Chương 9: Maybe The Real Treasure Was the Deaths I Had Along the Way

Leo had three weeks before he left for Exeter Daoist Academy, and those three weeks became the most miserable stretch of his young life. The math was simple and brutal. His death cooldown was three hours. That meant eight possible training sessions per day, though in practice he rarely managed more than seven before his body simply refused to cooperate. Seven deaths per day. Forty-nine deaths per week. Approximately 147 deaths over three weeks.

Unlike the other three members of his team, Leo couldn't benefit from the Otherworldly Demon Summoning Formation's rest function. He was constantly on cooldown, constantly recovering, constantly preparing for the next session.

On death 28, Leo logged in and walked to the sword without speaking. Mike sat on a boulder, sharpening a knife. He looked up.

"No witty complaint today?" Leo shrugged. His mom had quietly canceled her weekly spa appointments. His dad had stopped going to track days at Lime Rock. Neither of them said a word about it, but Leo knew it was because of how much his tea cost. So he lay down without a word and placed the back of his head against the flat of the blade.

"Just do it." Mike studied him for a moment. Then he set down the knife, knelt, and pressed his divine sense into the sword. Leo didn't scream on the way down. He screamed on the way back.

On death 46, Leo logged in and found that he couldn't remember what he'd been doing before the session. Not the dying, that he remembered in perfect, crystalline detail. But the hours between sessions had started to blur. Tea, phone, carpet, ceiling, tea, phone, carpet, ceiling. He lay down on the sword. The steel touched the back of his skull, and his body didn't flinch. Mike's divine sense descended.

Leo felt it coming this time, a pressure behind his eyes that built and built, and for a strange stretched moment he pushed back against it without meaning to. His own divine sense, such as it was, resisted the crushing force the way a sand castle resists a wave. After a long and painful moment, the wave won. Leo woke up on the carpet with his mom's hand on his forehead and the taste of tea already in his mouth. She must have started pouring before he finished screaming.

"How long was I out?" he asked.

"Three seconds longer than yesterday." He stared at the ceiling. Three seconds. His divine sense had bought him three extra seconds of agony before it shattered. Getting stronger meant suffering longer, and nobody had warned him that progress would feel like punishment. After he had his portion of spiritual tea, he went to his computer to practice Common.

Between deaths, he was teaching himself the language of the Azure Profound Continent, drilling himself on pronunciation until his cooldown timer ran out and it was time to die again.

On death 82, Mike's hand was shaking. Leo noticed it when Mike knelt beside the sword. A fine tremor in his fingers, the kind you'd see in someone who'd been gripping something too hard for too long.

"You okay?" Leo asked.

"Your Si is at 12. 4." Mike flexed his hand, working the tremor out.

"Crushing you used to be like stepping on a grape. Now it's like crushing a walnut. With my bare hand."

"Good." Mike looked at him.

"You just said 'good' to the news that you're harder to kill."

"I said 'good' to the news that you're suffering too." Mike laughed and brought his divine sense down like a hammer.

Between sessions Leo sometimes checked in on the rest of the operation. Arthur had excavated the tomb into something resembling an underground fortress. The Spirit Vein lay fully exposed, a river of concentrated Qi flowing beneath their feet, and the adults spent their free time absorbing its energy, pushing their stagnant cultivation forward. After years of saving money and maintaining their cultivation at the entry level of Foundation Establishment, it was a joy to walk the Immortal path again.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it. Wei Tuo, their prisoner, had grown increasingly despondent. He refused to eat and muttered prayers to gods that Leo could now almost understand. The words were Common, and Leo caught fragments between his language drills: pleas to ancestors, curses against fate, and once, very quietly, a name that Wei Tuo repeated like a mantra. Someone he'd lost, or someone he owed. Leo couldn't tell which.

Mike had already told Leo they planned to execute the man soon. Leo was the one who would have to explain it to Wei Tuo. He was the translator. When the time came, he would stand in front of a bound man, find the words in a language he'd been studying for two weeks, and deliver his last rites. The bad news came during week three. Mike and Kevin had been analyzing the Otherworldly Demon Summoning Formation, trying to understand its construction well enough to eventually create higher-tier versions.

"It's forbidden," Kevin announced grimly.

"A forbidden formation." Leo looked up from his language drills.

"What does that mean?"

"The divine sense requirements are three times what a standard formation of the same tier needs. About 60, 000 Si to create." The number hung in the air. Leo's Si had reached 56. 3 after nearly three weeks of constant deaths. The gap between where he was and where he needed to be made the math almost funny.

"Poor Mike," Kevin said, shaking his head.

"This is going to get rough for him." Leo blinked.

"What do you mean, poor Mike? I'm the one getting flattened seven times a day."

"Mike's divine sense is about 3, 000 Si. Each session, the backlash from grinding against your resistance hits him harder. By the time you pass 200, he'll need recovery time too."

"That doesn't seem fair. I'm the one dying," Leo said, fishing for sympathy he knew he wouldn't get.

"Which is why we need the Divine Sense Press," Arthur said.

"A machine that channels divine sense from an external source. More powerful than anything Mike can generate on his own."

"So instead of Mike crushing me directly..."

"The press does the work. Mike just monitors." Arthur paused.

"More importantly, the press operates at orders of magnitude beyond human divine sense. At that scale, the destruction is instantaneous. No grinding. No extended pressure. Just one clean impact, like the first time." Leo went very still. The first time had been a flash. One moment he existed, the next he didn't. The sessions since then had become unbearable. His growing strength turned each death into a slow compression, seconds of mounting agony before his divine sense finally gave way.

"How soon can we get one?"

"We'll commission it from a local craftsman. The press doesn't require any of our core secrets to build. And if anyone tries to steal it and use it on themselves..." Arthur mimed an explosion with his hands.

"They achieve instant reincarnation."

By the time Leo's three weeks were up, his Si had climbed to 60. 1. His mom called every relative she could think of, casually dropping Leo's numbers into conversation the way other mothers bragged about SAT scores. His dad kept pulling up the La Ferrari Eclipse product page on the Costco website and doing mental math at the dinner table. The night before his departure to Exeter, Leo was packing his suitcase when his dad appeared in the doorway.

"You know what a 60. 1 Si means?" his dad said.

"It means I have good divine sense."

"It means you might be able to lifebond with a La Ferrari Eclipse by next summer." His dad stepped into the room and sat on the edge of the bed.

"The sword requires Foundation Establishment divine sense to initiate the bond. But with growth like yours, you could hit the threshold while you're still in Qi Refining." His dad was doing the thing again. The same thing he'd done at Costco, standing in front of that glass case with the red flying sword between the toilet paper and the olive oil. Except this time he wasn't looking at the sword. He was looking at Leo, and something about that made Leo almost tear up.

"The Eclipse will give you High Gold Core combat power, Leo. You'll be fifteen years old with the combat strength of a Gold Core Superior." Leo's hands stopped halfway through folding a shirt. He held it there, fingers pressed into the fabric, the words catching up to him in pieces. He'd spent three weeks dying and watching the number climb. It had been a score on a screen, something to grind toward between respawns.

He'd never sat down and asked what the number actually meant in the real world, what his divine sense could actually do.

"Wait," Leo said.

"From the sword we saw at Costco?" His dad smiled.

"The very same one." High Gold Core combat power. From a retail flying sword sitting in a glass case next to bulk paper towels. Leo had been so deep inside the grind that he forgot he was working toward something real. Something with power. Something that could fly. He started laughing. His dad laughed too and squeezed his shoulder once before leaving him to finish packing.

When he logged in, Kevin and Mike were both waiting by the sword.

"Last one before school," Kevin said.

"Are you excited?"

"To die or to go to Exeter?"

"Exeter. I can't wait for you to show up and wipe the floor with those young masters." Kevin grinned.

"Walk in there with a 60 Si and watch their faces drop." Leo looked at him.

"Did you go to a prep school?" Kevin laughed.

"I wish. I only saw the rich kids after I started my graduate program at NYU. Three years of research, and every grant, every lab placement, every recommendation went to some Nascent Soul family's kid who'd been tutored since birth." He shrugged.

"I was better than most of them. Didn't matter."

"The young masters don't arrive at Exeter until sophomore year," Mike said, kneeling beside the sword and flexing his hands.

"Legacy families keep their kids home an extra year for private cultivation." Kevin's face fell.

"Seriously?"

"Seriously." Then Kevin brightened.

"Sophomore year, then. I can't wait for sophomore year. Leo's going to stunt on all their little sports cars with a flying sword."