The pouch of one hundred mid-grade spirit stones was a planet in Lin Feng's pocket. A single mid-grade stone was worth ten low-grade ones. This was a small fortune, enough to live comfortably in the outer sect for a year without performing a single chore. It was also a beacon. Displaying such wealth would paint a target on his back brighter than any Heavenly Spirit Root.
His first act upon returning to the dormitory was not to celebrate, but to dissipate. He used five stones to purchase, through discreet intermediaries in the Contributions Exchange, a set of unremarkable but high-quality necessities, nutrient-rich spirit grain cakes, a true set of copper alchemy tools (basic, but better than borrowed compost-shed junk), and several bolts of sturdy, plain cloth. He spent another ten stones to quietly pay off minor debts and purchase goodwill covering a week's worth of the worst latrine duties for a group of struggling disciples, no questions asked. The gratitude was anonymous, the currency of future silence.
The remaining eighty-five stones he hid not in his room, but in the most secure vault he had access to, the Scriptorium annex's condemned scroll crypt. A subterranean chamber deemed too unstable for valuable texts, its entrance was behind a collapsed shelf known only to Archivist Song and, now, to Lin Feng. It was a tomb for knowledge, perfect for interring treasure.
His wealth secured and laundered through small acts of anonymous utility, he turned to the scroll from Master Mu. The three "hopeless" conditions:
Sun-Leaf Vine: Exhibiting Photosynthetic Reversal. Leaves absorb spiritual light but emit a wasting shadow-energy, starving the plant. Cause unknown.
Ghost-Cap Mushroom Cluster: Suffering from Spectral Anchoring. The mushrooms, which should phase between spiritual and material planes, are stuck material, losing their essential medicinal property.
Singing Steelbloom: Afflicted with Harmonic Dissonance. Its natural resonant frequency, which strengthens metal-attuned cultivation, has split into two conflicting notes, causing the bloom to vibrate itself apart.
Each was a riddle wrapped in a spiritual catastrophe. He had a week to choose.
He spent the next day in the annex, not dusting, but thinking. He ignored the scroll. Instead, he reviewed the Ledger's record of his coral experiment. The key had been identifying the core conflict (order vs. self) and finding a conceptual counterpoint (transitional purity). He needed to approach these new problems the same way. Not as a cultivator, but as a systems analyst.
His meditation was interrupted by a presence at his shoulder. Not the oppressive sweetness of Yan Meixiang, nor the deep chill of Su Lingxi. This was a lighter, anxious energy.
"Disciple Lin?"
He opened his eyes. It was Bo, the former lackey of Zhang Hai. The disciple looked healthier, less pinched. His hands, which had once clenched in nervous anticipation of violence, were stained with archival ink.
"Senior Brother Bo," Lin Feng said, rising and giving a slight bow a courtesy Bo had never received from him before.
Bo flinched, uncomfortable with the title. "No, no, please. I wished to thank you. For mentioning the scroll work to Archivist Song. It's peaceful here." He glanced around the dusty shelves as if they were a palace garden. "I heard about your trouble with the spirit beast. And that you're helping in the gardens now. You're rising."
The words were not accusatory, but wistful. Bo saw Lin Feng's subtle ascendance and, in his simple way, attributed it to hard work and useful service. It was the perfect cover story Lin Feng could have never invented himself.
"We all find our path, Senior Brother," Lin Feng said mildly. "The annex suits you. Your hand is steady."
A faint smile touched Bo's lips. "It is. Thank you." He hesitated, then leaned closer, his voice dropping. "A word of caution. Zhang Hai he's not gone. He's festering. He blames you for everything. He's been asking about you. Where you go. Who you see. He has nothing left but that hate. Be careful."
Intelligence. Freely given. A return on Lin Feng's anonymous investment in peace. He nodded. "I appreciate the warning. I will be cautious."
Bo nodded back, looking relieved to have discharged his debt, and shuffled back to his scroll-mending.
The warning was timely. Zhang Hai, as a direct physical threat, was neutered. But a desperate, hate-filled man with nothing to lose was a different kind of variable unpredictable, potentially violent in an erratic, messy way. Lin Feng added it to his mental ledger: Monitor Zhang Hai. Low probability, high-consequence risk.
His thoughts returned to Master Mu's problems. The Ghost-Cap Mushrooms appealed to him a problem of states, of being stuck. It resonated with his own experience of being stuck in a weak body. But before he could decide, his world tilted on its axis again.
A runner found him in the annex, bearing not a written summons, but an oral message, delivered with wide-eyed awe: "Disciple Lin Feng. The Frozen Jade Pavilion requests your presence. Immediately. Palace Master Su has a task."
Su Lingxi. After weeks of silence. The timing was suspect, falling right after his return from the herbarium. Coincidence? Or had his activities somehow rippled up to her icy perch?
He followed the now-familiar path up the mountain, the cold deepening with each step. The antechamber of the Frozen Jade Pavilion was as stark and silent as ever. This time, however, he was not left to wait.
The crystal door slid open almost as he entered. Su Lingxi stood there, and the air around her was different. The perfect, monolithic cold was agitated. Not warmer, but frayed, like a frozen tapestry with threads pulled loose. Her jade-like face was, if possible, paler. Her glacier eyes held not emptiness, but a faint, disturbing shimmer, like light refracting through a cracking ice sheet.
"You," she said, her voice the same wind-chime frost, but underpinned by a tremor so subtle only his hyper-focused senses caught it. "You have been consulting with Mu Qing."
A statement. Not a question. The networks of the powerful were deep and silent.
"This disciple was granted the honor of performing minor observational tasks for Master Mu," Lin Feng said, bowing.
"Do not dissemble. She would not waste her time on 'observational tasks.' You engaged her intellect. She finds you conceptually useful." Su Lingxi turned, a swirl of pale blue fabric. "Follow."
She led him not to her receiving chamber, but deeper into the pavilion, down a corridor of ice-veined stone. The cold here was not just an environment; it was a presence, a living, breathing entity that pressed against his skin, his lungs, his dantian. It sought the weaknesses in his spiritual dampening field, probing like icy needles.
They entered a small, circular chamber. In the center, on a pedestal of clear ice, rested a stone. It was roughly the size of a human heart, its surface a swirling, smoky grey shot through with veins of brilliant, painful-looking blue. It pulsed with a deep, rhythmic cold that made the chamber throb in time. This was the source of the agitation. The stone was unstable.
"This is a Heart of the Glacial Vein," Su Lingxi said, her gaze fixed on the stone. "The core of my cultivation for the past decade. It is attuned to my Frost Phoenix Constitution. Or it was." She finally looked at him, and the shimmer in her eyes was clearer now a reflection of the chaotic blue veins in the stone. "A flaw has developed in its internal matrix. The cold it emits is no longer pure. It has become discordant. It reflects not the stillness of winter, but the violence of a blizzard. It is damaging my constitution's balance."
Lin Feng understood. Her perfect ice was developing cracks. The "brittle" spot he'd sensed in her domain, the irregular flow this was the epicenter.
"Master Mu is the finest alchemist and spiritual materialist in the range," Su Lingxi continued, her voice tight. "I requested her assistance. She declined. She said the flaw was 'conceptual, not material.' A disease of the stone's idea of cold. She said she had no tool for such a repair." Her eyes locked onto Lin Feng. "But she mentioned, in her refusal, that she had recently encountered a disciple with a 'perverse talent for conceptual intervention.' She suggested, indirectly, that I speak to you."
Lin Feng's blood turned to ice colder than the chamber. Master Mu. She hadn't just given him a title. She had advertised him. Thrown him into the deep end of a Golden Core powerhouse's existential crisis. As a test? As a favor? As a cruel joke?
The stone pulsed, and a wave of discordant cold washed over him. It wasn't just cold, it was angry. It carried a sense of frustration, of a song sung out of key. It scraped against his meridians, making his conflicting roots twitch in sympathetic distress.
"Palace Master," he said, forcing his voice through the pressure. "I am an outer disciple with trash roots. My consultations with Master Mu involve dying plants. This is a treasure of your Dao. I have no power to affect it."
"Power is not what Mu Qing implied," Su Lingxi said, stepping closer. The agitated cold radiating from her was a physical force. "She implied a method. A way of seeing. You saw something in a plant that she did not. Look at this stone. Tell me what you see. Not with spiritual sense. You have little. With whatever lens you used for Mu Qing."
It was a command. And an opportunity so vast it terrified him. To fail here was not just personal failure. It was to disappoint, and likely enrage, a Palace Master on the edge of a cultivation crisis. The fallout would be instantaneous and final.
But to succeed. The patronage of Su Lingxi would be a shield of absolute ice.
He swallowed, his throat dry. He approached the pedestal, ignoring the screaming instinct to flee. He pushed his Conscious Focus to its limit, the point of light in his mind blazing. He looked at the Heart of the Glacial Vein.
He didn't see a treasure. He saw a system in failure. The swirling grey was the base matrix, the "idea" of profound cold. The brilliant blue veins were the manifestation of Su Lingxi's Frost Phoenix Constitution the purity, the stillness. But now, the blue veins were jagged, forking wildly, like lightning frozen in panic. They were no longer harmonized with the grey. They were fighting it, trying to overwrite it, and in doing so, creating not a purer cold, but a fractured, violent one.
He saw the conceptual flaw. The Frost Phoenix Constitution demanded absolute, emotionless cold. But the stone, as a living spiritual entity formed over millennia, had a deeper, more ancient "idea" of cold one that included the cycle: the stillness, but also the howling wind, the crushing pressure of glaciers, the chaos of a forming snowflake. Su Lingxi's constitution was trying to suppress the chaotic, active aspects, demanding only the static perfection. The stone was rebelling. It was a civil war, just like the coral, but on a cosmic scale.
"The stone disagrees with you, Palace Master," Lin Feng said softly, the words leaving his mouth before he could censor them.
The temperature in the room plummeted further. "Explain."
"Your constitution seeks a single, perfect note of cold. Stillness. The stone contains the entire scale stillness, but also the wind, the grinding ice, the storm. You are asking it to be only the silence at the end of the song. It is refusing. The conflict is creating the discord."
Silence, heavier than the cold. Su Lingxi stared at him, her eyes wide. He had just told a Golden Core expert, a master of an ice Dao, that her foundational treasure thought she was wrong.
"And the solution?" Her voice was a whisper of falling snow.
"I do not have one," Lin Feng admitted. "To force it would break it. To yield to it would alter your constitution's path." He was treading on the edge of blasphemy. "Perhaps a reconciliation. Not to silence the storm within it, but to conduct it. To find a harmony that includes both your perfect stillness and its inherent wildness. To make the blizzard a part of the winter's beauty, not a flaw in it."
He was speaking in metaphors, in concepts. It was all he had.
Su Lingxi said nothing. She looked from him to the stone, her face an unreadable mask of ice. The discordant pulse of the Heart beat against the silence.
After an eternity, she spoke. "You will return. Once a week. You will observe the stone. You will think on this reconciliation. You will report your thoughts. You will speak of this to no one." She turned away, dismissing him. "Go."
He fled the chamber, the weight of the stone's dissonant cold clinging to him like a shroud. As he stumbled out into the marginally warmer antechamber, the Ledger's message seared into his mind.
Karmic Event Logged: Forced Engagement with Designated Variable 'Su Lingxi' at Critical Juncture. High-Stakes Conceptual Diagnosis Delivered.
Risk/Reward Matrix: Catastrophic / Paradigm-Shifting.
Passive Karma Adjustment: +12.
Current Karma Balance: 25.
Twenty-five points. Earned for telling an ice goddess her foundational philosophy was flawed. It was the most expensive money he had ever been paid.
He staggered down the mountain, his mind reeling. He now had two immortal-level patrons. One who valued his mind for solving puzzles. Another who might need him to save her Dao. Both saw him as a unique, fragile tool.
He also had a desperate, hate-filled ex-bully watching him. And a demoness who might decide his newfound connections made him more than just a curiosity.
The pouch of spirit stones in his hidden crypt felt insignificant. The true weight he carried was no longer in his pocket, but on his shoulders. He was no longer an external theorist. He was a conceptual therapist for the pillars of the sect's power. And his next session was in a week, with a patient made of stone and a doctor who had no medicine, only questions.
He looked up at the towering, mist-shrouded peaks. He had wanted influence. He had wanted to change the game. The game had just changed around him, and he was standing in the center of the board, holding a rulebook written in a language only he could half-read. The next move was his. And for the first time, he had no idea what piece he was, or what the goal of the game even was.