The silence in our office was absolute, save for the crackle of my bamboo pipe. He Lu sat on the edge of the client stool, staring at me as if I had just rewritten the laws of physics.
"I was nineteen years old," I rasped, the memory tasting like ash on my tongue. "The undisputed Patriarch of the Lo Clan. I had reached Foundation Establishment in record time. I was preparing to form my Core. The ambient Qi of the Whispering Wind Valley was mine to command."
I leaned forward, the shadows catching the deep, ancient wrinkles around my eyes.
"And then, one morning, I woke up, sat in the lotus position to circulate my Qi... and felt nothing. My crystalline lake of wind-attribute energy had dropped by an inch."
"A drop?" He Lu frowned. "Did you fight someone? Did you expend it?"
"I had been asleep, Junior Associate," I said grimly. "I panicked. I immediately initiated the Breeze-Catching Palm breathing technique. The Qi rushed into my Dantian, filling the lake back to the brim. I sighed in relief. But the moment I stopped actively meditating... the Qi began to drain away again. Slowly. Inexorably. Like sand through an hourglass."
I tapped the wooden barrel with a single, bony knuckle.
"I went to the finest medical elders in the Southern Province. I paid them with our family's meager savings. They examined my Dantian. They mapped my meridians. And then, they looked at me with profound, devastating pity."
I took a long, slow drag from my pipe.
"I did not possess a 'Flawless Wind Meridian,' He Lu. The Patriarch had misdiagnosed me. I possessed a Hollow Wind Meridian. Do you know the difference?"
He Lu shook his head slowly.
"A Flawless Meridian absorbs Qi with perfect efficiency and stores it," I explained, my voice hollow. "A Hollow Meridian absorbs Qi with perfect efficiency... and lets it pass right through. Because it is wind, He Lu. And wind cannot be caged. I was a human wind-tunnel. A leaky bucket. I could draw in the power of the Heavens, but I could not hold onto it for more than an hour."
"Oh, man," He Lu whispered, his modern sensibilities immediately grasping the horror of the situation. "You peaked. You literally peaked in high school, and then your stats started decaying."
"I was a dying star," I nodded. "But I could not tell my family. How could I? They were depending on me! Cousin Bo was already preparing to apply to an Inner Sect, bragging that his Patriarch was a Foundation Establishment genius. Auntie Lin had bought premium iron-hide feed on credit, assuming I would pay it off with bounty missions."
I closed my eyes, the shame of three centuries ago still burning fresh in my chest.
"I faked it. For a year, I faked it. I spent eighteen hours a day in a frantic, desperate state of meditation, just to keep my Dantian topped off so my aura wouldn't collapse. When I walked through the village, I painted my robes with cheap, glowing spirit-worms to make it look like my Qi was naturally overflowing."
"Boss, that's incredibly sad," He Lu winced.
"It was exhausting," I corrected him. "And eventually, mere meditation wasn't enough. The leak grew wider. I needed external help. I needed patches."
I set my pipe down, my missing-tooth smile twisting into a grimace of pure self-loathing.
"I turned to the alleys of Heavenly Peak City. Not the gleaming, white-jade pavilions where we sued Grandmaster Pill-Cauldron. I went to the slums. To the shadow-apothecaries who brewed elixirs in rusty cauldrons behind brothels. I started buying supplements to artificially inflate my Dantian."
He Lu's eyes widened. "Wait. Are you telling me you got addicted to magical meth?"
"I started with standard Minor Qi-Gathering Pills," I ignored his earthly terminology, though it was entirely accurate. "They worked for a month. Then my body built a tolerance. I moved on to Dragon-Blood Extract. It made my gums bleed and caused me to aggressively yell at passing carriages, but it held the Qi. Then came the Nine-Cloud Euphoria Paste. The Abyssal Root Powder."
I stood up, gripping my walking—my hands gripping the edge of the wine barrel.
"I was a mess, He Lu. I was eating twelve unverified, black-market pills a day just to maintain a fraction of my former glory. The side effects were catastrophic. I sweated in three different colors. I occasionally coughed up live sparrows. Once, I had a terrifying, three-day hallucination where I believed the Heavenly Dao was a giant, mocking chicken that judged my every move. I spent seventy-two hours apologizing to a rooster."
"I mean, considering the E-I-E-I-Dao case, a giant mocking chicken tracks," He Lu muttered.
"I liquidated the clan's assets," I confessed, my voice dropping to a harsh whisper. "I sold the ancestral swords. I sold the Patriarch's collection of antique teacups. I pawned the deed to the Whispering Wind Valley. I threw everything into the mouths of those shady alchemists, chasing the high of a full Dantian."
"And your family?"
"They found out, of course," I said, staring into the dark corner of the office. "You cannot hide it when the debt collectors of the Golden Coin Sect arrive to repossess your grandmother's rocking chair. There was an intervention."
I let out a dry, rattling laugh.
"Picture it, He Lu. A family of the most incompetent cultivators in the mortal realm, sitting in an empty, repossessed dirt courtyard, weeping over their fallen Golden Child. I was twitching, sweating neon-green Qi, and grinding my teeth to powder. I had failed them. The Lo Clan was officially ruined."
I slumped back down onto my stool, suddenly looking every bit of my three hundred years.
"They banished me. They packed up what little they had left and moved to the mortal kingdoms to become radish farmers. And I was left alone in the slums of Heavenly Peak City. A broken, leaking Foundation Establishment cultivator with nothing to his name but a crippling addiction to Abyssal Root Powder."
The silence in the room was heavy. The goat had stopped chewing and was looking at me with what almost appeared to be solemn respect.
"How did you survive?" He Lu asked softly. "How did you become... this?"
"I was sitting in an alleyway, contemplating the swiftest method to end my mortal coil," I said, a spark of the old cunning returning to my eyes. "When a shadow fell over me. It was my Uncle Jiu."
"I thought they all went to farm radishes?"
"Uncle Jiu was the black sheep of the Lo Clan," I grinned, tapping my temple. "He was the only one in the family who realized that cultivating orthodox martial arts with our cursed bloodline was suicide. So, he refused to cultivate. He remained a mortal his entire life."
"Then what did he do?"
"He became a bureaucrat," I said, my voice rising with a strange, perverse reverence. "He worked as a low-level clerk in the City Magistrate's archives. He wore cheap linen robes, he had a terrible comb-over, and he smelled faintly of old parchment and ink. He crouched down in the alleyway, looked at my twitching, pathetic form, and slapped me across the face with a rolled-up legal scroll."
I closed my eyes, remembering the exact words that changed my destiny.
"Uncle Jiu looked at me and said, 'The Heavens are not a meritocracy, Lo Yu. They do not care about your Flawless Meridian or your leaky Dantian. The Heavenly Dao is a bureaucracy. It is a system of rules, regulations, and karma.'"
I opened my eyes, locking my gaze onto He Lu's.
"He told me, 'A sword can cut a man, nephew. But a subpoena... a subpoena can cut a Sect.'"
He Lu gasped, the legal nerd inside him practically vibrating with excitement. "He taught you the Law."
"He dragged me out of that alleyway," I nodded. "He locked me in his basement. I went through three weeks of agonizing, terrifying withdrawal. I sweat out the Nine-Cloud Euphoria Paste. I fought the phantom chickens in my mind. And when my mind was finally clear... Uncle Jiu handed me a copy of the Heavenly Code, Volume One: Torts and Civil Disputes."
I slammed my hand down on the wine barrel, my eyes blazing with the fire of a born Litigator.
"I read it, He Lu. I read the entire volume in one night. Then I read Volume Two. I read the taxation codes of the major Sects. I read the property laws regarding spirit-veins. I realized that the Young Masters soaring through the sky on flying swords were nothing but heavily taxed, legally liable targets."
"You couldn't bend the Heavens with Qi," He Lu whispered in awe. "So you decided to bend them with paperwork."
"Exactly," I sneered. "I found my true Dao. I apprenticed under Uncle Jiu. I learned the art of the loophole. The majesty of the frivolous lawsuit. The sheer, devastating power of the Oopsie-Daisy precedent."
I leaned back, pulling my robes tight around my shoulders.
"I became a Litigation Master. I carved out a living in the red-light district, defending the weak, extorting the arrogant, and bleeding the wealthy dry. I made a fortune."
I paused, my voice dropping back to that ancient, heavy register.
"But despite my newfound wealth... my Dantian was still broken. I was still a leaky bucket. I was stuck at the absolute bottom of Foundation Establishment for two hundred years. The bottleneck was a physical chain around my soul. Until... fifty years ago."
He Lu leaned so far forward he nearly fell off the stool. "The Tribulation. The moment you broke the bottleneck."
"Yes," I breathed, my eyes glazing over with a profoundly degenerate, unholy light. "The day I discovered the true, terrifying secret of the Heavenly Dao. The day I realized that orthodox cultivation was a lie, and that true enlightenment... true, unfettered power... was hidden in the darkest, most unwashed corners of the mortal realm."
I looked at He Lu, my missing-tooth smile stretching into a terrifying crescent moon.
"Prepare yourself, Junior Associate. For I am about to tell you the tale of the Unwashed Gusset."