The small courtyard adjoining Matriarch Feng's offices was not a home, but an advanced operations center. The air, thick with the scent of sandalwood and administrative power, was a clear indicator of his new status: Kenji was no longer a simple servant, but a precision instrument in the hands of the most powerful woman in the clan's infrastructure.
He did not dedicate his night in the new headquarters to rest, but to what his CEO-mind considered the most critical task: planning. The light from a high-quality oil lamp—another perk of his promotion—cast his sharp shadow on the wall as his hands moved with hypnotic efficiency over two enormous, unfurled scrolls.
On the left scroll, under the title Project Cerberus: Vulnerability Analysis of the Adversary's Asset Network, Kenji was mapping out the complex web of Zian's corruption. It was an organizational chart of the clan's underworld, connecting names, resources, and trade routes with the precision of a surgeon.
On the right scroll, however, something far more personal and, in a way, more dangerous was being born. The title, written in a calligraphy so functional it looked printed, read: Project Phoenix 2.0: Forced Realm Advancement Protocol.
Xiao Yue found him the next morning. Kenji was standing by the table, an untouched cup of tea beside him, contemplating the second scroll with the intensity of a general reviewing his battle plans.
"Don't you even think about it!" she exclaimed, her voice cutting through the studious silence.
Kenji turned, a single eyebrow arched in a silent question.
Xiao Yue marched toward him, hands on her hips, her expression a terrifying mix of genuine concern and martial severity.
"I see you. The tea is cold, and those papers are freshly written. You haven't slept!" she snapped, poking a finger into his chest. "Do I have to remind you that the last time you ignored your own biological hardware, you ended up unconscious and nearly scared me to death? Your brain is a critical asset to our joint venture. I will not allow a second systemic failure due to user negligence. Understood, CEO?"
Kenji looked at her for a moment, his brain processing the directive. The logic was, as always, impeccable.
"Your concern for the integrity of management assets is… logically sound," he conceded, in the closest tone to an apology he was capable of producing. "The risk was assessed and accepted. The planning was necessary." He pointed to the scroll on the table. "Come closer. I need you to review and approve the terms of your new Service Level Agreement."
Xiao Yue sighed, but the tension in her shoulders eased. She approached and laid her eyes on the document. Her blood ran cold. It wasn't a training plan; it was a torture manual of impeccable logic. She saw diagrams of breathing cycles that left no room for rest, lists of foul-tasting herbs, and schedules that filled every minute of her day with some form of methodical exertion. And in the center, highlighted, were the three phases of the new protocol: Metabolic Qi Cycling, Adaptive Stress Response Training, and Controlled Constitutional Overload.
"Kenji…" she murmured, swallowing hard. The smell of fresh ink and the plan's cold logic sent a shiver down her spine. "This looks less like an advancement plan and more like an efficient self-immolation manual."
"A semantic distinction," he replied. "Conventional wisdom dictates that a realm advancement is a slow process. Conventional wisdom is inefficient. We will not wait for the door to open; we are going to kick it down. This protocol is designed to saturate your system, to force your hardware to execute a fundamental upgrade." He held the scroll out to her. "Your body is a vessel. Until now, we have filled it drop by drop. Starting today, we are turning the faucet on full. The vessel will overflow, yes. It will crack. But when it repairs itself, its capacity will be greater. The key is not to avoid the pain, Xiao Yue. It is to manage it as a resource. The pain will be the indicator that we are pushing the system's limits."
She took the scroll. The texture of the paper was smooth, but the words written on it felt as sharp as blades. She remembered her promise, her determination to become strong enough to protect him. The fear was still there, a cold knot in her stomach, but her faith in him—in his strange, brilliant madness—was stronger.
"Alright, CEO," she said, her voice firmer than she felt. "Let the system update begin."
And so it began.
The following days melted into a brutal, monotonous cycle of methodical exhaustion. The Metabolic Qi Cycling was a form of low-level, yet ceaseless, torture. From dawn until dusk, Xiao Yue had to keep her Qi circulating through her meridians without rest. Kenji had taught her a series of twelve stances, one for each hour, designed to maximize ambient energy absorption while she performed mundane tasks. She peeled vegetables for the kitchen while holding the "Thirsty Crane" stance, a one-legged balance that made her muscles burn. She read Liling's reports on the clan's movements while holding the "Coiled Serpent" stance, which stretched her back to its limit.
The sensation was like having an army of fire ants constantly marching through her veins. There was no peace. No inner silence. Her body was a furnace that never cooled, a machine that never shut down. The smell of her own sweat, infused with the Yang herbs of her new diet, became her constant perfume.
The Adaptive Stress Response Training was the personal hell that awaited her each afternoon. Kenji pushed her to the edge, forcing her to channel her Qi against a reinforced training shield until she felt her power core, newly formed and still unstable, was about to shatter. The sound of her strikes against the shield became the soundtrack to her suffering: a dull thump, thump, thump that marked the rhythm of her pain. When her muscles trembled violently, her vision filled with black spots, and she felt that a single ounce more of pressure would break her, Kenji's voice would cut through the air.
"System has reached 98% stress capacity. Activating cooldown protocol. Now."
And she, without thinking, would stumble to the garden pond and submerge herself in the icy water. The shock was agony. The transition from the searing heat of her meridians to the glacial cold of the water was like a thousand icy needles stabbing her in every pore. Her breath would catch, her heart would race. But beneath the pain, she felt her Qi, convulsing, contract and compress, becoming a little denser, a little more solid.
"The pain is an indicator that the system is reconfiguring," Kenji would repeat to her with the calmness of a technician reading a manual. "The spiritual fibers are realigning. Trust the process."
And she trusted. She trusted blindly, because despite the exhaustion and the pain, she felt the change. Her Qi was no longer a placid lake; it was a raging sea contained in an ever-shrinking vessel. The pressure inside her was immense, constant.
On the fifth day of the new regimen, the first fissure occurred.
She was in the middle of stress training, holding the most agonizing stance of all, "The Pillar of Heaven Holds the Mountain." The heat radiating from her body was no longer just an internal sensation, but a physical reality. The air around her shimmered visibly, like the heat haze over asphalt on a scorching summer day. The smell of crackling energy was so intense it nearly choked out the fragrance of the garden's flowers.
A dry leaf, carried on the breeze, landed on her outstretched forearm.
Fwoosh.
There was no flame, only an incandescent whisper. The leaf didn't burn: it turned to black ash in a fraction of a second, disintegrating into the air without even a wisp of smoke.
Xiao Yue choked back a scream and broke her stance. She looked at her arm, the skin pink but intact, and then at the ashes scattering in the wind. Cold, sharp panic shot through her.
"Kenji… what was that?"
Kenji approached, his face expressionless, but his eyes shone with an intense, analytical light. He knelt and touched the ash that had fallen to the ground, rubbing it between his fingers.
"Interesting," he murmured. "A thermal energy leakage not predicted in the model."
He stood up and looked at her, not with concern, but with the excitement of a scientist who had just witnessed a fascinating, anomalous result.
"The protocol is working faster than projected," he declared. "Your Qi is purifying and densifying at an accelerated rate. Your hardware is struggling to contain the quality of the energy you're producing. The excess energy is dissipating as residual heat. It's a sign that we are about to hit a logistical bottleneck."
"A bottleneck?" she repeated, her voice trembling. "Kenji, I nearly set myself on fire! My body is protesting!"
"Of course it's protesting," he said, with a logic that she found both incredibly cruel and comforting at the same time. "You are trying to run next-gen software on a decade-old computer. Overheating is a predictable symptom. This is not a failure, Xiao Yue. It is the clearest proof that we are winning."
The incident with the leaf was only the beginning. In the following days, the symptoms of Constitutional Qi Overflow, as Kenji christened it, intensified. Sometimes, she felt a heat so intense under her skin that she had to bite her lip to keep from screaming. The pond water no longer felt icy, but merely cool, and when she emerged from it, a cloud of steam would envelop her as if she were a demon rising from the depths.
But with the pain and the heat came a brutal, overwhelming strength. One day during training, frustrated by her inability to control a surge of heat, she struck the practice shield with her bare fist. The heavy, iron-reinforced shield didn't just dent: it split in half with a thundering crack, sending splinters of wood across the courtyard.
Xiao Yue stared at her fist, unharmed, and then at the remains of the shield. The power she had unleashed both terrified and intoxicated her. Her strength had taken a quantum leap, though it was still unstable and dangerous.
The climax arrived on the tenth day. The pain was nearly unbearable. Every breath was like inhaling embers, and every movement sent waves of searing heat through her meridians. She was on the verge of collapse, on the verge of begging Kenji to stop it all.
She crumpled to the ground after a particularly brutal stress session, her body trembling uncontrollably. The smell of hot metal and ionized air around her was so strong it made her dizzy. She closed her eyes, her mind a storm of pain and exhaustion.
And then, she felt something new.
It wasn't the searing heat, but a vibration, deep in the core of her being, in her dantian. She felt her Qi, that raging, furious sea, begin to swirl, to spin in on itself, drawn toward a single point by an irresistible gravitational force.
The pressure became unbearable. A choked cry escaped her lips.
CRACK.
The sound wasn't external, but internal. A seismic snap deep within her soul. The pressure vanished in an instant, replaced by a feeling of… fullness.
She opened her eyes. The world looked different: sharper, the colors more vivid, the air sweeter. The pain was gone. The uncontrollable heat had vanished, replaced by a stable, powerful warmth that emanated from her dantian like a miniature sun.
She stood up, not with effort, but with an ease that took her breath away. She felt light, strong. She looked at her hands. Her skin, previously flushed from the heat, had returned to its normal tone, but it seemed to have a subtle, almost translucent glow.
"Kenji…" she whispered, her voice full of awe. "What…?"
Kenji, who had observed the entire process with a concentration bordering on inhuman, approached her. There was no satisfaction on his face, only the calm of an engineer who has watched his machine successfully complete a complex cycle.
"Congratulations, Xiao Yue," he said, his voice as flat as ever. "You have surpassed the most optimistic projections and have skipped the intermediate stage entirely. Your Qi core has reached the advanced phase of the Formation Stage. Your system's efficiency has undergone an exponential increase."
A bubbling laugh, full of relief and a pure, wild joy, escaped Xiao Yue's lips. She had done it. She had endured a methodical hell, had trusted the craziest plan in the universe, and the result was glorious. All the pain, all the exhaustion, had been worth it.
In that moment, all the protocols, manuals, and efficiency analyses went up in smoke. Driven by a wave of emotion that not even the strictest regimen could contain, she lunged forward. She closed the distance in an instant and hugged Kenji with the force of a hurricane, lifting him slightly off the ground in a gesture of pure gratitude and unbridled euphoria.
She buried her face in his shoulder, expecting him to stiffen, to push her away, to tell her that physical displays of affection were not covered in the service level agreement. She expected the stoic reaction of the CEO, the consultant, the logic machine who had rebuilt her.
But the machine failed.
There was a split second of absolute stillness, as if Kenji's operating system had frozen while processing completely new and unexpected data. Then, slowly, almost clumsily, one of his hands rose and gave her a few gentle pats on the back.
"You have exceeded all my expectations," he said, and his voice, though still contained, held a nuance that was not calculation. It was… approval. Perhaps even pride. "Good work, partner."
That broke her. The word "partner," the clumsy pat, the unexpected warmth of his acknowledgment… it was too much. A sob of pure happiness escaped her, and she hugged him even tighter. She felt the vibration of his body, the solidity of his presence, sharing her victory with the only person in the universe who had made it possible.
"Xiao Yue…" Kenji's voice sounded slightly strained, pulling her from her emotional trance. "Emergency protocol… you're burning me."
She blinked, confused. "What?"
She pulled away from him abruptly and then she saw it. Kenji's cheek, where her own face had brushed against his, was red. Not flushed: red like a sunburn, a comical and perfectly defined mark. She touched her own skin. It was burning, radiating an intense but controlled heat.
"Oh, good heavens!" she exclaimed, equal parts horrified and fascinated. "I left a mark on you!"
Kenji touched his cheek with his fingertips, his expression a rare mix of analysis and bewilderment.
"Post-advancement thermal leakage," he diagnosed in a low voice, as if his own cheek were an experiment. "Undocumented side effect. We will have to add a new appendix to the manual."
Xiao Yue looked at him, at her other-worldly consultant with a red splotch on his face, and she couldn't help it. She burst out laughing. A free, loud, and powerful laugh that echoed throughout the pavilion, announcing not only the birth of a new expert, but of an alliance that was destined to burn the old world to the ground.