Chapter 8: Lattice by Lattice (Refurbished)
The morning mist still clung to the peaks of Emerald Sky Mountain, but below, in the outer sect, the cultivators were already buzzing. Not just with their usual morning Qi circulation, but with a low hum of confusion and curiosity.
In the communal Elder’s Hall, Elder Han, a wizened old man with a perpetually furrowed brow, scratched his thinning beard. "Did you feel that last night, Elder Wei?" he asked, taking a noisy sip of his bitter leaf tea. "A strange ebb and flow in the spiritual Qi. Like the very air held its breath for a moment, then sighed heavily, then quickly refilled."
Elder Wei, a plump woman with eyes that missed nothing, nodded slowly. "Indeed, Elder Han. A peculiar resonance. Most unsettling. I first thought it was the nearby earth-vein shifting, but then the Qi felt... drained from a specific area, quite rapidly, then replenished itself as quickly. It reminds me of those old tales of rogue cultivators drawing upon the ley lines themselves, but on a smaller scale." Her calm expression was momentarily troubled.
"Impossible!" Elder Han scoffed, waving a dismissive hand. "Our sect master would have sensed if there were any intruders intfiltrating the sect." He paused, taking another loud slurp of his tea. "Perhaps a new beast in the Spirit Forest? Or a disturbance from a rogue demon?"
"Or," Elder Wei mused, her gaze drifting vaguely towards the outer disciple dorms, where Shen Yuan’s cave was located, "perhaps something... new is happening within our own walls." But she didn’t elaborate, merely returning to her tea, her mind already running through subtle mental calculations, trying to pinpoint the origin of the disturbance.
Meanwhile, in the bustling outer disciple dining hall, the chatter was much less formal.
"Dude, did you feel it?" a scrawny young man named Li whispered to his friend, Jin, shoveling spiritual barley into his mouth with gusto. "Last night, during my meditation? I swear the Qi just... left my room for a second. Like the spiritual air-conditioning suddenly kicked off."
Jin, a more muscular disciple, grunted in agreement. "Yeah, I felt it too! My Dantian almost seized up. Thought I was finally having a breakthrough for a second, then nothing. Just... emptiness. It was freaky. Maybe the sect’s spiritual veins are dying?"
"Don’t say that!" Li gasped, looking around nervously. "That’s super bad luck!"
Inside that very cave, Elias Vance sat motionless, perfectly still, his body thrumming with suppressed energy. He wasn’t meditating in the slow, sleepy way the sect taught, where success was measured by how many wisps of Qi you vaguely felt or how profound your inner peace was. No, Elias was doing something far more intense: he was actively managing and monitoring a 37.2-trillion-node spiritual network—his own body—for any signs of catastrophic failure. It was like being the sole engineer of a massive, super-sensitive power grid, constantly checking for blown fuses and impending meltdowns. He needed is strong body frame to support the amount of qi stored in him, so he got to work.
Elias Vance had always believed pain was a diagnostic tool. It told you when something was wrong. Broken bone? Sharp pain. Burned hand? Pain. Stubbed toe? Existential pain. But the pain he felt now—this... transcendental agony of restructuring his own skeleton at the atomic level—defied all prior categorization.
"On a scale of one to ten," he hissed through clenched teeth, his voice a strained whisper, "this is somewhere between ’brain freeze in hell’ and ’entire spine turned into a Wi-Fi antenna.’"