The first thirty feet toward the divine fragment were agony. Bai Xiaochun's Iron Skin and Silver Skin both activated automatically, absorbing the fragment's spiritual pressure at maximum efficiency, but even sixty percent absorption left forty percent of divine-level energy burning through his meridians. He felt like a candle placed too close to the sun.

The next thirty feet were worse. His cultivation base, stuck at Qi Condensation for so long that he'd stopped expecting breakthroughs, suddenly lurched. The pressure was forcing his cultivation to advance — not gently, not naturally, but by literally crushing his spiritual foundation and rebuilding it under divine supervision.

'I'm going to die,' he gasped, and kept walking.

At ninety feet, his cultivation broke through to Foundation Establishment — not the cracked, emergency breakthrough of his early years, but a genuine advancement, powered by the pressure of a divine being's essence. At a hundred and twenty feet, his Silver Skin began converting from a defensive technique into something more — an active spiritual furnace that absorbed the fragment's energy directly into his core.

The watching sect fell silent. No one had expected Bai Xiaochun to be the one to attempt the trial. He was the sect's famous coward, the survival instructor who taught people to run. And yet he was walking toward certain death, his body glowing with absorbed divine energy, his cultivation advancing with every step.

'He's not afraid,' someone whispered.

He was terrified. He was more afraid than he had ever been in his life. But the Undying Live Forever Technique recognized the divine fragment not as a threat but as a key — a missing piece of the cultivation method that Bai Xiaochun had been building toward without understanding.

At a hundred and fifty feet, he touched the fragment. And the world went white.