Free Web NovelChapter 94: Two Walls [II]
Inside the freshly widened Dantian, the new pool of Qi felt a hand close around it from every direction at once. Not the lazy pressure of the first pill. A purposeful, methodical vise that had decided his Dantian was a sponge in want of wringing.
His exhale came short.
[ Compression’s started. This one isn’t a wall you punch through. It’s a wall you swell against until it has no choice. ]
He inhaled four. He held four. He exhaled four.
The second wall took shape at the upper aperture of the Dantian. It was not yellow. It was not translucent. It was a dense, grey slab of pressure that did not have the manners to look like a wall — it simply was the absence of any way through.
He looked at it the way a swordsman looks at an opponent who has not yet drawn.
[ Up two finger-widths. Hold. Now push outward through the seventh meridian. Slowly. Slower. ]
He pushed slowly.
[ Hold. Don’t move. Now down. Settle the lower channel before the upper one cracks. ]
He settled the lower channel.
[ Exhale on the count of four. One. Two. Three. Four. Now compress on the same count. ]
He compressed.
The pressure inside his Dantian climbed past anything Stage Six had asked of him. Past anything he had felt in a fight. Past anything he remembered from being in the body when the Withered Curse had been wringing it out for years.
Behind his eyes a thin pressure began. As though two thumbs had been pushed against the back of his eyeballs from inside his skull. The corners of his vision haloed white.
A hum took up residence in the column of his spine. It started at his tailbone and walked itself up, vertebra by vertebra, until it reached the base of his skull, where it set up house and refused to leave.
Mira’s voice did not let up. She had stopped speaking in directives. She was running a constant stream of corrections, a tower controller talking a damaged aircraft down by inches.
[ Half a finger up. Hold. Drop the right side. Faster. There. Now don’t move. ]
He did not move.
[ Inhale on three. One. Two. Three. ]
He inhaled.
His robe was glued to his back. Sweat sluiced through the linen at the shoulders and the lower spine and pooled under the curve of the lotus against the floorboards. A drop ran from his brow onto the inside of his nose, off the tip, and struck the wood with a small, ridiculous tap.
’If this is what cultivators do for fun every couple of decades I’d like to file a complaint.’
[ Save the complaint for after you survive. ]
His teeth ground harder. He tasted copper. He had bitten the inside of his cheek at some point, or his tongue, or both, and now the iron of his own blood mixed with the bitter aftertaste of the violet pill in the back of his throat.
Plain Steel, on the floor beside him, hummed.
The hum was not loud. It was a low, almost subsonic vibration that walked across the floorboards into his right knee and up the inside of his thigh and into the rim of the Dantian, where it joined the spine-hum like two distant relatives meeting at a wedding.
’My sword is singing.’
[ Your physique’s reacting to the pressure. Not a problem. Keep pushing. ]
The mind slipped again.
Of course it did. Bodies under this kind of strain do not allow their minds to stay home.
He was a boy with a fever, alone in a stone room, watching dust drift through a single yellow shaft of afternoon light, unable to move so much as his fingers. The dust did not care that he was dying.
He was a man at a table with his father, and his father was looking at the window, and his father was deciding, very quietly, that he was going to let his son walk into a Blood Fang mine because his son had asked.
He was a boy in his stepbrother’s chamber, where the trays outside the door were piling, and his stepbrother had not eaten in days.
He was a maid in a dark sickroom two years ago, hands folded over her apron, watching a body that did not move and would not move and was not loved by anyone in the household but her.
He was a voice in his ear when he had first woken up in this body, a panel of pink at the corner of his eye saying Welcome, Host, and a kaomoji whose meaning he had not yet learned.
He was a body strapped into a train seat, on Earth, in another life, in a moment already drifting from him the way smoke leaves a window.
The vise around his Dantian throttled tighter.
The room came back.
The Qi in his upper channels surged once, hard, in the wrong direction. A pulse of pressure rebounded toward his heart channel and his vision went very white for an instant, flushed very red, and narrowed to a pinpoint.
Mira’s voice came across the panel as something between a command and a shout.
[ DOWN. NOW. HEART CHANNEL IS BUCKLING. CAP IT. ]
He capped it.
The slam came out of pure will, a brute force closing of an inner door he had been holding open without realising. The pressure jolted back into the Dantian where it had business being. The red in his vision faded to white, to the colour of lamp, to the brown of the wood beam above him.
His chest ached. His breath had gone very small and very careful.
[ We almost lost you. ]
[ Pay attention. ]
’I am.’
[ Keep pushing. The wall’s giving. ] freёwebnovel.com
He pushed.
The grey slab at the upper Dantian, which had been deforming for some time without him quite noticing through the pain, was now bulging outward like a sail in a storm. A vertical crack ran its length. A horizontal one ran across. A third slanted between them, and the three lines met in the centre with a single, decisive shudder.
The wall blew apart.
It did not shatter the way the first one had, into delicate flecks of light. It went out all at once in a hard burst of grey that disintegrated the instant it touched air. Qi flooded the Dantian in a torrent. The cavity rebuilt itself wider, denser, with walls thick enough to hold a pressure that would have flattened the old Stage Five Lin Xuan in seconds.
He held it.
He held it.
He held it.
Plain Steel rang.
A single note. Bell-clean. Pure resonance, the sword answering the Qi pressure with its own voice.
The room composed itself around him. The first grey of dawn was sliding under the lattice of the eastern window.
The panel rendered.
[ Breakthrough complete. ]
[ Realm: Qi Refining Stage 5 → Qi Refining Stage 7 ]
[ Dantian Capacity: 12% → 38% ]
[ Sword Intent: 47% → 49% ]
[ Sword Absolute Physique Sync: 30% → 31% ]
[ Body Status: Stable. Consolidation underway. ]
[ Welcome to seven, Xuan. ]
He read the panel.
His body, which had been very disciplined for six straight hours, decided it was off duty.
His shoulders went first. His hips followed. The lotus posture, which had been the only thing holding him upright for half a night, gave way in a slow, dignified collapse forward. His forehead met the floorboards. His hands stayed on his knees because nobody had told them to do anything else. His backside, by simple geometry of the position, ended up the highest point of him, presented to the ceiling at an angle the carpenter of this room had not planned for.
He did not move.
[ ...Xuan. ]
’Mm.’
[ Are you going to lie like that for very long? ]
’Mm.’
[ Because if so, I want to mention that the lamp is throwing the most unflattering angle I have seen on a recently-promoted cultivator in my entire career. ] ƒгeewebnovёl.com
[ Thousands of cultivators I have seen breakthroughs in caves, in gardens, on the open road, on the back of a cloud-ox once. None of them ended in this posture. ]
’Mm.’
[ Also, I am required to inform you that Lian will be coming back to collect the dishes at some point this morning, and if I were you I would very seriously consider getting your face off the floor before that happens. ]
His left eye, which appeared to be the only voluntary muscle he had left, cracked open against the wood.
[ ...Take your time, of course. ]
