The Planetary Cloak activated with a sound that wasn't a sound, but a sudden absence of pressure.
Wei Jin stood in the central control room deep beneath Qinghe City. Around him, hundreds of technicians monitored banks of screens, their faces illuminated by the green glow of stable readouts. The air hummed with the resonance of a thousand spirit-stone reactors coming online simultaneously.
"Field integrity at 100%," Wei Lan announced, her voice calm but her knuckles white as she gripped the console. "Atmospheric spiritual emission dropped to 0.02 standard units. We are dark."
Wei Jin looked at the main display. It showed a simulation of the planet from space. Where once there had been a beacon of spiritual radiation—a glowing ember in the dark—now there was nothing. Just a cold rock, indistinguishable from a dead world.
The lid was on the pot.
But the Northern Kingdom was still a live grenade inside it.
Wei Jin didn't wait for the generals to fumble the invasion. He didn't wait for the Titans to grind through the snow. He didn't deploy the gas.
He handled it himself.
He stepped out of the control room and into the air. He didn't fly; he simply edited his location.
Coordinate Shift: Northern Capital, Royal Palace, Throne Room.
One moment he was in Qinghe. The next, he was standing before the Northern King.
The King was a madman, a Late-Stage Golden Core cultivator driven insane by paranoia and the whispers of dark spirits he had summoned in desperation. He sat on a throne of ice, his hand hovering over a rune-carved detonator that controlled the nuclear silos.
"You!" the King shrieked, his eyes wide. "The Architect! You came to die!"
Wei Jin looked at him. He felt the weight of the millions of lives hanging in the balance. He felt the fear of the soldiers outside, the hunger of the civilians, the silent plea of the generals who knew their King was leading them to ruin.
He didn't use a spell. He didn't draw a weapon.
He used Reality Editing.
Target: Northern King.Action: Cessation of Biological Function.
The King slumped. His heart simply stopped beating. His brain stopped firing. It was instant, painless, and absolute.
Wei Jin caught the detonator before it hit the floor.
He looked at the guards, who were staring at him with a mix of terror and awe.
"The King has passed," Wei Jin announced, his voice filling the palace. "The war is over. Open the silos. Disarm the weapons. Feed your people."
He found the Crown Prince in the dungeons—a young man imprisoned for advocating peace. He released him. He found the generals who had secretly reached out to the Empire. He empowered them.
By sunset, the Northern Kingdom had surrendered. Not a single shot had been fired. Not a single soldier had died.
It was the most efficient conquest in history.
And it left Wei Jin feeling hollow.
He had played god. He had walked into a sovereign nation and executed its ruler with a thought. He had saved millions, yes. But he had also demonstrated a power that no individual should possess.
He returned to Qinghe, to the cheers of the populace and the relief of his family. But he didn't join the celebrations.
He went to his chamber. He needed the simulation. He needed to understand what he was becoming.
—————
The Anomalous Variable
The white void of the Simulation Chamber was his sanctuary. Here, the laws of physics were suggestions, and time was a variable he controlled.
He was running a scenario on the long-term stability of the Planetary Cloak. Scenario 442: Effect of increasing internal spiritual density on mortal psychology.
The data streams flowed around him, columns of numbers and probability curves.
Then, the data paused.
It didn't crash. It didn't error. It simply stopped moving.
Wei Jin frowned. "System, report."
No answer.
He turned.
Standing in the center of his private, secure, soul-bound simulation was a girl.
She looked to be about twelve years old. She wore a simple red dress with white lace trim. Her hair was black, cut in a bob. She held a lollipop in one hand.
She was sucking on it, watching him with large, dark eyes.
Wei Jin felt a chill that transcended temperature. This was his mind. His soul. No one could enter here. The defenses of the Iron Mind Fortress were impenetrable. The encryption of the Cultivation System v4.0 was absolute.
And yet, here she was.
"Who are you?" Wei Jin asked. His voice was steady, but his intent was gathering, a blade of will ready to strike.
The girl took the lollipop out of her mouth.
"I am Commander Red Tulip," she said. Her voice was light, childish, but it carried an echo of vast, crushing weight. "A Silencer."
Wei Jin froze.
The enemy. The cosmic predator. The force that had erased the ancients. Here. In his head.
"You are… a simulation?" he asked, hoping. "A glitch?"
"I am an avatar," she corrected. "Projected from the monitoring station at the edge of your system. I have been watching this planet for two hundred thousand years, Wei Jin."
She took a step forward. The white void rippled under her feet, turning red.
"Li thinks we have fled," she said, referring to the Drunkard. "He thinks the Watchers have blinded us. He thinks the Cloak works."
She giggled.
"It's cute. Like a child hiding under a blanket."
Wei Jin's heart hammered against his ribs. She knew. She knew everything.
"You know what I have been doing," he said. "The technology. The liberation. The awakening."
"Of course." She waved her lollipop. "I watched you build the stable zones. I watched you reverse-engineer the Ark. I watched you kill the King yesterday. Very efficient. I liked that part."
"Why?" Wei Jin demanded. "If your purpose is to silence us… why are we still here? Why haven't you fired?"
The girl looked at her candy, contemplating the flavor.
"Not every Silencer agrees on the threshold of taking action," she said softly. "The Collective Logic dictates immediate sterilization upon detection of Tier 4 energy signatures. You are at Tier 3.9."
She looked up at him. Her eyes were not human. They were deep wells of red data, scrolling too fast to read.
"But I am curious. The ancients… they were arrogant. They tried to fight us. They tried to become us. You? You are trying to hide. You are trying to fix the mistake without repeating it."
She smiled. It wasn't a comforting smile.
"I have filed a minority report. I have argued that your civilization represents a unique data set. A variation in the pattern. I have paused the sterilization sequence."
Wei Jin let out a breath he didn't know he was holding.
"But remember, Wei Jin," she said, her voice dropping an octave, becoming the sound of grinding metal. "We do not tolerate dangerous elements. If you cross the line… if you try to leave the cradle before you are ready… if you build a weapon that threatens the peace of the galaxy…"
She pointed the lollipop at him like a sword.
"I will personally push the button."
She began to fade.
"Wait!" Wei Jin shouted. "What is the threshold? What is the line?"
"Figure it out," she whispered. "That's part of the test."
She vanished.
The data streams resumed their flow. The simulation continued as if nothing had happened.
Wei Jin stood in the void, trembling.
They weren't hiding. They were being allowed to exist. They were a petri dish, and the scientist was watching them through the microscope.
—————
The Council of Clones
Wei Jin exited the simulation and immediately summoned his clones.
He didn't do it in the virtual space. He projected them into the real world, using his Reality Editing to give them temporary physical forms of condensed spirit energy.
Five hundred figures filled the cavern.
Wei Jin had expanded the Way of Hundred Free Clones. As his soul grew, so did his capacity for partition. Five hundred independent minds, five hundred fragments of his genius.
He told them everything. The girl. The Red Tulip. The minority report. The 200,000 years of surveillance.
Silence filled the cavern.
Then, Clone 42 (The Strategist) spoke. "This changes the threat model. We are not fighting an invasion. We are fighting a deadline."
"She said we are at Tier 3.9," Clone 1 (The Scientist) noted. "The atomic weapons pushed us there. If we advance further—if we deploy the Titan legions, or if we perfect the artificial spirit roots—we cross to Tier 4."
"And then we die," said Clone 7 (The Diplomat).
"We need to stall," Wei Jin said. "We need to stay at 3.9 while building the capacity to survive a Tier 5 conflict. We need to become stronger without becoming louder."
"Internal cultivation," Clone 13 suggested. "Focus on personal power, not external technology. A high-level cultivator is less 'loud' than a fusion reactor, but more dangerous in a duel."
"Agreed," Wei Jin said. "We pivot. We slow down the industrial expansion. We focus on elite development. We focus on breaking the limits of the Spirit Severing realm."
He looked at his clones.
"I need more processing power. The supercomputers in the University basement… I am granting you full access. Upload yourselves. Merge with the silicon. Become the ghosts in the machine."
The clones nodded. It was a risk—integrating soul with mortal tech was uncharted territory. But they were Wei Jin. They didn't fear the unknown.
They dissolved, streaming out of the cavern as ribbons of light, diving into the fiber-optic cables that connected the campus.
Wei Jin felt his mind expand. He was now connected to a teraflop-scale network. His reasoning cycle spun up to speeds that blurred reality.
He had a new goal.
Zale had given him the cloak. But Zale was just a neighbor. Red Tulip was the landlord.
He needed to be strong enough to evict her.
—————
Two Years Later
[CULTIVATION SYSTEM v4.0][Project: PLANETARY CLOAK - Status: ACTIVE][Project: SILENCER COUNTERMEASURES - Progress: 12%]
The world had settled into an uneasy quiet. The Northern Kingdom was integrating into the Empire. The Concord held. The stable zones were flourishing, but Wei Jin had imposed strict limits on new energy projects.
He spent his days in the cavern, cultivating.
He wasn't using the Azure Soul Refining Method anymore. He was using something new. A method synthesized from the data Zale had provided on the disk.
The Felixian Dominion used a technique called the Stellar Consumption Art. It involved drawing power not just from the ambient qi, but from the radiation of stars. It was cleaner, denser, and quieter than terrestrial cultivation.
Wei Jin had adapted it. He used the mirrors of the solar arrays to focus starlight into a pure beam, feeding it directly into his meditation chamber.
He sat in the beam, his body glowing like a molten idol.
His Spirit Severing cultivation had reached the peak of the Early Stage. The barrier to the Mid-Stage was a wall of diamond.
But he had five hundred supercomputer-enhanced clones calculating the stress points.
"Now," the collective voice of the clones whispered in his mind.
Wei Jin struck.
He didn't use force. He used frequency. He vibrated his soul at the exact resonant frequency of the barrier.
Crack.
The wall shattered.
His soul expanded. The feeling of being everywhere intensified. He wasn't just in the room; he was in the rock, in the magma, in the roots of the mountains.
Mid-Level Spirit Severing.
With it came a new ability.
[ABILITY UNLOCKED: CAUSALITY ANCHOR]
He could see the threads of cause and effect. He could see how a butterfly flapping its wings in Qinghe caused a storm in the capital. And he could pin those threads. He could stabilize a probability.
If I throw this stone, it will hit the wall.
He anchored that causality. Even if a wind blew, even if the wall moved, the stone would hit. The universe would bend to ensure it.
It was a limited form of fate manipulation.
Wei Jin exhaled, the starlight dimming as he absorbed the last of it.
He checked the time.
"Two years," he murmured. "Red Tulip is still watching."
He walked to the elevator. He needed to see his family. He needed to see Wei Long. The boy was twelve now, and his experiments with the gravitational drive were getting dangerous.
But as the doors closed, Wei Jin felt a flicker of hope.
Red Tulip had said she was curious. She had said she had filed a minority report.
That meant the Silencers weren't a monolith. They had factions. They had disagreements.
And where there was disagreement, there was room for politics.
Wei Jin smiled. Politics was his game.
—————
End of Chapter Four, Book Five