The encounter with Yan Rong was a pebble dropped into the still pond of Lin Feng's existence. The ripples were faint, almost invisible, but they disturbed the perfect, cold surface of his calculated obscurity. A direct disciple, however junior, had noticed him. Not just as a function, but with a flicker of personal curiosity. In the ecosystem of the sect, this was a new variable. Variables required monitoring.
He returned to his routines with renewed intensity. The Scriptorium dust held no answers, but it offered camouflage. The herb garden, with its catalogue of small, profitable failures, was his laboratory. And his own body was the primary experiment.
With eight Karma points in reserve, he felt a semblance of security. Enough for a major analysis, or several targeted interventions. He spent one point to refine his internal "buffer" technique further, creating a more stable baffle between his fire and earth affinities. The improvement was marginal his overall efficiency crept from an abysmal 6% to perhaps 6.3% but it was progress. Progress he measured in decimal points and paid for with cosmic currency.
His days fell into a rhythm of quiet, incremental advancement. It was shattered one afternoon by a sound that was utterly foreign to the outer disciple mountains: panic.
It began as a distant commotion, a rising tide of shouts and running feet from the direction of the central training grounds. Then, a bell began to ring not the measured toll of the schedule bell, but a frantic, discordant clanging that spoke of emergency.
Lin Feng, who had been on his way back from the garden, stopped. Disciples streamed past him, their faces alight with a mix of fear and morbid excitement.
"broke through the containment arrays!"
"from the Beast Taming Peak!"
"Heavenly Spirit Root! They say it's attracted pure energy!"
He caught the fragments and pieced them together. A spirit beast. A powerful one. Escaped. And it was headed this way?
A collective gasp rose from the crowd ahead. Lin Feng moved to the edge of the path, looking down into a wide, rock-strewn valley that served as a buffer zone between disciple quarters. There, moving with impossible, sinuous grace, was the creature.
It was a Jade-Scaled Cloud Python. A beast he'd only seen in the basic bestiary manuals. It was as thick as a temple pillar, its scales shimmering with an emerald and silver iridescence. Its head was the size of a small cart, with intelligent, golden eyes that held not mindless rage, but a focused, predatory curiosity. It was a mid-tier spirit beast, equivalent to a late-stage Foundation Establishment cultivator a being far beyond anything the outer disciples could hope to face.
And it was not rampaging. It was hunting. Its tongue flicked out, tasting the air, and its gaze swept over the clusters of terrified disciples as if sorting through a buffet of weak spiritual signatures.
Elder shouts echoed as a few inner disciples and a hall master arrived, forming a cautious perimeter. They held glowing talismans and drawn swords, but their faces were pale. Containing it would be difficult. Driving it back would require serious force, and the valley was full of fragile outer disciples.
"Form up! Fall back in an orderly manner!" a hall master bellowed, but the crowd's discipline was crumbling into a stampede.
Lin Feng was about to join the retreat, his mind already calculating the safest egress route, when he saw it.
A flash of color amid the grey and brown rocks. A figure in soft peach-colored robes, standing frozen on a low outcropping, directly in the python's line of sight. She was young, perhaps fourteen, her hair in two simple loops. Her face was not contorted in terror, but held a look of profound, bewildered sadness as she stared at the approaching behemoth, as if it were a misunderstood puppy. In her hands, she clutched a small, glowing jade pendant that pulsed with a gentle, incredibly pure light.
Heavenly Spirit Root. The words from the gossip slammed into him. Attracted to pure energy.
The girl's pendant was a lighthouse in a sea of muddy spiritual noise. The python's head swung toward her, its golden eyes locking on. A low, resonant hiss filled the valley, vibrating in Lin Feng's bones.
The inner disciples shouted, launching attacks. Swords of light and bursts of flame splashed harmlessly against the python's shimmering scales. It ignored them, its sinuous body beginning to coil, preparing to strike at the girl on the rock.
Her name surfaced from the collective memory of the outer disciple Lin Feng, Xiao Rou. A recent addition, whispered about. A prodigy from a subsidiary family, brought to the sect for her unparalleled talent. Sheltered. Naive. And now, catatonically brave or simply too innocent to comprehend her doom.
The hall master roared, charging forward, but he was too far away. The python struck.
Its movement was a blur of jade and silver. Not toward the girl, but past her. Its massive tail, moving with whip-crack speed, smashed into the outcropping just below her feet.
The rock shattered. Xiao Rou cried out, a sound of pure surprise, not fear, as she tumbled through the air, the glowing pendant flying from her grasp. The python's head snaked around, its maw opening to catch both girl and treasure in one bite.
This was it. The trope in its rawest form. The Naive Prodigy Faces Mortal Danger. Usually, a hidden elder would save her, or she'd unleash her latent power. But Lin Feng saw no hidden elder. And Xiao Rou, plummeting toward the python's jaws, had only that look of sad confusion on her face.
Karmic Opportunity Detected: Subversion of 'Damsel-in-Distress/Prodigy Awakening' Trope. High Risk. Potential Yield: 8-15 Points.
The reward was staggering. The risk was instant, messy death.
Lin Feng's body moved before his conscious mind could veto it. He wasn't heroic. He was calculating. Fifteen points. A fortune. And the subversion not by being stronger, but by being smarter. By understanding the mechanics of the trope.
He didn't run toward the python. He ran laterally, toward the tumbling, glowing jade pendant. It was the source. The lure.
The python's head tracked the falling girl, but one golden eye flicked toward the spinning, glowing prize. A split-second of predatory indecision.
Lin Feng dove, sliding on the rough stone, his hand closing over the pendant. The moment he touched it, a wave of pure, unadulterated spiritual energy washed over him. It was like diving into a sunlit spring after a lifetime in a sewer. It was intoxicating, overwhelming. His Miscellaneous Roots screamed in chaotic delight and agony.
He didn't try to absorb it. He couldn't. It would vaporize his fragile channels. He did something else. He focused every ounce of his Conscious Focus, every shred of will honed by months of mental discipline. He took that overwhelming, pure energy radiating from the pendant and he shaped it. Not into a technique. Into a concept.
He imagined the pendant's purity not as light, but as sound. A single, piercing, high-frequency note that spoke of absolute, pristine emptiness. A spiritual dog-whistle.
And he slammed that imagined concept, using the pendant as a focusing lens, directly into the chaotic storm of his own five elemental affinities.
The effect was instantaneous and violent. His conflicting roots didn't harmonize. They cancelled each other out in a localized, catastrophic resonance centered on the pendant. The five colors in his spiritual vision red, blue, yellow, green, white collided in a silent explosion of grey negation.
A pulse of null energy erupted from him.
It had no power. It dealt no damage. But to a spirit beast that sensed the world through spiritual energy, to a creature currently fixated on a beacon of pure light, it was the equivalent of a sudden, blinding flashbang followed by absolute sensory void.
The Jade-Scaled Cloud Python recoiled as if struck. Its golden eyes widened in confusion and what might have been pain. The pure signal it was hunting had vanished, replaced by a brief, shocking hole of nothingness in the spiritual landscape. It hissed, shaking its massive head, its coordinated strike faltering.
That half-second of recoil was all the hall master needed. A blazing spear of condensed fire energy, launched from his full power, slammed into the python's side, not to pierce, but to shove. The beast was knocked sideways, its trajectory altered.
Xiao Rou hit the ground not in its mouth, but three meters to the side, rolling painfully but alive into a gully.
The python, now injured and disoriented, let out an enraged bellow. But its focus was broken. More inner disciples arrived, their combined attacks driving it back toward the containment arrays from which it had escaped. The battle shifted, becoming a war of attrition the sect could win.
No one was looking at the gully where Xiao Rou lay. And no one was looking at Lin Feng, who was on his hands and knees, vomiting nothing, his entire spiritual sense ringing with a deafening silence. The backlash from forcing his own roots into momentary nullification was immense. He felt hollowed out, his dantian aching with a strange, vacuum-like pain. The pendant, now dull and inert in his clenched fist, felt like a lump of ice.
He staggered to his feet, the world swimming. He saw the hall master directing the fight, saw disciples tending to the shocked Xiao Rou. His part was over. Invisible. A random outer disciple who had stumbled and fallen.
He turned and limped away, back toward the dormitories, clutching the nullified pendant. Each step sent jolts of spiritual nausea through him. But in his chest, a familiar warmth began to bloom, spreading through the hollow ache. It was deep, profound, and immense.
Karmic Thread Violently Altered. High-Risk Trope Subversion: Successful. Direct causal intervention preventing 'Fated Death/ Awakening' event.
Karma Points Gained: +12.
Current Karma Balance: 20.
Twenty points. A king's ransom. Earned in a single, terrifying gamble. He had faced a Foundation Establishment beast not with strength, but with a precisely timed application of his own spiritual dysfunction. He had weaponized his trash constitution.
Back in the empty dormitory, he collapsed onto his pallet. The spiritual vacuum inside him slowly filled back in with the normal, chaotic trickle of energy. The pain receded, leaving behind a profound fatigue and a crystal-clear understanding.
He looked at the pendant in his hand. It was just a piece of pretty jade now, its energy utterly spent in that brief, forced resonance. A disposable treasure. He tucked it away. A souvenir.
Hours later, as twilight fell, a soft knock came at the dormitory door. It was unprecedented. He opened it.
Xiao Rou stood there. Her peach robes were torn and dusty, one cheek scraped. But her eyes, those wide, bewildered eyes, were clear. They held no hero-worship, no gratitude tinged with romance. They held a deep, unsettling curiosity.
"You took my grandmother's pendant," she said, her voice soft. Not accusing. Stating a fact.
Lin Feng blinked. He had expected many things. Not this. "It was dislodged in the chaos. I retrieved it." He produced the inert jade piece. "The spiritual energy within seems to have been dissipated."
She took it, her fingers brushing his. She looked at it, then back at him. "It saved me. But not the way it was supposed to. It's supposed to make a shield if I'm in danger. It didn't. Something else happened." She peered at him. "You were there. You fell over. Then the big snake got confused. Did you do something?"
Her gaze was unnervingly direct. She wasn't probing for secrets with guile. She was simply asking, like a child trying to understand a broken toy.
"The hall master and the inner disciples drove it away," Lin Feng said, his voice carefully neutral. "I was just in the wrong place."
She frowned, a tiny, thoughtful crease appearing between her brows. "Maybe. But the pendant is empty. And you feel strange. Not like the others. You feel like a quiet spot." She tilted her head. "Are you the disciple who works in the old library and the garden? The one who doesn't talk much?"
The accuracy of her perception was alarming. Her Heavenly Spirit Root likely gave her an acute, if untrained, sensitivity.
"I perform my duties," he said, a non-answer.
She nodded, as if that explained everything. "Thank you for getting my pendant." She paused, then added, with devastating innocence, "You should be more careful. Your spiritual energy is all tangled up. It looks like it hurts."
With that, she turned and skipped away, back toward the inner disciple quarters, leaving Lin Feng standing in his doorway, cold air washing over him.
She had seen through him. Not his secrets, but his state. His pain. She had looked at his chaotic, broken roots and seen not trash, but a wound.
The encounter with Yan Rong had been a pebble. This was a boulder. Xiao Rou was not a side character. She was a central pillar of the world's narrative, a destined prodigy. And she had just marked him, not as a savior, but as an anomaly. A "quiet spot."
He closed the door, leaning against it. He had twenty Karma points. He had the direct, unnervingly innocent attention of a future powerhouse. And he had proven he could turn his greatest weakness into a temporary, potent weapon.
The ledger in his mind felt heavier, richer. The entries were getting larger. The stakes were climbing. He was no longer just optimizing his own broken system. He was beginning to cast shadows on the stories of others.
And as he sat in the gathering dark, a single, calculated thought crystallized. To protect his growing ledger, he needed more than just points. He needed influence. Not the loud, brute influence of strength, but the quiet, pervasive influence of being useful, of being understood by the right people, in the right way.
Xiao Rou saw a tangled, hurting quiet spot. Perhaps, he thought, that was a better foundation to build on than being seen as a hero. Heroes had expectations. Quiet spots were often overlooked, until the moment they decided to make a sound no one was expecting. He had twenty points to invest in the nature of that sound.