My Disciple Is Crazy! Chapter 14: Hole In The Fabric Of Reality

Muscle mory.

That was the first thing that ca to mind. Probably the only thing, if he was being honest with himself.

Xu Kai hadn't believed Chen Xi earlier when she'd suggested his cooking ability ca from muscle mory. He knew how to cook, had known in his past life. The techniques, the timing, the instinct for when a dish needed more salt or another minute on the fla. None of that was new.

But the tools? The ingredients? The strange, primitive setup of this world's kitchen?

That should have tripped him up.

Yet his hands had moved anyway. Reached for things before his brain could catch up. asured, stirred, adjusted, all on pure instinct.

So maybe she was right. Partially, at least. Muscle mory bridged the gap between what he knew and what his body had supposedly never learned. Who knew what else he'd been doing on autopilot without realizing it.

'Makes sense.'

Or at least, it made as much sense as anything else in this place.

He set the thought aside. He'd learned his first real spell now, not counting the flight from yesterday, which he'd sohow just... done.

'Ti to focus on bigger things.'

The original Xu Kai's study materials sat sowhere in the tent. He should dig through them, see what else he could pull from those mories. Or maybe ask Chen Xi if she had access to other spells, other techniques worth learning.

He opened his mouth to ask—

Then stopped.

"Xi. Didn't you say I had an artifact? Sothing I left with you to watch over you when I'm not around?"

She tilted her head.

"Yes, Master. You do."

Xu Kai pointed at the small table in the corner, the one she'd gestured toward earlier.

"The table."

A pause.

"The table?"

"Yes. You pointed at it when you told about the artifact. Isn't that it?" He squinted at the table's surface, bare except for... nothing. Just polished wood. "Because I don't see anything else."

Chen Xi blinked. Processed. Then a soft laugh escaped her, the kind that ca from finally understanding a bad joke.

"Master, no." She shook her head, hair shifting against her shoulders. "The table isn't the artifact."

Xu Kai's brow lifted.

She gestured with her chin, sensing his confusion.

"It's what's on the table."

"I don't see any—"

His voice died.

There, resting on the small table's surface, sat a sphere.

White. Perfectly smooth. A small dark grey circle printed on it surface, and embedded in that grey circle, a smaller black dot.

If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

Xu Kai stared.

Not because of what he was looking at, though that was strange enough, but because of how he was looking at it. The table sat in the far corner of the room. Too far. At least fifteen paces. At that distance, in his past life, he wouldn't have made out more than a pale blur.

'How?'

But now he could see everything.

'Right. Cultivator.'

He'd read about it in cultivation novels, cultivators had sharper senses than mortals. Better vision, clearer hearing. Even at the foundational stage, the difference was night and day. And as they progressed, it only beca more pronounced.

Xu Kai turned back to Chen Xi.

"Is that... an eye?"

At first, he thought he was seeing things wrong. Cultivators have sharp vision, he told himself, but maybe they also have a talent for playing tricks on themselves.

But the longer he stared at that sphere, the pale white curve, the dark grey ring, that unsettling black dot at the center, the more impossible it beca to deny.

It was an eye. Just sitting there on the table. Staring at nothing.

"Ah, yes." Chen Xi nodded. "It's an eye."

Xu Kai gave her a long side-eye of his own. She had the decency to look sheepish, fingers twisting together in front of her robes.

"Eye of... what?"

'Wait.' A cold realization crept up his spine. 'Is the person I transmigrated into a psychopath who gouges out eyes? And if muscle mory is a thing, does that an—'

His eyes widened.

'I'd eventually start exhibiting those traits.'

The horror of it settled into his bones like ice water. What had muscle mory already made him do without realizing? What would it make him do next?

'What in the world did I get myself into?'

"It's the eye of a beast," Chen Xi said, pulling him back from the spiral. "Driftlight Pupil. You refined it into a surveillance spiritual treasure."

"A beast." He let out a slow breath.

'Not a person. A beast.'

The ice in his bones thawed, mostly.

"What kind of beast?"

"You didn't know either, actually." She tilted her head, recalling. "You told you'd never seen, read, or heard of such a creature in your life. According to your description, it was..." She spread her arms wide, stretching them as far as they'd go. "...quite a big fish."

Xu Kai watched her arms.

'That big?'

"And its appearance suggested it didn't swim in water. It swam in sothing else. Sothing not within our understanding."

"What rank was it?"

"That's the thing." Chen Xi's brow furrowed. "You couldn't tell. No matter how hard you tried analyzing it, nothing ca back. Its qi was completely gone. It didn't exude anything, didn't give off so much as a whisper of energy. Like it was never supposed to in the first place." She pressed her palms together, then pulled them apart slowly. "The only thing that existed was its physical body. Everything else... gone."

"How does that happen?"

"You still didn't know. The only unusual thing you could find was the hole. You deduced it ca out from there."

Xu Kai frowned.

"Hole? What hole?"

She hadn't ntioned where the original Xu Kai had been when he found the fish. On land, watching from a cliff? At sea, swimming through the depths? Either seed possible.

"A hole in the fabric of reality."

Xu Kai's frown froze.

"You saw it wide open when you arrived. You created a barrier around it, mostly out of caution. You didn't sense any threat, but you figured it couldn't hurt to be careful." She shrugged one shoulder. "Nothing happened, though. The hole just closed, little by little. By the ti you left, it was gone."

"Did I have any idea what caused it?"

"Not really. You said you were minding your own business when you felt... an indescribable change in the environnt." Her voice dropped slightly. "Then a loud thud. You went to investigate the sound. All you found was settling dust, the fish, and the hole."

Xu Kai waited.

"At first, you thought sothing killed it, an extrely powerful cultivator or beast. But if sothing could punch a literal hole in reality just by fighting, a single move from that thing would have erased the whole area from existence." She t his eyes. "You would have died. No, not died. Erased."

He felt the weight of that.

Chen Xi shrugged again, but it was a smaller motion this ti.

“Or maybe the thing that caused its death attacked it, and that attack itself, punched a hole in reality, and the fish passed through it. But if that were the case..." She trailed off, then finished quietly, "Whatever it was would have co through to check the corpse. And if sothing like that saw you..."

She didn't need to finish the sentence.

A sigh escaped her.

"So in the end, you decided the fish was responsible for the hole. That it was capable of tearing through reality and moving wherever it wanted. It probably created the rift as a last attempt to flee from whatever wounded it so badly." She paused. "The reason the hole didn't close right away was because it died."

Xu Kai turned the words over in his head.

The reasoning was clean. Logical. He couldn't find a flaw in it.

Except for one thing.

'What killed the fish?'

Chen Xi's logic made sense, if whatever attacked it had followed through the hole, it would have found Xu Kai standing right there. But he is still breathing. Still intact. So maybe nothing had followed.

But that didn't an nothing was there.

It could have been on the other side. Watching. Deciding not to step through.

If that was the case...

It saw him.