It had been a week since the incident at the Red Lotus Pavilion, but luckily for Xiao Yun it seemed that Jue Li hadn’t been ticked off by his weird actions, or if she was, she hadn’t yet decided to act. Within the week Fatty Wang had come by a few times trying to convince Xiao Yun to go on another outing, but he had adamantly refused, instead choosing to remain within the Xiao clan’s residence. He didn’t blame Wang Jun for his frivolous actions however, both him and the original Xiao Yun were hotblooded youths and in a world that lacked the easily accessible distractions of the modern earth like video games, movies and porn it was understandable why young men without an aim or a goal in life might want to visit such ‘vulgar’ places as the Red Lotus Pavilion.
Unfortunately for Wang Jun, there was trouble brewing in their main watering hole and Xiao Yun was unsure if he should warn the pavilion’s manager, or the clan, but how would he even go about explaining the fact that he knew Jue Li was a demonic cultivator? He couldn’t just tell them he saw that symbol in a random book in the library, as original Xiao Yun wasn’t exactly known for his scholarly temperament. They would also ask to see the book and then what? He wasn’t exactly someone who could fabricate fake lore books and if such a book actually existed one of the elders of the clan would have already come across it. If he just went and told them that he saw a suspicious person, due to his repute he would be the one getting interrogated. Like how he was sure that she was a suspicious person? What proof did he have? If she turned around a blamed him for harassing her, he would become the criminal instead, thanks to his reputation as a wicked, alcohol and courtesan chasing degenerate.
Xiao Yun surmised that his best course of action right now was to gather information about his surroundings. His knowledge of the setting wasn’t that extensive to begin with, and Xiao Yun’s fragmented memories were mostly filled with debauchery.
“Clan Library it is!”
After a week of doing nothing but eating, sleeping and worrying about suddenly getting assassinated by a demonic cult member, one morning Xiao Yun finally decided to be proactive.
Stepping out of his modest courtyard, he began the long walk across the sprawling Xiao estate. The term 'estate' was a kindness, a relic of a more prosperous time. What he walked through now was a skeleton, a monument to decay. The cobblestone paths were fractured, with stubborn weeds pushing through the cracks. He passed a pavilion meant for quiet contemplation; its lacquered red pillars were peeling to reveal the pale, rotting wood beneath, and a corner of the tiled roof had collapsed. The central koi pond, once a shimmering jewel vibrant with life, was now a murky stagnant puddle. A single ghostly white carp drifted listlessly near the surface, its scales were dull and its movements sluggish. It seemed to be dying in tandem with the clan itself.
A pair of servants were sweeping the path ahead. Their movements were languid, devoid of energy. Their brooms were a little more than bundled twigs, scraping feebly against the stone, stirring up dust but doing little to clean it. They were dressed in drab, patched-up grey robes. The fabric was worn thin enough to be translucent in some places. As he approached, they paused their work. Their shoulders slumped and offered a bow that was more a weary slump of the spine than a gesture of respect.
"Young Master." one mumbled, his gaze fixed on the ground.
Xiao Yun nodded silently, his expression neutral. In his past life this was the corporate equivalent of employees who had mentally checked out, their morale shattered by mismanagement and impending bankruptcy. There was no fear in their eyes, no reverence. Only a profound bone-deep exhaustion. They didn't see him as a master, a figure of authority who could command their lives, but as just another piece of crumbling architecture. He was just another part of the decline.
He continued on, his slippers rustling through fallen ginkgo leaves that lay like golden coins scattered by a bankrupt god. Every corner he turned presented a new display of neglect. A medicinal garden was overrun with common weeds strangling the few remaining spiritual herbs. The wood of a moon gate was warped and splintered. The entire estate seemed to be sighing a long exhalation.
Soon, the muted sounds of grunts and the clang of metal reached him. He had arrived at the edge of the main training grounds. Here, the clan's martial strength was supposed to be forged. What Xiao Yun saw instead was a testament to its weakness.
About twenty guards were scattered across the dusty field. They weren't lazy; a grim determination was etched onto their faces. But determination could not sharpen a chipped blade or mend broken armor. A man practiced a sword form, his movements powerful but slightly off-balance. Xiao Yun, even with his layman's eye could see the sword itself was the problem, it was poorly weighted, the edge nicked and uneven. It was a hand-me-down from a better time, likely passed through a dozen hands before this one.
Another group engaged in sparring. Their strikes lacked the explosive force that was the hallmark of a trained cultivator. The Qi that flared around their fists and weapons was faint, flickering like a candle in a gale. It was the Qi of men who were underfed, whose cultivation resources were stretched thin, whose techniques were incomplete. They were trying to build a fortress with sand and spit.
Their instructor Head Guard Xu Ming, a grizzled older man with a long scar down his cheek, barked out corrections until his voice got hoarse. "Zhang Yi, your stance is too wide! You're leaking energy! Li Chun, put your dantian into it! Don't just swing your arms, use your Qi!"
But Xiao Yun could see the hollowness behind the commands. How could they focus on refining their Qi flow when their next meal was uncertain? How could they perfect their stances when the training manuals they used were likely incomplete, copies of copies that had lost their essence over generations? He felt a strange pang, not of pity but of analytical frustration. This was a systemic failure. Poor funding led to poor equipment, which led to poor training, which resulted in a weak defense force, making the clan even more vulnerable to external threats and less capable of acquiring new resources. It was a death spiral. Which was doubly bad for Xiao Yun, considering his recent encounter. None of these guards seemed capable or alert enough to fend off an assassin.
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He skirted the edge of the training grounds, keeping to the shadows of the row of pillars. No one paid him any mind. He was the "useless" young master, unable to cultivate beyond the third circle of the Qi Gathering stage, a footnote in the clan's register. His presence was neither inspiring nor intimidating; it was simply there.
The next courtyard was livelier. Here, the clan’s young disciples practiced martial arts with visible vigor. Boys and girls in crisp training robes moved in pairs, exchanging strikes and counters beneath the supervision of stern instructors. The air rang with the sharp crack of Qi enhanced palm strikes, the hiss of robes sliding through the air and the occasional grunt of impact.
These were the direct descendants of the Xiao clan, heirs to the family’s martial legacy, the ones who would later enter sects, make names for themselves or bolster the clan’s prestige. Their forms were crisp, clean and unlike the guards, clearly drilled into them from an early age with years of repetition.
Two boys sparred with wooden swords, their movements fluid and footwork precise. Across the yard, a pair of girls exchanged rapid palm strikes, their qi flaring faintly at each clash. The instructors barked corrections, and the disciples adjusted instantly. There was focus and determination here. The courtyard all but pulsed with youthful ambition.
Xiao Yun slowed his pace to watch, eyes tracking the interplay between fighters. There was a noticeable difference between the guards and these disciples: the guards were merely required to train, while the disciples wanted to win. Ambition was an altogether sharper blade than obligation.
Unfortunately, it didn’t take long before several of the disciples noticed him loitering on the edge of the yard.
“Look who it is.” one of the boys muttered just loud enough for others to hear.
“Ah, Young Master Yun.” said another, in a tone thick with mockery. “Careful everyone don’t let him catch your brilliance. He might get embarrassed that his cultivation hasn’t moved past the third circle of the qi gathering stage in… what is it now? Seven years?”
Laughter rippled through the group, subtle enough not to draw the instructor’s notice. Some of the kids were already in the fourth and fifth circle of the Qi gathering stage, despite being younger than Xiao Yun by three to five years, which was an embarrassment for the clan’s young master.
“I heard he spends more time tasting wine than circulating his qi.” a girl whispered, just barely covering her smirk with the back of her hand.
“Wine?” another boy snorted. “Couple months a guard found him passed out behind the kitchen after he went out with that equally useless fat friend of his.”
Xiao Yun heard every word.
Once upon a time, such jabs would have stung and perhaps even provoked the old Xiao Yun into some petty act of revenge. But the man they were talking about, the useless heir who had squandered his best cultivation years, was gone. In his place was someone who had endured abysmal world of deadlines, traffic jams and corporate team-building exercises. He involuntarily shuddered thinking about those. Petty insults from a group of robe-clad teens barely registered on his annoyance scale. He found them amusing instead. The scene was all too familiar from countless novels he read, he felt like he was watching a badly performed stage play.
He kept walking, his expression calm, almost serene. The mocking whispers followed him like the tail end of a bad joke, but he ignored them utterly. If anything, their disdain was useful. It meant that not a lot of people knew the old Xiao Yun all that well since he was ostracized, so the changes in his personality would be much less noticeable.
Within the training grounds, however, there was another youth who looked at the retreating figure of Xiao Yun with a peculiar expression. His hand on his wooden training sword tightening. His eyes were filled with a mix of envy, contempt and anger. If Xiao Yun had noticed him, he would have recognized the youth as Xiao Chen, the current most promising disciple amongst the younger generation. The other disciples looked at him with respect and admiration. Even with the Xiao clan’s dwindling resources, he had managed to make it all the way up to the sixth stage of the Qi Condensation Realm!
He was of the opinion that if the clan had devoted all the resources they had wasted on Xiao Yun to him instead, he might have already reached the eighth stage, or even the peak of Qi condensation realm, ready to break into the Foundation Blinding Realm and become a true cultivator. But alas, the elders were too blind and stuck to tradition, even continuing to give Xiao Yun an allowance, which he wasted on wine and women. He listened to the mockery of his fellow disciples, but didn’t say a word and kept looking after Xiao Yun quietly until he disappeared from view.
Clueless to his hostile rival, Xiao Yun eventually reached his destination. Set back from the main access road, nestled amongst a grove of ancient weeping willows was a three-story pagoda. A weathered plaque hung above the enormous, iron-bound doors. The calligraphy was elegant and masterful but faded by sun and rain. It read: Pavilion of Ancestral Wisdom.
He pushed one of the heavy doors. It groaned in protest with sound of long disuse. A cloud of dust flew out, carrying the scent of millennia of dried ink, decaying paper and bamboo scrolls.
Xiao Yun stepped inside. The air was cold and still. Faint light filtered through paper windows caked with grime, illuminating the dusty interior. The ground floor was a labyrinth of towering shelves, each one groaning under the weight of hundreds of books and scrolls. But it was organized chaos at best. Scrolls laid in haphazard piles on the floor, some had tumbled from their shelves, some of the books seemed to be falling apart and a fine layer of grey dust coated everything.
This wasn't the respected repository of power he had read about in the fantasy novels of his old world. There were no glowing artifacts, no wise old caretakers and no protective arrays humming with energy. There was only dust, decay and the crushing weight of neglect. Xiao Clan wasn't just poor in spirit and coin; they were poor in memory. They had forgotten their own legacy.
A strange feeling settled in Xiao Yun's chest. It was a mix of disappointment and recognition. In his life as Jack, he’d been sent to satellite offices that were underperforming once or twice, tasked with sifting through mismanaged data and disorganized records to find a path back to profitability. This was just a much older and dustier version of the same problem. This wasn't a tomb but merely an untapped archive.
He moved deeper into the library, his modern, methodical mind already cataloging and assessing. The decay that had disheartened him on his walk here now looked like an opportunity. No one came here. No one would question his presence. He was free to learn, to absorb and understand the intricate and deadly chessboard of this world without interruption.
His eyes scanned the faded labels on the ends of the shelves: Basic Cultivation Arts, Rudimentary Pill Formulas, Clan Lineages, Best Wines in the Nine Continents by Master Li Bai. He had every intention of gathering as much knowledge as possible, no matter how mundane or unrelated it might seem on the surface. This was a completely new world after all, who knew what piece of information could become useful when looked at from a different perspective, and with a more efficient manager looking over the clan’s dwindling resources, there was a tiny possibility of improving the clan’s situation.
