Chapter 111: Twenty-Nine Point Eight

Montclair's reaction was clear before the physician finished writing the report.

Publicly, he had completed his first full Internal Organ tempering in less than a year. Heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, and spleen had all been strengthened in sequence, while the medical records showed steady progress without any serious interruption. The physician checked the final measurements once more before signing his name.

"You've done well."

Joe finished buttoning his shirt and glanced toward the report. "Well enough to change anything?"

The physician gave him a knowing look. "That's the part you actually care about."

"Praise doesn't pay for medicine."

"No, but this report probably will."

He turned the page slightly, though not far enough to hand it over.

"Completing the first cycle at your age would already be considered a strong result for someone properly prepared. Doing it in less than a year while keeping the medical record this clean gives recruitment a reason to increase its investment."

The physician added a final note beneath his signature. "You'll still take several weeks before anyone clears you for serious second-cycle tempering. Circulation practice is fine, but I don't want you deciding that feeling healthy means the organs are ready."

"I wasn't planning to begin tomorrow."

"Good. Remember that answer when you've felt perfectly fine for three days and start convincing yourself I'm being cautious for no reason."

"I'll wait for clearance."

The physician nodded and closed the file. As far as Montclair knew, five newly tempered organs now needed time to stabilize before Joe could begin again from the Heart.

Privately, there was no second cycle left to begin. He had completed all nine.

Three days later, the revised authorization arrived. His nutritional allowance increased, better recovery medicines became available, and his access to physicians widened. The annex also expanded his library permissions into advanced mortal medicine, pharmaceutical processing, Acquired theory, and several historical martial collections. The Montclair family's core inheritances remained closed. Joe had expected that, and for the moment the books interested him more. Montclair believed it was preparing him for another Internal Organ cycle that might occupy much of the following year. Joe was preparing for Acquired.

Before beginning that transition, however, he wanted to understand something he had largely ignored while pushing through repeated organ tempering. He wanted to know what his completed Internal Organ realm could actually do. Ashbourne made that easier to investigate than Blackwood ever could have. Even after nearly a year in the city, Joe still noticed its peculiar mixture of old and new technology. Horse carts crowded intersections beside motorcars. Some medicine shops ground herbs by hand while clinics only a few buildings away used electrical diagnostic equipment. Factories ranged from belt-driven machinery and steam-assisted systems to specialized devices that had no close equivalent in his previous life.

Martial cultivation had pushed technology toward problems his old world had never needed to solve. Force measurement was one of them. Joe found what he needed in the South District. The dealer called it a dual-layer martial force tester. Its housing was built from thick industrial steel, with reinforced springs, mechanical gauges, and electrical sensors connected to a control box beneath the platform. The receiving assembly was more interesting. A heavy outer plate measured ordinary transmitted force, while a second receiver sat behind a buffered layer designed to record power carried through the first surface instead of being spent entirely against it.

Joe examined the mechanism long enough for the dealer to grow impatient.

"You buying it or planning to spend the afternoon staring at it?"

"That depends on whether the inner gauge still holds calibration."

"It came out of a training hall. They replaced it with a newer model, not because this one broke."

Joe crouched beside the control housing. "I'll check anyway."

The dealer sighed. "I assumed you would."

The calibration remained sound.

"I'll take it."

The dealer became noticeably friendlier after that. Joe did not make the purchase as Joe Vale. Different clothes handled the first impression, while Disguise took care of the smaller details. He carried his shoulders lower, shortened his stride, altered his posture enough to change his apparent proportions, and used a rougher voice than the one people at the annex knew. The skill could not transform him into an entirely different person, but it did not need to. Making a stranger's memory of him uncertain was enough. The machine was delivered to a rented industrial room near the freight yards, where the arrival of heavy equipment attracted little attention. Joe waited two nights before returning alone.

Rain had passed earlier that evening, leaving the room smelling of damp concrete and machine oil. Trucks occasionally rumbled beyond the shuttered windows, their engines muffled by distance and the thick walls. Joe closed the door, switched on the overhead light, and started the tester. The machine responded with a low electrical hum. He began with the simpler measurement. Joe planted his feet before the receiving plate and settled his posture. He deliberately avoided any unusual Internal Organ circulation, allowing his external martial structure to produce the force naturally. Power travelled from the ground through his legs, hips, spine, shoulders, and arms before entering the plate.

The outer gauge climbed steadily and slowed near twenty-eight hundred kilograms. Joe increased the pressure slightly, confirmed that the reading held, and stopped. Approximately 2.8 tons. The result matched his expectations. Ashbourne martial texts called this open expression of physical strength Ming Jin, the direct force produced through the external martial body Joe had developed through Skin, Muscle, and Bone. He reset the tester. The second measurement was the real reason he had bought it. Joe placed one palm against the first plate without pushing and began circulating Blood Energy.

A response rose from much deeper within his body. The sensation was not new. He had first noticed traces of it after completing his initial Internal Organ tempering, but at the time his attention had already shifted toward recovery and the second cycle. Later, when the effect became easier to reproduce, he had been far more interested in completing repeated tempering safely than in studying an ability he had little immediate reason to use. Combat had never forced the issue either. Joe rarely fought seriously, and the physical advantage he already possessed had usually been large enough that distinguishing between different expressions of force was unnecessary.

Now there was no next organ demanding his attention. He could finally examine what had been developing inside him. Years earlier, Theodere had explained why Internal Organ practitioners were called true Martial Artists. A Bone practitioner struck what he touched. A true Martial Artist could carry force deeper. Joe had understood the explanation intellectually. Only now did he possess the body required to understand the sensation behind it. He circulated Blood Energy again. The strengthened organs responded together, changing the way the energy moved through the body. It did not become qi, nor did it feel like a completely different substance. The difference lay in what the completed internal system could now do with power that had already existed.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to NovelPhoenix for the genuine story.

Joe pressed his palm forward. The outer gauge barely moved while the inner receiver jumped. He withdrew and watched the needle settle. An Jin. Joe repeated the test with even less muscular effort. The first plate registered little more than contact, yet the receiver behind it still moved. Theodere's old explanation finally became practical. An Jin did not ignore matter or pass freely through anything in its path. The outer defense still mattered. What changed was that the entire attack no longer had to exhaust itself against the first point of resistance. A portion could be transmitted through contact and released deeper inside the target.

That made armor, thick muscle, and other external defenses less absolute than they were against ordinary direct force. Joe increased the output gradually. The inner gauge climbed well beyond the 2.8 tons recorded by the outer plate. He stopped around fifteen tons, checked his circulation and organ response, then continued only after confirming that nothing felt unstable. The second attempt passed twenty tons before finally settling near twenty-seven thousand kilograms. Joe stared at the reading. Approximately twenty-seven tons of effective hidden force. That was far beyond anything his external body could produce on its own.

He reset the machine one final time. This time he allowed Ming Jin and An Jin to operate together, combining direct structural power with the deeper transmission produced by his completed Internal Organ system. The gauge stopped at 29,800 kilograms. Joe maintained the output for several breaths while monitoring his Heart, breathing, and circulation. Nothing destabilized. He released the pressure and watched the machine return to zero. Only then did he pull a chair closer. Twenty-nine point eight tons did not mean he could casually lift that weight or push it across a floor. The tester measured effective martial force delivered through a coordinated attack, which was a very different thing.

Joe wanted the result to make sense. Joe took out a sheet of paper and compared the reading with the measurements he had accumulated during Internal Organ cultivation. His external Ming Jin accounted for roughly 2.8 tons. The first four Internal Organ cycles had followed Montclair's recorded averages closely enough to provide a reliable starting point. The later cycles gave diminishing returns, and Joe's own estimates placed the total hidden-force contribution of all nine ordinary refinements at roughly 13.5 tons before Great Completion. That matched what he remembered sensing before the final spleen refinement.

The ninth completion had changed the structure rather than merely adding another small gain. Once the Internal Organ foundation integrated as a complete system, its accumulated contribution had effectively doubled to roughly twenty-seven tons. Add the direct force of the external body, and the machine's reading was almost exact. 29.8 tons. Joe leaned back and considered the comparison. An ordinary Bone Completion practitioner might possess around a ton of direct physical strength, while Internal Organ cultivation increased effective martial output dramatically once An Jin became available. Even a properly developed practitioner who reached the third cycle, the minimum required for Acquired, would remain far below Joe's current result.

He was approaching thirty tons of effective force without having entered Acquired. The information was useful. The paper containing it was not. Joe burned the calculations before leaving the room.

Back at Edwin's house, he waited until the building had gone quiet before calling the panel.

Joe Vale

Age: 19

Static Foundation — Lv.5 / Perfection

Dynamic Foundation — Lv.5 / Perfection

Skin Tempering — Lv.5 / Perfection

Muscle Tempering — Lv.5 / Perfection

Bone Tempering — Lv.5 / Perfection

Internal Organ Tempering — Lv.5 / Perfection

Medicine — Lv.4 / Complete

Disguise — Lv.1 / 63%

Breath Control — Lv.2 / Minor

His attention settled first on Internal Organ Tempering. The realm was complete. Then he noticed the two Foundation entries above it. Static Foundation and Dynamic Foundation had remained at Perfection for years. Joe had never considered that strange. He had simply exhausted what the techniques he learned in Green Hollow could teach him and continued into the body-tempering realms where further advancement was clearly defined. Ashbourne had gradually changed the way he viewed that assumption. The Foundation methods taught in Green Hollow were useful, but they were not the totality of what martial artists understood about the body's fundamentals. The city's libraries contained methods and theories that placed far greater emphasis on breathing, circulation, structural coordination, medicinal absorption, and synchronization between internal systems.

The village techniques had carried Joe exactly as far as they were designed to carry him. The unanswered question was whether their limits belonged to Foundation itself or only to those particular methods. For most practitioners, searching for an answer would offer little practical value. Time spent refining something that was already sufficient for safe advancement was time that could have been spent climbing toward higher realms. Joe's circumstances were different. His later Internal Organ cycles had already forced him to spend long periods recovering, and additional tempering during those intervals would have been counterproductive. Research conducted during the same time cost him almost nothing.

He dismissed the panel. The question could wait until he had better material to work with.

The next morning, Joe returned to the annex library. He had spent most of the previous year buried in Internal Organ material, so instead of returning to those shelves, he asked the librarian for texts concerning An Jin. She pointed toward a narrow collection beside Acquired theory.

"Most of the theory is there. Combat applications are kept farther down."

"I'm trying to understand the mechanism first."

"Then start with those. The combat books assume you already have."

Joe thanked her and spent the morning reading. Much of what he found confirmed the experiments from the rented room, so he passed over those sections quickly. Ming Jin was the open expression of the external martial body, while An Jin appeared after the tempered internal system became capable of changing how Blood Energy transmitted force. The books added something the machine could not tell him. They explained why the third complete Internal Organ tempering mattered. Joe slowed as he read. At Internal Organ III, the body reached the minimum condition necessary to stop treating Ming Jin and An Jin as separate expressions that had to be produced independently. Through Blood Energy, the two could be brought together, compressed, refined, and stabilized into a circulating martial energy.

Acquired Energy. Joe reread the passage with the previous night's measurements still fresh in mind.

The next realm was not introducing an unrelated source of power. It was consolidating what everything below it had already built. The external body supplied Ming Jin. Internal Organ cultivation supplied An Jin. Blood Energy connected them, while Acquired cultivation transformed those separate expressions into a stable energy system capable of circulating throughout the entire martial body. The quality of the previous foundation determined what that system could support. Internal Organ III was the minimum because anything less lacked sufficient internal development for the transformation. Further tempering increased both the capacity available to Acquired Energy and the quality the body could safely sustain.

Joe had completed nine cycles. The Greyspine inheritance had already given him enough information to make a rough prediction. Compared with someone entering Acquired at the minimum standard, Joe's completed foundation might eventually support around five times the ordinary energy capacity. Reaching the true limit of that foundation could also require energy refined to several times the ordinary quality. If both estimates proved close, fully developing the realm could demand roughly twenty-five times the effective cultivation required by an ordinary minimum-standard practitioner. Joe did not mistake that estimate for certainty.

The estimate did not need to be exact to expose the problem. One Effort Equals a Hundred could accelerate cultivation; it could not create the energy required to sustain it. Joe turned to the library's sections on Acquired nourishment. The recommended resources were familiar: high-density food, blood tonics, concentrated herbs, rare strengthening medicines, and increasingly expensive compounds as the practitioner advanced. For an ordinary martial artist, those methods were adequate. Joe could already see how quickly they would become a bottleneck for him. His talents allowed valid cultivation to advance far faster than conventional resources could replenish what the process consumed. If his Acquired foundation really demanded several times the ordinary capacity and refinement, the gap between what he could cultivate and what he could feed would only grow.

His thoughts returned to the six spirit stones and the degraded spiritual residue he had produced during Internal Organ recovery. His pharmaceutical experiments had already shown that spiritual material could be altered until it no longer behaved like the original substance. He still had no evidence that the remaining energy was useful or safe, but the possibility had become much more important. There was another reason not to rush. The Static and Dynamic Foundation methods Joe knew had been created around ordinary Blood Energy cultivation. They had never been designed for the kind of body he now possessed, much less for receiving an unconventional fuel source derived from degraded spiritual material.

He had no basis to assume the existing methods could support it. If broader Foundation principles could improve circulation, synchronization, medicinal absorption, or the way energy was distributed through the body, studying them before experimenting with stronger resources could solve problems he had not yet encountered. Joe closed the Acquired text. Returning to Foundation would be wasteful if it meant abandoning advancement for years. Researching it during periods when his body needed rest was something else entirely. He had already perfected the methods he possessed.

Now he needed to learn whether there was more to Foundation than those methods had taught him.