CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTEEN
### Two Days
He practiced on the platform for two days straight.
Not continuously — he slept for four hours each night. But every waking hour was on the platform with the domain extended and the absorbed principles reaching simultaneously through the between quality.
It was not clean.
The first attempt on the first morning lasted eleven seconds before the simultaneous application fractured into sequential. He tried again. Fourteen seconds. Again. Nine.
Feng Luo watched from the thermal perimeter stone.
"You look like you are trying to hold five different fires in one hand," Feng Luo said.
"Yes," Jian Yu said.
"That is not how you hold fire," Feng Luo said.
He looked at him.
"You commit to all of it at once," Feng Luo said. "You do not hold each one. You commit and let the fire decide what shape it takes." He paused. "The Vermilion technique is not managed. It is released."
Jian Yu turned back to the platform.
He stopped trying to hold the five absorbed principles simultaneously.
He committed to them.
All at once. Full investment. Nothing held in reserve.
The simultaneous application held for forty-seven seconds before the formation's amplification pulled it further than he expected and he released.
"Better," Feng Luo said.
He tried again.
Sixty-three seconds.
Then one hundred and eight.
By the afternoon of the first day he was holding it for three continuous minutes.
Lin Mei was watching from the camp's edge. Not reading his cultivation indicators. Watching. The way she watched things she needed to understand fully before she wrote about them.
At the three-minute mark she said: "The domain."
He released the application. "Yes."
"When the simultaneous principles combine with the between quality at this amplification," she said, "the domain extends beyond the standard range."
"How far," he said.
"Li Shan," she said.
Li Shan was at the Sword Rain position reading alongside Elder Qin. "At full simultaneous application the projection reached thirty-one li," he said. "The standard Sharpening stage maximum is twenty-three."
Thirty-one li.
He looked at the dead zone beyond the valley's northern entrance.
"The Void Anchor specialist," he said.
"At thirty-one li range," Li Shan said, "I can read the Void Anchor's frequency structure from here. The calibration pattern. The three gap points." He paused. "Before the specialist deploys. Before he even approaches the formation."
Jian Yu looked at the platform.
"I can read it before it arrives," he said.
"Yes," Li Shan said.
"I can counter the gap points before the application completes," he said.
"At thirty-one li range," Li Shan said, "the counter would arrive at the Void Anchor's structure approximately twenty seconds before the application reaches the platform position." He paused. "Twenty seconds is not thirty to forty seconds of warning. But at the Sharpening simultaneous application level—"
"Twenty seconds is enough," Jian Yu said.
He looked at the nine standing stones.
At the three-century deep structure River-Stone had built.
At the formation that had been practicing alone for three centuries and had recognized him the first time he stepped onto it.
He counted fourteen breaths.
He stepped onto the platform again.
He committed to all of it.
The valley went still in the way it went still when the formation received something significant.
Thirty-one li.
The dead zone's staging area was present in the domain at that range. The oversight cultivator was there. The thirteen suppression specialists. The guard formation of one hundred and thirty-eight.
He could read all of it.
Two more days of practice.
Then they arrived.
He held fourteen and practiced.
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