Kai's reaction to the public rejection wasn't to mourn, but to analyze. In his world, every problem, even a sociological one, had a technical solution or a mathematical flaw.
He spent the next full day locked in his workshop, running the data from his rejection file through his custom diagnostic program. He was trying to find the algorithm that had flagged him. The stated reason was "unaccredited methodology," but Kai suspected a deeper, more malicious filter.
He designed a simulation, inputting the parameters of every accepted student from the Top 5 academies—their scores, their lineage rank, their financial strata. He then inserted his own perfect scores and his zero lineage rank.
The simulation repeatedly returned the same result: Admission Approved.
He kept rerunning the program, increasing the complexity of the lineage filter, adding variables like "parental income score" and "certified training hours." The results were maddeningly consistent. By pure metrics, the Top 5 should have accepted him.
"It's not the metrics," Kai muttered, running a frustrated hand through his already messy hair. "It's a single-point failure. It has to be a specific flag."
He finally isolated the rejection point: a custom subroutine embedded deep in the Arbitral Council's admissions software, designed to analyze Bio Energy signatures submitted during testing. It was highly technical, focused on the purity and predictability of the candidate's cultivation flow.
When Kai ran his own Divergent Flow signature through the subroutine, the result was a massive, violent error message. His energy flow, asymmetric and non-standard, was read as System Corruption. The algorithm was designed to automatically reject anyone who didn't conform to the accepted cultivation model.
Kai leaned back, a cold, hard truth settling over him. It wasn't his lineage per se; it was the fact that his genius expressed itself in a way the establishment could not standardize, control, or replicate. He was an unpredictable variable, and the system demanded predictability. The rejection wasn't a mistake; it was a deliberate, self-preserving action by the elite.
A fierce, analytical rage overcame him. He wasn't angry at the people; he was angry at the flawed system. He felt a sudden, powerful need to destroy the algorithm that had judged him.
He began coding a retaliation program—not a hack, but a pure, unconstrained Bio Energy pulse, designed to overload the subroutine's diagnostic capacity.
He channeled his Inner Force directly into his comm terminal's energy buffer. He didn't refine the energy; he let it be raw, asymmetrical, and chaotic—pure, concentrated Divergent Flow.
I will show you corruption, he thought, his eyes blazing with focused intensity.
He hit the execution rune.
The terminal didn't overload. Instead, the sudden, volatile energy pulse shot out through the building's low-grade network—a massive, unbidden spike of raw, uncontained energy, exactly mirroring the chaotic discharge he'd experienced in the dojo in Chapter 5.
The spike was a brief, powerful echo of his defiance, a sudden rupture in the controlled noise of the city's network. It dissipated quickly, leaving Kai exhausted but satisfied. He hadn't destroyed the algorithm, but he had left his calling card.
Unbeknownst to him, this was the moment that his fate was truly sealed.
Miles away, in a poorly funded, back-end Grimstone Mech Academy server room, a low-priority sensor array—designed to monitor low-level network fluctuations for basic maintenance—suddenly registered a terrifying, impossible reading.
ALERT: Unclassified Anomaly. Bio-Energy Signature Level: Extreme. Pattern: Asymmetric, Non-Standardized. Source: Sector 4, Rust Belt.
The system's automated flag instantly categorized the signal not as a threat, but as an Unconventional Anomaly. The data was too perfect in its chaos to be random noise, and it was too powerful to be low-born tampering. It screamed of radical, non-compliant power.
The alert was routed to an obscure terminal, the one designated for "theoretical research of unverified methods." The terminal that belonged to a highly focused, but academically isolated, third-year student named Anaya Patel.
Kai had meant the pulse to be a symbolic act of defiance against the system. Instead, it had found the one person in the entire city looking for exactly that kind of impossible chaos.