Bob offered Roland the recliner, sat on the chair, and waited for him to state his business.
Roland kept his voice low. “There’s a ton of stuff I need to tell you, coz, but to start with, I need a twelve-gauge pump action and all the buckshot or slugs you can get me.”
Bob didn’t bat an eyelash, but his expression became more focused. He had gone into ‘shady’ mode. Bob preferred to roleplay different characters as circumstances required, and his ‘shady’ mode behaved and sounded a lot more streetwise than his usual nerdy self.
“No paperwork, I take it.”
“No paperwork, yeah. I kinda need it now. Don’t have weeks to spare.”
“I got a couple of clean guns, no pedigree, y’know? But they ain’t cheap. How much you got on you, Rolls? You know I don’t take checks.”
“Two hundred and sixty.”
It was the first week of the month, which meant Roland had spent most of his savings paying off his rent, credit cards, and utilities. After withdrawing that paltry amount, his checking and savings accounts combined had less than fifty bucks left.
Bob laughed. “You gotta be kidding me, coz.”
“We’re family, Bob.”
“This is business, Rolls. For two hundred, I could get you a used shottie, but it would have to be a legal transaction, and I know you ain’t got a long gun license.”
Roland sighed. He couldn’t even blame Bob. Might as well put at least some cards on the table. He reached into his pocket while mentally accessing his storage space.
“How about this?” he asked, producing one of the gold coins he’d earned along the way. He had thirty-two of them by his last count.
“Hey, hey,” Bob said, leaning over and taking the coin. “Where did you get this?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. And I will tell you, once we can speak more privately.”
“Feels like an ounce. Is that twenty-four-carat mark real?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. I’ll have to go to the pawnshop to get it checked out.”
“I don’t mind the wait if I can chill in the office for a bit.”
“Sure. If it’s the real deal, I can give you two grand in cash, or twenty-five hundred in trade.”
“I thought gold was going for over four grand an ounce.”
“I meant twenty-five hundred in cash, or three grand in trade,” Bob corrected quickly, the little rat. “Come on, Rolls, you can’t expect to get retail value, can you?”
“Why not?”
“For starters, this isn’t one of the commonly traded coins. I’ve learned enough about the coin trade at my dad’s shop. A regular buyer who sees a coin of unknown provenance is going to be suspicious from the get-go. Also, at a legit business you’d need to show ID and the sale will be recorded. Is this the only coin you got?”
“No,” Roland admitted.
“Three or four of those, and you’ve got a transaction above ten grand, and that’s got to be reported by law. Sooner or later – as in a few days at the latest – someone with a badge is going to come ask you where you got the coins. There are rules to prevent money laundering and the like. It can get messy.”
“Okay, I get it.”
“Doing it my way, I get the coin melted and nobody’s the wiser.”
“Fine. Let’s talk trade.”
“You’ll get the shottie and a hundred cartridges and lots more. Anything else you need?”
“A handgun and some ammo for it would be nice, too,” Roland said, thinking about dungeon crawls. It was going to be what the Army liked to call ‘Close Quarters Battle.’ A pistol might come in handy, too.
His powers probably made the guns unnecessary, but if he used some of his Upgrade Tokens on them, he would have more options.
“Don’t tell me you’re planning to jack up some dealers, coz,” Bob blurted out. “We’ve had bull sessions about that sort of stuff, but that was the booze talking.”
Roland thought about it. Was this the best time to spill the beans? His plan had been to clear the Dungeon in his quest by himself, just to have an idea what he would be up against. After that he’d bring Bob in along with a few other people.
Bob’s gaming group buddies were Roland’s first choice for potential recruits. There was Barton, an even bigger nerd than Bob who was a fount of useless trivia. His encyclopedic knowledge might be useful when dealing with the System. Goth girl Dahlia was spooky and had a mean streak a mile wide. Roland had played tabletop RPGs with them before his schedule at GameDrop made it impossible to show up regularly. They didn’t have military training (or any training at all) but might have the mental flexibility to adapt to the System.
And he couldn’t do it all alone, especially with half of his abilities broken.
“You thinking about lying, or getting ready to fess up?” Bob asked.
“Okay, Bob. I have something lined up, and it’s crazier than your conspiracy theories. So, why don’t you go check on the gold coin? That will prove I’m not full of crap. And here, take another one,” he added, producing a second coin with the same hand-in-pocket trick.
“Go check them out, and when you come back I’ll tell you. I’ll be right here in your office.”
“Two coins. You weren’t lying about that. You found a sunken pirate ship off the coast or something?”
“Or something even crazier than that. Go make sure the gold’s legit and then I’ll tell you the whole story.”
“Sounds good. And it better be a good story.”
“It’ll knock your socks off, cuz.”
“It better not start with, ‘No shit, there I was.’”
Roland laughed. “It kind of does, actually, but I swear, it’s not crap.”
They got up from their respective seats, and Bob finally processed the changes in Roland’s physique.
“You look taller, Rolls. Like way taller. You wearing lifts?”
“No. It’s all part of the story. Sooner you get back, sooner you’ll hear it.”
Shaking his head, Bob stepped out of the office and closed the door after him.
Roland heard him talking to Josh and listened to their conversation as clearly as if he was standing next to them, even though they were trying to keep it low. With his Perception, he could hear the TV in the next house over and understand the words. Granted, it was turned up a little louder than what would be considered neighborly, but he could also hear somebody talking on the phone two houses down the street, too.
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Paying attention and making sense of all the stuff was a little harder, but his Intelligence seemed to follow a couple of conversations at a time without a problem.
“… just need you to give me a ride,” Bob was saying. “To the shop. My car’s been busted for days and I can’t afford to get it fixed.”
“Is he all right? I don’t want to leave my sister alone with some creep.”
“I told ya, I grew up with the guy. He ain’t no creep. But if you want, I’ll borrow your ride and you can stay here.”
“Nobody rides my ride but me,” Josh proclaimed. “Hey, Winnie, wanna come with us?”
“I wanna sleep, is what I want,” was the muffled response.
“I’ll be back in a few. Giving Bob a ride.”
“Don’t care.”
“Ok, see ya.”
Roland heard the back door closing and Wendy muttering “Thanks for waking me up again, assholes. And thanks for ruining my life, Josh. Asshole.”
Bob’s strays usually carried high concentrations of drama with them, and Roland suspected the brother and sister pair had dragged more than their share to his cousin’s doorstep. Oh, well, not his problem. Yet.
Having some time to kill, Roland decided to check the damage to his cultivation a little more closely.
He moved the armchair to one side, sat on the floor, and assumed the familiar lotus position. With his eyes closed, he focused on his inner space and his Pattern.
It hadn’t gotten any prettier since earlier in the day. His Mana cycling was now steering clear from his middle Dantian and the whole cycle was no longer the serene flow he’d managed after days of intense practice. Mana flowed unevenly, as damage Pattern channels caused logjams and disruptions.
The Dantian was still gone. Roland peered closely into it, hoping there was something, anything to salvage. At first, all he saw was a big nothing. The lights were out and nobody was home. But after a few minutes of almost desperate scrutiny, he thought he saw something.
Thin lines of ghostly light, so faint he wasn’t sure if he was imagining them. If he focused on them, they disappeared, but if he let his mind wander a little, they came back, like some kind of mirage he could only see out of the corners of his virtual eyes.
He wasn’t sure, but he thought the lights looked like a Pattern.
Not the one he’d made, though. The lights that faded in and out looked a lot more intricate. More complex. His experience forming his Pristine Configuration made him sweat a little thinking of how much work it would be to inscribe that one. But it was already there.
Trixie, can you take a look at this?
His Guide had followed along invisibly but kept quiet since he’d entered Bob’s house.
Roland explained. The Guide spent several minutes examining his spiritual network. He could feel her intrusive presence like tiny fingers under his skin.
Maybe I’m imagining things. Or maybe she’s lying to me? That wouldn’t make sense, though.
He kept trying – and failing. Every time he wanted to focus on a detail, the lights vanished. After a while, they vanished completely and didn’t come back. Great.
Roland had to spend a few more minutes finding his balance after that disappointment.
Things were bad, but were they hopeless? He still had three working Dantians. Even if he couldn’t fix the gut one anytime soon, what if he could somehow empower his cultivation through his Third Eye and (or) Hypothalamus Dantians?
Surely somebody must have tried it before, he thought, before asking Trixie.
Sorry to disappoint you.
Hey, if I fix my cultivation, I bet I’ll unlock some big Achievements. Maybe another World First or two. That should put me right back on the top.
Trixie sounded like a mother encouraging her dumb kid on his way to a participation trophy.
The Guide didn’t know about Roland’s unknown bird, though. That was one secret he planned to keep until he made direct contact with it.
After he was done dealing with Bob, he planned to borrow his cousin’s basement and spend the rest of the day performing his now Legendary ritual. It was time to call Big Bird or whatever its name was to his world.
Of course, maybe this was all some kind of ruse to summon some monster to Earth. Maybe Big Bird will chomp my head off on arrival. At least it’ll be an interesting way to go.
You could go big with nightmares, too.
Despite Trixie’s warnings, he tried to see if he could bypass his broken circuit and use his Third Eye Dantian to empower his cultivation.
The pattern around the two extra nexus points was a little sparse in comparison to the ones linked to his cultivation and class. He guessed that as he advanced, he would have to fill in the blank spots with more channels until the network was as intricate as the original one around his gut.
One good thing about having a superhuman Intelligence was the photographic memory that went with it. Trixie had explained that high Intelligence didn’t make you actually smarter, but it allowed your brain to retain and process information better.
Somebody could still do incredibly stupid things with that information. Anybody who knew college graduates could tell you that.
He still had twenty-eight freebie points to burn; he’d been saving them in case he needed a quick bump, but one freebie point would get his Intelligence to fifty, five times the normal average and two and a half the human maximum. That had to count for something right?
Raising the stat to sixty or seventy was doable, but even if he did it a point at a time, he worried that the influx would leave him incapacitated. Or that it would improve his odds that much. He spent a single point, saving the other twenty-seven for a rainy day.
After that, he visualized the pattern he had inscribed inside his body, and it sprang to life. His memories flashed before him like so much found footage, except perfectly clear.
So, if I set up the same pattern between the upper Meridians and the Third Eye, I should be able to –
Pain tore through him, not only from the spot inside his head where he had tentatively begun to inscribe a pattern line, but from all his Dantians, including the one that housed his Class Core.
A mini-explosion of Mana erupted through his Meridians. Back in Basic Training, Roland’s drill sergeant had been fond of telling recruits that ‘pain is weakness leaving the body.’ As it turned out, sometimes pain is just weakness entering your body for no gain whatsoever.
That snapped Roland out of his pain-drunk state. What? I can do that?
As she spoke, Roland clearly heard the girl in the living room sobbing hysterically. Oh, crap.
I didn’t know that.
I’m already feeling like crap. No need to pile it on, Roland replied as he recovered from the double whammy of failure and knowing he might have killed somebody.
The pain was fading, except on the spot near his third eye Dantian, where he had started to draw inside his head. He’d made little more than a dot, but it felt like he’d jammed a white-hot needle into his brain.
Luckily, his time at the Chapel’s challenge had taught him how to erase those lines. Getting back into the lotus position, he went into meditation – still relying on his proficiency, as his super-meditative abilities were locked up in his art – and wiped the damn thing off his Pattern.
For several minutes, he focused on nothing but removing the figurative thorn from his mind. It took a bit and it hurt like hell, but he got it done.
“What are you doing?”
Roland’s concentration shattered and his he landed on his ass. He opened his eyes as he bit back a curse and saw Wendy standing by the open door to Cousin Bob’s office, her eyes wide. He realized that he had been levitating when she came in.
That trick was still on despite Art being on lockdown. Which meant he had accessed it despite the lock?
“What are you doing?” Wendy repeated as Roland got to his feet, derailing his train of thought.
“Meditating. You know, like yoga and stuff.”
“You were floating three or four inches off the ground.”
“That sounds crazy. Are you sure you saw that?”
“I know what I saw.”
Roland shrugged. “If you say so. But just so you know, Bob hates it when people go into his office uninvited. He’s kicked people out of his place for less than that. So maybe we both forget you were here and I can get back to my yoga and stuff.”
“You’re also glowing,” Wendy said, sounding pretty matter-of-factly about it.
“Welp, I’ll be darned,” Roland commented, looking at his hand, which was indeed glowing in all the colors of the rainbow, kind of like a Skittles commercial.
Leprechaun jokes?
How do I stop the lightshow?
Roland closed his eyes and got hold of his aura. His control was sloppier than it used to be, thanks to Yang, but he pulled at it until it sank into his skin. The rainbow effect dissipated.
“No more glow,” he said. “Assuming it was there in the first place.”
“There’s still that glowing thing floating next to you,” Wendy said, pointing right at Trixie. “It’s got wings.”
Eff my life.