The Resonance Gates — Ten through Twelve — required forming a cultivation core.

  Traditional core formation: compress stored Qi into a solid sphere. Transform your cultivation base from liquid reservoir to crystallised diamond.

  Chen Xi didn't have a lake to compress.

  He had a vortex.

  "The standard model doesn't apply," he told the group at their hallway briefing.

  "Core formation assumes stored energy. My vortex doesn't store. It processes. Asking me to form a core from a vortex is like asking someone to freeze a river while it's still flowing."

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  "Can it be done?" Su Yiran asked.

  "If I increase rotational speed beyond a critical threshold, centripetal forces should compress the innermost layer. But the speed required exceeds my meridians' structural tolerance by forty percent."

  "So it would tear you apart."

  "Yes."

  Little Abacus was eating one of Wu Zheng's custard buns. Getting crumbs on his calculations.

  "What if you didn't compress the whole vortex?"

  Everyone looked at him.

  "What if you just compressed the centre? Like the eye of a hurricane — calm, dense, while the rest keeps spinning."

  "That's not how cores work."

  "That's not how TRADITIONAL cores work. You don't have a traditional anything.

  Your dantian is shattered. Your method is a turbine. Why would your core be conventional?"

  The room was quiet.

  "He's right," Su Yiran said.

  "I know he's right. I'm annoyed that he's right."

  "Welcome to mentorship."

  The Newcomer Assessment was in six days. He needed a core to pass it.

  Six days to do something no cultivator had ever done.