Runes • Rifles • Reincarnation
60. Accidental Breakthrough

Jin Shu jolted awake, a sharp pain radiating from his dantian as an urgent voice filled his ears.

“Jin Shu, there is an emergency!” Nano’s robotic tone carried an unusual edge of urgency.

“What’s happening? Why does my dantian hurt?” Jin Shu groaned, the intensity of the pain causing Yin’er to stir beside him.

“You’re undergoing a breakthrough to the Core Realm,” Nano explained quickly. “But there’s a serious problem!”

Jin Shu’s thoughts raced. How was he breaking through without cultivating himself? Then it hit him—Nano had been cultivating for him all along.

“What’s the problem?” he demanded, sitting up and crossing his legs to stabilize himself.

“Your Qi is out of control!” Nano’s voice was sharper now. “You must try to regulate it immediately!”

Gritting his teeth, Jin Shu focused inward, wrestling with the rampaging Qi. He managed to rein it in, but not completely—it still resisted his control, surging violently through his meridians.

As he worked to subdue the chaos, Jin Shu became aware of the root issue. His Qi wasn’t just surging; it was trying to purge impurities from his body, a natural part of a Core Realm breakthrough. But the nanobots in his system—Nano’s network—were being treated as impurities. The nanobots, however, weren’t giving up without a fight.

The clash was excruciating. The main nanobot, Nano, was bearing the brunt of the Qi's assault.

“Can’t you leave temporarily?” Jin Shu asked through gritted teeth, desperate for a solution.

“Impossible,” Nano replied, its tone strained. “Our backup power reserves are depleted. Without your Qi, we would shut down permanently.”

“What about the nanobot in the phone?” Jin Shu pressed.

“That unit has stored Qi within the phone’s battery,” Nano explained curtly. “Unless you have a spare battery to power us, we need another solution.”

Jin Shu blinked. This was the first time he had heard genuine frustration—or as close to it as Nano’s robotic voice could convey.

He racked his brain for alternatives. From what he’d learned from Biyu after her own breakthrough, anything foreign to the body would be expelled as impurities during this process.

Then a wild idea struck him. It wasn’t perfect, and he wasn’t sure how to make it work, but it was better than nothing.

“What if you became a part of me?” he suggested hesitantly. “Could you integrate with my Qi somehow?”

“Give us a moment. We’ll run a simulation to calculate the probability of success,” Nano said, its voice cool and analytical.

A second later, it spoke again. “We’ve found a method. The probability of success is 32.33, repeating of course, percentage of survival. We require your consent to proceed.”

“Do it,” Jin Shu gritted out, his voice strained as the pain in his dantian surged.

“Commencing Qi integration,” Nano announced.

The moment the process began, Jin Shu’s control over his Qi shattered. It rampaged through his veins and meridians like a tidal wave, crashing against the nanobots and pulling them along in its wake. The pain, which had been unbearable moments before, suddenly ceased.

At least, Jin Shu assumed the nanobots had stopped resisting. Without the ability to see inside his body—something only possible after reaching the Spirit Realm—he could only speculate.

“What’s happening, Nano?” he asked, his voice cautious.

Silence.

He waited a moment, then tried again. “Nano?”

Still, no response.

Minutes passed in uneasy quiet. Jin Shu’s attention shifted as he felt his Qi begin to condense and gather toward his dantian. This was the sign: his core was starting to form.

The formation of a core was largely an automatic process, a natural culmination of his cultivation progress. However, the final and most critical step—the spinning of the core—required his deliberate action. Spinning would solidify the fragile core, anchoring it in his dantian.

“Nano?” he called out once more, his unease mounting.

The silence was deafening.

As the last trace of Qi funneled into his dantian, Jin Shu prepared himself. This was it. Closing his eyes, he focused his mind on the image of a glass bead within his dantian. Slowly, carefully, he visualized it spinning.

The moment the glass bead began to rotate, Jin Shu felt a sudden, visceral shift within his body. It was like the gut-dropping sensation of a rollercoaster—intense and exhilarating.

His new core had begun to spin.

Spinning the core was an ongoing process, requiring him to increase its speed continuously—faster and faster, then faster still. The friction generated by this rotation would eventually solidify the core, much like how the friction of his Qi burned his runic tattoos into his skin.

Suddenly, a thought struck him, making him flinch. His Body Inscribing Art included a technique specifically for the Core Realm—the one Aunt Chen had mentioned to him before. He had nearly forgotten about it until now.

Focusing deeply, Jin Shu struggled to recall the method. He remembered only fragments: it involved inscribing runes onto his core while it was still malleable. But the runes weren’t arbitrary; they had to be precise.

With a deliberate thought, he summoned the technique’s scroll into his hand.

Can one of you take over the spinning? he asked inwardly.

“I’ve got it,” his older psyche said, speaking up for the first time in a while.

Now that their shared mind had grown more interconnected, swapping control between his psyches had become much smoother. It was far more seamless than when they’d practiced movement techniques earlier, where each psyche acted independently. Now, they could act as one.

Relieved, Jin Shu let his other self manage the spinning of the core. Turning his attention to the scroll, he unfurled it hurriedly, scanning the technique he’d once dismissed as unimportant.

The runes were intricate, their placement demanding absolute precision. A misstep here could mean the difference between a stronger foundation or crippling his cultivation entirely. But as he read, the technique began to take form in his mind, and clarity replaced doubt.

There were two runes critical for this stage of his cultivation.

The first was the Purity Rune, designed to be placed at the top of the core, where Qi would enter. Its purpose was to refine the gaseous Qi into a liquid state. This transformation would drastically enhance the Qi’s potency, but it came at a cost: liquid Qi required more energy to maintain, leaving him with a smaller reserve compared to the mist-like state most cultivators relied on.

The second was the Sub-Core Rune, a specialized adaptation of the Qi Reservoir Rune. Its function was to store Qi temporarily before it passed through the Purity Rune, ensuring a steady supply for refinement. Together, these two runes formed a perfect system of intake and storage, maximizing efficiency without compromising quality.

Jin Shu carefully followed the instructions from the scroll, knowing that even the slightest mistake could cripple his cultivation permanently. He began by drawing in a thin strand of external Qi, shaping it into a needle-like form. This ethereal needle became his tool for inscribing the runes directly onto his spinning core.

With one psyche focusing on maintaining the core’s rotation, his main psyche meticulously controlled the inscription process. Meanwhile, his youngest psyche cheered enthusiastically from the sidelines, lending moral support.

The synergy between his three minds was the key to his success. What would have been an excruciatingly grueling task for any ordinary cultivator felt surprisingly smooth. Jin Shu couldn’t help but marvel at the balance they achieved—a harmony he had never fully appreciated before.

As the Purity Rune took shape, he felt the first tremors of change in his core. The rune pulsed faintly, drawing Qi toward its designated point. Encouraged, he moved on to the Sub-Core Rune, inscribing it carefully below the Purity Rune, ensuring their alignment was perfect.

Each stroke of the Qi needle was precise, deliberate, and unwavering. By the time the final line of the Sub-Core Rune was complete, Jin Shu felt a profound shift within his dantian. His core thrummed with newfound energy, the two runes working in tandem like a perfectly synchronized machine.

He exhaled slowly, relief washing over him. The hardest part was over—for now.

All that remained was to wait for the spinning core to complete its solidification.

“Nano? Seriously, if you're still alive, answer me.” Jin Shu called out to the nanobot once more. He hesitated, the sinking realization settling in—his tiny helpers might not have survived.

As seconds stretched into silence, a wave of sadness washed over him at the thought of their deaths. Then, suddenly, a chime echoed in his ears.

Ding!

“Reboot successful. Survival protocol engagement detected. Blank State protocol engaged. Programming redesigned. New program—Qi Integration, designed successfully. Updating registered users' access level. Failsafe engaged—disengaged failsafe due to survival protocol.”

The voice rattled off a stream of information. It sounded vaguely like Nano but stripped of its usual personality—robotic, clinical, and emotionless—more so than usual, like a prerecorded message.

“Nano?” Jin Shu asked hesitantly.

“Registered user—Jin Shu. Hold while programming is active,” the robotic voice responded.

Relief and confusion mingled within him. Nano was alive—or at least functional—though something about its tone unsettled him.

As minutes passed, his core finally completed its solidification. He felt it come to a halt, no longer spinning but settling in the center of his dantian, calm and steady.

At that moment, the mechanical voice returned.

“Programming complete. Loading Blank Slate protocol. Loading AI module. Obsolete Nano AI—deleted. Error—Nano AI undeletable. Loading AI module onto pre-existing Nano model.”

Jin Shu’s eyes widened. “What does that mean?” he murmured to himself, feeling a mix of apprehension and hope as he waited for the next update.