Elias sat motionless.
He wasn't meditating. Not in the way the sect taught it.
He was monitoring a 37.2-trillion-node spiritual network for symptoms of self-detonation.
A faint flicker behind his ribs—cluster 2A03-Q had a momentary resonance instability. He nudged the internal rotation angle five degrees. Fixed.
Another node in the sole of his right foot was vibrating slightly out of phase with the leg's meridian flow. He ran a three-second recalibration cycle.
"Can't believe the manuals call this 'just sitting still,'" he muttered.
His skin felt tight. Not in a metaphorical sense. It was literally stretched from the inside, Qi compressed so densely within his cells that the osmotic pressure could probably vaporize a frog.
There was no benchmark for this.
No manual in the outer, inner, or core library said anything about what to do when your entire circulatory system feels like it's whistling.
He shifted slightly and felt the floor creak beneath him.
"I've become a pressure cooker."
Elias wasn't worried about failure. He was worried about leakage.
With that much Qi packed into his system, even a slight misalignment of flow could rupture a meridian. Or ignite spontaneous cellular combustion.
"If one of my eyelashes gets itchy, I might vaporize the roof."
So, naturally, he created backup systems.
He began with his nervous system—using divine sense to map and encode conditional escape valves.
Each major nerve cluster became a controlled bleed-off node, programmed to activate if internal Qi pressure exceeded a preset threshold.
He carved the first node at the base of his spine, layering in divine sense runes so small, they'd make a fly's eye seem bulky.
Then he placed eight more, forming an internal emergency array woven directly into his flesh.
"In case I sneeze too hard and turn into a local weather phenomenon."
Next came the skeletal reinforcements.
He realized very quickly that his bones, while strengthened by Qi, were still… well, bones.
Not carbon fiber. Not titanium alloy.
So, naturally, he ran a full diagnostic.
He began altering the internal atomic lattice of his skeletal system using subatomic manipulation via divine sense. What was once a bone matrix became a triangular crystalline reinforcement pattern, hexagonally layered.
"Strong, flexible, and potentially useful for broadcasting low-band Qi frequencies. Huh. Built-in antennas."
For his muscle tissue, he wove internal energy-regulating "micro-coils"—muscle fibers shaped and trained into pulsing lattices that regulated spiritual pressure like hydraulic dampeners.
Even his organs were given structural failsafes.
His lungs? Layered like a bellows with alternating Qi-absorptive folds.
His liver? Tempered into a chemical filtration unit for spiritual impurities.
His heart? Well...
"You are now the motherboard, sorry," he said out loud, gently patting his chest.
On the eighth day, he initiated a full-system stress test.
He sat down. Breathed once. And gave himself permission to begin Qi flow from all 37.2 trillion micro-dantians simultaneously.
Results:
Qi density increased by 4,300% in three seconds.
Divine sense recorded 1,271 near-failures, all self-corrected via his bleed-off arrays.
Ambient air ionized. His clothes developed a soft electric crackle.
The candle on his desk melted. Through the stone.
And yet—he was stable.
He grinned. A tight, tired expression.
"Congratulations," he whispered to himself. "You are now an unsanctioned nuclear power plant. In sandals."
But then came the real challenge.
Foundation Establishment.
The sect's manuals described the breakthrough in poetic terms:
"Shape your Qi into a foundation within your dantian, stabilizing it with will and breathing."
Elias stared at the scroll.
"Translation: Build a glorified Qi donut and hope it doesn't collapse."
Nope.
That wouldn't do.
He needed a container—not a puddle.
Not a cloud. Not a spinning disc.
A structure worthy of housing what was essentially a city-sized energy grid shrunk down into human form.
So he turned back to physics.
He visualized it:
A containment shell—three-dimensional, fractal-stabilized.
Built not in his dantian, but woven across his entire nervous system.
Triangular lattices layered in nested tetrahedrons.
Qi filters aligned along his blood vessels like circuit regulators.
A core not in the gut, but in the pineal gland—the most naturally electromagnetic point in the body.
"If I'm going to ascend to godhood," he muttered, "I'm doing it with symmetry."
He began the initial blueprint—sculpting the spiritual "Foundation" not as a blob of Qi, but as a reactor casing capable of scaling exponentially.
Meanwhile, outside his room...
No one had noticed anything.
Because Elias, as always, kept his divine sense tighter than a miser's purse. All energy flow was internal. His formation was buried beneath stone. His activities masked by low-tier disciple camouflage.
Back in his room, Elias wiped sweat from his brow.
Three weeks.
Three weeks of saturation. Modification. Rerouting. Restructuring.
He was ready.
"Next step: simulate the foundation establishment collapse scenarios. Then initiate containment core construction."
He paused, blinked, and cracked his knuckles.
"After that… we'll finally get to do some real research."