Free Web NovelChapter 93: Two Walls [I]
The pills hit his stomach as he was already pushing the chair back.
He kicked it aside without looking, dropped barefoot onto the floorboards, and folded down into a lotus before his body could understand it was being asked to suffer for six straight hours. He set his hands on his knees, palms turned up, thumb pads pressed to index pads in the cultivation seal he had drilled until the gesture had become reflex.
The lamp above him steadied. frёewebnoѵel.ƈo๓
The panel reoriented to a monitor strip along the corner of his vision: pulse readings, meridian flow lines, Qi pressure in the Dantian rendered as a luminous coil that thickened by the second. Mira’s voice came across in a tone he had only heard from her twice before — during the Override, and in the alley when she had been deciding whether to let him die.
[ The Blue one is unfolding. Heat climbing your central meridian. Stop it. Bring it down and anchor it. ]
His Qi obeyed his thought a fraction of a second after she finished speaking. He did not bother to answer her. Inside the Dantian, the blue pill had begun to dissolve into a ribbon of warm light that wanted very badly to surge upward.
He grabbed the ribbon and dragged it down.
[ Better. Now hold. Sit on it. ]
He sat on it.
The first wall appeared in the Dantian’s upper aperture the way Mira had described it. A translucent membrane, faintly yellow, glowing with the soft refusal walls put up when they have held the same posture for years. The barrier between Stage Five and Stage Six. He had pushed against it every time he had tried to break through these past weeks. It had not yielded once.
He pushed against it now with a tide of new Qi at his back, but it refused.
[ Steady pressure. Don’t try to punch through. Lean. ]
He leaned.
The membrane bowed a fraction of a hair, then bowed back. His jaw set so hard he felt a muscle pop under his ear.
[ Lean harder. ]
He leaned harder.
The first beads of sweat broke at his temples and ran for the seams of his collarbones. The next ones followed before the first had reached his ribs. Heat gathered at the small of his back, not from the pill but from the simple labour of holding pressure against a wall that wanted nothing to do with him.
A second later the first of the thread-thin red lines opened along the inside of his left wrist. He felt it as a tickle and saw it as a dark filament before another bloomed across the right.
[ Bleeding’s normal. Don’t break form. ]
’Alright.’
[ Don’t answer me and lean. ]
He leaned.
Inside his skull his pulse drummed slow and dense, each beat thudding behind his ears like someone rapping a knuckle against the inside of his temples. The lamp blurred in his vision until it was only the colour of the lamp without the shape of it. His teeth ground against each other until something at the back of his jaw gave a small mineral pop.
The membrane did not crack. It bowed. It refused. It bowed again.
His mind, which had been very busy holding pressure against an immortal-grade door, took the strain as permission to drift.
For a stretch of breath he was not in the room.
He was in a sickbed, looking up at a ceiling beam carved with a Lin family crest he had not yet learned to read. The body beneath him had not moved in two years. He had not chosen the body. He had simply arrived inside it.
He was at a table with a brush motionless above paper. Across the table his father had been looking at the dark window for a count of breaths longer than Lin Xuan had measured. His father was already grieving him a little. His father did not know it yet.
He was watching Lian set down a tray. The tray had not fallen because her hands had never betrayed her. The rest of her had gone very still.
He was at the bottom of a dry well looking up at a man with a knife, and the man with the knife was about to learn that one of the two people in the well was no longer entirely human.
The room came back.
[ Xuan. ]
The voice cracked through the drift.
[ Eyes on the wall. Push. ]
He pushed.
A fissure opened in the membrane, a single thread of brighter gold running through the pale yellow, and the pale yellow knew it was finished even before he gave it the second shove.
He shoved.
The membrane shattered into flecks of yellow light that dissolved before they could touch the inside of his Dantian. New Qi flooded the space. The cavity widened in a sudden, terrible relief, the way a knot in the back unrolls when an honest hand finally finds it. He nearly fell out of the lotus from the simple release of it.
He did not fall out of the lotus.
A small panel pinged in the corner of his vision.
[ Stage Six. Breaking confirmed. Consolidating. ]
[ Sit. Breathe. Twenty minutes. ]
He breathed in for four counts and out for four. He did this seventy-five times by Mira’s quiet count and let the new Qi pour itself into the new shape of his Dantian, learning the floor of the cavity, learning the curve of the wall, learning the way pressure was supposed to sit inside a Stage Six instead of a Stage Five. His pulse stopped drumming. The bleeding on his wrists slowed and sealed under fine dark scabs.
The lamp came back into focus.
[ Window’s open. ]
[ Standard window between pills is twelve to twenty-four hours. We have about twenty minutes of stable plateau before your body starts demanding the next dose properly, and after that the cost of forcing it climbs the longer we wait. ]
[ Going now. ] ƒree𝑤ebnσvel.com
The violet pill, which had been waiting in his system the entire time the blue one fought its war, unfolded.
