Combined Calculation, Weaknesses Gradually Clarified

The oil lamp's flame flickered, casting light along the edge of the charcoal circle drawn on the sand table, making it gleam faintly. Chen Wuya's finger still pressed on that point. The mark beneath his fingertip had yet to dry, its rough texture traveling up through his hand and into his mind. He slowly opened his eyes. His breathing was far steadier than before; his chest no longer heaved violently, but sank layer by layer like water in a well.

Bai Zhi sat beside him, her brush hovering over the paper as she waited for him to speak.

"That model just now still isn't stable enough," he said quietly. "The system's patch was forced, like jamming a mortise into a broken log. It looks joined, but touch it once and it falls apart."

Bai Zhi did not move. She merely lowered her brush to the page and wrote the four words: "Model unstable."

Chen Wuya closed his eyes and once more stirred the flow of qi within him. The Misaligned Practice Connects to Spirit System emerged in his sea of consciousness, its interface hazy as mist, yet no longer as resistant to his summons as before. He knew that the copper plate left by the old craftsman, and those words he had spoken, were like a crooked key that had finally slipped into a crack in the lock's core.

This time, he did not rush to approach the core.

He emptied his thoughts and let an absurd cultivation art surface in his mind—the incomplete volume of the Still Abyss Art, said to have been created by some reclusive master. Its principle was: "The quieter all things become, the more fiercely inner force erupts." This art ran contrary to common sense: the more tranquil and undisturbed one's surroundings, the more the