I couldn't sleep, so I cultivated.

  That sentence would've meant something very different in any of the three hundred novels I'd read. In those stories, "I cultivated" meant sitting in a cave absorbing the concentrated essence of heaven and earth while spiritual energy poured through perfectly mapped meridians in volumes that could level mountains.

  What I actually did was sit behind the house in the dirt, close my eyes, soften my attention, and spend forty minutes trying to hold onto the boundary between internal and external qi for more than ten consecutive breaths.

  My current record was fourteen.

  The process was the same each time. Relax the mind and let the warmth build behind the sternum until it radiated outward on its own. Find the membrane and then breathe.

  On breath eleven, the membrane stabilized. I could feel it clearly now, a threshold that separated what was mine from what belonged to the world. Internal qi was warm, slow, and rhythmic. External qi was cooler, denser, and it moved in currents that shifted with the wind and the river.

  On breath fourteen, my concentration flickered.

  I opened my eyes and stared at the stars for a while.

  Alright. What do I actually know?

  I pulled the bark sheet from my belt — the third one, dedicated entirely to cultivation notes — and scratched marks by starlight. It was full of observations that were tested and retested over three weeks of nightly sessions.

  Observation one: qi exists in two states. Internal, which lives in the body and pulses with the heartbeat. External, which saturates the environment. There's a boundary between them, and crossing that boundary is the fundamental mechanic of cultivation.

  Every xianxia novel described this differently. Dantians, meridians, spiritual roots, and cultivation bases...it was a hundred different frameworks for what amounted to the same basic phenomenon. The jargon changed depending on the author. The underlying reality didn't.

  Observation two: emotional states affect qi output.

  Observation three: the body resists qi movement because the nervous system treats unfamiliar internal sensation as a threat.

  That third observation was the important one. Because if the barrier to cultivation wasn't talent or destiny or spiritual roots but a basic physiological reflex, then the solution wasn't mystical. You had to train the same way you trained any physical skill, which was by forcing the body past its limits and gently expanding what the body recognized as normal.

  In every xianxia novel I'd ever read, cultivation knowledge was hoarded. Sects guarded their techniques behind layers of hierarchy and loyalty oaths. Masters parceled out fragments to disciples who had to earn each scrap through trials and service. The entire structure of cultivation society was built on artificial scarcity.

  And look where it gets them. Corrupt sects and power vacuums that collapse into wars. The hoarding of knowledge is a flaw that guarantees the system's failure.

  If cultivation was a skill, you didn't hide it, you standardized it. You taught it to everyone who could learn and developed a curriculum based on principles that have been tested.

  I flipped the bark to a clean side and started writing.

  By sunrise, I had created a set of principles scratched into bark.

  Principle one: Cultivation begins with awareness. Before you can move qi, you must learn to feel it.

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  Principle two: The body's resistance to qi is protective, do not force past it.

  Principle three: Emotional spikes produce uncontrolled qi release. This is dangerous. Train the mind before training the energy.

  Principle four: Qi responds to intent, not desire.

  Principle five: Any principle that works for one person should work for any person with the aptitude to sense qi.

  These principles were meant to be basic, testable, and reproducible framework for the earliest stage of cultivation, written in plain language instead of mystical poetry.

  This is either the foundation of something real or the dumbest thing a transmigrator has ever scratched onto tree bark. Probably both.

  I tucked the bark away and went to do my morning circuit.

  I started watching people differently after that.

  I didn't walk through the village staring at farmers trying to sense their spiritual potential or anything like that. I just started paying attention to things I'd been filtering out.

  The Wei family's second son, Wei Bolin, was sixteen years old and quiet boy that was built like a rope, all sinew and no bulk, yet he worked the fields with a stamina that didn't match his frame. I'd watched him haul water for three hours without stopping while men twice his size took breaks every thirty minutes.

  Old Zhao Ping's granddaughter, Zhao Lin. Twelve, sharp-eyed, constantly in places she wasn't supposed to be. I'd caught her on the hillside drying rack twice, both times claiming she was checking the millet. She wasn't. She was looking at the northern road the same way I did. Situational awareness like that in a child was either trauma or instinct, and in this world the line between the two was thin enough to be meaningless.

  The Chen widow's eldest, Chen Yi was nine years old, undersized, and he'd been sick twice since spring. But I'd seen him playing by the river with the other children last week, and when one of the Liu boys had startled him by jumping out from behind a rock, the air around Chen Yi had a ripple effect.

  Maybe nothing, it's too early to tell, and if I start testing children for qi sensitivity without any context or authority, I become the village lunatic inside of a week.

  I needed a framework for identification.

  The labor rotation had given me a reason to visit every family on the south side. The fence project had introduced me to the working-age men. But I hadn't found a way into the households with children and elderly — the demographics most likely to have untested potential and least likely to be involved in farming labor.

  Health checks, and Mother would know the most about that. If I proposed a village wellness initiative then I'd have a reason to sit with every household and observe.

  I finished my circuit at the river fork and crouched to wash my hands. The water was cold from the mountain runoff, and when I submerged my fingers I felt that the qi in the moving water was different from the qi in the still air. It was as if the water carried energy the same way it carried sediment.

  I held my hands in the river and paid attention. The external qi in the current pressed against my skin, denser than the ambient qi in the atmosphere, and where it met my own internal qi at the boundary of my hands, the membrane thinned.

  Running water enhances qi sensitivity. Or at least qi perception at the boundary layer.

  I pulled my hands out and stared at them. They were tingling and alive with a residual warmth that faded over time.

  Principle six: environmental factors affect cultivation. The novels called these "spiritual veins" and treated them as rare treasures.

  I was going to need more bark.

  Wang Su left the next morning with a full belly and three bolts of cloth lighter. The village women had traded preserved vegetables and a skin of rice wine for rough-spun cotton, and both sides seemed satisfied with the exchange. I caught him at the gate before he reached the road.

  "You pass through here on your circuit?" I asked.

  "Every six weeks, give or take. It depends on the roads." He adjusted his cart's harness. "Hekou isn't usually a stop since it's so small, but your brother's hospitality and your mother's pickled cabbage may have changed my assessment."

  "If I gave you a list of supplies we needed , such as iron tools, rope, or different seeds, could you source them for me?"

  Wang Su looked at me. That merchant's appraising glance again. "Depends on the list and the payment."

  "We'll have a surplus of grain after this harvest. The labor rotation increased our planted acreage. I can guarantee some volume."

  "Guarantee is a strong word for a boy your age."

  "Check the fields on your way out and count the seedlings, then tell me if you think I'm guessing."

  He studied me for a long moment. Then he laughed, short and dry. "You're certainly an interesting kid," Wang Su adjusted his hat. "Give me the list and I'll see what I can find."

  I handed him the bark strip I'd prepared the night before. The list was for tools, rope, ceramic containers for grain storage, and at the bottom, two items I'd added after my session at the river.

  Ink and paper.

  The cultivation principles were outgrowing tree bark, and If I was going to build a system that could be taught, I needed to write it down in a form that lasted longer than the next rainstorm.

  Wang Su glanced at the list, pocketed it, and pushed his cart onto the northern road without looking back.

  I climbed the hillside to the drying rack and watched Wang Su's cart shrink to a point on the northern road. When he disappeared around the bend, I pulled out the cultivation bark and added principle six.