In the Sea of Consciousness, the remnant soul of the Dragon Scale Beast coalesced into a massive, shadowy projection. It roared with primal fury, charging straight at Sun Yi’s soul avatar like a virus seeking to corrupt the kernel.

“Hmph. A mere bug in the code dares to act arrogant on my server?”

A cold snort resonated from the mist. Sun Yi’s soul avatar stepped forward, the fog condensing into a solid form. He moved with the precision of a master algorithm, instantly closing the distance.

He threw a single punch.

Bang!

The massive phantom of the Dragon Scale Beast shattered upon impact, disintegrating into harmless data packets that dissolved into the void.

Threat neutralized.

Sun Yi exhaled. It was fortunate his soul specs had been massively upgraded by the Heavenly Soul Liquid. Without that patch, debugging this remnant soul would have been a significant resource drain.

With the soul threat deleted, the resistance from the drop of Dragon Scale Beast Essence Blood in his stomach vanished. Sun Yi immediately initiated the assimilation process.

Warning: Energy surge detected.

A violent force erupted within him. Sun Yi shuddered, waves of tearing pain radiating through his nervous system. If his hardware hadn’t already been reinforced, this energy spike would have blown his circuits.

Note to self: The user experience for this upgrade path is terrible. I need to optimize the safety protocols before rolling this out to the employees.

Sun Yi gritted his teeth and continued the integration.

Time passed. He absorbed the essence blood drop by drop, watching his physical stats climb. A day later, the process was complete. The marginal returns from the Dragon Scale blood had hit zero.

Sun Yi stood up and stretched. His body hummed with explosive power, as if a nuclear reactor had been installed in his chest.

He didn’t have a benchmark to measure his current specs, but he estimated that if he encountered that Foundation Establishment cultivator from Water Source City again, a single punch would result in a Fatal System Error for the opponent.

“Iterate. Next phase,” Sun Yi muttered, his eyes gleaming with ambition.

He retrieved the Red Flame Spirit Liquid.

Suspended in front of him by a thread of True Qi, the droplet looked like molten magma, radiating a terrifying, violent thermal energy.

Sun Yi hesitated for a microsecond. This was a Tier 3 resource—enterprise-grade material usually reserved for Golden Core architectures. Consuming it at the Qi Refining stage was technically a violation of safety protocols. To an outsider, this was suicide.

But Sun Yi knew his chassis was over-engineered. It could take the load.

He swallowed the droplet.

System Alert: Critical Thermal Event.

The moment the liquid hit his stomach, it felt like a volcano had detonated internally.

A violent heatwave swept through his meridians. Sun Yi’s skin turned a bright, angry red, as if magma was flowing just beneath the epidermis.

If asked to describe the sensation, Sun Yi would say it felt like standing inside a blast furnace. The pain was absolute, threatening to crash his consciousness.

“Grrraaaah!”

Sun Yi roared, his eyes bloodshot. He slammed his fists into the floor, cracking the stone tiles, trying to vent the agony of the thermal throttling.

This energy density… it’s off the charts!

Fortunately, his rational mind held onto the admin privileges. He forced the True Qi from his Gold Gate and Dantian to surge forth, wrapping around the violent energy to process it.

The refined medicinal power fused into his cellular structure, tempering his muscles and bones in a crucible of fire.

The stress test lasted for two full hours. Finally, the cooling systems caught up, and the pain subsided.

Sun Yi opened his eyes, examining his hands with lingering fear.

“That Red Flame Spirit Liquid is aggressive. It almost caused a total system meltdown,” Sun Yi muttered. “But the optimization results are undeniable.”

He sensed the changes in his body. His durability metrics had skyrocketed.

After a brief recharge to restore his True Qi, Sun Yi took out the second drop.

Execute.

He subjected himself to the torture again. The fire burned through his veins, but his tolerance had improved. The system was adapting.

For the sake of the Mission Statement, Sun Yi went all out.

He repeated the cycle, consuming all ten drops of the Red Flame Spirit Liquid. By the end, his physical strength had reached a terrifying level.

Sun Yi stood up and clenched his right fist. The air popped audibly under the pressure of his grip.

Time for a DPS check.

With a thought, he retrieved a Tier 2 Grade 3 spirit shield from his inventory and suspended it in the air. He activated its defensive wards, then threw a simple, straight punch.

BOOM!

The shield exploded.

It didn’t just crack; it shattered into shrapnel, unable to withstand the raw kinetic output.

Next, the speed test.

Sun Yi activated the Wind Thunder Step. His body blurred into a phantom, moving so fast that he was effectively invisible within the confines of the room.

He stopped, a satisfied grin on his face.

Latency reduced. Throughput increased.

Previously, the Wind Thunder Step offered a 5x speed boost. Now, supported by his upgraded hardware, he was hitting 10x speed. Furthermore, the stamina drain—the system overhead—was negligible.

He threw a few more test punches, calibrating his motor control to the new power levels.

“Hehe. The current meta of the cultivation world is flawed,” Sun Yi mused, shaking his head. “Abandoning hardware development to focus solely on software? It’s completely putting the cart before the horse.”

Having analyzed the sect’s database, Sun Yi knew that modern cultivators focused almost exclusively on True Qi and Realm progression. Body refining was a niche legacy tech.

It was understandable. Body refining had a high burn rate for capital, and the resources were scarce. Moreover, body cultivators were easily kited by ranged spellcasters. In the current PVP meta, melee builds were considered low-tier.

Most cultivators barely had enough resources to upgrade their OS (Realm); they couldn’t afford to upgrade their chassis.

But Sun Yi’s analysis concluded that the physical body was the server upon which all cultivation ran. A stronger server meant higher potential for future patches.

After witnessing the bottleneck failures of his disciples, his hypothesis was confirmed: The only correct path was a Full-Stack Architecture—Body, Soul, and Qi running in parallel.

The problem was the cost. Sun Yi only achieved this because he was leveraging the entire GDP of the Qingyun Sect and burning cash like a venture-backed startup.

This model isn’t scalable for the average employee, Sun Yi thought. I need to develop a budget-friendly version of this protocol.

Suddenly, Sun Yi frowned.

His sensors picked up a fluctuation of Spiritual Qi from outside. Before he could release his Divine Sense to scan the perimeter—

BOOM!

The door to the cultivation chamber exploded inward, shattering into dust.