The six massive automated transport carriers sat empty in the dark loading plaza behind Dormitory Block D, their multi-ton hydraulic beds gleaming with oil under the copper dusk. Within twenty minutes, the three thousand tons of uncut northern marrow stones had been completely extracted, transferred, and stored within the subterranean storage vaults beneath Lin Feng's quarters.
Instructor Meng had already withdrawn her tactical escort team to reinforce the outer campus gates, leaving the sector under an absolute, Code Black administrative lockdown.
Inside Room 409, the silence was dense and absolute.
Lin Feng sat in the center of the floorboards, completely surrounded by hundreds of rough, raw chunks of northern marrow stone. Unlike the glowing white Tai jades, these minerals were dark, heavy, and caked in a thick crust of sub-zero ice. They radiated a cold, crushing tectonic pressure that caused the air inside the room to visibly warp, tiny silver frost geometric patterns crystallizing along the concrete walls.
Han Xue wasn't lying about the composition,
Lin Feng calculated, his vacant, bottomless eyes tracking the dense, pale-blue matrix lines running through the rocks.
The Changbai ridge fault blocks compressed these nodes for three centuries before the calendar cracked. This isn't common spiritual vapor. This is pure, raw geocentric marrow fuel.
To open the
Du Channel
âthe primary dorsal pathway running from his lower lumbar straight up into his cranial matrixâhis current liquid Qi reservoir needed to undergo a total, devastating structural acceleration. He didn't just need to circulate energy; he needed to hammer his bone marrow into a flawless, unbroken conduit capable of anchoring the weight of the coming continental rifts.
Lin Feng closed his eyes, taking a single, deep breath that carried a sharp, metallic ozonous hertz.
âThe geocentric root descends to the core, the dorsal loop ascends to the sky, let the marrow turn to silver.â
He didn't manually crush the rocks with his hands. Instead, his
Qi Circulation ChannelingâStage 1
internal engine violently accelerated, spinning within his
Dantian
with the deep, pressurized roar of a subterranean tide.
HUMMMM.
A massive, invisible micro-gravitational pull detonated outward from his lower abdomen, forming a perfect, spherical energetic vacuum within a three-meter perimeter. The hundreds of multi-ton marrow stones surrounding him instantly left the floor, floating into the air and revolving around his bare torso in a slow, rhythmic celestial orbit.
Suddenly, the thick crust of sub-zero ice covering the minerals violently vaporized into a dense cloud of pale blue steam. Under the intense squeezing pressure of his circulating liquid Qi, the solid stones began to rapidly crack, fracture, and bleed their uncorrupted geocentric core currents directly into the atmosphere.
Long, liquid ribbons of pure, sapphire-blue energyâeach one cold enough to instantly calcify a Stage 9 Flesh Refinement practitionerâs lungs into solid iceâpoured from the stones, drilling straight into Lin Fengâs open pores.
...
The sensation was excruciating. It felt as if a river of liquid nitrogen and pulverized steel was being ruthlessly injected straight into his vertebral column.
Ordinary legacy descendants who attempted to bypass the system parameters using raw marrow stones would have experienced an instant cellular collapse, their skeleton shattering into fine powder under the sheer atmospheric weight of the geocentric current.
But Lin Feng's face remained an absolute mask of unbothered, student-like simplicity. His pulse didn't spike past sixty beats per minute. Within his lower abdomen, the
Dao Blueprint
âthe immutable internal alignment matrix he had scoured into his fleshâremained perfectly flat, absorbing and grounding the immense kinetic backlash into the granite foundation beneath his heels.
Circulate,
his mind commanded, guiding the boiling blue current straight into his
Changqiang
node at the base of his spine.
The liquid geocentric fuel slammed into the calcified dorsal pathways, ruthlessly tearing through the structural impurities left behind by his previous life as a broke scavenger. Node by node, his
Du Channel
was forcibly scoured clean, his bone marrow absorbing the sapphire light until his ribs and collarbones vibrated with a deep, silver-white pearlescent luminescence.
Candidate 45 Baseline Update:
Dorsal Channel Dilation: 30%... 60%... 90%...
CRACKâBOOM!
By 02:00 AM, a silent, high-frequency shockwave of absolute atmospheric pressure detonated from Room 409, blowing the reinforced poly-glass windows outward into a thousand microscopic shards. The hundreds of marrow stones floating around his body instantly turned into a fine, harmless white ash that drifted out into the mountain fog.
Lin Feng slowly opened his eyes. A brilliant, blinding flash of pure golden luminescence illuminated the dark room, so intense it burned out the automated security camera lens mounted on the opposite corridor wall before settling back into a calm, deceptive vacancy.
He stood up smoothly, his bare skin completely clean, free of any synthetic impurities or chemical burns. His posture was perfectly straight, blade-like, and so thoroughly anchored that his small footsteps left zero sound on the concrete floor.
[ANALYSIS: MERIDIAN LOOP â STAGE 2 REGISTERED]
[POWER BASELINE: QI CIRCULATION CHANNELING // STAGE 2 SUCCESSFUL]
[Du Channel Realignment: 100% Core Cohesion achieved]
"The second loop is locked," Lin Feng murmured softly, his smooth voice carrying a deep spatial resonance that caused the puddles in the courtyard outside to instantly vaporize into thin wisps of steam.
He reached down, picking up a fresh black t-shirt and slung his worn utility backpack across his shoulder. He checked the screen of his unbranded transponder. The encrypted satellite data feed from Director-General Sunâs war room was actively flashing with an intense crimson alert:
[ALERT: CRITICAL SITE BREACH â SECTOR 01 CORE]
[Source: Inner Directory Satellite Arrays]
[Subject: Southern Flame Syndicate Vanguard]
[Action: Three tracking signatures matching the Gilded Elders have just crossed the capital's southern defense grid. They have bypassed the state's military checkpoint using high-tier flame-shroud matrices. Current vector: Moving toward the Academy's main testing ground at three times the speed of linear transport lines. The countdown to the Imperial Core Rift has reached 60 minutes.]
Lin Feng looked at the glowing red text, a cold, undefeated smile curling the absolute corners of his lips within the dark, ruined dormitory room.
The Southern Flame Syndicateâs old dragons had arrived precisely on schedule to contest the table. They thought their forty years of vault refinement would grant them the monopoly over the primary world-rift, completely blind to the fact that the student they were coming to audit had just scoured his second loop using the mountains as fuel.
He pulled the hood of his gray utility jacket low over his eyes, stepping off the ledge and into the midnight mist, his silhouette walking straight toward the final war zone of the capital stage.