Lin Yu couldn't sleep.
He lay on his cot in the temple's converted storage room, staring at the ceiling, running the numbers. The Enlightened Path had forty-some members. Average karma in the +50s. Their leader pushing +76. They'd been operating for maybe a month, based on what Chen had said about Taichung.
That was too fast.
Normal karma accumulation, the kind Weilin had built over weeks of constant healing, was slow. Grinding. You helped someone, you got a point or two. Maybe three for something significant. Weilin's +82 represented thousands of individual acts of mercy, each one costing her energy, focus, time. It was real in the way that calluses were real, built up through friction against the world.
These people had found a shortcut.
He got up at dawn and went back to the cult's camp.
Soul sight active, he settled into a spot across the street where he could watch without being obvious. A food vendor had set up nearby, which gave him an excuse to linger. He bought a scallion pancake he didn't want and forced himself to eat it slowly.
The morning healing session started at seven. Three cult healers, a man and two women with minor restoration fragments, took positions in the central tent. Civilians with injuries lined up. The healers worked steadily, green and pale blue light flowing from their hands.
But here's what Lin Yu noticed.
The other cult members didn't leave. They stayed. Thirty-seven non-healers arranged themselves in a loose circle around the healing tent, some sitting, some standing, all within about fifteen meters of the action. They weren't doing anything. A few pretended to organize supplies. Others meditated. One woman was literally just sitting in a folding chair, eyes closed, hands in her lap.
And their karma auras were brightening.
Lin Yu watched a young man at the edge of the circle. +47 Mercy when the session started. By the time the first patient was healed, +47.3. Second patient, +47.5. He wasn't healing anyone. He wasn't even looking at the patients. He was reading something on a salvaged tablet.
But the system was giving him credit anyway.
Proximity karma.
Lin Yu felt something cold settle in his chest. He watched for another hour to be sure. The pattern was consistent. Every healing act performed by the three active healers generated karma not just for themselves but for everyone in a roughly fifteen-meter radius. The amount was tiny, fractions of a point, but with dozens of patients cycling through every hour and thirty-seven passive recipients soaking up the spillover, it added up.
Fast.
He did the math in his head. Assume each healing generates 0.1 proximity karma for nearby Bearers. Twenty patients per hour, three healers working simultaneously. That's six karma points per hour for doing absolutely nothing. Over a sixteen-hour operating day, roughly a hundred points. Scale that across weeks.
That's how you build a cult of people in the +50s in a month. You don't even need them to believe. You just need them to stand in the right place.
But they did believe. That was the sick part. The proximity karma created a feedback loop. You join the cult feeling skeptical. You stand near some healers for a few days. Your karma climbs. The system sends you notifications.
[Mercy karma increased -- +0.1]
[Mercy karma increased -- +0.1]
[Mercy karma increased -- +0.1]
Dozens of them, every day. And you start to think, maybe I am becoming better. Maybe the system sees something in me. Maybe Ascension really is divine.
The system was radicalizing them with positive reinforcement.
Lin Yu found a quiet corner of the temple and sat there for a while, thinking about what kind of mind would design something like this. Not a bug. A feature. A deliberate mechanic built into the karma system that rewarded physical proximity to good deeds, regardless of participation.
Why?
Because whoever, or whatever, built the system wanted maximum Ascension throughput. It wasn't trying to make people good. It was trying to make people ascend. Goodness was just the lubricant.
He thought about the mythology. The old stories of heaven recruiting mortals, celestial bureaucracies always hungry for new staff. In the Journey to the West, enlightenment was framed as escape from suffering, but the celestial hierarchy that granted it was just another power structure. The gods needed believers. The system needed Bearers.
Production quotas.
He found Weilin in the herb garden behind the temple, the small patch of earth she'd coaxed back to life with fragments of her healing power. She was sitting on the low stone wall, not gardening, just sitting. Looking at her hands.
"I figured out how they do it," he said, and explained.
She listened without interrupting. When he finished, she was quiet for a long time.
"Proximity karma," she repeated.
"The system awards fractional mercy points to anyone near a healing event. You don't have to do anything. Just be there."
"And my karma." Her voice was very careful, very controlled. "When I heal in the clinic. There are always people around. Other Bearers. Volunteers."
"Some of your gains might be proximity bonuses from your own mass healings, reflected back. I don't know how much. Maybe a little. Maybe more than a little."
"So my +82 Mercy." She turned her hands over, examining her palms like she might find the answer written there. "How much of it is mine?"
He didn't have an answer. She knew that. She asked anyway.
They sat together in the garden, surrounded by the green things she'd grown, and the silence between them was heavy with a question neither could resolve. If the system inflated your virtue automatically, was the virtue still real? Did it matter? The shoulder was fixed either way. The soup was warm either way.
But Ascension wasn't soup. Ascension was dissolution. And if you crossed the threshold partly on karma you didn't earn, you'd dissolve just the same.
A rustle from the garden gate. Fang Qiu stepped through, materializing out of the shadows the way she always did, like she'd been standing there for hours and only now decided to be seen.
"Now you're asking the right questions," she said.
Lin Yu didn't bother asking how long she'd been listening. "What do the Reapers know about this?"
"Everything you just figured out, plus about six months of additional data." She settled onto the wall next to Weilin with the ease of someone sitting down at a cafe. "The Reapers have been trying to exploit the same system in reverse. Karma draining. Stand near enough to someone committing violence and absorb the negative spillover."
"Does it work?"
"Poorly." She pulled a leaf off a nearby plant, twirled it between her fingers. "Here's the fun part. The system has a directional bias. Positive karma spreads easily, wide radius, low threshold. Negative karma barely spreads at all. You have to actively participate in the harmful act to get meaningful negative points. Proximity gives you almost nothing."
"The system wants people good," Weilin said quietly.
"The system wants people ascending," Fang Qiu corrected. "And positive karma is the faster path. Being evil takes real effort. Being good just takes showing up." She let the leaf fall. "Whoever built this thing designed the easiest on-ramp possible to Ascension. The question is why. What happens when enough people cross the threshold?"
Nobody answered.
Because the answer might already be playing out. Lin Yu thought about the cult leader's aura, that calm golden glow of someone walking willingly toward dissolution. She wasn't afraid. She was eager.
Forty-something members. Average +50s. Three of them already showing the early golden threads. In another month, maybe two, they'd start ascending. Voluntarily. Joyfully.
And if the cult was operating in Taichung, Kaohsiung, and Taipei simultaneously, that meant dozens of potential Ascension events. Hundreds, if there were chapters in other countries.
Fang Qiu stood, brushing dirt from her pants. "Oh, one more thing. They're planning a mass healing event tomorrow. Public. Every Bearer in Taipei is invited. The flyers went up an hour ago."
Weilin's head came up.
"Every Bearer who participates will get a karma bump. The healers especially." Fang Qiu looked at Weilin with something that might have been sympathy, or might have been curiosity. "At your current level, proximity karma from an event that size could push you past +90 in a single afternoon."
She left through the garden gate, leaving Lin Yu and Weilin alone with the growing things and the sound of the city's broken heartbeat.
Weilin stared at the gate where Fang Qiu had disappeared.
"There will be hundreds of injured people there," she said. "Real people. Really suffering."
"I know."
"And I'm supposed to just not help."
It wasn't a question. But it wasn't a statement either. It hung in the air between them, unfinished, waiting for something neither of them was ready to give it.
---
Thanks for reading\! If you're enjoying the story, please add it to your library and vote with Power Stones. New chapter every day. The karma system gets even wilder from here.