Man, that guy was terrifying.

I looked at the array and the little thing growled at me.

‘You fucked up my existence,’ the thing said.

“Wukong helped with that,” I replied.

The array meandered over to me with expectation.

“No,” I replied.

Then it… nagged at me, pulling at the fabric of my being like an angry small dog.

“I’m not abandoning my path just to fix you,” I replied.

Defining peace and tweaking the array was something I had planned to do from the get-go. First I would bring it to life, then I would train and trim it as necessary, cutting off the bits I didn’t need.

I was going to edit the array’s soul, and I would have been fine with it. But now I had a dao, a path.

A restriction.

It was irritating. Throwing away a dao wasn’t hard, people abandoned daos all the time. But when you have a desire to follow that path, it becomes much harder to discard.

And I simply did not want to give up peace.

“Having a dao is all the trouble I thought it was,” I mumbled.

The array looked at me and grumbled. It didn’t have the values I held. It didn’t care about living itself and would much rather be changed on a fundamental level to be more efficient at its job. Living was only an unfortunate necessity for its goals.

And I was one of the few people in existence who could be trusted to edit its soul. It was like a living program that couldn’t edit its source code.

“Well, the only path forward is cultivation ya know. So, sit tight, cross your legs, and ponder the nature of your existence or something.”

The array, for the first time in its existence, expressed emotion.

Dismay.

Poor bastard. I felt bad for it, but it would work through it. I knew my arrays, living or dead and I knew this one would find a way to persevere. I’d put literal billions of years into its creation. This would be nothing more than an early road bump, I was sure of it.

The array expanded, covering all of the valley and the Great Desert Strip in one length.

“Nothing beyond the immortal rank!” I yelled out to it. Ah-Marin was home to a few decently sized multiversal sects. Communication with the grander multiverse was common here and I didn’t want to risk getting any of the higher-up's attention, even if I could defeat them all.

I could have been a big fish in a small pond, but the pond was an endless ocean and big fish attract sharks.

It would listen. I knew it would, I had hard-wired that part properly at least.

Then, with a sigh, I walked off.

********

Chin was a very annoyed man, at least that was what most people thought of him. In truth, he was calm and mostly happy, as long as he was farming or with his wife.

Anything else felt like a waste of time. He didn’t mean to be rude, that wasn’t his nature, but he couldn’t help but see the potential of time.

Time that could’ve been better spent out in the field, directing other farmers or clearing out the fields. People could always use more food, and he was eager to provide that.

Sometimes he felt okay with Mister Bill. He didn’t think about farming too much when the two talked, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t annoyed. That old man had a way of grinding his nerves unlike any other.

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Chin may have looked older and his body may have been weaker, but Mister Bill would forever be an old man to him. He was ancient, regardless of how he looked.

Chin sighed and dug his hoe into the earth, then his hands went into the hole and pulled out a handful of black soil.

Living, his senses told him.

That was new. He could normally tell the quality of the soil by looking at it, but this wasn’t just his sense speaking. This was something else, it was his qi.

He could feel it leaking passively from his hand and into the earth. He could feel it mingle with the life within. He could sense the traces of life it had once held and the life it could hold today.

This field had once been the dumping place for feces. The insects the traders rode through the village were hive-like, meaning they could be instructed to treat one place as a collective dumping ground for their remnants. This was one of those places.

Chin would rotate the fields every five years, leaving a few sets of fields to compost for the next five years while they all planted their crops on the new one.

This was how they worked. He knew what this field was, but now, with his qi, he saw what this field was.

He felt the life beneath him, and more so, the potential for life. He knew what crops would grow best here, most he had already planned to grow, but some he had never even considered.

He saw the height of the harvest come next season and the way the water flowed deep beneath this plot of land.

He saw life, and more importantly, he saw death. He saw the harvest, the dung, the waste, the rot. Years of death hibernating, waiting for a chance to spring forth as a living thing.

Chin’s mind reeled back into the moment.

“OOOH looks like someone had their first moment of enlightenment,” a voice teased.

“What?” Chin replied.

He didn’t need to turn, he knew the man was behind him already.

“Enlightenment, you just touched upon it. A little peak at your dao buddy,” Mister Bill replied.

Chin stood up and frowned. That was the most suitable expression around this man, a firm and ever-present frown.

“What does that mean?” Chin asked.

“Enlightenment, you just saw the edges of your being, your dao and you touched on some very complex laws there Chin, very talented.”

Some more teasing Chin assumed. That was why this man annoyed him. The teasings.

“No, I really mean it. That takes quite a lot of talent. If any of the sects here had known what you’d done they come and scoop you up immediately. Give you a youth potion and call you young master or something.”

“The Five Sects?” Chin snorted.

“Nah, not them. Some of the bigger guys,” the old man replied. “Anyways Chin, welcome to the first rank, and what an entrance I must say. You barged in like a Champ.”

Mister Bill always had strange vernacular. Chin had heard ‘champ’ before, it meant some kind of champion or man of ability or something. A shortening most likely.

Chin was an educated man, after all, he made sure to read the language almanac every year from cover to cover. The language almanac of this year had just arrived, but he’d gone through it already.

Language almanacs were how the empires instituted law and language over such vast regions. Every child was expected to study the Imperial Language, also known as the common tongue throughout their younger years, and the yearly update was taught to the adults as well.

That was Renk’s job, one of his many duties as Light Master.

“I don’t feel different,” Chin replied.

“And yet you are, entirely different from who you were ten minutes ago. Definitely new.”

Chin stared annoyingly at the old man. He had read some fairy tales where old folks talked in riddles and hidden meanings, sometimes that old man reminded him of those beings.

“Look inside yourself Chin, you’re practically spilling you qi out,” Mister Bill said.

Chin did so, and as he looked he could feel his dantian overflowing. He could see his meridians flooding with qi.

“Normally you’d be puking up some impurities right now, but I already got rid of those when we first started. Now start closing your meridians and holding in as much qi as you can. Keep it contained and cycle it through yourself in that formation I taught you-”

“The Fat Camel Shape?”

“Yes,” Mister Bill replied. “The fat camel one.”

Chin smiled internally. He rarely managed to get one over Mister Bill. He remembered the original name of the technique having five or seven words in it. Something Mythic Heavenly Divine something something.

But when he connected the cycle through his meridians, it ended up looking like the torso of a camel with two humps, one on top and the other on the bottom.

So that was what Chin called it, the fat camel cycle.

It was hard at first, but Mister Bill had made Chin exercise that specific pathway a whole lot during the past few days, to the point where it was almost instinct for him now.

But this time the qi was immense. He could have never imagined the human body could produce so much of it. Much less his own body.

Power gushed through him. His joint ache was washed away. His tired back melted into heat.

And from the sheer amount of energy he had suddenly received, he stood and nearly jumped.

Then without a second thought, he took off running. He outpaced a horse instantly, and he wasn’t tired by the slightest. He jumped and the crops below him moved away, as if he had tossed the earth away with his feet.

Then he landed.

Chin was in awe. He looked, he saw, and he smiled.

“Someone’s happy,” Mister Bill chuckled.

“Yes, let’s celebrate.”

“Oh yeah, I’m sure Medin would love to make some fried meat or something, maybe Rin could-”

Chin smiled and hurled his hoe at the man.

“Oh come on!” Mister Bill exclaimed, catching the hoe with an outstretched hand.

Then he made the lazy bastard work till the sun went down.