He announced it in the Arena, as planned.

  Little Abacus, who had been at the monitoring station during Chen Xi's announcement, had been doing what Little Abacus always did: collecting data.

  He had been recording the Arena's energy readings in real time, tracking the drain as it fluctuated in response to the crowd's reaction.

  And when the crowd's energy spiked — when thousands of cultivators simultaneously flared their Qi in shock, alarm, and outrage — the drain spiked with it.

  The boy saw the numbers. He understood what they meant. And he did something that Chen Xi had not planned for, had not calculated, and had not authorised:

  He started screaming the numbers.

  "Seven point nine percent!" Little Abacus shouted from the monitoring station, his voice cracking with the strain of projecting across a stadium.

  "The drain is at seven point nine percent! Everyone in the stands is losing Qi right now! EIGHT PERCENT! IT'S GOING UP!"

  The boy was not a cultivator of any significance. He was a fifteen-year-old chestnut vendor with a notebook and a mouth.

  Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

  But he had three years of Sword Conference attendance, and in those three years he had become a familiar face in the spectator sections — the weird kid who counted everything, who always had chestnuts, who remembered your name and your betting preferences.

  People knew him. People listened.

  "EIGHT POINT THREE PERCENT! IT JUST SPIKED! IF YOU'RE FEELING DIZZY THAT'S YOUR QI BEING DRAINED! MOVE AWAY FROM THE ARENA!"

  The crowd began to move. Not in panic — Little Abacus's voice, despite its adolescent crack, carried the specific authority of someone reciting measurements rather than opinions.

  People moved because the numbers were moving, and the boy tracking the numbers was scared, and his fear was the most convincing argument in the stadium.

  Wu Zheng, who had been sitting in the seventh row of the eastern section feeling a familiar and unwelcome tightness in his meridians, stood and walked toward the exit.

  He was alive because a physicist had done the maths and a chestnut vendor had done the shouting.

  The Arena emptied in twelve minutes. The drain rate dropped as the energy supply — the crowd themselves — removed itself from the collection radius.

  When it was over, Little Abacus was sitting on the monitoring station's stone platform, his notebook clutched to his chest, his topknot listing at forty-five degrees, his hands shaking.

  "I think," he said to Chen Xi, who had fought his way through the crowd to reach him, "I need to change careers."

  "From chestnut vendor?"

  "To whatever you are."

  Chen Xi looked at this boy — this ridiculous, brave, data-obsessed boy who had just emptied a stadium by shouting fractions — and said the most honest thing he could think of:

  "I'm a physicist. And I could use an assistant."

  Little Abacus's grin was enormous, slightly unhinged, and entirely genuine. "Do I get a notebook allowance?"

  "Yes."

  "Then I accept."