Ideas are always more plentiful than solutions. Leaving X5 meant escaping the suffocating grip of the Li Conglomerate, if nothing else. Yao spent the first day of the voyage hunched over the shuttle's meager, self-contained network node, scouring the public data-streams for the most generic, freely available meditation guides—the kind of foundational pap every citizen of the Empire was theoretically exposed to. She downloaded the most official-looking, state-approved primer she could find and had the ship's fabricator spit out a stack of flimsy synth-paper sheets. For the next several days, as the stars streaked past the viewport in silent, indifferent rivers, she poured over the printed texts.
In the cosmology of Arcane Throne, meditation was not a hobby; it was the bedrock of civilization, a cultural constant woven into the fabric of life from the cradle. The body was tempered, the mind was shaped, all in service of this single, profound connection. Methods were legion—some mundane and widely practiced, offering modest returns; others esoteric and jealously guarded, promising explosive growth. The efficacy of any method, however, was a brutal calculus. It depended on innate constitution, mental capacity, technique, environment, and a dozen other variables. The final measure, the only one that mattered, was the Meditative Resonance Rate, measured in seven-day cycles. It was expressed as a percentage increase over one's baseline Spirit attribute. A 10% resonance was the baseline threshold, achievable by any diligent novice. 30% marked a talent. 70% was the realm of prodigies. 100% and above were the legends whispered about in academy halls.
The world was ruthlessly meritocratic. It did not care about your capital, your pedigree, or your tragic backstory. It did not care if you spent your seven days fighting for scraps in a gutter or lounging in a perfumed garden. It only measured the result. It was the ultimate, unforgiving examination. Score well, and your past laziness was rebranded as latent genius. Score poorly, and a lifetime of struggle was dismissed as inevitable mediocrity.
Yao understood this. The true crucible would be the academy entrance evaluations. Everything else—survival, luck, dungeon delves—was just noise, the chaotic background static against which true aptitude was measured. For now, her goal was simple: squeeze every drop of progress from these seven days in transit. Grinding for survival was nothing to be ashamed of.
So she devoted two full days to dissecting the meditation method and experimenting with postures. What generations of children absorbed through cultural osmosis, she had to brute-force through study. She was deliberately furtive, making a show of hiding her activities from the guards. It was, of course, a pointless charade. The moment she accessed the ship's network, her activity logs were automatically forwarded to the Xie family servers. The printed pages were a physical confession. The guard captain duly reported everything.
Xie An was informed. Arcane aptitude?Not surprising. Noble bloodlines carried a higher statistical probability. Over 75% of Green-Blood offspring manifested some talent. The question was the scale.
"And the caliber?" Xie An's voice was flat over the secure line.
"It appears he only recently Awakened, Master. Likely gained some experiential insight during the bandit incident. Current level is estimated between two and three. As for innate talent… given the environment of X5 and his lack of formal education, he is essentially fumbling in the dark. He's currently memorizing public-domain mantras from the network. Results are… unknown."
Xie An felt no excitement, no paternal warmth. If anything, a competent bastard was more troublesome than a useless one. A child abandoned and ignored would feel no loyalty upon recall. At best, they would be a neutral asset; at worst, a vengeful liability. And Xie An's personal distaste for this particular offspring ran bone-deep.
"If he asks for instruction, provide none," Xie An ordered, his tone leaving no room for interpretation.
The command echoed in the guard captain's mind, forcing a rapid reassessment. I misread the situation.A cold anger settled in his gut, directed at the greasy, entitled boy and the cold lobster now rotting in the ship's cooler. The novelty of a new outhouse lasts three days. His lasted less.
Confined to her cabin, Yao felt the shift in atmosphere almost immediately. It manifested in the meals delivered to her door—lukewarm, bland, and clearly prepared with minimal effort. Revenge, served on a tray. She half-expected to find phlegm in the soup. Thankfully, she'd had the foresight to stockpile instant noodles.
"Old dog Xie isn't even pretending to be humane," she muttered to the sterile cabin walls, a spike of youthful indignation piercing her usual calm. "So I can cultivate. Big deal. Is that worth this petty sabotage? And these guards… spineless weathervanes. The leftover lobster had been a wasted investment."
Shaking off the irritation, she returned to her meditation puzzle. "It makes no sense. I've memorized the entire mantra. Word for word. It's not that complicated. Why can't I enter the state?"
The public method was simple by design. For someone of her intelligence, memorization was trivial. Yet, the promised inner stillness, the connection to the ambient mana, remained elusive.
"If the text is correct, then the posture must be wrong." She became a human pretzel, contorting herself into dozens of positions gleaned from vague diagrams and poorly written descriptions. She tried the Lotus, the Half-Lotus, the Seated Scholar, the Reclining Ascetic. She stood on one leg. She hung upside down from the bed frame. Nothing. Only cramping muscles and growing frustration.
"Is this garbage method just too low-tier for me?" she finally groaned in defeat, collapsing in a boneless heap onto the narrow sofa, all discipline abandoned. She sprawled, limbs akimbo, staring at the ceiling, mind a blank slate of annoyed exhaustion.
Ding.
It wasn't a sound, but a sensation. A spark in the void behind her eyes. Suddenly, she was not in the cabin. She was adrift in a cosmos of swirling elemental motes—glimmers of emerald wind, flickers of crimson fire, specks of earthen brown. Vast, ghostly structures that might have been Gene-Sequence trees shimmered in the distance. The faint, majestic silhouette of a throne carved from pure arcane light dominated the horizon. It was terrifying and beautiful, distant yet intimately close. She felt it then—the tenuous, spider-silk thread connecting her consciousness to the pulsing heart of the world's magic. Meditation was the act of strengthening that thread through focused reverence, of whispering to the universe and hoping for a whisper in return.
She snapped back to reality, gasping. She was still splayed on the sofa, one arm dangling over the side. The posture of utter, decadent lounge.
"So…" she breathed, a slow smile spreading across her face. "The optimal meditation posture for me… is the 'Sprawled Debauchee'?" All her efforts had been aimed at discipline, at control. The answer, it seemed, was surrender. Letting the mind go fallow.
The remaining five days were spent in a state of deliberately cultivated languor. By the end of the seventh cycle, her Spirit had ticked up to 233. A baseline 10% resonance. Factoring in the two days of futile struggle, her natural aptitude was perhaps a hair above the dismal low tier, but nothing remarkable. She was a late starter, a transplant in this world's mystical ecology. Steady, survivable growth was the goal. Grandiose talent could come later, bought with S1 keys and a Trihedron shell.
Now, she had the Xie family to face.
The shuttle entered the atmospheric envelope of Brook Province, Jingyang Prefecture. Noble privilege meant bypassing the grubby commercial spaceports. If your family estate was large enough, you could carve your own landing pad from your own land. The Xie family, while only Green-Blood, was on an upward trajectory within the province, possessing enough clout and acreage for a private star-dock.
Yet, as the shuttle began its descent, Yao's internal map clashed with the view outside. The trajectory was wrong. They were not heading for the coordinates of the main Xie manor in the city.
She had done her homework during the voyage. She knew where the family seat was. A cold knot formed in her stomach. Why the deviation?
She maintained a facade of bored observation at the viewport, watching the sprawling, ochre-hued city of Jingyang resolve below. Data flickered in her mind: Jingyang Prefecture, 9th among Brook Province's 18 prefectures. Population: 9 million. Geographically disadvantaged, situated on arid loess plateaus. Known for Earth and Wind affinity Arcana. Economically stunted compared to its peers. Harsh environment breeds a hardened populace. Local dungeons skew towards caverns and seismic events…
The shuttle was now leaving the urban sprawl behind, heading into the scrubland beyond the city limits. "So, a proper homecoming is out of the question," she mused silently.
Time to act. She turned from the window and began a systematic, quiet dismantling of her cabin. The hot water heater's thermal regulator, a minor lens from the wall-mounted display, the privacy filter from the smart mirror in the washroom—small, non-critical components whose absence wouldn't trigger immediate alarms. To these, she added her own scavenged bits: the tiny recorder, a few stripped wires, a micro-power cell. With nimble fingers, she assembled a crude, wide-angle recording device.
Next, she activated the Arachnid Ascension Ring. A thought, and a strand of Gossamer shot silently from the ring, out the slightly cracked window viewport. It adhered to the shuttle's hull. She paid out the line, letting the homemade recorder dangle at its end. Then, with meticulous concentration, she began to playthe strand. Not reeling it in, but using subtle variations in tension to make the device at its end bob and weave, riding the shuttle's slipstream like a kite, keeping it tucked into the craft's sensor-blind spot beneath the belly. The device was activated, its single glass eye staring blankly backwards.
Just as she finished and severed the strand, the shuttle began its final descent. The guard captain arrived at her door, his face a mask of polite finality. "Young Master, the family head is currently occupied with urgent matters. You are to await his arrangements here. These quarters have been prepared for you."
Yao looked past him. The shuttle had settled not on a manicured estate lawn, but at the edge of vast, rolling fields of golden wheat, ready for harvest. It was picturesque in a brutally rustic way. A few hundred meters away, nestled against a tree line, was a cluster of farm buildings—a main house, several barns, what looked like a paddock and a pig sty. A working farm. A modest, out-of-the-way Xie property.
The message was clear. She wasn't the long-lost son coming home. She was the embarrassing secret being tucked away in the attic.
Old Dog Xie,she thought, the anger now cold and sharp. I'm your bastard son, not your mistress from the pleasure district. Is this really necessary?A worse thought followed. Or has Oaks's value changed? Is he no longer needed?That was dangerous. A useless bastard could be left to rot in obscurity. A bastard who was no longer needed… could be disposed of.
Perhaps fleeing had been the better option.
She let the mask slip, her face twisting into outrage. "What is the meaning of this? Is Father locking me up? I won't go! I'd rather be free and starving on the streets! I have no family left! Let me go!"
"I'm afraid that's not possible, Young Master," the captain said, his earlier deference completely evaporated. "Secure his pack. Check for any… misplaced items."
Guards moved in, ignoring her protests. They wrenched the pack from her grip, upending it onto the shuttle's deck. Everything was examined. The funerary urn was handled with rough indifference. Her spare clothes were shaken out. Even her undergarments were given a perfunctory once-over. Only when they were satisfied she carried nothing of note was the pack, its contents a jumbled mess, shoved back into her arms.
Then came the final insult. The transport waiting wasn't a ground-car or a hover-sled. It was a simple, open-backed rural cart, hitched to a dour-looking beast of burden. The farm had vehicles; this was a deliberate choice.
The guard captain mounted his own mechanical steed with a cold sneer. Yao was half-dragged, half-shoved onto the hard wooden planks of the cart. The journey to the farm compound was short, bumpy, and humiliating.
She was deposited not in the main farmhouse, but in a small, separate cottage at the edge of the property. The moment she stumbled through the door, it was slammed shut behind her. The distinct clunk-clackof heavy bolts being thrown echoed through the sparse room. Through the grimy window, she saw two guards take up positions, one at the front, one at the rear.
She was in a cell. A charming, rustic cell with a thatched roof and a view of the pig pen.
Outside, half-buried in the tall wheat stubble a hundred meters from the landing site, a small, makeshift device lay in the dirt. A single gossamer thread, almost invisible, trailed from it, leading back towards the long-vanished shuttle. Its single glass eye, now caked with dust, had captured the entire undignified procession—the forced disembarkation, the rifled pack, the rustic cart, the bolted door. The image was stored, a silent witness to her welcome.