Morning in the outer sect dorms did not begin with sunlight.
It began with movement.
Straw rustled as bodies rolled over and pretended they were not awake. Wood creaked as someone climbed down from a top bunk with careful, miserly control of every sound. Somewhere near the door, a disciple coughed and spit into a rag as if even phlegm was a resource to be managed.
Yuan He lay still for a long breath, ribs complaining in a low, constant way. The bruise under his arm had turned from sharp pain into a heavy ache, the kind that made every inhale feel like a decision.
Hunger made the decision for him.
His stomach gnawed, not dramatic, not romantic. Just empty and patient.
He opened his eyes to the dimness between bunks and let his mind do what it had done in a laboratory and in a stairwell full of screaming alarms.
Inventory.
Body: intact. Ribs sore. One arm stiff from where he'd been twisted. Face: a healing bruise. No broken bones. No fever.
Resources: zero rations. Zero tickets. Zero merit points. A few copper coins outside, if he went back for them. Copper that could buy something only if the person selling wasn't afraid of being seen selling it.
Status: marked. Weak. Five-element root. No backing. Target.
Constraints: hunger reduces control. Pain reduces sleep. Lack of sleep reduces everything.
He exhaled through his nose, slow, and forced his hands to stop shaking. Not from fear. From the body's petty insistence that it deserved breakfast.
On Earth, you could not argue a reactor into stability. You made stability cheaper than instability.
Here, stability had a price tag, and the dorm had already taught him how it collected.
A footstep passed his bunk. Someone glanced down at him, saw the dull look in his eyes, and immediately decided that looking away was safer.
Nobody spoke to him. Nobody asked if he was alive.
Nobody offered food.
That was not cruelty, Yuan He decided. Not entirely.
It was an equation.
If they acknowledged him, they became visible. If they became visible, they could be included in whatever lesson the dorm was currently enforcing. So they did what the system rewarded.
They became invisible.
Yuan He swung his legs off the bunk. The movement pulled at his ribs, and he stopped, waited for the pain to settle into a tolerable layer, and stood.
The dorm yard was already awake when he stepped out. Smoke drifted from the kitchen sheds. A line of disciples with bowls gathered near a pot, faces blank, shoulders hunched. No one smiled. Smiling was a broadcast.
He walked the edge of the yard again, not because it helped, but because it reduced the number of angles from which someone could approach him.
No one approached.
That did not mean safety. It meant the rules were already in place and did not require constant supervision.
A merit point in a pouch was a joke.
A ration ticket in a sleeve was a joke.
Any value that could be moved from his body to someone else's body with a single wrist twist was not value. It was bait.
He watched.
Two disciples argued quietly near the kitchen, one trying to slip a token into the other's palm, the other refusing with a flat stare. The first disciple finally shoved the token back into his own pocket, jaw tight. A third disciple leaned nearby, listening without looking.
There was a rhythm to it: small trades done in shadows, refusal done in public.
An older outer sect disciple walked past with a bundle of firewood balanced on his shoulder. Nobody touched him. Not because he was strong. Because his hands were full, his load obvious, and if you stole firewood you had to carry it away. Carrying made you visible.
Visibility was risk.
Rations were easy to steal because they disappeared.
Firewood was hard to steal because it dragged you with it.
Yuan He turned his head and saw the task board near the dorm entrance, nailed to a post that had been repaired so many times it looked more like a patchwork of older posts. Disciples gathered there in a loose half-circle, reading slips of paper and pretending they were not competing.
He approached with the same caution he would have used approaching a control panel after the first warning light turned red.
Up close, the board was simple: jobs written in brisk handwriting, each with a small line beneath that mattered more than the job itself.
Some postings said: Payment: two ration tickets.
Some said: Payment: five copper coins.
And some, rarer and more carefully worded, said: Recorded contribution: 1 point.
Recorded.
Contribution.
He stared at those words until they became heavy with meaning.
A recorded contribution did not sit in a pouch. It did not rattle when you walked. It could not be lifted out of your sleeve.
It lived somewhere else.
In a ledger.
In a person's memory, with a stamp or a signature, with a line in a book that mattered to the sect.
If someone wanted it, they could not simply take it off Yuan He's body.
They would have to persuade the system.
Or break the system loudly enough that someone else noticed.
That was leverage.
Not strength. Not courage. Not righteous anger.
Leverage.
Yuan He's hunger sharpened into something else, something like focus.
He edged closer, pretending to read the postings casually.
"Don't crowd," someone muttered, not at him specifically, but at the air, as if complaining to the world was safer than complaining to a person.
Yuan He ignored it and read.
Recorded contribution: 1 point.
Task: Clear irrigation channels in the east herb yard.
Requirements: none listed.
Notes: report to Steward's hut for confirmation.
Recorded contribution: 1 point.
Task: Sort dried leaves, remove spoiled stock, re-bundle.
Requirements: steady hands, no stealing.
Notes: sign-off required.
Recorded contribution: 2 points.
Task: Repair outer wall shingles before rain.
Requirements: basic body reinforcement.
Notes: dangerous. Supervisor present.
The higher the number, the more people watched it. The more people watched, the more pressure. The more pressure, the more ways a task could become "unavailable" without anyone saying the word.
But the one-point tasks were like gravel: ignored until you needed them, plentiful if you didn't mind dirty hands.
Yuan He breathed in through his ribs and decided.
He did not need to leap.
He needed to stack.
One point today. One point tomorrow. One point the day after.
A repeatable input into the sect's ledger.
A signal the system could not pretend didn't exist.
He reached for the posting about irrigation channels.
A hand moved first.
Not his.
A boy a little taller than him, with a sharper jaw and a cleaner robe, plucked the slip away with two fingers and smiled faintly at Yuan He as if to say, too slow.
The boy turned and walked off without looking back.
Yuan He stared after him, felt a small spike of irritation, then killed it.
This was not personal. This was not a duel. This was a queue.
A different slip. The sorting task. He reached.
This time, he got it.
The paper was rough, smelling faintly of ink and smoke. A stupid little rectangle. The kind of thing nobody would fight you for until it began to matter.
He folded it carefully and slid it into his sleeve.
Then he paused.
Last night had been violent, direct, and simple.
If Yuan He walked to the Steward's hut, got a recorded point, and walked back, no one could take the point out of his sleeve.
But they could take his time.
They could take his sleep.
They could take his access.
They could make sure that every job that paid in recorded credit became inconvenient, "claimed," or mysteriously re-assigned the moment he reached for it.
If he wanted stability, he needed more than a clever choice of currency.
He needed a task chain that was low-status, low-visibility, and hard to block without leaving a trace that someone with a stamp might care about.
He needed to be boring.
Boring was a kind of camouflage.
Yuan He turned away from the task board and walked toward the herb yard, not because he had the irrigation slip, but because he wanted to see the territory. He wanted to know where the Steward's hut sat, what paths people used, where shadows pooled, where work happened without an audience.
As he walked, a small sound made him glance to the side.
Copper coins in the dirt, half-trampled near the alley.
They were still there.
Nobody had picked them up.
Not because nobody wanted them.
Because bending down in that spot was a broadcast too.
I can be taken from.
Yuan He kept walking.
He did not pick them up yet.
Not because he was proud.
Because he had chosen a different currency.
When he reached the herb yard fence, he stopped and looked through the slats at the rows of plants, at the narrow channels that carried water like veins, at the workers moving slowly along them.
Work was done here without applause.
Work was done here because plants died if you didn't.
The sect needed this place to function.
That meant there were adults somewhere who cared, at least a little, about whether the water flowed.
Adults who might care about a ledger.
Yuan He pressed his fingers against his ribs, feeling the ache, and let his eyes narrow.
This was not cultivation yet. Not the kind that made your dantian flare or your aura brighten.
This was containment.
This was designing a boundary condition that could not be casually stepped over.
He turned back toward the dorms with the slip in his sleeve, hunger in his gut, and a small, steady thought taking shape.
Today, he would earn something that could not be stolen out of his hands.
And if the system tried to deny him even that, then he would learn exactly where its joints were.