"You need to be flashier," Little Abacus said.

  They were sitting behind the eastern stands.

  Wu Zheng had produced, from the apparently bottomless resources of his culinary imagination, a set of meat buns filled with something he called "spirit pork" — which was regular pork, he admitted when pressed, enhanced by being steamed over a pot of diluted spirit stone water, a technique he had invented in the Silted Bones using considerably less appetising raw materials.

  The buns were exceptional.

  "I don't need to be flashier," Chen Xi said. "I need to be efficient."

  "You need to be both. Nobody bet on you in that fight because nobody understood what you did.

  The betting pools drive half the attention at the Conference. No bets, no attention. No attention, no reputation. No reputation—"

  "I don't need a reputation."

  "You need people to know what you can do. That's a reputation. Right now, the commentators are calling your win a 'technical anomaly.' Do you know what that means in tournament culture?"

  "It means they think it was a fluke."

  "It means they think it was a fluke."

  Little Abacus bit into his bun, chewed thoughtfully, and continued with his mouth full.

  "The Crimson Lotus woman — Petal Lady, I'm calling her Petal Lady — she used forty-seven times more energy than she needed, and the crowd LOVES her.

  She's the favourite for the whole tournament. Because she LOOKED powerful."

  "She was powerful. Just wasteful."

  "In cultivation, looking powerful IS being powerful. Half of combat is the other person's belief about what you can do.

  If they think you're weak, they attack aggressively. If they think you're devastating, they hesitate. Hesitation is an opening."

  Chen Xi looked at the boy with renewed assessment. "That's not a bad tactical insight for a chestnut vendor."

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  "I've watched three hundred and twelve tournament matches from the chestnut section. You learn things."

  Su Yiran, who had been reviewing her arena measurements with a concentration that precluded participation in the conversation, looked up.

  "He's right. Your next opponent is Liu Fang from the White Crane Sect. Her technique is called Celestial Crane Dance — it manifests as visible energy constructs shaped like crane wings.

  She's defensive-counter, meaning she waits for an attack, reads the pattern, and responds.

  Against your current approach — which is to stand still for four seconds and then flick your wrist — she will read your single-pulse attack, adapt, and counter before you can follow up."

  "So I need a more complex attack pattern."

  "You need a more complex VISIBLE attack pattern. She can't counter what she can't perceive.

  But if all your attacks are invisible resonance pulses, the referees might call it for inaction. The tournament has engagement rules."

  Chen Xi considered this. He had, in fact, been thinking about the spectacle problem.

  Not from a reputational standpoint — he genuinely did not care whether the crowd appreciated his methods — but from an information-gathering standpoint.

  Every opponent he faced gave him data on a different technique. The more opponents he faced, the richer his dataset.

  To face more opponents, he needed to advance through the bracket. To advance through the bracket reliably, he needed the referees to recognise his wins as decisive rather than ambiguous.

  He needed, in other words, to make the invisible visible.

  "What if," he said slowly, "I showed the resonance?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "The resonance pulse is invisible because it's a single-frequency wave in the Qi spectrum.

  But I could generate a harmonic cascade — multiple frequencies simultaneously — which would produce visible interference patterns.

  Like light through a prism. The combat effect would be identical, but the visual output would be..." He paused, searching for the word.

  "Flashy?" Little Abacus offered.

  "Demonstrable."

  Wu Zheng, who had been eating buns and listening with the comfortable silence of a man who had long ago accepted that the people around him were going to do interesting things whether or not he fully understood them, spoke up. "Make it look like lightning."

  Everyone turned.

  "The crowd understands lightning," Wu Zheng said.

  "Fast, bright, obviously dangerous. If your resonance thing can be made to look like lightning, every person in that arena will understand immediately that you hit the other fighter with lightning, and that the other fighter fell down.

  Simple. Effective. Nobody calls lightning a 'technical anomaly.'"

  Chen Xi ran the mathematics.

  A harmonic cascade in the visible spectrum, structured to produce branching discharge patterns... it was unnecessary.

  It was wasteful. It would reduce his combat efficiency by approximately eight percent.

  "Eight percent," he muttered.

  "Eight percent of your efficiency for a hundred percent of the crowd knowing what you did," Little Abacus said. "That's a trade."

  "It's a bad trade."

  "It's a HUMAN trade. Not everything optimises on a single axis."

  Chen Xi looked at the fifteen-year-old chestnut vendor and former spectator-section data analyst, and conceded that the boy had a point that his models had not accounted for.

  "Fine," he said. "Lightning."