Every breath felt like an iron rasp sliding across raw pork.
The advancement to Qi Gathering Level Six had steadied Lin Ke’s dantian core. But the physical toll on his organic meat was total. Under fifteen times normal weight of sustained static load, the violent muscular contractions of the breakthrough had torn three rib muscle bands along his left ribs.
Worse was the cellular sludge.
Massive bursts of body-energy waste and dense muscle burn had flooded his tissues during the crushing merge. His joints felt stiff, clogged with gritty, unburned stone residue that threatened to cement his knees and shoulders into immobile stone within forty minutes.
Lin Ke leaned his back against the dark rock archway of Floor Four. His hands shook so hard he could barely hold his walking stave.
Across the chamber, the groans of approaching fighters echoed from the spiraling stairs below.
Zhao Wuji had not staked three thousand spirit stones on Iron-Fist Han alone. Backup enforcement squads were clearing Tier Two and climbing fast.
Lin Ke tapped his iron metal pen against his leather belt.
The chamber froze into neural silence. The blood dripping from his chin hung suspended in mid-air.
In the mental sandbox, Lin Ke ran the recovery simulations.
Run 01: Full body rest for four hours in the archway nook. Result: Backup mercenary waves arrive at minute thirty-eight. Lin Ke’s muscle burn solidifies into myoglobin casts. Muscular stiffness sets in. Unable to lift arms to block. Carried out on the floor by eight iron axe-spears.
Run 04: Standard fighters’ Qi-flushing cycle—surging high-volume energy through the spirit veins to sweep away toxins. Result: The sudden fluid speed through his non-elastic glass channels creates massive high-pressure water-hammer shock. Micro-channels in his forearms shatter like frozen glass tubes struck with a hammer. Fatal energetic blowout.
Lin Ke returned to meatspace, his throat burning from the phantom taste of shredded vessels.
He reached into his waistband, reversed the iron metal pen. Then he drove the needle point deep into his left thumb pad.
The sharp sting cut through the fog of tiredness, a thick bead of dark blood welling against the iron.
“Branch checked,” he whispered into his collar. “Main.”
He reached into his leather belt pouch. He pulled out a foul-smelling, dark brown sphere wrapped in dried cabbage leaf.
A Melted rock-Clearing Pill. Brewed by Apothecary He from scorched sulfur root, dried centipede bile, and wild willow bark.
Lin Ke popped the bitter lump into his mouth and bit down.
The taste was foul enough to turn a hog’s stomach, an oily concoction of bitter ash and skin-burning bitter-salt salts that burned his tongue like lye. He swallowed it dry, feeling the chemical heat drop into his stomach like a swallowed coal.
“Shen Yue,” Lin Ke rasped, his voice raw.
Shen Yue stepped forward right away, kneeling beside him, her brow slick with cold sweat. “I’m here.”
“Magic charm Blue-Two,” Lin Ke ordered, pointing to his upper back between his shoulder blades. “Apply it directly to my chest spine. Not a wide dispersal. Nearby contact only.”
Shen Yue’s hands paused as she pulled the cold-blue Frost-Anchor Magic charm from her sleeve. “Lin Ke... Your back is already bruised black. If the frost bites into your spine under fifteen times normal weight, the cold shock could freeze your marrow.”
“Apply it,” Lin Ke commanded, his voice brooking no argument. “We need acute vasoconstriction to purge the body-energy sludge. If my back freezes, I can walk. If my muscles lock up, we die here.”
Shen Yue bit her lower lip, peeled the backing wax from the parchment. Then she slapped the magic charm flat against his bare skin between his shoulder blades.
Tock.
The magic charm discharged.
An explosion of sub-zero ice-essence tore into Lin Ke’s chest spine.
Lin Ke’s vision whited out.
His teeth slammed together with a sickening crunch, nearly biting the tip of his tongue clean off. The cold didn’t just numb his skin. It seized his dorsal blood vessels in a violent, high-pressure clamp.
Under the sudden, nearby freeze, his blood-vessel beds tightened wildly by sixty percent.
The stale pools of muscle burn, scorched minerals, and body-energy toxins were forcefully squeezed out of his deep back muscles, driven downward through his inferior vena cava into his kidneys and lower elimination tract like bilge water pumped from a flooded hull.
His muscles screamed in painful protest. Cold needles of fire danced along every nerve ending in his spine.
Lin Ke didn’t cry out. He gripped the rough stone of the archway, his fingernails digging into the dark rock until they cracked, his chest heaving in silent, wracked shudders.
Ten minutes of blinding, pure torment.
Then, the numbness gave way to a clean, cold looseness.
Lin Ke pushed himself away from the wall.
His joints clicked, but they moved. The grinding stiffness had pulled back, eighty percent of his motor coordination restored through sheer, brutal body triage.
Across the chamber, Meng Shan was dragging Iron-Fist Han’s massive, unconscious body away from the portal by the collar of his ruined tunic.
The mercenary was still breathing, his burned right arm limp and charred. But his fight was long gone.
Meng Shan reached down with a calloused hand. It snapped an ornate, heavy medallion from Han’s stitched sash.
The big man turned around, his dark face tight with deep suspicion as he held the medallion out to Lin Ke.
It wasn’t the crude, stamped bronze plaque of an outer sect student.
It was carved from flawless black horn-jade, inlaid with filigree gold wire depicting a crimson vulture diving through lightning. It was stamped with a deep purple seal.
“Lin Ke,” Meng Shan rumbled, his voice dark as a thundercloud. “This isn’t an outer sect token. It belongs to the Inner Sect Discipline Registry.”