The interface flickered once—then stabilised.
A new tab appeared: Logs.
Only one document was fully loaded: Xiao Li's Journey.
The rest remained greyed out, suspended mid-download like echoes chasing time.
Lu Chen clicked instinctively. Thousands of entries spilled before him—fragments of a life.
Or… lives. Spanning centuries.
Unease coiled in his gut.
These weren't just records.
They felt like memories.
And some… felt disturbingly familiar.
"Was I there?" he murmured, eyes narrowing. "Or was he everywhere?"
The questions multiplied:
The Celestial Net.
The corrupted system.
The impossible world.
Too many layers—and not enough time.
He tapped the first entry.
The Day of Descent.
And as soon as he did, the world shifted.
System Quest Triggered: Unknown Origin
Objective: Reach Qi Condensation Realm
System Status: Corrupted
Time Remaining: 6 Days, 23 Hours, 48 Minutes
The timer etched itself into his vision, pulsing like a second heartbeat.
"Qi Condensation?" he muttered. "What is this—some kind of cultivation sim?"
But one glance around told him otherwise.
Ruins stretched to the horizon—some forged from chrome and synthetic alloy, others inscribed with glowing celestial runes. Petrified skeletons the size of airships slumped beside fractured towers.
A world built on ancient myth and machine logic.
Shan Hai Jing with machine.
He stepped forward, his hand brushing a jagged wall. Ash flaked beneath his touch. Moss clung to cracks.
"So… how do I survive this?"
He exhaled, eyes scanning the alien terrain.
No weapons.
No map.
No allies.
No instructions.
But he had something else.
Information.
Not from training. Not from experience.
From stories.
Thousands of hours reading cultivation novels, gaming systems, speculative theories—what others saw as escapism, Lu Chen saw as reference material.
Tropes. Patterns. Frameworks.
Now, with a corrupted system, a Qi Condensation objective, and a live countdown—those fictional patterns might be the only usable data he had.
Dantian. Meridians. Breath control. Qi flow. Refinement cycles.
Not fantasy. Potential mechanics.
"If the system runs on mythological logic," he said, "then myth is data."
Hypothesis testing, not blind belief.
He opened his eyes. The world didn't blur anymore. It took shape.
The ruins weren't random.
He moved toward a half-buried wall where glyphs glimmered beneath moss.
The lines were purposeful—dense with structure.
He knelt, tracing them with his fingers.
Not just decoration. These had rhythm. Syntax. Flow.
"This isn't writing," he murmured. "It's a formula. A protocol… maybe a command layer."
Was it the language of this world?
Or the interface left by its creators?
Patterns began to emerge. Repeated sigils. Nested rings. Directional flow lines—halfway between circuit diagrams and Daoist cosmology.
He needed time to analyse. A lexicon.
He moved under the shadow of a collapsed archway. Light fractured through broken crystal panes, scattering across the mossy floor.
His mind raced.
To cultivate, he needed confirmation.
Not theory—proof.
A spirit root.
The baseline requirement for any cultivation system.
No root, no path.
But without a scan function, without qi-sense…
How would he know?
He needed a test.
"And to test, I need a manual."
Not philosophy. A real, system-recognised method—even if rudimentary. If he could draft one and upload it into the console, the system might register it.
But writing a cultivation manual wasn't storytelling. It was system design.
Breath control. Energy loops. Anchor points. Flow dynamics. Theories blurred in his memory.
Still—if even one of them worked…
"I'll build it like code."
Define the loop.
Set parameters.
Initiate the process.
See if it returns an error… or a trigger.
First, though—shelter. Safety. Observation.
He stood and began walking, marking his path with stones.
Goal: Survivability. Data Collection. Environmental Scan.
If there were settlements, there'd be answers. Maps. Manuals. People.
If not—he'd build his own base of knowledge.
He moved through the ruins, eyes scanning for cover—half-functioning shelters, remnants of structure, anything defensible. His mind, though, wasn't on the terrain.
It spiraled inward.
Memory excavation.
He'd read hundreds—no, thousands—of cultivation manuals in fiction. Each with its own theory of qi circulation, dantian expansion, elemental alignment, even soul refinement. Most were power fantasies. But some… some felt real.
He could still recall their names.
Primordial Nine Revolutions.
Void Refinement Canon.
Starfire Sutra.
Each one burned into his mind, not because of their power, but because of their structure.
Blueprints.
Cycles.
Breathing rhythms.
Visualisations.
Anchors.
"What if," he murmured, "those authors were just… ahead of the interface?"
He paused beneath a half-shattered dome and sat cross-legged. Dust swirled in the dimming light.
He didn't need to replicate the strongest manual.
He just needed one the system would recognise.
Define Parameters.
Create Flow Cycle.
Anchor Breath.
Stabilise Awareness.
Return Qi to Core.
He jotted mental notes, simulating the process like writing a function in code.
Breath in four counts. Hold. Breath out. Visualise spiralling motion around the navel. Anchor in dantian. Recycle.
No dramatic poses. No thunder in his veins.
Just a controlled loop.
Test iteration one: Spiral Loop Entry Script.
He synchronised breath with heartbeat. Focused on the space below his sternum. Imagined light condensing there—not because he believed, but because pattern-matching demanded a focal point.
Nothing happened.
But then again, it didn't crash either.
No error. No alert. No rejection.
Just… silence.
And that, in this world, might be a good sign.
"Okay," he whispered, lips dry. "If the system didn't reject the input…"
Maybe—just maybe—he was compatible.
And if he could build a functional manual, he could refine it. Improve it. Iterate like software.
All he needed now was feedback.
Confirmation.
A flicker of qi. A resonance. A notification.
Or even—he glanced sideways—a glyph.
Something.
He stood again, eyes scanning for inspiration.
Interfaces. Machines. Arrays. Anything that reflected his inner state.
Because in every story, every system, every cultivation path—
The world responded when the user aligned.
Each hour passed beneath an alien sun. The wind carried scents he couldn't name—metallic, sweet, and wrong. Light fractured across broken sky panels, bending like it struggled to remember how to behave. Shadows stretched too quickly, as if time itself had begun to lean sideways.
This world wasn't just foreign.
It was aware.
Then came the ping.
Sub-Quest: Survive the Wave
Time Until Nightfall: 01:24:17
Warning: System Protection: OFFLINE
Lu Chen stilled.
He remembered twilight here.
Dead forests had twitched in the distance.
Ash rose against the wind.
Echoes returned when he didn't speak.
The glowing shards embedded in the ruins? They pulsed—not with light, but with attention—when he stepped too close.
Twilight wasn't a transition here.
It was a trigger.
And it was coming fast.
No backup. No system shield. No real plan.
Just instinct—and the broken interface flickering to life on his wrist.
He exhaled slowly and moved.
Think. Think.
Fear curled at the edges of his mind like smoke, creeping in through cracks he hadn't sealed. It wasn't the kind that made you scream—it was the cold, analytical kind. The kind that reminded you exactly how far you were from safety.
He wasn't built for this.
Not really.
No training. No cultivation base. No golden finger or hidden bloodline.
Just data.
Just stories.
And now—those weren't fantasies.
They were his only blueprint.
He walked faster, boots crunching over glass-dusted stone. The ruined landscape around him twisted with every glance—angles that didn't align, buildings that looked wrong when he wasn't staring directly at them. The air felt thin. Loaded. Like breath itself might become a liability.
"Survive the Wave," he muttered.
Wave.
What kind? Energy? Beasts? Radiation?
Too vague. Too fast. Too real.
The interface buzzed again, still damaged—like a wounded AI bleeding code.
[Warning: Energy Surge Detected | Pattern: Unknown]
[Status: Qi Instability Detected - Fluctuation Risk High]
Qi instability.
He didn't even have a cultivation base yet—and already the system was warning him about fluctuations? That meant the environment itself was saturated. Unfiltered. Dangerous.
His thoughts raced.
Was this world naturally like this? Or had something broken?
If there was a cycle—some kind of purge or test, recurring like clockwork—then maybe he wasn't alone. Maybe others had survived past sunset before. Maybe they'd left behind something.
But hope was a delay tactic.
He needed action. Shelter. Defense. Containment.
But more than that—he needed to know what he was dealing with.
Because the worst part wasn't the timer.
It was what might come after it hit zero.
The stories he read had taught him one thing above all: nothing good happened when the system stopped explaining.
No tutorial. No safety net.
Just survival.
He reached a broken wall, part of an old structure half-swallowed by crystalline growth. Moss and cables merged like something half-organic, half-machine. It wasn't ideal. But it was cover.
Lu Chen ducked inside, scanning for anything useful—scraps of metal, remnants of tech, shards that hummed when touched. He collected fast, hands steady despite the tremble beginning in his chest.
[00:47:12 Remaining]
Almost halfway.
His breath quickened. The light had dimmed again. The shadows were growing in reverse now—crawling toward the light instead of away from it.
"Okay," he whispered. "You're afraid. Good. Means you're alive."
Fear sharpened his focus. He let it in—then filed it away.
Priorities:
Find structure integrity points. Reinforce with scavenged metal.
Close off line-of-sight angles.
Insulate for energy fluctuation.
Set sensor markers outside—stones, wires, noise traps.
Leave one escape route. Just one.
Everything else… he'd improvise.
Even if he had to build a formation from trash and half-remembered tropes.
Because if the stories were right?
Then nightfall was when the real world started hunting.