Sun Yi surveyed the high-end assets spread out before him, a satisfied smirk on his face. With the sect’s daily operations fully automated by his management team, he finally had the bandwidth for the real work: personal R&D.

His immediate objective was clear: hit the Qi Refining production cap—Stage 10, the Great Perfection.

Sun Yi slipped the storage ring onto his finger and summoned the first item. A jade box materialized, revealing a thumb-sized Blood Spirit Ginseng. The aroma alone was intoxicating, a dense fragrance of pure energy.

Without a second thought, Sun Yi grabbed the ginseng and ate it raw.

In any standard cultivation novel, alchemists would be screaming. Eating a raw herb was like burning cash to light a cigarette—grossly inefficient. It was “chewing peonies like an ox.” But Sun Yi didn’t care about yield efficiency; he cared about throughput. He had the inventory to burn.

As the ginseng slid down his throat, a massive surge of energy exploded in his stomach. It felt like swallowing a nuclear battery. Sun Yi immediately initialized the Five Elements Art, channeling the torrent of power.

His cultivation bar began to fill at a terrifying rate.

Of course, the waste was astronomical. His body couldn’t process the raw data fast enough, and wisps of red energy leaked from his pores like steam. He ignored the leakage and focused on the core uptake.

Hours later, Sun Yi’s eyes snapped open. A sharp light flashed across his pupils. The final barrier shattered.

Qi Refining: Great Perfection.

He stood up, feeling a surge of omnipotence. His mana capacity was maxed out.

“Phase 1 complete,” Sun Yi muttered, checking his own diagnostics. “Now for the hardware upgrade. If I want to run the Wind Thunder Step—and eventually the dual-dantian architecture—my physical chassis needs to be reinforced.”

He summoned the next item. A box containing nine Blood Spirit Fruits.

These were rare biological enhancers, typically requiring decades of nurturing with demon blood. Sun Yi popped the first one like a grape.

Heat flooded his system. Every cell in his body screamed as it was forcibly rewritten, the fibers knitting together tighter, denser. It was a rapid, aggressive genetic patch.

An hour later, Sun Yi punched the air. Boom.

A visible shockwave rippled through the room. The air pressure dropped for a split second.

“Strength increased by 200%,” he noted. “Not bad. But let’s stress-test the limits.”

He looked at the remaining eight fruits. Diminishing returns were a known bug in cultivation items—the body built resistance quickly. The second fruit only gave 90% efficacy. The third, 80%.

Sun Yi didn’t stop. He ate them all.

By the time the ninth fruit was consumed, his body felt like forged steel. His physical stats were now ten times their original baseline. A casual swing of his arm created a sonic boom.

“Good. The chassis is stable,” Sun Yi said, wiping juice from his mouth. “Now for the stress test.”

He opened the final box.

Inside sat a single stalk of Thunder Spirit Grass. It was silver, crackling with live electricity. It was a 300-year-old specimen, a Tier 3 resource meant for Late Foundation Establishment cultivators. Eating this at Qi Refining was technically suicidal.

Sun Yi picked it up, his fingers tingling from the voltage.

“High risk, high reward,” he whispered.

He tossed the electrified grass into his mouth and swallowed.

It didn’t feel like medicine. It felt like swallowing a live wire.

“ARGH!”

Sun Yi collapsed instantly, his body seizing as raw lightning tore through his meridians. This wasn’t the warm heat of the fruit; this was millions of volts of unregulated current shredding his nervous system.

He rolled on the floor, veins bulging against his skin like blue worms. His skin turned lobster-red, steam pouring off him. His eyes were bloodshot, capillaries bursting under the pressure.

The pain was absolute. It was a total system override.

He blacked out.

When Sun Yi’s system rebooted, the first thing he saw was an angry face.

Patriarch Qingxuan was standing over him, looking like he was about to fire someone.

“Sect Leader!” Sun Yi scrambled to his feet, bowing instinctively.

“You reckless fool!” Qingxuan roared, his voice shaking the room. “Are you trying to liquidate yourself? Swallowing Thunder Spirit Grass at Qi Refining? That is a Tier 3 hazardous material! Do you have a death wish?”

Sun Yi scratched his head, offering a sheepish, corporate apology. “Patriarch, please. It was a calculated risk. I ran the numbers. My body was pre-hardened by the Blood Spirit Fruits. I knew the chassis could handle the voltage.”

Qingxuan stared at him, exasperated. “You call that calculated? I found you unconscious and smoking!”

“But,” Sun Yi grinned, flexing a hand that now crackled with faint static, “it worked. The upgrade is installed.”