His body still trembled. His fingers barely responded. But Mo Han's mind was sharper than ever. The fever burning his skin seemed to push the world away, leaving only the center: himself, and the void.
He lay on the straw, wrapped in filthy rags. The pain was constant, but no longer despairing. It was as if the body screamed, but he heard it from a distance, filtering everything through the lens of reason.
In the midst of that near-unconsciousness, an image repeated itself in his mind: the silhouette of his body wrapped in golden lines. The hallucinations brought on by the extreme cold had left something behind—a trace. A symbolic representation of what he was on the inside.
Lines. Circles. Patterns.
He didn't see meridians, but conductors.Not acupuncture points, but transmission nodes.
The structure was there. It only needed to be organized.
With difficulty, he stretched out a finger and began drawing on the dirt floor. The shapes came spontaneously: curved flows linked to pressure points, inverted triangles layered over routes of pain, spirals representing resistance and collapse.
It was a living equation. And for the first time, he saw a path.
Cultivation is not about accumulating energy. It's about converting information into adaptation.
My body is the catalyst. My mind, the conduit. Pain, the stimulus. Pattern, the formula.
He named it right then: the Adaptive Simulation Model.It was the skeleton of a cultivation system without Qi.A method where, instead of absorbing energy, the body was stimulated through patterns—forced to adapt, evolve, rebuild.
And each successful adaptation would generate an "echo"—a mental signature that could be repeated, refined, and accumulated.
Runes. Rhythm. Response. The three pillars.
It was insane. Heretical. Impossible.
But it was also his.
No one had given him this path.It wasn't inherited. It wasn't from a bloodline. It wasn't luck.It was pain, logic, and stubbornness.
When he finished the primitive diagram, he collapsed sideways, completely drained. His breathing was shallow.But he smiled.
Now I know where to begin. And if there's a beginning... there's possibility.
They may have Qi. I have the code.