Chapter 41: Chapter 41 - Pre-Installed Applications and the Workplace Liability

With his foundation flawlessly established and his meridians scrubbed completely frictionless, Su Bai decided to dedicate the rest of the day to practical application.

Having infinite Qi was useless if he didn’t know how to spend it.

Most orthodox Cultivation Methods were just an Operating System. They taught a cultivator how to process and store energy, leaving them to hunt down separate Cultivation Techniques to actually learn how to fight.

But the Void-Sunflower Supreme Method was different. It came pre-packaged with its own proprietary suite of martial arts applications.

Sitting on his favorite flat stone, Su Bai ran a diagnostic on his newly installed software.

The first thing he noticed was the sect’s standard weapon of choice. Everywhere he looked in the Radiant Sky Sect, cultivators rode, swung, and worshipped flashy swords. But the Void-Sunflower method completely bypassed orthodox weaponry.

It used needles.

Su Bai closed his eyes and reached into his Dantian. With a mental command, he snapped off one of the millions of microscopic, razor-sharp silver needles bristling on the surface of his Yin-Crystal Asteroid Dao Pedestal.

He pinched his thumb and index finger together. A sliver of condensed, absolute-zero liquid Yin materialized between his fingertips. It was nearly invisible, reflecting no light and emitting zero killing intent.

Su Bai narrowed his eyes at a thick peach tree across the courtyard. He flicked his wrist.

Pfft. There was no sonic boom. There was no flashy arc of sword light. The needle simply vanished from his fingers.

A tiny, microscopic hole appeared in the thick trunk of the peach tree. The needle passed directly through the dense wood without shedding any momentum, continued its trajectory, and silently struck a massive ornamental boulder ten yards behind the tree.

Crack. The instant the needle embedded itself, the volatile liquid Yin detonated. The entire boulder froze solid, encased in a thick, jagged layer of pitch-black frost.

Su Bai gulped as he stared at the frozen rock.

He had just acquired the ultimate assassination tool. His corporate brain immediately began calculating the efficiency metrics.

’Why do cultivators even use giant, aerodynamic-nightmare swords?’ Su Bai wondered in sheer disbelief. ’A sword requires massive energy to swing, creates air resistance, and flashes brightly enough to alert everyone in a three-mile radius. A needle offers one hundred percent armor-penetration with near-zero energy expenditure. The ROI on this is absurd.’

Thrilled with his new primary weapon, Su Bai stood up to test the second application: the movement technique.

The manual called it the Frictionless Phantom Step.

The original Sunflower Manual was infamous for granting its practitioners speed so extreme it looked like teleportation. Su Bai was eager to see how his customized OS handled the code.

Following the manual’s instructions, Su Bai rerouted his Qi into his legs. Instead of using the Qi to violently push himself forward like a normal cultivator, he used the extreme Yin to aggressively "lubricate" the space directly around his body.

He took a step forward.

Whoosh. Su Bai let out a startled laugh. He wasn’t running... he was gliding. By projecting absolute-zero Yin around him, he removed all physical air friction and atmospheric drag. He moved in absolute, terrifying silence.

When he dashed from the flat stone to the courtyard gate, he left behind a hyper-realistic afterimage of himself made entirely of condensed, freezing mist.

He spent the next hour limit-testing the skill. He glided around the courtyard. His unkempt, crumpled hair barely moved in the wind because he was essentially slipping through the cracks in the air.

’The synergy is flawless,’ Su Bai realized. Soon, he came to a smooth, frictionless halt. ’I can glide directly into an enemy’s blind spot, leave a decoy afterimage in my place, and flick a needle into their spine before they even blink. It’s the perfect stealth repositioning tool.’

However, there was a third application in the software suite that made Su Bai deeply hesitant.

It was a control skill called Nether-Thread Puppetry.

The principle was terrifyingly simple.

Su Bai could extrude near-invisible, microscopic strings of highly condensed Qi and attach them to the back of his needles. Once a needle was lodged into an enemy’s nervous system (or a fresh corpse), Su Bai could use the thread to aggressively puppeteer their limbs like a macabre marionette.

Alternatively, he could string the invisible threads across the battlefield to act as razor-sharp tripwires capable of cleanly slicing through low-tier magical shields like a laser cutter.

Su Bai winced.

’This sounds like a massive HR violation,’ Su Bai thought as he rubbed his temples. ’Puppeteering corpses? That is textbook Demonic Sect behavior.’

He stood there for a moment, having an internal morality debate. However, his practical corporate logic quickly overrode his hesitation.

A tool was just a tool. A pen could write a beautiful poem or sign a massive layoff notice. Righteousness and demonic behavior weren’t dictated by the software, but by the user’s compliance with policy.

As long as he didn’t run around using his coworkers as meat-shields, it was fine.

Shaking off his guilt, Su Bai decided to practice the technique.

Thanks to the Marrow-Severing Sword Pill that had aggressively scrubbed his meridians earlier that day, his Qi control was flawlessly smooth. He materialized a needle, extruded a microscopic tether of Qi from his fingertip, and attached it to the needle’s base.

With a flick of his wrist, the needle shot out.

Instead of flying straight, Su Bai tugged the invisible thread. The needle banked sharply around the peach tree at a bizarre, ninety-degree angle, wrapping the razor-wire thread around a thick branch.

Su Bai pulled his finger back.

Snick. The invisible tripwire effortlessly sliced through the thick wood. The branch dropped silently to the grass.

For the rest of the afternoon, Su Bai turned his courtyard into a lethal playground. He practiced recalling his needles mid-flight, banking them around corners, and setting up invisible, floating tripwires across the perimeter of his array.

He didn’t dare test the puppetry aspect on a living creature yet. He had no idea what kind of side effects that would trigger. But his spatial control over the threads was becoming top-tier.

By the time the sun began to set behind Clear Cloud Peak, Su Bai had successfully chained all three skills into a seamless, lethal combo.

He wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead and exhaled a long breath of frosty air. He felt deeply satisfied with his progress.

The cultivation world was a highly volatile, completely unregulated market. Even though he was currently protected by the Radiant Sky Sect, reorganizations happened, and rival companies could initiate hostile takeovers at any time.

No one knew what the future held.

"Basic workplace self-defense protocol established," Su Bai muttered softly to himself as he dismissed the invisible threads into the wind.

He was finally ready to clock back in.