After Arthur had gone to bed — still muttering worried thoughts about revolutionary techniques and heretical cultivation, his voice trailing off mid-sentence the way people's did when exhaustion finally won the argument with anxiety — Sylas lay awake staring at the water-stained ceiling and confronting an uncomfortable truth.

  He couldn't do it wrong.

  Not 'wouldn't.' Not 'shouldn't.' Couldn't. His brain wouldn't allow him to perform the inefficient version anymore, in the same way it wouldn't allow him to walk into a wall or swallow something he knew was wrong. He'd spent the hours since Arthur fell asleep trying to force the standard seventeen-point circulation — patiently, methodically, treating it as a technical problem that could be solved with sufficient application of will — and his body had rejected it every time. The moment his concentration slipped even slightly from the active task of maintaining the inefficient route, the mana defaulted to the optimised pathway the way a stream defaults to downhill. Inevitable. Automatic.

  It was like asking himself to deliberately write reports with grammatical errors, or to file paperwork in the wrong order, or to route shipments through every possible inefficient junction specifically because that was how everyone else did it. Technically possible, in the sense that he could physically perform the actions. But requiring such sustained, active, exhausting conscious effort that the effort itself became the thing that made it impossible.

  His brain optimised. Automatically. Involuntarily. It was how he'd been wired in his previous life — the compulsion to see inefficiency, to note it, to fix it wherever fixing was possible and document it where it wasn't — and apparently death and reincarnation hadn't changed that fundamental aspect of his psychology. If anything, giving him a world built on systems had made it worse.

  At Celestial Logistics, this had been an asset. When he looked at a mana distribution network, he couldn't help but see the bottlenecks, the redundancies, the wasted cycles, the places where the current design was costing more than it was worth. His reports had been full of optimisation suggestions because not pointing them out would have been physically uncomfortable, like watching someone struggle with a jammed door and saying nothing about the fact that it opened the other way. He'd written those reports, filed them, watched them be ignored, and written them again the following year because the problems didn't go away just because nobody read the documentation.

  Here, it was a liability.

  Sylas sat up carefully, taking pains not to wake Arthur, and retrieved his diagrams from the desk. The standard technique with its seventeen circulation points, mapped out in his own notation with each redundancy labelled and the estimated efficiency loss at each stage calculated. His simplified seven-point version with its safety protocol annotations. And now, apparently, his body's preferred pathway that he'd internalised without deciding to — the technique that was running whether he consciously chose it or not.

  He'd thought the problem was choosing between efficiency and safety. He'd been wrong. The real problem was that efficiency wasn't a choice anymore. It was automatic. His brain saw the wasteful pathway and his body refused to follow it, the same way a body refuses to maintain an unnatural posture indefinitely — it was possible for a short time with conscious effort, and then the natural state reasserted itself regardless of what he wanted.

  Like trying to write messily when you had precise handwriting. You could do it, technically, for a few lines, but it required constant vigilance and an active suppression of trained reflex. The moment you stopped thinking specifically about making it worse, your hand reverted to its patterns. And the effort of maintaining the bad handwriting — holding back, fighting yourself, paying twice the normal cognitive price for every stroke — was more exhausting than just writing correctly in the first place.

  Sylas had spent an entire evening trying to cultivate inefficiently, and it had drained him more thoroughly than an hour of actual cultivation would have. Not because the technique was physically demanding, but because fighting his own optimisation instincts was cognitively expensive in a way that nothing else was. It was expensive the way lying was expensive: doable, sustainable for limited periods, but with a running cost that added up.

  Which meant he had a new problem, sitting on top of all his existing problems.

  The examination was in twelve days. Twelve days to not just pass the minimum threshold, but to pass it while appearing completely unremarkable — while looking like exactly the kind of barely-surviving student that the Academy expected him to be. A student with a destroyed cultivation base who'd somehow scraped together enough to not quite fail. Not a student who had apparently developed a novel cultivation technique during a moment of inattention and whose body now rejected the standard methodology.

  Because if he went into that examination and demonstrated clean, effortless circulation — if he showed the examiners a mana flow that was smooth and naturally efficient, achieved through seven points instead of seventeen, with none of the visible strain that the standard technique produced — people would notice. The instructors would notice. And being noticed, Arthur had been very clear, was dangerous in specific ways that failing the examination was not.

  Custom cultivation techniques were classified as heretical methodology. Creating your own cultivation path, deviating from approved methods without sanction from a recognised authority, implied either that you were claiming superior insight to centuries of established practitioners, or that you had acquired secret techniques from outside your institution, which implied theft from a rival academy or contact with prohibited sources. Either interpretation invited scrutiny.

  Best case scenario: they'd think he was cheating — that someone had fed him unauthorised material or that his apparently destroyed cultivation base had been misdiagnosed and he'd been sandbagging all along. An investigation would follow. His actual technique would be examined. The truth would come out.

  Worst case scenario: they'd treat the novel technique as evidence of something dangerous and dissect his cultivation base to understand it, a process that the manual's references to 'corrective intervention for deviant cultivators' suggested was neither pleasant nor survivable in the form he'd prefer.

  Either way: not passing the examination because he was too competent was just as fatal as not passing it because he'd failed. Possibly more so, because it came with additional consequences beyond the standard Reclamation processing.

  Sylas pulled out a fresh piece of paper and began writing, organising his thoughts in the way that always helped him — externalising the structure so he could look at it rather than just think it, arranging the variables into something that could be analysed rather than just felt.

  Problem Statement: I cannot perform cultivation inefficiently. My brain and body automatically optimise. This is involuntary and cannot be suppressed without exhausting and unsustainable conscious effort.

  Constraint: The examination requires demonstrating the standard technique, or at minimum appearing to do so. Visible efficiency above a certain threshold will attract attention. Attention is dangerous in ways that extend beyond failing the examination.

  Failed Solutions: One — force the standard technique through willpower. Assessment: exhausting, unsustainable, will collapse under examination pressure when conscious focus is divided. Two — suppress the optimisation instinct. Assessment: impossible without constant effort that itself exceeds capacity, and creates the exact fatigue signature that will look wrong to an observer.

  He tapped the charcoal against the paper, thinking. In his previous life, when he'd encountered immovable constraints — the logistics equivalent of unmovable deadlines or unfixable infrastructure — he'd learned to reframe the problem. The constraint was real. He couldn't unmake it. But he could change his relationship to it. Could change what he was trying to do in response to it.

  He couldn't suppress his efficiency. Fine. Then he needed to hide it. Not prevent the optimisation from occurring, but prevent anyone from observing that it had occurred. The optimisation could happen on the inside. What he needed to control was the presentation on the outside.

  Sylas added to his notes.

  Reframed Problem: How do I perform efficient cultivation while appearing to perform standard cultivation? How do I look like a struggling student while operating as a functional one?

  Better. That was a problem he could actually work with.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  The examination had two observable components, according to Arthur's careful documentation: demonstration and measurement. Demonstration meant the instructors watching his physical form — his posture, his breathing pattern, his hand positions, the visible signs of effort or its absence. Measurement meant the output being assessed — how much mana he could circulate, how stable the flow was, how long he could sustain it.

  Form was about appearance. About theater. It had nothing to do with what was actually happening inside his meridians and everything to do with what signals his external presentation sent to an observer. Sylas had spent fourteen years in corporate environments where appearing appropriately busy and appropriately strained was a social skill as important as any technical competence. He could fake physical struggle. He could add sweat and visible tension and the particular kind of slow deliberate breathing that read as effort rather than ease. That part required no cultivation ability at all.

  Measurement was trickier. The examiners would assess his output — would apply whatever sensing tools or techniques they had to evaluate the actual mana in his system. He couldn't fake that part. But he didn't need to. The threshold wasn't perfection; it was adequacy. Thirty percent. The minimum viable competence that proved he was still a functioning student rather than a resource-negative liability.

  So what he needed was to appear to struggle while actually performing steadily. To look like he was following the standard technique while his body ran the optimised version underneath. To hit somewhere between thirty and forty percent — enough to pass, not enough to trigger the attention that exceptional performance would invite. To throttle his own output.

  He started making a list.

  Camouflage Strategies: One — physical performance. Act tired. Add visible strain to the breathing pattern. Let the hands tremble slightly. These are theatrical choices with no mechanical cost. Two — mana signature. Research what instructors at this level can actually perceive. If they can see internal pathways, the disguise fails at source. If they can only measure output, the disguise can hold. This requires information Arthur may have. Three — output throttling. Don't demonstrate full capacity. Target exactly thirty to thirty-five percent competency in the examiner's measurement. Anything above forty percent risks triggering the kind of attention that this situation cannot survive. Four — timing. Take the full five minutes even if the circulation stabilises faster. Add pauses. Add what will read as recovery time. Let the duration look like effort.

  The theater parts were familiar territory. Sylas had navigated corporate performance management for fourteen years — the careful calibration of how much to demonstrate versus how much to hold back, the art of appearing to be working at full capacity without triggering either the scrutiny that came with exceptional output or the concern that came with visible underperformance. He had been beige. He had been reliably adequate. He had made an art of occupying exactly the space he was supposed to occupy and no more.

  The technical parts — the mana signature question specifically — required information he didn't currently have. He didn't know what instructors could actually perceive during a cultivation examination at this level. If they had the ability to observe internal pathway structures directly, then running his optimised technique would be visible regardless of how carefully he managed the physical presentation. The whole disguise would be irrelevant.

  Arthur might know. Or might be able to find out. It would require explaining enough of the situation to get a useful answer without explaining so much that it became a source of alarm — which was a delicate calibration when the situation was already alarming Arthur considerably.

  But the output throttling — that was the most interesting part. That was the problem he hadn't encountered in precisely this form before.

  In his previous life, he'd always been trying to maximise. Push systems to their limits. Extract every available percentage point of efficiency. The culture of Celestial Logistics had been one of continuous improvement metrics, quarter-over-quarter comparisons, the implicit assumption that more output was always better and any shortfall required explanation.

  Now he needed to minimise apparent efficiency while maintaining actual functionality. He needed to design a presentation that looked barely adequate while the underlying system ran at something closer to optimal. It was the inverse of every professional instinct he'd ever developed.

  It was also, he realised slowly, a completely solvable engineering problem. If he could see his own mana output as a dial — could feel how much he was producing and consciously adjust the draw rate — he could target exactly the right output band. Not suppress the optimised circulation itself, just reduce the amount of ambient mana he was pulling through it. Run the efficient technique at thirty percent capacity instead of full capacity. Let it look like a struggling student's output because the output actually was a struggling student's output — just produced by a fundamentally different mechanism.

  The technique's efficiency would still be present, hidden in the quality of what did get produced rather than the quantity. The instructors would see exactly what they expected: a barely-functional student producing the minimum required output with visible effort. They wouldn't see the efficiency because efficiency at reduced throughput looked identical to inefficiency at full capacity from the outside.

  Sylas felt the familiar sensation — the click of pieces falling into alignment, the recognition that an apparently impossible problem had a solution that had been obscured by the framing rather than by genuine impossibility. He'd been trying to suppress the optimisation. He should have been trying to throttle the intake.

  He couldn't suppress his efficiency. But he could hide it under a reduced load. Could build a facade of adequacy over the optimised core by simply running that core at a lower power setting. Could give the examiners exactly what they expected — a struggling student barely meeting the minimum — while the system underneath ran exactly the way it was designed to.

  It was deceptive. There was no pretending otherwise. It required him to deliberately underrepresent his capability, to mislead the people evaluating him, to use their expectations as cover. Everything in his professional background had pointed toward transparency, documentation, making the actual state of systems visible to the people responsible for them.

  But the people responsible for him were also the people who would send him to Reclamation if he failed, or to something worse if he succeeded in the wrong way. The system's transparency had turned in a direction that was pointed at him. The only honest response to a dishonest system was, perhaps, a calculated one.

  Sylas looked at his notes, at the plan that was resolving itself into clarity on the rough paper. He'd spent his entire previous life being adequate. Being exactly competent enough to remain employed and exactly unremarkable enough to remain unnoticed. The World's Most Adequate Logistics Manager, the coffee mug had said, and he'd kept it because it was the most accurate thing anyone had ever committed to ceramic about him.

  He'd resented it at the time. He had written — in the private journal he'd kept sporadically in his thirties — bitter paragraphs about being underestimated, about suggestions being ignored, about management consistently promoting people who were louder and more visible over people who were actually keeping the systems running. He'd been angry, in the way of someone who had done everything right and been rewarded with adequate.

  Now he looked back at those fourteen years with something that wasn't quite different from what he'd felt then, but was oriented differently. The invisibility had been a gift he hadn't recognised as one. He'd been too competent to be fired and too unremarkable to be targeted. He'd survived fourteen years in an organisation that consumed people — that had consumed him, eventually, but through structural negligence rather than deliberate intent — by being the human equivalent of a system that ran quietly and required no maintenance.

  He could do that again. Could be the cultivation equivalent of adequate. Could pass every examination with exactly the right score and never more. Could maintain a reputation as a student who was trying his best and just about managing it, while actually operating through a fundamentally different mechanism than anyone around him realised.

  The curse of competence wasn't that he was too good. It was that visible competence invited attention, and attention invited the kinds of responses that this world had made clear it was capable of. The solution wasn't to be less competent. The solution was to be competent invisibly.

  Aggressive mediocrity. Strategic adequacy. The art of performing exactly at the expected threshold and generating no data points that would encourage anyone to look closer.

  Sylas added a final entry to his notes: Core Strategy — Don't suppress efficiency. Hide it. Throttle intake to produce the expected output level. Build the performance of struggle over a foundation of sustainable function. Be secretly capable, publicly adequate. Be the system that runs quietly in the background and requires no attention.

  It felt, as a strategy, dishonest. But then, so did every aspect of the system he was operating inside — the debt that accumulated while students tried, the examination thresholds designed to produce a particular distribution of outcomes, the Reclamation infrastructure waiting below every student who fell below the line. If the system had decided that honesty was less important than its own smooth operation, Sylas could make the same calculation.

  Tomorrow he'd talk to Arthur about what the instructors could actually perceive during the examination. Would start practising the performance of struggle until it was automatic enough not to require conscious maintenance. Would test the intake-throttling approach with careful attention to the output levels it produced.

  But tonight, lying back on the narrow mattress and looking at the water-stained ceiling that he was beginning to know the way you knew the ceiling above your childhood bed, he allowed himself a moment of something that wasn't quite amusement but was in the same family.

  He'd spent his previous life trying to make systems better, and the systems had killed him for it. Now he was going to survive by hiding the fact that he'd already made one better — by running the improved version in secret, maintaining the appearance of the broken version for anyone who looked, and being so thoroughly unremarkable that no one would ever think to look closely enough to see the difference.

  The World's Most Adequate Logistics Manager. The World's Most Adequate Cultivator.

  This time, he'd do it on purpose. And this time, if he did it correctly, he might actually survive long enough to find out what came next.