Around the consoles, watching the beaming Feng Congzhi, quite a few experts had a flicker of envy in their eyes.
After all, every person here was a leading figure in their field; a moment's thought was enough to grasp the immense value of this phenomenon.
Scholars who were closer to Feng Congzhi, like Pan Yongnian, even cupped their hands in teasing congratulation: "Old Feng, you're definitely treating us to a feast after this."
"Whoa, whoa, whoa, no rush, no rush. We haven't even written the first stroke of the character yet," Feng Congzhi replied. Hearing Pan Yongnian's words, he tucked away his earlier excitement and visibly steadied himself. "Old Pan, don't forget whose football fan I am."
A football fan?
Pan Yongnian had known Feng Congzhi for years and naturally knew his hobby outside of work: "AC Milan, of course... Oh, oh, oh, I get it. The Miracle of Istanbul, right?"
"Good that you know," Feng Congzhi huffed with a shake of his head. "Even a three-nil lead at halftime can get overturned, let alone an isolated case like ours. As Zhou Shuren said, popping the champagne early is ill-advised—ill-advised indeed."
Seeing Feng Congzhi frantically trying to avoid jinxing himself, the panel of experts burst into good-natured laughter.
Even Sun Guozhu, the meritorious elder, smiled with amusement.
Still, there was serious work at hand, so everyone quickly refocused their attention on the cultivation trial.
Pan Yongnian remained where he stood, continuing to observe Xue Rui's progress for a while longer.
He noticed that as time elapsed, a second distinct red area began to emerge at Xue Rui's neck.
Instinctively, Pan reached up and touched the back of his own neck—roughly around the atlas vertebra... that is, the region just below the occipital bone.
Pan pointed at the screen and asked another elderly man beside him, "Elder Huang, this should be the first node Comrade Lin Yi mentioned, right?"
If Lin Yi were present, he would have recognized Elder Huang as Academician Huang Rong—the very scholar who had asked him about what cultivation was and inquired about his relationship status at the Think Tank base during their second cross-world exchange.
"Yes, it should be."
Huang Rong's health remained frail. Though he did not require a wheelchair like Elder Sun, he leaned on a walking stick for support. Hearing the question, he analyzed: "According to the information Comrade Lin Yi provided, this so-called Awakening is actually the process of guiding spiritual energy through a complete circulation inside the human body, allowing the body to adapt to the properties of spiritual energy.
"In a sense, the logic is identical to seasoning a wok before stir-frying, or baiting the swim before fishing.
"Throughout this process, seven nodes must be breached. The Primordial Origin Pill's primary role is to condense spiritual energy, while the cultivation technique increases the efficiency of the impact."
Though Huang Rong had retired from the Institute of Modern Physics, his attainments in biology and linguistics were equally astounding—he was a rare master of three disciplines.
The nation's earliest post-founding physics textbooks had been compiled and translated under his leadership.
Otherwise, the Think Tank would never have invited him out of retirement to converse with Lin Yi about cultivation.
During this period, Huang Rong had personally participated in the preparatory work for the Awakening experiment; the audio guidance playing inside the cultivation chambers was the fruit of calibration and compilation led by his team.
According to his understanding, the *Tide Art* sent back by Lin Yi essentially used suggestive techniques to guide the practitioner into visualizing an ocean. Through a specific rhythm akin to rising and falling tides, and in combination with the medicinal pills and spirit stones, it pounded against the seven nodes.
The first node lay at the topmost end of the cervical spine, followed by the thoracic vertebrae, and then the coccyx.
After that came one node each in the left hand, left foot, right foot, and right hand, before finally looping back to the first node to complete a closed circuit.
Once the circuit closed successfully, a sea of qi would be born within the practitioner's body, divine sense would awaken, and they would formally step into the Qi Refining stage.
Ten minutes or so passed.
"Elder Huang!"
An observer raised a hand and reported, "Elder Huang, quite a few soldiers have begun taking their second Primordial Origin Pill."
"Oh?" Huang Rong walked up to the screen upon hearing this and asked, "What are the exact numbers, and what are their aptitudes?"
The observer checked the data: "A total of thirty-seven people. As for aptitude... all five spiritual roots—including Chief of Staff Chen."
Huang Rong nodded gently.
In the earlier baseline screening of all personnel, the base had discovered over a thousand individuals with five spiritual roots, along with two with four spiritual roots and one with three spiritual roots.
The latter three went without saying—they were exempt from early testing.
Next, the base had held a random drawing among the five-spiritual-root personnel, selecting ninety-six soldiers. Added to Chen Zhengze, who had volunteered to lead the charge, this made up the hundred-person roster for the experiment.
And according to the Awakening information provided by Lin Yi, the lower a person's spiritual root aptitude, the faster the medicinal efficacy of the Primordial Origin Pill would diminish, and consequently, the higher the frequency of taking them would be.
Under normal circumstances, an ordinary person could attempt Awakening once every three days, and during each attempt, the maximum allowable dosage was ten Primordial Origin Pills.
Any more than that would exceed the human body's tolerance limit, even if one were a bronze-skinned athlete.
Of course, much like the claim that web novelists in the home world could theoretically type for eighteen hours a day, the three-day interval was merely a theoretical figure.
For the ordinary populace of the Tianling Realm, scraping together ten Primordial Origin Pills every two months on average was already considered fortunate.
If luck favored them during Awakening, ten Primordial Origin Pills might breach one or even several nodes.
Yet if their luck or aptitude was abysmal, dozens or even hundreds of pills might fail to budge a node in the slightest.
Thus, in the Tianling Realm, people who spent decades only to clear three or four nodes were everywhere.
The only silver lining was that unlike the single-session dosage limit, there was no overall ceiling on the total quantity of Primordial Origin Pills one could consume over time.
In other words, as long as one had the wealth, one could endlessly repeat the cycle of ten pills every three days to batter through the barriers.
It was said that in Jiuwu City, a direct descendant of a prominent clan—blessed with terrible aptitude but adored by elders—had consumed over three thousand Primordial Origin Pills before finally achieving Awakening.
As for the thirty-seven soldiers on-site taking their second Primordial Origin Pill...
To put it bluntly, at least in this round of Awakening, they had already fallen behind the main pack.
Yet all of this fell well within the base's expectations; Huang Rong had no intention of faulting them.
Although the experiment aimed to identify the top-performing handful, it did not mean the slightly less gifted soldiers would be cast aside.
Another twenty minutes passed.
The first soldier to take a third Primordial Origin Pill appeared.
Then a second, a third...
An hour and a half after the Awakening experiment formally commenced, among the hundred soldiers participating, the one who had taken the most had already consumed eight Primordial Origin Pills.
Meanwhile, those who had taken only a single pill dwindled to just...
Sixteen people.
Shortly thereafter, two hours and seventeen minutes into the experiment:
*Click—*
Chamber No. 76 opened.
A visibly exhausted young soldier stepped out, head hung in dejection.
He took barely two steps before suddenly dropping into a crouch on the floor, covering his face with one hand, his shoulders trembling uncontrollably.
The battalion political instructor waiting outside hurried forward, squatted beside him, and wrapped an arm around the young soldier's shoulders to console him.
Seeing this, Huang Rong let out a soft sigh. He turned around and asked the observer, partly to ease the tension and partly out of genuine concern: "Xiao Ma, which comrade is making the fastest progress right now, and how far have they gotten?"
Chapter 50