[MA] 190. Paramount (Patreon)

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[A/N: I changed my mind about the big revelations in this chapter after thinking about the plot structure. The revelations make a lot more sense and let the story flow much better in chapter 192. Also, delaying them lets me flush out the Alliance and talents a little more and better address Liya's thinking process.

So, sorry for the change. To make up for it, this chapter is about 60% longer than usual, and the next is almost double the average length. But be advised: they are pretty dense, too.

Chapters this week: 2/3

Late chapters: 3

Next release: Saturday]

The following days passed in a tranquil cadence.

Liya would beat Feng Shen during a spar, correct his remaining mistakes and even a few regressions, then fill his mind with knowledge that cemented his understanding of his human self.

After biology came physics, as he had asked for. Then medicine to further cement both topics. It was no surprise when his high learning ability and the perfect control his mastered Path gave over his body let him experiment a little on himself and catch a few mistakes in human pre-System knowledge.

When he did, he once more asked for a smartphone to share the news, but she refused to annoy him. For whatever reason, that triggered some memory, causing him to finally realize something that should be obvious from the start.

"I didn't receive SC for attending a Call to Arms," Feng Shen suddenly said. "And there was no system message about picking a new Maiden for humankind."

Liya had worked him to the bone, but it had been a matter of time until he got comfortable enough with the training to keep at it while thinking of something else. It could even be considered evidence of his improvement.

Her reply was a smile and a sentence, "Block this stupid idiot's access to the Guardian Store, too."

| Feng Shen's access to the Guardian Store has been blocked

He frowned, then said, "Buy a G-tier white robe." He was met with silence from the system.

The boy's eyes widened slightly despite how much he had been learning to control the emotions he showed. Liya even saw a hint of fear as he understood how much control she had over him.

Then, the fear quickly turned into properly buried rage. She had chosen to beat him when he tried to buy stuff instead of painlessly blocking him from the Guardian Store. It naturally irritated him.

She smiled provocatively, which increased his anger. Then came fear again as he further explored the implications of her power over his interaction with the system. She widened her smile. He raged again.

And so on, until his fury reached an all-time high.

Liya elected to fan the flames even further.

"You know what's best?" she said sweetly. "I can only control your system interface because you did well in the tutorial. You were considered too valuable to live your life by yourself."

Liya wasn't lying. Only the mentors of third-class talents or higher control a charge's system interface.

Even a couple drow she had trained had felt they were being punished for being too good, so she guessed how much the arrogant human would hate it.

She continued, "Statistically, you're more likely to waste your time doing the bare minimum to secure a comfortable life for yourself than growing more powerful and helping fight the Void. My powers over you are in place to help you focus. And can't you see how much that helps? You even forgot about your late friend! I'm so good at it!"

As expected, he was further incensed—even more than she had expected. He stopped right at the edge of losing control, so she slowly got rid of her smile and paused to let him control himself.

All she had said was true. Talented individuals were valued for their higher-than-average potential, but it only mattered if said potential turned into something that could be put to good use. That meant forcing it to blossom by whatever means necessary.

Things like feelings were a secondary concern at best. It would be absurd to waste a valuable resource in a war for survival. The Alliance's leaders would rather have a strong Guardian that hated the establishment and worked to change it—but also had to fight to preserve their worlds or their own loved ones perished—than chance having a useless Guardian that could've been so much more.

Even if a Guardian ended up killing a former mentor for revenge for how they had been mistreated, the Alliance simply broke even; the number of people at that power level remained the same. Better yet, they got rid of an abusive mentor.

That said, abusing a charge wasn't easy. Talented individuals were valued, which also gave them an extra safety layer. Pushing someone hard wasn't the same as breaking them. For instance, Liya would be investigated if Feng Shen died on her. If they deemed her guilty of misconduct, she would get shipped to the front lines.

There was also a carrot to the stick. Depending on how well Feng Shen grew, she would gain AP and SC. Such gains would be useless if Feng Shen killed her.

In the end, mentoring a talented individual was a gamble.

Some would rather not be too forceful to avoid issues in the future—they were dealing with individuals with a lot of potential, after all. Such mentors only pushed their students enough to reach the minimum rank required by law and make their charges feel grateful, maybe even indebted. Their focus was building a relationship with someone with good prospects.

Others would rather extract all potential they could from their charges. That was the drow way. For them, if a mentor was revenge-attacked, it only meant they had done a bad job managing their charge's emotions. If they died in the attack, at least the next generation was growing stronger than the previous one. If enough mentors died, the drow simply honed their training methods.

Therefore, Liya couldn't accept having any of Feng Shen's potential go to waste. And to accomplish that, she used all the tools at her disposal, including altering his system interface.

Only a few things were beyond her on that front. She couldn't take any AP, SC, or item from his system wallet or Inventory; prevent him from buying personal upgrades; interfere with system attempts to regenerate his health, stamina, or mana; block Void-related or official Alliance messages and functions, such as a draft order; or cut his access to his Inventory after he got one.

That meant she had so many options that manually tuning everything for each student would be annoying. Fortunately, the Alliance was kind enough to let a mentor set up triggers to automate things.

Feng Shen was the tenth talent Liya trained. As much as she hadn't believed in the usefulness of talent before him—her other charges had been second-grade at best—the Triarchy had seen value in using the talent subsystem. Therefore, she had many triggers already set up, including one that came into play whenever the system determined she was teaching a charge.

The most important trigger was that her charges lost access to all system missives except direct messages from an official Alliance B-tier organization or system function. So Liya hadn't worried about Feng Shen finding out there were no new Maiden elections or about Marzia using her Maiden Title to contact him through the system's messaging service.

Feng Shen was only hers until she deemed otherwise.

It took him a long while to fully control his anger this time. But he did control it instead of blowing up and attacking her. He was getting much better at suppressing his emotions instead of getting ruled by them.

He didn't even attack her with the full power of his anger when she ordered him to spar with her again.

= - = - =

Liya observed her charge cultivating.

Two weeks had passed since she started focusing on Feng Shen's mind—three months since she had pretended to kill Marzia.

During those weeks, he had read human books and primers on biology, physics, human history, energy, human culture, human psychology, cooking, sports, G-rank martial arts, bodybuilding, and spear making—the latter after insisting it would help him differentiate a spear from his body. Liya had been worried about the psychology books, so she paid even more attention to his body language and soul to keep him from thinking of unnecessary things.

Those weeks had also been enough for him to get as good at unarmed combat as possible without getting into deeper topics or practicing in actual spars instead of the beatings he received. However, now wasn't the time to "lower" herself to fight eye-to-eye against him. The rigidity of their hierarchical relationship was still crucial for his training.

After investing so much time in making him understand that he was human, it was time to move on. Liya couldn't coddle him forever. It would be his fault if he ended up reverting to thinking he was a spear and died.

She was just waiting for him to finish this cultivation session before she—

Suddenly, he stopped focusing so much on cultivating. Ripples ran through his soul—exaggerated ones. They obviously weren't natural. Feng Shen was testing how she guessed his thoughts without reading his mind and attempting to control his soul in a novel way.

Liya regarded the attempt for an instant.

If she didn't act on it, Feng Shen would explore other possible ways she was using to read him. That would be a waste of time.

If she bit, he wouldn't use that newfound knowledge to produce more ripples where there should be none. That would only cause her to beat him to get back on track. Instead, he would focus on hiding his emotions better. That sounded much more effective.

Learning to properly fake emotional surges could come later. That would be easier to accomplish after his aura was back, letting him use it to feel the ripples in other people's souls to compare with what he was doing.

So, Liya pretended to get tricked.

The training spear was stuck not far from them. She used her domain to pull it off and throw it at his feet.

"If you have so much time to think of useless things, you have time to train harder," she said. He opened his eyes and did a poor job hiding a triumphant smile and the ripples of happiness in his soul. She didn't comment on either. "I give you one last question before I teach you how to use a spear better than the monkey you constantly try to mimic."

Liya wouldn't coddle him, but she was still worried. Giving him one last question wouldn't hurt anyone.

The speed of his question evidenced how much he had been waiting for that opportunity. "There are no Laws or Concepts related to the mind, and the mind rules over one's Path. How are those things related?"

His question greatly surprised Liya. Some things were better understood by oneself, but sometimes, asking the right question was infinitely superior to drawing half-correct or even wrong conclusions.

Of course, that wasn't entirely his credit; the Average Joe wouldn't be so confident there were no mind Laws if they journeyed the Alliance and had to deal with people illegally invading each other's minds. He was drawing from the well of knowledge he had brought from his past.

Even then, such an outstanding question usually deserved a proper explanation.

Usually.

Liya considered many things for a moment. How much she knew about the topic, her training goals, the incoming training phases, his growth until now and further projected improvements, and the challenges he would find in his far future.

He would certainly benefit from a thorough explanation about what he had asked, but was it the best she could do for him?

If he was thinking of such profound and crucial topics, he was at a crossroads in his Path. So she couldn't just give him a half-assed answer and review the topic later.

This was too important; it touched on his identity as a human instead of a spear.

Not only did he have to be adequately convinced, but not explaining things properly might make him draw the wrong conclusion and negatively affect his Path. She couldn't do that right before he started learning the spear from her. The weapon was too central in his Path, and she needed to polish it the most.

However, properly answering his question would touch on grand and valuable truths. No matter how much Liya pushed Feng Shen, that would make him quickly realize she saw him as more than a punching bag. If that happened, he would distrust and hate her less, and he had just reached a pivoting moment in learning to hide his emotions—which would be more effective if the emotions were stronger, thus, harder to hide.

Maybe even more importantly, hearing the answer to that question would make it easier for him not to see himself as a spear. In other words, he wouldn't hone his willpower as much.

And willpower was crucial for a Guardian's growth.

So the question was: how important was it for him to have all the tools he could give him to grow as much as possible?

It was paramount.

Humanity had withstood the first D-rank rift much better than the drow, but Liya had found a proverb on Earth that rang terrifyingly true: no good deed goes unpunished.

The thing was, there were just too many humans left alive. The Alliance pushed races based on their strongest Guardians, how many Guardians they had, and the overall number of members of that race. Each living individual cost the Guardian System something, even the non-Guardians. If a race wasn't powerful enough to protect themselves and justify the expenditure, it was better to push them to grow stronger, and that often meant many deaths before a balance was reached.

The True Enemy had made drow and humans suffer from a D Rift before they were ready, but only because the Alliance's rules determined rifts had to work that way. Alliance rules were in place primarily to create the elites they needed to fight the Void—or crush the races that couldn't live up to minimum standards.

Earth was definitely not ready for that. They would survive their first decade unless things took an unpredictable turn for the worse. However, things would become much more complicated after the first Standard year, around twelve Earth years.

They would need a true elite, then.

An elite might develop naturally. After all, a drow had. However, the drow had also been much fewer in numbers, so their elite hadn't needed to be as powerful.

Now, Liya had the opportunity to push Feng Shen into becoming the elite Earth needed. Even if she messed up badly and he died, it wouldn't be terrible for humankind. That would push them into trying harder to grow.

In other words, by risking his life, humankind would be as safe as possible after it reached the twelve-year mark in the Alliance.

Personally, while Liya empathized with humankind for suffering part of what the drow had, they weren't drow. She only cared for humans like the average human might care for an ugly abandoned dog. They wished the animal the best, but most wouldn't go out of their way to help.

However, when a charge was at a crucial crossroads of their development, it was standard drow procedure to consider their wishes even if they couldn't be consulted.

Would Feng Shen care about humankind's demise?

He had risked his life for those people before, so he was likely to care. Liya had also noticed his Path was highly focused on self-improvement. She didn't think he was someone who would choose safety over becoming the best he could, even if there was a risk.

Therefore, she decided she wouldn't answer his question right now.

She would have to be smart about it, though. She still needed him to trust her to some degree so their training could progress smoothly. She had let him ask a question, and going back on her word without a good reason might bring dire consequences.

Liya took all emotion from her voice and talked absolutely seriously to him for the first time. "Most of what I taught you is inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. However, the answer to that question touches on profound truths. You've improved slightly but haven't shown you're worthy of hearing those things yet.

"Instead of answering, I can let you ask two other questions. Alternatively, I could answer the one you asked if you do well enough in the next training phase and swear not to divulge the answer. If you choose to wait but then decide you don't want to know any longer, I shall give you four questions instead."

By giving him a choice, she treated him like something other than an object for the first time. She also acknowledged his growth, which made it more likely for him to choose to wait for the better answer that he wasn't yet ready for. Lastly, she was directly introducing meritocracy in their relationship, a significant shift that would boost his confidence even further.

That should make her 'no' feel less like going back on her words.

Feng Shen frowned at her words, thought deeply for a few seconds, got angrier, controlled said anger, then said, "You better not go back on your word again." He picked up the spear she had thrown and stood up. "Let's get this over with."

That had gone as well as it could. He was giving her a last chance despite his irritation. His improvements in not letting his emotions control him were immense.

Unfortunately, that wouldn't be enough.

She knew he was at a crossroads on his Path, so any stimulus might drive him the wrong way. Now, Liya saw signs of his soul changing, which meant his mind also was.

Much more hatred and his Path might get permanently tainted, especially if he didn't understand why his mind had to lord over his Path and his very self.

That was another risk, yet also an excellent growth opportunity. If he learned to better control his emotions instead of just suppressing them as he usually did, he might safely use his domain at C-rank before mastering a Law.

Liya decided that was also a risk worth taking.

She was gambling a lot, and regardless of whether Feng Shen benefited as much as possible in the end, she decided it had been enough. It was relatively safe to wait to tell him the truth about Marzia and the training after they finished with the spear, but that was the deadline.

After it was done, she would reveal everything.

Liya reverted her voice to a tone and volume he hated, then slightly tuned it down to avoid pushing him over the edge. "You keep treating me like garbage," she spat, sounding almost offended.

It was the first time he presented herself as someone with feelings instead of a monster. Victimizing herself would make him angrier because she deserved it if she had killed Marzia, but it would also make him wonder. Breaking the circle and giving him pause was important.

She continued, "I'm starting to think throwing the months I spent training you away wouldn't be so terrible if it meant I'm justified in killing you, after all."

That was a bit of crude reverse psychology. Usually, he hated himself for doing good because it pleased her. However, doing his best from now on would go against her stated wishes of having a reason to kill him. That sort of petty revenge would help him deal with the suppressed anger by giving it an out. It would break the self-feeding spiral. Directly stating she needed justification to kill him would also decrease the pressure on him.

And finally, she used his pride against him. "Now, stand while holding your spear—if you can."

Shen obeyed in record time.

Liya smiled only slightly and started their training.

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