Elias Vance had spent most of his first week in the sect's outer and inner library, a dusty, cavernous space lined with countless scrolls and heavy tomes. He worked at the library as a cleaner and occasionally reading some books. He moved with a practiced quietness, acting the part of a curious but ultimately unremarkable disciple. He kept his questions simple, his gaze downcast, and his coarse outer robes meticulously clean, a small rebellion against the accumulated grime of centuries on the shelves. The outer court elders, perpetually harried and preoccupied with their own cultivation or the incessant squabbles of the less disciplined youths, barely noticed him—just another underwhelming novice hoping to touch the sky with wooden wings and more ambition than talent.
But behind his deceptively still gaze, Elias was absorbing everything. Not just the literal text, but the nuances, the underlying data. He wasn't simply reading; he was performing a high-speed, multi-threaded information ingest, processing every scrap of data. Sect history: a chronicle of power struggles, alliances, and feuds. Cultivation manuals: dense texts filled with intricate diagrams and esoteric prose. Elemental theory: vague explanations of Qi manipulation. World geography: rough maps and accounts of distant lands. Cultivation stages: a hierarchical ladder of power classifications. Sect politics: a Byzantine web of allegiances and grudges. He was building a comprehensive mental database of this Xuanwu Realm.
He now knew this world called itself the Xuanwu Realm, a name that evoked ancient, powerful beasts. The sect he now belonged to, the Emerald Sky Sect, was one of the three dominant powers in the immediate region, its prestige built on centuries of tradition and its formidable roster of elders. Their strength, he quickly discerned, came from what they called "orthodox elemental cultivation"—mastery over wind, fire, water, earth, and lightning Qi—and a strict, almost religious adherence to established doctrine.
It was also, Elias observed with a growing sense of intellectual exasperation, deeply, profoundly inefficient. They recorded cultivation breakthroughs on brittle paper scrolls, prone to decay and accidental incineration. They catalogued medicinal herbs in poorly maintained, often inaccurate registers. Internal energy pathways, the very blueprints of their spiritual power, were primarily transmitted through oral tradition, whispered from master to disciple, prone to misinterpretation and deliberate obfuscation. Most manuals were passed down through generations with accumulated errors, illegible marginal notes, or "master's insights" that were more superstition than empirically verifiable science.
It was, in Elias's own internal assessment, "a Bronze Age wrapped in silk and arrogance." A civilization capable of incredible feats of power, yet utterly devoid of the systematic approach that had unlocked Earth's technological golden age. He saw the potential, the raw energy, but also the frustrating lack of precision, the reliance on intuition over repeatable results.
He wanted to do research. Proper, rigorous research. He yearned to build instruments, to isolate variables, to scan body states with precision, to set up computational simulations, to chart double-blind experiments. He wanted to measure Qi, quantify its properties, map its flow with a precision that would make their "meridian diagrams" look like child's scribbles.
But there were no labs. No controlled environments. No structured innovation beyond rote practice and whispered ancient secrets. Everything was anecdotal. Vague. Described in poetic metaphors and ambiguous parables: "Feel the river." "Absorb the flame." "Let the heavens move through you." Elias, a man who had once debugged an AI by tracing errant nanosecond fluctuations, wanted to scream into the dusty silence of the library. He hadn't spent two decades engineering orbital AI systems and predictive physics models, or contemplating the very nature of consciousness, just to get reincarnated into a world where cultivators genuinely believed "cultivation deviation"—a disastrous Qi imbalance—was caused by "mental demons" or, more simply, a bad mood. The concept of psychological factors was foreign to their understanding of energy flow.
So, he did what any sane, driven scientist would do in his situation. He looked for a better alternative. An edge. A foundational insight into this world's underlying mechanics that no one else understood.
And he found it in something called divine sense.
Divine sense, as he gleaned from the manuals and overheard whispers, was considered an advanced tool here—something that only manifested after weeks or months of diligent, arduous cultivation, dependent heavily on inherent talent and luck. Most cultivators used divine sense as a crude spiritual torchlight, a vague sensory extension to scout surroundings or probe other cultivators' Qi.
But for Elias? It had been active the very moment he woke up in Shen Yuan's body, a low-grade, buzzing awareness that permeated his new consciousness. A side effect of his unique reincarnation, perhaps. His consciousness information—optimized by quantum collapse during his Earth accident, and further refined by the unexpected spiritual encoding as it latched onto Shen Yuan's dying signal—had entered this world already harmonized with the surrounding Qi field. This initial, rudimentary divine sense was already more attuned than most beginners, but it was, to his exacting standards, a messy, noisy, and imprecise instrument. Not up to standard for a truly scientific endeavor.
So, he decided to level it up.
In the quiet hours after lights-out, when the other outer disciples in their cramped, communal barracks were lost to their fitful dreams or silent meditations, Elias sat cross-legged in his designated meditation cell. He didn't cultivate in the conventional sense. He rewired himself.
He pictured his brain as a processor—not just metaphorically, but structurally, drawing on his profound understanding of Earth's most advanced computing architecture. He manipulated the flow of Qi within his meridians, directing it with exquisite precision into specific parts of his nervous system, using his nascent divine sense like a finely tuned programming interface.
He began with the HIPPOCAMPUS—the intricate, seahorse-shaped region responsible for long-term memory encoding and spatial navigation. With divine sense, Elias began stimulating it using low-frequency, Qi-aligned pulses, structured like carefully controlled energy voltage. What he visualized—and then meticulously executed—was a transformation of memory cells into a biological solid-state drive (SSD) system. The hippocampal neurons, already naturally layered like dense synaptic matrices, were ideal for high-fidelity data storage. By reinforcing these neurons with microbursts of directed spiritual energy, Elias stabilized them into a quasi-digital state. Each neuron, or perhaps a cluster of neurons, became a floating-gate Qi transistor.
The core concept was directly borrowed from Earth's semiconductor memory architecture: transistors with insulated gates that trap or release electrons to represent binary data. In Elias's biological system, it wasn't electrons; it was precisely controlled Qi charge packets. If a neuron's gate held a Qi packet, the neuron "fired" a 1. If it was empty, it read as 0. Thousands upon thousands of these "Qi-transistors" formed synaptic clusters, storing binary-encoded impressions of sounds, visuals, and complex sensory cues. The result? A living, breathing biological solid-state drive, with read/write fidelity measured in milliseconds, far surpassing any organic memory.
By the end of the third day, Elias had achieved full eidetic recall. He could scan a clan scroll once, allowing his eyes to pass over the words, and then replay it in perfect, pixel-sharp clarity within his mind. He could review overheard conversations in reverse, dissecting them down to the faintest vocal inflection, detecting nuances no human ear could consciously register. He could mentally dissect a complex sword technique, replaying it frame by frame, adjusting form with zero lag, perfecting his simulated muscle memory. His mind was no longer just remembering; it was archiving.
Then came the CORTEX.
If the hippocampus was storage, the cortex was computation. Elias, ever the multi-tasker, recognized the inefficiency of linear thought. He energized the prefrontal cortex (for decision-making and planning) and the parietal lobes (for sensory integration and spatial awareness) using alternating Qi patterns. He applied high-frequency spiritual currents pulsed in precisely phase-locked intervals, effectively synchronizing synaptic firing across entire neural modules. By aligning these currents, Elias induced what he called resonant processing threads—a form of biological parallel computing.
Instead of a single, linear train of thought, he now ran multiple, distinct threads simultaneously:
Thread One: Dedicated to complex logical calculations and theoretical physics problems.
Thread Two: Focused on predictive modeling and strategic planning for his cultivation path.
Thread Three: Actively monitoring and analyzing raw divine sense input, filtering out noise.
Thread Four: Dedicated to fine muscle coordination, reaction time, and optimal body posture for cultivation.
Thread Five: Handling linguistic translation and seamless code-switching between his remembered Earth languages and the local dialect.
In total, Elias had simulated the behavior of a multi-core neural CPU—a brain with distinct, specialized processors that communicated asynchronously but harmonized via incredibly precise energy timing. Where most humans could follow one train of thought at a time, Elias followed five, all running in real-time feedback loops, constantly cross-referencing and refining data. His thoughts didn't just come faster; they came simultaneously, a symphony of accelerated cognition.
Finally, he refined his sensory cortex—the crucial interface layer between inner processing and external perception. Divine sense wasn't just a vague spiritual radar to him anymore. It became a full-body sensory array, with precision-mapped feedback tied directly to Qi-induced stimuli. Every pore of his skin, every nerve ending, was now capable of detecting:
Thermal fluctuations down to 0.01°C precision, sensing minute changes in air temperature or body heat.
Air pressure gradients, allowing him to perceive the subtlest breeze or the approach of a distant storm long before it was visible.
Qi frequency harmonics, discerning the specific elemental resonance of spiritual energy in the environment.
Vibrational interference from spatial distortions, indicating subtle shifts in the fabric of space itself.
Resonance feedback from elemental laws embedded in nearby matter, essentially "reading" the latent elemental properties of rocks, plants, and water.
He likened it to building a multi-spectral LiDAR system directly inside his nervous system, using his refined divine sense as the light, Qi as the signal, and his own highly optimized brain as the receiver array. The integration was seamless, perfect. Inputs arrived as instantaneous signal pulses, each was immediately routed through a dedicated recognition thread, processed, logged, categorized, and then visualized as dynamic spatial overlays within his mind's eye. He could now "see" without light, "hear" without sound, "touch" things across a room—not through magic, but through profoundly advanced sensory cognition.
In short, Elias had engineered his mind into a living supercomputer: memory like a biological SSD, computation like a multi-core CPU, perception like a deep-space telescope, and input streams like a distributed sensor network. And all of it powered by Qi—clean, limitless, spiritual voltage.
And this wasn't the end. This was just boot-up.
He established continuous feedback loops—divine sense pulses that returned with signal-weighted metadata, which he processed like real-time scan feedback from an autonomous drone. The results came fast, astonishing even him. He could now:
Store and retrieve every single experience, every detail, every emotion, with perfect, uncorrupted precision.
Perform complex calculations—physics simulations, biological modeling, energy flow analysis—in fractions of a second.
Maintain multi-threaded perception, simultaneously processing divine sense input forward, backward, and deep within his own body.
Auto-regulate his own heartbeat, hormone levels, and nerve signals, bringing his biological processes to a state of optimized efficiency.
He tested it all on himself first, the most complex and willing guinea pig available. By the fourth day, he achieved his first non-visible application, a profound insight into this world's fundamental nature: he identified and subtly manipulated subatomic activity.
At first, it was just Qi motion. He tracked individual Qi particles through his meridians, tracing their path with his newly refined divine sense, predicting their subtle curves and eddies based on their inherent charge and resonance. But when he magnified his focus, pushing his perception deeper, beyond the traditional Qi flows—
He saw more.
He watched how Qi latched onto electrons, how it hovered in waveform densities around ions, shifting its energetic signature based on elemental resonance. He realized Qi was not an undefined "spirit vapor" or a vague mystical force. Qi was a wave-particle duality entity—something this part of the universe contained in abundance for some reason , and which obeyed natural, albeit alien, laws of vibration, resonance, and charge. It was, in essence, the fundamental, ubiquitous energy currency of this cosmos.
He ran simulations in his mind, testing hypotheses. Matched a particle's frequency. Then, with a precise, almost imperceptible nudged a single electron mid-spin, altering its quantum state with a pulse of divine sense. It jumped. A detectable, measurable shift.
He'd used divine sense to influence subatomic behavior. He had, effectively, achieved subatomic telekinesis. It was microscopic, but the implications were titanic.
Then came space lines.
On the sixth day, while scanning an ancient formation tablet in a secluded, rarely visited section of the library, Elias caught something strange. His divine sense hadn't pass through the tablet as it should have; it bounced. Off space itself. He refined the scan, pushing his newly augmented perception to its absolute limits, filtering out the noise of ambient Qi.
There were invisible lines running through the world—fibers of structured dimensional tension. Most were dormant, static like unused fiber optic cables. Some vibrated faintly, carrying subtle currents. He quickly found that energy, when aligned to certain space lines, moved faster. Cleaner. More efficiently.
And where those lines crossed? Nodes. Singular points of amplified resonance.
He found one such node in a quiet, forgotten grove just outside the library, beneath a gnarled ancient tree. He sat atop it for three hours, silent and unmoving, and felt reality itself whisper to him. At that particular node, the "concept" of fire intensified. Not the temperature. Not the burning. But the idea of fire. The fundamental, informational pattern that defined 'fire' in this universe. And Qi, passing through that node, began to behave like fire—accelerating, expanding, consuming. Not because it was fire, but because it believed it was, coerced by the underlying conceptual programming.
That's when Elias truly realized the profound nature of this world: The laws weren't fixed, immutable physical constants like on Earth. They were entangled behavioral conditions—structures born from abundant Qi, reinforced by environmental resonance, and solidified by centuries of belief and practice. The elements. The concepts of time, space, gravity, even emotion. They were patterns. Programs. Laws born from interaction and resonance.
And divine sense, his refined divine sense, could not only read them.
It could, possibly, even rewrite them.
He'd found his cheat. His hack. The root-level access to this universe's operating system.
He tested it on the seventh day, just before sunset. He sat alone in the grove behind the herb field, the air fragrant with unfamiliar blossoms, and released a micro-thread of divine sense into the humid evening air. He filtered it. Thinned it. Tuned it to the specific resonance signature of 'sound.' Then, with a calculated, precise pulse, he spiked it into a spatial node tuned to silence.
And the sound of the world around him... blinked out.
It wasn't that he was deaf. The birds continued to move, their tiny beaks opening and closing. The wind still rustled the leaves of the ancient tree. But for a perfectly defined six-meter radius around him, sound was removed—not dampened. Not blocked. It was simply… cut. The very concept of 'sound' within that localized field had been altered, muted at its core resonant frequency.
He called it Field Suppression Protocol: Type 01.
Just a test. But if divine sense, harnessed with scientific precision, could do this...
Then he could slice, amplify, or mute any aspect of reality linked to a known frequency pattern. He could rewrite the very rules of this world, not with brute force, but with elegant, precise code.
"This is a fucking root-level access," Elias whispered, the words echoing in the sudden, eerie silence of his own making, a grin finally spreading across his lips. The game had just begun.