The pain was so absolute it eclipsed thought, eclipsed memory. There was no Moyong Clan, no betrayal, only the eternity of the Forge.
[Phase 1 Complete. Durability enhancement successfully integrated.]
There was no respite. The moment the skeletal structure solidified into a cage of unbreakable agony, the second phase began.
[Phase 2: The Void-Devouring Meridians.]
In his past life, Ha-jun's meridians, the pathways for internal energy, had been narrow rivers, easily clogged and painful to expand.
He had spent decades forcing them open, inch by agonizing inch.
The System deemed them pathetic. It tore them out.
Ha-jun felt a sensation akin to thousands of red-hot wires being threaded through the newly forged bones of his limbs and torso. But the wires didn't just sit there; they began to thrash, expanding violently.
It felt like being flayed alive internally. The System was dredging great canals through his spiritual architecture where only shallow streams had existed.
The new pathways were cavernous, hungry voids designed to gulp world energy in quantities that would explode a normal martial artist.
The process of hollowing him out to make room for this power was a violation more intimate than any sword thrust.
Every nerve ending, real or imagined, fired with incandescent fury as these new channels burned their way connecting points in his wrists, his ankles, his chest, and his temples. He was a circuit board being rewired while plugged into a lightning bolt.
[Phase 2 Complete. Energy throughput capacity increased by 6000%.]
Ha-jun's consciousness was flickering again, not from dissolution this time, but from shock. The pain was driving him insane.
He wanted to die. He prayed to whatever gods he had once believed in to let him dissolve back into the gray.
The System ignored his prayers.
[Subject consciousness fading. Stimulating the spiritual core to maintain awareness.]
A jolt of pure, freezing electricity speared through him, shocking him back into a state of hyper-aware agony. He had to be awake for this. He had to feel the vessel he was earning.
[Phase 3: Myriad Beast Sinews and Flesh.]
The scaffold of bone and the wiring of energy were in place. Now came the meat.
This was the most grueling part. It felt like being buried alive in wet concrete that was simultaneously boiling and setting.
Muscle fibers, dense and corded like steel cables, began to knit themselves over the adamantine bones.
He felt every attachment point being bored into the bone. He felt the agonizing stretch and snap as tendons stronger than hydraulic pistons were winched into place.
The flesh didn't grow layer by layer; it erupted in a chaotic, agonizing frenzy of cellular generation.
Skin formed last, stretching taut over the hyper-dense musculature until it felt like it would tear. It was a suffocating, crushing sensation, as if he were being compressed inside a suit of armor two sizes too small, only the armor was his own body.
[Phase 4: The Undying Furnace Dantian.]
The center. The core of all martial arts. His old dantian had been a cracked clay pot, leaking energy as fast as he gathered it.
The System focused its entire processing power on his lower abdomen. The pain changed texture. It stopped being a ripping, crushing physical sensation and became a sickening, vertigo-inducing gravitational collapse.
He felt a swirling vortex open inside his gut. It was a black hole of energy, spinning so fast it threatened to tear his newly formed soul apart.
The System was constructing a reactor core where a simple engine should have been.
The heat was unbearable. It was the sensation of swallowing a star. The walls of this new dantian were being forged to contain infinite potential, and the process felt like he was being hollowed out by a spinning drill bit made of pure fire.
As the dantian formed, flashes of his past life superimposed themselves over the pain.
The look of disgust in the Clan Elder's eyes when Ha-jun presented the head of the Northern Barbarian King.
The taste of the poisoned tea his disciple had handed him with a smile.
Moyong Chen's rapier slides effortlessly into his heart.
The emotional agony fed the physical torment, creating a symphony of suffering that transcended mortal limits.
The System used that rage, binding it into the very walls of the new dantian. This core would not just run on qi; it would run on hate.
[Phase 4 Complete. Regenerative capabilities maximized.]
Ha-jun was broken. He was a whimpering mess of raw nerve endings encased in a perfect, unfamiliar shell. He couldn't take any more.
[Final Phase: The Eye of the Sword Sovereign.]
The final intrusion was into his mind itself.
It felt like an icepick driven slowly into his left eye socket, pushing deep into the brain tissue. The System was rewiring his optical nerves and his cognitive processing centers.
It was an invasive, violating surgery of the soul's perception. He saw colors that didn't exist. He saw geometric patterns of impossibly complex sword stances flashing in the dark behind his eyes, burning themselves into his memory.
The pain was sharp, precise, and maddeningly localized. It felt as though his eye was being scooped out and replaced with a cold, alien lens designed to see the flaws in all things. To see death lines in the air. To deconstruct techniques before they were even launched.
It was the ultimate tool for a killer, installed with the delicacy of a rusted nail.
[All Phases Complete. Physical Vessel Reconstruction: 100%.]
[Integration of traumatized soul initiating...]
The final step was the worst. The System took his screaming, vibrating point of consciousness and shoved it into the newly forged iron maiden of a body.
The shock was instantaneous and absolute. The dissonance between his old, weak self and this new, transcendent vessel resulted in a feedback loop of sensory overload.
Every nerve in the new body fired at once. It was a crescendo of pure, white agony that shattered his remaining sanity.
Ha-jun screamed, a silent, psychic howl that echoed forever in the closed system of his rebirth.