Leo didn't go back to the locker room.

  He walked the opposite direction down the tunnel. A maintenance door let him out into the parking structure beneath the Yale Bowl. Rows of cars sat under fluorescent lights. The muffled thunder of a hundred and fifty thousand people vibrated through the ceiling above him.

  He found a gap between the parking structure's exit ramp and the outer wall, pulled Moonrider from its sheath, stepped onto the blade, and launched at a low angle out over the access road before banking upward into the night sky.

  At five hundred meters the noise disappeared, replaced by the whistle of January wind cutting across his helmet.

  Moonrider responded to his mood the way it always did, feeding off the tight coil of anger in his chest and translating it into speed. The Connecticut countryside rolled underneath him in patches of black and white. Highway lights traced long orange arteries between towns.

  Leo replayed it. I have no doubt about that. There's too much riding on Mateo. Too many stakeholders have an interest in his rise. That wasn't reassuring. That was a man covering himself. A man too afraid to speak up for the truth.

  And the security detail. NCAA officials who had been "inspecting" the Yale Bowl's formations since yesterday. Who inspects a home team's formations the day before a game and doesn't tell the home team's coach anything about it?

  He wondered if Mateo knew. The formation diagram passed during the handshake suggested he did. Or at least suspected. But Mateo had still walked out there and used the amplified domain. He'd still won.

  Everyone had a reason. Mateo was the Divine Child, so his handlers needed him to look invincible. Williams still had his dreams of playing in the NFL, so he needed to protect his career. The NCAA needed their golden boy, so they stationed guards and looked the other way.

  The adults decided since Leo was sixteen he could shut up and take the loss.

  The anger settled into something heavier that sat in his stomach.

  Boston resolved out of the dark. First a glow on the horizon, then structure. The financial district. Back Bay. Cambridge across the river, where Harvard's campus sat full of people who had watched Mateo Thandril win another rigged game and called it destiny.

  Then the dark spot.

  Where downtown Boston used to be, the city's light simply stopped. The skyline wrapped around it on three sides, apartments and restaurants and bars glowing near Fenway, packed with people who lived their entire lives within five miles of a hole in reality and never thought a bout it.

  In the middle of all that life sat a perfect absence.The exclusion zone. Miles of cleared earth and military fortification surrounding the dimensional tunnel that led to the Boston catacombs, unlit and invisible against the night sky. A black hole in a city of light.

  And down through that tunnel, convoys of teenagers and draftees died in a foreign wasteland.

  He'd been in the catacombs. He'd killed Nascent Souls down there. He'd nearly died. The country had given him a rating and forty-two million americans had tuned in tonight to watch him play a game, and the whole time the adults in charge had already decided he was going to lose.

  The lights were for everyone else. The darkness was for people like him.

  He thought about the wheat field. The Heart of Flesh and its demand that he feel the desire for life in every living thing. He looked at those hundreds of thousands of lit windows and tried to feel something.

  He felt nothing. The world felt just as cold as a stone.

  That scared him more than the loss.

  The Exeter campus was quiet when he landed. He dropped onto the walkway outside his dorm. His room was dark. Tom's bed was empty. Still at the game, probably.

  Leo sat on the edge of his bed and stared at the wall.

  His phone buzzed. Arthur.

  Kevin and your buddy made it back already. Tan man is near the fog wall.

  At least he had something to look forward to.

  ---

  Azure Profound Continent

  Leo logged in and found Shen Tianyi standing at the edge of the confounding formation's perimeter, arms folded inside his black robe, looking a little lost as he stared into the fog barrier.

  It had been a while since Leo last saw the young Gold Core cultivator. Tianyi turned and offered an easy grin, brushing dark hair from his face as he waved him over.

  "Brother Chen. It has been too long between meetings."

  "How'd you guys get back so fast?" Leo asked, "I thought you were escorting the formation back to your clan."

  "We gave the singular formation to my sister to carry home." Tianyi shrugged one shoulder. "Kevin said he wanted to come back and kill a Deity Transformation profundity, and naturally I was not going to let a Great Merit of Resolution slip through my fingers."

  "The singular formation alone is valuable, yes. But I know my own aptitude in formations." He tapped the side of his head. "Better to seek merit where my strengths actually lie."

  "And your sister?"

  "That brat can keep whatever scraps of contribution fall from delivering it. Consider it her allowance."

  Leo laughed, then asked. "Why'd you believe Kevin? About the profundity, I mean. You barely know him."

  Tianyi let out a short laugh. "Use your head. That greedy idiot was willing to surrender both the singular formation and my annoying sister's company in a single stroke."

  He held up two fingers for emphasis. "If the idiot voluntarily lets the singular formation walk out of his hands and turns his back on a woman, then whatever he heard must be a genuine opportunity."

  "Fair." Leo paused. "You're okay with him trying to court your sister, by the way?"

  Tianyi's expression flattened. "The only reason I tolerate that man and did not send him stumbling back alone through the wilderness is because he visibly annoys my idiot sister."

  Leo laughed again. After it faded, his eyes drifted to the fog wall. He stared at it for a while. Too long, probably.

  He opened his mouth once, then closed it.

  Tianyi fixed Leo with a look. "Now. Spit it out. You have been studying the confounding formation like a cat watching a fish pond. Something is eating at you."

  Leo launched into the story. The Yale-Harvard match. Flying Aces. Mateo. The formation he'd slipped into Leo's hand. The words: I hope you can keep teaching me in the future. The cheating on the field.

  Tianyi listened without interrupting. When Leo finished, the Gold Core cultivator was quiet for a moment.

  "For the record," Tianyi said, "cultivators of the Shen family settle friendly disputes with a game of Go. We do not shoot each other."

  "It's for entertainment. It's simulated combat. The rivalry between the schools just builds the hype."

  Tianyi raised an eyebrow. "Ah. You shoot each other for entertainment. Truly the customs of a great civilization."

  "I bet your clan fights over something as pointless as face."

  Tianyi straightened, looking genuinely affronted. "Face is the root of a man's standing in the world. Without face, what separates you from a wandering ghost?" He held the outrage for a moment, then relented. "But... I will concede the broader point. Continue."

  He began walking Leo back through the events, picking them apart with the careful patience of a man untangling thread.

  "The first thing," Tianyi said, holding up a finger. "His words when he handed you the formation. It's the truth. I hope you can keep teaching me in the future. You are focused on the formation. But those words are the formation's frame."

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  "What do you mean?"

  "He wants you to defeat him. In the future. Publicly. He handed you the formation in secret, which means he could not act openly. He could not simply explain it to you, could not pass it over where others might see."

  Tianyi tilted his head. "This Mateo is a bird in a cage, Brother Chen. He wants someone to open the door from the outside. But whoever holds the cage will not allow it."

  Leo felt the pieces click into place.

  "I understand," Leo said. "But I don't know how to beat him. How am I supposed to fight against people who cheat like that? They're abusing their cultivation and position to rig a game."

  He continued. "And what do you think I should do? I feel like I'm getting dragged into something bigger again. I'm seriously thinking about quitting Flying Aces."

  Tianyi looked at him. Then, without a word, he raised one hand and pointed toward the fog wall, at the swirling white barrier and the Deity Transformation profundity sealed somewhere beyond it.

  "Tell me, Brother Chen. Why are you and your fellow desperadoes throwing your lives at that wheat field day after day?" He let the question hang.

  "It is because the profundity inside unknowingly offended an old man. That is all. It simply existed in the wrong place at the wrong time, and now a group of desperadoes have decided it must die."

  He lowered his hand. "You did not choose that fight because you wanted a great merit. You chose it because someone wronged your people, and you intended to make them pay for it."

  He turned to face Leo fully. "I believe a young hero of your temperament would think the same way here. These people cheated you. They used a hidden formation to steal a victory that belonged to you. This Mateo handed you the proof because he knows it too."

  His eyes sharpened. "Beating them in the open, on the stage they built for themselves. That is settling a debt."

  Leo stood with that for a moment. Then he nodded.

  "May I see the formation?" Shen Tianyi asked.

  Leo pulled a piece of paper and a pencil from his storage ring. He called up the formation pattern he'd scanned into his game pod and overlaid an ingame projection onto a nearby rock. Then he crouched down and began tracing each stroke, working from the top of the paper to the bottom. He first outlined the shape, and then he scribbled it in with his pencil.

  Tianyi watched him draw for about ten seconds before his expression shifted. Something inside died a little.

  "Brother Chen. Have you taken any formation classes?"

  "I finally attended my first one."

  "A joyous occasion. And did they cover how to draw formations?"

  "Haven't gotten to that yet. We covered the Heaven-Earth-Man formation and then I got busy and didn't go back."

  Tianyi sighed. He looked at the paper, then at Leo, as though hoping one of them would offer an explanation for the other.

  "Ah. Well. That explains it. You are drawing stroke by stroke from top to bottom, like a child coloring with crayons." He pinched the bridge of his nose. "Formations are engraved in a specific sequence. The brush must follow the flow of Qi through the pattern. The order itself carries meaning. You will need to learn this properly."

  "I'll do it when I have time."

  Tianyi opened his mouth, closed it, and visibly chose peace.

  Leo finished the drawing. Tianyi leaned over it, eyes narrowing. He pointed to a cluster of intersecting lines near the center. "This junction. Are you certain this is correct?"

  Leo checked the scan of the formation. "The curve goes the other way. Like this." He traced the correction with his pencil.

  Tianyi pointed to two more spots. Leo clarified each one, referencing the scan each time. When the last correction was made, Tianyi straightened and folded his arms.

  "I understand," he said. "This formation draws heavily from the Heaven Trigram of the Eight Trigrams."

  "So it simulates Heaven's authority?"

  Tianyi's head snapped toward him. "Yes. Precisely. Wait." He held up a hand. "How do you know that?"

  "I learned all thirty-five domains of the Nascent Soul realm so I can fight and kill them when I meet them in the Catacombs."

  Tianyi stared at him. The pleasant smile was gone, replaced by something caught between admiration and horror.

  "This is like learning how to integrate before learning how to add." He gestured at the butchered formation drawing. "You attack Lords three major realms above your cultivation but you draw formations like that. You desperadoes truly do not fear death."

  "I do die on Earth, actually. Anyways, it's just me. They aren't as reckless."

  "Of course." Tianyi paused. "Kevin told me you killed six Nascent Souls. Is this true?"

  "I killed two. Both Mountain Domain. And it was with the help of a treasure inscribed with a Heavenly Tribulation Lightning formation. The formation did the heavy lifting. I just zapped them with it."

  Tianyi shook his head slowly. "Only you Americans would speak so casually about the Heavenly Tribulation Lightning. They say the ignorant are fearless, but I think in your case you have chosen to remain ignorant."

  "At least it is not what Kevin refers to as the 'great atomic Qi bomb.'" Tianyi shuddered.

  "Hey. We only used those twice against ourselves." Leo protested. "The rest of the time it was against the Catacombs."

  Tianyi held up both hands, palms out. "Even a Qi Refiner in the Azure Profound Continent knows better than to play with Heavenly Tribulation. But clearly common sense does not exist in your world."

  He dropped his hands. "Forget it. At least tribulation lightning has the courtesy to target one cultivator, unlike the indiscriminate destruction of such atomic bombs. Continue. What else do you know about the Heaven trigram?"

  "All I know is that it's banned in the Catacombs. Classified as heresy."

  "It is considered heresy for most temple-aligned cultivators here in the Azure Profound Continent as well," Tianyi said. "But the continent is vast, and there are cultivators like myself who do not swear fealty to a Great God. The Shen clan walks its own road."

  He looked at Leo seriously. "Kevin has talked a lot about your world during our travels together. He has revealed to me that this type of formation is classified in America. You should think carefully before spreading it. Someone powerful stands behind this formation's use, and such people do not appreciate juniors poking at their arrangements."

  Tianyi took the paper with the formation on it, and lit it on fire with a simple spell art. The paper curled, blackened, and was gone in seconds.

  "So what do I do with it?"

  Tianyi turned and began pacing. Leo fell into step beside him. "Your best option is the Shen clan branch in the Tier Five Immortal City, the Western Seat. They have Nascent Soul level formation masters there. True scholars who have spent lifetimes studying such things."

  He pulled a folded cloth from his robe and spread it across a flat rock. A map that showed the western half of the continent in fine detail. () Tianyi tapped a point in the Great Divide Mountains, near the border where the peaks gave way to the rolling grasslands of the High Marches.

  "We are here." His finger traced westward across the map, over the High Marches and into a jagged wall of peaks labeled in common script. "The Western Seat sits in the Western Spines, here. You will need to cross the entirety of the High Marches to reach it."

  Leo studied the gap between the two points. The High Marches stretched wide and open across the cloth, a vast expanse of plains and scattered settlements between the Great Divide and the Western Spines.

  "That is a lot of open ground," Tianyi said. "And the western region is a powderkeg. Patrols, checkpoints, war preparations. You will want to fly low and avoid the larger settlements."

  He tapped the Great Barrier Range. "Once you reach these mountains, follow the range west. The Western Seat sits guarding a river between the peaks. You will know it when you see it. It will be difficult for even you to miss."

  Leo studied the map. He used his VR pod's screenshot function to take a picture.

  "You'll come with me?"

  Tianyi shook his head. "That is the first problem. The Western Seat is currently undergoing war preparations. A Gold Core cultivator approaching an Immortal City during wartime will draw eyes like a torch in the dark. I would be detained before I got within a hundred li of the outer walls."

  He gestured at Leo. "You, on the other hand, are Qi Refining. Basically a mortal. No one investigates a Qi Refining cultivator."

  "But nobody will respect me either."

  "Correct. Which is the second problem. You will not gain access to the city proper through normal channels. Instead, you will need to answer a recruitment notice in the outer districts. My Shen clan always posts calls for formation masters, to receive secret guests like you."

  Tianyi stopped walking and knelt, pulling a brush and a slip of yellow paper from his robe. He began drawing with quick, practiced strokes, the brush moving in a sequence that Leo could tell carried meaning he didn't yet understand.

  "You will present this formation during the examination," Tianyi said as he drew. "It is a secret cipher. Any Shen family member who sees it will know you come bearing our name. Memorize it."

  Leo pulled up the screenshot function again and captured the image. Then he hesitated. "Do I need to learn how to draw it correctly? The brush strokes, the order you just used?"

  Tianyi paused, brush hovering over the paper. He thought for a moment, glanced down at the cipher, then glanced back at where Leo's earlier attempt at formation drawing had mercifully already been burned.

  "Actually... it is probably better if you do not." A faint smile crept across his face. "Think of it this way. If a man presents a Shen clan cipher but cannot draw a formation to save his life, what will the examiner think?"

  He answered his own question. "He will think: this person is clearly a messenger, not a spy. A spy would at least be competent."

  The smile widened. "Your complete lack of skill will be your most convincing credential. At the very least, the sheer absurdity of it will get you through the door."

  He reached into his robe again and produced a second slip of paper. This one he wrote on quickly, folding it into a precise square when finished. "A letter of introduction. It is encrypted. Only members of the Shen family can read it. Present it to Lord Shen Zhaowen."

  "Lord Shen Zhaowen. Got it." Leo took the encrypted letter and put it into his storage ring. He stood there for a moment, then let out a long breath.

  "Thank you, Tianyi. If there's anything I can do to help..." He glanced toward the fog wall.

  Tianyi followed his gaze and sighed. "Kevin said you all need bigger shovels. I have been thinking about what kind of tool would work."

  "Have you looked inside?"

  Another sigh. Longer this time. "I have."

  "And?"

  "I think there is a good chance the plan will work."

  He stood there, a Gold Core cultivator of the Shen clan, staring into the fog that concealed the divinity of a Deity Transformation profundity. His expression carried the particular weight of a man confronting an inevitability he found personally embarrassing.

  "A Deity Transformation profundity," Tianyi murmured. "Felled at the hands of a Qi Refiner and a shovel."

  He looked up at the sky, as if searching for where exactly the heavens had gone wrong.

  "When did the order of Heaven, Man and Earth become this crooked?"