Lu Chen's head was still ringing from the woman's flute note when he said it.
"System. Initiate breakthrough."
The words left his mouth and the world hiccupped. Not stopped, not frozen—just slowed, like someone had poured honey into the river of time. The wolves twitched upward in slow motion, their legs moving like they were swimming through tar. The woman's flute note stretched into an endless, wobbly drone. Even the dust hanging in the air seemed to pause mid-drift, uncertain which way to fall.
Lu Chen had felt this before. The first time the System activated. That same weird sense of being pulled aside, of standing in the crack between seconds while everything else stopped moving without him.
[Emergency Breakthrough Interrupt]
[Detected: Host is in active combat. System upgrade pathway temporarily locked.]
[Host has a choice: remain at Body Tempering, or initiate breakthrough to Body Forging.]
"What kind of question is that?" His voice came out flat, annoyed. "Of course I want to break through. Why would I even—"
[Is that your final choice?]
His mouth snapped shut.
Something prickled at the back of his mind. The System had never asked for confirmation before. It just did things—popped up notifications, gave him quests, called him trash. The fact that it was asking meant something was wrong. Or something was hidden.
His brain churned through the possibilities in this stretched time. The word final. The pause before the question. The fact that the System was offering a choice when it had never offered one before.
A light bulb flickered on somewhere deep in his skull.
"Is there... a legendary Body Tempering 10?"
Silence.
Then—
Lu Chen's eye twitched so hard he felt it in his temple. "You could have just told me."
"Before time runs out," he said flatly. "Talk."
"Pros and cons."
Lu Chen's jaw tightened. He knew that feeling. He'd played enough EXP-grinding games in his past life—the ones where you hit level fifty and suddenly needed more experience than the entire early game combined. The wall wasn't a maybe. It was a when.
That was the frightening thing about EXP leveling. It was easy at first. Deceptively easy. Then it became a nightmare.
"Soul Points."
Lu Chen stared at the options hovering in his mind's eye. EXP—the familiar path, the path that would eventually become a wall he couldn't climb. Soul Points—the bloody path, the permanent path, the path the System had clearly been steering him toward since the beginning.
He wasn't stupid. He knew when he was being herded.
I can sense you've been pushing me toward it.
You literally just called EXP a trap.
You're not denying it.
Lu Chen almost smiled. "Soul Points."
<...>
"Did you hear me?"
The world snapped back like a rubber band letting go.
---
Time resumed.
The wolves were still rising. The flute note still hung in the air. But something had changed—a pressure building behind his dantian like a dam about to burst, a pressure cooker with no release valve.
BOOM.
The energy hit him like a freight train made of lightning. His meridians, which had always felt like narrow streams, widened into raging rivers. His bones—already dense from Iron Hide—creaked and groaned and reformed, growing denser still, like a blacksmith was hammering his skeleton from the inside. His blood qi surged past its previous limits, doubling, tripling, then settling into something that felt steady and deep for the first time since he'd transmigrated.
Crack.
A sound like a chain snapping came from somewhere deep inside him—a shackle he hadn't known existed, breaking apart like rusted iron finally giving way.
For one glorious, terrifying moment, he felt untouchable. Like he could punch through mountains. Like the world itself was just a suggestion and he was the final answer.
The feeling didn't last though—reality crashed back in with the weight of a thousand bricks. But in that moment, suspended between heartbeats, he understood what the System had been hiding. Body Tempering 10 wasn't just another level. It was a foundation. The difference between building on sand and building on bedrock.
His aura swelled, threatening to announce his presence to the entire forest.
[Veil of the Unremarkable — Hidden Function Unlocked]
[Aura Restraint Active.]
[Breakthrough to Body Tempering 10 successful.]
The thin cloth against his skin pulsed. An invisible pressure spread outward from his body, wrapping around him like a second skin, suppressing the flood of power before it could escape. Like a blanket thrown over a bonfire—the heat still there, the flames contained.
But a single strand got through.
Tiny. Almost imperceptible. Like a single thread escaping a knot.
It slipped past the Veil, past the trees, past the canopy, and touched the sky.
Thunder cracked overhead—sudden and violent, the kind of sound that made the guards jump and scream for their mothers. Clouds that hadn't existed a moment ago swirled into being, dark and heavy, as if the heavens themselves had glanced down for a moment. Then, as quickly as they'd formed, they dissipated. The world outside the clearing noticed nothing.
Inside the clearing, no one noticed either.
They were too busy watching the wolves.
The wolves twitched.
---
[TO BE CONTINUED...]