Yuan Lin was sitting on his living room floor, his legs crossed in the lotus position. Or at least, he was trying to. His legs were screaming in protest, and his right knee was sending sharp signals of pain to his brain.
"How do monks do this for hours?" he thought bitterly. "It's only been five minutes, and I feel like I'm going to need a hip replacement."
In front of him in the air, the first page of the `[Gray Chaos Scripture]` floated with its blue glow. The instructions were clear and infuriating in their simplicity: `[Stage One: Sensing Chaos. Sit in silence for one hour. Focus on a single thread of energy. Just... watch it.]`
"A whole hour?" he whispered to himself. "I can barely focus on a ninety-minute movie without checking my phone ten times. An hour of meditation? Impossible."
But he was determined. He sighed, closed his eyes, and activated his `[Perception]` skill. His mental vision immediately filled with that chaotic web of threads that had become his new world. He decided to choose a familiar target to start with. He focused on the Wi-Fi router in the corner of the room.
He saw the device's main power thread, a steady current of electrical energy, but what emerged from it was more interesting. They were pulsating data threads, glowing with a sky-blue and white color, carrying remnants of the websites he had browsed, the cat videos, and the spam emails he had ignored.
He tried to focus on just one of these data threads. But his mind was rebelling.
Did I close the refrigerator door properly?
I wonder what Su Ling told the manager about me today...
That shawarma was amazing, maybe I should go again tomorrow...
Every time his thoughts wandered, the thread he was watching would become blurry and lose focus. After twenty minutes of epic failure, he felt frustrated. "This isn't working. My mind is an internet browser with a hundred open tabs."
Then, an idea occurred to him. He had been approaching this all wrong. He wasn't a monk in a mountaintop temple. He was an IT support technician.
"Alright," he said to himself, changing his strategy. "Don't think of it as meditation. Think of it as... debugging. I'm isolating a single suspicious process in the task manager, and I'm monitoring its performance without interfering."
This strangely stupid, technical metaphor worked. It gave his logical mind a framework to operate within. He focused again on the Wi-Fi data thread, and this time, he imagined it as a line of code in an infinite program. And he locked his focus onto it.
One minute... two minutes... five minutes. He was doing it!
Now, for the next step from the scripture: `[Gently pull the thread toward you. Do not absorb it. Just establish a connection.]`
Using his `[Chaos Grip]`, he extended his mental "hand" and gently grasped the pulsating thread.
The moment he did, he felt a shock. Not an electric shock, but an information shock. A torrent of raw, chaotic data flowed directly into his consciousness.
`...50% off shoes... watch the video of the cat playing the piano... seven ways to lose belly fat...`
"What is this nonsense?!" he screamed in his mind. He had pulled on a thread of the internet, and was now being attacked by ads and spam on a spiritual level. This was the worst version of pop-up ads ever.
He felt his consciousness begin to scatter under this assault of trivial information. It was a real battle. A battle to maintain his sanity and identity in the face of this flood of digital chaos. He had to "filter" this data, to search for the pure essence of energy hidden beneath all this junk.
He gritted his teeth mentally and began the "filtering" process. He ignored the ads, pushed aside the videos, and deleted the clickbait headlines. He searched for that tiny, essential bit of energy that carried all this chaos.
And after what felt like an eternity of struggle, he found it.
It was a tiny mote, smaller than a pinhead, glowing with a pure blue light. This was the real energy. Very carefully, he guided that small mote through the energy pathways in his body, following the diagrams he had seen from the scripture, until it settled in his lower abdomen.
The moment it settled, he felt a faint warmth. A single spark in a cold, dark furnace. It wasn't immense power, but it was there. And it was his. He had made it himself.
A system notification appeared before him.
`[Successfully cultivated the first wisp of "Gray Chaos Energy." Current cultivation progress: 0.0001%.]`
`[Warning: Currently cultivated Qi energy is unstable. Do not attempt to use it in combat tasks.]`
Yuan Lin stared at the number. "Zero-point-zero-zero-zero-one percent?" He burst out laughing. "At this rate, I'll reach Wu Tian's level in about... three million years."
But his laughter faded as he felt something else. A new and strange sensation he had never felt before.
Hunger.
It wasn't a normal hunger in the stomach. It was a deeper hunger, a hunger in every cell of his body. His body had tasted that tiny mote of pure energy, and now it was screaming for more. It was like an old car engine that had been started with a drop of high-octane fuel, and now refused to go back to regular gasoline.
He looked around his apartment. The food in his fridge suddenly seemed dull and uninteresting. His body didn't want food. It wanted... energy.
His eyes fell on the power socket in the wall. Through his perception, he saw the strong, pure threads of energy flowing behind the wall. They were thick, bright, and incredibly tempting.
His mouth watered, and a primal, terrifying urge took hold of him. An urge to go over there, chew on the wires, and suck out that delicious energy.
He recoiled in horror from his own thoughts. "What the hell am I thinking?! I can't eat electricity!"
He had solved one problem and opened a new door to hell for himself. He had learned how to cultivate power, but now he faced the most important question: where was he going to get enough fuel to feed the monster that was beginning to grow inside him?