Chương 204: What's Actually Going On

"If someone is manufacturing fake ratings to push us out of the league," Vince said, "we need to get the players union involved. Emergency meeting of the NFL Players Association. Tomorrow if we can swing it."

"Some nepo baby wants my roster spot so he can see himself on TV? Over my dead body." Niki pulled out her phone.

"I can get the association's president on a call in twenty minutes."

"I'll hit up the owner of the Colts." Damari stood up.

"He been complaining about TV money for years. If the ratings are fake, owners gonna want answers too." Vince nodded.

"Good. I'll handle the union reps." He looked at Leo.

"Sit tight, chief. This is a veterans' fight." They filed out, talking into their phones. Leo sat alone in the Giants locker room. He didn't know what to do. He knew he should let the veterans handle it. He was a rookie. This was their league, their fight, and they'd been doing this long before he showed up. But he still wanted to do something. The obvious first step was to reach out to his friends. Leo pulled out his phone and scrolled through his contacts. But what he saw were names from Exeter and Yale. Harry.

Jimbo. Edward. Vicky. All rich kids. At Exeter, every flyer had been a young master from a wealthy family. In college, same thing. Leo hadn't thought much of it at the time. They'd treated him well enough. He'd assumed the sport was just expensive, that the equipment costs filtered out everyone who couldn't afford a flying sword. Professional Flying Aces was different. To play in the NFL, you needed seventy-plus years of grinding formations.

Rich kids didn't want to spend decades of their prime hunched over a desk, drawing formations to slowly increase their Si. They wanted to advance to Gold Core quickly. Enjoy the privileges of a higher realm. The only people willing to spend seventy years drawing formations sixteen hours a day were people who had no other options. No family money. No connections. Hundreds of thousands of graduates became formation masters every year.

Only a few dozen stuck it out long enough to draw the four hundred thousand hours of formations needed to reach the Si minimum for the NFL draft. And now the nepo babies wanted in. They wanted the fame, the endorsement deals, the screaming fans. They wanted access to the minutes of T4 qi during games. They wanted to relive their glory days from high school and college without putting in the seventy years of formation work it took to earn a roster spot. It bothered them.

Foundation Establishment nobodies from broke families were living better than Gold Cores born into wealth. The NFL's biggest stars were commoners, and the rich kids couldn't stand it. The whole situation reminded him of something he'd heard about. The K-shaped economy. The S&P 500 climbed higher every quarter, but the growth wasn't distributed evenly. The richest cultivators grew richer. The poorest grew poorer. The gap widened every year. Pundits had been warning about the K-shaped economy for years.

If the trend continued, the wealthiest families would hoard the high-tier spiritual qi for themselves. The one percent would shrink to the 0. 1 percent. Then the 0. 01 percent. Eventually, the only cultivators who could advance to Nascent Soul Lord would be the ones born into the right bloodlines. Others argued that rewarding the richest families was necessary. Nascent Soul Lords died by the dozens in every major battle in the Catacombs.

If there was no incentive for them to fight, no promise that their descendants would inherit their status, then motivating the Lords to risk their lives would become impossible. Leo had never concerned himself with these arguments. He was just a teenager. He wasn't going to fix the economy by himself. He focused on his own cultivation, getting stronger, and assumed that eventually things would work themselves out. Now he wasn't so sure. Leo couldn't solve wealth inequality.

The President of the United States couldn't solve it. This was a problem that had been brewing for centuries. He'd spent years hoping this world was similar to his pre-transmigration one. That everyone was more or less equal. That hard work and talent could take you anywhere He'd known the answer for a while now. He just hadn't wanted to admit it. On the surface, cultivation seemed accessible. Work hard, get lucky, and you could probably reach Gold Core. But Nascent Soul Lord without family connections?

Deity Transformation? Was that really possible? The commoners played with T2 spiritual qi. They advanced to Foundation Establishment if they were talented, maybe Gold Core if they were exceptional. They served their mandatory years in the Catacombs and came home and lived comfortable lives. And above them, invisible, the real cultivators schemed and bargained and fought over T4 and T5 resources that the lower tiers would never touch. Leo needed to talk to someone who understood how this world actually worked.

Someone who could tell him what traps to avoid. But who could he trust? The obvious choice was the Apex Flyer Elia Manning. If Foundation Establishment cultivators were pushed out of the NFL, the Apex Flyer program would suffer. The military had the most to lose from this rule change. But Vince and the veterans were probably already reaching out to her. They'd played with Manning for years. Leo thought about who else he could reach out to. Someone not connected to the Players Association.

Someone who might see things the union couldn't. He thought about the Nascent Soul Lords he knew. Mike's wife, Lord Ross, was one option. But Mike said that she stayed out of politics. She lived a quiet life in Seattle and did her duty with the Navy Reserves when called upon. Even if Leo asked, she might not know anything useful. That left Lord Newmont. Could he trust Newmont? Leo still didn't know the Lord's true motivations, or which side he'd take if Gold Cores pushed their way into the league.

That being said, he had worked with Newmont many times. The time when Newmont first evaluated whether he could thread the mountain domain. The hospital after the Battle of Fort Cambridge where Newmont pinned a gold bar on his chest. The Thousand Talents controversy. The MGM takeover. The Cranesong trade. Every major point in Leo's cultivation career had involved Lord Newmont. Tianyi would call that karma.

Although Leo had never taken Shen Tianyi up on his offer to study karma at the Shen family compound in Fog City, he knew the basics. The higher cultivators ascended, the more they cared about karma. Leo didn't know exactly what karma he had accumulated with Lord Newmont. But he figured that after everything they'd been through together, there had to be something significant between them. Leo picked up his phone and composed a message asking for a meeting.

Lord Newmont agreed to meet him the next day deep below McGuire Air Force Base, in the cavern holding the replica Gate of Contrition. Leo landed at the entrance to Support Building G and showed his ID to the guard. The man checked a tablet, nodded, and waved him toward the elevator. He stepped inside. The panel showed no floor numbers, just two unmarked buttons. He pressed the bottom one. The elevator descended. He spent the ride thinking about the Gate of Contrition.

It was a fortress designed to hold against Void Refining Eternals, reproduced stone by stone from reconnaissance data that cost dozens of lives. He remembered watching a destroyer take a beam through its midsection during a live-fire drill. Three hundred feet of spiritual steel punched clean through. The whole ship had looked small next to the Gate's obsidian spires. The descent took several minutes. Long enough for Leo's body to remember what happened last time he was here and start hurting.

The doors opened to the observation platform. Lord Newmont stood at the glass waiting for him. He wore his olive military overcoat, same as always. Leo had never seen him in anything else. He wondered if Newmont slept in it. Beyond the glass, the Gate of Contrition replica loomed in the darkness.

"Leo." Newmont turned from the window.

"Tell me what's on your mind." Leo walked him through what Kowalski and Vince had figured out. There was a coordinated push to put Gold Cores into Flying Aces, and someone with enough resources to fake television ratings and throw around hundreds of millions in sponsorship money was behind it. He and his teammates were concerned about their future in the league. This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

"Kowalski thinks a bunch of rich kids are pushing for the rules change," Leo said.

"The descendants of Lords and Monarchs. They're probably jealous of commoners who worked their way up through the league. They want to replace us and have their time in the spotlight." Newmont nodded.

"Reasonable guess." A horn sounded somewhere in the depths. Gold Core flyers emerged from staging areas carved into the cavern walls. Newmont watched them lift off.

"Kowalski isn't wrong about the actors. He's wrong about the motivators." He turned to Leo.

"You and your teammates are focused on questions that don't matter. Who gets to play in the league? Who gets to be famous? Who earns the TV money?" Leo wanted to argue. Money is important. Money is immortal potential. That was the first lesson he'd learned about cultivation after transmigrating.

"Money doesn't matter. Not to the people who actually run things. The Deity Transformation Monarchs care about one thing and one thing only." Newmont pointed at the massive structure below.

"How to crack the Gate of Contrition and capture the T5 spirit veins of the Cults of the Catacombs." Leo looked at the Gate. A flight of Gold Core flyers dove at its walls. They lasted half a minute. The Gate's artillery lit up, and the flyers dropped out of the air one after another. Although Leo had spent weeks drilling against it, he was still unconvinced Earth could crack these things open. The Gates of Contrition were rumored to hold off Deity Transformation Monarchs. Even Void Refining Eternals.

And the whole time he'd been here, the only cultivators he'd seen fight against the Gate were Gold Core flyers. If the Monarchs really cared about cracking these things, why weren't they down here themselves, drilling against it? It didn't sound like the Lords and Monarchs were taking the Gates seriously. It sounded like they wanted someone else to do the job for them so they didn't have to risk their lives.

"The current plan," Newmont said, "is to develop cultivators with an exceptional amount of Si." The Apex Flyer Program.

"First, we start with Qi Refining cultivators." Newmont continued.

"We have tens of thousands of Formation Masters spend decades drawing formations over and over to strengthen their divine sense. Of the few that persist and reach the ten thousand Si limit, we allow them to breakthrough to Foundation Establishment and join the NFL." Allow?

"After the NFL flyers train their divine sense to the hundred thousand Si limit, the most talented are selected to breakthrough to Gold Core and become Apex Flyers. From there, they train their divine sense until it reaches the theoretical maximum of one million Si. Then they advance and form their Nascent Soul." Newmont paused.

"That's the theory, at least. In practice, this plan is still far from producing the first Apex Lords. The highest Si an Apex Flyer has reached is five hundred thousand. It will take over a hundred years of formation drawing for him to reach the theoretical maximum." He looked at Leo.

"But once he does, he will break into Nascent Soul with an Si of three million. A cultivator unlike anything Earth has ever seen. Before now, there was never infrastructure to support someone training their divine sense all day for centuries." Newmont pointed at the Gate.

"With that kind of power, he will be able to destroy the Gates of Contrition. Then he will advance again, tripling his Si to a monstrous nine million. And with that, he will conquer the cities of the Cults and seize the T5 spirit veins." Newmont gestured at the machinery around them. The staging platforms. The destroyer berth. The endless machinery of war.

"Everything you see here. Everything you take for granted in modern cultivation. It all exists to serve this one goal."

"Most people think the industrialization of cultivation was designed to help Foundation Establishment soldiers survive," Newmont continued.

"That we're using mass production to compensate for our shortage of Nascent Soul Lords. That the flak cannons, shrapnel shells, and formation drones are there because every American soldier deserves the best equipment we can give them." He shook his head.

"The reality is different." Leo waited.

"In order to increase divine sense, you need to draw formations. Thousands upon thousands of them. To strengthen an Apex Flyer, who has Nascent Soul level divine sense, you need to draw Nascent Soul tier formations. Constantly. For centuries." Newmont frowned.

"But the spiritual qi the Apex Flyers use to draw those formations has to come from somewhere." He paused.

"Every Apex Flyer in training consumes the cultivation resources of four Nascent Soul Lords. Per year. The more we expand the Apex Flyer program, the fewer Nascent Souls we can support. Every Apex Flyer in training means four Gold Cores who will never be allowed to advance." Newmont shrugged.

"So we take the formations the Apex Flyers draw during training and hand them out to regular soldiers. The T4 flak shells serve double duty. Si training for the Apex Flyers, and firepower for the troops who have to fight without Nascent Soul Lords backing them up." T4 flak shells. Every transport in the Catacombs carried Nascent Soul tier flak cannon shells. Leo had always assumed the T4 shells were proof that America valued its troops so much that they gave soldiers access to Earth's most powerful weapons.

It wasn't generosity. It was solving the problem they created themselves. The military needed Nascent Soul Lords on the battlefield, but the Apex Flyer Program had redirected an enormous amount of T4 spiritual qi. So the military handed out the Apex Flyers' leftover training materials to try to fill a gap they'd created themselves.

"But now we arrive at the real problem," Newmont said.

"Every year, as more Flying Aces players hit the hundred thousand Si threshold and graduate to become Apex Flyers, there are fewer Nascent Soul breakthrough slots to go around." He spread his hands.

"Gold Cores who aren't in the Apex Flyer Program find themselves squeezed out. Every year the qualifications to become a Nascent Soul Lord get harder. Every year spiritual qi gets more expensive. So they look for alternatives to get stronger." Leo thought about that. There weren't many good alternatives to improve your Si and stand out from the crowd. The most popular way to improve your Si was to draw formations. This was because it was one of the only ways to earn back the cost of the spiritual qi.

You drew formations, sold them, and used the income to draw more. But formation work was slow, tedious, and low-paying. Combat in the Catacombs was a much faster way of increasing your Si. You burned through massive amounts of qi in a fight, and your Si grew accordingly. But even the most skilled flyers had a combat half-life measured in hours. Seeking battle after battle to increase your Si would get you killed very quickly. The NFL was the dream.

You got paid generously to use copious amounts of T3 and T4 spiritual qi in front of millions of fans. The league had figured out how to turn riskless combat into profit. Playing in the NFL would supercharge your Si and your bank account at the same time. Everyone assumed the rich kids just wanted the spiritual qi and the fame. But if Gold Cores replaced Foundation Establishment flyers in the NFL, the pipeline of players training their Si to the hundred thousand maximum of Foundation Establishment would slow down.

"The push to let Gold Cores into Flying Aces," Leo said slowly.

"It's not just about rich kids wanting to skip the decades of Si training so they can play in the NFL. If Gold Cores take over the league, Foundation Establishment flyers lose the best training ground they have. Fewer of them max out their Si. Fewer qualify for the Apex Flyer program." Newmont nodded.

"Their argument is that we've hit the maximum Apex Flyers Earth can support. America has enough spiritual qi to support four thousand Nascent Soul Lords. If we keep admitting three new Apex Flyers a year, and it takes two hundred years to train each one to a million Si..." Three per year times two hundred years. Six hundred Apex Flyers in training. Times four Nascent Souls worth of resources each. Twenty-four hundred Nascent Soul Lords worth of T4 qi.

A full sixty percent of America's T4 spiritual qi, funneled into a few hundred elite cultivators. Newmont continued.

"The Monarchs are pushing the Apex Flyer program, but they're running out of T4 spiritual qi to divert. After all, a large portion of Nascent Soul qualifications each year must go to the military. In order to motivate troops to fight, you must provide certain opportunities for advancement." Each year the breakthroughs to Nascent Soul in the military were publicized. Lower that number and you'd have mutiny in the ranks. Newmont turned to face Leo.

"So the Monarchs only have one place left to cut. One pool of T4 spiritual qi they can divert without causing a political crisis." He paused.

"Their own families. The qualifications they'd set aside for their children and grandchildren." Leo gulped. He'd never heard anyone talk about the Monarchs' family conflicts so openly. But the bigger shock was what it implied.

"Wait," Leo said.

"The kids know their parents are doing this. And they're fighting back? Openly?" Newmont gave him a look.

"So the whole Gold Cores wanting into Flying Aces thing will resolve itself," Leo said.

"The Monarchs will step in and tell their kids to cut it out. To wait their turn. And advance to Nascent Soul after we win the battle in the Catacombs." Newmont shook his head.

"It's not that simple. The Monarchs can't just order their children to give up their futures. Many of them don't have the time to wait for the Apex Flyers to win the war." He paused.

"It has to do with karma." Karma. It all came back to karma.

"The karma between parent and child is one of the strongest bonds in the world," Newmont said.

"The higher your realm, the heavier it weighs. Even Void Refining cultivators of the Catacombs are restrained by their children."

"Yes, a Monarch stands as head of their household. But headship isn't ownership. It's stewardship." Newmont turned back to the Gate.

"You're entrusted with your children's cultivation, their future, their dreams. At the Deity Transformation level, that trust is not something you can violate without consequence." Leo stared at the Gate of Contrition. He thought about his own path. The choices he'd made. The doors that had opened for him along the way. No Lord had conscripted him into their ranks. No Monarch had forced him to swear a Dao heart oath. Maybe that wasn't a coincidence.

Maybe at the highest levels, even the most powerful cultivators had to let the next generation pursue their own path to immortality. From Leo's perspective, the rich families were cutting off his teammate's path to immortality so their kids could play in the league without doing the decades of necessary formation work. From the rich kids' perspective, the NFL flyers were cutting off theirs by graduating into the Apex Flyer program and taking up the T4 qi they needed to advance.

Both sides were fighting for the same thing. The right to breakthrough to the next realm. Leo and Newmont stood in silence for a while. Below, the flyer squad had completed their drill. They descended toward the staging platform, their movements crisp and coordinated. Another squad was already lifting off to take their place.

"So what should I do?" Leo asked. Newmont turned to face him.

"At the end of the day, none of this is your concern." The Lord gestured at the Gate.

"These are questions for cultivators far more powerful than you. Plans you're not part of." He paused.

"The Monarchs behind the Apex Flyer program will find a solution. They always do." Leo nodded slowly.

"But you are part of the New York Giants." Newmont put a hand on Leo's shoulder.

"And over this season you've formed karma with your teammates. Niki. Vince. Damari." His eyes met Leo's.

"Focus on one thing. How can you be there for them?" Leo couldn't solve the Apex Flyer problem. He couldn't fix the spiritual qi economy. He couldn't negotiate peace between Monarchs and their children. But he could show up for his teammates.

"I can work with that," Leo said.