Golden Body, once completed, was not just a tougher physique.
It was a shift in biological tier.
Early stage: impact resistance.Later stage: blade resistance.Further still: an almost unbreakable body by ordinary standards.
To civilians, that would already read as supernatural.
Inside the silent meditation domain, Ethan threw himself into it - repetition after repetition, correction after correction, with internal time stretched long enough to think precisely between every movement.
He could place each posture at exact angle. Any flaw, even slight, became visible and got corrected.
Even while training, he retained a detached observer-state.
Clear mind. Cold focus.
"Highest meditation," he thought. "Stationed in the void-zone with consciousness active, running Golden Body from here."
This place felt real in a way that made argument irrelevant.
Silent as a dead universe.
He knew his physical body was not literally here.
But training effects were feeding back outward.
As he continued, errors decreased to near zero.
At a certain point his movements inside the domain matched the manual line-for-line, no technical defect left to pick out.
Through the stillness, he could faintly sense the body outside.
It was moving too.
Not with the high-frequency trial-and-adjust loop he used in here, but slowly - as if memorizing perfect forms in muscle and fascia.
---
In that absolute-calm state, Ethan tested the core question:
If inner time here could run for years while outside passed in minutes, could results be carried back?
Mental realization, yes.
That part was straightforward.
Physical adaptation was less certain.
The body had not crossed into this domain directly.
He suspected flesh might lag behind cognition.
Realistic, but frustrating.
Then he noticed something he had initially underweighted:
why was the outside body still moving in such precise correspondence?
Subconscious carryover alone did not fully explain it.
A few days into subjective domain-time, fatigue appeared.
That was wrong.
By doctrine, this level should sustain years.
He watched himself continue the form cycle, increasingly slow, edging toward defects.
"No. Wrong model."
Then the break came.
He remembered the entry condition.
He had only entered because he ran the pre-Qin root method while already in hyper-sense.
So he switched.
He stopped pushing Golden Body with tired consciousness and reactivated the pre-Qin *fang shi* root method inside the domain.
Everything changed in near-instant sequence.
Fatigue peeled away.
Perception sharpened.
Signal depth increased.
Then his over-sense spread outward and touched something else.
"I pulled in a substance."
He recognized it immediately for what it functioned like, even if he could not name it:
a non-ordinary factor, scattered through the silent domain.
As it fell through that space, his spirit-state brightened instead of decaying.
Like rain in drought.
Like sweet dew in a dead field.
It nourished cognition first - then, over time, seemed to influence the vaguely sensed physical body as well.
At that point "highest meditation" no longer felt like a sufficient label.
The Taoist frame fit better:
Yellow Court inner landscape.
Absolute emptiness.
Profound stillness.
Open clear-time.
And from somewhere beyond direct language, an intake of hidden factor.
He understood in one sharp turn:
the foundation of old arts might sit here.
Not in outer drills alone, but in access to this domain and what could be drawn through it.
If that was true, pre-Qin *fang shi* strength stopped looking mysterious.
Their methods required this threshold.
Later generations mostly failed to reach it.
So old arts dimmed.
The gate itself - entering inner landscape through hyper-sense plus root method - had filtered out most practitioners across eras.
After a while, he felt physical-side response become clearer.
Not imagination.
Real carryover.
When the domain factor saturated, running root method stopped increasing intake. He returned to Golden Body training.
Results improved immediately compared with earlier cycles.
Perfect-form rehearsal in-domain.Slow but real body adaptation outside.
Same direction, two layers.
Then the key confirmation landed:
the factor drawn through inner landscape could be absorbed by the real body.
Which meant the Golden Body gains achieved in highest meditation were not trapped there.
They could transfer.
Even in this detached state, he gave a tiny involuntary tremor.
Then calm reset. The domain went silent again.
---
One year.Two years.
Subjective domain-time kept moving.
He alternated:
Golden Body practice until fatigue signs appeared,then root method activation to draw hidden factor again,then back to body method after replenishment.
By year two inside, he completed Golden Body layer two.
He also sensed clear external-body change: one full layer of skin shedding.
Mental and physical progression were staying coupled because of the drawn factor.
During those same two years, he also tested the gold-leaf body diagrams.
The pull was too strong to ignore - if the Zhang Daoling attribution held, this was founding-grade material.
What he found was brutal.
The method damaged the body.
Not metaphorically.
Mechanically.
"Ignorance really was fearlessness," he thought, remembering earlier attempts before entering inner landscape.
From this domain vantage, with near-surgical self-perception, he could see what normal conditions hid:
the moment trace pain appeared, micro-injury had already started in the viscera.
Tiny bleeding points in organs.
In the outside world, it would likely take very high-end instrumentation to detect changes this small.
Each single injury was minor.
Cumulative load was not.
Long-term accumulation would end badly.
Before this, he had treated it as manageable discomfort:
not tearing pain, endure and adapt.
Now he knew he had almost walked into a lethal zone.
"The gold-leaf body method can only be trained properly after entering inner landscape."
He also observed the compensatory mechanism:
after micro-bleeding appeared, the hidden factor in-domain diffused toward the organs and repaired them to baseline.
No wonder the method's floor was so high.
Without inner landscape access, it was effectively untrainable.
Even with access, two years got him only one result:
the first diagram on page one.
This time he did not swallow the whole page at once.
Single-diagram focus only.
After two years of injury-repair cycles, he brought that first figure to completion.
At completion, no matter how he stressed that figure, organ damage no longer recurred.
"The difficulty is absurd."
He judged the method was not meant for his current stage.
This was progress paid for by repeated controlled injury.
If figure one was this expensive, later figures would be worse.
He made a strategic cut:
prioritize Golden Body advancement,park the Zhang Daoling line until his level rose further.
---
Domain-time rolled on.
Another three years.
Golden Body reached layer three.
A few more months and it would likely stabilize to full completion.
Then an unprompted signal rose from inside:
exit approaching.
He knew it before it happened.
The silent domain began to admit sound.
First: his own heartbeat.Then: faint wind outside the window.Then: distant road noise.
Inner landscape thinned and dissolved.
Consciousness returned fully to the real room.
His first check was physical.
Two layers of skin shed.
New tissue: clearer, tougher, visibly upgraded.
Golden Body in real-world state:
layer three.
He checked the clock.
Five years in-domain.
Only minutes outside.