Within the hallowed silence of the Azure Sky Haven library, two very different scenes of industry were unfolding. At one meticulously organized desk, Lulu Hong sat with perfect posture, sipping a tea brewed from local mountain herbs. Her quill moved across the paper with unhurried, flawless precision as she transcribed another text from the boundless archives of her mind. The air around her was one of calm focus.

  Across from her, the scene was decidedly less serene. Kai was half-sprawled across a large reading table, his head buried in his arms, the very picture of exasperated stress. The peace of the library did nothing to quiet the turmoil in his mind.

  His disciples were still at the punishing obstacle course. Chen Gong was, by all reports, enduring his sentence with a lot of splashing and very little grace. Zhang Liao was dutifully manning the mechanisms. And Lu Bu, the source of Kai's current crisis, had joined the training not as a punishment, but as a personal challenge, treating the grueling course as a warm-up.

  Kai’s goal of tempering the boy's rapidly solidifying arrogance was failing spectacularly.

  “Lulu,” he groaned, not lifting his head from the table. “You need to help me with Lu Bu. I’m begging you.”

  The scratch of her quill didn’t pause. “I’m not sure I understand what your specific problem is,” she replied, her voice as even as her calligraphy.

  Kai finally pushed himself up, running his hands through his hair in frustration. “It’s this growing arrogance! I don’t know how to deal with it. He’s becoming… insufferably sure of himself.”

  “That is a statistically common and expected developmental phase for individuals possessing monstrous talent,” Lulu stated, as if reading from a clinical textbook. “An inflated ego is a frequent corollary to unprecedented success.”

  “But what should I do?” Kai pressed, his voice tight with worry. “Arrogance is a poison. I could recite a dozen ballads about promising young masters who died stupid, preventable deaths because they believed their own hype. I don’t want that to be Lu Bu’s song.”

  Lulu finally set her quill down, giving him her full attention. “Well, there are historical training manuals, primarily from the more militant sects, that suggest arrogance can be literally beaten out of disciples… with very large sticks.”

  “I am not beating Lu Bu,” Kai said, his tone leaving no room for debate.

  “Good,” Lulu replied, picking up her quill again. “Because there is an equal volume of literature, primarily from the scholarly sects, that argues physical violence is the least effective method for instilling genuine humility. It typically breeds resentment, not wisdom.”

  Kai let out a sound of pure frustration. “Then how about you suggest something that actually works?”

  “Well,” Lulu said, pausing to search the vast catalog of her memory. “A common theme in ethical cultivation texts is the importance of teaching talented disciples to be supportive of their peers. The goal is to redirect their pride from self-aggrandizement to the act of uplifting others. Instead of demeaning those weaker than themselves, they learn to empower them.”

  “He already does that!” Kai exclaimed, throwing his hands up. “I slow down his training to let the others catch up, and he never gets angry. He helps them! He spends hours showing Zhang Liao a stance or spotting Chen Gong on the logs. He’s the most supportive brother you could ask for.”

  Lulu’s brow furrowed slightly. “What about empathy? Teaching him to understand and share the feelings of others?”

  “He’s empathetic! Just yesterday, I saw him carefully helping one of the younger badger beastkin dig a burrow, even though the creature was perfectly capable on its own. He does things like that all the time.”

  Now Lulu looked genuinely confused. She placed her quill in its rest and steepled her fingers. “Kai, I am having significant difficulty reconciling your description with your diagnosis. You describe a disciple who is supportive, patient, empathetic, and helpful. These are not the traits of an arrogant braggart.”

  Kai took a deep breath, trying to articulate the nebulous fear gnawing at him. “It’s the overconfidence, Lulu. The sheer, unshakable scale of it. He doesn’t just want to be strong; he knows he’s going to be the greatest warrior who ever lived. He boasts about it constantly.”

  “A significant portion of that boasting,” Lulu interjected coolly, “is also about how you, his teacher, are a mythical sage whose every action contains profound wisdom. He is, in fact, your most vocal evangelist.”

  “That’s part of the problem too! All because of Chang Gong bullshit!” Kai said, slumping back in his chair. “But it’s more than the ‘greatest warrior’ talk. It’s that with that kind of untempered self-belief, he might one day do something catastrophically stupid. He might see a challenge where there is only a threat. He might pick a fight with someone far stronger than he is, not out of malice, but out of a genuine, unshakeable belief that he cannot lose. And he would die for that belief.”

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  The core of his anxiety was Mike’s warning—a prophecy of death stemming from this very arrogance. It wasn’t just about curbing annoying behavior; it was about preventing a future where Lu Bu’s incredible strength became the instrument of his own, and his brothers’, destruction. He was trying to install guardrails on a meteor, and he was desperately afraid he didn't have the right tools.

  “Well,” Lulu said, tapping a finger on her chin, “if the issue is specifically his confidence in his physical prowess, why not design a challenge that directly targets it? Create a physical feat he cannot overcome with brute strength. Force him to confront a limit. Perhaps a complex puzzle that requires finesse or intelligence over force. I have several treatises on logic puzzles and spatial reasoning challenges memorized; we could easily transcribe one.”

  Kai let out a weary sigh. “I thought about that. But Lu Bu is self-aware enough to know his intellect isn't his weapon. His strength is. If he failed a book puzzle, he’d just shrug and say, ‘That’s Brother Chen Gong’s job.’ It wouldn’t touch his core confidence. To truly make an impression, the failure has to happen in his own domain—his physical power.”

  Lulu considered this, nodding slowly. “A valid point. Then the solution is straightforward. Devise a physical challenge that is impossible through mere muscle. Once he exhausts himself and admits defeat, you step in and demonstrate the correct technique—the one that requires skill, leverage, or patience. The experience of failure, followed by a lesson, is a classic and effective method for tempering arrogance.”

  “You don’t think I’ve tried that?!” Kai’s frustration finally boiled over, his voice rising to a yell that echoed in the quiet library.

  Lulu flinched, genuinely startled by the outburst.

  Kai took a sharp breath, trying to rein himself in. “From the memories of my past life—the one I told you about, from Mike’s world—there was a challenge I saw in a… a moving picture, a story. It involved climbing a tall, smooth wooden post. The climber had ropes tied to their wrists and ankles, attached to heavy weights. The weights were too heavy, making the climb impossible through strength alone. The hero of the story only succeeded by realizing she could use the weights’ to create leverage by wrapping them around the post to pull herself up. It was a perfect lesson: a burden can become an advantage with wisdom.”

  He leaned forward, his eyes wide with the memory of the incident. “I recreated it exactly. I found a perfect post, used the heaviest stones we had… I set it all up. And you want to know what happened?”

  Lulu, now completely captivated, chimed in. “Let me guess . The weights, despite your efforts, were still not heavy enough. Lu Bu simply muscled his way to the top anyways.”

  Kai let out a short, bitter laugh. “HA! I wish that was what happened. That would have at least been a predictable failure. No. He looked at the setup for about three seconds. Then, he didn’t try to climb. He just started swinging the weights—all of them—in a huge circle by the ropes. He built up this incredible momentum, like some human catapult, and then, at just the right moment, he tossed the entire mass of stones straight up into the air. The force of the throw yanked him off his feet and launched him right to the top of the post, where he landed perfectly before the weights even finished their arc.”

  As Kai finished the story, Lulu’s mouth fell open. Her impeccable posture slackened, and the quill she was holding slipped from her fingers, leaving a small blot of ink on the pristine paper. The image Kai painted was so physically absurd, so defiance of basic biomechanics, that it short-circuited her logical mind. For a disciple in the Body Refinement realm to exhibit that kind of raw, explosive power was unheard of. It was a feat befitting a cultivator well into the Qi Gathering stage or higher.

  After a long moment of stunned silence, she finally found her voice, though it was little more than a disbelieving whisper.

  “Your… disciple is monstrous.”

  “Tell me about it,” Kai bemoaned, slumping forward until his forehead rested on the cool wood of the table. “I tried two other challenges after that, each one more impossible than the last. One was a boulder I had Ning the quake buffalo seal halfway into the earth, thinking he’d need to learn a specific vibration technique to shatter it from the inside. He just dug down and lifted the entire thing, earth and all. Another was a chasm I thought was too wide to jump. He took a running start and kicked off the side of the cliff halfway across to make it. He’s not solving the challenges, Lulu. He’s breaking them with brute force.”

  He sat up, running his hands over his face in despair. “My plan to slow-ball his techniques has completely backfired. While I’ve been having him wait for the others to catch up to his level, he hasn’t been idle. He’s been doing nothing but physical training, and the sheer volume of qi he’s managed to accumulate—naturally, just by being a prodigy—has supercharged his body. He’s developing the superhuman strength of a Qi Gathering realm cultivator while he’s still technically in the Body Refinement stage.”

  Lulu stared at him, her usual analytical composure completely shattered. “This… this talent transcends ‘heaven-defying.’ That term implies struggling against the heavens and winning. This is… the heavens simply got out of his way. It’s absurd. At the rate he’s progressing, by the time he actually reaches the Qi Gathering realm, his raw physical power will eclipse all of ours combined.”

  “Now you understand my panic,” Kai said, his voice pleading. “So please, help me. I am out of ideas. I need to conceive of a challenge that can actually… well… challenge Lu Bu’s physical strength. It can’t be a trick or a puzzle. I need a challenge he will fail, but one that is still technically possible, so that when he does fail, it teaches him about a real limit, not an artificial one.”

  Lulu resolved to help Kai. For the next several days, the library became a war room. Scrolls filled with ancient training regimens, treatises on body cultivation limits, and even mythological accounts of strength tests were pulled from the shelves. They devised challenges rooted in pure, unadulterated physical law.

  Unfortunately for Kai and Lulu, their collaboration only served to prove a grim new truth: there was no challenge they could conceive that Lu Bu couldn't eventually overcome with a breathtaking, and often destructive, application of brute force.

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