23. My Talent Is Truly Hopeless

I find Ling’er exactly where I left her, at the small desk in the room, surrounded by paper covered in careful characters. Dozens of sheets, each one filled with practice strokes, characters repeated until perfect, small notes in the margins. She’s been practicing writing for hours, and her progress is astonishing. What would take normal students weeks, she’s accomplished in a single day.

“Master!” She jumps up when I enter, her face lighting up. Then she catches herself, remembering her training, and bows formally. “I mean—welcome back.”

I smile despite myself. The formality is endearing coming from someone who was eating out of a communal kitchen bowl two weeks ago.

“Look what I found.”

I place the cracked jade on the desk. It looks ordinary in the dim light—old, damaged, unremarkable. But I can still feel a faint warmth from it, a pulse of something ancient.

She looks at it, then at me. “A manual?”

“The most important manual you’ll ever read.” I pull up a chair and sit across from her. “But it’s sealed. It needs blood recognition to unlock; a drop of the reader’s blood, so it can adapt to their specific constitution.”

“My blood?”

“If you’re willing. It might hurt, just a pinch. And then the manual will show you what it wants you to see. Every reader sees something different, tailored to them.”

She holds out her hand without a moment’s pause. I take my spare knife and prick her finger. A single drop of blood wells up, red with the faintest golden shimmer. She lets it fall onto the jade and the room changes. Light floods from the jade: not bright, but deep, like staring into a universe compressed into a stone. Colors beyond naming swirl within it. Ling’er’s eyes go wide, then gold, then something beyond gold. The light wraps around her, flows into her, and for a moment I see—

Everything.

Fire and water and earth and metal and wood, all spinning together, all one. A dragon made of stars, its scales infinite, its breath creation itself. A bone made of cosmic threads, connecting all things, weaving reality. And at the center, a girl made of impossible potential, smiling like she’s coming home.

Then it fades.

The jade sits on the desk, ordinary again. Ling’er blinks, her eyes slowly returning to brown.

“Master…” Her voice is distant, awed. “I saw things. So many things. Cultivation paths I didn’t know existed. Ways to combine elements I never imagined. Ways to use my bloodline and my bone together, not separately.” She pauses, touching her chest. “And it showed me… me. What I could become, if I follow the path. What I look like from the inside—all the pieces fitting together.”

“Can you remember it?”

She touches her temple. “It’s all here. Like the manual wrote itself into my mind. I couldn’t forget it if I tried. Every word, every diagram, every note. It’s part of me now.”

The Gaze flickers:

I sit down heavily. A three hundred percent increase to her already impossible speed. She was going to reach Foundation Establishment in months anyway. Now?

“How long to Foundation Establishment now?” I ask.

She closes her eyes, calculating—drawing on the knowledge now embedded in her mind. “The manual says… with my resources and training… three months. Maybe less. It depends on how quickly my body adapts.”

Three months. From mortal to Foundation Establishment in three months. Normal cultivators take decades. Geniuses take years. Ling’er will do it in seasons. I’m grinning. I can’t help it. This is it: the key, the path, the future. She has everything she needs now.

“Master.” Ling’er’s voice pulls me from my thoughts. “You should do it too.”

I blink. “What?”

“The manual. It adapts to the reader. You have a mixed-element root—five elements, even if they’re weak. It should work for you.” She gestures at the jade. “Please. Try.”

I’ve been so focused on empowering her that empowering myself seemed like a lost cause. I hadn’t even considered using it for myself. I’m mediocre. I’m Foundation Establishment with no hope of advancement. But she’s right. The manual adapts. It found a way for her impossible constitution; surely it can find a way for my pathetic one.

“Alright.” I pick up the knife. “Let’s see what this old manual does with a washed-up sect leader.”

I prick my finger. A drop of blood falls onto the jade.

The jade glows.

Barely.

A faint, apologetic shimmer, like a candle flickering in a windstorm. It lasts perhaps two seconds, then fades to nothing.

I feel… something. Knowledge flowing into my mind, foreign yet familiar—similar to how I inherited this body’s memories, but different. Cleaner. More intentional. The manual is writing itself into my consciousness, just like it did for Ling’er.

But where her integration took minutes and filled her with light, mine takes seconds and leaves me blinking in the dim room.

I stare at the assessment. Core Formation maximum. Fifteen percent speed increase. “Tough case.”

Ling’er looks at me with hopeful eyes. “Master? How was it?”

I open my mouth to answer. Nothing comes out. I droop slightly. The excitement drains away, replaced by resigned acceptance.

Even a 3,000-year-old Heaven-defying manual can’t fix mediocre.

Ling’er tilts her head, reading my expression. “It didn’t work well?”

“It worked.” I manage a smile. “Just… differently than for you. I’ll reach Core Formation eventually, maybe. That’s more than I had before.”

She looks at me with those too-sharp eyes, and I know she sees more than I’m saying. But she’s kind enough not to push.

“I’m fine.” I wipe my eyes, still chuckling. “I’m better than fine. I just bought you a technique that would make every major sect in the Lower Realm declare war to possess it, and I got it for five middle-grade stones from a woman who thought it was broken.”

She giggles. It’s such a normal sound from such an abnormal child—light and young and unguarded. For a moment, she’s just a twelve-year-old who heard something funny.

The moment passes, but the warmth lingers.

“Uh… Master?”

Something in her voice makes me look up. She’s staring at the jade slip on the desk between us. I follow her gaze.

The jade is crumbling.

A slow, quiet dissolution. The edges go first, flaking away in tiny fragments that catch the candlelight and vanish before they reach the floor. The ancient characters on the surface fade one by one, as if the words were only ever borrowed and now they’re being returned.

We watch in silence. By the time I think to activate the Gaze, half the slip is already gone.

I stare at the readout.

The last fragment of the jade slip dissolves. There’s nothing on the desk but a faint smudge of pale dust and the ghost of warmth.

I sit very still.

In my mind, with the crystalline clarity that only comes in moments of profound loss, I think about Mei Lin. Her water affinity. Her steady, patient cultivation. The years she’s spent grinding through techniques that were already outdated when this sect was founded. I think about how the Five Phases Transcendence was adaptable not just for impossible dragon-blooded prodigies, but for anyone. It would have found something in her. Something specific, something suited to what she already had, something that would have compounded over years and decades into a foundation she couldn’t build any other way.

Then I think about Wei Chen. Then Jun. Then Lian. Then the other eight disciples sitting on the mountain right now with mediocre techniques and genuine effort, working twice as hard for half the results because no one ever gave them tools worth using.

Then I think about the five middle-grade stones I paid for this.

Five.

Middle-grade.

Stones.

Something behind my left eye begins to throb.

“Master?” Ling’er is watching me with the careful expression of someone observing a pot that may or may not be about to boil over.

I open my mouth. Close it. Open it again. What comes out is not words. It is a sound. A very quiet, very controlled sound, the kind that a man makes when he is forty-eight years old and has spent a lifetime practicing equanimity and is currently watching equanimity pack its bags and walk out the door.