Pechorin breathed in and exhaled. His brain filled with the wind passing over him. The inside was outside and the outside was inside, his mind not separate from the world around him but another, denser phenomenon within it like a whorl in a river. “Pechorin” was just what this whorl called itself out of convenience. But there was nothing behind “Pechorin,” and nothing in front. There only was what was.
For whatever magic the Yishang might have done to create the world and keep it running, Po-Lin possessed an animus all of its own, a world spirit emerging from the sum of its parts, urging it onwards in directions its creators did not intend yet which could not be reduced to random chance. He knew this because he was a part of this world-moving spirit, and it was a part of him. He was Po-Lin thinking about itself. And he knew this because he had come to Shikijima to become a hermit and, because could not do what Shuixing could and take apart the world number by number, had sought to understand the world on its own terms.
Pechorin opened his eyes.
He sat cross-legged on a rock facing the open ocean on the southernmost point of Po-Lin. This point was an island so small it didn’t have a name and whose only “purpose” was to contain a small puzzle leading to a treasure chest that Pechorin’s party looted five years before. It was perhaps 30 yards around and its population consisted of Pechorin and five palm trees which provided him with coconuts every morning to sustain him. No one had bothered him in over two years.
To others this might have sounded lonely, but paradoxically, his feelings of connectedness had only grown in his solitude. The distillation of his mind had exposed the ways in which everything he consisted of had come from someone else. His love of drama and the macabre, of romanticism and poetics, began in the molding hands of the Yishang, was fired in Natsuko’s encouragement, and glazed with the intellectual nutrition of the Shikijiman fishermen and their tutelage. What was more, while exposing the negative parts of himself, he realized his poetry had also advanced out of a desire to assert his superiority over Daisy, since it seemed somehow unfair that she should be both a powerful Hero and an accomplished poet.
The silliness of it made him laugh.
Then there was the way Shuixing’s soft manners had rounded the sharper edges of his archetype, and the way Sofiane’s preference for the lurid had expanded Pechorin’s aesthetic reservoir and deepened his dour disposition with a touch of elegance. Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, the entire trajectory of his life had been altered by Natsuko, perhaps without her knowing. What had been just one memory among many now stood out to him as a turning point in his life:
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With Shuixing by his side, Pechorin scribbles on a piece of paper. Filling the paper to its margins are numbers representing everything from experience per hour to monster hitpoints to ability damage-scaling to stat point distribution. Were he to lift the paper, he would find indentations in the inn’s table where his frantic scratching had worn grooves. Since their team’s formation, he and Shuixing have been in charge of crunching numbers to ensure they stay ahead. Pechorin knows perfectly well his abilities are underpowered compared to other Heroes, so he makes up for this by working both smarter and harder. So long as he maximizes the utility of his stats and discovers the most efficient method of grinding experience before anyone else, he can remain ahead. On some days, he even finds himself crunching numbers in the middle of battle.
“These two dungeons are close enough that the clearance rate makes up for the lower-experience gain from the mobs,” Pechorin explains to Shuixing, pointing out two large formulas representing the “dungeons.”
“But doesn’t that place us further away from a third dungeon?” Shuixing asks.
“The time saved compensates for distance traveled, so we can fit in three dungeons in the same time as two from the higher-difficulty dungeons. The difference is about a 16% improvement in per hour rate.”
Shuixing nods. She sees his point now. But as they try to further refine the exp-grinding route, their train of thought is interrupted by a voice from the other room.
“Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go! The sun’s shinin’, the day’s awaitin’, and you’ll go blind squinting at ink all day, ya dorks. Let’s get a move-on!”
Natsuko’s voice grates against Pechorin’s nerves. With her overpowered class and abilities and inexplicably high Use-Number, everything is fun and games for her. She falls into success. But unlike her, Pechorin has to work hard for his position, all while Natsuko benefits from his hard work in identifying the most efficient uses of their time.
“Would you shut up!?” he finds himself yelling.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Shuixing startles at the outburst. Moments later, Natsuko traipses into the room with a cheshire grin on her face and her arms behind her back. His look of irritation follows her as she circles around the table behind him.
“You’ve been in a real sour mood lately, Pech. And ya know why? Cuz ya think too much about those dang numbers. If I had to think about them all the time I’d go crazy!” she says.
Well, good for you that you don’t have to, he thinks, but I do.
She crosses her arms and rests them atop his head. Unfortunately, try as he might to swat at her, her stats are better. Natsuko is stronger. And if she wants to pin him to the chair by leaning against him, she can.
“Get off of me! You—”
“Bet I can guess what you’re thinking,” she says.
“I don’t care! Get your hands off!”
“You’re thinking: “Oh, woe is me! My stats are so bad! If I don’t work super-duper hard I’ll be dropped and everyone will hate me and I’ll have no money and yap yap yap,” Natsuko says, leaning on his head. “I’m right, ain’t I?”
Pechorin scoffs. “No, I am doing important work for all of us so that we can all stay on top. And besides, my stats are bad. My abilities don’t scale worth a damn. So I’m ever so glad that you are doing fine and dandy, Natsuko, but not all of us—”
“Hmph. You remember that big dramatic speech you gave to that Entropic Axis Chaos General? What was her name… Medea or something?” Natsuko asks.
“What about it?”
“I thought that was way cooler than the number-crunching.”
Pechorin grunts in frustration. “The number-crunching keeps us in the competition. Big dramatic speeches don’t.”
“Yeah, but when are ya gonna make time for the cool stuff? I work my butt off to beat the Entropic Axis cuz I wanna save the world, but that doesn’t mean I gotta hate what I’m doing. I like seeing new places, I like fighting tough enemies, I like cooking good grub, and the numbers? The numbers are just there to make it happen, man. So loosen up! You don't have another life to live, so enjoy it while ya got it. You clearly don’t like all the math, so ditch it! Do something you wanna do!”
Shuixing says something to Natsuko about not bothering him, but Pechorin is still stuck on that last remark. “Do something you wanna do.” It’s not that easy, he wants to say. Life won’t be so fun when they fall behind. She has it easy, so what does she know? And besides, being on top is fun. Who wouldn’t want to be the most powerful? Have the most money? He could rest when the Entropic Axis was defeated. His duty wasn’t just to himself, but to his team, and all of Po-Lin, so how could he possibly put it aside?
Pechorin wants to say all of that, but something else tumbles out instead.
“Like what?”
Natsuko blinks. “Like what? I'unno, flower-sniffing? Landscape painting? Poetry?”
“Poetry…” Pechorin says flatly.
“Yeah! Poetry! Write me a poem, you brooding dork!”
“I’m not writing a gods-damned poem! Now get your arms off my head and leave me alone.”
Natsuko sighs and he feels the weight lift from his scalp. “Fine, fine. Me and Hemi are gonna go climb Mount Shenfen and see what’s on top. Catch up when y’all are done… if you can!”
Natsuko flips Pechorin’s long black hair up before sprinting out of the room.
With Shuixing’s help, the two of them map out a new grinding route for Eastern Tianzhou for levels 26-30. And as he waits for Shuixing to finish double-checking math, he writes something in tiny letters between two tables of long-form division:
“Roses are red, violets are blue—” and it feels so corny and cringy and stupid that he wants to drop his pencil right that very second, but eventually forces himself to scratch out, “—watch out Mt. Shenfen, I’m coming for you.”
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Back in the present, the sun was past its zenith and beginning to push the long shadows of the palm trees over his face. Reaching out with a finger, he drew in the sand:
Shenfen in Spring,
On white-capped peaks, the wind
Turns gently north.
Pechorin stood up and stretched. Once blood flooded back into his joints he shot one of the trees until a coconut fell out. Shooting a hole in it, he idly drank, the milk as sweet as the first day he planted roots on the island. With nothing demanding his attention, his one coconut meal stretched over an hour as the tide rose and washed away his poem. He had written thousands into that beach and as many had been swallowed by the water, but even if he couldn’t remember them, the act of writing them had already changed him in some way. Maybe the poem had changed the ocean too, infinitesimally.
When the waves arrived at his ankles, Pechorin retreated up the beach to a patch of grass in the center of the island and sat down to meditate once again. With consistent practice it took him no time at all to sink deeply into a state of non-judgemental awareness. There he rested and allowed Po-Lin to explain itself to him through the wind and waves, the order behind the world’s chaos emerging and leading him by the hand into a formless realm. In it, he could see flows of energy numbering in the billions, greater in number than every grain of sand on every beach. He could see the affection in Sofiane, the depletion in Shuixing, the resignation in Daisy, and the guilt in Natsuko as though they were right there before him.
But though Pechorin had tapped into the great, roiling core of Po-Lin, he was in no great rush to penetrate its secrets. What he needed to know the world would tell him in its own time.