Cold wind whistled through every gap in Classroom 404. Whoever built this shed had done a terrible job.
Every four seconds, mountain air slipped beneath rotting floorboards, rattled a loose cedar shingle, and hissed past the iron door latch.
Lu Zhen sat upright on a straw pallet smelling faintly of mildew and ancient despair. He rubbed his temples and sighed.
In his last life, he had been Frank. A lead builder, building code checker, and veteran video game modder whose main fuel was black coffee in an idling diesel truck.
Now, he was Lu Zhen: a twenty-four-year-old junior teacher at Hongwu Lower Academy in the borderlands of the Tianxuan Principality.
More importantly, he was a total supply disaster.
Frank stared at the glowing blue-and-amber box hovering three inches in front of his nose. It shook his head.
“The padding is off on the top header,” Frank muttered. “Who builds an office alert box with unequal level margins? This looks like an early-access build thrown together at two in the morning.”
Before he could search for a settings menu, the front door rattled wildly.
BAM! BAM! BAM!
The iron knocker struck the timber like an untuned high-pressure ram.
“Lu Zhen! Open this door right away by order of the Academic Disciplinary Hall!” a harsh voice barked from outside.
Frank stood up. His new body felt lean, but fully empty of ergonomic conditioning. His shoulders were slumped. His hamstrings were tight. His lower back gave off the ache of someone who spent eight hours a day slouching over scrolls.
He stepped across the unsealed pine floor. The third plank had a tiny bending under load.
“Subfloor isn’t supported,” Frank grunted. “No floor beam hangers. Just toe-nailed scrap timber. Criminal.”
He unlatched the rusty slide-bolt. The hinges shrieked with dry, ungreased friction.
Standing outside were three men in stiff azure scholar robes stitched with the silver scales of the Punishment Guard.
The man in the center was short, thick-necked, and flushed with fury. He grabbed a brass-bound parchment sealed with red lacquer. Flanking him were two junior exam guards holding heavy iron-banded discipline staves.
“Lu Zhen,” the fat judge sneered. “We were beginning to think you had hung yourself from the rafters to avoid facing the committee.”
Frank didn’t look at the man’s face. His eyes dropped directly to the iron spike driven into his doorframe.
“You split the grain,” Frank said, his tone entirely flat.
The fat judge blinked. “What?”
“This header is eastern white pine,” Frank pointed a blunt finger at the nail holding the parchment. “Janka hardness rating of barely three hundred and fifty pounds. You drove a square-shank iron spike through the load-bearing door post without a pilot hole. You split the casing four inches down the left side. When the frost hits, moisture will expand and pop the entire top door beam out of square.”
A bizarre silence dropped over the courtyard.
The two guards holding staves glanced at each other, their scowls faltering into confused confusion. They looked at the door, then at Frank, then down at their boots.
The fat judge’s face turned mottled purple. He thrust the brass-bound parchment into Frank’s chest.
“Are you insane, Lu Zhen?! Do you think you can play the fool with babble about pine wood?! Look at this document!”
Frank caught it with two fingers, unfolded the thick paper, and scanned the text.
Frank looked up from the document, unimpressed.
“A ten-thousand spirit stone indemnity fine for an empty shack?” Frank asked, tapping the parchment. “The roof has an active leak. The doorstep plate sits directly on bare soil without a vapor barrier, meaning termites are eating the foundation. This structure isn’t worth fifty silver coins.”
The judge’s left eye began to twitch wildly.
In twelve years of serving eviction notices, he had seen disgraced teachers cry, beg on their knees, or draw swords in panic. None had ever conducted an unsolicited town property test on a formal eviction summons.
“Lu Zhen!” the judge hissed. “Vice-Principal Lu personally ratified this decree! During the last test, your teaching caused young Master Sun to suffer a reverse-qi deviation that numbed his bladder for three weeks! The Vice-Principal gave you negative five, and the Senate approved it!”
Frank’s HUD flickered faintly, pulling up an archival log from Lu Zhen’s memories.
[Historical Event: Student Sun practiced 'Flaming Cloud Gale Kick' right away after eating six cold pork pies and two pints of raw goat milk. Result: Acute abdominal cramps and bladder burst.]
Frank sighed. “The kid had severe stomach cramps from lactose intolerance and poor dietary discipline. He didn’t have a reverse-qi deviation. If you kick at maximum extension with a full colon, you pull pelvic muscles. Any licensed physical therapist could diagnose that in thirty seconds.”
“Silence!” the judge roared. “According to Statute Section Four, a teacher must maintain three registered students. If you fail to recruit three students before the sunset gong thirty days from now, your license will be burned, your dantian sealed. Your body thrown into the southern limestone quarries to work off your debt! Let’s go!”
The judge spun on his heel, his guards following him down the path.
Frank watched them disappear behind the bamboo grove, then turned to inspect his classroom.
The inside measured roughly four hundred square feet. A single plain desk sat in the center, covered in grey dust. In the corner, a cast-iron coal fire bowl was rusted fully through its bottom plate. Through warped timber slats, misty mountain peaks rose into the morning sky.
“No heat padding. Single-pane wooden shutters with quarter-inch gaps,” Frank cataloged. “If winter hits early, this room drops below freezing before midnight. The heat loss is total.”
He walked over to the desk, pulled out a rag, and wiped away the dust.
As his hand brushed the splintered pine, his internal console gave off a crisp chime.
Frank pulled a small wedge of cured oak from the corner. He bent down, inspected the right front leg of the desk, slid the wedge beneath the gap. Then he tapped it firmly with his palm.
Clack.
The desk settled flush against the floorboards. The annoying tiny wobble vanished instantly.
A faint warmth blossomed in the center of Frank’s chest. It felt like swallowing a thimble of warm honey, streaming through his chest bone and into his forearms with quiet, clean energy.
Deep within his lower belly, resting in the center of his Sea of Qi, a tiny sphere of golden-white fire pulsed gently. It didn’t churn like spiritual water. It simply existed: an ultra-dense, self-contained sun-hot star-fire seed burning at ten thousand Degrees of star-heat. It was wrapped in eight layers of invisible magnetic holding coils.
Frank rested his hand against his ribs, feeling the steady pulse.
“So the core is basically an ultra-compact power-coil reactor,” Frank murmured. “Clean heat output, zero exhaust fine dust, and perfect holding. As long as the baffles hold, I don’t have to worry about melting the bedrock.”
He grabbed a battered broom with a broken cedar handle, swept dead leaves out the front door. Then he wiped the window sills.
The sun climbed past the eastern ridges, burning away morning fog and lighting up the golden spires of the Hongwu Lower Academy.
From the valley below, the deep chime of a bronze bell echoed across the hills.
GONG—! GONG—! GONG—!
The recruitment bell. The annual Freshmen Enrollment Fair had begun.
Frank hung his broom behind the door. He checked his tool pouch. He confirmed his measuring tape, chalk stub, and brass ball-peen hammer, then smoothed down his grey linen robes.
“Three students in thirty days,” Frank muttered. “Otherwise they seize the property and send me to break rocks. Let’s see what friend NPCs this academy has on offer. If their stats are as badly allocated as this building’s framing, I have a lot of bug tickets to file.”
---
Twenty minutes later, Frank arrived at the Central Martial Plaza.
Over five thousand people packed the massive flat stone slab square. Grand silk banners stitched with glowing runes fluttered from towering jade pillars. Luxurious pavilions lined the outer edge, staffed by senior instructors in brocade robes decorated with Master Teacher star-badges.
Crowds of wealthy merchants and high-born patriarchs bustled through the lanes. They pushed their pampered offspring toward the most prestigious booths.
“Move aside! Make way for the young master of the White Cloud Pavilion!”
“Elder Zhao! Please look at my son! He opened three spirit veins at age fourteen!”
“Teacher Lu Yan’s booth is over there! He has already accepted five prodigies!”
Frank strolled past the roaring crowds, fully calm by the noise. He found his assigned recruitment station at the total furthest corner of the plaza, set directly next to the public latrines and a stack of decomposing manure bags intended for the academy gardens.
Above his station hung a lopsided wooden signboard:
[Classroom 404 — Teacher Lu Zhen (Test: -5.0)]
The moment Frank sat down behind the rickety pine table, the surrounding noise in that section of the plaza died down.
A middle-aged noblewoman in rainbow-bright silk was dragging her son toward the nearby swordsmanship pavilion. The boy accidentally drifted within ten paces of Frank’s booth.
The woman’s head snapped around. Her eyes landed on the -5.0 signboard, then on Frank’s plain grey linen robes.
Her face drained of color. She yanked the boy back as though he had stepped toward an open cesspit.
“Aiyo! Heavens protect us!” she shrieked, wildly yanking her son backward by his silk collar. “Bao’er, don’t look at him! Don’t breathe his air! That’s Lu Zhen, the academy’s trash teacher! If you get within five steps of him, his bad luck will choke your spiritual roots and turn your dantian into stone!”
“Mother, my collar—” the boy choked.
“Shut your mouth and walk faster!” she hissed, dragging the gasping child away at a dead sprint. “Run! Before the Disciplinary Hall thinks we associate with that walking curse!”
Within three minutes, a fifty-foot outer edge of fully empty flat stone slabs cleared around Frank’s table.
Hundreds of parents, students, and exam guards actively detoured around his corner, giving him wide, scared berths while pointing and whispering behind their silk sleeves.
Frank leaned back in his wooden chair, crossed his arms over his chest. Then he took a slow sip of cold water from his enamel mug.
“Fifty-foot exclusion zone. Zero background noise. No line, no waiting,” Frank muttered, watching the panicked parents scramble past. “Best booth location in the entire plaza. Finally, some peace and quiet to inspect the tester logs.”