Coach Williams sighed as he hung up his phone.

  This was the strangest first quarter he had ever seen in college Flying Aces. And that was saying something, because just four weeks ago they had been facing the Divine Child.

  He walked down the corridor to the visiting locker room and pushed open the door. The Yale flyers and defenders sat on the benches in complete silence. Twelve players, all staring at their hands like kids caught with them in the cookie jar. Nobody wanted to be the first to make eye contact.

  "Leo."

  Leo looked up from the bench. Coach Williams sighed again.

  "Columbia's coach is asking me if you could stop terrorizing their players."

  "What are you talking about?" Leo's voice pitched up with indignation. "I didn't do anything. None of them are injured."

  "Physically, no. But their coach already made me promise that Yale would cover their therapy costs."

  "If they can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen. Besides, what I'm doing is great practice for omnidirectional awareness. I've broken all sorts of records today. Before, I was struggling to maintain it for more than twenty seconds. Now I feel like I can do it for two whole minutes."

  "Yes, Leo. I'm aware of how you took your time with every one of Columbia's twelve players." Williams pinched the bridge of his nose. "Especially the last gunner."

  "Yes! Combat is the best way to cultivate omnidirectional awareness. I'm making so much progress!"

  "You're torturing the kids, Leo."

  "What I'm doing is completely painless. All I'm doing is learning the patterns of their divine sense! I don't have anyone else I can practice with. Zhao started refusing after I successfully got the Scholar's Finger down while in omnidirectional awareness."

  "Leo. You've got to help me out here. You're going to ruin the program's reputation."

  Leo went quiet. The room watched him think.

  "I got it!" He looked up at Williams. "You can be my practice partner. If you agree, I promise I won't do it again."

  Twelve pairs of expectant eyes turned to Williams.

  Williams shifted on his feet.

  "I'm not dumb enough to agree to that." He crossed his arms. "How about this. You can continue to train with everyone, but just the eye contact. Don't use the lightsaber at the same time. Finish them off once you can't maintain omnidirectional awareness anymore."

  "Thanks, Coach. I knew I could count on you."

  Williams stood there for a moment, trying to figure out what had happened. At least the kid was happy with him again. He decided not to think about it and closed the door behind him.

  ---

  Azure Profound Continent

  The wheat field stretched out under the amber sky. By now, the narrow trench had begun to look more like a river cutting through the sea of wheat. Deep in the field Leo could see holes at various points, spots where the group had managed to make progress even after being teleported inside and harvested.

  The group was waiting for Leo at the edge of the fog wall, shovels in hand, looking uneasy before going back in.

  "Hey guys, guess what." Leo grinned. "I learned a cool new technique. Would you like to try it?"

  Four pairs of eyes turned to Leo.

  They all took a step back.

  Mike held up a hand. "Kevin was at your game, Leo. He told us how it went. Nobody is falling for that."

  Leo turned to Shen Tianyi and repeated the offer in Common.

  Shen Tianyi studied the group's body language for a moment. Arthur had his arms crossed. Kevin had physically moved behind Mike.

  "Brother Chen," Tianyi said carefully, "I know not a word of English, but one does not need ears to read such a retreat."

  Leo deflated slightly.

  Tianyi changed the subject. "Brother Chen, the group has made excellent progress removing the soil from the outer field. But we will eventually reach the boundary where the remaining wheat falls under the divine domain."

  "Can we just wait it out?" Leo asked. "If we reduce the size of the field enough, eventually the Monarch won't have enough material to repair himself."

  "The reasoning is sound," Tianyi said. "But starving out a Monarch through attrition alone could take decades. We could grow old watching the Monarch die." He paused. "At the very least, we are carting out a considerable quantity of Tier Four spiritual soil, which is no small fortune."

  "Which brings me to a concern. What does Brother Chen intend to do with it all? We have been piling it into a mountain outside the entrance. Gold buried in the garden grows nothing."

  Leo glanced at the others. "Kevin, what was the plan again?"

  Kevin scratched his head. "We wanted to build a farm somewhere, but Arthur won't agree to give up a share."

  Mike shrugged. "Sometimes if you want to make money, you gotta leave some meat on the bone."

  Arthur squinted at them. He couldn't understand Common, but he was pretty sure they were eyeing his soil.

  "I can't understand what you're saying, but if you're trying to take away my farm again, I'm going to be really mad!"

  Leo turned back to Tianyi. "What do you think?"

  "The primary difficulty is location. We could transport the soil to the Central Continent, but any land we place it on falls under the Imperial Court's authority. At that point, it is no longer our soil. It is theirs with extra steps."

  "What about somewhere in the Savage Mountains?" Leo asked. "Find some hidden Tier Four spiritual vein, set up there."

  Tianyi laughed. "Brother Chen, if unclaimed Tier Four spiritual veins were simply lying around in the Savage Mountains, every rogue cultivator on the continent would already be a Nascent Soul. If we wished to establish a permanent base there, we would need to negotiate with the Beast Kings."

  "What would that deal look like?"

  "The Beast Kings would demand roughly sixty percent. The Shen family would require fifteen percent for brokering the connection and managing the farming operations. Your group would retain twenty-five percent."

  Leo shrugged. "It's just soil. There's probably better stuff deeper in the sect anyway. I don't want to waste too much time or thought on building a farm."

  Kevin winced. "Arthur's not going to be happy about that."

  "Just explain it to him as spiritual vein taxes or something," Leo said. "On Earth the soil would be near worthless anyway. The qi maintenance costs alone would eat any profit."

  "That's not going to work," Kevin replied back, also in common. "He'll just get mad."

  Mike scratched his chin. "I'll tell Arthur to ask his twelve-year-old friend in the library to look it up. Let him do the research himself. He'll convince himself he's getting a good deal." He shrugged. "That's how I get my kid to eat vegetables."

  Kevin's face split into a slow grin.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  "Very well. I will begin making arrangements immediately," Tianyi said, and headed off toward the nearest settlement with a teleportation formation.

  The group watched him go. Once Tianyi was well out of earshot, Arthur motioned for Leo to come close. Kevin and Mike closed in. A huddle formed.

  "Leo," Arthur said. His voice was low and serious. "We brought you here for an important reason."

  Kevin nodded eagerly. Mike looked amused.

  "We realized something," Arthur continued. "We are the only ones who face Monarch Scattered Straw. We die. We get harvested. We get pulled apart and twisted and woven into patches. Every single time." He jabbed a finger toward Tianyi's retreating figure. "Tan Man gets to sit on the side and play with dirt."

  "We need to figure out some way," Kevin said, leaning in, "for Tan Man to experience what we experience. The pulling. The twisting. The weaving."

  Three faces looked at Leo expectantly.

  "Do you have any ideas?"

  Leo stared at them.

  "Cry me a river. I die five times as much as you guys."

  He turned and picked up a wheelbarrow, tossed in a shovel, a bucket of spiritual mud, and a crate of flak shells, and left the three of them to scheme.

  Leo rolled the wheelbarrow to the edge of the excavation zone, set down a shell, and scooped a handful of the brown-grey mud from the bucket. He worked it over the shell's casing in thick, even strokes, making sure every inch of the surface was covered before setting the timer and moving on to the next one.

  A few weeks of trial and error had taught them why this mattered.

  The field had two defenses. The first was that any equipment brought inside would eventually be teleported deep into the wheat, where Monarch Scattered Straw would destroy it. So everything they used had to be cheap or disposable. Shovels. Wheelbarrows. And, thanks to their earlier preparations, a stockpile of hundreds of Tier Three flak cannon shells that were begging to be used.

  The second defense was more problematic. Anything spiritually active went dead the moment it crossed into the wheat's boundary. A flak shell brought in raw would just sit there like an expensive paperweight.

  Shen Tianyi had figured out a workaround. He'd developed a mud mixture from the Tier Four spiritual soil they'd been carting out. The soil had spent so long saturated by the Monarch's domain that it carried a residual spiritual signature matching the field itself. Smear it over a flak shell, and the field's suppression effect passed right over it like it belonged there. Set the shell on a timer before coating it, and the countdown would keep running underneath the mud layer.

  Leo finished the last shell in the crate and wiped his hands on his robes. Now came the part he didn't love.

  He picked up a coated shell and walked toward the wheat field. The wall of exposed earth rose in front of him, a clean cross-section showing the three-meter layer of spiritual soil packed dense with white root networks.

  Leo drew Moonrider from his dantian. The sword hummed in his grip as he used the tip to carve a hole into the root-choked soil. The roots resisted, springy and tough, wrapping around the blade as he worked. He shoved the coated shell into the cavity and packed dirt over it, then moved ten paces down the line and started digging the next hole.

  "Blast mining through a wall of T4 spiritual roots. Quick, dirty, and effective."

  Arthur had claimed that the man who originally invented this method won the Nobel Peace Prize. Nobody had bothered to correct him.

  Leo was halfway through the tenth hole when he felt it. A faint tug behind his navel, like a fishhook caught on something deep inside his dantian. Barely perceptible. But after dying dozens of times in this field, he knew exactly what it meant.

  He sheathed Moonrider back into his dantian immediately. Mike had been a half-second too slow once. The teleportation had dropped him straight into the Monarch's domain with his Eclipse still drawn. Monarch Scattered Straw destroyed it on the spot. Mike was still sore about having to earn and lifebond a replacement.

  Leo grabbed the remaining shells from the wheelbarrow, armed the timers, smeared them with mud, and scattered them across the ground where he stood. They wouldn't be buried, but detonating on the surface was better than wasting them.

  Then he was among the wheat.

  The stalks surrounded him, thick and golden, their grain heads fat with spiritual energy, swaying in a wind that smelled like harvest and dust.

  The cutting sound was distant. Good. The Monarch was far away.

  Leo stood still and let his divine sense expand outward. The wheat registered as a dense carpet of spiritual signatures, each stalk a tiny filament of life pushing upward through three meters of root-threaded soil.

  He watched the stalks sway.

  He had been chewing on this for days. Between shovel loads and respawns, the same questions kept circling back.

  He knew from records that simple exposure to a divine domain was insufficient for Heart of Flesh progress. Most cultivators could sit inside one for years and get nothing. Leo figured the difference was the dying. You could meditate on a fire all day long, but you learned a lot more about fire when it burned you.

  Every session ended the same way. The Monarch found him. The scythe fell. Leo's body was twisted into golden thread and woven into the patchwork of the Monarch's rotting frame alongside stalks of wheat. He and the wheat suffered the same fate. Reaped together. Braided together. Pressed against the same dark hollow.

  Leo looked out at the field.

  The wheat did not look afraid. The stalks that had been cut in previous cycles had already regrown, as if nothing had happened.

  Was this what higher tier cultivators saw when they looked at lower tier ones? Wheat to be harvested?

  Leo thought about the Western Seat. The white walls rising from the river gap. The jade palace catching green light above the clouds. The kids fighting over a frozen turnip in the mud.

  He'd thought about going back. Finding some way to help. He knew modern agriculture. Sanitation. Basic infrastructure stuff that anyone from Earth could explain. He could feed people. Build something real.

  But then what?

  Would it make a difference?

  The wheat here was well fed. Rich spiritual soil, dense qi, endless sunlight. Yet every day the Monarch walked its circuit and cut it all down.

  Even if Leo brought everything he knew and poured it into the outer districts of the Western Seat, what happened when those people grew old? When they hit the natural limit of a Qi Refining lifespan? Could he promise them Foundation Establishment? He'd just be making people more comfortable while they were harvested.

  That thought bothered him more than he wanted to admit.

  The Heart of Flesh manual said human desire was to pursue the path to immortality. And Leo could see it everywhere he looked. The mortal who broke through to Qi Refining. The Qi Refiner clawing toward Foundation Establishment. The Foundation Establishment cultivator grinding toward Gold Core.

  But the system was rigged from the start. Limited spirit veins. Limited high-tier qi. Resources pooling at the top, fewer climbers at every stage. One Deity Transformation Monarch in a jade palace, hundreds of thousands of people below him scraping by.

  Leo had talked to one of the professors at Yale about this. The guy who taught Classical Cultivation Philosophy had introduced him to the concept of "Zhenren." A True Person. This was the classical honorific used to refer to cultivators. Like for example, True Person Chen.

  Originally, it meant a sage who had reached total harmony with the Heavenly Dao. Someone who understood the pattern of existence so completely that they moved with it instead of against it. Now people just heard 'powerful enough that nobody can tell me no.' The original meaning had been twisted under thousands of years of usage.

  Shen Tianyi had confirmed the same thing happened in the Azure Profound Continent. He was familiar with the concept of a "True Person" and some ancient sects had similar honorifics. But the idea of tuning yourself to something larger had been trampled by millennia of competitive advancement and territorial warfare.

  Shen Tianyi had speculated that following the Heavenly Dao would naturally bring opportunities. Karma flowed toward those who aligned themselves with the great pattern. But karma studies required Nascent Soul-level divine sense, and by the time a cultivator reached Nascent Soul, they had already spent decades climbing over others. The Heart of Stone was fully calcified.

  Leo had given up trying to convince the wheat to abandon its desire for immortality.

  So instead he'd been trying to understand the pattern itself.

  Why the Heavenly Dao had arranged things this way. What purpose the reaper served, walking its endless circuit through a field that would always regrow. What purpose the wheat served, reaching for a sky it could never touch. The whole system had a shape to it.

  Where did he fit in this shape?

  And most of all. Why had he transmigrated?

  He kept coming back to that question. He didn't have some grand theory about destiny or fate. But the pieces were adding up in a way that felt deliberate.

  The cutting sound stopped.

  Leo's divine sense contracted instinctively. The wheat went rigid around him, every stalk freezing in place. The wind died. The golden dust in the air hung suspended, motionless.

  The pressure arrived. The divine domain rolled from deep within the field, flattening the wheat in concentric waves.

  But today something was different.

  Leo didn't brace. He didn't plant his feet or clench his jaw or reach for that ember of defiance he'd been nursing since the first encounter.

  He just wanted to see what happened.

  Leo released his divine sense outward. His awareness detached from his body and expanded into a spherical shell. He saw himself from outside. A small figure in dark robes, standing in a sea of gold.

  The Monarch came through the wheat. The scythe rose.

  The blade took his legs. The invisible grip closed around him. The wringing began. His body twisted, elongated, compressed into a golden thread spinning alongside harvested wheat fibers.

  The Monarch sat cross-legged and began to weave. Three wheat strands laid parallel, pulled taut. A cross-weave at perpendicular angles. His thread was woven into the center of the patch. The wheat fibers cradled him from all sides.

  The patch was pressed against the Monarch's torso.

  ---

  [14:59:59]

  Leo pulled the VR visor off and stared at the ceiling of his pod.

  That was the first time he had maintained Third Person Perspective inside the Monarch's divine domain. Every previous attempt, the domain had crushed his awareness back into his body instantly.

  But today he had watched the whole thing. The harvest. The weaving. The patching. Minutes of sustained consciousness inside a Deity Transformation domain, at Qi Refining.

  He had gone in expecting to resist. To endure. To stand against the divine pressure and prove something about his willpower. And the moment he stopped doing all of that, the moment he just wanted to watch, everything opened up.

  The best explanation he had was simple. The Heavenly Dao wanted him to see.

  To see the Monarch. To understand the pattern. The growing and the reaping and the mending.

  And somewhere within that field, the first notes of the Melody of Heavenly Patterns were waiting to be heard.