The Qi was thick, the swords were flying, and Su Chen was losing his mind from boredom.
He had been in the Azure Cloud Sect for three months. In that time, he had learned how to breathe rhythmically (meditation), how to clean a latrine with a wooden bucket (punishment), and how to stare at a wall for twelve hours straight. There were no phones. No social media. No dopamine hits. Just old men talking about "The Great Dao" as if it weren't the most repetitive syllabus in history.
"If I have to read one more jade slip about 'The Flow of the River,' I'm going to jump off the Spirit Peak," Su Chen muttered, sitting cross-legged in his cramped outer-disciple shack.
He closed his eyes, reaching into his soul space. When he had transmigrated, he didn't get a legendary sword or a dragon bloodline. He got a glowing, ethereal icon in his mind that looked suspiciously like a high-end router.
[System Initializing... Signal Strength: Weak (1-Bar)]
"Come on, baby," he whispered. "Connect."
He focused his spiritual energy—the tiny drop of Qi he'd managed to scrape together—and shoved it into the icon. The icon pulsed.
[Network Detected: Heaven's Breath 5G] [Status: Online] [Current Nodes: 1 (Su Chen's Brain)]
Suddenly, a semi-transparent screen flickered to life in his vision. It was blank, save for a search bar and a single pre-installed app: The Spirit-Net Hub.
Su Chen's hands shook. He didn't have a mouse, but he found that by flicking his intent, he could navigate. He opened the Hub and saw the prompt: [Create First Domain?]
"Domain Name: The Sect-Gram," he thought.
He spent the next six hours pouring his Qi into the interface, coding the back-end using the System's automated cultivation-to-binary translator. By dawn, he had created a localized landing page. It was basic—just a public wall where people could post text and images using their spiritual sense.
Now, he just needed users.
Su Chen grabbed a piece of charcoal and a scrap of parchment. He wrote: Tired of talking to your sword? Want to know what the Inner Disciples are actually eating? Inject a sliver of Qi into this paper and think the word 'LOGIN'.
He spent the morning "accidentally" dropping these slips of paper near the communal dining hall.
By noon, the System chimed in his head. [New User Connected: 'SwordCrazy77'] [New User Connected: 'JadeBeauty_Official']
Su Chen grinned. The cultivation world didn't know it yet, but the era of silent meditation was over. The era of the "Comment Section" had begun.