The high-voltage plasma lines crackled through the dark concrete room like nested violet serpents, their overlapping arcs illuminating the bare walls of Room 409 in a blinding strobe-lit display. The air hissed aggressively as the raw neural-scrambling currents violently ate through the oxygen baseline, converging from three separate directions toward Lin Fengâs center.
"The grid is sealed!" the lead executioner rasped, his obsidian visor flaring with an intense, calculated violet heat. "Maximum output! Overload his pathways before the regional monitoring relays can log the atmospheric spike!"
Lin Feng stood at the perfect epicenter of the plasma storm, his feet lightly gripping the thin hemp mat. Beneath his porcelain-smooth skin, his newly integrated
Qi CirculationâStage 1
internal engine thrummed. He didn't execute a fluid footwork movement or summon a protective shield from the memories of his past life.
He took a slow, deep inhalation.
âThe ocean does not fear the rain, the bedrock does not count the sparks, let the nine channels swallow the sky.â
He didn't swing his fist outward. Instead, Lin Feng smoothly extended his bare hands, his open palms calmly grasping the two closest columns of crackling violet plasma with a slow, deliberate grip.
...
The executionersâ lens arrays violently flickered with a sudden barrage of systemic alerts.
The high-voltage plasma currentsâcalibrated to force an independent cultivator's internal
Dantian
to implode from the kinetic back-draftâweren't burning his skin. They weren't even leaving a microscopic scorch mark. The moment the raw, synthetic electrical energy met the absolute, immaculate marrow density of his Stage 1 framework, it experienced a total, unconditional structural grounding.
Lin Fengâs scoured meridians didn't reject the energy; they weaponized it as a literal conduit. With a short, sharp flex of his forearms, he yanked his hands backward.
"Get down here," Lin Feng whispered.
SCREECHâBOOM!
The three towering executioners were violently yanked off their augmented feet by their own whiplike cables. The multi-ton mechanical torque of their direct-bolted titanium exoskeletons counted for absolutely nothing against the compressed mass of a true Qi Circulation cultivator. They flew across the room like heavy, broken slabs of iron, their bodies violently slamming together in a tangled heap of black metal plating at the center of the floor boards.
Before the cyborgs could reset their actuator gears, Lin Feng stepped off the hemp mat.
His silhouette didn't just blur; it completely disappeared from the room's optical baseline. His raw physical velocity at the Stage 1 peak simple exceeded the operational parameters of their obsidian visors.
Thump.
He appeared directly above the tangled heap, his right heel driving down like an unyielding mountain block into the torso plate of the nearest executioner. The compact, unmitigated kinetic energy bypass the outer titanium-alloy shielding entirely, traveling straight through the hydraulic line manifolds to rupture the main battery storage packs hidden inside the man's lower pelvis.
BANG!
A sharp, internal detonation of hot synthetic oil and compressed chemical fluid burst from the armor seams. The cyborg let out a choked, synthetic gasp before his visor went completely dark, his augmented neural systems going into an absolute, irreversible shock state.
"Anomalous entity!" the lead executioner screamed, his right arm mechanically whirring as he frantically thrust his three-foot-long tungsten-carbide hydraulic spike toward Lin Feng's throat. The screaming weapon sliced through the white steam, moving at three times the velocity of a linear kinetic rail line.
Lin Feng didn't dodge the spike.
He simply raised his left hand, his bare index finger and thumb casually closing around the tip of the supersonic tungsten blade mid-air with effortless, loose precision.
ClangâCRUNCH.
The high-frequency vibration of the weapon violently died against his bare skin. With a slow, casual turn of his wrist, Lin Feng gave a light, three-inch twist. The solid, reinforced military-grade tungsten spikeâengineered to puncture five inches of reinforced concrete bunker platingâdidn't just bend; it violently twisted and crumpled into a spiral mound of scrap metal under the immense squeezing pressure of his bare fingers.
"Your Matriarch spent forty years building a cage out of iron scrap," Lin Feng said softly, his vacant, bottomless eyes locking onto the lead executioner's lens display from inches away. "She thinks that by bolting dead metal into living marrow, she can own the fault lines of New Huaxia. But when the primary grand rifts split the earth during the winter solstice, your metal suits will look like common river clay to the things that crawl through the smoke."
Lin Feng made a loose fist with his right hand, guiding a dense, circulating current of sapphire Qi straight down from his
Dantian
into his knuckles. He delivered a compact, three-inch straight punch directly into the center of the lead executioner's faceless visor.
BOOM!
The explosion was entirely localized inside the helmet cavity. The sheer kinetic and energetic weight of
Mortal Flesh RefinementâStage 9 Peak Integration
completely pulverized the executioner's electronic processing logic boards and shattered his skull matrix without breaking a single pane of glass in the surrounding walls. The massive leader shuddered once, his crimson visor darkening into absolute vacancy as his frame collapsed heavily into the concrete dust.
Thirty seconds after the window had dissolved, the room fell into a dead, suffocating silence once more.
Four elite, augmented executioners from the Capital Zhao Core Branch lay scattered across the floor boards, their expensive tactical gear smoking, their primary energetic paths thoroughly liquidated.
Lin Feng stood at the center of the carnage, his bare torso completely unblemished by the synthetic oil or the flying metal shrapnel. He calmly walked over to the wooden pallet, picking up a fresh, dry t-shirt and slung his worn utility backpack over his right shoulder.
Suddenly, his cheap smartphone vibrated inside his jeans pocket.
It wasn't an alert from the
Brocade Carp Network
. It was a direct, encrypted satellite video transmission channel originating from a secure bunker in Capital Sector 01. The screen lit up to reveal the sharp, wrinkled features of the Zhao Clanâs Elder Matriarch, her clouded eyes burning with an intense, industrial madness through the digital display.
"You are an old soul, Student Lin," the Matriarch rasped, her gravelly voice carrying a cold, heavy vibration over the speaker. She looked down at the biometric telemetry monitors on her desk, every single line tracking her
Iron-Core Executioners
currently showing a flat, zero-point output. "You didn't use an independent registry script in Jiangnan. You've completed an Unbroken Foundation before the global solstice even reached its peak. Who was your master? Which hidden sanctuary gave you the mapping for Sector 04?"
Lin Feng held the phone before his face, a cold, undefeated smile curling the corners of his lips in the dark dormitory room.
"I am the manual, Matriarch," Lin Feng whispered, his eyes flashing with an ancient, golden luminescence that completely filled the digital camera interface. "Your core branch has spent the last twenty-four hours hunting a shadow, assuming you could trade my container for a piece of the fault line ledger. Let me give you a final calculation: your liquidity in Sector 01 is officially empty. Director-General Sunâs defense columns have just implemented a federal military freeze across all assets tied to your corporate bank."
A sharp, audible gasp echoed from the senior advisors standing behind her in the bunker. The sound of alarms blaring over the transmission proved the Central Bureau's regulatory purge had just dropped over their corporate servers precisely on schedule.
"You... you redirected the state?!" the Matriarch stammered, her aristocratic composure completely shattering into a mask of absolute psychological panic.
"The board belongs to me, Matriarch," Lin Feng said smoothly, tapping the glass interface to permanently terminate the data connection. He tossed the cheap phone into his utility bag and unzipped his jacket line.
The first volume of his grueling ascent within the capital was thoroughly finalized. The corporate giants were bleeding their financial reserves, the regulatory bureau was shifting its heavy artillery units under his explicit telemetry, and the independent variable that everyone sought to containerize had just severed the dragon's head from the capital's ledger.
He pulled the hood of his black sweatshirt low over his eyes, stepping through the open, ruined window frame and into the creeping morning fog. The countdown to the Great Awakening was still ticking, but the undefeated apex of modern Huaxia was already moving toward the primary grand rifts.
[VOLUME 1: REDEEMING THE FAULT LINES â END]
The story of Lin Fengâs grueling ascent toward absolute dominance will continue in Volume 2: The Capital Imperial Academy Rifts.