Chương 22: Chapter 21

Ling Tian started a new day with meditation; he closed his eyes and focused on his dantian. Two microscopic deposits of refined Earth Qi rotated beneath his navel, though calling them two separate drops no longer felt entirely accurate. By the end of the previous night, they had already begun synchronizing, and after several hours of sleep, the integration appeared nearly complete. They moved together in a single slow rhythm. Every rotation released a faint pulse through his meridians.

The pulse was stronger than before, though not dramatically so, and Ling Tian could now follow it through his torso and limbs with very little effort. He lay still for several minutes and monitored the response as carefully as possible. No heat. No swelling. No pressure increase. The meridians in his right arm felt mildly tender after the previous night's transit, but there was no sharp pain or lingering sign of damage. Most importantly, the Earth Qi itself remained stable. Nothing had multiplied while he slept.

Nothing had migrated into his lungs. Nothing had interpreted integration as an invitation to become an internal explosive. That handled immediate safety. Now he needed measurements. Ling Tian pushed himself upright. The movement felt disturbingly easy, not because gravity had somehow stopped applying, but because his body offered almost no resistance to the transition. He stretched one leg, then the other, rotated his shoulders, and bent forward until both palms touched the floor. Everything moved cleanly.

Ling Tian stood, let the blanket fall from his shoulders, and waited for the morning cold to reach him properly. It did. His skin registered the temperature. His body simply did not care much. The Earth Qi inside his Dantian rotated, and a cool pulse spread through him. Ling Tian stood in the freezing shack for several seconds, increasingly suspicious of how comfortable he felt.

"This is becoming unreasonable." The shack offered no counterargument. He walked toward the door and picked up the disguised bronze weapon leaning beside it. The sword remained sealed inside its scabbard and buried beneath uneven layers of pitch, dirt, bark, and deliberate ugliness. Three days earlier it had looked like a plain but suspiciously well-preserved ancient weapon. Now it resembled a diseased length of timber someone had recovered from a drainage channel. Perfect.

Ling Tian lifted it onto one shoulder and immediately paused. The weapon was still heavy. He knew that intellectually. But his body cared far less than it had before. After the first Earth Qi deposit, carrying the bronze weapon had become manageable. It still possessed enough mass that long climbs and repeated swings made themselves known. Now the same weight settled against him almost naturally, as though his body had quietly renegotiated the definition of burdensome while he slept. That was worth testing.

Ling Tian pushed open the crooked door and stepped into the predawn air of Crimson Peak. Mist drifted between the pines surrounding the shack, turning the lower ridges into vague gray shapes beneath the first traces of morning light. Moisture coated the grass and darkened the exposed stone. Somewhere below, a stream moved through one of the ravines with a distant, steady murmur. He did not immediately run.

The second deposit had been completed only the previous night, and sprinting the instant he woke would contaminate the simplest observation available: how his body behaved at rest. Ling Tian walked for the first several minutes, paying attention to his breathing, balance, hunger, temperature, and the rhythm of the Earth Qi inside his core. Everything remained stable. He gradually increased his pace. The walk became a jog as the trail began descending between the trees.

Loose slate shifted beneath his bare feet, and thick roots crossed the path at irregular angles, but the terrain felt almost disappointingly familiar now. The original Ling Tian had once treated these routes as daily physical burdens. Ling Tian increasingly treated them as transportation infrastructure. He accelerated again. The jog became a run. The bronze weapon stayed tucked securely against his shoulder while his feet struck the mountain path with growing speed.

Each impact traveled through his legs and disappeared beneath the grounding reinforcement of the Earth Qi. His balance adjusted automatically to the uneven terrain, and the mountain passed around him with an ease that still felt slightly disconnected from the body producing it. By the time the secluded plateau came into view, Ling Tian had not accumulated enough fatigue to matter. The fallen pine from his previous experiment still lay near the edge of the clearing.

Its shattered trunk rested among scattered branches and splintered wood, an inconveniently visible reminder of the last time he had conducted a physical audit here. Ling Tian looked at the wreckage, then at the bronze stick resting across his shoulder.

"No." Not yet. The previous test had ended with him crawling toward food because he had discovered the existence of the equivalent of thermodynamics in this world several hours too late. This time, the order would be controlled. Cardiovascular output first. Observe. Impact tolerance second. Observe. Then stop before his body found another creative method of issuing an invoice. Ling Tian walked to the same side of the clearing he had used before.

The old line scratched into the dirt had mostly disappeared, so he redrew it with the end of the bronze scabbard, paced across the plateau, and marked the opposite side. The distance remained approximately sixty meters. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website. Same course. Same weapon. Same body. One major variable had changed. Two Earth Qi deposits instead of one. That was almost respectable experimental design.

Ling Tian returned to the starting point and lowered into a sprinter's stance. The lack of proper measuring equipment remained irritating. He had no stopwatch, no heart-rate monitor, and no reliable way to quantify exact acceleration or speed. The comparison would have to rely on repetition count, subjective effort, breathing, recovery time, and how quickly muscular fatigue appeared. Imperfect data. Still data. He inhaled once. Then pushed forward. The acceleration almost ruined the test immediately.

Ling Tian expected improvement, but the first stride carried more force than his body anticipated. His second landed farther ahead than instinct expected, forcing him to shorten the third to keep the movement under control. By the time the opposite line arrived, he was moving fast enough that the sharp pivot he used during the previous test felt unsafe. He widened the turn instead and slid through several feet of loose dirt before regaining balance. Dust rose around his ankles. Ling Tian stopped.

The sixty-meter distance had not changed. His assumptions had. He jogged back to the starting point and reset. Second attempt. This time he expected the acceleration. Ling Tian lowered his center of gravity and launched again, allowing the greater force of each stride without fighting it. The improvement remained obvious. His feet drove harder against the ground, and the bronze weapon added weight without meaningfully disrupting his rhythm. He crossed the plateau, turned cleanly, and came back. Then again.

Ling Tian began counting. Five crossings passed quickly. Then ten. His breathing deepened, exactly as expected. That remained reassuring. By fifteen, his heartbeat had accelerated and sweat began gathering beneath the thin tunic. Cardiovascular demand was still present. His body required oxygen, circulated blood, and generated heat like any functioning biological system. The difference appeared in his legs. There was no serious burn. Ling Tian continued. Twenty crossings. Still no familiar heaviness.

His calves remained loose. His thighs felt warm from effort but showed none of the progressive stiffness that had developed during the previous plateau test. Ling Tian frowned and kept running. Twenty-five. Thirty. His lungs were working harder now, but his stride remained clean. There was no threatening calf cramp, no shortening movement, and no sharp moment where his muscles began insisting that the experiment end. That was not what had happened with one deposit.

Ling Tian turned his attention inward while maintaining the run. The Earth Qi was not waiting for a crisis. That was the difference. During the previous test, muscular fatigue accumulated until it crossed some threshold, at which point the first deposit released a noticeably stronger pulse and reduced the symptoms. With two deposits, the background reinforcement itself seemed more active.

Every rotation sent a steady current through his legs, and physical stress never accumulated enough to trigger the same dramatic response. Ling Tian was careful not to invent an explanation from observation alone. Perhaps the Earth Qi was accelerating recovery. Perhaps it was reducing tissue stress. Perhaps it interacted with some entirely different cultivation mechanism that modern exercise terminology described badly. He had no equipment capable of verifying what happened at the cellular level.

What he could say was simpler. With one deposit, fatigue accumulated faster than the passive support could manage. With two, the same workload remained below that threshold. That was useful. Ling Tian completed forty crossings before stopping near the center of the plateau. He could have continued, but at that point he would have been collecting mostly redundant information.

His chest rose and fell steadily, his heart beat hard, and sweat dampened his hairline, yet the legs beneath him remained disturbingly functional. He performed one slow squat. No weakness. Then another. Still clean. Ling Tian straightened and looked down at his own legs. Assigning a numerical improvement would have been tempting, but without accurate timing it would also have been dishonest. Thirty percent faster sounded impressive and meant almost nothing if the number came from intuition.

So he settled on descriptions he could defend. Sprint speed: noticeably higher. Repetition tolerance: substantially higher. Muscular fatigue under comparable workload: drastically lower. Cardiovascular demand: still present. Good enough. Ling Tian turned toward the western edge of the plateau. The old pine was no longer available as a target because he had already reduced its vertical ambitions. He needed something new if he wanted to measure impact performance.

A moss-covered boulder sat partially buried near the far side of the clearing. Large. Gray. Solid. Ling Tian stared at it for several seconds. Then at the tar-covered bronze weapon. The previous experiment had involved dead wood. Stone represented a meaningful escalation, which by itself should have been a persuasive reason to stop. Unfortunately, the first Earth Qi deposit had already allowed him to break a thick pine with a sealed sword.

He needed to know how much the second deposit changed the same structural relationship. Ling Tian walked toward the boulder and tapped the surface with the end of the bronze scabbard. A dense, hard knock answered. No hollow section. No obvious fracture. No convenient excuse if it broke. Perfect. He stepped back and reviewed what he had learned during the previous test. Feet aligned. Knees loose. Generate force through the legs and hips rather than the arms alone. Do not overgrip.

Allow the recoil to distribute through the body instead of trying to stop it in the wrists. It was not martial arts. It was simply less incompetence. Ling Tian raised the bronze stick. He deliberately did not force an exaggerated surge of Earth Qi into his arms. The point was to observe what the body could do in its normal reinforced state, not manufacture the most spectacular possible result. He swung. The weapon struck granite. The sound cracked across the plateau sharply enough to hurt his ears.

A fraction of a second later, stone broke. Ling Tian felt the recoil travel back through the bronze into his palms. His wrists stayed aligned, the Earth Qi distributed the force across his arms and shoulders, and the impact continued down through the spine, hips, and legs before disappearing into the ground. He barely moved. For a moment, Ling Tian remained in the finishing position. Then he slowly looked at the boulder. A pale crater marked the impact point. Several stone fragments lay scattered nearby.

He blinked. That was granite. He was reasonably certain of this because Crimson Peak was largely made from the material and had spent the previous week introducing it to the soles of his feet. Ling Tian stepped closer and ran one finger over the broken surface. Fine gray-white powder coated his skin. The crater was not deep. It did not need to be. Stone was not supposed to lose arguments with ten-year-olds after all. He stepped back. One strike proved possibility. Consistency mattered more.

Ling Tian adjusted his stance and struck the same section again. Another sharp crack echoed through the clearing. More stone broke free. He stopped immediately and checked his wrists, elbows, and shoulders. No sharp pain. No numbness. No structural complaint. Third strike. Slightly higher. Another fracture. Ling Tian continued carefully rather than slipping into the destructive rhythm that had ended the previous test. Every few strikes he stopped, checked breathing, monitored hunger, and inspected his joints.

His arms gradually warmed and tired, but the Earth Qi reduced the fatigue before it became serious. The boulder accumulated damage. A horizontal strike widened the original crater. An overhead blow deepened one of the fractures. A diagonal swing chipped away another section. Ling Tian adjusted his stance between each attempt, treating the stone less like an enemy and more like an extremely durable piece of test equipment. The process was satisfying. Unreasonably satisfying.

There was something primitive about hitting an immovable object and watching it become less immovable, but Ling Tian tried not to examine that part of his psychology too closely.