An Attempt on the Edge of the Boundary

Lin Shao thought his ears were playing tricks on him. He let out a bewildered, “Huh?”

“According to my calculations, if Hou Xingyue used this method, it should have taken him three months to open the Twelve Primary Meridians, and another four months to clear the Eight Extraordinary Meridians. That is a total of seven months to completely open every spiritual path in his body,” Mu Li said, her voice dropping into a low, ominous register. “But reality has completely shattered my predictions. Clearing all twelve in a single night is fundamentally irrational. There is an absolute anomaly at play here.”

Lin Shao tried to look on the bright side. “Maybe Hou Xingyue is just a freak of nature when it comes to this specific method? I mean, if the world can produce a Li Zhuwen who was born with every single meridian naturally open, it’s statistically possible to produce a Hou Xingyue who possesses a flawless, perfect affinity with ‘Knowledge Pursues Man,’ right?”

“Theoretically, one could argue that, but…” Mu Li rubbed her temples, a rare sign of distress. “What I find most incomprehensible is his Post-Fate. I examined it again, and it remains completely unaltered from before. Logically, after surviving such a massive, destiny-altering turning point, his future trajectory should have shifted, even if only by a fraction.”

“Well, that obviously just means your original reading already factored today’s events into his destiny. As expected of my Li-bao, you see through absolutely everything.” Lin Shao grinned, leaning in close to her side, only to be promptly and dismissively pushed away by a slender hand.

“I hope that is the case. Regardless, we must prepare for the worst.” Mu Li tied a fresh, clean strip of white gauze tightly over her eyes, sat down squarely in the center of the desk, and began grinding her ink to practice her daily calligraphy.

After breakfast, Hou Xingyue found himself with nothing to do after thoroughly scrubbing the shop. At Mu Li’s suggestion, he began meditating on the ground floor so she could personally supervise his condition.

“Man, I’m jealous,” Lin Shao grumbled, leaning lazily against the desk while cracking melon seeds. “When I was cultivating, you never stood guard over me like a hawk.”

Mu Li replied completely flatly, “I did it for the sake of efficiency. If I were standing right beside you staring, would your mind actually be calm enough to cultivate?”

Before Lin Shao could come up with a witty retort, she asked, “By the way, how is your own progress coming along?”

Lin Shao proudly held up five fingers. “I smashed through my fifth meridian during the first half of last night. Then I tried to enter a deep meditative trance during the second half, but I accidentally passed out and fell asleep.”

“Your speed is acceptable,” Mu Li said with a slight nod. “The time required to clear the Twelve Primary Meridians decreases sequentially. At your current trajectory, you should be able to open the remaining seven within a week. The Eight Extraordinary Meridians, however, are vastly sturdier and grow exponentially harder to breach the further you go. I estimate it will take you three to four months.”

“All in all, reaching Level 1 within four months makes you a certified genius.”

Lin Shao let out a small, dramatic sigh. “Compared to you, I’m still a whole month slower. If I’m a genius, what does that make you? A freak of nature?”

Mu Li merely huffed and fell silent. Lin Shao turned his gaze back to the meditating Hou Xingyue. He could genuinely feel the surrounding Heaven and Earth Origin Qi rushing toward the boy at a terrifying, unnatural velocity. Intrigued, he leaned over and whispered directly into Mu Li’s ear, “Hey, how long do you think it’ll take him to break through the very first path of the Eight Extraordinary Meridians?”

The warmth of his sudden breath made Mu Li’s ear twitch with irritation. She placed a single, stiff finger against his cheek and firmly shoved his face away. “Seven days. Each of the Extraordinary Meridians is several times more difficult to breach than all Twelve Primary Meridians combined. No matter how absurdly rule-breaking Hou Xingyue’s affinity is, he still—”

Before she could finish her sentence, Mu Li’s mouth froze slightly open. She pointed a trembling finger toward Hou Xingyue in pure shock.

Lin Shao followed her gaze. The ambient Heaven and Earth Origin Qi had suddenly whipped into a violent, spiraling vortex, howling like a mini-gale with Hou Xingyue acting as the literal eye of the storm.

The vortex manifested in a flash and vanished just as quickly, lasting no more than three or four seconds before completely dissipating into the room. Sitting dead center, Hou Xingyue slowly opened his eyes, a thoroughly bewildered, almost constipated expression plastering his face.

“Um… the Eight Extraordinary Meridians… I think I just accidentally broke through one…”

By evening, after teaching Hou Xingyue a few more purely theoretical romance strategies, Lin Shao watched the boy leave. He locked up the doors and windows, headed straight up to the second floor, and walked to the furthest door down the hallway.

Ever since Hou Xingyue shattered the first Extraordinary Meridian that morning, Mu Li had locked herself inside her room, refusing to come out no matter how many times Lin Shao called. To ease Hou Xingyue’s anxiety, Lin Shao had been forced to fabricate a lie about her having a severe stomach ache.

“Li-bao, come out and have a drink of water. Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Lin Shao called out, leaning against the wooden door. “So you miscalculated a timeline, big deal! Everyone slips up occasionally. Besides, we’re just wandering rogue cultivators; we don’t need to uphold such a devastatingly high standard of professional integrity. Being this much of a workaholic is just going to run you into the ground.”

The room remained deathly quiet. Not a single sound echoed from within.

“Hey Li-bao, let me tell you a joke. Once upon a time, a polar bear bought a pair of sunglasses. It put them on, thought about it for a minute, and said, ‘Man, I suddenly have a massive craving for bamboo.’ Hahaha! Get it? Isn’t that hilarious?”

“Right, you don’t know what a polar bear is, or what sunglasses are, let alone why a bear wearing them would want to eat bamboo. But the moral of the story is that the world is full of strange, unpredictable things. Even the greatest fortune tellers are bound to miscalculate—”

“Shut up!”

A harsh, razor-sharp scolding suddenly tore through the door. It was saturated with a volatile mixture of raw anger and intense, claustrophobic anxiety. It was the most volatile emotional outburst Lin Shao had ever heard from her. Lin Shao’s mouth stayed open, a retort dying on his lips, before he finally deflated and closed his mouth.

“Alright… I’m heading back to my room then. There’s cold water in the teapot downstairs, and I left some pastries on the desk—assuming the fat parrot hasn’t eaten them all.” Seeing the heavy silence settle over the door once more, Lin Shao shrugged. “I’m going to bed. Get some sleep.”

Lying down on his bed, Lin Shao’s mind was a chaotic storm of conflicting emotions. Today was the very first time Mu Li had ever genuinely snapped at him. In the past, no matter how shameless or outrageous his jokes were, she had never shown that kind of genuine fury.

So you miscalculated a breakthrough timeline, is it really worth getting this stressed over? He sighed heavily, staring at the ceiling. Since when did she develop this insane level of professional pride? Dedicating her entire mental health to a client’s fortune? The kicker is that the guy didn’t even pay us a single copper coin!

He flipped himself out of bed and aggressively punched the empty air twice. “It’s all Hou Xingyue’s fault. Making Mu Li this upset. Just wait until tomorrow, I’m going to discipline him so hard… wait, I don’t think I can actually beat him in a fight right now…”

Collapsing back onto the mattress, Lin Shao buried his face beneath his pillow, his thoughts spiraling out of control.

That “Knowledge Pursues Man” technique was just too broken. Making Hou Xingyue level up like a literal cheat code. No, it was Hou Xingyue himself who was terrifying, breaking Mu Li’s predictions twice in a row.

Have I ever broken one of her predictions? Lin Shao thought bitterly. Not once. Ever since I sold that poetry at the Liuli Pavilion, every single action I’ve taken has fallen squarely within the palm of her hand… Does she find me incredibly boring because of that? Probably. Everyone needs a little surprise in their life… a shock like the one Hou Xingyue gave her.

Mu Li had personally supervised Hou Xingyue’s cultivation. She was currently losing her mind and locking herself away entirely because of him. Lin Shao logically knew that Mu Li didn’t harbor a single romantic shred of interest in the boy, but still… it felt like he was throwing a petty tantrum out of pure jealousy.

Me? A proud transmigrator, a natural-born prodigy with four innate spirit meridians, jealous of a guy who literally started with one?

What a joke!

But… damn it.

Letting out a heavy, suffocating sigh, Lin Shao felt an unbearable tightness in his chest. It made him feel restless, anxious, and deeply frustrated—like a trapped animal wanting to scream or tear something apart.

Cultivate. Just sit down and cultivate. I’ll use raw, unyielding hard work to surpass that cheater Hou Xingyue and win back Mu Li’s full attention!

Crossing his legs, Lin Shao focused his mind and attempted to channel the Heaven and Earth Origin Qi. But his heart refused to find peace. Images kept flashing violently across his mind: Hou Xingyue meditating under Mu Li’s watchful eye; Hou Xingyue shattering the Extraordinary Meridian and shocking her; Mu Li locking her door in a fit of silent rage because of him.

If I could achieve something like that… if I could completely shatter her predictions and exceed her expectations over and over, would she look at me with that much intensity too?

Subconsciously, Lin Shao’s mind wandered back to that night. He remembered the specific cultivation chant Hou Xingyue had been muttering in the backyard when he went to teach him romance tips. The verses were incredibly rhythmic, dangerously catchy, and so heavily memorized that his mind practically began chanting them on autopilot.

Just how twisted and powerful was this “Knowledge Pursues Man” method to let someone open twelve meridians in a night and breach the Extraordinary path in a morning?

Maybe… just a tiny taste? But I explicitly promised Mu Li I would never touch this method.

Right, I’ll just ‘sample’ it. I won’t fully commit to the cultivation. I’ll just use the chant to get a feel for the mechanism. Maybe it’ll give me a hint on how to speed up my own manual absorption of Origin Qi.

Concealing his guilt with rationalizations, he chanted the bizarre verses, adjusted his posture, and slipped into a meditative state. He focused his absolute attention on his skin, promising himself that the absolute millisecond he felt any “insects” trying to burrow into his pores, he would shut the operation down instantly.

As the low, rhythmic syllables echoed silently within his mind, the air around his room began to shimmer with faint, floating specs of light. These specs were composed of countless microscopic, luminous dots. Gathering together like glowing paramecia, the light-creatures writhed and surged toward Lin Shao’s body in an eager, ravenous rush.

Yet, the exact fraction of a millimeter before they could breach his skin, the glowing organisms froze mid-air as if struck by a primordial terror. They trembled violently, and then, like a volley of silent fireworks, they violently detonated, entirely dissolving into nothingness.

Suddenly, a wisp of mottled, iridescent mist—carrying a hue that seemed to contain every single color in existence—began to seep out from Lin Shao’s very pores, pooling directly above his head. The volume of this iridescent mist was pitifully small, aggregating to less than the size of a pinky finger.

Yet, despite its minuscule size, the moment this multicolored mist manifested, it radiated an aura akin to a suddenly igniting sun. In its majestic, absolute presence, the surrounding specs of rogue knowledge looked like mere stars in the night sky—instantly blinded, rendered completely invisible, and thoroughly suppressed by the blinding solar light.

Deep within his meditation, Lin Shao remained completely oblivious to the cosmic anomaly occurring in his room. He simply continued to silently recite the mnemonic chant, bracing himself for the stinging, itchy sensation of crawling insects.

Triggered by the rhythmic cadence of the chant, the iridescent mist above his head began to slowly shift and split. It divided into two perfectly equal halves: one half transmuted into the most pristine, unadulterated form of pure knowledge, while the other half crystallized into the most flawless, high-density form of pure Heaven and Earth Origin Qi.

The two forces merged seamlessly, instigating a chemical reaction that birthed radiant, pure-white specs of light.

Compared to the chaotic, writhing specs that had manifested earlier, these newly formed white lights were crystalline, holy, and completely devoid of a single trace of distortion or madness.

Though the iridescent mist had been smaller than a finger, the pure-white light generated by just half of its volume instantly multiplied, completely saturating every square inch of the bedroom. They formed a grand, slow-moving galaxy, orbiting gently around Lin Shao.

Then, at the exact, microscopic pinpoint of a second where a specific stanza of the chant concluded, the entire celestial sea of white light violently imploded inward, rushing straight into his body all at once.

The sudden influx inflated his internal pathways like a balloon pumped with raw, high-pressure gas.

Lin Shao’s face instantly contorted into a mask of pure agony. But the holy light didn’t care about his pain—it refused to halt, relentlessly hammering its way deeper into his flesh.

In Lin Shao’s drowning consciousness, there were no insects. There was no stinging itch.

What had descended upon him was a cataclysmic, all-consuming alpine avalanche—an unstoppable, roaring force of nature that completely buried him alive.