The morning of the third day arrived with a sky the color of old bruises.
Minho stood in the ruined pavilion, bare-chested despite the autumn chill, his skin already slick with sweat. Wu Chen's body was a map of his failures—soft where it should be hard, weak where it should be strong. Two days of brutal training had left him covered in bruises that bloomed purple and yellow across his ribs and shoulders. His hands trembled as he wrapped them in cloth strips, the kind servants used for cleaning.
"You're going to kill yourself," Mei Ling said from the doorway. She'd stopped trying to talk him out of these sessions after the first night, but she still showed up every morning, bringing water and clean bandages. "Young Master, please. The meeting is this afternoon. You should be preparing what to say to the elders, not—"
"I am preparing," Minho said, testing his stance. The horse stance he'd held for an hour yesterday, until his legs gave out and he'd collapsed face-first into the debris-strewn floor. Today he'd managed ninety minutes before the shaking started. Progress, however microscopic.
He'd spent the past two nights reading every text he could find, cross-referencing Doctor Chen's medical observations with the cultivation primers, mapping Wu Chen's shattered dantian against his own memories of the Heavenly Demon Divine Art. The pieces were falling into place, but they formed a picture that was either brilliant or suicidal. Possibly both.
The human body, Doctor Chen had written, contained what he called "vital gates"—points where the flow of life energy concentrated. Disturb these points through trauma or illness, and the body's natural equilibrium would collapse. But if you could force the body to rebuild from such a collapse, if you could guide it through the chaos rather than letting it destroy itself...
Cultivators called it Foundation Establishment. Martial artists called it marrow cleansing. Doctor Chen had called it regenerative crisis.
Minho called it his only chance.
"Mei Ling," he said, dropping his stance and turning to face her. "I need you to promise me something."
She straightened, her expression wary. "Young Master?"
"When I start, don't interfere. No matter what happens. No matter what you see." He held her gaze, willing her to understand. "Even if it looks like I'm dying. Especially if it looks like I'm dying. Do you understand?"
Her face went pale. "Young Master, what are you planning—"
"Do you understand?"
A long silence. Then, quietly: "Yes, Young Master."
"Good." He turned back to face the center of the pavilion, where he'd spent the morning clearing space and marking the floor with charcoal. The pattern was crude—nothing like the complex formations the Wu Clan probably used for their cultivation—but it would serve his purpose. A circle within a circle, with eight points marked at the cardinal and intercardinal directions. Each point represented a major meridian, a pathway through which qi could flow.
Or, in his case, flood.
The Heavenly Demon Divine Art was designed to absorb qi from defeated opponents—to tear it from their bodies and make it his own. But the underlying principle was simpler: forced absorption. The technique created a vacuum within the practitioner's dantian, pulling in any available qi without discrimination or restraint.
In a normal martial artist, this would be suicide. The human body could only process so much qi at once. Exceed that limit and the meridians would rupture, the dantian would shatter, and the practitioner would die screaming as their own energy consumption burned them from the inside out.
But Minho wasn't normal. And Wu Chen's dantian was already shattered.
The theory—and it was just a theory, untested and probably insane—was that if he forced enough qi into his broken dantian, the pressure would either destroy him completely or trigger a regenerative crisis. The body, pushed beyond its limits, would have two choices: die or adapt.
Minho was betting on adapt.
He'd spent last night in meditation, feeling out every crack in his dantian, memorizing the pattern of damage. Zhao Lin had been thorough but not creative—he'd simply shattered the center point, the spot where qi accumulated most densely. Everything around it remained intact, which meant the structure could theoretically be rebuilt. It just needed the right catalyst.
"Young Master," Mei Ling said, her voice small. "You're scaring me."
"Good," Minho said, and stepped into the circle.
-----
The first stage of the Heavenly Demon Divine Art was called "Opening the Gate."
Minho settled into a seated position, cross-legged, his hands resting on his knees in the meditation mudra Cheon Ma had beaten into him ten years and one lifetime ago. His breathing slowed, deepened, following the pattern that was more muscle memory than conscious thought. In through the nose for eight counts, hold for four, out through the mouth for eight.
Wu Chen's body resisted. The meridians were sluggish, unused to the demands being placed on them. The dantian was a knot of pain even at rest, each breath sending sharp reminders of its destruction.
Minho ignored it all and sank deeper.
In the murim, qi was generated internally through breathing and movement. Martial artists cultivated it like a garden, carefully tending their internal energy until it grew strong enough to fuel their techniques. It was slow, methodical, safe.
Cultivators, he'd learned from the manuals, didn't generate qi—they absorbed it from the world around them. Spiritual energy suffused everything: the air, the earth, plants, animals, even stones given enough time. A cultivator learned to draw that energy into themselves, to refine it within their dantian until it became something purer, stronger.
The Heavenly Demon Divine Art did both. And neither. It wasn't cultivation and it wasn't martial arts—it was something older, something that existed in the space between definitions.
Something forbidden.
Minho reached for it now, pulling the technique from memory and overlaying it onto Wu Chen's pathetic excuse for a cultivation base. The first circulation was agony. His meridians felt like they were lined with ground glass, each pulse of qi scraping them raw. The dantian shrieked in protest, qi leaking through the cracks as fast as he could gather it.
He kept going.
Second circulation. Third. The pain built like a fever, like being burned alive from the inside. Wu Chen's body wasn't designed for this. It had been pampered, protected, fed spiritual herbs and given cultivation pills to smooth its advancement. It had never known true hardship.
Minho would teach it.
By the tenth circulation, sweat was pouring down his face, his back. His hands shook. The qi in his meridians moved like molasses, thick and reluctant. But it was moving. That was all that mattered.
"Opening the Gate" referred to the moment when a practitioner's dantian began pulling in external qi without conscious direction. For normal martial artists, this happened gradually over months or years of training. The Heavenly Demon Divine Art compressed that timeline into minutes.
Minho felt it starting on the fifteenth circulation—a subtle shift in pressure, like the first crack in a dam. His dantian, despite being shattered, was still a dantian. It still wanted to fulfill its function. And right now, its function was to absorb qi.
The problem was that all that qi had nowhere to go. It poured in through his meridians, pooled in his dantian for a fraction of a second, then leaked back out through the cracks. An endless, agonizing cycle.
Unless he closed the cracks.
Or broke the dam entirely.
Minho opened his eyes. Mei Ling was watching from the doorway, her face pale, one hand pressed to her mouth. She could see it now—the way the air around him had started to shimmer, distortions rippling outward like heat waves.
"Don't interfere," he reminded her, his voice hoarse.
Then he stopped fighting the leak.
The effect was immediate and catastrophic. Qi rushed into his dantian with the force of a flood, filling it beyond capacity in seconds. The cracks widened. The pressure built. Minho felt something inside him give way with a sensation like tearing fabric, and suddenly the qi wasn't just in his dantian—it was everywhere, flooding his meridians, saturating his flesh, turning his entire body into a vessel for power it couldn't contain.
This was the moment. This was where he'd either trigger the regenerative crisis or die.
Minho channeled everything into the second stage of the Heavenly Demon Divine Art: "Refining the Vessel."
-----
Pain had colors, Minho discovered.
White-hot agony in his meridians as they swelled with excess qi, stretching like overfilled wineskins. Red blooming behind his eyes as blood vessels burst. Black creeping at the edges of his vision as his body began shutting down non-essential functions to deal with the crisis.
And through it all, a strange silvery light that seemed to come from inside him, from the qi itself as it tore him apart and rebuilt him in the same breath.
His muscles seized. His bones creaked. Every cell in Wu Chen's soft, pampered body screamed for mercy.
Minho gave them none.
"Refining the Vessel" was the stage where a practitioner used absorbed qi to strengthen their body. Normally, this was done gradually—small amounts of refined qi circulated through the meridians, slowly improving the muscles and bones over time. Cheon Ma had compared it to tempering steel: heat it, hammer it, cool it, repeat until it became something stronger than the base material.
What Minho was doing wasn't tempering. It was smelting.
He forced the raging qi through every meridian in sequence, following the pathways he'd memorized from the cultivation primers. Lung meridian to large intestine meridian. Stomach meridian to spleen meridian. Heart meridian to small intestine meridian. Each circuit was a lesson in suffering, each pulse of energy leaving burnt channels in its wake.
But burnt channels could heal. And when they healed, they'd be stronger.
He felt his body beginning to change. Impurities—waste products accumulated over Wu Chen's spoiled lifetime—were being forced out through his pores. His skin turned gray, then black, as toxins that should have taken years to purge came boiling to the surface. The stench was incredible, like rotting meat mixed with sulfur.
Mei Ling made a choking sound from the doorway.
Minho didn't care. He was too busy keeping himself from exploding.
The qi in his dantian was a churning maelstrom now, pressure building toward a critical point. He could feel the cracks widening with each second, could feel his body tearing itself apart trying to contain forces it wasn't designed to hold.
Almost there. He just needed to push a little further.
He drew in more qi. Not from his meridians this time, but from the world itself. The technique required visualization—imagining his body as a black hole, a void that pulled in everything around it. In his previous life, Minho had used this to drain dying opponents, stealing the last scraps of their cultivation as they breathed their final breaths.
Now he used it on the ambient spiritual energy that saturated the world.
It came reluctantly. This close to mortal lands, spiritual energy was thin, diffuse. The Wu Clan's estate had slightly higher concentrations than the town, but nothing compared to what the manuals described as "blessed lands" or "spirit veins." Minho pulled at it anyway, yanking every available scrap of qi into his body with the desperation of a drowning man clawing for air.
The pavilion's temperature dropped. Frost formed on the broken tiles. The air itself seemed to dim, as if the light was being sucked away along with the qi.
More. He needed more.
His dantian was approaching critical mass. The cracks had spread so wide now that it was less a vessel than a suggestion of one, qi bleeding out as fast as it came in. But the pressure was still building. The cycle was becoming self-sustaining—absorb qi, overflow the dantian, force it through the meridians, damage the body, pull in more qi to fuel the healing, overflow again.
A feedback loop. An ascending spiral.
Minho tasted blood. He was biting his tongue hard enough to tear flesh, but he couldn't stop. If he broke concentration now, if he let the technique slip for even a moment, the accumulated qi would detonate inside him like a bomb.
Doctor Chen had written about regenerative crisis triggered by trauma. The body pushed to the edge, forced to adapt or die.
This was trauma. This was the edge.
Now he just needed to survive falling off it.
-----
The exact moment when his body gave up and his cultivation began was impossible to pinpoint.
One second, Minho was drowning in agony, his every nerve firing distress signals, his shattered dantian hemorrhaging qi faster than he could replace it. The next, something deep inside him clicked into place with a sensation like a key turning in a lock.
His dantian stopped leaking.
For one perfect, crystalline moment, every drop of qi he'd forced into his body stayed there. The pressure stabilized. The pain receded to a dull roar.
Then it all came crashing back, but different this time. Purposeful.
The qi began moving through his meridians in patterns Minho didn't recognize, patterns that bypassed his conscious control entirely. His body had taken over, and it knew things about cultivation that Wu Chen had never learned, things that were written into the fundamental structure of existence itself.
This was Foundation Establishment.
Not the way the manuals described it—not the slow, careful process of compressing qi over months or years until it solidified into a stable core. This was violent, chaotic, more like watching a building being demolished and rebuilt in fast-forward.
His dantian restructured itself. The cracks didn't seal so much as become irrelevant as the entire organ transformed into something new. Where before it had been a simple storage vessel—a cup for holding water—now it was becoming a forge. A place where qi could be refined, compressed, fundamentally altered.
Minho felt new pathways opening in his meridians, channels he'd never accessed because Wu Chen had never advanced far enough to need them. His bones ached as they thickened, density increasing to support the weight of a proper cultivation base. His muscles cramped and spasmed, tearing and regrowing denser than before.
The marrow in his bones caught fire.
That was the only way to describe it. A heat that started deep in his skeleton and spread outward, burning away the weakness Wu Chen had been born with and replacing it with something harder. This was true marrow cleansing, the kind that transformed a person from the inside out.
Minho had experienced this twice before, in his previous life. He knew what was coming next.
The pain doubled. Tripled. Went beyond any scale he had words for.
His vision whited out. His body convulsed, muscles locking rigid as every system went into shock simultaneously. He was dimly aware of Mei Ling screaming, of footsteps running toward the pavilion, of voices shouting questions he couldn't begin to parse.
None of it mattered. The only thing that existed was the transformation, the fundamental restructuring of what he was into what he could become.
Somewhere in the chaos, he felt his cultivation base solidify.
Foundation Establishment. First stage.
The realization should have been triumphant. Instead, all Minho felt was numb shock as his body continued its violent transformation, as qi continued flooding his newly stabilized dantian, as the technique he'd set in motion refused to stop just because he'd achieved the impossible.
The Heavenly Demon Divine Art didn't recognize satisfaction. It only knew consumption.
More qi poured in. His cultivation base, still soft and new, began compressing under the pressure. This was dangerous—pushing too far too fast could cause a deviation, could crack his foundation before it finished forming.
Minho tried to slow the absorption. Couldn't. The technique had taken on a life of its own, his body now acting as an autonomous qi vacuum. He was trapped inside his own success, watching helplessly as his cultivation advanced without his input.
Foundation Establishment, second stage.
The voices outside were louder now. More of them. People had noticed something was wrong. Soon they'd break into the pavilion, try to stop what was happening.
They couldn't be allowed to interfere. Not yet. Not until the process completed.
Minho forced his awareness outward despite the screaming protests of every nerve. He couldn't move his body—it was locked in place, a statue carved from agony. But he could still manipulate qi.
With the last scraps of conscious control, he gathered the excess energy bleeding off from his meridians and pushed it outward in a crude, explosive wave.
The result was less a technique and more a detonation. Qi erupted from his body in all directions, a shockwave of unrefined power that cracked the pavilion's remaining pillars and sent debris flying. The people who'd been approaching were thrown back, shouting in alarm.
Good. That would buy him time.
Foundation Establishment, third stage.
His cultivation was climbing too fast. Each stage should take months, years even. Instead, minutes were passing and he was still ascending, the qi compressed so tightly in his dantian that it was beginning to liquefy.
That shouldn't be possible. Liquid qi was characteristic of Core Formation, a realm supposedly three full stages above where he was. But the Heavenly Demon Divine Art didn't care about normal cultivation progression. It had been designed by someone who'd transcended normal limits, who'd looked at the established cultivation system and decided to break it.
Cheon Ma had called himself the Heavenly Demon. The murim had called him a monster.
Neither description did him justice.
Minho felt his consciousness beginning to fragment, his mind struggling to process the changes happening too fast. He was Foundation Establishment fourth stage now, his cultivation base denser than most Core Formation cultivators despite still technically being in a lower realm.
The contradictions were going to tear him apart.
He needed to stop the ascension. Needed to interrupt the technique before it compressed his cultivation to the point of collapse. But he didn't know how. The Divine Art had no off switch—it ran until the practitioner died or until it ran out of qi to absorb.
And given that Minho had turned himself into a vacuum that pulled spiritual energy from everything in range, it wasn't going to run out anytime soon.
Foundation Establishment, fifth stage.
His body was transforming faster now, pushed beyond human limits into something else. His bones had turned dense as steel. His blood flowed thick with qi. His meridians had expanded to channels wide enough to circulate power that would kill a normal cultivator instantly.
He was becoming a weapon. A vessel designed for a single purpose: the absolute perfection of the Heavenly Demon Divine Art.
The thought should have terrified him. Instead, Minho felt a dark satisfaction settling in his chest.
Yes. This was what he needed. This was what it took to challenge cultivators, to stand against people who could break the sky with a gesture.
Foundation Establishment, sixth stage.
The absorption slowed. Not much, but enough that Minho could feel it—the technique finally reaching its natural limit. His dantian had compressed to the point where it couldn't hold more without advancing to Core Formation, and his body, despite its forced evolution, wasn't ready for that leap.
Not yet.
The qi flow stabilized. The pain began receding from unbearable to merely excruciating. Minho felt his awareness starting to return, his consciousness knitting back together after coming dangerously close to dissolution.
He opened his eyes.
The pavilion was ruins. What little remained of the roof had collapsed inward. The walls had developed massive cracks. The floor was covered in debris and something black and viscous that Minho realized with distant disgust was the impurities purged from his body.
Mei Ling was gone. So were the people who'd tried to approach. Probably driven back by the qi shockwave he'd released.
Smart. If they'd gotten closer, they might have been caught in the absorption field. The Heavenly Demon Divine Art didn't discriminate about its sources.
Minho tried to stand. His legs folded like paper.
He caught himself with one hand, fingers sinking into the wooden floor hard enough to leave deep grooves. The casual display of strength would have been impossible five minutes ago. Now it was reflexive.
Foundation Establishment, sixth stage. His cultivation had stabilized there, his dantian full to bursting with compressed qi.
He'd done it. He'd repaired his cultivation base, forced his body through a regenerative crisis, and achieved in one morning what should have taken years.
He'd also probably crippled himself in new and exciting ways, but he'd worry about that later.
Right now, he needed to move. The meeting with the clan elders was in a few hours, and showing up looking like he'd bathed in toxic waste probably wouldn't help his case.
Minho forced himself upright, legs shaking but functional. The world spun. His newly enhanced senses were overwhelming—he could hear conversations from the main compound, smell cooking food from the servant quarters, feel the qi signatures of every person in the estate like pinpricks of light against his awareness.
It was intoxicating. Nauseating. Perfect.
He took one step. Then another. Each movement was practice, relearning how to exist in a body that had been fundamentally altered.
By the time he made it to the pavilion's entrance, he was moving almost normally. The black toxins coating his skin were already flaking off, revealing flesh beneath that was paler than Wu Chen's had been, smoother, almost luminous.
He looked like a cultivator now. He looked like someone worth paying attention to.
Good.
The Wu Clan was about to learn that their disgrace of a son had become something else entirely.
And Minho was going to enjoy every second of their realization.