The Rise of the Unbound Sovereign Sect Chapter 9: Chapter 9

Read chapter 9 of The Rise of the Unbound Sovereign Sect by Magic on NovelPedia.

"The heaviest stone does not need to fall to kill you. You only need to be foolish enough to stand beneath it." The fissure was a tear in the rock face filled with darkness and a dim red glow. I didn’t hesitate. I squeezed my battered frame inside, leaving the hunt and boar behind. The transition of me stepping out of the crack was instantaneous. The entire world pressed down on my fragile body with a vengeance. It felt like sinking to the bottom of the ocean while having my feet cast in cinder blocks. My lungs failed to expand. The muscles in my chest cramped against an atmospheric pressure that shouldn't exist above sea level. Dropping to my knees, my jaw snapped shut so hard I tasted blood. The blood pooled in my calves. My vision blurred. What is this? I scrambled for the texts I had memorized back on Earth, and all that came up was gravity, but that made no sense. Gravity was a causality of mass, the same weak force that kept everyone from floating away, but this was like comparing a tree to the weight of an entire forest. The Furnace-Tusk had been a Rank 2, an unstable animal with a leaky core. But this math didn't add up. Theory didn't account for gravity multiplying just because a beast was in the area. If a Rank 2 could burn a forest, what the hell was I standing in? Whatever it was, my charts were useless here. To have this much mass was so far beyond impossible that it couldn’t even be joked about. Still, I did feel like my density had increased after I flooded my body with Qi the night before Rather than panic, I took a page from every cultivation novel I had ever read. I needed to cultivate the environment. But the Qi in this cave was too thick, pressing heavily against my skin and trying to force its way into a body that wasn't structurally sound. If I let it ignite my core right now, my brittle mortal bones would turn to shrapnel. I sat down in the lotus position and closed my eyes, ignoring the slick, cold stone beneath me. I focused all my thoughts and intent on my “Dirt-Dao”. It was a personal joke from the elder’s comment, but I wasn’t taking it as a joke now. I didn't need celestial mysteries; I needed mortar and bedrock. The needles I had driven into ST36 and BL23 yesterday had left bruised, aching pathways in my nervous system. I used that residual pain to navigate. I forced my awareness down into my calves, mentally gripping the Zusanli points. It didn't feel like spiritual enlightenment. It felt like wet concrete curing inside my legs. My tendons tightened with the vicious snap of over-tensioned steel cables. As sweat trickled down my face, I began visualizing that lead plumb bob, dropping it straight down through my spine, anchoring it heavy in my pelvis to stabilize the load-bearing pillars of my femurs. I locked my skeletal structure, forcing my center of gravity down until my boots felt welded to the floor. I closed the leaks. My vitality stopped bleeding into the cold air. And then the pressure reversed. With the exits sealed, my Jing rebounded. It surged back up from the soles of my feet, hitting my kneecaps and slamming upward. The sheer mechanical force of it made my jaw lock and my teeth grind together. My thigh bones felt like they were physically bowing under the weight of a collapsing roof. Deep inside the bone casing, the marrow began to heat and thicken, compacting the loose, porous gravel of my mortal flesh into heavy stone. I held the pressure, actively suffocating the ambient Qi trying to invade my pores, forcing my body to handle the internal structural load alone. I sat there until the brutal, splintering pain in my femurs finally settled into a deep, dense ache. I wasn't a leaky vessel anymore. I dragged myself upright. My breathing was wet in my own ears. I looked at the walls, adjusting my glasses and squinting to make sense of the geometry. The "moss" near the entrance was petrified, sure, but the walls themselves were structurally wrong. This wasn't carved stone or water-eroded r