The cracks on the training ground's stone tablet spread like a spiderweb, finally collapsing into fine powder with a mournful groan.
The golden characters—[Judgment Result: Insufficient Permissions (Administrator Level)]—were branded into the retinas of every Qingyun Sect disciple. Elder Zhao Yi knelt on the cold ground, trembling; he didn't even dare to look at Ye Chen's back. He knew all too well that in that moment, in the eyes of this mere handyman—no, this mysterious entity—he might as well have been a line of "redundant code" subject to instant deletion.
Ye Chen pulled his hand back, the blue light at his fingertips receding like a tide. Paying no mind to the pile of rubble, he walked straight toward the registration desk for the inner-sect examination.
"Name?" The registrar's throat was dry, his voice trembling; the fingers holding the roster were bone-white.
"Ye Chen."
"…Cultivation level, Qi Refining Stage 4." As the registrar wrote this down, his hand shook so violently he nearly punctured the parchment. A Qi Refining Stage 4 disciple shattering the Spirit-Testing Tablet and subduing a Golden Core Elder? This logic defied every cultivation manual in existence.
Ye Chen took the token and turned to leave.
However, the moment he stepped out of the training ground gate, an invisible pressure descended from the sect's deepest forbidden area. It was the divine sense of a Nascent Soul cultivator, vast as the ocean, instantly enveloping the entire Qingyun Sect.
"Who dares to pry into the foundation of the sect?"
A venerable voice, filled with boundless authority, resonated through the void. The Qingyun Sect's Old Ancestor, a Nascent Soul powerhouse who had been in seclusion for a century, had been disturbed by the fluctuations caused by the destruction of the tablet.
The outer-sect disciples fell to their knees, vomiting blood under the pressure. Even Zhao Yi found it difficult to breathe. This was absolute hierarchical suppression—the manifestation of "maximum computing power" within the laws of the cultivation world.
Ye Chen stopped. He looked up, his gaze piercing through the layers of clouds and locking onto the forbidden area behind the Scripture Pavilion. In his field of vision, that divine sense was not formless; it was a stream of extremely complex, dense, dark-gold binary code.
[System Warning: High-tier reconnaissance process in progress…] [Match Source: Qingyun Sect Old Ancestor] [Threat Level: High]
"So, you've finally come?" Ye Chen's mouth curled into a cold smirk.
Just as the dark-gold divine sense was about to touch his body, Ye Chen neither dodged nor defended. Instead, he proactively opened an "interface."
"Since you want to see, I'll let you see everything."
To outsiders, Ye Chen was merely standing there, looking indifferent. But in that instant, only Ye Chen and the Old Ancestor knew what had truly transpired.
The Old Ancestor's divine sense, like a diving dragon, had surged into Ye Chen's "consciousness space" with aggressive momentum. He had intended to wipe out this ant who had caused such a disturbance, but the moment his consciousness touched the sea of Ye Chen's mind, he felt as if he had stepped into a completely alien, terrifying interdimensional space.
There was no consciousness sea, no Dantian—only a vast, boundless ocean of blue light.
Countless leaping runes, complex algorithmic structures, and layered, nested logic firewalls were woven into a labyrinth of extreme precision. The moment the Old Ancestor's divine sense entered, it was swept away by a massive torrent of logic.
"What is this? This is not the consciousness of a cultivator…" The Old Ancestor's soul trembled. He realized with horror that his proud Nascent Soul divine sense was as fragile as a toy in the hands of a child before this blue ocean.
He attempted to retract his divine sense, but it was too late.
Ye Chen gave a light snap of his fingers.
[Command: Trigger Firewall Trap — Infinite Loop Encryption]
A string of unbreakable encryption commands was instantly injected into the Old Ancestor's consciousness. This string of commands coiled around the core of the Old Ancestor's divine sense like a suffocating knot.
Deep within the restricted seclusion chamber:
The Qingyun Sect's Old Ancestor violently spat out a mouthful of blood, his body convulsing as if struck by lightning. He attempted to break the bizarre "code" in his mind, but every calculation led him into a deeper, recursive loop, causing his divine sense to dissipate further with every struggle.
"Damn it! What kind of entity is this!" The Old Ancestor was terrified. In his six hundred years of life, he had never encountered such eerie methods; he felt as if his soul was being "formatted" by a higher-dimensional power.
A moment later, the Nascent Soul pressure that had suppressed the entire sect retreated in a panic.
Outside the training ground, Ye Chen looked calm as ever. He smoothed his sleeves, sensing the small fragment of the Old Ancestor's memory he had "force-read" now stored in his mind. The blue light in his eyes faded.
From the Old Ancestor's memories, he not only confirmed that there was indeed a "bottom-layer logic hub" buried beneath the Scripture Pavilion, but he also learned some secrets about this world—that it was indeed crumbling through constant, flawed "self-iteration."
"It seems this so-called cultivation world is not far from a total format."
Ye Chen murmured to himself. He walked toward the inner sect, his silhouette appearing remarkably tall against the setting sun.
Only then did the surrounding outer-sect disciples recover from the suffocating pressure. They looked at Ye Chen with eyes filled not just with awe, but with extreme worship and fear. They didn't understand what had happened; they only knew that even the Old Ancestor's divine sense seemed to have been defeated by this handyman.
"What is your name?" one disciple asked, summoning his courage, his voice trembling.
Ye Chen didn't look back. He said indifferently, "Just a maintenance worker here to patch a bug."
After he left, Zhao Yi slumped to the ground. Looking at the direction Ye Chen had departed, his heart was in turmoil. He finally understood why he had knelt, and why the tablet had shattered.
Because in front of this man, the millennium-old traditions of the Qingyun Sect were nothing more than a game that could be reset at any time.
And in this game, Ye Chen was the only player.