Data-Driven Daoist

The watch’s second hand moved, and the tourbillon spun like a little hurricane in a glass orb.

「What’s this?」 Fei Rui held the watch up in wonder. 「Ah—」

He threw it away, retracting his eyes, limbs, and spikes into his boxy body.

”What’s wrong—?”

Then Yu Han saw the anomaly. The watch was engulfed in green flames as it sailed through the air in an arc.

Green. Burning. It seared his soul.

The watch exploded into fragments of pearls, each shooting outwards like shrapnel. But each fragment was too small, like grains of sand.

The watch, along with its memory pearl core, had been utterly destroyed.

A sudden pain appeared in his head. It was all too familiar. When he had echoed the green meteo—

***Art Levelled Up!

Art Levelled Up!

Art Levelled Up!

Art Grade Levelled Up!

Fortitude: 9 -> 10

Adaptability: 16 -> 17

Clarity: 9 -> 10

Focus: 10 -> 11

Memory: 23 -> 24

Yu Han woke to Huang Niuniu shaking him.

”Don’t die!” she cried, wobbling Yu Han’s body.

”I’m awake. Stop! Stop it,” Yu Han stammered out. Each shake felt like it was ejecting his soul out of his body. Girl, how many points do you have in strength?

Huang Niuniu wailed. ”I thought you were dead!”

”How?”

”You’re bleeding out of everything!”

Yu Han opened his eyes. The daylight felt like someone was holding a spotlight to his pupils.

”Ugh.”

Huang Niuniu’s tears fell onto his face. She was a mix of terror and anger, biting her lips, her brows knitted above her glossy eyes. She took a damp piece of cloth and tapped his cheeks. When she removed it, it was stained with blood.

Yu Han felt a strange sensation near his lips, eyes, nose, and ears. He touched them, fingers coming away wet and red.

”I overused my Art,” he said to Huang Niuniu. ”It’s Qi depletion.”

He hoped it was. Echoing the watch into the pearl was a calculated risk. The most he had expected was the pearl to explode, which it did. But the green flames appeared again. He hadn’t directly echoed the green meteor, just something on his person during the moment of his death.

Previously, when he had echoed things like smartphones and gunpla models, the green flames were absent. They were a strain on his reserves, and he would be ejected out of the dreamscape faster, but never once did he go directly to Qi depletion.

So what was the difference? Was it that he had the watch while the green meteor blasted him away? Or was it the act of projecting it into a pearl?

I’m going to need an official way to refer to the projection.

It wasn’t registered as an Art. After all, it was like a combination ability of Fei Rui and Yu Han. Before the accord, he couldn’t do it, so if the accord was broken, he would probably lose this ability too.

”Where’s Fei Rui?” He had ben pretty spooked by the green flame.

Huang Niuniu placed Yu Han’s head on her lap and cleaned the blood off his face.

”He wasn’t here when I woke up,” she said, sounding worried.

Yu Han heaved himself up despite the headache and scanned the hut. No boxy crab. He opened the door and saw a pretty obvious crab covered in soil outside.

He was pretending to be a rock again.

”Fei Rui?” Yu Han wobbled over to him, then sat down, not caring about the damp grass or mud.

「It hurts,」 Fei Rui said. He sounded like a kid about to cry. An eye peeked out of the socket. Somehow, it was shedding tears. Did crabs have tear ducts?

Fei Rui extended a claw. The shell near the pincers was burnt and cracked. 「It hurts.」

”I’m sorry,” Yu Han said. ”I didn’t know the green flame would appear.”

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「It hurts.」

”I didn’t know it would affect you in reality.”

Maybe Fei Rui felt that nothing would be accomplished without a good wail. So he did.

Yu Han didn’t know how this mental speak worked. It really needed an equivalent phrase to crying one’s lungs out.

「It hurts!」 Fei Rui shrunk into a palm-sized crab. Yu Han picked him up and caressed his shell.

”There, there. It’s going to be fine.” Yu Han really hoped it would. But the green flame was an anomaly. Was it the same one from the meteor? Did it follow Yu Han to this world somehow?

From now on, he would have to be careful with echoes of objects or events from his life as Johan. He wouldn’t let Fei Rui activate the projections either.

”Is he crying?” Huang Niuniu asked.

”You can tell?”

”Look at all those tears. Give him to me!”

Yu Han passed the crab over.

「Soft Niuniu, do you see this?」 Fei Rui held the tiny pincers up. 「It hurts. Can you see it? My shell was good before, but after that green fire, it became all soft like you. What do I do now?」

Huang Niuniu didn’t understand him, of course. But she saw the discolouration of the shell and said every consoling word in her vocabulary.

Strangely, it worked.

I’ll ask him later. Although part of Yu Han wanted to have Fei Rui bring a pearl to reality as soon as possible, he leaned against the wall, letting his mind rest. His brain felt like a smoothie, and from time to time, his vision would blur.

He brought up the status screens one by one. He had woken up to a huge amount of notifications.

Name: Yu Han (Johan)

Level: 1

Active Accords: 1

True Qi: 107 (+2) / 200

Pure Qi: 12 / 200

Primordial Qi: 0

Lifeforce: 401 (-100) / 792

I lost HP. Well, yeah, bleeding from the head would do that...

True Qi had risen by two. He didn’t take any elixirs, nor did he meditate inside the dreamscape, so it was just the natural gain.

Active Accords: 1

Name: Fei Rui (***)

Type: Spirit Beast

Species: Cerebrant Collector Crab

Level: 10

Arts: 4

Traits: 2

The accord section was the same. Yu Han had hoped that in the Arts, it would show Carapace Control Kata. If the Art name Fei Rui had been using was real, at least.

He then opened the stats panels. He’d gained how many stats? Five? That was the same as a Level Up.

Wait, no. With a Level Up I get Heavenly Allocation too. So half a level up.

Primordial Qi: 0

[Mind Origin: 17.33 (+0.73)]

Intelligence: 14

Memory: 24 (+1)

Perception: 11

Clarity: 10 (+1)

Focus: 11 (+1)

[Body Origin: 6.60]

Endurance: 7

Vitality: 10

Strength: 7

Agility: 4

Dexterity: 5

[Spirit Origin: 8.60 (+0.40)]

Adaptability: 17 (+1)

Magnitude: 5

Density: 6

Fortitude: 10 (+1)

Purity: 5

”What’re you smiling about?” Huang Niuniu asked.

”I became stronger,” Yu Han said.

Now, all his substats in Mind Origin were at ten or more. In MMORPGs, that would usually mean something. In this world, maybe it didn’t. Yu Han’s head felt like a ten-tonne brick at the moment, so he couldn’t really test out if he felt different. Especially with the gains to Focus, Clarity, Fortitude, and Adaptability.

He had some idea what Memory and Adaptability did. But for Focus, Clarity, and Fortitude, he didn’t know.

Have to ask Fang Zhao. The exiled scion from the ever so great clan should have received tutelage.

Yu Han opened the Arts panels next.

Arts:

[Deep Sleep]

Type: Bloodline

Grade: Mortal Level 1

Mastery: Initial Step Level 2 (+1)

True Qi: 7 (+3) / 300

He’d had some hope that the Grade Level increase might’ve been Deep Sleep, but it wasn’t. It was the Art directly tied to his Bloodline, and for Bloodlines which were traits, one could only increase Grade Levels and not Mastery.

[Echoing Dreamscape]

Type: Auxiliary

Grade: Mortal Level 10 (+1)

Mastery: Initial Step Level 6 (+3)

True Qi: 130 (+1441) / 700

”One thousand four hundred and forty-one,” Yu Han whispered. It’s crazy.

The Grade went from nine to ten.

Was it all the testing? Was it the synergy with the memory pearls? That final explosion with the watch? The permanent fixture of Fei Rui’s crabscape to Yu Han’s dreamscape?

It was probably all of those and more.

Three levels in one go. Seeing all those numbers go up made Yu Han wonder if having a brain haemorrhage from time to time wasn’t so bad.

Did the numbers change to reflect what I can do with Echoing Dreamscape now? Or did the numbers change first, which then brought up my Mastery and Grade level with the Art? Will this progress disappear if the accord is no longer there?

Yu Han didn’t want to find out.

[Calm Before the Storm Breathing Technique]

Type: Cultivation

Grade: Mortal Level 5

Mastery: Initial Step Level 2 (+1)

True Qi: 35 (+6) / 300

[Ox Tail 72 Sweeping Forms]

Type: Martial

Grade: Elite Level 2

Mastery: Initial Step Level 2 (+1)

True Qi: 46 (+6) / 300

[Thousand Petals Awareness]

Type: Psychic

Grade: Elite Level 9

Mastery: Initial Step Level 1

True Qi: 148 (+63) / 200

Of the other Arts, only Thousand Petals Awareness had risen considerably in True Qi. Yu Han had almost instinctively gone into focus mode with the Art—

I gained a point in Focus and Clarity. Does this have anything to do with it?

Wen Liujie had mentioned that different Arts, even with the broad categorisation of Martial, Spiritual, and Psychic, relied on different substats within each of the Origins. Maybe for this specific kind of Psychic Art, it relied most on Focus or Clarity, or both?

Traits:

[Existential Anchor]

Grade: Mortal Level 1

True Qi: Requirements Not Satisfied

[Deep Writhing Clam Bloodline]

Grade: Mortal Level 10

True Qi: 70 (+35) / 1100

[Qi Affinity]

Grade: Mortal Level 7

True Qi: 11 (+3) / 800

Deep Writhing Clam Bloodline’s True Qi had doubled, gaining 35. Qi Affinity gained 3.

At the rate he was gaining points in Qi Affinity, he could probably raise the level within a few years. But the thing was, he didn’t know what he was doing to raise the affinity. There was too little data to even plot a correlation.

It was hidden somewhere, within all the changes and experimentations.

Fei Rui scuttled to Yu Han and clasped the hem of his shirt. He gently tugged on it. 「Yu Han. It doesn’t hurt much anymore. Soft Niuniu put the sticky thing on.」 He raised the injured claw. It was covered with some wax-like substance. One of the minor healing ointments they had gotten from the Night Alchemists Yard.

”Good thinking,” Yu Han said.

Huang Niuniu beamed, though she looked troubled.

Fei Rui tugged his shirt again. When Yu Han looked down, Fei Rui was holding a lime-green pearl in his pincer.