31: The Trial of the Gate, Step 1
We left Jianghai by the north gate at the change of the in-game day, with the launch-week sun still under the horizon and the lanterns along the gate-arch kindling in their slow morning sequence and the small loose pre-dawn crowd of Lv 18-22 north-grinders dispersing along the four trail-heads in their small respective parties — and Wanqing, walking at the half-step beside me with the Withered Quiver slung high and the Hawk Pin glinting at the back of her ponytail, said in the small dry voice she used when she had been working on a sentence for the last fifteen minutes IRL, "Cangtian. I am walking you to the foothills' edge and no further. After that the trial is yours alone. I want to put the *no further* on the record now, before either of us is tempted to renegotiate it at the cleft."
"On the record."
"On the record."
"All right."
"Mn." She tightened the strap of the quiver. "I am also putting on the record that I am not going to log out for the duration of the trial. I will sit at the foothills' edge in shifts. I will sleep in shifts. Wenqing has agreed to relay the trial system messages to me through the bonded UI's grey echo. If you bleed out at the gate I will know within the in-game minute."
"Wanqing."
"Mn."
"That is twenty-one in-game days."
"It is ten and a half IRL days. I have my fall break next Monday through Friday. I have negotiated my data structures problem set deadline with the TA. I have arranged with my dorm RA to absent-sign for me through the weekend. I have one programming lab on the eleventh day that I cannot move; I will log out for the lab and log back in immediately after. The rest of the trial I will be at the foothills' edge."
"You will not be eating."
"I will be eating snacks at my desk. I have prepared a small snack budget. The budget is reasonable. Cangtian, do not turn this into a thing about my snack budget. The budget is fine."
I did not turn it into a thing about her snack budget.
We walked.
The Jianghai north road in the launch-week pre-dawn was a small flat earthen path that ran for forty kilometers between the city and the Black Castle Foothills, through a flat patchwork of launch-week-rendered rice paddies and small timber-roofed villages and one bridge over a slow brown river that the launch-week artists had clearly enjoyed painting the morning mist on. The path was lightly traveled at this hour. We passed a single mule-cart, a small NPC farmer's family of three on foot, and one pair of Lv 14 swordsmen in matching grey tunics who did not have a guild crest and who nodded at us in the small respectful way that two indie players nodded at the bonded gold double-arc above two other indie players. The aura was steady. We had agreed, this morning, to leave the bond visible for the road. The visibility had become, in the last week, a small civic shield: indie players who saw the *First-Hour Pioneers* aura nodded; Tianxia outer-recruits who saw it tightened their jaws and walked past without trying anything. The aura was, on the launch-week server, the small bright signal that *we are not interested in being recruited and we are not interested in being interrupted.*
Wanqing walked at the half-step. The pre-dawn launch-week light came up in the east in slow pale fingers. The morning mist clung at the rice paddies' surfaces and the small timber roofs in long careful spreads.
She said, "Tell me about the bandits."
"Eight kilometers from the foothills' edge there is a small bandit camp on a low rise above the road. Lv 17 to Lv 19 trash, Lv 21 leader. Three ambush points along the road on the approach. They will hit any party that has not pre-cleared the camp from the rear. The published wiki rotation suggests pre-clearing the camp. The published wiki rotation is correct. We will pre-clear from the rear approach via the small dry creek east of the rise. The camp's leader drops a Green-grade dagger and a small purse of silver."
"Cangtian."
"Mn."
"That was the dream brief. Give me the new brief."
"The new brief."
"The new brief is the brief that includes whatever Wenqing's pseudonymous patch-notes column has flagged about the launch-week patch cadence on bandit camps in the last four days. He sent me a small private memo last night."
I had not, yet, read Wenqing's memo. He had sent it to the bonded channel after our Greenleaf Inn meeting; I had been in the Premium pod farming the fifth BIB clear from eleven until three in the morning. The memo had been waiting for me at five-fifty when I had logged out. I had glanced at it and saved it to my IRL phone for breakfast reading. Wanqing had, between three AM and breakfast, read it.
She read me the relevant paragraph from the memo aloud, off the small parchment Wenqing had left in her shared inventory slot.
> *The Lv 17-22 bandit-camp tier was patched on Friday with a small adaptive-difficulty multiplier that scales the camp's response to incoming damage above the launch-week soft cap. Specifically: damage above 200 per single hit triggers a defensive cluster-formation behavior in the trash, who will reposition into a tight three-row block within the second exchange and apply a coordinated parry-rotation that previously did not exist. Mitigation: stay below 200 per hit through the first three exchanges, then break the cluster with a high-damage AoE that hits all three rows simultaneously. Crescent Moon Slash at mastery cap with the Black Iron Heavy Blade equipped will produce sufficient cone coverage to break a three-row cluster on a single swing.*
I stopped walking for one beat.
The Black Iron Heavy Blade equipped against a Lv 17 bandit at my present ATK 192 plus the Black Iron Heavy Blade's +88 base would land approximately 280 per swing on a basic strike. The trash would cluster on the second exchange. Crescent Moon Slash on the cooldown would shatter the cluster. I would have eaten three to five small parry exchanges against three-row trash before the AoE landed. The clean play.
Wenqing had identified a launch-week patch I had not heard of, two days ahead of the wiki, and had sent the mitigation pre-baked into the briefing.
"Wenqing-ge," I said, quietly, "is going to be useful."
"He is going to be useful." Wanqing tucked the parchment back into the shared slot. "Walk."
We walked.
***
The bandit camp at the eight-kilometer mark was where the wiki had said it was. The small dry creek east of the rise was where my old timeline had remembered it. The launch-week patch's adaptive cluster behavior was — when we triggered it on the first exchange of the rear approach with one of Wanqing's deliberately calibrated 195-damage Aimed Shots into the lead Lv 17 — exactly as Wenqing had described. The trash repositioned in two and a half seconds into a tight three-row block. The coordinated parry-rotation came up. The wiki's Friday-morning version had not flagged any of it.
I stayed below 200 for the next three exchanges. I worked the perimeter with the Black Iron Heavy Blade at half-swing pace, threading the parry-rotation, eating two small ten-damage clips on the pauldron that the system noted and dismissed. Wanqing, from the rise's eastern lip, kept her shots calibrated to the same 195-damage ceiling. The block held. The leader at the back of the formation stepped forward to commit to a flanking move he did not, in the launch-week patch's design, have the AI to execute cleanly. I baited the flank one full second. I activated Severing Form on the third successful parry of the leader's small probing strike — the chains stacked. Crit chance bumped to +6. The block tightened; they were preparing the second-exchange parry-rotation. I waited the half-beat. I activated Crescent Moon Slash.
The cone-AoE bit through the front row, the middle row, and the back row in a single horizontal arc. The Black Iron Heavy Blade's Black Iron proc fired on the leader at the back; his DEF dropped twenty-five percent for eight seconds. The cluster's parry-rotation animation broke mid-frame. Five Lv 17 trash dropped to one-quarter HP each in the same second.
Wanqing finished them with five Twin Notches in three seconds — two arrows per draw, one trash per draw, ninety-five percent overkill on each.
> *Ding!* [System Notification: You have slain Bandit Trash (Lv 17) ×5. EXP +780. Gold +52 copper.]
The leader, at the back, was still standing — but he was alone, his cluster gone, his flank exposed. He turned to run. I closed the eight meters between us in three strides. Crescent Moon Slash on the cooldown was not yet up; I used a basic two-handed downstroke that landed for 384 with the Black Iron proc still active and the +6 crit chance from Severing Form pulling — on the third roll — a clean critical multiplier that took him to zero on the single swing.
> *Ding!* [System Notification: You have slain Bandit Leader (Lv 21). EXP +480. Gold +1 silver 80 copper.] > *Ding!* [Equipment Drop: Bandit's Quick Dagger — Green Grade. AGI +8. LV req 18. Special: 5% chance to apply Bleed (10s).]
Wanqing slid down the rise's eastern face at a controlled run and landed beside me at the leader's body. She picked up the dagger. She turned it once in her hand. She offered it to me, hilt-first.
"For the inventory. Wenqing's pseudonymous account will want to know the proc rate for his patch notes."
I took it. I tucked it in.
She bent and went through the leader's purse. Two silver and change. She split it cleanly to the bonded inventory's auto-split.
She straightened. She looked at me.
"Cangtian."
"Mn."
"Wenqing's patch note worked on the first try."
"It did."
"The dream did not have the patch note."
"It did not."
"The dream did not have the patch note and we still cleared the camp clean."
"Yes."
"Mn." She looked west across the rise toward the next leg of the road. The launch-week mid-morning sun was up; the mist had burned off the rice paddies. The Black Castle Foothills were visible on the horizon as a small dark uneven blue line. "Cangtian. We are going to be all right with the dream decay. The doctrine is stronger than the dream. The strategist plus the duo plus the foreknowledge is — is more than the foreknowledge alone."
"Yes."
"Mn." She tucked the empty purse into the shared slot. "Walk. The foothills' edge is — what — eighteen kilometers."
"Eighteen."
We walked.
***
We made the foothills' edge at the change of the in-game evening. The Black Castle Foothills proper rose ahead of us in long dark slate ridges streaked with darker pine, dropping toward the road in a fan of small sharp scree slopes that the launch-week artists had painted with the small careful menace of a zone the design team had wanted players to feel, on first arrival, was not entirely safe. The foothills' edge was marked by a small NPC trader's hut — a launch-week vendor named Old Pei who sold travel rations and one specific kind of healing salve that the launch-week wiki had not yet flagged as an essential trial-prep item — and beyond the hut a long flat bowl of cleared stone where small parties could rest before pushing into the foothills proper.
Wanqing went into Old Pei's hut. She bought twelve travel rations and four salves on her own credit. She paid in clean silver. She came out and offered six rations and two salves to my inventory.
I took them.
She did not say anything as she handed them across.
She walked with me to the edge of the cleared bowl, to the small flat rock at the bowl's eastern lip, where the path into the foothills opened into a dark cleft between two slate buttresses and a small worn cairn marked the trial threshold.
She stopped at the cairn.
She did not step past it.
She turned to me.
The launch-week evening light was the long warm orange of the day's last hour. The pre-rendered moon over the eastern foothills had not yet risen. The launch-week pass-through carried the small ambient of the foothills' wind across the cleared bowl in a low steady whisper. The avatar's silver-blue tunic at her shoulders caught the orange light along the line of the collarbone, the single narrow trim along the cuff, the small loose strand of hair at the cheekbone. The freckles were on. The Hawk Pin glinted at the back of the ponytail. The Withered Quiver at her shoulder was steady.
She lifted both her hands and put them flat against the front of my Beggar's Tunic-over-Iron-Boar-Torso, one over each pectoral, with the small precise pressure of a person who was, very deliberately, not making a thing of the gesture.
The pass-through carried the warmth of her two palms across the IRL skin under the new blue cotton shirt with the small clean fidelity that the Premium pod's pass-through engine had been engineered for. The cradle band logged the small sustained climb in my heart rate that the system had no context for.
She did not lean in.
She held the pressure.
"Cangtian."
"Mn."
"Twenty-one in-game days."
"Twenty-one."
"You will come back."
"I will come back."
"You will not, in the trial, take a hit you did not have to take to feed the AI threshold. You will come back with all your fingers. You will come back with the Berserker subspec confirmed. You will come back with Beigong Yan having said something useful. You will come back."
"Yes."
"Mn." Her voice did not change. "Cangtian."
"Mn."
"I have been thinking about a sentence."
"Tell me."
She looked up. The amber-flecked brown — her IRL eye color, the launch-week build had carried it faithfully — held mine.
"The sentence is, *I am not going to wait for you to put the second sentence where it goes. I am going to put it there myself, while you are gone, and I am going to tell you when you come back.*"
I held her eyes.
She watched me for the small space of three breaths.
She lifted up onto the toes of the avatar's Iron-Sole-dyed-black boots and put her mouth, very lightly, very briefly, on the corner of mine. The contact was perhaps the small width of a finger. It lasted less than a heartbeat. The pass-through carried the warm small soft pressure across the IRL skin at the corner of my IRL mouth with the small precise fidelity of a launch-week Premium pod that the engineers in Beijing had been very well paid to engineer.
She lowered. She held my eyes.
"Treat used," she said. "I am, this once, taking it back. Walk."
She lowered her hands from my chest.
She turned. She walked back toward Old Pei's hut.
She did not look back.
I stood at the cairn for one full breath with the small clean warm trace of her at the corner of my mouth and the cracked-egg ceiling stain of the dorm and the cradle band's gentle hum and the small new fifth voice in my chest, beneath the counter, the *three months, three months,* the *she has remembered something she does not know she has remembered,* and the *the Berserker trial is twenty-one in-game days from now, you are not, anymore, alone* — the small fifth voice that said simply, in the launch-week evening on the small worn cairn at the foothills' edge: *come back.*
I stepped past the cairn.
The cleft swallowed the orange evening light into a small dim corridor of slate and pine.
The system pinged.
> *Ding!* [Trial Phase 1 Initiated: Approach to the Abandoned Shrine. Solo entry confirmed. Bonded duo paused. Shared inventory accessible.]
The bond icon dimmed in the corner of my UI to a small standby badge.
I started up the cleft.
Behind me, faintly, I heard — through the launch-week ambient, across the bowl of cleared stone, perhaps a hundred meters back at Old Pei's hut where she had stopped and turned to watch me go after all — the small soft sound of Wanqing exhaling, very long and very slow, into the launch-week evening air.
I walked into the foothills.