34. Plagiarizing Fictional Immortals and My Disciple is Calling Me Out

Ling’er leads body refinement as always. The disciples groan when she announces the day’s regimen: iron sand pockets sewn into their training garments, adding weight to every movement. She demonstrates first, moving through the Coiling Dragon forms with the pockets visibly bulging at her wrists and ankles. Her movements are fluid, effortless. The disciples watch, impressed despite themselves. What they don’t know is that her pockets contain the densest iron sand I could procure, carefully distributed across her limbs and torso. Fifty pounds of weight added to her small frame. More than twice as heavy compared to what they all were wearing. She wears it like a second skin. They struggle. It weighs on them, throwing off their balance, making every punch and kick a battle against momentum.

She doesn’t struggle. She moves like the weights aren’t there, demonstrating each form with the same precision she’s always had.

Wei Chen collapses after the third set, gasping. “How does she do that?”

“Genetics,” I say again.

He accepts this. Everyone accepts this. Ling’er catches my eye and hides a smile. As the day wanes, I face her in the clearing behind my quarters. Moonlight paints the snow silver. She wears the full weights: fifty pounds distributed across her small frame, making her seem heavier, denser, more grounded.

“Fight me. Don’t take the weights off.”

She attacks. It’s harder for her now. I can see it in every movement: the weights slow her, throw off her balance, force her to work for every strike. Her water-saw is sluggish. Her flame spikes flicker before forming. Her earth steps crack the frozen ground but don’t lift her as high. But she adapts. The bone shows her how to shift her center of gravity, how to use the weights as momentum, how to turn disadvantage into advantage. Her body learns faster than her mind can follow. We spar for two hours. She lands three hits; a palm to my shoulder, a kick that glances off my hip, a water saw that I only barely deflect. I land one. She’s holding back. I can feel it.

When we finish, she’s breathing hard, sweat freezing on her face. But her eyes are bright.

“The weights are teaching me,” she says. “Where I’m inefficient. Where I waste movement. The bone shows me, but the weights make me feel it.”

I nod, catching my own breath. “Good. Keep them on.”

After sparring, I lead her to the stream that borders our territory. It’s frozen at the edges, but the center still flows, dark and cold, carrying winter’s chill down from the mountains. Our usual routine of elemental training. I have her sit in it. Weights on. Clothes soaked. The water is just above freezing.

“Water adapts to any container.” I settle on a rock beside her, watching her shiver. “Your weights are a container. Be water within them. Don’t fight the weight; flow around it, through it, under it.”

She closes her eyes.

I’m not even pretending to be original anymore. I read hundreds of xianxia novels in my past life, thousands of chapters of cultivation wisdom and martial philosophy. Some of it was nonsense. Some of it was profound. All of it is available for me to steal.

Ling’er doesn’t need to know I’m plagiarizing fictional immortals.

She sits for three hours. The stream flows. The moon rises. Ice forms on her lashes and freezes her hair into white strands. When she emerges, her control has shifted. Water rises with her, clinging to her clothes, then falling away at a thought. The weights don’t seem to drag her down anymore. She moves through the frozen air like she’s still in the stream.

The next day, I take her to the mine. Deep underground, where the air is still and the darkness absolute, surrounded by stone that’s been sleeping for millions of years. The weights clink softly as she settles onto the cold rock floor.

“Earth supports everything.” I stand beside her, my voice echoing in the narrow tunnel. “Your weights are earth—heavy, patient, immovable. Become the mountain that carries them without effort. Let them be part of you, not a burden on you.”

She closes her eyes.

“Master?” Her voice is quiet in the darkness. “Why do you say such profound things but never apply them to yourself?”

I freeze. Sweat forms on my back despite the chilling cold.

“You talk about becoming water, becoming earth, becoming metal. You teach me to flow, to support, to endure.” She opens her eyes, and in the dim lantern light I can see her expression—genuinely curious, not accusing. “But you don’t do any of it. You learn the Frost Manual, but you fight like you’re still forcing the cold instead of becoming it.”

I cough. “I’m… that’s different. I’m older. Set in my ways. My foundation is already built.”

“Is it?”

I have no answer for that.

She waits, patient, her eyes holding something that might be pity or might be wisdom or might just be a twelve-year-old who sees too much.

“Focus,” I say finally. “We’re working on your earth affinity, not my cultivation struggles.”

She sits for four hours. Miners pass, confused by the Sect Leader and his disciple in the darkness, but Old Zhao waves them on. He’s learned not to question the strange training that’s transformed this sect.

Two days later.

The herb garden has become something beautiful. Mei Lin tends it like a mother tending children, talking to the sprouts, singing to them, coaxing growth with patient love. Rows of healthy plants thrive under her care, their green shoots reaching toward the pale winter sun. Ling’er kneels among them, weights pressing into the soft soil, her small hands resting on the frozen ground.

“Wood grows through obstacles.” I stand at the garden’s edge, watching her settle into meditation as I recite a passage from a novel where the character controlled nature. “Your weights are stone. Be the seed that cracks stone. Find the path through resistance, around barriers, between grains of earth. Wood doesn’t fight. It grows.”

She closes her eyes. She meditates for hours. Mei Lin comes and goes, bringing water, checking her plants, glancing curiously at the kneeling girl. I wave her away each time. The sun sets. The moon rises. Frost forms on Ling’er’s hair, her shoulders, the weights pressing her down. When she opens her eyes, tiny sprouts have curled around where she sat, delicate green shoots that weren’t there before, pushing through frozen soil to reach her warmth. She looks at them, then at me. At the end of the week, I give her the iron again. The same chunk of iron she’s been working with for weeks. It sits in her palms, cold and dense, absorbing the lantern light without reflecting it.

“Metal is the element of weights. Of resistance. Of structure.” I settle across from her in my quarters, the candle between us casting long shadows. “Your weights are metal: not just physically, but spiritually. They are the discipline you carry, the structure you build, the shape you choose to become. Become the metal that accepts more metal without breaking.”

She holds the iron for hours.

The candle burns down. I replace it. The wind whistles outside, rattling the windows. She doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe, doesn’t seem to exist except as a statue holding iron.

Dawn approaches.

The iron hums in her hands. A low, resonant vibration that I feel in my chest before I hear it. She opens her eyes, and for a moment, the iron glows faintly, not with heat, but with something else. Acceptance. Recognition.

She sets it down carefully.

“Metal isn’t just hard,” she says. “It’s patient. It waits. It knows that what’s being built is worth the weight.”

I sit in my quarters as dawn breaks, updating her records. The candle gutters. My hand cramps. The numbers tell a story of impossible growth.

Sparring Record: 12 sessions, 0 losses (to me), 37 hits landed on Master

To begin the next week, I add more iron sand. Seventy-five pounds total, distributed across her limbs and torso. The pockets bulge, the fabric straining. She accepts it without complaint, without visible strain. She simply stands, adjusts her center of gravity once, and walks out to lead morning practice. The disciples groan when they see the new weights. They’ve been struggling with twenty pounds for a week. Thirty feels impossible.

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Ling’er doesn’t mention that she’s carrying more than double that. She just leads. We fight every night in the clearing behind my quarters. The moon is our only witness, the snow our only record. She’s faster now, even with seventy-five pounds dragging at her limbs. Her techniques flow together seamlessly; water into earth, earth into metal, metal into wood, wood into fire. Combinations I’ve never seen, transitions that shouldn’t be possible, attacks that come from angles that don’t exist.

She lands hits more frequently. I’m actually trying now with Foundation Establishment speed and power, no holding back—and she’s keeping up.

That’s more than any Qi Condensation cultivator should be able to do. Afterward, we focus on her elemental synthesis.

“Fire and earth become magma,” I instruct, pacing the clearing while she sits cross-legged in the snow. “Water and wood become life. Metal and fire become molten destruction. Create. Experiment. Find what works.”

She experiments. By midweek, she’s created techniques that shouldn’t exist at Qi Condensation. Techniques that I’ve only read about in novels, that major sects hoard for their top geniuses.

Magma Spike (Fire + Earth): A molten projectile that hardens on impact, trapping enemies in cooling rock. She throws one at a boulder and it punches through, leaving a hole lined with obsidian.

Living Armor (Wood + Metal + Earth): Vines reinforced with metal roots, anchored to the earth, growing and shifting to deflect attacks. She wears it while sparring, and my frozen palm strikes glance off like water.

Frozen Flame (Fire + Water): A contradiction. Flame that burns cold, that freezes what it touches.

Dragon’s Breath (Fire + Wind + Bloodline): Her most powerful attack. A cone of dragon-flame that ignites the air itself, that burns through stone and metal, that carries the weight of her bloodline. She only used it once, at a dead tree at the edge of the clearing. The tree ceased to exist.

Ling’er – Synthesis Progress

2-Element Combinations: 8 mastered

3-Element Combinations: 3 mastered

4-Element Combinations: 1 attempted (unstable, needs work)

Bloodline-Enhanced Techniques: 4

The disciples are hard at work too. Struggling. I watch them during morning practice, their weighted forms moving through the Coiling Dragon forms with visible effort. They’re caught between two impossible things: not wanting to be outstripped by Ling’er, and not being able to match her no matter how hard they try.

Every time they see her simply do better, I notice it.