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.'"
He wasn't screaming. Not because it didn't hurt—oh, it did. Every single nerve ending was screaming. But because he had total control. His divine sense, enhanced beyond anything any cultivator in the sect could dream of, wasn't just a passive sensory field. It was an interface. A tool. A scalpel. An advanced feedback system.
Elias wasn't simply enduring the pain. He was managing it. He was suppressing certain pain receptors, dimming their signals like turning down a volume knob. He was redirecting neural load, spreading the overwhelming sensory input across less critical brain areas. He was segmenting pain signals, separating them like background noise in a poorly designed data stream, allowing him to focus on the essential information: what was hurting, and why.
The process had started three days earlier. He'd run a stress test on his new micro-dantian cellular mesh, pushing his entire body to its absolute limit, and he'd realized one ugly truth: his skeleton, even with the initial Qi strengthening, wasn't built to handle this much energy. His amazing Qi-conductive network worked beautifully, but each joint, tendon, and bone was now a critical weak point in a high-pressure system.
He needed a new chassis. A completely rebuilt, stronger framework for his super-charged body. And in typical Elias fashion, he thought: "If I'm going to rebuild my skeleton from the ground up, I might as well use the best material possible. Why settle for bone when I can have… better?"
He ran thousands of mental simulations. He cross-referenced material strengths from Earth's science, considering things like spiritual energy permeability (how well Qi could flow through it) and structural integrity under immense pressure. The answer was obvious, elegant, and horrifyingly difficult to achieve:
Diamond cubic lattice.
It wasn't just a metaphor. The diamond cubic lattice is one of the most stable and durable atomic structures known. In carbon, it forms actual diamond. But Elias wasn't just trying to grow pretty, indestructible bones. He wanted to restructure the very atomic pattern of his existing skeletal tissue. He was going to transform his biological framework at a fundamental level.
Using his divine sense, he zoomed in—past the cells, cellular layer by cellular layer, then deeper, past the proteins and calcium, down to the individual atoms. He isolated the carbon content naturally present in his bone matrix, then, with incredible precision, he began to align it. He introduced targeted spiritual force like a microscopic catalyst, gently, gradually forcing these atoms into perfect tetrahedral configurations, the basis of the diamond structure.
One bond. Then another. Then another. Billions upon billions of them, forming a new, internal framework.
"This is what pain tastes like," he muttered, twitching as his femurs (thigh bones) began humming with a deep, resonant vibration, like tuning forks of agony.
The reconstruction burned. Each tiny shift in atomic structure sent a full-body vibration through him, a wave of discomfort so profound it felt like a wrongness, as if his own body was trying to veto the entire idea of becoming a diamond-infused super-being. Ligaments screamed as they were stretched and pulled. Marrow (the soft tissue inside bones) felt like it was boiling. Even his teeth itched with the strange, deep vibration.
But he was methodical. He was a scientist. He pushed through the pain, analyzing, adjusting, perfecting.
He reinforced the long bones first—his femurs, humeri (upper arm bones), tibias (shin bones). Then he moved to the rib cage, making it an unbreakable shield. Then his spine, transforming it into a super-conductive, super-strong central pillar. He paused several times to let his new system stabilize, setting up temporary divine sense dampeners to prevent his overwhelming internal pressure from accidentally liquefying an organ.
He took breaks only to drink water and to mentally mock his past self for having once thought that Qi Condensation was the hard part. That was just basic charging. This was rebuilding his entire hardware, rebuilding the very foundations of his being.
By the second day of this agonizing, meticulous process, he'd reached his skull.
"Ah," he said cheerfully, though his voice was strained, "the part that houses the thing I like most about myself." His brain. The core of his identity.
Restructuring the cranium required extreme delicacy. Brain tissue, even enhanced with divine sense neuro-threading, was far too precious to risk. One wrong move, and he wouldn't just be dead; he'd be an idiot, trapped in a diamond shell.
So he slowed down. Even more. Micro-adjustments. Tiny, precise shifts. He reinforced the sphenoid bone—a complex, butterfly-shaped bone at the base of the skull, a known keystone for spiritual energy focus. He adjusted the mandible (jawbone) to better withstand shock (and, as he humorously noted, verbal arguments). He finished by laying a diamond-cubic outer shell on the occipital bone at the back of his head, like building a divine, invisible helmet.
"Congratulations," he said aloud, slowly rolling his jaw, testing the new solidity. "I now have a diamond skull. If I die now, at least someone will make really expensive jewelry out of my head." The thought made him chuckle, a dry, rasping sound.
When it was all over, he lay flat on the floor of his quarters, twitching slightly and doing very little except existing, feeling the profound, terrifying changes within him. His body was a masterpiece of bio-engineering.
His mind-scan power ran an immediate internal diagnostic, compiling the results of his self-experiment.
Bone Density: +410% (His bones were over four times stronger and denser than before).
Qi Resistance: 99.7% (Almost perfectly resistant to internal Qi damage or overheating).
Impact Absorption: Diamond-tier (He could probably survive being hit by a small asteroid and barely flinch).
Internal Humility: Critically low (He was ridiculously, scientifically, and justifiably pleased with himself).
He sat up slowly. Every motion felt… grounded. Like his body had serious inertia now. Not sluggishness—solidity. His limbs didn't just move; they commanded the space around them, feeling impossibly heavy and strong, yet perfectly responsive.
"I weigh twice as much," he muttered, rotating a shoulder with a satisfying crack, a sound like thunder in the quiet room, "and feel three times as smug."
He stood.
The floor of his stone cave groaned. Then, with a sharp CRACK, a small fissure appeared under his right heel. Elias sighed. "Oops. Forgot about the floor's structural integrity."
He decided to run a few more physical tests. He leaped lightly in place—and found himself hitting the ceiling with surprising force, embedding a tiny crack there. He pivoted on one foot, spinning too fast, throwing himself off balance for a moment due to his new density. He practiced a basic outer sect punch technique—and his fist promptly tore clean through the thick, wooden training post embedded in his quarters, sending splinters flying across the room. The post was supposed to withstand low-level Qi attacks from disciples.
"I think I understand why no one else does this," he muttered, staring at the shredded training post. "They'd explode. Probably before they even finished realigning their kneecaps, let alone their whole skeleton."
This wasn't just body tempering, like dipping yourself in lava until you got tougher. This was material science. Lattice engineering. Atomic-level redesign of skeletal infrastructure using his mind-scan power as a precision fabrication tool and spiritual energy as the ultimate binding force, holding everything together.
Cultivators in this world tried to grow stronger by bathing in volcanoes, or eating rare herbs, or chanting for decades, hoping for a breakthrough.
Elias Vance, the Earth scientist, had just rebuilt himself like a sentient, self-aware humanoid Dyson Sphere—a massive energy-gathering machine, but made of bone and flesh, now ready for serious power.
He sat again, not to rest, but to plan. The true Foundation Establishment wasn't finished yet. His body could now channel, contain, and absorb more Qi than anyone in the sect—but it needed a core. A central reactor. A spiritual heart that could unify and control this immense distributed power.
That would come next. The core reactor. The full synchronization. The moment when every micro-dantian, every reinforced bone, every bleed-off valve came online in perfect, thunderous harmony.
But first, he allowed himself a moment of silence. Not meditation in the sect's sense. Elias didn't meditate. He just enjoyed the satisfying, deep internal hum of diamond bones beneath his skin, the quiet thrum of a power plant running perfectly within him.
"Lattice by lattice," he whispered, flexing his fingers, which felt impossibly strong and precise, "I'm becoming something this world won't understand until it's far, far too late."