The door to Lu Ren's chamber closed behind me with a soft, final click. I walked through the pre-dawn stillness of the Lu Clan estate, not as a sated lover or a broken slave, but as a ghost haunting the ruins of my own ignorance. The world looked the same—the gray flagstones, the dew-kissed leaves of the courtyard trees, the rising sun painting the eastern sky in bruised shades of violet and rose—but my perception of it had been irrevocably altered. The diary, a small, cold weight against my ribs, had not just given me knowledge; it had given me a singular, clarifying purpose.
The complex, thrilling, and perverse dance I had been engaged in with Lu Ren was over. My desire for her, a tangled knot of fetish and ambition, had been severed with the clean, brutal efficiency of a guillotine. There was no more game. There was only a debt, written in a mother's blood, that would one day be paid in full with the currency of a monster's suffering.
My own chambers felt alien, a place I had merely been passing through. I ignored the comfortable bed, the fine furniture. I walked to the center of the room, stripped off my robes, and sat cross-legged on the bare wooden floor. The chill of the wood seeped into my skin, a welcome, grounding sensation. My mind, which had been a chaotic storm of hatred, strategy, and revulsion, needed to be brought to order. I was a software engineer by trade. It was time to debug my own soul.
I closed my eyes and began to build a fortress in my mind. I took the raw, screaming emotion of my hatred for Lu Ren and I did not suppress it. I contained it. I visualized it as a black, pulsing singularity, a core of pure, cold fury. I built walls of logic and patience around it, not to extinguish it, but to harness it. It was no longer a poison that would cloud my judgment; it was now the reactor core, the power source for the long, cold war to come.
With my hatred contained and repurposed, I turned to the next critical system: my own power. My cultivation was a pathetic joke. First Stage of the Qi Crystallization Realm. In this world, that was barely enough to qualify as a speedbump for a true expert. My successes so far had been built on a foundation of bluffs, psychological manipulation, and the scientific knowledge of another world. It was an effective strategy, but a fragile one. Against a true, unrestrained Golden Core master like Lu Ren, it was a house of cards in a hurricane. I needed hardware to match my software. I needed power.
The cultivation methods of this world were, from my perspective, laughably inefficient. They were based on mysticism, tradition, and brute force—meditate, absorb Qi, circulate, repeat. It was like trying to code a complex application by randomly mashing keys and hoping for the best. It worked, eventually, through sheer trial and error, but the amount of wasted energy and corrupted data was staggering.
I would not follow their path. I would create my own.
I unrolled a blank scroll on the floor before me and took up a brush. I would not be writing a cultivation manual. I would be writing an algorithm.
Project: SoulForge OS - Version 1.0
Objective: Achieve maximum efficiency in Qi absorption, refinement, and integration, surpassing all known conventional methods.
Core Principles:
* System Diagnostics (The Body Scan): Before running any new process, a system must be fully understood. I closed my eyes and turned my senses inward. I did not try to feel my Qi in a mystical sense. I began to map my body with the cold precision of an MRI machine. I traced the paths of my meridians, not as mythical rivers of energy, but as a biological nervous system for Qi, a network of conduits with specific bandwidths and potential points of failure. I located my dantian, not as a magical elixir field, but as a bio-spiritual reactor, the central processing unit of my internal system. I noted the blockages, the impurities—the buggy code and fragmented data left over from the original Lu Bing's years of drug abuse and neglect.
* Input Optimization (Resonant Breathing): Standard cultivation focused on simply pulling in as much ambient Qi as possible. It was like a network connection with no firewall or data regulation—a recipe for corruption and crashes. My theory was different. The Qi in the air was not a uniform substance; it was a chaotic spectrum of different energies, different frequencies. My first task was to create a filter.
I began to experiment with my breathing. The 4-7-8 rhythm was a good start for relaxation, but for absorption, I needed something else. I began to modulate the frequency of my breath, creating a low, resonant hum deep in my chest. I visualized the sound waves propagating outwards, not to hear, but to feel. I was using my own body as a tuning fork, trying to find the specific resonant frequency of the purest, most stable Earth-elemental Qi in the room.
For an hour, there was nothing. Then, I felt it. A subtle shift. A specific hum, a deep, bass note that felt like the thrumming of the planet itself, seemed to answer my call. The ambient Qi in the room began to stratify. The chaotic,杂 (zá - miscellaneous) Qi was pushed away, while the pure, calm Earth Qi was drawn towards me, arranging itself in neat, orderly waves. I had created a signal filter.
* Data Processing (Dantian Reactor Control): Now that I had a clean input stream, I needed to refine it. Cultivators spoke of refining Qi with their willpower, a vague and unscientific concept. I reconceptualized it. The dantian was a reactor. Any reactor, whether chemical or nuclear, has an optimal operating temperature. Too cold, and the reaction is inefficient. Too hot, and you risk a meltdown—Qi deviation.
As I drew in the filtered Qi, I did not just dump it into my dantian. I used my breath control to regulate my core body temperature with microscopic precision. I focused on the feeling of the Qi entering my dantian, analyzing the waste product—the heat, the faint tremor of instability. I treated it like an overclocked CPU, adjusting the "coolant" flow of my circulation, tweaking the "voltage" of my Qi intake, searching for the sweet spot.
The pain was excruciating. My dantian felt like it was being alternately flash-frozen and set on fire. This was the debugging process. Every stab of pain was a system error, a data point telling me what not to do. I logged the errors, adjusted the parameters, and ran the process again. And again. And again.
* Code Compilation (Meridian Optimization Protocol): The final step was circulation. Simply pushing Qi through the meridians was like running uncompiled, messy code. It was slow and prone to errors. I needed to streamline the process. I visualized my meridian network as a circuit board. I began to circulate a tiny, controlled thread of my newly refined Qi, not as a flood, but as a probe. I mapped every blockage, every narrowing of the channels.
Then I applied a principle from my old world: defragmentation. I began to use my Qi to gently, persistently, break down the blockages, not with force, but with focused, resonant pulses. I was cleaning my own system, optimizing the pathways, preparing them for a massive data flow.
I worked for hours, lost in a world of intense focus and agonizing trial and error. The sun rose high in the sky, and I did not notice. Servants came and went, leaving food I did not touch. My world was reduced to the internal machine of my own body.
And then, I felt it. A click. A moment of perfect, harmonious synthesis. The resonant breathing locked onto the ambient Qi. The dantian reactor stabilized at its optimal temperature. The refined Qi, a cool, dense, liquid silver in my mind's eye, flowed into my newly cleaned meridian channels not as a river, but as a current of pure data in a fiber-optic cable. There was no resistance, no waste, no heat. It was a closed loop of perfect, silent efficiency.
The amount of Qi I was absorbing and refining was ten, maybe twenty times what I had been capable of before. My cultivation level, which had been stagnant at the First Stage of the Qi Crystallization Realm, began to surge upwards with an audible hum. My bones creaked, my muscles seized, my skin grew hot to the touch as my body was forcibly upgraded by this new, hyper-efficient power source.
Second Stage… Third Stage… Fourth…
It was a torrent, a violent, explosive growth that would have been impossible with any traditional method. I had not just opened the tap; I had redesigned the entire plumbing system from the ground up.
When the process finally stabilized, I was at the peak of the Ninth Stage of the Qi Crystallization Realm. I was on the very cusp of breaking through to the Qi Foundation Realm. I had achieved in a single day what would have taken the original Lu Bing a decade, or a lifetime.
I opened my eyes. The world looked different. Sharper. The colors were more vibrant. The motes of dust in the air seemed to move with a slow, deliberate grace. I could feel the life force of the wood in the floor beneath me, the slow, steady pulse of the earth itself.
I clenched my fist. The feeling of power, of real, tangible power, was intoxicating. It was not the borrowed power of a woman's desire or the ephemeral power of a clever plan. This was mine. Forged in the fires of my own mind, fueled by the cold, hard certainty of my hatred.
I was still a long way from challenging a Golden Core master. But the journey had begun. And my first step had been a giant's stride.
The next day, my new reality began to assert itself. A servant arrived with a message: the Lady Lu Ren had arranged the meeting with her son, Lu Peng, the clan's First Young Master, as I had commanded. She had complied. The balance of power had already shifted.
I found Lu Peng in his own opulent courtyard, a place far grander than my own. He was the opposite of the original Lu Bing in every way—tall, handsome, with an aura of arrogant, well-practiced confidence. He was the clan's golden child, the heir apparent.
"Third Brother," he said, his smile a thin, polite veneer that did not reach his eyes. "I hear you have been causing quite a stir since your return. To what do I owe the honor of this meeting?"
"First Brother," I replied, my tone equally polite, equally cold. "I am here to discuss the future of our clan's business. Specifically, the establishment of the Golden River Bank."
I laid out the plan, not the secret of fractional-reserve lending, but the public-facing prospectus. A secure, centralized financial institution to stabilize the clan's economy.
He listened, his expression unreadable. "An ambitious project," he commented when I was finished. "And you wish for my help in securing the charter from the provincial governor? My connections are indeed significant."
"I do," I confirmed.
"And what," he asked, leaning forward, the polite mask slipping to reveal the predator beneath, "is in it for me?"
"A twenty percent stake in the bank's profits," I said without blinking. "And the full, public credit for its success. You will be seen as the visionary who ushered the Lu Clan into a new era of prosperity. I will remain in the shadows, a mere administrator. Your reputation will soar. You will be untouchable."
I was offering him everything he craved: wealth, and more importantly, glory. I was appealing to his vanity, his greatest weakness. He thought he was getting the better end of the deal, the lion's share of the prestige for a simple political favor. He had no idea he was willingly shackling his own future to my financial engine. He would be the public face of a system he did not understand and could not control.
He smiled, a genuine, greedy smile this time. "An excellent proposal, Third Brother. Consider it done."
I had just acquired another unwitting pawn.
My final piece of business before departing for Blackwood City was to check on my true kingdom. I used a long-distance communication talisman, a rare and expensive artifact from the hidden treasury, to contact Ironwood City.
The first face that appeared in the shimmering projection was Mengue's. She was in a bustling workshop, surrounded by bolts of colorful silk and busy seamstresses. She looked radiant, energized, a woman in her element. Her report on 'Aria' was filled with a passion and a business acumen that was blossoming by the day.
The second face was Fengue's. She was in a sparsely decorated room, a stack of scripts on the table before her, a look of intense creative focus on her face. Her 'Fantasia' guild had already recruited its first male band, and their debut was causing a minor sensation. She spoke of narrative arcs and market demographics with a confidence that was breathtaking.
The third face was Chixi's. She stood on a training ground, the banner of 'Aegis'—a shield crossed with a lightning bolt—fluttering behind her. She had already recruited a core of fifty elite mercenaries, and her report was a clipped, efficient summary of their training progress.
And finally, there was Lihua. She appeared in the projection from her study, her face as cool and commanding as ever. Her report on the Consortium was a litany of successes. The new furnace was ahead of schedule. The concrete was already being used to reinforce the city walls. She was an industrial titan in the making.
I was a puppeteer watching his creations dance. My empire was growing, even in my absence.
"Your progress is… adequate," I said to all of them, my voice the calm, authoritative tone of their distant kingmaker. "Continue. I will be incommunicado for the next few weeks. I am undertaking a diplomatic mission to Blackwood City to solidify our new trade alliances."
I saw Lihua's eyes narrow slightly at the mention of Blackwood City. She knew it was a hub for alchemists and runemasters. My lie was the perfect cover. She would assume I was seeking to recruit more talent, not to uncover the secret to my own chains.
I cut the connection, leaving them to their work. My pretext was established. My power base was growing. My own cultivation was on a revolutionary new path.
I packed a simple bag for my journey. Inside, nestled beside a change of clothes and a bag of spirit stones, was a small, leather-bound journal.
The viper was leaving the nest. The hunt for Old Man He, and for my freedom, was about to begin.