Heavenly Forge Ark, Tier Seven – Day 4 of seclusion
The first week is survival.
They do not sleep.
They do not eat anything that isn't laced with star-metal dust or dragon bone marrow.
The Ark itself is a living predator. Gravity shifts without warning. Corpse-fire orbs drift through walls and whisper forgotten laws in voices that make dao-hearts bleed. The dragon souls patrol the corridors in eight-headed formation, testing, watching, waiting for weakness.
Liàn Xing sets the rules on day one.
"No fighting each other. No leaving Tier Seven until we can all survive Tier Eight without the spear shielding us. Three months. Core Formation or death."
No one argues.
They claim the largest forging platform (the one whose name was scratched out so violently the grooves still smoke) and turn it into a camp.
Lan Shuyin builds an ice bunker around the perimeter, three metres thick, laced with frost runes that drink radiation and convert it into qi. Inside, the temperature is a perfect minus-ten: cold enough to keep the yin poison dormant, warm enough that blood doesn't freeze.
Zhao carves a sword array into the deck: nine golden rings that spin slowly, slicing any ghost-Smith that drifts too close. Their golden tears fall upward and become floating lanterns that never go out.
Zhenxing spends the first three days mapping the Ark with starfire clones. She returns pale and shaking.
"Lower tiers are worse," she reports. "Tier Eight has the furnace, but the Immortal Smith ghosts are… active. Tier Nine is sealed behind a law-lock I can't break yet. We're stuck here until we're stronger."
Liàn Xing nods.
"Then we get stronger."
Training begins at what they decide is dawn (when the corpse-fire orbs burn blue).
Morning: Body Forging
Liàn Xing drags a chunk of star-iron the size of a hover-car into the centre of the platform.
"Lift it," he says. "One thousand reps. No qi."
Zhao laughs until he tries.
The metal weighs exactly what the lifter fears they cannot carry.
Lan Shuyin lasts eleven reps before her arms shake and frost explodes across the deck.
Zhao manages twenty-three before golden blood leaks from his eyes.
Liàn Xing does one hundred without breaking a sweat, then flips the chunk end-over-end like a toy.
"Again," he says.
They hate him by day four.
They thank him by day ten.
Afternoon: Qi Cycling Under Tribulation
They sit in a triangle, legs crossed, palms touching.
Liàn Xing channels raw starlight from the half-formed spear shaft into their meridians.
It burns.
Lan Shuyin's frost qi tries to freeze it; Zhao's sword intent tries to cut it; both fail. The starlight forces its way through every blockage, every old injury, every scar from a lifetime of being less than they could be.
On day six Lan Shuyin screams as the yin poison is burned out of three major meridians at once.
On day eight Zhao coughs golden blood when his Perfect Sword Body is forced to accept something sharper than itself.
On day twelve Liàn Xing's own meridians crack and reforge themselves in silver-black star-iron.
None of them stop.
Evening: Spear, Sword, and Frost
Liàn Xing teaches spear intent the way he learned it: by surviving.
He stands in the centre.
Zhao and Lan Shuyin attack from opposite sides.
No killing blows.
Everything else is fair.
Zhao's nine rings become golden storms that carve the deck into canyons.
Lan Shuyin's twin short-spears weave frost lotuses that freeze the air solid.
Liàn Xing blocks with the half-formed shaft.
Every parry teaches the spear something new.
Every missed strike teaches them something new.
By the end of week two the platform is a cratered wasteland of frozen sword scars and molten spear grooves.
By the end of week three they move like one organism.
Night: The Dreams
The Ark does not let them rest clean.
Every night the corpse-fire orbs drift close and whisper.
To Lan Shuyin: visions of her palace, her grandmother's disappointed eyes, the slow death waiting if she ever goes back.
To Zhao: his sect's ancestral tablets smashing one by one, his name erased from the golden rolls, his father's voice calling him traitor.
To Liàn Xing: Ring 8, the alley, the 98 losses, the day they finally decided he was ripe for harvest.
He wakes every time with the spear shaft in his hands, glowing, ready.
On night nineteen he stops sleeping entirely.
He sits on the edge of the platform and stares into the radiation storms until dawn.
Lan Shuyin finds him there on night twenty.
She sits beside him without speaking.
After an hour she rests her head on his shoulder.
He lets her.
Zhao finds them an hour later and pretends not to notice.
Week Four: First Breakthroughs
Lan Shuyin is the first.
She is cycling starlight through her frost qi when it happens.
The yin poison that has defined her entire life crystallises into a single perfect azure snowflake in her dantian.
Then it shatters.
Frost explodes outward in a perfect sphere that freezes the entire platform solid (three metres deep, flawless ice).
When it clears, she stands in the centre, eyes pure winter starlight.
Peak Foundation Establishment.
The yin poison is gone.
She looks at Liàn Xing and smiles (small, real, devastating).
"Thank you."
Zhao breaks through two nights later.
He is sparring with nine golden phantoms of himself when the tenth ring forms unbidden (pure golden sword intent forged from the refusal to lose to anyone, ever).
Perfect Foundation Establishment.
He laughs until golden tears freeze on his cheeks.
Liàn Xing is last.
On night twenty-nine he sits alone on the anvil whose name still glows.
He places the spear shaft across his knees and simply breathes.
The Celestial Seed opens.
Starlight pours in from every direction (from the Ark, from the radiation storms, from the distant real stars that have started watching).
His dantian collapses into a perfect silver-black orb.
The half-formed spear shaft drinks the overflow and grows one inch longer.
Perfect Foundation Establishment.
The Ark itself sighs in approval.
Dragon souls bow their eight remaining heads.
The Immortal Smith ghosts drift closer and, for the first time in four thousand years, smile.
Four weeks down.
Eight to go.
They are no longer the runaway teenagers who arrived.
They are something the Nine Heavens has no name for yet.
And the spear is only half-awake.