3: First Boar

Wanqing stopped four meters short of me, tipped her head sideways the way a curious bird inspects an unfamiliar nut, and said, "You look exactly like a guy who would name himself Bladeless. Wow. I almost didn't recognize the avatar; the system flattered you."

I lowered the hand I had been about to wave with.

"Hello to you too," I said.

"Hello." She closed the last few meters and stopped a half-meter from me, tipped her head the other way. The avatar's ponytail flicked over one shoulder. The Tianyu sensory pass-through was good enough that I could see, very faintly, the freckles across the bridge of her nose — a launch-build cosmetic option I knew almost no eighteen-year-old girl on the server had bothered to enable. Wanqing had enabled it. Of course she had. Wanqing had been spending a small portion of the helmet's startup time tuning the avatar to look as much like her as the avatar would allow, because anything she did, she did precisely. I had forgotten that about her, between the time she died and the time she stopped being dead.

She held up the half-eaten meat skewer. "I bought this off the NPC at the gate. It is, and I quote, *'savory and restorative.'* It has restored zero of my hit points. The NPC lied. I want a refund and you to pay for breakfast."

"You haven't earned a copper yet."

"That is not relevant to the demand."

"Eat the lying skewer." I gestured at the still-cooling boar carcass three meters away. "Or eat that. Hide quest. Walk with me; I'll show you."

She squinted past me at the carcass. Her eyes — green-flecked brown in the avatar, the same as IRL — narrowed. "Cangtian. There is no hide quest in the launch tutorial. I read the wiki."

"There's no wiki yet. The game is twelve hours old."

"There are forum threads. I read the forum threads. There is no hide quest."

"There is. It triggers off a corpse field-dressed within thirty seconds of the kill, in line of sight of the willow stump." I jerked my chin east. "The stump is ninety meters that way. The third gravestone behind it has a quest item under it. We do that, then I show you the gully on the western creek where the elite-tier rabbit spawns, then we hit Lv 4 by lunch."

She stared at me.

"Cangtian," she said.

"What."

"Nobody plays this game yet. The launch was at midnight. It is six-forty-three in the morning. There is no information yet about elite-tier rabbits or hide quests on the willow stump. There can't be. The game does not even have a wiki." She pointed her skewer at me. "Are you a beta tester. Did you sneak into a beta."

"There was no public beta on this server," I said, which was true, and which she would verify in twenty seconds with a forum search if she chose to. "I picked it up over the summer. I'm just guessing."

"You are not just guessing."

"All right," I said. "I'm not just guessing. Eat your skewer."

She looked at me for a long beat. The pass-through caught the small movement at the corner of her mouth — not a smile, not a frown, the small considering motion she made when she was filing something away to ask me about later. She ate her skewer in three bites, brushed crumbs off her gauntlet that did not exist on the gauntlet, and shouldered her bow.

"Lead the way, ghost," she said.

I led the way.

***

We took the willow-stump quest at a brisk walk and finished it without speaking. The gravestone was where it was supposed to be. Under it lay a small brown leather pouch containing a token engraved with a stylized boar tusk — the *Hunter's Recognition* token — plus a hidden-objective EXP bonus that nobody else on the server would unlock for at least two weeks. The pouch also contained, as I had remembered, a recipe scroll for a level-five Stamina Tonic which, in the early-economy phase the server was about to enter, would sell to the alchemy guild for almost a full silver per unit.

Wanqing watched me bag the scroll without comment. Then she said, "How much is this worth."

"Forty copper a unit at NPC. Sixty to eighty to other players when crafting opens next week."

"How do you know what it'll be worth next week."

"I'm guessing."

"Mn-hm."

We backed out of the willow-stump area before another player wandered close enough to see what we'd been digging up. I led her along the creek to the gully I remembered, which in old timeline I had not found until I was Lv 12 and which I had spent a small fortune of my old-timeline self's regret wishing I had found earlier. Halfway there she said, conversationally, without looking at me:

"Cangtian. Did something happen."

"What."

"Did something happen."

I did not look at her either. The avatar's footsteps and mine kept pace through the grass.

"You called me yesterday afternoon and asked if I had finished my summer reading list," she said. "Which, by the way, was a weird question, because we have not had a summer reading list since secondary school. I told you yes. You said good. Then you hung up. Then this morning you log into a game I have never seen you play, and you tell me to add WindSpirit and meet you at the boar field, and you knew the name WindSpirit before I told it to you. You acted like I had told you. I did not tell you. I picked it last night at one in the morning."

I kept walking.

"And," she said, "you are walking like a person who knows where he is going in a place he has supposedly never been."

"You're observant," I said.

"I'm always observant. You usually aren't this *interesting*."

I stopped. She stopped beside me. The gully was twenty meters ahead, its mouth half-hidden by a tangle of red vines. A breeze moved through the rapeseed and made a soft *hush* sound. The pass-through carried the texture of it well enough that the small hairs on the avatar's forearm raised under her gauntlet, and I noticed because she rubbed her thumb across her forearm absently to settle them, the same small gesture I had watched her make a thousand times in IRL classrooms over a textbook she did not want to read. The Tianyu Tech sensory layer was good. It was almost too good. I had not remembered how vivid it was on launch day, before the patches sanded the edges down.

I said, "I had a long dream last night."

"Mn."

"I dreamed I had played this game for a long time. The dream was very detailed. I remembered things from it. Some of the things turn out to be real, when I check. I'm working on the assumption the rest are also real, until they aren't. I haven't decided yet whether to tell anyone." I looked at her. "I'm telling you."

She held my eyes for a long beat.

"That," she said, finally, "is the most Cangtian sentence you have ever said."

"What does that mean."

"It means you have managed to give me almost enough information to be polite while telling me almost nothing. I'm going to think about it. Do not tell anyone else this story. They will think you have lost it." She tipped her head at the gully. "Show me the rabbit."

I showed her the rabbit.

The Lv 5 elite Iron-Sole Rabbit was hunched at the back of the gully exactly where I remembered, eating something that had once been a smaller rabbit. It was, in launch-zone terms, a monster — three levels above us, with an armored kick that could one-shot any Lv 2 player who took it square. In old timeline it had killed eleven players over the first three days before someone figured out how to kite it. In the dream that was not a dream I had killed it on day six with a party of four. This morning I planned to kill it with a party of two and our level disadvantage.

I crouched at the gully mouth and held up two fingers to Wanqing. She nocked an arrow without being asked.

"It kicks back," I said. "If you bait the kick from the right side, it pivots its weight onto its left foreleg and it can't restart its charge for three seconds. I'll bait. Hit the left foreleg as soon as it commits to me."

"You said this is Lv 5."

"It is."

"We are Lv 2."

"We are."

"You are insane."

"You're going to do it anyway."

"I am going to do it anyway."

I grinned, and was startled by my own grin. I had not meant to. It had snuck up on me, the small reflexive grin of a man playing a game he was good at with a person he had once mourned, and the surprise of feeling it pulled the muscles of the avatar's face in a way that it had been a long time since they had been pulled. I let it sit. I did not want to lose it by examining it.

I went in.

The rabbit's head whipped up at twenty meters; ears flat, nostrils flared. The icon over its head pulsed red. *Iron-Sole Rabbit (Lv 5 Elite).* I tracked left across the front of the gully, drawing its angle. It coiled. I took two more steps left. It launched.

Iron rabbits launch in a long flat kick. The trick is you cannot dodge along the kick line; you have to go *under* it. I dropped — full slide tackle off the avatar's heels, the physics engine punching the ground past my ear with a *thump-thump* of two iron pads landing where my chest had been — came up rolling, came out of the roll with the longsword across my knee, and shouted, "Now."

Wanqing's first arrow took the left foreleg in the joint. Clean. The rabbit pivoted, screamed a thin angry squeal, and tried to recoil for another launch. The leg bowed. It went down on the leg.

Three seconds. I was already inside the three seconds. I closed the seven meters between us at a sprint and brought the longsword two-handed across the back of the rabbit's neck.

> *Ding!* [System Notification: You have slain Iron-Sole Rabbit (Lv 5 Elite). EXP +95, Gold +24 copper.]

> *Ding!* [Hidden Achievement Unlocked — *First-Day Apex.* You have killed an elite enemy at least three levels above your own. Reward: +2 to all base stats permanently. Reward: +10% damage vs enemies of higher level for 24 in-game hours.]

> *Ding!* [Equipment Drop: Iron-Sole Boots — Green Grade] > DEF +6 | AGI +4 | LV Req 5 | Special: 10% chance to negate first kick attack each combat.

> *Ding!* [Level Up — You have reached Level 4.]

I stood over the carcass with the longsword's tip on the moss. The avatar's chest moved. My own chest moved. The cradle band thumped against my IRL ribcage in time with both. Wanqing came out of the gully cover at an even walk and stopped beside me, her bow lowered, an expression on her face that I would have given a great deal of my old-timeline regret to have seen even once during the years she had been dead.

"Cangtian," she said.

"Mn?"

"That was *cool*."

"Mn."

"I am keeping the boots."

"You're an Archer; you'd skin out of those. You wear the leather class." I bent and picked the boots up off the moss. "Take them anyway. Sell them. I'll give you the gold split tonight."

"Sixty-forty," she said, "and I don't tell anyone you've been having weird detailed dreams about this game."

"Fifty-fifty," I said, "and I don't tell anyone you bought a lying meat skewer from an NPC."

"Deal."

She tucked the boots into her inventory, took a step toward me, and prodded my chest with the back of her hand in the small no-eye-contact way she had been prodding people's chests since secondary school whenever she wanted to communicate *thanks I won't say it.* The pass-through registered the prod against my IRL ribcage as a small soft bump. The cradle band noted my heart rate spike. The sensors did not know the spike was not from the fight.

"Lunch break," she announced, pivoting on her heel. "I'm logging out for thirty. I want eggs. You want eggs. Don't level past me."

"I make no promises."

"I will *find* you and shoot you."

She vanished into a soft column of pale dust as the system disconnected her avatar.

I stood in the gully a moment longer with the bone-marrow feeling of a man who had just done the simplest possible joint-attack drill with a partner and felt the weight of nine years' worth of cumulative loneliness move out of one shoulder. I closed my eyes inside the helmet. I exhaled, slow. The pass-through layered the smell of damp moss and rabbit blood into my nose; somewhere in a server room in Beijing a very expensive piece of olfactory hardware was deciding, on my behalf, what an iron rabbit smelled like.

I opened my eyes. I bent and pulled the looter's dagger across the rabbit's spine to claim the elite-skin bonus pelt — a small bonus drop only the killer could trigger, and only within ten seconds.

> *Ding!* [Hidden Item: Iron-Sole Pelt — White Grade]

A small white pelt. Worthless to keep, valuable to sell to the right NPC tanner, who would not exist in Jianghai for another three days but who I knew the location of in advance. I bagged it.

I straightened.

I felt, then, the way I had not let myself feel walking down through the rapeseed an hour ago — the small clean human satisfaction of having done a thing well with a person I had chosen. I had spent five years learning how to do everything by myself. I had been very, very good at it. I had also been extremely tired the entire time.

I was less tired this morning than I had been on any morning in five years.

I stood in the gully mouth with the longsword across my shoulder and the late-morning sun coming in low over the willow stump, and I thought, *one. That's one.*

Behind me, very softly, a voice said, "How is he doing that?"

I did not turn.

The voice belonged to a player. Male, young, somewhere on the rim of the gully ten or fifteen meters back. He had not been in chat. He had been watching. There were going to be many such voices in the months to come, and I would have to learn which ones to ignore and which ones to make a note of, and this was the first one and I could not see him without giving away that I had heard, and the cleanest thing was to walk on.

I walked on. The longsword tapped lightly against my shoulder. The Iron-Sole Rabbit's pelt warmed the inside of my pack. The launch-day sun came down through the rapeseed in long pale stripes.

Behind me, the voice did not speak again. But I heard the soft scrape of a player camera angle changing on the far side of the gully — the system's tiny audio cue when a stranger zoomed in on you for a screenshot — and I knew the screenshot of the Iron-Sole Boots dropping at my feet would be on the Tianlong Server forum within the hour, with my name in the caption.

*Bladeless,* the caption would say.

I had, I realized, picked up my old name again on day one and had it published before lunch.

I tightened my grip on the hilt. Different sword. Same hand.

I walked on.