Little Abacus took to optimised cultivation techniques the way fire takes to kindling.

  The teaching arrangement was absurd. Chen Xi shouted instructions across thirty-one metres of hallway.

  Left diagrammed equations at the midpoint table. Demonstrated techniques using visible-spectrum energy constructs projected at distance.

  It was the most inconvenient master-student relationship in history.

  It worked.

  "Your standard circulation takes 2.4 seconds per cycle," Chen Xi called from his end. "The optimised version should complete in 1.1. Start slow."

  The boy began. His Qi moved sluggishly at first. Gate Three was not a level that allowed for elegance.

  But the optimised pathway was shorter. More direct. It required less energy to maintain.

  By the fourth cycle, the sluggishness smoothed.

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  By the tenth, the boy's eyes were wide.

  "It's flowing. Like water downhill. The standard path feels like pushing a boulder uphill compared to this."

  "Measure it."

  Little Abacus produced a calibrated measurement stone.

  "Output increased by... one hundred and fourteen percent."

  "Energy expenditure?"

  "Down by thirty-eight percent."

  "More than twice the output at less than two-thirds the cost. And your cultivation level hasn't changed. You're still Gate Three."

  The numbers were absurd.

  A Foundation Gate 3 cultivator, the cultivation equivalent of a toddler with a plastic sword — was now outputting more raw power per cycle than a Gate 6 practitioner using standard methods.

  Not because the boy had gotten stronger. Because the technique was doing all the work.

  Little Abacus was still the weakest person in any room he walked into. But with Chen Xi's optimisation, he was hitting harder than half the people in it.

  That was the thesis. That was the whole point. Efficiency beat power. Measurement beat talent. And a fifteen-year-old chestnut vendor with a knotted measuring cord had just proved it.

  The boy stood in the hallway with his measuring cord draped over one shoulder, his topknot listing thirty-eight degrees to starboard, and grinned the grin of someone who had just discovered the universe was rigged in favour of people who measured things.

  "When do we start selling?"

  The Newcomer Assessment was thirty-seven days away.

  They needed income, residency, and reputation before the deadline.

  The clock was ticking.