The heavy silence inside the South Training Hall stretched thin, brittle enough to snap under the weight of a single breath.
Instructor Meng stood completely motionless, her digital pen still resting forgotten on the floorboards. Her eyes darted from the deep, hand-shaped indentation warped into the solid carbon-alloy crystal back to Lin Feng’s calm, relaxed profile. For decades, the testing pillars had stood as the absolute, immutable yardstick of the Imperial Academy—structures engineered to ground the impact of heavy artillery shells. To warp its core required more than linear force; it required an absolute density of mass that shattered the standard variables of mortal physiology.
Up in the viewing galleries, the corporate syndicate representatives had stopped looking at their tablets. Several elderly men from the Capital’s primary branches had pressed their palms flat against the safety glass, their sharp, predatory gazes locking onto Lin Feng like wolves spotting an unknown apex predator entering their territory.
"Nine hundred and ninety-nine..." Zhao Ming muttered under his breath, his knuckles turning a stark, bloodless white as he gripped the seam of his white linen shirt. The pride of his artificial Stage 6 baseline—a result of millions of yuan worth of capital gene-stripping therapies and private archive breathing forms—instantly felt hollow, small, and utterly insignificant. "Old Tang... did you see any hidden triggers? Did the Jiangnan node leave a residual electronic variance in his clothing?"
Old Tang didn't respond immediately. His thick, refined ears twitched faintly as he attempted to track Lin Feng’s respiratory cadence. But the youth's lungs were operating on a flat, rhythmic cycle that didn't drag or push the ambient air. It was a perfect internal loop.
"There are no digital signatures, Young Master," Old Tang whispered back, his voice dropping into a register filled with a sudden, profound chill. "His skin... look closely at his knuckles. There are no calcified calluses or chemical burns. That isn't a structure built by hard labor. That is an Unbroken Foundation."
Lin Feng casually pulled his hand from his utility jacket pocket, completely ignoring the flashing red crimson errors on the suspended holographic display arrays. He turned his vacant, bottomless gaze back toward Instructor Meng, his posture completely loose and unassuming.
"Instructor?" Lin Feng prompted softly, his smooth voice cutting through the suffocating atmosphere of the amphitheater floor. "Is the calculation sufficient for my placement?"
Instructor Meng snapped out of her psychological paralysis, clearing her throat sharply as she bent down to retrieve her digital pen. Her severe face hastily reconstructed its mask of institutional authority, though her fingers trembled slightly as she tapped the clipboard screen.
"The... the testing software is experiencing a mechanical calibration error due to a localized mass variance," she stated, her voice tight, echoing unnaturally off the obsidian granite blocks. She didn't look at the elite candidates as she typed. "However... the kinetic minimum is cleared. Candidate Lin Feng, your provisional registry status is approved. You are assigned to... the Advanced Special Section."
A sharp, collective gasp rippled through the rows of provincial representatives. The Advanced Special Section was the playground of the capital's legacy geniuses—the vanguard tier funded directly by the Central Regulatory Bureau's inner circle. To throw an independent commoner from Jiangnan into that cage was an unprecedented institutional shift.
"Step back into the ranks," Instructor Meng commanded flatly, trying desperately to steer the schedule back onto the ledger.
Lin Feng gave a brief, respectful bow of his head and walked toward the elite staging sector. As he approached, the legacy candidates instinctively parted, their eyes filled with a mixture of intense, calculating greed and hidden hostility. Nobody sneered. Nobody spoke. The deformed carbon-alloy pillar behind them had thoroughly redrawn the boundaries of their arrogance.
He took his seat at the edge of the front bench, his worn backpack resting firmly against his shins. Within his lower abdomen, his
Dantian
remained perfectly composed, guiding the liquid current of Qi through his
Ren Channel
with the slow, deep rumble of a subterranean tide.
The first fracture is hammered into the capital's board,
Lin Feng calculated, his eyes casting a vacant look through the high-rise windows toward the smog-blanketed skyscrapers of Sector 01.
Zhao Ming will immediately report this variance to the core branch directors. The Bai family's intelligence networks will receive the data within three hours, and the shadow brokers will realize their 'broke student' has crossed the threshold. The hidden target on my back has grown into a beacon.
He welcomed it. In his previous life, he had spent a decade operating in the absolute dark, hiding from the corporate execution squads because his foundation was broken and his meridians were scarred. Now, he was the one holding the board, and the capital's elite were merely the pieces he needed to clear the path toward the primary grand rifts.
Suddenly, a localized electronic chime vibrated inside his utility jacket pocket.
It wasn't his cheap personal smartphone. It was a secondary, unbranded communication transponder he had extracted from the black-ops engineering squad leader back at the southern ancestral estate. The device’s encrypted screen lit up with a single, text-only alert originating from the highest server logs of the
Central Regulatory Bureau's Deep Directory
:
[ INTERNAL DIRECTIVE — GRID SEC 01]
[Source: Bureau Executive Office]
[Subject: Special Observation Protocol // Candidate Lin Feng]
[Action: The data drive provided at the Southern well has been verified. The western fault line anomalies match our satellite telemetry by 100%. The capital's Vanguard Selection is no longer an academic exercise. The first true dimensional tear is scheduled to breach beneath the Academy's North Training Grounds forty-eight hours ahead of the global timeline. Secure the youth at all costs.]
Lin Feng looked at the glowing screen for a split second before smoothly tapping the interface to wipe the cache memory from the transponder.
A cold, undefeated smile played at the edge of his consciousness as he slid the device back into his pocket.
The mishap of the early bureau deployment had officially given him a direct pipeline into the state’s high-level military movements. The global clocks were ticking toward the grand rupture, but the Imperial Academy’s hidden dragon nest was about to crack open tonight, and the apex of New Huaxia was already sitting at the absolute center of the stage.