Leo Chen didn't expect to transmigrate in a Costco.

  It was the first day of summer break, and he had asked his dad to drive him to the Costco in Milford because someone on Reddit said they'd restocked the Pokemon 151 booster boxes. His dad, who understood nothing about Pokemon but everything about his son's enthusiasm, had agreed, and the two of them made the drive on a Sunday afternoon.

  The booster boxes were gone. Of course they were. The shelf where they should have been held a single pack of bicycle playing cards and a sign that said "LIMIT 2 PER MEMBER".

  Leo stared at the empty shelf for a while.

  "Want to go get us some hotdogs?" his dad asked.

  "Sure thing, Dad," Leo said. "You want the usual?"

  "Diet Coke," his dad said. "And don't skimp on the relish."

  Leo navigated to the food court and came back with two hotdogs, two sodas, and a sense of mild purpose. He scanned the aisles for his dad.

  He found him where he always found him. The motorcycle section. Or at least, where the motorcycle section used to be.

  "You know Mom would never let you get one of those, right?" Leo called out as he rounded the corner, already picturing his dad staring at the Yamaha display.

  He stopped.

  The motorcycles were gone. In their place stood rows of swords.

  They floated. Each sword hovered at chest height above its own circular display platform, rotating slowly under individual spotlights, the way a dealership would showcase a limited-edition sports car. Glossy placards listed specs in clean sans-serif font.

  Every single blade was covered in the coolest lines Leo had ever seen. Tiny geometric patterns traced across the steel in paths that folded into themselves, spiraled outward, and reconnected. Every single one of them was unmistakably a weapon designed to kill things.

  His dad stood in front of one particular sword, hands behind his back, bending over to get a closer look.

  Leo looked left. Toilet paper. He looked right. A pallet of Kirkland Signature olive oil. And in front of him was his dad admiring a sword.

  This sword was different. It was enclosed in a glass display case, separated from the rest by a length of velvet rope. The blade was three and a half feet of steel the color of Ferrari red, deep and glossy, and its formation lines burned a brighter white than anything else on display.

  The cross-guard swept back in two sharp wings that evoked the headlights of a hypercar, and the grip was wrapped in something dark and expensive looking.

  A small placard sat on the stand below it.

  La Ferrari Eclipse Tier 2 Spiritual Steel / Tier 4 Forbidden Formation Array, Foundation Establishment Compatible, Costco Item #4471882

  "Beautiful, isn't it?" his dad said, without turning around.

  "What is that?" Leo stared. Costco was selling swords. Swords that floated. Swords covered in tiny glowing lines that moved as he looked at them.

  His dad turned to him.

  "This," his dad said, "is the La Ferrari Eclipse. This is the dream, Leo. Every Foundation Establishment cultivator who has ever lived has wanted something like this."

  "Foundation Establishment," Leo whispered. He was hearing his dad say these words. His dad was talking about cultivation novel terms. Words that should have existed only in web novels on his phone were now printed on the Costco placard.

  "The blade is Tier 2 Spiritual Steel," his dad continued, "Any Foundation Establishment cultivator can lifebond with T2 material. But the formations."

  He tapped the glass lightly. "The formations are Tier 4, Leo. T4. Forbidden grade. Do you understand what that means?"

  Leo did not understand what that meant. Spiritual Qi was supposed to be fictional. Now he could see it crawling across the blade with his own two eyes.

  "That's Nascent Soul level formations," his dad said, his voice dropping the way it dropped when he was about to explain tax deductions. "Inscribed on a blade that everyday Foundation Establishment cultivators like you and me can buy and use.”

  "The formations do all the heavy lifting. You channel Foundation Establishment divine sense into this thing, and it outputs at high Gold Core. High Gold Core, Leo.."

  His dad was shaking his head in disbelief. At a sword. In a Costco.

  "Foundation Establishment," Leo said again, because his brain was stuck in a loop.

  His dad finally seemed to register that Leo was holding food.

  "Oh, is that mine?"

  He reached for the hotdog and the diet Coke, and took a large bite while still staring at the sword. A glob of relish fell on his polo shirt. He didn't notice.

  "You're going to start cultivating next year," his dad said through a mouthful of hotdog. "And you'll hit Foundation Establishment easily before college. Easily. I bet if you get into Harvard, your mom would buy you one of these as a graduation gift."

  Leo was still processing. His dad was eating a $1.50 Costco hotdog and casually discussing cultivation between bites.

  "Remember, don't tell your mom about the hotdogs. She wouldn't want to hear about us eating this stuff."

  Leo looked at the display case again. His eyes drifted down to the price tag.

  $1,199,999.97

  He choked on air.

  "It costs that much?"

  "I know, right?" His dad's face lit up. "It's such a steal. I can't believe Costco would have one on sale. Normally you'd pay a few hundred grand more. The Costco buyer must have gotten a bulk deal from the Formation Master. Member price, Leo.”

  “This is why we pay the Executive membership." He pointed his hotdog at Leo. "It pays for itself."

  "Dad." Leo looked at the price tag again to make sure he hadn't miscounted the digits. "Are you sure it's okay to spend this much money?"

  Leo didn't know how it happened. Somehow he'd been carried along by his dad's excitement, and he'd almost forgotten that they were discussing a sword.

  His dad waved a hand. "Save money, save money. You sound like your mom. Do you know how much we have saved for your high school? Your college? Your Foundation Establishment Body Refining elixirs? We're fine. We've saved enough."

  His dad took another bite of the hotdog. Chewed thoughtfully.

  "As soon as you graduate college, I'm going to buy one of these, Leo. That's my promise to myself."

  Leo looked at his dad, and despite the absurdity of everything, felt a warmth in his chest.

  "Dad, I support you. Go for it!"

  His dad beamed. Then it faded. He looked back at the sword, and something heavier settled over his expression.

  "I'd need six months to lifebond with it, though," he said quietly. "You can't just pick up a flying sword and go. Six months of dedicated meditation."

  He stared at the slowly rotating blade for a long moment.

  "There's no way the firm would let me take six months off." He sounded slightly disappointed, vaguely aware that the life he'd built that could let him afford such a sword was the same life keeping him from using it. "Maybe when I retire."

  Then his dad turned to Leo, and something shifted.

  "I know," his dad said.

  "Yes, Dad?"

  "Leo, you'll have summers off. You could lifebond with one of these the summer before you go off to college." His dad put both hands on Leo's shoulders. "And then you can tell me how it feels to fly around on one of these things."

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  "So you're telling me this will let me fly?" Leo asked.

  "Of course it will let you fly! It will let you exhibit the combat power of a Gold Core. This thing is insane, Leo. At this price, it's robbery. Costco is practically giving it away."

  Leo looked at the La Ferrari Eclipse. Floating there in its glass case between the toilet paper and the olive oil. Glowing faintly. One point two million dollars. Costco Item #4471882.

  He looked at his uneaten hotdog. The familiar concrete aisle stretching out behind him. The fluorescent lights. The distant beep of the forklift. A woman three rows over was putting a pack of paper towels onto her cart. Somewhere, a child was crying about a churro.

  He looked back at the La Ferrari Eclipse.

  "I'll try, Dad." He squeezed his hotdog a little too hard, and a line of mustard shot onto his shoe. "I'll do it for the both of us."

  ---

  That was how it happened. No truck. No dramatic last words on a hospital bed.

  One second Leo was walking through a normal Costco with normal motorcycles and normal everything, carrying two hotdogs. The next second there were flying swords, his dad was talking about Foundation Establishment, and the Prius they drove home in could fly.

  When they got home, he told his dad he was tired, went to his room, locked the door, pulled out his phone, and opened Wikipedia.

  He started with the basics. What he needed to learn before he started high school in the fall. In his old world, education rested on the three Rs: Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic. Here, students were required to master the three Arts: Martial Arts for physical cultivation, Dao Arts for formations, refining, and alchemy, and Language Arts for the proper pronunciation and application of spell techniques.

  The history articles painted a picture of a world that rhymed with his original one but didn't quite match.

  In 1492, Superior Columbus sailed the ocean blue and discovered America, a land blessed with Tier Four and Tier Five Spirit Veins that the native cultivators had left undiscovered for millennia. What followed was depressingly familiar: guns, germs, and spiritual steel.

  The two World Cultivator Wars (WW1 and WW2) mirrored his original history's conflicts, though the ideology was different. Instead of democracy versus fascism, it was the new "Nation States" banding together against the Axis of "Legacy Immortal Sects," ancient cultivation powers opposed 'universal cultivation for all'.

  At the Paris Peace Treaties after WW2, the Allies and the USCR (Union of Soviet Cultivator Republics) divided Europe in half, just as they had in Leo's original world. The Cold War began, with both superpowers racing to build cultivation augmented nuclear weapons. The "Great Atomic Qi Bomb".

  The 1980s changed everything.

  That was when the Great Catacombs War began. Leo had spent weeks reading about the conflict on the internet. The terror. The death tolls. The desperate measures.

  Earth was invaded by a hostile cultivation world, a vast realm connected to the planet through dimensional rifts. The Catacombs, as they came to be called, was an enemy cultivation realm many times larger and more powerful than Earth.

  On Earth, there were seven known realms of cultivation: Tier 1 Qi Refining, Tier 2 Foundation Establishment, Tier 3 Gold Core, Tier 4 Nascent Soul, Tier 5 Deity Transformation, Tier 6 Void Refining, Tier 7 Great Ascension.

  The problem was simple: Earth only possessed up to Tier 5 Spirit Veins. Without higher-tier resources, the highest cultivation realm achievable on Earth was Deity Transformation. Spirit Veins were the cultivator equivalent of oil wells. You needed to absorb Spiritual Qi from Spirit Veins in order to cultivate and grow more powerful.

  The more powerful your realm, the more powerful a spirit vein you needed, otherwise your cultivation would regress and you would lose your realm. Each spirit vein had a tier, corresponding to the density of Spiritual Qi it could provide and the maximum realm of cultivator it could support.

  The Catacombs had Tier 6 and Tier 7 veins. Their strongest cultivators could reach Great Ascension.

  Earth was outmatched.

  But humanity had one advantage the Catacombs lacked: the Great Atomic Qi Bombs.

  In the decades following World Cultivator War 2, both superpowers had converted many of their spirit veins into weapons of mass destruction. Tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, an arsenal capable of destroying the world multiple times over.

  When the Catacombs invaded, those weapons proved decisive.

  The MBAs of the 1990s, Leo had read with horrified fascination, calculated that for every ten Great Atomic Qi Bombs detonated, the United Cultivators of America could seize enough spirit veins from the Catacombs to manufacture fifteen new bombs.

  A profit margin of five bombs per campaign.

  The Corporate Nuking Raiders became the most profitable industry in human history.

  It was the era of barbarians at the gate, where great corporate profits were only interrupted by mushroom clouds and fallout alarms. CEOs traded spirit stone futures while their employees died of radiation sickness. Quarterly earnings were measured in megatons.

  But all good things came to an end.

  At the direct intervention of the Catacombs' Great Ascension cultivators, the United Cultivator Nations (UCN) and the Catacombs signed the "Treaty of Great Restraint" in the year 2000.

  The terms put a necessary stop to things.

  During direct conflicts between the Catacombs and the UCN, the UCN promised not to use any Great Atomic Qi Bombs. In exchange, cultivators at the Deity Transformation realm and above were prohibited from participating in the conflict, under threat of "ascending in a mushroom cloud of irradiated Qi dust."

  There was an exception to this rule for high tier spirit veins. When fighting over Tier 5 spirit veins, both sides could use Tier 5 (Deity Transformation) cultivators. Likewise for Tier 6 spirit veins both sides could use Void Refining Cultivators.

  At first glance, this seemed to disadvantage the Catacombs enormously. They were bigger, more populated, more powerful. Why would they sign away their greatest advantage?

  The answer was simple: nobody wanted to conquer irradiated wasteland.

  The Corporate Nuking Raiders had been thorough. Thousands of miles of Catacombs territory had been strip-mined and nuked into oblivion. The land was so barren and radioactive that it was projected to take until the 2030s before it became habitable again.

  The spirit veins themselves would recondense eventually. That was how spiritual geography worked. Destroy a vein, and it would reform over decades, drawing ambient Qi from the surrounding area.

  The Corporate Nuking Raiders called this "sustainable development."

  Leo would like to say that America had moved on from her profit motivated past. But at the end of the day, people cared about their bottom line.

  If you didn't earn enough dollars, you couldn't afford your spirit vein fees.

  If you couldn't afford your spirit vein fees, your cultivation would regress.

  If your cultivation regressed, your lifespan would shorten.

  In today's society, one's immortal potential was determined by income.

  And that was the part that mattered most. The part Leo kept coming back to during his research. The part that made everything click.

  Spirit Vein fees cost money. Cultivation resources cost money. Pills, elixirs, body refining materials, all of it cost money. If you couldn't earn enough, your cultivation regressed and your lifespan shortened.

  Money was immortal potential.

  Now it was 2025, and the world was optimistic again. Spirit veins in the Catacombs were recondensing. The S&P 500 posted double-digit returns every year. Countries sent expeditions back into the Catacombs. VR pods were developed to train this new generation in the art of war.

  The old generation who warned of war's horrors were dismissed as "boomers." Millennials made fun of them, claiming the only thing they knew was how nukes went boom.

  Everyone was eager for the war to resume. To finally conquer territory. To seize the Catacombs' superior resources.

  The Trend of the Times was one of hope, great profit, and immortal potential.

  During this summer break, Leo had spent his time researching everything he could. Thankfully, since he'd transmigrated into a parallel version of himself, his parents suspected nothing.

  But one thing gnawed at him constantly.

  Where was his cheat?

  Every transmigration story had one. A system. A golden finger. An old grandpa sealed inside a ring.

  Two months of research. Two months of searching for his goldfinger.

  Nothing but embarrassment and a growing sense that he might be the first transmigrator in literary history to get absolutely nothing.

  He ended up spending most of his summer in the VR pod.

  The pod was the single most convincing piece of evidence that Leo had actually transmigrated. It sat in the corner of his bedroom where his bookshelf used to be. It was his Apple VisionPod Pro, finished in the same seamless white as every other Apple product he owned

  Inside, the lid was covered in formation lines. Formations were geometric patterns etched into materials that could channel and manipulate Spiritual Qi. They were the reason this version of Earth could produce things like VR pods and flying swords.

  Somewhere along the way, businesses had figured out how to merge modern technology with cultivation, and the results were decades ahead of anything Leo's original world had managed.

  If the pod didn't exist, he probably could have convinced himself this was all a psychotic break. The swords at Costco could have been a fever dream. His dad's casual monologue about Foundation Establishment could have been heatstroke. But the futuristic pod greeted him every morning when he woke up.

  The government promoted the pods as training tools for the next generation of cultivators, which Leo figured meant there had to be some kind of opportunity buried inside. So he tried game after game after game, cycling through combat simulators and dao arts trainers, hoping to stumble onto a hidden talent.

  However, VR technology ran at ten percent realism. The pod felt like a waste of time. Controlling your avatar was less like learning to fight and more like steering a puppet through mud.

  Leo found nothing special. But he did find something memorably terrible.

  ---

  This is the stupidest game I've ever played.

  Leo pulled his consciousness out of the session and lay still in his pod, staring at the inside of the lid.

  He had just finished a round of The Great Earth Catacombs War, a game he'd found through a sketchy banner ad. The ad had promised "the most realistic combat simulation ever developed" and "a genuine experience of pre Treaty of Great Restraint warfare." There were testimonials from old veterans, actual Catacombs War boomers, praising how authentic the combat felt.

  Leo had been intrigued. He'd logged in, joined a match, and immediately understood what kind of realism they meant.

  At ten percent realism, combat using Heavy Radiation Protective Daoist Robe Enclosures was apparently an accurate representation of how the Corporate Nuking Raiders fought. The key insight being that fighting inside lead shells felt just as clunky and miserable in real life as it did in the simulation.

  When wearing a Heavy Radiation Protective Daoist Robe Enclosure, you couldn't use Spell Arts without breaching your own suit and irradiating yourself. All you could do was waddle toward the opposing lead shell and stab at it with a sharpened stick until you poked a hole.

  Then you would both lose.

  This is because if you somehow managed to crack your enemy's enclosure first, they would just reach back, flip the switch on their backpack Miniature Atomic Qi Bomb, and send everyone within fifty meters to their next life.

  Chain reactions of Miniature Atomic Qi Bombs regularly wiped out entire battlefields. Twenty minutes of miserable lead-suited poking, erased in a cascade of tiny mushroom clouds. Every match ended the same way. Someone got a hole poked in their suit, flipped their switch, and the server reset.

  Leo could see why the boomer veterans had given it five stars. The game perfectly captured the soul-crushing futility of Catacombs era warfare.

  He was still salty about the hour he'd wasted on waiting for it to download.

  He was already scanning for another ad. At least in this world, since the VR pod was government promoted, the ecosystem was relatively clean. He didn't have to worry about malware or subscription traps. Every developer wanted to be first to market, which meant a constant stream of new releases, and Leo had made it his policy to try basically everything.

  A new banner loaded at the bottom of his interface. A game he'd never seen before. Must have just launched.

  Azure Profound Continent.

  Interesting.

  Leo tapped the ad and immediately hit download.