Staring into the ceiling of flames above, Jun Li's glassy eyes had no sign of cognition within their depths.

  The only sign of life from her body at this point was the quiet chittering of her teeth and the twitches that shifted her body from time to time.

  She had long ago run out of her antidotal elixir and was now left entirely without any assurance or safety net. Either she would complete Viscera Tempering now, or she would remain vulnerable to her own poison and end up crippled in this vile pit.

  Jun Li had no great awareness of her body as a whole and had, for dozens of hours, focused her senses internally.

  Her focus, as one might expect, was primarily directed towards her internal organs.

  The lungs and heart were of particular interest to most combatants, yet Jun Li knew well that she couldn't play favourites when it came to such a foundational step in her Cultivation.

  Every 'visceral aspect' of her body had to be refined here, in this moment. From her heart and stomach, to her liver and intestines, to her fascia and visceral fat. Not even a single aspect could be ignored.

  Due to the wide area of refinement, however, Jun Li had to split her focus between innumerable sites, ensuring that each of them was equally poisoned, degraded, repaired, and refined. All while her control over her Internal Qi slowly slipped away from exhaustion.

  Although Cultivation was typically a 'generative' act, this stage of refinement was 'consumptive' in the extreme, and even though Jun Li had implemented a unique method to steadily reclaim Qi through a cycle of self-poisoning and antidote application, that cycle had long since run its course, now leaving her reliant entirely on her own internal faculties.

  Now, almost seventy-five hours into her attempt to break through, with a touch softer than a feather and slower than melting ice, a delicate wave of Qi seeped into a curled and dried piece of fatty flesh, appearing like a hardened barnacle attached to an otherwise immaculate organ.

  Like a sponge re-inflating itself, this dried lump expanded, slowly blooming until it held the same soft and wavy texture as the rest of the organ.

  As that final refinement of the brain was completed, conscious thought returned to Jun Li, whose awareness was reclaimed just in time to feel a strange pulse of energy in her body.

  It was as if a circuit had been completed, and a pleasant buzzing sensation ran through her body, from the depths of her brain to the pads of her feet, the softest and most vulnerable parts of human anatomy were now connected to the ephemeral space of Jun Li's Crimson Palace.

  Her meridians, which existed as a web of interconnected highways, were now interrupted by the great rivers and lakes of her viscera, readily absorbing and emitting Qi, creating a force that projected Internal Qi faster and stronger than Jun Li's meridians could ever have managed on their own.

  With great effort, Jun Li rose from her bath of blood, the former liquid thickened from heat and time into a fleshy mass that came away in thready clumps.

  Though she took no notice in the moment, the complexion of her skin had become starkly 'even,' now appearing almost inorganically pure and unblemished after her tempering.

  As Jun Li sat up, she coughed and sputtered forcefully, spitting up blackened bile laden with both natural impurities and the poison of her breakthrough.

  In that moment, Jun Li breathed from new lungs, and even the vile air of the cauldron tasted as sweet as morning mist.

  Taking a breath deeper than any she had before, Jun Li's face raised to gaze into the ceiling of the Earth Dragon's Grave. 'I can see it…?' In that moment, she saw through the flames and gazed towards the sweeping figure of the Earth Dragon's skeleton.

  With a great influx of oxygen, Jun Li's newly tempered eyes experienced a sharp increase in clarity, to the point that even the thick blanket of flames above seemed like an open, half-weaved fabric.

  In a single breath, all the pain and fatigue Jun Li felt vanished, replaced by the post-breakthrough euphoria that countless obsessive Cultivators chased after all across the world.

  At her command, Qi welled up from deep within Jun Li's body, flowing out over her hands.

  Whereas previously, Jun Li's ability to project Qi was akin to releasing carefully controlled streams, with her newly empowered lungs and veins, her Qi was now projected with an intense force, the likes of which was so intense that she quickly had to rein it in.

  She felt that, if she so chose, it would be an easy matter to eject almost every shred of Qi in her body at once, bringing herself to the brink of death near-instantly.

  It was a level of bodily agency that no normal human should reasonably possess, and at a very primal level, she couldn't help but feel a bit shaken by the sensation.

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  Her capacity for Internal Qi hadn't increased significantly. She could feel that little had changed in that regard. But her ability to manipulate and manoeuvre that Qi had changed at a fundamental level.

  Analogising her Dantian to a keg of wine, Jun Li's body was previously a spigot, limited to releasing a steady flow of Qi whenever she pleased.

  Now, however, it was as if Jun Li could tear the lid straight off that keg, removing any and all restrictions on the flow of her Qi. "Pretty scary…" Jun Li carefully scrutinised her own newfound capabilities.

  If she wasn't skilled enough in Qi manipulation, this sort of freedom could lead to a genuine danger of self-harm in combat. Unfortunately, she had little time to practice in her new condition.

  "Five days have passed… Qin Yihua's probably gathering the rest of the disciples to fight that mutant beast…"

  Looking over the smooth walls of the cauldron, with no gaps, cracks, or caves to be seen, Jun Li slowly nodded her head. "...I think I can get out, as I am now…"

  "But…" Jun Li turned her attention to the centre of the cauldron's fetid pit. There, the small hill of flesh that used to be the Earth Dragon's heart laid dormant and half-rotten. "...I can't leave without trying at least."

  Wiping herself off atop the still-warm stone that had fallen three days ago, Jun Li put on a thin robe and jumped down into the sludge once more, readily making her way towards the heart.

  'This place sucks… I hope there's clean water somewhere in the Grave…' Lamenting her filthy surroundings, Jun Li put up with her conditions just a moment longer.

  'Now… what can I even do with this thing?' Up close, Jun Li looked over the Earth Dragon's Heart. It was a soft, oblong thing the size of a hill, with creases and folds covered in ancient, rotting fat. At this point, Jun Li couldn't tell if it smelled any worse than the rest of the vile pit.

  Walking around the gigantic mass, Jun Li attempted to spot any point of interest. If she wanted to 'take' something, it would have to be small enough to fit in her Spatial Ring, or in the Spatial Ring of the Frost River Sect disciple she had ambushed a few days ago.

  "That is… an auricle?" Jun Li referenced her inherited medical knowledge, happy for once to know such normally useless information as the anatomy of reptile hearts.

  The auricle that caught Jun Li's eye was a comparatively small part of this heart, but still hopelessly massive compared to the capacity of her Spatial Rings.

  'Maybe I can cut something out…?' Pulling her new Peak Mortal Grade saber from her spatial ring, Jun Li placed it against a fold in the heart and pressed down hard, forcing the saber into the creased flesh.

  "...uhh?" Making the sound of a fool, Jun Li felt absolutely no change to the flesh beneath her blade. In response to all the force she mustered, the ancient, half-rotten flesh merely sank a few inches before springing back up unharmed.

  It was as though it wasn't a blade cutting into flesh, but the blunt side of a hand pressing down into a cushion.

  Jun Li quickly stopped, concerned that forcing things any further would merely blunt her new saber. "Damn it… Is there anything I can do…?"

  Jumping up out of the sludge, Jun Li landed atop the heart and looked closely over its surface for any gaps and seams. '...Seriously…? This thing's in way better condition than I thought…'

  Other than the filth that covered and seeped out from the heart, little could be identified as 'wrong' with it, and it maintained its shape well over the unknown years.

  Jun Li gently ran her saber over the heart's surface, testing it. As she did, a translucent layer of half-melted fat was all she could mark. 'Wait… maybe that's enough…?'

  Quickly adjusting her position on the heart, Jun Li looked towards the remains of the heart's aorta and followed its offshoots. 'Aorta, coronary artery, descending artery, coronary branches…'

  Following numerous branches of the heart's veins to their ends, Jun Li eventually found what she was looking for, a vein that ended at the very shallowest point of the heart's fat.

  "There…!" Getting down on her knees, Jun Li slid her saber under a vein, into the fat, and, with one foot pressing down on the now-uplifted strip of fat, she slid her saber forward, undercutting the vein and pulling it up inch by inch.

  Within about a minute, she reached a discolouration in the heart, a segment that had rotted through more severely than most, and looked back to measure her work. "About… two body-lengths of heart vein…" Jun Li stood up after cutting to that point. "That should be plenty…"

  Retracing her steps, Jun Li wrapped the length of fat-encased vein around her arm as tightly as she could, one end still attached to that rotten point.

  Breathing deeply, she quelled her anxiety. 'If I lose a battle of durability against a rotten patch of dead coronary artery…'

  Allowing some of the vein to fall slack, Jun Li used the Glass Cloud Art, forming a flowing sphere of Qi beneath her foot.

  'I see…' The sensation of executing her Movement Technique now was unlike anything Jun Li had experienced before Viscera Tempering. '...I can do more.'

  Beneath her foot, that flowing cloud of Qi near-instantly expanded to more than twice its original size, causing a pang of unease even in her own heart. "...forget breaking my arm, if that vein doesn't give out, I won't even have an arm left…"

  Laughing at her own plan, Jun Li took a moment before she sucked in a cold breath and leapt straight up.

  When the length of the vein wrapped around her arm grew taut, her momentum reversed, sending her back down to the heart. Raising the same leg that bore the sphere of the Glass Cloud Art, Jun Li kicked down. "Sparking Thorn - Single-Point Stab!"

  In an instant, Jun Li's technique was crushed between her own foot and the surface of the Earth Dragon's heart, rupturing it with enough force to send Jun Li flying away, spitting up blood from the shock of the impact.

  Without so much as slowing her flight, the vein trapped under the rotting fat was torn up like a hangnail the moment it went taut, and snapped away from the heart, sailing into the distance with Jun Li.

  Jun Li, on the other hand, had passed out the instant her technique ruptured and was neither able to appreciate how well her Cloudburst technique scaled up, nor how successful her 'heart surgery' was.