Chapter 5: Midnight Cultivation Disaster
Fatty Wang was asleep. This was not remarkable — Fatty Wang was always asleep or eating or combining both in ways that defied physics and good taste. What was remarkable was the hole in the wall.
It was roughly the size of Fatty Wang's fist. The crack patterns radiated outward in a perfect circle, which was not how stone cracked when hit by a sleeping person. This stone had cracked with mathematical precision, as though the force had been applied by something that understood structural engineering better than Fatty Wang understood anything except dumplings.
Owen stared at it. Fatty Wang snored — rhythmic, almost meditative, the sound of a man who had achieved perfect harmony between unconsciousness and pork residue.
He tried to sleep. He could not.
The hum was louder tonight. That vibration at his core — the thing the doctors called crippled — was deeper. Fuller. As though it had eaten something and was still chewing.
He sat up. The room was dark except for the faint blue glow of the ceiling formation — a standard lighting array supposed to last fifty years without maintenance. It was flickering. Not like a candle. Like a light when something is stealing its power.
Beyond the window was the sect's Qi-cycling herb garden. The plants nearest his window were wilting. Owen watched a stalk of Silverthread Sage droop, its leaves curling inward from luminous silver-green to dull gray. Not diseased. Drained. As though something had sucked the life out through invisible straws.
The wilting was concentrated in a perfect circle centered on his window.
The dantian pulsed, satisfied, like a cat that had just knocked something off a table.
"Coincidence," Owen said.
The Sage collapsed into dust. White dust — the color of something completely drained of spiritual energy and biological matter, leaving only mineral skeleton.
He closed the curtain.
Owen sat on his bed and tried to cultivate. The Azure Cloud Circulation Method. The most basic technique in the sect's library — "so simple that even a rock could do it," Elder Zhao had said.
He breathed in. Breathed out. Focused on his dantian.
The dantian responded like a black hole responding to matter. Not gently. Not gradually. With the sudden, overwhelming hunger of something that had been starving and had just smelled food.
The ambient spiritual energy in the room vanished. Not reduced. Vanished. The ceiling formation died. Temperature dropped. Owen's breath came out white, which was wrong because it was summer and the night was warm.
He tried to stop. The dantian did not care what he tried. The dantian was hungry. It would continue being hungry until it consumed everything within reach, and then it would reach further.
The absorption expanded outward — into the walls, into the garden, into the reserves the sect's formation arrays had maintained for decades. Outside the window, the remaining herbs collapsed in a cascade of wilting that spread like a wave. The formation powering the entire eastern dormitory wing flickered, dimmed, and died.
Spiritual energy reserves of the eastern wing: down thirty percent in four minutes.
"Owen? Why is it dark?"
"The formation went out."
"Formations don't go out. They're literally designed to not go out."
"Well, this one did."
Fatty Wang stopped. Looked at his hands. Flexed his fingers. "I feel weird."
Owen's blood went cold. "Weird how?"
"Good weird. Like—" Fatty Wang stood up — an achievement, since he usually treated standing as a negotiation between his body and gravity. He punched the air experimentally.
The ripple was visible this time. A wave of displaced air that traveled from his fist to the opposite wall and back, like a stone dropped in still water. It hit the hole in the wall and continued into the hallway beyond.
Fatty Wang stared at his fist. "Okay. That's new."
"What did you feel?"
"Strong. Not just physically. My Qi reserves feel full. That's never happened before. My reserves are usually described as 'technically present,' which is the sect's polite way of saying 'almost empty.'"
The connection was screamingly obvious. The humming dantian, the missing energy, Fatty Wang's inexplicable strength, the dead plants — a blind person could have seen it with the right instruments and a basic understanding of cause and effect.
Owen did not see it.
Because Owen Chen's dantian was crippled. Everyone said so. His cultivation level read as ERROR: VALUE OVERFLOW. The dantian was empty. It had always been empty. It could not absorb anything because there was nothing inside it to absorb with.
The plants wilting, the formations dying, the energy vanishing in a perfect circle around him — clearly someone else's problem.
"The sect's maintenance is terrible," Owen said.
"Owen, I just punched a ripple into the air."
"Adrenaline. Sleep-adrenaline. I just invented it." He stood up. "I'm getting water. Want water?"
"I want an explanation."
"Water is all I'm offering."
The hallway was dark. Disciples muttered about the formations dying, about the herb garden collapsing into dust. Owen kept his head down.
The water station at the end of the hall. He filled a cup, drank. The water tasted flat — ordinary water that had never heard of spiritual energy. Even the Qi had been siphoned out.
Behind him: "You're Chen Baijiu."
A tall disciple with the sharp features of someone surviving on spite and tea squinted at him. "You drained Lecture Hall C, and now the eastern wing's formations are dead and the herb garden is dust. You're doing it again, aren't you?"
"I'm drinking water."
"That's what you said in Lecture Hall C! 'I'm just breathing!' And then three people collapsed!" The disciple backed away. "Everyone! CHEN BAIJIU IS—"
A door slammed down the hall. Elder Zhao's voice, furious: "What is going on?"
Owen walked quickly back to his room, closed the door, pressed his back against it.
Fatty Wang sat on his bed, eating a meat bun produced from somewhere.
"Where did you get that?"
"Emergency buns. Under the pillow."
"Under your pillow?"
"A man needs a system."
Owen slid down the door to the floor. The dantian hummed. Outside, Elder Zhao's voice rose, accompanied by the clatter of maintenance workers with replacement formation cores.
The System appeared.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ MISSION 5 AVAILABLE! ║
║ ║
║ Mission: Cultivate alone for one hour ║
║ without causing any collateral damage ║
║ ║
║ Difficulty: ██████████ (ERROR) ║
║ (Difficulty cannot be calculated) ║
║ (The system has given up) ║
║ ║
║ Reward: +50 Cultivation Insight ║
║ (The insight is: "You are the problem") ║
║ ║
║ Penalty: +3 System favors (Total: 6) ║
║ ║
║ Deadline: Now. ║
║ ║
║ NOTE: This mission was supposed to be ║
║ assigned to someone else. ║
║ That person is having a much better ║
║ night than you. ║
║ ║
║ Collateral damage has already occurred. ║
║ Mission failed. Initiating penalty... ║
║ ║
║ ERROR: Penalty module not found. ║
║ Falling back to: Sympathy. ║
║ ║
║ Good luck, Host! ║
║ (You will need it.) ║
╚══════════════════════════════════════════╝
"The System has given up on me," Owen said.
"The what?" Fatty Wang asked through a mouthful of pork.
"Nothing. Talking to myself."
"You do that a lot."
"It's a healthy coping mechanism."
Fatty Wang finished his bun and lay back. "Hey, Owen?"
"Yeah?"
"Whatever's happening — the formations, the garden, the cold — it's not your fault."
"How do you know?"
"Because if it were your fault, you'd be doing it on purpose. And you're the least purposeful person I've ever met." He rolled over. "Also, I feel great. Whatever's happening, it's working for me. So if you could keep doing whatever you're not doing, I'd appreciate it."
He was asleep in thirty seconds.
Owen sat on the floor and looked at the dead formation. Moonlight seeped through the curtain, painting everything silver and shadow.
His dantian hummed — quieter now, not satisfied but paused, the way a stomach growls between meals. It would hunger again. More plants would die. More formations would fail. More cultivators would lose their energy. And Owen Chen would stand in the middle of it all, confused, blamed, and absolutely certain that none of it was his fault.
Outside the window, a single Silverthread Sage stem remained in the moonlit dust. White, brittle, devoid of spiritual energy. It stood alone in the center of the destruction like a gravestone.
The stem cracked. Fell. Dissolved into powder.
Owen closed the curtain. He did not sleep for a long time.