My dao to eternity

The first thing Li Fan noticed, once he'd eaten properly and slept a full night in his own bed rather than the chamber's cold floor, was that his qi didn't feel the way three months of continuous refinement should have left it feeling.

He'd expected depth. Every prior breakthrough had delivered exactly that — a fuller reservoir, a denser current, power sitting closer beneath his skin than it had the day before. What he found instead, reaching inward the next morning to check the new core's shape, was a strange, disorienting distance, his qi answering his call a fraction slower than it ever had at Peak Qi Sea, as though the core now sat somewhere further from his conscious reach than the old scattered reserves had ever needed to travel.

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