loop balance of angular driving force, fully canceling out spinning precession.
He didn’t need to fight the pressure. He needed to harness it to forge the sixth ring.
Lin Ke seated himself cross-legged on the cold stone. He ignored the agony in his ribs, and closed his eyes.
He drew a thick, stone-heavy thread of refined earth-essence directly from the Ashen Iron Lattice in his pelvic bones.
He drove it into the chaotic, wobbling dantian chamber like a steel reinforcement bar shoved into the center of a storm.
The live merge struck with the subtlety of an iron battering ram.
Lin Ke’s back snapped straight. His chest heaved wildly, and a bone-shaking CRACK echoed from his ribs as his between-rib muscles tore under the violent contraction.
He coughed, spraying a thick, black clot of congealed dark blood onto the flat stone slabs between his knees.
Inside his gut, the five wobbling vortexes slammed into the stone thread.
External gravity clamped down with fifteen sea-weights of unbending force. It crushed the chaotic energetic clouds inward. Under that huge, terrifying crushing pressure, the stone thread ignited.
Snap.
A sixth azure vortex ring crystal-hardened in the center of his dantian.
Instantly, the wobbling ceased.
The six vortexes locked into an equilateral six-sided array, their angular momentums perfectly balancing one another. The spinning flutter died away, replaced by a deep, terrifying hum that shook through the core of his Ashen Iron skeleton with the smooth, silent care of a turbine spinning in an empty pocket.
The choking drag of Floor Four didn’t disappear—it simply ceased to matter.
His glass spirit veins, locked inside their thermally swelled bone grooves, pulsed with cold, packed power. The six vortexes drank the throttled surrounding Qi. It turned it into high-thickness Crimson Yang energy at more than twice his last processing speed.
Lin Ke opened his eyes.
His pupils were sharp, glowing rings of deep azure light, cold and steady as polished sapphire.
He raised his right hand and wiped the dark smear of blood from his chin, his breath whistling smoothly through his teeth.
“Training advancement,” he whispered into the silence of the chamber. “Qi Gathering Level Six.”