The smoke from my bamboo pipe curled toward the rotting ceiling of our office, thick and heavy. I did not look at the Junior Associate. I looked through the smoke, into the abyss of three hundred years of memory.
"The Heavenly Dao is not a ladder, He Lu," I rasped, the ancient weight of my past settling into my bones. "Young masters in their gleaming pavilions will tell you that cultivation is a staircase to the Heavens. They say that if you gather enough Qi, if your willpower is strong enough, you can shatter the mortal coil and become a god."
I let out a harsh, bitter cough.
"They are arrogant children playing in a sandbox. The Dao is not a ladder. It is a meat grinder. And the Heavens turn the crank."
I took another slow drag from the pipe. The glowing embers illuminated the deep lines etched into my face. He Lu was sitting perfectly still on the client stool, his eyes wide, completely captivated by the sudden, terrifying shift in my aura.
"I was not born a Litigation Master. I was born a son of the Lo Clan, of the Whispering Wind Valley. We were a minor cultivation family, clinging to the edge of the Southern Province. We did not have grand pavilions, jade spirit-mines, or ancient texts. We had a dirt courtyard, a leaky roof, a flock of half-blind chickens, and a lineage cursed by our own profound, inescapable incompetence."
I paused, letting the silence stretch, listening to the goat gently chewing on a piece of paper in the corner.
"To say my family was 'bad' at cultivation is an insult to bad cultivators. We were a statistical anomaly of failure. The Heavens did not just ignore the Lo Clan; they actively found us hilarious. Our martial arts foundation was a technique called the Breeze-Catching Palm. It was meant to be elegant. A way to redirect force. But my uncles and cousins lacked the necessary spiritual circulation. When they practiced in the courtyard, they looked like a flock of drunken pigeons trying to fight a strong gust of wind."
"Did none of them reach Foundation Establishment?" He Lu whispered.
"Those who showed promise were immediately culled by the Heavens in a series of deeply embarrassing freak accidents," I said, my voice solemn and devoid of humor. "My eldest uncle, Lo Jian, achieved a minor breakthrough in the Dao of Fire. He celebrated by eating a bowl of extraordinarily spicy spirit-peppers to 'align his internal Yang.' He spontaneously combusted at the dinner table. We had to bury his ashes in a soup bowl."
He Lu winced, pressing a hand over his mouth.
"My cousin, Lo Ping, attempted to forge a bond with a majestic Spirit-Wasp," I continued, staring blankly ahead. "He miscalculated the binding array. The wasp did not become his familiar. It became agitated, picked him up by his robes, and carried him over the horizon. We never saw him again."
"By the Dao..."
"My Second Auntie Su believed she could tame beasts through the Dao of Seduction. She attempted to dual-cultivate with an Iron-Hide Spirit Bear. She ended up as its winter provisions. And Grand-Uncle Fen... he tried to forge a spiritual artifact to defend the village. He accidentally forged a homing wok. The moment he activated the array, it flew across the room and bludgeoned him to death."
I shook my head, the ghosts of the Whispering Wind Valley crowding the small, cabbage-scented office.
"We were a family of clowns performing for a cruel god. By the time I was born, the Lo Clan was reduced to a handful of traumatized mortals and one single, ancient pillar: Patriarch Lo. He was our Great-Grandfather. He was over eight hundred years old, stuck at the absolute peak of Core Formation, forever barred from reaching the Nascent Soul stage. But his lifespan had long since dried up. He was kept alive purely by a daily regimen of bitter medicinal paste, sheer spite, and the absolute refusal to let his bloodline die."
I smiled, a thin, melancholy curve of my lips.
"The Patriarch looked like a piece of beef jerky that had been left in the sun for a century. He was entirely bald, covered in liver spots, and he smelled like formaldehyde and old tea leaves. He communicated mostly by wheezing and hitting us with a polished bamboo stick. But his eyes... his eyes were sharp. His heartbeat wasn't a biological function; it was just a rhythmic 'screw you' to the Heavenly Dao."
I tapped out my pipe and slowly refilled it.
"When I was seven years old, he struck me with his stick and felt the resonance of my Dantian."
I looked down at my hands. They were calloused now, stained with ink, cheap wine, and the sweat of Amazonian boots. But once, they had glowed with the pure, unadulterated promise of a prodigy.
"I was a mutant, He Lu," I whispered. "A genetic lottery winner born into a family of peasants. I did not have a standard spiritual root. I had a Flawless Wind-Attribute Meridian. When I breathed, the ambient Qi of the valley rushed into my lungs like water into a sponge. I did not need to struggle. I did not need to meditate under waterfalls or eat spicy peppers. I simply understood the wind. I understood how it moved around the rocks, how it bent the grass."
I tapped my chest, right over my heart.
"The Dao is in all things, Junior Associate. The arrogant Sects look for it in ancient scrolls and glowing pills. I found it in the way the dust swirled in our dirt courtyard. And when the Patriarch realized what I was, my childhood ended."
I took a deep pull from my pipe, the cherry glowing bright red in the dim office.
"The training was brutal. He did not teach me the Breeze-Catching Palm. He forced me to sweep the dirt courtyard with a single broom bristle, relying entirely on my Qi to move the dust. He made me dodge falling cabbages while blindfolded. If I failed, the bamboo stick found my ribs. Under his wheezing, violent tutelage, I soared."
I let out a soft, nostalgic chuckle. "I was the golden child. I mastered our ancestral techniques in a week. I achieved Qi Condensation by my tenth winter. I used to dry my mother's laundry in three seconds by snapping my fingers. I once blew the roof off the neighbor's barn by sneezing too hard. My remaining family members looked at me with tears in their eyes, praying I would elevate them from the mud. I was their only hope."
"And then you reached Foundation Establishment?" He Lu asked, leaning forward, fully invested in the lore.
"It happened on my eighteenth birthday," I said softly, the memory still vivid in my mind. "I sat atop the highest hill in the valley. The sky turned a violent shade of bruised purple. The ambient Qi formed a visible vortex above my head, spiraling downward, funneling directly into my Dantian. It was agonizing. It felt as though my mortal flesh was being peeled away, replaced by something heavier, something eternal."
I closed my eyes, remembering the sheer, terrifying weight of the energy.
"With a sound like a thunderclap, my Foundation was set. My Dantian solidified into a perfect, crystalline lake of wind-attribute Qi. I opened my eyes, and the world was different. I could see the spiritual currents in the air. I could hear the heartbeat of the earth. I was a true Cultivator. I stood up, radiating the aura of a young god."
I opened my eyes and looked directly at He Lu. The grief in my gaze made him flinch.
"The Patriarch wept," I whispered. "He hobbled up the hill, his bamboo stick trembling in his hands. He looked at me, his eyes shining with a century of delayed pride. He struck me with his stick one last time, named me the official Heir of the Lo Clan... and promptly died of a massive, stress-induced heart attack on the spot."
He Lu's jaw dropped. "He... he died right there?"
"Instantly," I nodded. "He just folded in half like a cheap lawn chair. His life's work was complete. His spite was exhausted. He passed the burden to me, and he immediately abandoned this mortal realm."
I knocked the ashes from my pipe into a small dish on the wine barrel.
"I was eighteen years old. A newly minted Foundation Establishment genius. I carried his coffin down the hill by myself. As I buried him in the dirt courtyard, surrounded by my weeping, deeply incompetent relatives, I felt the crushing weight of the Heavens settle onto my shoulders."
I let out a long, raspy sigh, the sound mimicking the tragic, whispering winds of my youth.
"I thought I was ready. I thought my Flawless Meridian would carry me to the Core Formation stage and beyond. I thought I would raise my family to the ranks of the Inner Sects, that I would avenge Cousin Bo and Auntie Su."
My missing-tooth smile returned, twisting into a bitter, cynical sneer.
"But the Heavens, He Lu, are infinitely cruel. They do not build you up to let you touch the sky. They build you up so that the fall breaks every bone in your body. Because the very next year... my crystalline lake of Qi began to dry up. And I hit the Wall."