Chương 108: Honeypot

"So let me get this straight." Arthur leaned forward.

"This Megan girl just happens to move in next door to you."

"Yes." Kevin nodded eagerly.

"That's exactly what happened."

"And she just so happens to need help setting up her TV."

"Like I said, she just moved in, so she needed an extra pair of hands."

"And she wanted to set it up specifically so she could catch up on some obscure anime called Frieren." Kevin immediately became offended.

"Frieren is not an obscure anime! Millions of people watched it!"

"Okay, fine. Millions of weebs watched it." Arthur spread his hands.

"How many sweet American girls from the Midwest watch it?"

"Hundreds of thousands? Have you ever been to an anime convention?" Kevin's nervousness melted away the moment the conversation turned to anime.

"Those conventions are packed with thousands of people from all walks of life. Frieren is such a masterpiece. I've been trying to get you guys to watch the new season!"

"Yes, Kevin." Vivian rubbed her temples.

"You talk about it all the time. That's the problem. And it just so happens that the girl who moves next door strikes up a conversation with you about your favorite show. Seems too coincidental." Kevin smiled, a wistful look crossing his face.

"The stars aligned. One thing led to another, and I invited her over to watch the first episode with me because her TV didn't work." Leo spoke up from his chair.

"Did you invite her to watch? Or did she invite herself over?" Kevin's brow furrowed.

"Now that you mention it, she was awfully insistent about coming over. I even offered to go to Costco to buy a working TV for her." He waved dismissively.

"But let's not focus on that. The point is that I have a girlfriend. And not only is she very attractive, she loves cosplay." He raised his eyebrows several times in rapid succession. Vivian made a face.

"Ew." Mike crossed his arms.

"No, Kevin. She's cosplaying as your girlfriend. She's pretending to be into you."

"She's the perfect cosplay girlfriend! What more can I ask for?" Kevin beamed.

"She's my dream girl!"

"No, I mean she's a CIA agent. She's pretending to be your girlfriend."

"Yes, I know shes a CIA agent. I told you guys already." Kevin's grin somehow widened.

"She carries a gun and everything. Do you know how cool that is?" Leo pinched the bridge of his nose.

"She's collecting information on you, Kevin. The CIA now knows everything we do here because of your big mouth."

"No, no, no." Kevin shook his head vigorously.

"She explained it to me. She's focused on protecting valuable assets in the United States. She said there was this important mission recently. Four foreign intelligence agents were trying to compromise an important asset." Leo looked annoyed.

"Let me guess. Soviet and Chinese agents. And one from a country they couldn't identify." Kevin's jaw dropped.

"Leo, you do know her! How did you know about her mission?"

"The important asset the agents were trying to compromise was you, Kevin. Those were agents sliding into your DMs."

"No agents slid into my DMs." Kevin crossed his arms.

"Well, there were some suspicious scammers recently." Leo made a rolling gesture.

"Tell me more."

"They messaged me on Instagram. It was pretty fun talking to them at first." Kevin shrugged.

"But I knew they were crypto scammers as soon as they tried to get me to go to a third-party website. You know the play. Get you to some sketchy site, sweet talk you out of your life savings." Leo's stared in shock. Kevin thought the foreign intelligence operatives targeting him were crypto scammers. He remembered Nick commenting on Kevin's lack of confidence. What exactly happened between Kevin and those agents?

"These scammers," Leo said slowly.

"I thought they were trying to get you to go on a date?"

"Kind of. They kept talking about wanting to meet up for coffee or get a bagel." Kevin rolled his eyes.

"I couldn't figure out what they wanted, so I googled 'coffee meets bagel' and saw some sketchy dating app. So I blocked them." Mike started laughing.

"Wait. Kevin, you fended off foreign honeypot intelligence agents because you were too intimidated by the thought of going on a date with a girl in real life?" Kevin glared at him.

"Hello?? I have a girlfriend! We go on lots of dates! I told you, Instagram is filled with scammers! The technique is called pig butchering. Don't you get those messages all the time?"

"My wife banned me from Instagram two years ago." Leo raised his hand.

"My mom made me uninstall it once the whole Thousand Talents controversy started."

"I stay away from that garbage," Vivian added. Kevin threw his hands up.

"Why am I the only one with Instagram? This is the twenty-first century! How are none of you on Instagram? No wonder none of you guys even respond to the reels I send!" Arthur cleared his throat loudly.

"Hey! Why doesn't anyone ask me? You all just assume I'm not on Instagram. I'll have you know I absolutely have Instagram." Kevin glanced at Arthur.

"Arthur, what do you think Instagram is?" Arthur opened his mouth to respond. Then he noticed everyone staring at him.

"I quit Instagram when I came back from Vietnam. Swore it off."

"Arthur, Instagram was invented in 2010. What exactly were you quitting in Vietnam?" Arthur pressed his lips together and made a zipping motion across them. Mike turned back to Kevin.

"I think this Megan girl is problematic."

"You're just jealous!" Kevin jabbed a finger at him.

"I bet your wife doesn't send you cute pictures of her in cosplay and ask how your day went! Hey, speaking of which, why don't you ever tell us anything about your wife? It's been three and a half years since we met, and we still don't know what she looks like. We don't even know her name!" Mike pressed his lips together and made a zipping motion across them. Leo tried one more time.

"Kevin, I really don't think your girlfriend is telling you the whole story." Kevin pressed his lips together and made a zipping motion across them. Three men sat around the table, furiously staring at each other with their mouths clamped shut, as if daring each other to speak first. Shen Tianyi watched the display with naked confusion. Vivian sighed.

"Okay, fine." Leo threw up his hands.

"Since no one wants to talk, I'm going back to my story." He stood up and adopted what he clearly thought was a dramatic storytelling pose.

"No shit, there I was, at the airplane terminal...." Arthur stood up.

"I just remembered I need to check on something." You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author. Mike rose as well.

"I should see if the oven is still on." Kevin waved goodbye.

"I have to message Megan." The three of them left, leaving Leo with his mouth open mid-sentence. He turned to Vivian and Shen Tianyi.

"What's wrong with my story? Vivian, you know it's true." Vivian considered for a moment.

"The beginning is too fantastical. You need to ease the listeners in before you hit them with Nascent Soul lords and KGB agents." She glanced at Tianyi.

"What do you think?" Shen Tianyi had been quietly sitting through the entire exchange.

"Leo, sitting here listening to stories of your world is always... interesting. Truly, every time I think I understand America, I discover new details." He paused.

"But what is an airport terminal?" Vivian stood.

"I'm going to go find the Divine Sense Press. Good luck." She left. Leo looked at Tianyi. At least he's willing to listen.

"Okay." He settled back into his chair.

"So an airport is like a really big sky dock, except instead of flying cultivation boats..."

It took quite a while to get through the story. Without the dramatic tension of an audience who understood what airports and KGB agents were, the tale lost most of its punch. But Shen Tianyi listened patiently, nodding along and asking clarifying questions at all the right moments. When Leo finally finished, Tianyi sat in thought. Then he reached into his storage ring and pulled out a small object. A talisman made of petrified wood, carved with intricate formations that caught the afternoon light.

"Look at this with your special vision," Tianyi said.

"Tell me what you see." Leo focused, letting his ortho-k enhanced sight examine the talisman. The formations etched into the wood revealed themselves in layers of complexity.

"It's complicated," Leo said slowly.

"Way more complicated than I expected." He leaned closer, tracing the patterns with his eyes.

"I can see the array runes here, and these complex pivots linking them together. And there's something else." He squinted.

"One or two intermediate runes implied by the distortion patterns in the surrounding structures." Tianyi's eyebrows rose.

"You can perceive all that? You can derive intermediate runes?"

"Professor Vogt and Mr. Morimoto have been drilling me pretty hard for the Grand Formations Summit."

"Not bad at all." Tianyi nodded.

"You've come a long way. A year ago you drew formations from top to bottom. But don't focus on the formation itself. Can you see anything special? Something beyond the array work?" Leo looked again. No strange energy signatures like the Chernobyl Well. No obvious spiritual phenomena. He was about to say no when something caught his attention: a faint strand extending from the center of the formation.

"There's something like a spiderweb line over the formation," Leo said.

"Coming out from the center." Tianyi leaned forward.

"Describe it further." Leo tried shifting into his omnidirectional perspective, but that didn't help. Only the ortho-k vision let him examine the strand. He pushed harder, straining to see more detail. Pain lanced through his eyes. He closed them and shook his head.

"I barely saw anything," he admitted.

"Maybe a faint line? I could have been imagining things. I'm not really used to this special vision yet."

"A single line? Or multiple?"

"Just one. Like a single silklike thread coming out from the center of the formation." Tianyi smiled.

"This is a family identity token of the Shen clan. It marks my identity, my status, and my position within the family. The formation uses a very specialized technique to generate synthetic karma lines. Lines that can connect to other identity tokens." Leo straightened.

"Karma lines? Like actual karma?"

"Synthetic karma. Because it is artificial rather than natural, the divine sense requirement to perceive it is far lower. Typically, early Gold Core cultivators can see them." Tianyi turned the token over in his hands.

"That you can perceive it at all is quite remarkable."

"How does it work?"

"There is an ancestral tree in the family's secret realm. We cut pieces from it but preserve the spiritual nature of the material. The karma of the separated pieces remains linked because they were once part of the same whole." Leo held up a hand.

"Wait. Spiritual nature?"

"Exactly. The key lies in preserving the spiritual nature. When you maintain that essence, the connection between the separated pieces remains intact."

"No, I mean, what is spiritual nature? I've never heard of it before." Tianyi stared at him.

"What do you mean you don't know what spiritual nature is? This is the foundation of artifact refining. Even Arthur knows what spiritual nature is. He and I have discussed it many times when developing treasures together." Leo shrugged, pushing down a flicker of embarrassment.

"I thought I was going to grow up to be either a Flying Aces player or a formations master, so the only class I went to last year was a formations class. I skipped all those useless material science classes." Tianyi's expression shifted to disbelief.

"How in the nine heavens did you learn about intermediate runes without understanding spiritual nature? Have all the formations you've drawn been only on talisman paper?" Leo was shocked.

"How did you know?" Tianyi glared at him.

"You are the strangest cultivator I have ever encountered. You have poisoned and robbed an Embroidered Uniform Guard. You can derive intermediate runes. Yet you lack basic artifact refining knowledge that children learn before they can walk. Truly, you climb the mountain by falling up it."

"My dad told me it's better to be really good at one thing than mediocre at everything." Something flickered across Tianyi's face.

"Ah, well. I'm certain the Iron Rhinoceros Sect will find great comfort knowing the ignorant desperado who turned their sect upside down doesn't even understand the spiritual nature of materials." Leo glared at him. Tianyi let the silence stretch for a moment, then changed the subject.

"Regardless. That ability of yours is very interesting." He picked up the identity token and tucked it back into his storage ring.

"Someday we should bring you to the Western Seat. Let you look around with those special eyes of yours. You might notice things that Monarch Cloudpiercer wishes to keep hidden." Leo thought about it. The journey to the Western Seat took many days, and he needed to prepare for the formation competition. Theoretically, he could have Kevin deliver his Otherworldly Demon Summoning Formation to somewhere hidden near the Western Seat. Then when he died and respawned, he'd basically teleport there instantly.

He shook his head. Too much risk. He didn't want to gamble his access to the Azure Profound Continent.

"I don't really have the time to make that journey. Maybe after the formation competition."

"That suits me as well." Tianyi's expression grew distant.

"To speak honestly, I am in no rush to visit the Western Seat myself. For reasons I cannot quite explain, I have a feeling my uncle harbors some anger toward me." Leo thought back to the time in the capital, when he infuriated Lord Shen, Tianyi's uncle, by drawing formations with a red crayon. The way Lord Shen's face had turned purple. And how Leo had thrown Tianyi under the bus. I guess he still doesn't know I'm the reason that his uncle will make him kowtow three hundred times.

"I have no idea why he would be mad at you," Leo lied.

"Last I met your uncle, he seemed pretty happy to work with us." Leo couldn't bear to look at his friend. So he walked away to find some cranes to try out his ortho-k on.

Leo's ortho-k enhanced vision helped him immediately verify some of their fundamental hypotheses about Cranesong, the formations of the cranes. The basic mechanics were well understood. Cranes used flight as a "formation brush" to draw the lines, and song as "spiritual ink" to fill them in. Basic formations worked exactly this way, and Kevin's AI model handled them perfectly. The problem was complex arrays.

Kevin had spent over a month building a "world model" version of their Cranesong AI, even learning algebraic topology to incorporate true understanding of space and time. The results had disappointed them. Sure, basic formations came out beautifully. But complex arrays and intermediate runes fell apart completely, often performing worse than their simpler model. Now Leo could see why. Complex Arrays required multiple cranes singing simultaneously.

Leo had initially focused on measuring the harmony and dissonance of their overlapping songs, treating the combined sound as the important variable. The ortho-k revealed his mistake. The key wasn't the final mixed sound. It was the physical process of interference itself. When two slightly different Cranesongs met in the air, they created something new.

The interference patterns produced spiritual ink with properties neither song possessed alone, allowing the cranes to manifest array runes and formation pivots that they could not normally sing. They were measuring the output when they should have been modeling the collision. And now with his ortho-k enhanced vision, he could observe the collision itself. This insight wasn't original. Many Crane formation masters believed this hypothesis. The problem was calculation.

The Doppler effect meant that the cranes' speed and direction changed how their songs mixed. Two cranes flying toward each other produced different interference than two flying apart. The calculations required to predict these interactions while also choreographing flight paths had long been considered impossible. Leo expected Kevin to be discouraged by the confirmation. Instead, Kevin looked excited.

"We can model this," Kevin said.

"I was already considering the approach. All we need to do is restructure our tokens into three components: a song vector, a velocity vector, and a relative position vector. Feed those into a physics-informed layer, and it should work." Leo nodded along. He didn't understand the technically details, but he understood what Kevin needed from him. His job was to observe both ends of the process. His own Cranesong proficiency let him understand the starting conditions.

The ortho-k let him perceive the final results with perfect clarity. For the first time, they could build a fluid dynamics layer. Leo verified the input-output pairs and they could finally verify if their model understood the physics, and not just the language. Their AI would no longer produce plausible hallucinations that occasionally worked. Their model would act as a fluid dynamics simulator, using a massive array of NVIDIA GPUs to run calculations that no human could perform by hand.

Kevin felt like it would take them another few months, but after that, they could begin teaching cranes how to farm using their new Cranesong AI.