I woke up to pain.

  A deep, all-encompassing pain that suggested my body had recently been used as a testing ground for advanced blunt force trauma techniques. My ribs ached. My limbs felt like they had been independently disassembled and haphazardly put back together. My mouth tasted like blood and failure.

  And, most concerningly, I had no idea where I was.

  The ground beneath me was stone — cool, unforgiving, and utterly indifferent to my suffering. As I blinked the haze from my eyes, I became aware of people. Many, many people.

  I was not supposed to be here.

  Which was a problem.

  Because here was a massive, open-air courtyard, packed with people. Rows and rows of robed disciples surrounded me, forming a loose semicircle of varying expressions — some pitying, most entertained. I could see smug faces, bored faces, and even a few outright gleeful ones. Further back, seated on raised platforms like judgmental statues, were sect elders — their long beards practically vibrating with disappointment.

  Memories — not mine, but mine — slammed into me like a badly aimed battering ram.

  Jiang Lingwu. That was me. Now, anyway. A disciple of some esteemed martial sect. A man who had spent years cultivating his strength, training for this one moment.

  A fated duel.

  An arrogant young master.

  A months-long struggle to bridge the gap in power through sheer hard work, culminating in a miraculous fortuitous encounter.

  And then, the most important part:

  I had still lost. Spectacularly.

  The noise of the crowd faded into a dull murmur as I processed this. I was in a cultivation story. A bad one. A world where the author undoubtedly got so much hate comments from readers that they took away their protagonist’s plot armour and killed them off.

  A shadow fell over me.

  “You truly are worthless, Jiang Lingwu.”

  Ah. There he was.

  Zhao Feng.

  If there were a Platonic ideal of an Arrogant Young Master, Zhao Feng had perfectly optimized his parameters to fit the mold. He stood above me in his immaculate blue robes, golden embroidery practically screaming ‘I have never worked a day in my life.’ His hair was long, his posture was effortless, and his eyes were practically twinkling with condescension.

  He even had a folding fan, which he tapped idly against his palm — because of course he did.

  “You talked such a big game,” he continued, voice ringing through the courtyard, clearly enunciated for maximum public humiliation. “You boasted that you could defeat me. That you would surpass me.”

  He took a step forward. The crowd leaned in.

  “And yet, in the end, this is all you amount to.”

  A pause. A slow shake of the head. “How utterly pathetic.”

  The audience loved that.

  A few disciples scoffed. One even spit on the ground. Sect elders murmured to one another, shaking their heads at my tragic downfall. A group of junior disciples in the back were already exchanging bets on whether I would try to fight again or just collapse into sobbing, shameful regret.

  I barely noticed any of it.

  Because I was having an existential crisis.

  I had always loved math. Sort of. Not just in the casual, oh, I like numbers way, but in the staying up late trying and failing to read nineteenth-century proofs I barely understood way. But I had never been good enough. Not enough to study it in university. Not enough to risk everything on it. So I had settled.

  Biology. A safe choice. A respectable choice. A practical, employable field where I had built a decent, modest career. And yet, no matter how many papers I published, that lingering what if? had never left me.

  What if I had chased math? What if I had been brave enough to take the plunge?

  And now, here I was. Given another chance at life.

  A world where immortals lived.

  A world where truth and knowledge and insight were not just intellectual pursuits, but literal sources of power.

  What kind of absolutely absurd mathematical discoveries had been made in such a place where immortals could dedicate centuries to a single problem?

  I shivered.

  Somewhere out there, an old monster had surely spent millennia cultivating the Monster Group.

  Probably had a hidden disciple he called the Baby Monster.

  Together, they formed the Happy Family.

  A giggle slipped out before I could stop it. Group theorists were such weirdos.

  The crowd went silent.

  Zhao Feng blinked.

  “You dare to laugh?”

  From their perspective, a man who had just been soundly defeated and publicly humiliated was now chuckling to himself on the ground like an unhinged lunatic.

  It was so, so stupid.

  Another laugh bubbled up.

  “He’s gone mad,” someone whispered.

  Zhao Feng’s expression twitched. “Enough.” His voice rang out, sharp as a blade. “You have eyes but cannot see Mount Tai. Cripple your cultivation, and I may yet let you live with the weight of your shame.”

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  There it was. The stock phrase. The scripted insult every arrogant young master was contractually obligated to say at least once before delivering the final humiliation.

  I was supposed to refuse. To grit my teeth, eyes blazing with defiance. To shout, ‘I will never surrender!’ and then promptly get beaten within an inch of my life, barely surviving to start my long and arduous revenge arc.

  Instead, I took a deep breath.

  I searched my memories. I examined my cultivation base.

  And immediately wished I hadn’t.

  Because what in the fresh hell was this?

  The Raging Dragon Tyrant Fist.

  The foundational method I had trained in. The martial path that had shaped my body and meridians.

  It was all about destruction. Brute force. Martial dominance. Crushing your enemies.

  No elegance. No curiosity. No creation. No beauty.

  Just power for power’s sake.

  Selfish. Ugly. Pointless.

  I stared down at my hands, feeling the raw, graceless, meaningless qi that had been cultivated for years in pursuit of what? A duel? A tournament arc? A meaningless rivalry?

  Why the hell was I clinging to this?

  Why not start from scratch?

  I sighed. Pushed myself up. Dusted off my robe.

  And did something no xianxia protagonist had ever done before.

  I agreed.

  “You know what?” I exhaled slowly. “You’re right.”

  Silence.

  Pure, deafening silence.

  Zhao Feng’s smirk froze. The crowd collectively stopped breathing.

  Even the sect elders, who had up until now been half-asleep, suddenly looked very awake.

  I closed my eyes. Reached inward.

  And dispersed my qi.

  -x-x-x-

  My dantian fractured.

  A shockwave rippled through my meridians as years of cultivation collapsed.

  Someone actually screamed.

  A junior disciple fainted.

  Zhao Feng staggered back like I had personally slapped him.

  Oddly enough, I didn’t feel any pain. Wasn’t that supposed to happen when someone crippled their cultivation? Didn’t they begin vomitting blood and aging?

  A deep, unnatural silence followed my actions, stretching so long that I wondered if I had somehow broken the sect.

  It wasn’t just Zhao Feng standing there like I’d personally rewritten reality with a single move — it was everyone. The disciples. The sect elders. The spectators who had come here expecting a nice, traditional public humiliation session.

  Even the wind seemed to have stopped.

  I looked around. Blinked.

  Had… had I actually won?

  Not in the traditional sense, of course — I was still technically the loser, seeing as I had just willingly uninstalled my cultivation base like a poorly optimized mobile app. But in another, far more satisfying way, I had achieved total and utter victory.

  Because no one — not even Zhao Feng with his vast, self-sustaining ego — knew how to respond.

  I had derailed the script.

  Zhao Feng finally broke the silence. “You… you actually… did it?” His voice cracked on the last word, which was deeply gratifying.

  A nearby disciple inhaled sharply, his face a shade paler than before. “No one has ever voluntarily dispersed their own qi before…”

  Another disciple grabbed him by the robes. “There must be a reason! A deeper meaning!”

  The first disciple swallowed. “He… he must have achieved a higher enlightenment…!”

  Ah.

  There it was.

  The inevitable, tragically unavoidable misunderstanding.

  I should have seen this coming. These people were cultivators. They didn’t operate on logic; they operated on narrative convenience and grand, fate-driven assumptions. And apparently, the idea of someone just quitting because he was tired of this nonsense was too incomprehensible for their feeble, battle-hardened minds to grasp.

  Zhao Feng, however, was still struggling between horror and rage. “No, no, no! There’s no enlightenment! He’s just a fool! A spineless coward!”

  One of the elders, a thin man with sharp eyes and an even sharper mustache, rubbed his chin. “But Zhao Feng, he did exactly what you demanded. You told him to disperse his cultivation, and he did. Does this not make you, in some way, his master?”

  Zhao Feng’s expression froze.

  Then contorted into an unspeakable level of disgust.

  “ABSOLUTELY NOT!”

  “Hmm,” the elder hummed. “But you did guide him to this action.”

  “No, I — ” Zhao Feng visibly fought the urge to start screaming. His elegant, arrogant persona was hanging on by a thread.

  Somewhere in the crowd, a junior disciple mumbled, “Maybe… maybe Senior Brother Jiang saw through the illusion of martial power itself?”

  Another disciple, eyes wide, clutched his robes. “Is… is martial cultivation meaningless?”

  “No!” Zhao Feng snarled.

  But the whispers were spreading.

  The sect elders looked increasingly disturbed. One of them, an older woman with sharp features, massaged her temples like she had a headache forming. “Enough.” She turned to me, fixing me with an unreadable gaze. “Jiang Lingwu. What is it you seek?”

  I hesitated.

  This was a very dangerous question.

  I couldn’t say, ‘I just want to go somewhere far, far away from this ridiculous sect nonsense where my chance of dying an early, spectacularly violent death is significantly lower.’

  Nor could I say, ‘I want to study math,’ because then they’d start assuming I was chasing some esoteric Dao of Numbers, and that was an entire problem I did not want to deal with.

  So I did what any reasonable person would do in my situation.

  I rolled with the misunderstanding.

  I sighed, putting on my best impression of a weary scholar who had glimpsed something profound beyond mortal comprehension. Then, in the most mysterious, noncommittal voice possible, I said:

  “There are some things that cannot be explained in words.”

  A full-grown man collapsed to his knees in shock.

  Another disciple choked on his own spit.

  One of the sect elders audibly muttered, “Oh no.”

  Zhao Feng, meanwhile, looked like he was experiencing a profound personal crisis.

  “This is ridiculous,” he hissed. “You’re all being ridiculous! He’s not enlightened! He’s running away!”

  A disciple looked up at me with absolute reverence. “Senior Brother Jiang… have we all been blind?”

  I gave him my best cryptic, all-knowing smile and said, “Perhaps.”

  He promptly fainted.

  The sect elder with the headache rubbed her temples harder. “Enough. Jiang Lingwu, you are determined to leave the sect?”

  “Yes.”

  Another wave of whispers. As if it was truly that simple.

  The elder sighed. “Normally, we do not allow disciples to abandon the sect so easily. It is an insult to the great legacy of the Azure Sky Sect.”

  I nodded slowly. Here it comes. The part where they refused to let me leave. Where I’d be forced to navigate absurd bureaucratic nonsense just to walk out of a gate.

  “However,” the elder continued, “since your decision has already stirred such… profound disturbance…” She cast a glance at the disciples, several of whom were still whispering about me like I was some wandering immortal in disguise. “It may be best to let you go before this gets any worse.”

  I blinked.

  Wait.

  That actually worked?

  Zhao Feng, still reeling, blurted, “You can’t be serious.”

  The elder raised a hand. “It is not entirely unheard of. Many great sages have chosen to temporarily dwell among lesser mortals before returning as something greater.”

  Zhao Feng physically recoiled. “You’re saying you think he’ll come back as —”

  “Let’s not entertain hypotheticals,” she interrupted swiftly, clearly wanting this entire conversation to end as soon as possible. “Jiang Lingwu, since you are choosing to abandon your path, the sect will allow you to leave.”

  Finally. Finally.

  I gave her a polite bow, channeling every ounce of gracious exit energy I could muster. “Thank you, Elder.”

  The sect gates loomed in the distance—an open door to a new life. A life where I wouldn’t be forced into duels, where no one would try to kill me for bumping into them in a hallway.

  Zhao Feng gritted his teeth. “Jiang Lingwu,” he spat. “I hope you regret this.”

  I turned back, flashed him the most infuriatingly serene smile possible, and said, “Oh, I won’t.”

  Then I walked through the gates.

  And into freedom.