Scroll 12: Breakthrough Before Training
It was spring for hot springs and flowed freely across the courtyard. The tiles were gold, the moss that crept through the cracks. There was a bird somewhere beyond the wall, who was trying--and failing--to imitate the whistle of the old gatekeeper. It made Ethan smile but he sat back in his chair trying to be serious.
As was the case in this world, the personality of an underpaid call center employee was the AI core of this mansion. It was technically called "Chatbot-L17" but Ethan had already christened it in his mind as "Plumber Jesus."
> "Alright, bro," Ethan said, tapping the side of the crystal interface, "you're gonna walk me through this plumbing project before my brain leaks out my ears."
L17 was being a chippy for no reason.
> "To construct a water delivery system, you will require: primary piping material, joint connectors, directional valves"
"Valves?" Ethan interrupted with an eyebrow raised. You talk about that bendy thing that stops the water getting into my house and makes it not a pond?
> "Correct. You will also need a good supply of water and gravitational distribution plan."
This was the difficulty--there was not a single one of the pipes of this world. Here the water systems were simple stone channels or magic buckets that did not move the water anywhere but kept it cold. Ethan was, however, a human being and he lived in a place where plumbing was as natural as breathing. Without it, you were left with dysentery, stench and neighbors who gave up visiting.
Now… he had Qi. The power, as a bunch of construction workers on steroids. And perhaps he was not yet at the level 100 throw-mountains, but with ten good men to help him, he could do it, and presumably by himself.
That thought gave him a dangerous little thrill.
He strapped on a makeshift tool belt a collection of mismatched chisels, a carpenter's hammer, and a couple of forged iron rods he'd stolen from the mansion's unused cellar. Then he set out.
The mountain wasn't far maybe half an hour's walk but the climb was enough to make his calves burn. The locals called it "Cold Tooth Peak" because even in summer the upper ridges bit at your fingers. To Ethan, it was just the perfect place to hide a workshop where no nosy servant or family member could wander in asking why their young master was melting metal in the backyard.
The cave didn't exist yet. That was the fun part. He picked a cliffside that faced away from the main road, rolled his shoulders, and pressed both palms to the rock.
Qi surged from his dantian, threading through muscle, bone, and skin until his fingers hummed like tuning forks. Then he pushed not like a human pushing, but like a human deciding that stone shouldn't be stone anymore. The wall groaned. Cracks spread like spiderwebs. A section the size of a carriage shuddered, then broke free with a noise like the world's angriest drumbeat.
Dust billowed, coating his hair and clothes in chalky gray. He coughed, waved a hand, and kept going.
By the time he stepped back, there was a rough opening tall enough for him to walk through, deep enough to feel private. Over the next few hours, he carved and smoothed until the "workshop" had space for a forge, storage shelves, and a long table where he could measure and cut pipe sections.
The first pipe was the hardest. He didn't have PVC or copper he had spirit-iron, an ore mined deep underground and known for holding enchantments. Melting it required heat way beyond any blacksmith's forge. Luckily, Qi wasn't just for punching people; he could focus it into his palms, compressing air until it burned white-hot.
Still, it was slow going. The first mold warped. The second leaked at the seams. By the third try, he'd figured out how to keep the molten metal from cooling too fast, and he poured it into a carved sandstone mold that gave him a hollow cylinder about the length of his arm.
It wasn't pretty. The edges were rough, and the surface had bubbles from trapped air. But when he held it up to the light and saw it was straight enough for water to pass through, he grinned. "Firstborn of the Pipe Family," he declared, dusting it off like a proud parent.
He worked until sunset, shaping a few more sections, experimenting with joint angles, and sketching a layout in the dirt for how the whole system would run under the mansion.
That's when it happened.
One moment, he was crouched over a pipe joint, wiping sweat from his forehead. The next, something deep inside him like a locked door burst open.
Qi roared through his meridians, flooding his limbs with molten fire. His vision went white, his teeth clenched so hard his jaw popped, and for a heartbeat, he swore he could hear his own blood. His body felt like a furnace on the verge of explosion.
He forced himself to stay upright. To breathe and endure.
Then, just as quickly, the pain broke.
The air felt clearer, every sound sharper. The scraping of his boots on the stone echoed like music; the faint hum of insects outside sounded like a chorus. Even the distant smell of pine resin from the forest below carried on the breeze as if the world wanted to gift it to him.
He'd broken into the First Stage without even trying to "start" cultivation.
Ethan's first instinct was to hide it. He didn't trust half the people in the mansion not to sell that information to someone with sharper knives. But as soon as he thought it, a ripple of spiritual energy escaped him rising like a flare into the evening sky.
Somewhere, far away, predators human or otherwise would have felt it.
He cursed under his breath.
Still… within a few minutes, he figured out how to pull the energy tight, like wrapping a blanket around a lantern to hide its glow. The power stayed, but the signal vanished.
For now, no one needed to know.