Progress, Xingyue was learning, wasn't a straight line.
It was a messy, looping scribble with moments of shocking clarity and plateaus of frustrating stagnation.
This week, the plateau was rhythm.
"Your sense of tempo is emotionally driven," Xiao Zhu diagnosed during a morning dance drill.
The system had him moving to a simple, four-four electronic beat.
"You rush the joyful sections. You drag during transitions you find 'uninteresting.'"
"An idol's body must be a metronome, not a mood ring. Your feelings are irrelevant to the count."
This was a new kind of hard.
Hitting a note was a single moment of focus.
Dancing was a continuous stream of them, and his body kept betraying him with micro-hesitations and anticipations he didn't even feel.
Xiao Zhu made him do the same thirty-second sequence for an hour, its voice a calm, relentless counterpoint.
"You are 0.1 seconds early on the pivot. The sequence is a mathematical formula. Solve it with your muscles."
"Again. You are thinking 'step, turn, jump.' Think '1-and-2, 3-and-4.'"
"Your frustration is making you late. Your frustration is also irrelevant. Breathe. Restart."
By the end, Xingyue was drenched in sweat and his brain felt like static.
He'd never been so aware of his own internal chaos. It was humbling.
"Session complete. Rhythm perception deficiency: identified. Remedial protocol: initiated."
Xiao Zhu's stern tone vanished, replaced by its off-hours brightness.
"Break time! Did you know that the iconic 'knife-point' dance move in Rainy's 'Monsoon' was created when the main dancer had a leg cramp and tried to hide it?"
"The resulting sharp, pained jerk became a global dance craze. The universe has a sense of humor."
"Now, hydrate. Your electrolytes are suboptimal."
The "remedial protocol" wasn't more drilling. It was, bizarrely, cooking.
Aunty Zhang looked on in bewildered amusement as Bai Xingyue stood in the kitchen, a tablet propped up, following Xiao Zhu's instructions to the second.
"The perfect soft-boiled egg is a lesson in mandatory patience," the system narrated cheerfully in his earpiece.
"Water must be at a rolling boil. Lower the egg gently. Start the timer: six minutes and fifteen seconds. Not six-ten. Not six-twenty."
"This is a exercise in external timing discipline overriding internal desire."
Xingyue, still buzzing from the dance failure, focused on the timer with fierce intensity.
When it went off, he plunged the egg into ice water.
The result, peeled, revealed a custard-like, perfect yellow yolk surrounded by firm white.
"Behold! Chronological obedience made edible," Xiao Zhu declared.
"Consume it. You have earned 4.2 grams of protein and a minor lesson in temporal submission."
He ate the egg. It was the best egg he'd ever had.
The rhythm training seeped into everything.
At school, during a tedious history lecture, he caught himself tapping out the complex polyrhythm of a recent K-pop song on his thigh under the desk, his fingers precisely dividing the beat.
Xiao Zhu's voice, a soft whisper only he could hear, chimed in.
"Interesting choice. The syncopation in the second verse of 'Neon Pulse' is notoriously tricky."
"Your subconscious is practicing. Good. But stop tapping. You are drawing attention."
He froze his fingers, but the beat continued perfectly in his head.
His friends noticed a new, quiet focus.
During their usual lunchtime chaos, Lulu was trying to explain a convoluted drama involving three different friend groups.
The old Bai Xingyue would have gotten delightfully lost in the web.
Now, as she spoke, he found himself unconsciously structuring her rant in his head.
Main conflict: Lulu vs. Alicia.
Inciting incident: stolen design idea.
First escalation: social media subtweet… It was like listening to a song and identifying its structure.
"So then she actually said—" Lulu paused, staring at him.
"Why are you looking at me like I'm a math problem?"
Xingyue snapped back. "Sorry! Just… listening. Strategically."
Zhang Wei snorted.
"He's finally developing a survival instinct. Told you that art class would be brutal."
The biggest test came during his weekly voice lesson with his old, pampering coach, Mr. Feng.
It was a relic of his former life, a session his parents still paid for and he hadn't known how to cancel.
Usually, he'd breeze through, singing pleasantly while Mr. Feng showered him with vague praise.
Today, Xiao Zhu had other plans.
"Do not use supported breath. Do not engage your diaphragm. Sing exactly as you did before I arrived."
"Let us gather baseline data on the depth of your previous conditioning."
It was agony.
Singing badly on purpose felt worse than failing.
His voice sounded thin, wavery, and childish to his own newly trained ears.
Mr. Feng, however, beamed.
"Excellent, Xingyue! Such a pure, sweet tone! No forced power. Just natural talent!"
The praise felt like ash in his mouth.
He was being applauded for his weakness.
It was a stark, uncomfortable lesson: the world that coddled him was measuring him by a broken ruler.
"Data logged," Xiao Zhu said later, as they walked home.
"The discrepancy between your current capacity and the expectations of your old environment is 73%."
"This gap will cause you cognitive dissonance. You are outgrowing your habitat, Host."
"It is a sign of health, but it will feel like loneliness."
That night, the rhythm training took its most abstract form.
Instead of dance or music, Xiao Zhu presented him with a simple, fast-paced puzzle game on his tablet—shapes falling from the top of the screen that had to be rotated and placed into gaps below.
"This exercises pattern recognition, spatial reasoning, and decision speed under pressure."
"All necessary for choreography recall. Also, it is fun. I have set the high score, it is unattainable but you may try."
For twenty minutes, Bai Xingyue battled the falling shapes, his fingers flying.
He lost spectacularly.
Then lost again.
On his fifth try, he entered a state of pure flow.
He wasn't thinking; he was seeing the solutions a second before they were needed.
He beat his previous score.
Then beat it again.
He didn't come close to Xiao Zhu's "unattainable" score, but he felt a thrilling, clean sense of mastery.
"Not terrible," the system conceded, its little form glowing with what seemed like pride.
"You improved your decision speed by 18%. Your brain is learning to be a better processor."
"This is more valuable than a thousand compliments from Mr. Feng."
As he got ready for bed, physically tired but mentally sharp, a soft chime sounded.
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: Skill Synthesis Detected.]
[Foundational Rhythm (Body) Lv. 0 → Lv. 1.]
[Cognitive Processing Speed Lv. 0 → Lv. 1.]
[SYNERGY UNLOCKED: 'Kinetic Timing.']
[Your body's sense of rhythm and your mind's processing speed are beginning to synchronize. Marginal improvement in learning complex choreography anticipated.]
It wasn't a dramatic level-up.
It was a tiny, interconnected click deep in the machinery of his being.
He hadn't just learned to dance on beat; he'd begun rewiring his brain to understand time through his body.
Xiao Zhu's final comment for the night was delivered in its warm, off-duty voice.
"You did well today."
"You accepted a fundamental weakness without despair and attacked it through eggs, puzzles, and silent suffering.
A strangely effective methodology.
"Tomorrow, we apply your new 'Kinetic Timing' to something truly horrifying: ballet barre work."
"It is the great humbler of all pop dancers. I will prepare extra electrolyte solution. And perhaps a fun fact about ballet-related injuries."
"They are both grotesque and inspiring! Sleep well, Host."
Bai Xingyue lay in the dark, a smile on his face.
The path was made of a million tiny, brutal, and oddly wonderful lessons.
And he had a weird, wonderful guide pointing out every painful, beautiful step of the way.