Chương 6: It's Only a Game

Mike had disappeared. Leo pressed himself against the wall and counted his heartbeats because counting gave him something to do besides think about the fact that whatever had seized Mike could reach into any of them at any moment and switch them off like a light. Seven beats. Eight. Nine. Transmigrations were supposed to come with cheats. Systems. Immortal destiny.

The protagonist wasn't supposed to stand in a tomb full of zombie corpses while his strongest ally vanished into thin air, leaving behind a sword clattering on the stone. Kevin flinched so hard his yang fire flared, scorching a black streak across the ceiling. Arthur dropped into a combat stance, fists glowing, pivoting to cover both tunnel entrances at once. They stood there for agonizing seconds that stretched into minutes. Nothing happened. No spectral figure materialized.

No sinister laughter echoed through the chamber. No explanation presented itself. And then it got awkward. Nobody wanted to stick their neck out. So they just... waited. And about fifteen minutes later, Mike reappeared.

"Mike!" Leo's voice cracked with relief. Mike gave him a strange look, his expression holding something complicated that Leo couldn't read. He glanced around the room, taking in the zombie corpses, the bound prisoner, the three faces staring at him like he came back from the dead.

"So, guys," Mike said slowly.

"Do you remember what you were doing before you got here?" Leo stared at him. Arthur and Kevin scratched their heads. They thought about it. Really thought, reaching for memories that should have been immediate and obvious, and found a wall of fog where the last few hours should have been. Nothing. Something important was missing.

"Let me fill you in," Mike said, crossing his arms.

"You were checking out a new game in your VR pod. The Azure Profound Continent. The one that appeared out of nowhere and took a day to unlock." The words landed, and Leo felt them touch against something buried deep in the fog. Azure Profound Continent. He knew those words. He just couldn't remember why. Mike gestured around at the tomb chamber.

"Apparently, this is all a game. My baby monitor force-logged me... I mean, notified me to log off." Leo's brain went blank for a full three seconds. Then everything came back at once. The rules page that warned about short term memory loss. The mysterious words that burned into his mind. Him waiting out a countdown clock and logging in the moment it reached zero. A game. He was inside a game called the Azure Profound Continent. An ultra realistic game that fooled him into thinking he had transmigrated.

Everyone gave each other weird looks.

"So the zombies..." Kevin started.

"NPCs," Mike confirmed.

"And the guy Arthur just..."

"Also an NPC." Leo looked at Wei Tuo. The man had gone quiet, his sobs reduced to hitching breaths, his hollow eyes fixed on the ceiling. NPC or not, the pain had sounded real, and Leo had been the one who said the word cripple. He pushed the thought aside. He could feel guilty later. Right now he needed to check if he could get back to the real world. He activated the log-off sequence, and everything dissolved into light.

Leo opened his eyes in his VR pod. The gel peeled away from his temples. The seal hissed. Connecticut sunlight slanted through blinds he'd left open, painting a warm stripe across the pod's white exterior. He sat up slowly and let the real world solidify around him. Mike was right. It was a game. It felt nothing like any game he'd played before. His other VR experiences were all limited by technology to ten percent realism. He had genuinely thought he'd transmigrated again. But it wasn't just any game.

The qi in that tomb had been real enough for Kevin's palms to throw fire, real enough for Arthur to shatter a man's dantian, real enough for Leo to feel the ambient pressure of a Tier Two spirit vein thrumming through the stone floor. He grabbed his phone and opened the notes app. Free qi = free cultivation. No vein fees. Unlimited money from selling formations. Progress carries over between worlds. He stopped typing and stared at the sentence. Ms.

Patterson's pyramid she had left for him to study flashed through his mind. You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author. Two hundred fifty million Qi Refiners and Mortals. Eighty million Foundation Establishment cultivators. One and a half million Gold Core Superiors. Four thousand Nascent Soul Lords. Ten Deity Transformation Monarchs. The young masters at Exeter had Nascent Soul parents and birth-to-present cultivation regimens funded by generational wealth.

Leo's parents were Foundation Establishment. But if cultivation progress carried over, and the Azure Profound Continent's qi was free, then Leo had just removed the single largest variable separating him from every silver-spoon legacy student he'd be sitting next to in September. He looked at the list he had made earlier. Train combat arts with zero risk. Die, respawn, repeat. Sell formations on Earth using qi gathered for free. 100% profit margin.

Get strong enough that nobody slots me into the "serve a young master" track. He thought about Ms. Patterson's explanation that the real path for students like him was making himself indispensable to someone born richer. He looked at the next line. Independence. He smiled. He had achieved that. Look for high tier spirit veins. The smile faded. Independence wasn't that simple after all. Sure, he could be an independent Foundation Establishment cultivator. But he lived in a world of Gold Cores and Nascent Souls.

He needed to get back in and find higher-tier spirit veins. He put the phone down, climbed back into the pod, and logged in.

The tomb materialized around him. Same stone walls, same dead zombies, same bound prisoner. The first order of business was learning about the world they were in. They'd found an English-Common Dictionary in Wei Tuo's belongings. Leo spent the next two hours translating Wei Tuo's increasingly fragmented explanations while the man drifted between cooperation and dull-eyed despair. The story came out in pieces. Wei Tuo had found a map while running from creditors. The map led here.

Inside the tomb he'd discovered four Nether Sovereign Jade plates pre-carved with summoning formations, a comprehensive formation manual, and an unregistered Tier Two spirit vein. The formation manual contained Otherworldy Demon Summoning Formations for every cultivation tier from Qi Refining to Great Ascension, plus something called a Profound Website Formation that apparently controlled the game's recruitment interface on Earth.

Someone had built an interdimensional video game using ancient cultivation techniques that predated the internet by millennia. The good news was that the screenshot function on their VR pods still worked. They photographed everything. Page after page of formation diagrams, cultivation theory, dimensional mechanics, and dictionary entries. It took days. Between sessions they planned, debated, and argued about what to do next. Once Leo logged in to find Arthur and Mike talking quietly by the tunnel entrance.

They stopped when they noticed him. By the end of the week, Kevin had read the formation manual cover to cover three times.

"This is our golden ticket." He tapped the page.

"If we can master these formations..."

"We can summon anyone we want," Mike finished.

"Armies. Specialists. Whoever we need." The excitement was palpable. Even Wei Tuo seemed to perk up slightly, perhaps sensing the shift in atmosphere even if he couldn't understand the words. Then reality reasserted itself.

"There are two problems." Leo leaned over and flipped the manual to a dog-eared page.

"It says here that the formations act as a level cap."

"A what?" Arthur's voice echoed from somewhere in the tunnels. He hadn't gone as far as Leo thought.

"The summoning formation we're bound to determines our maximum cultivation in this world," Leo explained.

"We're connected to Foundation Establishment formations. That means we can cultivate up to Foundation Establishment, but we can't break through to Gold Core." Silence.

"So we're stuck," Kevin said flatly.

"You normally need to be Gold Core to create a Gold Core formation. It's a chicken and egg problem."

"There's more. Each formation plate requires Nether Sovereign Jade. One piece per person, bound permanently. We can't duplicate them. We can't share them. Four plates, four players, forever. Or at least until we can find more." Mike's jaw tightened.

"So we can't make more plates to bring help in."

"Fantastic." Arthur emerged from the tunnel mouth, covered in dirt and looking thoroughly frustrated.

"Found the spirit vein, by the way. About thirty feet down, running under the whole tomb complex. Tier Two, like we thought."

"But we need a Tier Three spirit vein," Leo said. Arthur raised an eyebrow.

"Foundation Establishment is the floor, not the goal. We need Gold Core. For that we need Tier Three qi. Which means we need to take a Tier Three vein."

"There's a Tier Three vein at the Pond Gazing Sect," Kevin said.

"Wei Tuo mentioned it earlier. Four Gold Core elders defending it."

"Four Gold Cores versus four Foundation Establishments." Arthur sucked his teeth.

"Those are terrible odds."

"On the ground," Mike said quietly. Everyone looked at him.

"The locals don't fly. I asked Wei Tuo. They don't use flying swords. If we can get airborne..."

"And then what?" Kevin interrupted.

"Hover politely until they surrender?"

"Qi bombs." Arthur crossed his arms.

"We fly over their sect and drop qi bombs until they decide the vein isn't worth the trouble. Standard aerial denial. That's how we did it in Vietnam." The plan was crude and violent, and Leo could see half a dozen ways it could fail. But they could respawn, so they could afford to fail. The most important thing was to do something. To solve their situation. To breakthrough to Gold Core. They divided roles. Arthur would scout for opportunities and spiritstones to build capital ingame.

He would also search for spiritual iron deposits needed for their future flying swords, and food for Wei Tuo. On top of that, he was to quietly hunt down and silence the creditors currently on Wei Tuo's trail. The old boomer was too stubborn to learn new things, so they let him do the dirty work. Kevin, who had studied formations as a graduate student, would manage their Earth-side finances.

He would refill his spiritual qi reserves in the Azure Profound Continent, return to Earth, and use the qi to inscribe and sell formations at pure profit. Mike, whose military background gave him the highest divine sense of the group, would focus on learning the formation work for their future flying swords and qi bombs.

"That leaves me," Leo said. He wasn't sure of his role. Arthur and Mike had discussed it without him. The secrecy bothered him, but there was nothing he could do about it. He was a fourteen-year-old mortal, and they were Foundation Establishment adults. He needed leverage. Arthur turned to face him. Something in the old man's expression had shifted.

"You're our secret weapon, kid." Leo was assigned two responsibilities. First: learn Common, the language of the Azure Profound Continent. The other three had refused. They claimed they were too old for a new language and would handle it later once they broke through to Gold Core, where improved comprehension abilities would make it trivial. Leo accepted this without argument because it would give him the leverage he needed. Every word he learned was a tool they didn't have.

Second: eventually create the Tier Three Gold Core summoning formation.

"I'm a mortal," Leo said.

"I don't have enough divine sense to register on most Si meters. How am I supposed to draw a formation?" Arthur didn't answer immediately. He picked up the spiritual sword from where Mike had set it against the wall.

"The good news," Arthur said, "is that the game gives us something we can't get anywhere else. Unlimited attempts. Zero permanent consequences. You die, you respawn. Three hours for a mortal." He stopped two paces from Leo and held the sword loosely at his side.

"The bad news is that you're going to need to die a lot."