Night in the Silver Cloud Clan had its own hierarchy. For the disciples and Elders, it was a time for meditation and rest, a reverential silence. For the servants, it was collapsing onto hard cots, an ephemeral respite before another day of grueling labor. For Kenji Tanaka, the night was his true workday.
He sat cross-legged on the floor of his assigned corner in the servants' dormitory, long after the last snore had begun its monotonous rhythm. The air smelled of stale sweat and damp straw, but he didn't notice. Before him, in the flickering light of a small oil lamp, lay his copy of the forbidden scroll: Principles of Disruptive Qi Channeling.
He wasn't reading it. He was deconstructing it.
To Kenji, the text wasn't a cultivation manual; it was the source code of a malicious program, written by a mystic and terribly inefficient programmer. The poetic phrases were hell.
«To break your enemy's river, you must first understand the stillness of your own pond.»
Translation, Kenji muttered to himself as his charcoal stick flew across a notation tablet, "System prerequisite: Absolute control of one's own Qi flow before attempting external manipulation. Risk of catastrophic feedback in case of failure."
«The adversary's energy is a furious dragon. Do not face its fiery breath; make it trip over its own scales.»
"Inefficient!" he thought with a pang of irritation. "Call things by their proper names. Variable: Opponent's Qi follows rhythmic patterns. Objective: Introduce an arrhythmia at the moment of peak stress to induce systemic failure. It's not that hard!"
For three nights, he immersed himself in this madness. He realized the fundamental design flaw in the manual: it was a complete system, a martial art unto itself. Teaching the entire system to Xiao Yue would be like giving an inexperienced intern the admin password to the entire corporate network. A single mistake, a single misinterpreted command, and she wouldn't just erase her own data, she'd fry the central servers: a digital and physical suicide.
The risk of her self-destructing was, by his calculations, over 87%. Unacceptable.
It was on the third night, as he watched the lamp flame dance and cast shadows on the wall, that he had his epiphany. The solution wasn't to teach Xiao Yue how to be a hacker. The solution was to design a single, devastating application for her. A Trojan horse. A simple, single-purpose executable.
She didn't need to understand the whole system. She just needed to learn how to double-click.
He forgot the rest of the scroll. He focused on a single concept, barely a couple of paragraphs that the mystic authors had likely considered a mere footnote. It spoke of "empathetic vibration" and "destructive resonance." The idea was simple and elegant: you didn't need a huge amount of energy to bring down a bridge; you just needed to find its resonant frequency and push it with the right rhythm until it tore itself apart.
"That's it," Kenji whispered in the darkness. The sound was swallowed by his roommates' snores. "We're not going to attack her strength. We're going to corrupt her data."
He had found his solution. A pulse. A single, tiny injection of Qi at the precise moment of impact, not to add force, but to introduce a vibration, an error, that would make the opponent's own Qi turn against itself.
The concept was clear. Now he needed the R&D phase.
While Kenji plotted in the shadows, Zian strutted under the sun. He walked through the main training grounds, followed as always by his two lackeys, Huo and Lin, who had adopted his same expression of arrogant disdain as if it were part of the clan uniform.
"See that?" Zian said, stopping and pointing with his chin toward a secondary training yard. His voice was loud enough for several nearby disciples to hear.
There, in the distance, was Xiao Yue. But she wasn't practicing the complex, fluid forms that had briefly put her on the map. She was executing, over and over again, the Crane Dance—the clan's most basic form. The equivalent of a master calligrapher practicing stick figures. Her movements were perfect, yes, but painfully simple.
The week before, Zian had felt a pang of fear he wouldn't admit to even under torture. His sister's calmness, her sharp logic, had disarmed him. But the days passed, and the reports from the spies he'd set to watch her were consistent: no more miraculous progress. No dazzling new techniques. Just the monotonous repetition of the fundamentals.
A smirk of superiority spread across Zian's face. His fear transformed into an even deeper contempt.
"The miracle's over," he declared smugly. "It seems she had a stroke of luck, a small epiphany, but her foundation is too weak. She's hit her limit. She can't advance any further."
Huo, the bulkier and less brilliant of the two, nodded vigorously. "Of course, Young Master! It was impossible for a useless girl like her to keep up the pace!"
Lin, the more cunning one, watched Xiao Yue with narrowed eyes. The perfection of her basic movements was… unsettling. There wasn't a single wasted gesture. But Zian's conclusion was the most logical one. Talent without a solid foundation was like a flash of fire: bright but brief.
"A real shame," Zian continued, savoring his own magnanimity. "For a moment, I almost thought she might bring some honor to the family name. I guess she's back to being her old useless self. Make sure everyone knows her lucky streak is over. I don't want anyone holding out false hope for her."
The news spread like pollen in spring. Xiao Yue's shooting star had burned out. The status quo had been restored. And as the clan's expectations for her plummeted, the value of Kenji's "invisible asset" skyrocketed. Zian's arrogance was the best camouflage money couldn't buy.
That night, the clearing by the Silent Bamboo Pavilion became a clandestine laboratory. The moon hung in the sky like a disk of pale jade, its light filtering through the bamboo leaves and dappling the ground.
"This is insane," Xiao Yue whispered for the fifth time. She held a wooden sword, but she wasn't training. She was standing in front of a thick bamboo stalk that Kenji had driven into the ground. At the base of the bamboo, he had placed a wide, shallow bowl filled with water.
"Insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting a different result," Kenji retorted from the shadows, where he sat with his tablet and charcoal. "That's inefficiency. This is a controlled experiment. I'll be the architect; you, the executor. The objective is simple: I don't want you to break the bamboo. I want you to make it vibrate."
He explained the theory to her. The idea of the dissonant pulse. Xiao Yue listened, torn between dread and a morbid fascination.
"Alright, first attempt," Kenji ordered. "Execute a simple thrust. In the instant before impact, channel a minimal amount of Qi to the tip of the sword. Not as a strike, but as a… hum. Imagine you want to ring a bell, not shatter it."
Xiao Yue took a deep breath. She focused. Her Qi, now an obedient partner, pooled in her dantian. She executed the thrust, a clean, swift motion. Just before contact, she tried to release that tiny pulse.
POCK!
The sword struck the bamboo with a dull thud. The water in the bowl barely stirred.
"Failure," Kenji announced. "Pulse was too early and integrated with the impact's force. A 0.5% increase in power, 100% failure of the disruptive objective. Try again. Later. More subtle."
She tried again. This time, the pulse was too late, a useless burst of Qi after the sword had already bounced off. The water splashed.
"Failure. 0.2-second delay. Useless in combat. Next."
Two hours passed. Two hours of failures. Frustration began to eat away at Xiao Yue's composure.
"I can't do it, Kenji! I can't feel it! It's either too much force or nothing at all!"
"Your perception is the problem," Kenji said without looking up from his notes. "You're trying to feel power. I'm not asking you to feel. I'm asking you to execute an instruction. Stop trusting your cultivator's instincts; they're the ones that have failed you for years. Trust the process. Watch the water."
Xiao Yue looked at the bowl. What was she supposed to see?
"I'm not watching the bamboo," Kenji explained. "I'm watching the ripples in the water. The frequency. A brute-force impact creates a chaotic splash. A successful disruptive pulse should create a series of rapid, tight, concentric ripples—a high-frequency vibration. The water is our oscilloscope. Now, forget the bamboo. Your only objective is to create that specific ripple. Try it."
That change in focus altered everything. Xiao Yue stopped thinking about power, about impact, about breaking. She focused solely on that abstract concept: creating a vibration.
She took a deep breath, the four-seven-eight breathing cycle he had taught her calming the storm in her mind. She executed another thrust, but this time, her intent was different. It wasn't to attack. It was… to touch. And in the instant of the touch, she released the smallest, sharpest pulse she could conceive; a thought, more than an action.
Tic.
The sound of the impact was almost nonexistent, like a fingernail tapping on wood. But the effect was astonishing.
The bamboo didn't move. But the water in the bowl… it didn't splash. It hissed. For a fraction of a second, the surface of the water filled with thousands of tiny, frantic ripples, as if it had begun to boil without heat. An instant later, the water was calm again.
Xiao Yue gasped. She stared at the intact bamboo and then at the still water.
Kenji slowly stood up and walked over. He crouched down and ran a finger along the bamboo stalk. Then, he gave it a light tap.
CRACK.
A hairline fracture, almost invisible, shot down the bamboo from the point of impact, like a frozen vein of lightning. It hadn't been broken by force. It had been shattered from within.
"Positive data," Kenji said, his voice devoid of emotion, but Xiao Yue could perceive the vibration of pure, analytical satisfaction. "Estimated pulse frequency: 1.2 kilohertz. Duration: 0.05 seconds. Qi expenditure: negligible. Result: success."
He stood and looked at Xiao Yue, whose golden eyes shone with a mixture of amazement and a little fear. She had just performed the strangest, most terrifying technique of her life.
"I… I did it," she whispered.
"We have successfully completed the proof of concept," Kenji corrected. "Now begins the implementation and optimization phase."
He returned to his spot and spent the next hour having her repeat the process, over and over and over, while he took feverish notes, documenting every variable: the angle of her wrist, the intensity of her breath, her mental focus.
When the moon began its descent, Kenji stopped.
"Enough for today. System overload would lead to performance degradation. Rest. Tomorrow, we integrate."
That night, Kenji didn't sleep. He sat in his corner, with the tablet full of notes and a new roll of parchment. With the precision of an engineer drafting a microchip design, he translated the chaos of experimentation into a clear, concise protocol. He created diagrams, key points, and safety warnings.
When he was finished, just as the first hint of gray light tinged the horizon, he took the Biological Asset Optimization Manual, v1.0: Xiao Yue, and added a new page.
Appendix 18.1: Disruptive Pulse Injection (DPI) Protocol.
He contemplated his work. He had created a weapon that didn't exist in any of the sect's cultivation manuals. It wasn't a new sword stance or a secret technique. It was an exploit. A zero-day vulnerability for the operating system of cultivation, born from an abandoned theory.
The prototype was complete. The lab-testing phase was over.
Now, it was time to find a real-world test subject. And the clan competition, just four days away, offered the perfect candidate.