The cultivation started on the eighty-ninth night.
He prepared for it the same way he always did—by eliminating uncertainties first. He understood the dormitory's sleep pattern well. The last worker fell asleep consistently before the second night bell, while the earliest riser woke at the fifth. This gave him three bells of reliable darkness. He knew his cot's corner position meant his back was to two walls and his face was to the room, so nothing could approach him without entering his view. He also knew the guard rotation passed the dormitory's eastern window at the first, third, and sixth bells, but never at the second or fourth.
He chose the night of the new moon intentionally. Less light through the wall cracks meant a lower chance of anyone outside spotting qi fluctuations, however unlikely. Unlikely wasn't the same as impossible. He did not work with the idea of zero.
He sat with his back against the cold wall, arranging twelve medium-grade ore pieces in a loose circle around him. He focused inward toward the Ledger and the nameless technique he had rebuilt from the *Breath of Hollow Stone's* ruins over two months of night work.
The Ledger made a notation right away: *Time Compression function available. Activation will induce accelerated cultivation perception at a ratio of 1:2.7. Cost: significant physical fatigue post-session. Recommended duration limit: two hours of real time. Proceed?*
He hadn't known the function would ask. He noted that it had, and he filed that implication—some functions came with conditions he could refuse, which meant they had real costs that the Ledger deemed important enough to flag.
He indicated yes in the way he had learned to communicate with the Ledger—not with words, but more like the deliberate weight of a decision.
The world didn't change visibly. However, something in his perception expanded, deepening like a breath filling a chest—the same space suddenly felt larger. The silence between moments seemed to stretch. He felt each heartbeat as a separate, unhurried event.
He began.
---
The technique he had rebuilt made no assumptions about elements. This was a deliberate choice made during reconstruction. The original *Breath of Hollow Stone* was specific to metal elements, meant for workers whose roots matched the Iron Hollow Sect's dominant qi type. He had abandoned that framework when the Ledger revealed its limitations and built instead from the second pathway: a framework that only assumed a void at the center and worked outward.
He hadn't known his root was literally hollow when he made that choice.
He realized this now and chose not to call it fate, because fate is what people label patterns they haven't closely tracked enough to predict.
The first hour, in compressed time, felt like three. He worked the qi from the ore pieces carefully—drawing it outward through the natural seepage produced by high-density ore, pulling it toward his hollow root along the reconstructed pathway. The first twenty attempts yielded nothing. On the twenty-first attempt, he felt a sensation like a crack forming in dry stone—not painful, just sudden, a new line appearing where there had only been a surface.
His root was Hollow and Withered, and it had never accepted qi before.
On the thirty-first attempt, it accepted a thread.
The thread was negligible. A single filament of qi, barely classifiable and immediately unstable. The Ledger noted its density and composition clinically: *First successful qi intake. Volume: trace. Stability: 34%. Recommend immediate consolidation before further intake attempts.*
He consolidated, carefully holding the thread in the hollow space of his root, like someone holding water in cupped hands. He applied the compression stage of the technique—the part that had survived in the original document—and the thread steadied to 71% stability, then held firm.
He worked for the remainder of the two hours, not pulling in more—just holding it. Consolidating. Learning what the inside of a functioning root actually felt like, since none of the texts he had read described it from the perspective of a defective one.
When he released the Time Compression, his body quickly reminded him of the cost. His hands shook. His vision had dark edges that took four minutes to clear completely. He felt cold in a way that came from within rather than from the mountain wind and was hungrier than dinner had prepared him for.
He lay down without moving the ore pieces and fell unconscious within two minutes.
---
He woke before the fifth bell. The dark edges were gone, the shaking had subsided. He was still hungry.
He checked the thread. It was there—slightly reduced from its consolidated state, some loss to overnight dissipation, but it was present. Measurably present. The Ledger had updated its notation while he slept: *Qi retention overnight: 68% of consolidated volume. Loss rate consistent with early Qi Condensation Layer One instability. Projected stabilization timeline: three to four sessions.*
Three to four sessions. He considered that and thought about what each session cost him. He began calculating the schedule.
Two sessions per week felt sustainable without impacting his work output. The fatigue was significant but cleared within a day. The hunger was manageable if he increased his food intake, meaning he needed to eat everything at meals instead of sticking to his current habit of restraint. He had been conserving food as a general principle. He updated that principle.
He put the ore pieces back in their three hidden locations, went to breakfast, ate everything, and then headed to his shift.
---
Section Seven was deeper than the earlier sections by forty meters, which meant the stone had a different quality—denser, less fractured, with thicker, more continuous ore veins instead of the patchy bands in the upper sections. The Ledger's scanning range had sharpened slightly with his first successful cultivation, which he noted as something worth monitoring. Functional improvement correlated with his own development. He stored this information and continued working.
The secondary passage entrance was eighteen meters from his section boundary.
He did not approach it during shifts. The discipline of not acting on available information was as crucial as the information itself—possibly even more, because acting too soon was the primary way careful plans turned visible.
Instead, he cataloged. Every shift produced more data about the passage, gathered from his section position without moving toward it. The air movement at the tunnel junction suggested the lower chamber had at least one additional opening he hadn't identified on his single visit. The faint blue-black light pulsed slowly, on a rhythm that the Ledger eventually mapped as a 4.3-second cycle. Breath-like. He noted the word and set it aside, knowing that attribution wasn't the same as explanation.
On the ninety-eighth day, the Ledger's Bottleneck Prediction function activated for the first time.
He was in the middle of his fourth cultivation session, the thread in his root now a stable cord rather than a filament, and the first layer of Qi Condensation was approximately 60% consolidated when the notation appeared mid-session with an urgency he hadn't seen from the Ledger before:
*Bottleneck identified. Current blockage: meridian junction at the secondary qi gate, left-side channel. Cause: reconstruction error in stage four of current technique—qi routing assumes symmetrical channel width, but the actual left-side channel is 12% narrower than right. Pressure accumulation will cap Layer One consolidation at approximately 78% without correction.*
He stopped the cultivation immediately and contemplated this.
Stage four. He reviewed the technique in his mind, located the junction, and found the assumption. The Ledger was correct—he hadn't caught a measurement error from the original document's surviving pages because the original author had made the same assumption, and he had not yet developed enough internal sensitivity to feel the discrepancy.
He spent the rest of the session revising the technique at that junction, running the corrected routing through the Ledger's structural review. The revision took forty minutes of compressed time. When he tested it, the qi flowed cleanly through the left-side channel, no accumulation.
He realized that the Bottleneck function had just saved him what might have been weeks of stalled progress and a fundamental technique flaw that he would have spent months trying to locate by feel alone.
He moved his assessment of the Ledger from useful to necessary.
---
On the hundred and ninth day, he reached Qi Condensation Layer One.
There was no dramatic sensation. The cord of qi in his root fully consolidated. The compression completed, and the Ledger made its notation: *Qi Condensation Layer One: complete. Foundation stable. Void-element alignment confirmed. Recommend consolidation period of seven days before Layer Two attempt.He was a cultivator. Technically, officially, in the only way that mattered, the internal way, the real way that no testing stone would ever confirm. The Ledger wore a different mask over his root for every outside instrument. According to every record outside his own mind, he was a cultivator with a Hollow Withered Root.
He noticed the gap between the record and the reality.
He found it useful. He sat in the dark corner of the dormitory after the session and looked at nothing in particular.