Chương 2: The Great Atomic Qi Bomb

They hit the wall of brake lights the moment they merged onto I-95. Sunday afternoon traffic, bumper to bumper, stretching past the horizon. Leo checked his phone. 1: 23. He needed to be home by three, and they sat at a dead stop.

"We could fly," his dad said. His dad's hand drifted toward the dashboard. Leo followed it and found a second ignition switch next to the standard Prius controls, flanked by gauges he had never seen before. An altimeter. A needle labeled QI FUEL. Something called a flight lane indicator. So the car could fly. Leo tried not to look shocked. This world had flying cars. His dad's fingers hovered over the switch. Then he pulled his hand back.

"Your mother would kill me. Last time I flew to pick up groceries, she didn't talk to me for two days." Above them, a man on a flying sword overtook the entire highway in three seconds, trailing a faint red contrail. David Chen watched the sword go and decided the sword guy was living better than him.

"It's fine, Dad. I'll use the time." Leo pulled out his phone.

"I want to look some stuff up before Ms. Patterson gets here anyway." He had a little over an hour, and he needed to figure out what kind of world he had transmigrated to. He started with school, since Patterson would arrive soon. What did students here actually learn? His old world ran on the three Rs: Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic. This one ran on the three Immortal Arts: Martial Arts for physical cultivation, Dao Arts for formations, refining, and alchemy, and Language Arts for spell techniques.

Leo read that last one twice. Language Arts. Hopefully mispronouncing a spell wouldn't make things explode. History next. If he was going to fake being a native, he needed to know what happened. In 1492, Superior Columbus sailed the ocean blue and discovered America, a land rich with Tier Four and Tier Five Spirit Veins the native cultivators had left untapped for millennia. Leo could already predict the next paragraph, and the article confirmed it: guns, germs, and spiritual steel. Some things never changed.

The two World Wars matched his timeline's dates. The ideology differed. Instead of democracy versus fascism, the Allied Nation States had fought an Axis of Legacy Immortal Sects, ancient powers opposed to universal cultivation for all. Then the Cold War. Korea. Vietnam. A nuclear arms race. Leo scrolled faster. Old news. He needed the present. Then he hit the 1980s and stopped scrolling. The Great Catacombs War. A hostile cultivation world had invaded Earth through dimensional rifts.

The enemy realm was many times larger and more powerful than Earth. The article called it the Catacombs. Earth only had up to Tier Five Spirit Veins. Without higher-tier resources, cultivators on Earth could only reach Tier Five Deity Transformation. Spirit Veins were the cultivator equivalent of oil wells. You needed to absorb spiritual qi from them to grow more powerful. The higher your realm, the more powerful a spirit vein you needed, or your cultivation would regress and you would lose everything you'd built.

The Catacombs had Tier Six Void Refining and Tier Seven Great Ascension veins. Earth was outmatched by two full cultivation realms. Earth should have lost in a month. Except he was sitting in traffic on I-95, which meant Earth had survived. So Earth had some advantage the article hadn't mentioned yet. Something big enough to close a two-realm gap. He read the casualty figures for the first Catacombs incursion and realized this wasn't a novel. People had died. Were still dying. And he lived here now.

Then he found the advantage. The Great Atomic Qi Bombs. During the Cold War, both superpowers had converted spirit veins into weapons of mass destruction. They had stockpiled tens of thousands of nuclear warheads, enough to end the world several times over. When the Catacombs invaded, those weapons proved decisive. No wonder Earth survived. That made sense. What came next did not.

The MBAs of the 1990s, Leo read with growing horror, had calculated that for every ten Great Atomic Qi Bombs detonated, the United States could seize enough enemy spirit veins to manufacture fifteen new bombs. A profit margin of five bombs per campaign. The barbarians at the gate got their hands on the nuclear arsenal. Someone had optimized nuclear warfare for quarterly returns. The article even had a name for the industry: the Corporate Nuking Raiders, the most profitable business in human history.

CEOs traded spirit stone futures while their employees died of radiation sickness. They measured quarterly earnings in megatons. But all good things came to an end. After the Catacombs' Great Ascension cultivators intervened, the United Nations and the Catacombs signed the Treaty of Great Restraint in the year 2000. The terms put a stop to things. During direct conflicts between the Catacombs and the UN, the UN promised not to use any Great Atomic Qi Bombs.

In exchange, cultivators at the Deity Transformation realm and above could not fight, under threat of "ascending in a mushroom cloud of irradiated Qi dust." The treaty had an exception for high-tier spirit veins. Fights over Tier Five veins allowed Deity Transformation Monarchs. Fights over Tier Six veins allowed Void Refining Eternals. Leo frowned at his screen. Something didn't add up. The Catacombs were bigger, stronger, and had Great Ascension Immortals. The treaty neutralized their greatest advantage.

Why would the stronger side give that up? Maybe nobody wanted to conquer an irradiated wasteland. If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. The article confirmed it. The Corporate Nuking Raiders had strip-mined and nuked thousands of miles of Catacombs territory into oblivion. The land was so barren and radioactive that nobody could live there until the 2030s. The spirit veins themselves would not recondense until decades later.

The Corporate Nuking Raiders called this "sustainable development." Leo closed the app and looked out the window. The highway hadn't moved. Sunlight warmed his lap through the windshield, and for a second the heat felt wrong. Too normal for a world that had nuked another dimension into submission and booked it as revenue. One phrase from his reading kept circling his mind. He didn't understand what it meant, but it felt important.

"Dad, what does 'money is immortal potential' mean?"

"It means exactly what it sounds like. You need spirit vein access to cultivate. Spirit vein access costs money. Monthly fees, Leo. It's like a gym membership. If you cancel, your body goes backward. Your meridians narrow. Your cultivation regresses. And when your cultivation regresses, your lifespan contracts back toward baseline." Leo went quiet. Earlier, he'd been thrilled to learn that your lifespan doubled every time you broke through to a new realm. Foundation Establishment was 160 years. Gold Core was 320.

But now he realized the extra lifespan wasn't an opportunity for everyone. In his old world, being broke meant ramen and a bad apartment. Here, being broke meant growing old while the rich stayed young for centuries. Most people couldn't afford to keep cultivating. They just watched themselves grow frail while the wealthy didn't age a day. Leo thought about the Kowalskis across the street, who had held a yard sale last spring and moved to a smaller house.

He wondered now if that move had meant something worse than downsizing in this world.

"Is that why you and Mom push so hard about Harvard?"

"It's not about the bumper sticker. A degree from a top cultivation university gets you the career that gets you the vein access that keeps you alive decades longer. That's what your mother and I are building for you." He tapped the steering wheel.

"That's why she clips coupons for a family that doesn't need to clip coupons." His dad said all of this like it was normal. But his hands were tight on the wheel. They sat in silence. A few more cars passed overhead. Leo lined up two facts he'd read and one he'd just heard. The Catacombs veins were recondensing. The forums were full of expedition chatter and territory maps. And every family on Earth was desperate for vein access. Recondensing veins plus desperate demand equaled a land rush.

And a land rush into hostile territory meant...

"Dad, the Catacombs veins are recondensing, right? I keep seeing stuff about new expeditions, territory expansion..."

"Everybody's excited." His dad didn't sound excited.

"The market's pricing in a conquest that hasn't happened yet, and every twenty-two-year-old thinks they're going to claim a plot and retire at three hundred." The car moved forward another length. Stopped.

"It's going to be a war, Leo. The Catacombs won't just let us walk in and take their veins. And when it starts, it's going to need bodies. Lots of young Foundation Establishment cultivators with combat training and not enough career options to say no."

"But that's what Exeter is for," Leo said.

"Academics. Getting into a good college." His dad gave him an odd look.

"Exeter is a military academy, Leo." Leo kept his face still. He frantically revised everything he thought he knew about his own future.

"It's been military since the Civil War. Most of the graduating class signs their commission the day after commencement or goes to college for ROTC." His dad glanced over.

"You know this."

"I know. I just... I thought I was going to end up majoring in Computer Science."

"Your mother doesn't want you going into the Catacombs, but I'll tell you this." His dad kept his eyes on the road.

"Once you're at Exeter. Once you're around boys who are running transport missions, earning military merits, and living that life. It's going to call to you. That's what Exeter does. It gets into you."

"I'm not interested in the military."

"I know you're not. But you'll be surrounded by kids who are. You understand what I'm saying?" Leo set down his phone. The Exeter Wikipedia article had made it sound like a cultivation paradise. He had imagined stone courtyards and older students explaining the theory of core formation while autumn leaves fell. A modern-day sect. But sitting here now, with his dad's hands tight on the wheel, Leo saw its true nature.

It was a machine that produced soldiers and fed them into a meat grinder that had already killed tens of millions. And his parents were trying to thread the needle. Send him into the machine, but pull him out the other side holding a diploma instead of a deployment order. Fine. He'd get the diploma. Study, cultivate, graduate, walk straight into a career with zero military anywhere near it.

A small voice pointed out that he was a transmigrator, and that transmigrators in every novel he'd ever read never got the quiet life, and that the universe had not dropped him into a world at war so he could major in Computer Science. He told the voice to shut up and picked his phone back up. Fifty minutes until Ms. Patterson arrived.

"Leo, we're here." His dad had already pulled into the driveway. Leo looked up, startled. The last stretch of the drive had passed without him noticing.

"Dad, what time is it?"

"Two forty. We're good." His dad killed the engine.

"Remember, not a word about the hotdogs."

"Got it."

"Or the sword."

"Especially the sword." His dad grinned, and they went inside. Leo's mom stood in the living room, vacuuming. She looked them over.

"Did you eat anything?"

"No," they said in unison. She narrowed her eyes.

"There's relish on your shirt, David." His dad looked down. The glob from Costco sat there, green against the white polo. He touched it with one finger and acted like he'd never seen it before.

"That's from yesterday."

"You didn't wear that shirt yesterday."

"I'll go change." His dad fled upstairs. Leo followed.

"Leo, go wash your face!" his mom called after them.

"Brush your hair. Ms. Patterson will be here in twenty minutes." Leo's bedroom door stood open the way he'd left it that morning. Everything matched his memory: the unmade bed, the desk cluttered with junior high notebooks he'd never open again, the window overlooking the backyard where his dad's garden fought a losing battle against Connecticut summers. Everything except the corner where his bookshelf used to be.

An Apple VisionPod Pro sat where three shelves of manga and a stack of Pokemon binders should have been. The VR pod had the same seamless white finish as every other Apple product, and it was the size of a large recliner. Leo crossed the room in three steps. According to every Wikipedia article he'd just read, this was the primary training tool for the next generation of cultivators. His generation. Half the cultivation forums he'd skimmed treated it the way his old world treated a top tier gaming PC.

And his parents, the coupon-clipping, Harvard-obsessed, keep-my-son-out-of-the-war Chens, had already bought him one. He placed his hand on the lid. Dozens of interlocking geometric circuits etched on the pod's surface flared to life under his palm. They were Formations, spiritual arrays that channeled qi the way circuit boards channeled electricity. They pulsed. And something moved. One pattern detached from the lid.

It peeled away from the white casing, a small cluster of golden lines and angles that rotated slowly as it rose between Leo's face and the pod. The formation hung there for half a second. He could see its geometry folding inward, patterns nested inside patterns, smaller and smaller, until his eyes watered trying to track them. Then it moved. It shot toward him. Leo flinched, but the formation had already struck his forehead.

A point of warmth drilled through his skull and kept going, past bone and tissue, into somewhere deep he had no name for. He stumbled backward and sat hard on the edge of his bed. His hands shook. He touched his forehead expecting a mark, a burn, anything. Just skin. But three words sat inside his mind, clear as if someone had typed them there. The Azure Profound Continent.