Three hundred and fifty-one.
The blue text hovered above the scarred wood of the desk. It did not illuminate the dark. It existed purely on the optic nerve, an overlay of absolute, clinical certainty.
Three hundred and fifty-one points of Gold-tier fortune.
Yesterday, the number had been 347. An increase of four points. This aligned perfectly with the incident in the courtyard. The servant, the crushed knee, the Rare-grade marrow-knitting pill offered without an audience. The Virtue Coefficient doing its work, reinforcing the boy's heavenly armor because the boy was genuinely, infuriatingly good.
Xie Yan accepted the math. Actions produced reactions. The system rewarded virtue. The rules were visible.
Then he opened the historical ledger.
The Codex kept passive logs. He scrolled back exactly seventy-two hours, tracing the sequence before Sheng Mingchen had stepped through the Xuanque Sacred Ground's eastern gates.
Day minus three: 351. Day minus two: 350. Day minus one: 349.
Xie Yan stopped breathing.
The stillness in the room became absolute. The silence changed texture, shifting from the ordinary quiet of a sleeping sect to the specific, heavy pressure of a room containing a problem that defied its own architecture. The inkstone on the edge of the desk had a hairline crack down the left side. It looked like a dry riverbed. He hadn't noticed it before.
Three points. Gone.
He hadn't executed a mission. He hadn't initiated a scheme. He hadn't even spoken to the boy until the welcoming banquet.
The fortune was decaying without him.
He tapped the empty air. He expanded the data set, forcing the Codex to display the raw variance logs. The blue text cascaded, rearranging into a secondary diagnostic window. The system had a classification for this.
[NON-STANDARD BASELINE VARIANCE]
He highlighted the term. The definition rendered below it in smaller, sharper characters.
[Natural fortune fluctuation within expected parameters.]
Xie Yan looked at the word expected.
A century of surviving the Iron Summits had trained him to locate the most dangerous word in any contract. Expected meant a model existed. It meant someone, or something, had designed the parameters of how a Favored Child of Heaven lost their fortune without external interference. It meant the system had its own momentum.
He was not the only variable on the board.
He might not even be the primary variable.
The torn meridians in his right shoulder ground together, a dull, mechanical ache radiating down to his elbow. He ignored it. The physical pain was manageable. The structural implication of the blue text was not.
Expected parameters of what?
The Codex offered no further clarification. The text sat there, indifferent to the question.
He closed the interface. The blue light dissolved. The room was just a room again. The desk was just a piece of cheap furniture.
Not enough data, the internal accounting engine noted. The voice was flat. Classification: pending. Active monitoring required.
He pushed his chair back. The wood scraped against the floorboards. He needed to look at something that was not the math.
The underground corridor leading to Hall Four smelled of wet limestone, exhausted qi, and cheap pine resin.
The torches in the iron sconces burned low. They cast erratic, overlapping shadows across the compacted dirt floor. The temperature down here was consistently ten degrees colder than the surface, preserving the dampness in the stone walls permanently.
Tang Xiao was inside.
He was running the modified circulation sequence. He was not doing it gracefully. He was sweating through his tunic, his breathing ragged and uneven, his stance slightly too wide. He swung the splintered wooden practice sword. The arc was tight, but the elbow flared at the last second, bleeding kinetic energy into the air instead of transferring it into the strike.
"Garbage," Tang Xiao muttered to himself. He dropped the sword tip to the dirt. "Absolute garbage. The angle is wrong."
Xie Yan stood in the shadow of the stone archway. He did not step into the light. He did not announce himself.
Tang Xiao reset his stance. He wiped sweat from his eyes with the back of his wrist, adjusted his grip on the hilt, and started the sequence again. Left foot forward. Weight shifted. The ambient qi in the damp room pulled toward his chest, snapping into the meridians with a mechanical click that was audible even from the doorway.
The swing. The pivot.
Better. The elbow stayed tucked. The kinetic transfer held.
"Less garbage," Tang Xiao said. He leaned forward, bracing his hands on his knees, pulling air into his lungs in sharp gasps. "Still terrible. But less terrible."
Xie Yan sat on the low stone wall near the entrance. The rock was freezing through his thin robes. He leaned his good shoulder against the archway.
He didn't offer a correction. He didn't speak. He just sat there in the dark, watching a boy who owed him nothing fight an invisible enemy with a broken stick.
Tang Xiao was entirely unaware he had an audience. He complained to the empty room. He kicked a small rock. He picked up the sword and ran the sequence a third time.
The math of the Codex was a trap. The numbers moving by themselves meant the world was operating on a script Xie Yan couldn't read. The logic of the Heavenly Dao was a machine designed to crush anything that didn't fit the parameters.
Tang Xiao's stance was slightly too wide again. He cursed, adjusted his back foot half an inch, and swung. The air whistled.
Xie Yan watched the swing.
He didn't need to be here. There was no tactical advantage in observing a low-tier disciple practice a basic form. He should be running contingency models. He should be evaluating the blind spots in the Lower Corridor's formation architecture. He should be anywhere else, doing anything productive to secure the thirty-day margin.
He stayed for an hour.
The sun was fully up when he returned to his quarters. The light was harsh, exposing the dust on the floorboards and the fraying edges of his sleeves.
He sat at the desk. He engaged the system.
The blue overlay returned. He bypassed the fortune tracking logs and opened the mission architecture. He needed the exact parameters. He needed to know exactly how much of a wall the Virtue Coefficient had built around the target.
[TARGET: SHENG MINGCHEN] [FORTUNE: 351 (GOLD)]
He ran the tactical projection. If he isolated Sheng Mingchen, if he cut the boy off from his allies, if he used the social chess of the sect to strip away the external support structure—what was the yield? How much fortune could he actually pull before the system intervened?
The Codex processed the query. The text rendered slowly, as if calculating the weight of the variables.
[PLUNDER EFFICIENCY ESTIMATE: 31% OF TARGET FORTUNE ACCESSIBLE VIA CURRENT METHODS.]
Thirty-one percent.
That was the ceiling. If he executed every scheme perfectly, if he dismantled Sheng Mingchen's standing within the sect without leaving a single fingerprint, the maximum fortune he could strip was roughly a third of the total.
Because of the shield.
[NOTE: VIRTUE COEFFICIENT OPERATING AT MAXIMUM SUPPRESSION FACTOR.]
The boy's genuine goodness acted as an anchor. The Heavenly Dao wouldn't allow a truly righteous Favored One to be completely hollowed out by standard adversity. The virtue constantly replenished the baseline. You could chip away at the edges, but the core remained untouched, protected by the very mechanics of the universe.
Thirty-one percent wasn't enough.
The mission requirement for the First Evolution was total depletion. He needed to break the fortune down to Ash. He needed the boy standing with open hands, receiving nothing. If the Codex didn't evolve, the system shut down. If the system shut down, Xie Yunlan's poisoned body collapsed within hours.
A social scheme wouldn't do it. A political maneuver wouldn't do it.
To break the Virtue Coefficient, he had to make the virtue itself the mechanism of destruction. He had to construct a scenario where Sheng Mingchen's absolute refusal to compromise, his absolute dedication to the right path, was exactly the thing that isolated him permanently.
He had to weaponize the goodness.
He looked at the final line of the display.
[MISSION TIMER: 14 DAYS.]
Fourteen days until the Nightfall Inheritance opened. Fourteen days until the board locked and the outcome was decided.
He needed new methods.
He had fourteen days.