I stepped out of the inn that morning like a cultivator emerging from a decade-long seclusion.

  The sun was bright, the air crisp, the world somehow new, as though I had been blind before and only now had my eyes opened. My movements were controlled, precise. My breath steady. I carried no outward signs of change — no glowing aura, no billowing robes, no heavenly light cascading around me — but to me, the difference was profound.

  For four long months, I had laboured in obscurity, wrestling with ideas that defied intuition, with truths that demanded absolute precision, with a power that cared nothing for my mortal impatience. I had been a prisoner in the allegorical cave of Plato, shackled by ignorance, watching shadows of mathematical truths flicker on the walls — until, at long last, I had turned and seen the fire for myself.

  The weight of my training sat upon me.

  No longer was I an ordinary man. No longer was I a mere teacher. I had taken a step into a realm that none before me had dared to tread.

  I paused on the threshold of the inn, staring up at the heavens.

  And then I casually strolled toward the market to buy breakfast.

  It was an unfortunate consequence of my ‘seclusion’ that I still needed to eat. I had considered attempting a breathwork technique to sustain myself on pure mathematical thought, but as I suspected, reality was not so easily deceived. My stomach had not been impressed by my newfound insights into variational principles, nor had it appreciated my in-depth contemplation on the fundamental nature of symmetry in algebraic structures.

  Instead, I had spent the past four months in and out of the inn, passing townsfolk who I now knew well enough to exchange pleasantries with, all while maintaining the deeply undignified routine of purchasing steamed buns and fresh vegetables with the quiet, methodical efficiency of a man determined not to break character.

  It was lucky that for whatever unfathomable reason, Headmaster Song had graciously covered the cost of my lodgings. There was no way I could have stayed an unemployed bum for that long otherwise. Truly, he was my fortuitous encounter with a benefactor in the early chapters that so pervaded the xianxia stories.

  But I digress. Despite the mundane interruptions, I had changed.

  Not much. Only the barest morsel compared to what I now knew was out there.

  But even that little was more than I had ever anticipated.

  Four months earlier, I had sat in my room, attempting to command my qi with the sheer force of logical reasoning.

  It had gone poorly.

  -x-x-x-

  The candle flickered on my desk, casting unsteady shadows across the parchment. I took a slow breath, rolling my shoulders, settling into what I assumed was a suitably mystical posture — back straight, hands poised in a vague approximation of a mudra I had once seen on a cheap book cover.

  This was it. The first step into the unknown. The moment in every cultivation story where the protagonist, through sheer will and insight, defied all known logic and stepped onto a grander path.

  I exhaled, eyes narrowing. Slowly, deliberately, I picked up my brush and began to trace a function onto the parchment. A simple one to start with. A quadratic function, smooth and continuous, perfectly behaved, the kind of thing even a twelve year old could grasp.

  A simple foundation.

  A starting point.

  My qi would flow along the curve, naturally, effortlessly.

  I set down my brush. Stared at the function.

  Then, with all the gravitas of a man touching upon the great mysteries of the universe, I whispered under my breath:

  “The structure of reality follows a higher order…”

  I closed my eyes.

  Felt my breath steady.

  Listened to the silence.

  The air in the room shifted — no, it should have shifted.

  A current of power should have coalesced, should have flowed along the smooth arc of my function, should have responded to the sheer weight of mathematical inevitability.

  I held my breath, waiting.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  I cracked an eye open.

  Nothing had changed.

  I frowned. Maybe I hadn’t visualized it properly. Maybe I had to be more specific. I inhaled again, brushing my fingers lightly over the inked curve, willing my qi to follow its path, urging it to obey.

  I whispered again, this time more forcefully:

  “Reality yields to structure…”

  I reached inward.

  Called upon the infinitesimal fragments of my shattered dantian, upon the uncountable dust that should have, by all rights, responded to my will.

  I felt for the flow of qi.

  There was no flow.

  I tried harder.

  Still nothing.

  Not a flicker. Not a whisper.

  The parchment just sat there, smug and unmoving, like an impassive examiner watching a student fumble their way through their viva.

  I scowled.

  Alright. Maybe a different approach.

  A periodic function, then. A sine wave. Smooth, predictable, eternally oscillating. Surely something in my qi would resonate with it.

  I sketched it out quickly, drawing careful arcs, feeling the natural rhythm of it, the way it seamlessly transitioned from peak to trough.

  “Resonance governs all things…!” I murmured, with the solemn air of an immortal sage.

  Nothing.

  Fine.

  If smooth and continuous functions weren’t doing anything, maybe something more… specialized. A step function, perhaps? A sharp transition in state, forcing a sudden change in qi behavior?

  I drew the step function, defined its domain, ensured every point was marked with deliberate clarity.

  “A function must be well-defined,” I intoned.

  Still nothing.

  A piecewise function? A discontinuous function? A fractal function?

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  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  I growled under my breath.

  This was ridiculous.

  By all logic, there should have been some effect. It didn’t have to be grandiose. I wasn’t expecting to shake the heavens or split the earth. Just… something. A wisp of movement. A tiny fluctuation.

  Instead, I was met with absolute silence. A void of meaningful response.

  Mathematical truth was supposed to be the fabric of reality itself, was it not? The foundation of all things? The hidden order underlying existence?

  So why was nothing happening?!

  I slumped back, rubbing my temples.

  Why was this not working? This was exactly how enlightenment was supposed to happen. In the stories, a protagonist would mutter some vaguely profound statement, the heavens would tremble, and suddenly they would break through realms at a speed that would put exponential growth to shame.

  There was precedent for this! I had read them!

  Example 1: “All things return to one, and one returns to nothing!” → Boom, instant ascension to Immortal Lord.

  Example 2: “I am the sword, and the sword is me!” → Boom, sword qi that splits mountains.

  Example 3: “A drop of water may reflect the entire universe!” → Boom, comprehension of cosmic laws.

  And, of course, the sort of profound statement that came with the unholy scriptures:

  Example 4: “If the heavens suppress me, then I shall overthrow the heavens!” → Boom. At this point the protagonist, who had spent his entire life as a complete waste, would immediately gain the ability to obliterate mountains with a single punch.

  So why, after my entirely reasonable insights, was I still sitting here with nothing but ink-stained fingers and a mild sense of existential despair?

  I was forced to conclude that my qi was either dead or had extremely high standards.

  I sighed and rubbed my temples. It was at this point that I had to admit something deeply uncomfortable: cultivation enlightenment was not like in the novels.

  There was no single profound phrase that would suddenly unlock my potential. No sudden moment of clarity where the universe would recognise my brilliance and reward me with a power-up.

  Perhaps I had been naive.

  Mathematics governed reality — but that didn’t mean I could just write down an equation and expect reality to care.

  It was like trying to control my liver enzymes by sketching out the relevant metabolic pathways. Yes, the process was real, the interactions existed, but merely acknowledging their existence did not grant me the ability to command them.

  Which, in hindsight, made perfect sense.

  And yet, some foolish part of me had genuinely hoped that simply defining my qi in mathematical terms would be enough to control it.

  Instead, all I had accomplished was proving, in painstaking detail, that my qi was infinitely unwilling to cooperate, infinitely unresponsive, and infinitely unhelpful.

  Mathematics was, at its core, rigorous. It was not a realm of mystical epiphanies and sudden revelations — it was a realm of painstaking proofs, of slow and deliberate reasoning, of work.

  I had known this, of course. But I had hoped.

  It was clear now that my qi did not respond to empty proclamations. I could not merely assert a truth and expect the universe to bend to my will.

  It wasn’t enough to write a function. It wasn’t enough to say something deep-sounding.

  I had to understand.

  I had to prove.

  And that, as I would soon learn, was going to be a very long process.

  -x-x-x-

  A week into my self-imposed training, I found myself crouched in the courtyard, glaring at yet another carefully drawn cycloid in the dirt.

  It was, objectively, a very nice cycloid. I had painstakingly carved it out with the precision of a man who had nothing left but time and a growing sense of existential despair.

  I hadn’t started this process intending to develop a personal grudge against an equation. But here we were.

  Step one: rederive the brachistochrone.

  Step two: prove why it worked.

  Step three: stare into the abyss of my own ignorance and hope it didn’t stare back.

  I was currently on step three. And the abyss, as expected, was staring.

  I pressed my fingers into my temples and exhaled slowly.

  This wasn’t how training montages were supposed to go. The heroes in stories never spent a week glaring at a curve, muttering under their breath like a deranged scholar on the verge of losing a fight with reality. No, they had breakthroughs. Dramatic epiphanies. They would say something like or , and then — boom. Instant mastery. All while epic orchestral music played in the background.

  Meanwhile, I had spent seven days doing what amounted to drawing fancy slides for a hypothetical marble race and had precisely nothing to show for it.

  I stared at the curve again, as if sheer frustration alone might will it into yielding its secrets.

  The thing was, I knew the brachistochrone was correct. It wasn’t some mystical theory, some vague intuition about flowing with nature. It was a mathematical certainty. If a bead were to slide along this path under the influence of gravity alone, it would reach the endpoint faster than along any other route. Even a straight line.

  That was the part that should have mattered.

  I had thought that if my qi were to manifest in a structured, mathematical way, it would have to obey the brachistochrone. It was the shortest path in terms of time. If my body — or at least my qi — could somehow align with that principle, wouldn’t I… move faster? Wouldn’t I faster?

  I stood up, rolling my shoulders. Enough theorising. Time for another attempt.

  The first few tries had been embarrassing. I had walked the curve like a fool, only to accomplish absolutely nothing aside from drawing strange looks from the innkeeper.

  That had been my first mistake—thinking that walking the curve was enough.

  If I wanted to understand the brachistochrone, I couldn’t just mimic it.

  I had to be it.

  Which, frankly, was the sort of phrase that would have sounded much cooler if I hadn’t spent the last half-hour failing to do exactly that.

  I shook out my hands, squared my stance, and inhaled deeply.

  This time, I wasn’t going to just move along the curve.

  I was going to let it move me.

  I took the first step. Slow. Deliberate. I adjusted the angle of my descent ever so slightly, feeling the way my weight shifted along the imagined path of least time.

  Second step. A little faster.

  Third step.

  Fourth —

  And then I was falling.

  Not in the traditional, catastrophic sense.

  But there was a pull — a sudden, subtle shift in momentum that shouldn’t have been there. A sensation of acceleration that wasn’t entirely my own.

  My foot hit the ground slightly ahead of where I had expected it to. The timing was off — just a fraction of a second, but enough that I noticed. Enough that I felt it.

  I had moved… wrong.

  Or rather, I had moved right, and my intuition was wrong.

  I exhaled sharply, stepping back to my starting point.

  This was something.

  Not much.

  But something.

  The curve had responded — not to force, not to blind repetition, but to the underlying principle of why it worked. The moment I stopped treating it like a shape and started treating it like an inevitability, something had changed.

  I still didn’t know what, exactly.

  But I was going to find out.

  I set my foot forward again.

  -x-x-x-

  I stood at the edge of the 8x8 grid I had carefully scratched into the dirt, hands behind my back, surveying my work like a general preparing for battle.

  This was, objectively, a very good grid.

  Was it slightly uneven? Maybe. Would an actual mathematician be horrified at my choice of spacing? Definitely. But did it serve its purpose? Absolutely.

  I had spent the last month attempting to channel my qi into meaningful structure — functions, equations, carefully written proofs. That had gone spectacularly nowhere. The only thing my qi seemed to have internalised was the null set, and it was getting very comfortable there.

  So, this?

  This was an absolutely necessary training exercise. This wasn’t just an excuse to stretch my legs, get some fresh air, and pretend I was making progress without actually doing math. No. This was an essential step in my cultivation.

  Because, let’s be honest, all the great training montages had a sequence like this.

  The classic Rocky stair scene? Training montage gold. Neo flipping around in cyberspace learning kung-fu via high speed data injection? Yes, please.

  Clearly, getting out and moving was important.

  And I was absolutely not using that as an excuse to get away from the massive pile of failed proofs sitting on my desk back at the inn.

  I inhaled deeply. Focused.

  The Knight’s Tour. A sequence of knight’s moves that covered every square of the chessboard exactly once. No repeats. No backtracking. Just perfect traversal.

  In theory, it was simple.

  In practice?

  I stepped onto the first square.

  The knight’s move was an elegant constraint — two forward, one to the side. A single unit of movement, restrictive and yet flexible, bound by strict rules but still allowing for infinite variations.

  Leonhard Euler — Grandmaster of Grandmasters — had understood this better than anyone. He had been the first to rigorously analyse the nature of graph connectivity, solving problems centuries ahead of their time with an ease that defied logic.

  Had he known?

  Had he known just how far his work would be taken? How many ways it would be extended, reinterpreted, applied to circuits, algorithms, even quantum mechanics? Had he imagined that one day, a stranded biologist-turned-xianxia-refugee would be running a Knight’s Tour in a secluded clearing, desperately hoping that moving with mathematical intention would somehow coax his qi into behaving?

  I took another step.

  And another.

  The path unfolded, a dance of rigid motion and open possibility. I wasn’t thinking about the math, not directly — not about adjacency matrices or Hamiltonian circuits or directed graphs — but rather about the shape of the movement itself. The constraints dictated the flow, the flow dictated the choices, and yet, even within those choices, there was grace.

  I stepped again, pivoting smoothly.

  I didn’t feel qi shifting. Didn’t sense some grand breakthrough.

  But for the first time in weeks, I felt something else.

  Relaxation.

  Enjoyment.

  This wasn’t struggle. This wasn’t me forcing an insight, bashing my head against pure abstraction until the universe begrudgingly handed me a consolation prize.

  This was… fun.

  The grid became a challenge, a puzzle, a mental game unfolding beneath my feet. The way my brain had to keep track of past positions, plot the next ones, ensure I wasn’t leading myself into an unsolvable dead end — it was effortless and consuming all at once.

  And it made me wonder.

  Euler had asked, long ago, whether certain paths existed — paths that could traverse bridges or graphs without repetition, paths that seemed impossible until the right perspective revealed their inevitability.

  I had spent my life afraid of mathematics. Hesitant. Always looking at it from the outside, admiring from a distance but never stepping in.

  But now?

  I was walking it.

  Maybe this wasn’t a breakthrough.

  But it felt like movement.