That night, the dorms did what they always did.
They made it hard to think.
People argued in low voices over nothing and everything. Someone laughed too loudly and then stopped as if remembering that laughter was a provocation. Feet thumped on floorboards. Straw shifted. The air held the stale mix of sweat, smoke, and damp cloth that never fully dried.
Yuan He lay on his bunk with his hands folded over his abdomen and told himself he was resting.
His ribs had earned rest.
His stomach had earned rest.
His mind did not understand the concept.
One recorded point.
One bowl of gray paste.
One weak, repeatable heaviness that appeared in his gut if he breathed the same way twice.
He felt the temptation to treat those facts like a miracle. He also felt the opposing temptation to treat them like proof that the next step would work if he only pushed harder.
Both temptations were how people died.
"Don't get excited," he whispered into the straw. "Excitement is just panic with better posture."
He waited until the dorm's noise sank into something closer to sleep. Not quiet, never quiet. Just less attention.
When he was sure nobody was watching his bunk out of boredom, he slid off the straw and moved with the care of a man stealing time.
He took the beginner manual from inside his robe. The pages had softened slightly from use. He opened it to the section he had skimmed before and not understood well enough to be offended by.
Five elements.
Most disciples focused on one, the manual said. Those with two or three could still be cultivated into something useful. Four was rare, a mixed blessing, "difficult but possible."
Five was…
The ink was polite about it. The tone wasn't. It called five elements "scattered," "unfocused," "slow to refine," and, in the margin, a note from some long-dead instructor had written: "Do not waste years chasing what cannot be condensed."
Yuan He stared at that line.
"Waste years," he murmured. "Sir, I would love to have years."
He flipped back to the diagrams. The manual described the basic qi-gathering method as if qi were water and the dantian a cup. You breathed, you gathered, you condensed. It described each element as a "nature" that could be cultivated more easily if it matched your root.
The problem was obvious to him now in the way a problem became obvious only after it had already punched you in the ribs.
If you tried to pour five different liquids into one cup at once, you didn't get more water.
You got a mess.
It didn't mean cups were useless. It meant the method assumed you were pouring one thing.
He turned the page and found a short paragraph he had ignored earlier because it read like one of those lines meant to sound wise.
"Those of mixed roots must first pursue harmony. If you cannot make the natures coexist without conflict, you will never condense."
Harmony.
The word sat there like an accusation.
He almost laughed.
"You want harmony?" he whispered. "Screw that. You're gonna get interlocking tangles like a princess in a tower with too much hair."
He closed the manual and looked around the dorm. Shadows. Sleeping shapes. The occasional shifting body. A man coughed and muttered something vulgar in his sleep.
No one was looking at him.
Good.
He slid the manual back into his robe and pressed his palm lightly over his lower abdomen, where he'd felt that faint settling earlier.
He needed a rule that would keep him alive.
On Earth, when you couldn't see the thing you were trying to control, you didn't pretend you could. You designed for feedback. You designed for failure.
He took a slow breath.
Four in.
One hold.
Six out.
There it was again: the faint heaviness, like an anchor settling low. Not dramatic. Not warm. Not powerful. Just present.
He did it once more, exactly the same way, to make sure he wasn't lying to himself.
Four in.
One hold.
Six out.
The familiar feeling returned.
"Okay," he murmured. "I'll call that my steady state."
The steady state didn't mean "normal." It meant "repeatable." It meant if I do this, I get that.
Everything else would be measured against it.
He stood, because the dorm didn't allow a private laboratory. So he would use the herb yard, where people were too busy to care about a weak disciple breathing strangely behind drying racks.
Night air was cooler. The herb yard smelled sharper, cleaner, as if the plants judged the dorm's human stink and refused to accept it.
He found the same corner behind the drying racks. The ground was cold under him. The racks were a dark fence of woven reeds and hanging bundles.
He sat and listened.
A distant shout. A laugh. A dog barking somewhere outside the sect walls. A soft rustle as a worker shifted in a nearby shed, maybe sleeping, maybe not.
No footsteps near him.
Good enough.
He put his hands in the seal from the manual and set his tongue and unclenched his jaw.
"New rule," he whispered. "If I can't repeat it, it's not real."
He ran his breathing cadence twice, slowly, until he returned to steady state.
Then he did it again. Same result.
Repeatable.
Now for the interlock.
He had heard the five elements described as generation and restraint, as cycles instead of piles. He didn't trust himself to recite doctrine, but the structure was what mattered.
Wood feeds fire. Fire makes earth. Earth bears metal. Metal enriches water. Water nourishes wood.
A loop.
Not five things at once.
One step stabilizing the next.
Interlock.
He tasted the word and decided he liked it.
"Elemental Interlock," he murmured, the name private, almost embarrassed. "Because 'stop dying' doesn't fit on a page."
He wasn't going to write it down anyway.
No paper trail.
Not yet.
He needed the smallest possible experiment.
A micro-step.
Something that could not hurt him even if it failed.
He thought about which element sounded least likely to burn him from the inside.
Fire was exciting. Fire was obvious. Fire killed.
So he started with earth.
Earth was heavy.
Earth was stable.
Earth already matched what his anchor felt like.
"Earth," he whispered, barely moving his lips.
He breathed normally once, returning to steady state, then on the next inhale he held only one change in his attention: weight, settling, sand in a jar.
He exhaled.
The anchor settled again, faintly clearer.
Or maybe he wanted it to be clearer.
He refused to trust "maybe."
"Again," he told himself quietly.
Neutral breath. Back to steady state.
Earth-focused breath. Still steady.
He paused, breathing normally, and checked himself like he was checking a gauge.
Ribs: sore, unchanged.
Head: clear.
Stomach: not empty. Thank the gray paste!
Dizziness: none.
Heat: none.
Agitation: none.
Good.
No new pain. No drift. No weird pressure rising into his chest.
"Okay," he said softly. "Earth doesn't bite."
That was an embarrassingly low bar.
It was also the first honest bar he had.
Now the interlock required a second element.
Earth bears metal.
Metal, the manual said, was "cutting" and "sharp."
He didn't like sharp things inside his body.
He also didn't like helplessness.
"Metal," he whispered, as if testing whether the word itself would stab him.
He took the neutral breath first, returning to a steady state, then earth again. Then he added a single breath with metal as the only new change in attention: boundary, edge, definition.
He exhaled.
A faint prickling ran along his forearms, like static after pulling cloth too fast.
He froze.
Not from fear, but from discipline.
A new sensation.
New could be a boon.
New could also be the start of a problem.
He breathed normally and waited.
The prickling faded without leaving heat behind, without making his head swim, without tightening his chest.
He exhaled slowly.
"Okay," he whispered, and the word came out almost reverent. "That's different."
He didn't call it a breakthrough. He didn't call it progress.
He called it what it was.
"Repeat test," he muttered.
He ran the same sequence again, carefully:
Neutral breath, to return to steady state.
Earth breath, to keep it stable.
Metal breath, to see if the prickling returned.
It did.
Weaker, but in the same place, and at the same step.
Repeatable.
He sat very still behind the racks, night air cooling the sweat at the back of his neck.
"Okay," he whispered, and then corrected himself immediately, because words were where lies began. "It's repeatable at the very least."
He stopped for the night.
Not because he was satisfied.
Because he had promised himself a cap, and the cap was the only thing standing between him and the old instinct to override the interlocks.
He wanted to keep going. He could feel the greedy part of his brain that wanted to stack water and wood and fire in one sitting, like he could brute-force a system into behaving.
He swallowed it.
"Tomorrow," he told himself quietly. "One variable at a time."
He stood and slid back toward the dorms before the yard could decide he was suspicious.
As he walked, he repeated the protocol in his head until it felt like a groove he could step into.
Neutral for steady state.
Earth to stabilize.
Metal to draw boundaries.
Stop and assess.
Success criteria: steady state, prickling appears on the same step, recovery feels normal.
Failure criteria: pressure spike, dizziness, nausea, heat, agitation, anything that doesn't match the last run.
He reached his bunk and lay down, letting the straw press into his bruises.
He stared into the dark and whispered, so softly it barely existed, "If this works, it won't look like anything."
That was fine.
He wasn't trying to look impressive.
He was trying to stop being helpless.