Cultivating in Reverse: My Sign-In System Wants Me Dead

Su Bai froze at the window of his wooden hut.

It had only been two days since he had casually mentioned holding "Office Hours" to the Outer Sect disciples. He had expected maybe a dozen stragglers.

Instead, gathered at the base of his mountain was a sea of hundreds of disciples. They were all waiting in silence.

’Well, there goes my business trip to the other peaks today,’ Su Bai sighed. But a corporate promise was a corporate promise. Canceling a scheduled meeting with this many attendees was a massive HR violation in his personal code of conduct.

Su Bai unsealed the defensive array of Clear Cloud Peak.

Sensing the barrier part, the Outer Sect disciples immediately moved. They didn’t rush, shove, or chatter. They marched up the thousands of stone steps in a highly organized, terrifyingly orderly manner. They were absolutely terrified that a single misplaced footstep or loud cough might anger their Senior Brother Su.

When they finally reached the the peak, Su Bai was waiting for them. He was standing with his hands clasped behind his back, looking as serene and pale as moonlight.

"Greetings to Senior Brother Su!" the massive crowd echoed, bowing deeply.

Su Bai offered a polite smile. "Take a seat. Let us begin our Office Hours."

The crowd sat cross-legged on the stone tiles in perfect unison. Su Bai looked out over the sea of heads and spotted the earnest junior sister he had spoken to previously.

"Junior Sister, do you have the compiled report?" he asked.

"Yes, Senior Brother!" She practically sprinted forward, then respectfully handed him a stack of neatly organized scrolls detailing the disciples’ various bottlenecks.

Su Bai took it. He was genuinely pleased. ’Excellent administrative efficiency. I love it when the juniors consolidate the FAQs.’

The other disciples watched him with bated breath. Many had already drawn their calligraphy brushes, hovering over blank scrolls. They were ready to transcribe his words as if they were divine scripture.

Su Bai skimmed the reports. His six years of reading the sect’s grand archives were about to pay massive dividends. He easily identified the root causes of their problems and began to speak.

He was incredibly patient. He purposely slowed his cadence and translated profound, headache-inducing Daoist riddles into simple, practical logic so even the most untalented disciple could understand.

The Outer Sect disciples stared at him with glowing eyes.

His calm and melodious voice felt like magic. It pulled them into a state of deep enlightenment.

Some wrote frantically, terrified of missing a single syllable. Others were so absorbed they completely forgot to take notes, their mouths hanging open.

In the far corner, one eccentric disciple wasn’t even listening to the lecture. He was rapidly painting a majestic portrait of Su Bai looking thoughtfully at a scroll.

For the first hour, Su Bai cleared out the minor technical errors. But as he reached the bottom of the report, his eyes narrowed at a glaring, systemic issue.

’A massive accumulation of chaotic, impure Qi,’ Su Bai noted.

Outer Sect disciples were notoriously poor. To keep up with their quotas, they often bought cheap, low-grade pills filled with toxic impurities.

In the short term, it provided a burst of Qi. In the long term, it was the equivalent of heavy metal poisoning. It clogged their meridians with violent, chaotic sludge that prevented them from breaking through.

To a normal cultivator, this impure Qi was a deadly, career-ending poison.

To Su Bai, his eyes literally glowed with capitalist joy. ’It’s a goldmine!’

Without hesitation, Su Bai extended his spiritual sense over the crowd. The disciples didn’t dare resist his probing.

Instantly, Su Bai detected the specific individuals suffering from severe impurity buildup.

He pointed to the crowd, then called up dozens of disciples to the front.

The selected juniors nervously approached. They looked confused and slightly terrified.

Seeing them like that, Su Bai gently explained the severe buildup of toxic impurities in their meridians.

Hearing the grim diagnosis, the disciples’ faces drained of color. These impurities was notoriously difficult and expensive to cure. They couldn’t afford top-tier pills. Their cultivation paths were effectively over.

"Do not panic," Su Bai’s soothing voice washed over them. It instantly calmed their racing hearts. "Sit and meditate. I will handle this."

The disciples immediately sat cross-legged, trusting him.

Su Bai stepped behind the first disciple and placed a pale hand on the boy’s back.

Internally, he activated his newly downloaded app: The Starving Wraith’s Devouring Maw.

A localized, invisible vacuum formed in Su Bai’s palm. Instantly, the dark, violent, and highly toxic chaotic Qi polluting the junior’s meridians was forcefully siphoned out.

The dark energy surged up Su Bai’s arm, funneling directly into his meridians.

The crowd stirred violently. Gasps echoed across the training ground.

They could actually see the dark, poisonous miasma leaving the junior’s body and entering Su Bai’s pure, pristine white robes!

Several disciples instinctively lurched forward, wanting to scream and stop him. They knew exactly what he was doing. He was drawing their lethal poison into his own body!

But they froze in their tracks. If they interrupted a delicate Qi transfer now, the backlash could violently cripple their Senior Brother Su even further.

They were forced to sit in agonizing silence, watching this peerless genius supposedly destroy his own foundation to save a bunch of worthless Outer Sect laborers.

Muffled crying began to ripple through the crowd.

’He is so pale... he is already injured... yet he is bearing our sins!’ a female disciple wept into her hands.

Su Bai, completely oblivious to the dramatic tragedy playing out behind him, was having the time of his life.

’Oh, this is fantastic!’ He moved efficiently down the line. He placed his hand on the next disciple, siphoning their toxic waste, and moving to the next. He was an aggressive asset liquidator, forcefully acquiring all their discarded Qi.

The first disciple opened his eyes. He felt incredibly light. His previously clogged meridians were wide open, and the agonizing pain in his chest was gone. He looked back at Su Bai who was absorbing another junior’s poison.

He froze, suddenly realizing what Su Bai had just done for him.

Tears streamed down the boy’s face. He fell to his knees and kowtowed so hard his forehead cracked against the stone tiles. "Senior Brother Su’s magnanimity knows no bounds!" he sobbed.

The crowd went wild with tears of profound admiration. It was a scene of absolute, tragic beauty.

However, as Su Bai reached the final few disciples, a very real, physical problem emerged.

His abdomen began to bulge.

’Uh oh,’ Su Bai thought.

He had the raw data. He had the Dead Wood root to process it. But without the CPU Overclock (the Oblivion Pill) or a proper Operating System (a cultivation manual), his processing speed was too slow. The toxic gas was expanding inside his mortal stomach again.

By the time he siphoned the last drop of chaotic Qi from the final disciple, Su Bai’s robes were visibly tightening around his midsection. If he didn’t leave right now, he was going to let out a freezing burp in front of hundreds of people. It would ruin his HR reputation forever.

Moving with stiff, robotic precision, Su Bai immediately turned his back to the crowd so they couldn’t see his bulging stomach.

"I..." Su Bai’s voice was slightly strained as he tried to hold the gas in. "I must rest for now. You are all dismissed. Come back next week if you have more questions."

He didn’t turn around. He didn’t check their expressions. He simply power-walked as fast as his dignity would allow toward his wooden hut. He was desperate to pop a Shattered-Soul Oblivion Pill to process the backlog.

Behind him, the massive crowd watched his retreating, stiff figure.

They saw a hero. A pale, injured saint who had just absorbed lethal poison to save them, walking away in obvious, agonizing physical strain, asking for nothing in return.

"Senior Brother Su..." the junior sister whispered. Her vision blurred with tears.

Right then and there, hundreds of Outer Sect disciples simultaneously slammed their fists over their hearts. They made a silent, unbreakable oath to the Heavens. They would never betray Su Bai. They would repay this monumental debt, even if it cost them their lives.

Meanwhile, inside the hut, Su Bai scrambled for his storage ring, "Where’s the pill, where’s the pill, I’m going to explode—"