Chapter 3: The Soul Patch
The food at the inn wasn't just nourishment; it was raw fuel. Han devoured the beast-meat stew with a desperation bordering on animalistic, feeling the warmth spread from his stomach toward his numb extremities. With every bite, the red warnings flickering in his vision began to fade, replaced by a status bar slowly climbing from three to fifteen percent.
"Energy consumption stabilized," he whispered, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
He couldn't stay there. He knew Lu Chen and his friends wouldn't take long to regain their senses and seek revenge. He paid with the last of what he had and slipped toward the outskirts of the city, seeking refuge in an abandoned temple that his system had flagged as a "Low Entity Density" area.
The temple was in ruins, swallowed by overgrowth, but the air there felt different. It was dense, almost heavy.
[ENVIRONMENT: Qi Spring Node (Damaged) | Data Concentration: High]
"If this world runs on Qi, I need to know how to process it," Han said, sitting in a lotus position on a cracked stone slab.
He tried to recall the memory fragments floating in "Xiao Han's" mind. In this world, cultivation was simple: close your eyes, feel the flow of energy from the universe, and pull it toward the "Dantian," the core located below the navel. It was like downloading a file from a remote server.
Han closed his eyes and concentrated. At first, there was nothing but static. Then, he began to feel it. The air around him wasn't empty; it was filled with invisible threads of energy vibrating at a constant frequency. They were the universe's data packets. With a mental effort, Han tried to pull those threads into his body.
The result was a disaster.
The moment the Qi touched his skin, Han felt an electric shock that made him bolt upright. His chest burned as if he had swallowed glowing embers, and a series of error windows erupted in his vision, blocking everything else.
[CRITICAL ERROR: Protocol Incompatibility]
[DETAIL: Host core (Dantian) contains bad sectors]
[STATUS: Unable to write to soul memory. Access denied]
"What...?" Han gasped, coughing up a small amount of blood. "My core is... corrupt?"
He focused on the error message, diving deep into his own body's metadata. What he saw left him cold. Xiao Han's Dantian wasn't a perfect sphere of energy as the legends described. It was a shapeless mass, filled with energy scars and "bad sectors." It was the equivalent of a hard drive that had taken too many physical hits. Attempting to cultivate traditionally was like trying to install a next-gen operating system on a computer with a burnt motherboard.
"That's why Lu Chen called me trash," Han realized, clenching his fists. "It wasn't that Xiao Han lacked talent... his hardware was broken from the factory."
He stared into the void, his mind working at a thousand miles per hour. In this world, a broken core meant a life of misery. But Han wasn't a cultivator; he was a senior programmer. And in his world, if the hardware failed, the software could find a workaround.
"If I can't use the central core for storage..." Han whispered, his eyes glowing with a bluish light, "then I'll create a virtual partition."
He concentrated again, but this time he didn't try to force the Qi into his Dantian. Instead, he projected his will toward the meridians in his arms and legs. If the "central server" was down, he would use "distributed storage."
He began to write mental code, injecting his logic into the very structure of his soul. He was creating a bridge—a bypass that diverted energy away from the damaged sectors toward alternative routes.
[INITIATING PATCH COMPILATION: "V-Core v1.0"]
[MERIDIAN MAPPING: Rerouting Qi flow...]
[CREATING SPIRITUAL CACHE IN NERVOUS SYSTEM]
The pain was unbearable. It was the sensation of being reconfigured from the inside out, as if someone were peeling back his nerves and rewiring them with hot copper cables. Han grit his teeth so hard his gums bled, but he didn't stop. He couldn't afford to fail. On his mental screen, the "Patch Installation" progress bar advanced slowly.
[60%... 85%... 99%...]
[PATCH INSTALLED SUCCESSFULLY]
[USER HAS UNLOCKED: Logic-Bypass Cultivation]
Suddenly, the atmosphere changed. The Qi that had previously rejected him like a foreign body now began to flow toward him. But it didn't enter his pores in a disorganized mess; it entered in binary sequences, filtered by the patch Han had designed. The energy didn't accumulate in his broken core; instead, it circulated constantly through his meridians, stored in a network of "virtual nodes" he had mapped himself.
[NOTICE: First Level of Qi Refinement reached (Simulated)]
[WARNING: Soul RAM consumption has increased. Constant processing required to maintain partition]
Han opened his eyes. He didn't feel like an enlightened or powerful being. He felt like a machine that had just been overclocked. He could feel the energy flowing through him, but it wasn't a warm sensation; it was cold, precise, and efficient.
He stood up and looked at one of the temple's stone columns. Without thinking, he threw a punch. He didn't use physical strength; he simply released a small packet of Qi through his new optimized channel.
CRACK!
The stone, which should have resisted the blow of a teenager, splintered, revealing a spiderweb of fissures centered on the point of impact. Han looked at his knuckles; there wasn't even a scratch.
"It's not magic," Han smiled, feeling a technical satisfaction he hadn't felt in years. "It's just an error-free command execution."
However, his triumph was short-lived. A red notification flashed in the center of his vision, much larger and more alarming than the previous ones.
[GLOBAL ALERT DETECTED]
[TYPE: World Integrity Scan]
[DESCRIPTION: Sector Administrator has detected an "Unauthorized Code Instance"]
[STATUS: Searching for anomaly...]
Han felt the breath leave his lungs. The world wasn't just a place to live; it was a monitored system. And he had just installed illegal software into his own soul.
"Damn it," he muttered, looking up at the darkening sky. "I haven't even finished the first level and the antivirus is already hunting me."
He gathered his rags and prepared to move. He knew that if he stayed still, he would be deleted. The "Glitch" had to keep running, or the system would send him to the recycle bin.