The morning routine of the Iron Blood Sect was a masterclass in human inefficiency.
At four in the morning, under a sky that was still a dark, vibrating grey, all two hundred outer disciples were lined up in the courtyard. The ground was composed of jagged, uneven slate tiles that clipped into each other at odd angles. Standing at the front of the courtyard was Elder Iron Mountain, a man whose muscles looked like they had been sculpted from stale beef jerky and whose face was permanently set in a grimace of profound constipation.
"The Dao is forged in endurance!" Elder Iron Mountain roared, his voice sending a shockwave that made the low-resolution clouds in the sky-box shudder. "For the next nine hours, you will stand on your left leg! You will not move! You will not breathe through your mouth! If your foot touches the stone, your flesh will be stripped by the whip! If you complain, your family will be billed for the whip's wear and tear!"
Around me, disciples immediately hoisted their right legs, sweating profusely, their eyes wide with religious terror.
I looked at Han. He was already trembling, his left leg wobbling like a jelly dessert in an earthquake. "I can do this," Han whispered, his glasses slipping down his nose, caught in the sweat of his upper lip. "The energy of the earth... the strength of the iron... oh gods, my calf is already on fire. Caelan, please, just lift your leg. Don't do anything stupid."
"No," I said, dropping my shovel onto the stone with a loud, metallic clang. "This is a terrible utilization of resources. Standing on one leg for nine hours is not 'forging the Dao.' It's an ergonomics nightmare. If I were running this sect, I'd have a union strike on my hands before breakfast. Where is the ROI? What is the core competency being developed here? Balancing? If a demonic beast attacks, are we going to hop at it?"
Han looked at me. Then at the Elder. Then back at me. Then he reached down, grabbed my ankle, and physically tried to lift my leg into the air.
"Lift. Your. Leg," he grunted, straining against my dead weight. "I am not going to die because you decided to unionize the morning workout. Lift it!"
I did not lift it.
Instead of lifting my leg, I sat down. Then I leaned back, crossed my legs in a lazy lotus position, and closed my eyes.
"What... what are you doing?" Han gasped, his leg giving a violent twitch. "You're sitting! You're actually sitting down!"
"I'm initiating a passive optimization protocol," I said, folding my arms behind my head. "It's called a nap. It has a much higher recovery rate than hopping on one foot like a half-plucked chicken. If the author wants to pad this chapter with description of physical torture, they can do it on someone else's screen. I'm taking my scheduled break."
A shadow fell over me. It was a cold, heavy shadow that smelled of old copper and bad temper.
I opened one eye.
Elder Iron Mountain was standing directly in front of me. Floating right above his head, in bold, glowing red letters that only I could see, was his system-rendered title:
[SECT ELDER IRON MOUNTAIN - LEVEL 45 - HP: 12,000/12,000]
"You," the Elder rumbled, the air around him growing heavy with spiritual pressure that felt like gravity being turned up to eleven. "You dare defile the morning forge? You dare sit in my presence, commoner?"
"Gramps, please," I said, yawning. "Your spiritual pressure is venting at a sixty-percent loss. You're squeezing the air around you, but you're not actually directing it at me. It's just a waste of atmospheric pressure. If you keep this up, you're going to give yourself a hernia."
The Elder's face turned a shade of crimson that wasn't even on the standard color wheel. "Impudent cur! I will grind your bones to paste!"
"Wait, let me help myself," I said.
I reached up into the empty air directly above his head. To the Elder and the surrounding disciples, I was just reaching up to grab nothing. But my fingers wrapped around the glowing red letters of his title: [SECT ELDER IRON MOUNTAIN]. I dragged the invisible text down, folded the word MOUNTAIN in half to make a nice, rigid wedge, and slid it under my lower back.
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To everyone else, I had just reached up, made a folding motion in the empty air, and then leaned back—except instead of falling over, I remained hovering at a comfortable forty-five-degree angle, leaning against a completely invisible, solid backrest.
"Ah, that's better," I sighed, adjusting my position against the invisible wedge. "The lumbar support in this courtyard is practically non-existent. Thanks, Gramps. You can keep the SECT ELDER part floating up there if you want, but I'm keeping the mountain."
The entire courtyard went dead silent. Disciples stopped trembling; several of them actually fell off their one leg in sheer shock.
Elder Iron Mountain backed up a step, his fists trembling. He stared at me hovering in mid-air against nothing. "You... you hover without qi? No... there is no spiritual ripple. You use a spatial treasure?! Where is it hidden?!"
"He... he is sitting on nothing," Han whispered, his voice squeaking so high only dogs could hear it. He took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, put them back on, stared for five full seconds, then carefully placed his shovel on the ground, sat down cross-legged, and closed his eyes.
"I am meditating," he announced. "I am going to achieve inner peace while the insane man who adopted me steals the Elder's name. This is my life now."
"I told you, Han, it's all just poorly compiled data," I said, patting the invisible support beneath my hip. "If you don't treat it like magic, it doesn't act like magic."
Elder Iron Mountain's face was a mixture of absolute fury and deep, existential confusion. "Insolent brat! If you think your little tricks can save you, let us see how you handle the Iron Blood Bone-Crusher Method! It is a high-grade technique of our sect! To learn it takes ten years of bone-breaking labor! I will imprint it upon your soul!"
He raised his hand. A dark, metallic black energy began to swirl around his palm, the sound of grinding iron echoing through the courtyard. He began to recite the technique's chant, his voice deep and rhythmic:
"By the blood of the forge, the bones shall turn to iron! The breath flows through the third meridian, circling the gate of the spleen, rising like a dragon of soot—"
"Stop, stop, stop," I interrupted, waving my hand dismissively. "That is the most bloated, inefficient piece of logic I have ever heard. Let me see that."
I reached out and grabbed the floating text of his chant as it materialized in the air for my eyes only: `[The breath flows through the third meridian, circling the gate of the spleen...]`
I pulled the invisible sentence toward me, squinting at the empty space in my hands.
"Look at this," I said, pointing a finger at what looked like thin air to everyone else. "Why are you routing the qi through the spleen? The spleen is a blood-filtering organ. It has zero capacity for thermal or kinetic energy storage. By routing the flow there, you're creating a massive bottleneck in your circulation. It's like routing Glasgow's traffic through a single-lane dirt road in the Highlands. No wonder your face is red; your blood pressure must be through the roof."
"What... what are you talking about?" the Elder stammered, the black energy around his hand flickering and weakening. He stared at my finger pointing at nothing. "The ancestors—"
"The ancestors were idiots who didn't understand basic biology," I snapped, breaking the invisible word spleen off my text and throwing it over my shoulder. "If you route the breath directly from the third meridian to the diaphragm, bypassing the spleen entirely, you reduce the cycle time from four seconds to 1.2 seconds. And you don't get the acid reflux. Watch."
I took a deep breath. I didn't have meridians, but I had the system's wireframe logic. I simply imagined the energy path shortening, editing the local physics in my immediate sector.
A sudden, sharp blast of black, metallic energy erupted from my chest, blowing back the hair of every disciple in the first three rows. The force of the wind was so strong it knocked Elder Iron Mountain back three steps, his boots dragging tracks in the slate tiles.
I let out the breath, a small wisp of black smoke escaping my lips. "See? Much faster. And I didn't even have to break a single bone. It's called process optimization, Gramps. You should try it."
Elder Iron Mountain stared at me. His mouth was wide open, a tiny trickle of drool forming at the corner. To him, I had just pointed at empty air, muttered about a spleen bottleneck, and then unleashed a perfectly optimized version of his sect's ultimate technique without using any cultivation base.
"One... second..." he whispered. "He... he mastered the Bone-Crusher Method... in one second... and he optimized it..."
"He's a monster," a disciple in the front row whispered, dropping his shovel and running out of the gates. "He's an ancient demon in the guise of a mortal!"
"Run! The insane student is going to eat our cores!" another yelled.
Within ten seconds, half the outer disciples had fled the courtyard, screaming about demons and spreadsheets.
Han slowly lowered his leg, standing on both feet for the first time in hours. He walked over to me, his face completely pale, his hands twitching. He looked down at the empty space beneath my back where I was still leaning.
"Caelan," Han said, his voice flat and dead.
"Yeah, Han?"
"Who the fuck are you talking to when you look at the reader?"
"Oh, you know. The guys who are currently reading this on their screens. They're probably thinking I'm a bit too OP, but honestly, this whole system is so poorly coded it's practically begging to be hacked."
Han slowly knelt down, grabbed his head, and pressed his forehead against the slate tiles. "Please, void-demon. Please don't delete my family. I'll sweep the courtyard. I'll sweep the whole world. Just don't make my spleen explode."
"Get up, Han," I sighed, standing up and letting the invisible support dissolve. "We have rocks to shovel. Or rather, we have a database to query. Gramps here is going to be out of commission for a while."
I looked at Elder Iron Mountain. He was currently sitting on the ground, tracing circles in the dirt with his finger, mumbling, "The spleen... is a bottleneck... my life... has been a lie..."
"Yeah, he's definitely going to need some counseling," I muttered, slinging my shovel over my shoulder. "Let's go, Han. Before they try to make me the CEO of this dump."