The night before the tournament felt like a heavy, suffocating blanket. While the upper tiers of the Cloud-Mist Sect were ablaze with lanterns and the sounds of celebratory feasting, the servant quarters remained a cold, silent tomb. Long Chen didn't seek sleep. Sleep was a luxury for those who didn't have the weight of a buried kingdom on their shoulders.
Instead, he sought the heat.
The Great Kitchen's Hearth was a cavernous room built into the very side of the mountain. In its center sat three massive, blackened iron furnaces that ran day and night to provide steam and heat for the entire sect. To a normal person, the air here was unbreathable; to Long Chen, it was the only forge large enough for what he needed to do.
"Koda, watch the door," Long Chen commanded, his voice raspy from the soot.
The white ferret chirped, his eyes gleaming with an intelligence that far surpassed his tiny size. He took his post atop a sack of dry grain, his ears twitching at every distant footfall.
Long Chen stripped off his tattered, grey tunic. His body was lean—too lean—but his skin had taken on a strange, matte finish, like unpolished silver. He climbed onto the secondary cooling vent of the central furnace, a place where the internal temperatures soared upward of 180°C.
The moment he slid inside, the world turned into a roaring tunnel of orange and white. The heat hit him like a physical blow, trying to sear the oxygen from his lungs. His skin reddened instantly, blisters threatening to form before being hissed away by his internal "Pulse."
He sat cross-legged, the Stone-Breaker's Gavel resting across his knees.
"The Black-Cold Spring gave me the 'Density' of ice," Long Chen thought, his teeth gritted so hard they felt like they might crack. "But density alone is brittle. A diamond is hard, but it can be shattered by a hammer. To truly hold the Weight, I must have the 'Elasticity' of the flame."
He began the Second Pulse.
In his mind's eye, he activated his Origin Sight, turning his vision inward. He didn't see his body as flesh and blood; he saw it as a structural blueprint. His bones, already dark and dense from the Frost Qi he had "devoured" at the spring, looked like rods of cold iron.
He opened the "pores" of his bone marrow.
The white-hot energy of the furnace began to pour into him. It wasn't a gentle flow; it was a violent invasion. The Absolute Cold already stored in his marrow met the Absolute Heat of the furnace in a catastrophic collision.
CLANG.
His heart didn't beat. It rang. A sound like a hammer hitting a divine anvil echoed through the vent, vibrating through the metal walls of the furnace.
The pain was a living thing. It felt as if his skeleton was being melted down and refolded like a piece of high-carbon steel. Every rib, every vertebra, every finger bone was being broken at a molecular level and rebuilt. The "Smart" logic of his bloodline acted as the Master Smith, ensuring that the frost and the fire didn't cancel each other out, but instead wove together into a dual-polarity lattice.
Hours bled into each other. Long Chen's sweat evaporated before it could even bead on his skin, leaving behind a fine, white crust of salt and impurities.
Suddenly, the rusted key in his pocket—sitting on the floor of the vent—began to glow with a deep, obsidian light. The heat in the furnace didn't just stay hot; it began to spiral. The "Logic of Fire" was being sucked into Long Chen's marrow.
By the time the first grey light of dawn touched the kitchen windows, Long Chen crawled out of the vent. His rags were gone, reduced to grey ash that clung to his body like a second skin of soot. He walked to a water barrel, his movements slow and deliberate.
When he splashed his face, the water hissed as it touched his skin.
He didn't look like a "Power-up" hero. He looked exhausted, his eyes sunken and his frame still thin. But as he stood up, he accidentally gripped the wooden edge of the water barrel to steady himself.
Cr-shhh.
His fingers didn't just dent the wood. They passed through the thick oak as if it were wet paper. He looked down in shock. There was no splintering, no resistance. He had simply "overridden" the physical density of the wood with the sheer weight of his own existence.
He had achieved Dual-Polarity Tempering. His bones were no longer just hard; they were "heavy" in a way that defied the laws of the Mortal Realm.
Koda hopped onto his shoulder, sniffing at the strange, metallic-bronze glow that pulsed beneath Long Chen's skin.
"I'm ready," Long Chen whispered. The tournament was no longer a threat. It was an opportunity to see exactly how many "Genius" bones he would have to break to reach the ceiling.
Author's Note: The Dual-Polarity Marrow
1. The Physics of the Power-Up
Ice Polarity: Provides Rigidity. It ensures his bones cannot be crushed or bent by external pressure (like Elder Gao's Aura).
Fire Polarity: Provides Tension. It allows his bones to absorb and reflect kinetic energy. If someone punches him, the "Fire" in his marrow vibrates, sending the force of the punch back into the attacker's hand.
The Hidden Cost
Hunger: Long Chen's body is now a high-performance machine. He requires massive amounts of "Weighty" energy to maintain this state. He will soon need to "devour" more than just mountain air and furnace he