The Quiet Peak herbarium existed outside of time. The sun rose and set, bells tolled distantly, but within the walled garden, the only rhythms were the pulsing glows of the plants and the slow, deliberate movements of Master Mu. Lin Feng's world contracted to the stone bench, the dying Glacier Coral, and the puzzle.
For two days, he observed. He didn't touch the coral. He documented the spread of the Internal Ice-Shatter with sketches and notes on parchment Master Mu had left remarkably high-quality parchment. He studied the bench's resources. Powders of Sun-Baked Clay (warm, absorbing), Ground Mica (reflective, insulating), Sapped Willow Charcoal (porous, filtering). Vials of Dew from a Dawn Lily (pure, transitional), Sap from a Fire-Blossom Thorn (volatile, stimulating), Essence of Quiet Moss (dampening, calming). And the flawed spirit stones, their energy leaking in faint, useless wisps.
They were the dregs of an alchemist's world. But to Lin Feng, they were a vocabulary. Each substance was a bundle of properties, of concepts.
He used his Conscious Focus to hold the problem in his mind: Ice turning against itself. A logical error. A civil war of energy. The solution was not to add a new element, but to change the internal conversation. A "conceptual reminder."
On the morning of the third day, he had nothing to show but pages of observations and a deepening sense of the problem's elegance. It was beautiful, in a tragic way. The coral's own perfection its pure, potent ice-attunement was killing it.
Master Mu appeared as he was sketching the crystalline fracture patterns for the tenth time. She stood behind him, silent, reading his notes over his shoulder. Her presence was like a shift in atmospheric pressure.
"You have not begun an experiment," she stated.
"I lack the premises for one, Master," he replied, not turning. "I understand the what. The energy crystallizes. I do not understand the why. Why does this particular strain of Glacier Coral, in this specific array, decide that solidity is preferable to flow? What is the trigger?"
He heard a faint intake of breath, almost of approval. "The trigger is its own excellence. It refines its ice-attunement past the point of stability. Purity becomes brittleness. A common flaw in peak-grade materials."
Lin Feng put down his chalk. "Then the reminder cannot be about adding fluidity. It must be about redefining purity. If purity equals brittleness equals death, then the definition is flawed. The coral must be convinced that true purity includes the potential for flow. That ice is not the end state, but a phase."
He turned to look at her. Her slate eyes were fixed on him, intense. "And how do you convince a plant of a philosophical principle?"
"Not with words. With an embodied argument. A substance that embodies both purity and transition." He gestured to the vials. "The Dawn Lily Dew. It is water, but water captured at the precise moment between night and day. It is pure, but its purity is defined by change. And the Sapped Willow Charcoal. It is structure, but a porous, filtering structure born of dissolution and fire."
He was theorizing wildly, but the logic felt clean. "If I can create a medium a paste or a mist using the dew as a carrier and the charcoal as a scaffold, and infuse it with the concept of transitional purity, perhaps I can create a sympathetic environment around the roots. A whisper that contradicts the coral's fatal logic."
Master Mu was silent for a long moment. "The Dew is inert. The Charcoal is dead. They hold no active spiritual concepts. You would be painting with water and ash."
"Then I need a way to charge them. To imprint the concept." He looked at the flawed spirit stones. "These leak energy. Chaotic, wasted energy. But what if that chaos, that waste, is the key? If the coral's flaw is an excess of order, perhaps a carefully introduced, filtered form of spiritual chaos not to attack, but to provide a contrasting background could make its own rigid order seem unnecessary?"
He was leaning so far out over the abyss of conjecture he felt dizzy. But Master Mu's expression had shifted from clinical assessment to something akin to fascination. "You are attempting a spiritual homeopathy. Treating a disease of order with a diluted disease of chaos." She shook her head slowly. "It is either brilliant or the most profound nonsense I have ever heard. You have permission to try. One stem. The most infected one. You will kill it, almost certainly."
That was his window. His one question per week. He needed it now.
"Master Mu," he said, bowing slightly. "My question for the week. To charge an inert medium with a conceptual intent specifically, the intent of 'transitional purity' what is the most fundamental, low-energy method? Not a formation array or a powerful will. The basic principle."
She looked at him, and for the first time, he saw a flicker of something like respect in her weary eyes. He had not asked for the answer. He had asked for the tool to find it himself.
"Resonance," she said, the word crisp. "All things that share a property resonate, however faintly. To charge your medium, you must find a source that already embodies the concept you desire. Not a powerful source. A pure one. Even a weak, pure resonance is more effective than a strong, impure force. You must align your medium with that source, then seal the alignment before it disperses. The simplest method is sympathetic exposure and a containment sigil. The knowledge of basic sigils is in the green ledger on the lower shelf. Do not touch the others."
She turned and left, her grey robes whispering against the gravel.
A source of 'transitional purity'. He looked around the herbarium. Dawn Lily Dew was a product, not a source. The coral itself was the opposite. His gaze landed on a plant he'd noted before: Twilight Duskblooms. They were unremarkable, greyish flowers that opened only in the ten minutes between sunset and full dark, emitting a faint, silvery light before closing until the next twilight. Transition. Purity in impermanence.
That was it. A weak, but conceptually perfect source.
He spent the afternoon studying the green ledger. It contained basic sigils for preservation, moisture retention, and gentle energy channeling. He found one called the "Moment-Catcher" a simple, three-line sigil meant to hold the ephemeral quality of a dewdrop or a scent. It was fragile, low-power, exactly what he needed.
As the sun began to dip, he prepared his medium. He mixed a pinch of the powdered Willow Charcoal into a small dish of Dawn Lily Dew, creating a thin, greyish slurry. He placed the dish on a clean slate next to the Twilight Duskbloom bed. Using a needle of purified copper, he etched the tiny "Moment-Catcher" sigil onto the slate beneath the dish.
He waited.
The last sliver of sun vanished. The grey buds of the Duskblooms began to unfurl. A faint, silvery glow emanated from them, a light that felt like a sigh. It was not spiritual energy in any cultivator sense. It was the light of a threshold.
As the glow peaked, Lin Feng focused his Conscious Focus to a razor's edge. He didn't try to grasp the light. He aligned his intent with it. He imagined the slurry in the dish not as charcoal and water, but as a blank slate ready to receive the signature of this transitional moment. He visualized the sigil activating, not as a powerful trap, but as a gentle cup holding the echo of the glow.
He felt nothing. No surge of power. But when the Duskblooms closed and the silvery light faded, the slurry in the dish looked… unchanged. Yet, to his heightened senses, it felt different. It held a quiet coolness that wasn't just temperature, a sense of "between" that hadn't been there before.
He had, perhaps, charged it. Or he had imagined the whole thing.
He took a clean brush made from a single spirit-beast hair (another scrap from the bench) and carefully painted the slurry in a thin ring around the base of the most afflicted coral stem, the one already three-quarters white. He then used the last of the slurry to paint a tiny, simplified "Moment-Catcher" sigil on a pebble, which he placed atop the ring.
It looked like a child's mud pie. A pathetic attempt.
He documented everything and went to the small, stone sleeping alcove Master Mu had pointed out a space barely larger than a coffin, but his own. He slept fitfully, dreaming of silent, grey flowers and spreading ice.
At dawn, he went to the coral. The white death had not receded. But it had not advanced. On a plant with a ten-day death sentence, a single day of stasis was a miracle.
He checked the other stems. The withering continued. Only the treated stem was frozen, locked in its tragic state.
He had not cured it. He had paused it.
Master Mu appeared as he was recording this. She examined the stem, her fingers hovering over the dried slurry ring without touching. She closed her eyes, extending a wisp of her spiritual sense, so refined it was like a breath of winter air.
She opened her eyes. "You captured a whisper. And it is arguing with the scream." She looked at him. "It is not a cure. It is a debate. You have given the dying part of the plant a counterpoint. A tiny, persistent 'but what if?'"
"Is it enough?" Lin Feng asked.
"No. The coral's own logic is too powerful. Your whisper will be drowned in a day or two. But you have proven the vector. The principle has merit." She turned away, then paused. "Your question was well-chosen. Your execution is crude. You have six days. Improve the volume of the whisper without changing its nature. Do not make it a shout. A shout will be rejected as foreign. It must remain a persuasive, internal thought."
She left him with the impossible task: amplify a conceptual whisper using only scraps.
He had seven Karma points left (he'd spent four on a deep analysis of the flawed spirit stones, learning to briefly align their leakage into a predictable, if weak, chaotic stream a potential "contrasting background"). He couldn't spend them on the answer. He had to use them on tools.
He spent two points for the Ledger to analyze the "resonance capture" process he'd attempted, to identify the precise moment of greatest conceptual transfer. The answer was depressingly simple, it was the instant the Duskbloom's glow began to fade, not at its peak. The moment of transition from being to memory. He had been slightly off.
He spent two more points to analyze the Willow Charcoal at a conceptual level. The Ledger revealed its structure held a latent [Concept: Memory of Flow] the trace of the sap that once ran through it. It wasn't just a filter; it was a mnemonic device. This changed everything. He could use the charcoal not just as a scaffold, but as an active participant, telling the story of flow to the rigid ice.
His final three points he saved. A reserve.
For the next five days, he refined. He gathered Dew at the precise moment of dawn (transition from dark to light). He powdered the charcoal more finely, whispering the intent of "flowing memory" into the mortar as he ground it, a technique of focused will the Ledger suggested. He etched more precise sigils on thinner slates. He treated a second stem.
On the sixth day, the first treated stem remained in stasis. The second stem showed a faint, almost imperceptible retreat of the white death at its very outer edge. A single, microscopic vein had regained a hint of blue.
It was a victory smaller than a grain of sand. But in the desert of the coral's death, it was an oasis.
On the morning of the tenth day, Master Mu came for the final assessment. She spent an hour examining the two stems, using tools of crystal and prism that bent light in strange ways. Finally, she straightened.
"You have not saved the plant," she announced. "But you have demonstrated a novel therapeutic vector. You have given me a new lens with which to view self-destructive spiritual ailments. That is worth more than a hundred Glacier Corals."
She walked to the bench and placed a new pouch next to the half-empty one of spirit stones. This one was made of simple, undyed hemp. "One hundred mid-grade spirit stones. Your payment. And a standing offer. You may return one day per week to continue your research. You will have the same resources. You may ask one question per visit. In return, you will document your thinking process as you just did. You are not my apprentice. You are my external theorist."
It was a title without precedent. It meant nothing in the sect hierarchy. It meant everything in the world of knowledge. It was a lifeline thrown not to the disciple Lin Feng, but to the mind within him.
"I accept, Master Mu. Thank you."
She nodded. "Your work here is done for now. Go. Do not let the outer world make you stupid. I expect your report in seven days. On a new problem." She handed him a small scroll. It listed three other "hopeless" herbarium conditions. He was to choose one.
He left the Quiet Peak as he had come: silently. The pouch of mid-grade stones was heavy in his robe, a tangible weight of success. The scroll was lighter, but its burden was greater.
As he walked down the mountain path, back to the world of grey robes and dust, the Ledger's final judgment for the endeavor appeared.
Karmic Resolution: Successful Engagement in High-Level Intellectual Contract. Novel Methodology Validated.
Karma Points Gained: +10.
Current Karma Balance: 13.
He now had thirteen points. A hundred mid-grade spirit stones. A weekly appointment with an immortal alchemist. And a title: External Theorist.
He had entered the herbarium as a curious tool. He left as a recognized, if bizarre, asset. The currency of his new patronage wasn't strength or talent, but a specific, warped kind of creativity. He had turned his disadvantage seeing the world in broken concepts into a professional qualification.
The outer disciple mountains came into view, looking smaller, dingier. He had a foot in two worlds now: the gritty economy of the outer sect, and the rarefied, intellectual economy of Master Mu's garden. One dealt in points and chores. The other dealt in ideas and impossible problems.
He touched the pouch of stones. He could buy better food, a real meditation cushion, perhaps even a low-grade artifact. But more importantly, he had proof. Proof that his path, the unorthodox ascension built on cunning and concepts, had value in the eyes of true power.