Chương 132: The Synaptic Acceleration Protocol

Seattle, Washington"Mike!" Arthur's voice carried across the entire brewpub.

"How in the world did you manage to marry the Crimson Witch of the West? I can't believe you've been hiding this from us!" Every head in the room turned to stare. A bearded guy in a flannel shirt paused midbite, pizza slice hovering in front of his face. Mike's face went pale.

"Quiet, Arthur. People are staring at us."

"Let them stare!" Arthur remained standing, gesturing wildly at the table.

"Three years! Three years we've known you, and you never thought to mention that your wife is Katherine the Killer?" Leo sat in the booth next to Kevin, a half-eaten slice of pepperoni going cold on his plate. Arthur and Kevin had flown in from the East Coast after Leo told them he had finally figured out who Mike's wife was. They all agreed the occasion called for a dramatic confrontation in person. Kevin tugged at Arthur's sleeve.

"Sit down, man. You're making a scene." Arthur ignored him.

"Three years!" Mike rubbed his temples.

"Arthur, will you please calm down?" Arthur finally dropped back into his seat across from Leo, still fuming.

"The man changes the subject every time anyone asks about his wife. I figured she was ugly or something. Not that she was one of the most terrifying cultivators alive!"

"Crimson Witch of the West?" Leo asked.

"Who's that?" Arthur stared at him.

"She made her name in World War II, kid. During the island hopping campaigns in the Pacific." He leaned forward, his voice dropping to something almost reverent.

"You have to understand what those islands were like. The Japanese legacy sect disciples were ready to sacrifice everything for the Imperial Emperor they worshiped. Fanatics, every last one of them. The kind of guys who'd blow themselves up just to take a few Americans with them." Arthur turned to Mike.

"I saw her in action once. I was just a grunt back then, barely knew which end of my sword was which. She was..." He trailed off, searching for words.

"I don't know if I should be impressed or terrified for you." Mike rubbed his temples.

"People who knew her from back then think she mellowed out."

"Mellowed out?" Arthur's voice cracked.

"Mellowed out? I literally saw her..." Arthur stopped midsentence. His mouth snapped shut. He sat very still, his eyes fixed on a point somewhere in the distance. Leo gulped. An extremely powerful divine sense swept through the brewpub like a searchlight, locked onto Arthur, and held. Leo wasn't even the target and his hand was shaking. Kevin looked at him.

"You okay there, Arthur?" Arthur folded his hands on the table like a schoolboy who had just been called to the principal's office. Mike patted his hand.

"Arthur. This is Seattle. She has ears everywhere. Why don't you behave yourself?" A chill ran down Leo's spine. He had never seen Arthur look chastened before. The old man now sat with his shoulders hunched, avoiding eye contact.

"Mike," Leo said carefully, "is it okay that I spilled the beans about your wife? Is everything all right at home?" Mike shrugged.

"It's fine. I'm used to it."

"Psst." Arthur leaned in close to Mike and dropped his voice to a whisper.

"Your wife is very scary."

"She can hear you even if you whisper, Arthur." Arthur went quiet again. Kevin drummed his fingers on the table, his curiosity apparently stronger than his survival instincts.

"Okay, but seriously, how did that even happen? Did she pick you? Ask you to help fix her broken TV?"

"I didn't know anything about her past or cultivation when we met," Mike said.

"My mom set me up with one of her friend's daughters from church. I didn't think much of it until we said our 'I do's and started combining finances."

"Really?" Arthur looked skeptical.

"I don't buy it."

"It's true. She told me she wanted to live a quiet life. Have some kids, own a home. She said she was ready to start thinking about leaving a legacy." Mike smiled.

"She's really sweet once you get to know her. My mother-in-law, on the other hand? That's another story." Kevin threw his hands up.

"Come on, Mike! Three years! Three years you could have told us! Do you have any idea how much easier things would have been? I spent six months drawing formations for my La Ferrari Eclipse! Six months! I missed three anime conventions!"

"She has helped," Mike said.

"Always in the background. She helped Leo during the Thousand Talents Program, and when he took over MGM. She just did it without telling him. She believes it's important for cultivators to grow on their own."

"Wait. She's been helping me the whole time?" Mike shrugged.

"It wasn't that big of a deal. She mostly just made sure you had a fair fight."

"A fair fight?" Leo's voice went up.

"When I fought Mateo, the people behind the Thousand Talents Program cheated with that Divine Domain boosting formation. I only won because Mateo leaked the formation to me!" Mike looked at him.

"And where do you think Mateo got the formation?" Leo opened his mouth. Closed it.

"Does he look like a formation master to you?" Mike asked. Leo thought about Mateo. He had been extremely unhelpful during the Summit.

"Do you think he's clever enough to slip you the formation on his own? Someone had to give him the idea."

"Please thank your wife for me," Leo said quietly.

"What about me?" Kevin complained.

"Nobody secretly helped me! I did everything the hard way! Do you know how many tutorials I watched? How many times I burned my fingers on spiritual ink?"

"See?" Mike spread his hands.

"She didn't give you any money, and you learned about the benefits of hard work. Sounds like it ended up being a good life lesson for you." Kevin glowered but said nothing. The waitress came by with another round of beers for Arthur and Mike. Leo stuck with his Coke. Once she left, Kevin took a long sip from his glass and set it down.

"All right, Leo. Business stuff. It'll be about another two days before I finish creating our new hideout. I'll send you a message when you're good to log on."

"It's going to be a lot harder for us to meet in the game after this. If there's an emergency, you can use a one-way teleportation disk to arrive at Human Hut Mountain instantly. But for regular check ins, we'll need to figure something else out."

"Got it." Leo nodded. Then he turned to Arthur.

"Hey Arthur, since it's going to be harder to meet ingame, have you considered moving to New York? Kevin and I are already there. And Mike's wife takes business trips to New York all the time, so it'll be easy to meet up." Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit. Arthur stroked his chin.

"You know what, fine. I've been thinking about it anyway. Can't spend my golden years in a Florida retirement home playing pickleball with the other geezers. Besides, I've been looking for a home health aide. You can't find good help in Florida. Half the state needs one and the other half already is one." He pointed at Leo.

"But you do know the Giants aren't actually in New York, right?" Leo blinked.

"What do you mean? I was looking at neighborhoods. New Tribeca seemed pretty cool."

"The Giants play in East Rutherford, New Jersey." Arthur let out a bark of laughter.

"Kid, you're going to be living next to warehouses and truck stops. Hope you like the smell of diesel." Leo stared at him.

"Then why don't they call them the New Jersey Giants? I thought I was going to play in New York City! This feels like a scam!" Mike laughed.

"Look on the bright side. Property in New Jersey is a lot cheaper than Manhattan. You could probably afford a whole house instead of a shoebox apartment."

"A house in New Jersey? What's next, a minivan and a lawn to mow? I'm eighteen!"

"Well," Mike said, "if you have some kids, they can mow the lawn for you." Leo glared at him.

Leo arrived at Pfizer Bothell at seven in the morning. The same receptionist handed him a keycard for sublevel two without being asked, and he followed the signs down. At least the lab was more interesting than the boring corporate uniformity of the rest of the campus. Cabinets lined the walls, filled with glass vials of glowing liquids. In the center of the room sat a specimen table made of spiritual steel, its surface inscribed with formation arrays that pulsed faintly with residual Qi.

Restraint clamps were built into the table at the wrists, ankles, chest, and forehead. Leo stared at the clamps. He froze, and he suddenly became very aware of the door locking behind him.

"Those are for me, aren't they." The technician nodded and gestured for him to sit. Lord Ross entered a few minutes later with a team of four researchers. She had traded yesterday's pantsuit for scrubs and a white coat, her hair pulled back under a surgical cap.

"Good morning, Leo." She set a tablet on the counter.

"Before we begin, I want to walk you through what we're actually optimizing." She pulled up a diagram of the human nervous system.

"When you're in combat, the total time between perceiving a threat and physically responding is roughly two hundred milliseconds. That breaks into three parts. Recognition, decision, and execution." She held up three fingers.

"Recognition is where your brain processes what it's seeing and classifies it as a threat. For most cultivators, this is the slowest part. But you have omnidirectional awareness. Your divine sense handles spatial processing from every direction at once. For you, recognition is essentially instant. Nothing to improve." She lowered one finger.

"Decision is where your brain picks a response. Dodge left, raise a barrier, channel Qi. However, we can't touch anything brain related until Gold Core." She lowered another finger.

"Execution is everything after the decision. The signal leaves your brain, travels down your nerves, and your muscles actually move. About sixty milliseconds." She set down the tablet.

"Sixty milliseconds doesn't sound like much. But at NFL combat speeds, that's the difference between a clean dodge and elimination. When two flyers with Third Person Perspective face each other, the one with faster reactions wins. Every time." She pulled up a cross-section of a nerve fiber.

"The sixty milliseconds splits roughly in half. Thirty for the signal to physically travel from brain to muscle. Thirty for the muscle to actually contract and generate force. We're improving both." Lord Ross closed the diagram.

"I should mention there's considerable interest in how the protocol will improve how a flyer performs in the NFL. Every current player started body refining decades before they were drafted. You'll be the only one in the league with a top tier military technique. Combine that with decision making training and you'll have the fastest reaction loop on the field." Leo's jaw tightened. He thought about his fight with Lord Hollowfang. Toward the end, Hollowfang had set up an inescapable trap.

Leo had known exactly how to survive. But his body couldn't have handled it.

"Let's start," he said.

"Wonderful." Lord Ross picked up a syringe from the tray. The liquid inside glowed faintly amber.

"The first compound targets the insulation around your peripheral nerves. It bonds with the qi saturating your nerve sheaths to lay down thicker, more conductive layers. It should cut your signal travel time considerably." Leo caught it immediately.

"Should?" Lord Ross continued as if she hadn't heard him.

"The second compound remodels your fast-twitch muscle fibers. Your liquid qi has already restructured the fiber architecture during breakthrough, so the compound works with that existing framework. It will probably triple your motor unit recruitment density."

"Probably?"

"And the third compound stabilizes your tendons so they can handle the increased contraction speed. We're more confident about that one." Leo sat up as far as the chest strap allowed.

"Lord Ross. Are you using experimental drugs on me?" Lord Ross set the syringe down and looked at him.

"The Synaptic Acceleration Protocol has been tested on over two hundred military cultivators."

"What's the catch?"

"The specific formulation we're using on you is bespoke." Lord Ross adjusted a dial on the monitoring equipment.

"After all Leo. Your Foundation Establishment was unusual wasn't it?" Leo blinked.

"Profound Clarity Spirit Nectar." He hadn't considered if the Nectar did more than just increase his divine sense. Lord Ross pulled up a scan on her tablet and turned it toward him. A web of luminous pathways filled the screen, showing the map of his meridians. She highlighted a bright line on the scan.

"The Nectar remodeled your Governing Vessel during breakthrough. The channel that carries qi from your dantian up through your spinal column to the Zifu point in your brain is roughly ninety percent more conductive than baseline." She set the tablet down.

"The standard protocol brings execution time down from sixty milliseconds to forty. The signal from brain to spine can only move so fast through a standard Governing Vessel." Leo turned the information over in his mind. He controlled his lifebound sword through his Dantian. Ninety percent more conductive meant ninety percent closer to instant. His reluctance began to grow into excitement. Lord Ross picked the syringe back up.

"You don't have a standard Governing Vessel. The Nectar already did half our work for us. I spent the last two days developing a formula that takes advantage of your remodeled channel. We're exploiting an opportunity that has never existed in a patient before."

"Wait... is two days of research enough time to create a formula for me? Should we test this on something else first? Like a lab rat?" Lord Ross looked at him. Then she looked at the restraint clamps around his wrists and ankles.

"So I'm the lab rat."

"Look on the bright side, Leo. If the integration works the way we expect, we'll push your execution window down to thirty milliseconds. Possibly twenty."

"Lord Ross. I'm not so sure about this anymore. Can you give me a few more days?" She glared at him. He felt a sudden chill.

"Leo. You asked me for the Synaptic Acceleration Protocol because you wanted an edge. I'm offering you an edge that no one else in the world can have, because no one else has your Governing Vessel. Did you imagine I would let that go to waste?"

"I guess I didn't think it all the way through," he said. His voice came out smaller than he wanted it to. Lord Ross fitted the syringe into an injector mechanism mounted on an articulating arm.

"The improved formula has a minor interaction with the digestive system that we're still characterizing." Leo remembered the photograph she'd shown him two days ago. The chubby, balding cultivator who'd chosen the same technique.

"Is that why the guy in the photo from the other day looked like that?"

"That had nothing to do with the formula. He just really liked fried chicken." Lord Ross locked the injector into position.

"Now. If you're done interrogating me, I'd like to begin. The procedure takes approximately twelve hours." Two technicians moved to each side of the table. They secured the restraint clamps around his wrists, then his ankles. The chest strap pressed him flat with just enough give to breathe. The forehead clamp came last, locking his head in place. One of the technicians swabbed the inside of his elbow and inserted an IV line.

The needle slid in clean, and Leo watched the clear fluid begin its slow drip through the tubing. Lord Ross pulled a surgical tray closer and selected a scalpel from the array of instruments. The blade caught the overhead light as she held it up for inspection.

"I'll need to make several incisions along your primary meridian junctions to insert the refinement catalysts." She consulted a diagram on her tablet, then looked down at his exposed forearm.

"Let's start with the Lung Meridian entry point." She brought the scalpel down and made a precise cut, about two inches long, just below his wrist. Leo hissed through his teeth. The pain was sharp but manageable, and blood welled up along the incision line. Lord Ross paused. She stared at the blood pooling on his skin. Her eyes went slightly unfocused, and something shifted in her face.

"It's been so long," she murmured. Lord Ross raised the scalpel to eye level. A thin line of blood ran along the edge of the blade. She tilted her head, studying it.

"Lord Ross. Lord Ross. Are you okay?" Her eyes snapped over. She looked a little embarrassed.

"Oh." She set the scalpel down on the tray with a soft clink.

"I apologize. I forgot you were still awake."

"You forgot I was conscious?"

"Old habits." She smiled in a way that was probably meant to be reassuring but absolutely was not.

"Don't tell Mike about this, okay? It can be our little secret."

"Our little secret? You had a crazy look in your eye!"

"Goodnight, little Leo." Lord Ross reached for a control panel mounted on the side of the table.

"I'll see you in twelve hours." Her finger hovered over a button.

"Wait. Lord Ross. Lord Ross, I have more questions about the side effects. Lord Ross, I really think we should discuss this in more detail. Lord Ross..." She pressed the button. The world went dark.