The room was dark.

  Li Wei preferred it dark.

  He sat on the floor of his rented quarters with his sword across his knees — the Dustfall Blade, which had been in his family for six generations, which he had earned the right to carry at seventeen by being the youngest Foundation-stage cultivator in the Azure Dust Sect in forty years, which he had not set down in nine days because setting it down felt like admitting something he was not ready to admit.

  His cultivation flickered.

  There it was. The flutter. The same one he'd first felt in the registration queue, when the strange young man from the Silted Bones had stood four places behind him and Li Wei's Qi had stuttered like a candle in a draft.

  It was fainter now — Chen Xi was somewhere across the city, not nearby — but it was still there. A reminder. A wound that did not close because the knife was still in the building.

  He had been told, his entire life, that cultivation was the measure of a man. Not character, not wisdom, not kindness — cultivation.

  The Azure Dust Sect's founding principle, drilled into every disciple from the first day: "your worth is your power."

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  He had believed it because the evidence supported it.

  He had been talented. He had worked hard. The world had rewarded him. The system made sense.

  Then a man with a broken dantian had walked through the ward that had imprisoned people for centuries, sold a technique for fifty thousand spirit stones, destroyed the Arena's fraud with mathematics, and done it all while accidentally stealing Li Wei's Qi without knowing or caring.

  The system didn't make sense anymore.

  Li Wei was not stupid. His instructors had called him many things — arrogant, certainly; reckless, occasionally; spoiled, in whispered tones they thought he couldn't hear — but never stupid.

  He understood what the Arena exposure meant. He understood that the institution he had devoted his life to was, at minimum, complicit in a decades-long theft scheme.

  He understood that Lin Chen's methods worked — not as a trick, not as a cheat, but as a genuinely superior approach to the physics (the word tasted foreign in his mouth, but he used it anyway) of cultivation.

  He could hate the man. He had been hating the man for two weeks, and it had been the most exhausting fortnight of his life.

  Or he could learn from him.

  The Dustfall Blade was cold across his knees.

  Six generations. Seventeen years.

  Every hour of training, every breakthrough, every moment of pride — all of it built on a system that a physicist from another world had cracked open like a walnut.

  He set the sword down.

  It made a small sound on the wooden floor. The sound of six generations of expectation being placed, gently, to one side.

  Li Wei stood.

  He straightened his civilian robes — no sect insignia, no family crest, no title. Just a man.

  He set out to find Chen Xi.