The Mid Sentinel breakthrough happened on a Thursday in week eight, alone in the outer ring, during the third repetition of the eastern second form at approximately two in the morning.
He had not been trying to break through. He had not been thinking about it. The training had been producing a specific quality of internal pressure for the past three weeks, the accumulated weight of Iron Root and Water Spine and Heaven Gate operating simultaneously on a core that had been Low Sentinel since October, and the pressure had been building in the way that genuine cultivation pressure built, not dramatically but steadily, the way stone cracked under sustained load rather than sudden impact.
The second repetition of the eastern form ended and he reset and began the third and somewhere in the transition between the second beat and the third the pressure crossed a threshold it had been approaching for weeks and the core shifted.
He stopped.
