Chương 4: Chapter 3

Sunlight slipped through the crooked gaps in the walls of his miserable wooden shack. There was nothing warm or welcoming about it. Thin blades of morning light cut across the room, catching the dust drifting lazily above the packed dirt floor and making the place look even more neglected than it already was. The light exposed everything it touched: splintered boards, stale straw, and the outline of footprints he had tracked in yesterday. Ling Tian opened his eyes.

He stayed flat on the frayed woven mat that passed for a bed and stared at the sagging, water-stained ceiling. The thatch looked one bad storm away from collapsing and burying him under moldy straw. He did not move. For several seconds, he simply waited for the familiar wave of exhaustion that came every morning with being ten years old, badly fed, and worked far harder than any child should be. There was no breakfast waiting, no family voice calling him up, and certainly no room for any extra sleep.

He knew the sequence by now. First came the hollow pain in his stomach. Then his arms and legs would turn to lead, until sitting upright felt less like getting out of bed and more like trying to lift a boulder with his spine. But the exhaustion never came. Instead, warmth moved through his veins with an almost electric sharpness. Even the stale air inside the shack seemed to carry a faint vibration.

He recognized it immediately: the pulse of environmental Qi he had isolated and mapped yesterday beside the waterfall. Traces of it threaded through the warped planks, lingered in the damp soil beneath his mat, and seemed to rise and fall with the annoyingly cheerful birds outside. It felt wrong. Deeply, unmistakably wrong. It reminded him of waking up to discover that some ethically questionable doctor had broken into his apartment and connected an espresso IV directly to his bloodstream.

His body was still starved, bruised, sore, and wrapped in rags, but his mind was painfully awake. He felt capable of running a marathon. Or, more realistically, surviving a quarterly audit without once staring blankly at a spreadsheet and wondering where his life had gone wrong. Ling Tian did not consider this a mystical blessing. He considered it a biological offense. A normal human body needed sleep, calories, protein, carbohydrates, and preferably a mattress that did not double as agricultural waste.

Feeling this alert while ignoring all of those requirements seemed like a direct insult to biological logic he knew. Either Qi was cheating the rules of biology, or this world obeyed a set of physical laws completely different from the ones he knew. The second possibility was, unfortunately, becoming more likely by the hour. With a tired sigh that did not match how awake he felt, Ling Tian forced himself off the cold floor. His joints answered with several sharp pops.

He winced at the stiffness in his knees and the lingering ache across his lower back, then ignored both. Complaining would not improve his circumstances. He reached into the darkest corner of the shack and grabbed his worn herb sack. Inside was yesterday's hard-won collection of Cloudmint. He opened the bag and checked the small green leaves. On their own, they were barely worth anything, useful mostly for cheap, bitter cough remedies sold to peasants who could not afford better medicine.

Still, worthless was relative. At the moment, this sack of weeds was the closest thing Ling Tian had to a bank account. He pulled the strap over one narrow shoulder, pushed open the complaining wooden door, and stepped outside. The morning air hit him at once: cold, clean, sharp, and completely free of industrial pollution. It smelled of pine, wet earth, and mountain dew. He hated it on principle. From the ridge outside his shack, the misty valleys of Crimson Peak stretched below him in layers of green.

Looking at them, Ling Tian found himself missing the comforting poison of Yogyakarta traffic. He missed motorcycle exhaust, burning trash, hot concrete, and air humid enough to qualify as soup. This mountain air belonged in an expensive tourism spot. It had no business filling the lungs of a starving orphan heading toward another day of manual labor. The scenery was almost offensively beautiful, and every beautiful detail only reminded him that he had no idea what he was doing here.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. The route to Hua City wound downhill through the rough foothills in a long series of dusty slopes, exposed roots, and loose stones. Whoever had designed the path had apparently considered broken ankles an acceptable form of population control. If anything resembling a local government existed in this medieval disaster, road maintenance was clearly not part of its budget. No railings. No paved steps.

Just dirt, gravity, and optimism. As he started down the slope, Ling Tian made what seemed like a reasonable decision. He needed to test his new perception while fully awake and moving. Carefully, he loosened the mental restraint around his spiritual senses and let them spread into his surroundings. It was an extremely bad decision. The instant the restraint weakened, the entire world screamed. There was no peaceful communion with nature, no gentle revelation of hidden wonders.

The forest crashed into his awareness all at once. Ancient pine trees towered over the trail, each of them blazing with thick Verdant Qi. Their green aura pulsed with slow, heavy vitality, so bright in his mind that it felt less like life energy and more like standing beside an exposed reactor. The stones beneath his feet were worse in a different way. Earth Qi rolled through them in a low, grinding rhythm that seemed to vibrate inside his bones.

For one sickening second, he felt as if the whole mountain were a tectonic plate preparing to shift. Even the insects registered: tiny, erratic sparks of biological energy darting around him like electrified mosquitoes with personal grievances. None of it seemed to pass through his ordinary senses. The information simply appeared in his head, bypassing his eyes and ears and arriving directly inside his brain without permission. Pain stabbed behind his eyes.

He recognized the warning signs of a migraine almost immediately. His vision blurred at the edges, greens and browns smearing together until the forest looked oversaturated and unreal. Then nausea slammed into his empty stomach hard enough to send him stumbling off the trail. A lifelong disciple of some ancient sect might have called this a sacred moment, a profound union with the living world. Ling Tian, former corporate accountant, had a different diagnosis: catastrophic information overload.

His untrained brain was trying to identify, sort, and remember the magical signature of every rock, leaf, insect, tree, and drop of water within range. That might have been impressive if the hardware responsible were not the underfed brain of a ten-year-old child. There was simply not enough processing capacity for the amount of data being shoved through it. He stopped moving and dropped to one knee. His fingers pressed hard against his temples while his face tightened against the pain.

His breaths came short and fast. Panic began scratching at the edges of his thoughts. If he could not shut this down, he was going to collapse on the side of a mountain, tumble into a ravine, and become a mildly confusing discovery for some future herb gatherer. He needed a firewall. Immediately. Ling Tian squeezed his eyes shut against the spiritual glare and forced himself to think past the pain. Panic was useless.

The flood of Qi signals was not mystical anymore; it was a corrupted spreadsheet with millions of rows, most of them irrelevant. That framing he understood. He seized on it with all the cold discipline years of corporate work had beaten into him. First, he identified the loudest source: the grinding Earth Qi pouring from the stones under his feet. In his mind, he pictured it as an overflowing column of unwanted data. Background noise. No operational value.

He selected the entire column and mentally deleted it, cutting his awareness of the ground as cleanly as he could. The pressure inside his skull eased slightly. Not much, but enough for him to drag in one steady breath. Next came the pine trees. Their Verdant Qi burned green across his awareness, loud with stubborn life. He labeled it nonessential telemetry, closed the imaginary program, and forced the signal out. The unbearable green glare disappeared.

Then he worked through everything smaller: the insects, the dew, the faint hiss of moisture in the soil, every useless spark and whisper crowding his mind. One by one, he muted them. It took far more concentration than it had any right to. Sweat ran down his face despite the cold air, and he clenched his jaw until his teeth hurt. Slowly, painfully, the mountain stopped shouting. He built the mental filter piece by piece until the flood of signals narrowed into something he could survive.

The migraine did not vanish, but it retreated into a dull pulse behind his eyes. Ling Tian stayed still for another moment, breathing through the leftover nausea, then released a long, shaking breath and opened his eyes. The world had stopped glowing. The mountain path was once again just mud, stone, roots, and bad infrastructure. He stood carefully and wiped the dirt from one bruised knee.

His legs trembled beneath him, not from weakness this time but from the physical aftermath of forcing his mind through an hour's worth of strain in a few minutes. Then he continued downhill. The path was still dangerous in perfectly ordinary ways. Every loose stone or exposed root could twist his ankle. A twisted ankle meant no herb gathering. No herbs meant no money. No money meant no food. Given his current reserves, starvation would stop being theoretical within roughly seventy-two hours.

His margin for error remained, in practical terms, zero. It was the sort of arithmetic this world demanded before breakfast every day. He placed one bare foot ahead of the other and paid close attention to angle, traction, and balance. His spiritual perception stayed throttled to the smallest useful fraction, enough to warn him of immediate danger and nothing more. The grand mysteries and majestic beauty of the cultivation world could wait until after breakfast.

His commute had barely started, and somehow he was already exhausted.