The floorboard in the eastern pavilion hallway possessed a slight, imperceptible warp. It sat exactly half an inch higher than the surrounding ironwood. For three days, Xiao Mei had successfully avoided it.
On the morning of the fourth day, carrying a heavy bamboo tray loaded with hot soy milk and pickled vegetables, she forgot.
Her cloth shoe caught the lip of the wood. Physics took over.
Xiao Mei pitched forward. The tray launched from her hands. Scalding milk arced through the air, heading directly toward the face of the mortal husband, who was sitting cross-legged on the tatami mat, deeply engrossed in his blue-covered book.
She squeezed her eyes shut. She braced for the crash, the burns, and the inevitable disciplinary flogging that would follow for disfiguring the Sect Master's useless spouse.
The crash never came.
Wei Tian didn't look up. He didn't shift his posture. He simply reached out his left hand.
Two fingers pinched the edge of the falling wooden tray, arresting its momentum instantly. Simultaneously, his right thumb flicked out, catching Xiao Mei by the wrist just a fraction of a second before her chin shattered against the low reading table.
It lasted a millisecond.
The kinetic energy of her fall needed somewhere to go. Wei Tian, functioning on the muscle memory of a being who dictated the structural order of galaxies, did not consciously choose to heal her. He simply grounded the chaotic energy through his thumb to stop her from bleeding on his mat.
The physical force passed through his skin, entered her wrist, and ran straight up her primary qi meridian.
It collided with a massive, calcified blockage near her collarbone—a genetic defect that had kept her permanently stalled at Sage Layer 4 since she was twelve. The energy didn't shatter the blockage. Shattering caused internal bleeding. Wei Tian's innate, unavoidable authority simply reorganized the blockage. The dead qi realigned into perfectly flowing, optimal pathways.
He let go of her wrist.
Xiao Mei collapsed in a tangled heap of silver-trimmed robes. She gasped, grabbing her chest.
The bamboo tray sat perfectly flat on the low table. The soy milk had not spilled a single drop. A faint curl of steam rose from the ceramic cups.
Wei Tian turned a page in his book. The paper made a dry, rasping sound.
"You're blocking the light," he said.
Xiao Mei scrambled backward, her heels slipping on the mat. She bowed so fast her forehead cracked audibly against the wood. "I deserve death! I was clumsy. I..." She stopped.
Her shoulder felt hot. Not painful. Just... open. A strange rushing sensation echoed behind her collarbone, like a dam breaking and flooding a dry riverbed.
She looked up. Wei Tian was already chewing on a piece of pickled radish, his eyes scanning the next paragraph of whatever local dialect nonsense he was always reading.
"The milk is good today," Wei Tian noted. He didn't look at her.
Xiao Mei fled. She ran all the way to the outer courtyards, hiding behind the laundry sheds, waiting for the burning sensation in her chest to stop.
It didn't stop.
Three days later, Xiao Mei woke up screaming.
Her blood felt like it was carbonated. A terrifying, overwhelming pressure ballooned in her spiritual sea. The ambient qi in the junior dormitory rushed toward her cot, snapping the wooden frame and blowing the paper screens out of the windows.
Three outer disciples drew their swords, shouting in the dark.
Xiao Mei hovered two inches above her broken bed, glowing with the unmistakable, dense blue aura of a Sage Layer 6 cultivator.
She dropped to the floor, coughing violently. She stared at her hands. Layer 6. She had jumped two full layers in her sleep. That was impossible. That was the kind of thing that happened to legendary geniuses eating thousand-year-old spirit herbs, not a kitchen-sweeping spy who ate leftover tofu.
"Don't kill me," Xiao Mei sobbed to the empty room. "I didn't steal any pills, I swear."
The Medical Hall smelled of crushed lotus root and severe skepticism.
Elder Hua, a woman whose face looked like it had been carved from dried ginger, pressed two glowing fingers against Xiao Mei's wrist. Hua had been probing the girl's meridians for forty-five minutes. Six other medical disciples stood around the examination table holding clipboards.
"Tell me again," Elder Hua rasped.
Xiao Mei was shivering in her thin shift. "I went to sleep. I woke up. The bed broke."
"People do not jump two layers in their sleep, child." Hua pressed harder on the pulse point. "Who gave you the Marrow Cleansing Pill? Was it a Core disciple? Are you harboring illicit cultivation resources?"
"No one! I sweep the Eastern Pavilion. I serve the mortal." Xiao Mei was openly crying now. "Check my blood. There's no pill."
Hua already had. That was the problem.
The elder pulled her hand back, wiping her fingers on a cloth. She looked at the senior medical disciple.
"Results?" Hua demanded.
The disciple swallowed hard. "Zero pill residue in the bloodstream. Zero signs of forbidden demonic arts. No residual aura from an external master forcibly transferring qi." The disciple looked at his notes, clearly hating what he had to say next. "Her primary meridian... it's flawless. The congenital blockage is gone. The pathway looks like it was carved by a diamond chisel. It's the most structurally perfect Sage-tier foundation I have ever seen."
Elder Hua stared at Xiao Mei. The girl looked like a frightened rabbit.
"Draft the formal report for the Council," Hua said, her voice entirely flat.
"What do I write as the cause, Elder?"
Hua looked at the ceiling. "Spontaneous breakthrough of unknown cause. Let Shen Mu choke on it."
Shen Mu did, in fact, choke on it.
He sat in the high tower of the Elder Council, staring at the parchment on his heavy oak desk. The red wax seal of the Medical Hall mocked him from the bottom right corner.
He read the words again. Spontaneous breakthrough. Unknown cause.
"This is an insult," Shen Mu whispered.
The messenger disciple kneeling on the rug didn't dare look up.
"I assign a useless, defective girl to spy on a mortal," Shen Mu said, his voice dropping into a raspy, dangerous cadence. "A girl whose foundation was certified broken by three separate instructors. Four days after she begins serving him, she breaks through two layers. Spontaneously."
Shen Mu stood up. He grabbed the heavy jade inkstone from his desk and hurled it at the stone wall. It shattered, splattering black ink across an ancient tapestry.
"Do they think I am senile?!" Shen Mu roared. "Bai Qian is mocking me! The Sect Master is funneling top-tier resources to my own spy, artificially inflating the girl's cultivation to prove she can bypass my authority!"
He paced the length of the room. His breathing grew shallow.
"She wants to play games. She wants to show me that even the trash in her husband's pavilion is superior to the disciples I train."
Suddenly, Shen Mu stopped. He gripped the edge of his desk.
A sharp, agonizing stutter hit his chest. His primary qi pathway misfired. The ambient energy in the room spiked wildly, fluctuating between freezing cold and searing heat. He choked, coughing violently into his fist.
It was a stress-induced instability episode. A hallmark of a cultivator letting rage override their spiritual foundation.
He forced his breathing to slow, drawing the erratic qi back into his core. It took three agonizing minutes. When he pulled his hand away from his mouth, his knuckles were trembling.
"Send the girl to the Disciplinary Hall," Shen Mu rasped, his voice strained. "Order a second investigation. Use the soul-searching array. I want every second of her memory from the last four days pulled apart. I will find the pills Bai Qian fed her."
The messenger scrambled out the door.
Shen Mu leaned heavily against the window frame, looking down at the sprawling sect. His chest ached. "You will not win this board, little girl," he muttered to the glass.
Bai Qian did not play games with pills.
She sat in the center of her private sanctum, the only light coming from a single, steady flame in a bronze lamp. The room was perfectly silent.
On the low table in front of her sat a copy of the exact same medical report Shen Mu had just read.
She didn't throw anything. She didn't raise her voice. She simply read the text. Once. Twice.
Spontaneous breakthrough. Structural perfection. Zero external residue.
Bai Qian picked up her writing brush. She dipped the tip into the ink.
She reached into the drawer of her desk and pulled out a fresh, unmarked manila folder. She set it beside the report.
She had married Wei Tian because he was a zero-variable. A mortal with no background, no family, no qi, and no ambition. He was supposed to be a piece of furniture that effectively neutralized the Elder Council's demand for a political marriage. A shield made of paper.
She thought about the way he had looked at her on the first day. The absolute, impossible stillness in his eyes.
She thought about his answer in the grand hall. I am entirely useless. Therefore, I am perfectly safe.
Bai Qian brought the brush down on the tab of the blank folder.
She wrote two characters.
Wei Tian.
It was the first file.
She set the brush down. She didn't know what the variable was yet. She didn't know how a mortal could casually exist in the center of a spontaneous, impossible breakthrough. But she was a Sect Master who survived by seeing the board before the pieces moved.
She closed the folder. She slid it into the top drawer of her desk.
"Let us see what else you accidentally do, husband," she murmured to the empty room.