Chapter 134: Wei’s Cheat Code
The light unspooled slow, the way good fortune likes to make an entrance, and Xuan held his breath like a man watching a ten-pull animation crawl toward its final card.
Something rose out of the coffer on a cushion of that glow — a slender vial, no longer than his thumb, the liquid inside it a deep, living amber that turned over on itself like it had weather. Threads of pale gold drifted through the amber, coiling and uncoiling, refusing to rest. Even to his untrained eye it was obviously expensive, obviously rare, obviously the finest thing the wheel of fate had ever personally pressed into his hands.
He could have wept.
’Mira.’ His voice came out hushed, reverent, the voice of a man who has pulled the SSR and urgently needs a witness. ’Mira, look at it. Look at it. I’m a genius. Two thousand points and the universe just folded for me. What is it? Tell me it’s broken. Tell me it’s so broken they patch it next update.’
A panel slid open beside the vial, and Mira read it to him the way you read a price tag aloud to a child who has already fallen in love with the toy.
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[ Verdant Crucible Elixir ]
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[ ▸ Effect: awakens and elevates the drinker’s innate talent and spirit root. ]
[ ▸ Single use. Permanent. ]
[ ▸ Grade: Superior. Scales to an ordinary talent’s ceiling. ]
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’A talent elixir.’ He breathed it like scripture. ’It upgrades your root. It makes you flat-out better at everything, forever, in one swallow. Mira, this is the single most valuable thing I have ever — ’
[ It’s useless to you. ]
The words dropped clean into his victory lap and tripped it flat on its face.
’...What.’
[ I said it’s useless to you. ] No malice in it, only the patient honesty of a system telling a man his winning ticket is for a draw he aged out of years ago. [ Read the grade again. Superior, yes — for an ordinary ceiling. It awakens a normal talent and lifts it toward something worth bragging about. You don’t have a normal talent, Xuan. You have a Heaven-tier physique that rewrote your foundation from the marrow outward, and a system welded to your soul that half this continent would start a war just to crack open and study. Pour this into you and it’s a spoonful of sugar stirred into the sea. It has nothing left to wake up. You’re already awake. ]
He stared at the vial. The amber rolled over, gold and gorgeous and, as it turned out, beneath him.
’So let me get this straight.’ He said it slow, each word laid down like a man counting the wreckage of his own house. ’I whaled. I emptied my entire balance into a mystery box. I pity-pulled reality itself. And the jackpot — the certified, rarer-than-rare, light-show-and-everything jackpot — is a participation trophy.’
[ The box gave you exactly what it promised on the label. ] A beat, and he could hear the grin loading behind her words. [ It favors the fortune of whoever breaks the seal. This is your fortune, host. ]
’My fortune is a drink I can’t legally benefit from.’
[ Your fortune, ] she corrected, sweet as something with a hook in it, [ is the people you pour it into now. The coffer read you down to the marrow and decided your single luckiest possible pull wasn’t one more toy for the boy who already has everything. It was the right gift for someone standing in your shadow. Frankly, it’s a bit touching. You’ve gone soft, host. Dying and coming back rounded off your edges. ]
’It did not round off my — ’ He stopped. The gears, which had been spinning helplessly in the mud of his disappointment, caught pavement all at once. The grin crawled back across his face, slow and broad and openly dangerous. ’Oh. Oh, that’s — no, you’re completely right, that’s perfect.’
[ And there it is. ]
’It’s perfect.’ He tilted the vial so the gold threads dragged through the lamplight, regarding it now the way a man regards a weapon he hadn’t realized he was already holding. ’It’s wasted on me. It is absolutely not wasted on a fresh, talented, fully un-awakened body that happens to be sweating through forms in my yard at this exact moment.’
[ Wei. ]
’Wei.’ He said the name like the landing of a joke he’d set up that very morning without knowing the setup was real. ’I told you at breakfast I wanted to feed the kid like a gacha unit. And then I went and pulled, for him, the best single piece of leveling material in the entire catalog — by accident — with coin I spent purely to spoil myself.’ He laughed, short and disbelieving. ’The system has a sense of humor. I respect it. I loathe it, but I respect it.’
He turned the vial once more, and the sour knot in his chest finished curdling into something far more useful than self-pity. Back home, the serious whales never blew their last pull on themselves at the end of a banner. They funneled it into the one account that would carry the whole roster, the carry, the unit everything else was built around. He’d spent the morning calling Wei exactly that without doing the math on what it meant. The math had just done itself.
[ His aptitude is already good. You’ve seen it yourself. ] Mira’s tone slid out of teasing and into something more invested; she was fond of Wei, in the way she insisted she wasn’t fond of anyone. [ Wake that up with this and his root climbs straight out of "promising inner disciple" and into the bracket that sects bleed each other over. You’d be handing a boy scraped off the bottom of the ladder the kind of foundation most heirs are born praying for. ]
’I’d be whaling on him.’ Xuan folded his fist around the vial, careful, as though it might bruise. ’Feeding the unit. Breaking the game over one knee.’ His balance blinked at the corner of his vision — three hundred and twenty pitiful Origin Points, the smoking crater of his shopping spree — and for the first time he read the number and didn’t flinch. Three hundred twenty points and an elixir worth more than the rest of his year, every bit of it about to walk straight into someone else’s hands. By rights it should have stung. It grinned at him instead.
’Mira.’ He was already up, already moving, the vial sliding into his sleeve while his mind ran ahead to that sad little drawer of recovery pills he would never need again. Pills for the grind, elixir for the root, the full care package wrapped in one terrible afternoon. ’Where’s Wei right now?’
[ Outer yard. Drilling the new forms precisely where you left him, because the boy is physically incapable of coasting on the chance you might be watching. (◠‿◠) ]
’Well, we need to pay a visit to him.’ The grin had teeth in it now, warm and merciless at once, the look of a man about to wreck a teenager’s whole week in the finest possible way.
He crossed the courtyard with the vial a small fierce weight knocking against his wrist, the pill drawer his first stop and Wei his second, and somewhere past those two doors stood a kid who had walked into this morning as a useful errand-boy and was going to walk out of this afternoon as something the sect did not yet own a word for.
The door to the yard swung wide before he reached it.
Wei filled the gap, chest still heaving from the drills, eyes already huge at the sight of his young master.
"There you are," Xuan said, far too pleased with himself. "Good. Come with me."
