Clang!
Clang! Clang!
The sharp, metallic ringing vibrated straight through the stone floor, rattling the inside of Xuan Xi's skull.
He winced, a heavy layer of dizziness pressing behind his eyes. He reached up instinctively to rub his temples, his mind still half-anchored in his grand study. 'What is with this noise? I needed absolute silence to calculate the spatial folding parameters for that tier-4 spell...'
Then, his fingers touched his face.
The skin beneath his palms was rough, caked in grit, and entirely missing the faint, comforting warmth of active mana.
Xuan Xi opened his eyes.
There was no majestic, floating silver-glass architecture. No shelves of ancient leather-bound grimoires. Instead, a suffocating dampness filled his lungs—a thick, stagnant mixture of wet earth, iron dust, and stale sweat.
His brow furrowed. The emotional panic that would grip a normal man didn't hit him; centuries as an Archmage had trained his mind to treat anomalies not with fear, but with raw analysis.
"Where am I?"
The voice that left his lips was thin, strained, and far too high-pitched. He touched his throat. 'Not my vocal cords. Not my body.'
His left hand was gripping something cold and splintered. He looked down. It was a crude, heavily dented pickaxe. The tunnel around him was narrow, lit only by flickering, low-grade tallow torches stuck into the rough-hewn stone walls.
'A mining cavern?'
He pushed himself up against the stone wall. His knees buckled slightly, trembling from sheer muscular exhaustion and malnutrition. All around him in the dimly lit tunnel, other young men were swinging tools in a rhythmic, hollow symphony of desperate labor. They were hollow-eyed and skeletal. When Xuan Xi stood up, not a single one turned to look. In a place like this, energy spent looking at a neighbor was energy stolen from your own survival.
Instead of crying out or demanding answers from the broken souls around him, Xuan Xi leaned back into the shadows of a structural pillar. He closed his eyes, completely detaching his consciousness from the external noise to perform an internal diagnostic.
He sought the familiar, boundless sea of his Sage Soul—the vast core of mental magic that defined an Archmage.
It was gone.
In its place, nestled deep within his chest, was a volatile, faint spark of light. It looked like a microscopic fragment of his old soul, burning feebly in the dark.
'Ambient mana density… is gone,' his mind calibrated, reaching outward into the air. He tried to draw upon the fire element to form a standard Tier-1 fireball—a spell he could usually cast with a casual thought.
Nothing. The universe around him remained utterly dead to the laws of magic.
'Fascinating. Magic is fundamentally non-existent in this reality. The rules of physics here do not recognize the language of incantations.'
Yet, the space wasn't empty. There was a different energy vibrating in the dark. It was heavy, violent, and saturated with the raw essence of nature.
He focused his mind—the one tool that hadn't been stripped away—and pulled at that strange energy.
The glowing spark near his diaphragm flared.
"What's this energy?"
The moment he questioned it out loud, a violent, spiking pain shot through his cerebral cortex. Fragments of memories—crude, unrefined, and completely alien—burst into his conscious mind. It was the residual life data of the body's previous owner.
'The Great Qi Continent. The Iron Blade Sect. Cultivators. Qi.'
He instantly absorbed the mountain of new information, his organized mind making sense of it all. He parsed through the concepts instantly. This world didn't manipulate reality through mental formulas; they absorbed the raw energy of the cosmos into their bodies to achieve physical divinity.
Xuan Xi focused back on his internal structure, mapping what his old instincts wanted to call mana circuits. 'No. Meridians.'
At the center of it all lay the storage vessel: the Dantian. In the boy's memories, the Dantian was described as a sacred, perfect sphere that must be nurtured into a revolving core.
Xuan Xi looked at the spherical Dantian and felt a deep, academic disapproval.
'A sphere? How inefficient.'
In spellcraft, a Sage Soul core was never fixed. A Mage specializing in piercing lightning would forge their core into a razor-sharp pyramid. A Mage specializing in absolute defense would form a perfect cube to maximize structural stability and internal pressure. A sphere was lazy—it allowed energy to roll and dissipate too easily without friction.
'If this Qi responds to my mental will, then it must obey structural geometry.'
Xuan Xi focused his massive, ancient willpower onto the tiny, fluid Dantian. Using his mind like a high-precision chisel, he forced the circular energy walls to flatten, sharpen, and lock into place.
The shifting energy resisted, threatening to tear his lower abdomen apart. A normal young cultivator would have collapsed from the agony of a mutating Dantian, but Xuan Xi's mind was an absolute monolith. He ignored the physical pain, calculating the exact pressure tolerances of the flesh until the energy submitted.
Click.
The Dantian snapped into a perfect, crystalline cube.
Instantly, the sluggish Qi within his body stopped wandering. Locked within the structural walls of the cube, the energy compressed, its density multiplying by three times in a fraction of a second. His weak muscles tautened. The constant, gnawing fatigue in his bones receded, replaced by a cold, highly pressurized strength.
He hadn't raised his cultivation level, but the quality of his output had just broken the established laws of this world.
Xuan Xi opened his eyes, a cold, sharp glint replacing the dull gaze of the dead slave boy.
He looked down at the blunt pickaxe, then reached down and picked up a raw piece of jagged ore from the dirt. He channeled a tiny thread of his newly compressed Qi through his hand, applying a standard Decomposition Filter—a basic formula used by apprentices to separate gold from dirt, now mapped entirely onto the behavior of Qi.
The rock in his hand hissed.
Right before his eyes, the grey impurities crumbled away into fine ash, leaving behind a pebble of shimmering, high-grade, pure Qi-infused steel. The pure elemental energy from the refined metal flowed effortlessly through his hand, pulled directly into the hungry, solid faces of his cubic Dantian.
A faint, dangerous smile played on the young man's lips.
'They call this place a slave mine. To me, this is a library of free energy. I must try this cultivation.'