Karen and I disguised ourselves as a very Karen-like HR-representative of a Voidship construction company, and a very Chad-like workman of said company.

“Everything hinges on us removing the Crown and the Blade the moment the protagonist finishes the parts of his training montage on top of them. That gives us five minutes to board the ship, two minutes to remove the targets, and around… Fifteen minutes thirty-four seconds until the next arc repeats the exact same beats, and the montage starts anew.”

“Hah. That’s assuming that an Alpha Cultivator can talk to regular cultivators without provoking a duel out of them. What if a Young Master is offended by your confident presence and demands you to kowtow?”

“Then we must adjust the plan accordingly. I’m far more concerned about the possibility of you being offended by a servant or handyman and immediately escalating things to a fight with the highest level manager present, forcing us to confront the sage realm cultivators.”

Karen shrugged smugly, as if she’d received a compliment. “What can I say? Reprimanding sloppy service swiftly and sharply is an instinct I’ve honed for decades.”

The final battle ended. The echoes started to reset their loop.

“Go time.” I adjusted the laborer’s sweat-band on my forehead, set my grin to the widest setting, and picked up two tonnes of planks on both of my shoulders, thus perfecting the look of an Apha Workman.

Karen pulled on a jacket that screamed ‘Hello I’m a foreman with an over-inflated ego’, opened a paper fan, and equipped an expression of someone who enjoyed sucking lemon-juice out of a donkey’s ass while screaming at her underlings.

When we approached the long boarding plank, two guards in blue and yellow armor of a sect I did not recognize crossed their spears.

They shouted guardsman words in Xianxia.

I replied with the word Karen had taught me. “Work.”

One of the guards asked a clarifying question, still in Xianxia.

I nodded. “Work.”

“Aaaahhh.” The guard gasped, nodding as he understood. “Work.”

“Work. Work. Work,” I confirmed.

One of them smiled sympathetically. “Work. Work.”

They stood aside and let us ascend. The ship’s top-deck was abuzz with activity. Painters re-painted walls already painted. Builders and inspectors ran about, rushing to double-triple-quadruple check every part of the ship.

A gaggle of small children ran past us, shouting as they played. Teenagers in laborer uniforms loitered in an alley between two bunkers, pretending to work.

“Eyes forward. Breathe,” I reminded Karen.

Her mouth kept opening and closing, whilst emotions of outrage battled on her face. She ground her teeth, sucking in angrily quivering breaths. “They are just echoes. They don’t know they are offending you. They’re just echoes,” she muttered to herself.

A young man bumped into her and glared at her. He said something disrespectful in Xiancia.

I tapped my Big Brain mode, slowing my perception of time.

Karen’s lips were in a snarl, her tongue arched against the top of her mouth to howl the Karen war-cry. If released, the shout would trigger a manager escalation cascade event, leading to combat that would destroy much of the ship, and leave most of the echoes dead.

I drew all the strength my Chad-forged muscles could pump out, moving my hand at supersonic speeds. Channeling Big Dick energy into my [Alpha Slap], I focused on its power to slap anything and everything, and smacked Karen’s first words out of the air and up into space. Before she could follow up with a Karen energy empowered attack at the young man, I stepped between them, and seized his gaze with [Eyes of the Alpha].

My lips couldn’t speak Xianxia, but my Alpha gestures and [Universal Alpha Language] surpassed the need for language.

I tapped my shoulder, then shook my head at the boy, frowning. “Bruh. Not cool.”

He understood, kowtowing and apologizing profusely to Karen.

Her fury cooled. She harrumphed, crossing her arms. “Fine! I will let you off the hook. This one time!”

The boy bowed once more, glanced at me, and fled.

“We best move swiftly,” I said, continuing towards the Crown. “That boy was among the peanut gallery cheering for the protagonist. Scaring him may affect the plot of the loop.”

“That’s unlikely. Only echoes of people with strong spirit or dao can change the details. Prepare yourself, hun. We’re about to pass by a young master. Don’t let him get provoked by you.”

I saw him, a scrawny young man with silky black hair, an equally silky cultivator’s garb, a smirk smug enough to join the Smug Smirk Sect, and enough Jade jewelry on him to make a princess jealous. A gang of sidekicks and boot-lickers crowded around him, gawking and gasping at whatever the young master’s monologuing about.

He saw me back. A chain of reactions played across his face so loudly he might’ve as well carried a sign. His first response to my physique and presence was being intimidated and glancing away. Next came shame from having looked away, shame which quickly ignited into anger. The Young Master’s eyes narrowed in a ‘you dare’. He turned to face us, and started to approach, obviously intending on coming over and making up for his insecurities with violence.

I paused, smiling at the man, unable to shrink away from the direct challenge.

“HellloooO!” Karen waved at the Young Master.“ Yes, you handsome young boy. Do you want to see what essential elixirs I have to offer? Fifty percent off for annual subscription~”

Smoothly, as if he had intended to do so all along, the Young Master spun 180-degrees in one step and returned to his groupies. It seemed, even for echoes, human survival instincts overrode the need to act out their archetypes.

“Smart move,” I said to Karen.

“Of course, hun. My pleasure.”

An arctic chill breezed through my spine at how she relished that word. Idly, I pondered: What manner of madness was required for a man to court a Karen cultivator? Was it even possible? As mighty as my Big Brain technique was, it found no answers to the conundrum, and I hoped to never learn them.

We arrived at the back of the ship, where the 10-meter diameter Crown rotated above the roof of a small bunker.

I checked my smartphone. “One and a half minutes until the Jade Beauty incident. Start disabling the formations that keep it floating. We need to grab both the Crown and the Blade the moment the training montage passes them.”

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Karen rolled her eyes at me. “Youngsters these days. Demands. Demands. Demands. Pah.”

A muscular old man with a laborer’s tan who guarded the bunker entrance glanced at us, and asked, “Work?”

“Work.” I nodded, hefting the planks on my shoulder.

He approved, letting us enter.

Karen rushed to the nearest formation. I felt the Dao of Karen in the air, as she unleashed a hideously powerful formation destroying technique. To my eyes, it appeared as frustrated button smashing. The technique grew ten times in strength the moment a hapless formation maintenance worker walked by her and got trapped in a whirlpool of complaints, such as: ‘Why is this not working?’ ‘Of course I tried unplugging it.’ And: ‘You must have installed games on it. That’s why it’s not working.’

Such was the power of her technique that I had to adopt the [Impeccable Pecs] protective posture in order not to suffer collateral cringe damage.

Though her Dao was horrifying and amoral to the extreme, I couldn’t argue with the results.

In less than a minute, she’d disabled almost all of the formations that kept the Crown and Blade locked in place. Only the formation keeping the Crown afloat was left functional, in order to not disrupt the loop.

I gave Karen a professional nod, acknowledging her work.

She returned it, with a dash of unprofessional smugness.

Back on the deck, we stood on the sidelines and watched the Jade Beauty event as it happened. I didn’t need to know Xianxia to understand the ‘You Dare’s’ or the shocked gasps of the spectators, when the Young Master’s defeat led to the “surprise” arrival of his elder. The hidden master revealed himself, once again defeating the guards and ninjas, accepted the protagonist as his disciple, and arranged a duel between the protagonist and the original Young Master’s senior.

So far so good.

The hidden master led his new disciple to the back of the ship, smiling as he explained something profound in Xianxia while gesturing at the Crown. I prepared to move, as the training montage began with the hidden master hopping atop to balance on one of the jagged spikes of the Crown. His foot slipped and the hidden master impaled himself.

His body twitched, sliding further on the spike.

Blood dribbled down on the ship’s deck and rained on the face of the protagonist, who kept on grinning and nodding at his deceased master, as if he was in progress of being taught great cultivation secrets.

“Karen…”.

“What? How is any of this my fault? That’s discriminatory.”

“You were in charge of the formations.”

“And that somehow makes knowing how Qi cultivator formations work my responsibility? How is it fair for you to blame me for this? I’m just as inconvenienced as you are, if not more so!”

The protagonist bowed and showed respect to his master’s dead body, and started climbing up, no doubt intending to impale himself on the Crown in a misguided attempt to complete his training montage.

I could’ve bet my favorite protein shaker that Karen had botched her role to force a deathmatch between us and the sage realm cultivators, but I had no time to point fingers and shift blame. The loop could still be salvaged.

“What are you doing?” she hissed, but I was already rushing forward with the empowered Alpha Walk.

I reached the tips of the crown before the protagonist, picked up the dead hidden master’s hat and tossed his body into the woods as respectfully as possible. I then donned the wide brimmed headpiece and leapt down on the bunker roof to prevent the protagonist from killing himself.

“No jump,” I said, holding up my hand.

He stopped, giving me a confused look, while asking something in Xianxia.

Before he could be further befuddled by his new master’s sudden inability to speak, I launched into a series of Alpha Protective poses. I pointed at my flexed bicep. “Me strong.” Then pantomimed several bicep curls. “Training.” And finally pointed at the young man. “You strong.”

Perhaps the man had once had a spark of an Alpha Cultivator in him, or perhaps my sign language was more effective than I anticipated, but he understood me perfectly.

Wasting no time, I gave the man’s body a Big Brain analysis and designed an optimal training montage to preserve the loop.

I pulled all the stops for him, drawing from my experiences of teaching my junior bruhs, the secrets of the H*-Man figurine, and everything I remembered from every work-out video I had ever watched. What I created was a one-minute cross fit course consisting of uphill sprints on the boarding plank, one-handed free-climbing on the side of the ship, weighted lunges across the length of the deck, and finally weighted push-ups with the load increasing until failure.

When the protagonist collapsed on deck, I gave him three of my one gallon protein shakes that I had lying around in my pockets.

He said something in Xianxia, glancing at the Jade Beauty who waited behind the corner, and then gave me a bratty wink.

As a final precaution, I boosted his power with an encouraging [Just Do It!] and shooed him off.

“That should buy us time,” I said, walking past Karen as I headed for the Crown.

“Buy us time? Your little stunt guaranteed that we’ll never manage to drag both the Crown and the Blade out of the valley in time.”

“Oh Karen. Have you forgotten how Alpha Cultivators generate our power? We are currently surrounded by hundreds of cultivators and civilians who believe me to be a freshly revealed hidden master. How much Bid Dick energy do you think their reactions are generating?”

“I don’t know.” She groaned, hands on her hips. “Enough to justify wasting our time with the echo?”

“More than enough, Karen. More than enough.”

The energies coursing within me were proof that the echoes still had emotions and souls. Every glance in my direction was followed by a hushed whisper of awe, and a sharp surge in my Big Dick energy. Raw Chadtastic potential coursed within my body, suffusing my jaw, muscles, organs, and brain.

I reached the Crown by taking a single empowered Alpha Stride up the mast and plucked it up from where it levitated. Its weight crashed on me. Formation reinforced bunker roof groaned and dented under my slippers. My body buckled under the mass of the Dao within. I felt my spine compress and my knees groan. My arms shook. My grip faltered, barely holding on.

I poured every scrap of my Big Dick energy into my muscles, roaring as I lifted the Crown up for one trembling millimeter.

Then the echo of a little kid pointed at me, drawing his friends to look up.

I felt their awe.

And my Dao accepted it as firewood to its brazier.

My Big Dick energy surged! More voices called out. More eyes looked up. Millimeters turned to centimeters and centimeters to inches. My arms stopped trembling. My spine straightened. My grip tightened. I hefted the Crown overhead, drew a deep breath, and threw it with every fiber of my being and every drop of my Chadness. The twenty-something ton Crown of Dao infused mystery-metal flew to the valley entrance and with a poof of upturned grass and dirt, embedded it into the earth.

I landed beside Karen, who stared at the Crown, looking equal parts miffed and surprised.

“Come on,” I said, starting towards the bow. “Let’s get the Blade and get out before the loop goes off the rails.”

Weighing less than half the mass of the Crown, the Blade turned out to be far easier to handle. Plus, the Blade was designed to cut its way through the Realm of Dao, making it well suited for throwing.

We reached the edge of the valley and dragged our loot outside with two minutes in the loop to spare.

“Fine. I will admit it, just this once. Your plan also worked. But even if you fix the Blade and the Crown to your fortress, you still haven’t figured out a way to travel through the Realm of Dao.”

I had to laugh. “Come now, Karen. After all this time, you still doubt me? I do have a plan, one so simple that it can’t possibly fail.”

“Well, then. Let’s hear it.”

I grinned, flexing my muscles.

Karen bristled, leaning her head back. “What… I don’t get it. Care to explain?”

I nodded and assumed another posture to display my glutes.

Karen’s bewilderment turned her face into a slideshow of outrage and confusion. “Well? What? What is it? You can speak, hun. I know you can.”

“And you have the power to understand subtext, [I Believe In You].”

I continued my posing for a while longer, enjoying the good natured goofness we had established. Karen was surprisingly receptive, when I revealed my plan of physically pushing Happyland through the Realm of Dao, though she did have a condition.

“Fine. As long as I don’t have to push.”

“It’s alright. This is a task for an Alpha Cultivator, though I do need to make some gains before we can attempt it.”

She glanced into the distance, biting her lip briefly. “There is… I may know someone who could speed you through the beginnings of the Chad Core stage.”

“Really?” I couldn’t hold back my surprise. “How?”

“An ex of mine.”

“Now you have me curious.”

“A…” Karen let out a resigned sigh. “I suppose I’ll come out and admit it. His name is Armstrong Mansson. He is. Was. The fifth head of Gigachad sect. And he’s currently possessed by the Ghost of the Alphahole.”