Stan took a deep, deliberate breath.
The Divine Bronze Bone-Tempering Pill sat in his right palm, dark and warm and slightly heavier than it should have been for its size. He turned it over once between his thumb and forefinger, studying the faint, almost invisible script etched across its surface.
He set the jade elixir aside for now. The bottle could wait. Whatever it did, he wanted to take the pill first.
He weighed it once more, exhaled, and brought it to his mouth.
Though he didn’t let it linger on his tongue, the instant the pill touched its tip, a sharp, electric sting spread across his taste buds. It wasn’t the fiery burn of spice or the harsh bite of alcohol, but something far stranger, more invasive. It felt as though the inside of his mouth had been brushed by a low-voltage current, every nerve ending simultaneously numbed and set ablaze.
He swallowed almost immediately, more out of instinct than intention.
A wave of intense heat followed the pill down his throat.
It was, in the first half-second, comparable to drinking a long, deep gulp of high-proof whiskey. The kind of swallow that burned all the way down. The kind that left a hot, glowing line behind it as it traveled.
In the second half-second, the comparison stopped working.
The heat intensified with terrifying speed, becoming several orders of magnitude harsher than any alcohol he had ever tasted. It no longer felt like a chemical burn. It felt alive.
The scorching sensation seemed to crawl deliberately through his throat, spreading itself across every inch it touched, as though it were searching for every exposed nerve. It left behind not mere warmth, but a trail of nerves screaming in protest, each one flaring with a fierce, almost sentient agony that made his muscles tense involuntarily.
The pill reached his stomach and it dissolved instantly. And then it stopped behaving like medicine altogether.
Stan staggered.
A wave of unbearable heat erupted from deep within his abdomen, exploding through his body with such violence that the edges of his vision flashed white. The pill’s effects ignored every law of biology he understood. It did not seep into his bloodstream or spread through his circulatory system. It propagated through him instantaneously, as though every nerve in his body had been waiting for a signal, and that signal had finally arrived.
Then he felt his bones.
That was what he would remember most vividly afterward, not the heat, not the paralysis, but the impossible awareness that he could feel his own skeleton.
His femurs. His tibias. The bones of his arms. His ribs. His spine. His skull.
Every bone in his body had been brought into perfect, horrifying focus, as though flesh, muscle, and skin had ceased to exist, leaving only his skeleton illuminated within him.
And every single bone was burning. It felt as though molten bronze had been poured directly into the marrow of every bone he possessed.
A ragged, involuntary cry ripped from his throat as his legs buckled beneath him.
He slammed into the kitchen counter, barely catching himself before he hit the floor. His fingers dug into the countertop until his knuckles whitened, using it to force himself upright one final time. Already, his body was beginning to betray him.
His vision tunneled.
A metallic taste flooded his mouth, blood, saliva, or perhaps both.
His knees refused to lock. Violent tremors seized his shoulders, not from cold, but from a nervous system overwhelmed by a heat it had no capacity to endure.
’Bed. Bed!’
The thought surfaced through the rapidly shrinking window of his consciousness.
He had seconds. Perhaps four. Perhaps five. Before the paralysis consuming his body became absolute.
Grinding his teeth against the agony, Stan gathered every shred of will he possessed and forced himself forward.
Three stumbling steps. Four more. Then six, each one clumsier than the last, until walking became controlled falling.
He reached the bedroom doorway just as his legs finally gave out.
His body pitched forward and he struck the mattress like a felled tree.
Everything stopped. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t even shift his weight. His arms had locked rigid at his sides. His legs refused the slightest command.
Half his face was buried in the pillow, his neck twisted at an awkward angle that should have been agonizing on its own, yet it barely registered.
The paralysis was complete. Whatever control had carried him from the kitchen to the bedroom had been the last reserve his body could offer.
Then the true agony began.
The burning in his bones intensified.
Some distant, detached part of Stan’s mind, the part still capable of coherent thought, understood what was happening.
The pill was doing exactly what its name promised; Bone-tempering.
It was rewriting the very architecture of his skeleton at a level so fundamental that his nervous system possessed no language for the experience. This wasn’t ordinary pain. Ordinary pain was the body’s warning that something had been injured.
This was different; this was the body trying to comprehend the impossible.
His bones were being dismantled and rebuilt simultaneously, and every nerve anchored to them was faithfully transmitting the process to his brain without mercy or restraint.
Stan groaned through clenched teeth.
Sweat poured from him in torrents. His shirt was already soaked through, clinging to his skin. Beneath him, the bedsheet darkened as moisture spread across the fabric.
His entire body felt impossibly hot.
Heat radiated from his skin in relentless waves. Cool air brushed against the sweat coating his arms and neck, only for fresh perspiration to replace what had already begun to evaporate. It felt as though his body had become a furnace, burning from the inside out.
Then another wave struck.
His bones felt as though they were breaking.
Not all at once. One after another; His femurs, his ribs, his jaw, his spine, his forearms, his hips.
The agony rolled through him like seismic aftershocks, each surge igniting a fresh explosion of pain before fading just enough for the next to arrive. There was never relief, only brief valleys between impossible peaks.
’Fuck!’
The thought flashed through his mind with the simple, crystalline clarity that only unbearable pain could produce.
’Fuck!’
’Fuck!!’
’Fuck!!!’
He had read about this countless times in cultivation novels.
From the safety of a reader’s perspective, he had always assumed the authors were embellishing.
The protagonists screaming until their voices gave out. The cultivators writhing across stone floors during body-tempering.
The prodigies biting through their own tongues to keep from crying out during breakthroughs.
He had read those scenes with detached amusement, convinced that the suffering was exaggerated for dramatic effect.
He even remembered dismissing one particular protagonist as a wimp for screaming through an almost identical tempering sequence.
A distant, almost hysterical laugh echoed somewhere in the back of his mind.
He took it back. He took it all back. If anything, those authors had been restrained.
No words on a page could truly convey what it felt like to have every bone in your body remade while remaining painfully conscious throughout the process.
This, What was happening to him now, on his bed in Aurelia Heights, on an otherwise ordinary afternoon in Inksea, This was the reality behind those stories.
"Fuck..." he croaked aloud.
The word scraped past teeth that refused to unclench.
"Fuck..."
His vision had become a watery blur. Tears streamed unchecked down his face, but they carried no emotion. They weren’t born of fear or despair.
His body was simply reacting.
His eyes watered for the same reason sweat drenched his skin: the pill’s transformation was reaching every part of him.
He could feel it working through the tiny bones of his inner ears.
Through the delicate structures surrounding his eyes.
Through the bones of his hands, wrists, feet, and fingers.
Every dense, calcified structure in his body had become another battlefield in the relentless process of tempering.
He couldn’t tell how much of the pill’s power was being spent on his bones and how much was spilling into the rest of his body.
From the inside, it felt like all of it.
Yet some detached corner of his mind, the part still capable of reason, understood that couldn’t be true. The pill was called the Divine Bronze Bone-Tempering Pill for a reason. Most of its power had to be focused on his skeleton. The heat coursing through his organs, the pressure behind his eyes, the burning beneath his skin... those were only secondary effects, the excess energy radiating outward from the true transformation.
Perhaps ninety percent of the pill’s power was devoted to his bones.
The remaining ten percent was enough to make every other part of his body feel as though it were being forged alongside them.
If ten percent felt like this... It’s hard to imagine what ninety percent was doing to his femurs.
His consciousness began to slip.
The temptation was overwhelming. The human mind wasn’t built to remain awake through prolonged agony. Faced with pain beyond its ability to process, it sought escape. Darkness crept in at the edges of his awareness, soft and inviting.
’Just close your eyes.’
’Just let go.’
’You’ll wake up when it’s over.’
For one dangerous moment, the offer sounded almost irresistible.
Then something inside him rejected it. Not with logic but with instinct.
A deep, primal refusal rose from somewhere beyond conscious thought.
’No!’
He couldn’t have explained why, even to himself.
Perhaps it was stubbornness. A refusal to become nothing more than a passive subject while the System remade his body.
Perhaps it was the nagging certainty that something important was happening, something he needed to witness rather than awaken to after the fact. Or perhaps it was something older.
He had lived through enough as a teenager to learn one lesson that pain had carved into him:
When life became unbearable, the answer wasn’t to surrender consciousness and hope the world would still be waiting when you returned.
So he refused. He held on.
His jaw remained clenched so tightly that it ached.
Sweat streamed from every pore. Every muscle trembled uncontrollably. His body begged for oblivion. His mind denied it.
And so Stan endured.