24: The Pod

The Tianyu Premium pod's official street price was fifty thousand yuan, and the only entity in the entire Tianlong Server territory of Hangzhou City that had a Tianyu Premium pod available for rent on a per-hour basis without a long-term contract was the back office of Manager Fang's I Z N E T C A F E, where it sat behind the storage-room door with a small handwritten sign across its visor that said *PREMIUM — by reservation only — 60 yuan/hour.*

I had known about the back-office pod since launch day.

I had not booked it because sixty yuan an hour was sixty yuan I had not, in launch week, had to spend, and because the pod's reservation queue had been booked solid for two weeks straight by a rotating cast of upper-tier students and adjacent café regulars who wanted to brag about having played in a Premium even if they did not need one. I had been on the waiting list at position six since the second day of launch. I had been climbing the list at the rate of one position every two days. By Sunday morning of the second week I was at position two.

Position one belonged to an older man whose name on the list was simply *Mr. Hao* and who had been holding the position for nine days because he had never actually shown up to claim a slot.

Manager Fang, when I came in for the early-morning shift on Sunday at five-fifteen — the new schedule he had quietly moved me to after the Tianxia recruiter had recognized my face — handed me a coffee cup without asking, leaned across the counter, and said, "Mr. Hao is dead."

"Manager Fang."

"He is. He died yesterday evening of a stroke at his apartment three blocks east. I was told this morning by his daughter when she came by to pick up his deposit. He had paid a deposit. The deposit is non-refundable. The daughter does not want the slot. The slot is yours, if you want it. You are next in line. The Premium is open from eleven PM tonight in eight-hour blocks. You can have all of them."

I held the coffee cup.

"All of them."

"All of them. The list collapsed after Mr. Hao because the others on it were waiting for Mr. Hao to take his block first, and now nobody else is willing to bid against you. They have asked me, hypothetically, what your offer is."

"What is my offer."

"You will tell me what your offer is."

I drank the coffee.

The Premium pod's value was not, primarily, its physical comfort. The Premium was — as the small print in the Tianyu Tech product brochure said — built for the *competitive practitioner.* Its sensory pass-through fidelity was forty percent higher than the community pod's. Its cradle band's heart-rate dampening was tuned by a small additional algorithm that smoothed out the autonomic spike of high-intensity combat. The helmet's audio engine sat on a different chipset that resolved the ambient atmosphere mod in three additional bands. Its time-dilation processor was, mostly, identical to the community pod's, but the buffer between in-game frames was tighter by twelve milliseconds, which on a launch-week server with twelve-millisecond average latency to the central node was the entire difference between a Tianxia top-tier swordsman's parry and his evasion-roll.

Twelve milliseconds was the difference, in old timeline, between fighting Wang Jian on equal footing and being one frame behind every counterattack he threw.

Twelve milliseconds was the gap I had eaten, every fight, for four years.

I was not going to eat it for another four.

"Manager Fang."

"Mn."

"Block-rate. Eight hours a night. All seven nights of the week."

"Eight times sixty is four-eighty yuan per night. Four-eighty times seven is three thousand three hundred and sixty yuan a week."

"That is a lot of money."

"It is. You can afford it."

"I — can. Just."

"Mn." He flicked the daily ledger toward me. "I will give you eight nights for the price of seven, on a four-week running contract, on the condition that you also work the early-morning shift those four weeks at half pay. Half pay is fifteen yuan an hour. The early-morning shift is six hours. That is ninety yuan a day from me back to you. You will, net, pay me three thousand three hundred and sixty yuan a week for the pod minus six hundred and thirty yuan in shift wages — net out two thousand seven hundred and thirty yuan a week for the pod, full Premium access, eight hours a night, four weeks. The arrangement gives you the pod, the schedule cover, and a continuing income reason for being in the cafe on the early shift, which is a useful cover for the next month."

I read the ledger. He had pre-written the numbers. He had pre-written them in pencil at the bottom of the daily sheet some time before I had walked in this morning, in his small precise shopkeeper's hand. He had been waiting for Mr. Hao's death since perhaps Friday. He had run the numbers Saturday night.

"Manager Fang."

"Mn."

"Why."

He flicked the ledger closed.

"Because you refused the Tianxia woman's standing thousand," he said. "And because you walked out of here last Thursday morning at six AM in your green polyester apron with a face I have not seen on a college boy in many years. And because — Cangtian. I had a son once. He was older than you. He died ten years ago of a thing that was not anybody's fault. He had wanted, very much, to be the kind of young man who makes things work. He was nineteen when he died. I watched him for nineteen years and he never quite figured out how. You came in here on launch night with the same face he never managed to grow into. I am not your father. I do not need to be. But the pod is going to do you more good than it would do anyone else on the waiting list, and I am the man who sets the contract. The contract is the contract."

I sat for a long minute with the cup of coffee in my hand and the ledger flat on the counter between us and the morning light beginning to come up across the burned-out *I* and the burned-out second *E* of the green pixel sign outside the window.

"All right," I said.

"All right."

"I will sign the contract."

"You will sign it before you leave the early shift. The pod is yours from eleven PM tonight."

"Manager Fang."

"Mn."

"Thank you."

"You will repay me in four weeks. The contract is the contract."

"Mn."

He went back to his magazine.

***

I slept four hours that afternoon at the dorm, with the cracked-egg ceiling stain over me and the cradle band on the desk and the small persistent low-grade headache that had been pulsing in my left temple since the second night of the second week. The headache was not new. The headache was the physical wear of fourteen-day cradle-band sustained sessions, plus three hours of sleep on the train back from Suzhou last night, plus the small accumulated cortisol of a Wednesday with a girl in a navy cashmere cardigan and a Saturday with a sister and a phone call with my father. The headache was the kind of thing that the Premium pod's better cradle band would, by the small steady mechanism of better autonomic dampening, take the worst edge off in maybe a week.

The headache would not, this week, take the edge off itself. I had a Black Iron Heavy Blade run at eleven PM and I needed to be sharp for it.

I drank a pot of tea.

I walked to the western-alley noodle stand and bought a bowl of plain noodles and ate them at the corner table and looked at the small late-afternoon Sunday sun on the sidewalk outside the awning. Wanqing was not at the stand. She was at her own dorm's library studying for a Monday-morning data-structures quiz. I had texted her the contract terms. She had texted back four words: *good. eat. sleep. ramp.*

The four words were in their order.

I ate the noodles. I went back to the dorm. I lay down on the lumpy pillow. I closed my eyes. The cracked-egg ceiling stain was over me. I slept for four more hours, badly, with two small sharp dreams I did not remember well except that one of them had the cockpit at the end of it and the other had Bai Yueran in a cashmere cardigan turning her head toward me at the door of a coding lab and saying, in her precise composed voice, *I have remembered.*

I woke at ten. I drank water. I put on a clean shirt. I walked to the cafe.

The Premium pod's storage-room door was open. Manager Fang was at the front counter eating a pre-packaged bun. He nodded at me without looking up.

"Pod's ready. Cradle band is fresh. Helmet calibration is at default; you will want to retune it for your specific scan."

"Thank you."

I went into the back office.

The Premium pod was a slim reclining chair with a darker matte finish than the community pods, a slightly larger headrest, and a set of small additional sensor pads along the inside of the cradle band. The helmet was darker, sleeker, half a kilo heavier. The strap had a small embroidered Tianyu emblem at the chin-piece in gold thread that the community helmet did not have. The seat itself was a little too soft when I sat down — Mr. Hao had, in the nine days he had been holding the slot, never actually sat down in it; the seat had been calibrated for the catalog body type, not for any single user.

I retuned the seat. I retuned the cradle band. I sat back. I let the helmet's strap click. The visor sealed. The pass-through bloomed.

The forty-percent fidelity increase was not the kind of thing you could read off a tooltip. It was the kind of thing you felt in the small particular ways the helmet's audio pass-through resolved the ambient — the back-office hum of Manager Fang's small battered air conditioner outside the door, the small distant traffic of the Sunday-night street, the small subliminal hum of the Premium's own cooling system inside the visor. The community helmet had given me a serviceable approximation of these. The Premium gave me — exactly these. The accuracy was not impressive in any single moment. It was impressive in the way that the small precise rendering of the small particular sounds let my brain stop, after thirty seconds, performing the small subconscious work of *the helmet is approximating; I am compensating.* The compensation work was a thing I had been doing for two weeks without noticing. Without it, the headache in my left temple eased a small detectable click.

I logged in.

Wanqing pinged me on the bonded channel before I had finished walking from the Jianghai south gate to the western edge of the city.

"Cangtian."

"Mn."

"You are running cleaner than yesterday. Your latency is down."

"The pod."

"Mn." A small pause. "How does it feel."

"Like sitting twelve milliseconds further forward in time."

"Cangtian. That is a poetic thing to say at eleven PM on a Sunday."

"Wanqing."

"Mn."

"Manager Fang gave me a four-week contract on it. Plus shift cover. Plus a quiet half-pay arrangement for the early-morning shift. He — he is a good man."

"Mn." Another small pause. "Tell me his shift schedule. I am going to bring him a thermos of soup tomorrow."

"You don't have to—"

"I am going to bring him a thermos of soup tomorrow."

"All right."

We met at the Black Iron Beasts entrance at eleven-twenty. The visible bond aura between us, which we had unfastened for instance entry the past three runs, was suspended again, but Wanqing's avatar — Lv 16 today, ATK 138, AGI 70 with the launch-week Hawk Pin's small +6 AGI — was clearly running on an upgrade of her own. She had borrowed a friend's slightly better helmet for the night. She would, she told me on the channel, switch to a small better community pod the following week with the proceeds of her own cumulative auction credit.

She would not, I noted, ask me to subsidize the better pod. She had her own balance sheet. She was running it precisely.

"Cangtian."

"Mn."

"Bear?"

"Bear."

We went in.

***

The Ironclad Bear at eleven-forty in-game was a 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, exactly as I had remembered. The Premium pod's twelve-millisecond cleaner buffer let me read his swing-tell two frames earlier than I had on the community pod. I sidestepped the first claw. I parried the second on the longsword's flat. I baited the third into a position that let Wanqing's Twin Notch into his eye, which proc'd a Wither tick that staggered him into an open-mouth animation that I closed with a Crescent Moon Slash up through the soft palate.

His HP dropped through the half-mark. The roar came. I activated Ironbody Stance just before. The stun caught me at the twelve-percent damage reduction floor; the bear's follow-up swing landed for sixty percent of what it would have landed for. I did not die.

> *Ding!* [Ironclad Bear (Lv 18 Elite) slain. EXP +1,250. Gold +2 silver 18 copper.] > *Ding!* [First-Clear Bonus: Bonded Duo *First-Hour Pioneers* — +500 EXP each, +20 server reputation.]

The chest spawned behind the carcass. I crossed to it. I opened it with one hand on the lid and the other steady on the longsword.

Inside: a brown leather purse with a small clinking weight, two small Green-grade armor pieces (a leather greaves and a wrist-bracer), and — on the third roll of the loot animation, the slow gold-shimmering one that the Tianyu engine reserved for the rare cases where the Purple-grade variant rolled — a long heavy two-handed sword with a black-iron blade and a stylized bear's paw etched along the cross-guard.

> *Ding!* [Equipment Drop: Black Iron Heavy Blade — Purple Grade] > ATK +88 | STR +14 | LV req 18 | Special: 10% chance to apply Black Iron (8s, target's DEF reduced 25%).

Wanqing exhaled.

"Cangtian."

"Mn."

"That is a Purple."

"It is."

"On the first run."

"On the first run."

"Cangtian — the Premium pod's cleaner roll table. Did you—"

"I did not factor it. The Premium is supposed to use the same loot roll table. The drop is — well-timed."

"Mn." She stared at the blade for a beat. "We are auctioning."

"Direct sale. Hu Liansheng. Twenty-two thousand."

"Cangtian."

"Mn."

"After tonight, a Tianxia mid-tier in the Lv-17-18 bracket is going to be holding a Black Iron Heavy Blade that he sourced from a no-name indie through Hu Liansheng's outer-circle pipeline. Inside the Tianxia internal ledger, that promotion lands on Hu's record. Hu owes us, after tonight, even more than he already does."

"Yes."

"And the next time he asks us for an exclusive supply."

"Yes."

"That is the end of the trust line."

"That is the end of the trust line."

"Mn."

She picked up the leather purse. She slung the bracer onto her wrist. The black-iron blade I lifted out of the chest and into the shared inventory slot. The longsword on my hip — the Iron Longsword, Lv-5 issue, my old companion — I did not remove. I would wait until I had hit Lv 18, in perhaps three days, before I equipped the Black Iron Heavy Blade. Selling a Purple weapon while being seen wielding the Iron Longsword in the launch-week public auction logs was, itself, a small misdirection that I planned to take advantage of.

We exited the dungeon. We re-bonded at the cleft. The gold double-arc bloomed back between us.

The pre-dawn launch-week light was beginning to creep along the eastern horizon of the Black Iron foothills.

"Cangtian."

"Mn."

"You should sleep."

"I should sleep."

"You did not sleep well today."

"I did not."

"Mn." She did not say anything else. She turned and started down the foothills toward the mule path. The pre-dawn pass-through caught the line of her back and the small loose strand of hair at the cheekbone and the Hawk Pin glinting at the back of her head in the small launch-week first light.

I followed her down the foothills.

The Black Iron Heavy Blade in the shared inventory slot weighed nothing in the pass-through. It would weigh, in the IRL world, in roughly twelve hours, exactly twenty-two thousand yuan.

The Premium pod's cradle band against my IRL ribcage was running, I noted, the sustained heart-rate climb of the late hour and the post-fight cortisol at a measurably gentler curve than the community pod had, in the same circumstances, two nights ago.

The headache in my left temple had, somewhere in the four hours of the bear fight and the descent, gone away.