Azure Profound Continent

  "Kid! KID!"

  Arthur came sailing over the treeline on his La Ferrari Eclipse, his lifebound sword trailing a faint streak of orange spiritual fire. He landed badly, stumbling two steps on the rocky ground, and stabbed the sword into the dirt to catch himself.

  Mike touched down a moment later.

  "We watched the game," Arthur said. He was grinning. "Three touchdowns. Three! On their home field! Surrender in the third quarter!"

  "The spread was fourteen and a half," Mike said. He was also grinning. "You beat the spread by nearly twenty points, Leo."

  "You bet on the game?"

  "We bet on the season," Arthur corrected. He pulled a crumpled piece of paper from his robes and smoothed it against his thigh. "Futures. Yale to win the National Championship. I got in at twenty to one before the season started, back when the odds were still reasonable." He jabbed the paper with a finger. "You know what twenty to one means on the kind of money I put down?"

  "How much did you put down?"

  Arthur's grin widened. "Enough that if you win, I'm buying a Tier Four Ferrari Testarossa cultivator car. The one that just came out this year."

  Mike shifted his weight. "I put in a reasonable amount."

  "He put in his kids' college fund," Arthur said.

  "It wasn't the college fund. It was the vacation fund."

  "Either way." Arthur folded the paper and tucked it back into his robes. "The point is, we're sitting pretty. Yale's been tearing through the schedule. The kid here is playing like a man possessed. National Championship's looking like a lock."

  Leo took a breath.

  "About that."

  Arthur's grin didn't falter yet. "What about that?"

  "Harvard has a new student. Mateo Thandril. His divine blood concentration is high enough that his divine domain incapacitated an entire team instantly. Cultivators below Nascent Soul can't resist it." Leo paused. "We play them week three, and Coach Williams told us to accept the loss."

  The grin died.

  Arthur's jaw worked once, twice, and then his mouth opened and closed without sound.

  Mike had gone very still.

  "Run that back," Arthur said.

  "The descendant of a Void Refining Old Monster. Can manifest a Divine domain. Entire opposing team incapacitated instantly. We surrender."

  "The whole team?"

  "Flyers literally dropped out of the sky."

  Arthur turned to Mike. Mike turned to Arthur. They stared at each other for three full seconds.

  "My twenty to one futures," Arthur whispered.

  "My vacation fund," Mike said.

  "YOUR VACATION FUND? I took out a loan on my military pension, Mike! On a sixteen year old and a bunch of college kids!"

  "You bet your military pension on Flying Aces futures?" Leo said.

  "The odds were twenty to one! It was a sure thing! You were a sure thing!" Arthur was pacing now. "Void Refining divine blood. Void Refining! That's not even fair. That shouldn't be legal. Is that legal?"

  "The NCAA approved it."

  "The NCAA." Arthur spat. "The NCAA. When I was in Vietnam we had a word for organizations that changed the rules after you'd already committed. We called them the IRS."

  Mike sat down on a rock. He put his face in his hands. After a moment he looked up. "There's got to be a solution right? I don't want to have to go back to drawing formations day and night."

  "We might be able to come up with something in the next twelve weeks. Right now all we have is the Heart of Flesh technique."

  "Might," Arthur repeated. "I really don't like the sound of 'Might'."

  "Arthur."

  "What."

  "I need you to calm down."

  "I am calm. This is calm. You should see me when I'm not calm." Arthur stopped pacing and pointed at Leo. "Alright. I got a plan. We'll ask Shen Tianyi. Kevin's been annoying him with the Heart of Flesh technique. I'm sure he'll have something for us."

  Arthur looked at Mike. Mike looked at Arthur.

  Arthur was already pulling his La Ferrari Eclipse out of his dantian. "I'll get him."

  "No one knows where Kevin is in the game world. You'll have to go to his pod in Queens."

  "Then I'll go to Queens." Arthur swung onto his sword. "What's his address?"

  "You're going to fly to Queens. On a flying sword. In the real world."

  "My military pension is riding on this! I need to go immediately!"

  He logged off and vanished.

  Mike watched him go. He sighed.

  "He's going to break Kevin's pod," Leo said.

  "He's going to break Kevin."

  ---

  Kevin opened his eyes to the sound of someone banging on the outside of his VR pod hard enough to rattle the bolts.

  "MILLER! MILLER, GET OUT OF THE POD!"

  He fumbled for the emergency release. The pod hissed open. Arthur Higgins stood in Kevin's studio apartment in Queens, wearing a rumpled polo shirt and khakis, breathing heavily.

  "Arthur, what the hell..."

  "Harvard's got a Deity Transformation divine blood kid who can knock out an entire Flying Aces team with one move and I have my pension riding on Yale winning the National Championship. We need to talk to Tianyi."

  Kevin blinked. Processed. His face went through several phases. Confusion. Comprehension. Horror.

  "Oh no."

  "Oh yes."

  "I took out a loan on my 401k and put it on Yale."

  "You put your retirement into Yale? Who would do such as stupid thing?" Arthur stared at him, clearly forgetting his own predicament.

  "The odds were really good!"

  "I know the odds were really good, Kevin! That's why we're all in this mess!" Arthur grabbed Kevin and shoved him back into the VR pod. "Get back in the pod. Log into the Azure Profound. We need Tianyi."

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  ---

  A few hours later, Arthur's avatar materialized at their camp, looking a little more confident than before.

  "Kevin's back in with Tianyi," Arthur said. "He told Tianyi everything. Tianyi spent about twenty minutes lecturing Kevin, who translated it and passed it to me in a message."

  He unrolled a paper on a table, and started writing on it, copying down Kevin's translation. Leo and Mike leaned in. Mike read aloud, occasionally squinting at Arthur's handwriting.

  "If a person is born blind and learns to identify a cube and a sphere by touch. Once they gain sight, can they immediately tell them apart by looking? No. The knowledge exists but the perceptual framework is different. Touch and sight are separate languages."

  Arthur glanced up. "That part was really long. I skiped his commentary."

  Mike continued.

  "Your world has a problem with karma. Earth's cultivators struggle with karma lines, the connection between all living things. In the Azure Profound Continent, karma lines are visible to anyone with sufficient divine sense. A Nascent Soul cultivator reads them the way you read words on a page."

  "So we're the blind ones," Leo said.

  "Pretty sure they're the ones with the broken realm," Arthur quipped back. "Isn't that what the Ammo sect guy said?"

  Mike continued. "Earth's cultivators work with karma the way a blind person works with shapes. By inference. Which is why the Heart of Flesh technique is remarkable. Whoever developed it found a way to cultivate dao heart resonance with the Heavenly Dao without perceiving karma directly."

  Mike looked up, "Tianyi says the Heart of Flesh is remarkable. A unique way of perceiving merit and karma."

  Arthur added. "He also wrote that he underestimated Earth's cultivation heritage. Which is the only nice thing Tianyi has ever said about us."

  "Keep going," Leo said.

  "Right. Next section." Arthur flipped to the second page of his copy. "He's been studying the technique through formations. That's how his family does everything. He says upfront that formations are imperfect and his family has drawn wrong conclusions before. Overconfidence in the model is a known weakness. But the insights can be real."

  Arthur tapped a diagram Tianyi had drawn. A hexagonal pattern with six directional markers.

  "Most cultivators protect their dao heart using something like the Six Harmonies Formation. Six directions. North, south, east, west, up, down. You build walls on each face. Fortify. Seal the heart inside." Arthur traced the edges. "That's the Heart of Stone. Works for most things, but cuts you off from the living Heavenly Dao."

  He moved his finger to the second diagram. Triangular. Three points interconnected with flowing, curved lines that fed back into each other.

  "The Heart of Flesh seems similar to the Three Talents system. Heaven, Earth, and Man." Arthur squinted at Tianyi's notes. "The Three Talents formation is interconnected. Heaven gives shape to Earth. Earth gives foundation to Man. Man gives meaning to Heaven."

  Leo studied the diagram. The connecting lines wove through each other.

  "You are Man," Arthur read. "The question the technique asks is: how do you fit within the Three Talents? What is your current state as Man? How do you open yourself to resonate with Heaven and Earth rather than walling yourself off?"

  "The resonance I felt with the crowd," Leo said. "During the game. My heartbeat synced with fifty thousand people."

  Mike leaned forward. "That would be Man to Earth, wouldn't it? Connection to the living world around you."

  "That's what Tianyi says here." Arthur pointed to a line near the bottom. "Man-Earth axis. Connection to people, place, shared purpose. Good starting point. But incomplete. Three Talents requires all three. Man to Earth. Man to Heaven. And understanding how Heaven and Earth connect through you."

  Arthur set the paper down and leaned back. "Then there's a line that says 'Study it. Meditate on where you sit within the Three Talents. The technique will unfold from there.' And then Kevin added 'how will this help save my 401k?'"

  Leo picked up the copied note and read the last section.

  "He's got more," Leo said. "About testing against real Deity Transformation pressure."

  Leo read aloud. "There are many Deity Transformation level profundities in this region. Most go unresolved because no Deity Transformation cultivator or Great God has reason to risk their life engaging them. If a profundity can be ignored, it is ignored. If it cannot be ignored, the cultivators just move away."

  "So the profundities just sit there," Mike said. "And now we get to clean up their leftover trash."

  Leo ignored him and continued. "He recommends one in this mountain range. The ruins of the Karma Severing Sect."

  Arthur straightened up. "The what?"

  "The Karma Severing Sect. They tried to sever their connection to karma entirely. Cut the threads binding action to consequence." Leo paused. "They failed. The sect fell to demonic corruption. The profundity from their failure has persisted ever since."

  "We are neighbors with a sect full of Deity Transformation demons," Arthur muttered. "Wonderful."

  "The profundity carries Deity Transformation level spiritual pressure, and thus divine blood suppression." Leo set the page down. "Tianyi says the Iron Rhinoceros Sect will have its location mapped."

  Mike nodded slowly. "Lord Ironhorn."

  Leo looked at him. "Do you think he will tell us?"

  Mike laughed.

  "Leo, Lord Ironhorn will be thrilled to give us that information."

  "Why?"

  "Because it means you'll be somewhere else." Mike shook his head. "That man has been trying to get you out of his hair since the day you showed up with the green hat. If I tell him we want to go poke around a corrupted Deity Transformation profundity on the far side of the mountain range, he'll hand me the map himself. He'll probably pack us a flying ship."

  Arthur snorted.

  "I'll go find him now." Mike said.

  Leo looked at Three Talents diagram that Arthur had copied. He didn't understand any of it.

  It was probably a good time to stop skipping class and go back to school.

  ---

  Phillips Exeter Daoist Academy

  Leo walked through the front gates of Exeter for the first time since sophomore year and nobody looked at him.

  He'd expected something. A wave. A nod. A double-take. Maybe a small crowd, if he was being honest with himself. He'd scored three consecutive touchdowns against Florida on national broadcast. His first one was even was short enough to fit on a TikTok.

  Nothing.

  Students streamed past him on the main path, backpacks slung over shoulders talking about homework and weekend plans. A group of sophomores nearly walked into him because they were arguing about a formation theory exam. A girl on a bench glanced up from her tablet, looked right at him, and went back to reading.

  Leo adjusted the baseball cap on his head, with the gold crossed-arrows insignia stitched on the front. The insignia that indicated he had an ELO and was strong enough to kill a Nascent Soul.

  Tom was waiting for him outside the library, leaning against a pillar with his phone out.

  "Hey." Tom pocketed the phone. "Vivian said she'll find us at lunch. Matt's buried in the tether system specs. Hasn't come up for air since you last saw him."

  "Good. That's fine." Leo fell into step beside him. They walked in silence for a few seconds. A senior walked past and didn't even glance his way.

  "Tom."

  "Yeah?"

  "Why do I feel like a nobody right now?"

  Tom looked at him.

  "I scored three touchdowns against Florida. I killed six Nascent Souls. I won the high school national championships for us."

  "I'm aware. I was in the stands cheering you on."

  "Then why is nobody..." Leo gestured vaguely at the stream of students flowing around them like water around two very unremarkable rocks. "Nobody's come up. Nobody's said anything. I feel invisible."

  Tom studied him for a moment. Then he looked at Leo's hat.

  "Leo."

  "What."

  "You're wearing a hat."

  "So?"

  "Hard to tell who you are when your wearing a baseball cap." Tom reached over and flicked the brim. "You could be anyone right now."

  Leo reached up and touched his hat. Gold crossed arrows. It meant something.

  They rounded the corner toward the science wing. A boy fell into stride beside them. He wasn't looking at Leo. He was looking at Tom's wrist.

  "Dude," the boy said. "Is that a Jacob & Co?"

  Tom grinned. He extended his wrist.

  The watch was absurd. The case was rose gold, thick enough to qualify as light armor. The face displayed a miniature formation array that actually moved, tiny lightning bolts arcing between diamond-studded nodes in a continuous loop. The band was some kind of exotic leather that probably came from a spirit beast.

  The boy's eyes went wide. He stopped walking. Tom stopped too, because Tom was the kind of person who gave strangers his full attention when they were excited about his new watch.

  "Wait. Is that the Jacob & Co. Heavenly Tribulation Lightning Edition?"

  "Yeah." Tom rotated his wrist so the light hit it better.

  "They scrub pictures of that model online. My uncle saved a picture of one he found on a forum and it was already gone when he tried to show me the post."

  "Really?" Tom said, pretending not to know.

  "Can I..." The boy pointed at the watch, then at his own eyes.

  "Go ahead."

  The boy leaned in. His mouth hung open slightly. The lightning formation on the watch face arced and crackled in miniature.

  "That is the coolest thing in the world," the boy said. "That is genuinely the coolest thing I have ever seen. How did you even get one?"

  Tom shrugged, smiling the broad, easy smile that made people like him within thirty seconds of meeting him.

  Leo stood two feet away. Invisible. Wearing his very meaningful hat that nobody understood.

  He glowered.

  He was beginning to deeply regret not choosing a watch.

  The boy thanked Tom three more times, took one last longing look at the Heavenly Tribulation Lightning Edition, and jogged off to class. Tom watched him go, then turned to Leo.

  "You look like someone stole your lunch money."

  "Nobody even looked at me."

  Tom's expression softened. He put a hand on Leo's shoulder and turned him slightly, pointing with his other hand down the corridor.

  "See those two by the water fountain?"

  Leo looked. Two ROTC cadets, a boy and a girl, standing at the edge of the hallway. They glanced in Leo's direction, then looked away.

  "And those three by the stairwell," Tom continued.

  Another cluster. Same behavior. Nobody approaching.

  "They recognize you, Leo. Even with the hat."

  "Then why aren't they coming over?"

  Tom tapped the gold crossed arrows on Leo's brim.

  "Because you're a real officer. A bona fide Second Lieutenant. Commissioned by Lord Newmont himself." He let that sink in.

  "Everyone else in this school with a military affiliation is a cadet. Cadet NCOs. Cadet ranks. They've got the titles, but they're still students playing dress-up until graduation."

  Tom nodded toward the two by the water fountain, who were now pretending very hard to be interested in the bulletin board next to it.

  "You walk in here as an officer, and most of these kids would have to salute you before starting a conversation."

  Leo looked at the clusters of hesitant students.

  He adjusted his hat. Straightened it slightly.

  "So they do recognize me."

  "Yes."

  "They're just intimidated."

  "Significantly."

  Leo considered this.

  "The hat stays on," he said.

  Tom laughed and clapped him on the back, and they walked to formations class.

  Leo still thought about what watch he was going to pick, and how he could kill another Nascent Soul to get another purchase qualification.