Chapter 84: Manual Override
Panic gripped him as he felt his heart start to fail. He was pretty sure it wasn't supposed to do that. His muscles felt starved for oxygen, and he felt the need to breathe like he was underwater, even though he could inhale just fine.
After a couple of breaths, he was able to convince himself that he could breathe and needed to look at the cause of the problem. Something had gone wrong in his physical cultivation.
As a cultivator in the second realm, he was able to take a lot more physical punishment than a mortal, but even this was pushing it. He could feel his heart straining as it struggled to move his blood.
He traced it back, feeling one part of his body at a time. The erratic beats seemed to be caused by the flexing of his aorta, contorted in a way that didn't align with his heartbeat.
That seemed to be directly from the pumping action trying to move his qi through the channels. For some reason, it was also affecting his body. It made some sense; it was physical cultivation after all.
Paike could see two ways he could come out of this alive. First was to undo the changes he had made. That may or may not be possible in time. It would certainly set him back. It might even knock him down a stage of physical cultivation.
His other option was to try and fix this.
He didn't have time to weigh his options.
Reaching to the root of where his cultivation decided to pulse, he made a slight change. Instead of pumping his qi, it would pump his blood. The rhythm changed, but his heart was still fluttering, and it was getting worse.