Lin Wei knew he was fucked the moment Elder Yun called his name.
"Lin Wei, step forward."
The training ground went dead silent. Two hundred outer sect disciples turned to stare and Lin Wei felt every single pair of eyes like needles sliding under his skin.
He was the last one.. Well, of course he was the last fucking one.
The Annual Meditation Trial happened every year and every year Lin Wei failed it spectacularly. This was year four, at this point his failure was basically a sect tradition, like the Harvest Festival or the Solstice Duel, except more humiliating and everyone looked forward to it for the wrong reasons.
He stood from his spot at the back of the crowd and walked forward. His sect robes was a faded blue, patched at the elbows, too loose on his thin frame. He'd lost weight this year, stress and skipped meals will do that.
The whispers started immediately.
"That's Trash Wei."
"Gods, he's actually going to try again?"
"His dad was executed, right? For that pervert cultivation research?"
"Lust Qi or some shit. Fucking disgusting."
"I'll bet you five spirit stones he doesn't even last thirty seconds."
"Only five? I'll bet ten he explodes something again."
Lin Wei kept his face blank and his eyes forward. Reacting only made it worse, he'd learned that lesson the hard way after three years of daily mockery.
The trial circle was carved into the ground at the center of the training field, a simple formation that measured Qi circulation. Sit inside it, meditate, circulate your Qi through the proper channels and the formation glowed blue. Easy, every outer disciple could do it by their second year.
Everyone except Lin Wei.
He stepped into the circle and sat legs crossed on the packed dirt. The ground was warm from the morning sun and the formation lines glowed faintly, waiting to measure his inevitable failure.
Around him, disciples had formed a loose crowd. Some looked bored, some looked amused, few looked almost sympathetic but sympathy didn't help him pass the fucking trial.
Elder Yun stood on the raised platform overlooking the grounds, arms crossed over his barrel chest. He was old, tuff, and deeply uninterested in Lin Wei's excuses. He'd heard them all before.
"Begin when ready," Elder Yun said, his voice flat.
Lin Wei closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
Okay, you can do this. You've practiced every night for a month, you know the pattern, you know the breathing. Just... don't fuck it up this time.
He reached inward, searching for his Qi core. There... a weak flicker buried in his lower dantian, like a candle trying to stay lit in a hurricane. Most disciples had cores that burned bright and steady, visible even to outside observers. His barely existed.
Carefully, moving with the delicacy of someone defusing a bomb, he tried to guide the Qi through his meridians.
The energy moved sluggishly, his meridians were damaged, had been since he was twelve and no amount of meditation or breathing exercises or wishful thinking could fix them.
The Qi crawled forward slow and painful.
Sweat grew on Lin Wei's forehead despite the cool morning air.
Come on, just circulate once, just one complete loop. Prove you're not completely fucking useless.
The Qi hit a blockage in his chest meridian and stopped dead.
Lin Wei gritted his teeth and pushed harder.
The energy resisted, piling up against the obstruction like water behind a dam.
He pushed again, throwing everything he had into forcing it through.
Move, damn you. MOVE.
The blockage gave way all at once.
Not smoothly. Not gradually.
It shattered.
The Qi that had been building up behind it exploded through his meridians in a chaotic, uncontrolled floor. Lin Wei's eyes snapped open as pain flooded through his chest.
"No.. Not now, please not again—"
His body convulsed.
The Qi backlash hit like a sledgehammer to the gut. Energy erupted outward from his core in violent, uncontrolled bursts, and the formation circle beneath him flared bright red. Failure. The color every disciple dreaded, the color that meant you were trash.
But it didn't stop there.
The Qi discharge was so strong, so catastrophically uncontrolled that it didn't just register as failure, it exploded. Lin Wei felt his robes heat up as raw, chaotic energy poured out of him in waves he couldn't stop.
A seam split down his back with an audible rip.
Oh no.
Another burst of energy, his left sleeve tore from shoulder to wrist.
Oh.. no.. no.. no..
The front of his robe gave way with a sound like tearing paper.
And then Lin Wei was on his hands and knees in the center of the circle, gasping for air, with his robes in smoking tatters around him and his chest half exposed to two hundred fucking disciples.
Silence.
Complete, absolute, suffocating silence.
For one beautiful terrible moment, Lin Wei thought maybe it was over, maybe they'd just let him crawl away quietly and he could go throw himself off a cliff in private.
Then someone laughed.
It started as a single bark of disbelief, but it spread like wildfire through the crowd. Within seconds, disciples were howling, doubled over, pointing, some of them actually crying from laughter.
"Holy shit, he blew up his clothes!"
"Trash Wei can't even meditate without stripping!"
"Someone check if he exploded his dick too!"
"Is that his cultivation technique? The Exhibitionist's Path?"
"Someone get this pervert a dancer's outfit, he's in the wrong fucking sect!"
Lin Wei's face burned hot, he tried to stand, tried to cover himself with the remains of his robe but his legs wouldn't work. The Qi backlash had drained him completely, left him weak as a newborn kitten. He was stuck there, half naked and shaking, while two hundred people laughed at him.
"Pathetic."
A voice cut through the noise like a blade.
Lin Wei looked up through the sweat dripping into his eyes.
Huo Liang stood at the edge of the platform, arms crossed, looking down at him with the kind of disgust usually reserved for dog shit on expensive shoes. He was everything Lin Wei wasn't—tall, handsome, talented, rich. Twenty years old and already at Foundation Establishment, the golden boy of the outer sect, destined for inner sect promotion, destined for greatness.
And he hated Lin Wei with the passion of a thousand burning suns.
"Four years," Huo Liang said, loud enough for everyone to hear, his voice dripping with contempt. "Four years of wasting the sect's resources, your father was a pervert who corrupted his alchemy with lust Qi, got himself executed for it, and now look at you. Can't even circulate basic energy without exploding out of your pants like some two copper brothel act."
The laughter intensified.
"Maybe that's the family technique!" someone shouted from the crowd. "Seduce your enemies by flashing them!"
"The Lin family's secret art, public indecency!"
"No wonder his dad got executed! Probably tried to fuck a spirit beast!"
Lin Wei's hands curled into fists. His vision blurred with tears he refused to let fall, he wanted to say something, anything. Wanted to scream that his father wasn't a pervert, wasn't a criminal, was just trying to help people who couldn't cultivate normally, people like Lin Wei.
But his throat was too tight, the words wouldn't come.
He couldn't even defend his father's memory.
Elder Yun finally raised one gnarled hand, and the laughter died down to scattered chuckles.
"Lin Wei." His voice was colder than a winter storm. "This is your fourth consecutive failure. By sect law, you are hereby placed on probation. You have thirty days to demonstrate measurable improvement in your cultivation, or you will be demoted to servant class. Do you understand?"
Thirty days.
Lin Wei's stomach dropped through the floor.
Thirty days to fix meridians that had been broken for six years. Thirty days to suddenly develop talent he'd never had. Thirty days to prove he wasn't the useless trash everyone said he was.
Impossible.
"Dismissed," Elder Yun said, already turning away like Lin Wei wasn't worth another second of his time.
The crowd began to disperse, still chuckling, already moving on to the next bit of gossip. Lin Wei's humiliation would fuel conversations for days, but right now they had training to get to, pills to refine, lives to live.
Lives that mattered.
Lin Wei stayed where he was kneeling in the circle, too exhausted and humiliated to move.
Someone draped a robe over his bare shoulders, he looked up and saw Instructor Feng—a woman in her thirties, an ice Qi master known for her rigid professionalism and complete lack of humor. She didn't smile, didn't offer comfort, didn't say anything comforting. Just looked at him with something that might have been pity buried under layers of professional detachment.
"Medical hall," she said curtly. "Get your meridians examined, they might be able to do something."
They wouldn't, they never could.
But he nodded anyway.
Instructor Feng walked away without another word, her pristine white robes a stark contrast to his smoking rags.
And Lin Wei was alone again.
Slowly and painfully, he forced himself to stand. His legs shook like a newborn deer's. His chest ached with phantom pain from the backlash. His pride, what little remained of it was somewhere in the dirt, ground into paste by two hundred pairs of feet.
He pulled the borrowed robe tight around himself and walked.
One step, then another.
Off the training grounds, through the outer sect pathways, past the sneers and the whispers and the disciples who stepped aside like failure might be contagious, like just standing too close to Trash Wei might ruin their cultivation.
He didn't go to the medical hall.
What was the point?
Instead, he went home.