Max tried to move. To speak. To do anything.
Nothing happened.
Panic clawed up through the void, raw and animal. He had no mouth to scream with, no lungs to pull air into, but the urge was there all the same, thrashing uselessly.
Am I dead? The thought floated up, thin and fragile.
It felt like an answer rather than a question.
He remembered the ache in his chest, the way his heart had misfired, the way his limbs had turned into stone. He remembered lying alone in his tiny rented room with no one to notice when his breathing had gone strange. No one to call an ambulance. No one to knock on his door the next morning when he didn't show up for class.
There was a bitter sort of symmetry to it. Overworked, under-rested college student dies of an overtaxed heart. The kind of thing that got a paragraph in a local newspaper and then was forgotten.
The panic slowly ebbed into a dull, heavy resignation.
So that's it, he thought. Game over. No continues.
Time—or the absence of it—stretched. He tried to count, to measure it somehow, but there were no heartbeats to mark the seconds, no breaths to divide one moment from the next. Just endless, blank existence.
Eventually, something changed.
It started as a pressure, faint and distant, like someone pressing a finger against the outside of a balloon he was trapped inside. Then there were two points of pressure. Then three. They moved around him, heavy and slow, grinding past.
Sound seeped in next, filtering through like water soaking into dry earth. At first it was only a muted, rumbling throb. Then the rumble split into layers: deep, rolling vibrations from far below; sharper, staccato clicks from somewhere above; a constant, whispering hiss all around.
It took Max a long moment to recognize any of it. His brain kept trying to fit the sensations into familiar shapes—traffic, maybe, or distant thunder—and failing.
The realization came all at once, sudden and absurd.
I'm underground.
He wasn't sure how he knew that, except that the pressure around him was constant, heavy from every direction at once, and the sounds felt… thick, smeared through layers of earth and stone. Tiny tremors vibrated through him with every distant footstep, every shifting root.
He tried, again, to move.
Nothing.
No arms. No legs. No chest rising and falling. No heartbeat. His sense of self felt tiny and fixed, like a single point floating in a sea of weight.
Awareness flared, sharper. He focused inward—or whatever direction counted as inward now—and realized he did have something like a body. It was just… wrong.
Solid. Dense. Cool.
The kind of patient, unmoving presence he'd always associated with rocks.
No, he thought flatly. No way.
A high, hysterical sort of laughter bubbled up inside him, except there was nowhere for it to go. He imagined it ricocheting around his stone-brain like a trapped bird.
Of course. Of course this is what happens. You work yourself to death and wake up as a rock. That tracks.
He had no idea how much time passed with him just… existing there. At some point, he stopped flailing mentally and started paying attention.
The rumbling vibrations he'd heard earlier came and went in patterns. Sometimes they were steady, like a march. Sometimes they crashed and boomed, making fine cracks shiver through his body. Once, there was a sharp, searing sensation along one edge, as if something extremely hot had scraped past him. He would have flinched if he'd had muscles.
Through it all, faint threads of something else brushed against him. Not sound, not exactly, though it vibrated the same way sound did. It was more like… warmth without temperature, pressure without weight. It moved in currents, swirling and twisting around him, sometimes strong, sometimes barely noticeable.
If Max had still been in his human body, he would have called it wind. But there was no air here. Only soil and stone.
Qi, a distant, half-remembered part of his brain supplied. Cultivation novels. Shenanigans. All those stories he'd read between lectures, where exhausted modern nobodies got second chances in mystical worlds full of spiritual energy.
He'd always joked that if he ever got isekai'd, he'd probably end up as cannon fodder or a background NPC. A rock was a step down from that.
Unless…
The thought came softly, like a notification ping.
If this really is a cultivation world, rocks can become things. Spirit stones. Magic artifacts. Golems. Stuff like that. Maybe I'm not completely screwed.
It was a thin thread of hope, but he clung to it. Anything was better than the idea of spending eternity as inanimate scenery.
The strange not-wind brushed against him again, stronger this time. It pooled in the tiny fractures that ran through his body, seeping into him like water soaking into dry clay. Wherever it passed, he felt… less numb. More present.
He focused on that sensation, trying to guide it without really knowing how. In the stories, people "circulated Qi" through meridians. Max didn't have meridians, but he did have cracks and flaws and tiny, jagged pathways running through his stone form.
He pictured the energy flowing through them. Not pushing—he had no strength to push—but inviting, the way he'd mentally nudged progress bars in his games, coaxing them to keep ticking up.
Something answered.
A whisper of warmth settled inside him, then thickened. The not-wind swirled, picked up speed, and began to spiral slowly through his body in a looping path.
A faint chime rang out—not in the air, but directly inside whatever counted as his mind now.
A translucent panel snapped into existence in front of his awareness. Words appeared on it in crisp, glowing letters.
> IDLE SYSTEM v1.0 INITIALIZING…
Host: [MAX CARTER]
Current Form: [Inert Stone – Rank F-]
Status: [Conscious] – [Immobile] – [Uncultivated]
Max would have blinked if he'd had eyelids. Instead, his thoughts simply stalled.
This was… a HUD. An interface. A system window straight out of a game. Not the minimalist kind from the more "realistic" stories, either. The font was clean, the borders a soft blue, the text slightly animated as if some bored UX designer had spent a weekend giving it personality.
"Okay," he thought slowly. "Either I'm hallucinating, or I actually got a cheat."
Another line of text appeared, as if in response.
> ERROR: No vocal apparatus detected.
INFO: System interprets mental commands and queries.
"Right," Max thought. "Mental only. Got it."
The panel flickered, then expanded into a more detailed display.
> BASE PARAMETERS
Durability: 3/3
Density: Low
Spiritual Affinity: 0
Mobility: 0
Intelligence: 2 (Residual)
IDLE SKILLS (v1.0)
– Idle Qi Absorption (F)
Slowly absorbs ambient Qi while host remains motionless.
– Idle Tempering (F)
Gradually refines host's form using stored Qi.
– Idle Insight (F)
Converts prolonged observation and introspection into minor intelligence gains over time.
SYSTEM NOTE: All available idle skills must be raised to maximum rank to unlock Evolution 1 and trigger Idle System v2.0.
The information poured into his mind in a smooth, matter-of-fact stream. It wasn't overwhelming, exactly—more like reading a well-organized tutorial screen.
Max latched onto one phrase.
"Evolution 1?" he asked silently.
A smaller window popped up.
> EVOLUTION 1 – REQUIREMENTS:
Idle Qi Absorption: Rank E
Idle Tempering: Rank E
Idle Insight: Rank E
REWARD PREVIEW:
– Improved base parameters
– New idle skills
– Partial access to external sensory data
"So I can't move yet," Max muttered in his head, "but I can eventually see more than… vibrations."
The system did not confirm or deny. It simply sat there, glowing faintly in his awareness like the dashboard of a car waiting for him to press the gas.
He stared at the skill list for a long moment.
Idle Qi Absorption. Idle Tempering. Idle Insight.
It was almost funny. He'd spent his life juggling work and school, never able to rest, and now his second chance at existence revolved around doing nothing as efficiently as possible.
On the other hand, if there was one thing he was good at, it was letting idle games run in the background while he did other things. Or, in this case, while he did nothing at all.
"All right," he thought, letting a quiet determination settle where his panic had been. "Let's do what we do best."
He focused on Idle Qi Absorption. The skill description pulsed once, like a heartbeat, and a thin progress bar appeared beneath it, currently empty.
> Idle Qi Absorption (F) – 0.0%
The not-wind—the Qi—was still flowing around him in lazy currents. He pictured the skill reaching out like unseen roots, anchoring his stone body to the energy in the earth. No forcing, no desperate grabbing. Just… inviting, again. Like setting up a collector in a game and letting it do its thing.
Something clicked.
The flow of Qi shifted, drawn toward him more steadily. Threads of energy seeped into his cracks, following the looping path he'd imagined earlier. The warmth inside him grew, no longer faint but definitely there, like a small coal nestled at his core.
The progress bar ticked up.
0.1%.
Max felt a absurd flare of triumph. "Yes. Come on."
He checked Idle Tempering next, and the system obligingly showed him its own bar, currently at 0%. The description expanded slightly, adding:
> Automatically consumes a portion of stored Qi to improve Durability and Density.
Effect increases with skill rank.
So, Qi in, tempering out. A feedback loop. Simple, clean.
He set both skills to "active"—or whatever the mental equivalent of clicking a checkbox was—and felt the system settle into a quiet hum. Idle loops, running in the background without further input.
For the first time since waking as a rock, Max felt something like hope. It wasn't huge or dramatic. Just a small, steady spark.
He still couldn't move. He still couldn't speak. He had no idea where in this new world he was buried, or what sort of terrifying cultivators might be walking above him. But he had a system tailored to doing nothing and getting stronger for it.
If there was one unfair advantage perfectly suited to a guy who'd tried to run his life on idle, this was it.
Above him, faintly, footsteps shook the earth. The rhythm was different from anything he'd felt so far—light, quick, controlled. Voices filtered through, distorted but unmistakably human. One of them laughed, the sound sending a pleasant shiver through the Qi around him.
Max couldn't make out the words yet. But every vibration, every scrap of sound, every shift in the currents of energy was now another thing for Idle Insight to chew on. Another tiny sliver of information he could turn into understanding.
He watched his skill bars creep forward.
0.3%. 0.5%. 0.8%.
Progress. Slow, but real.
In his previous life, time had always felt like something chasing him, snapping at his heels, demanding more work, more effort, more hours. Now, buried deep in the earth with nothing to do but exist and let the numbers rise, time flowed differently.
He wasn't sure if minutes or hours—or days—passed as he settled into the strange, quiet rhythm of cultivation. All he knew was that for the first time in a long time, every second spent doing nothing wasn't a waste.
It was investment.
Somewhere far above, something roared. The sound ripped through the ground like a shockwave, making his entire body vibrate. Stones cracked. Roots tore. Qi surged, wild and chaotic.
Rock or not, Max felt a jolt of instinctive fear.
The world out there was big and dangerous. Bigger and more dangerous than anything he'd dealt with before.
But so was the potential sitting quietly inside him.
"Fine," he thought, watching his skill bars inch upward even as the world shook. "Let the world go crazy up there."
Down here, in the dark, the Idle System hummed.
And Max—once an exhausted, invisible student—began the slow, patient work of becoming something more