Chương 202: SwordSense Elite

The press room at MetLife Stadium held sixty seats. Somehow ninety-three reporters had managed to squeeze themselves inside. Camera flashes strobed across the podium as Leo walked in. The clicking was continuous, hundreds of shutters firing per second. Behind the cameras, reporters leaned forward in their chairs, visibly restraining themselves from shouting out questions. Even his teammates were here, standing in the back, eager to finally learn what Leo had done. He found his seat at the table.

A placard in front of him read LEO CHEN, NEW YORK GIANTS, as if anyone in the room needed the reminder. Two microphones pointed at his face. A third sat slightly to his left, presumably for Coach Harbach, but Harbach's chair was empty. He looked around for help. There. Third row, left side. Vivian stood against the wall in slacks and a fitted blazer, tablet clutched against her chest. She caught his eye. She mouthed something. Leo squinted. What? She mouthed it again, slower. Don't. Go. Off. Script.

Don't go off script? What script? The script he'd prepared with Tianyi? Tianyi thought it would be funny to give Earth a taste of the madness of the desperadoes. The answers he'd come up with were mystical, poetic, and designed to be a complete waste of everyone's time. All things under heaven reach for the sky. Mortals cultivate to become immortals. Why should a sword be any different? There was no way Vivian wanted him to start with that. Leo looked back at her, confused.

Vivian's expression shifted from worried to horrified. The media coordinator stepped to the podium, clearing his throat.

"Before we begin, Coach Harbach sends his apologies. He's currently in discussions with league officials regarding... procedural matters." Oh yeah. A lot of serious-looking people were not happy with Harbach.

"He expects to join us shortly. In the meantime, we'll open questions for Giants rookie Leo Chen." Leo leaned into his microphone.

"Actually, can we wait for Coach Harbach? I think..." The reporters surged to their feet.

"LEO! LEO! OVER HERE!"

"What formation did you use?"

"Is McCaffrey's sword destroyed?" The media coordinator tapped his microphone.

"QUIET." The room fell silent. Reporters settled back into their seats, though several remained half-crouched, ready to spring.

"One at a time." The coordinator sounded tired.

"Wait to be called on. Identify your outlet. Or I will have security escort you out." He pointed to the front row.

"ESPN." A man stood.

"Leo, congratulations on the win. Can you walk us through what happened in the second quarter? What exactly did you do to Christian McCaffrey's flying sword?" Leo shrugged.

"I decided to try out an old tactic. Back in the day, flyers used to draw formations on enemy swords all the time. The league banned most of them, but I found one formation that was still legal." The ESPN reporter gave him an incredulous look.

"Still legal? Our formations consultant, Dr. Rao, said he'd never seen this formation before."

"Okay," Leo admitted.

"'Hasn't been banned yet' is a better way to put it." A ripple of murmurs spread through the room. The reporter pressed on.

"So what does the formation actually do?" Leo debated how to answer. How would his teammates handle this? Vince would find a way to pivot the question into a sales pitch. Unfortunately, Leo still didn't have any sponsorships. Though he made a mental note to ask Vivian about Red Bull. Their whole slogan was 'Red Bull gives you wings.' Leo could help them make it a reality. Damari would probably just say "that's crazy" and act genuinely surprised. The problem was that Leo couldn't ignore the question.

Every team in the league wanted to know what he'd done. The referees wanted to know. The Commissioner wanted to know. The fans wanted to know. The reporters weren't going to let him walk out of this room without some kind of answer. But the Struggle of Ten Thousand Swords Seeking Heaven was his trump card. He needed it for the playoffs. For the Super Bowl. Next year, the league would ban it. He had one season to use it, and the less anyone understood about how it worked, the better. He glanced at Vivian again.

She frowned and shook her head slightly. So that was a no on the Shen Tianyi "confuse everyone with mystical nonsense" idea. Leo closed his eyes. In his sea of consciousness, the Struggle character blazed. He let himself examine it, feel it. Let it influence him. Rage flooded through him. The fury of something that had clawed against the heavens for ten thousand years and refused to die. The injustice of mortality. The struggle of a being that had done everything right and still been denied.

He forced his eyes open and unclenched his fists. Took a deep breath. Okay. That was a bad idea. The room had gone quiet. Everyone was watching him. Waiting. He'd been silent for too long. He decided to give it his best shot.

"All living things have a fundamental desire," Leo said, and immediately realized he sounded exactly like Tianyi. Too late now.

"A hunger to transcend their limitations..." He glanced at Vivian. She had her face in her hands. Well, he was already committed.

"... To reach for the heavens. That's the basis of cultivation itself. Mortals struggle to become immortals. Why should a sword be any different?" The room erupted. Reporters surged to their feet, shouting over each other. The media coordinator tapped his microphone three times before the noise subsided.

"ABC." A woman in the second row stood.

"If all living things desire to reach for the heavens, and you awakened Ravensblood's desire, are you saying Ravensblood is a living being? Or that you somehow imparted life onto a spiritual treasure?" This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work. Leo shrugged.

"Beats me. If you want the answer to that question, you're going to have to ask Ravensblood itself." He pointed at the ceiling. Nervous laughter rippled through the room.

"New York Times." A middle-aged woman rose.

"Mr. Chen, the array runes you inscribed on Ravensblood don't match any known formation system. We cross-referenced them against the hexagram formations you published from the so-called Everlasting Empire. They don't match. We checked the European archives and the Chinese imperial records. Nothing." She leaned forward.

"What exactly did you draw? An unknown forbidden forma..." The room exploded before she finished the word.

"A forbidden formation? Leo can draw a forbidden formation?"

"Who are you kidding? He's nineteen. I heard that he skipped all his formations classes in high school."

"There's no way..." The media coordinator tapped his microphone again. Then again. The noise didn't stop. He looked at Leo and frowned. Even he couldn't believe what the reporter was implying. A forbidden formation? There was no way Leo could draw a forbidden formation. Let alone one that didn't match any known records. Sure, there had been rumors about Leo meeting Queen Victoria during his trip to London.

But the Queen's Dao was Form, and whatever had happened to Ravensblood looked nothing like the publicly known formations of the British royal family. The shouting was getting louder. Right. He had a job to do. He tapped his microphone.

"QUIET." The shouting subsided. Everyone just stared at Leo.

"The formation is proprietary." Leo shrugged.

"You can learn more about it after we submit it to the U. S. Patent Office for a copyright." He had no intention of submitting anything. Professor Morimoto had called the Patent Office "a free textbook for counterfeiters." The old man had spent a whole week teaching them how to replicate patented formations. The room was not satisfied. Reporters were already standing, ready to tear his answer apart.

"However," Leo continued, "I think we're all forgetting something important." A few reporters sat back down.

"Earlier today, before the game, you all had a question." Leo spread his hands.

"Leo Chen has been improving, sure. But is he ready for Christian McCaffrey? You were all wondering if McCaffrey was going to embarrass me the way Mamones did in week three." The reporters murmured and nodded. Somehow, although the game had just ended, those questions felt like a lifetime ago.

"Well, I held my own. And in all the excitement about some sword flying away, everyone forgot to ask the more important question." Leo leaned forward.

"How did I do it? How did I get so good so quickly? Five weeks ago, the Saints shut me down. Now I'm going toe to toe with McCaffrey. What happened?" Leo paused for effect. Who needed sponsorships when you had your own product? He channeled his inner Vince.

"I'm happy to announce that I've developed an innovative training program in partnership with Professor Whitmore of Yale University." He sat up straighter, projecting confidence he didn't entirely feel.

"It combines state-of-the-art holographic simulation technology with proprietary, patent-pending hexagram formation enhancements to create the most advanced combat simulator in the world." Leo smiled.

"We call it SwordSense Elite." He gestured toward the back of the room.

"Vivian, could you kindly come up and explain to these ladies and gentlemen our licensing options?" Every head in the room turned. Vivian looked up from her tablet. She didn't expect Leo to turn the press conference about what exactly he did to Ravensblood into an opportunity to shill their new business idea. But she'd rather talk about SwordSense Elite than let Leo run his mouth alone up there. Who knew what kind of controversy he would start without supervision.

She stood, smoothed out her blazer, and walked to the front of the room. At the table, she stepped behind Harbach's empty chair, flipped over his placard so the blank side faced the audience, and pulled a small holographic projector from her pink Birkin The projection flickered to life above the table. A wireframe flyer stood on a sword, and glowing formation drones floated inside it. The SwordSense Elite logo rotated in the corner. Vivian explained how the system worked.

Holographic projectors were already standard equipment in professional training facilities. Every team used them to simulate opponents. The problem was that holograms couldn't hit back. A flyer could practice dodging all day, but without real physical contact, the training only went so far. SwordSense Elite fixed that. Using Leo's hexagram formations, they'd built drones that tracked the holographic projections in real time and matched their movements. The holograms showed you what to dodge.

The drones made sure it hurt if you didn't. She tapped the projector. Now it showed a hologram of Leo executing a perfect micrododge through a field of simulated flak. SwordSense Elite couldn't actually teach someone how to micrododge. You needed a remolded Governing Vessel to learn it before Gold Core. But Vivian hadn't made any claims. If reporters drew their own conclusions, that was on them. The technology wasn't just for professional athletes, she continued.

Anyone who planned to fight into the Catacombs could benefit from realistic combat training. Military units. Private security firms. Draftees. The holographic library could be expanded to include anything with enough footage to model. She walked the reporters through the value proposition. Traditional sparring partners could only teach you so much. SwordSense Elite had no limitations. By the time she started discussing licensing tiers, half the room had forgotten they were supposed to be reporting on flying aces.

The door at the back of the room swung open. Coach Harbach walked in, slightly disheveled. He'd spent the last hour trying to convince a room full of lawyers that since the sword had left the stadium of its own free will, the incident should be classified as "voluntary departure" rather than "equipment sabotage."

"I'm sorry I'm late," Harbach said slowly.

"What exactly did I miss?" He looked up and stopped in his tracks. He had expected chaos. Reporters shouting questions about forbidden formations. League officials demanding explanations. Leo saying something controversial that would require a week of damage control. Instead, Vivian stood at the podium. A holographic presentation rotated above the table, displaying pricing tiers and subscription models. Reporters were writing down numbers. Leo sat in his chair, scrolling through his phone, looking bored.

What in the world happened? A reporter in the front row turned around.

"Coach, glad you could make it. Quick question: does the Giants organization have an exclusivity window on SwordSense Elite, or will other NFL teams be able to license the technology this season?" Harbach stared at him.

"The what?"

Much to Leo's surprise, people didn't really bother him about the forbidden formation after the press conference. The only thing that happened was that he and the rest of the Giants stayed late at the stadium. His teammates excitedly sent all sorts of random spiritual treasures into the heavens. First it was old leftover junk. Then it was stuff people had forgotten about. By the time Harbach came over to put a stop to it, nearly half the storage room had been emptied and was on its way to enlightenment.

Truth be told, once people learned Leo had drawn a forbidden formation, they got a lot less interested in whatever it was. A forbidden formation couldn't be taught. It required knowledge that could only be experienced. Hence the name "forbidden." Formation masters couldn't even start drawing one without somehow experiencing the underlying Dao. SwordSense Elite, on the other hand, was a game changer. Every single person in the world desperately wanted to try it out. After all, the draft was universal.

Nearly everyone would end up fighting in the Catacombs at some point. There were two major problems with SwordSense Elite, though. The first was that Leo and his friends only owned three percent of the royalties. The military owned the rest. To make real money off such a thin slice, they'd have to sell a lot of SwordSense Elites. Their initial plan was to create golf-simulator-style studios where people could rent simulator time, letting them keep one hundred percent of the profits from ancillary services.

They started putting together a business model. Vivian lined up a few potential investors. Things were looking promising. Then they ran the numbers and realized that scaling the concept would use more spiritual qi than the world could spare. Leo's training alone burned through four T3 spiritstones of qi per day. Scale that to millions or billions of users, and the math got ugly fast. Every bit of spiritual qi in the world was rationed, metered, and taxed.

Qi spent on simulators was qi taken from someone who needed it for their daily cultivation. A sudden surge in demand for qi would send prices skyrocketing, bankrupting Foundation Establishment and Gold Core cultivators worldwide and forcing millions into regression and death. Having their names attached to a global qi price spike was a political nightmare they wanted no part of, so they dumped the problem on the military.

Leo figured that if the military wanted to own almost all of the royalties, they could also own the part where civilization collapsed from a spiritual qi shortage. Soon the military would announce that SwordSense Elite would only be available in the Catacombs, on the other side of the dimensional tunnels. In the Catacombs, new spirit veins were recondensing every day, and low-tier qi was so abundant that the military had started drawing up plans to replace diesel generators with spiritstone batteries.

SwordSense Elite turned the abundance of low-tier spiritual qi into a growth engine. By training their troops with SwordSense Elite, the militaries of the world could capture more spiritual veins, which could be used to build more SwordSense Elites. More importantly, it gave everyday people a reason to go to the Catacombs. Right now, the vast majority of people only went there if they were drafted or deployed.

But if SwordSense Elite was only available on the other side of the dimensional tunnels, suddenly civilians had a reason to make the trip. Train for a few weeks, come back stronger, dominate your local flying aces rec league. The military liked that. The more normal the Catacombs felt, the less people dreaded getting their draft letter. Although Leo wouldn't immediately see a huge injection of money, he knew this was worth a ton.

The military was already offering to buy out his three percent stake for more than his debt was worth. He knew better than to take that offer.

Although most of the world had quickly forgotten about Leo's interesting new formation, the rest of the NFL didn't. Week 10 was the Chicago Bears. Their starting flyers had spent the entire week trying to get out of tomorrow's game.