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Chapter 6. Proof by Contradiction
The days settled into a rhythm. Not an easy one — certainly not a peaceful one — but a rhythm nonetheless. Mornings were devoted to the classics and calligraphy, afternoons to literature, poetry, and arithmetic, and the evenings… the evenings were supposed to be for my personal studies, a time to finally sit down with numbers and lose myself in mathematical exploration.
But reality had other plans.
I still studied math when I could, still worked by candlelight on finding the proofs to theorems whose key results I vaguely knew of. Yet far too often, my nights were spent poring over the texts I was supposed to be teaching these children. My knowledge of the classics had been shamefully shallow. I knew the famous passages, the oft-quoted verses, but that was not enough.
The classics, literature, history — I had assumed that I could get by with surface knowledge. That as long as I could keep the students engaged, I wouldn't need to be a master of Confucian thought or poetry. But Zhang Xian had other ideas.
The boy had the infuriating habit of asking questions. Not the polite kind. The kind designed to trap me, to expose the cracks in my knowledge. And I had been bluffing my way through those cracks for weeks now, barely keeping ahead of him.
I had to be better.
Which meant sacrificing my own time.
Which meant, to my great frustration, less math.
I tried not to think about it too much, but of course, that only made it worse. Every time I sat down with a scroll on proper conduct or a treatise on the duties of a gentleman scholar, a small voice in the back of my head whispered, You could be proving something right now. Instead, I was memorizing yet another passage about filial piety, which, if Zhang Xian was feeling particularly troublesome, would undoubtedly be used to question why I, a grown man with no apparent family, was here teaching rather than serving his ancestors.
It was a balancing act — holding authority over a class that seemed determined to test me while maintaining just enough leniency that they didn't actively revolt. I was, to my great relief, not the only instructor at the school. The other teachers managed their own groups of students in separate rooms, and though I hadn't spoken much with them, I had gleaned enough to understand that they, too, were embroiled in their own battles.
Instructor Liang, a severe man with a perpetually furrowed brow, handled the older students, those who were preparing to take the county examinations. His teaching philosophy seemed to revolve around scaring them into competence. Instructor Ma, the oldest among us, was far more patient, more prone to quiet sighs of disappointment than actual scolding. The youngest instructor, Miss Shen, was the only one who seemed to genuinely enjoy the profession, though I had caught a few glimpses of weariness in her eyes when she thought no one was looking.
Between classes, we exchanged nods, the silent acknowledgment of comrades-in-arms. Once, when I emerged from my classroom after dealing with an ink-spilling incident, Instructor Liang caught my eye and grunted, "They test you yet?"
"They test me every day."
"Hm." He nodded. "Good. That means you're still worth testing."
I wasn't entirely sure how to interpret that, but before I could ask, he had already turned and walked away.
And so, I settled into my new role, slowly learning more about the students in my charge. Some were bright, eager to prove themselves. Others were less academically inclined, their interests lying elsewhere.
Zhao Qiang, the blacksmith's son, had a natural knack for numbers but no patience for poetry. "What's the point?" he grumbled after yet another failed attempt at composing a verse. "If you have something to say, say it plainly."
"Some things cannot be said plainly," I told him. "Some things can only be understood when felt."
He squinted at me. "That sounds like an excuse."
"Possibly." I didn't push him further. His father, from what I'd gathered, was a man of few words, and it showed in Zhao Qiang's blunt way of thinking. He would never be a poet. But he might, given time, come to appreciate poetry all the same.
Chen Meili, on the other hand, was meticulous in all things, from her handwriting to the way she folded the sleeves of her robes before beginning a task. Raised in a merchant family, she had an innate understanding of negotiation, which she frequently employed to try and reduce the amount of written work I assigned.
"If we copy three passages instead of five," she proposed one afternoon, "we can still demonstrate our ability while also having time to reflect on their meaning."
"You don't want to reflect on their meaning. You just don't want to do the extra work."
She smiled, entirely unrepentant.
And then there was Ru Lan, who I was beginning to suspect might be my favorite, if only because she was one of the few students who never deliberately caused trouble. She was quiet, careful, and always followed instructions, which in a class that included Wu Liang was something of a miracle.
But even she had begun looking at me strangely at times.
I knew why.
Because something was strange.
It wasn't obvious. Not in the way a thunderstorm announces itself with dark clouds and rolling winds. It was subtle. A sensation just beneath the skin, an awareness that prickled at the edges of my thoughts. A feeling that, if I were being completely rational, I should have ignored.
But I couldn't.
It was there in the way my brush never quite seemed to run dry, no matter how much ink I used. In the way my voice carried across the room with an unnatural weight, silencing even the rowdiest of students without the need to raise it. In the way I caught things that should have slipped from my grip, as if my hands knew before my mind did.
Most of the time, I told myself it was nothing. Tricks of the mind. Coincidences.
And then, sometimes, I would meet Ru Lan's gaze.
She never said anything. Never pointed it out. But there was a weight in the way she looked at me, as if she, too, could sense something just slightly off. And that was worse than any amount of suspicion from Zhang Xian, any challenge from Ma Rui. Because Ru Lan wasn't the type to speak without certainty.
And if she was noticing, then it wasn't just in my head.
-x-x-x-
It was almost two weeks since taking up this job, and I was quickly understanding that something was wrong.
Not in an immediate, catastrophic way. No assassins lurking in the shadows. No powerful cultivators descending from the sky, demanding to know how I had dared survive my own crippling.
No, this was worse. This was subtle. The kind of wrong that made me question my own sanity.
It was in the way my brush moved too smoothly across the page, never catching on fibers, never smearing. In the way my voice cut through the classroom like a blade when I needed it to, sending even the most unruly students snapping to attention without a shout. In the way my body reacted just a fraction of a second faster than it should have — catching a falling cup before it hit the ground, stepping out of the way of a wayward inkpot without thinking, turning a page just as a draft threatened to snatch it away.
None of it was overtly supernatural. None of it was something that would make anyone stop and say, 'That man is a cultivator!'
But I knew.
Cultivation required meditation, required gathering and condensing qi within the dantian, shaping it, refining it, strengthening it. I had not done any of that. And I could not do any of that, because my dantian was in pieces.
Fractured. Shattered. Broken into smithereens.
It should not be able to hold qi.
And yet, something was happening.
It didn't make sense, but then, neither did a lot of things in my life. I had transmigrated into the body of a failed protagonist, abandoned a destiny of cultivation in favor of mathematics, and was currently locked in an ongoing war of attrition against a class of children who oscillated between cute and unruly. Logic had not exactly been a constant.
Still. This was different.
The feeling crept in at odd moments. When I wrote, the brush seemed to move with an almost unnatural ease, the ink flowing in smooth, even strokes that should have required years of refinement. When I spoke, my words carried — more than they should, more than they had any right to, like the quiet authority of a master lecturer commanding an auditorium.
But the strangest part was my reflexes.
There was no conscious thought to them. They happened in the gaps — between movement, between calculation, in the fractions of time that should not have existed. A book slipping from my desk, caught before I even registered it was falling. A student tripping over a bench, only for my hand to be there, steadying them, without a single conscious decision made.
The human brain was good at pattern recognition. That was what made mathematics so beautiful — seeing the connections, the inevitabilities. And my brain had begun to recognise that something didn't quite fit expectations.
It wasn't a single moment that tipped me over the edge, but a series of them. Subtle things. The kind of things that could have been dismissed if they had happened in isolation.
A brush never running dry was one thing. A fortunate reaction time could be explained away. But the accumulation of impossibilities was something else entirely.
It was Ma Rui's inkpot incident that lingered in my mind the longest. He had knocked it over, that much I was certain of. I had seen it tip. I had reached for it, but I had been too far — too slow.
And yet it hadn't fallen.
It had hovered for just an instant, long enough for me to snatch it upright and pretend nothing had happened. Long enough for me to question if my eyes had deceived me.
Only Ru Lan had noticed. She hadn't said anything, but I had felt the weight of her gaze. Thoughtful. Observant.
Watching.
I had ignored it at the time. Ignored the creeping unease, ignored the way my fingers had tingled in the aftermath, ignored the fact that my pulse had been steady — too steady.
But I wasn't stupid.
The pieces didn't fit.
I wasn't meditating. I wasn't absorbing qi. My dantian wasn't just damaged — it was gone. Completely and utterly. It did not exist. I had no vessel to hold qi, no means of channeling it.
There was a pattern here. I just wasn't sure what it was yet.
If I had to describe it mathematically, it was like trying to find a limit that refused to settle. The closer I looked, the more it slipped through my grasp — each instance insignificant on its own, yet, in sum, forming something undeniable. I hadn't been meditating, hadn't been cultivating, hadn't even thought about my dantian in weeks beyond the occasional pang of regret. And yet, my body was adjusting to something.
There was a kind of smoothness to my actions, a continuity where there should have been rough edges. I should have stumbled, should have miscalculated, should have had at least one embarrassing moment of dropping something or knocking over a stack of books. But I hadn't.
Not once.
Luck had statistical distributions, and coincidence had limits. This was neither.
The realization sat heavy in my mind as I dismissed the students for the day, their voices spilling out into the courtyard in waves of unbridled relief. The moment they were gone, I sat down at my desk and took a deep breath.
One: Cultivation required meditation, required intent. It required gathering qi and refining it within the dantian.
Two: My dantian was shattered. Not cracked, not damaged, but disintegrated. My plan had been to repair it only when my understanding of mathematics grew to the point that I could truly benefit from immortal insight.
Three: I had not engaged in any cultivation practices whatsoever.
Four: And yet, something was happening.
I tapped my fingers against the wooden surface. What changed? I had only been teaching. Only reading, writing, solving problems, thinking. Thinking a lot.
Mathematics had always been a mental exercise, but never a physical one. There was no reason solving an equation should make me more aware of my surroundings, no reason it should sharpen my reflexes. I did still hold on to my belief that mathematical insight could manifest in cultivation techniques, but such arts required qi.
And I had no dantian to hold qi with. A proof by contradiction.
Except… contradiction implied impossibility. And yet, here I was.
I stared at the wooden surface of my desk, fingers drumming lightly against it as the thought settled deeper. Contradictions in mathematics weren't always dead ends. Sometimes, they pointed toward the need for a new framework, a reexamination of axioms. The discovery of irrational numbers, the rejection of Euclidean parallels, the realisation that infinity wasn't a single concept but a whole uncountable hierarchy — each had been born from contradictions, from things that should not have been possible but somehow were.
So what did that make me?
I pushed my chair back, rising to my feet. The schoolhouse was empty now, the echo of children's laughter fading into the distance. Outside, the town moved with the steady rhythm of daily life—merchants calling out their wares, oxen pulling carts over dirt roads, the scent of evening meals beginning to rise from the houses.
I walked to the doorway and let my gaze drift, focusing not on anything in particular but simply… observing.
The world felt sharp.
Not in an overwhelming, heightened sense kind of way, not like the stories where cultivators suddenly found themselves able to hear the flapping of a butterfly's wings. No, this was different. It was as if my mind had become more efficient, as if I were noticing details just a fraction of a second earlier than I should have. The way a breeze stirred the fabric of a vendor's stall before ruffling the hair of a passing child. The way the weight of a bird on a tree branch slightly altered the shadow it cast. It was a kind of awareness — not mystical, not divine. Just… precise.
Was that all it was? A kind of subconscious pattern recognition? The culmination of days spent thinking, analysing, breaking problems down into their smallest components?
A memory surfaced, unbidden — Jiang Lingwu, the original one, in the days before his downfall. Training. Meditating. Seeking enlightenment through swordplay, through qi refinement. He had always struggled, always lagged behind those with better talent, stronger constitutions, superior bloodlines. But when he had finally found his fortuitous encounter, when his dantian had surged to life with power…
This felt nothing like that.
That had been heat and motion, the flood of energy pouring into his core, surging through his meridians like a rushing tide as he broke through to the next realm. That had been visceral, unmistakable.
This was quiet.
Not an expansion, but an absence.
I let out a slow breath.
It didn't matter. Not yet.
If there was an explanation, I would find it. In time.
For now, the more immediate concerns were my students, my job, the careful balance I had to maintain in this town. I had no enemies here, no sects breathing down my neck, no young masters seeking revenge for past humiliations.
I was not about to disturb that peace by chasing something I didn't yet understand.
No. For now, I would do what I always did.
I would observe.
I would wait.
And when the answer revealed itself, when the pieces finally aligned into something comprehensible…
Then I would act.
Chapter 7. The Infinite Set of My Problems
There was a famous saying in my past life: Boys only think about one thing, and it's gosh-darn disgusting.
And I had to agree.
Sets were disgusting.
Oh, sure, they seemed innocent at first — just a collection of things, like a basket of apples or a pile of failed cultivation protagonists. But the moment you started looking closer, you realised sets didn't obey normal human intuition. There were sets that contained themselves, sets that didn't, sets that were infinitely larger than other infinities, sets that somehow refused to fit inside the sets they logically should. The moment you let your guard down, they hit you with Russell's Paradox and left you questioning reality itself.
And yet, despite my firm belief that sets were an affront to common sense, I found myself standing in front of a classroom full of students, about to teach them arithmetic — a subject built on the foundation of sets.
"Master Jiang," Zhang Xian piped up from his seat, arms folded in the infuriating way only a precocious twelve-year-old could manage. "If zero is nothing, how can it still exist?"
I resisted the urge to sigh. Zhang Xian had that particular glint in his eye — the one that meant he was ready to make my life difficult for the next several minutes. I should never have encouraged critical thinking in these children. It was my greatest mistake, and I was now paying the price.
I placed the chalk down and turned to face him, lacing my fingers together like a sage about to impart deep wisdom.
"Zhang Xian," I said, "imagine your mother tells you that if you keep pestering your instructor with impossible questions, you'll get no dinner tonight."
Zhang Xian hesitated. "That won't happen. My mother wouldn't —"
"This is hypothetical," I said. "Now. If you have one dinner and you eat it, you have zero dinners left. Yes?"
A nod.
"But if your mother gives you no dinner to begin with, you still have a dinner — you have a dinner that is missing."
Zhang Xian frowned. "That doesn't make sense."
"Exactly," I said. "Zero is the existence of a missing dinner."
The class went silent.
Zhao Qiang, who up until now had been carving something into his desk with the tip of his brush, squinted. "So zero is real?"
"As real as your hunger will be if you question it too much," I said. "Now, if we —"
"But if zero is real, then shouldn't we be able to divide by it?"
I took a deep breath. "Zhang Xian, do you enjoy being my greatest headache?"
He shrugged. "It's my nature."
I rubbed my temples. The worst part was that I had actually been studying division by zero last night. Not in a serious, academic way, but in the vague, abstract manner that came when I was too tired to sleep but too awake to be productive. I had been thinking about limits — how division by smaller and smaller numbers approached infinity, how things like L'Hôpital's rule tried to make sense of indeterminate forms, and how I was slowly losing my mind trying to make these thoughts relevant to my situation.
None of that, of course, was helpful in this exact moment.
"If you divide something by zero," I said carefully, "you are asking how many times nothing fits into something."
Zhang Xian nodded. "And the answer is…?"
"An existential crisis."
The classroom was quiet again. I let it settle. Eventually, Zhang Xian let out a quiet, "Huh," and leaned back in his seat.
I took that as a victory and moved on.
-x-x-x-
It wasn't until the students had gone out for their midday break that I let myself slump forward onto my desk, exhaling slowly.
Somewhere outside, I could already hear Zhang Xian trying to convince Zhao Qiang that zero was a hoax invented by corrupt mathematicians.
I let out a slow breath, rubbing my temples. Zhang Xian was going to be the death of me. I liked him — really, I did — but he seemed to be on a one man crusade to overturn my world view.
It wasn't just the questions — it was the sheer, relentless determination behind them. There was no hesitation, no moment of doubt, just an unwavering confidence that the entire world was built on flawed assumptions, and that he alone had been chosen to dismantle them.
And worse, he was starting to infect the others.
By the time I gathered the energy to step outside, I found Zhao Qiang standing with his arms crossed, brow furrowed in deep thought, while Chen Meili looked utterly exasperated. Some of the parents who lived or worked in Qinghe itself were there, visiting their children during the break.
"It's not that zero does or doesn't exist," she was saying, her patience hanging by a thread. "It's that it represents an absence."
"But if it represents something," Zhang Xian countered, "then it exists, doesn't it?"
Ru Lan, sitting a few paces away, tilted her head slightly. "Then does silence exist?"
Zhang Xian paused.
I had never been prouder.
I turned just in time to see Ru Jingshan making his way toward me.
Ru Lan's father was a man of quiet strength, the kind of person who didn't need to raise his voice to command attention. The first time we had spoken, it had been brief — polite greetings, a few words about Ru Lan's studies, and a nod of approval before he had walked away. I hadn't thought much of it at the time. But as I had come to learn more about the town, I had realized that Ru Jingshan was not just respected — he was known.
He was the head of a family that, while not wealthy, was deeply entrenched in Qinghe's affairs. His eldest son had already made a name for himself in the city, aiming for the imperial exams, while his other children had settled into respectable trades. And then there was Ru Lan, his youngest.
I had assumed, at first, that she was quiet because she was the youngest in a house full of brothers. That she had simply learned to listen before speaking, to measure her words carefully. But the more I watched her, the more I realised it was something else entirely.
She wasn't just listening.
She was watching.
"Master Jiang," Ru Jingshan said again, stopping before me. He gave a nod, his expression unreadable. "My daughter speaks well of your lessons."
I blinked. "She does?"
"She says you teach them to think."
I resisted the urge to glance over at Zhang Xian, who had now begun a full-fledged debate with Ma Rui over whether infinity could be counted. How did a bunch of preteens even manage to navigate their way toward this topic?!
"I try," I said instead.
Ru Jingshan regarded me for a long moment, then gave a slow nod. "That is good."
There was something about the way he said it that made me feel like I had passed some invisible test.
And then, with nothing more than a polite nod, he turned and left.
Ru Lan, still sitting nearby, watched him go. Then she turned back to me and said, "My older sister says Father speaks in judgments, not words."
I arched a brow. "And what judgment was that?"
She considered this for a moment. "You're interesting."
I wasn't sure how I felt about that.
-x-x-x-
How long had it been since I started teaching? A month? Two months?
I wasn't sure how I felt about a lot of things lately. My dantian was shattered, yet I was catching inkpots midair before they fell. My nights were supposed to be dedicated to mathematics, yet they were spent mentally defending myself against Zhang Xian's increasingly convoluted attempts to disprove arithmetic.
At least break time meant a temporary reprieve from existential crises.
Or so I thought.
Because as I turned back toward the schoolhouse, I saw Ma Rui and Zhao Qiang standing over a crudely drawn diagram in the dirt, sticks in hand, faces scrunched in deep concentration.
That was never a good sign.
I hesitated. Then, with the resignation of a man who had seen too much, I walked over. "What," I said, "are you doing?"
Ma Rui gestured at the ground. "We're making a paradox."
I sighed. Why had I ever thought it a good idea to tell them about Zeno's Paradox?
"Why?"
"So we can trap Zhang Xian in it."
I took a moment to process that.
"You're trying to trap him."
"Yes."
"In… a paradox."
"Yes."
Zhao Qiang nodded solemnly. "If we make a strong enough paradox, he'll get stuck thinking about it forever."
That was, perhaps, the most diabolical thing I had ever heard.
I looked down at the diagram. It was an absolute mess of circles, arrows, and what appeared to be a poorly drawn cow.
"…Explain."
Ma Rui pointed at the center of the diagram. "Okay. So. This is Zhang Xian."
"Of course it is."
"And here," he pointed at the cow, "is his logic."
I paused. "Why is it a cow?"
"Because it's going to get lost."
I blinked. "Go on."
Zhao Qiang took over, gesturing at the spiraling arrows. "First, we tell him that if he knows he's in a paradox, then he's not in a paradox."
I rubbed my temples. "Right."
"Then," Ma Rui said, grinning, "we ask him if he can ever truly know he doesn't know something."
I considered it.
Then I considered the potential for peace and quiet.
Then I said, "Carry on."
And walked away.
-x-x-x-
By the time the students returned to the classroom, I had almost managed to convince myself that the rest of the day would be normal.
That was a mistake.
"Master Jiang," Chen Meili said as she settled into her seat, "is it true that numbers are made up?"
I frowned. "What?"
"I heard Zhang Xian say that numbers are fake and only exist because we believe in them."
I turned slowly to Zhang Xian.
He shrugged. "What? If you take away all the numbers, where are they? Nowhere. That means they were never real to begin with."
I took a deep breath.
Then I turned to the board and, in large, deliberate strokes, wrote:
"2 + 2 = 4"
And underlined it.
"This," I said, "is real."
"But—"
"No. No buts. This is a fact. If I give you two apples, and then two more apples, you will have four apples."
"Unless you take one away," Ma Rui muttered.
"Or if one of them is actually a pear," Zhao Qiang added.
I pinched the bridge of my nose. "We are not going to deconstruct numbers today. We are going to —"
"Master Jiang," Ru Lan interrupted, voice as soft and steady as ever, "what if there's a number that exists but we can't see it?"
Silence.
Slowly, I turned to her.
Because that — that was an actual, real question. A good one.
She met my gaze calmly.
I exhaled. "Like… an imaginary number?"
Ru Lan tilted her head. "Is that a real thing?"
"Yes," I said, feeling some combination of exhausted and delighted. "It is."
I turned back to the board and, beneath the underlined 2 + 2 = 4, I wrote:
i = √-1
There was a long pause.
Then Ma Rui squinted. "That's illegal."
"No, it's imaginary."
"That's the same thing."
"It is not."
Zhang Xian leaned forward, suddenly intrigued. "So you're saying there are numbers that don't exist, but they do?"
"Yes."
"But you said numbers are real."
"Yes."
"So how —?"
"They exist in a different way," I said quickly. "Just like zero. You can't see it, but it has meaning."
What were they putting in xianxia water? What made children even ask questions like these?
Then again, this was a world where children started learning how to smash boulders with their bare fists before they even turned twelve.
Zhang Xian stared at the board, gears turning in his head.
And then he smiled.
I felt a chill run down my spine.
"I have so many questions," he said.
I regretted everything.
-x-x-x-
By the time the day ended, I had fielded no fewer than eight questions about whether numbers were secretly sentient, had to ban Zhang Xian from writing a proof that 1 = 0, and had listened to Ma Rui propose a theory in which all math was a vast conspiracy by the imperial court to control grain taxation.
By the time the last student had left and I was alone in the classroom, I felt like I had aged at least ten years.
I slumped into my chair, staring at the chalkboard where i = √-1 still sat, underlined, as if daring me to reconsider my life choices. Outside, the town moved on as if nothing had happened — merchants selling their wares, farmers pulling carts of produce, blacksmiths hammering away at metal. A world blissfully unaware that I had spent the last few hours wrestling with the existential consequences of whether numbers were a government conspiracy.
I exhaled, rubbing my temples.
What was I even doing?
When I had first taken this job, I thought it would be simple. Teach some arithmetic, drill in some memorized passages, collect my pay to tide me over while I did my independent studies in mathematics. But now?
Now my students were attempting to trap each other in paradoxes, questioning the fabric of reality, and potentially inventing entirely new branches of philosophy by accident.
At this rate, I was going to have an entire classroom of heretics.
And the worst part was — I wasn't sure I could stop them.
Because it was now clear that something was happening. Something beyond just bright students and childhood curiosity.
I had been in the classroom long enough now to notice patterns. And the pattern was this: none of them were arguing like this in the other subjects I taught them. They memorised their classics, copied their passages, read their histories. They discussed the interpretation of proverbs when I bid them to, but they didn't engage in hour-long debates about their meaning during their midday break the way they did the notion of whether '0' was a natural number. Instructor Liang still ruled his older students with an iron glare, and Miss Shen's young class still ran on innocent giggles and ink-stained fingers.
But in my classroom? The students debated the nature of numbers, tried to prove paradoxes, and were rapidly approaching the dangerous precipice of mathematical philosophy.
At first, I thought it was just Zhang Xian being a menace, infecting the others with his constant questioning. But then I looked at Ru Lan.
She had been my quietest student at first. The one who had cried in my very first lesson, frozen by numbers she couldn't grasp. But now?
Now she was asking me about imaginary numbers.
Now she was arguing the existence of things unseen.
Now she was breezing through my lessons like they were easy.
I didn't know how to feel about that.
I had been excited at first — of course I had! What teacher wouldn't be proud of a student improving? But this wasn't just improvement. It was unnatural. And it wasn't just Ru Lan. It was allof them, every single one of my students, and only in mathematics.
They weren't just learning fast. They were learning in ways that children their age shouldn't.
They were making logical leaps, jumping between concepts that should have taken years of careful instruction. They weren't following the standard, gradual progress of arithmetic into algebra into geometry. No — they were discovering mathematical ideas entirely on their own, chasing patterns, constructing arguments, making connections.
And I —
I was afraid.
Because I had no idea why it was happening.
My dantian was shattered. My qi should have been — was — nonexistent. I had abandoned the path of cultivation entirely. But somehow, I was affecting them.
No. Not affecting them. Influencing them.
And that was a deeply unsettling realization. They were only children.
Because I didn't understand how.
And if I didn't understand how, I couldn't control it.
-x-x-x-
I needed to test this. I needed to know if it was truly me or if I was just being paranoid. So, I did what any responsible adult would do.
I decided to gaslight a classroom full of children.
The next morning, I walked into class, set down my chalk, and announced, "We are doing multiplication drills today."
A collective groan rippled through the room.
"But Master Jiang —"
"No 'but Master Jiang's.' We're reinforcing basic skills today. No debates, no paradoxes, no conspiracies."
Zhang Xian crossed his arms, scowling. "This is an oppressive system of control."
"Yes, it is. Thirteen times seventeen?"
The next hour passed in excruciating boredom. I kept the lesson deliberately mechanical — rote memorization, repetition, drills. The energy in the room died. Even Zhang Xian, the eternal agitator, was subdued, droning out multiplication tables like a prisoner scratching tally marks on a wall.
And I watched.
I watched for any sparks of curiosity, for any sudden bursts of brilliance.
There were none.
For one full hour, they were normal children.
And then, when I finally relented and introduced a single logic puzzle — just a harmless little number trick — everything changed.
It was like striking a flint. The moment I posed the question, their eyes lit up. Zhang Xian immediately tried to deconstruct the problem into its core assumptions, while Zhao Qiang grabbed a scrap of parchment and started scribbling. Ru Lan tilted her head, brow furrowed, already thinking through the implications.
The moment I engaged with mathematics beyond simple memorisation and computation, it was like the entire class had shifted gears.
And that was when I knew.
It was me.
It wasn't just Zhang Xian. It wasn't just a bright class. It wasn't even some strange genius of Ru Lan's.
It was something about me, about how I taught, about whatever unexplainable thing had happened to my dantian, about how I could cultivate without a shattered dantian.
Because, yes, that was it. I could see no other possibility. An unproven conjecture, yes — but the Riemann Hypothesis was just as unproven, and it had been checked to the first 1013 zeroes. Hundreds of theorems exist bearing statements that begin under the assumption that the Riemann Hypothesis was true.
Somehow, I was still cultivating.
-x-x-x-
That evening, I sat at my desk, staring at a blank page.
What did I even do? How did I fix this? How did I contain this?
I had believed I was powerless. That I was the same regular mortal I had been back on Earth. That my dantian was gone, that my connection to cultivation had been severed. And yet, here I was, warping reality and young minds through mathematics.
This was a problem.
This was a moral problem.
What if this spiraled out of control? What if I wasn't just influencing their thoughts, but their minds? What if this was something more than just quick learning — what if I was changingthem?
I couldn't afford to be careless. I had to control this.
I had to stop them from spiraling further, from reaching concepts too early, from asking questions they weren't ready for.
And above all, I had to make sure I wasn't doing harm.
I reached for a fresh sheet of parchment and, on impulse, wrote down one of the first mathematical thoughts that had truly terrified me:
"There exist infinities larger than other infinities."
I stared at the words, heart pounding. I almost crumpled the paper on the spot.
This was a xianxia world. Where people unprepared for grand truths had their cultivation shattered. Where a contradiction in one's world view could lead to their Dao hearts fracturing, all the way through to their heads exploding.
My students were proving remarkably intelligent, but I wasn't certain that all of them were ready to comprehend Cantor's theory of infinite sets. And yet, they were dangerously close to approaching that topic.
I burned that sheet of parchment in the candle flame.
I had to control this.
Before one of them inevitably disproved themselves.
Chapter 8. Proof by Exhaustion
I barely slept that night.
Normally, I spent my evenings wrestling with mathematics, trying to claw my way toward understanding the theorems I had once feared. But tonight, I did no such thing. My candle burned low as I stared at it, the words 'There exist infinities larger than other infinities' that I had burned in those flames staring back at me like an accusation.
I had thought I was free. That by leaving cultivation behind, I had left behind all the absurd, nonsensical dangers of this world. But now, I was faced with an entirely new horror: I was warping reality through pedagogy.
That was, objectively, worse.
I slumped in my chair, rubbing my temples. At this rate, I was going to give myself a stress-induced stroke before I even made it to thirty. If I had thought Zhang Xian was dangerous before, the realisation that my students were all becoming little mathematical anomalies in real time had pushed things into a completely different category of existential crisis.
Because here was the real problem — one I hadn't fully admitted to myself yet.
I liked teaching.
I liked seeing them learn. I liked watching their eyes light up when they grasped a new concept. I liked hearing them argue about paradoxes and debate infinities and the nature of zero. And that made this even worse, because if I wasn't careful, my own excitement would push them even further, and I had no idea what the consequences of that would be.
The ethical implications alone were staggering.
I needed time. Time to think. Time to test. Time to figure out how, exactly, I was making my students into mathematical prodigies before they collectively discovered Gödel's incompleteness theorems and shattered their Dao hearts.
So, the next morning, I did the unthinkable.
I requested a leave of absence.
-x-x-x-
Song Junhai had seen many things in his years as headmaster of Qinghe Academy. He had seen bright students rise and fall. He had seen fathers push their sons toward the imperial exams with all the enthusiasm of a pig to slaughter. He had even, on occasion, been forced to mediate a dispute between two scholars over the proper interpretation of an obscure classical passage, a battle that had nearly come to blows over the use of a single comma.
But he had never, in all his years, been as terrified as he was now.
Jiang Lingwu stood before him, calm as ever, his hands tucked neatly into his sleeves, as if he were making a perfectly reasonable request.
"I would like to take a leave of absence," Jiang Lingwu said.
Song Junhai did not hear these words as a simple statement. No, his mind, sharpened by years of survival in the treacherous world of academia, immediately converted them into a hidden message.
I will be entering secluded cultivation.
A thousand thoughts ran through Song Junhai's head at once. Had he misstepped? Had someone offended this hidden master? Was Qinghe too small a place for a man of his talents? Had someone from a rival sect dared to interfere with his Dao? Was the Academy at risk of being obliterated by a single wave of the hand?
Most were not yet aware, but he was sharp. He liked to know what was going on in his Academy, and he had heard the children talking in the courtyards during their breaks and after their dismissal in the evenings. This was a man who had, without even trying, ensnared the minds of his students with incomprehensible, esoteric knowledge. A cultivator who was running a strange experiment imparting profound Dao truths to children below the age of thirteen. A man whose presence alone had accelerated their thinking to unnatural speeds.
Even the old scholars in the city would have balked at what his students were discussing. Concepts that should have taken decades of study — concepts that weren't even in the realm of mortals — came as naturally to them as breathing.
He'd thought Jiang Lingwu a failed scholar during their first meeting. How foolish he had been! Jiang Lingwu was no ordinary scholar; he had been deliberately testing Song Junhai during the interview. Over his two months of employment, Song Junhai had come to conclude that much.
He was a hidden expert. And he was asking for leave.
Song Junhai swallowed. His voice was very careful when he spoke. "Master Jiang," he said, choosing his words with the delicacy of a man handling a lit fuse, "forgive my ignorance, but… is this leave of absence absolutely necessary?"
Jiang Lingwu sighed. "I'm afraid it is."
Song Junhai's mind reeled. That confirmed it.
Something was happening. Something beyond the comprehension of ordinary men.
Perhaps he had seen too much. Perhaps Jiang Lingwu had decided that Qinghe Academy was no longer suitable for his cultivation. Perhaps the students, their mortal minds straining under the weight of his wisdom, had become too much of a burden. Perhaps whatever experiment he was running had not proven fruitful. Whatever the case, Jiang Lingwu was preparing to leave.
The only question was whether he would ever return. And if he did, in what capacity that would be.
Song Junhai fought to keep his hands from shaking. "Might I… inquire as to the reason?" he asked carefully.
Jiang Lingwu hesitated, as if struggling to find the words. "Let's just say," he said at last, "I need to… reflect."
Reflect.
Song Junhai's stomach dropped.
That was how cultivators spoke when they had reached a bottleneck in their cultivation.
This was worse than he had feared.
Jiang Lingwu had been pushing the limits of something. He had been imparting truths that mortals could not grasp, and now, even he was uncertain. What had he touched upon? What great, unknowable principle had threatened his enlightenment? Was he in danger of Qi deviation?
The answer, of course, was yes.
Song Junhai had no doubt that Jiang Lingwu's Dao was terrifyingly profound. Perhaps too profound for even him to control.
"Of course," he said immediately. "Master Jiang, if you require anything — funds, supplies, silence — you need only ask."
Jiang Lingwu frowned slightly. "Funds?"
Song Junhai's heart seized. Had he offended him? Was it presumptuous to assume a master of Jiang Lingwu's level needed worldly wealth?
"Only if it would be of aid," Song Junhai said quickly.
Jiang Lingwu gave him a strange look. "I will still be staying at the inn."
Song Junhai's mind reeled.
Still staying at the inn?
That changed everything.
Most cultivators, when entering seclusion, retreated to mountains, hidden valleys, ancient ruins — places far removed from mortal affairs, where the heavens and the earth would bear witness to their enlightenment. But Jiang Lingwu…
Jiang Lingwu was simply staying at an inn.
How terrifying.
To cultivate among mortals, to enter a state of profound reflection in a place so mundane — it meant that for Jiang Lingwu, enlightenment was not confined to the isolation of nature or the depths of a sect's forbidden grounds. No, for him, even an ordinary inn in a small town was sufficient.
This was the mark of a true master.
A lesser cultivator required heavenly treasures, mystical formations, and secluded environments to deepen their Dao. But Jiang Lingwu needed none of these things. His cultivation had long since transcended the physical.
Song Junhai tried not to tremble. "I… see."
Jiang Lingwu tilted his head slightly, as if waiting for something.
Song Junhai scrambled to think. Was he expected to prepare something? Arrange an escort? Did Jiang Lingwu wish to leave quietly, or should the Academy formally recognise this moment?
No. No, Jiang Lingwu was a man of mystery, a scholar hidden among mortals. He would not want fanfare.
"Yes," Song Junhai said, forcing his voice to remain steady. "Then, Master Jiang, if you need anything during your… period of reflection, the Academy will provide."
Jiang Lingwu gave a small nod. "I appreciate that."
Song Junhai exhaled. He had survived.
But his relief was short-lived.
Jiang Lingwu hesitated, then said, "Actually… could I say a temporary goodbye to my students?"
Temporary?
Song Junhai's entire perception of reality shifted.
Jiang Lingwu was planning to return.
He wasn't just leaving for a period of enlightenment, never to be seen again — he was coming back.
That meant this was not a retreat. This was… something else. A test? A trial?
Was he assessing the Academy? Was he testing whether Qinghe was a worthy place to continue his teachings?
Or — worse — was he preparing them for something greater? Had he seen something coming?
Song Junhai had once heard stories of sages who walked the mortal world, planting seeds of knowledge before disappearing, only to return years later to see which of their disciples had ascended.
Was that what was happening?
Was Jiang Lingwu preparing the next generation for something beyond the limits of this small town? Something they would have to rise up to face?
The thought was both exhilarating and horrifying.
"Yes, of course," Song Junhai said quickly. "I will arrange for it immediately."
Jiang Lingwu nodded, as if satisfied.
Song Junhai, meanwhile, was already sweating through his robes.
-x-x-x-
The classroom was unnervingly silent as I stood before them, hands clasped behind my back, trying to figure out how best to break the news.
There was no easy way to say 'I am concerned I may have turned you into a beacon of eldritch mathematical power and that old monsters who cultivate through arcane insights into reality may descend upon you like locusts.'
So instead, I said, "I will be taking a leave of absence."
The response was immediate. Zhang Xian shot up from his seat like an arrow loosed from a bow.
"No!" he declared. "Absolutely not. Denied."
I rubbed my temples. "Zhang Xian, you don't get to —"
"You can't just leave us like this!" he interrupted. "We have questions! So many questions."
"That is precisely the problem," I muttered.
Chen Meili, ever the voice of reason, frowned. "Why are you leaving, Master Jiang?"
I hesitated. I had already learned the hard way that giving them too much information was a dangerous game. These children had somehow managed to turn a simple discussion on zero into a full-blown existential crisis. If I even hinted that my departure was tied to the fact that their mathematical insights had grown in ways that defied the natural order, I had no doubt that within a week, they'd be running an underground number theory symposium complete with rival factions.
So, I took a deep breath and said, "I need to… reflect."
Ru Lan, who had been sitting quietly up until now, tilted her head. "On what?"
Damn it.
"On…" I grasped for something. "On whether I am teaching you the right way."
That, at least, was technically true. If I was unintentionally pushing them toward some unnatural enlightenment, then I needed to figure out how to put a stop to it. Or at the very least, slow it down to mortal levels of gifted.
Zhao Qiang frowned. "But… you'll be back, right?"
I swallowed.
Would I?
I had come here with no real plan, just the vague intention of finding work that didn't involve sect politics or arrogant young masters challenging me to duels over minor offenses. And I had succeeded. But somehow, I had stumbled into something far worse.
"I don't know yet," I admitted.
Zhang Xian gasped as if I had personally betrayed him. "So it is a trial."
"It is not a trial," I snapped.
"A test of our mathematical fortitude," he continued, as if I hadn't spoken. "You are leaving us to meditate on the true nature of numbers, and then, one day, you shall return to see if we have ascended."
I pinched the bridge of my nose. "For the last time —"
"If I reach enlightenment before you return, I'll wait for you at the peak."
I choked. "What peak?"
He gestured vaguely toward the horizon. "The peak."
I was too tired to deal with the delusions of grandeur of a twelve year old child. "I will still be at the inn."
Then Ma Rui squinted at me. "So… it's like a really short seclusion?"
"No, it's not a seclusion —"
Zhao Qiang frowned. "But you'll still be in town."
"Yes —"
"And we know where you'll be staying."
I shifted uneasily. "That's not —"
Zhang Xian nodded gravely. "It is a test."
I resisted the urge to groan.
"Master Jiang," Ru Lan said, tilting her head, "if you're staying in town, why can't we still have lessons?"
"Because I need time to think," I said firmly.
Zhang Xian crossed his arms. "You can think while we ask you questions."
"Absolutely not."
Chen Meili furrowed her brow. "But you always say that thinking is most efficient when it's challenged by new ideas."
I paused. I had indeed said that.
I needed to stop giving them ammunition.
Look," I said, "this isn't forever. But I need to take a step back."
The words tasted bitter.
I hadn't wanted to admit it, but deep down, I knew this was more than just a precaution. If I had any lingering doubts about whether I was making a difference in these children's lives, they had been erased over the past months. Even as I struggled with my own uncertainties, I had found genuine joy in teaching them, in watching them grasp new ideas, in seeing their faces light up when something clicked.
And now, I had to leave them.
Because I was afraid.
Not of them, but for them.
If there really were old monsters who cultivated through mathematical insights — if such a path existed — then what I was doing here was dangerous. I might as well have been lighting a beacon and inviting the heavens to strike us down. Someone would notice.
And if history had taught me anything, it was that people who hoarded knowledge did not take kindly to outsiders stumbling into their domain.
What if there were entire sects who cultivated mathematics, not just single old hermits sitting in caves? What if they guarded their insights like dragons hoarded gold? What if, right now, there was some ancient scholar-sage dwelling in a mountain stronghold, monitoring the world for anyone who dared approach their forbidden theorems?
What would they do to a group of children who had begun questioning infinity?
I didn't want to find out.
I couldn't let them be noticed. Not when I didn't have proper cultivation of my own. Not if I couldn't protect my charges from the consequences of my own actions.
My absence was the best way to slow things down — to let their enthusiasm settle before they crossed a line neither of us could come back from.
At least, that was what I told myself.
"Master Jiang," Zhang Xian said suddenly, his expression uncharacteristically serious, "are you sure this isn't about something else?"
I tensed.
He stared at me, eyes narrowed.
"Are you dying?"
"No!" I snapped.
Zhang Xian exhaled in relief. "Oh, good." Then he paused. "Wait, but if you were dying, would you tell us?"
"I —" I choked. "Zhang Xian, what —"
"Because it sounds like something a sage would hide from their students so they could struggle to reach enlightenment in time to save them."
Ma Rui frowned. "That does sound like something from a story."
I ran a hand down my face. "I am not a sage."
Zhang Xian looked unimpressed. "That's exactly what a sage would say."
I could not do this right now. I cleared my throat. "Regardless of what you think, my decision is final."
There were a few murmurs of protest, but ultimately, they accepted it.
Zhao Qiang, ever the practical one, furrowed his brow. "So… what do we do in the meantime?"
I hesitated. "Focus on your other studies. Listen to your other teachers. And —" I sighed, "please do not try to figure out the secrets of the universe in my absence."
There was a long silence.
"…define 'secrets of the universe,'" Zhang Xian said.
I shot him a glare.
He looked away, whistling innocently.
I sighed, rubbing my temples. "Just… focus on your other studies."
That was the best I could do. I had set this in motion, and now I could only hope that taking a step back would slow things down before they spiraled out of control.
With that, I left the classroom.
Back at the inn, I sat down at my desk, staring at my parchment-covered table. Equations, unfinished proofs, half-formed ideas — everything I had been wrestling with since coming to Qinghe Town. I had thought this would be my second chance, my quiet life of mathematics, free from cultivation and its absurdities.
And yet, here I was.
Somehow, I had left one path only to stumble onto another.
I closed my eyes, steadying my breath, and focused inward once more. The shattered remnants of my dantian still lay there, utterly ruined, disintegrated so finely that it didn't exist. The soul of a mortal; the soul that I had back on Earth.
But if that was all it was, then none of this should have been possible.
I exhaled and opened my eyes.
I had thought that I was done with cultivation. That I would leave it behind, pursue mathematics, and return only when I was ready to pursue the hidden truths that immortal mathematical daoists had gleaned.
But maybe — just maybe — cultivation wasn't done with me.
Chapter 9. The Measure of a Man
I sat cross-legged on the floor of my tiny rented room at the inn, staring at the flickering candle in front of me like it owed me money. The wax had melted unevenly, pooling in strange shapes, like a graph of a function that had somehow become self-aware and decided to defy continuity just to spite me.
The floor creaked beneath me. The distant murmur of patrons in the common hall below drifted through the wooden walls. Someone sneezed.
Secluded cultivation, indeed.
I took a deep breath. My goal was simple: figure out why I was manifesting effects without qi. Logically speaking, this was impossible.
Then again, so was the Banach-Tarski paradox, and yet here we were.
The memories of the old Jiang Lingwu told me exactly how I should be doing this. First, calm the mind. Second, draw my focus inward. Third, examine the state of my dantian and circulate my qi.
Step three was, of course, impossible. Because I had no qi. None. Not even a single stray iota.
But that was what I needed to confirm.
I took another deep breath, trying to channel my memories of the old Jiang Lingwu's meditation practices. It was difficult. Trying to meditate with someone else's instincts was like reading about how an MRI machine worked and then being asked to build one out of spare parts and good intentions. I had never been good at meditation back on Earth — every time I tried, my brain would decide that right now was the best time to remember all my past embarrassments in vivid detail.
I ignored the mental image of twelve-year-old me mispronouncing 'organism' in front of my entire biology class and focused inward.
At first, there was nothing. Just the familiar sense of being inside my own body, of bones and muscles and organs. The ordinary, mortal self.
Then, deeper.
The dantian should have been there.
A normal dantian — a functional one — would have been a concentrated node, a closed domain of power, a space that existed in a way that normal anatomy could not explain. If qi were a fluid, then the dantian was the flask that held it. A perfect, abstract sphere; a topological entity lacking concrete description but existing in the mind as a locus of condensed power.
Mine was gone.
Not merely damaged. Not cracked or blocked.
Gone. Disintegrated.
I had known this, logically. I had been the one to destroy it, after all. But knowing something was broken and actually seeing the absence of what should be there were two entirely different things. It was the difference between knowing a window had shattered and actually pressing your hand against where the glass used to be, only to find nothing but empty air.
The space where my dantian had once been was hollow, utterly vacant, as though something had scooped it out with surgical precision.
I swallowed.
Had I somehow annihilated it completely?
The thought sat heavy in my mind, unwelcome but insistent, like a rogue term in an equation that refused to cancel out. That wasn't how a shattered dantian was supposed to work. A damaged dantian was like a cracked cauldron — still there, still functional in the loosest sense, but leaking qi constantly, unable to hold power properly. If a cultivator lost their dantian, they usually suffered for it. They would feel the absence, the energy bleeding out into nothing, the slow withering of their meridians like a body deprived of nourishment.
But mine?
Nothing. No pain. No lingering remnants. No sense of loss.
Just absence.
It was like my dantian had been erased. Like a particle and an antiparticle colliding and annihilating each other, leaving behind only energy.
Had I, in a moment of inexperience, fresh to the experiences of life in a xianxia world, reduced my dantian to a state of such utter nothingness that even the idea of it had been erased?
I sucked in a slow breath, steadying my nerves. No. Speculation was pointless without data.
I needed an experiment.
I reached under my bed, retrieving the small wooden box that contained the last remnants of my past life — sect-issued robes, a few old scrolls, and the spirit stones I had never exchanged. They were standard-grade, nothing particularly valuable, but still precious in a way. These were my emergency funds, the last bridge between me and the world of cultivators. I had avoided selling them because the only place to do so was in the cities, and cities meant sect-affiliated merchants, which meant cultivator politics.
I did not want to get a table flipped on me just because I looked wrongly at some young master at a teahouse.
Jiang Lingwu's memories told me how this was supposed to work. Qi absorption was a simple process — well, simple for someone with a functioning dantian. One guided the external energy inward, allowing it to cycle through the meridians before condensing it into the core. It was supposed to be as natural as breathing for a trained cultivator.
I had no idea what would happen in my case.
I closed my eyes, steadied my breath, and followed the familiar motions stored in my borrowed muscle memory. Focus. Draw in the energy. Direct it inward.
Nothing happened.
At least, not at first.
I sat there, legs folded, hands resting on my knees, doing my best impression of someone achieving enlightenment. The faint glow of the spirit stones did not waver. The air remained still. The universe, unbothered by my presence, continued as usual.
I frowned and tried again, this time with more determination. What lingered of Jiang Lingwu's instincts guided my breathing, his muscle memory shaping the flow of energy, but I felt nothing. No warmth, no pull, no whisper of power. Just stillness.
Fine. This was fine. Science was all about patience.
I exhaled slowly, relaxing my posture. If it wasn't working, I wasn't going to force it.
My thoughts drifted, unbidden.
Was this why cultivators sought seclusion? Not just for enlightenment, but for the clarity that came from complete isolation? André Weil had done his most groundbreaking mathematical work while imprisoned. With nothing else to do, no distractions, no external pressures, he had turned his mind inward and reshaped mathematics itself.
Perhaps this was something similar.
I had spent my days guiding students, avoiding trouble, and, despite my best efforts, becoming involved in things beyond my understanding. But now? Now I had space.
Time.
Purpose.
The candle flickered. The air grew heavier, or perhaps I only imagined it.
I inhaled again, slower this time. Focused.
Minutes stretched into hours. The faint noises of the inn faded from my awareness. Time lost meaning. The outside world became distant.
Then —
A flicker.
The tiniest, faintest shift.
Like the space around me had wobbled, for just an instant.
I opened my eyes.
The spirit stones were gone.
I blinked.
Looked around.
Checked under my sleeves.
No trace. No dust. No lingering energy in the air.
I exhaled slowly.
Alright. Something had happened.
I reached inward, expecting… something. Anything. Some feeling of increased strength, or a reservoir of energy, or even just the faintest shift in my internal balance.
But there was nothing.
The void in my center remained unchanged, untouched, as if nothing had entered it at all.
I had absorbed the energy.
And yet, my dantian was still empty.
That didn't make sense.
Qi didn't just vanish. It had to go somewhere. Even if my dantian had been shattered, even if I had somehow managed to consume the spirit stones improperly, I should have felt something.
Instead, there was only void.
But not just a simple void. Not the structured emptiness of a missing piece in a puzzle, nor the mere absence of a container waiting to be filled. No, this was something else entirely.
The energy had entered my body. That much was undeniable. The spirit stones were gone. Their faint glow had vanished, consumed by the gaping non-space where my dantian should have been. Yet, when I reached inward, seeking even the smallest trace of gathered qi, there was nothing.
Nothing, as in no sensation of energy pooling within me.
Nothing, as in not even the faintest ripple of qi shifting along my meridians.
Nothing, as in a void so absolute that it should not have been possible.
At first, I entertained the possibility that I had failed. Maybe I had absorbed the energy incorrectly. Maybe I had inadvertently dispersed it into the environment, scattering it into useless entropy like a poorly insulated circuit. Maybe there was some step in qi absorption that my damaged, mortal shell simply couldn't perform.
But the more I thought about it, the less sense that made. Energy didn't just vanish. Even the crudest alchemical waste left behind some residue. If my dantian were completely gone, then the energy should have spilled elsewhere — perhaps leaking into my body chaotically, seeping into my bones, stagnating in my limbs. I should have felt something.
Instead, there was only nothing.
I exhaled slowly, dragging a hand down my face.
Right. I had read about this sort of thing before.
Void cultivation was the kind of absurd concept that appeared in xianxia novels whenever an author wanted to justify a protagonist breaking all known rules of qi circulation. It usually came with grandiose names, ranging from the mildly poetic to the outright ridiculous:
The Boundless Abyss Devouring Art.
The Infinite Hollow Meridian Sutra.
The Absolute Nihility Divine Codex.
The Grand Mystic Dao of No-Dao (Which Transcends All Dao and is Therefore the True Dao).
And, of course, my personal favorite from a particularly egregious MTL:
[Insert Profound Cultivation Technique Name Here]
Most of these techniques were little more than theoretical nonsense, the sort of thing you read but didn't question. They promised their practitioners infinite growth through paradoxical means — absorbing qi yet not absorbing qi, existing outside the cycle of the heavens yet somehow surpassing it, breaking through realms without a bottleneck because they cultivated 'nothingness' instead of 'something'.
It was all very impressive-sounding, right up until you realised that the authors didn't understand set theory.
I mostly just shut my brain off when reading those novels and waited for the dopamine hit to kick in. Now, sitting here, staring into the empty space where my dantian should be, I was beginning to wonder if maybe some of them had been onto something.
The problem was that void cultivation, as typically described in fiction, had always been a contradiction. It was supposed to be a state of existence where qi was neither gathered nor expelled, where energy passed through a person like light through glass, where the absence of something paradoxically became a source of power.
But I wasn't dealing with a paradox.
I was dealing with mathematics.
Something about my situation adhered too perfectly to mathematical structure. The energy hadn't been lost. It hadn't been scattered. It had entered my body and disappeared, not into nothingness, but into something so fine, so fractured, so infinitesimally dispersed that it no longer registered as existing in any one place —
Wait.
I swallowed hard.
I needed to check something.
Closing my eyes again, I reached inward — not seeking qi, but seeking structure. Seeking any kind of internal framework that might explain why the energy was vanishing without a trace.
At first, it was the same as before. A vast emptiness, an absence of form, a void without center or boundary.
But then, as I focused — really focused — I saw it.
Not a single entity. Not a sphere of condensed power, nor a broken remnant of a dantian.
Instead, there were points.
Tiny, dust-like specks, scattered so finely that no matter where I looked, there was no one place they gathered. No neighborhood where I could say, 'Yes, this is where my energy went!'
No continuous structure to contain anything.
Just a collection of infinitesimally small points.
And yet… I knew, instinctively, that these points were where the qi had gone. They were absorbing the energy, but because they occupied a space of measure zero, the energy felt like it had disappeared entirely.
I felt my breath catch in my throat.
Cantor dust.
I had turned my dantian into Cantor dust.
The realisation struck like a thunderclap in my mind.
At first, I refused to believe it. Surely, it was just fragmented, a shattered remnant scattered into minuscule grains, like sand too fine to be gathered again. But no — this was something else entirely. This wasn't a finite fragmentation, nor even a mere countable infinity of specks.
This was an uncountable infinity of points.
A structure where qi entered, only to be absorbed across an infinite-dimensional nowhere. A set that was nowhere dense — no matter how closely one examined any part of it, there was never enough substance to form a continuous whole. No region of measure greater than zero, no connected structure that could act as a vessel.
And yet, it still existed. It still absorbed.
This wasn't just void cultivation. This wasn't some xianxia technique spouting profound-sounding contradictions. This was a mathematical entity more terrifying than anything in those novels.
I had seen diagrams of this in my past life. I had given them a cursory read in fascination and terror, yet without understanding. For how could I? I had been a biologist with an interest in mathematics but never took the time to fully understand all its rigour. I had read about Georg Cantor, that pioneer who had dared to map infinities themselves. He had realised — shocked and bewildered — that the real numbers between 0 and 1 were not just infinitely many, but uncountably so, beyond the mere countable infinity of the whole numbers. He had grasped a truth so counterintuitive that even the mathematicians of his time had recoiled in horror.
Cantor had peered into the abyss of infinite sets and found that it did not follow the logic of mortal minds. He had seen something that shook the very foundations of mathematics, something so profound that it had led him to a life of chronic depression and stays in sanatoriums.
And now, I was staring at that same abyss.
He had famously wrote: "I see it, but I do not believe it!"
I understood him now.
I had dispersed my qi barely a few minutes into my arrival in this world. In that single moment, in my conviction to sever myself from cultivation, I had performed an act so precise, so absolute, that it had transcended any ordinary fragmentation.
I hadn't merely broken my dantian. I had taken it and recursively shattered it in such a way that the process had continued indefinitely, reducing it to an infinite dust that held measure zero, yet still existed everywhere within me.
There was no center. No locus. No core.
It was nowhere. And yet, it was everywhere.
I sucked in a shaky breath.
If this was true, then it explained everything.
The reason why my students had been affected — why they had begun developing a terrifying, unnatural affinity for mathematics — was because my qi was no longer governed by a normal cultivator's meridians or techniques.
It had no structure except mathematical structure.
It did not flow through my body. It could not be condensed, because there was no region where it could pool. Instead, it dispersed into an uncountable set of infinitesimal points, each absorbing and transmitting some fundamental essence of itself.
That was why it had only manifested in mathematics.
I hadn't been teaching my students mathematics.
I had been transmitting qi through mathematics.
The horrifying realization settled over me like a lead weight.
If a normal cultivator imparted their Dao through their martial understanding, their insights into the world, their profound wisdom forged through years of enlightenment, then what had I been doing?
I had no martial insights. No profound wisdom. No mystical Dao comprehension.
All I had was math.
So when my fragmented qi had bled into my surroundings, when it had unconsciously influenced those around me, it had done so through the only structure it could still recognise — the only structure it could still exist in.
Mathematical truths.
Without intending to, I had already been unknowingly cultivating through mathematics itself.
The implications were staggering.
Was there a path here? A method of understanding this state, of learning to control it? Could I shape my energy with logical rigor, with axiomatic precision? But how?
Was I simply trapped within? A broken remnant of what had once been a cultivator, now reduced to a walking, breathing paradox?
I clenched my fists.
No, there was something deeper here. Something I had to understand.
Cantor had looked into the nature of infinities and been struck by its grandeur. He had been met with resistance, with rejection from his peers, with disbelief that such an idea could exist. He had been condemned by those who saw his discoveries as an affront to reason itself.
I was standing at the precipice of something equally unfathomable.
I was not merely a man without qi. I was not merely a failed cultivator.
I was a man whose very existence had been rewritten by mathematics.
I closed my eyes and reached inward once more. Not with the expectation of gathering qi, not with the futile attempt to circulate it through non-existent pathways, but with the intent to understand.
And in that infinite dust of shattered qi, I felt the echoes of something vast. Something beyond the mortal methods of cultivation.
Something beautiful.
Something terrifying.
I had become a mathematical singularity, and I barely even properly knew my calculus.
I exhaled sharply, my pulse hammering in my ears.
Charles Hermite had once written, "There exists, if I am not mistaken, an entire world which is the totality of mathematical truths, to which we have access only with our mind, just as a world of physical reality exists, the one like the other independent of ourselves, both of divine creation."
I now glimpsed it. And I had not just glimpsed it — I had become entangled with it, absorbed into its structure like a function swallowed by its own recursion.
For all my years of regret, all my excuses, I had feared that mathematics was beyond me. That I was an outsider, a mere admirer of its beauty rather than a true participant in its great unfolding. But now? Now I was no longer merely a man looking in from the outside.
I had stepped through the door and found myself standing in a space that should not exist.
And I was entirely unprepared.
I had no formal training. I had never attended a single proper university lecture on analysis, nor studied the full depths of set theory. I was a biologist — I could wax lyrical about haematopoietic lineages and single-cell transcriptomics, but true mathematics was beyond me. I was a man whose mathematical knowledge was fractured and incomplete, filled with half-remembered theorems and scattered proofs like the pages of an unfinished manuscript.
And yet, Charles Hermite had also said, "We are servants rather than masters in mathematics."
That, too, I understood now.
I was not the master of this power. I was its servant, dragged along its currents like a hapless traveler caught in the tides of an uncharted ocean. I had shattered my dantian with the arrogance of a man who thought he was escaping cultivation, only to create something infinitely more terrifying in its place. Something I didn't know how to control.
I could not afford to remain ignorant any longer.
If I had been an ordinary cultivator, I would have had a path. A master to guide me. A sect to teach me techniques. Manuals and scrolls filled with knowledge accumulated across generations.
I was alone.
The thought had come to me like a reflex, a natural conclusion drawn from the absurdity of my situation. What manuals could I study? Who in this world had ever cultivated through Cantor dust? Who had ever transformed their qi into a nowhere-dense set of measure zero?
But… was I truly alone?
I had no master in the traditional sense. No sect, no grand elder to guide me through this unknown path. No lineage of sages passing down their wisdom in sealed scrolls, waiting to be unraveled by a promising disciple.
And yet —
Was that not precisely my position?
The wisdom of my predecessors did not come to me in the form of immortal jade slips or cryptic manuals bound in silk and gold. But I had glimpsed the texts of sages long past. I had pored over their words, their symbols, their theorems carved into the foundation of reality itself.
I was not alone.
I had my masters.
Not in the flesh, not bound by sect or bloodline, but in the vast and infinite inheritance they had left behind, their wisdom scattered across the annals of time like fragments of an ancient Dao.
There was Évariste Galois, the Troubled Genius, cut down before his time, burning with such unrelenting brilliance that he defied the very heavens. On the eve of his fatal duel, he raged against the limits of mortality itself, leaving behind an inheritance so profound that it reshaped the landscape of algebra. Even as he bled onto the streets of Paris, he knew his insights would live on, immortal. He was the Young Hero Who Challenged the Heavens, the unyielding force who had glimpsed a truth far beyond his years and, with his final breath, entrusted it to those who would follow.
There was Leonhard Euler, the Grandmaster of Infinite Paths, a sage whose wisdom knew no equal. Where others stumbled, he walked effortlessly. The weight of analysis, number theory, graph theory — none of it burdened him. Even when blindness took his sight, his mind saw further than any before him, weaving together the fabric of mathematics with a grace that defied comprehension. His techniques — his methods — had become the foundation of an entire era. The Serene Master of the Unbounded Flow, guiding the river of knowledge with patience and precision.
There was Carl Friedrich Gauss, the Sage of Hidden Depths. His genius had been apparent even as a child, a single insight revealing the arithmetic series in an instant. He had been a cultivator in his own right, advancing from mortal arithmetic to the divine truths of number theory and beyond. The Ever-Victorious Scholar, whose discoveries paved roads where none had walked before.
There was Emmy Noether, the Matriarch of Symmetry, whose enlightenment had uncovered the deep, unbreakable bond between conservation laws and the underlying structure of reality. She had shattered barriers, not only in mathematics but in the very notion of what was possible. The Sage Who Walked an Unseen Path, forging forward when an ignorant world tried to deny her passage. Her insights had illuminated fields that would endure for eternity.
There was Joseph-Louis Lagrange, the Grand Tactician of the Calculus of Variations, the strategist who found solutions where others found chaos. The Architect of Stability, who shaped the very foundations of celestial mechanics and optimisation, the one who saw beyond mere motion and into the deeper laws governing it.
There was Pierre-Simon Laplace, the Prophet of Determinism, whose mind stretched to the limits of probability and celestial mechanics. The Oracle of Causal Chains, who glimpsed a world where every action had its outcome written in the stars, where nothing was left to chance.
There was Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier, the Master of Resonance, the one who understood the harmonic nature of the universe itself. The One Who Heard the Music of Heat and Waves, revealing that even the most chaotic patterns could be understood through decomposition into their fundamental frequencies.
There was Ferdinand Eisenstein, the Shadowed Genius, taken too soon, yet leaving behind whispers of insights that would be pursued long after his passing. The Unfinished Luminary, whose brief but brilliant contributions stood like an unsolved equation — an inheritance waiting for the next to complete it.
Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of masters.
I had thought myself alone in this path.
I had been a fool.
I was not the first to walk a path of discovery with no master to guide me. I was not the first to stand before the vastness of the infinite and feel utterly insignificant. Every one of these grand sages had, at some point, been where I stood now — peering into the void, struggling against their own ignorance, clawing their way forward through sheer force of will.
Their works had endured, not because they were bestowed upon chosen disciples in some hidden mountain temple, but because they had carved them into the very foundation of reality.
And now, I stood on the edge of that inheritance.
I had been a coward before. A man who loved mathematics but feared it, who admired from a distance but never had the courage to take that final step. But what was hesitation in the face of infinity? What was doubt before a lineage of sages who had already walked this path?
I was their descendant in spirit, an inheritor of their knowledge. They had left behind cryptic, fragmented techniques, methods that had to be deciphered with patience and effort — was that not the Essence of Cultivation itself?
Did a xianxia protagonist not stumble upon a half-burned scroll, an incomplete jade slip, the remnants of some grandmaster's final insights, and spend years trying to grasp its meaning? What difference was there between me and them?
Instead of martial manuals, I had treatises and proofs. Instead of sect elders, I had the writings of the masters.
I had inherited a Dao.
It was scattered, broken, cryptic, half-remembered — but it was mine.
I clenched my fists.
If a wandering cultivator could spend decades reconstructing a forbidden art from fragmented teachings, then I could study Lagrange's equations until they burned themselves into my soul.
If some 'trash talent' could decipher the lost techniques of an ancient sword saint by meditating over a single stroke left on a cave wall, then I could bloody damned well learn analysis from what I remembered of Euler's works.
If an orphaned child in some war-torn realm could ascend to the heavens by deciphering the remnants of a fallen sect's knowledge, then I could —
No, I would —
Unravel the mysteries of mathematics.