Elias Vance spent his mornings doing two things.
First, he drank tea that tasted like regret boiled in ditchwater.
Second, he stalked people.
Not in the suspicious-loner way. More like a professional botanist observing particularly dim houseplants.
From the corner of the outer sect dining hall, Elias sat cross-legged with a cracked ceramic bowl of spiritual barley and something that might have been meat, watching the crowd with the same intense focus one might reserve for counting solar flares.
And all the while, his divine sense was busy doing what divine sense had never been used for before: stealing cultivation secrets from every so-called genius around him.
He wasn't just watching disciples. He was scanning them.
Mapping the enzyme activation in their blood when they channeled Qi.
Recording how their spiritual roots lit up like neon circuits when they showed off for girls.
And more importantly?
Cataloging everything.
To the untrained eye, Shen Yuan—the quiet, seemingly unremarkable outer sect orphan—was just meditating. Again. In the corner. Still weird.
But under the surface?
A metaphysical quantum computer was slicing its way through the sect's gene pool.
Three disciples two tables ahead.
One had a robust root in the lower lungs—fire affinity.
Another's Qi surged strongest through the spine—lightning, or maybe instability. Hard to tell.
The third had wildly inconsistent energy resonance.
Elias raised a brow.
"Triple root," he noted. "Impressive. Also inefficient. Like trying to drive three cars at once with one steering wheel."
He took another bite of flavorless barley and nodded thoughtfully.
A younger disciple slid beside him, awkward and trying very hard to sound confident.
"Hey, uh… Senior Brother Shen. You always eat alone?"
Elias blinked.
"Yes," he said flatly. "Because I'm never actually eating."
"…Huh?"
"I'm mapping your endocrine Qi feedback and wondering how you're still alive. That liver is tragic."
The disciple gave a weak laugh. "Ha… ha… wait, what?"
Too late. Elias had already tuned him out, eyes narrowing at a nearby inner disciple as the man lifted his arm and flexed subtly—sparks dancing across his skin.
Lightning affinity confirmed.
His spiritual root was clearly bifurcated—twisting into a double-helix configuration at the base of the sternum, rotating Qi faster than a traditional cycle.
"Interesting. Harmonic spiral model. But the field distortion suggests instability at higher throughput. Probably shortens his lifespan if he overchannels."
Elias didn't bother writing it down. He didn't need to.
His hippocampus, enhanced with divine sense SSD layering, was already filing it in a labeled folder:
📁 Cultivation Roots
📂 Lightning-Based
📄 Inner Disciple Dou Chen – Spiral Pattern (unstable)
He left the hall two hours later with over 40 new full spiritual root mappings.
By the end of the week?
Over three hundred disciples and seven elders had been observed, scanned, and involuntarily studied.
From Soul Formation instructors to Foundation pups trying to copy techniques off poorly translated bamboo scrolls, Elias had recorded them all.
And now?
Now he was ready to do something stupidly brilliant.
🧠 The Birth of the Fractal Root
Sitting on his meditation mat that evening, Elias floated in absolute silence.
Inside his mind, a massive glowing lattice hovered—spiritual root patterns from across the sect, layered like an evolutionary tree.
Some were elegant but weak.
Some were strong but brittle.
Some were just bizarre.
"That guy who cultivates through belching? What evolutionary hell spawned that path?"
He muttered to himself as he assembled his plan.
Not to copy. Not to imitate.
"I don't want their talents. I want their code."
He plucked core traits from the best of them.
From the fire-root elder: energy acceleration pathways—efficient internal ignition.
From a water-based inner disciple: waveform smoothing—high resonance stability.
From a rare wood-affinity girl: cellular anchoring—low loss Qi transfer.
From an unknown metal cultivator: Qi compression lobes—turns dense energy into usable, metabolized threads.
From lightning types: oscillating pulse channels for high-frequency cycling.
Then he rewrote it.
Not as a fusion, but as an upgrade.
Using divine sense, Elias designed a self-correcting, multi-elemental, recursive root system.
A root that shifted.
Adapted.
Updated itself based on ambient Qi density.
He dubbed it the Fractal Root.
And then he carved it—into himself.
The first night was fine.
He reshaped the outer channels—meridian alignment, Qi pulse anchoring.
The second night hurt.
He began breaking his old spiritual root's geometry. There was bleeding. Mentally and physically.
The third night?
He screamed once, quietly, into his sleeve, so the disciples next door wouldn't hear.
"Wrong angle—reverting. Why is my liver vibrating. Oh god did I invent spiritual arrhythmia—no—wait, I can fix this—"
His mind blurred from strain. He injected divine sense nanothreads to reprogram his own resonance behavior.
He triggered enzyme cascades to reset Qi conductance across his shoulder nerves.
At one point, his toes lit up.
At another, his right eye briefly saw everything in thermal spectrums for three minutes.
But on the fourth night?
It worked.
The moment it did, he nearly cried from relief.
His new spiritual root—beautiful, sharp, recursive—sat at the core of his being, spinning silently, recalibrating its affinity in real time.
A cultivator would call it "perfect."
Elias just called it "functional."
And now?
Now he needed fuel.