The Golden Hall of the Thunder Sound Holy Land was a place where sound went to die. The walls, inscribed with silence runes, absorbed every breath, every heartbeat, leaving only the rhythmic, subsonic chanting of one hundred and eight Arhats sitting in a perfect circle.
In the center of the circle sat Abbot Kong. He was not meditating today. He was staring into the Mirror of Samsara, an ancient artifact said to be a shard of the heavens themselves. The mirror surface swirled like oil on water, reflecting not the room, but the soul frequency of a man four thousand miles away.
"He mocks the Dao," Kong whispered, his voice carrying the weight of a mountain. "He poisons the air with his 'radio' lies. He breaks the faith of the mortals."
Around him, the Arhats intensified their chanting. They were pooling their psychic energy, a collective consciousness strong enough to rewrite reality within a localized area. They weren't sending a physical attack. They were sending a dream.
"We shall pull his mind into the Infinite Purgatory," Kong announced. "There, his machines will not work. His 'physics' will not apply. He will be a naked soul before the judgment of the Buddhas. He will beg for forgiveness, and when he wakes—if he wakes—he will be a drooling husk."
Kong placed his hand on the mirror. The surface rippled.
"Find him," Kong commanded. "Drag the Demon of Iron into the illusion."
Four thousand miles away, in the deepest level of the Beiluo Command Bunker, Jiang Chen dropped his coffee mug.
It didn't shatter. It fell in slow motion, turning end over end, the dark liquid spilling out as a ribbon of obsidian silk that hung suspended in the air.
Jiang Chen blinked. He looked at the spill. He pushed it with his finger. It felt like solid glass.
"Chen Wei?" Jiang Chen called out.
There was no answer. The hum of the servers was gone. The rhythmic thrum of the Earth Shaker Golem deep below was gone. The air smelled not of ozone and recycled oxygen, but of incense and lotus flowers.
Jiang Chen stood up. As he did, the walls of the bunker melted. The steel plates dripped away like wax, revealing a sky that was too blue, filled with clouds that looped in impossible, non-Euclidean shapes.
He was no longer underground. He was standing on a floating island made of white jade, suspended in an infinite golden void.
"System," Jiang Chen said calmly. "Diagnostic."
[System Error. External Reality Matrix Mismatch.][Logic Core: Destabilized.][Conclusion: User consciousness has been hijacked. Hostile Simulation detected.]
"A dream attack," Jiang Chen muttered, tapping his foot on the jade floor. It rang like a bell. "The Holy Land. They decided to skip the missile defense system and go straight for the driver."
A thunderclap shook the golden void. Above him, the clouds parted, and a colossal figure descended. It was Abbot Kong, but he was a thousand feet tall, his skin radiating blinding light, wreathed in halos of fire and lightning.
"JIANG CHEN," the giant voice boomed, vibrating Jiang Chen's very teeth. "YOU STAND BEFORE THE THRONE OF JUDGMENT. WHERE IS YOUR IRON NOW? WHERE IS YOUR SCIENCE?"
Jiang Chen put his hands in his pockets. He looked up at the giant avatar.
"Rendering scale is off," Jiang Chen critiqued. "The pixel density on your halo is terrible."
"INSOLENCE!" The giant Abbot raised a hand. "Here, thought is reality. And your thoughts are weak. You believe in a cold, dead universe. I shall show you the suffering of the Wheel."
The Abbot flicked a finger.
Gravity reversed. Jiang Chen fell upward.
The jade island shattered into a million razor-sharp shards, swirling around him like a hurricane. Each shard reflected a different nightmare—his death, the fall of his city, the burning of the world.
"Do you feel it?" Kong's voice sneered from everywhere at once. "In this realm, I am the constant. I am the axiom. You cannot shoot me. You cannot burn me. You can only submit."
Jiang Chen floated in the chaos, watching the shards cut at his coat. He felt pain—real, searing pain. But he didn't scream. He closed his eyes.
"System," Jiang Chen whispered. "If this is a simulation run by their minds... it has a processor limit."
[Affirmative. Psychic constructs require mental bandwidth.]
"And they are cultivators," Jiang Chen smiled. "They believe in vague concepts. They believe in the 'infinite'. But they don't know what infinity actually is."
He opened his eyes. They were glowing with the cold blue light of the Interface.
"System. Deploy Logic Virus. Execute Paradox Loop."
[Targeting Environmental Parameters. Injecting...]
Jiang Chen looked at the giant Abbot.
"You say thought is reality?" Jiang Chen shouted. "Fine. Let's think about Russell's Paradox."
He pointed a finger at the sky.
"The Barber shaves all those, and only those, who do not shave themselves. Does the Barber shave himself?"
The giant Abbot froze. "What babble is—"
"If he shaves himself," Jiang Chen continued, his voice amplifying as the System hijacked the dream's audio code, "then he belongs to the group who shave themselves, so he must not shave himself. But if he does not shave himself, he belongs to the group who do not shave themselves, so he must shave himself."
The golden void flickered. The clouds stopped moving.
"A simple loop," Jiang Chen stepped forward on the empty air. "Let's try Geometry. System, render a Klein Bottle."
In front of Jiang Chen, a shape materialized. It was a bottle with no inside and no outside, a surface that looped back into itself in four dimensions.
"Look at it, Abbot!" Jiang Chen commanded. "Trace the surface! Where does it end?"
The Abbot looked. His mind, trained to understand the 3D world and spiritual planes, tried to process the 4D object.
"It... it curves... into..." The giant avatar flickered. His face contorted in confusion. "It does not... fit..."
"ERROR," Jiang Chen shouted. "CALCULATING."
He wasn't fighting with Qi. He was fighting with Information Theory. He was flooding the "server" of the monks' collective mind with unresolvable data.
"Let's try Math. Calculate Pi to the last digit!"
[Injecting: 3.1415926535...]
Numbers began to rain from the sky. Millions of them. They coated the jade island. They filled the golden void. They buried the Abbot.
"Stop!" The Abbot screamed, shrinking in size. "This is not the Dao! This is chaos!"
"It is precision!" Jiang Chen walked through the storm of numbers. The dream world was cracking. The golden sky was tearing, revealing static and binary code underneath. "Your mind is a primitive operating system, Abbot. And I just caused a Stack Overflow."
"System. Final blow. Schrödinger's Divinity."
Jiang Chen stood before the shrinking Abbot.
"Are you a God, or are you a Battery? Until I observe you, you are both. But I am observing you now."
He reached out and touched the Abbot's forehead.
"And you are empty."
In the Golden Hall of the Thunder Sound Holy Land, the chanting stopped abruptly.
CRACK.
The Mirror of Samsara shattered.
"ARGHHH!"
One hundred and eight Arhats simultaneously grabbed their heads and screamed. Blood poured from their noses and ears. Their brains, forced to process infinite loops and 4D geometry, had snapped.
Abbot Kong was thrown backward against the wall, his golden skin turning grey. He vomited a mouthful of blood, clutching his skull.
"The numbers..." Kong gibbered, his eyes rolling wildly. "They don't end... the bottle has no inside... the barber... the barber..."
"Abbot!" A disciple rushed in, terrified. "What happened? Did you crush his soul?"
"He..." Kong looked up, his eyes filled with absolute, primal terror. "He is not a soul. He is... a void of logic. He broke the dream. He broke the math."
The psychic backlash cascaded through the temple. The ancient formations flickered and died. The "Faith" they had harvested for centuries evaporated as the collective consciousness suffered a critical failure.
Jiang Chen woke up.
He gasped, lurching forward in his chair. The coffee mug lay shattered on the floor, the liquid spreading in a normal, physics-compliant puddle.
The lights of the servers were blinking green. The hum of the ventilation was music to his ears.
"Administrator?" Chen Wei ran into the room, pistol drawn. "You were unresponsive for three minutes! Your vitals spiked! We were about to inject the adrenaline!"
Jiang Chen held up a hand. He was sweating, his head pounding with a migration headache, but he was alive.
"Stand down," Jiang Chen rasped. "I just had a debate with the Holy Land."
"A debate, Sir?"
"Yes." Jiang Chen wiped the sweat from his eyes. "They tried to install malware in my brain. I crashed their server."
He stood up, his legs shaky but holding.
"Check the radio frequencies. Is the Holy Land broadcasting?"
The comms officer checked the scanner. "Negative, Sir. Total silence on all spiritual bands. It's like they vanished."
Jiang Chen smiled. It was a tired, vicious smile.
"They didn't vanish. They are rebooting. And while they are down..."
He walked to the Gene-Seed containment unit in the corner of the room. The vial of glowing green and blue liquid—the fusion of Ghost King essence and Mutated Rabbit DNA—sat waiting.
"While they are down," Jiang Chen picked up the injector gun, "I'm going to upgrade the hardware."
He rolled up his sleeve.
"Old Wu, lock the door. If I turn into a monster, shoot me. If I don't..."
He pressed the injector to his neck.
"Then prepare the tanks. We are going to the Holy Mountain to accept their surrender."
HISSS.
The fluid entered his bloodstream.
Jiang Chen's eyes rolled back. The radiation didn't kill him. It bonded. The Rad-Qi flooded his meridians, burning away the mortal fragility and replacing it with something new. Something toxic. Something eternal.
[System Alert: Biological Evolution Initiated.][New Cultivation Path: Atomic Core Stage 1.]
The lights in the bunker flickered and exploded as Jiang Chen's body began to emit a soft, neon-green glow.