Elias Vance woke with the rising mist.
Six hours of rest. No dreams. No tossing. No delay. The moment internal Qi pressure hit its morning peak, his eyes opened with mechanical precision.
He was alone in his meditation cell, and perfectly content with that.
While the other outer disciples drowsily stirred, mumbling and stretching beneath rough-woven blankets, Elias was already running full-system diagnostics.
Pulse: optimal.
Qi saturation: 91%.
Divine sense resonance: stable. No lag. No oscillation.
Memory vault: 4.4 terascrolls recorded, categorized, archived.
He dressed quickly and made his way, as he always did, to the outer sect library.
Not to browse. Not to read.
To copy.
He had no ink. No paper. No brushes.
He had divine sense.
And an engineered hippocampus that now operated like a biological SSD array, layered with floating-gate Qi transistors. Each neuron could trap and store a specific energy-encoded signal representing text, image, or sound. The presence or absence of that Qi packet in the gate represented the memory state—binary data.
One glance. One scan. One moment of focused divine sense.
And everything was stored.
Thousands of scrolls. Hundreds of jade slips. Dozens of obscure cultivation classics, often misfiled and forgotten.
He walked the shelves silently, dressed like any other outer disciple, his fingers sometimes brushing the spines of books he didn't need to open.
From the outside, he looked like he was wandering.
In reality, he was silently copying the entire intellectual catalog of the Emerald Sky Sect—without a trace.
Not even the Library Elder noticed.
That alone told him how far he'd come.
The elder—a reserved, white-robed man with a soft voice and a Soul Formation cultivation base—sat at the front of the archive most days, sipping bitter leaf tea and occasionally glancing over the disciples with tired disinterest.
Elias passed within five meters of him multiple times.
Not once did the man's divine sense twitch.
Because Elias's divine sense wasn't just powerful—it was surgically refined. Condensed to micron-thin threads, layered in phased pulses, filtered through neural frequency dampeners he'd designed himself.
He wasn't scanning. He was tunneling—borrowing subspace threads the way he'd once moved neutrinos through shielded channels back on Earth.
It was elegant. Invisible. Efficient.
By the fifth day, he had replicated and archived the complete contents of every outer sect text, cultivation manual, spiritual theory, alchemy ledger, formation scroll, talisman registry, and beast compendium—all the way up to advanced Void Integration theory.
Most of the disciples around him wouldn't even reach Foundation Establishment in their lifetimes.
Elias had just stolen the entire sect's knowledge base before his first real combat lesson.
And still, he wasn't satisfied.
Elias went back to his cave.
Elias sat cross-legged on his mat, surrounded by nothing but silence, dust motes, and an unspoken sense of intellectual offense.
"They're calling it a golden core," he muttered aloud. "It's literally just an energy sphere they jam into their abdomen. How is that golden? What about it is core-like? And why does everyone talk about it like it's a sentient artifact?"
He sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose, and opened a new neural thread in his mind—his internal 'rant buffer.'
Log: Day 14Subject: Cultivation TheoryDiagnosis: Terminal Idiocy with Occasional Insight
He'd finally finished parsing the full cultivation framework used by this world. It had taken all of two days, fourteen divine sense sweeps, and one near-aneurysm after reading a scroll that described Qi as "the love of heaven entering the meridians."
The love of heaven.Really.
He leaned back, laced his fingers behind his head, and began reconstructing the real structure of cultivation realms in his mind—not the poetic nonsense, but the actual physiology and energetic thresholds each realm represented.
✅ Qi Condensation Realm
Description (sect version): "Breathing in the essence of the world."
Real description: "Sucking on space vapor until your blood tingles."
Actual function: Qi particles begin interacting with biological cells. Cells adjust membrane conductivity to absorb and route low-density energy. Think early battery charging with no safety regulation.
"Beginner mode. Can't even store Qi properly. Everyone's basically a walking diffuser."
✅ Foundation Establishment
Description: "Fortify your body with spiritual essence."
Translation: "Reinforce bones and muscles until you stop dying from mild sword wounds."
Scientific note: Cellular regeneration increases, muscle density spikes, neurons become more receptive to Qi-signal transmission.
"At least this part makes sense. Basically doping your entire endocrine system with clean energy."
✅ Core Formation
Sect claim: "Refine your essence into a core, the anchor of your Dao."
Elias's take: "Cram a homemade nuclear battery into your abdomen and pray it doesn't explode."
Actual function: Energy compression. Formation of a dense Qi core that self-refines. Core uses slow harmonic cycling—literally a spiritual capacitor.
"It's a glorified energy ball. The golden part is probably just branding."
✅ Nascent Soul
Lore: "Birth a soul within your soul. Ascend your mind."
Real process: Elias's eyes twitched. "You fork your consciousness like a GitHub repo and hope the clone doesn't glitch."
Mechanics: Brain enters enhanced parallel cognition. Divine sense begins to function like a dedicated AI co-processor. Law comprehension begins here due to cognitive resonance with natural frequency fields.
"Finally. Something impressive. Also: dangerously unstable. But still impressive."
✅ Soul Formation
Cultivators: "I now walk with the heavens."
Elias: "You've taped your AI consciousness to your actual soul and called it enlightenment."
Real effect: Quantum coherence between Qi-core and consciousness. Awareness can remain active outside the body in short intervals.
✅ Void Integration
Local phrase: "I am space."
Elias: "You are not space. You barely understand momentum."
Reality: Divine sense can interface directly with spatial nodes. Short-range teleportation becomes possible. Minor spacetime influence.
✅ Divine Integration
Sect's myth: "Where man and law become one."
Actual function: Qi-core, divine sense, and soul all harmonize with one or more universal conceptual frameworks (Laws).
Elias's description: "Congratulations. You've become a glorified spell API."
✅ Ascension Stage
They say: "Become immortal."
Elias: "Become a persistent energy configuration capable of self-repair and waveform reassembly. Sure. Let's call that 'immortal.'"
Function: Self-sustaining consciousness loop anchored to high-density law imprints and stabilized spatial resonance fields. Achievable only with perfect harmony of internal systems and external universal constants.
He stared at the ceiling after finishing his internal chart. His eye twitched once.
"These people are trying to transcend reality by breathing real hard and making inspirational speeches in the rain."
He stood, flexed his fingers, and gave a nod of approval to himself in the silence.
Still.
He had to admit...
As clumsy as it all was—it worked.
That meant something was worth salvaging.
Which meant it was time to stop mocking the system.
And start rebuilding it properly.