The Quantum Path to Immortality

Elias Vance had spent most of his first week in the sect’s outer and inner library, a dusty, cavernous space lined with countless scrolls and heavy tomes. He worked at the library as a cleaner and occasionally reading some books. He moved with a practiced quietness, acting the part of a curious but ultimately unremarkable disciple. He kept his questions simple, his gaze downcast, and his coarse outer robes meticulously clean, a small rebellion against the accumulated grime of centuries on the shelves. The outer court elders, perpetually harried and preoccupied with their own cultivation or the incessant squabbles of the less disciplined youths, barely noticed him—just another underwhelming novice hoping to touch the sky with wooden wings and more ambition than talent.

But behind his deceptively still gaze, Elias was absorbing everything. Not just the literal text, but the nuances, the underlying data. He wasn’t simply reading; he was performing a high-speed, multi-threaded information ingest, processing every scrap of data. Sect history: a chronicle of power struggles, alliances, and feuds. Cultivation manuals: dense texts filled with intricate diagrams and esoteric prose. Elemental theory: vague explanations of Qi manipulation. World geography: rough maps and accounts of distant lands. Cultivation stages: a hierarchical ladder of power classifications. Sect politics: a Byzantine web of allegiances and grudges. He was building a comprehensive mental database of this Xuanwu Realm.

He now knew this world called itself the Xuanwu Realm, a name that evoked ancient, powerful beasts. The sect he now belonged to, the Emerald Sky Sect, was one of the three dominant powers in the immediate region, its prestige built on centuries of tradition and its formidable roster of elders. Their strength, he quickly discerned, came from what they called "orthodox elemental cultivation"—mastery over wind, fire, water, earth, and lightning Qi—and a strict, almost religious adherence to established doctrine.

It was also, Elias observed with a growing sense of intellectual exasperation, deeply, profoundly inefficient. They recorded cultivation breakthroughs on brittle paper scrolls, prone to decay and accidental incineration. They catalogued medicinal herbs in poorly maintained, often inaccurate registers. Internal energy pathways, the very blueprints of their spiritual power, were primarily transmitted through oral tradition, whispered from master to disciple, prone to misinterpretation and deliberate obfuscation. Most manuals were passed down through generations with accumulated errors, illegible marginal notes, or "master’s insights" that were more superstition than empirically verifiable science.

It was, in Elias’s own internal assessment, "a Bronze Age wrapped in silk and arrogance." A civilization capable of incredible feats of power, yet utterly devoid of the systematic approach that had unlocked Earth’s technological golden age. He saw the potential, the raw energy, but also the frustrating lack of precision, the reliance on intuition over repeatable results.

He wanted to do research. Proper, rigorous research. He yearned to build instruments, to isolate variables, to scan body states with precision, to set up computational simulations, to chart double-blind experiments. He wanted to measure Qi, quantify its properties, map its flow with a precision that would make their "meridian diagrams" look like child’s scribbles.

But there were no labs. No controlled environments. No structured innovation beyond rote practice and whispered ancient secrets. Everything was anecdotal. Vague. Described in poetic metaphors and ambiguous parables: "Feel the river." "Absorb the flame." "Let the heavens move through you." Elias, a man who had once debugged an AI by tracing errant nanosecond fluctuations, wanted to scream into the dusty silence of the library. He hadn’t spent two decades engineering orbital AI systems and predictive physics models, or contemplating the very nature of consciousness, just to get reincarnated into a world where cultivators genuinely believed "cultivation deviation"—a disastrous Qi imbalance—was caused by "mental demons" or, more simply, a bad mood. The concept of psychological factors was foreign to their understanding of energy flow.

So, he did what any sane, driven scientist would do in his situation. He looked for a better alternative. An edge. A foundational insight into this world’s underlying mechanics that no one else understood.

And he found it in something called divine sense.

Divine sense, as he gleaned from the manuals and overheard whispers, was considered an advanced tool here—something that only manifested after weeks or months of diligent, arduous cultivation, dependent heavily on inherent talent and luck. Most cultivators used divine sense as a crude spiritual torchlight, a vague sensory extension to scout surroundings or probe other cultivators’ Qi.

But for Elias? It had been active the very moment he woke up in Shen Yuan’s body, a low-grade, buzzing awareness that permeated his new consciousness. A side effect of his unique reincarnation, perhaps. His consciousness information—optimized by quantum collapse during his Earth accident, and further refined by the unexpected spiritual encoding as it latched onto Shen Yuan’s dying signal—had entered this world already harmonized with the surrounding Qi field. This initial, rudimentary divine sense was already more attuned than most beginners, but it was, to his exacting standards, a messy, noisy, and imprecise instrument. Not up to standard for a truly scientific endeavor.

So, he decided to level it up.