General Li Zhenhua

General Li Zhenhua never liked war rooms.

He respected them, having commanded more battles from polished tables and stone-banded strategy halls than any other living general in the Empire. But liking them? No. That was for nobles who never saw what happened after the ink dried on a battle plan. Plans looked good on paper; steel looked better in throats.

The General stood in one now, alone. Replay feeds flickered across soulglass projections arranged on a wall no one else in the household used. This wasn’t the official war room. It was a back chamber beneath the east wing of the estate—a place for ghost work. And that's what the General was doing.

He tapped the projection twice, and the visual sequence resumed. It showed a timestamped recording of his three sons—Gavin, Lucas, and Nathan—in a private chamber from three weeks earlier with his “ever so interesting” son-in-law, Ethan Zhou.

It was a projection that he had watched several times already.

Ethan stood before the others, his hair slightly disheveled, sleeves rolled up, with his confidence tightly leashed. There was no preamble, ceremony, or apologies, just a straight approach to business.

General Li's mouth ticked up slightly. “Good,” he muttered aloud. “If you have to explain everything you’re building, it’s not worth building.”

He already knew about the machine, the Framework, Ethan was developing; he had known from the start. Not the specifics, of course, but the contours of it. The background investigation he had conducted had been thorough, providing an intimate understanding of his son-in-law's genius, but it wasn't until Ethan came to his home that he truly appreciated it. The General valued boldness, decisiveness, and the ability to act and accomplish. This was precisely why he had been hesitant about the second son of the Zhou family, who had many theories but didn’t seem to accomplish much.

The Ethan before him was different. He had goals. He had ambitions. He stopped at nothing to accomplish those goals, and, in furtherance of those goals, he went to work. He did what was necessary to acquire resources through every means at his disposal, including use of his own body. He worked tirelessly, regardless of obstacle, sacrificing time and even health in the pursuit of accomplishment. He identified his weaknesses and trained. He found his project's flaws and created workarounds. He realized his need for specific items and procured them. The young man had done all this with mastery: it was beautiful.

He completed his project, and his exhaustive work to understand cultivation, spell casting, and the sword had seen terrific progress.

It was truly impressive.

But what truly surprised him every time he reviewed the feeds was Ethan’s machine. The Framework, as he called it, was amazing. He was in awe at how effectively the damn thing worked. In less than a week, they had built the room to facilitate Ethan’s vision. All three of his boys helped his son-in-law. They tried to keep it from their father, of course, but it was foolish of them to think he would let it go unnoticed.

They hired a group of workers, Scripters, and Spellworkers with no fanfare or ceremony. They simply carved out a room in one of the lesser-used drill halls on the north end of the estate and filled it with Ethan’s machines and all sorts of other mage tech. There were mana-threaded plates, resonance pillars, and a glowing central projection table that never seemed to cool. The equipment alone was worth thousands in gold or elixirs. After importing the equipment, they brought in people, books, and scrolls and started dumping information into the machine. He didn’t understand it at first but slowly caught on.

After what seemed like endless hours of this information dump, the Framework went to work. The General watched the whole thing unfold from a projection crystal that one of his elite guards had installed without the boys' knowledge.

It was absolutely fascinating to see the ordeal unfold.

The General watched as a half-dozen cultivators from minor sects moved through a standardized blade form. One sequence. Ten steps. Easy to memorize, hard to perfect.

Above them, on the monitoring wall, a series of projected motion paths played on a loop—recordings layered with spectral overlays. The first clips were rough. Young disciples with solid muscle but no rhythm. Their strikes jerked wide at the elbow. Their stances failed under internal pressure. Timing was inconsistent. Recovery was delayed after every fifth movement. Daniel's system didn't scold. It showed. Each error was rendered in fine red glyph-light: rotational failure in the spine, micro-pulse delay in the rear foot, residual mana drag on the third extension.

Then the same sequence played again with the same cultivators and same forms. Only this time, after a single week of training under the Framework’s feedback system, something had changed. They were cleaner. Sharper. Their lines more stable, their recovery tighter. It wasn’t just physical correction—it was rhythmic integrity, the combination of mana, and movement and form. The body was responding to something deeper than instruction, something internal, honed by repetition guided by algorithmic awareness.

General Li watched the last set of forms conclude, then shifted his gaze to the logs scrolling beside the projection. There was over a seventy percent reduction in recovery lag and nearly double the stance retention scores. A marked increase in mid-technique control under simulated spiritual strain.

“He’s not teaching them forms,” the general thought. “He’s teaching them how to adapt to realtime feedback.”

The General marveled. Ethan hadn’t built a weapon; he’d built a system of production that trained people into better weapons. He watched the next vid. The same cultivators, same strikes, after an additional week using the Framework overlay. Cleaner. Sharper. More stable. They were visibly getting stronger before his eyes. Not only their technique, but their cultivation was steadily improving as the Framework dissected in real-time the efficiency of their mantras.

Holy shit.

These weren’t prodigies. They were at best Level 3 cultivators, most of whom were in their mid-20s. But with Ethan’s machine reinforcing their instincts, technique, process, and skills with technical feedback, they didn’t need to be geniuses. They just needed to learn how to listen to corrections.

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“He’s building for the weak,” General Li said, folding his arms. “That’s the difference.”

He turned to another panel and keyed a different feed—this one tied to the medical trial Ethan had just begun. Two formulas. One stabilizer. One cleanser. He hadn’t been briefed officially, but unofficially? He knew. He always knew.

The stabilizer was clean. No banned components. Nothing volatile. It refined pulse consistency, balanced energy discharge, and had already prevented two core destabilizations during preliminary tests. The cleanser was a bit harder to pin down, but the aura traces it left behind were unmistakable—like a cleansing flame moving through poisoned soil. It couldn’t purify a corrupted core entirely, but it gave damaged cultivators a chance to stand again. And in war, that kind of edge could win battles. Not for elites. For everyone else.

He switched to the final file. It wasn’t training footage this time. No minor sect students. No sword drills or mana overlays. This was a briefing room. Dimly lit. Twelve mid- and high-ranking military commanders were seated around a mana-woven strategy table. Gavin stood at the front, a projection ring humming at his side. He was calm, focused, and in command.

“The following formations were generated by the Framework’s tactical grid engine,” Gavin said, gesturing as lines of holographic energy arranged themselves into battalion-sized groupings. “Parameters: mixed-level force, high variance in cultivation stages, restricted use of individual spellwork.”

The projections moved. Six linked squads rotated into a shifting V-pattern—interlocking movement routes layered with mana field boosts and synchronized strike zones. The model showed each low-level cultivator weaving in and out of flanking positions, guided by predictive mana behavior and enforced rhythm.

And then it happened.

A simulated high-tier cultivator—clearly marked at Level 7—entered the field. The formation didn’t break. It adapted. The rear guard pulled mana suppression shields while the front pods collapsed into a pressure trap. Internal feedback adjusted in real time. The enemy’s aura spike was absorbed by the outer ring and redirected into two piercing strikes from the sides—by Level 3 units.

“The system compensates for difference in level through synchronization and intentional disruption,” Gavin explained. “Weak cultivators simply act like soldiers. They can win if the rhythm is perfect by allowing the formation to carry the weight.”

Not one of the generals spoke. Even through the feed, General Li could see it on their faces. Respect. And more than that—reluctant belief. He sat back, exhaling once through his nose. “He’s solved it,” he thought. “The scaling problem.”

General Li stepped back from the screens. In the stillness of the chamber, a strange feeling stirred in his chest—faint, but real. Excitement. He hadn’t felt it in years. The truth was he knew that war was coming; he’d been preparing for the horde quietly, alone. No fanfare. No committee. Just the old channels: scouts in the western ridges, arcane surveillance spells stitched into old leyline routes, and one or two quiet kills in the dark. He’d known something was coming.

But Ethan had confirmed it. Worse, he’d shown data that General Li had missed. That had stung a little. Not because he felt threatened, but because he realized for the first time that someone else had started looking ahead with the same clarity he used to own alone. So he had double-checked the numbers. He reran the routes. He collated the resonance fluctuations from the zones near the southern provinces. And he’d found what Ethan had already seen. The horde was coming. More of them than anyone expected. Not wild things. Not rage-beasts. But tactically aligned sub-ranks, organized into modular strike formations. They moved like they trained. Like they listened.

And their champions? Power signatures were on par with advanced Human-level cultivators. At least ten of them. Maybe more. General Li could take one. The brutes had power but lacked the spells and skills that tipped the scale. So he could take one. Maybe five. Maybe ten, if he pushed his body beyond safe limiters. But not ten… with tens of thousands behind them. That was suicide.

He sat down slowly, not out of weariness, but just to think better. Ethan Zhou had seen all of this coming. He’d begun preparing not to fight the war himself, but to build a structure that could elevate others. To coordinate. To survive. To win.

“He’s not building swords,” the general murmured. “He’s building the armory, the logistics, and the infrastructure."

And suddenly, General Li wanted to help. He didn’t need to give orders. He just started asking questions.

In the southern storage yard, five floors below the standard inventory registry, General Li walked among sealed crates older than some provinces. His escort—a junior quartermaster named Jinhai—hadn’t stopped sweating since they entered the cold vaults.

“When was the last time these were opened?” the general asked, tapping a heavy steel-bound container.

“Twelve years, sir,” Jinhai said. “They’re tagged under Cold Reserve—listed for sector flood contingencies.”

“They’re weapons, not sandbags.”

“Yes, General.”

General Li tapped the lock rune, and the crate hissed open. Inside were racks of dormant spears—reforged with folded bloodsteel, not meant for dueling, but for coordinated fieldwork. Infantry weapons. They were designed to hold an aura charge for five seconds after being thrown. Perfect for soldiers with unstable cores or trainees who couldn’t consistently project force.

“Give them a weapon that remembers what they can’t yet do.”

He marked the inventory. “Move two hundred to isolated training stores. Quietly.”

“Of course, General. Will they be used for formal drills?”

“No,” Li said. “Not yet. For now... they’re part of a hypothesis.”

Next came the drills. He requested a list—not of elite sword instructors but of the old bastards. The kind who’d trained provincial militia units or managed city gate defense. Men and women who understood formation fighting, pressure balance, and how to maintain cohesion when ranks broke. Not duelists. Fighters. He sent letters to seven of them. He didn’t use an official seal, just a note.

“We may need to teach new blood how to stand together again. I’ll give you the tools if you bring me their discipline.” Four responded by the end of the week.

Then came the healing units. He rerouted three squads of internal medicine adepts from the secondary infirmary and reclassified them under “combat recovery reserve.” No one noticed. No one questioned. The entry was buried in a funding line leftover from a Rift relief allocation. They were told only to review basic battlefield triage for cultivator-class wounds and start practicing with instability suppressants during mana backlash.

“You don’t need to know why,” he told the squad leader. “Just be ready.”

By the end of the fifth day, the General had moved: two hundred mana-responsive spears, four dozen collapsible shields, seven old instructors, three healers with field-level clearance, and one quartermaster with orders not to speak. And he hadn’t said Ethan’s name once. Not even in the reports. But he thought of him often.

He thought of the way Ethan never quite looked anyone in the eye when talking about the system—like he was always running calculations in the background. Like the machine mattered more than the politics. He thought of how Ethan hadn’t come to him for approval.

“He doesn’t want permission.”

“He wants freedom.”

It was rare. And it was dangerous. But it was right. Because what Ethan was building wasn’t a personal empire. It wasn’t a weapon to swing or a banner to fly. It was something deeper, quieter—a structure that would let ordinary people become more than the world allowed. General Li had spent his whole life protecting power. But Ethan? He was trying to distribute it.

That night, General Li sat alone on the roof of the western pavilion, legs crossed, his sword laid beside him like an old friend. He watched the moon rise above the ridgeline. And for the first time in a long while, he whispered something he hadn’t said in years. “Let’s build it.”