The data was conclusive—and brutal.

For a cultivator with a low-grade Spirit Root, the resistance encountered during a realm breakthrough was catastrophic. The feedback loop generated by the attempt didn’t just target the physical vessel; it assaulted the Divine Soul simultaneously. It was a total system crash waiting to happen.

The Vitality Pill was a potent patch for hardware damage, capable of knitting flesh and bone back together. But how many lowly Qi Refining disciples had the liquidity to afford such a premium healing asset?

Even if they secured the funding, it was a moot point. The Vitality Pill had zero effect on the software side—the Divine Soul. If the soul collapsed under the strain of the backlash, the user was bricked regardless of how healthy their body was.

“Next subject,” Sun Yi ordered, his voice devoid of emotion.

Li Yu, a disciple at the Qi Refining Great Perfection stage, stepped forward. Following Sun Yi’s protocol, he began his attempt to breach the bottleneck.

Crash.

The moment Li Yu pushed his Qi against the barrier, the rebound force hit him like a hydraulic press. His face went grey instantly, blood leaking from his lips as both his body and soul took critical damage.

“Deploy the Foundation Establishment Pill. Now,” Sun Yi commanded.

Li Yu swallowed the precious pill with trembling hands and initiated a second run.

The Foundation Establishment Pill acted as a buffer, damping the oscillation of the rebound force. Yet, even with this expensive mitigation in place, the shockwaves still tore through Li Yu. He was a brave employee; he gritted his teeth and ran the breakthrough sequence six times in a row.

On the seventh attempt, his system failed. He collapsed.

“Stabilize him!”

The five Golden Core Elders, acting as the onsite medical team, immediately intervened. They suppressed the riotous True Qi rampaging through Li Yu’s meridians. A Vitality Pill was administered, and his physical injuries began to knit rapidly.

However, the damage to his Divine Soul was beyond their ability to patch.

Li Yu sat slumped against the wall, his face the color of ash. The disappointment radiated off him in waves. He had spent years grinding his XP to reach the level cap of Qi Refining, and he had even been granted a corporate-sponsored Foundation Establishment Pill. To fail despite all that… it was a devastating blow to his morale.

Sun Yi observed the crushed employee. He stepped forward, switching his persona from ‘Chief Engineer’ to ‘Benevolent CEO’. He rested a hand on Li Yu’s shoulder.

“Don’t let this metric define you,” Sun Yi said warmly, his voice projecting confident leadership. “This is merely a setback in the development cycle. I will engineer a solution to repair your Divine Soul and get you back on the track to Foundation Establishment.”

“Thank you… Sect Master.” Li Yu forced a smile, though his eyes remained dull. He clearly thought Sun Yi was just offering empty HR platitudes.

“Go to the recovery area. Rest.”

Li Yu dragged himself away. Sun Yi signaled for the final two test subjects.

The results were grim.

The control subject—the cultivator attempting breakthrough without a Foundation Establishment Pill—nearly crashed completely. He suffered catastrophic failure similar to Zhang Yuan. If not for Elder Jin Jue and the executive team monitoring his vitals, the man would have been deleted from existence.

The final subject, equipped with a Foundation Establishment Pill, fared only slightly better. He managed to sustain the stress test for seven cycles before his durability hit zero. He retreated, broken and bleeding.

Sun Yi stood in the center of the cultivation room, staring at the data points in his mind. The room was silent. Elder Jin Jue and the other board members watched him nervously, unsure if their Chairman had hit a dead end.

After a long silence, Sun Yi looked up.

“Gentlemen,” Sun Yi addressed the five Golden Core Elders. “Let us conduct a root cause analysis. Do you know what the ‘Bottleneck’ actually is? Why does the system generate a rebound force when we try to scale up? Why does this force vary based on user specs—sorry, aptitude? And why does it target both the hardware and the software—the body and the soul—simultaneously?”

The Elders exchanged blank looks.

Elder Jin Jue offered a hesitant, circular answer. “The bottleneck… is the bottleneck. It is simply a hurdle every cultivator possesses.”

“Indeed,” Elder Qin Chu added, looking perplexed. “Sect Master, do you believe there is an error in the nature of the bottleneck itself?”

Elders Han Yun, Ye Luo, and Li Tai stared at Sun Yi as if he had asked why water was wet. To them, cultivation was dogma. One did not question the code; one simply executed it.

Sun Yi sighed, shaking his head. Typical end-users. They consume the product without understanding the architecture. It’s like people eating eggs without knowing a chicken laid them.

He had observed eight distinct failure cases. The telemetry was clear. He had a working theory.

“I believe,” Sun Yi began, pacing slowly like he was giving a keynote presentation, “that the bottleneck is a form of DRM—a Shackle placed upon us by the Heavenly Dao.”

The Elders blinked. Shackles?

“To break through a realm is to hack the system constraints. We are attempting to override the user permissions set by the admin,” Sun Yi explained, translating his thoughts into terms they could grasp. “Because we are violating the natural order, the system pushes back. That rebound force? That is the Heavenly Punishment Force.”

He turned to look at them. “Think of aptitude as ‘Compatibility’ or ‘Affinity’. High-tier talents have Admin privileges; the Heavenly Dao recognizes them, so the firewall lowers, and the punishment is minimal. Low-tier talents like our disciples? They are unauthorized users. The Heavenly Dao treats their breakthrough attempt as a security breach and deploys maximum force to stop it.”

Elder Jin Jue’s jaw dropped slightly. He had never heard cultivation explained as a hostile negotiation with the Heavens, but… it made terrifying sense.

“Sect Master,” Jin Jue murmured, “that… that actually sounds remarkably logical.”

Qin Chu frowned, deep in thought. “A shackle bestowed by the Heavenly Dao…”

“But Sect Master,” Elder Ye Luo asked, “does the Heavenly Dao truly exist as a conscious entity? Is it truly placing locks within our bodies?”

Sun Yi smiled, the expression of a teacher leading a student to the answer. “I have reviewed the legacy documentation—the ancient texts. When top-tier users attempt to Ascend to the Upper Realm, they face the Heavenly Tribulation. Lightning, fire, wind. If the Heavenly Dao is not real, who is sending that Tribulation? Who is auditing their ascent?”

“The Tribulation…” Jin Jue’s eyes widened. “By the Heavens, you are right. We carry the shackles of the Dao within us! But… how? What kind of existence is the Heavenly Dao?”

Sun Yi waved his hand dismissively. “That is outside the scope of our current project. The Heavenly Dao is a Tier-0 Architect; we are barely script kiddies. We cannot comprehend that level of coding yet. Our priority is the immediate deliverables: solving the breakthrough crisis for low-aptitude staff.”

“Sect Master, have you found a solution?” Li Tai asked, his face full of desperate hope.

Sun Yi’s lips curled into a confident smirk. “The solution is elegant in theory, though the implementation will be resource-intensive.”

“What?!” Elder Jin Jue nearly shouted, his composure forgotten. “You really found a way? Is this true?”

The entire room focused on Sun Yi with the intensity of a laser.

Sun Yi scanned their faces. “Now that we have identified the bug, we can patch it. The problem is the Heavenly Punishment Force—the system backlash. It overloads the body and soul.”

He held up a fist.

“If we cannot bypass the firewall, we simply build a machine durable enough to crash through it. If a disciple’s physical chassis and mental OS are reinforced to the point where they can tank the Heavenly Punishment Force raw… then the Foundation Establishment Pill becomes obsolete. We won’t need to mitigate the damage if the damage is negligible compared to our defense stats.”

“I have run the numbers,” Sun Yi continued. “The backlash for low-tier cultivators is high, but not infinite. With my current hardware specs—my physical body strength—I could withstand that force without any external aids.”

“Observe.”

Sun Yi didn’t wait for a reply. He activated the Wind Thunder Step.

Zap.

He vanished from his spot, reappearing instantly at the far wall of the reinforced chamber. The movement was a blur of kinetic energy. Without pausing, he drove a simple, brutal punch into the stone.

BOOM!

The entire cultivation room shuddered. Dust rained down from the ceiling. On the wall, a crater in the shape of a fist was embedded deep into the stone, with spiderweb cracks spreading out for meters.

“This…” Elder Jin Jue stammered, staring at the destruction. “This is the Wind Thunder Step!”

The five Elders stood frozen. They weren’t just looking at a martial art; they were looking at a man who had turned his body into a weapon capable of challenging the Heavens themselves.