Arthur had eventually left to attend his own classes, promising to return in the evening with more food and fresh notes. Sylas had nodded, made appropriate grateful noises, and waited until the door closed and the sound of footsteps faded down the hallway before allowing himself to slump back onto the bed with a groan of relief.

  Socializing, it turned out, was exhausting when your body was held together primarily through stubborn refusal to die. The cracked ribs throbbed in rhythm with his pulse—a reliable, insistent percussion that he'd stopped being able to ignore about an hour into Arthur's explanation of meridian architecture. His head felt like someone had packed it with cotton and regret. His left shoulder had developed a new opinion about his life choices, expressed in the form of a deep ache that radiated whenever he tried to move his arm above waist height.

  But he couldn't afford to rest for long. Two weeks until the exam. Fourteen days to go from 'destroyed cultivation base' to 'minimally functional student.' The timeline was aggressive even by Celestial Logistics standards, and that company had once asked him to route a magical hurricane around seventeen population centres in forty-eight hours.

  He'd done that, incidentally. The hurricane had only killed twelve people instead of the projected twelve thousand. He'd gotten a performance review that said 'adequate' and a coffee mug that said "World's Most Adequate Logistics Manager." He'd kept the mug on his desk for three years because it was the most honest assessment of his career he'd ever received in official form.

  He still had that mug. Or rather, he'd had it. In a life that was now ash and administrative failure, currently serving as evidence in an incident report filed under 'low priority.'

  Sylas shook his head, forcing his thoughts back to the present. Nostalgia was unproductive. It consumed time and energy and produced nothing actionable. He had work to do.

  He retrieved the Foundation Mana Circulation manual from the satchel and spread it open on the desk, smoothing the pages with careful hands. Arthur's simplified diagrams were helpful—a genuine starting point, the product of real thought—but Sylas needed to understand the source material. Needed to see what the technique was actually trying to accomplish versus what it was accidentally accomplishing through centuries of accumulated inefficiency. You couldn't optimize a system you didn't understand from first principles. That was Logistics Rule Three, right after 'document everything' and 'never trust a verbal handoff.'

  The manual opened to a page showing the human body as a network of channels. Meridians, they were called. Energy pathways that ran through the physical form, connecting various nodes—gates, points, chambers—each with their own names and documented functions, described in the elaborate vocabulary of a discipline that had been developing its terminology for longer than most civilisations had existed.

  The Foundation Mana Circulation Technique, according to the manual, required the cultivator to:

  One: Draw ambient mana through the Crown Point. Two: Channel it down through the Central Meridian to the Heart Chamber. Three: Split the flow into the Left and Right Arm Channels. Four: Cycle through the Hand Gates, all five fingers on each hand. Five: Return the flow up through the Inner Arm Channels to the Shoulder Points. Six: Redirect down through the Torso Meridians to the Solar Plexus Node. Seven: Branch into the Digestive Pathway for purification.

  It continued. The list went on for two full pages. Seventeen major circulation points, each with their own sub-steps and breathing patterns and meditation focuses, each described with the confident authority of received wisdom that had never been questioned. By the time the mana actually reached the dantian—the storage core in the lower abdomen—it had travelled through nearly the entire body, touching points that seemed to serve no purpose other than satisfying the diagram's commitment to comprehensiveness.

  Sylas stared at the diagram for a long moment.

  Then he started laughing.

  It hurt his ribs—quite a lot, actually—but he couldn't help it. The technique was absurd. It was the cultivation equivalent of routing a data packet from New York to Boston by way of Tokyo, Cairo, and Antarctica, and then congratulating yourself on the elegance of the system. Whoever had designed this had either possessed a very particular sense of humour or had genuinely believed that complexity was a form of rigour.

  He pulled out fresh paper and the piece of charcoal. If he was going to understand this properly—understand it well enough to rebuild it—he needed to externalise the structure. See it laid out as what it actually was rather than what the manual's reverent prose insisted it should be.

  Sylas began to draw.

  His logistics background took over automatically, the way a practiced reflex operates below conscious direction. The human body became a series of nodes and pathways. Mana became packets of energy moving through a distribution network. The cultivation process became what it actually was: input, processing, storage, with various transformation stages in between.

  He mapped the Crown Point as the entry node. Drew arrows showing mana flow down the Central Meridian. Branched them out to the arm channels, marked each of the seventeen circulation points as processing nodes, labelled each one with the manual's function description in small letters at the side.

  And as he drew, he began to see the waste.

  The Hand Gates, for instance. The technique required mana to flow through all five fingers on each hand—ten points total—before returning up the arm. Sylas looked at the manual's explanation for this requirement. It mentioned 'harmonizing the external flows' and 'balancing the dual nature of reception and projection,' which sounded precisely as profound as it needed to sound to avoid further questioning.

  But when he traced the actual path the mana took through the finger channels, what he saw was energy moving through a series of capillary-thin pathways with high resistance and no clear processing function. The mana that came out the other end of the Hand Gates was not demonstrably different from the mana that went in. It had simply spent energy getting there and back.

  It was mystical language covering for the fact that whoever designed this technique a thousand years ago had probably thought it sounded impressive, or had been working from an even older source that they hadn't fully understood, or had simply added it because the previous version had ten circulation points and ten felt incomplete without a reason they could articulate.

  Sylas did rough calculations based on what he'd observed in the training yard that morning. Each unnecessary circulation point added resistance to the flow—friction in the pathway, energy spent on the movement itself rather than on reaching the destination. Each branch and loop created additional surface area for ambient dissipation. The Hand Gates alone, by his estimate, were responsible for a ten to fifteen percent efficiency loss in the overall cycle.

  He continued mapping. The Digestive Pathway—another unnecessary detour, routed through the abdomen on the claim that it 'purified' the mana by passing it through metabolic channels. Sylas looked at where in the process this purification supposedly occurred. It happened in the middle of circulation, well before the mana reached the dantian where it would actually be stored. If purification was genuinely necessary, the logical place for it was at the end, in the dantian itself, where you could apply focused effort without losing the purified mana to subsequent circulation losses. Doing it mid-route was like filtering water halfway through a pipeline and then running it through six more unfiltered sections before it reached the tap.

  The Torso Meridians had three separate loops when a direct route would accomplish the same transfer. The Solar Plexus Node was positioned in a way that created a bottleneck—the incoming and outgoing channels converged at an angle that forced the mana to slow and queue rather than flowing through. The Shoulder Points required the mana to briefly reverse direction relative to its natural downward flow, which introduced turbulence and increased the probability of deviation.

  It was a legacy system. There was no other honest description. Someone had built the original version centuries ago with a limited and partially incorrect understanding of how mana behaved in the human body. Then generations of cultivators had added their own refinements—extra steps that supposedly improved the technique based on insights they'd had, or traditions they'd inherited, or mistakes they'd made that they'd incorporated as precautions. No one had ever gone back and asked "Is this step necessary?" because questioning traditional wisdom in a discipline where the traditional wisdom was also your only protection against catastrophic self-harm was a reasonable thing to avoid.

  And now students were trying to run this bloated, inefficient, historically-accreted process with malnourished bodies and minimal preparation, and the system called them failures when they couldn't manage it.

  Sylas set down the charcoal and looked at his diagram. The seventeen-point circulation path was laid out in front of him in all its unnecessary complexity, every redundant step visible and labelled. Then he picked up a fresh sheet of paper and began drawing again.

  This time, he drew what the technique should look like.

  Crown Point to Central Meridian—that part was sound. The entry point made anatomical sense, and the central channel was the most direct pathway toward the core. Keep that.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  But instead of branching to the arms at the Heart Chamber, route through the Heart Chamber itself as a processing node. It was already positioned along the natural path. It already had the structural characteristics of a transformation point—the manual noted, in a subordinate clause buried in a longer paragraph about meridian hierarchy, that the Heart Chamber was where external mana first began resonating with the cultivator's personal energy signature. That was genuine function. Use it.

  From the Heart Chamber, straight down to the dantian along the Central Meridian's lower section. One clean pathway. No detours through the digestive system. No triple loops through the torso. No bottleneck at the solar plexus, no counter-current turbulence at the shoulders. Direct transfer, minimal resistance, maximum delivery.

  The arms could serve as secondary circulation pathways—used when the cultivator needed to project mana externally for combat techniques or material work, but not part of the basic storage cycle. Same with the leg meridians that the manual mentioned in passing but never fully integrated into the main technique, as though whoever wrote it had run out of certainty before they ran out of body parts.

  Sylas's simplified version had seven circulation points instead of seventeen. A reduction in complexity of nearly sixty percent, with every remaining point serving a documentable function. Clean. Direct. Efficient.

  He stared at his diagram, feeling the particular satisfaction of a well-solved problem—the clean click of elements aligning into something that worked because it was built correctly rather than because it had survived long enough to become traditional. This would work. He could see it working. The mana would flow faster, waste less energy on unnecessary travel, arrive at the dantian with higher purity and volume than the standard technique could manage even in a healthy body.

  A cultivator using this simplified technique wouldn't accumulate mana as quickly as someone using the full seventeen-point version in terms of absolute capacity, since less total processing meant less refinement. But they'd be dramatically more efficient per unit of effort. They'd be able to cultivate on a fraction of the ambient mana that the standard technique required.

  Which was exactly what Sylas needed. He didn't have resources. He didn't have a healthy body. He had a damaged system, two weeks, and a method that might—if it worked—allow him to do more with less than anyone around him would think possible.

  He reached for his own body's energy channels, trying to feel the meridians the way the manual described—the subtle internal awareness that cultivators apparently developed through practice, the ability to sense one's own energy pathways from the inside. It was difficult. His cultivation base was destroyed, his channels damaged and partially collapsed. But he could sense something. A faint network of pathways, like the ghost of a circuit diagram, dim and incomplete but present. The ghost of a system that had once functioned, waiting to see if it would be asked to function again.

  Could he rebuild it? Could he implement his simplified circulation pattern on this wreckage, channel mana through pathways that had been burned out and left to scar?

  Sylas looked at his two diagrams side by side. The official technique, bloated and inefficient, built for bodies that had never been broken. His simplified version, streamlined and practical, built for the conditions that actually existed.

  And then doubt crept in—the cold, specific kind that came not from uncertainty about the analysis but from awareness of how much he didn't know.

  What if the complexity was intentional? Not tradition for its own sake, but necessary architecture that his outside perspective was misreading as waste? He'd been in this world for less than a week. He understood logistics, distribution networks, system optimisation. He did not understand mana at any level deeper than observation and inference. What if it behaved in ways his model didn't account for? What if those extra circulation points were safety valves, pressure regulators, the kind of built-in redundancy that looked unnecessary right up until the moment you removed it and everything failed catastrophically?

  After all, the manual included extensive warnings about mana deviation. About corruption, damage, death—the consequences of circulation gone wrong. Original-Sylas had died from forcing mana through unprepared channels using the standard technique under inadequate conditions. Sylas's simplified technique was, in at least one sense, even less conventional than what had killed him.

  He thought about the server room fire. About three maintenance requests that had been marked low priority and ignored. He'd been right about the cooling array being miscalibrated. Right about the danger. But he'd also been overconfident in his understanding of the system's tolerances, and the gap between what he'd known and what he hadn't known had been the size of a server room and twelve thousand BTUs of unmanaged heat.

  What if he was making the same mistake here? Seeing inefficiency where there was actually necessary caution? Assuming that his outsider perspective gave him clarity when it actually just gave him a model that was missing crucial variables?

  Sylas rubbed his eyes, feeling the exhaustion settle back into his bones like sediment returning after a disturbance. The confidence he'd felt while drawing had not evaporated exactly—the logic was still sound, the diagram still looked right—but it had developed a layer of uncertainty that he couldn't dismiss.

  The conservative choice was obvious: follow the manual. Use the standard technique. Yes, it was inefficient. Yes, it was badly designed for someone in his condition. But it was tested and proven, used successfully by thousands of cultivators across generations. If he failed using the standard method, at least he'd failed doing what everyone else did. The failure would be clearly attributed to his condition rather than to a decision he'd made.

  But the standard technique had also killed Original-Sylas. Had burned out his channels so thoroughly that Sylas was now inhabiting a body held together by healing time and spite. Using the standard technique in his current condition wasn't conservative—it was slow suicide executed according to approved methodology.

  He thought it through as a decision matrix, the way he'd been trained to approach problems with multiple failure modes.

  Option one: Try the standard technique. Probable outcome given current channel condition—mana deviation, additional damage, accelerated deterioration. Fail the exam. Reclamation.

  Option two: Try his simplified technique. Possible outcome—works as designed, passes exam, survives. Possible outcome—unforeseen complication, additional damage, fails exam. Reclamation. Unknown probability distribution between the two.

  Option three: Don't attempt cultivation at all. Certain outcome—fails exam. Reclamation.

  When he framed it that way, the choice resolved itself. Option one and option three were both certain failures with different timelines. Option two was the only path that included success as a possibility, however uncertain. The uncertainty itself was preferable to certainty of the wrong outcome.

  But the doubt didn't fully leave. It settled into a background condition, an acknowledgment that he was working with incomplete information and choosing to act anyway because the alternative was worse.

  He looked at his simplified diagram again. Then he looked at the manual, re-read the warnings section more carefully than he had the first time, looking for the specific mechanism of deviation—not just what it felt like, but why it happened.

  And there, in a dense paragraph near the end of the warnings section, buried under layers of mystical framing, he found something useful.

  Mana deviation occurred when energy became 'unaligned' with the cultivator's body—when it moved too quickly, too suddenly, in volumes that exceeded the channel's current capacity to safely process. The symptoms progressed: first warmth, then pressure, then pain, then burning. If you felt warmth and stopped, you were fine. If you felt burning and continued, you were not.

  That was a safety protocol. That was a feedback system with clear escalating signals, the same way a properly designed mechanical system reported stress through vibration before it reported failure through fracture. The standard technique's extra circulation points weren't arbitrary—they were buffers, places where the mana slowed naturally, giving the cultivator's body time to adjust to each new volume before the next stage added more.

  Which meant his simplified technique wasn't wrong in its design. It was right. But it would move faster than the standard technique through fewer regulatory points, which meant the cultivator—him—would need to provide the regulation manually. Conscious control at each of his seven nodes. Deliberate pausing, deliberate checking, deliberate not-proceeding until the current volume had been safely integrated before drawing in more.

  It would be slower than the standard technique in real-time, despite having fewer steps. But it would be safer than the standard technique for someone with damaged channels, because the load at each point would be smaller and more controlled.

  The doubt receded to something manageable. Not gone—it was appropriate to maintain some doubt when operating at the edge of his knowledge—but workable.

  Sylas picked up the charcoal and began annotating his simplified diagram. Pause at each node. Check for warmth. Proceed only if clear. Hard stop at any sensation of pressure. These weren't additions to the technique—they were the technique's operating procedure, the manual regulation that compensated for the reduced number of automatic buffers.

  He added estimated timings. Marked the two nodes he considered highest risk given his specific channel damage. Drew small warning symbols at the junctions where the mana changed direction. It was, by the time he finished, a document that looked less like a mystical cultivation diagram and more like an industrial safety protocol.

  He looked at it with the critical eye of someone who had spent years writing process documentation. It was as complete as he could make it without actual testing. The testing would tell him things the documentation couldn't anticipate. That was always true. You documented what you knew and planned for what you could predict, and then you encountered reality and updated.

  Tomorrow, he would try it. Start with the smallest possible mana draw—barely a thread, enough to feel the pathway without stressing it—and work through the seven nodes at whatever pace his damaged channels could sustain. Map the actual behaviour against his predicted behaviour. Adjust.

  Tonight, he would rest. Let the body do whatever healing it was capable of on the resources available to it. Prepare himself mentally for the possibility that his model was wrong in ways he couldn't currently see, which was the most honest thing he could do.

  Sylas carefully folded both diagrams—the original mapping of the standard technique and his annotated simplified version—and tucked them under the mattress with Original-Sylas's small cloth bundle of photographs and memories. Two kinds of things worth protecting.

  He lay back, stared at the water-stained ceiling, and listened to the distant sounds of the Academy continuing its routines outside. Students in the courtyard. The bell marking another hour. The drip of water somewhere in the walls, patient and unremarked.

  Two weeks to the examination. Thirteen days after tonight. Time to find out whether his optimization was the work of someone who understood the system well enough to improve it, or the work of someone who understood just enough to get themselves killed more efficiently than the standard method allowed.

  He was betting his life on the former.

  In his previous life, he'd been wrong about critical things and paid the full price for it. In this one, he intended to be less wrong, more carefully, with better documentation of his reasoning so that if he failed, at least the failure would be thoroughly understood.

  That was the best he could offer. It would have to be enough.