The compound was large enough for five people.

  It was not large enough for a school.

  They needed the adjacent property: a double-courtyard building on the eastern approach, owned by a widow named Fang Mei who lived in the northern district and had not visited her property in three years because the last time she'd tried, a cultivator named Zhao Peng had told her he was "managing" it and she should return later.

  He had been managing it for five years. He paid no rent. He considered this arrangement settled.

  Li Wei went to speak with him.

  ───

  Zhao Peng was Foundation Gate 8. He had the build of someone who had spent years practising techniques designed for someone stronger, and had compensated by becoming genuinely aggressive about challenges to his personal territory. He called the school "the equations club." He looked at Li Wei's practice sword and smiled.

  "Gate Nine," he said. "One step up. You think that's going to matter?"

  "I think the property belongs to someone else," Li Wei said. "And I think you've had five years to save enough to find your own training space, which means this argument is about habit rather than necessity."

  "I'll leave when I choose to leave."

  "That's the last reasonable option. After this one, the choices get less comfortable for you."

  Zhao Peng threw the first strike.

  It was a solid Foundation Gate 8 technique — a compressed Qi surge channelled through the right hand, aimed at Li Wei's sternum. Standard Iron Crown adjacent training method. The kind of strike that worked on Foundation Gate 6 opponents who hadn't studied anatomy.

  Li Wei moved left and let it pass.

  Then he hit Zhao Peng.

  Not with a technique. With the same nerve-confluence strike he'd used on the Iron Crown enforcers. Left hand, heel of the palm, three centimetres below the collarbone where the fifth and sixth meridian channels crossed. The point Chen Xi had drawn on an anatomy diagram and described, without particular emphasis, as the location where standard defensive reinforcement didn't reach because standard training didn't know it existed.

  Zhao Peng's right arm stopped cooperating.

  He swung with his left. Li Wei caught his wrist, rotated, and used the momentum of the swing to put him face-down on the courtyard stones. Held him there with one knee and a grip on the disrupted shoulder.

  "This goes two ways," Li Wei said. "You leave with whatever belongings you have, we say nothing to anyone, and Fang Mei starts receiving proper rent. Or you keep trying, in which case the next strike goes to the nerve cluster at your fourth meridian junction, which will have your left arm matching your right." He paused. "I'll also need to note, for the school's records, that we had an altercation with a trespassing cultivator. Which goes in the Exchange's security log. Which is public."

  Zhao Peng left.

  He took his equipment, his practice weapons, and his training mats. He left three years of accumulated food waste in the eastern courtyard, which Chen Xi declined to call a deliberate parting gesture, and Wu Zheng declined to leave for more than two hours before cleaning it.

  Fang Mei received her first month's rent the same day, delivered by Su Yiran with a written lease agreement and an apology for the delay.

  ───

  City hall registration was Su Yiran's operation.

  Chen Xi came along because the registrar's office required a founding member's signature in person, and also because he wanted to see how Su Yiran operated in bureaucratic conditions.

  The answer was: like a geologist working with sedimentary rock. Patient. Systematic. Aware that the layers could be moved if you understood exactly which ones were load-bearing.

  The clerk was a Foundation Gate 3 cultivator named Shao Bin, who had discovered early in his career that the processing of forms gave him the closest thing to power he was ever going to hold, and had accordingly become meticulous about the ways that forms could fail to be correctly processed.

  "Independent school registration requires ten separate certifications," he said, with the particular satisfaction of someone who has memorised a list and is about to deploy it. "Sect lineage documentation. Exchange arbitration clearance. Safety formation certification from an approved inspector. Meridian-load assessment from a licensed cultivator healer — "

  "Article Seventeen," Su Yiran said.

  Shao Bin paused.

  "Of the city administrative charter," she continued. "The clause establishing independent cultivation research organisations. It requires three documents: a practice site deed, a founding declaration, and a safety bond. All three filed." She placed them on the counter. "The sect lineage requirement applies to sect registration. We're not registering a sect. We're registering a research organisation."

  The clerk stared at the three documents. They were correctly formatted, correctly notarised, and correctly filed. He opened his procedural manual. Su Yiran had the relevant page number.

  He turned to page forty-seven.

  Article Seventeen was there.

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  He reached for a different manual — supplementary regulatory guidance, updated six months ago.

  Su Yiran had the clause from that one too. She had printed it on a separate sheet and clipped it behind the founding declaration.

  Shao Bin stared at the clipped sheet with the expression of a man whose fortress has just been walked through without the drawbridge being lowered.

  "This will need supervisor review," he said.

  "Of course. We'll wait." Su Yiran sat. "Take your time."

  The supervisor review took forty minutes. The supervisor — a Core Formation Early elder who had not read Article Seventeen in fifteen years and had forgotten it existed — confirmed, under Su Yiran's gentle, uninterruptible guidance through the relevant statutory language, that the filing was correct.

  The School of First Principles was registered by midafternoon.

  Shao Bin filed the registration with the precise care of a man who wants the paperwork to be impeccable in case anyone ever audits why he let this through.

  ───

  Little Abacus handled recruitment from his recovery bed.

  He had the Exchange's transaction records, three months of passive cultivation signature logs, and what Chen Xi had started calling "the instinct" — a pattern-recognition capability that found high-potential cultivators the way a sieve finds gold, by keeping everything that didn't wash through.

  Twelve interviews. Eight acceptances. Seven who actually showed up on the first day.

  The interview he enjoyed most — and the one Chen Xi heard about in detail for weeks afterward — was Bai Junhao. Third son of a northern district merchant family, Foundation Gate 7, nominal cultivation credentials. He arrived ten minutes late. He remarked that the school's compound was "smaller than expected" and its registration class was "unusual." He implied that his father's commercial relationships with the Exchange constituted a form of institutional endorsement.

  "What's your current Qi efficiency?" Little Abacus asked.

  Bai Junhao looked at the question the way most people look at a door they hadn't noticed before.

  "My cultivation level is Gate Seven."

  "I know. Efficiency is a different number. It measures what percentage of your Qi circulation produces usable output, versus what's lost to heat, vibration, and inefficient pathway routing."

  "I haven't measured that specifically."

  "Estimate."

  The estimate Bai Junhao provided was thirty percent. He said it with the confidence of a man who has never been asked to justify a number before.

  Little Abacus measured it.

  He produced his calibrated stone from his coat pocket, had Bai Junhao demonstrate two basic circulation cycles, and read the number.

  Eleven percent.

  Below the Torrent average for Foundation Gate 3.

  "Your gate level is seven," Little Abacus said, showing him the stone. "Your efficiency is eleven. For reference, that means your effective output is lower than a Gate Four cultivator at twenty-five percent. Which is what most of our enrolled students hit after three weeks."

  Bai Junhao stared at the number.

  "My father — "

  "Your father's purchasing relationships affect what the Exchange puts on your public file," Little Abacus said pleasantly. "They don't affect how your meridians move Qi. This school teaches efficiency. If you'd like to improve this number, you're welcome to apply again after you've tried the free introductory technique session we're posting on the Exchange board next week."

  He made a small notation in his notebook.

  "That's the door."

  The girl who came in after Bai Junhao was named Mei Qian. She was sixteen, a refugee from the war, no sect, no family connections in Clearwater Crossing. She hesitated in the doorway long enough that Little Abacus looked up and waited.

  "You're allowed to come in," he said. "The chair is for sitting on."

  She sat. She was already producing her measuring stone before he asked.

  "Gate Two," she said. "I know it's low. My efficiency is — " She checked the stone. "Thirty-one percent."

  Little Abacus looked at the number for a moment.

  Thirty-one percent at Foundation Gate 2 was the highest efficiency in that tier that he'd ever recorded. Higher than Chen Xi's estimates suggested was achievable at that stage.

  "How did you get to thirty-one?" he asked.

  "I practised the circulation pathways until they stopped feeling like the pathways and started feeling like mine." She shrugged, as if this were obvious. "The standard routes never quite fit. So I adjusted them."

  Little Abacus made a longer notation in his notebook.

  "When can you start?"

  ───

  The first lesson was a disaster in the specific way that all important things are disasters initially.

  Seven students sat in what had been Zhao Peng's eastern courtyard and was now a classroom, the chalk diagrams on the stone wall still wet from Chen Xi's morning preparation. They were a strange group: ages ranging from sixteen to thirty-four, cultivation gates from 2 to 7, backgrounds from refugee to minor merchant family to failed sect applicant.

  What they had in common: their efficiency numbers were all above what their gate level predicted. Little Abacus had found the ones the system was undervaluing.

  Chen Xi stood at the front.

  "Energy cannot be created or destroyed," he said. "Only transformed. This is the first — "

  Blank stares. Six pairs of them. Mei Qian was taking notes.

  "When you circulate Qi through your meridians, the total energy entering your system must equal the total energy leaving it, plus whatever is stored."

  Five blank stares. Mei Qian still writing. One student, a Foundation Gate 5 woman named Tang Lu, was frowning — not at Chen Xi, at her own hands, as if she were trying to apply the statement immediately and the application wasn't working.

  "Imagine a bucket," he tried. "You pour water in. You pour water out. What remains in the bucket is what you poured in minus what you poured out. That's conservation."

  Tang Lu's frown shifted.

  "So cultivation is... accounting?"

  "Cultivation is accounting. With explosions."

  Something changed in the room. Not dramatic — a settling, the specific shift of people who have been waiting to understand something and have just been given the key.

  "But efficiency matters more than gate level," Tang Lu continued, still working through it. "Because if I'm at Gate Five and I'm wasting seventy percent of my Qi to heat and friction — "

  "Then your net output is thirty percent of Gate Five capacity," Chen Xi said. "Which is lower than a Gate Two cultivator at sixty percent efficiency. In raw destructive output, in technique execution speed, in sustainability over a long engagement."

  A student in the back row: "That's not how the Exchange assesses us."

  "The Exchange measures potential. We teach output. Those are different things." Chen Xi picked up his chalk. "Let me show you how different."

  He drew two columns on the stone. Left column: six cultivators arranged by gate level, highest to lowest. Right column: the same six cultivators arranged by efficiency. The rankings were almost inverse.

  Mei Qian, Gate 2, was at the top of the right column.

  A former Iron Crown applicant, Gate 7, was at the bottom.

  The former Iron Crown applicant looked at the columns for a long time.

  "Can that actually be fixed?" he asked. The defensiveness was gone from his voice. Something genuinely uncertain had replaced it.

  "That's the first thing we're going to find out," Chen Xi said. "Together. Measure everything. Report everything. Assume nothing is fixed that can be improved." He set down the chalk. "Questions?"

  Tang Lu had seventeen. She rattled them off in sequence. Mei Qian had six, more precise, aimed at the underlying principles. The former Iron Crown applicant had one: "How long does it take?"

  "It takes as long as it takes. Which is faster if you measure carefully and slower if you assume the answer before you start."

  Li Wei, from the doorway, where he'd been standing since the start: "One month."

  Everyone looked at him.

  "One month before you see measurable results. I read the methodology last night." He shrugged. "Fourteen times."

  The first laugh. Genuine, surprised, spreading through seven people who had not been expecting to laugh on the first day of anything.

  The School of First Principles began.