He did not go straight to the Steward's hut.
Not yet.
The slip in his sleeve was a promise, but it was also a trap: a path with a beginning and an end, and in between, a hundred places where someone could decide the path belonged to somebody else.
"I guess I'll practice the basics of cultivation first," Yuan He murmured, and his voice came out rough from a dry throat. "Then money."
He walked the herb yard perimeter, slow enough to look aimless. He counted steps like he was mapping a corridor in a lab. He noted where the fence slats were loose enough to see through. He noted the small shed where tools were kept, the line where damp soil turned to packed dirt, the way workers moved in pairs without talking.
He looked for a corner that was not hidden, but not central.
A place where he could breathe without an audience pressing in.
He found it behind a stack of drying racks, where the air smelled like crushed leaves and wet earth. The racks cast thin shadows across the ground. If someone walked by, they would see him. If someone wanted entertainment, they would have to come closer.
Close meant effort.
Effort meant risk.
He sat anyway, because he had learned one thing already: perfect privacy did not exist here. You chose the kind of exposure you could tolerate.
His ribs ached when he lowered himself. The bruise under his arm pulled like a stretched cord. Hunger pinched under it all, patient and mean.
He drew the beginner manual from his robe and opened it to the first method again.
The ink strokes were clean, the diagrams precise. A loop of breath. A line of posture. A note about keeping the tongue against the upper palate. A note about not clenching the jaw.
It read like instruction. It read like certainty.
On Earth, certainty was expensive. It required measurement.
Here, certainty was sold cheap.
He forced himself to respect it anyway.
If the method worked for others, and it did not work for him, that difference was information.
"Follow it like a checklist," he told himself quietly. "No heroics."
He adjusted his posture exactly as shown: spine straight, shoulders sunk, knees slightly bent even while seated, as if he could stand in a single motion. He placed his hands in the seal described, fingers relaxed, palms not pressing. He set his tongue, unclenched his teeth, and exhaled through his nose until the hunger in his gut quieted into a background ache.
Then he breathed in.
Slow.
He followed the text like a recipe.
In through the nose. Let the breath sink. Imagine it gathering in the lower abdomen. Do not force. Do not chase sensation. Let qi come like dew.
He almost laughed at that line.
Dew came when conditions were right. Dew did not come because you begged.
He closed his eyes and tried anyway.
One breath.
Two.
His ribs complained on the inhale, a dull wedge of pain that made his body want to protect itself by tightening. He forced his shoulders down. He let his jaw hang loose. He took smaller breaths, careful not to aggravate the bruise.
The method did not mention bruises. The method assumed a body that belonged to itself.
Ten breaths.
Twenty.
Nothing.
No warmth pooling in the belly. No tingling. No pressure. The only sensations were emptiness, pain, and the faint cold sweat that came from trying to be calm while hungry.
He opened his eyes and stared at the page.
He was doing it right.
Right, as far as right existed.
"Again," he said under his breath. "Same inputs."
He tried again.
This time, he watched for the smallest thing: a change in how the air felt against the inside of his nose, a shift in his pulse, the faint heaviness that might have been signal rather than hunger.
Ten breaths.
Twenty.
Thirty.
If there was a change, it was too small to separate from noise.
He stopped and did what the manual suggested next: elemental sensing.
Close the eyes. Extend awareness outward. Feel for the five flavors of qi in the world: metal sharp, wood supple, water cool, fire hot, earth heavy. Do not grasp. Do not fear. Let it brush the mind like wind.
He read the line twice.
"Don't grasp," he repeated quietly. "Fine. I won't."
He closed his eyes.
At first, he felt only impatience.
Then he felt the air.
Not qi. Not "flavor."
Air.
The dampness near the herb rows. The faint heat from the sun, still weak but present. The smell of leaves drying. The distant clack of tools. The grit on his palms where he'd sat down.
His awareness did extend outward, but it was the awareness of a person sitting in a yard, not a cultivator touching the hidden structure of the world.
Maybe that was the point, he told himself. Maybe the first step was learning to sit without flinching.
He tried to find "earth" in the packed soil beneath him.
He found hardness. Coolness. The memory of yesterday's rain.
He tried to find "wood" in the drying racks.
He found brittle reeds and woven twine and the sound of something small snapping when a worker shifted a rack too quickly.
He tried to find "fire" in the sun.
He found light.
Everything he found had an obvious explanation that did not require cultivation.
He wasn't offended by that. He was…relieved, a little. It meant he was not hallucinating progress to soothe himself.
But it also meant that if there was anything else here, he could not detect it with this method, not in a way that would convince anyone.
A soft scrape of footsteps made him lift his eyes.
Two disciples were practicing in the open strip of dirt beyond the racks. They weren't hiding. They weren't performing. They were simply doing what the manual said, the way people did things when they believed the thing would work.
One of them, a girl with a calm face and a braid tied tight, stood in the starting posture and began the breath cycle. The other, a boy with narrow shoulders and a slightly too-large robe, mirrored her.
Yuan He watched without staring.
Their shoulders rose and fell, slow and even. Their chests moved like bellows. Their hands stayed steady. They looked bored.
Boredom meant this was normal.
The boy exhaled, and the sound came out quieter than it should have, almost inaudible.
The girl said, softly, not unkind: "Stop lifting your shoulders. Let the breath drop."
"I am," the boy muttered.
"You're not," she said. "Again."
He adjusted. They restarted.
After a few cycles, the boy's skin took on a faint flush, as if warmth had spread from inside. Not a glow. Not a halo. Just the living heat you saw in someone who had been running but was not sweating.
The girl's posture did not tighten as she inhaled; it relaxed, as if something else was doing part of the work.
They weren't powerful. They weren't impressive.
They were simply…consistent.
Yuan He lowered his gaze and ran the method again, using their bodies as a reference.
Spine. Shoulders. Jaw. Tongue. Hands.
Breath.
He tried to copy the ease he saw in the girl's inhale: not bigger, not harder, just…less guarded.
His ribs punished him for the attempt. The bruise under his arm pinched sharply and made him want to curl inward.
He forced himself not to.
"Don't tense up," he whispered. "Observe."
Ten cycles.
His skin did not flush. His breath did not quiet. His posture did not soften into that effortless shape.
His stomach tightened and loosened, tightened and loosened, as if it was trying to chew his resolve into something edible. His awareness kept snagging on discomfort like cloth catching on a nail.
It would be easy, he realized, to decide the method was wrong.
It would be easy to decide the manual lied.
But the manual didn't need to lie.
It worked for those two. It worked well enough that they could practice in the open without being mocked for wasting time.
The difference wasn't the method.
It was him.
Or, more precisely, it was the thing everyone had already judged him by: five elements.
He ran the breath cycle and tried to imagine the qi gathering. He tried to imagine it obeying, settling into the lower abdomen like water filling a cup.
Instead, his mind produced five images at once, layered and clashing: metal sharpness, wood growth, water cold, fire heat, earth weight.
He felt like he was trying to hold five bowls in two hands.
If one dropped, the others would spill.
He stopped and breathed normally for a moment, letting the frustration drain into the dirt.
"This is the trap," he said quietly, like naming it would keep it from being a monster.
If his progress was unreadable, it would be treated as nonexistent.
If it was treated as nonexistent, he would be punished for "wasting" time.
If he was punished, he would have less time and less food.
Less food meant worse practice.
Worse practice meant slower progress.
The system would call it proof that the path was useless.
On Earth, he had watched people misread data because the instruments were wrong. The system would then "confirm" its own mistake by repeating it.
He looked at the manual again.
He didn't feel hatred for it.
He felt something colder.
Respectable methods were designed for people who could produce a respectable signal.
Five elements did not produce a respectable signal.
Not at first. Maybe not for a long time.
That meant if he wanted to survive, he needed a method that treated weak signal as expected, not as failure.
A method that could be measured by him, even if nobody else could see it.
A method that was stable.
He closed the manual and slid it back into his robe with the same care he would have used putting away a tool he might need later.
He stood, ribs aching, and looked once more at the two disciples practicing in the open. They were still breathing, still steady, still boring.
He didn't envy them.
He envied their margin.
Then he turned away, the slip for the sorting task warm against his inner arm, and walked toward the steward's hut.
If his cultivation couldn't buy him respect yet, then his work would buy him time.
And time would buy him the space to build a path that didn't need to look impressive to be real.