When they moved on, Hunter kept one hand on the trees.
He’d noticed it in the thicket: the bark was warm, and not sun-warm.
Under his palm it hummed, faintly, the way a wall hums when there’s a transformer behind it.
“The ley lines run strong here,” the kid with the ponytail murmured, catching him at it.
“You feel it in the trees, and in the air.”
He could.
The air sat thick in his lungs, as though he were breathing through a wet cloth.
“System,” Hunter said under his breath, “what is this place?”
[SYSTEM] WORLD_OVERVIEW: TERRA•AQUA
ENERGY: QI (SPIRITUAL ENERGY)
DISTRIBUTION: AMBIENT + UNDERGROUND MERIDIAN_ROOTS → SURFACE NODES
So the planet had veins, and something ran through them, and the things that lived near them grew bigger and hungrier.
He filed it under reasons to hate everything and walked faster.
“Lex.” He kept his voice low.
“Your old boss, the man I…” He couldn’t say it yet.
“How strong was he?”
“First level of Body Refining, Master.” Lex didn’t turn around.
“It took him six years to get there from mortal.
To us he was very strong.”
Six years, and Hunter had ended it in about thirty seconds.
“And after that?”
“Nine levels of Body Refining, if you live, and then Foundation Establishment.” Lex’s voice dropped.
“Most who try for Foundation die.
The body can’t hold it, and they burst from the inside.
I saw it once.” He hesitated.
“Master, you put him down so easily.
You must be Foundation already, or even higher.”
He’d seen what the slave threads could do.
[SYSTEM] CULTIVATION_HIERARCHY
BODY_REFINING: 8 SMALL STEPS / HARDEN MUSCLE AND BONE
FOUNDATION_ESTABLISHMENT: EXPAND AND STABILIZE THE DANTIAN
HIGHER_REALMS: DATA LOCKED
Nine levels, and eight steps.
He read it twice before he got it: eight steps between nine floors.
Somebody had drafted the policy wording without reading it back, and the adjuster in him flagged the clause on reflex before he remembered there was nobody to send the memo to.
[SYSTEM] SPIRIT_ROOT: GRADE_B (SILVER-TIER / ABOVE AVERAGE)
ABSORPTION RATE: 2.3X MORTAL BASELINE
Silver-tier sounded fine, but so did “standard coverage”, right up until you tried to claim on it.
He wanted to ask whether it was good.
He didn’t want to look ignorant in front of his slaves, and then he noticed that he’d just thought the words my slaves without flinching, and he flinched twice as hard to make up for it.
The last two hours were trees.
In the eighth, a clearing opened on a rocky hillside with a black mouth in it, curtained with vines.
“There, Master,” Lex said.
“Home.”
“You live in a cave.”
“The best shelter for miles.” There was pride in it.
“It stays warm, and patrols never find it.
There’s an old ruin underneath, so it’s very stable.”
Inside, the tunnel split into three cramped chambers lit by torches in iron brackets and by thin veins of glowstone in the rock.
Hunter took the left one.
A threadbare cultivation mat lay on the floor, and it had almost certainly belonged to the man he’d killed.
He sat on it anyway.
There wasn’t anything else.
Fine, he thought.
Level up or explode, and let’s find out which.
He said yes to the prompt.
[SYSTEM] COMMENCING: FOUNDATION ESTABLISHMENT + SPIRIT_ROOT=GRADE_B
SUGGESTION: BITE YOUR SHIRT.
THIS WILL HURT.
A breathing pattern he’d never learned arrived in his head as if he’d always known it.
He followed it, in and out.
Qi came in through his nose and through his skin, down channels he had not known he owned.
It pooled below his navel, three fingers down, in the place the System called a dantian.
Hunter called it a battery behind the belly button, and then the battery started to grow.
It swelled until it was an ocean held behind a wall of skin.
The energy inside it tightened, turned heavy and dense, and began to circle: up the spine, down the front, back to the center, over and over, faster each time.
His meridians caught fire one by one.
The first passes scraped like grit through a pipe, carving channels where there had been none.
Then something black began to seep from his pores.
The stench reached him through the pain.
It was rot, rot with ambitions.
Somewhere far back in his mind, he understood that it was coming out of him: a lifetime of whatever made a mortal mortal, pushed out through the skin.
[SYSTEM] WARNING: ESTABLISHING FOUNDATION INFRASTRUCTURE
ESTIMATED COMPLETION: 7 HOURS 43 MINUTES
BODY SCAN: PHYSIQUE [UNREADABLE]
SPIRITUAL_SENSE: ACTIVATING
Unreadable.
Even half out of his mind, the word snagged.
On a form, “unreadable” was never good news.
It meant somebody would be calling you back.
Then the pressure found his soul, the same raw place the integration had torn open, and the pain climbed faster than he could follow it.
The cave blinked in and out.
Glowstone, black, glowstone, black.
The last thing he felt was his cheek sliding down into something warm and slick on the mat, and the last thing he knew was that it was his.