Chương 4: Freedom of Speech?!?

Wei Tuo's POV, Azure Profound Continent In all the Azure Profound Continent, across its great provinces and countless lesser territories, there was no one the heavens had cheated more thoroughly than Wei Tuo. Or so Wei Tuo had believed, right up until yesterday. He counted the formation plates one more time. Four. Still four. He knelt in the center of the tomb chamber and ran his fingers across the nearest Nether Sovereign Jade plate.

The Otherworldy Demon Summoning Formation carved into its surface pulsed with a slow amber light, each pulse slightly brighter than the last, feeding on the Tier Two spirit vein that ran beneath the tomb. Twelve hours until the formations completed their cycle. Twelve hours until four Otherworldly Demons materialized on these plates, bound to serve whoever activated the array. Wei Tuo had activated the array. Wei Tuo would be the master.

He sat back on his heels and allowed himself, for the first time in recent memory, to grin. The grin split his gaunt face in a way that would have alarmed anyone who knew him. But he was alone these days, since most of his former acquaintances worked for the creditors hunting him across three provinces. Wei Tuo owed Elder Zuo alone more spiritstones than a Foundation Establishment cultivator could earn in six lifetimes of honest work. And Elder Zuo was not a patient man.

Two weeks ago, Wei Tuo had felt the divine sense sweeps of Pond Gazing Sect outer disciples combing the hills south of here. They hadn't found the tomb yet. The unregistered spirit vein was small enough to escape casual detection. But the Pond Gazing Sect had four Gold Core elders. It was a matter of time. Twelve hours. He needed twelve hours, and then he would have four Foundation Establishment demons standing between him and everything the world had sent to collect on his debts.

The entire cultivation world was a rigged game, and anyone who pretended otherwise was either a liar or a fool. Wei Tuo was a gambler. He'd spent enough years in Elder Zuo's dice dens to know the only way to change your fate was to bet everything on a single hand and pray the heavens blinked first. Three months ago, hiding from a pair of bounty cultivators, he had found the map in the collapsed basement of an abandoned waystation. Water-stained, torn along one edge, written in archaic script.

Any other man would have discarded it. But Wei Tuo recognized the summoning formations in the margins. Half the cheats in Crimson Lotus City used minor summoning arrays to rig dice rolls, and he'd been on the receiving end of that trick more times than his pride allowed him to admit.

He'd followed the map to this tomb, and inside he found everything it promised and more: four Nether Sovereign Jade plates already carved with Tier Two Otherworldly Demon Summoning formations, a formation book thick as his forearm detailing the summoning system and dimensional theory, and a chamber fed by the unregistered spirit vein. Wei Tuo had wept when he found the spirit vein. Actual tears, streaming down his dirty face, because for the first time in his miserable life the heavens had dealt him a winning hand.

The formation book sat open beside him now. He'd spent a day trying to read it before giving up. The formations were incomprehensible, but at least the explanations were straightforward. Each Nether Sovereign Jade plate was permanently bound to one summoned demon. Once a demon materialized on the plate, the bond was set for life. The demon could traverse freely between the Demon Continent of America and the Azure Profound Continent using the plate as an anchor point, but the plate could never be reassigned.

He checked the timer formations he'd inscribed into the chamber walls. Roughly eleven hours remained. Wei Tuo picked up the second book he found in the inheritance. An English-Common Dictionary. The language of the Demon Continent.

"Heh-lo," he muttered, squinting at the first entry. Common translation: a greeting exchanged between Americans upon meeting. Appropriate for all social stations. He wasn't exactly sure what the word 'Americans' meant. It was probably the name for the people of the Demon Continent. He flipped ahead, scanning for useful vocabulary. Words for 'obey', 'fetch', 'guard', 'attack'. The inheritance texts had warned that the plates bound demons spatially, not mentally. The summoned would serve only if given reason to.

Wei Tuo wasn't concerned. He'd been swindling people his entire life. He caught a phrase near the bottom of the page. The Common translation beside it read: The foundational covenant of American governance, guaranteeing sacred rights to all Americans regardless of station or cultivation.

"Bill of Rights," Wei Tuo read aloud, butchering every syllable. You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story. He stared at the entry for a long moment, brow furrowed, trying to parse the implications. He read the first entry beneath it twice, certain he was mistranslating.

"Freedom of speech." The sacred right of all Americans to speak their minds without punishment from those above them. Wei Tuo's mouth hung open. He read it a third time. The Common translation was unambiguous. Any demon, regardless of cultivation realm, could say whatever they pleased to anyone, including their superiors, and the superior was forbidden by covenant from retaliating.

Wei Tuo tried to imagine walking up to Elder Zuo and telling him exactly what he thought of his rigged dice tables, his extortionate interest rates, and his ugly wife. The fantasy lasted about two seconds before his survival instincts suppressed it. Zuo would have his tongue pulled out through his throat before he finished the sentence. What kind of world produced cultivators powerful enough to cross dimensions but too bound by covenant to silence a man for causing them to lose face? He shook his head.

Whatever strange customs the demons brought from their world, they would learn how to obey him soon enough. A low thud echoed from somewhere deeper in the tomb. Wei Tuo's head snapped up. He held his breath. Listened. Probably one of the Qi Refining jiangshi bumping into a wall. Those walking corpses were too mindless to find the main chamber. Probably. He set down the formation book and went to check on the barricade he had made earlier.

Leo's POV, Earth This is the stupidest game I've ever played. Leo pulled his consciousness out of the session and lay still in his pod, staring at the inside of the lid. His jaw ached from clenching it for the last twenty minutes. He had just finished a round of The Great Earth Catacombs War, a game he'd found through a sketchy banner ad.

He still had one more hour before The Azure Profound Continent finished unlocking, and until then he'd been killing time with everything else the VisionPod's App Store had to offer. VR games maxed out at ten percent realism. That was the industry ceiling, a hard technical limit that no developer had cracked. Every game Leo had tried in the last twenty-three hours felt like playing with oven mitts on. You could see the world just fine, but your body moved like it was wrapped in cotton.

So when Leo saw an ad promising "the most realistic combat simulation ever developed" and "a genuine experience of pre-Treaty of Great Restraint warfare." He had to try it out. After all, there were even testimonials from actual Catacombs War veterans praising how authentic the combat felt. Leo logged in, joined a match, and immediately understood what kind of realism they meant.

At ten percent realism, combat using Heavy Radiation Protective Daoist Robe Enclosures was apparently an accurate representation of how the Corporate Nuking Raiders fought. The key insight was that fighting inside lead shells felt just as clunky and miserable in real life as it did in the simulation. When wearing a Heavy Radiation Protective Daoist Robe Enclosure, you couldn't use Spell Arts without breaching your own suit and irradiating yourself.

All you could do was waddle toward the opposing lead shell and stab at it with a sharpened stick until you poked a hole. Then you would both lose. If you somehow managed to crack your enemy's enclosure first, they just reached back, flipped the switch on their backpack Miniature Atomic Qi Bomb, and sent everyone within fifty meters to their next life. Chain reactions of Miniature Atomic Qi Bombs regularly wiped out entire battlefields.

Twenty minutes of miserable lead-suited poking, erased in a cascade of tiny mushroom clouds. Every match ended the same way. Someone got a hole poked in their suit, flipped their switch, and the server reset. Leo could see why the boomer veterans gave it five stars. The game perfectly captured the soul-crushing futility of Catacombs era warfare. The reviews must have been a sick joke. He was still salty about the hour he'd wasted waiting for it to download.

He swiped the game closed and checked the Azure Profound Continent icon. 00: 56: 47 One hour. After a full day of killing time, the countdown was almost done. He closed his eyes. He'd spent the last twenty-three hours doing two things: playing every game in the App Store, and thinking about what the Azure Profound Continent actually was. He still didn't know exactly what it was. But it had a rules page, and the rules page had told him enough to keep him awake all night.

The first thing he'd noticed was the respawn timer. Death wasn't permanent inside the Azure Profound Continent. You died, you came back. But the cost of dying scaled with your cultivation realm, and it scaled hard. Mortal stage: three-hour respawn. Inconvenient. A slap on the wrist. Qi Refining: fifteen hours. Most of the day, gone. Foundation Establishment: seventy-five hours. Three full days locked out. Gold Core: three hundred and seventy-five hours. Over two weeks. The pattern was obvious.

Every realm multiplied the penalty by five. The second thing he'd noticed was that time inside the Azure Profound Continent counted as sleep. Leo hadn't slept last night. He hadn't needed to. In less than an hour he'd be getting all the sleep he wanted. The third thing, and the one that had kept his mind racing since yesterday afternoon, was what you would bring into the game. You entered the Azure Profound Continent with your cultivation and the clothes on your back.

You died, you lost everything you'd gathered, and respawned the same way you came in. Just you, and whatever cultivation you'd built. This meant that there were spirit veins inside the game. There had to be. And if there were spirit veins inside, Leo would have access to free spiritual qi. Free. Not metered. Not billed monthly. Not gated behind the career ladder his dad had described in the car. He'd been thinking about this for a full day now.

The notepad app on his phone had a list twenty items long, everything he could do with unlimited free spiritual qi. Cultivate. Practice Spell Arts. Sell formations on Earth for massive profit, since he could inscribe them with free spiritual qi from the game. He could do things no other incoming Exeter student could, because every other student was paying by the hour. There was one warning he hadn't figured out yet. First-time entry could cause temporary short-term memory loss.

The rules page offered no explanation for why. It just said that there was no way around it. Leo didn't love the idea of his brain scrambling itself on arrival. But the rules said he could respawn if he died. So what was the worst that could happen? He closed the rules page, settled back into his pod, and watched the timer count down. He just hoped he wouldn't have to die too many times to get what he wanted.