A scientist's first duty, Alistair Kane had believed, was to test his hypothesis.
The hypothesis, recorded in shaky charcoal the night before, was that the cultivation techniques of this world were flawed programming. The supporting observation was the network of crimson fault lines he saw superimposed on the Azure River Qi Condensation Method. The corollary was that he could interact with those faults.
Now, he needed an experiment.
Dawn's grey light filtered into his room. The two Low-Grade Spirit Stones sat on the warped table, their faint, sickly glow an insult and an opportunity. He picked one up. It was cool and slightly greasy, its energy matrix—visible to his Fracture Sight as a wobbly, translucent sphere—leaking ambient Qi in a slow, wasteful drip.
One for the experiment. One held in reserve. Standard protocol.
He sat cross-legged on the thin pallet, the stone cupped in his palms. He closed his eyes, not to meditate in the traditional sense, but to observe. He called up the mental image of the Body Tempering exercise he'd inherited from Li Fan's memories—the "Verdant Willow Body Tempering Art." It was a simple series of postures and breathing patterns meant to draw ambient Qi into the muscles and bones, strengthening them from the inside out.
As before, the visualized pathways were laced with those jagged crimson fractures. But this time, he focused not on the pain of their wrongness, but on their structure. One fracture, in particular, caught his attention. It was a major bottleneck in the meridian leading from his right palm to his shoulder. The standard technique forced Qi through this constricted, high-resistance pathway. It was inefficient by a factor he estimated, based on the fracture's geometry, at roughly forty percent.
Experiment Design:
Control: Attempt the standard Verdant Willow Art pathway.
Variable: Divert energy flow 3mm around the primary bottleneck fracture, following a smoother, adjacent channel that his Fracture Sight indicated was latent but unused.
Energy Source: One Low-Grade Spirit Stone.
Success Metric: Reduction in pain; successful energy absorption.
He began. Drawing a trickle of Qi from the stone into his palm was like sipping static electricity. He guided it into his meridian, following the painful, prescribed route. Agony, sharp and familiar, lanced up his arm. He noted it—baseline established.
He halted the flow, let the pain subside to a dull throb. Then, he began again.
This time, as the energy reached the fracture point, he exerted the barest mental nudge. Not force. A suggestion. A redirect. He imagined the energy as water, and the fracture as a dam. He was digging a tiny, temporary canal around its edge.
The Qi resisted. The "code" of the technique pushed back, insisting on its programmed route. Li Fan's jaw tightened. He poured more focus—not spiritual will, but intellectual certainty. The fracture was a flaw. The alternate path was more efficient. This was not belief; it was observable fact.
The energy shuddered, then slid into the adjacent channel.
The immediate relief was profound. The searing pain vanished, replaced by a warm, flowing sensation. The Qi moved up his arm, not in a painful torrent, but in a steady, manageable stream. It dissipated into his muscles, not with a jarring impact, but like a gentle infusion. He felt a slight, palpable strengthening in his right arm, a subtle hum of vitality he had never experienced in this body.
Result: Success. Pain decreased by an estimated 70%. Energy absorption efficiency increased. The alternate pathway was viable.
He opened his eyes, a rush of triumph—the pure, clean triumph of a successful test—flooding him. He had just debugged his first line of living code.
Then the world glitched.
His vision doubled. The walls of his room seemed to breathe, bulging inward then retreating. The wooden grain of the floorboards writhed like snakes. A high-pitched whine, inaudible but felt in the teeth, filled his skull. He tried to stand and stumbled, his stomach lurching.
Side effect. Unanticipated variable.
He collapsed back onto the pallet, gripping the edge as reality stuttered around him. He focused on his breathing, on the solid feel of the worn fabric beneath him. The episode lasted exactly thirty-seven minutes by the count of his internal clock—another legacy of a life ruled by precise measurement. As suddenly as it came, it faded, leaving him sweaty, nauseous, and with a headache drilling behind his eyes.
He reached for his journal, his hand trembling only slightly.
> Personal Log, Entry Two.
> Experiment: Bypass of Primary Fracture in Verdant Willow Art, Meridian 7A.
> Result: Pathway optimization successful. Achieved Body Tempering, Layer 1 in right upper extremity. Subjective pain reduction ~70%.
> Anomalous Observation: Post-intervention perceptual corruption. Temporal duration: 37 minutes. Symptoms: visual diplopia (double vision), spatial distortion, auditory tinnitus (subjective). Designated: Tier 1 Soul Glitch.
> Conclusion: Causality confirmed. Direct intervention in systemic flaws is possible. However, interaction with fractures induces a feedback corruption of own cognitive processes. Risk-reward balance requires careful calibration.
> New Hypothesis: The 'glitch' is a tax imposed by the system on unauthorized access. Or a symptom of my soul's instability.
The door slid open. Xiao He entered with a bowl of steaming broth, his face brightening. "Young Master! You're awake. You look… pale. Was the night bad?"
Li Fan looked at him. Xiao He's familiar, concerned face was a welcome anchor. But as he focused, a terrifying blankness yawned where the boy's features should be. For a heart-stopping second, he couldn't recall his servant's name. The memory was gone, erased like a corrupted file. A cold fear, deeper than any fear of physical harm, gripped him.
Then it flooded back—Xiao He, the servant, kind, bringer of congee—along with a phantom image of a different young man in a white lab coat, smiling over a spectrometer. David. His assistant. The betrayer.
"Young Master?" Xiao He's smile faltered.
"A… difficult meditation, Xiao He," Li Fan said, the words thick. He took the broth, the heat scouring the last of the nausea away. The fear remained, icy in his gut. The cost wasn't just dizziness. It was him. His memories, his identity—the very data of his existence—were vulnerable.
"Thank you," he managed.
Xiao He nodded, still looking worried, and busied himself with straightening the already-sparse room.
The fear crystallized into a new parameter in his mental model. Every action has a cost. The currency is not just energy, but self.
His moment of introspection was shattered by the door slamming open without ceremony.
Li Fang, his eldest brother, filled the doorway. At eighteen, he was broad-shouldered and brimming with the casual vigor of someone at the peak of Qi Condensation. His presence pushed at the room, a dense, arrogant pressure of contained energy. Under Li Fan's still-sensitive sight, Li Fang's cultivation aura was a riot of unstable connections—flashing junctions of pride-fueled Qi, brittle meridians from rushed advancements, a core that pulsed with aggressive, poorly integrated energy. He was a walking catalog of systemic vulnerabilities.
"Still alive, little brother?" Li Fang's voice was a sneer. "I heard you were staring at walls again. Contemplating your glorious irrelevance?" He strode in, ignoring Xiao He's hurried bow. "You should be in the training yard, not wasting Father's resources in here. Then again," he said, looking around the barren room with disgust, "what resources?"
Li Fan met his gaze, saying nothing. The scientist observed: Subject displays dominance behavior. Insecurity manifesting as aggression. Cultivation foundation shows significant resonance instability—prone to feedback loops under emotional stress.
"Cat got your tongue? Or did you finally cough your wits out?" Li Fang leaned in, his sneer widening. "The clan tournament is in a month. Try not to disgrace us by dying in the first round. It would be… messy."
He turned and left, his departure as violent as his entrance.
Xiao He let out a breath he'd been holding. Li Fan simply added another note to his mental dossier on Li Fang. Primary local antagonist. Motivation: status anxiety. Method: intimidation. Weakness: fragile foundation.
Later that afternoon, necessity drove Li Fan from his room. He needed air that didn't smell of his own sickness and the lingering psychic residue of the glitch. He walked the secluded garden paths of the Alabaster Gardens' western wing, his domain by virtue of neglect.
He turned a corner and froze.
Patriarch Li Hong stood twenty paces away, speaking quietly with Elder Wen, the librarian. The Patriarch was not a large man, but his presence was a tangible force. He was the epicenter of the clan's power, a Foundation Establishment expert.
Curiosity overrode caution. Li Fan focused his Fracture Sight on the Patriarch, seeking to understand the structure of true power.
He saw nothing.
No crimson fractures. No glowing pathways. No leaking energy matrices. Where Li Fang had been a scribbled-over, bug-ridden page of code, Patriarch Li Hong was a smooth, monolithic wall of polished jade. His energy was deep, vast, and utterly seamless. It flowed in perfect, incomprehensible patterns that offered no purchase for Li Fan's perception. It wasn't that there were no flaws; it was that the system was too advanced, its code too dense and alien for his current level of access to parse.
A wave of profound relief washed over him, followed immediately by a crushing sense of limitation. He was not omniscient. His sight had a ceiling.
Patriarch Li Hong's eyes flicked towards him—a glance that held the weight of a mountain. It was not hostile, merely noting his presence like one might note a stone. Then he turned back to Elder Wen, dismissing him from his world entirely.
Li Fan stood there for a long moment in the quiet garden.
He opened his journal.
> Addendum, Log Entry Two.
> Observation: Fracture Sight is realm-locked. Attempted perception of Foundation Establishment-level cultivation yielded null data. Subject's energy system presented as a unified, impermeable construct.
> Conclusion: Cannot perceive systems more than one major realm above my own. Current perceptual ceiling: Qi Condensation.
> Implication: My advantage is contextual and limited. I am not a god. I am a technician with a low-level security pass.
> Next Objective: Increase base cultivation (security clearance) while minimizing Tier 1 Glitch accumulation. Must find a sustainable optimization loop.
He looked down at his right hand, clenched it into a fist. The new strength there was minute, but real. He had taken one step. He had also seen the cliff face looming above him and felt the first cracks in his own mind.
The path forward was clear, narrow, and fraught with hidden costs. He was debugging a universe with a soul that might not survive the process.