The air on Floor Five didn’t smell like air anymore. It smelled like scorched cotton and hot machine oil.
The static pressure was so violent that a dry parchment scroll dropped near the doorway suddenly began to smoke, its plant fiber fibers auto-igniting from sheer sky squeezing before crumbling into black ash.
Thirty times static gravity.
The surrounding light from the spirit-lanterns along the outer edge had dimmed from bright azure to a muddy, blood-red smear.
The light itself seemed heavy, dragging against the floor as though photons were struggling to climb the gravity slope. Lin Ke’s boots hit the threshold. His entire body felt as if it had been dropped into an ocean of wet cement.
Every pound of his flesh now weighed thirty pounds.
His internal organs sagged against his pelvic floor. His tongue felt like a lead metal bar pinned to the roof of his mouth.
Lin Ke lifted his left arm to shield his eyes. But his elbow reached a forty-five-degree angle. Then, a savage, tearing pain ripped through his shoulder muscle.
The reddish haze of the hall froze into motionless crimson glass.
In the mental sandbox, Lin Ke simulated taking three standard steps forward into the hall.
Run 01: Standard bipedal stride. Lin Ke pushes off his right ball of foot. The inertial drag on his trailing leg creates massive turning force. The thigh head grinds against the acetabulum. On the third step, the downward gravity shear exceeds the pulling strength of his shoulder tendons, tearing the rotator cuff and dislocating the joint under the dead weight of his own arm.
Run 03: Fast forward dash. Result: The moving impact of his foot striking the stone at speed acts like an explosive charge. Both knee tendons snap. Femurs punch through the knee joints. Real body collapse: permanent bilateral amputation.
Lin Ke returned to meatspace, his right shoulder throbbing with phantom agony.
He slid his thumb toward the iron metal pen, piercing the skin of his left thumb pad until the sharp pain cleared the mental static. A thick drop of blood surfaced, black in the crimson light.
“Branch checked,” he whispered into his collar. “Main.”
Don’t use muscle to move, he calculated coldly. Muscle is ductile and unsafe to shear. Rely entirely on the incompressible frame.
He turned his head slowly, keeping his neck bones locked in total upright posture.
“Meng Shan. Shen Yue,” Lin Ke said, his words forced out in tight, monosyllabic bursts through clenched teeth. “Lock... Your... Frames.”
Meng Shan was already kneeling on both knees, his breath whistling like a broken bellows, his iron-plated shoulder plate groaning under the crushing static field. Shen Yue stood between them. It trembled wildly, her chest heaving as she fought to keep her lungs from collapsing.
“No swinging strides,” Lin Ke instructed, his voice flat and hard. “High-pressure micro-steps. Lock the knee before taking the weight. Transfer the load directly from the thigh bone through the shin bone into the bedrock. Zero muscle engagement during weight transfer.”
Meng Shan nodded once, his jaw clenched so hard a bead of blood leaked from his gumline. He rose, locking his knees until his joints clicked into place like stone pillars, his massive body becoming an unbending obelisk of stone-hard muscle and iron bone.
Lin Ke set Shen Yue directly between them. They formed a tight, three-person wind-cutting and gravity wedge.
Meng Shan broke the main shear wind at the front. Lin Ke anchored the rear. Shen Yue walked in the sheltered vortex between their rigid skeletons.
Lin Ke took his first step.
He didn’t swing his leg forward.
He leaned his balance point forward by two degrees. It slid his left boot forward by three inches without lifting the sole from the dark rock floor.
The moment his heel reached the mark, he snapped the knee straight. He locked the Ashen Iron Lattice into a rigid upright column.
The thirty-fold downward load passed down his stone-hard bone into the floorboards with a dull, underground thump. His thigh muscles didn’t contract. They acted merely as passive steadying stays. That let his incompressible skeleton bear the entirety of the three-thousand-pound load.
Three inches. Lock. Slide. Lock.
Slow. Clockwork. Relentless.
They advanced across the vast, shadowed expanse of Floor Five like an iron clockwork iron-puppet grinding across a sea of lead.
Fifty paces ahead of them, the true horror of Tier Five revealed itself.
Three outer students—men who had survived the slaughter of the lower tiers through sheer stubbornness—lay pinned flat against the black dark rock floor like pressed insects.
They weren’t dead yet, but they were dying.
Their chests were crushed flat against the stone, their ribs visibly caving inward under the thirty-fold pressure with terrifying, wet crunching sounds. They couldn’t draw breath. They could only scratch their bleeding fingertips against the flat stone slabs, their eyes bulging from their sockets in silent, bulging terror as their lungs slowly suffocated under the weight of the air itself.
Lin Ke walked past them, his locked knees clicking in the crimson gloom, his gaze fixed straight ahead on the dark shape of the central pillar.
There was no pity in his eyes. Under thirty times normal weight, pity was just excess weight that would drag you down into the stone alongside them.