Chapter 378 - 33: The Wall

Chapter 378: Chapter 33: The Wall

Ash sat on the platform in the quiet of late night and opened the Status Panel in full.

The familiar blue interface appeared in front of him, crisp and clear under the soft residual glow of the array rings.

Foundation Rebuild: Layer 29 (Complete)

Strength: 8,000

Speed: 7,200

Endurance: 8,800

Mental Strength: 4,000

Spiritual sense range: 1,000 m

Mental energy: 100% | Recovery rate: Very fast

Cell reserve: 100%

Estimated lifespan: about 1,000 years (rising)

Soul: ???

Body abilities: Cell cosmic energy storage, fast regeneration, self-purification, poison and toxin resistance, temperature tolerance, pressure and gravity tolerance, low-oxygen survival, reduced fatigue and sleep, sharper senses and reflexes, pain and shock resistance, slower aging and longer lifespan, cosmic radiation resistance

Mind abilities: Parallel thinking, faster thinking speed, computation, perfect memory, focus and stability, faster learning, pattern recognition and prediction, mental resistance, larger mental pool and faster recovery, spatial mapping

Sealed Intents (not yet mastered): Sword, Fire, Annihilation.

He looked at the numbers for a long time.

Nine days of nonstop work. From an ordinary E-Rank body that could barely keep up in basic training to this. The pride was quiet but real. It sat in his chest without needing to announce itself. His body refining cultivation was now complete.

The technique that had carried him from Layer 1 all the way here had no more effect on him. No matter how carefully he ran the cycles, no matter how precisely the scanning step searched every cluster of cells, there was no further refinement. The tissue simply had nothing left to give under the current method.

Just to be sure, he formed the nine black holes one more time.

They bloomed in the familiar star pattern across his body. He pushed the technique as hard as he could, condensing energy until the singularities trembled on the edge of instability, then releasing it in controlled, precise waves. The scanning step examined every part of him twice. The Nova pulses washed through muscle, bone, organ, and marrow with the same clean force as always.

Nothing changed.

Not even the smallest improvement registered. The body remained exactly as it was.

He let the black holes fade and sat in the silence that followed.

---

In the monitoring station beneath the administrative tower, the junior technician rubbed his eyes and stared at the display for Training Room Seven.

The line output had sat at peak for days. Steady, high, almost greedy. He had watched the numbers climb and held his breath more than once, wondering when the system would finally complain or throw a warning. The draw had been heavy enough that he had started calculating how long the local reserves would last if it continued. But for the last several hours the consumption had dropped to nearly nothing. The line was quiet. Almost idle.

He leaned closer to the screen.

Could he have finished?

A small breath of relief left him.

Any more of that peak draw and he might have had to go down to the underground cosmic energy reservoir himself and top the system up the hard manual way. The process was straightforward in theory but miserable in practice. He would have needed to reach out with his power, drag in the abundant solar particles floating through the vast space around the academy, and compress them until they were denser and hotter than the surface of the sun. Then, using precise mental control, he would convert those compressed photons into pure cosmic energy particles before carefully feeding the converted energy into the underground reservoir.

Normally a dedicated conversion machine handled the work, but its rate was slow—far too slow to keep up when someone like the student in Training Room Seven was pulling energy faster than the system could replenish it. Ash had been the only real variable. His consumption had outpaced the machine for days. That meant the technician would have been forced to do the conversion manually, which was faster, yes, but also deeply unpleasant.

It was a mentally exhausting job. Compressing photons to that degree, converting them, then controlling an unholy amount of freshly created cosmic energy and guiding it safely into the reservoir without destabilizing anything—that alone was enough to leave any Martial Master with hours of headache and mental fatigue. He had done it once before during an emergency two years ago and still remembered the way his thoughts had felt scraped raw afterward.

He had no desire to repeat the experience at this hour, or on any other day, especially with most of the senior staff gone. So when the draw from Training Room Seven finally dropped to nearly zero, the relief he felt was genuine and immediate.

He logged the change with a few quick taps.

Training Room Seven – draw near zero. Possibly finished.

Relief mixed with curiosity. The student in that room had used up a few years of the western block’s energy in ten days and was somehow still quiet. No alarms. No emergency signals. No requests for help. Just silence. No reply from Supervisor Marsh yet either. The technician could not help wondering what was really going on in there.

He knew where the higher-ups had gone. Everyone above a certain rank had been summoned. They had taken off into the sky one after another, leaving the academy strangely empty. Most likely they were headed for the large space station in orbit. He did not know the purpose, and no one had told him. He only knew the school felt quieter without them, and that the energy systems were now his problem to watch alone.

He sat back in his chair, kept one eye on the quiet line, and tried not to think too hard about what kind of student could burn through that much power and then simply stop.

---

Back at the training room.

Ash tried again.

He ran the full technique from start to finish, slower this time, more careful than before. He let the scanning step examine every cluster of cells with deliberate thoroughness. He condensed energy until the black holes felt almost unstable in his spiritual sense. He released it in controlled waves, watching for any response, any flicker of further change.

Nothing.

He could not detect even the smallest refinement that might kickstart a new layer. The body simply refused to change further under this method. The technique that had been so effective for twenty-nine layers had reached the end of what it could do.

He was quiet more than angry.

"So that’s it?" he said to the empty room. His voice sounded small against the residual heat still ticking in the stone.

He leaned back on his hands and stared at the ceiling for a while. The cracked line he had left in the floor during the earlier frustration was still visible at the edge of his vision. The scorch mark on the far wall from testing the cell reserve had cooled completely.

"I thought there would be more. Like those MCs in webnovels that can go to three thousand three hundred thirty-three layers of body refinement that crazy author who made his mc undergo 33333 stage of qi refinement relam and he was comparable to a god level being, without even breaking through to the foundation establishment realm. I guess I’m not that heaven-defying."

He laughed once, short and tired, then let the sound fade into the quiet.

He lay back on the platform and stared upward. The air still carried a faint smell of ozone and hot stone. His body felt dense and finished and strangely still after so many days of constant change. He thought of Rylan’s last message—you owe me dinner—and of how much time he had already used. Ten full days locked in this room. He did not feel sorry for himself. He just felt the wall. Solid. Unmoving. Real.

After a few minutes he sat up again.

The number 29 did not sit right with him. He had a minor streak of that kind of thinking—odd numbers bothered him more than they should. In short he had a minor OCD, and he felt like Layer 30 would have felt cleaner, more complete. But preference changed nothing about the reality in front of him.

He began reasoning through it step by step, speaking aloud because it helped him hear the logic clearly and keep his thoughts from circling.

"To go further I need one of three things."

He held up one finger.

"A much more advanced technique. The Saint’s memories say Master-grade body refinement methods exist. They are on a different level from what I’ve been using. But they are not simple to get. They have to be learned from someone who already knows them, bought at a price I can’t afford, or found in some ruin or inheritance. I have none of those options right now."

Second finger.

"A way to improve my own technique so it affects me again. I’ve improved it again and again since I started. Every major fix—tighter compression, the return paths, the scanning step—moved the limit a little farther. But I’ve run out of ideas for now. The well is dry. Maybe more skill and more comprehension later will show me new angles. Right now I don’t see any."

Third finger.

"Higher-quality cultivation resources with greater energy density. The array’s energy is good. It’s clean and steady. But it’s ordinary. At this point it’s too thin for a body like mine. Something denser—like Quintessence Fluid—might give the technique something new to work with. It might create the conditions for further change."

He lowered his hand and sat in silence for a moment, letting the three options settle.

Then he picked up his terminal for the first time in ten days.

The screen lit up. Two messages from Rylan waited. He read them both carefully. Simple check-ins, the same quiet concern as before, asking if he was still alive and reminding him about the dinner he owed. Ash typed a short reply so his friend would know he was fine, then opened the academy systems.

His contribution points sat at 41.

He checked the contribution store with the same careful attention he had given the technique. Advanced techniques started in the thousands of points. Master-grade methods were not even listed for someone at his official rank. Quintessence Fluid was marked clearly in red: Restricted – Assessment reward only.

The Assessment was about three weeks away.

He had no better technique. Almost no points. No access to denser resources. All three options were closed for now.

He had also thought, more than once over the last few days, about initiating another space-time jump with the Boundless Origin Martial Soul. He could search for a version of himself that walked a different path—a Mage, a spiritual cultivator, someone whose methods might break this wall or offer a completely different approach to refinement. The idea was still there, waiting in the back of his mind. But he decided to hold the jump.

He had not finished the basics yet. He had absorbed a great deal from the Martial Saint—fragments of Intents, martial skills, combat techniques, circulation methods, battle instincts—but he had not mastered any of them. They sat in his mind like tools he had not yet learned to use properly. Jumping again before he had solid ground under his feet felt wasteful. Better to wait until the foundation he already had was something he could actually fight with.

He set the terminal down on the platform.

The decision settled quietly, without drama.

He would stop pushing the foundation for now. A body this strong with no skills was wasted potential. He still had about twenty days before the settling period ended and the academy returned to normal schedules. The right use of that time was learning how to fight—martial techniques, the skills from the Saint’s memories, and the sealed Intents that still waited behind the barriers he had placed.

"Okay," he said aloud to the empty room. "No more thinking about the odd layer. Time to learn how to use my current foundation."

He sat with that for a while longer, taking stock of where he actually stood.

Officially he was still in Body Refining. He had not broken through to Martial Apprentice. The academy systems would still list him as E-Rank if anyone checked the records. But his stats and abilities were already past that realm. If he had to put a rough number on it, he sat somewhere between a Peak Martial Apprentice and an Early Martial Master. Strong enough that most students in the academy would not understand what they were looking at if they saw him fight at full strength. Fast enough and durable enough that ordinary training spars would no longer teach him much.

He wondered, briefly, if Layer 29 was his absolute limit.

He checked the Saint’s memories of what the true limit felt like when a body was ready to cross into the next major realm. In those memories the body always gave a clear signal—a deep, almost hungry pull, a sense that the current vessel had become too small and needed to break open into something larger. Ash did not feel that. His body felt finished under the current method, dense and complete and quiet, but it did not feel like it was asking to break through. So this wall was the limit of his methods and resources, not the body’s true ceiling.

He would deal with the breakthrough later, when he had better tools.

There was no time to waste tonight.

He lay down on the cot, closed his eyes, and used the reduced-sleep ability to take exactly thirty minutes of rest. His mind stayed clear even as the short sleep took hold. When he opened his eyes again the room was the same, the quiet was the same, and the work waiting for him had changed direction completely.

No more refinement.

It was time to learn how to use what he had built.