The first light of dawn filtering through the single window of his apartment felt different. It wasn't just illumination; to Su Yang's newly attuned senses, it was a gentle wave of nascent Yang energy, a daily gift from the heavens that most of the world slept through. He sat cross-legged on the thin mattress, circulating the Harmonic Convergence Art for an hour, refining the Qi within his dantian. The energy he had absorbed in the primordial cavern was vast, but unrefined. This daily practice was like sharpening a divine weapon, honing its edge.
He opened his eyes, the world appearing in hyper-defined clarity. He had no suitable clothes. His only suit was a shredded monument to his past life, now bundled in a trash bag. With a mental command, he accessed his spatial ring. Among the countless treasures were simple, humble robes of undyed, spirit-reinforced hemp, likely worn by the lowest disciples of the Twin Dao Sect. They were plain, but the fabric was incredibly durable and comfortable. He put one on. It fit perfectly and felt like a second skin, though it made him look like an extra from a historical drama. It would have to do.
His goal today was simple: reintegrate. He needed to appear normal, to gather information, and to access the resources of his old life without raising suspicion. That meant going back to the one place that defined his old life: Celestial Code Innovations.
The commute was a study in surreal observation. The bustling crowds, the frantic energy, the stressed faces staring at phones—it all seemed so… inefficient. So disconnected from the true rhythm of the universe. He moved through the throng with an effortless grace, people unconsciously shifting to make way for him without understanding why.
He entered the familiar glass-and-steel tower of Celestial Code Innovations. The air-conditioned, sterile air felt thin and dead compared to the vibrant energy of the mountains. He rode the elevator up, a silent capsule of perfumed anxiety.
When the doors slid open on his floor, a few of his former colleagues glanced up. Their eyes widened at his appearance. The robe. The hair, now longer and tied back simply. The unnerving calm that radiated from him. Whispers began to circulate.
He went straight to his old cubicle. It was exactly as he'd left it, but a fine layer of dust had settled on the monitor. He was just sitting down when a sharp, nasal voice cut through the low hum of the office.
"Well, well. Look what the cat dragged in. Or did you finally decide to crawl out of whatever hole you've been hiding in?"
Su Yang looked up. It was Manager Li, a man whose face was permanently set in a scowl of perpetual dissatisfaction. He was thin, balding, and wore his mediocre authority like a crown of thorns.
"Manager Li," Su Yang said, his voice neutral.
"Don't 'Manager Li' me, Su Yang!" the man snapped, his voice rising enough to draw more attention. "Where in hell have you been for over a month? No call, no email, nothing! We thought you'd been kidnapped. Or finally had the sense to quit."
"I had a personal emergency," Su Yang replied, his tone still infuriatingly calm.
"Personal emergency?" Li scoffed. "Your *personal emergency* has caused this department a real emergency! Your projects are backed up, your deadlines are a joke, and I've had to answer to upstairs for your unexplained absence!"
He gestured dramatically to the cubicle next to Su Yang's. A young woman Su Yang had never seen before was sitting there, her posture rigid, her eyes fixed on her screen, trying to pretend she wasn't listening. She was sharp-faced, with glasses and an air of intense, anxious competence.
"This is Senior Engineer Wang," Li sneered. "A *permanent* assistant I was forced to hire to clean up your mess. Something your intern salary certainly won't be covering, by the way."
Senior Engineer Wang offered a tight, nervous smile without making eye contact. She had been thrown into a chaotic situation and was clearly drowning.
Li leaned in, his voice dropping to a venomous whisper. "The higher-ups are furious. I've been given direct orders. You have two days. Two days to complete every single task, every line of code, every bug fix that has piled up in your absence for the last month. If it's not done, and done perfectly, by 5 PM day after tomorrow, your employment will be terminated. And given the breach of contract, good luck getting a reference from anyone in this industry again."
The threat was meant to be crushing. A month's worth of complex, demanding coding work, condensed into two days? It was impossible. The old Su Yang would have felt a cold dread seize his heart, his stomach twisting into knots of anxiety.
The new Su Yang simply nodded. "Understood."
His lack of reaction seemed to infuriate Li even more. The manager glared, expecting tears, pleading, anything. Getting nothing but serene acceptance, he finally just snorted in disgust. "Get to work. And for god's sake, change out of that… whatever that is." He stormed back to his glass-walled office.
The ridicule didn't stop there. Throughout the morning, other superiors—team leads and senior developers—found reasons to walk by his cubicle.
"Nice dress, Su Yang. Buddhist monastery not work out?"
"Think you can just waltz back in after a vacation? Some of us have been working."
"Two days? Good luck. You're going to need a miracle."
Senior Engineer Wang, whose name was Lihua, occasionally glanced over with a look of pity.
Su Yang ignored them all. He turned on his computer. The familiar IDE loaded. He looked at the list of tasks and tickets assigned to him. It was a mountain of work.
He took a breath and closed his eyes.
This was the first test. Could he apply his cultivated mind to a mundane task? He began to circulate his Qi, not for power, but for focus. His consciousness expanded. The world fell away—the sounds of the office, the smell of coffee, the pressure of the deadline. In his mind's eye, the code appeared not as lines on a screen, but as flowing streams of logic, architectures of light and data. He could see the flaws, the optimizations, the pathways, all at once.
His fingers settled on the keyboard. And then they began to move.
It was not typing. It was a symphony. His fingers flew across the keys with a speed and precision that was inhuman. There was no hesitation, no backspacing, no debugging. He wrote perfect, elegant, efficient code in a continuous, flowing stream. The click-clack of his keyboard became a constant, rapid-fire staccato that was so fast it drew stares. Colleagues paused their own work to look over, their jaws slowly going slack.
He finished his first major task in twenty minutes. A task that should have taken two days.
He moved to the next. Then the next. By lunchtime, he had cleared a week's worth of backlog.
During the afternoon, he noticed Lihua, the new senior, struggling desperately with a complex algorithm, her face pale with stress. Without a word, Su Yang rolled his chair over.
"The issue is in your recursive function," he said softly, pointing to her screen. "You're creating a memory leak. Here." He took over her keyboard for a moment. His fingers danced, rewriting a dozen lines of code in seconds. "This should resolve it."
Lihua stared at the screen, then at him, her eyes wide with disbelief. "How… how did you see that so fast?"
Su Yang just offered a small smile and returned to his desk, leaving her utterly bewildered.
By 5 PM, he had completed everything. Every ticket was closed. Every project was up to date. The mountain had been leveled in a single day.
As people began to pack up, Manager Li emerged from his office. He had been watching the flurry of completed task notifications on the project management system with growing, incredulous suspicion. He walked over to Su Yang's cubicle, his face a mask of confused anger.
"What is this, Su Yang?" he demanded, his voice low and dangerous. "This is impossible. No one works this fast. Are you cutting corners? Writing garbage code that will fail in production? This is a serious breach if you're trying to cheat your way through this!"
Su Yang looked up, his eyes meeting Li's. "The code is perfect. You can review it yourself."
The calm certainty in his voice was unnerving. Li glared, but he had no proof. Just a deep, gut feeling that something was very, very wrong. This wasn't the broken, eager-to-please intern who had left over a month ago. This was someone else entirely.
"This isn't over," Li hissed before turning on his heel and marching back to his office, slamming the door.
Once inside, he didn't start reviewing code. His mind was racing. Su Yang's sudden reappearance, his bizarre change in demeanor, his impossible productivity… it was all wrong. And Manager Li was a man who covered his own back above all else.
He picked up his private cell phone, scrolling through his contacts until he found a number he'd been given months ago, with strict instructions to use it only for "urgent matters regarding a certain individual." He took a deep breath and dialed.
The line was picked up on the second ring. "Speak." The voice on the other end was young, arrogant, and laced with impatience. It was Jin Feng.
"Young Master Jin? This is Manager Li, from Celestial Code. Forgive the intrusion, sir, but… it's about Su Yang."
There was a sharp intake of breath on the other end. "Su Yang? What about him? Has his body turned up?"
"N-no, sir. Quite the opposite. He's… here. At the office. He came back to work this morning."
"What?!" Jin Feng's voice lost its lazy arrogance, becoming sharp and alarmed. "That's impossible! Are you sure?"
"Positive, sir. It's him. But he's… different. And he did a month's worth of coding work in a single day. Something is not right."
There was a long silence on the line. When Jin Feng spoke again, his voice was tight, controlled, but with an undercurrent of something Manager Li had never heard before: fear.
"Listen to me very carefully, Li. You are to watch him. Report anything unusual. Anything at all. But do not approach him. Do not engage him. Is that clear?"
"Y-yes, sir. Crystal clear."
The line went dead.
In a luxurious penthouse apartment across the city, Jin Feng lowered his phone, his hand trembling slightly. His face, usually a mask of bored superiority, was pale.
Across from him, sipping a glass of expensive wine, was Lin Mei. "What is it, darling? You look like you've seen a ghost."
"It's Su Yang," Jin Feng whispered, his voice hoarse. "He's back."
The glass slipped from Lin Mei's fingers, shattering on the marble floor, staining it blood-red. Her perfect composure shattered with it. "No… that's not possible. He… he must have… after what we did… he had to have…"
"We thought he killed himself," Jin Feng said, standing up and pacing. "We were sure of it. The humiliation was too much. It was the perfect end to that pathetic story."
"And if the police investigate a suicide, and they dig into his last days…" Lin Mei's voice was trembling. "Our names will be there. The scene at the café… people saw us!"
"It's not the police I'm worried about!" Jin Feng snapped, running a hand through his perfectly styled hair. "It's my family! My father is in the middle of a critical merger with another ancient family. There can be no scandals. No black marks. No whispers of driving orphans to suicide! The elders would skin me alive and use my hide for a rug if this disrupts their plans!"
Their relief at thinking Su Yang was gone had been immense. It had neatly tied up a loose end. His return was not just an inconvenience; it was a potential catastrophe. They weren't afraid of the law; they could buy or bury any mundane investigation. They were terrified of the judgment of their own hidden world, a world where reputation and power were everything, and where Jin Feng had just become a major liability.
Su Yang, meanwhile, left the office at exactly 5:01 PM. He had completed his mundane task. The game at Celestial Code Innovations was now secondary. A different, more dangerous game had just begun, and he had no idea he had already made the first move, simply by walking back through the door.