415: Chapter 415 Increased Strength, Clan Members' Fighting Spirit Soars

The morning bell had just rung, and before the first ray of light could climb over the city wall, the Mecha Training Ground was already vibrating enough to make the earth tremble.

"Left wing formation, reduce speed! Unit 3, don't drift!"

"Understood! Switching to manual mode, stabilizing the gyroscope—"

"Signal's lost? Dammit! I'm flying by feel now!"

In the sky, seven training mechas were passing through a layer of clouds glowing with a grey light; the navigation Spirit Compass was entirely red, and alarms were blaring one after another.

Those clouds seemed alive, constantly twisting the flow of Spiritual Qi, such that even the Formation Tower couldn't accurately measure the wind direction.

But no one below panicked.

On the Sword Dao Stage, a row of youths was holding horse stances, wooden swords held horizontally before their chests, with fine beads of sweat appearing on their foreheads.

"Slow down your breathing, don't let the chaos outside affect you," a veteran leading the training roared. "A Sword Cultivator first cultivates the heart; even if the heavens fall, you must stand firm!"

Someone's lip twitched: "That loud bang just now... did Unit 3 explode?"

"Nonsense! That was a drill breaking rock! Are your ears more sensitive than a Spirit Array?" The person next to him slapped the back of his head. "Concentrate! If you wobble again, I'm marking it against you!"

The Spirit Array Workshop was even quieter; over a dozen apprentices were gathered around the main formation diagram, their fingers rapidly moving rune bricks.

"Eastern node offset by 0.3 degrees, supplement the spiritual flow!"

"The southern corner can't be held down, switch to short-range resonance!"

"Don't rush, follow the mnemonic: 'One line loose, nine lines adjust; if the heart is not chaotic, the formation is naturally secure'!"

The cloud layer churned for several rounds before finally slowly dispersing.

Almost at the exact same second, all three training areas erupted with sound simultaneously.

"The signal is back!"

"The Spiritual Qi has stabilized!"

"The formation diagram is locked!"

Before the cheering could finish, the captains of each team roared in unison: "Extra practice for fifteen minutes! Whoever stops can get lost!"

As soon as these words were spoken, not only did no one complain, but their eyes lit up one by one. The mecha group immediately reset their flight paths, the Sword Cultivator Team jumped directly from stance work to sparring, and even the Spirit Array apprentices, who were the most mentally exhausted, took the initiative to extend their deduction time.

"Hey, do you think they've gone crazy?" a logistics technician muttered to his companion while crouching by the wall eating a flatbread. "They were still modifying circuit boards at midnight yesterday, and they're back at it this morning pushing through interference. What's the point?"

The companion swung his toolbox over his shoulder: "What's the point? Didn't you see last month's trial? Little Chen's kid controlled two mechas by himself and took Best in Show. Who doesn't want to learn an extra trick now?"

"But these clouds came so strangely, could it be an enemy attack?"

"Enemy attack?" The man sneered. "If it were really an enemy, would we still be standing here talking? We'd have been blown to bits long ago. This is troop training! Don't you understand what a combat simulation is?"

In the afternoon, the classroom was so hot it was practically smoking.

A high-level mecha control logic was scrolling across the projection formation diagram, densely packed with spiritual flow circuits and motion prediction models.

A group of young people stared at it for a long while, their heads spinning.

"How are we supposed to understand this?" A youth threw down his pen. "It's all Spiritual Pressure differences and feedback delays; how are we sword practitioners supposed to understand this stuff?"

"Exactly, before, the Master taught us that 'where the heart goes, the intent follows, and where the intent goes, the power follows.' Now, we have to calculate data instead?"

"Stop with the sarcastic remarks. How many pages of notes did you secretly copy last night?" the person next to him exposed him. "I saw it, your lamp was lit until the third watch."

Before the words had finished, a thin, small figure stood up in the corner.

It was Li Ergou, the one who had crashed and damaged a training mecha due to an operation error last month.

He silently walked to the front and opened the notebook in his hand, spreading the pages out on the table—over three hundred debugging records, each marked with the time, error type, and correction logic, written in messy but meticulous handwriting.

"I made mistakes thirty-seven times." His voice wasn't loud, but the whole room heard him clearly. "Every time I made a mistake, I asked myself: Was I too slow? Was my reaction late? Or did I simply not understand what the System was thinking? Later, I realized... it's not that the machine is too difficult, it's that I didn't treat it as a partner."

The room fell silent.

After a moment, someone whispered: "Is it... actually useful to record things in such detail?"

"It is," Li Ergou nodded. "With every mistake, I get one step closer to being correct. Now, I can complete seventy percent of the procedures with my eyes closed."

This single sentence was like a spark falling into a haystack.

"Wait!" A girl wearing glasses suddenly slapped the table. "Can we look at this System in a different way? Don't treat it as cold code, but as... as a new type of cultivation?"

"How so?"

"Look, traditional cultivation is about sensing heaven and earth, and now mechas also rely on sensing the flow of Spiritual Qi to operate. It needs to 'breathe,' and we need to 'enter a meditative state'; it can 'lag,' and we can 'suffer cultivation deviation'—essentially, isn't it all just state adjustment?"

Everyone was stunned, then an uproar broke out.

"That makes sense! Those control levers are our Meridians, and the feedback signals are the True Qi flow!"

"Yes! I'll break the startup sequence into three steps: first, Gathering Qi; second, Guiding; third, Burst—just like practicing a technique!"

"Hurry up and write this down! Let's tackle it module by module; we must successfully run a full simulation today!"

Amidst the noise, the projection formation diagram flashed, successfully lighting up the entire operational link.

Everyone jumped up and cheered, and even the lecturer couldn't help but grin.

At dusk, the sunset glow burned half the sky red.

Suddenly, alarm bells rang out loudly, and red runic light soared into the sky—it was an exercise alarm, simulating an enemy raid on the East Gate.

Most of the veterans reacted extremely quickly, immediately forming ranks. But several newly promoted newcomers turned pale and subconsciously took half a step back.

"Don't move!" A bearded man in the front row suddenly turned around. "If you take a step back, who behind you is going to block for you?"

"I... I didn't..."

"Do you know what you're protecting?" The man grabbed him by the shoulder. "It's the eaves your parents sleep under! It's the school where your child studies! It's the hearth where your wife is brewing soup waiting for you to come home!"

The youth shuddered.

The surroundings fell quiet.

Someone growled: "Roots in the Eastern Desolation, lives tied to comrades!"

Then a second voice rang out: "Rather break bones than bend the waist!"

A third, a fourth... until finally, the entire field chanted in unison: "Roots in the Eastern Desolation, lives tied to comrades, rather break bones than bend the waist!"

The waves of sound rolled, causing the dust on the city walls to rustle down.

The alarm was lifted, and the red light extinguished.

No one dispersed.

The mecha students returned to their cockpits to continue familiarizing themselves with the controls, the Sword Cultivators spontaneously added extra night combat drills, and the Spirit Array apprentices began to review the emergency response vulnerabilities from just now.

Lamps were lit one after another, illuminating the entire Chen Family Territory as if it were day.

At the school entrance, the youth who had once questioned "can we really Master this kind of power" was now hunched over a table writing a summary. His notebook was filled with sketches, and the last line read:

"I'm not afraid of making mistakes, only of stopping. As long as I'm still practicing, I haven't lost."

In the distance on the city wall, an old craftsman stood for a long time leaning on a cane. He looked at the busy figures below and murmured:

"Thirty years ago, we couldn't even forge a decent blade... and now? Hah, we can even poke a hole in the sky."

The wind blew across the training ground, picking up several scattered pages of notes.

One fell by the Sword Dao Stage, with "Basic Sword Stance · Day 47 of 100-Day Challenge" written on it.

One drifted into a mecha cockpit and was tucked into the layers of an operation manual by a student.

The last one landed gently on the main rune brick of the Spirit Array Workshop, its ink still wet:

"Today's response to fluctuations: Qualified. All personnel have met the standard."