“Simulation complete,” Sun Yi muttered, stepping out of the Battle Tower.

The data was conclusive. Over the last ten days, he had optimized his combat workflow against the Sky-Soaring Tiger. What once took an hour of desperate struggle had been streamlined into a six-minute execution. His technique was sharp, his movements efficient, and his combat logic sound.

But the stress test revealed a critical hardware bottleneck: Battery life.

“I’m running a high-performance OS on an economy-class battery,” Sun Yi mused, rubbing his chin as he walked briskly toward the Scripture Library. “My burst damage is high, but my sustained operational time is pathetic. I’m empty after a few high-output cycles.”

In cultivation terms, his Dantian—the fuel tank—was simply too small for the amount of True Qi he burned. He had already upgraded the fuel quality with the Five Elements Art and additives like the Tempering Spirit Pill. The only remaining solution was to install a larger tank.

Or, better yet, an auxiliary power unit.

Sun Yi entered his private cultivation chamber and locked the door. With a wave of his hand, a massive carcass materialized on the floor.

It was the Mi Luo Beast.

“Time for a teardown,” he whispered, eyes gleaming with the intensity of an engineer about to reverse-engineer a competitor’s flagship product.

One month flew by.

For the Qingyun Sect, it was a quarter of exponential growth. Without the Sect Leader constantly micromanaging, the departments executed his policies with frightening efficiency. The sect’s power was compounding like interest on a high-risk loan.

Inside the R&D lab, however, things were messy.

The Mi Luo Beast had been dismantled. Flesh, bone, and organs were categorized and separated. Sun Yi sat amidst the gore, holding a clump of white, fibrous tissue he had extracted from the beast’s thoracic cavity. He had been staring at it for ten days.

Suddenly, the pieces clicked.

“Eureka,” Sun Yi breathed, a manic grin stretching across his face. “It’s not an organ; it’s a biological capacitor. That’s how the beast stabilizes the extra energy. It’s a proprietary node!”

He jumped up, ignoring the blood on his robes. “I can replicate this. I can install a second core.”

He immediately sent a ping for Elder Ye Luo.

When Elder Ye Luo rushed into the room, he nearly gagged. The air smelled of ozone and old blood. The Sect Master looked like a mad demon, holding a pulsating white sphere the size of a human head.

“Sect Leader?” Ye Luo asked, eyeing the sphere warily. “You summoned this elder?”

“Elder Ye, I need your refining expertise,” Sun Yi said, his voice buzzing with caffeine-like energy. “I’ve isolated the Mi Luo Beast’s energy matrix. This is the component that allows them to generate a secondary Dantian.”

Ye Luo’s eyes widened. “Secondary… Dantian? Sect Leader, that is defying the Heavens. The human body has only one vessel for the Sea of Qi.”

“That’s legacy thinking,” Sun Yi scoffed. “The Mi Luo Beast proves the architecture is scalable. If I refine this node and integrate it, I can double my capacity. But I need you to strip away the impurities. I need this raw material turned into a biocompatible implant.”

Ye Luo paled. “You intend to… consume this? Sect Leader, this is courting death! No one has ever tampered with their internal organs like this. If the energy rampages, you will explode.”

“Calculated risk,” Sun Yi dismissed, shoving the sphere into Ye Luo’s hands. “I’ve run the simulations in my head. The theoretical success rate is acceptable. Besides, we only have enough material for one prototype. I’m the test subject.”

“But—”

“Process it, Elder. That’s an order.”

Ye Luo sighed, the weight of the command crushing his protest. He sat down, summoned his Dan Fire, and began the delicate work of purification.

It took twenty-four hours to compile the code.

Under Ye Luo’s precise control, the head-sized mass of tissue was burned down, distilled, and compressed. Impurities turned to ash. Essence condensed. By the time the fire died down, the object had shrunk to the size of a ping-pong ball.

It was perfect. Smooth, gelatinous, and glowing with a soft, white light. It smelled faintly of orchids.

“Product launch imminent,” Sun Yi said, taking the sphere. “Elder, stand by for emergency containment. If I start to seize, stabilize the room, not me.”

“Sect Leader…” Ye Luo looked like he was watching a man jump off a cliff. “Please reconsider waiting for the Ancestor.”

“Time is money, and the Ancestor isn’t here.”

Sun Yi sat cross-legged on the platform. He didn’t hesitate. He popped the sphere into his mouth and swallowed.

The object didn’t digest; it dissolved into a stream of pure, programmable energy. Sun Yi seized control of it with his True Qi, guiding the flow down his throat.

Now came the critical architectural decision: Placement.

“The Lower Dantian is already occupied,” Sun Yi analyzed internally. “I need a new housing slot. The heart is too risky—that’s the CPU; if it overheats, I’m dead. The stomach is too volatile.”

He steered the energy toward his chest cavity.

“Right lung,” he decided. “It’s a redundant system. If I blow out my right lung during the installation, I can still function on the left one while I seek medical repairs. It’s the safest expansion slot.”

He wrapped the energy around the lobes of his right lung, forcing the alien essence to fuse with his own tissues. He squeezed out a drop of his own Essence Blood to act as a binding agent—a digital signature to trick the body into accepting the new hardware.

The integration process was slow. For five days, Sun Yi sat motionless, rewriting his body’s biological drivers to recognize the foreign object as ‘self.’

Finally, the rejection response faded. The sphere and the lung shared a single pulse.

“Integration complete,” Sun Yi thought, sweat beading on his forehead. “Now for the stress test. Booting up.”

He drew a massive breath and slammed a surge of violent True Qi into the new core.

BOOM.

Inside his chest, the sphere detonated.

Pain, white-hot and blinding, tore through his right side. It felt like someone had shoved a live grenade into his ribcage. The force threatened to shred the lung tissue into confetti.

“Stabilize!” Sun Yi mentally roared, gritting his teeth so hard a molar cracked. “Reinforce the chassis!”

His tempered physique—the result of the Five Elements Art—held the line. The lung tissue stretched, groaned, but didn’t tear. The chaotic energy swirled, expanding the internal space, carving out a void where solid matter used to be.

It was an earth-shattering renovation. The biology was being rewritten in real-time.

Five hours later, the agony receded, replaced by a hum of power.

Sun Yi scanned his internal status. There, nestled within the reinforced tissue of his right lung, was a swirling vortex of energy. A second storage tank.

“System status: Green,” Sun Yi gasped, collapsing back onto his hands, a foolish grin breaking through the pain.

“I did it,” he laughed, the sound wheezing slightly through his dual-core respiratory system. “Expansion successful.”