Water stopped being rude.
That did not mean it became friendly.
It meant it could be tolerated in small doses, like bad food and worse neighbors.
Yuan He spent the next day doing what the sect expected of a weak outer disciple: work, keep quiet, don't look like you were building anything inside yourself.
He also spent the day doing what his body expected.
Not dying.
By the time night came, "Version 'don't drown'" had stopped being funny and started being a rule.
Rules were survival.
He waited for the dorm to forget him the way it forgot everyone. When the straw settled and the conversations collapsed into mutters, he slipped out.
The herb yard was cooler. The drying racks were where they'd always been. The world did not care about his experiments.
Good.
He sat behind the racks and listened for footsteps, then set tongue, jaw, and hands. He started breathing slow and even until the anchor returned.
Then he walked the familiar sequence into place: earth, metal, and water.
The anchor tried its tiny lift, then sat back down like a child testing boundaries.
No nausea.
No drift.
Repeatable.
He breathed normally for a few beats and stared at the darkness as if it could tell him what came next.
The manual's cycle ran in his head: wood feeds fire, fire makes earth, earth bears metal, metal enriches water, water nourishes wood.
He didn't trust the words.
He trusted the shape.
A loop, not a pile.
A loop meant you didn't add elements like ingredients and hope. You handed something forward, step by step, and the only proof was that it came back around without losing itself.
He had an anchor. He had an edge. He had water that didn't drown him.
Now he needed something water could nourish.
Wood.
Wood sounded harmless.
Which made it suspicious.
"Okay," he whispered, quiet enough that even the leaves might not hear. "One more. But we don't touch fire."
He almost laughed. He didn't. Fire was how you died.
He treated wood the way he treated water now: a micro-step, not a flood.
He reset to neutral, rebuilt the same stable run, and only then let in one new variable: wood, not "growth" in the dramatic sense, but a soft pull outward from the anchor, like roots spreading without lifting the soil.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then he felt it.
Not a new sensation.
A relationship between sensations.
The anchor stayed seated, but it wasn't alone anymore. The boundary from metal didn't feel like a knife. It felt like a frame. Water didn't loosen the anchor upward; it slid around it, low and contained.
And the wood step, quiet and almost embarrassing, made the whole thing feel like it wanted to connect.
Like a loop trying to close.
Yuan He opened his eyes, startled by how ordinary it felt.
"Don't lie to yourself," he whispered. "Repeat."
He did.
No increase in intensity. No extra steps "just to be sure." He ran the same partial loop again, then again.
Three clean passes without drift.
That wasn't power. Nobody could see it.
But it was the first time Elemental Interlock had felt like a machine with gears instead of a handful of parts he kept dropping.
He sat behind the racks and tried to name it without turning it into poetry.
Anchor: reference.
Edge: definition.
Water: circulation, kept shallow.
Wood: connection.
Together, they made a faint internal shape that formed, returned, and formed again—boring in the best way.
He almost smiled.
He didn't, not fully.
Because the moment he smiled, his brain would ask for the next step.
And the next step, according to the cycle, was fire.
Fire was exciting.
Fire was visible.
Fire killed.
He exhaled slowly and let his shoulders drop.
"Not yet," he murmured. "We don't need fire to be alive."
He capped it on purpose, before his body could get greedy or tired. Then the check.
No climbing pressure.
No heat.
No drift.
Repeatable.
Boring.
He slipped back to the dorms, careful and neutral and forgettable.
On his bunk, he stared into the dark and felt the partial loop still present in him like the memory of a song.
He hadn't read cultivation novels. He didn't know what people called a breakthrough.
He only knew what he could measure.
Tonight, he could run three cycles without drift.
That meant tomorrow he could run two cycles between chores and still work.
That meant the world could keep laughing while he quietly built something it couldn't see.
He closed his eyes and whispered, so softly it barely existed, "If we add fire, we add it like a candle, not like a furnace."
Then he added, because private complaining was a tradition: "And we add it when I'm not already tired and annoyed."
He slept.