The walk back to the personal courtyard of the Bai Sect's "Young Master" was a lesson in social isolation. As Bai Chen moved through the manicured gardens and over the arched stone bridges, the disciples he encountered didn't offer the respectful bows one would expect for the son of a Sect Leader. Instead, they moved to the edges of the path, heads lowered in a way that signaled avoidance rather than reverence.
The original Bai Chen had been a plague upon this sect. A boy born with the highest status but the lowest talent, who had spent his years lashing out at everyone around him to compensate for his own inadequacy.
'A spoiled tyrant in a gold-trimmed cage,' Chen thought as he stepped onto the polished porch of his private pavilion.
Meilin followed a few paces behind, her footsteps silent. She was a constant shadow, a watchdog assigned by his father to ensure he didn't drink himself into another scandal or harass the younger disciples. She looked at his back with a cold, professional detachment.
"You've been unusually quiet, Young Master," Meilin said. "Usually, by this time of day, you've found a reason to complain about the heat or the quality of the tea."
Chen stopped at the door to his bedchamber. He didn't turn around. "People change, Meilin. Sometimes it just takes a very long fall to wake them up."
He pushed the door open. The room was unnecessarily large, filled with sandalwood furniture, rare inkstones, and silk hangings that cost more than a commoner would see in a lifetime. It was the room of a man who owned everything but understood nothing.
"I am entering closed-door meditation," Chen said, his voice flat and decisive. "I don't want to be disturbed. Not for meals, not for reports from the outer sect. Not even if my father comes knocking."
Meilin's eyebrows shot up. "Closed-door meditation? With all due respect, Young Master, your Dantian is..."
"I know what my Dantian is," he interrupted, finally looking back at her. His gaze was steady, lacking the erratic flicker of the boy he had replaced. "Broken. Shattered. A useless sack of flesh. I'm aware. But I'm going in regardless. One week. If anyone tries to enter, tell them I'm in a foul mood and likely to break something expensive. They'll believe that easily enough."
Meilin hesitated, then bowed a shallow, skeptical gesture. "As you wish. I will stand guard."
Chen entered the room and barred the door. He didn't head for the bed. Instead, he cleared a space on the floor in the center of the room and sat cross-legged, his spine straight. He closed his eyes and began to regulate his breathing.
'Can I use magic here, too?'
In his previous life as the Storm of Virgil, mana was like the very air he breathed. It was thick, responsive, and obeyed the slightest pull of his soul. Here, the world felt different. The energy in the air the Qi was heavy and grounded. It felt like trying to breathe underwater. It was dense and stubborn, tied to the physical world in a way mana never was.
He reached out with his spiritual sense, filtering through the layers of heavy Qi, searching for that familiar, ethereal thread of mana. For a long time, there was nothing. Then, a tiny flicker. It was faint, like a single candle in a hurricane, but it was there.
'The concentration is abysmal,' he noted. 'If Virgil was an ocean of mana, this world is a desert with a few scattered puddles.'
He began the process. It wasn't about "cultivating" in the traditional Murim sense. He couldn't store Qi in his Dantian; the organ was a web of scarred tissue that couldn't hold pressure. Instead, he used his limited mana to act as a probe. He pulled a thin strand of it into his body through his crown.
The moment the mana touched his meridians, he winced. His energy pathways were clogged with "impurities" stagnant Qi and biological waste that had built up from years of neglect and the trauma that had broken his Dantian.
'If I can't store energy in a center, I have to make my entire body the vessel. But first, I have to clear the pipes.'
The first three days were a grueling exercise in pain management. Chen sat motionless, sweat soaking through his silk robes until they clung to his skeletal frame. He used the mana like a surgical needle, slowly picking at the blockages in his primary meridians.
In the Murim world, practitioners used Qi to bash through these gates with brute force. But Chen's body was too weak for that; he would have burst his veins. Instead, he used the refined, liquid nature of mana to dissolve the blockages from the inside out.
It was microscopic work. He would find a knot of hardened energy in his forearm, wrap his mana around it, and slowly break it down until it flushed into his bloodstream. Each success brought a localized burst of heat, followed by an agonizing itch.
By the fifth day, his breathing had slowed to the point where he looked like a statue. He had managed to clear the three main pathways leading from his extremities toward his core. He hadn't touched the Dantian yet that was the epicenter of the damage.
'The Dantian isn't just broken; it's obstructing the flow of the entire system,' he realized. 'If I can't fix it, I'll never be able to utilize the Qi of this world. And mana alone isn't enough here—I'm too vulnerable.'
He began to experiment. He took the thin trickle of mana he could gather and tried to use it to "bridge" the gaps in his shattered Dantian. He wasn't trying to heal the organ; he was trying to create a bypass. It was like building a new road around a collapsed bridge.
The strain was immense. His vision blurred behind his closed eyelids, and the metallic taste of blood filled his mouth. He was operating on a level of precision that no martial artist in this kingdom could conceive of, because they didn't understand energy as a fundamental law, they only understood it as a muscle to be flexed.
On the seventh day, a small, audible pop echoed in the quiet room.
Chen's eyes snapped open. A thin, black mist the physical manifestation of the impurities he had dissolved oozed from his pores, smelling of rot and old iron. He felt light. For the first time since waking up in this body, the "weight" of his own limbs felt manageable.
He raised a hand. He didn't try to throw a punch. He simply focused. A tiny, nearly invisible swirl of blue light flickered at his fingertip before vanishing.
'It's weak. Pathetic, really. Compared to the storms I used to summon, this is a joke.'
But it was a start. His meridians were open, and he had established a rudimentary "Mana Circuit" that bypassed his broken Dantian. He could now draw in energy, though his capacity was still that of a bucket compared to the lake he needed.
He stood up, his legs shaking from a week of inactivity. He looked at his hands, which were covered in a layer of grime. He needed a bath, a meal, and a way to test his progress.
He sat back down on the bed, his mind racing through the possibilities of combining his mana-weaving with the martial techniques he had seen in the courtyard.
'I have a foundation. Now I need the tools to build that foundation better.'
As the exhaustion finally began to pull at his consciousness, a thought surfaced from the back of his mind a memory of that blue screen that had appeared when he first arrived.
'The System Shop!'
He had thirty thousand coins. In his previous life, he had earned his power through decades of blood and study. In this life, he might just be able to buy the shortcuts he needed.