Calibration Attempts
The first thing Shin Yung did after deciding to lie to the world
was nothing.
He sat on the edge of his pavilion bed, boots still on, hands resting loosely on his knees, staring at the wall where the light from the paper window fell slightly out of alignment. The shadow of the window frame lagged behind the sunlight by a hair’s breadth, creating a silent, visual stutter that made the room feel like a poorly dubbed foreign film.
He waited.
The world waited back.
No alarms.
No elders bursting in.
No sudden thunder announcing that Heaven had noticed his internal monologue.
After several minutes, Shin Yung nodded to himself.
“Good,” he murmured. “So thinking doesn’t count.”
That, at least, was a relief.
The second thing he did was attempt a very small lie.
Not a declaration. Not a performance. Just a suggestion.
He stood and walked to the low table by the window. On it sat a cup of cold tea, forgotten sometime yesterday. The surface of the liquid was still.
Shin Yung stared at it.
“I am about to touch this cup,” he thought calmly.
Then, carefully, deliberately—
He did not touch it.
He waited to see if the world would flinch.
Nothing happened.
The tea remained tea.
The cup remained a cup.
Reality, it seemed, was not yet reading his intentions like a finalized script.
He exhaled slowly.
“Alright,” he said aloud. “Let’s try something stupider.”
He raised his hand again, hovering it above the cup.
“I am touching the cup,” he thought.
The cup remained untouched.
For a moment.
Then—
The tea rippled.
Just once. A single, perfect ring spread outward across the surface, as if something had brushed it from the inside.
Shin Yung froze.
His hand was still several inches away.
The ripple faded. The tea stilled.
Nothing else occurred.
No system fanfare. No trembling Dao. No screaming cultivators.
Just a cup of tea that had, very briefly, believed a lie.
Shin Yung lowered his hand.
“…Huh.”
He did not smile. He did not panic.
He sat back down and stared at the cup with the tired, evaluating gaze of a man trying to figure out whether a chair was going to collapse under him or merely squeak.
“That was delayed,” he muttered. “And partial.”
He waited for the System.
It waited longer.
Then, with the enthusiasm of a tax notice, a thin red line of text flickered into existence at the edge of his vision.
[ * SYSTEM STATUS * ]
[ Local Calibration: Unstable ]
[ Illusory Effect Registered ]
[ Causality Confirmation: Incomplete ]
No explanation.
No suggestions.
No congratulations.
Shin Yung rubbed his temple.
“So,” he said, “lying works.”
The headache pulsed in agreement.
“Sometimes.”
By midday, Shin Yung had established three important rules.
First: Effects could be triggered without movement.
Second: Effects were not guaranteed.
Third: The world behaved like an underpaid clerk who had been asked to approve something above their authority and was stalling for time.
He tested again.
This time, with a rock.
He picked up a small stone from the courtyard path and placed it on the table.
“I will drop this,” he thought.
He did not drop it.
The stone remained where it was.
He waited.
Three heartbeats later, the stone rolled half an inch to the left and stopped, as if embarrassed.
Shin Yung stared.
“…That wasn’t even the right direction.”
The System did not comment.
He tried again.
“I have already dropped it.”
The stone wobbled. Lifted—barely—then fell back down with a soft click.
Shin Yung sighed.
“This is less ‘divine authority’ and more ‘poorly trained illusionist.’”
Another flicker.
[ * SYSTEM STATUS * ]
[ Reality Response: Hesitant ]
[ Error Normalization Attempt: Ongoing ]
He snorted quietly.
“They’re arguing about it,” he realized.
Not the System.
Reality.
The world itself seemed unsure whether it was supposed to obey him, ignore him, or report him to someone higher up.
That uncertainty, Shin Yung suspected, was the only reason he was still alive.
He began, reluctantly, to organize his thoughts.
Not on paper—he did not trust paper anymore—but in his head.
He called it, without much enthusiasm, the Lies Notebook.
Not lies he had told.
Lies he intended.
Entry One (Mental):
Lie: “I have touched the cup.”
Result: Delayed ripple.
Notes: World acknowledged the concept before the action.
Entry Two:
Lie: “The stone has fallen.”
Result: Partial compliance. Wrong direction.
Notes: Literal interpretation appears optional.
Entry Three:
Lie: “Nothing is happening.”
Result: Nothing happened.
Notes: Either the world agreed or refused to be ironic.
He stopped there. It wasn’t a muscle he was training; it was a rendering error he was trying to exploit. Too many entries felt dangerous.
He was, after all, still under observation.
The sect, meanwhile, was not idle.
From his pavilion, Shin Yung could hear raised voices drifting from the training grounds.
Not shouting.
Debating.
Which, in a cultivation sect, was worse.
“…you cannot simply pause the Cloud Flow technique mid-strike!”
“Why not? Senior Shin pauses while walking!”
“That’s not a technique, that’s—”
“A revelation!”
Shin Yung closed his window.
He did not need to hear the rest.
Yesterday’s punishment had done its work. The sect was quiet in the way that precedes an administrative disaster. No riots. No rebellions.
Just memos, whispered opinions, and ideological lines being drawn with increasing neatness.
The conservatives wanted stability.
The progressives wanted acceleration.
Both believed Shin Yung was on their side. Somewhere, a high-pitched hum pierced his ears as the System interface flared a violent red.
[ Status: Consensus Achieved ].
This was, he suspected, how wars started.
That afternoon, Su Yan arrived.
She did not knock.
She hovered outside the pavilion door for a moment too long, then entered as if stepping onto thin ice.
“Senior Shin,” she said, bowing.
Her voice was correct. Her posture was correct. Her eyes were not.
They flicked to the corners of the room, as if expecting the walls to blink.
“How is your… condition?” she asked.
Shin Yung considered lying.
He did not.
“It’s inconsistent,” he said.
Su Yan stiffened.
“…In what way?”
He gestured vaguely at the air.
“Sometimes the world listens. Sometimes it pretends it didn’t hear me.”
Her hand moved unconsciously toward her waist, clutching the 'Reality Anchor' jade talisman hanging there. She performed a subtle sect gesture of protection—an act usually reserved for warding off evil spirits.
“That… may be for the best,” she said, carefully.
Shin Yung raised an eyebrow.
“For whom?”
“For everyone,” she replied, too quickly.
He watched her swallow.
“The Elders believe the incident yesterday has… stabilized the situation,” she continued.
“Disciplinary action restores trust in the system.”
Shin Yung thought of the boy being dragged away, bewildered and terrified, punished not for failure but for success.
“They punished him for being fast,” he said.
Su Yan nodded.
“They called it ‘irregular advancement.’”
He waited for the justification.
She did not provide one.
“That phrase,” Shin Yung said, “does a lot of work.”
She did not disagree.
After she left, Shin Yung attempted another calibration.
This time, with himself.
He stood in the center of the room.
“I am sitting,” he thought.
He remained standing.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then his legs buckled.
Not fully. Just enough that his knees bent sharply, forcing him to catch himself on the table.
He grimaced.
“That one counts as a warning.”
[ * SYSTEM STATUS * ]
[ Self-Targeting Detected ]
[ Recommendation: Discouraged ]
“Oh, now you have recommendations,” he muttered.
He sat down properly, heart pounding.
The Lies Notebook updated itself.
Entry Four:
Lie: “I am sitting.”
Result: Delayed physical compliance.
Notes: Self-directed lies carry higher risk. Avoid unless necessary.
He leaned back and stared at the ceiling.
This wasn’t power.
It wasn’t even control.
It was negotiation.
With something that didn’t like being contradicted.
The problem, Shin Yung realized, was not that the world responded to lies.
It was that it responded selectively.
Like a bureaucracy.
Clear instructions were ignored.
Ambiguous ones were overinterpreted.
And anything that threatened the existing order was escalated immediately.
He thought of the System’s rising synchronization value.
Of reality trying, desperately, to make him fit.
To define him.
To correct him.
He closed his eyes.
“If I don’t manage this,” he thought, “they will.”
The Lies Notebook added its most important entry yet.
Entry Five:
Lie: “This is harmless.”
The world did not respond.
That, somehow, was the most frightening result of all.
That night, Shin Yung lay awake listening to the sect breathe.
Footsteps.
Distant bells.
The soft hum of wards doing their jobs.
Everything was functioning.
Everything was wrong.
He did not laugh.
But somewhere, deep in the absurdity of it all, he felt the faintest flicker of something like grim amusement.
The world was terrified of chaos.
So terrified that it was willing to create far more of it in the name of order.
Shin Yung stared into the darkness and began planning his next lie.
Not to escape. Not to dominate.
But to survive in a world where being slightly out of sync had become a crime.
This was not cultivation. This was calibration.
And for the first time, Shin Yung understood:
He was no longer reacting to absurdity.
He was preparing to use it.
He reached out and, for the first time, didn't try to hide the lag. He grabbed the candle's flame. The pain arrived two seconds late, a white-hot sting that confirmed his theory. He was no longer a bug; Reality, somewhere beyond the walls, hesitated.
