Iris Wu looked good tonight.
Her loose knit sweater softened the line of her figure without hiding it. Less overt than last time. Still hard to ignore.
She did not speak to Ethan. Just gave him one cool glance, then turned her eyes back to the crowded bar street with no visible emotional spike.
The two women beside her were openly sizing Ethan up, clearly surprised he kept pressing Julian instead of backing off.
One had short hair and a short skirt despite late-autumn cold, pale legs bare under streetlight glare. The other had long hair with a natural wave and vivid red lips, striking enough to pull passersby into second looks.
"Ethan, did you wake up loaded tonight?" Zhou Ting stepped in for her brother. She was watching both men closely, less for etiquette than for impact control. She clearly did not want Julian charging again just to get dropped again.
"So you're Ethan Ward?" the wavy-haired woman said, stepping forward with easy poise. "Let's get acquainted. Li Qingxuan."
Iris cut in at once. "Qingxuan, don't overdo it."
She knew Li Qingxuan and Lyra Ling had history. This was trouble bait.
Ethan nodded politely to Li Qingxuan and mentally marked her, Zhou Ting, and Julian as low probability for direct shooter identity.
Two young men stood farther back, quiet and controlled, unlike Julian's habitual provocation profile.
"I'm being very restrained tonight," Julian said, still simmering. "Are you trying to pick a fight?"
Ethan stepped closer with deliberate sincerity.
"My bad. I ran into someone tonight with a faint red glow over the body. Aggressive type. Forget it." He gave a short breath. "Not in the mood. Good night."
He turned to leave.
Other than Julian, the rest of the group held themselves too evenly to read much in one pass.
Julian actually smiled.
"You ran into someone with red radiance? That's unlucky." His tone shifted toward smug relief as he started filling gaps with his own story: Ethan must have been flattened by a higher-tier practitioner, hence tonight's temper.
The thought improved his mood almost instantly.
Now that he felt superior again, he grew "generous."
"Little Wang, advice: stop clinging to old arts. New arts are on a different scale. People beyond grandmaster tier are coming soon. You're stuck on Old Earth. Too little exposure. Waste of talent."
He said all this with head wrapped in white gauze, arm braced and slinged, and enough visible treatment on his face and hands to contradict every word.
Ethan gave him a cooperative sigh, let him have the psychological win, and moved to go.
"Brother, maybe try humility," Zhou Ting snapped. "You've been beaten twice in days."
After Ethan moved off, Iris watched his back and said quietly, "Be careful with him."
Julian laughed. "Iris, be generous. Last time he just gave you a pathology lecture. He wasn't even trying."
Iris almost wanted to walk over and break his already injured arm herself.
She had tried to warn him.
In her read, Ethan had just done a full emotional manipulation pass: first needle Julian into raw reaction, then feed him just enough superiority to relax, then exit cleanly without residue.
Targeted probing.
Not random temper.
She decided to stop helping.
Li Qingxuan smiled brighter and leaned in. "So what's his deal, Zhou-ge?"
Julian might be arrogant, but he was not simple.
Part of his earlier line had been aimed at Iris on purpose. He was still angry that the Wu side had forced itself into the Qingcheng split; waiting for their participation had delayed digging, then the whole operation collapsed.
"You mean Little Wang..." Julian began.
"Tell me more," Li Qingxuan said sweetly. "My family is assembling an expedition team for that area. We're looking for people with real hands."
Iris saw exactly where this was going and, for once, chose silence.
Let them burn each other.
---
The moment Ethan turned away, his expression reset.
No smile. No theater.
His eyes became blade-sharp and swept the full bar street flow.
Several pedestrians felt the glance and flinched slightly, the way people do when a predator's attention lands on them for half a second and moves on.
He and Aoki moved through bar after bar that night.
No positive hit.
The team had withdrawn cleanly.
"This isn't over," Aoki said. "Whoever did it, we escalate. This crosses every line. We'll push it to Old Earth authorities."
At parting, Aoki told him to sleep and said he would deliver a legal firearms permit the next day.
"They won't show again in the short term," Aoki added. "I'll put people on watch."
---
It was late, but Ethan still called his parents.
Everything sounded normal.
That mattered.
The strike had been for him specifically, not a broad pressure operation against his family - at least not yet.
Back in his apartment, he took out the Golden Body manual.
Tonight had altered his internal state. Even reading felt different.
He started running the forms.
The gun attack had landed deeper than he wanted to admit. Under modern weapons, even strong old-arts practitioners were fragile. One slower reaction, and his head would have been opened.
Even now, thinking of it, cold sweat traced his spine.
Near his ear, one lock of hair was gone - fused off by passing round heat.
Life could end in a blink.
And he had needed Aoki to break the kill pattern.
He wanted strength more fiercely than ever.
Not abstract strength - bullet-survival strength.
If Golden Body had been even partly established tonight, he would not have let those men walk.
If he could reduce ballistic lethality from instant-death to survivable, he could chase and finish.
Golden Body's first layer converted smoothly for him from Iron Silk foundations.
He pushed into second-layer work - nominally a two-year stage by text.
Professor Lin's warning stayed active: ignore the time claims; old manuals inflated.
Body methods were frequency methods - organ resonance, metabolic acceleration, constitution change, sometimes touching endocrine axes along the way.
Golden Body's endpoint claim was straightforward:
body transformation, mind-side shift, eventual firearm resistance.
Root method remained the root.
Lin had repeated that enough times for it to become structural law in Ethan's head.
After one training block he stopped, took out the pre-Qin translation pages, and began reading.
He had remained in extended hyper-sense for too long tonight without fully dropping out.
The intuitive pressure was still there: something was coming.
He followed that pressure and read the *fang shi* transmission text.
Then something shifted.
Not metaphorically.
Functionally.
When he entered visualization and internal nourishment, everything changed at once.
He felt pulled into a sealed space - absolutely still, absolutely silent.
No fear.
No panic.
His calm was so complete that even he registered it as unusual, as if one part of him had stepped outside the world and was watching from there.
Time stretched.
Silence remained total.
His cognition, however, accelerated sharply - memory, association, retrieval.
With one backward pass of thought, the entire Golden Body manual burned into place. He could mentally "flip" it from back to front and recite cleanly.
He tested the same on the pre-Qin translation pages.
Same result.
Forward recitation. Reverse recitation. Segment-level recall on demand.
This exceeded his prior definition of hyper-sense.
This was close to overclocked consciousness.
What state was this?
The key feature was not just clarity, but environment:
a segregated interior domain,silent like an empty universe with no stars.
He searched the text for matching descriptions.
Given his current recall profile, he could cross-read aggressively, including sections normally beyond his current stage.
Soon he hit a dense paragraph near the back - one Professor Lin himself had marked as unresolved and therefore appended with older pre-Qin source wording.
Under normal conditions Ethan could not have parsed it fully.
In this state, he began to unlock it.
Associated frameworks surfaced in sequence:
meditation,Yellow Court inner landscape,*zhi xu ji, shou jing du*,later doctrinal glosses that mapped onto earlier technical language.
A pattern emerged.
In meditation discourse, there was an extreme attainment almost no grandmaster could reliably touch:
highest meditation,where subjective internal duration could span years while external time moved only minutes.
By that model, Ethan was in it now.
By Yellow Court language, he had entered a special inner-landscape domain.
By *Daodejing* phrasing, this matched "arrive at utmost emptiness; guard profound stillness."
Different traditions, one state.
Mysterious to outsiders.
To Ethan, the shock came from inversion:
what later systems treated as summit experience might, in pre-Qin *fang shi* terms, be only one operational state inside the root method.
Even in this ultra-calm mode, he felt genuine astonishment.
Highest meditation.
Inner landscape.
Were these, in practice, just the correct activation mode for the pre-Qin bamboo-slip method?
If his reading was right, he now had something more valuable than force:
time.
In meditation framing, years of interior duration could be available here.
In Daoist framing, he was in open clear-time and could remain.
He did not become euphoric.
He kept the same detached calm.
Then he made a decision.
Test it.
He began practicing Golden Body inside that domain.