Chương 23: Chapter 22

After several minutes, one fracture deepened through the upper section. He stepped back and studied it. Another clean strike might separate the entire piece. Ling Tian adjusted his feet, rotated his shoulders, and swung. The bronze scabbard hit just beside the fracture. The upper section split. A chunk of granite roughly the size of his head broke loose and crashed onto the dirt. Ling Tian lowered the weapon. He flexed his arms. No damage.

His hands trembled faintly from repeated impact, but the sensation was ordinary mechanical fatigue rather than the hollow weakness that had preceded his previous collapse. That was enough. Ling Tian did not continue pulverizing the boulder simply because the option existed. The answer to whether he could damage stone had already become obvious. Turning the entire rock into gravel would provide diminishing informational returns and increasing opportunity for stupidity.

He rested the bronze stick against one shoulder. Then waited. The memory of the previous plateau test remained unpleasantly clear. One moment he had been functional. The next his vision narrowed, his knees failed, and twenty meters of crawling became a major logistical operation. Thirty seconds passed. Nothing. A minute. His breathing slowed. Two minutes. The tremor in his hands disappeared. Ling Tian continued waiting. His stomach growled. He froze. Then placed one hand against his abdomen.

Another low complaint followed. Hunger. Normal hunger. No nausea. No clammy sweat. No tunnel vision. No cognitive fog. Ling Tian bent one knee experimentally. Stable. Five minutes passed without further symptoms. That did not fit the previous model. He had performed more sprint repetitions than before, at greater speed, then spent several minutes breaking stone instead of wood. The total physical workload should have been at least comparable and probably higher. Yet the metabolic crash had not returned.

The first explanation was obvious. He had eaten better. That mattered enormously. Several days of rice, pork, fat, vegetables, and actual rest had replenished reserves that barely existed during the previous test. Pretending that nutrition was irrelevant simply because cultivation had changed would be exactly the kind of reasoning that got people killed. Ling Tian refused to ignore the variable. Still, improved nutrition did not explain everything comfortably. His hunger felt less urgent than expected.

Physical recovery was dramatically faster. The two-drop Earth Qi reserve had behaved differently throughout the sprint test. All of that suggested a second possibility: the additional Qi might be changing how much ordinary biological fuel his body required for the same workload. Maybe. That word mattered. Maybe the Qi contributed directly to movement. Maybe it improved conversion efficiency. Maybe it reduced the energy cost of maintaining reinforced tissue. Maybe the entire model was wrong. Ling Tian did not know.

And suddenly that bothered him far more than the boulder. He sat on the broken edge of the stone and looked down at his hands. They looked normal. Still small. Still calloused. Still attached. Yet two microscopic deposits of invisible mountain energy had already altered endurance, recovery, temperature tolerance, impact resistance, striking force, and possibly the relationship between exertion and food. That was a lot of biological restructuring for something he could barely perceive.

His cultivation depended almost entirely on identifying changes after each experiment. Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. And he was documenting almost none of them. The realization arrived unpleasantly fast. Ling Tian replayed the last week from memory. How far had he run after the first deposit? Approximately ten kilometers. How quickly? Unknown. How long had muscular fatigue lasted during the first plateau test before the Earth Qi responded?

He could remember the general sequence. Not the duration. How much food had he consumed before the second deposit? A lot. That was not data. How long had the second transit from palm to Dantian taken compared with the first? Shorter. Again, uselessly vague. Ling Tian's expression tightened. This was unacceptable. He had been treating cultivation like an audit while failing to create an audit trail. The first night, he had at least scratched crude notes into broken wood. Since then, events had accelerated.

Rare herbs. Money. Food. The bronze weapon. The metabolic collapse. The second cultivation attempt. Physical testing. Everything remained clear now because it had happened recently. A month from now, memory would smooth the edges. Three months from now, he would remember conclusions instead of evidence. That was dangerous. Human memory was very good at producing confidence and very bad at preserving exact detail. Ling Tian stood. The administrative failure suddenly felt more urgent than the physical discovery.

He needed records. Not charcoal marks on scraps of furniture. Proper records. A ledger that tracked cultivation quantity, element, entry point, route, pain level, recovery period, food intake, physical performance, perception range, and every unusual response that followed. Failures especially. The original Ling Tian had died because he lacked information. Ling Tian possessed information and was currently allowing it to decay inside his own head. That felt almost insulting.

He looked around the plateau as though the mountain itself were responsible.

"This is why people write things down." Paper. Ink. A proper writing tool. Preferably something more precise than the traditional brushwork the original boy had learned from his parents. That introduced a second issue. Writing the ledger in the local language would make the entire thing readable to anyone who found it. Ling Tian's expression turned thoughtful. Information security. Another problem. At least that one could wait until he possessed something worth encrypting. Procurement first. Security second.

For once, he could afford both. His two silver coins remained hidden inside the folds of his clothes as emergency reserve capital. He still possessed big copper and small copper from the previous market trip, enough to purchase ordinary supplies without producing silver in public. Office supplies should qualify as ordinary. Probably. Ling Tian glanced toward the damaged boulder. Then down at himself. His stomach growled again, louder this time. Right. Breakfast first.

The previous plateau experience had established quite clearly that paperwork was not exempt from caloric requirements. He retrieved the tar-covered bronze stick and started back toward the shack at a brisk but controlled pace. The morning had already produced enough information without adding another variable. As he moved through the trees, Ling Tian repeated the actual conclusions to himself. Second deposit stable overnight. Higher physical output. Reduced muscular fatigue. Improved impact tolerance.

No repeat metabolic collapse despite greater workload. Possible improvement in energy efficiency, heavily confounded by improved nutrition. That last qualification mattered. Improved nutrition. Do not invent certainty because the result was exciting. That was precisely why he needed the ledger. By the time his shack came into view, the initial thrill of the morning had settled into something more useful. Purpose. Ling Tian pushed open the crooked door and looked toward the splintered table.

A few days earlier, it had held a bloodstained cultivation manual and rough charcoal notes deciphering someone else's terrible instructions. Soon, it would hold something better. Not another cultivation manual. The world had enough mystical poetry disguised as documentation. Ling Tian wanted records written by someone who understood the difference between metaphor and operating procedure. A ledger. His ledger.

One that recorded exactly what he had done, what happened afterward, what changed, and which decisions had nearly killed him. He rested the ugly bronze weapon beside the door and turned toward the pantry. First, breakfast. Then Hua City. His cultivation had officially become complicated enough to require paperwork. For the first time since transmigrating, that felt almost comforting. — Ling Tian ate before doing anything else. The decision required less internal debate than it would have several days ago.

His body had already demonstrated what happened when enthusiasm outran nutrition, and no administrative emergency justified repeating the plateau incident. He built up the embers in the crude hearth, sliced several pieces of fatty pork into the clay pot, and waited until enough grease rendered out to coat the bottom. Rice, chopped root vegetables, and water followed, along with enough salt and spice to make the resulting porridge smell like actual food rather than survival equipment. He ate a full bowl.

Then another smaller one. Only when the persistent hunger from the morning's stress test settled into something quiet did Ling Tian consider the trip to Hua City authorized. The pantry still looked almost luxurious by the standards of the shack. A coarse sack of polished rice rested against one wall, several remaining cuts of pork had been wrapped as carefully as his current preservation technology allowed, and bundles of starchy roots occupied a dry basket beside the hearth. None of it would last forever.

The mountain air was cold enough to help, but cold was not the same as refrigeration, and Ling Tian had no intention of discovering how quickly expensive pork developed an independent ecosystem. Before leaving, he reorganized the food. The rice stayed in the driest corner he had found. He moved the wrapped meat farther from the hearth and placed it inside a covered clay container weighted with a flat stone. The roots required less attention, though he checked each one for soft spots before stacking them again.

He also moved the remaining seasonings and lamp fuel away from the door, where a determined animal would have had the easiest access. His security system remained primitive. Wooden walls. A crooked door. Several stones. Prayer. Still, there was little point spending money on food only to donate it to mountain rodents. Ling Tian checked his money next.

The two silver coins remained exactly where he wanted them: separately wrapped and hidden deep inside the inner folds of his clothes where they could not clink together. He had no intention of producing either coin during an ordinary purchase. Silver was reserve capital, and reserve capital stayed invisible until the situation became serious enough to justify explaining why a ragged ten-year-old possessed it. The usable funds were the remaining big copper and small copper from his previous trip.

There was less than before, obviously. Meat, rice, vegetables, household supplies, pitch, and several days of ordinary expenses had already reduced the amount. But there was enough for paper, ink, and a writing tool unless Hua City's clerical class had somehow developed luxury pricing for stationery. Ling Tian paused. Considering the behavior of office-supply vendors in his previous life, that possibility could not be dismissed. He secured the copper in two places rather than one.

The small copper went into the worn pouch at his waist where ordinary market money belonged. Most of the big copper stayed beneath his tunic in a wrapped bundle, leaving only a few pieces easily accessible. Nothing jingled. Nothing gleamed. Good. The tar-covered bronze weapon came last. Ling Tian lifted it from beside the door and examined the dried coating. The pitch had hardened into an ugly brown-black crust, complete with embedded dirt and bark.

Any remaining hint of clean bronze had vanished beneath the camouflage. The weapon looked diseased. Ling Tian considered that a success. He stepped outside and pulled the shack door shut behind him. The mountain path descended between wet pines and exposed shelves of gray stone. Only a week earlier, Ling Tian had needed to treat this route as a serious physical undertaking.

Every loose rock demanded attention, every incline punished his malnourished legs, and the journey to Hua City consumed enough energy that arriving at the market already felt like completing half a day's labor. That version of the commute no longer existed. Ling Tian started at a jog. The two-drop Earth Qi reserve rotated beneath his navel with the same slow rhythm he had observed throughout the morning.

Each step sent a muted impact through his legs, and each impact disappeared into the familiar grounding support before it could accumulate into discomfort. He gradually increased his pace. Not a sprint. There was no reason to turn a stationery purchase into another athletic trial. Still, what counted as a comfortable traveling speed had changed enough to become absurd.