The door to Elias's small room clicked shut behind him with a soft thud. He locked it. Then locked it again. Just to be super sure. After that, he slid the heavy stone bolt across, and for good measure, he slapped a special soul-mark onto the door. He'd copied the mark from an elder's secret jade slip (another one of his 'borrowed' sect secrets). With that, no one was getting in. Period.
Outside, the Emerald Sky Sect was slowly winding down for the night. Disciples were in their rooms, some meditating, some whispering gossip, some probably still messing up their sword drills. But inside this humble room? A quiet revolution was about to begin.
Elias stood on the cold stone floor, in the middle of a perfectly clean circle he'd cleared. Every sprinkle of shimmering silver spirit-dust within that circle was laid out with incredible precision. He'd used his mind-scan power to measure it down to less than a millimeter – more precise than any ruler.
The glowing design on the floor was a formation, a magical drawing. But this wasn't just any old drawing from a dusty book. It wasn't some swirly pattern meant to gather energy, drawn by some weird old master 200 years ago. No.
This was custom code.
Runic Programming 101 (For Anyone Who Plays Games)
Elias had spent days tearing apart the basic rules of these magical formations and then putting them back together his own way.
To everyone else in this world, runes were just mysterious symbols, ancient drawings with magical power.
But to Elias? They were like computer commands for Qi energy.
Each rune: A specific instruction, like telling a computer to "open file" or "save data."
The lines connecting them: These were the wires, the data pipelines, showing where the energy should flow.
Qi energy: This was the power source, like electricity, and also the smart part that understood the commands.
Where you draw them (stone, paper, air): That's the computer's socket, where you plug everything in.
The whole formation: An ancient, open-source operating system (like Windows or Linux), but with absolutely terrible instructions.
"They're using old-school, basic computer logic," Elias muttered to himself, his voice a low hum in the quiet room, "but they forgot to add a way to fix mistakes."
So, he wrote his own debugger. He added conditional logic glyphs (like "if this, then do that"), error-handling stabilizers (to stop things from blowing up), and even recursive feedback tuning (so the formation could fix itself in real-time based on how much Qi was in the air).
This was writing a living machine that ran on the very breath of heaven itself.
And now?
Now he stood in the very center of it.
He sat down, cross-legged, breathing slowly, focusing his mind. "Begin," he whispered, a command for himself, and for the powerful ritual awaiting him.
He gently touched the main activation rune.
The formation hummed. Not with a sound you could hear with your ears, but with a deep, resonant thrum in the air, a vibration that felt like space itself was vibrating. Qi energy rushed toward the formation, pulled in as if a hidden river had suddenly found its slope.
At first, it was subtle. Like a faint breeze. Then, it became overwhelming, a powerful suction. The air pressure in the room visibly dropped. The temperature felt weird, shifting rapidly. The light from his single wall crystal warped at the edges, shimmering like heat haze.
Somewhere in the distance, out in the sect grounds, multiple elders paused their own meditations. They felt a strange disturbance in the Qi flow, a sudden emptiness in the air. One particular Formation Elder, a grizzled man named Elder Ming, felt a subtle ripple in the Qi. "Hmmmm, odd," he mumbled, scratching his beard. "Why has the Qi in this area suddenly decreased? Did have someone breakthrough, stealing all the energy?" He sighed, shaking his head. "Well, it's none of my business. The Sect Leader gave me a task to complete with a low budget. Where does he think I'm going to get the materials for this huge formation? Maybe I should just retire." He never looked towards Elias's direction, too busy worrying about his own problems.
Elias's hair lifted slightly around his head, not from wind—but from the sheer force of the Qi being compressed and drawn into the room. It was like standing in a vacuum chamber, but instead of air leaving, pure energy was rushing in.
And all of it flowed into him.
But not into his dantian, the main energy storage organ in the belly.
No.
Elias Vance had made a choice—one no cultivator had ever made, and for very good reason:
"Why would I cram all my energy into a single soft-ball-sized organ," he thought, recalling the flawed Qi condensation methods, "when I have access to… this?"
He opened his eyes, his mind-scan power sweeping inward, analyzing his own body.
The Micro-Dantian Network (Or: Everyone Gets a Battery)
He had calculated it. The average human body contains roughly 37.2 trillion cells. About 25 trillion are red blood cells, always moving. But another 10 trillion are muscle, skin, nerve, and other cells. Every single one is alive, active, and capable of storing energy.
He'd crunched the numbers: how much surface area each cell had, how much energy it could handle, how well it could conduct electricity (or Qi, in this case).
Then he'd asked himself: "What if… every single cell became its own tiny dantian?"
Why build one central battery when you could have a huge, spread-out energy network—one tiny battery for every cell? It was a distributed, decentralized Qi network. Like having a million tiny power banks instead of one giant one.
💡 Why It Worked (Elias's Simplified Explanation):
Each of Elias's cells, under the careful guidance of his mind-scan power, had been subtly changed. He'd tweaked the tiny outer layer of each cell, creating microscopic energy-cycle loops right inside their structure. Think of it like giving every single cell a tiny, personal Qi absorption and storage device.
He used ideas he'd "borrowed" (copied) from:
Ancient Elder manuals on "cellular tempering" (which mostly just told people to punch rocks until their hands bled and adjusted to the pain).
His divine sense observations of a powerful Soul Formation elder's meditation process (watching how their cells handled Qi).
And a night of desperate, slightly crazy experimentation, figuring out how Qi energy twisted and rotated around the tiny "powerhouses" inside cells, the mitochondria.
"Turns out, mitochondria really are the powerhouse of the cell," he muttered, a faint, almost scientific glee in his voice, as the first wave of super-condensed Qi flooded into his bloodstream, filling billions of his cells at once.
His mind-scan power split into thousands of individual threads, like tiny, invisible data cables. Each thread monitored and controlled the Qi flowing into a cluster of cells—managing how much energy they crammed in, what type of energy they absorbed (fire, water, etc.), and how well they resisted damage from too much power.
This wasn't just cultivation.
This was like programming a living reactor farm.
The first group of cells—in his left forearm—took three agonizing hours to completely fill with Qi. Under his mind-scan, the cells glowed faintly, pressurized with tightly swirling energy.
The next set—his back and shoulders—took only one hour. His body was learning, adapting. The Fractal Root was already at work, making the process faster and more efficient with each cycle.
By the third day, he'd passed 5 trillion saturated cells. His body was becoming a vast, interconnected network of tiny energy storage units. He ate nothing. He slept in short, burst-like meditations, barely leaving his quarters for a full week.
Outside, some disciples assumed he'd died from over-cultivation. Others hoped he had; Shen Yuan had always been strange, and now he was even weirder.
Inside his room? His body began to glow from within. A soft, pulsing light visible only to his own divine sense, or to anyone else with mind-scan power strong enough to peer through stone walls.
"God," Elias muttered, his eyes bloodshot from constant concentration, "I'm starting to resonate with my own heartbeat. My body is literally humming."
He checked an internal reading.
Qi compression ratio: 94:1. (Meaning, he was packing 94 times more Qi into his cells than normal).
Tolerance integrity: Holding. (His body wasn't breaking down - yet).
Failure cascade probability: Low-to-Moderate. (Still a chance he could explode, but not a huge one).
He continued. Pushing, refining, filling.
On the 27th day, it nearly broke him.
Every single cell in his body was at its absolute maximum sustainable compression. The air around him shimmered with pressure, distorting light. Even inanimate objects near him subtly warped—his bedding seemed to pull towards him slightly. Static energy crackled and sparked when he moved a muscle. He felt like a walking, vibrating bomb.
"This is fine," he told himself through gritted teeth, sweat plastering his hair to his forehead. He was consoling himself "I'm fine. My bones aren't liquefying. Just… humming."
He paused. And realized his bones really were humming, vibrating with suppressed energy.
He stopped. Pushed himself away from the edge.
On the 29th day, he pulled out. Literally—he cut off the formation's Qi draw, sealed his meridians to stop more energy from flowing in, and sat there for two hours, just meditating, letting the insane internal turbulence calm down.
Then he sat up straight, pressed a hand against his chest, and a wide, exhausted grin spread across his face.
"Qi Condensation, my ass," he whispered.
He wasn't just condensed. He was densified, distributed across billions of micro-dantians, harmonically stabilized, and running on more raw spiritual power than some mid-level sect elders who had cultivated for decades.
Now he just had to figure out how to not explode during the next stage, Foundation Establishment.
He stood slowly, his joints cracking like a string of tiny firecrackers. His muscles felt like tightly coiled cables of pure energy. His veins pulsed with a faint, visible glow. His skin felt… strangely too thin, as if the power within him was barely contained.
He looked down at his trembling hands, seeing the faint, internal light emanating from them.
"I'm a walking, grumpy star," Elias muttered, a dark chuckle escaping him. And the universe, if it had ears, probably agreed.