Of course, Kai wasn't actually going to kill the sow.
He'd floated the idea purely to watch Dan's face do something interesting, and it had delivered beautifully. But the animal was Furong Restaurant's most valuable livestock — two piglets a year, steady income, not his to touch. Killing it would hand Dan an actual legitimate reason to destroy him, and Kai hadn't survived long enough to reach Rank 2 just to throw it away over a joke.
He went back to work.
But his mind was running hot underneath the calm exterior, turning the system over and examining it from every angle the way he used to theorize about game mechanics at two in the morning with cold coffee going stale beside his keyboard.
No Dantian required. That was the critical piece. Every cultivator in Tianyuan needed a functioning Dantian to store and circulate Qigong — damage it and the energy dissipated the moment it formed, like trying to fill a shattered cup. Five years of the previous Kai training in secret behind a mountain every single night, and not one breakthrough to show for it. The broken Dantian had made rank 2 a locked door with no key.
The system had simply walked around the door entirely.
Kill monsters. Gain experience. Level up. Qigong increases permanently with each rank.
No Dantian storage required. The system handled it directly.
Kai paused his sweeping for exactly three seconds, doing internal math.
Other cultivators grind through years of meditation and practice and careful Qigong circulation just to push through each rank boundary. I kill things. That's it. That's the whole method.
He resumed sweeping before anyone noticed he'd stopped.
I've spent my entire life killing things in games, he thought, and felt something warm and dangerous unfurl in his chest. That's basically my only transferable skill. And it turns out it's the only one that matters here.
Leo found him between the lunch rush preparations, during the brief window when the yard was empty and no one was watching.
"Young Master." His voice was careful, searching. "You feel... different. Your aura — it shifted. During the turkeys." He hesitated, clearly wrestling with something that didn't make sense to him. "Did you actually break through? To Rank 2?"
Kai glanced around. Kitchen staff visible through the window, Dan somewhere inside, no one near enough to matter.
He looked at Leo and nodded once.
The effect was immediate and slightly alarming.
Leo's face crumpled. Not with disappointment — with relief so overwhelming it had nowhere to go except straight through his eyes. The enormous man stood in the middle of the restaurant courtyard in the early morning light and simply started crying, silently, tears cutting straight down his face without any apparent intention to stop.
"Leo."
"I'm — " Leo wiped his face with the back of his hand, which did nothing useful. "I'm happy. I'm just — five years, Young Master. Five years I watched you go out behind that mountain every night and come back with nothing and never complain, and I couldn't—" He stopped. Pressed his lips together. "I'm happy."
Kai looked at him for a moment.
He thought about five years of secret practice. A fifteen year old kid, broken Dantian, cast out and humiliated, climbing a mountain every night alone anyway because giving up wasn't something he was built for. Training until his body gave out, getting nothing back, doing it again the next night.
That wasn't the previous Kai's story. That was someone else's story — someone who'd inhabited this body before him and left it behind.
But Leo had watched every night of it.
Kai put a hand on his shoulder. "It's a good day," he said simply. "Stop leaking."
Leo laughed despite himself, rough and wet, and wiped his face again. "Yes, Young Master."
They stood there for a moment in something that wasn't quite silence — kitchen noise in the background, distant city sounds, a pig doing pig things in the far corner of the property.
Like brothers, Kai thought, accessing the memory. That's what they were.
He understood it differently than the previous Kai would have. He'd spent his old life solo — games played alone, nights alone, a life carefully constructed to require no one. He'd thought that was preference. Standing here now, he wasn't sure it had been.
"Come on," he said. "Lunch crowd's coming."
The restaurant filled quickly.
Qinghe City had dozens of establishments like Furong, but business boomed regardless — cultivators ate heavily, travelers needed stops, merchants needed tables. By midday every seat was claimed and the noise level had risen to something that required shouting across short distances.
Kai worked the floor with a white towel over his shoulder and his head down.
Inferior. That was the social category he occupied — the bottom tier, the ones without rank or backing or worth. He'd processed this intellectually before, but moving through a crowded restaurant wearing it was different. The way eyes slid past him. The way orders were given without eye contact. The casual assumption that his time and comfort were irrelevant variables.
He kept his expression neutral and his movements efficient and filed every observation away.
In my old world, he thought, carrying a tray of wine cups toward the upper floor, there were systems for this too. Social hierarchies with different labels. Same architecture underneath.
The difference is that here, the hierarchy is legible. Rank tells you exactly where you stand. Which means it also tells you exactly what you need to change.
He was almost past the private room on the upper floor when the voice hit him.
Loud, performance-loud, calibrated to carry through thin walls and into the corridor:
"Everyone, look — that's him. The most useless member of the entire Qin clan." A pause for effect. "Fifteen years old. Still Rank 1. Can you believe it?"
Kai stopped.
Not visibly — his feet kept moving at the same pace, the same measured step. But every part of his attention pivoted toward the open door of the private room like a compass finding north.
"Brother Rex—" someone inside was saying, "when did you reach Rank 1?"
"Five years old," said a different voice, cheerfully.
"Seven, for me."
Laughter. The specific kind of laughter designed to travel.
"You hear that, useless? Five years old. Seven years old. And you're fifteen and still dragging yourself along the floor." The main voice again — lazy, amused, entirely comfortable. "If I were you, I'd have ended it already. Saved everyone the embarrassment. Ha—"
Kai stepped into the doorway.
Not all the way in. Just enough to get a full look.
Rex sat at the head of the table, sixteen years old, built like someone the clan had spent years carefully constructing into a weapon. Rank 7 Warrior — Kai accessed the memory involuntarily — at sixteen, the youngest in recent clan history to reach it. Qigong more vigorous than most Warriors of equivalent rank. The great elder's son. The clan's proudest product.
The one who had beaten the previous Kai unconscious over a dirty table.
He was currently looking at Kai with the expression of someone who'd found a mildly interesting insect.
Then he spat.
Thick and deliberate. It landed on Kai's face.
"Get out," Rex said.
Kai did not move for one second. Two.
Then he turned, walked out of the room, and pulled the door shut behind him with a quiet, controlled click.
He stood in the corridor.
His body was shaking.
Not fear. He identified it precisely — not fear. Pure, clean, cold fury, the kind that didn't burn hot but instead settled into the bones and stayed there, permanent as scar tissue. He reached up slowly and wiped his face with the white towel.
I will remember this, he thought. Every specific detail. The angle of the light. The sound of the laughter. The exact weight of that moment.
I will remember it until I can do something about it.
"Young Master—" Leo appeared at the end of the corridor, took one look at Kai's face and the towel in his hand, and his expression shifted instantly from concerned to furious. "He did it again. I'll—"
"Don't." Kai's hand came up. Leo stopped.
"He needs to be—"
"He's Rank 7, Leo. You're Rank 3. What happens when you walk through that door?" Kai's voice was quiet and entirely steady. "He gets a reason. That's what he wants — a reason to escalate, something he can justify to the clan. Don't give it to him."
Leo's fists were clenched so tight the knuckles had gone pale. He breathed through his nose for a long moment.
"Then let's report it to the patriarch. There are rules—"
"The patriarch," Kai said carefully, "is not going to discipline the great elder's son and the clan's most valued cultivator because a nobody servant complained about being spat on."
He said it without bitterness. Just the clean assessment of a game mechanic, a rule of the system he was currently playing inside.
This is a world where strength resolves everything. He'd known it intellectually. He understood it differently now, with Rex's spit drying on the towel in his hand. There is no authority to appeal to. There is only power or the lack of it.
And I don't have enough yet.
Yet.
He looked at Leo. The big man was still fuming, a barely contained storm in human shape.
"Leo," Kai said quietly. "Do you trust me?"
A pause. Then, with absolute certainty: "Yes."
"Then be patient." Kai folded the towel over his arm. "We're not reporting anything. We're not confronting anyone. We're going to go back to work and smile at every table and be completely, perfectly unremarkable."
"And?" Leo said, reading something in his face.
Kai's expression didn't change. But something moved behind his eyes — the same calculation that had once looked at a begging BOSS and clicked attack anyway. Patient. Methodical. Already three steps ahead.
"And I'm going to get strong," he said simply. "Fast."
He turned and walked back toward the stairs.
Rank 2 today, he thought, descending into the noise and heat of the lunch crowd below. Rex is Rank 7.
Five ranks.
In this world, five ranks is a lifetime of work.
Good thing I'm not playing by this world's rules.
In Kunlun Mountain Range, forty kilometers north, ten thousand monsters were living their lives completely unaware that someone had just decided to use them as experience points.
They would find out soon enough.