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I Was Assassinated For Crimes I Hadn't Committed Yet, So I Got Up And Went To Work

A young man survives an assassination attempt and discovers he has supernatural powers that make him immortal and stronger over time.

Key Takeaways

  • Immortality combined with continuous strength gain creates a unique power dynamic.
  • Survival over time is more important than dying repeatedly to gain power.
  • The awakening event is a global phenomenon affecting all humans simultaneously.
  • Ranks and panels determine individuals' worth and abilities in this new era.
  • Early attempts to kill the protagonist fail due to timing and his emerging powers.

What the video covers

  • The protagonist is stabbed in the chest in a university library by a man named Lee who believes he must die before his crimes begin.
  • Despite the knife wound, the protagonist fights back and survives, discovering he has a unique panel that grants immortality and continuous strength gain.
  • The universe assigns a rank to everyone, and the protagonist's rank is zero but with a special grade 'ex' indicating innate divinity.
  • His powers include immortality and a permanent strength increase of 0.2 attribute points per minute, which accumulates rapidly over time.
  • The protagonist realizes that dying does not grant him points; only time spent alive increases his power, making survival crucial.
  • Lee, the attacker, was early in his attempt, as the protagonist had not yet received his panel and powers at the time of the attack.
  • The story explores the protagonist's struggle to understand and harness his powers while navigating a world where others also awaken with ranks.
  • The awakening event affects everyone on the planet simultaneously, marking the beginning of a new era.
  • The protagonist interacts with others who have awakened, including a girl ranked B and an old man who is her grandfather.
  • The narrative sets the stage for a larger conflict involving supernatural abilities, rankings, and survival.

Chapters

  1. 00:00 Assassination Attempt in the Library
  2. 09:26 The Awakening and the Panel
  3. 19:02 Understanding the Rank and Powers
  4. 28:35 The Importance of Time and Survival
  5. 38:31 Meeting Others Who Have Awakened
  6. 48:11 The New Era Begins
  7. 57:30 Challenges and Conflicts Ahead
  8. 69:00 Setting the Stage for Future Battles

Answers

Questions about this video

What happens to the protagonist after he is stabbed?

He survives the stabbing because the knife misses his heart by less than a centimeter and later discovers he has supernatural powers granting him immortality and strength gain.

What is the significance of the protagonist's rank zero and grade ex?

Rank zero indicates the universe initially did not assign him a value, but grade ex signifies innate divinity, granting him unique powers like immortality and continuous strength increase.

Why can't the protagonist gain power by dying repeatedly?

Dying does not grant him attribute points; only the passage of time while alive increases his strength, making survival the key to becoming stronger.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

00:00
Speaker A
The knife went into my chest before I finished the sentence I was reading. Not a metaphor, an actual fruit knife, the cheap kind with the plastic handle, buried in me up to the grip while I sat in the university library at 4:00 in the
00:11
Speaker A
afternoon with a highlighter in my hand. I remember the highlighter. I remember thinking very calmly that I had just bought it. The guy holding the knife was crying. That's the part nobody believes when I tell it. Lee was maybe my age,
00:21
Speaker A
hollowed hair like he'd been sleeping in a stairwell for a month, and he was sobbing so hard he could barely get the words out. For the millions, he said, for the millions of innocent souls, Lee twisted the handle. For Me, I did not
00:33
Speaker A
know anyone named Me. I had never met this man. I had a part-time job at a noodle place and 1100 yuan in my bank account, and my biggest crime that semester was pirating a textbook. Lee leaned in close enough that I could
00:44
Speaker A
smell how long it had been since he'd eaten. "You devil," he whispered. "You have to die here. You have to die before it starts." And here's where I found out something about myself. Because the sensible reaction to a knife in the
00:54
Speaker A
heart is to go into shock, to slump, to do the thing where your vision narrows and you politely stop existing. That's what he was waiting for. Lee was already relaxing, already letting out this shaky breath of relief like a man who'd been
01:06
Speaker A
carrying a piano up a staircase for years and had finally set it down. Instead, something in me went very, very quiet. And then it stood up. I grabbed the chair beside me and put it through the side of his head. Lee went down over
01:17
Speaker A
a study desk, scattering somebody's flashcards, and I went down on top of him with my hand around his throat, and the knife still in my chest. And I want to be clear that I was not thinking heroic thoughts. I was not thinking at
01:27
Speaker A
all. There was just this enormous cold pressure behind my ribs going, "Kill him." And my hands were already following instructions. Somebody screamed. Somebody else pulled me off. I looked down at the handle sticking out of my shirt like a badly parked car and
01:38
Speaker A
thought with the last coherent thought I had for a while, "Well, that's my highlighter money gone on hospital fees." Then the floor came up. I woke up in a hospital bed with a tube in my arm and a nurse telling me the blade had
01:49
Speaker A
missed my heart by less than a centimeter. Lucky, she said. Incredibly lucky. Miracle even. I want you to remember the word lucky. We're going to come back to it. Two days later, a detective sat on the edge of my bed with
01:59
Speaker A
a folder he never opened and told me they'd gotten nothing. Not a name, not a motive, not a single word since the ambulance. The man had sat in an interrogation room for 48 hours and stared at the wall like it owed him
02:09
Speaker A
money. Then, roughly an hour before the detective came to see me, he'd finally spoken. Lee said, "Ten, then nine." The detective told me this. The way you tell someone about a weird dream you had, a grown man in handcuffs counting
02:19
Speaker A
backward, tears running down his face, and this awful hope in his voice like a kid waiting for fireworks. Eight, seven, six. Nobody in that room understood what he was counting toward. The officer across the table asked him what happened at zero.
02:31
Speaker A
Lee smiled and said, "Everything." Then he hit zero and the sky broke open. I saw it through the hospital window.
02:36
Speaker A
Everybody on Blue Star saw it. Whatever window they were standing at in whatever time zone at whatever hour of their day, which is the detail that broke people afterward. There was no sunrise line.
02:45
Speaker A
There was no delay. Light came down on every single human being alive at exactly the same instant. And it did not come from the sun. And it did not care what was in the way. It went through concrete. It went through my ceiling and
02:55
Speaker A
my blanket and my rib cage. It went through me like I was a rumor. And a voice that was not a voice said in a language I had never learned but understood perfectly. The era of awakening has begun. Somewhere in a
03:04
Speaker A
police station across town, a man in handcuffs put his forehead on the table and started laughing and then started crying again and said the only other sentence anyone got out of him that week. The demon king has been born. Lee
03:14
Speaker A
wasn't wrong. Lee was just early. So there's a panel now. Everyone gets one. You think the word and it unrolls in front of your eyes and only you can see it and it tells you exactly what the universe thinks you're worth. Mine took
03:24
Speaker A
its time. Everyone else's had already resolved. I could hear them through the wall, the whole ward. This rising babble of, "Oh my god, and did you get one and what's yours?" And mine was still assembling itself letter by letter like
03:35
Speaker A
a website on hotel Wi-Fi. Then it finished: rank zero. Cool. Great. Love that for me. Everyone else is out there pulling letters and I'm the one guy the universe looked at and went, "You know what? Let's not." Except there was a
03:48
Speaker A
second line. And the second line was where things got interesting. Innate divinity, it said. Grade ex. I didn't know what ex meant yet. Nobody did. In about six weeks, the whole planet would be arguing about it on forums at 3:00 in
04:00
Speaker A
the morning. But right then it was just two letters glowing in a hospital room.
04:03
Speaker A
Underneath it were two effects. Effect one, immortality. Effect two, with every breath you take, you get stronger permanently forever. No cap listed. No cap implied. 0.2 attribute points per minute, which sounds like nothing, which is the entire joke because 0.2 a minute is
04:20
Speaker A
12 an hour, is 288 a day, is 105,000 a year, and I am a 19-year-old with functioning lungs and absolutely nothing else going on. I lay there in a hospital gown doing math on my fingers and thinking about the man with the fruit
04:33
Speaker A
knife. Because if you want to kill somebody who can't die and who gets stronger every second he exists, there is exactly one window in which it works.
04:40
Speaker A
It's the window where he's a skinny kid in a library who hasn't gotten his panel yet. Lee had been early by about 96 hours.
04:47
Speaker A
And I want to be honest with you about the first thought I had because it wasn't noble. It was what an absolutely miserable amount of luck that guy has.
04:54
Speaker A
Now, I know what you're already asking because I asked it, too. Lying there with a tube in my arm, doing the greediest arithmetic of my life. If you can't die, why not just farm death, walk into anything, get killed, come back,
05:06
Speaker A
get killed, come back until you're a god? Yeah, I tried. We'll get there. And it's very funny. But here's the thing that keeps this from being a story about a man who wins in an afternoon. Dying gives me nothing. Not one point. The
05:18
Speaker A
counter doesn't care how brave I am or how many monsters chew on me. It cares about one thing and that thing is time.
05:25
Speaker A
Point 0.2 a minute. Sitting still, running, screaming, bleeding out on a floor, doesn't matter. Immortality isn't the engine. It's just the seat belt.
05:32
Speaker A
Which means the only way I ever become strong enough to matter is to survive long enough. And it would turn out very soon that the universe had a countdown for that, too. And the countdown was faster than I was. But that's day 90.
05:42
Speaker A
This is day one. On day one, there was an old man in the bed across from mine, and he was the happiest human being I have ever seen. His granddaughter had awakened at B rank. Lee told me this.
05:50
Speaker A
Then he told the nurse. Then he told a man pushing a mop. B rank apparently put her in the top few percent of the entire planet. And he had a photo of her on his phone that he showed me twice and would
05:59
Speaker A
have shown me a third time if the tea trolley hadn't come by. She's going to be somebody. He kept saying, "You watch.
06:04
Speaker A
She's going to be somebody." I said, "That was great. I meant it." I also quietly turned my phone face down because my class group chat had turned into a crime scene. Shiao Guang Lee had pulled the rank. Shiao Guang Lee could
06:14
Speaker A
not spell his own major. Within four hours, he had been informally adopted by a man who introduced himself as a godfather, capital G, the kind with a c.
06:25
Speaker A
buffet with the caption, "Grind set." Meanwhile, three separate people in my year had awakened to frrank, and two of them had gone quiet, and one of them was posting from a bathroom stall and had stopped using punctuation. The gap
06:37
Speaker A
opened that fast. One flash of light and the whole species got sorted like laundry. And by dinner time, the F ranks already knew and the A ranks already knew and nobody had to be told. I looked at my zero and decided to keep it to
06:50
Speaker A
myself. That turned out to be the smartest thing I did all year. And I'd like to claim it was strategy, but honestly, I just didn't want the old man to feel bad about the bee. 6 hours later, the wall exploded. Not the wall
07:02
Speaker A
of my room, the wall at the end of the corridor, the one with the window and the vending machine. And it didn't so much explode as tear. This ugly vertical rip in the air with nothing behind it.
07:12
Speaker A
And what came through the rip were wolves. Except they weren't. I need you to stop picturing a wolf. Picture something that was built by somebody who had a wolf described to them over a bad phone connection. Too many joints. Eyes
07:24
Speaker A
set wrong. A mouth that kept going past where a mouth should stop. There were three of them and they went straight for the tea trolley. And standing next to the tea trolley was a girl of about eight who had come to visit her
07:32
Speaker A
grandfather. I would like to tell you I hesitated. I would like to tell you I made a decision. I was already off the bed. The first one had her sleeve when I hit it. And here's where I learned what
07:40
Speaker A
180 free hours of breathing had quietly done to me because I hit that thing with the flat of my hand and its jaw came off. Not broke, came off. It went sideways into the vending machine hard enough to fold the front panel and the
07:50
Speaker A
little bags of dried plums went everywhere. And I stood there in a hospital gown with my back completely exposed to the corridor thinking, "Huh, the second one bit my forearm." I let it. It got a mouthful of me and I got a
08:00
Speaker A
fist full of its throat. And I want to be clear that at that moment I understood for the first time that the calm, cold thing that had picked up the chair in the library was not a one-time event. It lived in me. It had always
08:10
Speaker A
lived in me. Awakening hadn't installed it. Awakening had just taken the lid off. The third one ran. I caught it by the back leg. When it was over, there was an 8-year-old girl standing in a corridor full of glass and dried plums,
08:21
Speaker A
unheard, holding her grandfather's phone, and the old man was flat against the wall with both hands over his mouth.
08:25
Speaker A
And the nurse, who had told me I was incredibly lucky, was staring at my forearm, which had already stopped bleeding, which had in fact already closed. I pulled my sleeve down, said something about adrenaline that would not have convinced a golden retriever,
08:36
Speaker A
and walked out of that hospital in a paper gown and borrowed slippers. And I did not stop walking until I was home because I'd done the other math on the way, the important math. Those riffs opened everywhere that night. Every
08:46
Speaker A
city, every country, three wolves here, five somewhere else, a dozen in a shopping district in Osaka. Total confirmed casualties worldwide by morning, high but not catastrophic.
08:55
Speaker A
Every news channel called it an attack. It wasn't an attack. It was a knock. If something with the reach to light up every human being on the planet simultaneously, had actually wanted us gone, we would have been gone before the
09:05
Speaker A
light finished arriving. Instead, it sent three wolves into a hospital corridor. That's not an invasion. That's somebody wrapping their knuckles on the glass to see if anything inside is still moving, which meant a real one was coming, and it meant the timer had
09:15
Speaker A
started the second that man in the interrogation room hit zero. I sat on the floor of my apartment at 2 in the morning with my back against the door and the panel glowing in front of my eyes. Zero rank 2 a minute 1100 yuan in
09:26
Speaker A
the bank and I thought about the crying man with the fruit knife and the millions of innocent souls he said I'd killed and how he had looked at me a skinny nobody with a highlighter and seen something worth throwing his entire
09:35
Speaker A
life away to stop. I'd spent 19 years being nothing in particular, keeping my head down, not making waves. It had gotten me a knife in the chest anyway.
09:44
Speaker A
Fine, I said to my empty apartment and I opened the dungeon list. You did this, all of you. You forced my hand. The system had opened dungeons the same night it opened the rifts. Instances, it called them little pocket worlds you
09:56
Speaker A
could walk into, and inside were monsters. And if you killed the monsters, you got attribute crystals, and attribute crystals were the only thing on blueest star that could make a person permanently stronger. The catch was you couldn't go alone. Minimum party
10:08
Speaker A
size five. The system matched you with strangers if you didn't have four friends, which given that I had recently been stabbed by one of the few people who knew my name, was the option I took.
10:18
Speaker A
My first instance was called Blood Battle at Xiao Family Fortress. Difficulty easy. And I want to underline that word easy because the entire planet is still angry about it. my four teammates, a guy in glasses who had clearly spent 36 hours reading
10:32
Speaker A
everything ever written about instances, which at that point was 36 hours of forum posts, a woman with a fire crystal who kept apologizing, a very large man with a very small knife, and someone whose name I genuinely never got because
10:45
Speaker A
of what happened next. Glasses had a plan. Lead drawn it. Lee held up his phone and walked us through formations, aggro rotation, who pulls, and who peels, and he used the phrase focus fire four separate times. And honestly, I
10:57
Speaker A
respected it. It was a good plan. It was the plan of a man who had watched a lot of raid videos in a world that had had video games for 40 years and monsters for one day. We cleared the outer
11:06
Speaker A
courtyard fine. Bandits, basically, guys with sabers who died when you hit them, which at the time felt like a reasonable arrangement between us and the universe.
11:13
Speaker A
Then the door at the end of the hall opened and the boss came out. Lee was about 2 and 1/2 m tall and he was wearing full lamalar armor and he was holding a blade that started near his
11:21
Speaker A
shoulder and ended somewhere past my ability to care. Glasses said, "Okay, so remember the formation." The boss killed him in the middle of the word. I want to describe the speed properly because the speed is the whole point. There was no
11:32
Speaker A
wind up. There was no monster roar. Lee crossed 11 m and glasses stopped having a top hat and then the fire crystal woman and then the large man with the small knife who at least got the knife up and then the fourth one. And the
11:43
Speaker A
entire sequence took less than 10 seconds. Then it was me standing alone in a hallway in slippers at easy difficulty. Lee cut me in half at the waist. Now, here's the thing about dying that the movies get wrong. It is not
11:55
Speaker A
peaceful and it is not a tunnel of light. It is loud and it is undignified and you spend the last two seconds of it extremely embarrassed. And then I woke up at the entrance of the instance with all my parts attached. I sat there in
12:06
Speaker A
the dirt for a while. Then I got up and walked back into the fortress because I had just noticed something. My attribute panel had kept ticking. The whole time I was dead, the whole time I was reassembling to a minute, right on
12:17
Speaker A
schedule. The universe did not consider death an interruption, which is a beautiful gift and also a trap. And I figured out which one within the hour because dying does not make you stronger. I need to be very clear about
12:28
Speaker A
this or the next 6 hours make no sense. I did not get points for being brave. I did not get points for being killed by something impressive. Every single point I earned in that fortress, I earned by being alive in it minute after minute,
12:40
Speaker A
while a man in lamela armor took me apart in increasingly creative ways. Immortality didn't make me strong. It just meant time could. So, the strategy was not fight the boss. The strategy was survive near the boss. I ran. I hid
12:54
Speaker A
behind a rice barrel for 4 minutes and got 0.8 attribute points. And he found me and put his blade through the barrel and me. Respawn. I hid in a stable. 6 minutes. Respawn. I climbed onto a roof and lay flat and got 11 whole minutes
13:06
Speaker A
before he came up through the tiles like a shark through the top of the ocean.
13:10
Speaker A
Somewhere around the eighth death, I started talking to him. You know, I said, dragging myself behind a pillar with my legs not currently working.
13:16
Speaker A
There's no way there's just one of you. Lee came around the pillar. How many twins do you have? I asked him.
13:21
Speaker A
Seriously, because I've killed you never, and you've killed me eight times, and statistically, one of us should have gotten tired. Lee killed me. Your mother, I said at the entrance, standing up and brushing off my slippers. How does she have so many babies? That
13:34
Speaker A
became a bit. I want to apologize in advance because it stays a bit for a long time. By death 11, I could stay ahead of him in a straight line. By death 14, I could stay ahead of him
13:42
Speaker A
around corners, which is harder. Somewhere in there, my hiding intervals stopped shrinking and started growing.
13:47
Speaker A
And that was the moment I knew because the boss wasn't getting slower. Lee was exactly as fast as he had been on the first swing. I was the variable. Death 15. And here is where I stopped running because I checked my panel and my
13:58
Speaker A
attributes had come up to 91. When I walked in, they had been in the teens.
14:02
Speaker A
91 is not a number that meant anything to anyone yet. There was no scale published. Nobody knew what an A ranks numbers looked like. All I knew was that the last time this man had swung at me, I had seen the swing. Not felt it, seen
14:12
Speaker A
it. Lee came down the hallway. I let him get close. Lee raised the blade over his head with both hands in the same motion he'd used 15 times, and I stepped inside it and hit him in the chest. His armor
14:23
Speaker A
went in like a soda can. Lee staggered. In 15 deaths, he had never once staggered, and something about that changed the temperature of the room. I hit him again in the same spot, and I heard something behind the armor break.
14:34
Speaker A
Lee tried to bring the blade down and I let go of caution entirely and hit him a third time and he came apart. 6 hours and 11 minutes. Instance clear. Grade A.
14:42
Speaker A
I stood alone in a fortress full of dead bandits holding nothing wearing a hospital gown with a pile of attribute crystals glowing on the floor where the man in lamelar armor used to be. And I thought easy. They called this one easy.
14:54
Speaker A
Outside the world was losing its mind. Not about me. Nobody knew about me yet.
14:58
Speaker A
The world was losing its mind because by that first morning roughly 400,000 people on blue star had entered an instance and roughly 400,000 people had not come out and the forums that existed to discuss this had been alive for about
15:10
Speaker A
11 hours and had already invented every stage of grief. The top thread was titled the difficulty is broken and it had 900,000 replies. The theory going around was that the system had made an error, that easy was a mistransation,
15:23
Speaker A
that surely surely a tutorial dungeon was not supposed to delete a full party of awakened humans in under 10 seconds.
15:29
Speaker A
People were writing very long posts about game design. People were citing games. There was a man with an avatar of a cartoon frog explaining aggro tables to the survivors of a mass casualty event. And then the wind and thunder
15:39
Speaker A
squad went in. Ja's best. Five awakeners, three of them S-rank, live streamed to about 200 million people.
15:44
Speaker A
And the stream had a countdown timer and a sponsor. They walked into a fortress instance with matched gear and matched jackets and a plan that was, I have to say, significantly better than the one glasses had. They lasted 11 seconds.
15:55
Speaker A
They went back in the next day with a different formation and lasted nine. That second one is what did it because after the first wipe, you can tell yourself it was bad luck. After the second, with adjustments, with
16:05
Speaker A
everyone's best effort, the number went down and the whole planet did that math at the same time and arrived at the same place, which was that this was not a game with a difficulty curve. This was a wall. And that is the exact moment with
16:15
Speaker A
the entire species sitting in the dark staring at the same conclusion that the sky said, "Congratulations to the awakener of blue star Wongi for achieving the world's first instance clear. I was in my apartment eating instant noodles. I would like to
16:27
Speaker A
describe the forum response, but I don't think I can do it justice." The thread hit a million replies in about 20 minutes. Half of it was who in every language on Earth. A quarter of it was people insisting the announcement was
16:36
Speaker A
fake. And a solid chunk was one very specific kind of post, which was people who had personally been in an instance that day working out in real time. That the difficulty had not been broken, that it had been beatable the whole time,
16:46
Speaker A
that the wall had a door in it, and they had simply not been the one to find it.
16:50
Speaker A
Glasses posted, "I know it was him." Lee described the party. Lee described the formation. Lee described the guy in the hospital gown who had said almost nothing. The post was titled, "I was there." And it was very good, right up
17:01
Speaker A
until the last paragraph where he explained that the clear had obviously been a fluke because the fifth member of his party had been, and I am quoting, completely unremarkable. 40,000 people quoted that line back at him. It became
17:11
Speaker A
a meme with a lifespan of about 9 months. I never said a word. I didn't have to. The internet does its own executions. My rewards showed up while I was still reading. Swordsmanship proficiency grade excellent. A skill book and skill books at that point in
17:24
Speaker A
history were traded between governments. attribute crystals, enough to take me from 91 to 108. And a problem because I went to Q for a second instance and the matching system looked at my numbers and refused to give me anybody. It wanted a
17:35
Speaker A
party of five. It would not put four random awakeners into a room with someone carrying 108 attributes because to the system that was not a party. That was a hostage situation. I needed four teammates voluntarily. And here's the
17:47
Speaker A
thing. The entire planet had by then figured out one hard fact about instances, which was that everyone who entered with me had died. four out of four 100%. By that evening, my party had a nickname on the forums. They called it
18:00
Speaker A
the death group. Some translations went with the group of death, which sounds like a football bracket and honestly was more accurate. So, I did the only reasonable thing. I sold an attribute crystal. One crystal, the single lowest value item in my entire inventory, put
18:13
Speaker A
up on the one exchange that existed, which was a hastily built web page with a payment processor bolted on. It sold in 14 seconds for 1 million yuan. I sat there looking at my banking app. 1100 yuan one week ago. I refreshed it three
18:25
Speaker A
times. Then I put up four more crystals and watched them evaporate. And I understood something about the new world that a lot of very smart people took another 6 months to understand, which was that the currency was no longer
18:35
Speaker A
money. Money was just the thing you converted the currency into. Then I posted the offer. Four slots, one instance. 500,000 yuan per person paid by me to you. I need you to sit with the shape of that. I was not charging. I was
18:48
Speaker A
paying half a million UN to walk into a room, stand somewhere safe, and let the system count you as a warm body. 11,000 applications in the first hour. And then I started rejecting people. And this is where I got my reputation. An Srank
19:02
Speaker A
applied, actual Srank, real one, with a verified panel. I said no. An SS rank applied through an intermediary who explained that his client would be doing me a favor. I said no. A whole certified team applied together, matched gear,
19:15
Speaker A
matched jackets, and I have never typed the word no with more pleasure. Because I had thought about it, and the math was ugly and simple. The stronger my teammates were, the more the instance would scale. And the more the instance
19:25
Speaker A
scaled, the more likely it was that somebody standing behind me stopped having a top half. I had watched that happen once. I was not interested in a second showing. What I wanted was the weakest possible people who could still
19:36
Speaker A
legally count as people. I took a D-rank, two E-ranks, and a guy named Wei Ming. How we Ming Hao was E-rank 22 and he had borrowed money to buy a bus ticket to the meeting point. His application was four sentences long. Lee
19:49
Speaker A
didn't tell me about his talent which was as good as no talent. Lee told me his sister's tuition was due in March. I liked him immediately. I have never regretted it and I [clears throat] have had a lot of time to so I walked back
19:59
Speaker A
into Blood Battle at Xiao Family Fortress with four people whose combined attributes did not equal my left arm and I told them to stand at the entrance and they stood at the entrance. The boss came down the hallway. Same guy. 2 and
20:09
Speaker A
1/2 mters. Lamelar armor blade from shoulder to whatever. Hello again, I said. How's the family? I hit him once.
20:14
Speaker A
Lee did not stagger. Lee did not come apart in pieces. Lee simply stopped being an object in the room and the wall behind him developed a new feature.
20:21
Speaker A
Total time under a minute. Clear grade. SSS. The system likes it when you exceed expectations. The system likes it a great deal. SSS clear meant maximum growth rate, which meant every crystal in that place, which meant my four
20:33
Speaker A
terrified companions walked out of an easy instance with a payday that put them in the top fraction of a percent of awakened humans on Blue Star. Weii Mingha threw up in the parking lot. Then he asked me very politely if I would
20:43
Speaker A
consider doing it again. Every day this week, I said, Lee looked at me with his hands on his knees and this expression I would come to know extremely well, which is the expression of a man deciding to believe something insane because the
20:54
Speaker A
alternative is going back to his old life. Okay, he said. Okay. Yeah. Okay. That was the founding of the only organization on Blueest Star with a hiring policy of exclusively dead weight. And I wanted on record that it
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Speaker A
was a business decision. The SSS clear paid out a movement skill called magic shadow step which does exactly what it sounds like and does it about four times faster than you're imagining. I learned it in an afternoon. I put a hole in my
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own bathroom door learning it. And then I sat down with the instance list and got greedy because the system had said world's first, not Shaw's first, not this instance's first. There was an entire list of easy instances live on
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Blueest Star, four of them, and every single one of them was sitting there unclaimed with a world first attached.
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And I had just proven I could walk through one of them in under a minute.
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There were four. I could take four, I told Mingho, Lee said, and I want to render his tone accurately. All of them?
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All of them in one day before dinner, ideally. The second instance on the list was called the Shogunate Coup, and it was in Japan. Now, at that point in the world's timeline, in Japan meant something specific. Instances were
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geographically anchored. If a gate spawned in a country, that country's teams got there first. And Japan had gone extremely hard on the shogunate coup. They had an official project around it. They had a squad called Amitarasu, which was their national
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team. Three SS ranks and two Sranks backed by a corporate consortium and a documentary crew. They had been attempting it for 6 days. They had a live stream. They had a countdown clock on the stream with the words first clear
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attempt 9, which tells you the outcome of attempts 1 through 8. I flew coach. I want to be clear that I did not do anything illegal. Instances were open.
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anyone could quue for any gate they could physically stand next to. Japan had simply assumed along with everyone else that the people who would stand next to their gate would be Japanese because the alternative was that a foreign national would fly in and take a
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national project off the table in the time it takes to microwave a meal. Which brings me to the clear. Inside the instance is a castle town at night and the setup is a coup in progress. Rebel forces, thousands of them moving through
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the streets toward the keep. The intended path, according to six days of Amatarasu's very expensive footage, is to fight through the rebel army, ally with the loyalists, defend the inner gate, and eventually confront the Shogun's traitorous general in the
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throne room. I read that in the instance briefing and thought, why is the shogun still alive? Because that's the whole scenario. The rebels want the shogun dead. The loyalists want the shogun alive. Every fight in that town is a
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fight about a man sitting in a room at the top of a hill. So, I went up the hill. magic shadow step over four roofs through a window past two guards who I think are still turning around into a
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room with a very startled man in extremely nice robes. "Sorry about this," I said and took his head off. The instance had, I would learn later, roughly nine narrative branches. All nine of them required a shogun. The town
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went insane. Both armies, rebels and loyalists, simultaneously received the information that the objective they were fighting over had been resolved by an outside party. And the scenario logic did what scenario logic does when you take the loadbearing wall out, which is
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that everything hostile in the instance turned around and came for me at once. Thousands of them down every street and I went down the hill through them. There is no clever description for this part.
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I had 108 attributes and swordsmanship proficiency at excellent and a movement skill that let me cross a street between heartbeats and they had spears. I went through that rebel army the way weather goes through a tent city. I did not stop
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moving the entire time. Somewhere in the middle of it, I stopped counting because counting was slowing me down. The traitorous general was waiting in the square with his personal guard in formation and he made a speech. Lee got
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about 11 words in. I didn't stop for him either. I just ran him over. That's the honest verb. I hit the formation at full speed and came out the other side and he was on the ground behind me in a shape
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people aren't. 3 minutes and 20 seconds. Instance clear. Now here's the part I only saw later and I have watched it more times than is healthy. A Matarasu squad stream was live. They were in a briefing room gearing up for attempt 9
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and their captain, a man named Tanaka Kenji, was giving a genuinely stirring speech about the honor of the first clear and what it would mean for the nation. The chat was flooded with hearts. Somebody in the room had brought
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a cake, which is a level of confidence I will always admire, and the sky said, "Congratulations to the awakener of Blue Star, Wong, for achieving the world's first clear of the shogunit coup." The stream stayed on for 11 more seconds.
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You can see Tanaka's face do the whole journey. Confusion, then the name landing, then a look. I would spend the next several months on the receiving end of, and which I did not at the time take remotely seriously enough. Then someone
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had the presence of mine to cut the feed. Somebody in that room had a cake with the words first clear on it. It's in the frame. You can see it. Goblin forest took 5 minutes. And I want to
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explain why because it is the only clear from that week that involved a decision.
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Goblin forest is a maze. That's the design. 11 square km of identical trees with a goblin warren under it. And every account of the instance describes teams wandering for six or seven hours getting picked at, and the boss is at a fixed
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point that nobody can find because there are no landmarks. I did not solve the maze. I went up a tree, worked out which direction had the most smoke, and then went through the forest in a straight line without turning. And by straight
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line, I mean that the trees between me and the smoke stopped being trees. 4 minutes and 40 seconds, most of which was walking. There is a bureau assessment of that clear which describes my approach as brute force pathing. And
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there is a handwritten note in the margin of the physical copy which I have seen and which says it isn't brute force if it's correct. Then I lost the fourth one and I lost it by 90 minutes. Crimson
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Graveyard was in Europe and a coalition team had been on it for 6 days and they were not a national squad and they did not have a sponsor. They were 11 people from four countries who had met on a
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forum. They went in 11 times. The first 10 they died. On the 11th they worked out that the graveyard's undead came back unless the headstone went first which nobody had thought of because nobody had lived long enough in there to
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notice a pattern. I was in a taxi from the airport when the announcement went up. Congratulations to the Awakeners of Blue Star for achieving the world's first clear of Crimson Graveyard.
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Awakeners, plural. First time the sky had said that. I said out loud in the back of a taxi, "Good for them." And I meant it about 70% and the driver looked at me in the mirror and asked if I was
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all right. I have thought about that clear a lot since. 11 people, 10 failures, one idea, no immortality, no ex talent, no point to a minute. If Blueest Star had produced 400 more teams like that, nobody would have needed me
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at all. and the entire rest of the story would be somebody else's. Three world firsts in one day. That's what went on the record. What went on the forums was worse than that because by then people had started assembling a picture. Three
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clears, three different continents, one name, and a total absence of any information about the person attached to it. No agency, no sponsor, no interview, no photograph. The theories got creative. My personal favorite was that Wangi was a ja program and the name was
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a designation. Then the list updated and everything about the world changed shape. A new category appeared, advancement instance. Every awakener on Blue Star was at tier zero. Nobody had known there were tiers. Now there were, and the way up was a specific kind of
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instance, and the first one available was called Rise of the Orcs part one, party of five, which meant I needed my four again. The problem was that Rise of the Orcs scaled off the party. And unlike an easy instance, an advancement
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instance would not let me solo carry a lump of terrified civilians through a hallway. It required all five members to survive to the end, not contribute, survive. So before we went in, I took my four back into blood battle at Jiao
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Family Fortress and ran it seven times in 10 minutes. Seven clears. SS every time. I have never seen four human beings absorb that many attribute crystals that quickly. And by the end of it, we was sitting on the floor of the
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instance entrance with his hands shaking and his panel maxed out at every value a tier zero could hold, saying my name in a tone I describe as accusatory. Then we went into the orcs, and the orcs, it turned out, were not the problem. Rise
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of the Orcs opens on a frozen step at a temperature the instance description called severe. Severe is a word doing an enormous amount of work. It was cold in a way that had opinions about you. The wind came across that plane like it had
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been sent. And within 4 minutes, two of my party had stopped being able to hold their weapons. There was a withdrawal option. Leave the instance, forfeit the advancement, keep your fingers. The D-rank took it. Then one of the E-ranks,
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then the second E-rank, who apologized about six times on the way out and who I have never held a single thing against because I have been that cold exactly once and I understand. which left me and we Mingha, E-rank, 22, borrowed money
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for a bus ticket, standing in a wind that was actively removing him from the world with his arms wrapped around himself and his jaw locked so hard I could hear it. "Go," I said. "No, waming how. You'll lose fingers. I can't carry
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you through this. The instance won't." "My sister's tuition is due in March," he said through his teeth. "And I am so tired of being poor." So, we stayed. And here is the strategy that got us through. And it is the stupidest
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strategy in the history of dungeon clearing. And it worked because of exactly one property I had that nobody else on blue star had. We sat down for 4 hours in the wind behind a rock. Because remember what actually makes me
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stronger, not kills, not crystals. Time 02 per minute. And it does not care about weather. And it does not care about tactics. And it does not care that there are 11,000 orcs over the ridge. 4 hours behind a rock is 240 minutes is 48
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attribute points and I had come in around 160ome and I walked out from behind that rock at 215 way Mingh how spent those 4 hours pressed against my back for warmth which is not a heroic image but is the reason he still has a
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full set of fingers around hour three he told me about his sister around hour four he said and I have thought about this a great deal since you know you're going to end up being important right like actually important and I'm going to
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have to explain to people that I met you when you had no shoes I had slippers you had slippers. Then I stood up and went over the ridge. The Blood Hoof tribe had a war cap of about 11,000 and a
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chieftain named Kale. And I am not going to pretend the next 40 minutes were a fight. 215 attributes against a tier zero instance is not a fight. It's a demonstration. I went through that camp and the camp got smaller and eventually
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the camp was a field. Chieft Kale was 3 and 1/2 m of muscle with a war axe and he was the only thing in that instance that actually made me use the sword properly. Lee got me twice real hits.
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hits that would have ended a normal person. And I felt the rib go and kept moving because the rib would be fine in 90 seconds and he did not have 90 seconds. I took his head off at the
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shoulders. Advancement complete. Tier one. And the panel unrolled and I got the first real look at what innate divinity grade EX was actually going to do to my life. Effect one, still immortality. Effect two, still the endless climb. And now effect three,
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rank suppression. Anything below my tier that stands in front of me gets weaker. Not slightly, meaningfully. The gap does the fighting for me. Plus a title.
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Trailblazer. awarded for first advancement on blue star. And here's what Trailblazer does. It displays your true attributes to everyone who looks at you. I laughed out loud in an empty frozen field because the system had just handed me unprompted the single most
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useful piece of bait that has ever existed. And it thought it was giving me a trophy. The rest of the payout was two items. A Wuhan root seedling, which is a plant that increases the awakening rate of an entire region if you put it in the
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ground. And the scarlet blood of the wild bull, a fine-grade consumable, permanent constitution. Wayamingha was waiting at the entrance.
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Blue alive tier one. I handed him 40 attribute crystals. Lee looked at them and then at me and started doing the thing where a person's face argues with itself and I cut him off before he could get into it because I did not want to
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have the conversation and I still don't buy a skill book. I said a real one and way. Yeah, don't sell these. Lee didn't.
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Lee never has. That man has been offered numbers for those crystals that would restructure a small country. And he has never once wavered. And I did not know at the time that I was making the only friend I would have on the way up. We
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came out of that instance into a world that had gotten quieter while we were gone. Because 70 minutes earlier in every sky over every country, the countdown had appeared. It hung there.
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Everyone could see it. You could photograph it. And the photographs came out, which was somehow the worst part.
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Blue star disaster instance first level. Demonized monsters. Demon level 90 days. That was all. No explanation of what a demon level was. No explanation of what happened if we lost. Just a number in the sky over every city on Earth going
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down by one every day in front of 8 billion people. Weii Minghao looked up at it for a long moment. 90 days, he said. I did the math without meaning to.
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It's a reflex now. 90 days at 288 points a day is 25,920 attributes. assuming I never stopped breathing. And I had absolutely no idea whether that number was enormous or pathetic because nobody had told us what we were being measured against. That's
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the thing about a countdown. It doesn't tell you if you're going to make it. It just tells you when you'll find out. Now I have to tell you about a room I wasn't in. I found out about it much later. And
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when I did, it rearranged everything. And if I keep it in the order I learned it, you will spend the next several hours watching me make decisions that look insane. So I'm going to hand it to you now, and you can carry it for me.
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There is a supernatural management bureau. Sha built it in 9 days, which is faster than that country has ever built anything. And there was an agent in it named Jang Lelay. SS rank 26. Talent called absolute law. The kind of person
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who gets recruited by three agencies in one week. On day 10, she got handed a file so thin it was insulting and an assignment that was, in her supervisor's words, a formality. There was a man in a detention cell who claimed to be reborn.
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Every agency on Earth had one of those by then. Turns out that when the sky opens and monsters come out, a certain reliable percentage of people announced that they have already lived this. The bureau logged them, sedated the loud
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ones, and moved on. This one had been in custody since before the awakening. Lead stabbed a university student in a library. Jang Lelay walked into the interview room, sat down, and opened her mouth to introduce herself. "Janggang Lelay," he said, 26, "As absolute law,
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you were third in your intake class, and you should have been first, and the reason you weren't is in a sealed file that your supervisor has read and you haven't." She did not react. She was extremely good at not reacting. You're
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going to die in about a year. Mashin said in the Western Desert. I'm sorry.
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I've been trying to work out how to say that part for 6 days. Then he showed her his panel. Lee hadn't shown it to anyone. Not to the police, not to the psychiatrists, not to the three previous interviewers. Lee' been waiting because
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he'd been very carefully picking who to spend it on, and he had already known exactly which agent would be sent and exactly when. Talent, time travel, grade SSS. There were at that point four confirmed SSS talents on the entire
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planet. and every one of them was a head of state's problem. Jang Lelay looked at those letters for a long time. Then Maashin told her what he was here to stop. In 16 years, he said, "There is a
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man who has killed more human beings than every war in our history combined. Lee is the strongest thing that has ever stood on this planet, and he cannot be killed, and he does not rule anyone because ruling requires caring what
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people do. Lee does not care." Lee erases a city the way you'd move a chair that's in your way. Not out of hatred, out of preference. "Name," said Jong Le.
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They call him the great demon king. Lee was 19 when the awakening happened. Lee had,00 yuan and no shoes. Name: Wong Wei and Jeang Le who had spent the entire morning reading the same three world first announcements as everybody else on
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Blue Star put her pen down. So you want us to kill him? She said, "No," said Mashin. Lee said it fast. Lee said it like he'd been rehearsing that one word for a year and a half. No, I want you to
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protect him. Here's the whole thing. The way he laid it out on that table. Ma had lived it. 16 years of it. Lee had been part of a rebellion, one of the last ones, and it had cost more than I am
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going to describe here. And one of the things it cost was a girl named Mi. They had exactly one asset, which was Maashin's talent, and they spent everything they had left buying him one jump. It was supposed to go further
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back, much further. Lee was supposed to arrive with years to work with. Lee arrived 4 days before the awakening, and he did what any of us would have done.
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Lee found the address. Lee bought a knife at a market because he did not have a weapon and he did not have time.
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Lee walked into a university library and he found a skinny kid reading a textbook with a highlighter. "And I could not do it," he told Jong lay. I had the knife in him. I had it in his heart and he
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stood up. Lee tried it before is the thing. That's what he wouldn't say for the first hour and finally said in the second. There had been another attempt in the future at the end. Not a jump backward, a confrontation. They had
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cornered me, a full alliance, everything humanity had left. And I had turned around and said two words to him. You're here. And then Mashin said, I had asked him how the trip was. I had known 16 years early. I had known he was going to
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jump and I had let it happen because it was more interesting than not letting it happen. So no, he said, killing him is not a plan. It was never a plan. There is nothing in this universe that kills
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Wong Wei. There is one thing that could stop him, and it's not a weapon. Jang Lelay waited. Only Wong Wei can kill Wong Wei, said Mashin. The version of him I met had nothing to lose and nobody to lose it to. So the plan is not to
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weaken him. The plan is to give him something. Jan Lelay said, "You want the bureau to make friends with the demon king." "I want the bureau," said Mashin, to make sure he never becomes one. Lee also told her the other half, "and this
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is the half that got him out of that cell and into a job." "Because everything he'd said so far was unfalsifiable, and Jang Lelay had spent four years learning what unfalsifiable sounds like. So he took a wrist and told
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her the next 11 weeks, what instances would open, where, which countries would find what. Lee told her what the countdown in the sky was actually for, and what a demon level disaster was, and what came after it, which nobody on Blue
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Star knew, and which he should not have been able to know. Then he told her the date and location of an event that had not happened yet and would happen in 6 days. 6 days later, it happened. That is
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the entire reason anyone on Earth was ever ready for anything. And the man responsible spent that week in a cell for stabbing me. The doorbell rang at 9 at night. I want to describe my reaction honestly. I had just come out of an
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advancement instance. There was a countdown in the sky. I was tier 1, alone in a rented apartment, and every intelligence service on the planet was actively trying to work out what Wong Wei was. I opened the door. There were
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two women standing in the hallway, one in a black coat, calm in a way that took training, and one behind her with a hand near her hip. I looked at them. Then I said very quietly, "So, you've arrived.
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I have never in my life seen two people go so still. I want you to understand what was happening on their side of that doorway. They were standing in front of a man who, according to a time traveler
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in a bureau cell, had known Main was coming 16 years before Main came. And the very first sentence out of his mouth was, "So, you've arrived." Jang Lelay told me months later that in that moment, she genuinely thought she was
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going to die in a hallway with a takeout menu taped to the wall behind her. She said carefully. "You were expecting us.
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I ordered 40 minutes ago," I said. There was a silence. "You're not the food," I said. "We're not the food, right?" I stood back from the door. Well, come in.
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But if the food gets here, I'm answering that first. That is a real conversation that really happened, and it is the founding document of Sha's entire strategic posture for the next 2 years.
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They sat on my one chair and my one stool. Jean Lelay did the talking, and the bureau's offer was better than I expected, which immediately made me suspicious. Manpower, any team I wanted, drawn from anyone in the country.
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Equipment, including things I did not know Shaw had. Firearms, which sounds quaint now and did not then.
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intelligence sharing, full access to the National Treasury of Awakening Resources, which had been assembled at enormous cost over nine days, and which they were offering to open for one 19-year-old. No demands attached. That was the part that itched. There were no
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demands attached. I asked what they wanted. We want you to keep clearing instances, Jean Lelay said. That's it.
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That's it. I let that sit for a second. I'd like to tell you I saw through it. I didn't. What I actually thought was that the bureau had done the same math I had about world firsts and national
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prestige, and that I was being sponsored the way a country sponsors a swimmer. I did not consider the possibility that I was being managed. So I reached into my inventory and put the Wuhan root seedling on the table. Jang Lelay did
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not know what it was. I told her, "Plant it in the ground. The awakening rate of the entire surrounding region goes up permanently. Put it in the right place and you get thousands of new awakeners who would otherwise have been nothing."
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She asked what I wanted for it. "Nothing," I said. "I can't plant a tree. I don't have a garden. I have a window sill and I killed a cactus on it in high school." She took it and she was
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very quiet about taking it. And I found out later that she filed a supplementary report that night which was two lines long and which her supervisor read four times. I've seen it. It says, "Subject surrendered a strategic national asset
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within 11 minutes of first contact. Recommend immediate revision of threat assessment. Then the bureau built me a team. Jang Lelay SS rank absolute law and she put herself on it which was not the assignment she was given. Lu Yen,
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Srank, spatial talent, which meant she could move things and occasionally people across distances, and which meant she was the most logistically valuable human being in the country, and they gave her to me anyway. Ga Fu, SS rank, defense specialist, built like a
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municipal structure and roughly as talkative, and Wei Minghao, E-rank, who the bureau tried very gently to leave off the roster, and who I put back on it twice, and they gave me an adviser. Lee came in with a bureau escort and a
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lanyard, and he had gained about 6 kilos and had clearly slept, and he put a skill book on the table in front of me without looking me in the face. body strengthening art, a cultivation method, not a system reward, not an instance
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drop, something older than either. And to this day, I don't know how a man in a detention cell got it. This is worth more than the tree, he said. Do I know you? Lee looked at me then. Lee had gray
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in his hair that had not been there when he was crying over a fruit knife in a library, and that was 3 weeks ago. No, said Mashin. You don't. I called the detective on the way home just to check.
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The case was closed. The suspect had been evaluated, diagnosed with a delusional disorder, and transferred to a facility, and the whole thing had been resolved administratively, and the detective's tone was the specific tone of a man reading from a card. "So, he's
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not a threat," I said. "Lee's a very sick man," said the detective who needs help. I said, "Okay." I hung up and I let it go. And that is genuinely the last time I thought about it for months
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because there was a number in the sky and it said 89. Somewhere in a bureau office, a man who had crossed 16 years to murder me was writing my training schedule. Tier 1 unlocked a new difficulty bracket, and the bracket was
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called ordinary, which after what easy had done to 400,000 people is the single funniest word choice the system ever made. Nobody on blue star had cleared an ordinary. 11 national teams had tried.
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The survival rate was posted on the forums in a table, and people had stopped clicking on it. The one we took was called cataclysm beginning. The briefing room had a projector and my four teammates and a bureau liaison who
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kept saying we in a way that included himself and I stood at the front and gave what I understand was supposed to be a briefing. Here's the plan, I said.
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I'll take responsibility for the whole thing and end it. Silence. Sorry, said Lu Yan. Which part is the plan? All of it? That's the plan. You four stay behind me and try not to get separated and I'll take responsibility for the
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rest of it and end it. Gau, who to that point had said 11 words in 2 days, said, "And what?" Whatever's in there. Lee nodded slowly like a man agreeing to something he intended to review later.
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Inside Cataclysm Beginning is a city and the city has a virus. Real city, not a fantasy one. Overpasses, convenience stores, a shopping center with an escalator still running and about 2 million people who used to live there and now moved like their joints had been
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reassembled by somebody with a grudge. You could still read their name tags. That's the design of the thing. You are supposed to see the name tags. The instance objective was one line.
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Eliminate the source. No location. No hint. 2 million infected across roughly 90 square km and a clock. And this is where the E-rank eye had refused to leave off the roster earned every crystal I ever gave him. Because we
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Mingao spent the first 40 minutes not fighting. Lee climbed onto a bus shelter with a notebook and he watched the way the infected moved. They're not random.
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He said, "Look at the drift. Everything's leaning. They were. It was subtle. Maybe one step in 20, but across 2 million bodies it was a current. And you could stand at any intersection and work out from the lean which way was
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upstream. It's a source, not a plague, he said. Everything's still connected to it. If we follow the drift against the current, "How long?" Lee did the math on the back of a receipt. 90 minutes on foot. 40 if we're on the roofs. We went
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on the roofs. That run is the best hour I have ever had with those four people.
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And I say that having been to war with them since Liu Yan opening short hops across gaps that shouldn't have been crossable. Gau going through rooftop doors ahead of us without breaking stride. Because a locked door is only a
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door if you're the kind of thing that stops at doors. Shan lay behind me the entire time and never once out of position. Weii Mingha in the middle, calling corrections off the current, terrified. Correct. We were 11 blocks
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out when Gau stepped onto a parking structure and started sinking. Not falling, sinking into concrete that had gone soft and was holding him up past the knees. Then the hips and the infected on that level all turned around
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at once and they were not drifting anymore. That was the source's defense. It could feel us getting close. Lu Yen tried to pull him with spatial and couldn't get purchase on something half embedded. Shan Lelay locked the nearest
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40 infected in place with absolute law and told us she had maybe 20 seconds of that. And I looked at the far end of the structure and I saw two of them. Two sources, not one, both at the top of the
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ramp and they'd been feeding off each other the entire time, which is why nobody had ever cleared an ordinary because everyone who found one had assumed they'd found it. 20 seconds. I did not go around. I went through the
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parked cars. And I want you to know that hitting a sedan at that speed teaches you a great deal about sedans. And I came up that ramp with the sword out and I killed both of them inside the same
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movement. One cut left to right. The system logged it as a double. The concrete let Gau go. 2 million people stopped moving all at once across 90 square km. And the silence in that city was the loudest thing I have ever heard.
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World's first ordinary clear. Gau sat on the edge of the parking structure with concrete dust in every seam of his gear and said his 12th word of the week, which was a request for the plan to be repeated. I take responsibility for the
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whole thing. I said, and end it. Okay, he said. Yes, I understand it now. The forum war started before we'd even left the instance because the announcement said blue star and then it said Dia and the second one is what did it. Japan had
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lost the shogunate coup. Now they'd lost the first ordinary 2 and every national team on the planet was staring at a leaderboard with one country on it. The theory that took over was that Zia had been hiding a program that Wong way was
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manufactured. There were 40-page posts with charts. There was a very popular thread arguing that no single awakener could physically hold the attributes required and that Wongi was a rotating designation used by four different people. And the evidence for this was
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that Wong Wei had been photographed wearing slippers. And somewhere in the middle of it, a partial bureau file leaked, not mine. Jean Lays. 12 minutes of the internet finding out that the SS rank on the roster was 26 and
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photogenic. And my entire team acquired a fandom. Galu got a nickname that translates roughly to bullwark bear. Lee hated it. Lee has it embroidered on a jacket now. What actually mattered came out of that clear and it was
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information. The ordinary clear reward included an intelligence unlock and the unlock explained the countdown.
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Disasters come in five levels. What was coming for us in 89 days was the first one, demon level. It was, and I want to quote the phrasing because the phrasing is the point, the lowest form of calamity a world can experience. Above
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it was ghost level. Above that, human level. There were two more above that and the file did not name them, which is a design choice I have opinions about.
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And in the monster classification, the thing that ends worlds at ghost level sits at the third tier out of a scale that also did not have a stated ceiling.
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I read that in a bureau conference room with my team around the table and I watched five people arrive at the same sentence at the same time which was this is not something we survive once 89 days said Jang lay. Then we don't stop. I
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said that's when we went into hard hard difficulty was at that time theoretical. There was no clear anywhere on blue star. There was barely an attempt. It took us 12 hours and I want to walk you through all three of them because that
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instance is where my team stopped being four people the bureau assigned me. The place was called the Ashen Keep. Three bosses in sequence, no way back. And the first one was a mistake. Not mine, the designers. It was an armored thing the
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size of a bus with a hammer and it hit like a landslide and it was slow. Not slow for a monster, slow for me. I had insight 9 weeks away from existing, but I did not need it because a boss that
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telegraphs is a boss that has already told you. I killed it in about 90 seconds and I did not enjoy it. That's the part I want to flag. I was disappointed. A hard difficulty world first. The thing no team on blue star
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had touched and I came off it annoyed and Lu Yan noticed and said so. You wanted it to be harder. I wanted to find out something about the boss about me.
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She gave me a look I have received many times since from many people and the look means that is not a healthy sentence and I am filing it. The second boss found out something about me. It was a flame abbott and it was not big
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and it was fast and it did the thing that nothing on blue star had done to me yet which is that it fought my team instead of fighting me. It went for way Minghow first. That is the correct move.
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Any competent thing in that room makes that move. Lee was the E-rank. He was the one with a panel you could read from across a hall and the flame abbott went around me in a way I could not intercept
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and put a hand of fire through the space where he had been standing. Lee was not standing there because Liu Yen had already moved him. She had moved him about 11 m into a wall hard enough to break his collarbone. and I have never
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once heard her apologize for it and I would be disappointed if she did. Then it went for her and this is where Gau spent his entire personality. Lee got between them, not with a shield. Lee did not have time for the shield. Lee got
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between a flame abbott and a spatial talent with his forearms up and his feet planted. And he took a full strike from a hard difficulty boss on the bones of his arms, and his arms did what arms do.
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Lee did not move. I killed it about 4 seconds later, and those 4 seconds are the longest 4 seconds I experienced that year. Afterward, he sat against a pillar with both forearms in a shape that made Jen Lelay look away. And I asked him
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what he had been thinking. And he said his 12 words for the week, which were, "You were on the wrong side of the room," which was true. I had been I had positioned for the boss instead of for
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the team because I had spent nine weeks in rooms where nobody could be heard except me, and I had forgotten how to stand in a formation. I have never made that mistake again. It cost a man both forearms to teach me, and he has never
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mentioned it since. Then there was a 6-hour respawn lockout on the third chamber, and around hour 8, we had hot pot. I want to defend this. There was a 6-hour respawn lockout on the third boss chamber. 6 hours is not a break. 6 hours
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is an afternoon. Galfu had a portable burner in his kit because Galfu has everything in his kit. Lu Yan pulled ingredients through from a shop two provinces away, which is a use of a national strategic talent that I believe
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was later reviewed. So, there is a photograph in a bureau file of the first team ever to reach the third boss of a hard instance. They are sitting on the floor of a demon fortress around a pot of broth. Galfu has both forearms
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splinted with strips of somebody's cloak and is being fed by Jang Lelay, who is doing it very badly on purpose. We Minghao is arguing that the meat goes in before the vegetables. Lee is wrong. The third boss took four hours and it is the
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only fight from that period I would call a fight. It was a warden and it had no attack pattern because it did not have a body. It had 11 of them. 11 identical armored figures around the chamber and
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only one was real at any moment. And the real one moved between them faster than the eye handles, which means that for the first time in my life, being able to hit hard was worth nothing at all. I
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spent the first hour killing decoys. I spent the second hour learning that killing a decoy told the warden where I was. I spent the third hour on the floor of that chamber, getting taken apart repeatedly from 11 directions. I broke
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it in hour four, and I broke it with something I had been carrying since a hospital corridor because there was a tell. There always is. The real one had to commit for about a tenth of a second before it struck. And in that tenth of a
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second, the armor at the shoulder moved differently because there was a body in it. I did not see it. I heard it. That's the whole thing. 11 suits of armor, 10 of them empty. And empty armor sounds like a bell and full armor sounds like a
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man. I killed it with my eyes shut, which sounds like a boast and was actually a concession because keeping them open was making me worse. Both skills broke through in the aftermath.
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Swordsmanship proficiency went from excellent to sword play specialization, which is a category jump and not a rank one. And magic shadow step became thunder shadow step, and I came out of that upgrade having crossed a canyon without deciding to. Weii Minghao wrote
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something in his notebook while I was still lying on the floor. I asked what?
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Number 31, he said. Meanwhile, in a building in Tokyo, Tanaka Kenji was having a different kind of week. I'm going to give you this one now, too, because you need to know that while I was eating hot pot, somebody was
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deciding to sell people. Amaterasu squad had gone from national heroes to a punchline in 11 days. The cake footage had 800 million views. Their sponsors had gone quiet, and Tanaka had done the arithmetic that everybody at the top was
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doing that month, which was that the gap between him and Wong Wei was not a skill gap. It was a resource gap. And resource gaps close if you can find enough resources. The problem was that attribute crystals only drop in
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instances. except except that when an awakener dies, whatever they've absorbed doesn't simply evaporate. And there were at that point about 9 million registered awakeners in Japan, and the overwhelming majority of them were F and E-ranked civilians who would never enter an
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instance in their lives, sitting on small amounts of value with no way to use it. Lee didn't do it himself. Lee never did anything himself. Lee went through intermediaries, and the intermediaries went through organizations that already had experience with this kind of logistics.
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And the phrase he used in the meeting which came out at his hearing eventually was sometimes people are also a resource. It started in Japan. It did not stay there. Within 3 weeks there were seven countries with the same quiet
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program and the disappearance numbers in low rank awakener populations went up in a way that governments described as a public safety matter. That is what was happening on blue star while the sky counted down and I did not know a single
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thing about it. And I have never fully forgiven myself for the gap between when it started and when I noticed. We cleared hard at hour 12, minute 40, and the system did something it had never done. Congratulations to the Awakeners
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of Blue Star for completing a hard difficulty instance within the 72-hour bonus window. Nobody knew there was a bonus window. It had never been announced. It had apparently been running since the difficulty unlocked, and we had walked into it by accident
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because I am incapable of waiting. The reward was not for us. It was for the country. Every awakener in Sha, all of them, 900 million people, received an attribute allocation, not a large one, enough to lift an entire nation's floor
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by a step simultaneously in one evening. I have seen the footage from that night.
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Public squares, people sitting down in the street. A woman in Changdu who had been frank for 6 weeks watching her own panel move for the first time and covering her mouth with both hands. And then the countdown changed. It had been
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at 89. It went to 59. 30 days gone in 1 second in every sky on earth at the same instant. And the reason was in the system message underneath. And the reason was us. Blue Star's progression rate has exceeded projection. Disaster
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schedule adjusted. We hadn't beaten the clock. We'd taught it to run. I stood outside that instance gate with my team and looked up at a number that had just eaten a month of the human race's remaining time. And I understood finally
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and completely what my life was going to be. Every single thing I did to get stronger was going to make the thing coming for us stronger. There was no version of this where I got strong quietly. Ja threw a party anyway. 900
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million people got stronger in one night. You cannot ask a country not to celebrate that. There were fireworks in cities that had banned fireworks. The rest of the planet did not celebrate because from outside the sequence read like this. One country's team clears a
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heart instance. One country gets a national reward and everybody on Earth pays 30 days for it. The word that got used was theft in 11 languages on state broadcasts by people wearing very good suits. 30 days of the human race's
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survival window spent by a single nation to buy its own citizens a personal upgrade. Within 48 hours, there was a joint statement from nine countries. It was carefully worded and under the wording, it said one thing, which was,
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"Hand him over. Not stop him, hand him over." They wanted the asset transferred to international oversight, which meant a facility, which meant a schedule, which meant a committee deciding which instances I was allowed to enter and on whose behalf. Sha's response came from a
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man named Wong Cha who at that point was a mid-level diplomat and who is now on money. Lee did not deny anything. Lee said the reward mechanism was the systems that Blueest Star had received an accelerated timeline because Blueest
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Star had accelerated and that any nation which felt agrieved was welcome to clear a hard difficulty instance of their own and collect the same reward and he said the last part slowly. Then he was asked whether Shaw would consider
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international custody of the Awakener Wong way. And Wongcha said that any attempt to take a citizen of Sha into foreign custody would be treated as an act of war. that Shaw was prepared for that and that he would like to remind
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the room of one small thing. The conventional military balance of Blue Star had not changed on the day the sky opened. It had simply stopped being the most important thing. The nine countries issued a clarification the next morning.
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The clarification said they had been misunderstood. I watched all of this on my phone lying on a bureau couch eating an orange. That was the first time I understood that I had become a thing countries argue about. And the honest
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emotional content of that moment was, "Huh?" And then I finished the orange. The other thing that happened that week was the guide. A post went up on the global forum in the advancement section from an account with no history called
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Guardian. It was a full walkthrough of Rise of the Orcs part one. Every mechanic, the cold, the withdrawal trap, the exact rgeline, the chieftain's tells. It was correct. All of it. Down to details that I knew for a fact only
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two living people had experienced. And one of them was me, and the other one was a frozen E-rank who had spent the relevant 4 hours behind a rock with his eyes shut. Nobody else questioned it. It was the most valuable document on
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Blueest Star inside of an hour. Teams in 40 countries advanced to tier 1 that month off the back of it, which is the entire reason there was a species left to defend anything later. But I read that post three times and I did not like
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how it felt because a guide is written by someone who has done the thing and the only people who had done the thing were on my roster. I asked Jang Lelay about Guardian. She said the bureau was looking into it. She was not lying. The
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bureau was in fact looking into it. It had been looking into it since roughly 9 minutes before the post went up when a consultant with a lanyard had asked to borrow a laptop. I let it go. I had a
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book to read. Body strengthening art took me one afternoon. Cultivation methods for context are not skills. A skill you learn, a method you practice for years. And the reason the great sex in the old stories were great is that
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they had methods and time and a lot of very patient teenagers. The bureau's estimate for body strengthening art was 8 to 14 months to first completion. I sat down at 2:00 in the afternoon in an empty training hall. I finished at 9
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that night. Perfect completion, which the book described as a state achieved by fewer than one practitioner in a thousand. And I want to be honest that I did not achieve it through insight or discipline. I achieved it because the
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method's entire premise is that you circulate energy through the body until the body adapts. And the body adapts fastest under strain. And I could not be injured in any way that stuck. So I ran the circulation at a level that would
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have destroyed a human being. And when it destroyed me, I was fine in 90 seconds. And I did it again 22 times.
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Perfect completion in 7 hours. The bureau instructor who was observing had to leave the room at hour 4. That evening, Jang Lelay sat down across from me with a folder and told me about the harvesting. Not the Japan program
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specifically. She didn't have Tanaka's name yet. What she had was a pattern across 11 countries of low rank awakeners disappearing in numbers that no longer looked like a public safety matter. Bureau analysts had a name for it internally, and the name was the dark
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turmoil. and it was going to get much worse before anyone did anything because the countries where it was happening were the countries that would have to investigate it. I asked her how bad the number was. She told me the number. I
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put the folder down and stood up and I was very calm. And Jeang Lelay, who had by that point spent 11 days in rooms with me, watched me be calm and did something I did not expect. She asked me
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a question. You've got a countdown in the sky, a disaster nobody understands, nine countries who want you in a box, and now this. She tilted her head.
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Aren't you afraid? And we Ming Hao, who was in the corner and who I had assumed was asleep, said without opening his eyes, "No, we have you." Nobody said anything for a second. Then Lu Yan said, "That's the whole answer, actually." And
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Gau Fu grunted, which from him is a standing ovation. I have been given a lot of things since then. Titles, weapons, and actual planets worth of gratitude. That sentence from a broke E-rank in a plastic chair is the only
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one I've kept. Then I said, "Okay, let's go bully Japan. I want to be precise about what I did next because it has been described in nine languages as an act of aggression and it was in fact an
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act of queueing. Japan had an advancement instance in project green oni riot tier 1 to tier 2 and Amitarasu squad had been prepping it for 2 weeks with a full support apparatus. It was going to be their comeback. There was a
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press schedule. Gates are open to anyone standing next to them. I flew coach again. Amatarasu's people were at the gate when I got there. Not in it. Add it. Full support apparatus. the documentary crew, a line of vehicles,
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and Tanaka Kenji standing in the middle of it in a jacket doing an interview. I did not speak to him. I have been asked whether I said anything and I did not. I walked past about 11 meters behind him
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through a queue that had no legal standing and by the time somebody in that entourage worked out what was happening, I was inside. You can hear the moment on the interview audio. There is a question about national resilience
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and then there is a pause and then Tanaka says a word that the broadcaster bleeped. The greenface oni king is 4 m tall and it is genuinely legitimately dangerous. Every published account of that instance describes the same 40-minute war of attrition. And the war
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is about regeneration. The Oni King heals, not fast, but faster than a tier 1 team can outpace, which means the only winning line is a coordinated burst that removes more of it in 9 seconds than it can rebuild in 30. Amaterasu had drilled
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that burst for 2 weeks. Their whole plan was three phases and a stopwatch. I opened with War Stop. That was a hard clear reward, and it does what it says.
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And what it says is that the ground stops being on the boss's side. The entire arena went to pieces and the oni king came off its feet for the first time in the recorded history of the instance. Then mountain river collapsed
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which I had gotten from sword play specialization and had not yet had a reason to use twice. I used it twice.
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The first one took the arm and most of what the arm was attached to. The second one arrived before the regeneration finished deciding what to do about the first one. There is no 40-minute war of attrition. There is a very large hole in
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a mountain in Japan that people take photographs of. Tier 2 advancement world's first. On an instance another country had spent 2 weeks and a great deal of money preparing. I did not do a press schedule. I went home and slept
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for 11 hours. The international video conference happened 4 days later and I was made to attend it. And I have never been more bored in my life. 41 delegations simultaneous translation. A representative of a European block spoke for 19 minutes about the norms of
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instance access and used the phrase goodfaith actor six times. Wang Chow handled it. Lee apologized at length for any distress caused. Lee noted that instance gates have no borders and no ticketing and that this was the systems design and that if the delegations wish
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to submit a complaint about it, he would be delighted to forward it upward. Then a Japanese delegate said with real heat that Wang Wei had shown contempt for another nation's efforts and Wang Chow said, "Your films are very popular in
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our country." There was a pause where the interpreters caught up. "Very popular," he said. "For decades, nobody has ever complained about the cultural exchange. I did not understand the joke for about 4 hours. When I did, I had to
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sit down. We took Frosty Snowfield off the Holy Hall squad 2 days later and that one I did not enjoy. Holy Hall were not cheaters. They were not on Jean Lay's list and they never had been. They were a European team of 11 who had been
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running relief operations in three countries during their own preparation window which is why their preparation window had taken so long. Their captain met me at the gate and did not threaten me and did not appeal to me. She said,
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"You know we've been here 5 weeks. I know and you're going in anyway." "Yes." She nodded slowly and then she asked the only question that has ever actually landed on me at a gate which was why and I said the true thing which is worse
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than a lie because there's a countdown I said and I'm faster. The instance was a glacier and the boss was under it and it took 11 minutes and about nine of those were the walk. I came out and Holy Hall
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were still standing there. All 11 in a line and their captain shook my hand which I had not expected and did not deserve. Then she said, "Next time you're faster than somebody, tell them earlier. I have never gone in front of
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another team's gate since without saying so first. That is the entire content of my diplomatic education and it cost one European captain 11 minutes on a glacier. And then the Truth Squad went into an advancement instance and did not
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come out. Truth Squad were the White Eagle country's best. Not a bad team. Five people, three of them extremely good. And they went into a tier 2 advancement and the instance closed behind them and the gate went inert.
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Nobody knew what had happened. There were 4 days of frantic international theorizing before the answer came out and the answer was in a line of system text. nobody had read carefully because nobody had ever failed an advancement before. Failure in an advancement
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instance is not death. It is worse for anyone in a hurry. You are ejected and you are locked out of all advancement content for 10 days. 10 days with 50s something on the clock. Everybody worked this out at once and everybody drew the
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obvious conclusion, which was to be extremely careful about which advancement instance you attempted next and to gather as much information as possible first and above all to find out what the strongest teams were doing. And here is where the Trailblazer title,
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which I had laughed at in a frozen field, paid for itself forever. Because Trailblazer displays my true attributes to anyone who looks at me. So, I went and stood in a public place in front of cameras at a tier 3 advancement gate in
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Shaw's east, and I let the entire planet read my numbers off my face. Then, I walked in. Then, I walked back out 4 minutes later, empty-handed, with an expression I had practiced in a mirror.
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The interpretation was immediate, unanimous, and completely wrong. Wonge had attempted it. Wong Wee had found something in there worth having. Wong Wei had come out to prepare, and Wong Wei<unk>s numbers were now public, which meant the difficulty was now calculable,
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which meant any team within reasonable distance of those numbers could take the prize before he came back. 11 top tier teams entered that instance in 72 hours.
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Every single one of them was a team that had been on Jang Lelay<unk>s list, not by coincidence. I had chosen the gate, the timing, and the exact 4-minute performance based on a folder of names because those were the teams that had
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been buying their attributes instead of earning them. And a bot attribute pool is very impressive on paper and completely useless the moment an instance asks you a question you can't purchase the answer to. 11 entries, 11 failures. 11 of the strongest squads on
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Blueest Star at a 10-day advancement lockout in the same week with the countdown at 51. And not one of them could complain publicly because complaining would require explaining what they had been doing with their evenings. I never entered that instance
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at all. There was nothing in it I wanted. I just needed somewhere quiet to put them for 10 days. The next thing on the list was not an instance. It was a challenge. Different category challenges don't give attributes and they don't
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advance your tier. They give you one specific thing and the system does not tell you what it is until you're done.
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And the entry text is a taunt. This one was called showdown at the forbidden city. Difficulty high. High is not on the easy to hard scale. It is a different scale entirely which starts where the other one stops and the
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systems own description of it used the word discouraged. The objective was three lines. Enter the world. Kill three of the 11 listed grand masters. Survive.
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At the top of the list of 11 were two names, and the file had entire paragraphs about them, which the file had not bothered to do for the other nine. Ya Wu Chen, the blade saint, undefeated in 40 years, and a man the
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world called the sword god, who did not have a listed name, which is always worse. My team could not come.
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Challenges are solo. Jang Lelay argued about that for 11 minutes in a briefing room and lost the argument to a line of system text, which is the only way anyone has ever won an argument with her. Wei Mingha walked me to the gate
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and did not say anything useful, which I appreciated. Bring back a hat, he said finally. A hat. They wear great hats in those. If you're going to a martial arts world, I want a hat out of it. The world
65:57
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on the other side of the gate is a real one. That's what nobody tells you about the high difficulty instances. It has weather that continues when you're not looking, and it has an economy, and it has people who are having the worst day
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of their lives for reasons entirely unrelated to you. And in that world, martial artists are ranked. And the ranks are third rate, second rate, first rate, and then the top tier. And above all of that, 11 names that the empire
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itself is afraid of. I arrived in a rice field about 400 km from the capital, wearing modern clothes with no money and no papers and no hat. So I walked. The first two weeks of that instance are the
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part I think about most, and there isn't a single fight in them worth describing.
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I worked. I carried things. I learned the language, which the instance graciously handled, and I learned the manners, which it absolutely did not. I got thrown out of a town for eating with the wrong hand. I spent four days with a
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caravan and got paid in dumplings. And on the road, I picked up a nickname, which was not my idea because I stopped at a Marshall school. The Fang family, a small one, third rate, the kind that teaches farmers sons a set of forms and
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a great deal of dignity. I asked to spar. They laughed and gave me their worst student. And their worst student went into a wall, then their best, then the instructor. I want to explain what was actually happening there because it
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looks like arrogance and it wasn't. I had 180,000 attribute points and sword play specialization, and I could not be killed. And I had walked into a world where a very good man had spent 30 years perfecting a set of movements that could
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not hurt me if he had a weak. I did not use the sword. I never used the sword in that world until the last day. I used my hands because using the sword felt like showing up to a village fair with
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artillery. They asked what school I was from. "No school," I said. Then the old master of the Fang family, who had been watching from a doorway and who had not laughed once, said, "Then what do you call it?" I didn't have an answer. I
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said the first thing I thought of which was that I mostly just hit things.
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Somebody in the courtyard said that's an Assura's fist and I have to hand it to whoever that was because that name reached the capital six weeks before I did. The tea house thing happened outside a town called Fang Yang. I was
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eating. Somebody had put a bounty out on the wandering fist artist because I had by then embarrassed four schools and a magistrate's nephew and the people who came to collect were from the black tiger stronghold and the blood shadow
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sect and there were 10 of them and five were second rate which in that world is genuinely frightening. They came in through the door and the windows at the same time, which was well done. I put down the bowl. Here's the thing about
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second rate experts. They are, in their world, the top few thousand people alive. Every one of them had killed.
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Every one of them had earned it over decades of a life I could not have survived at 19. It took 11 seconds. I did not enjoy it, and I did not make jokes during it, and the tea house owner
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was under a table with his hands over his ears. And when it was over, I put money on the counter for the damage, which was the first time I had ever had money in that world, and it was theirs.
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The Assura's fist arrived at the capital as a rumor about a demon in peasant clothes. I arrived about a month behind my own reputation, which is the correct order. And on the road there, something in me finished. The body strengthening
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art had a successor technique I had been carrying without being able to open called the 100 battles technique. And its requirement was not attributes or time. Its requirement was battles, real ones, against people who could conceivably kill you. Somewhere around
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the 800th engagement of that walk in a river valley, in the rain, against nobody important, it opened. I sat in the mud for an hour afterward, feeling it move through me and understanding for the first time that my body was no
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longer a thing I had. It was a thing I was building. Then I went and killed two of the 11. I'm going to be brief about those two and it's not modesty. It's that they were both assassinations and
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both of them were over in less than a minute. And the reason is that neither of them believed the rumor. The poison hand of the southern mountain met me in a garden and spent his first 11 seconds explaining what was going to happen to
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me. The iron rod monk was better and got as far as an actual exchange. Four movements and the fourth movement was mine. Two down, one to go. And every single one of the remaining nine went into hiding on the same night, which is
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how it came to happen on a roof. Because the blade saint did not hide. Yu Chen sent word to the capital that on the ninth day he would be at the Hall of Light in the Imperial Palace and that
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the Assura's fist was welcome to come and see him and that he intended to eat lunch first. 40 years undefeated. Lee had a great sword that two men could not lift. Lee had killed a first- rate expert at the age of 22, which people in
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that world still talked about like a comet. Lee was standing on the roof of the Hall of Light with the sword across his shoulders and the courtyard below was full of the imperial court and the emperor Chong Wu himself was in a chair
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under an awning with a cup of tea and I want you to understand that this was a scheduled entertainment. I came up onto the roof. Lee looked at me for about 4 seconds and he did not draw. Lee didn't
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even take the sword off his shoulders. Lee said, and I am quoting because it got written down by three separate court historians. Boy, kneel and I will let you keep the hands. Then he swung one-handed without moving his feet the
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way you'd wave off a fly. That swing had killed 11 people. It hit my forearm. The great sword broke. I need you to picture the courtyard. 400 people, 40 years of undefeated, and the sound that a legendary blade makes coming apart
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against a 19-year-old's arm in the open in daylight in front of the emperor. Yauen looked at the handle in his hand.
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And then, to his eternal credit, he did not run, and he did not beg, and he went for my throat with a broken half. So, I used warstop on a roof. The hall of light had stood for 211 years. It
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stopped standing during a sentence. The roof went down into the hall and the hall went down into itself and the shockwave went out through the courtyard and took the awning and the tea and the chair and briefly the emperor. Emperor
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Chong Wu 300 years of imperial dignity sitting in the wreckage of his own tea service cursing my ancestors by name and generation which is a thing you can do in that world because they will actually be listening. And in all of that, the
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sword god arrived. Nobody saw him come. Lee was standing in the ruined courtyard and he had a plain sword and he was the single most dangerous thing I met on the other side of any gate for the next 6
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months. Lee got me properly, not a graze. Lee put that plain sword through my chest with a movement I did not see start. And I stood there with a sword in me for the second time in my life at a
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different angle and I looked down at it. And then I looked up at him and I smiled. And that is the exact moment the sword god's face changed because he had felt it hit the heart. I killed him with
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the blade saint's own broken blade. And then Yiu Chen came out of the rubble of the hall of light with a spine that should not have been working. And I killed him too. And then they both got back up because a high difficulty
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challenge does not simply let you kill three of the 11 respawns. Theirs, not mine. That was the actual mechanic. The grand masters of that world reconstituted and the counter did not move. And the systems requirement was not to kill them, but to kill them
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permanently, which meant killing them enough times in enough sequence that the world stopped being able to argue. It took 9 hours. 9 hours on the rubble of the Hall of Light with the Imperial Court watching from a safe distance that
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kept getting less safe, killing the two greatest swordsmen of an entire world over and over while they got progressively more tired and I got progressively more rested because the counter in my head went up 2 every minute of it. They both understood.
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Somewhere around hour six, you could see it. They stopped fighting to win and started fighting to be seen fighting.
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And I have never respected two people more. At hour nine, they stayed down. Two of the 11, which made four total, which was one more than I needed. And the counter said two of three because the sword god, it turned out, was not on
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the list. Lee had never been ranked. Lee had never allowed it. The greatest swordsman in that world had spent his whole life refusing to be counted. And he had died for a challenge objective that did not include him, and the system
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gave me nothing for it. I sat down in the rubble and laughed until I couldn't breathe. Somewhere behind me, in the shadow of a broken pillar, a man in black robes who had been watching the entire 9 hours made a small sound of
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amusement. I turned around. Something funny? Lee said. You're very strong, boy, and very stupid. There were 11, and you have spent a day and a temple on two of them, and the other nine have already. Lee was number seven on the
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list. Challenge complete. I came back through the gate at 3:00 in the morning into a bureau processing room with fluorescent lights and Wei Ming Hao was asleep in a chair and Jang Lelay was not and I put a hat on the table. It's a
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very good hat, widebrim black lacquer, the kind the Imperial sensors wore. We Ming Hao has it on a shelf. Then I read my rewards. Effect three of innate divinity had unlocked and it was called insight. And what insight does is very
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simple and completely unfair. I see the flaw. Whatever is in front of me, whatever it is made of, however it moves, the place where it fails is highlighted for me like a misspelled word. I had spent nine hours killing two
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men who had spent 80 combined years being unkillable. With insight, I would have needed one exchange each. Absolute defense from the challenge, life force field, which is a shell that has to be broken before anything touches me and
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which regenerates. and rank suppression and trailblazer merged into one title which the system did without asking and which I only mention because it is the first time I ever saw the system do something creative. Then the sky spoke
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and it spoke to everybody. A nationwide reward for JA again the second one 900 million people again in an evening and a new instance category unlocked for the entire planet. Disaster instances the countdown went to 25. The unlock came
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with a demonstration which I do not think was intentional and which was the most important 11 seconds of video ever recorded on Blue Star. A disaster instance opened in Australia. Their national response was fast and it was correct by every doctrine anybody had
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written. 50 tier [clears throat] 1 awakeners coordinated with support going in together. The helmet footage is public. It's 4 minutes long. They are professional the entire time. Nobody panics. You can hear the team lead calling formations right up until the
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last 30 seconds when he stops calling formations and starts calling names. 50 tier ones under 4 minutes. and that the whole planet realized at once was a disaster instance at the bottom of the scale, generated by a world that had not
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yet experienced its first calamity. The number in the sky said 25. Shaw's first disaster instance opened in a place called Thunder Mountain Valley. And by the time I got there, it had a perimeter, a command tent, and 11,000
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soldiers. Nobody was going in. The order had come down from very high up that nobody was going in until the Australian footage had been analyzed, which was a reasonable order given that the analysis of the Australian footage had concluded
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that a disaster instance was not survivable by any force Blue Star could currently field. I walked past the perimeter. There is body camera video of this and the audio is the best part because you can hear a young lieutenant
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say, "Sir, sir, you can't. This is a restricted sir." And then you can hear him recognize me and then you can hear him say, "Sir," in a completely different tone of voice. Shan Lelay caught up with me 9 m from the gate.
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Alone, she said. It wasn't a question. It was a diagnosis. You can't come in.
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You'd die in the first 11 seconds and I'd have to spend the rest of it thinking about that instead of the monsters. That's an argument for me coming in and being useful, not for Zong Le. I stopped. The system scales
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disaster instances to the party. If you're with me, it makes a thing that can kill you. If I'm alone, it makes a thing that can kill me. She worked that through and arrived at the place I'd arrived at 3 days earlier, which is that
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nothing in that category of statement was comforting. How long? She said, "I genuinely have no idea. That's not an answer I can put in a report. Put in that I said before dinner. Then I went in and the gate closed and Shia's
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national command structure spent the next 14 hours standing around a jade counter in a tent. Thunder Mountain Valley contained 1,528,730 monsters. I want to sit on that number for a second because I have found that people hear it and it doesn't land. That
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is more individual hostile creatures than there are people in most cities. The valley was 11 km long. From the ridge, it looked like the ground had a texture. The objective was not a boss.
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There was no boss. The objective was all of them. The first four hours were good.
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I'm serious. My life force field held. Insight made every one of them a solved problem before it reached me. And I went down that valley like a machine that had been designed for exactly one purpose by someone who hated the local wildlife.
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Then the field broke. That was hour five. And it broke because a thing about the size of a bus landed on me from a cliff. And I went into the rock and everything above me became teeth. I got
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up. The field came back in 90 seconds and then broke again in 40. That was hour six. By hour nine, it had broken six times, and I had stopped standing upright. I was fighting on the ground in a trench of my own making in a valley
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that was now roughly one-third dead and entirely covered in what the dead had left behind. And around hour 10, I picked up a blade off a corpse, cold moon demon blade. It had belonged to something with a title, and when I took
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hold of it, it moved in my hand. Not possessed, hungry. Every kill I made with that blade, it took something and gave a piece of it back to me. and it did not stop being hungry. And I want to
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be very clear that I knew immediately that it was a bad idea and I used it anyway for 14 straight hours. Somewhere past hour 12, the Thunder Eagles came.
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They had been waiting. That's the thing that changed how I thought about monsters forever. There were about 400 of them, and they were the strongest thing in that valley, and they had been circling at altitude for 12 hours,
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watching me kill 900,000 of their neighbors, waiting for the exact moment I began to slow down. They picked correctly. They came in when I was on one knee. They came down the length of the valley in a single formed wave and I
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lay there in a trench with my head on the ground and let them get close because I had noticed something about 11 hours earlier and had been saving it.
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The cold moon demon blade did not just take from what it killed. It stored 14 hours 900,000. All of it sitting in a blade in my hand waiting for me to stop being careful. Little chicks, I said into the dirt. Don't worry, I'll be
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quick. I have watched people react to the aftermath imagery of the next 4 seconds, and the most common reaction is that it must be a rendering error because there is a section of the Thunder Mountain Valley where the
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geology changes. Outside in the tent, there was a jade slab with a counter on it. Jang Lelay stood in front of that slab for 14 hours. Liu Yan brought her tea she did not drink. A bureau analyst named Xiaoi, 23 years old, was assigned
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to record the number every 10 minutes, and her log is in the National Archive, and it is one of the strangest documents ever produced by a government. Hour 1, 41,26.
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Hour 4, 302,884. Hour 9, 85,612 out of 1,528,730. At that point, a general in the tent said out loud to nobody, "Les more than halfway." Xiaoui's handwriting gets worse after hour 10. By hour 13, she has stopped writing the denominator. Hour
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14, minute 41, 1,528,730 of 1,528,730. I came out of that gate and I did not look good. I want that on record because the official photograph has been cleaned up. I came out with a demon blade I could not put down for another two hours
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and about four liters of things that were not mine. And the first thing I saw was 11,000 soldiers standing at attention in absolute silence. And the second thing I saw was Jang Lelay walking toward me at a speed that was
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not a walk. The rewards from a disaster instance are not attributes. The first one was a world shard. The systems description of it is two lines and I read it four times in the tent. A fragment of the origin of a world, not a
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resource, not an item. a piece of the loadbearing structure of a reality, which is the sort of thing that exists in the plural, which meant there were other worlds, which meant something had been breaking them. The second reward
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was a permission, not an item, not a skill, a permission granted to Blueest Star, unlocked by me and available to everyone. Refinement, the ability to take what a world produces and make it into something better. It was the first
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thing that ever happened on Blueest Star that made us producers instead of scavengers. And I did not understand its importance for another 6 weeks. and Main apparently sat down on a bureau staircase when he heard. The second disaster instance in Sha opened three
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days later and this time I had company. A commander named Yang Kai had spent 72 hours assembling what the bureau called the response force and what everybody else called the volunteers because that is what they were. 99 awakeners, tier 1
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and tier 2, the best the country had that was not on my roster. Every one of them had watched the Australian footage.
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Every one of them had signed the same form. Yang Kai briefed them at dawn on a runway with a whiteboard and it was a genuinely excellent briefing about staged entry, fallback rotation, and casualty thresholds. And about 11 minutes into it, a sound started. They
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looked up. I had come off a transport at 10,000 m without a parachute because I did not need one. And because I had worked out that arriving on time was worth more than arriving conventionally.
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I hit the runway apron about 40 m from the whiteboard. I did not mean to crack it. It cracked. I walked out of the dust and 99 of the most capable people in the country were pointed at me. And Yang Kai
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had his hand on his sidearm without having decided to. Morning. I said, "I'm Wongwei. I'm your captain." Nobody said anything. "Here's how this works." I said, "We go in. I'll sweep it. You lot can do whatever you want." There was a
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pause. A man near the front, 30some, tier 2, with the kind of face that has run a lot of operations said, "With respect, that's not a plan. That's a Sorry." I said, "Which of you was at Thunder Mountain?" Nobody. Right. So,
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I'll sweep it. The objection did not so much get answered as evaporate. And I want to be fair to those 99 people because it is easy to make them sound like extras. They were not. The instance was called the sunken shrine and it had
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about 400,000 in it, which after Thunder Mountain sounded like a light afternoon and was not because the sunken shrine was vertical, 11 levels going down, flooded from level six. And the thing about a vertical instance is that a man
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who can delete a horizon is worth considerably less in a stairwell 9 m wide. I took the front. Obviously, I took the front, but a corridor only fits so much of me. And behind me were 99 people whose entire job for 11 hours was
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to make sure that nothing came up behind the front. And on level four, something did. There was a side shaft nobody had mapped. I was two levels down and about 900 m of stone away when it opened. And
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what came out of it went at the middle of the column, which is where the support talents were, which is where the healers were, which is where everything that keeps a 100 people alive in a hole in the ground was standing. Yang Kai
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closed that shaft with 31 people, not with a wall, with 31 people in a 9- m corridor in rotation for 50 minutes while the column moved past them. Lee lost four. Their names are on the same list I read later for Osaka at the top
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because that was earlier. I came back up and the fight was over and Yang Kai was sitting against a wall with his forearm open to the bone, giving instructions about the wounded in the same voice he had used at the whiteboard. I said
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something. I don't remember what. It was probably inadequate. Lee said, "You told us to do whatever we wanted, captain." And then he said the thing that I have never been able to argue with. This is what we wanted. 11 of those 99 did
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things in that shrine I still describe to people. A woman from Harbin held a ceiling up. Somebody swam level seven.
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But the honest structure of the day is still the honest structure of the day. I went in front and the valley in front of me stopped existing. And 99 of Sha's best came behind me at a jog and did the
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actual work of keeping each other alive. And Yang Kai's casualty threshold document was never opened because his casualties never reached the first line of it. Four is not zero. Lee knows the difference better than I do. Lee wrote
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all four letters himself. The captain thing stuck, by the way. I have never been given a rank by anybody. 900 million people call me captain. And then the survey came back and it had two entries on it. And the entries were the
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reason nobody in that command tent slept that week. Two more disaster instances had formed on blue star and both of them were reading at tier three. Not tier one like Thunder Mountain, tier three. The category that the intelligence unlock
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had told us was what ends a world at ghost level. One was in the sea east of Japan and one was in Sha's western desert. I read that second line on a tablet in a moving car and I did not
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know why my stomach dropped because at that point in my life nobody had told me anything about the western desert but Jang Llay was in the seat across from me and she read it at the same time I did
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and she went absolutely still. I asked her what was wrong. She said nothing. She said it well. She was extremely good at not reacting. But I had unlocked insight 3 weeks earlier and insight shows me the flaw in whatever is in
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front of me and it does not politely switch itself off for people I like. I saw her lie. I watched it happen. I didn't say anything. I put the tablet down and looked out the window at a country that had 22 days left and I
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filed it the way I had filed a detective's voice reading from a card. I was getting very good at filing things I should have opened. We took the Western Desert one second. Japan's was closer to a population center and Japan had
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refused all offers of assistance, which is a sentence I will come back to. The Shaw instance was called the original forest and it was a jungle the size of a province with a canopy you could not see the sky through and it contained
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something in the region of 80,000 monsters of which 78 were tier three. 78 individually any one of them could have finished the 50 Australians in the same 4 minutes. We went in with a full expedition this time. 99 again under
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Yang Kai my four and a specialist the bureau attached at the last minute whose name was Fanggu and whose talent was reading memory. The forest was not the problem. The canopy was. Because the thing that made the original forest
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lethal was that it had air superiority. There were tens of thousands of flying monsters up in that canopy. And they did not come down and fight. They came down and took. And in the first hour, we lost four people to things nobody actually
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saw. You could not reach them. You could not draw them. They only descended on something isolated, wounded, and quiet.
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So, I made one. Blood lure is not a skill. It is a thing I invented in that forest in about 9 minutes. And it consists of opening yourself up and letting the smell go up through the canopy. Solai was a cold moon demon
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blade passive I had been carrying since thunder mountain. It shows me everything alive within a radius. It does not care whether there is a forest in the way. So I walked out into a clearing on my own bleeding and I sat down and I made
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myself look like the end of a bad day. They came, not hundreds, thousands. They came out of the canopy across 4 km of forest from every direction, silent in a spiral because they had done this before and it had always worked. I let them get
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all the way in. That was the hard part. Solai was showing me every one of them and my job was to sit in the middle of a closing spiral of several thousand predators with my head down and my hands
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empty and wait for the last one to commit. Then I stood up and hit [clears throat] the ground. I don't have a good name for what that was. It wasn't Wartop. It was Hundred Battles technique run all the way open through a body that
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had been drinking souls for a month and the shock wave went up and out through 4 km of canopy and the sky over the original forest emptied. All of it in one movement. The air superiority of an entire tier three disaster instance
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ended in under a second and the sound of it reached the expedition camp 11 km away. And Yang Kai's people thought the instance had collapsed. After that, the forest surrendered. Literally, that's not a figure of speech because about 6
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hours later, I walked into a hollow and found a three-tailed fox the size of a car. Tier three, one of the 78. It took one look at me and went down on its front legs, head on the ground, tail up
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in the air, and made a sound I can only describe as extremely negotiable. I stood there. Are you? I said begging. It begged harder. I brought it back to camp. This caused a certain amount of institutional distress. Fengue was the
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one who got it useful because Fengue could read memory, and a tier three monster that had been in that forest since the instance formed had seen things nobody on Blueest Star had seen.
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She went in on her hands and knees with her forehead against its skull for about 40 minutes. She came out of it on all fours, shaking. She could not speak for a quarter of an hour, and when she could
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speak, the first thing she said was not information. She said, "It's so old." Then she told us what was in the fox's head and the command tent went very quiet and I am going to give it to you
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the way she gave it to us because we had all been operating for 2 months on the assumption that we were dealing with a natural disaster. The monsters are not native to anywhere. They come from a place the fox's memory named as the
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abyss and the things that run it are called abyssal demons and what they do is not invasion in any sense we had a word for. They arrive at a world they break it. What is left over they keep as
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a remnant world and a remnant world is a farm. The instances we had been so proud of clearing were pieces of other people's worlds. Thunder Mountain Valley had been somebody's country. Fungee said the fox had memory of three of them.
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Three worlds in sequence that had gone through the process from beginning to end. And the reason the fox knew is that the fox had been in the third one. How long does it take? Junglay said. Fun looked at her. The whole process
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beginning to end for a world. About 4 years, said Fungee. Nobody said anything for a while. Then somebody in the back of the tent asked the only question left, which was where we were in the process, and I answered that one myself
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because I had been doing this math since the day the sky counted down from 90. We were in the part where it knocks on the glass. The last battle in the original forest took 11 hours, and it is the
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closest I came to losing in the entire first year. 77 tier three monsters coordinated because the forest had a will, and the will had finally understood that the flying ones were not coming back. I used mountain River Collapse seven times. Each one of those
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leaves a trench. You can see them on satellite. There are seven parallel gouges through the original forest floor. The longest of them 9 km and they had been photographed by everybody and they are on the cover of a textbook. At
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the end of it, I was flat on my back in the bottom of the seventh trench, unable to move any part of myself below the neck with the cold moon demon blade about 2 meters away where it had left my
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hand. And the last tier three, a thing like a centipede made of doors coming down the trench toward me. And the thing that killed it was Ga Fu, Bullwwork bear. 12 words a week. Lee came off the trench wall with a shield he should not
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have been able to lift at that point in the fight. and he put it through the centipede's head. And then he sat down next to me and said his aotment for the month, which was, "You were slow." Instance clear refinement jumped to
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level five, which meant blue star could now improve materials up to epic grade, which meant blueest star had an industry. And I got something I had never seen before, a designated reward, tier three, which means the system does
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not give you a thing. It gives you a form and you fill it in. And what you write down is what you get subject to a limit. I did not fill it in, not for 11 days. I carried it around like a lottery
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ticket in a coat pocket while things got worse because Japan's disaster instance did not go well. They had refused assistance three times. On day 19, they stopped refusing. The request came through diplomatic channels and it was for a document of that kind close to a
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screen. Their instance had breached, not cleared, not failed, breached. Things were coming out of the gate on their side and Japan's remaining strength after a national squad had spent 2 months embarrassing itself was not adequate to the situation. Shaw said
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yes. Shaw said yes within 4 hours, which I want on the record because of what came next. Amaterasu squad's captain was by then effectively running Japan's awakened response, and Tanaka Kenji sent a follow-up communication specifying the terms under which Shaw's assistance
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would be accepted. Lee wanted the contribution split. 50% of all instance contribution and therefore all rewards to be allocated to Japan's forces on the grounds that it was their territory. I read that message in a bureau corridor at 1:00 in the morning with monsters
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loose in a foreign country and I have been asked many times what my response was and my response was one word. I said no. Then I went to the western desert. I want to talk about the western desert
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for a moment before the instance because of the car ride. Jang Lelay had gone quiet in a very specific way in the 11 days since I had watched her lie. Not distant, the opposite. She had stopped leaving. She was at every briefing and
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in every vehicle and outside every door. And twice I woke up in a bureau bunk at 4 in the morning and she was in the corridor with a coffee on no rotation anyone had assigned at the desert forward base. I finally said something.
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You've been following me around like I'm going to wander into traffic. That's my job. Your job is absolute law and a national security clearance. Your job is not standing in a hallway. She looked at the dunes for a while. Then she said,
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Speaker A
"There's a report I'm not allowed to give you." I know. You know, Jang Llay, I have a talent that shows me where things break. you have been about to say something for 11 days. And she said, "If I tell you, it might make it happen."
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That is the single most frightening sentence anybody has ever said to me, and I have been stabbed in the heart twice. I let it go again. And I want to flag that clearly because letting it go was the wrong call. And about 90 minutes
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Speaker A
later, the desert made that extremely obvious. The gate in the western desert was called Burning Red Cliff, and it was tier three. And when I put my hand on it, the system did something it had never done with anybody. It offered me a
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Speaker A
sublimation. talent sublimation. It said, "Except an increase in difficulty in exchange for a permanent elevation of your innate talent." The difficulty offered was extreme. Extreme is above hard, above high. And there was at that point no record of any blue star
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Speaker A
awakener seeing that word. The system attached the standard warning, which for extreme is not a warning. It's a paragraph. I said yes before I finished reading it, and the gate changed the whole thing. The desert in front of us
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Speaker A
went from a red cliff face to something with depth, and the systems description rewrote itself in front of 40 people.
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Mythical three kingdoms red cliff and underneath it one line of objective slay Guan Lelay. Behind me on the sand Jang Lelay made a sound. I turned around and she had her hand over her mouth and she was staring at the gate and she was
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Speaker A
crying which I had never seen and have seen exactly twice since. What? I said it changed. She said it changed. It's different. It's not. She stopped herself. 11 days of not saying it and she stopped herself even then. And I
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Speaker A
have never loved anybody more for a failure of nerve. But I had insight and I had 11 days and I finally finally opened the file I had been keeping shut.
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Speaker A
Somebody told you I'd lose someone here. I said in this desert at this gate. She didn't answer and the gate just became a completely different instance. She nodded once. Then whatever they told you, I said isn't a fact, it's a
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Speaker A
forecast. And I walked into the three kingdoms. Not the one from the books. The word in the title was mythical and the system meant it. I arrived on a road outside a city and the first thing I did
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Speaker A
was check a farmer. You can do that with insight. It's rude. I did it anyway because something about the way the man was carrying a load of firewood was wrong. And what was wrong with it was that a normal human being cannot carry
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Speaker A
that. Lee was tier one, a farmer carrying wood in a world where Blue Star had produced its first tier 1 11 weeks ago and the total global count was in the low thousands. Then I came around the bend and saw the city wall and the
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Speaker A
wall was 100 m high and it was not made of stone. It was made of one piece of something and it went off into the haze in both directions. That is when I understood what extreme difficulty actually meant. It did not mean the
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Speaker A
enemies hit harder. It meant I had been dropped into a world where the ambient level of everything was above me. Then a horse landed on the road from the sky. A white horse with a rider in silver and
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Speaker A
the horse had come down out of the clouds and the rider had a spear and a face I recognized from about 40 movies.
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Machau looked down at me and said, "You are not of this world." "How can you tell?" "You are standing in the road," he said, in the open alone on the day of the muster and nothing has eaten you.
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Lee took me to Pangda. Now, I had a plan for this. My plan was to be extremely useful. I had 11 weeks of blue stars best behind me. I had killed the blade saint. I had emptied a valley of 1 and a
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Speaker A
half million monsters and the objective on my sheet said slay Guanle and Guanlay was fighting for the other side and therefore this was going to be the easiest alliance in history. Pongo was in a tent with a fan and about 900
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Speaker A
bamboo slips and he listened to the whole thing without interrupting. And when I finished he said no. I asked why and he said an alien has descended upon the world. Not you are an alien. An alien has descended upon the world, like
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Speaker A
a weather report, like the arrival of a locust year. Lee explained it because he was courteous, and the explanation was the worst news I had received since the fox. In that world, there was a prophecy, and the prophecy was about a
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Speaker A
being from outside who would come during the great muster, and the prophecy did not describe a hero. It described a hinge. Everything that happened after the alien arrived would be worse, and the alien would not necessarily know it
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was doing it. "You have come to help us," he said. "I believe you." That is not the same as being helped. Then he gave me his three conditions because that's who he was. And I have those three conditions written on the inside
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Speaker A
of my forearm in my own handwriting in ink that took four months to come off.
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Speaker A
One, do not enter a city. Two, do not accept command of any man of this world.
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Three, when you strike, strike where there is nobody left to save. I said yes to all three, and I have kept all three, which surprised me more than it surprised him. Then he gave me the manuals, six of them, cultivation
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Speaker A
methods from a world where farmers are tier one, and he handed them over without ceremony. And I asked why he would arm the locust. Lee said, "Because the prophecy also says the alien leaves.
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I went up a mountain for 9 days and Machow came with me and that is the part of the three kingdoms I would keep if I could only keep one." Lee was not sent.
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Lee decided. Lee said the alien should not be alone with six manuals, which was a diplomatic way of saying that Punga had just handed a locust a library and somebody sensible ought to watch. Day one, he did not speak to me. Day two, he
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Speaker A
corrected my grip. Not on the sword, on the manual. There is a way you hold a bamboo text in that world. And I had been holding it like a menu. And he took it out of my hands and turned it and
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Speaker A
gave it back without a word. And I understood that I had been being rude for 2 days in a language I could not hear. Day three, he asked what my world was like. I told him, "Cities of glass,
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Speaker A
machines that carry you across an ocean while you sleep. 8 billion people. And until 4 months ago, not one of them could lift a horse." Lee thought about that for a long time. 8 billion, he said. And none of them strong. None.
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Then how did you not all die? And I said, "We mostly did not need to be strong." And Machowo said with no malice at all, "Then something has been protecting you." And went to sleep. And I lay awake on a mountain in a mythical
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Speaker A
world for the entire night. Day four, I hit the wall. The 100 battles technique has a stage that will not open through effort because its requirement is not effort. I ran the circulation for 11 hours and got nowhere and got angry. And
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Speaker A
being angry with a body like mine is an environmental hazard. I started using the mountain as a resistance surface. By day six, the summit had a new profile.
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By day eight, there was a valley on the eastern face that had not previously been a design feature. Mao watched all nine days of it from a rock eating and offered exactly one piece of advice. On day seven, when I was standing waist
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Speaker A
steep in a crater I had made out of frustration, Lee said, "You are trying to be stronger than the wall. The wall does not care how strong you are. Be somebody the wall has no argument with.
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I want to be honest, I did not know what that meant. I got it on day 9 at about 4:00 in the morning. I got it because I stopped hitting the mountain and sat down and thought about 11 suits of
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Speaker A
armor, 10 of them empty, and about a boss in a lamel hallway who is never once slower than the first swing. The technique is not called the 100 battles technique because you win a 100 battles.
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It broke through at dawn. Mao looked at the summit. Then he looked at me, then he said, "Master Chugua would like it noted that this was a mountain." Then Redcliffe started and I broke condition three on purpose. Sunuan's camp on the
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northern shore was 800,000 men. That number is not a blue star number. It is that world's number. And in that world, 800,000 men means 800,000 people who are individually stronger than anything blue star could field. I went in at night
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Speaker A
alone against the western quarter. And the reason I picked the western quarter is that it was the supply and staging section and the fighting formations were east. Strike where there is nobody left to save. I had read that as poetry. It
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Speaker A
isn't. It's targeting. Destruction form first, which is a state, not an attack, and it does to me roughly what the cold moon demon blade does to what it kills.
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Speaker A
Then Mountain River collapsed. Dion Wei was there. Lee should not have been. Lee was inspecting the staging area with 5,000 of the Tiger and Leopard cavalry, which is the finest heavy cavalry in that world and possibly any world. And
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Speaker A
he saw me come down out of the dark, and he did the correct thing, which was to form them up and charge. 5,000 of the best cavalry in existence and a general whose name has survived 2,000 years. The
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strike took a tenth of Sunuan's camp off the map. I do not have a comparison for you. There is no Blue Star event that is like it. The crater started where I landed and ended somewhere past where the 80,000 had been sleeping. And Deion
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Speaker A
and the 5,000 were inside the first third of it, and there was nothing to recover. It also killed me. That's the part nobody in that world could process.
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The blow was too big for the body that threw it. I came apart in the middle of my own attack, and I was dead on the ground in the crater I had made for about 6 minutes, and then I got up.
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There were survivors on the ridge who watched me get up. That is the exact moment the war stopped being about the river. Sonuan's response took 11 days and it was I have to admit the correct one. Lee sent Guan Lelay. I had been
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Speaker A
told Guanlay was a general. Lee was not a general in that world. Guanle was the reason the other two kingdoms existed because he was the only thing Sunuan had that Sunuan could not fully control. And Sununuan had spent years building a
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Speaker A
solution to that. And the solution was that Guan Lelay was not entirely a man anymore. Lee came alone. Lee came on foot, which I did not understand until later. And he stopped about 200 m out and drew a bow. Sunset Arrow. I have
99:44
Speaker A
been hit by many things. Nothing has ever been like that. The first arrow took my life force field and my chest and about 11 meters of the hill behind me and I was dead before the sound arrived. I got up. The second one killed
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me. I got up. Over the next 10 minutes, he killed me somewhere between 30 and 40 times and I did not manage to close 200 m. That is the only fight I have ever been in where I was genuinely,
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Speaker A
structurally, mathematically losing. Insight showed me his flaw. And his flaw was so far above me that knowing about it was useless. Like being handed a diagram of a building that is falling on you. What changed it was not strength.
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Around the 30th death, I stopped trying to reach him and started talking. I asked him why he was on foot. Lee didn't answer. Lee killed me. I asked him where his horse was. The red one. Everybody knows about the red one. Where is it?
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Lee killed me. I asked him who had it and Guanlay missed. the first miss in 10 minutes and he lowered the bow about 4 centimeters and I saw his face for the first time and insight lit up like a
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Speaker A
switchboard because the flaw was not in his stance. It was a thread down the back of the neck into the spine fine as a hair and old and there were about a hundred of them. They've got you on a
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Speaker A
wire, I said. 10 minutes of arrows and this is where he spoke. Lee said, "Do not. They took the horse and they put you on a wire." Do not, said Guanlay.
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Speaker A
Speak of my horse. And then he came apart. Not physically. The thing Sunuan's people had done to him had exactly one requirement, which was that he never be reminded of anything from before, and I had walked into it
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Speaker A
accidentally while dying repeatedly on a hillside. Lee stood there for a moment in the middle of a battlefield with a bow in his hand, and then he raised his head and screamed a name that was not mine and not Sunuans. And I do not
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Speaker A
believe there was a person within 11 km who did not stop what they were doing. I am Guan Lelay, he said. Guan Lelay Changen. The threads at the back of his neck went taut. Somebody somewhere behind the lines was pulling. I am not,
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Speaker A
he said. your puppet. And he broke them himself, all of them. And it cost him almost everything. And he knew it would.
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Speaker A
And he did it in about 4 seconds. What was left of him turned around and looked at me. I could have killed him then. Lee knew that, too. My objective said, "Slay Guan Lelay." And he was standing in
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Speaker A
front of me with nothing left holding him together, and I had 30 deaths worth of reasons. Lee said, "Come on then, on your feet." So, I fought him properly.
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Speaker A
It took 9 minutes, and he was magnificent for all nine of them. And at the end of it, he was on one knee with my sword in him and his hand around the blade holding it there. and he was
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Speaker A
laughing and he said the last thing he ever said to anyone. Lee said, "Tell them it was a man who did it. I have kept that. I've never told anyone which them he meant. I don't think he meant
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Speaker A
anyone in that world." Objective complete. Extreme difficulty. Instance cleared. I came out of the western desert with everybody I went in with, including one bureau agent standing on the sand who had been told by a man who had crossed 16 years, that she would die
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Speaker A
in that place. She did not. I want that stated plainly and without a joke attached because it is the single most important fact in this entire story.
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Speaker A
Somebody looked at the future, wrote it down and was wrong. Tier three. The advancement came out of the extreme clear along with the sublimation payout, and innate divinity moved up a grade I did not know existed, and I finally
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Speaker A
filled in the designated reward form I had been carrying in a coat pocket for 11 days. I did not ask for a weapon. I did not ask for attributes. I had spent 11 days thinking about a jade counter in
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Speaker A
a tent and about a fox's memory of three worlds and about the fact that in 9 days something called a demon level calamity was going to arrive at a planet with 190 countries on it and I could only stand
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Speaker A
in one place at a time. I wrote down something that protects a country while I am not in it. The system thought about it for 4 seconds which the system has never done before or since and it gave
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Speaker A
me the nine provinces cauldron epic grade a thing you put in the ground and what it does is hold. I was walking out of the gate with it when the sky finished counting. The number had been at one for most of a day. Everybody had
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Speaker A
been watching. There were broadcasts. There were people in every city on Earth standing outside looking up at a digit.
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It went to zero. And then it did not disappear, which is what everyone had expected. It changed. Blue star disaster commencing. Level ghost. Not demon.
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Ghost. We had spent 90 days preparing for the lowest form of calamity a world can experience. And somewhere in those 90 days, we had gotten interesting enough to be promoted. It came down in 105 places. Not a wave, not a front. 105
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Speaker A
discreet impact zones distributed across the surface of Blueest Star with an even-handedness that was somehow the most insulting part. And out of each one came monsters and numbers that made the original forest look like a hobby. 32 of
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Speaker A
the 105 were in Ja. I have been asked whether that was targeted. It was not.
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Sha is enormous. And Sha had the highest awakening density on the planet, largely because of a tree somebody planted and the calamity distributed by density. We had made ourselves worth landing on.
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Tens of millions of monsters global. I was in the western desert about 3,000 km from the nearest landing zone holding an epic grade cauldron. So I flew. Tier 3 does not fly. Technically, tier 3 moves so fast that the distinction becomes
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Speaker A
academic. What I did that morning was cross most of a continent low enough to be seen from the ground. There is a compilation of every phone camera that caught me between the desert and East Emperor Mountain. 11 minutes long. The
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Speaker A
sound in it is a boom that arrives after I have gone. East Emperor Mountain is not the tallest thing in Sha. It is the oldest thing with a name. I put the nine provinces cauldron into the summit. Then
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Speaker A
I waited because I did not know what it did. Nobody knew what it did. I had written a sentence on a form. It took about 90 seconds. Then it went out from that mountain in a ring and it did not
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look like anything. That's what I want you to understand. There was no dome, no shimmer, nothing you could photograph.
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Speaker A
What happened was that across the entire territory of Sha, every monster that had come out of 32 landing zones got weaker at the same moment and every human being got stronger and it held. 900 million people felt it simultaneously in
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Speaker A
hospital corridors and on the third floor of apartment blocks and in the middle of fights they were losing. The system named it out loud in the sky so that everybody got to hear it. Wong wei has been granted the title guardian of
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the nine provinces. And then because the system has a sense of humor I have never appreciated, it gave me a second one at the same time. Enemy of Kyushu. That one was from a foreign registry. Titles are not always yours to refuse. Somewhere in
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Speaker A
an official system in Japan, a categorization had been made about me after Green Oni Riot and after Frosty Snowfield, and after one word sent through a diplomatic channel, and the system had noticed the categorization and made it real, and now I carried both
105:35
Speaker A
at once. Guardian to 900 million, enemy to a country that was at that exact moment on fire. I have thought about that pairing more than is healthy. The tiger and leopard cavalry came out of the red cliff payout, and I had not read
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Speaker A
the description properly, which is a recurring theme. 3,000 summons, heavy cavalry from a mythical world. And the reason nobody in that world could beat them was not the men and not the horses.
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It was that when 3,000 of them formed up correctly, the formation stopped being 3,000 things. I called them onto a plane in Shaw's northeast against a landing zone, and they came out of the ground in ranks. And then the officer at the front
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Speaker A
raised a standard, and the formation folded into itself and became a tiger the size of a stadium made of cavalry, moving as one animal. It went through a landing zone lengthwise. Then it came apart back into 3,000 riders, reformed
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Speaker A
into a leopard, and did it again from the other direction. There is a general in Sha's northern command who requested formally in writing to be allowed to observe this a second time. The request was denied on the grounds that there was
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no operational justification. Lee submitted it twice more. The thing I did not expect about the tiger and leopard cavalry is that they remembered. They are summons. The systems description of them uses the word construct. And on the second day I use them, the officer at
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Speaker A
the front of the formation, the one who raises the standard, brought his horse over to me before the charge and looked at me for a while. Then he said in the language of a world that does not exist
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anymore. You are the one from the crater. I said I was. You killed Dion Wei. I said I had. Lee thought about that. Then he said Lee was a good man and he served a bad house. And he rode
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Speaker A
back to the front of the line and raised the standard and 3,000 riders became a tiger. I have never asked the system what they are. I have decided I do not want a straight answer. They took four landing zones over 11 days and I lost
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Speaker A
none of them because summons do not die. They simply stopped being available and every time the cool down ended the officer came out of the ground at the front of the formation and looked around to see where he was. On the last one, he
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Speaker A
asked me whether the war was going well. I told him we were winning. Good, he said. Tell me when it is over. I have not because I am not sure it is and because I am not entirely certain what
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he would do with the information. Then Eunnan happened and Eunan is where I stopped being a person to most of the planet. Landing zone 19 produced a demonized giant ape. Tier three, but the wrong kind of tier three. The way a
107:44
Speaker A
whale is the wrong kind of fish. 200 m. It had walked out of the zone and into a mountain range, and it was heading toward a city of 11 million people, and nothing that had been thrown at it had
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Speaker A
registered. 64 tier three awakeners from four countries engaged it in the mountains. That was the largest concentration of tier 3 strength in human history at that point. They were all of them extremely good. It did not notice. Then Sha used a nuclear weapon
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on its own territory. I want to give that decision its weight. There were 11 people in that room, and the vote was not close. And every one of them knew exactly what they were signing. And the evacuation had been running for 9 hours
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Speaker A
and was not going to finish. The strike was clean, full yield, direct. When the imagery cleared, the demonized giant ape's left arm was still standing up out of the crater, and it was moving. That is when I hit tier 4. Not because of the
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ape, because of the clock. I had been climbing at 0.2 a minute for 111 days without a single break longer than a plane ride. And the advancement came through in a transport at 800 km an hour while I watched a live feed of an arm in
108:38
Speaker A
a crater. And tier 4 gave me the bow, the sunshooting bow. There is a story attached to it that is older than every country currently arguing about it and the system handed it over as an advancement reward the way you'd hand
108:48
Speaker A
someone a towel. I fired once from about 40 km standing on a ridge at an arm and a nuclear crater with 64 tier three awakeners scattered across the mountains in between and no way to warn them because there was no time. The
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sunshooting bow does not fire a projectile. I thought about how to describe it for a long time and the closest I can get is that it makes a straight line between two points and then insists on it. The crater got
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Speaker A
bigger, meaningfully bigger, in a way that changed the maps. The ape stopped, and so did about 60 of the tier three awakeners who had been engaging it because I had not been able to warn them. And I have never once described
109:19
Speaker A
that as anything other than what it was. A commentator on the White Eagle country's largest network live said the phrase that stuck to the rest of my life. That was not a weapon, he said.
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That was the wrath of a god. After that, I stopped traveling because I did the geometry, and the geometry was extremely good news. 40 km was not the bow's range. 40 kilometers was where I happened to be standing. I went back out
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Speaker A
to the western desert to open ground with a clear horizon and I put soul eye out as far as it would go and I started shooting things I could not see. There is a city on Sha's eastern seabboard
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Speaker A
called Tianqing and I have never been there. I need you to hold that. I have never been to Tianqing. I could not find it on a map without help. There is a man in Tianqing named Wayan. On the fourth
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Speaker A
day of the ghost level calamity, he was 34 years old, a D rank, which is nothing, and he worked in building maintenance, which is why he had the axe. The residential block he worked in had 11 floors and no evacuation because
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the coastal corridor had gone six hours earlier and there were about 200 people in the upper floors, mostly the ones who could not use stairs quickly. We Anon went down to the fourth floor landing and stood in it. That's the whole plan.
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There was no plan. A D-rank in a stairwell with a fire axe on the only route up in front of 200 people who could not run because he had done the arithmetic that everybody in this story eventually does and had arrived at the
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Speaker A
only answer available to him. Lee has said in an interview that he was not brave. Lee has said he was so frightened that he could not feel the axe in his hands and had to keep looking down to
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check it was still there. Lee stood in that landing for 2 hours and 11 minutes.
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The thing that came up the stairwell was a tier three fisherman. Wean raised the axe. That is a fact I think about a lot.
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Lee had watched the Eunan footage like everybody else. Lee knew precisely what a tier three was and precisely what a fire axe was, and he raised it anyway.
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At a range of about 11 m on a fourth floor landing in a city I have never visited, and the fishermen stopped existing. No sound, no cause, no warning. One moment there was a tier three monster on the stairs and the next
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Speaker A
moment there was concrete dust and a smell like a storm and a man in maintenance overalls standing in a landing holding an axe over his head at nothing. Lee waited 11 minutes before he lowered it. Then he sat down on the
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stairs. Lee cries during the interview. Lee apologizes for it, which is the part I cannot stand. I was 2,900 km away in the western desert sitting on a folding chair working down a coastline on Solai at a rate of about one every 90 seconds
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Speaker A
and I did not know his name and I did not know there was a stairwell and I did not know there were 200 people above it.
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Lee was a contact on a list. Lee was not even the contact. Lee was the reason the contact had stopped moving. I did that for 6 days. I have a number for how many. I am not going to say it here.
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Here is what I will say. Every time somebody calls that period my defense of blue star, I think about a maintenance worker on a fourth floor landing who had already decided to die there before I ever pulled the string and who has spent
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Speaker A
the years since apologizing on television for being frightened. The bow got the kill. Lee held the stairs. Those are different jobs and only one of them was hard. Japan fell on day four, not entirely, but their central government
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Speaker A
relocated and their national response ceased to exist as an organization. And the request that came through this time did not have terms attached and did not come from Tanaka Kenji because nobody could find Tanaka Kenji. Sha went in. I
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want to spend real time on this because it is the part of that year I am proudest of and I had almost nothing to do with it. The decision took 90 minutes. Shaw had 32 of its own landing
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zones open. Every unit committed to Japan was a unit not standing between monsters and a Sha city and everybody in that room knew it. And they voted to go anyway. And the vote was not close. Yang Kai took them in. 1100 Awakeners, the
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largest expeditionary force Blue Star had ever assembled, and they went ashore on a coastline where the local response had stopped answering the radio. I was not with them. I was on a folding chair in the western desert working down a
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list of coordinates at 2,900 km, which is a form of help and is not the same as being there. Yang Kai's people found the Osaka corridor on the second day. There were about 400,000 civilians in it, not evacuated, stuck. The rail had failed
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Speaker A
and the roads had failed and the corridor was a 9 km strip of people between the sea and a landing zone that was still producing. Lee had 1100 awakeners and no authority in that country and no interpreter for most of
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Speaker A
them. Lee did the thing anyway. Lee put a line across the mouth of that corridor and he held it for 31 hours. The 41 is not a statistic to me. I have read the list. There is a tier 2 from Changdu on
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Speaker A
it who was 23 and who held a stairwell and there is a woman from Shing Jang on it who went back in twice. And there is a man on it whose entire recorded contribution to the defense of Blue Star
113:40
Speaker A
is that he carried people for 31 hours and then stopped. Nobody in Japan asked them to come. The government that could have asked was gone. There were Japanese awakeners on that line too. By hour 6, unassigned and uncommanded, standing
113:53
Speaker A
next to foreign soldiers because the thing coming down the corridor did not care about the paperwork. At hour 31, the landing zone collapsed because I got to it from a folding chair 3,000 km away. That is the entire story of my
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involvement in Osaka. I ended it in about 4 seconds from a chair, having never seen the place. Yang Kai came back and gave a debrief and did not mention the corridor once and I had to get it out of a junior officer. And when I
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asked him afterward why he had left it out, he said it was not operationally relevant. Then he said the other thing quietly at the door. Captain, you said once that you take responsibility for the whole thing and end it. I remember.
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That's a good line for one man in one room, said Yang Kai. It is a terrible national strategy. Lee was completely right and it took me another four months and a court proceeding on another world to understand exactly how right and on
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day five the white eagle country issued an ultimatum. To me personally, not to Shia. The document was long and the substance was short. The awakener Wong Wei represented an unacceptable strategic asymmetry. The events in Eunan had demonstrated capability against
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protected targets. If the asset was not placed under international control within 72 hours, the White Eagle country would consider the full range of its options. The phrase full range of its options appeared next to a paragraph about their arsenal. They sent it during
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a calamity. That's the part I still can't get past. There were monsters in 11 of their own states. I made a video, three shots, no commentary. The first arrow was fired at a tier three monster in a landing zone in Shaw's far north,
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and the camera was on the monster, and the monster stopped existing along with a section of a mountain range behind it.
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Timestamped, verifiable. The second arrow was fired at nothing, straight up out of the atmosphere, and the camera followed it until it was gone. And there is a NASA tracking record of the object and its velocity that was declassified
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years later and which people still argue about. Then the camera came back to me standing in a desert and I knocked a third one and I did not aim it anywhere in particular and I said the third arrow
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is up to you. 9 seconds of video, no music. The White Eagle Country issued a clarification the following morning and the clarification stated that the previous communication had been an internal draft released in error and that the White Eagle Country deeply
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valued the contribution of all awakeners to the defense of Blue Star. I have never confirmed what the second arrow hit. I know. I have never confirmed it.
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There was one more. 4 days later, and it did not come through a diplomatic channel. It came from orbit. A faction inside the White Eagle country's defense apparatus, the one the analysts called the Hawks, had a platform up there that
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was not on any treaty list, and it was called the Gods Slayer Blade, and it was a kinetic weapon, and they used it on the Western Desert while I was sitting in a folding chair. I felt it coming
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about 4 seconds out. Insight is a wonderful thing. I hit it with mountain river collapse straight up from the ground and a kinetic strike weighing several tons and traveling at orbital velocity reversed direction about 11 km above my head and went back the way it
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came and it did not stop at the platform and there is a debris field up there that is still logged as a hazard. The hawk faction's command was in a hardened facility inside a mountain in the northwest of their own country was I did
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not do that one. I want to be precise because it gets attributed to me constantly. The Gods Slayer Blade had a targeting package and the targeting package had been keyed to a location.
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And when the thing came back down, it was still keyed and it did not go where they were pointing it. It went home. I have never been able to decide whether that is justice or an accident. It is,
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however, the last time anybody on Blue Star tried it. Around day nine, the intelligence caught up and it recontextualized every single thing we had done. It came out of the accumulated disaster instance unlocks cross- referenced against a fox's memory and
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Fangue presented it in a bunker to about 40 people who had not slept. Worlds are graded. Ordinary worlds have no supernatural anything. Physics, chemistry, weather, people. Most worlds are ordinary, and most worlds are eaten without ever knowing there was a
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category. Extraordinary worlds have power in them, but not in their people. Magic exists. Humans are cargo. And awakened worlds are worlds where the world itself wakes up and starts arming its own population, which is what had happened to us on the day a man in an
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interrogation room counted down from 10. We had all assumed the awakening was the attack. The awakening was the immune response. The abyss had arrived at Blueest Star and started the process.
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And Blueest Star had woken up and started handing out panels. And everything since, the instances, the crystals, the tears, the countdown had been our world frantically manufacturing antibodies out of 8 billion people who did not know they were being
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conscripted. That was the good news. Fanggue then delivered the bad news, which was one line long and which came out of a captured disaster instance record. The Merurloc landing zone in the East Ocean was reading as a fragment of
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a world that had been tier 5. We had been fighting tier 3 all week. Tier 3 had needed a nuclear weapon and a god's bow. Somewhere out there, a tier 5 world had been broken up for parts, and the
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parts were washing up on us. The East Ocean is where it stopped being a calamity and started being a war.
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Because the Murlog zone had not been sending monsters onto land at random. It had been building. 9 days of a tier 5 remnant assembling something in deep water while we were all busy on the coasts. The response was, for the only
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time in that entire year, genuinely global. Half the navies on blue star. That is not an exaggeration. It is a manifest. 11 carrier groups from six countries in formation in the same water under a joint command that had been
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assembled in 30 hours by people who had spent their entire careers preparing to shoot at each other. I flew out and stood on a deck and watched the horizon fill up with other people's flags. And I want to say something sincere here
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because I have been sarcastic for a long time. That was the best thing our species did that year. Not me. That the murlocs pushed five tier fours through.
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Tier four, the category I had reached 11 days earlier and which no other human being on blue star had reached at all.
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Five of them came up out of the water into the middle of a combined fleet. And in the first 90 seconds, they sank enough tonnage that the joint command's casualty projection for the entire operation was exceeded. The first 90
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seconds are on record from about 900 cameras. And I have watched a lot of it.
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And the thing that stays with me is not the sinking. It is a Norwegian frigot that turned toward the contact toward with deck guns against a tier 4. They knew. Every officer on that bridge knew exactly what the arithmetic was. And
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they turned in anyway to buy a carrier, 1100 meters of water, and they bought it. And I got there 4 seconds too late for them. 4 seconds. I have that number two. I killed two with one arrow. They
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were in a line. That's all. It was not clever. I saw them line up on Soi, and I had about a second and a half. And the sunshooting bow does not care what is between the two points it has decided
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about. And what was between them at that moment was 11 km of the Pacific Ocean.
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The water came back down for about a minute. The third one was in the middle of the fleet and I could not shoot it because Pangda's third condition had been written on my forearm for nine days by then and I have never broken it. So I
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went in on foot on the water between holes. That thing was faster than anything I had fought and it was built for that environment and I was standing on the surface of the sea in the middle of somebody else's navy. It killed me
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twice. Numbers 180 something. According to a man with a notebook who was not there and who reconstructed it from footage afterward, which tells you something about Wei Minghao, I finished it with Ghost God Slash, which came out of tier 4 and which I had used exactly
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once before in a desert on a target I could not see. It is not a technique that leaves anything to examine. The fourth one had gone under a carrier, not to attack it, to use it. It had worked
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out in about 4 minutes that the human vessels were a constraint on me, which is a thing no monster on Blue Star had ever worked out about anything. I want to sit on that for a second. It had
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noticed that I would not shoot through a ship. So, it sat under 30,000 tons of somebody's flagship with 6,000 people on it and waited for me to come and get it with my hands. I came and got it with my
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hands. That is the closest I have ever come to losing a fight underwater. And I want the record to show that a blue star tier 4 beat a tier five remnants tier 4 asset in blue water by being unable to
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drown, which is not a marshall accomplishment. It is a loophole. The fifth one I did not kill because on Solai at about 11 km in the middle of a battle the fifth one broke off and started swimming away from the fleet
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retreating which nothing had ever done which meant it was thinking. I went and got it out of the water by the back of the neck and I brought it up onto a carrier deck in front of about 400
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sailors from six countries and it was a magic eagle and it was tier 4 and it spoke not a language anyone had but it spoke and it looked at the deck and the aircraft and the people and its eyes
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move the way eyes move when something is taking inventory. That is the first live prisoner Blueest Star ever took.
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Everything we learned in the following two years came out of it, and I have never been thanked for it by any of the 11 countries that spent four months arguing about who got to keep it. Things Shu Reddit 11 days later on her hands
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and knees with her forehead against a tier 4 skull in a hardened room with 40 people watching. She came out of that one on her feet. I asked her what it had been thinking when it broke off and swam
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away from a combined fleet because that was the question I had actually taken it alive for. And Funue said it was going to report to what? She looked at me for a moment. That's the part it doesn't have a picture of, she said. It has
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never seen the thing it reports to. It only knows the direction. Then I went and settled the other thing. Because with the fleet action over and the landing zones collapsing, I finally had 40 consecutive hours, and I spent them
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on Jang Lelay's folder. The dark turmoil had not stopped during the calamity. It had accelerated. 11 countries had become 19. Low rank awakeners had been disappearing at a rate that over 111 days added up to a number I am not going
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to put in a sentence with anything else. Here is what I did and I have never apologized for it and I am not going to start. I made an announcement. I did not go through Sha. I did not go through a
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channel. I got a camera and I put it in front of me and the bureau broadcasted on every frequency and platform they could reach which by then was most of them. And I said one thing. From now on,
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Speaker A
all acts of exploiting other people for their attributes are prohibited anywhere, anyone. Those who disobey will be killed. That is not a law. I know it is not a law. There is no clause in any constitution on Blue Star that grants a
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19-year-old the authority to say that. And there is no court that could have reviewed it. And I said it anyway. And here is the thing. It worked. Within 11 days, the disappearances stopped in 17 of the 19 countries. Not because
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governments acted, because the individual people running those programs did the personal arithmetic, and the personal arithmetic had recently been demonstrated on an orbital weapons platform. Two countries did not stop. I went to both. The first one was a
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facility, 1100 people in it, of whom about 900 were the inventory, and 200 were the staff, and the 200 had ID badges and a shift roa and a break room with a kettle. That is the detail that stays. There was a kettle. Somebody had
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written their name on a mug. I used the imprisonment array which was a ghost calamity drop and which holds anything below tier 4 in place indefinitely. I put it over the whole compound and then I walked through it and I checked every
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face against lays folder and I checked them one at a time. That took 9 hours. I have been asked why I did not simply level it. The person who asked was not being cruel. They were asking an operational question and the operational
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answer is that 900 of the people inside that building were the reason I was there. The nuanced answer is that I had watched a valley counter climb from a tent and I had learned in that tent that a number is not a number and I had
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absolutely no intention of ever producing one. I did not kill anyone who was not in that folder. That is the only defense I have ever offered and it is true. The second country was worse because the second country's program was
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legal, not hidden, not deniable. It had a statutory framework and an oversight body and an appeals process and it had been passed by a legislature and it was called a resource contribution scheme and the participation was voluntary in
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the way that things are voluntary when the alternative is arranged in advance. There was nobody to arrest. There was a system. I stood outside their capital for about 2 hours working out what to do about a building full of people who had
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each done a small legal thing that added up to a large one. And I want to tell you that I found an elegant answer. I did not. What I did was give them nine days publicly by name and say that on
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the 10th day I would come and read the register myself. They repealed it on day six. I have never been sure whether that counts as restraint or as a threat that happened to work. And the fact that I
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still cannot tell is roughly the whole subject of a conversation I had in a corridor at 4 in the morning about a month later. Tanaka Kenji took 9 days to find. Lee was not in Japan. Lee had gone
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out through a private channel before the collapse with a great deal of money and a very small number of people. and he was in a house in the mountains of a country that had officially never heard of him and he had been there for 3 weeks
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eating well. I came in through the roof. Lee knew what it was immediately. Lee didn't run. Lid had 3 weeks in a nice house to think about the fact that the bill was coming. And when I came down
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into that room, he was already standing and he did something that I did not expect at all, which is that he tried to explain, not beg, explain. Lee talked for about 4 minutes. It was, I want to be fair, a coherent argument. His
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country had been humiliated. The gap had been unclosable by legitimate means. Every nation with a program had made the same calculation. Lee had done what a leader does, which is take responsibility for an unpleasant necessity, and the only difference
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between him and 11 other men was that he had been better at it. And at the end of it, he said, "You would have done the same." I thought about that. I thought about a broke E-rank and a plastic chair
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saying, "No, we have you." No, I said, "I really wouldn't have." Then it was done, and I flew back and the number in Jangle's folder stopped going up. 2 days after that, 11 governments proposed the Blue Star Federation. The pitch was
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good. A unified planetary authority, a single command for calamity response, pulled resources, shared instance access. Given what was coming, it was probably correct. They offered me the top of it, not a seat. The top supreme commander of the Blue Star Federation
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with an office and a term and a flag somebody had already designed, which I have seen, and which was purple. I said, "No." They asked why, and there was a room full of very senior people waiting for a philosophy, and I did not have
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one. I'm not from Blueest Star, I said. I'm from Great Shia. There was some noise about that. There still is. I have been called a nationalist and a warlord and a very short-sighted young man by people whose analysis I respect. Here is
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the actual reason, and it is not ideological. Every one of those 11 governments had been on Jang Lelay's list at some point in the previous four months. Not all of them still, but all of them once. And a planetary authority
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is a machine for making sure that whoever holds it never has to answer to anyone. And I had just spent 9 days demonstrating what happens when somebody with no oversight decides they know best. I was not going to
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institutionalize me. On day 19, the last landing zone closed. The sky said, "Blue star ghost level disaster has concluded.
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World defense successful." And then it kept going. And what it said next is the reason people still date things from that morning. Blue star civilization level has increased. Blue star has advanced to a first level civilization.
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Instance content of tier three and tier 4 is now available. Blue star has been registered. That last word did a lot of quiet work and nobody caught it for 2 days. And then one line addressed to one person in every sky on Earth. Wang Wei
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has been designated a child of civilization. Weii Mingho read it off his phone standing next to me on a runway and he read it twice and then he looked up at me with an expression I hadn't seen since a frozen field. Child
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of civilization, he said. Yeah, that's not a title. Guardian of the nine provinces is a title. This one's a category. Lee was right. Of course, Lee is annoyingly off and right. It took another 4 days for anyone to work out
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what it was a category of. And by then, we had been sent an address. Before that, though, there was a corridor. I came back into the bureau building at about 4 in the morning, 9 days after the broadcast with Tanaka Kenji's matter
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concluded and my coat in a state that I should probably have changed before walking through a government building and the adviser was standing in the corridor. Lee' been there a while. There was a cold cup of something on the
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windowsill next to him. Lee had a lanyard and about 9 kilos he hadn't had in a library and more gray than a man his age should have had and he was looking at the floor. You've been up all
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night, I said. I watched your announcement, said Mashin. Which one? Lee looked up. Those who disobey will be killed, he said. I stopped. That's the one, he said. That's what you said. All acts of exploitation are prohibited anywhere, anyone. Those who disobey will
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be killed. They were selling people. I know. 19 countries. It stopped in 17 of them in 11 days. Nothing else was going to stop it. I know, said Mashin. And he was not arguing with me. That's the thing that made it stick. Lee was
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standing in a corridor at 4 in the morning, agreeing with every single word, and he looked like a man watching a building come down in slow motion from a distance at which running is pointless. "Then what?" I said. Lee was
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quiet for a moment. "You said it very easily," he said. "That's all." Then he picked up his cold cup and went to whatever office they had given him, and I stood there in a corridor for about a minute and a half, feeling something I
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did not have a name for. And then I filed it because I am extremely good at that. 4 days later, the address came.
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Every awakener above tier three on blue star received the same system prompt at the same instant. And the prompt was an invitation. And the invitation was to something called a civilization convergence zone. Sha sent five, me, Jang Lelay, Liu, Yan, Gao Fu, and one
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more slot that 11 separate agencies submitted candidates for. I gave it to Wei Ming Hao, who was tier 2 and did not qualify by exercising a child of civilization privilege that I discovered existed by trying it. The convergent
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zone is not a place you travel to. You step through and you are standing in a street and the street is the single most humiliating experience of my life because I had just spent 4 months becoming the strongest thing on my
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planet. I had killed a blade saint and Guan Lelay and a demonized giant ape. I had a bow out of a myth and a title from a system and a country that called me captain. And I stepped out into a
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boulevard about 400 m wide under a sky that was not a sky. And there were things walking past me in both directions, thousands of them. And not one of them looked at us. Not hostility, not curiosity, nothing. The way you
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don't look at a pigeon. There was a creature about 11 meters tall, made of something like polished bone having an argument with a merchant. There was a group of very tall, thin people in robes that were doing something with light
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that I could not resolve. There was a thing that was mostly liquid moving along in a suit and a small round gray person came trotting up to us with a board and said in perfect Shaw dialect, "New civilization, first time.
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Congratulations on your registration." His name was Zix. Lee was a guide. Guides are assigned to new registrants for one standard cycle free of charge and Zix was very good at his job and his job had made him a connoisseur of a
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specific kind of disappointment. I asked him what everything was. Lee explained the zone neutral trading space maintained by nobody anyone had met open to any civilization that had achieved registration. Currency was civilization credit. There were districts. There was
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a trade pavilion, an intelligence pavilion, an auction house, and a residential quarter. Then Lu Yan, who is the practical one, asked what our credit was. Zix looked at his board and made a face I have since learned means the same
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thing in about 40 species. Then I got out something to sell. I had brought the best thing I own that I was willing to part with. Rare grade material out of a tier three disaster instance. The kind of thing that on blue star would have
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restructured a national economy and I put it on Zix's board and asked what it was worth. Rare grade, said Zix. Yes. Is that very precious where you're from? I want to describe how he said it. There was no cruelty in it at all. That's what
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made it lethal. It was the tone of a man asking a tourist whether the pebble they picked up on the beach was special to them. I said it was. Ah, said Zix and he wrote something down and he was kind
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about it and he got me a price. The price was enough for a week's rent on a bungalow in the outer residential ring behind me. Gau said his aotment for the month which was oh we spent that first
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day walking and I did not talk very much because I was recalibrating an entire model of my own significance and it was going badly. The thing that finally broke it was the intelligence pavilion and it broke it because I said something
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stupid. We were in a public hall. A broker was quoting us for a general orientation package. I was trying to explain what Blue Star had that might be worth trading. And I said that our world had produced an extraordinary number of
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awakened humans very quickly. That our population had a high concentration density. That this was our advantage.
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And the hall went quiet. Not the whole hall, a radius, about 11 m of it in every direction all at once. Everything within that radius stepped back. A tall, thin person in a light robe made a sound. The broker put down his
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instrument and a merchant three stalls over said a word that Zex's translation rendered after about a second and a half of hesitation as breeders. Zex got us out of there fast. I have never seen a small round gray person move like that
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in an alley. He explained it and he explained it in a hurry with his hands going. And this is what a breeder civilization is. There are civilizations out there that have looked at the same problem we had and found a different
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solution. If a population's strength comes from the number of awakened individuals it can produce. And if what those individuals accumulate can be harvested when they die, then the optimal configuration is not a civilization at all. It is a farm of
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people run by people. Generation after generation, bred for yield, harvested on schedule by their own species. There are dozens of them. They are legal in the zone. They are not technically doing anything to anyone but themselves. And they are the single most despised thing
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in the known universe. And the moment I had said high concentration density in a public hall, every creature within 11 meters had heard a farmer describing his herd. I stood in that alley for a long time because I had said that sentence in
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Sha dialect on another world 4 months ago and I had just heard it come back to me in a translation. And somewhere behind it, there was a man in a nice house in the mountains saying, "Sometimes people are also a resource."
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And a 19-year-old on a broadcast saying, "Those who disobey will be killed." Two of us had arrived at that idea independently. One of us had done it.
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And what I had actually learned standing in an alley in a place 400 m wide with a guide apologizing to me was that it was not an idea Blueest Star had invented.
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It was a well-known configuration. There was a word for it. There was a market reaction to it. We had not been clever.
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We had been early to a bad conclusion that older civilizations had already institutionalized. How do we not be that? I said. Zach, who was a guide and not a philosopher, said most don't manage it honestly. Then I asked him the
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other question, the one I had come for. and I asked it in the alley because I did not want to ask it in a public hall.
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What's the abyss? Zach stopped moving. Then he took us to the intelligence pavilion and he paid for the query himself out of his own credit, which he was not required to do and which I have never forgotten. And the answer costs
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more than everything Blue Star owned. A disaster in the zone's classification is what happens when a world's own defensive response goes wrong or gets overwhelmed. Every registered civilization has been through some. They are survivable. They are in a horrible
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way normal. That is what our ghost level was, a childhood illness. The abyss is not a disaster. The abyss is a large calamity. And a large calamity is a category that does not describe an event happening to one world. It describes
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something moving through a region over a long time, doing to worlds what weather does to coastlines. The pavilion's record listed the abyss's confirmed activity going back a length of time that the translation rendered as an approximation with a lot of zeros. And
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underneath it, in the section for affected regions, there was a list. Blue Star was on the list. We had been on it, according to the timestamp, for two years before the sky ever opened. I read that in a public pavilion with my four
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people around me and a small gray guide who had spent his own money on it. And here is what I felt. And it was not despair. It was relief. Because for 4 months, I had been operating with the
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working theory that I was the problem. That every clear made the countdown shorter. That every advancement invited something worse. That blue star was being escalated because Wang Wei kept raising his hand. And it turned out we had been on a list for 2 years. The
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itinerary was set before I could hold a highlighter. I had not been attracting attention. I had been running out of time in front of an audience. The civilization steelely is in the center of the zone and it is the size of a
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district. It is a ranking. Every registered civilization ordered by an index and the index is public and there is a plaza in front of it where representatives stand and look up and quietly lose their minds. Sex walked us
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there on the fourth day. Registration entitles a new civilization to a formal indexing and the indexing comes with a one-time reward and the reward scales with your placement. There was a queue.
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Well, not a queue, a crowd. And in front of us being indexed was a delegation from something called the sea serpent civilization. Seven of them, 3 meters each, iridescent, extremely pleased with themselves. They had been registered for about a century, which in zone terms is
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a toddler with a driver's license, and they were there for a reindex after what one of them announced loudly twice was a period of exceptional development. They noticed us while they waited. The one at the back looked us over, five humans in
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bureau field gear, and asked Zixs over our heads what we were. Zix said we were newly registered. From where? Blue star.
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The sea serpent said he had never heard of it, which was true and unremarkable.
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And then he said the other thing, which was that our species looked structurally unfinished, and that he assumed we had been registered on a technicality. And then, because he was enjoying himself, he asked what our index was going to be.
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I did not answer him. I want credit for that. 4 months of being the most powerful thing on my planet, and I stood in a plaza and let a glowing eel be rude to me because I had spent 4 days
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learning exactly how much I did not know, and I had decided to be a person who learns things. Then the Steelely indexed the seaurppent civilization.
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Their number came up in the air above the plaza, and it was lower than it had been at their last indexing. I did not understand what I was seeing until the noise happened. The plaza made a sound, not laughter, something worse and more
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polite, and the seven sea serpents stood underneath their own number in front of a public square, and the one who had been talking did not turn around. An index goes down when your civilization has spent a century consuming its own
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reserves. Zix explained it later. It is the specific signature of a civilization that has stopped producing and started harvesting, and everybody in that plaza could read it off the number. They left without collecting. Then it was us. Blue
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star registration index 1000086. Racial grade excellent. Overall placement 78,551,314. Let me do those three lines in order.
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The index number meant nothing to me and meant a great deal to everyone else because a first indexing for a world that had just survived its first calamity typically lands in the low hundreds. 10,086 is not a first indexing
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number. It is what you get when a world produces in 111 days an unreasonable amount of everything and the steelli does not care how you did it. Racial grade excellent is the one that got the plaza's attention. It is not about
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strength. It is about potential ceiling measured on the species and excellent is the second highest band there is. Humans are according to a stone the size of a district extremely good raw material which is exactly the sentence that makes
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people say breeders and I felt the radius happen again smaller this time and placement 78,551,314 78,551,314th out of a number that the ste does not display because displaying it is considered discouraging. Weii Minghao said that's not last though. No, 78
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millionth is not last. There are 78 million we're better than we Mingha. I'm just saying we came in ahead of 78 million civilizations and I'd like that noted. The reward for a first indexing at that level was by zone standards a
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rounding error and by blue star standards it changed our situation permanently. Credit a refinement license upgrade and access rights to three tiers of the trade pavilion we had not been able to enter and a notification I did not understand for 11 days because
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indexing is public. Everything on that Stella is public and a new registration with a racial grade of excellent and an index of 10,086 is not a curiosity. It is a listing and there are civilizations in the zone whose entire economic model
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is reading that stella every cycle looking for exactly that combination. High potential, no allies, no history, no one who would notice. There is a civilization called the dragon slayers.
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They got their name honestly in the sense that they did once kill something enormous and they have spent a very long time monetizing the reputation. What they actually do now is contract work and the contracts are almost always the
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same shape. A young world with good material and nobody standing behind it. They did not approach us. They did not threaten us. Zix simply noticed on the 11th day that a Dragon Slayer factor had pulled Blue Star's public record three
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times. That is all that happened. Three record polls. Zix went very quiet and told me what it meant. And then he told me the part that mattered, which is that there is nothing you can do about it.
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You cannot file anything. You cannot pay them off because the payment is the thing they came for. You can only be expensive. That night I went back to where we were staying, which brings me to the housing situation. We were
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renting a bungalow. I want to spend a moment here because I think it is the truest thing in this entire story. The strongest human being who has ever lived. Guardian of the nine provinces.
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Child of civilization. The man who put a kinetic weapon back into orbit with his fist. Sharing a two- room rental in the outer ring with four colleagues. Rent due Thursday. Gao Fu on a mat in the hallway because he did not fit in the
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second room. Lu Yen had opinions about the bathroom. Weii Mingha had found a market. Lee came back on the sixth day with vegetables he could not identify and a very complicated story about the exchange rate. And on the ninth day, I
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walked past the inner residential district, the one where the established civilizations keep their permanent holdings. And I stopped at a wall and looked through a gate at a house. Just a house, nothing special by the standards of that district. Three floors, a
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courtyard, a tree that was doing something with its leaves that trees on Blue Star do not do. I stood there for a while. Then I said out loud, "I'm going to buy a house here." We Minga appeared next to me. Lee does that. In there? In
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there. Do you know what that costs? No. Lee went and asked. Lee came back. Lee did not tell me the number. Lee put his hand on my arm the way you do with someone who has had a shock. And he said
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in the gentlest voice I have ever heard him use. Let's aim for the middle ring.
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So that became the goal. Not defend the world which I already had, not master the bow which I already had. Buy a house. I have been asked by people who study this sort of thing what my long-term strategic objective was during
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that period. And I have always told them the truth and they have always assumed I was being difficult. Then we went home and blue star had woken up. It happened while we were in the zone. The advancement of first level civilization
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had done something to the planet itself. And the something was that blue star developed a will. Not a personality, not a voice, nothing that talks. What it developed was preference and awareness and the ability to tell one of its
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inhabitants a thing it had noticed. I want to describe how that feels because 11 people have asked me and I have never given a good answer. It is not a message. It is closer to the way you know where your own hand is in the dark.
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I stepped off the transit and stood on ground that had been under me my entire life and I knew without being told that there was something wrong under the ice in the raw sea. In the same way, you
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know, your hand is behind your back. Liu Yan asked me what my face was doing. I said, "It's awake. What is?" I did not have a word for it. I still do not. It has never spoken to anybody else, and it
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has never spoken to me, and it has never once been wrong, and I have spent a considerable amount of time wondering whether that relationship goes both ways, and what it thinks it is holding on to. Mashin's note in the bureau file
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about that week is one line long, and I have read it more times than I want to admit. It says, "The world has chosen a hand." And the first thing it noticed and told me was that there were still
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monsters. The ghost level calamity had officially concluded. Every landing zone had been closed and every zone had been certified. And there were, according to a planet that had just learned to count its own contents, somewhere over 400 tier three creatures still on blue star
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in deep ocean trenches and under ice and inside mountains, quiet, waiting, not doing anything at all. They had gone to ground during the calamity. They had watched what happened to the loud ones, and they had settled in to wait however
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long it took for the thing with the bow to be somewhere else. Blue Star gave me the coordinates, all of them, at once. I went out to the western desert and sat down on the same folding chair. That
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took 9 hours. I did not have to see them. I did not have to reach them. Soul eye plus a planet's own propriioception plus a bow that makes a line between two points and insists on it. And I worked
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down a list. And the list included things at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. And the arrows went through several kilometers of seabed to get there. And the seabed did not meaningfully slow them down. 411 of them in 9 hours from a folding chair. There
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is a seismological record of that day. and it is the reason four separate countries reformed their monitoring agencies. Weii Minghao brought me tea at hour 6 and sat down in the sand next to the chair and did not say anything for a
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while. Then he said 206. What? That's how many times you've died. I've been counting since the Xiao family fortress.
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I lowered the bow. You've been counting. Somebody should. He said you don't. I have never checked his number. I don't want to know if he's off by one. I want it to be 206. The distress signal came through on a public band in the trade
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pavilion and it was not addressed to anybody. That's how those work. A registered civilization in serious trouble can spend a very large amount of credit to broadcast an open call into the zone. And the call goes to everyone,
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and everyone ignores it because answering a distress call from a world you have never heard of is a superb way to die a long way from home for a stranger's cause. The signal was from the purple profound civilization. I read
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the terms twice. The reward on offer was, by the standards of a world that had recently sold a rare grade material for one week's rent. Absurd. They were not offering a fee. They were offering a share of their world's foundational
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holdings, which is the kind of thing you offer when the alternative is not having a world. Jang Lelay said no before I finished reading it out. She had reasons and they were all correct. We had been registered for 11 days. We had four tier
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three awakeners and one tier four on the entire planet. And the tier four was me.
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And there was a dragon slayer factor pulling our public record. You want to leave Blue Star undefended, she said. To go to a world we cannot locate on a chart on the invitation of people we have never met during a period when we
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are being appraised. Yes. say a reason. So, I said the reason, and it took a while, and it comes down to three things. One, blue star had 111 days of instance content and a planet that had just learned to count, and I had
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personally removed 411 of the remaining problems from a folding chair. It was as defended as it was going to get with me sitting on it. Two, a civilization with no allies and a good racial grade is a listing. A civilization that has
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answered a distress call and is owed something by somebody is a relationship, and relationships are the only thing in that zone that makes you expensive.
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Three. Somebody on the other end of that signal was having a ghost level week.
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And 11 days earlier, a small round gray person had spent his own credit on a query for me because nobody else was going to. Jang Lelay looked at me for a long moment. You're going to go whatever I say, she said. Yes, but I'd rather you
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said the thing you're about to say. I'm coming. You're not. Wong way. You are tier three, I said. And their world is having a calamity. And I would like there to be a blue star when I get back.
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She did not like it. She did it. She has never once failed to do it. I bought a mask in the trade pavilion. Low-grade disguise item, cheap by zone standards, and it does one thing, which is that it
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prevents identification of species and civilization of origin. Everybody who does contract work in the zone owns one.
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There is an entire wing of the pavilion that sells nothing else. I bought it because of the three record pulls.
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Because if Blue Star's only tier four goes off world and does something visible in front of an audience, that is a data point, and data points are what a dragon slayer factor is assembling.
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Better to be an anonymous contractor with a mask and a bow. Zex approved of the mask. Zex also on the way to the transit gate said something I did not appreciate for another two weeks. Three others accepted, he said, checking his
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board. Three what? Three civilizations answered the signal. You are the fourth, I asked who. The Dawn civilization, said Zix. Old, solid, boring, which is the highest compliment I can give. The Xiaopang civilization, which is a Marshall civilization, well reggarded,
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extremely proud. And the third? Zix looked at his board for a second. Unlisted, he said. What does that mean?
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It means they responded without registering the response. Lee shrugged, which on Zix involves his whole body. It happens. Some civilizations prefer not to be seen doing charity. I got on the transit and did not think about that again for 11 days, which is the last
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time in this story that I file something and it costs me. The purple profound civilization's world is beautiful and I want that recorded because of what it looked like when I left. It is a high world. Mountains and terrace cities and
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long bridges between them and their people are tall and slight and their whole civilization is oriented around light in a way that goes past aesthetics into engineering. They had been registered for 1100 years. They were by the steelely ranked somewhere around
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41,000 which meant they were roughly 78 million places above blue star and considered themselves modest. I came down onto a landing terrace in a black mask with a bow on my back, and there were three delegations already there,
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and a purple profound elder who had clearly not slept in a period measured in their calendar, not mine. The Dawn civilization had sent 11. Practical people, gray uniforms, the body language of a professional rescue service, which is essentially what they were. The
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Chiaong civilization had sent three, only three, and they arrived last, and they arrived in a way designed to be watched. Chiao are humanoid, tall with a build that reads as sculpture, and their marshall tradition is roughly 9,000 years old, and they will tell you so.
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The one in front introduced himself as Xiao Rui, and he was tier 5. I want to explain what tier 5 meant to me at that moment. I had been tier 4 for about 3 weeks. I had killed four tier fours in a
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single naval engagement. Tier 5 was a word I had read in a pavilion. Xiao Rui looked at the dawn delegation and greeted them by their civilization's proper form of address. Lee looked at the purple profound elder and offered
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condolences that were, I have to admit, gracefully worded. Then he looked at me, masked, alone. No delegation, no uniform, no civilization. And he nodded very slightly. The way you acknowledge furniture that has been moved into the room for the meeting. Behind him were
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two more. Chaolong, who was tier 4, and one whose name I never learned because he never spoke. And Chowolong smiled at me in a way I liked immediately and should not have. Then the elder briefed us and the briefing took four minutes
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and at the end of it the dawn delegation's leader asked her to repeat the last part because the purple profound civilization was not having a ghost level calamity. It was having five of them simultaneously. Five separate ghost level disasters in five regions
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all active all at once which is not a thing that happens which is not a thing the zone's own records had a precedent for outside of one specific circumstance. The dawn leader said the circumstance out loud because dawn are
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practical people. That's not a calamity. She said, "That's a harvest." Somebody had done this to them. Nobody knew who.
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The elder had no evidence and no theory and 1100 years of registration and a world that was going to be gone in about a month. And five separate ghost level events meant five separate response fronts. And the assembled help consisted
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of 11 dawn specialists, three Chiao, and one masked contractor with a bow. Xiao Rui said the sensible thing, which was that the fronts should be prioritized, that two of the five were already unsalvageable, and that a rational allocation would concentrate on the
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three that could be held. The elder said nothing because she was a diplomat and she had just been told which two of her regions to bury. And I said from the back through a mask in a room full of
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civilizations that were all older and better ranked and more numerous than mine. I'll take the five. Xiao Rui turned around. All five, I said. You lot can do whatever you want. There was a silence of a specific quality that I had
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heard once before on a runway in Sha in front of a whiteboard. You are one individual, said Xiao Rui. Yeah. Of an unlisted civilization. Yeah. wearing a mask. I said, "It's a nice mask." And I went to work. The first front took 11
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hours. I want to describe the difference between a blue star ghost level calamity and a purple profound one because it is instructive and because it explains why an 1100-year-old civilization was about to die. On blue star, the calamity
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landed in 105 places and produced tens of millions of monsters topping out at tier three. On purple profound, each of the five fronts had a tier four at the center of it. Five tier fours. That is more tier four hostiles than blue star
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had seen in its entire existence in one world in one month. And the purple profound's own peak strength was tier three because they were a civilization of engineers and light and 1100 years of not needing to be anything else. I
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killed the first one in a canyon at the bottom of a terrorist city. It took 11 hours and nine of those hours were getting to it because I would not let myself take a shot with a bow through a
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populated terrace. And Pangda's third condition has never once stopped being relevant. When it was done, I came up out of the canyon and there was a crowd on the bridges. Thousands of them, purple profound civilians who had been
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evacuating for 6 days and who had stopped evacuating to stand on bridges and look down into a canyon. And when I came up over the lip of it, they made a sound. Nobody had come up out of a
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canyon in 6 days. I went to the second front without stopping and I did the third and fourth the same way. And somewhere in there, I stopped sleeping entirely because at tier 4 with 111 days of accumulation behind me, sleep had
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become optional and time had not. The Dawn civilization held their assigned front for nine days without losing a single one of their 11 people, which is a professional achievement I still admire. And they did it by never once
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attempting anything ambitious. The Chow Fang cleared theirs on the fourth day. Chiao Rui killed a tier four in about 90 seconds in front of an audience that included two purple profound recording specialists, and it was genuinely beautiful, and I say that without any
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sarcasm at all. 9,000 years of Marshall tradition, executed perfectly, on schedule. Then he came and watched me finish my third. I noticed him about halfway through standing on a ridge, arms folded, not helping, which was not an obligation and not a betrayal, and I
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thought nothing of it at the time. What I did notice later was his face when I got back up because the third tier 4 killed me twice. The first time I was careless and it cost me a chest. The
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second time I was not careless and it cost me anyway, which happens and I came apart and reassembled in the standard 90 seconds and got on with it. And the whole sequence was so routine to me by then that I did not register it as an
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event. Shiao Rui registered it. Lee was still on the ridge when I finished. I walked up to him because I was going that way and he did not greet me and I got about four meters from him and his
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face did something. It was fast, under a second. Lee put it away immediately and he was courteous for the rest of the conversation. But for that one second, the man from a 9,000-year Marshall civilization looked at the masked
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contractor who had just died twice and gotten up. And what was on his face was not awe and it was not curiosity. It was disgust. The way you look at something in a kitchen that should not be moving.
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I filed it. Obviously, I filed it. I have a system. Then I met Aara on the fifth front and the fifth front is where this stops being a job. The fifth was the worst of them. It had been
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designated unsalvageable in the first briefing and the reason was a city called Orin which had about 2 million purple profound in it and one evacuation corridor and the corridor had been cut on day two. 2 million people sealed with
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a tier 4 calamity corps in the mountains above them working its way down. When I got there on day 11, the city was still alive. And the reason it was still alive was a woman standing on a wall. They
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call her the daughter of light which is a purple profound honorific and not a mystical designation and it means roughly the same thing as a national laurate and it is given to the single strongest practitioner of their light
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tradition in a generation. Her name rendered as Allara and she was tier three and she had been holding a barrier over the northern quarter of Orin by herself for 9 days. 9 days without sleep without relief because there was no
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relief because everybody who could have relieved her was dead in the first week. I came in over the mountains and I saw the barrier from about 40 km out and it was the palest thing I have ever seen
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and it was still up. I landed on the wall next to her. She did not look at me. She could not. Looking at me would have cost her the northern quarter. She said in a voice that had nothing left in
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it. Are you evacuation or are you help? Help. How many? One. And she laughed. It was awful. It was a laugh with no air behind it from a woman who had been standing in one place for 9 days. One,
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she said. I'm going to go up the mountain now. I said, "Can you hold for two more hours?" "No." "Can you hold for one?" There was a pause and I watched a person do arithmetic on herself, which is a thing I have watched people do too
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many times. "Yes," she said. I did it in 51 minutes. I'm not going to describe the fifth tier 4 because it was the fourth hardest fight of that trip, and by then, I had a routine. And the honest
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truth is that the interesting part of that afternoon was not on the mountain. The interesting part was that when the Calamity Corps died, the barrier over the northern quarter of Orin did not come down. It stayed up for another 11
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minutes because nobody had told her and she was not going to risk 2 million people on a rumor of quiet. And so the daughter of light held a barrier over a district for 11 minutes after the last thing that could hurt it had stopped
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existing. I came down off the mountain and landed on the wall and told her it was over and she said, "Prove it." So I sat down on the wall next to her and waited. She let it go at minute 12. Then
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she went down like a dropped coat and I caught her and she weighed about as much as We Mingha's opinions. Five fronts, five tier fours, 11 days. The purple profound civilization survived, and their world is still there. And the
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elder who had been told which two regions to bury did not have to bury either of them. There was a ceremony. I hate ceremonies. I stood through it in a mask. They offered the reward as agreed.
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Foundational Holdings split four ways among the responders, and the Dawn delegation took their share with a nod and left within the hour because Dawn are practical people. And their job was done. Xiao Rui did not leave. Lee stayed
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for the ceremony, and he was gracious throughout. And at the reception afterward, he came and found me by a window and he congratulated me at length in front of people. Lee said my work on the five fronts had been extraordinary.
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Lee said that in 9,000 years, his civilization had produced perhaps 11 individuals capable of what I had done in 11 days. Lee said that he would consider it an honor to know which civilization I represented. And I said
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through a cheap mask I had bought in a trade pavilion because a factor had pulled our public record three times.
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I'd rather not say. Xiao Rui smiled and said he understood completely and that discretion was the mark of a professional. Then he asked me very lightly as an afterthought whether my civilization was a large one and I said
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no. That is the entire mistake. One word at a party through a mask to a man who had already looked at me on a ridge like I was something moving in a kitchen. I have replayed it about 400 times. I left
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the following morning. The transit terrace at Orin is a long open platform on the side of a mountain with the city below it. and I went up there at dawn with my share of the reward in a zone
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issued holding token and nothing else because I had arrived with nothing else. Ara came to see me off. She had slept finally for about 30 hours and she looked like a person again and she had brought two things. One was a purple
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profound honor token which is a formal object and which I still have. The other was a bag of something to eat on the transit which is not a formal object and which is the reason I liked her. You're
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not going to take off the mask. She said no ever. Not here. She accepted that faster than anyone else had. And then she said the thing that I have thought about more than almost anything anyone has ever said to me. Whoever you are,
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she said, your world should be careful about how good you are at this. I asked what she meant. And that is when Xiaolong came through my back. I want to be technical about this because the technique deserves it. Chiao have a form
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called the nine-fold piercing, and it is 9,000 years old. And its entire design premise is that it is used once from behind on something that cannot be beaten from the front. It went through my spine, through my heart, and out
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through my sternum. and it kept going for about 11 cm past that and then it opened. The nine-fold part is what happens after the entry. I was dead before I understood I had been hit.
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Genuinely dead in the way I had been 206 times except that this one also took the life force field absolute defense and roughly half of my torso as an architectural concept. Ara screamed.
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Xiaolong who was tier four pulled the blade out and behind him on the terrace were Xiao Rui who was tier five and the third one who had never spoken.
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Surprised said Xiaolong. Unexpected Lee said it to my body which was on the ground. It is a hard thing to do well and he did it beautifully. Here is what they said next. Standing over me in front of a purple profound national
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laurate they had already decided to kill. And I heard every word of it because a person who cannot die hears the whole conversation. Chiao Rui was annoyed. Not triumphant annoyed the way a project manager is annoyed because the
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five simultaneous ghost level calamities on the purple profound world had not been a natural event. And the reason nobody had a theory about who had done it was that the party responsible had been standing in the briefing room
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offering to prioritize the fronts. Chiao seated it. 9,000 years of marshall tradition and an excellent public reputation and a business model which was identify a wealthy civilization with no military ceiling. Induce a calamity it cannot survive. Wait for the distress
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call. It will be forced to broadcast, answer it, and take a share of the foundational holdings as an honorable rescuer. They had done it 11 times. That number came out later in the zone in a proceeding. The unlisted fourth response
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on Zix's board had also been them. They had answered their own signal twice, once publicly and once quietly, so that the quiet one could take the share of anybody who died on the fronts. And then a mass contractor from an unnamed
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civilization had walked in and cleared all five, including the two Chiao Rui had written off, and taken a full quarter of the payout and made the rescue unnecessary in front of a very large audience. It is a small
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civilization, Xiao Rui said. Lee said so himself. Lee was already talking about my world, standing over my body, working out logistics, because that is the part I want you to hold on to. They did not kill me for the reward. The reward was
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already gone. They killed me because a single individual from a small unlisted civilization had done in 11 days what Xiao Rui had needed 9,000 years of tradition to do once. And that meant the small unlisted civilization was producing something worth going to look
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at. Excellent racial grade, high potential, no allies, no history. I had spent 11 days making my world expensive and I had made it interesting instead.
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Then Xiaolong turned to Aara. I got up. I have gotten up 206 times and I have never enjoyed a single one of them and I enjoyed that one. The sound Chowolong made is the best sound I have ever
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heard. It is not a scream. It is the noise a person makes when a category collapses. They had taken the mask off.
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That's the detail. At some point in the 11 seconds I was on the ground, one of them had crouched and taken the mask off my face to see what I was. And so when I stood up, I was looking at three members
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of a 9,000-year-old Marshall civilization with my actual face. And the third one, the one who had never spoken, spoke. Lee said, "It's a human." I killed him first, not for the line.
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Because he was closest and because Insight had spent 11 seconds on the ground reading all three of them, and he was the one whose flaw would resolve fastest, and I had exactly one advantage in that fight, which was that they
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thought there were three of them. There were three of them for about a second and a half. Sholong was tier four, and he was, I have to be honest, better than me. 9,000 years of forms against 140 days of dying. If he had been alone, and
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if he had been ready, he would have won. Lee was not ready. Lee had just watched a corpse stand up. I took the nine-fold piercing off him at the wrist and used it. And it works exactly as well from
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the front. Then it was Chrui, and Cha Rui was tier five. And this is the part I do not have a clever description for.
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Lee hit me 11 times in under a minute. Every one of them would have finished any other living thing on that terrace.
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Lee broke me apart four separate times and each time I came back I was 90 seconds further into a fight he was 90 seconds more tired from and by the fourth one he had stopped attacking and started backing up not retreating
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reassessing Lee said you cannot kill me you are tier 4 I know then what said Xiao Rui do you imagine is going to happen here and I said I'm going to keep getting up understood it about 3 seconds
161:30
Speaker A
before it became irreversible you could watch it land because the maths of that terrace had nothing to do with which of us was stronger it had to do with the fact that His 90 seconds cost him something and mine cost me nothing. And
161:40
Speaker A
there was no exit condition in which he walked away from a thing that had 206 of these behind it and nowhere else to be.
161:46
Speaker A
Lee went for last resort. Take the hostage. Force a stop. Lee was fast. Lee was tier five. Lee got about 4 m. I put an arrow through him from 11 m with a bow that makes a straight line between
161:57
Speaker A
two points and insists on it. And the mountain behind him developed a feature. Three of them in under 9 minutes on a transit terrace at dawn. Ara was on the ground with her hands over her head and she was not hurt and she did not move
162:08
Speaker A
for a while. And when she did, she looked at me the way people look at me now, which took some getting used to. I sat down on the edge of the terrace with my legs hanging over a city and my chest
162:16
Speaker A
in whatever state my chest was in, and I put the mask back on. And then I took it off again because it had stopped being useful about 4 minutes earlier. "Your civilization," said, "Is it really small?" One planet registered 11 years
162:28
Speaker A
ago, ranked 78,551,314th. She sat down next to me. And you? She said, "Yeah, how many like you does it have?" And I said, "One." And put her face in her hands. We sat on that terrace for about an hour and she told
162:43
Speaker A
me what I had just done. And it was not what I thought I had done. I thought I had killed three people who had tried to kill me. What I had actually done was end a 9,000-year-old civilization's business model in front of a witness on
162:54
Speaker A
a world that had 1100 years of registration and excellent records with three bodies on a public transit terrace that could be examined. Xiaoong had never left a witness before. That was the whole reason it had worked 11 times.
163:06
Speaker A
The proceeding in the zone took 9 days and I did not attend any of it because the purple profound elder who had not slept in a period measured in her own calendar turned out to be extremely good at this and she did not need me. She
163:16
Speaker A
needed the bodies and the terrace and the findings are public. You can pull them. 11 civilizations over 4,000 years induced calamity, honorable rescue, foundational holdings. Two of the 11 no longer exist. Xiaoong's registration was not revoked because the zone does not do
163:32
Speaker A
that. What happened instead is that their index was recalculated with the findings attached and their placement dropped by a number I will not repeat because it is genuinely obscene and every civilization in the zone can read it forever next to their name. The sea
163:45
Speaker A
serpents had been humiliated by one bad cycle. Chiong got a permanent annotation and Purple Profound formally recorded a debt to the blue star civilization. That is the thing I actually came for. That is the sentence I had been trying to buy
163:57
Speaker A
when I answered an unadressed distress call 11 days earlier over Jang Lelay's objections. A world that has been registered for 1100 years and ranks around 41,000 on the public record owing something to a world ranked 78 million.
164:09
Speaker A
We had a relationship. We had for the first time a reason for somebody to notice if we went quiet. Then told me the other half and the other half is why I went home instead of celebrating.
164:19
Speaker A
Chiao weren't breeders. She said they were harvesting civilizations. They were harvesting foundations, holdings, assets. She shook her head. That is theft, and theft is scandalous, and that's why the proceeding worked.
164:32
Speaker A
Breeders aren't scandalous. I waited. Breeders are legal, said Ala. You know this. Everyone knows this. They are not doing anything to anyone but themselves.
164:40
Speaker A
So nothing in the zone touches them. So the ones who have been added a long time are old, enormously old, enormously wealthy, and not three people on a terrace. How old? There are breeder civilizations, she said on that Stila
164:51
Speaker A
above the point where the numbers stopped being displayed. I did not say anything for a while. And your world, she said, has an excellent racial grade, a first index of 10,086, one individual of note, and a public listing that
165:02
Speaker A
anyone in the zone can read in about 4 seconds. Then she said the thing that ended my very good month. You've just made that listing significantly more interesting because the proceeding was public, which meant the terrace was public, which meant that a tier four
165:13
Speaker A
from an unlisted civilization had killed a tier five of Xiao Fang, and the transcript said so. and my civilization's name was on it now. I had gone off world in a cheap mask specifically so that a dragon slayer
165:24
Speaker A
factor would have nothing to read. I had come back with a court record. Zex found me 2 days later in the outer residential ring at the bungalow and he had his board and he did not do the thing with
165:33
Speaker A
his hands. "How many polls?" I said. "Blue stars public record has been accessed 141 times in 9 days," said Zex.
165:41
Speaker A
Prior to the proceeding, it had been accessed three times, all by the same factor. By who? 41 of them are commercial data brokers, which is normal after any proceeding. Lee looked at his board. 11 are Dragon Slayer affiliated,
165:54
Speaker A
and the rest, Ze said, unlisted. I want to describe the feeling accurately because it was not fear. It was the feeling of standing in a hospital ward on the first night, looking at a panel that said rank zero, and doing the
166:05
Speaker A
arithmetic and understanding that 0.2 a minute is a wonderful number if you have years and a completely useless one if you have days. I had 141 somebody's reading my world's index. I went and looked at the house again, the one
166:18
Speaker A
behind the wall in the inner residential district. Three floors, a courtyard, a tree doing something with its leaves. I stood at the gate for a while like an idiot at a level of wealth where I could not afford the gate. Weii Minghao found
166:29
Speaker A
me there because he does that. Middle ring, he said. We agreed. Middle ring first. I know you've got that face. What face? The one from before the western desert, said Wei Minghao. the one where you've done arithmetic and you didn't
166:42
Speaker A
like the answer and you're not going to tell anyone what it was. So I told him I told him all of it standing at a gate in front of a house I could not buy in a place 400 m wide where nobody looks at
166:51
Speaker A
you the 141 poles the unlisted ones what had said about the part of the steelely where the numbers stop being displayed.
166:58
Speaker A
Xiao Rui saying it is a small civilization over my body while working out logistics. Weii Minghao listened to the whole thing without interrupting which he had learned somewhere along the way. Then he said, "So we're the tutorial dungeon." "What?" "Blue star.
167:11
Speaker A
Excellent material. No allies, one guy." Lee shrugged. "We're a rare grade item on a board, and somebody's about to ask if it's very precious where we're from." I looked at him. "That's exactly it," I said. "Yeah, well." Lee put his hands in
167:24
Speaker A
his pockets. "I've been poor my whole life, Captain. I know what it looks like when somebody's pricing you." We went home the next day. Blue star from the transit gate looks like nothing has happened to it, which is the great lie
167:33
Speaker A
of that whole period. Cities running traffic. A woman on a scooter with four crates of something in a hurry, annoyed about a light. 141 days earlier, I had been a 19-year-old in a paper gown with 1100 UN walking out of a hospital in
167:45
Speaker A
borrowed slippers. And a man who wanted me dead had been the only person on the planet who knew my name. Now 900 million people called me captain and 141 strangers I would never meet were reading my world's price. I gave the
167:56
Speaker A
bureau 9 days of debrief. Everything, the zone, the steelli, the index, breeders, the terrace, the proceeding, the polls. 40 people in a room with the lights on for nine days. And at the end of it, a very senior person asked me
168:08
Speaker A
what the recommendation was. And I said it and I heard how it sounded while I was saying it. Blue star has one tier 4, I said. That's the entire problem.
168:15
Speaker A
Everything that has happened to us since registration has happened because 141 somebody's looked at a planet with an excellent racial grade and exactly one individual on it. One is a target, one is a resource. Nobody prices a civilization that has 11 of me. So the
168:27
Speaker A
recommendation, every instance, every resource, every crystal, every refinement license, and every designated reward we generate from here goes into producing tier 4 awakeners, not defense, not infrastructure, not reconstruction, production, everything else waits.
168:40
Speaker A
Somebody said that there were rebuilding commitments. They wait. Somebody said the population would not accept it. Then don't tell them the room got quiet and I want to be precise about what happened in me at that moment because it is the
168:49
Speaker A
actual ending of this story and it is not the part with the arrows. I was right. That is the horrible thing. Every sentence I had just said was correct.
168:56
Speaker A
And I could have defended each one for an hour. And 141 record polls do not care about rebuilding commitments. And I had said all of it in about 90 seconds in a flat voice without checking a single face in the room. And the last
169:07
Speaker A
three words had come out of me as easily as breathing. Mashin was against the far wall. Lee had been in every one of those nine days in the same chair in the corner taking notes for a bureau file
169:17
Speaker A
nobody had asked him to keep. And when I looked up, he was not writing. Lee was just looking at me with a pen in his hand and his face was doing absolutely nothing at all, which after 4 and 1/2
169:26
Speaker A
months I had learned was the most expensive thing his face could do. I said, "Everyone out." They went. Lee didn't. I sat on the edge of the table and looked at him for a while and I opened the file. "You're the one who
169:36
Speaker A
told Jang Lelay I'd lose somebody in the Western Desert," I said. Lee didn't answer. "Your guardian, the rise of the orcs walkthrough. Every detail in it happened to two people and one of them is an E-rank who had his eyes closed.
169:47
Speaker A
Nothing. You've written every bureau projection since day 10, and every one of them has been right, including the ones about instances that hadn't opened yet. I tilted my head and I have a talent that shows me where things break.
169:58
Speaker A
I've had it since the Forbidden City. That's 4 months of looking at you across a briefing room. Majin put the pen down.
170:04
Speaker A
How long have you known? He said that you're the one who stabbed me. Since about a week after you started, Lee absorbed that. You never said no. Why?
170:13
Speaker A
And here is the honest answer. and I gave it to him because at that point in the evening I did not have anything left to spend on being clever. Because you tried to kill me for a reason, I said
170:21
Speaker A
and you're the only person on this planet who's ever been afraid of the right thing. Lee was quiet for a long moment. Then Majin said, you said those who disobey will be killed and I told you that you said it easily and you did
170:31
Speaker A
not ask me what I meant. I'm asking now you will not like it. I've had a month.
170:36
Speaker A
So he told me not the whole thing. Lee has still never told me the whole thing and I have stopped asking. What he told me that night was one piece and it was this. The version of you I met said
170:45
Speaker A
Mashin had people at the beginning. Lee had a team and he had a country and he had a friend who kept count of something for him because he wouldn't. Lee looked at his hands. That is not the part that
170:54
Speaker A
goes wrong. That is not the warning. Everyone assumes the warning is that you become cruel. You do not become cruel.
171:00
Speaker A
Then what? You become right. He said every single time about everything for years and one day you are standing in a room full of people who are all wrong.
171:09
Speaker A
and you have been correct so many thousand times in a row that you stop checking their faces before you speak.
171:14
Speaker A
Lee picked the pen back up. You did that 11 minutes ago, said Mashin. It's the first time. I have been sitting in the corner of bureau rooms for 4 and 1/2 months waiting to see it, and I would
171:24
Speaker A
give a great deal not to have been here tonight. Nobody said anything for a bit.
171:28
Speaker A
Then I said, "Do you still want me dead?" And Main, who crossed 16 years with a fruit knife and a name he will not say out loud, thought about it honestly for four full seconds, which I appreciated more than a fast no. I want
171:40
Speaker A
you watched, he said. By somebody who knows what it looks like, then keep the chair in the corner. I intend to. And Mashin Lee looked up. Next time you're going to say something like that, I said, don't wait 4 and 1/2 months. So
171:52
Speaker A
that's where it sits. Blue Star is a first level civilization with an excellent racial grade and an index of 10,086 ranked 78,551,314th with one recorded ally, one very public court proceeding and one tier 4. There is a debt owed to us by a world that has
172:08
Speaker A
been registered for 1100 years and there is a daughter of light on it who has my honor token and my actual face. There is a small round gray guide who spent his own credit on a question for me. And
172:17
Speaker A
there is a house behind a wall in the inner residential district with a tree doing something with its leaves and I am going to buy it. And we Ming how says middle ring first and Wei Minghao is annoyingly often right. Somewhere out
172:28
Speaker A
past the part of the Stella where the numbers stop being displayed. There are civilizations that have been farming their own species since before my planet had bacteria. And 11 Dragon Slayer affiliates and an unknown number of unlisted parties have read our price
172:39
Speaker A
this month. That's the outside. I can shoot at the outside. I have a bow.
172:43
Speaker A
Here's the inside. 4 and 1/2 months ago, a man put a knife in my heart in a library and cried the whole time. And he told me I was a devil. And everybody in that building thought he was insane. And
172:52
Speaker A
I have spent every day since proving him early. Lee isn't wrong about the destination. Lee's wrong that it's a monster at the end of it. It's a man in a briefing room being completely correct at speed without looking up. I sat in
173:03
Speaker A
that library again last week. Same floor, different chair. They replaced the desk. I got about 40 minutes before somebody recognized me. And the whole time I was in there, I kept thinking about the one question I have never
173:13
Speaker A
asked Ma Shin, the one I am saving, the one I am going to need an answer to eventually. Lee said the version of me he met had people at the beginning. I want to know what happened to them.
173:24
Speaker A
Packaging title one was assassinated for crimes I hadn't committed yet. So I got up and went to work. Description: A crying stranger put a knife in my heart in a university library 4 days before the sky opened. and he told me I was a
173:38
Speaker A
devil who would kill millions. Lee was right about everything except the timing because when the world awakened, I got the one talent nobody could kill and a counter that goes up every second I keep breathing. This is a full mana recap of
173:51
Speaker A
an apocalypse lit RPG where the system hands out dungeons, tears, and world first announcements and the weakest man on the leaderboard clears an easy instance in a hospital gown because he simply refuses to stay dead.
174:02
Speaker A
reincarnation, cultivation, an OPMC with an ex-grade cheat, and one time traveler in the corner of the room taking notes.
174:09
Speaker A
Lee came back 16 years to stop me. Do you think he still should? Splitframe close shot of the same young man in a torn hospital gown and slippers. On the left, he is on a library floor with a
174:19
Speaker A
fruit knife buried in his chest, eyes wide. On the right, he stands in the same gown in a wrecked fortress hallway, unhe hurt with the giant armored boss coming apart behind him. Text block one, upper left, day one. Text block two,
174:31
Speaker A
upper right, can't die. Text block three, bottom center, world first. Cinematic, high contrast, cold blue on the left and fire lit orange on the right. Face fully readable at phone
Topics: immortality supernatural powers awakening rank system strength gain assassination attempt university library panel blue star Money Magnet Manga

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