Chapter 2: An Invisible Problem
The hiccups had not stopped.
It was the morning of Day Two, and Owen Chen lay on his back on a mattress that crunched like a bag of gravel having an existential crisis, staring at a ceiling that had more water stains than a sad poem, and hiccuping at regular intervals like a broken metronome designed by someone who hated music.
"Hic."
Fatty Wang was already awake. Fatty Wang was always already awake. He had been awake since before dawn, eating — a trait Owen was beginning to suspect was less a hobby and more a biological imperative, like breathing, but louder.
"Morning," said Fatty Wang through what appeared to be his fourth pork bun. "The hiccups are still going, huh?"
"Hic. Yeah."
"Have you tried scaring yourself?"
"I tried holding my breath, drinking upside down, and asking the System for help. The System told me to—let me see if I can remember the exact wording—" Owen squinted at the memory. "'Try dying and respawning. Just kidding. Respawn feature not available. ERROR.'"
"That's dark."
"The System has a very casual relationship with mortality."
Fatty Wang offered a pork bun. Owen took it. The bun was hot, soft, and tasted like nothing — not because it was flavorless, but because Owen's dantian had eaten the spiritual energy from it somewhere between his hand and his mouth, leaving behind a sad little husk of wheat and pork that had the nutritional density of a polite suggestion. He had not noticed this yet. He thought the buns were just bad.
"Where are we supposed to go today?" Owen asked.
Fatty Wang pulled a crumpled paper from inside his robe — a sect schedule that Owen was fairly certain had been used as a napkin. "'Orientation Tour: Training Grounds.' All new outer disciples. Nine o'clock. Elder Zhao supervising."
"Elder Zhao."
"The guy whose robes you exploded."
"They were already like—"
"They were not already like that."
Owen conceded the point.
The outer disciple training grounds occupied the sect's third tier — a broad plateau of packed earth, stone practice formations, wooden sparring dummies, and several buildings whose roofs were held together by a combination of architectural genius and what Owen suspected was spiritual duct tape.
Forty-seven new outer disciples assembled in a loose formation that could charitably be called a line. Elder Zhao stood at the front, dressed in replacement robes that were slightly too large and a shade off from the ceremonial white, which meant he had raided someone else's wardrobe in a hurry. His bald scalp caught the morning light. His expression suggested he had not slept, had not enjoyed what little sleep he'd had, and was blaming a specific person for both facts.
"Today," he announced, "you will familiarize yourselves with the training grounds. You will learn the layout of the practice formations, the sparring rings, the Qi absorption arrays, and the emergency exits. You will need the emergency exits. This is not a joke."
His gaze found Owen. It stayed.
"The training grounds are maintained at a carefully calibrated spiritual energy density. These formations—" he gestured at the stone practice dummies, each one etched with glowing runes, "—require ambient Qi to function. If you are found to have disrupted the energy balance, you will be held financially responsible."
Owen felt a hot flash of guilt, which was impressive since he had no idea what he had done but was fairly certain it was his fault regardless.
"The tour begins at the eastern practice ring. Follow me. Do not touch anything."
They followed him.
Elder Zhao walked the group through the eastern ring, where three senior outer disciples were practicing combat techniques — a girl with braided hair striking a practice dummy with Qi-infused palm strikes, a tall boy executing sword forms with visible blue light trailing from his blade, and a heavyset man practicing a defensive technique that surrounded him in a shimmering golden barrier.
Owen watched from a respectful distance, hands in his pockets, hiccups punctuating Elder Zhao's lecture at random intervals.
"Hic. Impressive," he muttered.
The senior disciples were impressive. Their movements were fluid, their Qi control visible to anyone with even the faintest spiritual awareness. The braided girl's strikes left afterimages. The swordsman's blade hummed with energy. The defensive cultivator's barrier pulsed like a heartbeat.
Owen stepped closer for a better look.
He walked within ten meters of the eastern practice ring.
The braided girl's next palm strike landed flat. No Qi. No afterimage. Just flesh hitting wood. She stumbled forward, caught off balance, and looked at her hand as though it had betrayed her.
The swordsman's blade flickered — the blue light stuttered, dimmed, and went dark mid-swing. He faltered, nearly dropped the sword, and stared at the inert metal with the expression of a man who had just watched his car engine die on a highway.
The defensive cultivator's golden barrier vanished. Not gradually. It was there, then it wasn't, like a light being switched off. He stood in the sudden openness of bare air, blinking.
"What the—" the braided girl started.
"Elder Zhao," the swordsman called, "the formations are malfunctioning again."
Owen, who had stopped walking to admire the swordsman's technique, was now standing at the edge of the practice ring. The three senior disciples were three meters away. He was close enough that the spiritual energy in their vicinity was being quietly, efficiently, and completely consumed by a dantian that did not know the meaning of the word "enough."
"I didn't touch anything," Elder Zhao snapped. "The formations are externally maintained. Report it to the maintenance office."
The three disciples exchanged uncertain looks. None of them noticed the quiet new kid who was now shuffling along behind the tour group, hiccuping softly and wondering why everyone in the sect seemed to have coordination problems.
The tour continued.
Elder Zhao led them past the sparring rings, the weapon storage shed, and a meditation garden that was really just a circle of flat rocks next to a pond, which Owen thought was the cultivation equivalent of putting a fountain in a conference room and calling it a wellness center.
They reached the informational section — a row of stone stands holding pamphlets about sect rules, formation schedules, and training curricula. A Level-2 practice formation stood nearby: a stone pedestal topped with a floating orb of compressed spiritual energy that disciples could strike to measure their Qi output. It glowed steadily, the orb rotating at a gentle, hypnotic pace.
Owen picked up a brochure titled "A New Disciple's Guide to Not Dying." He began reading.
He was standing next to the practice formation. He did not touch it. He did not look at it. He simply stood there, reading about the cafeteria hours and the importance of not cultivating in the latrine, and his dantian — that hungry, bottomless, humming void inside him — did what it always did.
It ate.
The orb's rotation slowed. The glow dimmed. The stone pedestal cracked — a single, sharp sound like a bone snapping — and the orb fell, hit the pedestal's edge, and shattered on the ground. Dust. Silence. A few sparks of dissipating spiritual energy drifted upward like sparks from a dying fire.
Owen looked up from the brochure.
"Huh," he said. He looked at the shattered formation. Looked at the brochure. Looked at the formation again. "Guess the quality control here isn't great."
He went back to reading.
Fatty Wang caught up at the next junction. He had fallen behind during the meditation garden segment to investigate a food cart on the second tier.
"They've got braised spiritual pork ribs at the east gate cart," he reported, slightly out of breath. "Thirteen spirit stones a portion. I spent my entire monthly allowance. Worth it."
"You spent thirteen spirit stones on pork ribs?"
"On pork ribs, on a meat bun for you, and on a dumpling that I dropped. So twelve and a half spirit stones worth of food." He held out a bun. "Here. You look terrible."
Owen took the bun. It was warm. His dantian ate the spiritual energy from it before he took his first bite, but the meat was still good — the non-magical part, which was, Owen had learned, the best part.
Behind them, the Level-2 practice formation lay in pieces on the ground. A senior disciple was staring at it with the confused horror of someone who had just witnessed a natural disaster in slow motion and could not find the cause.
A voice came from Owen's right.
"Excuse me. Do you know where the medicine hall is?"
He turned. A girl stood a few paces away — young, maybe his age, with careful eyes and outer disciple robes that were noticeably brighter and more carefully maintained than anyone else's on the tier. The fabric shimmered faintly, the telltale sign of spiritual energy woven into the threads. A high-quality robe. An expensive robe. The kind of robe that said its owner had ranked near the top of the intake assessment and had the budget to prove it.
She was looking at him expectantly.
"The medicine hall?" Owen said. "I just got here yesterday. I don't—"
As she stood within arm's reach, something happened to her robe.
The shimmer faded. Not dramatically — not like the practice formation dying. More like watching a sunset in reverse: the bright, luminous quality draining from the fabric in a slow wave that started at the hem closest to Owen and crept upward. The robe's color shifted from brilliant white to dull gray, as though someone had turned down a dimmer switch on the spiritual energy woven into every thread.
The girl looked down.
Her face changed.
"My robe," she said quietly. She touched the fabric. The gray spread further. "This is — this shouldn't—" She took a step back, away from Owen, and the graying stopped. She looked at her sleeve. Looked at Owen. Looked at her sleeve again.
"Is it supposed to do that?" Owen asked, genuinely concerned.
"It is absolutely not supposed to do that." Her voice was tight. She pulled her sleeve closer, examining the fabric. The gray patch remained, but the spreading had halted. She was pale. "The Qi threads are depleted. This robe cost me — this is a Qi-woven outer robe. It shouldn't lose saturation for decades."
"Maybe you got a defective one?"
She stared at him for a long moment. Then she turned and walked quickly toward the administrative offices, one hand pressed to her sleeve, murmuring something about material quality guarantees.
Owen watched her go.
"Her clothes fell apart," he said to Fatty Wang.
"Did they?"
"The color just... drained out of it. Like she bought it from a discount vendor."
Fatty Wang, who had been too busy eating his dumpling to notice, shrugged. "Some people go cheap on robes. My cousin bought a pair of cultivation pants from a market stall and they dissolved during his first meditation session. He was fine, but the embarrassment nearly killed him."
"I should probably avoid that girl. She seemed upset."
"Good instinct. Upset people want to be left alone. Hungry people want pork buns. I am the second kind of person, and I suggest you become the same."
From across the training ground, on the elevated walkway connecting the outer disciples' quarters to the lecture hall, a girl watched.
Lily had been on her morning walk — a habit she maintained since arriving at the sect, partly for exercise and partly because the walkway offered a strategic overview of the training grounds that allowed her to observe which disciples trained hardest and which ones faked it. She ranked first among all new outer disciples. She held a rare Violet Flame spiritual root. She had scored highest in every intake assessment, and she took her position seriously enough to study the competition daily.
She had watched the tour group pass through the eastern ring. She had seen the senior disciples stumble mid-technique. She had noticed the Level-2 formation die. She had observed the girl's robe lose its color.
And through all of it, her gaze had settled on one person: the quiet boy in slightly-too-large outer disciple robes who walked through the chaos with his hands in his pockets and a pork bun in one hand, looking at everything and touching nothing.
She watched him now. He was talking to his fat roommate. He seemed entirely unbothered. No visible Qi fluctuation. No technique activation. No spiritual pressure. Nothing on the surface that would explain what she had just witnessed — four separate spiritual energy events, all occurring within a ten-meter radius of the same person, all following the same pattern of sudden, unexplained depletion.
Lily pulled a small notebook from her robe. She opened it to the first page. She had written one entry last night:
Owen Chen — Hidden Master? Evidence Log.
Below it, in careful handwriting:
Entry 2 — Day 2, morning training observation. Four incidents within walking radius. Senior disciples lost Qi mid-technique while he was nearby. Level-2 formation collapsed while he stood beside it. Junior disciple's Qi-woven robe depleted in real-time during conversation. Pattern: spiritual energy vanishes in his proximity.
She paused. Tapped the pen against her lip. Added:
Technique hypothesis: area-of-effect Qi suppression. Silent activation. No visible tells. Estimated range: 10-15 meters. Possible classification: Void disruption or spatial Qi absorption. Both techniques require minimum Foundation Building, possibly higher.
She looked up. The boy was walking away with his roommate, shoulders slightly hunched, one hand occasionally pressing against his stomach as though he had a stomachache.
Note: subject appears unaware of own abilities. Could be deliberate concealment. Or genuine ignorance. Both options imply mastery level far above apparent Qi Condensation baseline. Will continue observation.
She closed the notebook and tucked it away. Her heart was beating faster than usual.
She had entered the Azure Cloud Sect as the strongest new disciple. She had expected to find worthy rivals among the other gold-tier talents.
She had not expected to find someone who could silently drain an entire formation's worth of spiritual energy while reading a pamphlet about cafeteria hours.
"Interesting," she whispered.
The tour ended at noon. Elder Zhao dismissed the group with a reminder that the next day's schedule included basic Qi circulation training and that anyone who was late would "discover why the sect's emergency exits are labeled as such."
Owen and Fatty Wang walked back toward the dormitory. The hiccups had stopped — somewhere around the meditation garden, the 24-hour penalty had expired, and Owen's diaphragm had finally been released from its contractual obligation. He had not celebrated. The System had not given a completion notification. It had simply stopped, like a faucet that ran out of water.
As they passed the outer disciple bulletin board, Owen's vision flickered.
The translucent blue rectangle materialized with its usual grace — which is to say, no grace at all. The interface stuttered into view, text already overlapping, the border cycling through three colors before settling on a shade of green that suggested corruption rather than design.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ NEW MISSION AVAILABLE! ║
║ (Mission 2 of ∞) ║
║ ║
║ Mission: Touch a tree for 10 seconds ║
║ Difficulty: TRIVIAL ║
║ Reward: +5 Nature Affinity ║
║ ║
║ Penalty for failure: You will develop ║
║ an irrational fear of squirrels for ║
║ 72 hours. ║
║ ║
║ Deadline: 60 seconds ║
║ ║
║ [Accept] [Decline] [Report Bug] ║
║ ║
║ NOTE: [Decline] button is decorative. ║
║ Mission accepted automatically. ║
╚══════════════════════════════════════════╝
Owen looked at the mission. Looked at the nearest tree — an ancient pine that stood at the edge of the training ground, its trunk three feet wide and covered in moss.
"Touch a tree?" he muttered.
"What?" said Fatty Wang.
"Nothing. The System wants me to do something stupid."
"When has it not?"
Owen walked over to the pine tree and pressed his palm against the bark. He counted to ten. The bark was rough, cool, and — like everything else he touched — slightly less energized by the time he was done. A single pine needle turned brown and fell.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ MISSION COMPLETE! ║
║ ║
║ Reward: +5 Nature Affinity ║
║ ║
║ You can now communicate with trees. ║
║ Duration: 30 minutes. ║
║ ║
║ Note: Trees have nothing to say. ║
║ This reward is useless. ║
║ ║
║ You're welcome, Host! ║
╚══════════════════════════════════════════╝
Owen stared at the interface.
He listened.
The pine tree said nothing. Not in words, not in rustling, not in any discernible form of communication. It was a tree. It was doing exactly what a tree does: standing there, being a tree, existing without agenda.
"Useless," Owen said flatly.
"The tree talk to you?" Fatty Wang asked.
"How did you—"
"Your face is doing the thing where you talk to the invisible rectangle."
"I don't have a thing."
"You absolutely have a thing."
Owen turned away from the pine tree and walked toward the dormitory, Fatty Wang beside him, the sun warm on his shoulders, the training grounds quiet behind him.
He did not notice the practice formation he had killed. He did not notice the spiritual energy dead zone he had left in his wake — a fifteen-meter circle where the ambient Qi had dropped to near zero, where the grass was slightly less green, where the air tasted faintly of static. He did not notice that the senior disciples in the eastern ring had spent the rest of the morning unable to generate more than a flicker of Qi, and had blamed the sect's aging formation arrays.
He did not notice any of it, because Owen Chen had spent his entire life believing his dantian was a crippled void that could hold nothing.
He did not know that the void did not hold.
It took.
Behind him, the pine needle he had killed drifted to the ground and settled in a dead zone of bare earth where nothing had grown for a very long time and would not grow for a very long time after.
The System interface flickered one last time, displaying a single line in text so small he had already looked away:
WARNING: SPIRITUAL DEAD ZONE EXPANDING
CURRENT RADIUS: 15 METERS
TREND: INCREASING
Just kidding!
...
Or is it?
ERROR: HUMOR MODULE NOT FOUND
Then it crashed, and Owen Chen went to lunch, and behind him the world was a little more empty than it had been before, and he had no idea.