Time in the underworld was not measured in hours, but in feet.
One foot of digging. One tuber found. One grub eaten. Sleep. Repeat.
According to Ji Han's notches on the clay wall, ninety days had passed. Three months. Outside, the sun had merely shifted from "early morning" to "mid-morning." Inside the tunnel, the heat had transformed from a comfortable warmth to a stifling, humid oppression.
The tunnel system had grown. It was no longer just a trench; it was a crude, winding burrow extending twenty meters from the original entry point, spiraling downward in a desperate chase for cool earth.
Clack.
Ji Han's stone tool hit something that didn't give.
He wiped the sweat from his eyes—a mixture of mud and salt—and struck again.
Clack.
Sparks flew in the darkness.
"Report," Ji Han rasped. His voice had changed over the last ninety days. It was deeper, rougher, unused to long sentences. He was shirtless, his skin stained a permanent reddish-brown by the soil. His muscles, once soft from office work, were now lean and ropy, vibrating with nervous energy.
Lin Qinghe crawled up from the rear chamber. She looked better. Her complexion was no longer waxy; the diet of spirit-roots had stabilized her meridians, though she was still far from recovered. She held a glowing moss-covered stone—a faint light source they had discovered near a deep root cluster.
She held the light to the wall.
"Granite," she diagnosed. "Bedrock."
Ji Han slumped against the dirt wall. "We're stuck."
"The heat is penetrating," Lin Qinghe noted, touching the ceiling of the tunnel. "The sun is rising toward the Zenith. In three months, it will be High Noon. If we cannot go deeper, this tunnel will become an oven."
Ji Han looked at his hands. They were calloused, scarred, and strong. He had been eating the "Wild Qi" of the roots and the protein of the Earth Dragons. His [Basic Breathing Technique] sat at 99/100. He was at the peak of the mortal limit.
But rock was rock. Stone Age tools couldn't break granite.
"We need a pickaxe," Ji Han said. "We have a sharp rock."
"You have Qi," Lin Qinghe corrected. She sat back on her heels, her eyes gleaming in the dim moss-light. "You have been hovering at the threshold for weeks. You treat the Qi like fuel for digging. You burn it as fast as you gather it."
"It works," Ji Han argued. "I dug twenty meters."
"It is waste," she said sharply. "To break the rock, you cannot just use the Qi. You must condense it. You must turn the gas into liquid. You must enter the First Realm."
Qi Condensation.
According to the Bible, this was the step where humans became supernatural . Where they could cast fireballs and move with blurring speed.
Ji Han picked up his triangular stone. "Teach me."
"Strike the rock," she ordered.
"It won't break."
"Strike it until you understand why it won't break."
Ji Han gritted his teeth. He swung the stone. Clack. The vibration jarred his arm up to the shoulder.
"Again."
Clack.
"Again."
Clack.
"Where does the force go?" Lin Qinghe asked quietly.
"Into my arm," Ji Han grunted, shaking his stinging hand. "The rock rejects it."
"The rock is dense. Your arm is soft. Your tool is brittle. The Qi you use is scattered," she recited. "Don't push the Qi into your muscles. Push it into the point of the stone. Make the stone an extension of your meridian."
Ji Han closed his eyes. He visualized the heat in his belly—the accumulated energy of three months of root-eating. Usually, he let it flood his whole body to fight fatigue.
"Focus it," he whispered.
He imagined the energy flowing down his right arm, bypassing the elbow, bypassing the wrist, and flooding into the stone. He imagined the stone glowing red hot.
He swung.
Clack.
"No," Lin Qinghe said. "You hesitated. You are afraid the stone will shatter. You are protecting the tool."
"It's the only tool I have!"
"If you fail to condense, you die in the heat," she said coldly. "Break the tool, or break the wall."
Ji Han stared at the granite. He felt the oppressive heat pressing down from the soil above. He thought about the three remaining months until noon. The inevitable cooking of their bodies.
Desperation was a powerful catalyst.
He took a breath. He pulled every scrap of energy from his Dantian. The "Wild Qi" of the dying grass, the heavy "Earth Qi" of the roots. He forced it all into his right hand.
The air in the tunnel seemed to hum. The pressure dropped.
"Condense," Ji Han roared.
He slammed the stone forward. He didn't think about the impact. He thought about the space behind the rock.
BOOM.
The sound wasn't a clack. It was a gunshot.
Dust exploded in the confined space. Ji Han was thrown back, landing hard on his rear. He coughed, waving his hand through the cloud of pulverized stone.
The triangular stone in his hand was dust—shattered into a thousand fragments.
But on the granite wall, there was a crack. A spiderweb fracture the size of a dinner plate, running deep into the bedrock.
[System Notification: Limit Broken.][Congratulations. You have advanced to Qi Condensation: Level 1.][Attribute Unlocked: Spirit +1.0][Attribute Unlocked: Perception +1.0]
Ji Han stared at the notification. He felt... different. The exhaustion that usually plagued him was gone. His senses were sharper; he could hear the distinct scuttle of a beetle ten meters away. He could see the texture of the darkness.
He looked at his hand. It was bleeding, but the cuts were already knitting together.
"You broke the tool," Lin Qinghe noted, but there was a hint of a smile on her face.
"I broke the wall," Ji Han countered.
He stood up. He didn't need the tool anymore. He picked up a chunk of the shattered granite. It was sharper, harder than the slate he had used before.
He channeled his Qi again. It flowed smoother now, like water instead of mud.
He drove the granite shard into the crack.
CRACK.
A fist-sized chunk of bedrock fell away.
"We can go deeper," Ji Han said, turning to Lin Qinghe. His eyes, once dull with survival fatigue, now glowed with a faint, supernatural light. "We can build a palace."