The "humiliation" of Zhao Feng did not bring immediate retribution. Instead, it brought something far more valuable to Lin Chen: obscurity.
Zhao Feng, paralyzed by the shame of being tossed into a spring by a "trash-root" water-carrier, told no one. He claimed he had slipped on moss. Wei Kang, whose internal nerves still felt like they were being pricked by ice, was too terrified to speak. For a few days, the world forgot about the abandoned herb pavilion.
Lin Chen used that silence.
He returned to the ruins that night and sat. He did not move for twelve hours.
The breakthrough to the peak of the Second Layer had changed the fundamental nature of his "Silent Thread." It was no longer just a wisp of energy; it was a rhythmic pulse that matched the rotation of the stars.
Day One to Three: The Sinking Weight
On the first day, Lin Chen stopped "breathing" $Qi$.
Most cultivators at the Second Layer are like hungry ghosts, pulling energy into their lungs and then pumping it through their meridians. Lin Chen did the opposite. He sank.
He allowed his consciousness to drop into the "Gaps" between his cells. He discovered that the more he quieted his own thoughts, the more the mountain's natural energy wanted to fill the vacuum he created.
By the end of the third day, his Third and Fourth Layers vanished into him. There was no sound. There was no heat. His skin simply became cooler to the touch, and his bones grew as dense as lead. While others spent months tempering their flesh with fire and friction, Lin Chen's body was being restructured by the sheer, heavy weight of absolute stillness.
Day Four to Six: The Echo of the Void
On the morning of the fourth day, Lin Chen realized that his meridians—the standard pathways everyone used—were actually a form of "noise." They were like loud pipes rattling in a quiet house.
He didn't widen them. He didn't temper them.
He collapsed them.
Using the Silent Thread, he pinched his meridians shut, one by one. To any Elder scanning him, he would now appear to be a total cripple, a man with no path for $Qi$ to flow. But the energy didn't stop. It began to flow through the "meridian-shadows"—the spaces outside the channels.
This was the "Escape." He was escaping the biological map of a human cultivator.
Fifth Layer. Sixth Layer. Seventh Layer.
The speed was terrifying. Because he wasn't fighting the $Qi$, because he wasn't trying to "refine" it into his own image, it flooded into him like a dam breaking. He was simply a vessel.
By the sixth night, the air inside the ruined pavilion began to distort. It didn't swirl like a vortex; it simply became... heavy. A fallen leaf drifting toward Lin Chen would stop mid-air, frozen in the density of the silence he radiated.
Day Seven: The Eighth Layer
By the seventh day, Lin Chen's heart was beating only once every ten minutes.
His internal world was a vast, dark ocean. The "Silent Thread" had grown into a rope of colorless power that bound his soul to his physical form with unbreakable tension.
He felt the Eighth Layer snap into place.
At this stage, a normal disciple would be a local legend. Their $Qi$ would be thick enough to deflect arrows and shatter boulders. They would be preparing for the "Great Transformation" of the Ninth Layer.
But Lin Chen felt nothing but a deepening of the void. He was becoming a "Black Hole" of cultivation. He consumed everything—the moonlight, the mountain mist, the spiritual residue of the old alchemical furnaces—and silenced it all.
Day Eight: The Final Descent
On the eighth night, the Qingyun Mountains were hit by a sudden, inexplicable chill.
There were no clouds. No wind. But the disciples in their dorms shivered and pulled their blankets tighter. The Elders looked at their candles, which flickered with a blue tint before going out.
Inside the pavilion, Lin Chen reached for the Ninth Layer of Qi Condensation.
In the standard path, the Ninth Layer is the "Roar." It is the moment the $Qi$ reaches such a volume that it prepares to crystallize into a Foundation Building pillar. It is the loudest a mortal can be before they become something more.
Lin Chen didn't roar.
He took all the gathered energy, all the weight of the eight days, and he pushed it into a single point in his lower abdomen. He didn't compress it into a ball of light. He compressed it into a point of nothingness.
The air in the pavilion suddenly rushed inward toward him, not as a wind, but as if the vacuum of space had opened in his chest.
Pop.
The sound was no louder than a bubble bursting.
Lin Chen's eyes opened.
They were no longer just dark; they were absolute. For a moment, the moonlight hitting them didn't reflect; it was simply swallowed.
Qi Condensation, Ninth Layer. Perfected.
Eight days.
A journey that took geniuses a decade and "trash-roots" a lifetime had been completed in the span of a week, in a pile of rubble, without a single person in the sect knowing.
Lin Chen stood up.
He felt... light. Paradoxically, the more "weight" he added to his silence, the less he felt the gravity of the world. He looked at his hands. They looked the same—calloused, dirty from hauling water—but he knew that if he wished it, he could strike a mountain and the mountain wouldn't explode. It would simply cease to be.
He walked to the entrance of the pavilion.
The sun was beginning to rise on the ninth morning. The Morning Bell began to toll.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
To everyone else, it was the sound of authority. To Lin Chen, at the Ninth Layer of Silence, the bell sounded like a tin cup being rattled by a child. It was thin. It was hollow. It was insignificant.
He picked up his empty water pole. He had work to do.
As he walked down the overgrown path, he passed a small spirit-flower growing in the cracks of the stone. Usually, a Ninth Layer cultivator's presence would make the flower bloom instantly from the sheer overflow of $Qi$.
As Lin Chen passed, the flower didn't bloom. It didn't even stir.
He had become so silent that even nature forgot he was there.
Far above, the eye of Heaven narrowed. The "Anomaly" had just jumped seven steps in the dark. The "Locked" status of Heaven's intervention began to hum with a strange, cosmic tension.
The One Who Escapes was moving too fast to be watched.