Chương 7: Why Do You Have to be Mad?

Arthur picked up the spiritual sword from where Mike had set it against the wall, tested its weight with a single lazy arc, then reversed his grip and held it out pommel-first.

"Take it," he said to Mike.

"I'm going topside." Mike accepted the blade without question.

"The bounty hunters?"

"Wei Tuo's creditors sent trackers. At least two, maybe three, camped somewhere within a mile of the tomb entrance." Arthur was already moving toward the tunnel.

"If they find this place before we're ready, we lose everything. The vein, the formation plates, all of it."

"And if there are more than three?" Arthur cracked his knuckles.

"Then I'll be back in three days." He didn't look back. His footsteps faded into the dark passage, and the tomb settled into the dense silence of underground stone. Leo wondered why Arthur hadn't taken the sword. Mike sat cross-legged and laid the blade flat across his knees.

"Sit down, Leo." Leo sat. The stone was cold through his clothes, and the ambient qi of the Tier Two vein pulsed beneath it like a slow heartbeat. Wei Tuo had gone quiet in his corner, bound and staring at nothing.

"Tell me what you know about divine sense," Mike said.

"It's how cultivators perceive qi. Detect formations, read spiritual signatures, sense threats beyond physical range." Leo rattled off what he'd learned over the past day.

"You grow it through repetition. Drawing formations thousands of times."

"Divine sense is the biggest difference between rich kids and people like you and me," Mike said.

"Young masters enter Qi Refining at seven. While ordinary kids learn arithmetic, they spend their childhood drawing formations before they ever learn to multiply. By the time they reach Foundation Establishment, they've built a divine sense baseline that a normal cultivator can't match in a lifetime of catching up." He looked at Leo.

"A young master your age would be sitting around 300 Si right now. You're entering qi refining next year at fifteen. You haven't started." Leo had known there was a gap between him and the rich kids. Ms. Patterson had made that clear enough. But he'd imagined they would just advance a little faster. He hadn't realized he was already eight years behind.

"Your mom's a doctor, right?" Mike said.

"Yeah."

"She'll have a Divine Sense meter somewhere in the house. Go find it. Check your Si and come back." Leo logged off and found his mom's Divine Sense meter in her medical kit, a brushed steel cylinder about the size of a thermometer. He pressed it to his temple. 0. 1 Si. He set it beside his VR pod and logged back in.

"Zero point one," he told Mike. Mike nodded like he'd expected it." That's baseline. Every mortal on Earth has a divine sense strength of 0. 1 Si. Once you step into Qi Refining, you'll reach 100." The words should have been discouraging. Instead Leo felt a strange electricity in his chest, because Mike was still talking, which meant 0. 1 wasn't the end of the conversation.

"Arthur was involved in some classified research. They discovered that divine sense grows stronger through destruction and reformation. If you shatter someone's divine sense completely using two sources of qi, it absorbs residual energy from whatever destroyed it when it rebuilds. Comes back bigger." Leo looked at the sword on Mike's lap. Then at Mike's hand. Two sources of qi. His stomach tightened.

"What's the catch?" Mike grimaced.

"Normal humans suffer brain death after one or two attempts. Every time. They stopped the research after killing a few prisoners of war." Leo's mouth went dry.

"Then why are you telling me this?" Mike set the sword flat on the stone between them. He placed one hand on the blade and looked at Leo with an expression that made Leo's skin crawl.

"Because you're in a game. Players should revive on death."

"Should?" Silence filled the tomb. Leo knew the Rules stated that he would revive. But he'd rather someone else be the first test subject. Mike gripped Leo's arm.

"Mike, what are you doing?" His grip was Foundation Establishment strength, absolute and immovable, and something about the way he locked down sent a spike of animal terror through Leo's body. The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

"Mike, stop. Stop!" Wei Tuo gave Leo a sad look.

"Make sure you have the dictionary saved offline," Mike said, his voice calm, completely disconnected from the fact that Leo was thrashing against his grip. He positioned Leo's head against the flat of the blade.

"You saved my number already, right? Call me when you wake up."

"Mike, stop. Stop!" Leo kicked. Twisted. Threw his weight sideways. Mike held him the way a parent holds a child mid-tantrum, effortless and unmoved, and the disparity in their strength made Leo despair.

"LET GO!" Wei Tuo turned his eyes toward the sound and then turned away, as if this was simply what happened in places like this. Something that might have been guilt flickered behind Mike's eyes.

"We all want to know if you survive." Three thousand Si of Foundation Establishment divine sense crashed down. Leo's skull cracked under the invisible weight. The pressure invaded his ear canals like molten lead, forcing through bone and tissue into soft gray matter. The sword's cold qi acted as anvil, Mike's divine sense as hammer, and Leo's fragile awareness was caught between them, compressed, crushed, ground into spiritual paste. Every nerve ending in his brain fired at once.

White-hot agony bypassed his nervous system entirely and struck the core of his existence with pain. A wet, sickening pop deep inside his head. Then nothing.

Leo bolted upright in the VR pod. His forehead cracked against the plastic cover hard enough to leave a bruise. His lungs heaved, pulling air for a raw, ragged shriek that shattered the silence of his parents' house. He was alive. But alive was a technical classification. His hands wouldn't stop shaking. The ghost-sensation of Mike grinding his consciousness to paste clung to him like grease on skin, something he could feel but couldn't scrub away. He'd said no.

He'd screamed it, fought against that iron grip, begged, and none of it had mattered. Leo clawed the haptic visor off his face and tumbled out of the pod. His legs folded on contact with the floor. He curled on the carpet, howling, clutching his temples as if the bones might split apart again. Upstairs, heavy footsteps shook the ceiling.

"Leo!" The den door burst open. His mother crossed the room at Foundation Establishment speed, a blur of motion that ended with her on her knees beside him, hands already glowing soft green as she pressed diagnostic spell arts against his temples.

"Leo! Breathe! Circulate your breath!" Her voice carried a fear he'd never heard from her before.

"What happened? What did you do to yourself?" He couldn't answer. He was dry heaving into the shag carpet, eyes wide and bloodshot, seeing double. Every blink stamped Mike's grimace across his vision like an afterimage burned into a screen.

"Who did this to you?" Mrs. Chen demanded, her qi flaring. Leo's mind, still fragmented and reeling, locked onto a single thought: revenge. Mike had done this. Mike had crushed his consciousness without hesitation, without remorse, treating him like a lab rat in a classified experiment. Leo pointed at his phone and screamed: "Mike!" Mrs. Chen snatched the device from the floor. Her fingers found Mike Ross in Leo's contacts. She hit call. Two rings.

"Hello? Leo, you're alive? Thank God."

"WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY SON?!" Mike's voice stayed calm.

"Mrs. Chen, I presume? Please, let me explain." Mike Ross was many things: a former soldier, a stay-at-home dad, a man with questionable ethics regarding fourteen-year-old test subjects. But above all, he was experienced at one crucial skill. Calming down hysterical women. Leo couldn't hear every word, but he watched his mother's posture change. Her voice dropped from volcanic fury to sharp questioning to something that sounded, impossibly, like excitement. It took under two minutes.

Then she picked up her Divine Sense meter from the floor.

"Stop crying, Leo. Hold still." She pressed the metal tip to his temple. He was still shaking, still gasping, still seeing Mike's calm face every time he blinked. His mother didn't seem to notice.

"Zero point two," she breathed into the phone.

"Mike, his Si is at 0. 2. That's double baseline. In one session. As a mortal. And his divine sense looks perfect. Brand new, without any of the damage from playing video games. Is my son a talent?" Leo heard Mike respond, and his skin crawled. The same tone Mike had used while positioning his head on cold steel. But another part of Leo, the calculating transmigrator part, was already counting the gains. 0. 1 to 0. 2 in a single session.

The trajectory from nobody to formation genius mapped itself across his mind in clean exponential curves, and at the end of those curves sat everything Ms. Patterson had told him he could never have. His stomach turned. Three minutes ago he'd been howling on the carpet. Now he was marveling at the progression, and the speed of that transition frightened him more than the training itself.

"How much does this cost?" his mother asked.

"The program itself is only $899 a month," Mike replied.

"But the real expense is the spirit calming medicine. The training is traumatic, equivalent to experiencing death. Without proper pharmaceutical support, the psychological damage accumulates."

"What tier of medicine?"

"Tier Two Spirit Calming Tea at minimum, administered after each session. Tier Three would help him recover quicker." Mrs. Chen's fingers flew across Leo's phone, pulling up bulk pricing. Tier One at $5 per portion. Tier Two at $39. Tier Three at $299. She did the math. Tier Three tea, administered every three hours, eight sessions per day for year-round training. $634, 000 annually, plus the monthly program fee. The number would require weekend locum shifts on top of her already crushing hospital schedule.

She looked down at her son. Leo was still trembling, still pale, still clearly shattered. He looked more pitiful than she'd ever seen him. More pitiful than teething, more pitiful than his first fever, more pitiful than the time he fell off the backyard wall and broke his wrist at six.

"I'll order him Tier Three," she said.

"But I want results. Monthly progress reports. And if he misses a single training session, I expect to be notified immediately."

"Of course, Mrs. Chen. We're partners in your son's success."

"Partners," she repeated flatly.

"My husband and I work twelve-hour days to afford opportunities like this. Leo better be diligent. He better attend every session without complaint." She looked at her son again. Her expression softened, but only slightly.

"This is your future, Leo. This is your path to immortality. Don't waste it." Leo, still curled on the carpet with the memory of his own death clinging to his skin like a second shadow, managed a weak nod. His mother hung up and set his phone on the desk.

"Your next session is in three hours," she said.

"Drink water. Eat something. I'll have the Tier Three tea here by then." Leo stared at the VR pod. The plastic cover was still open from where he'd clawed his way out, the haptic visor dangling off the side by its cable. Yesterday it had been his great hope in this new world. Now it looked like a coffin. He was never getting back in that thing again.