Chương 178: Old Man Yelling at the Clouds

The New Jersey heat hit Harbach like a wall of wet concrete. Ninety-six degrees. Seventy percent humidity. The sun directly overhead, turning the parking lot into a skillet. The kind of August noon that made you question every life choice that had led you to East Rutherford. He didn't care. The slate-gray pinstripe clung to his shoulders as he crossed the parking lot, Italian wool soaking up the noon sun. The good shampoo was already sweating out of his hair.

The tie he'd adjusted three times that morning had wilted against his chest. None of it mattered. Because in approximately forty-five seconds, he was going to round the corner of the facility and see Leo Chen stumbling through the final stretch of his first noon lap, drenched and broken and learning what it meant to disobey a direct order. Harbach checked his watch. 12: 03 PM. Three minutes late. Traffic on the turnpike had stolen his theatrical entrance.

He'd planned to arrive at noon exactly, arms crossed, already in position when Chen came around the bend. The kind of coaching moment that belonged in a documentary. Instead he was speed-walking across a parking lot in a suit designed for Milan, sweating through his undershirt. He found a spot near the facility entrance where he could see the final stretch of the lap route. The asphalt shimmered with heat mirages. He straightened his tie. Crossed his arms. Any second now. 12: 15 PM.

The smile was still there, but it had stiffened. The back of his neck was wet. When he shifted his weight, his sock slid against the inside of his shoe, damp with sweat. A groundskeeper drove past on a golf cart, slowed down, stared at the head coach standing alone in a three-thousand-dollar suit. Harbach waved him off. 12: 31 PM. The smile was gone. Harbach's shirt was plastered to his back. The Italian wool had become a personal sauna. He could feel his socks squelching inside his dress shoes.

The suit he'd worn to his daughter's wedding and the Coach of the Year ceremony had developed sweat stains in places he didn't know could produce sweat. He pulled out his phone and dialed Patterson, his flyer coach.

"Patterson. Where's Chen?"

"Coach?" Patterson sounded confused.

"Chen's not here."

"What do you mean he's not here?"

"I mean he's not at the facility. Hasn't checked in today." Harbach's jaw tightened.

"I assigned him noon laps. Twelve PM. Every day until preseason ends."

"Right, I saw that email. But then I got another email saying his training schedule had been modified."

"Who authorized that?" A pause. Papers shuffling.

"Uh." Patterson's voice went up an octave.

"Lord Goodell's office." Harbach stood very still. The Commissioner. The Nascent Soul Lord.

"Lord Goodell?" Harbach repeated.

"Yes sir. The order came through military channels, but Lord Goodell's signature was on the authorization. Chen's been reassigned to some kind of classified training program." Harbach's phone creaked in his grip.

"And nobody," he said slowly, "thought to inform me?"

"I assumed you knew, Coach. Given that it came from the Commissioner's office." Harbach hung up. He didn't move. Sweat dripped from his chin onto the asphalt, where it evaporated instantly with a faint hiss. The suit was ruined. His perfect day was ruined. The groundskeeper drove past again. This time he didn't even pretend he wasn't gawking. Harbach's hands curled into fists at his sides.

The Commissioner had reached down from on high and plucked Leo Chen out of his punishment schedule like a child stealing a cookie off the counter. No warning. No consultation. No courtesy email saying "Hey John, we're borrowing your first-round pick for classified military operations, hope that's okay." Just gone. He looked up at the sky. The sun glared back, indifferent and blazing.

"CHEN!" Harbach screamed at the clouds. A flock of birds scattered from the practice field.

"YOU THINK YOU CAN JUST..." He gestured wildly at nothing.

"THE COMMISSIONER? THE COMMISSIONER?" The groundskeeper had stopped his cart. He was recording on his phone.

"I AM YOUR HEAD COACH!" Harbach's voice cracked on the last word.

"I GAVE YOU LAPS! LAPS, CHEN! DO YOU KNOW HOW LONG I STOOD OUT HERE?" He threw his arms wide.

"LORD GOODELL!" Harbach jabbed a finger at the heavens.

"WHEN I GET MY HANDS ON YOU..." He stopped. Processed what he'd just said. Realized he'd just threatened a Nascent Soul cultivator who could liquefy his bones with a thought.

"... I WILL FILE A VERY STRONGLY WORDED COMPLAINT THROUGH THE APPROPRIATE CHANNELS!" The groundskeeper was openly laughing now. Harbach looked down at himself. The sweat-soaked pinstripe. The squelching shoes. The torn seam where Milan craftsmanship had met New Jersey rage. Three occasions. His daughter's wedding. Coach of the Year. And this. His phone buzzed. An email from Lord Mara's office, the team's owner. Coach Harbach, we've received reports that you've been standing in the parking lot screaming at the sky.

Please remember that you represent the New York Giants organization at all times. Harbach screamed one more time, just to get it out of his system, and squelched toward the building. Somewhere out there, Leo Chen was in an air-conditioned room. Probably playing video games.

The Azure Profound Continent Leo opened his eyes in the Azure Profound Continent game world. It was completely dark. Hidden Hideout didn't have a spirit vein, so they'd never bothered adding formation lights. Leo activated his omnidirectional awareness, and their underground hideout took shape around him. He was lying on his back, centered on the otherworldly demon summoning formation that served as his respawn point.

He got up, dusted himself off, said goodbye to the divine sense press, and made his way through the winding tunnels that would take him to the outside world. The cave mouth opened onto a gray morning. Cold wind came down from the Great Barrier Range, the wall of snow-capped mountains that separated the Azure Profound Continent from the former Hindustan to the southeast. Leo pulled Sunshifter from his dantian. He stepped onto the sword, checked his compass, and flew north.

The route north took him over the Savage Mountains. They stretched around him in every direction. Peaks. Ridges. Ravines. Peaks. Ridges. Ravines. An entire province of stone and forest with no end in sight. The mountains split the two western provinces from the rest of the Azure Profound Continent. If you wanted to reach Thousandsteppes or Lanternmarches by land, you either followed the Embertears River or you didn't go at all. Leo flew straight over the top.

Sunshifter hummed beneath his feet as he pushed it faster. Normally this journey would take a T3 spiritual boat four or five days, accounting for rest stops and the need to find spirit veins along the way. Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author. Leo didn't have those limitations. When his body got tired, the VR pod would provide rest.

When Sunshifter's T3 qi reserves ran low, he could log out and plug it in the the spiritual Qi outlet in his East Rutherford studio. Normally that would be expensive. Every minute of T3 qi drained the joint bank account they'd built for operations, and Arthur tracked those withdrawals like a hawk. But Vivian had negotiated a travel stipend with the military for this mission. A generous one.

Leo could fly as fast as he wanted, burn as much qi as he needed, and Arthur wouldn't send him a single angry voice memo about how Leo was "bleeding him dry."

One and a half days later, he broke through the northern edge of the mountain range. Lanternmarch Province spread out beneath him. Rolling hills, terraced valleys, the occasional village. From this altitude, it almost looked peaceful. Leo descended to get a better view. He was at the easternmost edge of the province, as far from the front lines as you could get without entering the territory of the Beast Kings. But even here, the war had left its mark. The villages below had been stripped clean.

The spiritual soil that had once filled the terraced fields was gone. Anything of value that could be moved had already been moved. Leo passed over a T1 spirit vein. Before the war, people would have used it to cultivate. Now it was left alone. The vein wasn't worth defending, so nobody bothered. Leo flew on. After an hour, he spotted something that made him slow down. A city sat in a valley to the northwest. It hadn't been here the last time he'd passed through.

And there shouldn't be a spirit vein anywhere near this location. Leo adjusted his course and flew closer. The streets were crowded. Leo hovered at a few hundred feet above and let his divine sense wash over the scene. Thousands of people. Tens of thousands. All of them moving through their daily routines, buying vegetables, arguing with merchants, carrying children on their shoulders. Most of them were mortals. He'd heard about this in the reports Vivian had compiled for him.

Cities where cultivators who wanted no part of the war had gathered, far from any spirit vein, content to farm mortal crops and wait out the fighting. If you were younger than eighty and hadn't sworn oaths of service to any sect, you could pretend the war didn't exist. A patrol moved through the central market. Four cultivators, all Foundation Establishment, wearing the leather and fur of Thousandsteppe nomads.

Their horses were mortal animals, which meant they'd been in the city long enough to exhaust whatever spirit beasts they'd arrived with. One of the soldiers grabbed a merchant by the collar. The man's arms went up immediately, palms open, showing he carried nothing. The soldier's divine sense swept through the merchant's pockets, his belt pouch, the interior of his market stall. Nothing. No spiritstones. No storage rings. No hidden caches of spiritual treasure.

The soldier shoved the merchant away and moved to the next stall.

"Third sweep this month," one of the soldiers muttered to another.

"These people have nothing. Command knows they have nothing. Why do they keep sending us?"

"Commandant Huoyan has water in his brain," the second soldier said.

"He believes if we squeeze long enough, someone will reveal a hidden storage ring."

"My grandmother's ghost possesses more spiritual wealth than this entire city." The youngest soldier glanced up at the sky. His eyes went wide.

"Captain." He tugged at his squad leader's sleeve and pointed.

"Captain, someone is up there. On the flying sword. He probably has a storage ring." The color left the captain's face. He didn't look up. He reached over and pressed two fingers against the young soldier's neck. A flicker of qi. The young man's eyes rolled back and he slumped sideways off his horse, hitting the cobblestones with a dull thud. The citizens nearby parted around the unconscious body without looking down. Nobody stopped. Nobody asked questions.

"Heat exhaustion," the captain announced to no one in particular.

"This one does not drink enough water." He gestured to the remaining soldiers.

"Throw him over his saddle. We are leaving." The patrol continued down the street. All three remaining soldiers kept their eyes fixed straight ahead, their divine senses carefully retracted, their attention locked onto the market stalls, all of them deliberately ignoring Leo and his T4 flying sword overhead. Leo watched for another minute, then turned north and resumed his flight. War in the Azure Profound Continent worked differently than it did on Earth. Storage rings changed everything.

A single Foundation Establishment soldier could carry enough food, weapons, medicine, and spiritstones for months of combat on his pinky finger. You didn't have to protect caravans or hold territory to maintain logistics. You just needed spiritstones. Because of this, both sides fought to deny spiritual resources to the enemy. Marauding bands of soldiers roamed the countryside, attacking anyone who tried to cultivate or recharge spiritstones on an undefended spirit vein.

The result was that tens of millions of cultivators had already regressed. People who'd spent decades building their foundations suddenly found themselves cut off from the spiritual energy they needed to maintain their cultivation. Many had become fully mortal. If the war dragged on, that number would balloon into the hundreds of millions. Leo thought about the city he'd just passed. All those people, going about their mortal lives, pretending the war didn't matter to them. In a couple of years, that would change.

The Enlightened was trying to release the Corpse Eternal. When he succeeded, he would expose long-forgotten T5 and T6 spirit veins deep below the surface of the western provinces. And doing so would release a giant horde of jiangshi, zombie cultivators from the Everlasting Empire that had been sealed underground for over a thousand years. Leo had already brought the news to the Shen Clan and the Beast Kings. Cultivators far more powerful than him. Cultivators who should have been able to do something.

But knowing about a threat and being able to stop it were different things. The problem was the top tier spirit veins. If the Lords and Monarchs and Eternals of the Azure Profound Continent learned that there were unclaimed T5 and T6 veins beneath the two western provinces, they wouldn't unite to stop the threat. They would fight each other for the chance to claim those veins. Some of them might even help the Enlightened release the zombies, just for the chance to own the top tier spirit veins underneath.

Leo didn't know what he could do about it. He was Foundation Establishment. A T2 cultivator with a fancy sword and some unconventional techniques. The Eternals that would decide the fate of this continent operated at a level he couldn't touch. He pushed the thought aside and flew on.

The Embertears River appeared on the horizon near sunset. If you followed it east, you would wind your way through the Savage Mountains and eventually reach the central provinces. The sects and temples of the central provinces, collectively known as the Central Powers, led the opposition to Monarch Cloudpiercer's war of western unification. They viewed Lanternmarch as their own backyard and had been sending armies of cultivators to defend against Cloudpiercer's aggression.

Leo descended until he was flying just above the treeline, following the river's course upstream. He'd never thought much about the name before. Embertears. It sounded like something from a poem. But after meeting Monarch Embercrown, the Vermillion Bird, one of the four mythical beasts, Leo had started to wonder. Embercrown. Embertears. Did this river have some connection to the Vermillion Bird? Had something tragic happened here, long ago, that gave the water its name? He filed the question away for later.

If he ever saw Monarch Embercrown again, he would ask. Then he unfiled it. Some questions weren't worth dying for.

Crimson Lotus Fortress came into view the next morning. Leo spotted it from thirty miles out. The fortress sat on a bend in the river, its walls rising in concentric rings around a central tower. Defensive formations shimmered along the battlements, layer after layer of overlapping barrier arrays. This had once been Crimson Lotus City, a trading hub controlled by Lord Ironhorn's Iron Rhinoceros Sect. Leo had been here before, back when the city had been smaller and there had been only one wall.

That was before Lord Shattervow and his army demolished the city. Ironhorn had only survived due to the heroic actions of Leo and his friends. Unfortunately, the Iron Rhinoceros Sect remembered the battle differently. In their minds, Leo was somehow responsible for the destruction of their city and the scattering of their sect. Leo had stopped trying to correct them. After Shattervow's assault, the Central Powers rebuilt the city. Reinforced the walls. Upgraded the formations. Stationed a permanent garrison.

They gathered spiritual soil from the surrounding countryside and planted acres of spiritual wheat. This was what the war was actually about. Spiritual wheat. Territory didn't matter when you had storage rings. The only things worth fighting over were the fortress cities and the fields they guarded. The war followed the seasons. During spring and summer, the fighting cooled down. Both sides focused on planting and growing, letting their enemies do the same. An unspoken agreement.

You didn't burn crops you might capture later. But when harvest came, the war resumed. Whoever held the fields when the wheat ripened claimed the entire year's yield. The winner fed their armies. The loser starved. Leo extended his divine sense toward the fields of wheat. T4 spiritual wheat. Nascent Soul tier. The kind that only grew above T4 spirit veins. So much for Ironhorn's claim that there was only a T3 vein here. He thought about stopping by.

Ironhorn had asked him to bring an update on what he'd found in the Everlasting Empire ruins. The old man had helped Leo learn to thread the Mountain Domain, and Leo had never properly thanked him for it. But Ironhorn answered to the Imperial Court. And the Enlightened had significant influence over the imperial secret police. Leo hesitated, hovering above the river, watching the fortress in the distance. Then he remembered something else.

The last time they'd parted, at the entrance to the ruins, Ironhorn had banned him from Crimson Lotus City. The Central Powers had renamed the city since then, rebuilt and reinforced it into something barely recognizable. But Leo had a feeling the ban still applied. He pulled a jade message talisman from his storage ring and pressed his divine sense into it and composed a message. Hey Ironhorn. Flying by your new fortress. Very impressive. I couldn't help but notice all the T4 spiritual wheat in your fields.

If you ever have time, I'd love to learn the secret of growing Nascent Soul tier crops on a T3 spirit vein. He flicked the talisman into the air. It shot toward the fortress like a tiny green comet, carrying his message. Leo caught the return talisman a few minutes later. Go away, Leo. Please. Fair enough. He continued east and followed the river into the Savage Mountains.

The Savage Mountains were Beast King territory. The great void refining beasts who ruled the peaks didn't tolerate human settlement. Cultivators who wandered too deep into the range tended to get eaten. But the war had changed things. Leo started seeing camps. Small clusters of tents pitched on the riverbanks, smoke rising from cooking fires, figures moving between makeshift structures. Refugees. Families who had fled the fighting in the western provinces and found shelter here.

Leo passed a spirit vein where dozens of Qi Refining cultivators sat in meditation circles, drawing what energy they could from the trickle of T1 qi. A year ago, any human who approached a vein in Beast King territory would have been eaten. Now the kings looked the other way, letting the displaced masses recover what cultivation they could. Boats moved in both directions, their water wheels churning the river white.

Westbound vessels carried troops, Foundation Establishment soldiers packed onto decks, their armor gleaming in the morning sun. Eastbound boats rode lower in the water, heavy with wounded and empty supply crates. Three hours into the mountains, he passed the mouth of a valley branching south. He knew that valley. If he followed it through the peaks, he would eventually reach Stonehaven and Monarch Scatterstraw's field of wheat. Leo had unfinished business with Scatterstraw. But not today.

He kept flying east until he found the valley he was looking for. Narrower than the others, its walls steeper, its floor hidden beneath a permanent layer of mist. The river split here, the main branch continuing east toward the central provinces, a smaller tributary winding south, into territory few humans had ever seen. Leo followed the southern branch. The mist closed around him. The mountains disappeared. And somewhere ahead, hidden in clouds that never lifted, lay Skyhome. The land of the cranes.