The last thing Dr. Alistair Kane knew was the smell of ozone and the cold, clinical betrayal in his assistant's eyes. The quantum resonance chamber wasn't supposed to overload. The containment protocols weren't supposed to fail. But as reality itself seemed to peel around him, a single, absurdly clear thought cut through the pain: They'd falsified the damping coefficients.
His consciousness didn't fade. It fractured.
It was not an end, but a catastrophic translation. He felt himself slipping, not into darkness, but through the gaps—the infinitesimal cracks between what is and what could be. He saw the scaffolding of his own universe, a shimmering lattice of cause and effect, and he was a rogue variable being forcibly deleted from the equation.
Then, pressure. A terrible, squeezing weight, as if being born anew through a keyhole.
---
Li Fan woke to the taste of blood and dust, his body convulsing with a cough that tore at his lungs. Sixteen years of another life—this life—crashed into the jagged edges of Alistair Kane's memories. The integration was not gentle. It was a collision of two souls, two complete histories, leaving a psychic scar that throbbed behind his eyes.
Alistair Kane. Quantum theorist. Murdered.
Li Fan. Third son of the declining Li Clan. Sickly. Despised.
He pushed himself up on thin, trembling arms, the rough hemp of his bedding scraping his skin. The room was spare, lit by a single, guttering oil lamp. It smelled of medicinal herbs gone stale and damp stone. Through the lone, high window, a foreign moon cast a sickly green light.
A wave of dizziness hit him, and with it, his new senses ignited.
It wasn't sight, not exactly. It was a deeper, more intrusive perception. The air in the room wasn't empty. It was threaded with currents of faint, luminous energy—Qi. But it didn't flow like a natural gas or fluid. It moved in rigid, geometric patterns, tracing precise, repeating circuits along invisible channels in the air and stone. It looked less like a natural phenomenon and more like… engineered plumbing. Or code.
A memory surfaced—a child's memory. The basic clan meditation technique, the "Azure River Qi Condensation Method." Instinctively, he tried to follow its dictates, to draw a thread of that ambient energy into his body.
Agony.
It was like forcing a square peg through a round hole lined with razors. The prescribed energy pathway in his dantian felt alien, wrong. A searing pain lanced from his navel through his meridians. He gasped, falling back onto the thin pallet.
But with the pain came clarity. Behind his clenched eyelids, a new vision superimposed itself over the pain. The mental diagram of the Azure River Method, once a simple instructional image, was now spiderwebbed with jagged, pulsating lines of crimson light—fractures. These weren't imperfections in his understanding. They were faults in the technique's very design. The energy flow was forced to take inefficient, contradictory routes, creating bottlenecks and painful feedback loops. The technique itself was buggy.
"Young Master? Are you unwell again?"
The voice was young, hesitant. Li Fan—Alistair, no, Li Fan, you are Li Fan now—forced his eyes open. A boy of about fourteen stood in the doorway, holding a wooden tray with a bowl of watery congee. He wore simple servant's robes, his face etched with a concern that seemed genuine amidst the neglect of this place.
Xiao He. My servant. The only one who doesn't look at me with open contempt or pity.
"A… difficult night, Xiao He," Li Fan managed, his voice a raw whisper. He sat up slowly, the scientist in him already compartmentalizing the trauma. Observation first. Understand the environment.
Xiao He hurried in, setting the tray on a rickety stool. "You missed the evening meal again. Steward Wang said the kitchen was closed, but I saved this for you." The boy's tone was apologetic, as if the congee's inadequacy was his personal failing.
"Thank you," Li Fan said, the words feeling strange. Gratitude had been a rare currency in either of his lives. He took the bowl, its warmth a minor anchor in the chaos.
As he ate the bland gruel, he prodded Xiao He with careful, casual questions. The boy, eager for any interaction, spilled a stream of gossip and clan news.
The Li Clan was fading, its spirit stone mines nearly depleted. The rival Zhou Clan, backed by a stronger spirit beast trade, was ascendant. The Patriarch, Li Hong, was a Foundation Establishment expert, but weary, holding a crumbling edifice together. Li Fan's own status? The useless, sickly third son of a deceased concubine. A drain on resources. A subject of ridicule for his elder brother, Li Fang, and a political inconvenience for the First Elder, Li Tian.
"Your monthly stipend," Xiao He said, digging into his pocket. He produced two faintly glowing pebbles—Low-Grade Spirit Stones. They pulsed with a weak, uneven light. "Steward Wang said… he said with your poor health, you wouldn't need the full amount this month. That the energy might be 'too stimulating.'" The boy couldn't meet his eyes.
Li Fan took the stones. They felt cool and slightly greasy. Under his new perception, their energy matrix was a mess—leaking, inefficient. Like cheap batteries on their last legs. A wave of cold, familiar anger rose in him, not the hot rage of a humiliated youth, but the icy fury of a professional whose work has been sabotaged. Resources withheld. Status negligible. Environment hostile.
"I see," he said, his voice flat. "Thank you, Xiao He. That will be all for tonight."
The boy bowed and scurried out, leaving Li Fan alone with the whispering code of the world and two pathetic spirit stones.
Night deepened. The green moonlight shifted. Li Fan sat at a warped wooden table, a blank parchment and a charcoal stick before him. The scientist reasserted himself. Panic was data-less. He needed to record, to hypothesize.
He began to write, the characters of this world flowing from muscle memory, the thoughts pure Alistair Kane.
> Personal Log, Entry One.
> Hypothesis: The foundational premise of this world is false.
> Supporting Observation 1: Spiritual energy (Qi) does not behave as a wild, natural force. It exhibits structured, repeatable pathways reminiscent of programmed systems or hardwired circuits.
> Supporting Observation 2: Standardized cultivation techniques (e.g., Azure River Method) contain non-optimized, even contradictory, operational parameters. They are not refined over millennia; they are imposed, flawed blueprints.
> Supporting Observation 3: My consciousness (a hybrid of Alistair Kane and Li Fan) is fundamentally incompatible with these blueprints. Attempting to run their program causes systemic error (pain, qi deviation).
> Corollary: My value is not in strength, but in perception. I can see the fractures in the system.
> Primary Question: If this is a system, who wrote the code? And why is it so full of bugs?
He set the charcoal down. The room was silent save for the faint hum of the world's energy grid. He stood and walked to the window, leaning on the sill. His body was weak, his cultivation non-existent, but his mind was a razor.
He looked up at the sky, at the strange constellations. And he saw them.
Not just stars. Between the pinpricks of light, in the vast velvet black, were faint, shimmering lines. Cracks. Like a porcelain bowl that had been broken and imperfectly glued back together. They were subtle, visible only to his fractured sight, tracing nonsensical, non-Euclidean paths across the firmament. One particularly vivid crack seemed to slice directly through the heart of the green moon, a scar on reality itself.
A slow, grim smile touched his lips. It held no joy, only the cold satisfaction of a confirmed theory.
"The first observable anomaly," he whispered to the uncaring night, his voice the only sound in the room. "This world isn't just governed by laws. It's running on buggy code."
The game, he understood, was not about becoming the strongest player.
It was about becoming the hacker.