Young disciple Wei Cabbage-Heart stood before Senior Sister Divine Thunder-Snail in the Hall of Ten Thousand Administrative Scrolls within the Soaring Phoenix-Dragon Sect. His right arm was in a sling, all of his hair was missing, and a pattern of lightning scars traced itself across his entire body—nature's eloquent reminder that the universe had an impeccable sense of irony and had chosen to express it through the medium of human flesh.

  "I see that you've recovered from your failed attempt to perform the signature Needle of Heaven technique," Senior Sister Divine Thunder-Snail said, suppressing a smile as she recalled yesterday's spectacular mishap. The technique was supposed to summon a miniature lightning bolt, but Wei Cabbage-Heart had somehow managed to electrocute himself while simultaneously setting his own robes on fire and dying for approximately 42 seconds—just long enough to be embarrassing, but not quite long enough to be permanent.

  "Honorable Senior Sister!" Wei Cabbage-Heart said formally, bowing as deeply as his injured arm allowed, "I wish to formally withdraw from the Soaring Phoenix-Dragon Sect and return to mortal life."

  Divine Thunder-Snail's jade pendant clinked against her desk as she leaned forward in surprise. "You've filled out form Cloud-Pattern-881?" she asked, noting the perfectly brush-stroked document before her.

  "Yes, Senior Sister. Along with Mountain-Peak-236, River-Flow-167, Stone-Ridge-419, Dragon-Scale-775, and Phoenix-Feather-302-B," the young man recited, presenting the stack with the casual precision of someone naming old friends.

  Divine Thunder-Snail froze, her brush suspended mid-air. "You filled out the form Phoenix-Feather-302-B? That's impossible."

  She knew by heart that completing the Phoenix-Feather form would take someone 148 years to finish due to all of the associated recursive paperwork needed to sign by immortals who were meditating and weren’t to be disturbed until they departed from their deep-cultivation chambers.

  “Ah that.” Wei smiled. "I discovered that by declaring myself administratively deceased, I created a temporal window where my identity was officially null."

  “Wait what?” Thunder-Snail sputtered.

  “I’m essentially a mortal commoner Wei Cabbage-Heart, representing the interests of the deceased cultivator novitiate Wei Cabbage-Heart.”

  Thunder-Snail simply stared at the young cultivator. “But… you’re not dead.”

  “Physically, no,” he said. “But on paperwork, I absolutely am.”

  Thunder-Snail opened and closed her mouth.

  “All I had to do was get a very tired coroner to sign the ‘Cause of death’ form based on the form that specified I was dead for forty two seconds.” He tapped the documents. "Thus, I've essentially created a legal paradox—I’m simultaneously the deceased disciple Wei Cabbage-Heart and a new administrative entity exempt from continuity requirements.

  Divine Thunder-Snail's eyes darted across the forms, her expression transforming from skepticism to confusion to something approaching horror. "But that would mean—"

  "That I've escaped the recursive paperwork loop by stepping outside its fundamental assumptions," Wei finished. "See? The system collapses when approached as a set of logical propositions rather than spiritual obligations."

  The Senior Sister seemed to age a decade in seconds as she grasped his dangerous words.

  Most people just wrote "I quit" and ran away screaming when lightning bolts started chasing them down the mountain. Wei, a novitiate barely twenty six winters old had somehow outwitted the millenia-old bureaucratic framework of the cult.

  She went through the paperwork, cold sweat blooming across her forehead. There was nothing she could do to deny Wei. Nothing at all.

  It was awful. She had no choice but to give him his refund now.

  "So, what are your future plans?" she inquired, barely retaining her composure.

  "I've had some success growing Spirit-Touch Turnips and Moonlight Cabbage in the outer fields," he said. "I believe my talents lie more in nurturing things that grow in soil rather than attempting to harness heaven's fury."

  "Hrm. What sort of plants are you going to cultivate?" The Divine Thunder-Snail Sister asked. "You are aware that the specific spiritual herb, fruit and vegetable cultivation rights belong to our Sect and anyone growing such outside of our compound walls is to be fined first and lightning-executed if the crime persists, yes?"

  "I will not be growing spiritual herbs," the disciple answered. "I wish to grow… people."

  For the second time today, Divine Thunder-Snail felt utterly thunderstruck.

  "I don't understand," she said. "You want to grow... people? Do you want to become a teacher?"

  "No, sister," Cabbage-Heart shook his head. "I plan to grow people. Literally."

  Thunder-Snail squinted at Cabbage-Heart as if he'd grown a second head. "What? You want to be… a father?"

  "No. Allow me explain—most cultivation techniques have been already discovered, documented and claimed by the cult Immortals as their divine right," Cabbage-Heart clarified. "But this one hasn't."

  "Probably because it's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard," Divine Thunder-Snail said, massaging her temples. "Growing people? Like... vegetables?"

  There was something terribly wrong with this disciple. Perhaps the lightning strike had damaged his brain. Yes, this was the most logical explanation.

  "Precisely, Senior Sister! Through my experiments with Spirit-Touch Turnips, I discovered that certain spiritual energies might affect growth patterns in fascinating ways. I have a hypothesis that by experimenting with—"

  "Enough!" Thunder-Snail raised her hand. "The sect administration already has enough nightmares dealing with immortals who turn people into swords. We don't need immortals turning turnips into people."

  "Actually, it would be more like turning the dead into turnips—"

  “What?!”

  "Basically, I just wanted to make sure that I'm not executed for this cultivation method," the disciple interrupted himself, catching a glimpse of the horror spreading across Thunder-Snail's face.

  "You won't be, because nobody is insane enough to grow… people from the dead," the woman said. "Just... just take these approved forms to Elder Thousand-Year Pine in the Treasury Hall. He'll process your severance payment."

  Wei Cabbage-Heart's bowed. "The Senior Sister is too kind!"

  "Just promise me one thing," she said, affixing her Thunder Seal to the documents. "Whatever this 'people growing' technique becomes, don't name it after our sect."

  "I shall call it the Humble Cabbage Cultivation Method!" he declared proudly.

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  "Whatever," Divine Thunder-Snail muttered, mentally preoccupied with trying to figure out how to close the monstrous loophole Wei had unearthed with his actions. “Just get out of my sight already.”

  Wei Cabbage-Heart bowed one final time and quietly left the hall, his footsteps echoing against the pink marble-inlaid floors. By mid-day he had collected his severance payment, packed his few belongings into a burlap sack, and slipped out through the sect's lesser-used Western-Gale Gate.

  No lightning bolts marked his departure, no heavenly omens appeared in the sky—just a former disciple walking down a mountain path, a cloth bundle over his shoulder, and a mind full of ideas that would have given the sect's formation masters collective aneurysms.

  Massarim... the name of this world was Massarim. I wasn't in Kansas anymore.

  I still couldn't believe how it happened. One moment I was staring at a blackboard filled with equations, contemplating energy distribution patterns in living systems, and the next I was inhabiting the body of Wei Cabbage-Heart, a failed cultivator who had apparently died from a lightning technique gone horribly wrong.

  According to the other novices, the original Wei had been technically dead for nearly a minute before my consciousness slipped in—just long enough for his soul to depart but not so long that the body was unsalvageable.

  It was a strange experience, having access to all his memories and knowledge. I could recall his childhood in the mortal realm, his excitement at being accepted into the Soaring Phoenix-Dragon and then his growing disillusionment and frustration as he struggled to master even the most basic cultivation techniques.

  The original Wei had been, to put it kindly, a complete disaster. His attempts at the Needle of Heaven technique weren't even his worst failure—there was that time he tried to perform the Phoenix Wing Step and somehow ended up stuck upside down in a tree for three days. Or when he attempted the Dragon's Breath meditation and gave himself hiccups that came out as miniature flame bursts, singing his eyebrows off for weeks.

  During one memorable incident, he'd tried performing the Five Elements Hand technique and somehow managed to combine all five elements into what his instructors later termed "the Element of Surprise," which manifested as a perfect vacuum that caused an implosion that deafened all nearby novitiates.

  Looking through his memories, I could see why the original Wei had been so desperate to try the advanced Needle of Heaven technique despite being warned repeatedly not to. He'd been trying to prove himself after the "Immortal's Tea Ceremony Incident" where he'd accidentally set Immortal Instructor Marmokosh's prized thousand-year-old teapot on fire. Yes, somehow he'd managed to set liquid on fire. The Immortal's expression had been particularly memorable—a mix of rage, confusion, and genuine amazement about how it was even possible.

  I winced, rifling through more of Wei's original memories as I walked down the mountain path. What I found most interesting wasn't the failures themselves, but rather a conversation I discovered between two elder disciples who had been discussing Wei's case in the garden below one of the many white halls.

  "His heart core is too big," Elder Sister Frost-Pine had said to her peer.

  "Isn't that usually a good thing?" Second Brother Iron-Storm had asked. "The wider the meridians, the more potential for power?"

  "Not in his case," Frost-Pine sighed. "His heart core is abnormally enlarged—like a spiritual cardiomegaly. When most cultivators gather energy, it naturally concentrates in their dantian. But his oversized heart core acts like a second dantian, pulling energy downward and unleashing it all before it can properly settle."

  "So there's no hope for him to advance?" Iron-Storm had asked.

  "Not in any traditional path," Frost-Pine replied. "If the boy persists at it, he will likely encounter a catastrophe and perish. Proper application of power requires focus and he is simply unable to focus his Qi."

  Wei had taken the conversation to heart and took it as a challenge to attempt the Needle, instead of slowing down. That was his end and my beginning in his body.

  In essence, from the soup of Cabbage-Heart's memories I understood that Cultivation was basically magical nonsense that relied on stuff called Qi. But beyond that? I had no idea how it actually worked. The memories gave me words like "dantian" and "meridians," but the concepts felt as foreign to me as the sensation of having lightning scars all over my body.

  Back on Earth, I was a theoretical physics student at MIT with a background in mathematics—the guy everyone avoided at parties because my best conversation topic was how plants such as cabbages formed perfect Fibonacci spirals that correlated to everything from quantum fluctuations to cosmic inflation.

  The academic world I left behind on Earth, operated according to what many euphemistically called "disciplinary boundaries," but what I recognized as intellectual territorialism—the compartmentalization of disciplines, often referred to as "academic silos." Each silo had its appointed guardians, tenured professors who'd spent decades fortifying the walls that separated their domain from neighboring fields.

  Due to my personal struggle with academic silos, I found unexpected kinship in chemist Leroy Cronin's Assembly Theory. Like me, he'd dared to propose a framework that transcended artificial disciplinary boundaries—suggesting that complex systems could be understood through the information required to assemble them, regardless of their chemical composition. In Leryo’s case, the academic establishment performed its predictable immune response against Assembly Theory: first ignoring his work, then attacking it, all while carefully avoiding engaging with its actual implications.

  Cronin had at least secured a professorship before challenging the system. I was attempting to storm the gates as a mere graduate student—a mathematical Don Quixote tilting at disciplinary windmills with nothing but elegant equations.

  Sadly, I had learned that physicists studied particles, botanists studied plants, and mathematicians studied abstract patterns—and anyone attempting to bridge these domains was viewed as a heretical threat to the established order. The pattern was painfully consistent: ideas that didn't fit neatly into predefined categories became intellectual orphans, regardless of their potential value.

  The irony wasn't lost on me that academic silos existed in a universe where everything was fundamentally interconnected. My theories on how living systems processed energy in patterns that defied current mathematical models were dismissed not because they lacked merit, but because they lacked the proper institutional pedigree. They belonged neither to physics nor botany nor pure mathematics, but inhabited the liminal spaces between disciplines—precisely where innovation tended to emerge, and precisely where academic bureaucracy was designed to prevent it.

  My failures were quite different from that of misfortune disciple Cabbage Heart.

  "Your dissertation on plant-based energy distribution patterns is..." my advisor had paused, searching for a diplomatically devastating word, "...creative. But the review committee feels it lacks sufficient empirical grounding."

  Translation: We refuse to publish anything connecting cabbage leaves to quantum mechanics.

  "The grant committee cannot justify funding experimental equipment for... 'measuring quantum resonance patterns in domesticated brassicas,'" the department chair had informed me with barely concealed chortling. "Perhaps consider more conventional research paths if you wish to advance in this department."

  Well, who was laughing now? Not me, actually. I was currently walking down a mountain with a sack of meager possessions, having just quit magical kung fu school because the previous occupant of this body had established a perfect record of setting things on fire—a data set of spectacular disasters that my consciousness had inherited along with his oversized heart core.

  The more I contemplated my situation, the more fascinated I became with the fundamental mechanics of cultivation. From Wei's memories, cultivation appeared to be a pseudoscientific mishmash of energy manipulation, spiritual awakening, and improbable physical transformations—all wrapped in layers of metaphorical language that obscured any actual operational principles.

  Beneath the poetic terminology and ritualistic practices, there had to be quantifiable patterns. Energy was energy, regardless of whether you called it qi, mana, or potential difference. The fact that Wei's "heart core" dispersed energy rather than concentrating it wasn't a spiritual failing—it was a physical property, like diffusion across a permeable membrane.

  "What we have here," I muttered to myself as I admired the bamboo trees along the winding mountain path, "is a classic case of interdisciplinary blindness."

  The cultivators were like medieval alchemists—they had stumbled upon genuine phenomena but lacked the analytical framework to systematize their observations. They were trapped in their own academic silo, just as the physics department back at MIT had been trapped in theirs.

  But I had the advantage of intellectual arbitrage—the ability to apply principles from one domain to problems in another. If I could model qi circulation using fluid dynamics equations, or map meridians as network topology problems...

  My idea was that if I couldn't focus Qi into narrow channels for combat techniques, maybe I could do something else with it. Something that involved diffuse energy distribution. Something that leveraged my apparent ability to spread energy rather than concentrate it.

  Like growing plants. Very… special plants.

  First, though, I needed to understand what I was working with. And for that, I needed a test subject. Specifically something—or someone—who had successfully manipulated this Qi stuff.

  Of course, on Earth, experimenting on humans or digging up fresh corpses would have immediately triggered institutional review boards, ethics committees, and probably criminal charges.

  But here in Massarim? The moral landscape appeared considerably more... flexible.

  As I gazed down at the village nestled in the valley below, my eyes locked onto a small, walled enclosure on its outskirts—a cemetery, its weathered tombstones arranged in uneven patterns.

  "A perfect place to start my xianxia research journey," I murmured. “Test subject zero, here I come!”