Chương 17: Chapter 16

By the time the sun climbed to its highest point, most of the morning mist had burned away from the upper ridges of Crimson Peak. Gray stone glared beneath the midday light, while the deeper valleys remained hidden beneath dark pine and drifting white cloud. Ling Tian barely noticed the scenery. The frayed canvas sack hanging across his back had become heavy enough that every turn reminded him exactly how successful the morning had been. The bag no longer contained much Cloudmint.

He had collected a few particularly healthy patches when they happened to sit directly along his route, but the common herb was no longer worth going out of his way for. The real inventory consisted of four Crimson Starpetals, a thick patch of Frostvein Moss harvested from a shaded runoff channel, and two dense Ironwood Roots dug from beneath the remains of an ancient pine.

Each valuable specimen had been wrapped separately in damp leaves to protect the roots and prevent the more delicate foliage from bruising against the others. Ling Tian did not know the precise price of the haul. The original boy's memories were frustratingly incomplete whenever actual numbers became useful, but they were clear enough about the category involved. Cloudmint was measured in copper. The plants currently pressing against Ling Tian's spine were measured in silver. That distinction changed things.

Silver meant more than surviving until the next market day. It meant proper food, replacement clothing, tools, containers, perhaps even enough spare materials to make the shack marginally less offended by the concept of weather. For several days, his entire financial model had depended on gathering enough cheap herbs to purchase enough cheap food to remain alive long enough to gather more cheap herbs. The arrangement technically functioned, but so did a leaking boat if someone kept bailing fast enough.

The mountain still contained more valuable plants. His Verdant Qi filter made that irritatingly obvious. One dense signature rested somewhere inside a narrow ravine to the north, another clung to a nearly vertical wall farther east, and a third flickered high above the tree line where the terrain became exposed enough that even Ling Tian's improved body objected to the idea. He left them alone. That decision required more restraint than expected.

Every rare signal immediately translated itself inside his head into food, money, and security, which made greed feel suspiciously similar to responsible planning. But the original Ling Tian had already demonstrated what happened when desperation turned "one more attempt" into a survival strategy. Crimson Peak had existed for longer than Hua City. Whatever remained hidden today would probably still be there tomorrow. More importantly, Ling Tian had already answered the economic question.

His gathering efficiency had changed completely. He no longer needed to compete with ordinary herbalists for whatever happened to grow beside established trails. The physical question remained less certain. Ling Tian slowed near the edge of a ridge and examined his own condition. He had spent most of the morning climbing rock faces, crossing narrow ledges, hauling himself up with his fingers, and carrying a bronze weapon almost as long as his body. His breathing had recovered quickly after every difficult section.

His joints felt fine, and the familiar ache that should have accumulated through his shoulders and legs remained strangely mild. Useful information, but incomplete. Field performance only revealed what the body could comfortably handle. Ling Tian wanted to know what happened when comfort ended. Discovering his actual limits while fleeing a mountain beast would be poor experimental design, so he began searching for somewhere isolated enough to make mistakes safely. A broad plateau farther west offered exactly that.

Dense pines concealed it from the lower gathering trails, and several steep shelves of rock discouraged casual visitors. The clearing itself was roughly sixty meters across, covered mostly in hard-packed earth and crushed slate. Ling Tian expanded his perception briefly and found no large animals, unusual Qi concentrations, or signs of recent human movement. Good enough. He crossed the final stretch of ridge and entered the clearing.

The first priority was protecting the morning's inventory, so Ling Tian selected the thickest pine near the edge and carefully lowered the herb sack into its shade. He checked the damp wrappings around the Starpetals, placed the Frostvein Moss against the cooler side of the trunk, and left the far sturdier Ironwood Roots beneath them. Beside the herbs sat his remaining provisions.

A small parcel of heavily salted dried meat, several bitter roots, and a dwindling amount of millet represented almost everything he possessed in the category of food. Ling Tian crouched in front of it for a moment while his stomach tightened. The hunger had grown noticeably worse over the course of the morning. That by itself was not surprising. He had been climbing for hours. What bothered him was the relationship between exertion and recovery.

His muscles recovered quickly whenever the Earth Qi pulsed through his body, but his appetite seemed to sharpen rather than disappear. Ling Tian had already formed a theory about that. He was hoping to be wrong. He stood and picked up the sealed bronze sword. The weapon remained stubbornly fused inside its scabbard. He had tried opening it twice during the morning, partly because irritation demanded repeated confirmation, but the result had not changed.

The blade that slid effortlessly free the previous evening now behaved as though the hilt and sheath had been cast from one continuous piece of bronze. Ling Tian had mostly stopped complaining about it. Mostly. The weapon still possessed excellent balance and enough mass to make it useful even without an edge. During the morning climb, he had used it as a counterweight, a brace, and once as an improvised hook while crossing a particularly ugly section of rock.

If the ancient artifact refused to function as a sword, then its classification would simply have to become flexible. For the next test, the weight was actually useful. Ling Tian walked toward one side of the plateau and scratched a line into the packed dirt with the end of the bronze scabbard. He then paced across the clearing, estimating the distance through the original boy's familiarity with mountain travel, and marked the opposite side. Roughly sixty meters separated the two points.

Yesterday's ten-kilometer run had already demonstrated sustained endurance. Ling Tian knew he could maintain a moderate pace for an absurd amount of time compared with the original body. Today he wanted to test repeated maximum effort instead. No stopwatch meant exact speed was impossible to measure. No heart-rate monitor meant cardiovascular data would remain subjective.

His equipment consisted of dirt, two lines, a mysterious bronze weapon, and memories of once pretending to understand exercise science on the internet. It would have to do. Ling Tian returned to the starting line and rolled his shoulders. He considered setting the bronze weapon aside, then decided against it. Real emergencies did not guarantee empty hands, and testing his body while carrying additional weight would produce more useful information than an ideal sprint under artificial conditions.

He lowered his center of gravity and focused on the far line. The tiny drop of Earth Qi inside his Dantian continued its steady rotation. Its presence had become familiar enough that he almost ignored it until the next pulse spread faintly through his limbs. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon. Ling Tian inhaled once. Then sprinted. His first few steps ripped loose dirt from the plateau.

Instead of settling into the efficient rhythm he had used during the previous day's run, Ling Tian pushed immediately toward the fastest pace he could sustain. His short legs drove hard against the ground, while the sealed bronze sword remained tucked close enough to his body that its weight did not throw him off balance. The opposite line arrived almost immediately. Ling Tian planted one foot, felt the Earth Qi reinforce the ankle and knee through the sudden deceleration, and turned sharply.

He drove back toward the starting point without resting, crossed it, turned again, and repeated the process. The plateau became a narrow shuttle track. At first, the sensation was exhilarating. His body responded with a speed that still felt disconnected from its appearance. Ling Tian was a thin ten-year-old wearing ragged clothes and running barefoot through dirt, yet the ground moved beneath him with a velocity the original body could never have produced.

He pushed the excitement aside and concentrated on what mattered. Breathing changed first. After several crossings, his lungs began working harder, each inhale deeper and faster as the repeated bursts increased oxygen demand. Earth Qi apparently had no intention of manufacturing additional air inside his chest, which Ling Tian considered reassuring. His heartbeat followed. By the time he completed roughly ten passes, it pounded hard enough against his ribs to become impossible to ignore.

Sweat gathered along his forehead and beneath his tunic soon afterward. The improved resistance to cold had not removed the body's need to regulate heat generated from intense exertion. Several ordinary warning systems were still functioning. Good. Ling Tian continued. Around the fifteenth crossing, heaviness appeared in his thighs. The sensation began mildly but strengthened over the next several sprints, spreading down into his calves.

His stride shortened slightly at each turn, and the muscles demanded more effort to produce the same acceleration. There. That was what he had been waiting for. The original Ling Tian would already have been finished. A short uphill run had once left the boy struggling for breath, and carrying herbs down to Hua City regularly produced hours of soreness. Ling Tian was now performing repeated maximum-effort sprints while carrying several kilograms of bronze. The muscles burned harder.

His right calf tightened dangerously. Ling Tian maintained the pace for one more crossing. Then another. He was not trying to prove toughness. He needed to see whether the Earth Qi responded automatically or only when consciously directed, and stopping at the first sign of discomfort would teach him nothing. The burning reached the point where his legs began forcing his stride shorter. Then the drop inside his Dantian reacted. Its rotation accelerated slightly.

A deeper pulse traveled through the meridians in his lower body, carrying that familiar cool density into his hips, thighs, and calves. The effect was not instantaneous, but it was fast enough that Ling Tian noticed the change within seconds. The threatening cramp loosened first. The heavy stiffness in his thighs receded shortly afterward, and the sharp muscular burn faded into something far more manageable.

His lungs were still working hard and his heart remained elevated, but his legs began responding cleanly again. Ling Tian completed two more passes to verify the result. Then he stopped. He bent forward near the center of the clearing, resting one hand against his knee while the other continued holding the bronze weapon. Sweat fell from his chin into the dirt. His chest rose and fell rapidly, and several deep breaths were required before his breathing began to normalize.

His legs, however, felt disturbingly functional. Ling Tian slowly straightened. That clarified one misconception. Earth Qi was not giving him infinite stamina. The term was too broad. Oxygen demand remained real, cardiovascular stress remained real, and his body still accumulated heat through exertion. What the Qi appeared to do was dramatically alter local muscular recovery. The exact mechanism remained unknown. Perhaps it accelerated tissue repair.

Perhaps it removed whatever buildup created the burning sensation. Perhaps cultivator physiology had no meaningful relationship with the concepts Ling Tian remembered from modern exercise science. He had no laboratory equipment with which to determine the answer. He was reverse-engineering supernatural biology using subjective discomfort and the body of a child who had already died once from cultivation. Academic standards would suffer. Survival would have to accept the methodology.

Ling Tian walked toward the shade at a slower pace. Halfway there, his stomach cramped hard enough that he stopped. That symptom had not improved. If anything, the hunger was worse than before the sprint test. He looked toward the small pile of food beneath the pine. The theory gained another piece of evidence. His muscles recovered. His fuel reserves apparently did not. Ling Tian considered eating immediately, but the hunger remained unpleasant rather than dangerous.

One more category of testing would complete the basic physical profile he wanted. After that, he could stop. He turned back toward the plateau. Speed and endurance were useful, but neither answered the question that mattered most in a fight. A body could produce tremendous muscular force and still destroy itself when that force encountered something harder. Wrists, elbows, shoulders, bones, and connective tissue all placed limits on how much power a human could safely deliver.

Earth Qi had already demonstrated some ability to absorb impact while running and climbing. Ling Tian needed to know whether the same protection applied when he struck something deliberately. A dead pine near the northern edge of the clearing provided an obvious target. Most of the bark had fallen away years ago, leaving behind pale timber hardened by repeated seasons of mountain weather. The trunk was considerably thicker than Ling Tian's torso and solid enough that it remained upright despite being dead.

He approached and tapped the bronze scabbard against the exposed wood. A hard, dull knock answered. Suitable. Ling Tian stepped backward and tested the weapon's grip in both hands. It remained awkwardly long compared with his body, but the balance was excellent enough that he could control it without fighting the weight. His own technique was another matter. Ling Tian possessed no martial arts training.

The original boy had experience with farm tools and an axe, while Aditya's combat education consisted mainly of fictional sword fights and several questionable action movies. Neither source qualified him to improvise a proper stance. That left basic mechanics. He widened his feet slightly, kept his knees loose, and adjusted the angle of his shoulders. The position felt crude, but he was not trying to invent swordsmanship. He only needed to strike the tree without doing something obviously stupid to his joints.

Ling Tian drew the bronze weapon back. The Earth Qi inside his core rotated. He focused on the familiar reinforcement spreading through his wrists, elbows, shoulders, spine, and legs. Then he swung. Bronze struck hardened wood with a violent crack that echoed across the plateau. The impact jolted through Ling Tian's arms. Splinters burst outward from the trunk, scattering across the dirt. He instinctively tightened his grip and prepared for the pain that should have followed. Very little came.

Ling Tian stared at the tree. A deep indentation scarred the trunk. Several thick fragments of weather-hardened wood lay at his feet, and the damaged section had visibly fractured around the point of impact. He flexed his fingers and rotated both wrists. Everything still worked.

"That seems excessive." Ling Tian stepped closer to inspect the damage. He had understood abstractly that his physical output had increased, but abstract understanding was different from watching hardened timber lose an argument with a starving ten-year-old. He stepped back for another attempt. This time, he cared less about the damage and more about what happened to the recoil. Ling Tian adjusted his grip, set his feet, and swung again. The scabbard slammed into the trunk. Vibration entered his palms.

He followed it inward with spiritual perception. The force traveled through the wrists and forearms, exactly where an ordinary child should have suffered most. Then the Earth Qi responded. Instead of allowing the impact to remain concentrated in those smaller joints, the force spread across his shoulders, down through the spine and hips, and into both legs before dispersing toward the ground. Ling Tian's expression sharpened. That was important. The Earth Qi was not simply increasing strength.

It was helping the entire body behave as one connected structure under impact. A stronger muscle meant little if the wrist shattered when the force reached the target. By distributing recoil across a much larger frame, Earth Qi changed the amount of power he could safely deliver. He tested the idea with another strike. This one landed poorly. A narrow flash of pain touched his left wrist. Ling Tian stopped immediately and flexed the joint. No damage, but the warning was clear. Good.

The Qi did not erase bad mechanics. Technique still mattered. That made sense. If the body were poorly aligned, the recoil could still concentrate somewhere faster than the Earth Qi dispersed it. Ling Tian adjusted his stance and tried again. This time he initiated the movement with his legs and hips rather than forcing the weapon through the target using his arms alone. The torso rotated, the shoulders followed, and the arms guided the bronze rather than supplying all the power themselves.

The impact was noticeably heavier. A larger piece of dead wood broke away. Ling Tian stared at the trunk for a moment before a slow smile appeared. Now this was interesting. Not because he had suddenly developed ambitions of becoming some legendary sword cultivator. He still considered that profession statistically unhealthy. What interested him was the process. Change input. Observe output. Correct inefficiency. Repeat.

For the first time since arriving in this world, physical training began to resemble a system he understood instinctively. Ling Tian lifted the sealed bronze sword again. The damaged pine waited. He had already confirmed that he could hurt it. The next question was how efficiently he could keep doing so without hurting himself. That seemed like a problem worth solving.