21: Lv 15

We hit Lv 15 at three in the in-game afternoon of the seventh day of launch on a small bare slope on the Black Iron foothills, between a cluster of low mossy boulders and a dry stream bed, after eight straight hours of cycle-grinding the higher-tier Stone-Spine Hare variant that spawned in this zone instead of the gully — and I noticed the level-up only because Wanqing's bow tipped sideways across her thighs as she sat down on a flat rock and said, very dryly, "*finally*."

The system pinged a half-second later for both of us in sequence.

> *Ding!* [Level Up — You have reached Level 15.] > *Ding!* [Level Up — WindSpirit has reached Level 15.] > *Ding!* [Bonded Duo Milestone — *Long Run Together*. Reward: shared inventory slot expanded to two slots. Bond aura visible to other players within ten meters.]

Wanqing read the bond-milestone tooltip from the bonded UI. Her eyebrow lifted a small precise quarter-inch.

"*Visible to other players within ten meters*," she said. "Cangtian, this means people will know we are bonded. The double-arc icon is going to float over the gap between us at every south-gate step."

"It will."

"You did not tell me that was the milestone."

"I did not know that was the milestone. The Bonded Duo system is launch-week-only; I never saw the milestone in old timeline because the system was patched out before any other player progressed past it."

"Mn." She looked at the gold double-arc that had bloomed faint and steady at chest height in the air between our two avatars. The visible bond aura was a small soft thing — a pale gold line, perhaps a hand's-width long, that hung between the two avatars at the height of the shared inventory slot, like a thread connecting two needles. It would not, at this faintness, be visible to other players from more than perhaps four meters in good light. It would be visible from ten meters in low ambient. The tooltip had not lied.

"Fine," she said, finally. "Visible. Mn." She did not seem displeased. The corners of her mouth did the small considering thing, the half-amused half-careful set she had been wearing since the Founder's Pact at the Greenleaf Inn, and then settled. "We will own it. The other guilds will start saying our duo name in the same breath. That is good for the brand."

"You have a brand."

"We have a brand. *First-Hour Pioneers*. The brand is a clean cut at this stage of the launch. We will keep it for at least two more weeks before the bonded system gets crowded."

I sat on the flat rock beside her. The launch-week sun was low. The Black Iron foothills around us were the bare brown that the launch-week artists had painted them — small broken cliffs of dark slate, scrubby thorn bushes along the old stream beds, a thin line of darker forest higher up the slope where the foothills properly began. The Black Iron Beasts dungeon entrance was ninety meters above us, a small unmarked cleft in a stone face that the launch-week wiki was, this evening, just beginning to catalogue.

I opened my stat panel. I rarely did the formal sheet check more than every three or four levels; doing it at every milestone was a beginner's nervousness. But the bond milestone had given us a clean break to the grind, and Wanqing was eating a meatbun, and the launch-week sun on the foothills was the small kind of sun that the artists had painted for sitting on a rock to read a sheet.

``` [Character: Bladeless] Class: Swordsman (Lv 15) HP: 1180/1180 | MP: 360/360 ATK 142 | DEF 71 | STR 49 | AGI 41 | INT 22 | END 36 Equipped: Iron Longsword, Beggar's Tunic (reinforced), Hidewrap Pants, Iron-Capped Boots Skills: Basic Slash (Lv 7), Parry (Lv 4), Crescent Moon Slash (Lv 10 cap, +5% ignore-DEF on crit), Ironbody Stance (Lv 1) Achievements: No Wasted Motion, First-Day Apex, Pioneer of the Path, The Off-Tick, Dawn Pilgrim, First-Hour Pioneers, The First Hand to Master, Long Run Together (Bonded) Title: Pioneer of the Path Bonded Duo: WindSpirit (active +1 stats) Severing Path: Cycle 6/60 Gold: 4 silver, 88 copper ```

Ironbody Stance had come to me on the fourth Severing-Path cycle, two days ago, as the small permanent bonus from cycle four's reward instead of a stat bump — a passive defensive stance that reduced incoming physical damage by twelve percent for thirty seconds on a sixty-second cooldown. It was the first proper non-base skill the chain had given me. The chain had also begun, on cycles five and six, to tilt the rewards toward small stat clusters — a +1 STR and a +1 AGI together, which suggested the design was beginning to weight toward melee fighters, which was useful information about the chain's downstream pattern.

I closed the panel. I opened Wanqing's.

``` [Character: WindSpirit] Class: Archer (Lv 15) HP: 760/760 | MP: 290/290 ATK 121 | DEF 47 | STR 32 | AGI 64 | INT 27 | END 24 Equipped: Withered Quiver, Reinforced Pale Tunic, Light Boots, Hawk Pin Skills: Basic Shot (Lv 7), Aimed Shot (Lv 4), Wind Step (Lv 3), Twin Notch (Lv 1) Achievements: First-Day Apex (joint), The Off-Tick, Dawn Pilgrim, First-Hour Pioneers, Long Run Together (Bonded) Title: First-Hour Pioneers Bonded Duo: Bladeless (active +1 stats) Gold: 4 silver, 32 copper ```

Twin Notch had come to her yesterday afternoon. It was a launch-week archer skill that allowed two arrows to be loosed in a single draw at fifty-percent damage each — useless on a single high-HP target, devastating on a pack of low-HP rim mobs, exactly the skill that fit the kiting role she had been carving into our duo doctrine. The Hawk Pin was a small Lv-12 cosmetic item she had crafted herself from a hare bone and a Stone-back Wolf canine and a small piece of black wire that the system had let her assemble after I had told her, last night, that the launch-week crafting trees had a hidden assemble-from-loose-parts protocol that the wiki had not yet catalogued.

"Mn," she said, reading her own panel through the bond UI. "AGI 64 is excellent."

"It is."

"Cangtian."

"Mn."

"Did the dream's WindSpirit reach AGI 64 at Lv 15."

"There was no WindSpirit in the dream."

"I know. I am asking you to compare to anyone."

I thought about it. In old timeline at Lv 15 the average top-twenty Tianlong-Server archer had been running an AGI in the high forties to low fifties. The exceptional ones — the future continental-war breakouts — had pushed sixty by Lv 20. Wanqing was at sixty-four at Lv 15. The bond bonus accounted for one. Hidden achievement compounding accounted for perhaps three. Twin Notch's AGI scaling did not show up in the base panel. Cycle bonuses she did not have. The remaining gap was — Wanqing.

She was an exceptional player in the way that she did everything: precisely, observantly, faster than the people around her noticed.

"You're well above the curve," I said. "Top three percentile for archers at Lv 15 on this server, assuming the rest of the server is running visible data."

"Mn."

She did not preen. She did not press. She tucked the meatbun wrapper into the shared inventory slot — the second slot — and stood up.

"Black Iron Beasts," she said. "Briefing. Tell me what you remember."

***

I gave her the dungeon brief in the small clean military cadence I had developed in old timeline for raid briefings — four minutes, roughly, with the visual aids of a stick I drew the floor map with in the dirt of the dry stream bed. Three floors. First floor, mob pull on a long descending corridor, two trash packs and a mini-elite Iron-Hide Boar that triple-charged when its HP dipped under thirty percent. Second floor, the Beast Pit, a wide oval room with three Iron-Tooth Mastiffs in a coordinated formation that flanked any single tank. Third floor, the Ironclad Bear, the dungeon boss, Lv 18 elite, with a slow heavy two-handed claw swing and a roar phase that stunned for two seconds at the half-HP mark.

"Drops?"

"Mini-elite drops a chance at a Green-grade ring. Boar leaves a hide that crafts into a Lv-15 leather torso. Mastiff fangs sell at four silver each NPC. Bear drops are the ones I want to talk about. Bear chest spawn behind it has — possibly — a Black Iron Heavy Blade. Purple grade. ATK +88, STR +14, LV req 18. Drop rate one in twelve at the launch-week tuning. We need two or three runs."

"Purple."

"Purple."

"Cangtian."

"Mn."

"How much is a Purple Lv-15-area weapon at this stage of launch."

"On the auction at this point in the curve, ten to fifteen thousand RMB. Direct-sale to a heavyweight buyer who needs it for the upcoming guild war qualifier — twenty thousand, possibly twenty-five. Tianxia's mid-tier swordsmen are short on Purple two-handers because Wang Jian's ops desk is hoarding them for the inner circle and the mid-tier is screaming for upgrades."

"Cangtian, you are *farming* the enemy's logistics gap."

"I am farming the enemy's logistics gap."

"We are two players."

"We are two players who have a rune-trap-knowledge advantage and a six-move plan."

She smiled. Small and satisfied.

"Six-move plan number two, then. Walk me through it."

I walked her through it. One: clear Black Iron Beasts. Two: get the Black Iron Heavy Blade in two or three runs. Three: do not auction. Four: list it via direct-sale push to a Tianxia mid-tier swordsman through Hu Liansheng's open trust line — Hu would want the credit for sourcing it; he would push it up his own ladder; the eventual buyer would be a mid-tier of approximately Lv 17 or 18. Five: name a price of twenty-two thousand RMB and stick. Six: take the cash; close out the hospital invoice and the first pre-surgical deposit; remain at *Refused — Provisional* in the Tianxia ledger for at least one more cycle.

She listened. She nodded.

"All right. Risks."

"Three. One: Tianxia inner-circle gets the kill cam of our run and identifies our doctrine before we are ready to be doctrinally identified. Mitigation: we run without bond aura active by exiting the duo for the dungeon. The system will allow exit-for-instance if both members consent. We re-bond at exit. Two: Hu Liansheng smells the scale of the trade and escalates his contact. Mitigation: we accept the escalation; it accelerates the inevitable. Three: someone other than Hu offers more for the blade. Mitigation: we turn it down. Hu is the trust line we are nurturing. Other buyers can wait."

"You are willing to leave money on the table for the trust line."

"I am willing to leave money on the table for the trust line."

"Cangtian."

"Mn."

"That is a guild-leader sentence."

"Wanqing—"

"It is. It is a small one. It is also the right one. Mn." She bent and picked up the Withered Quiver from where she had set it on the rock and slung it across her back. "Run tonight. We — wait. Cangtian."

"Mn."

"I have a friend asking to party."

She had her party-request panel open. The party-request was from a player named *FattyTank* — a Lv 11 warrior with a generic launch-week shield-and-axe build, the in-game ID of a man who in IRL was a computer-science classmate of Wanqing's named Wei Pengfei whom she had texted yesterday about study notes and who had, in the course of the texting, learned that she had been playing SOHO and asked to be added.

I had no objection to FattyTank as a person. I had no objection to FattyTank as a tank. I had a precise strategic objection to FattyTank as a third member of the Bonded Duo at this exact stage of the plan.

"No."

"Cangtian, he—"

"He is a friend. He is welcome at the table later. The bonded duo system will not survive a third party member; the +1 stat shared bonus is duo-locked. He cannot be in the run. He cannot be in any run that uses the bond. We will lose the only mechanical advantage that has carried us this far."

"You are going to make me tell him no."

"I am going to make you tell him *not yet.* Tell him the duo is a private dungeon-clear vehicle for the launch-week first-clear bonuses. Tell him that the duo's third member will be hand-picked when the guild charter lands. Tell him to add me — Bladeless — to his friends list and to keep his Tank gear current. Tell him that the guild will need tanks, plural, and that he will be considered."

She looked at me sideways. The pre-evening light caught the freckled cheek and the loose strand of hair at the cheekbone.

"You are going to recruit him."

"I am going to evaluate him. The evaluation may be positive. The evaluation requires me to see him fight for two hours in something I have already cleared. I will set up a wargame next week. He is welcome to come."

"That is — a graceful no."

"It is a graceful *not yet.* The graceful *not yet* is going to be a tool we use a great deal, Wanqing. Most of the recruitment we do this year is going to be *not yet.* People do not understand *no.* People understand *not yet.*"

She typed for a moment. The party-request panel pinged the small grey *declined* tag, with the text Wanqing had appended: a brief friendly note that mirrored the language I had given her, slightly softened with a smiley emoji. The smiley emoji was Wanqing's. The smiley emoji landed in a small fox-shape that I had begun to know.

"All right," she said. "He sent back a thumbs up. He is not offended. He is also — he did say *if the guild needs tanks, I am here.* He took it well."

"Good."

"Mn." She tightened the strap of the Withered Quiver. "Run."

We ran.

***

The approach to Black Iron Beasts at sunset took twelve minutes of climbing. We crested the final rise at the dungeon's small unmarked cleft. Wanqing pinned the dungeon entry with a private waypoint to her own UI.

I unfastened the Bonded Duo for the instance — the small confirmation dialog flickered, both of us tapped *Confirm — Re-Bond on Exit*, and the gold double-arc dimmed and folded into a small storage badge in the corner of our shared inventory. The +1 stats faded out of both panels.

The system pinged.

> *Ding!* [Bonded Duo: paused for instance entry. Re-bond on exit. Duration capped at four in-game hours.]

I drew the Iron Longsword. The longsword, after ten levels of growth, was a sword I would replace within the hour if the Black Iron Heavy Blade dropped on the first run. The Iron Longsword was the sword I had bought from Tieshan at Lv 5 and that I had ground from one mastery to one hundred Crescent Moon on. The Iron Longsword was a small attached object now, the way a hand-me-down was attached.

I would not, I noted, be precious about replacing it. Sentimentality was a luxury for retired players and for old men in repair shops. I was neither.

Wanqing checked her quiver's count. She nodded.

I stepped first into the cleft.

The stone narrowed. The launch-week light failed by inches. Behind me, Wanqing's footstep on the stone was the small clean *click-click* of a player whose AGI 64 made her foot-falls more efficient than the system had originally meant them to be. Ahead of us the long descending corridor of Black Iron Beasts opened into a soft red-orange glow — the first floor's torch-line, the trash packs already pre-spawned around the bend.

The dungeon system pinged.

> *Ding!* [Instance Entered: Black Iron Beasts (Lv 15-18). First-Clear bonus available.]

I started down the corridor.