5: The Iron Longsword

The blacksmith Tieshan was three meters tall, polygon-soft at the shoulders, and on launch night his entire dialogue tree was four lines long. I had already heard all four lines in old timeline. I let him say the first one anyway — *young swordsman, your blade is dulled* — because the relationship counter ticked another point upward when you let a vendor finish his opening, and at this stage of the game every NPC point was a copper not yet spent.

"Sharpening service," I said. "And the proper Iron Longsword. Not the tutorial stub."

Tieshan rumbled and produced from his rack a longer, heavier blade with a properly stat-windowed hilt. The tutorial stub I had been carrying for two days had no entry in the equipment menu — it was a prop, designed to make level-one players feel armed without giving them anything to optimize. The Iron Longsword (proper) was an item with a stat block.

> *Ding!* [Equipment Acquired: Iron Longsword — White Grade] > ATK +12 | STR +2 | LV Req 5 | Special: none. Standard issue.

Twelve attack and two strength was nothing. It was nothing at level five and it would be nothing at level six and at level seven I would be eyeing the next rung up the ladder. What it was, this evening, was the first item in my inventory with a stat readout. The first proper line on the long ledger.

I paid Tieshan one silver and forty-two copper out of the small purse I had earned from boar tusks and one Iron-Sole pelt sold to a wandering tanner who had appeared at the fountain at dusk exactly when I had remembered him appearing. Wanqing had watched the transaction from over my shoulder and had not commented, except to mutter, *that tanner was not on the wiki either,* under her breath, into a meatbun she had bought from a vendor mid-walk because she needed, she said, *backup nutrition for the gully.*

I unsheathed the new longsword once. Tested the heft. The avatar's wrist took the weight slightly differently than the tutorial stub had — a real moment of recalibration; the old longsword and the new one had different center-of-balance points by maybe two finger-widths, and the new one would take a few combats to properly internalize. I rolled my shoulder once and resheathed.

"Sheet check," Wanqing said, leaning on her bow.

"Sheet check," I agreed.

I opened the character window. The pane bloomed into the air at chest height, a faint translucent white panel that only I could see.

``` [Character: Bladeless] Class: Swordsman (Lv 5) HP: 420/420 | MP: 110/110 ATK 41 | DEF 22 | STR 20 | AGI 19 | INT 11 | END 16 Equipped: Iron Longsword, Beggar's Tunic, Cloth Pants, Cloth Boots Skills: Basic Slash (Lv 3), Parry (Lv 1) Achievements: No Wasted Motion, First-Day Apex, Pioneer of the Path (in progress) Gold: 0 silver, 38 copper Title: (none) ```

Plain numbers. Plain class. The +2 STR bonus from the new longsword had folded into the line; the +2-to-all from First-Day Apex was already baked in. The Pioneer of the Path achievement was sitting at one of three steps complete. *No Wasted Motion* would expire in another thirty in-game hours; I would re-trigger it twice more before the buff window closed.

I closed the window.

"Mn," Wanqing said. "What do mine look like at five."

I tilted my head. "A little less ATK, more AGI. Probably ranged-leaning twenty-one, twenty-two AGI by now. You should be running thirty-five to forty ATK with the bow."

"You have no way to know that."

"I'm guessing."

"Mn-hm." She did not push. She stretched her neck to one side, then the other; the avatar's collarbone caught the late twilight torch from the blacksmith's forge, the thin chain of her in-game ID-tag slipping a finger's width along the line of her throat in the way the chain had wanted to slip for the last ten minutes and that I had been carefully not looking at. The pass-through fidelity at this distance was very high. I could see the small movement of the chain. I did not let my eyes settle on it.

She caught me not letting them settle and grinned. "That counts."

"What counts."

"The not-looking. It's the same as the looking. You used your daily."

"I have not."

"You have. I'm calling it. Try again tomorrow."

"You are setting a punishing rate of accountability."

"I am setting a survivable rate. Walk." She turned and strode for the gate. The grey hem of the tunic flicked behind her thigh.

I caught up.

***

The gully at full dusk was a different kind of hunt. Iron-Sole rabbits did not respawn — once-per-day-per-instance, in the launch-week design — but the gully also held a second variant, one that nobody on the server had cataloged yet because nobody had bothered to come back to the gully a second time on the same day. The Stone-Spine Hare. Lv 4, regular, pack of three. It would not drop boots. It would drop pelts in stacks of two and a low-tier crafting reagent that the alchemy guild would pay through the nose for in the third week of launch, when the first Stamina Tonic recipes started circulating and the supply of pelts had not caught up.

We worked the pack in fifteen-minute cycles. I baited; Wanqing shot. The pelts piled up. By the end of the first cycle she had hit Lv 5; by the end of the third she was Lv 6 and irritated with me for refusing to swap the bait role with her. By the end of the fifth she was Lv 7 and laughing. By the end of the seventh — somewhere past nine in the evening of launch day — we had cleared the gully out, the three-hare pack had stopped respawning, and we had thirty-eight pelts and twelve crafting reagents in our shared inventory, plus a small stack of iron-tipped arrows she had pulled off a spawn we had not expected.

We sat at the gully mouth with our feet on the moss. Wanqing had her bow across her knees and a cold meatbun in her hand.

"Quiz," she said. "Where do we sell the pelts."

"Tanner Wu, eastern market alley, opens at dawn server time. Pays sixty copper a pelt against the NPC's forty. Eight-day exclusive vendor; rotates out next Tuesday."

"And the reagents."

"Don't sell the reagents. Sit on them. In four days an NPC alchemist named Old Zhao will appear in the temple ward and pay four silver per."

"Per?"

"Per."

She whistled low, soft. The sound did a clean little bend through the moss, the way the pass-through carried small noises in low ambient. "How sure."

"Very."

She chewed.

"Cangtian," she said. "How much money do we need to make."

I had not expected the question now. I thought about lying. I did not lie.

"Eight hundred thousand by next April for my father's transplant, on a clean schedule. One-point-two million if we count the pre-existing family debt. Plus runway. Plus my sister's tuition and a new pod and an apartment that doesn't require me to sleep next to Fatty Chen for two more semesters."

She finished her meatbun. She wadded the wrapper and put it in her pack. The wrapper was a system-generated illusion; the pack was an inventory slot; she put the illusion in the slot anyway.

"Cangtian."

"Mn."

"That is a lot of money."

"It is."

"Through the game."

"Through the game."

"In a year."

"In eight months. The transplant window narrows after April."

She looked across the gully at the dark forested ridge on the far side. The launch-evening insects were the sort the Tianyu sound team had clearly invented from scratch — a low percussive thrum, somewhere between cicada and bell, repeating on a slow uneven rhythm. The system was very pretty in the dark. I had forgotten how pretty.

"All right," she said, finally. "All right."

"You don't have to—"

"All right." She turned her head toward me. The ID-tag chain flicked along her throat. "Cangtian. Look at me."

I looked at her.

"I am not going to tell you how to do this," she said. "I am going to do it with you. We will figure out the route. We will not have any conversations where I try to talk you out of it, because I am not going to talk you out of saving your father's life. We will have many conversations about whether your sword arm needs a break. We will have a few conversations where I yell at you. You will not be alone for this. Are we clear?"

"We are clear."

"Mn." She popped the chinstrap of her hood and pulled it back up over her hair. The ponytail vanished into the hood. The pass-through caught the small smile of one corner of her mouth, the smile she used when she was already planning the next sixteen steps of an argument she had won. "Good. Stand up. Two more cycles before bed; I want Lv 9 by midnight."

I stood up.

We did not get two more cycles.

***

We were halfway through the first one when I noticed the player on the far rim of the gully.

He was not the player from the morning. The morning player had been male, young, casual; this one was older, slower in his stance, in a red-piped Lv 6 leather jerkin with a small black-and-red guild crest at the right shoulder. The crest was a stylized character, a single sword-stroke through a red disc. The crest meant something to me with the immediacy that a brand mark means something — Tianxia Coalition outer-recruit, the easiest version of the crest, the one given to scouts and runners who had not yet earned the inner badge with the second stroke. Old timeline I had killed maybe eighty of these between the second month and the fourth.

He was watching us. Not pretending not to.

Wanqing felt my line of attention before she saw the player. She stepped half a pace inside my shoulder without looking up and spoke under her breath. "Right rim, eleven o'clock."

"I see him."

"Friend of yours."

"Acquaintance of my acquaintances." I lifted my voice, let it carry across the gully, conversational, bored. "Can I help you."

The scout walked down the rim slope unhurried. He was an in-game-only player — the name above his head was *RedSpear*, four characters, generic, the kind of name a Tianxia recruit had pinned for the launch week before being assigned an internal ID. He came to a stop at six meters. He kept his hands away from his weapon. He had been told, by someone in his guild's chain of command, to be polite to indies of unknown level.

"Bladeless," he said, reading the floating name. "You and your archer have made some impressive runs today. I represent the Tianxia Coalition's outer recruitment. We're offering provisional contracts to standout new players this week. Forty silver signing bonus, weekly stipend, dungeon priority. Both of you — together as a duo — would qualify for the elevated package."

I let the silence sit for a heartbeat and a half.

"No, thank you."

"I haven't given you the elevated package details."

"I'm not interested in the elevated package details."

He blinked, slowly. He did not, I thought, often have the no-thank-you phase of a recruitment cut so short. Most launch-week players were thrilled at the attention.

"You should at least hear—"

"He said no, thank you," Wanqing said, easily, conversationally, without lifting her eyes from the bowstring she was wax-checking. "And I said no, thank you, by extension. Was there something else."

The scout's eyes flicked to her. His mouth tightened a millimeter — the small quick fingerprint of a man not used to being dismissed twice in one minute.

"I'll leave my contact tag in case you change your mind," he said, recovering. He made the offering gesture; a small icon-card icon flicked into the air between us. I did not accept it. Wanqing did not accept it. The icon hovered for the polite three seconds and then dissolved, with the small *poof* sound the system used for an unaccepted contact card. The little failure was a public record on the scout's UI; he would need to log it back to whoever was running this scouting cell.

"Pity," he said. "Walk safely."

"You too," I said. I did not turn my head until he had vanished up the rim.

Wanqing said, very quiet, "Tianxia. The big one in the launch ads."

"Yes."

"You don't want their money."

"No."

"Why."

"They sponsor the people I am going to bury."

She turned her head toward me. The quiet over her face was a different quiet from the gully quiet. It was the quiet of a person who had been told, twice in one day, an answer she had not expected at the speed it had been given.

She said, finally, "Cangtian."

"Mn."

"I need you to know that I am with you on this. And I need you to promise me, right now, here, that you will not start the burying without telling me you are starting."

"I will tell you."

"Pinky."

"Pinky."

She held out the avatar's smallest finger, gravely. I hooked my own around it, gravely. The pass-through registered the contact at our IRL fingertips; somewhere in two separate dorm rooms in Hangzhou, two people in helmets touched the very tip of a finger to the air in front of them and the system told their nervous systems they had touched another human, and the system was not entirely wrong.

She let go. She picked up the bow. She nodded toward the gully.

"One more cycle, then bed. I want Lv 9 by midnight. Move."

I moved.

Behind us, on the rim, where the scout had stood, I caught one small motion before we vanished into the next pack — the briefest line of red, half a heartbeat of someone else stepping into the place the scout had vacated and looking down the slope after us, and then vanishing.

Wanqing did not see it. I kept walking.

The chat scroll pinged. It was a system message, faint and grey, the sort the system pushed out automatically when a player crossed an unmarked threshold.

> *Ding!* [Faction Note: Your name has been recorded in the Tianxia Coalition's outer-recruitment ledger as 'Refused — Provisional.']

"Refused — Provisional" meant the recruiter would write me up as recoverable. "Refused — Hostile" was the next tier. "Refused — Hostile" was the box I planned to be in by the end of the second week. I closed the message and walked into the next pack of hares with the longsword loose under my hand, and the new sword's two-finger-balance shift settled, finally, into the wrist that had once carried a Tier-Six Berserker greataxe through a continent's worth of war.

It felt like nothing. It felt like everything. It felt, I thought as Wanqing's first arrow took the lead hare clean through the eye, like the first day of a year that was going to be very, very long.