Chương 8: You'll Thank Me When You Grow Up

Leo climbed back into the VisionPod. [01: 43: 47]"Mom, one hour and forty-three minutes before I can go back in." He heard a familiar sound. She had grabbed the rooster. The rooster was an egg timer shaped like a fat ceramic chicken, bought at some market in Shenzhen before he was born. It had haunted every timed event of his childhood. Homework sessions. Piano practice. Timeouts. The ticking started. Even through the pod's walls, Leo could hear it, faint and relentless. He wondered how long until the tea arrived.

Mrs. Chen checked the Amazon app. Fifteen more minutes until the drone got here. Leo looked small in the pod's contoured seat. Wrung out. She watched his breathing, shallow and uneven, the way it got when he was trying not to cry. Everything in her wanted to pull him out of the machine and hold him on the couch and tell him he never had to do this again. But she knew better. Leo was going to walk into Exeter obsessed with advancing his cultivation as fast as possible, just like every other fourteen year-old boy.

The children in their neighborhood compared realms the way boys compared height. Early Qi Refining. Middle Qi Refining. Who broke through first, who broke through fastest. They were all wrong. Her grandmother used to say that an Early Qi Refining cultivator with 3000 Si would crush a Peak Foundation Establishment cultivator with 2000 Si. Divine sense mattered more than realm, and every cultivator who chased breakthroughs instead of sharpening their perception was putting the cart before the horse.

Leo would understand when he was older. Children always did. Her phone buzzed. Amazon delivery: your package has arrived.

The pod lid opened. Light stabbed Leo's eyes and he flinched, turning his face away, but his mother's hand was already at the back of his head, tilting a ceramic cup against his lips. He swallowed. A wave of ice washed through him, and the ghost-pressure behind his eyes, that greasy sensation of his consciousness being ground between sword-steel and divine sense, pulled back to a dull ache. The screaming static that had filled his skull went quiet.

"More," his mother said, and tilted the cup again. He drank. The cold spread from his stomach outward, and his heartbeat, which had been hammering against his ribs for the last hour, finally slowed to something that felt human. He could think again. Full sentences, not just flashes of Mike's calm face and the wet pop inside his skull. Money truly could buy happiness. Whatever this tea cost per cup, it brought him back to life. His mother set the empty cup on the desk beside the rooster timer.

The ceramic chicken ticked on, indifferent.

"Mom. Thank you." He let his head fall back against the pod's headrest.

"I feel like a person again." She didn't acknowledge the gratitude. She was already refilling the teapot with her back to him, and Leo recognized the posture. She had prepared a speech and intended to deliver every word of it.

"I'm not doing it again," Leo said. His mother turned around.

"I know what Mike told you on the phone. I know the Si went up. But Mom, he killed me. He held me down and crushed my brain and I died, and I'm not getting back in that game so he can do it again." Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more. She pulled the desk chair to the pod and sat down.

"Leo, you have three weeks before Exeter. Three weeks." She held up three fingers.

"You can spend them playing video games and watching cultivation streamers, or you can spend them building the one thing that nobody at that school can take away from you."

"I can build divine sense without having my brain crushed."

"At what speed?" She tapped the Si sensor on the desk.

"0. 1 in one session. Formation work at Qi Refining produces gains so small you need a lab to measure them. What Mike is doing is brutal, yes. But there is no substitute." Leo stared at the ceiling. Three weeks. He thought about September, walking into Exeter surrounded by rich kids with family Nascent Soul cultivators and private tutors. If he didn't want to be someone else's lackey, he would have to do something special.

"Fine," Leo said.

"I'll do it until Exeter. That's it."

"Good." His mother nodded.

"The first week will be roughly fifty sessions." She paused, and something in the pause told Leo she wasn't finished.

"The fifty portions I bought were individual retail price. Three hundred and sixty dollars per portion. Eighteen thousand for the box." She folded her hands in her lap.

"But if I commit to a bulk order of two thousand portions, the price drops to three hundred even. And the eighteen I already paid converts to a deposit on the bulk order." Leo blinked.

"Two thousand?"

"Two thousand sessions of training, yes."

"Mom, that's..." He tried to do the math.

"Six hundred thousand dollars."

"I taught you how to multiply, Leo." Six hundred thousand dollars. He turned the number over in his head, and then the other number caught up to him and the money stopped mattering entirely. Two thousand sessions meant two thousand times Mike would crush his brain and he would wake up screaming. He sat up in the pod.

"You're out of your mind. Two thousand? That's two thousand times I have to die. You want me to do that two thousand times?" His mother held the remainder of the tea out to him.

"Drink."

"I'm not going to just drink tea and pretend you didn't say two thousand."

"Drink the tea, and then I'll explain why." He took the cup. He drank. The tea settled through him like cool water over a burn, and even as the relief spread through his skull he resented it, because the tea was making it harder to hold onto the anger he needed.

"When a cultivator advances to a new realm," she said, "their divine sense multiplies. The Si you accumulate at one stage is worth roughly three times as much after breakthrough." Leo glanced at the rooster. Twenty-two minutes left. Twenty-two minutes until the next time he died, and his mother was trying to get him to save money buying his death in bulk.

"I've stayed at Foundation Establishment for eight years longer than I needed to," she continued.

"Every surgery I perform at this stage builds my Si in fractions. When I finally break through to Gold Core, my Si triples." She leaned forward.

"If that principle holds from Mortal to Qi Refining, then every point of Si you build before you start cultivating will be worth three times as much the moment you step into the first stage. And right now, you are the only person in recorded history who can build Si as a mortal." Leo stared at the sensor. 0. 2. Three times 0. 2 was 0. 6. Worthless. Three times whatever two thousand sessions could build was something else entirely.

"How far could two thousand sessions take me?" he asked.

"Mike estimates diminishing returns per session, but even conservative projections would put your mortal Si in a range that has never been documented. And when you enter Qi Refining and the multiplication kicks in..." She didn't finish. She didn't need to. Leo held the empty cup in both hands and stared into it. The tea leaves sat at the bottom in a dark spiral, spent and still. Two thousand sessions. Two thousand deaths.

Two thousand times he would feel Mike's divine sense crash through his skull and grind him into pieces. Two thousand chances to build something that would multiply the moment he started cultivating.

"Buy the two thousand," Leo said. His mother took the cup from his hands, rinsed it in the kitchen sink, and came back with a glass of water and a granola bar.

"Your next session is in fourteen minutes. Eat something."

Leo's second death was somehow worse than the first. This time, he knew what was coming. He had time to anticipate, to dread, to feel his heart rate climb as he logged back into the Azure Profound Continent and found Mike waiting beside the spiritual sword.

"Ready?" Mike asked.

"No."

"Good. Honesty is healthy." Mike positioned Leo's head against the cold steel.

"Same as before. Try to relax into it."

"That's the worst advice I've ever heard."

"Probably." Mike's divine sense descended. The pain was just as absolute as before. Leo's consciousness shattered against the anvil of the sword, fragmenting into pieces too small to hold thought or memory or self. He died. He woke up screaming. This time, his mom was ready. She pressed the second portion of tea into his trembling hands. Leo drank. The screaming subsided. The world reassembled itself.

"0. 3 Si," Mrs. Chen announced, checking the meter. Her smile was radiant.

"Another 0. 1 increase. The training is working beautifully." She called Mike immediately, gushing about the results. Telling him about how her son was going to get into Harvard. Leo lay on the carpet, staring at the ceiling, and wondered if this was what the rest of his summer would look like.