Lunch.

  For all the enlightenment, the conceptual breakthroughs, and the slow, inevitable realisation that I was becoming something other than what I once was, lunch remained a universal constant.

  And in some ways, that was comforting. The world of cultivation might be vast and unknowable, an endless series of nested hierarchies, but at the end of the day, even the greatest of immortals had to sit down and eat.

  … actually, no, maybe not.

  I frowned as I walked toward my usual dumpling stall, my mind rapidly spiraling into the kind of existential crisis that only hunger and academic curiosity could induce. If cultivators could survive on pure qi, was it analogous to photosynthesis? Did they synthesise all necessary compounds internally, or were there fundamental biochemical pathways that still required external inputs?

  If a cultivator never ate, did their microbiome collapse? Did their gut bacteria ascend with them?

  Wait.

  I stopped in the middle of the street, considering.

  Did gut bacteria cultivate?

  Did I have to worry about some ungodly strain of E. coli going around?

  … did they have a dantian?

  I stared down at my stomach, genuinely unsettled. If qi could influence a cultivator’s body, then surely it influenced their microbiome as well. And if not, then… helminth parasites? And if that was the case…

  No. Stop. This was a rabbit hole I did not need to go down.

  I needed lunch.

  I shook my head and continued toward the dumpling stall, forcibly shoving aside the horrifying thought of a microbial golden core.

  The scent of freshly steamed buns and sizzling scallion pancakes filled the air as I reached the vendor, an old woman who had long since stopped questioning why I sometimes stared into the distance like I was having an out-of-body experience. I greeted her with a polite nod, placing my order with practiced efficiency.

  As I waited, I allowed myself a brief moment of self-reflection.

  I was almost ready.

  Four months ago, I had been barely more than a fraud — an imposter with a head full of half-remembered mathematical theorems and no real understanding of what I was doing. Now? Now, I could move with intent. I could sense the invisible structures that surrounded me. I could feel the faintest whisper of transformation when I aligned myself with the underlying symmetries of the world.

  It wasn’t much. Not yet. Compared to true cultivators, I was still barely a rounding error in the grand function of reality. But I was no longer just flailing blindly, hoping to brute-force my way into enlightenment through sheer academic stubbornness. I had a direction now. A method.

  And most importantly — I had a plan.

  Step one: Resume teaching. Probably.

  Step two: Continue refining my understanding through increasingly convoluted mathematical metaphors that would make my students question the nature of existence.

  Step three: Survive long enough to get to step four.

  Step four: Punch a mountain apart.

  I was under no delusions that step four was anytime soon. But I had started to see the outlines of the path. The first derivatives, the partial differentials that hinted at a greater underlying structure. Given enough time, enough iteration, I would reach a point where my understanding was no longer just an approximation.

  And then — then we’d see what was really possible.

  I allowed myself a small, satisfied nod. The wax on, wax off phase was over.

  Now the good stuff began.

  “Here you go,” the vendor said, handing me a neatly wrapped portion of dumplings.

  I accepted them with the appropriate amount of reverence. The universe was governed by certain immutable truths, and one of them was that a man who had spent the morning pondering the nature of qi transformations still needed to eat.

  But before I could take a single bite, before I could even appreciate the delicate balance of soy and vinegar seeping into the perfectly pleated dough, a voice cut through the street.

  “Master Jiang!”

  A small figure was sprinting toward me, her breath coming in sharp, panicked gasps.

  Ru Lan.

  I barely had time to register the sheer desperation in her voice before she reached me, skidding to a halt with a force that suggested she had forgotten how friction worked. Her eyes were wide, wild, her hair slightly disheveled from running, and she was breathing so hard that for a moment, all she could do was stare up at me, gulping down air.

  I blinked.

  Well, this was new.

  I knelt down slightly, setting my dumplings aside. “Ru Lan?” I said gently. “What’s wrong?”

  She opened her mouth, but what came out wasn’t words. It was an incoherent mix of gasping and frantic gesturing, like a child who had just learned about the existence of irrational numbers and was now experiencing a personal crisis.

  Huh. Was that what was happening? Had Headmaster Song been teaching them about that?

  I put a steadying hand on her shoulder. “Breathe. Then explain.”

  She sucked in a sharp, unsteady breath, tried again. “Th-there’s a cultivator —”

  My mind snapped into full alertness.

  A cultivator.

  That single word was enough to cut through all the lingering amusement, all the idle speculation, all the deeply unsettling questions about microbial qi refinement that I had been trying to suppress. My entire body tensed instinctively — not with fear, but with the kind of acute awareness that only came from knowing you were about to be violently reminded of your own mortality.

  I stayed kneeling, keeping my tone steady. “What cultivator?”

  Ru Lan was still gulping air, her hands clenching and unclenching at her sides, as if trying to hold onto something solid while the world around her spun out of control. “He—he’s from Longtiao City. The Liu Clan.” She swallowed hard, voice barely above a whisper. “He won’t leave my sister alone.”

  The words hit me like a cold splash of water.

  Liu Clan. From Longtiao City.

  I wasn’t deeply versed in the politics of local cultivation sects, but even I had heard of them in passing. One of those well-established clans that owned a significant chunk of the businesses in the city and probably considered Qinghe Town to be little more than a place where their servants came from. They were not the type of people you crossed.

  And if a Liu Clan cultivator had decided he was interested in someone…

  I exhaled, keeping my voice calm even as my mind raced. “Where?”

  Ru Lan pointed, trembling. “The market. He — he just — he —”

  She didn’t finish. She didn’t need to. Her entire face, her entire body, told me everything.

  Panic. Helplessness.

  The look of someone who had already run through every possible solution in her mind and found nothing.

  I had seen that look before. I had worn that look before.

  It was the look of someone who had realised that, no matter how much they struggled, they were bound by constraints they could not control. That they were trapped in an equation with no real solution, and all they could do was watch as the inevitable played out.

  I felt my stomach twist.

  I was not a hero. I had never been. I had spent four months avoiding situations exactly like this, keeping my head down, training in quiet solitude so that when the time came — some hypothetical, far-off future that they came for me — I would be ready.

  I wasn’t ready.

  Not really.

  Yes, I had learned. Yes, I had refined my control. Yes, I had glimpsed something greater than myself.

  But that didn’t mean I could fight a true cultivator.

  It didn’t mean I could stand in front of someone from a powerful city clan and tell him to leave.

  It didn’t mean I wouldn’t end up just like the protagonist whose body I had inherited — beaten down, discarded, powerless.

  But.

  But.

  Ru Lan’s hands were shaking.

  Her breath was uneven.

  She had run all the way here, past dozens of adults who would have looked away, past the rest of my students who were too young, past anyone else she might have known.

  She had run to me.

  I took a slow breath, forcing my own panic down.

  The truth was, it didn’t matter if I was ready.

  Because Ru Lan hadn’t come to me because she thought I was a hero. She hadn’t come to me because she believed I could solve everything in one miraculous stroke.

  She had come to me because I was the only one who might try.

  And for that alone —

  I couldn’t turn away.

  I let my breath out. My thoughts snapped into order, my mind aligning with a singular, unshakable decision.

  “Take me there.”

  Ru Lan nodded frantically, already spinning on her heel.

  I followed.

  My lunch lay forgotten on the street behind me.

  -x-x-x-

  I followed Ru Lan through the winding streets of Qinghe Town, my mind racing faster than my legs could carry me.

  Which was unfortunate, because if there was ever a time for my newfound mathematical cultivation insights to grant me an immediate mobility technique, this was it.

  But no—better to conserve what little control I had. My qi wasn’t some obedient dog that followed commands on a whim; it was more like a half-feral animal that occasionally acknowledged my presence when it felt like it. If I spent my energy now, I’d have even less to work with when I got there.

  And I would need everything I had.

  Because let’s be real — this was exactly the kind of situation that, in every xianxia story, existed purely as a post-breakthrough face-slapping moment.

  The arrogant young master shows up. He’s a smug, insufferable bastard with a local backing and a handful of bootlickers. He terrorizes the common folk until the protagonist, fresh from an epiphany in seclusion, arrives to teach him a lesson.

  And that was the problem.

  I had not just had a breakthrough.

  I was still weaker than Jiang Lingwu had been before he got trounced by Zhao Feng. If this cultivator was even close to Zhao Feng’s strength, then I was already dead.

  Except, of course, I couldn’t think about that right now.

  Ru Lan’s small figure darted ahead of me, her short legs moving faster than I’d ever seen them in class. She wasn’t stopping to look back—she was trusting that I was behind her, that I wouldn’t hesitate.

  And so I didn’t.

  The market came into view, and I caught my first glimpse of the situation.

  Oh.

  Oh, yeah.

  Arrogant young master.

  In the middle of the street, lounging against a silk-draped stall like he had personally invented the concept of leisure, was a man who could not have been more obviously stamped with the words face-slappable villain if he’d tried.

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  Expensive robes? Check. Dark green, embroidered with silver — definitely moneyed.

  Elaborate hairstyle? Check. He was even holding a jade hairpin like he was deciding whether or not it was worthy of being used.

  Smug expression? Oh, absolutely. The kind of smugness that came from a lifetime of never facing consequences.

  And, of course — lackeys.

  Two of them, standing slightly behind him with identical postures of obsequious deference. It was one of the fundamental constants of this universe. No matter where you went, arrogant young masters always came with at least two bootlickers. The optimal number for maximum synchronised laughter and unquestioning validation.

  The Liu Clan cultivator was talking, his tone as lazy as his stance. “I’m being quite reasonable,” he was saying. “I’m merely offering to pay for your company. Many would consider that generous.”

  My stomach turned.

  Ru Lan’s sister stood stiffly in front of him, her expression carefully neutral. Her husband was at her side, his hands balled into fists — but his entire posture screamed hesitation. Because he knew, just as I did, that if he started a fight, he would lose more than just the fight.

  I took in the scene carefully, my mind snapping into the kind of brutal, analytical clarity that only absolute panic could produce.

  The Liu Clan cultivator was young — maybe early twenties — but carried himself with the weight of someone who had never once questioned his own place in the world. He had that unmistakable bearing of a man who had never faced a problem that couldn’t be solved by his surname, his fists, or, failing both, a sufficiently large amount of bribery.

  Which presented a problem for me.

  One, I had no surname worth mentioning.

  Two, my fists were currently better suited for writing out proofs than throwing punches.

  Three, I had about seven copper coins currently on my person, and I had just abandoned my dumplings.

  Suboptimal.

  Still, I needed to figure out exactly who I was dealing with. The Liu Clan was prominent in Longtiao City, but I couldn’t tell if this man was an important figure in the clan or just some young master on the periphery, the kind who had just enough authority to make trouble but not enough to resolve it if things went sideways.

  What was worse, I had no idea how strong he actually was.

  A normal cultivator would be able to gauge an opponent’s strength at a glance, sensing their qi fluctuations, measuring the density of their spiritual energy, the purity of their core.

  I, on the other hand, had the keen spiritual perception of a well-trained potato. My dantian was shattered, my meridians fractured — I was fundamentally incapable of sensing qi the way normal cultivators could. For all I knew, with me and my fragmented meridians, he might just be a particularly well-dressed accountant.

  Which meant I was walking into this completely blind.

  All I had to go on was body language, context clues, and a deeply unhealthy level of meta-awareness about how these kinds of xianxia scenes usually played out.

  I refocused on the Liu Clan cultivator.

  The way he stood, the way he spoke — everything about him radiated that distinct flavor of arrogance that came from believing the universe itself had been constructed with him as the central reference frame.

  And normally, I would have dismissed that as just another case of young master syndrome requiring a prescription of one hefty dose of face-slapping, PRN.

  But now — after months of training, after struggling to grasp the fundamental mathematical underpinnings of reality itself — that attitude felt like a personal affront.

  The arrogance was wrong. Not just in the usual ‘this guy is unbearable’ way, but in a deeper, more fundamental sense. It was an offense against symmetry. Against invariance. Against the very nature of mathematical truth.

  Because, yes, technically, one could always perform a coordinate transformation to put oneself at the center of a system. It was a valid mathematical operation.

  But doing so was not the same as being the actual center of reality.

  This man, with his complete lack of self-awareness, had taken the arbitrary choice of his own existence as an absolute truth, as though he were the origin point of all things rather than just another interchangeable element in the grand equation of life.

  It was offensive.

  It was infuriating.

  It was wrong.

  And I hated that I was even having this thought because oh my god, I am going to die.

  The Liu Clan cultivator turned slightly, tilting his head as he regarded Ru Lan’s sister with that same unbearable, condescending smirk.

  “Come now,” he said, still speaking as if this were all some grand joke at everyone else’s expense. “Surely you don’t expect your husband to defend you?”

  Her husband clenched his jaw so tightly I thought his teeth might crack. His fists were trembling at his sides — not in fear, but in sheer, helpless rage. He wanted to fight. He wanted to defend his wife. But he knew, just as everyone else in the market knew, that if he tried, he would lose.

  Not just the fight. Everything.

  Because that was how these things worked.

  A cultivator could do what he wanted. The laws of common folk didn’t apply to him. If he so much as raised a hand, the Liu Clan young master would beat him to the ground, humiliate him, cripple him, kill him — and there wouldn’t be a single thing anyone could do about it.

  Because power was the only thing that mattered.

  My stomach twisted, a bitter taste rising in my throat.

  For all the complexity of cultivation, for all the talk of enlightenment and grand cosmic principles, the reality of it was painfully simple. It was an arms race. A contest of who had the biggest, shiniest metaphysical stick. And those at the top of the hierarchy had long since decided that they were the natural center of the universe, that their power was deserved — that the suffering of others was nothing more than an acceptable error in the equation of their own superiority.

  I hated it.

  I hated it because it wasn’t just wrong. It was sloppy.

  It was bad mathematics. A false axiom accepted without proof. A system where the rules existed only to reinforce a conclusion already assumed to be true.

  And in that moment, as the Liu Clan cultivator stood there, still smirking like the outcome had already been determined — because from his perspective, it had been — I felt something shift.

  A redefinition of variables. A realisation of constraints.

  And an undeniable certainty that I was about to do something incredibly stupid.

  I exhaled slowly, stepping forward.

  Not dramatically. Not heroically.

  Just… moving.

  The marketplace was silent as I approached. The townsfolk parted instinctively, as if afraid that proximity to me might result in some sort of collateral damage.

  Liu Xun’s smirk widened as I stepped into the open, his eyes lighting up like a particularly smug cat that had just cornered an exceptionally stupid mouse. He tilted his head, as though he were entertaining a brief moment of curiosity before he went back to doing whatever it was he considered important.

  “And who,” he drawled, “might you be?”

  I clasped my hands behind my back and tilted my head in return, mirroring his condescension at a slightly off angle, as if I were adjusting a coordinate system just to be petty.

  “A teacher,” I said simply.

  His smirk twitched. That wasn’t the answer he had been expecting.

  “You must be new to Qinghe Town,” I continued before he could recover. “Otherwise, you’d know that anyone under the age of twelve finds me utterly terrifying.”

  That got a snicker from someone in the crowd. Wait. Was that Wu Liang? The lackeys, however, did not find it amusing. One of them took a step forward, hand drifting toward the hilt of his sword.

  Liu Xun lifted a lazy hand, stopping him. His smirk was back in place, this time tinged with something sharper. “A teacher?” He let the word roll off his tongue like he had just been presented with an exotic insect. “And you came here thinking you could teach me something?”

  I shrugged. “I didn’t think it, but hope springs eternal.”

  That got another laugh from the crowd. Liu Xun’s eyes narrowed. The amusement in his expression flickered, ever so slightly.

  Then it returned, sharper than before. He tilted his head, and I caught the barest glint of calculation in his eyes. Ah. So he wasn’t just all bravado — there was a working brain somewhere in there. A heavily underused one, perhaps, but functional.

  “You’ve got quite the mouth for a cripple,” he said, eyes glinting.

  One of his lackeys let out a predictable, sycophantic chuckle. The other crossed his arms, clearly waiting for me to start groveling. The crowd around us was frozen in place, unwilling to speak, but I could feel their silent pleading as tangible as the humidity in the air.

  I let the insult slide past me. It wasn’t an inaccurate assertion. I took another step forward.

  Liu Xun’s eyes flickered — just briefly — to my feet.

  Then he laughed. “Oh? Oh-ho! This is precious.” He clasped his hands behind his back, straightening slightly. “Let me guess. You’ve been reading too many stories, haven’t you? You think this is the part where the feeble cripple defeats the arrogant young master with hidden wisdom? Where the underdog reveals that he was secretly a peerless genius all along?”

  He spread his arms. “Is that it?”

  I did not respond.

  He smirked wider. “Then allow me to remind you of reality.”

  The air shifted.

  It was subtle — so subtle that I wouldn’t have noticed it if not for the fact that the surrounding crowd instinctively recoiled, some of the weaker ones nearly stumbling back.

  It was not power in the form of a visible explosion. It was not brute force.

  It was precision. A sculpted wave of qi.

  Liu Xun’s smirk turned lazy. “You feel that?” he asked. “That’s the difference between you and me.”

  Still, I did not react.

  His smirk widened further.

  “Since you seem confused,” he continued, taking a slow step forward, “allow me to explain. I, Liu Xun, am at the sixth stage of Foundation Establishment. My mastery of the Yin-Yang Divine Perception Technique is unparalleled among my peers. With a single glance, I can see all of an opponent’s movements before they even make them.”

  Foundation Establishment. That was a realm lower than the old Jiang Lingwu had been after his fortuitous encounter.

  Yet Liu Xun’s voice was measured, confident. All that he had said was not a boast. It was merely a statement of fact.

  I could see it now — the way his shoulders stayed relaxed, the way his weight shifted effortlessly between each step, the way his fingers never strayed far from the hilt of his sword. He believed there was nothing I could do.

  And, objectively speaking, he was probably right.

  I was not at Foundation Establishment. I was not even at Qi Gathering. With my shattered dantian, I wasn’t defined by the same axiomatic system as other cultivators. I was, for all intents and purposes, cultivating nothing at all.

  Liu Xun glanced at his lackeys. “Jian Hong,” he said lazily, as though selecting a particularly unremarkable piece from a game board. “Deal with him.”

  The taller of the two stepped forward. His gait was steady, but relaxed. Not aggressive. Not cautious, either. Just… dismissive.

  Good.

  I centered myself, feeling for the structures I had begun to understand over the past month.

  Invariance. Reinforcement.

  I aligned.

  It was harder than I remembered. The old Jiang Lingwu had done this reflexively, without thinking, cycling his qi through his meridians. I, on the other hand, had to map the transformation manually, feel out the stress points, compensate for the inefficiencies.

  But it held.

  It was the identity transformation — that which left an object unchanged under its own operation. It was the zero of addition, the one of multiplication. The simplest symmetry of all, yet it was identity alone that gave all other transformations meaning. I locked into that symmetry, reinforcing my stance, my balance, my structure. The bones in my arms felt heavier, denser. My skin tightened, resisting deformation.

  It was, in simpler terms, isomorphic to the tempering of the body under the action of qi.

  Jian Hong sighed, drawing his blade. Still relaxed.

  I moved.

  Not forward. Not back.

  The Knight’s Tour.

  A traversal of the field, avoiding linear predictability. Movements I’d been practicing for months now.

  Jian Hong reacted — too slow.

  His blade cut through empty space as I shifted three steps to his side. His stance wavered. Just slightly.

  Good.

  Five steps ahead.

  I reoriented. His body twisted, correcting. His eyes narrowed.

  Seven steps.

  He slashed again, recalibrating, compensating for my angle. Better.

  But still wrong.

  Nine steps.

  I was behind him before he had even finished his motion.

  His mistake wasn’t in speed or strength. It was in assuming my path was continuous.

  I turned.

  I struck.

  A simple blow. No wasted energy, no theatrics. A fist, reinforced by symmetry, action under identity.

  His body staggered, then crumpled.

  Silence.

  The marketplace, once humming with nervous whispers, now held its breath.

  I straightened.

  Jian Hong did not rise.

  Liu Xun’s smirk had not vanished, but it had changed.

  He was watching now.

  Liu Xun exhaled slowly through his nose. His smirk remained, but there was something new behind it — a faint, curling edge of irritation. He had been enjoying himself. Now, the amusement was wearing thin.

  The sword at his waist whispered free.

  The crowd scattered.

  It was not a grand, dramatic movement. He did not roar, did not bellow a challenge to the heavens. He simply drew his blade, and in doing so, announced his intent more clearly than any words could.

  I cursed under my breath.

  His grip was relaxed, his posture easy. He didn’t expect a fight — he expected a conclusion. This wasn’t a battle to him. It was arithmetic. A simple equation. Me, plus his sword, equaled inevitability.

  I was not part of his worldview. I was an anomaly, a rounding error that had slipped through unnoticed. But now, with Jian Hong lying motionless on the ground, I had upset the balance of his function. The equation had to be corrected.

  He raised the tip of his sword, pointing it at me. “Crippled or not,” he said, “you’ve made a mistake.”

  A familiar sensation, really.

  I adjusted my stance.

  Jian Hong’s sword was still lying where he had fallen. That was a resource. A variable I could still manipulate. I stepped forward and nudged it with my foot, flipping it up into my grip.

  My fingers curled around the hilt of the fallen sword, the unfamiliar weight settling into my palm. It wasn’t much — just a basic weapon, likely forged without any grand inscriptions or ancient reforging techniques — but it was the best option available.

  Liu Xun’s eyes flicked down to the blade, then back up to me. His smirk had settled into something closer to irritation, as though I had just scribbled all over his neatly written proof. This was supposed to be an effortless calculation, and I had somehow introduced an unexpected remainder.

  The onlookers, to their credit, had already reached the correct conclusion: that standing anywhere within the vicinity of a duel between cultivators, no matter how one-sided, was an objectively bad idea. They dispersed with the silent efficiency of people who had seen this sort of thing before — stall owners sweeping away their wares, vendors pretending they had never been present in the first place. Even the stray dogs had the good sense to vanish.

  Ru Lan was behind me, gripping the sleeve of her sister’s robe with small, trembling fingers. Her sister’s husband stood frozen, caught between an instinct to protect his wife and the absolute certainty that any action he took would make things worse.

  I exhaled slowly.

  Liu Xun had drawn his sword with a casual sort of arrogance, the blade catching the afternoon light as though it had been waiting for this moment to shine. He hadn’t adopted any obvious stance, hadn’t made a show of his movements — because he didn’t need to. He wasn’t taking me seriously.

  And, objectively speaking, he was correct.

  He was a proper cultivator, at the sixth stage of Foundation Establishment. He had techniques, he had qi, he had experience. I had… well, a rudimentary understanding of symmetries, a month of self-taught practice, and the vague hope that Jiang Lingwu’s muscle memory might kick in at a crucial moment.

  So.

  Not the fairest fight.

  I flexed my fingers against the hilt, adjusting my grip. Jiang Lingwu had known how to use one with the swordsmanship style he practiced, and I had inherited the feel of it, if not the instincts. But wielding was different from understanding. I could stand correctly, position my feet with decent weight distribution, even shift my balance to maximise control. In the last month, I had even taken up the sword myself among my other training.

  But that was only a month. Liu Xun would have trained years.

  Liu Xun watched, the irritation in his gaze giving way to something else — mild curiosity, perhaps. His smirk had faded, replaced by something quieter, something more calculating.

  I had upset his initial function. Now he was recomputing.

  I let out another breath, deep and measured. A force through a constraint. A transformation under identity.

  Align.

  Reinforce.

  Hold.

  It was subtle. Nothing dramatic, no sudden surge of power, no explosive aura that would announce to the world that I had grasped some deeper truth. Just a shift in perception, a recalibration of internal variables. My stance locked into place with a quiet sort of finality, a structure stabilised against collapse. My grip firmed. My center of mass found its equilibrium.

  It was inefficient. It was draining. It was only the first time I would be properly using it outside of a sterile training environment.

  But it was something.

  Liu Xun’s sword tilted slightly, the edge catching a different angle of light.

  His weight shifted.

  I could feel the moment beginning to slip, the pause between action and consequence shortening. The function of the encounter was approaching a critical point, the limit approaching zero.

  I had no idea if I could hold my own against a cultivator like him.

  But I was about to find out.