Leo was looking forward to learning how to weaponize his divine sense.

  Coach Williams had told him it should be pretty straightforward. Easy to learn, relatively speaking.

  The past few days had been brutal. He was now cultivating two of the hardest techniques known to man simultaneously. The Heart of Flesh and Omnidirectional Awareness. At this rate, the only technique he was making real progress on was the Great Bash Your Head Against the Wall technique. He'd measure progress in small ways, but the path forward was deeply counterintuitive. Approaches that felt like breakthroughs would instead set him back days.

  Coach Mei tried to keep his spirits up. She kept praising him for his "remarkable brain plasticity" and his "extraordinary neural flexibility for a cultivator of his age."

  Leo had started to suspect this was a backhanded compliment. Her polite, academic way of saying he was young and stupid.

  So he was sitting on the bench near the entrance, killing time before the new trainer arrived. Williams had been vague about who it was. Just said they'd meet him at two o'clock.

  The front doors opened.

  Leo looked up with a grin, ready to greet his new combat instructor.

  His eyebrow twitched.

  Kim Yuna walked in wearing a red dress with a matching red bow in her hair. She carried a small handbag and gave him a sweet smile.

  She was very clearly not his new trainer.

  Leo looked down at his phone. Checked the date.

  February 14th.

  Crap.

  He looked up. Yuna was already standing right in front of him.

  "Hi, Leo." She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and looked up at him through her lashes. "How are you doing? I'm here for my Valentine's Day present."

  She clasped her hands behind her back and leaned forward slightly. "You remembered to get me one, right?"

  Leo's mind raced. He had almost nothing on him. His dorm at the training facility contained nothing gift-worthy unless Yuna wanted a half-empty bottle of spiritual recovery pills.

  He was cycling through excuses, each one worse than the last, when his hand brushed against something in his pocket.

  The jade merit stamp.

  Leo pulled out the jade stamp, letting Yuna inspect the blank block first. Then he pressed it to his forehead. The stamp glowed, and when he pulled it away, glittering characters had resolved across its surface.

  He held it out to her.

  Yuna took it carefully, turning it over in her hands. The shining characters caught the training hall lights.

  "It's pretty," she said. "What is it?"

  "It's a record of me resolving a Nascent Soul level profundity. Basically nobody at Qi Refining has ever done that. So it's kind of a big deal."

  Yuna smiled, dimples appearing on both cheeks. "Thank you, Leo. That's actually really thoughtful."

  Leo exhaled. Crisis averted.

  "What should I do with it?" she asked, still admiring the stamp.

  "When I made one for my teammate Kotch last year, he threaded a red string through the top and wore it around his neck."

  The warmth left Yuna's face.

  "You made one for Kotch."

  "Yeah, he really liked..."

  "You're giving me the same thing you already gave someone else?"

  "It's a new one. I stamped it just..."

  "And you know what Kotch did with that stamp?" Yuna's voice rose. "He threw away his childhood friend's pendant to make room for your jade trash around his neck. I knew it looked familiar. She cried for a week! What kind of gift is this? You're giving me the thing that broke a girl's heart?"

  "That's not... I didn't know..."

  "Unbelievable. On Valentine's Day. A regifted jade block with a history of heartbreak."

  Leo panicked. His brain produced exactly one viable escape route.

  "Do you want to go to prom with me?"

  Yuna glared.

  "Fine," she said. "But under one condition."

  "Done. Whatever it is."

  "Next year, you try harder. For Valentine's Day and for how you ask me to prom. This was pathetic, Leo."

  "That's fair."

  Yuna tucked the jade stamp into her handbag with exaggerated care, turned on her heel, and walked toward the door.

  He caught the briefest flash of a smirk before she disappeared through the doors.

  Leo sat on the bench in the empty training hall, staring at nothing.

  The doors opened again.

  Jimbo walked in first, laughing so hard he had to brace himself against the doorframe. Behind him, Zhao was trying and failing to keep a straight face.

  "How much of that did you hear?" Leo asked.

  "Enough," Jimbo wheezed. "Bro, you regifted her something that broke another girl's heart?"

  "It wasn't the same one. It was freshly made."

  "That's even worse." Zhao jumped in, eager to rub salt in the wound.

  "And then you panic-asked her to prom." Jimbo wiped his eyes. "Smoothest thing I've ever seen."

  "It worked, didn't it?"

  "Did it? She gave you homework, Leo. You got assigned homework by your prom date. And now you're stuck with her for another year."

  Zhao finally cracked, a quiet laugh escaping through his nose. He shook his head and dropped a duffel bag on the floor.

  Leo looked him over. Zhao had traded the lab coat for practice gear.

  "I thought you were doing your graduate work," Leo said, trying to change the subject.

  "I was." Zhao sat on the bench across from him. "But I have one more year of NCAA eligibility. So I signed up for an elective at Yale. Health Education, the one you took with Reyes."

  Leo frowned. "Does that count as being enrolled?"

  "If the NCAA asks, we'll tell them I'm doing a sports science program and Reyes will make me a transcript." Zhao waved a hand. "It doesn't need to stand up to scrutiny. It just needs to last a game."

  Leo briefly recalled Reyes spending a few seconds handwriting a transcript and giving him an A.

  Jimbo clapped Leo on the shoulder. "Once you get yourself thrown out of the Harvard game, somebody's got to fly in your spot."

  Leo looked between them. "Coach Williams told you about the plan?"

  Zhao stretched his legs out. "You handle Mateo at the coin toss. You get unfairly ejected. I replace you and we beat Harvard straight up." He shrugged. "I've been in a lab for months. Could use the exercise."

  "Plus, I'm here to train you." Zhao grinned. "I've got something you're going to like."

  Leo perked up. Finally, some good news.

  ---

  They found an empty study room on the second floor of the training complex. Zhao rolled a chalkboard out of the corner and dug through his duffel bag for a box of chalk. Leo pulled up a chair and sat backwards in it, arms folded over the backrest.

  "What do you know about the High Culture formation pattern of the Seven Stars system?" Zhao asked.

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  "A little. It's a popular Nascent Soul domain. A lot of formation masters choose it when they form their divine infant."

  "Correct." Zhao picked up a piece of chalk and turned to the board. He wrote two characters in clean, practiced strokes.

  WEN QU

  "The English translation 'High Culture' is clumsy. The actual name is closer to 'The Melody of Heavenly Patterns,' but nobody wants to say that every time, so High Culture stuck."

  He tapped the first character. "WEN. This is the interesting one. Wen means pattern. The spots on a leopard are wen. The constellations in the sky are wen. The grain of wood. The ripples in a pond."

  "To a cultivator, writing and art are more than human expression. They are attempts to capture the patterns of Heaven and Earth. Formation patterns are a subset of wen. A more specific, spiritually active pattern that describes the flow of spiritual qi."

  He tapped the second character.

  "QU. To listen to the patterns and put them into song. The act of hearing Heaven's rhythm and translating it into something that can be performed."

  Zhao set the chalk down and turned to face Leo.

  "This is why the domain is so popular with formation masters. If you spend your entire career drawing heavenly patterns, inscribing formations, studying the natural order of qi flow, wouldn't you want to prove the Dao through those same patterns? High Culture Nascent Souls like to claim their domain is the purest, most generalized form of formations."

  Leo leaned forward. "That sounds amazing. So why doesn't everyone choose it?"

  "All roads lead to immortality." Zhao shrugged. "Nobody has demonstrated that any formation pattern is definitively better than another. Even the Catacombs, which is home to cultivators of the Great Ascension, doesn't show a clear preference for one pattern above the rest."

  He picked up the chalk again.

  "But that's background. Let me show you the cultivation technique we'll be building toward."

  He wrote on the board: The Scholar's Finger.

  "The principle is straightforward. You use your body as a brush, your divine sense as ink, and the enemy's spiritual sea as parchment."

  "You're writing on them?"

  "Graffiti, more accurately." Zhao allowed himself a small smile. "Once the enemy's divine sense becomes so cluttered with your graffiti, they can no longer function. They're effectively crippled until they can clear it all out."

  Zhao tapped the board where he'd written WEN QU.

  "You can't just slap random noise onto someone's spiritual perception. Their divine sense will reject it instantly. Like an immune system fighting off a virus."

  He drew a rough circle on the board.

  "Every cultivator's divine sense has a WEN. A pattern. A fingerprint. The way their perception flows, the rhythm of how they process spiritual information."

  He drew a second circle beside it, slightly different.

  "The Scholar's Finger requires you to first read the enemy's wen. Then you compose a QU of that pattern. A song that sounds close enough to the original melody that when you paint it onto their spiritual sea, their divine sense accepts it as familiar."

  Leo nodded slowly. "So you're forging their own signature."

  "Close enough to pass inspection." Zhao held up a finger. "But your qu is a a frozen imitation. The enemy's actual divine sense is alive. It shifts, adapts, breathes. Your copy doesn't. It sits there, rigid, taking up space, and the enemy's divine sense can't simply ignore it."

  He drew hash marks through the second circle.

  "Imagine someone glued a painting of your face over a mirror. Maybe after making some movement you'd figure out it wasn't your reflection, but you'd still have to stop and peel it off. And while you're peeling, someone is gluing another one on from the other side."

  "So the better my read on their wen, the stickier my qu."

  "Exactly. A sloppy imitation gets rejected in seconds. A precise one can linger for days." Zhao set the chalk in the tray. "We'll craft you boots and gauntlets to help transfer your divine sense physically through Mateo's armor."

  "Here, let's give it a try." Zhao gestured Leo forward. "Come up to me."

  Leo complied.

  "Now enter Third Person Perspective and focus on me. Try to feel the pattern of my divine sense."

  Leo closed his eyes. His awareness expanded outward, the familiar sphere blooming through the room. He found Zhao's divine sense easily. Leo pressed his perception through it, mapping it from the inside out.

  Zhao went very still.

  He looked like a fly that had just realized the glass it wandered into didn't have an opening on the other side.

  "Leo," Zhao said carefully. "Your divine sense is... considerably stronger than I expected."

  Leo grinned.

  "Is it?"

  Zhao stared at him. A bead of sweat had formed at his temple. "I'm beginning to reconsider the wisdom of volunteering as your practice partner."

  Leo cracked his knuckles.

  "Don't worry, Zhao. I'll be gentle."

  ---

  Wien Flying Aces Stadium, Columbia

  Archer Pemberton sighed. He never imagined this was how his first collegiate flying aces game at Wien Stadium would look like. Last year he was teammates with Leo at Exeter. Now he was facing him.

  Wien Stadium towered over upper Manhattan, a hundred-thousand-seat field that Columbia had built during the cultivation boom with money they no longer had. On a good day they filled maybe a third of it. After all, Columbia was 3-3 and already eliminated from the playoffs.

  Columbia's roster sat on the benches in the home team's locker room in various states of distress.

  The ceiling shook.

  A deep, rhythmic thunder of stomping feet, pounding in unison until the overhead lights swung on their fixtures. Then the chant broke through.

  "We are Bulldogs. We are Bulldogs. We are Bulldogs."

  The room went quiet.

  Their school had sold them out. Literally. The athletic department had seen dollar signs the moment ticket requests started pouring in and happily sold seats to visiting fans. A hundred thousand tickets at premium prices. Columbia would make more money from this single game than the rest of their season combined.

  One of the linemen pulled off his helmet and stared up at the ceiling. "Are you kidding me?"

  "It's a hundred thousand people out there," someone muttered from the far bench. "And they're all here for Leo."

  Every head in the locker room turned to Archer Pemberton.

  Archer felt the weight of eleven pairs of eyes settle on him. He pulled at his gloves.

  "I don't know why you guys are looking at me." he said.

  Nobody bought it. He didn't buy it either.

  "Pemberton. Did you watch what Leo did to Cortland in week two?" His captain had walked over. "He's coming for you. You think he holds a grudge?"

  Archer tried to reassure himself. But he remembered his brief exchange with Leo last year at the High School quarterfinals and how he'd doubted Leo's ability to fight a Nascent Soul.

  "I don't think I did anything wrong," he said.

  The words came out thin. He could hear how unconvincing they sounded.

  "Also, why am I flying? How am I taking Mathis' spot? He's way better than me."

  His captain sat on the bench across from him. "Pemberton. Sometimes you got to take one for the team. Your job is to fall on the grenade so the rest of us can walk away." He spoke with the calm resignation of a man who had already done the math on this game. "And we all know Leo's coming for you."

  Archer opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at the floor.

  Their captain stood up. He picked up his helmet and pulled it on. The rest of the team followed. Buckles clicked. Visors locked. Chest plates settled with soft thuds.

  ---

  Archer Pemberton gulped as he watched the Yale flyers rise into formation overhead.

  He had dreamed about collegiate Flying Aces since he was a little kid. Playing his first year at Columbia was supposed to be an honor. A privilege. Right now it felt like a sentencing.

  The stands were a solid wall of Yale blue. Flyer seven jerseys were everywhere he looked. Every section. Every row. Nearly a hundred thousand people were wearing the callsign of this former teammate who was about to ruin his day.

  There had been some Thousand Talents program controversy surrounding Leo earlier in the season. Talking heads on the sports networks debating eligibility, fairness, the usual. But by the sound this stadium was making, you would think none of it had ever existed.

  The kickoff horn blasted.

  The Yale flyers dove as one. Five figures dived from above in a tight spearhead formation, trailing spiritual light against the evening sky.

  Columbia's flyers scattered. Standard response to an aggressive opener. Split apart, force the attackers to choose targets, regroup for counter-engagement.

  All five Yale flyers targeted Archer.

  He banked hard left. Poured qi into his sword and dove for the deck, trying to lose them in the vertical space near the fort's defensive envelope. A shadow passed over him and he rolled right, narrowly avoiding Ellie's flame-wreathed blade. He climbed again, twisting through a corkscrew that should have shaken at least two pursuers.

  Then the gravity hit.

  Harry's spell art clamped down on him like a giant fist. His flying sword groaned beneath him, the formation arrays whining as they fought the crushing downward force. His arms went heavy. His trajectory flattened and his speed bled away in seconds.

  Something cold wrapped around his torso.

  Jimbo had switched to a chain. The black links coiled around his chest and arms, cinching tight, pinning his elbows to his ribs. His sword wobbled beneath him, barely holding altitude under the combined weight of the gravity field and the binding treasure.

  He was frozen in midair. Trussed up like something on a hook.

  The stadium roared its approval.

  Then Leo was in front of him.

  He just appeared. One of those lightning-bolt movements that looked wrong on replay and looked worse in person. One moment he was fifty yards away, the next he was hovering three feet from Archer's face, perfectly still, Moonrider humming alongside him.

  Archer could see Leo's face through the clear visor. His eyes were closed.

  Then it started.

  Something crawled over his skin and sank through his armor and mapped the shape of him from every angle at once. It pushed past his own divine sense like it wasn't there, penetrating him completely.

  He could feel it inspecting his meridian lines, following the pathways of qi through his body. The back of his neck, the soles of his feet, the spaces between his ribs. All at the same time.

  He was a specimen. Pinned to a slide, examined under magnification by something that did not need eyes to see.

  Archer thrashed against the chains. Jimbo held firm on one side. Harry's gravity field pressed down from above. He couldn't move. He couldn't fly. He could barely breathe.

  Leo opened his eyes.

  Archer wished he hadn't.

  They were not the eyes of the kid he had spoken to last year. That Leo had been quiet, a little awkward, easy to underestimate over small talk. This Leo was cold. Direct eye contact, unblinking, the way a predator freezes prey before the killing stroke.

  A hundred thousand people screamed for blood above them.

  Leo reached down and ignited his silver lightsaber. The blade materialized with a low hum, casting pale light across both their faces.

  He pressed the tip against Archer's abdomen.

  The armor resisted. It was Tier Four, League-grade, built to absorb killing blows. The surface formation arrays flared white, then yellow, then orange as they fought to redistribute the energy. Damage indicators along Archer's HUD began to climb.

  Leo did not rush. He leaned into the blade with slow, deliberate pressure, the way you push a knife through something tough. His eyes never left Archer's.

  The armor started screaming. The formation arrays cycled through their damage indicators, white to yellow to orange to red.

  Archer started screaming too.

  There was no pain. Instead there was Leo's face, three feet away, those calm eyes boring into him. He couldn't look away. His body wanted to, every instinct screaming at him to turn his head, but Leo's gaze pinned him into place.

  The divine sense worming through his meridians. The lightsaber pushing into his abdomen. The crowd cheering. The chains holding him still. Each thing layered on top of the last until his brain couldn't process any of them individually and gave way to a single understanding.

  He was completely at the mercy of someone who was taking his time.

  Something warm ran down the inside of his pants.