He met Su Yiran on the third day of the Conference.

  She was arguing with a formation technician about measurement error.

  Chen Xi had been examining the Competition Arena — a structure of impressive scale, comprising nested energy barriers that could be adjusted to create controlled combat environments.

  The barriers were formations, and formations were mathematics, and he was in the process of mapping the Arena's energy topology when he heard a voice nearby expressing precise, technical dissatisfaction with the accuracy of the Arena's Qi density measurements.

  "The sensors are calibrated to whole-number readings," the voice said. It belonged to a woman standing at one of the Arena's monitoring stations, holding a tablet of the luminous material he recognised from Xu Ling's manual.

  "You're rounding to the nearest integer. That's a potential error margin of plus or minus half a unit on every measurement.

  Over the course of a tournament with forty-seven matches, that error compounds."

  "The readings are adequate for competition standards," the formation technician said, in the weary tone of a man who had heard this complaint before.

  "Competition standards are wrong. If a competitor's Qi output is measured at 14 and their actual output is 14.4, they're being undervalued by three percent. f their opponent measures at 15 and their actual output is 14.6, the lower-ranked fighter is actually stronger. Your measurement system can't distinguish between them."

  "Nobody has ever complained about this."

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  "I'm complaining about it now."

  Chen Xi stood at the edge of the Arena and watched this exchange with the first genuine interest he had felt in another human being since arriving in this world.

  The woman was approximately his current body's age — mid-twenties, dressed in the red-trimmed robes of the Crimson Lotus Sect with an additional insignia he didn't recognise: a small silver abacus embroidered on her collar.

  Her posture was rigid with frustration. Her arguments were, he noted, mathematically correct.

  He approached. "The error is actually worse than you've calculated," he said.

  Both the technician and the woman turned to look at him. The technician's expression said "not another one." The woman's expression said "explain."

  "The sensors aren't just rounding to integers. They're sampling at discrete intervals — every 0.4 seconds, based on the pulse pattern I've observed. A cultivator's Qi output fluctuates within each second.

  Your measurements are capturing snapshots, not averages. The true error margin is closer to eight percent, not three."

  The woman stared at him.

  "How do you know the sampling interval?" she asked.

  "I measured it. The sensors emit a detectable pulse each time they take a reading. I've been counting the pulses for the last twenty minutes."

  "You've been counting sensor pulses."

  "I count things. It's a habit."

  She studied him with the specific, evaluative attention of someone who assessed claims for a living. "Who are you?"

  "Lin Chen." He used the body's name in public, on Wu Zheng's advice. "Who are you?"

  "Su Yiran. Crimson Lotus Sect, Technique Evaluation Division." She tapped the silver abacus on her collar.

  "I audit cultivation methods and tournament procedures for accuracy and fairness."

  "You're a scientist."

  "I'm an auditor."

  "Same thing. You measure, you test, you report what you find regardless of whether anyone wants to hear it. That's the scientific method with a different title."

  Su Yiran's expression did something Chen Xi's pattern-recognition could not immediately classify.

  Later, after extensive reflection, he would identify it as the face of a person who has spent their entire professional life being told their approach is excessive, unnecessary, and annoying, and has just met someone who called it something worthy.

  "Nobody has ever described it that way," she said.

  "Then nobody has been paying attention."

  They stood at the edge of the Arena and talked about measurement error for forty-five minutes.

  It was the best conversation Chen Xi had had in either of his lives.