Elias Vance had spent most of his first week in the sect's outer library, acting the part of a curious but quiet disciple.
He kept his questions simple, his gaze down, and his robes clean. The outer court elders barely noticed him—just another underwhelming youth hoping to touch the sky with wooden wings.
But behind his still gaze, Elias was absorbing everything.
Sect history. Cultivation manuals. Elemental theory. World geography. Cultivation stages, power classifications, sect politics.
This world called itself Xuanwu Realm, and the sect he now belonged to was the Emerald Sky Sect, one of the three dominant powers in the region.
Their strength came from orthodox elemental cultivation—wind, fire, water, earth, lightning—and strict adherence to tradition.
It was also deeply inefficient.
They recorded cultivation breakthroughs on paper. Catalogued medicinal herbs in poorly maintained registers. Used oral transmission for internal energy pathways. Most manuals were passed down with errors, marginal notes, or "master's insights" that were more superstition than science.
It was, in Elias's words, "a Bronze Age wrapped in silk and arrogance."
He wanted to do research. Proper research. Build instruments. Isolate variables. Scan body states. Set up simulations. Chart experiments.
But there were no labs. No controlled experiments. No structured innovation.
Everything was anecdotal. Vague. Described in metaphors and parables. "Feel the river." "Absorb the flame." "Let the heavens move through you."
Elias wanted to scream.
He hadn't spent two decades engineering orbital AI systems and predictive physics models to get reborn into a world where cultivators believed "cultivation deviation" was caused by mental demons AKA mood.
So, he did what any sane scientist would do in his situation.
He looked for a better alternative.
And he found it in divine sense.
Divine sense was considered an advanced tool here—something that only manifested after weeks or months of cultivation, dependent on talent. Most used divine sense as a spiritual torchlight.
But for Elias?
It had been active the moment he woke up in Shen Yuan's body.
A side effect of his reincarnation. His consciousness information—optimized by quantum collapse and spiritual encoding—had entered the world already harmonized with the surrounding energy field.
That gave him an early divine sense.
But it was not up to standard so he decided to level it up.
In the quiet hours after lights-out, when the other disciples slept, Elias sat cross-legged in his meditation cell and rewired himself.
He pictured his brain as a processor—not just metaphorically, but structurally.
He manipulated the flow of Qi into specific parts of his nervous system, using divine sense like a programming interface.
He began with the HIPPOCAMPUS—the region responsible for long-term memory encoding and spatial navigation. With divine sense, Elias began stimulating it using low-frequency, Qi-aligned pulses, structured like energy voltage.
What he visualized—and then executed—was a transformation of memory cells into a biological SSD system.
The hippocampal neurons, already layered like dense synaptic matrices, were ideal for high-fidelity data storage. By reinforcing these neurons with microbursts of directed spiritual energy, Elias stabilized them into a quasi-digital state.
Each neuron became a floating-gate Qi transistor.
The concept was borrowed from Earth's semiconductor memory architecture: transistors with insulated gates that trap or release electrons to represent data. In Elias's system, it wasn't electrons—it was Qi charge packets.
If a gate held a Qi packet, the neuron "fired" a 1.
If it was empty, it read as 0.
Thousands of neurons formed synaptic clusters, storing binary-encoded impressions of sounds, visuals, and sensory cues.
The result?
A biological solid-state drive, with read/write fidelity measured in milliseconds.
By the end of the third day, Elias had full eidetic recall. He could scan a scroll once, and replay it in perfect clarity. He could review conversations in reverse, down to vocal inflection. He could mentally dissect a sword technique frame by frame, adjusting form with zero lag.
His mind was archiving.
Then came the CORTEX.
If the hippocampus was storage, the cortex was computation.
He energized the prefrontal cortex and parietal lobes using alternating Qi patterns: high-frequency spiritual currents pulsed in phase-locked intervals, effectively synchronizing synaptic firing across entire neural modules.
By aligning these currents, Elias induced what he called resonant processing threads—a form of biological parallel computing.
Instead of single-threaded thought, he now ran:
One thread for logical calculation
One for predictive modeling
One for monitoring divine sense input
One for muscle coordination and reaction time
One for linguistic translation and code-switching between Earth terms and local language
In total, Elias simulated the behavior of a multi-core neural CPU—a brain with distinct, specialized processors that communicated asynchronously but harmonized via energy timing.
Where most humans could follow one train of thought at a time, Elias followed five, all running in real-time feedback loops.
His thoughts didn't just come faster.
They came simultaneously.
Finally, he refined his sensory cortex—the interface layer between inner processing and external perception.
Divine sense wasn't just a vague spiritual radar to him anymore.
It became a full-body sensory array, with precision-mapped feedback tied to Qi-induced stimuli.
Every pore of his skin was now capable of detecting:
Thermal fluctuations (to 0.01°C precision)
Air pressure gradients
Qi frequency harmonics
Vibrational interference from spatial distortions
Resonance feedback from elemental laws embedded in nearby matter
He likened it to building a multi-spectral LiDAR system inside his nervous system, using divine sense as the light, Qi as the signal, and his own brain as the receiver array.
The integration was seamless.
Inputs arrived as signal pulses
Each was routed through a recognition thread
Processed, logged, categorized, and visualized as dynamic spatial overlays in his mind
He could now "see" without light, "hear" without sound, "touch" things across a room—not through magic, but through sensory cognition.
In short, Elias had engineered his mind into a living supercomputer:
Memory like an SSD
Computation like a multi-core CPU
Perception like a deep-space telescope
Input streams like a distributed sensor network
And all of it powered by Qi—clean, limitless, spiritual voltage
And this wasn't the end.
This was just boot-up.
And finally, he set up feedback loops—divine sense pulses that returned with signal-weighted metadata, which he processed like real-time scan feedback.
The results came fast.
He could now:
Store and retrieve every experience with perfect precision
Perform complex calculations—physics simulations, biological modeling, energy flow analysis
Maintain multi-threaded perception: divine sense forward, backward, and within
Auto-regulate his own heartbeat, hormone levels, and nerve signals
He tested it all on himself first.
By the fourth day, he achieved his first non-visible application:
He identified and manipulated subatomic activity.
At first, it was just Qi motion. He tracked particles through his meridians, tracing their path with divine sense and predicting their curve.
But when he magnified his focus—
He saw more.
He watched how Qi latched onto electrons, how it hovered in waveform densities around ions, shifting based on elemental resonance.
He realized Qi was not an undefined "spirit vapor."
Qi was a wave-particle duality entity—something this universe contained in abundance, and which obeyed natural laws of vibration, resonance, and charge.
He ran simulations in his mind. Matched frequency. Then nudged a particle mid-spin.
It jumped.
He'd used divine sense to influence subatomic behavior.
Subatomic telekinesis.
Then came space lines.
On the sixth day, while scanning a formation tablet at the library, Elias caught something strange.
His divine sense bounced. Off space itself.
He refined the scan.
There were invisible lines running through the world—fibers of structured dimensional tension. Most were dormant. Some vibrated faintly.
He found that energy, when aligned to certain space lines, moved faster. Cleanly. Efficiently.
And where those lines crossed?
Nodes.
He sat atop one for three hours in silence and felt reality itself whisper to him.
At that node, the "concept" of fire intensified.
Not the temperature. The idea of fire.
And Qi, passing through that node, began to behave like fire—accelerating, expanding, devouring.
Not because it was fire, but because it believed it was.
That's when Elias realized:
The laws of this world weren't laws.
They were entangled behavioral conditions—structures born from abundant Qi and reinforced by environmental resonance.
The elements. The concepts. Time. Space. Gravity. Emotion.
They were patterns. Programs. Laws born from interaction.
And divine sense could read them.
Possibly even rewrite them.
He'd found his cheat.
His hack.
He tested it on the seventh day, just before sunset.
He sat alone in a grove behind the herb field and released a micro-thread of divine sense into the air.
He filtered it. Thinned it. Tuned it.
Then spiked it into a spatial node tuned to silence.
And the sound of the world around him... blinked out.
He wasn't deaf. The birds kept moving. The wind kept rustling.
But for a six-meter radius around him, sound was removed—not dampened. Not blocked.
Cut.
Because he had altered the resonance of sound's concept within that spatial node.
He called it Field Suppression Protocol: Type 01.
Just a test.
But if divine sense could do this...
Then he could slice, amplify, or mute any aspect of reality linked to a known frequency pattern.
"This is a fucking root-level access."