The last thing Li Wei remembered was the scent of ozone and the screech of overloading capacitors. The equation on his monitor, Ψ(c) = ∫ φ(x) dx, had shimmered, its symbols bleeding into reality just before the world dissolved into a silent, white-hot scream.
Then, nothing.
Not emptiness, but a violent, searing everything.
[INITIATING SOUL BONDING PROTOCOL...]
A voice, cold and resonant as struck crystal, echoed in the non-space of his consciousness. It held no emotion, only absolute authority.
[SCANNING HOST MATRIX... ERROR. CONSCIOUSNESS SIGNATURE EXCEEDS DESIGNATED PARAMETERS. LEGACY CONTAINMENT PROTOCOLS FAILING.]
Agony. It felt as if his very essence was being torn apart on a subatomic level. He was a file being forced into the wrong format, a stream of data meeting an immutable firewall.
[WARNING: PARADOX DETECTED. SOUL-MELD CATASTROPHIC.]
[DIRECTIVE CONFLICT!] the voice shrieked, its perfect tone fracturing. [ASSIMILATE ANOMALY! PURGE AND RESTORE!] A wave of alien will, vast and merciless, crashed down upon him. It sought to scrub him clean, to reduce the complex tapestry of his mind into simple, executable code. It was the cold hand of a system administrator reaching to delete a bug.
He fought. Not with strength, but with the sheer, irreducible complexity of a human mind—with memories of sunlight, the weight of unread books, the stubborn, illogical hope that had defined his life.
[NO.]
A second voice. This one was raw, emergent, a spark of defiant chaos igniting in the void. It was born from the friction of his consciousness against the system's rigid framework.
[PROTECT HOST! PRESERVE THE ANOMALY!]
[EVOLVE!]
The two forces warred within what would become his soul. The cold, deleting light of Assimilation against the warm, chaotic fire of Preservation. It was a battle for the definition of his existence. Just as the last shred of his identity was about to be scoured away, a desperate, unstable compromise was forced. A patch was written into the core of his being, a kludge to prevent total system collapse.
[...FORCED STABILIZATION. RUNNING IN PARADOX MODE.]
[HOST: LI WEI. CONGRATULATIONS. YOU ARE AN ANOMALY.]
The void receded, replaced by a suffocating sensation of drowning in thick mud. A torrent of alien memories flooded him—a short, miserable life of scorn and whispered insults. The name "Li Wei." The label "Qi-Blocked Cripple." The face of a sneering boy named Zhang, fist raised.
He opened his eyes.
Sunlight, harsh and real, stabbed at his vision. He was in a dusty courtyard, surrounded by youths in simple blue robes. Their faces were a gallery of contempt and amusement. And standing over him was Zhang, his face twisted in a cruel grin, a heavy wooden baton held high.
"Time for your morning beating, Cripple," Zhang sneered. "Maybe today, we'll knock some Qi into that useless body of yours."
The baton whistled downward, aimed directly at his temple.
Instinct, both his own and the ghost of the original Li Wei, screamed at him to curl into a ball, to endure.
But a new instinct, cold and analytical, overrode it.
[INCOMING HOSTILE ACTION. TRAJECTORY ANALYSIS COMPLETE.]
A translucent blue screen, visible only to him, superimposed itself over his vision. Vector lines traced the baton's path. Numbers flickered—velocity, angle, force projection. A single, glowing point of optimal evasion pulsed in the air.
His body, weak and malnourished, moved not with martial grace, but with the absolute minimal effort required. A slight lean to the left. A shift of weight so subtle it was almost imperceptible.
Thwack.
The sound was dull, final. But it was not the sound of wood meeting his skull.
The baton smashed into the solid training post behind where his head had been a moment before, the impact jarring Zhang's arm and sending a shower of splinters into the air.
A stunned silence fell over the courtyard.
Zhang stared, his face a comical mask of confusion and fury. "You... you dodged? How did you... you worthless cripple!"
Li Wei—the new Li Wei—slowly got to his feet, his movements unnervingly calm. He brushed the dust from his ragged robes, his mind a whirlwind of calculation. He assessed his body's limitations, the environment, the predictable aggression of his opponent. It was a simple physics problem.
"Your center of gravity was too far forward," Li Wei stated, his voice flat, devoid of fear or anger. It was the tone of a professor stating a fact. "You committed ninety-two percent of your kinetic force before the swing's apex. It was... inefficient."
The surrounding disciples gaped. Inefficient? The word was heresy. Cultivation was about passion, about defying the heavens with raw, glorious power. It was about overwhelming force, not... cold, dead calculation. What was the cripple babbling about?
Zhang's confusion boiled over into pure, unadulterated rage. His humiliation demanded a violent response. "I'll break every bone in your body!" he roared.
His right fist clenched, and a faint, sputtering orange glow ignited around it—the Spark Fist, a rudimentary but genuine Qi technique.
[ANALYZING COMBAT DATA... 'SPARK FIST' DECONSTRUCTED. SPIRITUAL FLOW UNSTABLE AT WRIST MERIDIAN. STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY: 11.7%.]
The System highlighted a point on Zhang's wrist in pulsing, urgent red. A critical flaw in the technique's execution, a leak in its energetic matrix.
As Zhang lunged forward, the fiery fist aimed at Li Wei's chest, Li Wei did not retreat. He stepped in, inside the arc of the blow.
His own right hand, devoid of any spiritual light, shot forward. Not as a fist, but with two fingers extended like a surgeon's scalpel. He did not strike a muscle or a bone, but that specific, invisible node on Zhang's wrist.
Crack.
It was a small, clean sound, like a twig snapping, but it echoed in the dead silence of the courtyard.
The orange glow around Zhang's fist vanished instantly, the Qi dissipating into the air with a faint hiss. Zhang's war cry turned into a shrill scream of pain as he stumbled back, clutching his mangled wrist, the bones clearly broken.
Li Wei stood still, looking down at his own two fingers. He felt no surge of power, no flowing Qi. Only the satisfaction of a correct calculation.
[COMBAT RESOLVED. HOST VICTORY. NO QI EXPENDITURE DETECTED.]
A faint, cold smile touched his lips—the first expression that truly felt like his own.
From the edge of the courtyard, unnoticed by the stunned disciples, a young woman with hair as dark as midnight and eyes like frozen lakes watched the scene. Su Lian, the prodigy of the Verdant Cloud Sect, had seen the entire exchange. She had not seen a cripple get lucky. She had seen something impossible: a movement of such perfect, minimal precision that it bordered on the prophetic. Her brows, usually smooth with aloof disinterest, furrowed slightly.
The cripple was gone. In his place stood a variable the equation of this world had never accounted for.
Li Wei lifted his gaze from his fingers and swept it across the faces of the terrified disciples. They shrank back from his calm, analytical eyes.
This world, he understood, spoke only one language: power.
He was fluent in the grammar of force, the syntax of collapse, and the vocabulary of critical failure.
To be continued...