Chapter 4: The Blame Game
The dining hall of the Azure Cloud Sect could seat three hundred disciples. It was built to withstand spiritual energy fluctuations, accidental technique discharges, and one legendary food fight between inner disciples that had been reclassified as a "spontaneous combat training exercise."
It was not prepared for Owen Chen.
He entered through the east doors behind Fatty Wang, who moved with the urgency of a man who had a date with the rice porridge station and intended to arrive early. The hall was half-full. Disciples ate in clusters of four and six, measuring self-worth in Qi levels and spiritual root rankings, when the conversation died three tables before Owen reached the serving counter.
It died the way sound dies in a snowfall — first the far tables quieted, then the middle, then the nearest, until the only noise was Fatty Wang slurping porridge he had not yet acquired through a combination of predictive eating and enthusiasm.
Owen felt it. The quiet. The chopsticks pausing mid-reach, the forty-eight pairs of eyes tracking him with the coordinated suspicion of birds that had collectively decided he was a cat.
He collected a bowl of porridge and sat at the end of a long table. Fatty Wang sat across from him, already on his second bowl, a meat bun in each hand like a man dual-wielding weapons he had no intention of surrendering.
"So," Fatty Wang said. "People are talking."
"People are staring."
"Same thing, different volume." Fatty Wang bit into a bun. "Pei Jun's been telling everyone you robbed him of his cultivation. Sui Ling's older brother — the one built like a small building — said he wants to 'have words' with you. Tang Wei fainted so hard he chipped a tooth, and he blames you for that too."
"I wasn't even touching any of them."
"I know. You were breathing. Apparently that's enough now."
Owen pushed his porridge around the bowl. The rice had gone cold — not from time, but because something was wrong with the ambient temperature around him. The warmth drained out of food, out of air, out of everything within arm's reach, like the world was slowly losing interest in being warm near Owen Chen.
He did not connect this to the dantian. He connected it to the window being open.
"They want answers," Fatty Wang continued. "The kind you don't have. Which is a problem, because the kind they want is 'you did this on purpose and you can fix it,' and the only answer you can give is 'I don't know why I'm like this,' which — and I say this with love — is the worst answer in the history of conflict resolution."
"Thank you."
"You're welcome. Eat your porridge. You look like a scarecrow that lost a fight with a windmill."
Owen took one bite. The porridge tasted like nothing. Not flavorless — actively, aggressively nothing, as though the spiritual energy that normally gave the rice its faintly sweet, Qi-infused taste had been siphoned out before it reached his mouth.
He put the spoon down.
The confrontation came at the east corridor, fifteen minutes later, on the walk from the dining hall to the training grounds.
Owen counted five of them before they reached him. Pei Jun led the group — the thin boy from yesterday's Qi circulation class who ranked forty-first and had the haunted look of someone who had watched his spiritual energy reserves drop from "mediocre" to "zero" in under ten minutes. Behind him walked Sui Ling, who had exchanged her usual calm expression for controlled fury, and Tang Wei, the broad-shouldered boy with the chipped tooth and a bruise on his jaw from where he hit the floor.
The other two were older disciples — probably second-year — recruited from the ranks of people with personal stakes in the well-being of their juniors. One cracked his knuckles as he walked, producing a sound that echoed off the stone walls with theatrical menace.
"Chen Baijiu," Pei Jun said.
"Owen Chen," Owen corrected. He had given up correcting people and then un-given up, because if he was going to be blamed for something, he wanted it to happen under his actual name.
"You drained us."
"I didn't—"
"You sat next to me, and my Qi vanished. Every last drop. Two days of cultivation — gone." Pei Jun's voice shook. "The healers said my meridians are empty. They don't know when my reserves will recover. Some people never recover from total depletion."
"I wasn't doing anything. I was trying to follow the same breathing exercise as everyone else."
"Then why didn't anyone else collapse?" Sui Ling stepped forward. "Why was it always the people sitting near you?"
Owen looked at the five of them. Looked at the corridor behind them, where other disciples had stopped to watch. Looked at Fatty Wang, who had positioned himself slightly behind Owen with a pork bun in each hand and an expression suggesting he was prepared to use them as projectiles.
"Maybe it's the formations?" Owen offered. "The energy formations in Lecture Hall C — I noticed that formations tend to—"
"The formations have been working fine for thirty years," the knuckle-cracker interrupted. "I've taken classes in that hall since I was a first-year. Nobody's ever collapsed. Nobody's ever lost their Qi. And then you show up with your 'crippled dantian' and suddenly three people go to zero."
He took a step closer. Owen's dantian hummed — that deep, hungry vibration at his core that he had learned to ignore the way a person learns to ignore a leaking faucet. The knuckle-cracker stopped. Frowned. Touched his own dantian briefly.
"What was that?" he muttered.
"What was what?" said the second older disciple.
"Nothing. I just—" He shook his head. Stepped back. "Look. Just stay away from the rest of us. If you don't know what you're doing, that's worse than doing it on purpose."
The group withdrew. Pei Jun lingered, mouth open as though he wanted to say something else, then turned and followed the others. Sui Ling was last. She looked at Owen with an expression that was not anger — it was the quieter, more dangerous thing that comes after anger, the thing that lives in the space between "I blame you" and "I'm afraid of you."
Then she was gone, and the corridor was empty except for Owen, Fatty Wang, and the distant sound of someone practicing sword forms badly.
"Well," said Fatty Wang. "That could have gone worse."
"How?"
"The knuckle-cracker didn't actually punch you. That's a win." He bit into his pork bun. "Also, I think you made him nervous."
"I didn't do anything."
"You never do. That's what makes it impressive." Fatty Wang chewed thoughtfully. "Hey, Owen — do me a favor. Stand over there for a second."
Owen moved two paces to the left. Fatty Wang extended his fist and punched the air.
The punch was wrong.
It was wrong in a way that Owen could not articulate but could feel — a sudden, sharp displacement of air, a flicker of something that was not wind and was not light but occupied the space between them for a fraction of a second. Fatty Wang's fist, which should have produced nothing but a puff of displaced air, generated a visible ripple.
Fatty Wang stared at his hand.
"What," he said flatly.
"What?" said Owen.
"Did you see that?"
"See what?"
Fatty Wang punched the air again. Nothing happened. He punched a third time, harder, grunting with effort. Still nothing. He looked at Owen with the expression of a man who had just seen a ghost and was now being told the ghost had never existed.
"Never mind," he said. "I'm seeing things. Too much pork."
Elder Zhao had cancelled the afternoon session "pending investigation into the Lecture Hall C energy depletion incident," which was administrative language for needing to sit in his office and process the fact that ten years of painstaking cultivation had vanished in a single lecture. Owen and Fatty Wang went to the training grounds instead, where Owen sat on a bench and Fatty Wang attempted to demonstrate the Azure Cloud Palm Strike on a practice post.
Fatty Wang's palm strikes produced a sound like a wet towel hitting a wall. The practice post did not move. This was normal. Fatty Wang ranked dead last in every assessment. His spiritual root was earth-element, lowest quality. His Qi reserves were, by the sect's official measurement, "technically present."
What was not normal happened at the twenty-third attempt.
Fatty Wang struck the post. His palm connected with a sound like a drum — a real drum, not a wet towel. The practice post shuddered. A crack appeared along its base, spidering upward through the spirit-reinforced wood.
Fatty Wang pulled his hand back. Stared at the crack. Stared at his palm. Stared at Owen.
"I have never," he said slowly, "done that before."
"That post is reinforced with Qi-absorbing wood," Owen said. "You could hit it with a hammer and it would dent, not crack."
"I know. I've hit that post forty-six times in my life. I know exactly how hard I can hit. It is not hard enough to do that." He looked at the crack again. "Owen, that post is older than I am."
Owen looked at the post. Looked at Fatty Wang. Felt the hum of his own dantian — that ever-present vibration, the sound of something vast and empty and perpetually unsatisfied.
He filed it under "things I don't understand" and tried to move on. Fatty Wang did not move on. He spent the next ten minutes touching his own dantian, flexing his fingers, and muttering calculations.
"I feel stronger," Fatty Wang finally said. "Not a lot. Not like, 'I can punch through a wall' stronger. But measurably, definitely, unambiguously stronger than I was two days ago. And the only thing that's changed is that I've been sitting next to you."
"I haven't done anything to you."
"I know. That's the part that scares me."
The System appeared at sunset.
Owen was sitting on the dormitory roof — the one spot in the sect where nobody had complained about his presence yet, mostly because nobody could climb the trellis without a running start. Fatty Wang was asleep below, producing sounds that suggested he was fighting an invisible opponent in his dreams.
The translucent interface flickered to life with all the grace of a cat landing on a keyboard:
╔══════════════════════════════════════╗
║ MISSION 4 AVAILABLE! ║
║ ║
║ Mission: Apologize to the person ║
║ you harmed most today ║
║ ║
║ Difficulty: IMPOSSIBLE ║
║ (You don't know who you harmed) ║
║ (They're all harmed) ║
║ (You harmed someone you haven't ║
║ met yet) ║
║ ║
║ Reward: +50 Reputation ║
║ (Sect-wide, probably negative) ║
║ ║
║ Penalty for failure: +2 System ║
║ favors. (Total debt: 3) ║
║ ║
║ Deadline: When the moon is highest ║
║ ║
║ NOTE: The moon is always highest ║
║ somewhere. ║
║ ║
║ This mission cannot be failed. ║
║ It is already in progress. ║
║ Everything you do is an apology. ║
║ Everything you don't do is also ║
║ an apology. ║
║ ║
║ Good luck, Host! ║
║ (Luck is not included in your ║
║ stats.) ║
╚══════════════════════════════════════╝
Owen closed his eyes. Opened them. The interface was still there.
"Everything I do is an apology?"
╔══════════════════════════════════════╗
║ CORRECTION: ║
║ ║
║ Everything you do makes things ║
║ worse. That is a form of apology. ║
║ Probably. ║
║ We're not sure anymore. ║
║ ║
║ Also: ║
║ Cultivation Level: ERROR: VALUE ║
║ OVERFLOW ║
║ Dantian Status: ████████████████ ║
║ Hunger Index: RISING ║
║ Nearby Cultivators Affected: 247 ║
║ ║
║ Your dantian has consumed more Qi ║
║ in the last 24 hours than the ║
║ average Core Formation cultivator ║
║ absorbs in a month. ║
║ ║
║ This information is not useful ║
║ to you. We are sharing it anyway. ║
╚══════════════════════════════════════╝
- The sect had what — eight hundred disciples? Elders? Senior disciples? Nearly a third of them had been affected by his dantian in a single day.
"That can't be right," he whispered.
╔══════════════════════════════════════╗
║ IT IS RIGHT. ║
║ ║
║ But you knew that already. ║
║ You just don't want to know. ║
║ ║
║ That's fine. Knowledge is optional. ║
║ Consequences are not. ║
║ ║
║ Have a nice evening! ║
║ (Weather forecast: clear skies, ║
║ chance of existential dread.) ║
╚══════════════════════════════════════╝
The interface crashed. In the space where it had been, Owen saw the sunset painting the sect's rooftops in copper and shadow. He saw disciples moving along the walkways below, hundreds of them, each carrying spiritual energy that his dantian was quietly, invisibly draining.
He saw — far across the sect, on a pavilion that jutted from the upper cliff face like a bird's outstretched wing — a figure watching him.
The figure was small from this distance. A silhouette against the fading sky, dressed in robes that caught the light wrong, as though the fabric itself was made of something brighter than ordinary cloth. The figure stood perfectly still. Not meditating. Not practicing. Just watching, with the unhurried patience of someone who had been watching for a long time and intended to keep watching.
Owen stared at the silhouette. The silhouette did not move.
A voice — not the System, not anyone on the roof, but something carried on the evening breeze with impossible clarity — reached Owen's ears:
"So that's the one."
Two words. Spoken with the light, amused tone of a man commenting on a particularly entertaining street performance. Then the figure turned and walked back into the pavilion's shadow, and the voice was gone, and Owen was alone on the roof with a broken System, a mysterious cultivation drain, a best friend who was somehow getting stronger, and the growing suspicion that he was the worst thing that had ever happened to a sect.
Below his window, Fatty Wang rolled over in his sleep and punched the wall.
The wall cracked.
Fatty Wang snored on, unaware. Owen pressed his hands against his face and breathed in, out, in, out, trying to ignore the hum of the thing at his core — that bottomless hunger, that patient, vast, and ever-expanding emptiness that the doctors had called crippled, that the System classified as OVERFLOW, and that the silhouette on the distant cliff seemed to have already known about.
Somewhere far above the sect, in a study filled with jade mirrors that reflected moments that had not happened yet, Sect Master Yun poured himself a cup of tea and smiled.
"Interesting," he said to no one.
The tea was cold. He drank it anyway.