Qingyun Sect, Outer Sect Martial Arts Arena.
The martial arts arena, usually a place for mundane chores and clearing spirit herbs, was currently suffused with a suffocating sense of oppression. Chen Tong, the sect deacon, lay unconscious from severe injuries, and Zhao Yi, the arrogant inner sect elder, was pinned to the ground by a mere outer sect menial disciple, unable to move a muscle.
The surroundings were deathly silent. The eyes of hundreds of outer sect disciples were fixed firmly on the center of the arena. Ye Chen's hand was pressed against Zhao Yi's shoulder, with faint blue light ripples flowing from his fingertips and sinking into the elder's body.
Zhao Yi's expression shifted from initial panic to a near-hysterical distortion. The Golden Core within him was trembling violently, and the century's worth of spiritual energy he had painstakingly accumulated was acting like a kite with a broken string, completely out of his control. He tried to mobilize his divine sense to resist, but under the touch of that eerie blue light, his prized Golden Core cultivation felt like a program with its modules forcibly disabled—it simply would not respond.
"Who… who exactly are you? This is absolutely not the Daoist art of the Qingyun Sect!" Zhao Yi roared in a hoarse voice, his tone filled with despair.
Ye Chen remained calm. In his vision, the flow of spiritual energy within Zhao Yi's body was clearly visible, and to him, it was riddled with loopholes.
[Command executed: Logic redundancy detected, performing redundancy cleanup...] [Process: Heavenly Tribulation hidden hazard repair (Estimated progress: 15%)]
Ye Chen did not completely destroy Zhao Yi. He was using the elder's spiritual energy as a "debugging tool." Every shred of stagnant spiritual energy he cleared away became fuel for his own cultivation growth. This method of "forced optimization" of others to nourish himself was a hundred times faster than bitter meditation.
"Your body's logic is far too bloated," Ye Chen remarked nonchalantly, as if performing daily maintenance on an old computer. "The toxins left behind by the Heavenly Tribulation that cause your meridians to rupture every full moon—you thought it was a 'Dao wound,' but in truth... it's just an unpatched logic dead-loop."
As Ye Chen's fingertips exerted pressure again, the hidden injury near Zhao Yi's heart—which had plagued him for decades—emitted a faint hum under the cutting of the code-like light. It was the sound of a hidden error being removed.
Zhao Yi's eyes widened in shock as his body jerked as if struck by lightning, freezing in place.
The next moment, a surge of majestic spiritual energy erupted from within him. It was the bottleneck of cultivation that had suppressed him for half a lifetime finally breaking. His realm, which had been stagnant for years, showed signs of loosening, and there was even a glimmer of imminent breakthrough!
"This… how is this possible?" Zhao Yi sensed the long-lost fluidity within his body in shock, forgetting for a moment that he was still pinned under Ye Chen's hand.
"Don't get too happy yet," Ye Chen said, pulling his hand away as the faint blue light at his fingertips faded. "I only repaired your runtime environment. As for your computing power cap, you'll have to handle that yourself."
Zhao Yi slumped onto the ground, his eyes complex beyond measure—filled with fear and shame, but above all, an unbelievable sense of reverence. As a Golden Core elder, his discernment was extraordinary. While he couldn't understand the "code," he clearly felt that what Ye Chen had just done was millions of times more profound than even the personal guidance of the sect's ancestors.
"Ye... Brother Ye, this old man..." Zhao Yi struggled to his feet, subconsciously using an honorific.
"Clean up the arena. I'm here to participate in the sect selection," Ye Chen said, not even glancing at him as he turned toward the registration desk at the edge of the arena.
The surrounding disciples stood in complete silence, automatically parting to clear a path for him.
The deacon at the registration desk was utterly dumbfounded, his ledger slipping from his hands unnoticed. He looked at the approaching Ye Chen, then at the respectful-looking Elder Zhao Yi in the distance, his brain sinking into a severe logic conflict.
"Ye... Ye Chen? You... you want to participate in the inner sect assessment?" the deacon's voice trembled.
"Is that not allowed?" Ye Chen raised an eyebrow slightly.
"Allowed... of course it is." The deacon shakily handed over the registration token, even waiving the usual spirit stone fee.
Ye Chen gripped the token, a hint of a curve appearing on his lips.
This was his third day in this world. In just three days, he had gone from a lowly menial to making a Golden Core elder submit, all because he possessed the "compiler." But he knew clearly that the Qingyun Sect was only the edge of this massive "system." If he wanted to truly understand the origin of this world—and perhaps even find the so-called "Developer"—he had to enter the Qingyun Sect's core database: the "Scripture Pavilion" located in the forbidden zone.
And participating in the sect selection was the only stepping stone to the core zone.
At the assessment site, a massive test stele stood in the center, used to measure spiritual root aptitude.
As Ye Chen approached the stele, several genius disciples currently undergoing assessment let out mocking laughs.
"Ye Chen? The loser in charge of clearing weeds? He actually dares to test?"
"He's probably just looking to get blasted away by the stele and lose all his face!"
Ye Chen ignored the surrounding jeers. He walked up to the stele, which detected the spiritual energy within him—concentrated spiritual energy many times that of a normal person, refined through a "compression algorithm" Ye Chen had written himself.
The moment his palm pressed against the stele, the patterns on its surface lit up instantly—not in the usual white, but in a dazzling, piercing gold that shot toward the heavens!
[System Prompt: Spiritual energy overflow detected, triggering stele verification mechanism...]
Inside the stele, the "function" responsible for recording aptitude was running wildly.
Ye Chen's brows furrowed, and he tapped the side of the stele with his fingertip. To everyone else, it looked like a casual brush, but in his eyes, he was performing a "hot patch" on the stele's judgment logic.
He modified the stele's original logic for "Superior Spiritual Root" to "System Administrator Permission Level."
"Buzz—!"
The stele emitted a groan of being overwhelmed. Immediately after, the light representing aptitude flickered frantically, eventually culminating in a line of text never before seen, to the screams of the crowd:
[Judgment Result: Undefined (Administrator Permission)]
The entire scene fell into dead silence. Even the referee in charge of the assessment widened his eyes, and some people dropped to their knees on the spot. They had never seen such a result; it was a mysterious existence that transcended all spiritual roots.
Ye Chen withdrew his hand, looking toward the distant forbidden zone with a calm expression.
"Step one, complete."