Shen didn't see Alicia for the rest of the day. When the bell rang the following morning, she was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt in the entrance hall.

"Good morning," he said.

She avoided his eyes. "Morning."

He opened the door to find a man in black there. "Mister Feng Shen, Miss Alicia Winter," he nodded to them. "Will you be training today?"

"I will," Alicia said.

Shen nodded. "Me too. Give me a minute."

He clad himself in armor and brought his spears and backpack with him. He didn't trust the place's security.

The trip to the training center was uncomfortable.

Shen and Alicia kept silent most of the time, primarily because of her. When they talked, it was awkward and mechanical. Neither of them knew how to act after what had happened the previous day.

The training center was in Washington DC, but not in the urban area. It was a military base surrounded by tall walls and towers. It looked like a prison.

The SUV went through three different checkpoints—one protected by tanks and mounted machine guns—to finally reach a common-looking white utilitarian building in the center. The big square building was protected by more soldiers, password pads, keys, and verbal passwords. The soldier leading Shen and Alicia dealt with everything until they reached an elevator, where another soldier was waiting for them.

"I'll take the stairs," Shen said.

The soldiers froze for a moment, unsure of what to do. "There are no stairs, sir," one of them said.

"Of course, there are stairs," Shen countered. "It would be stupid for everyone to be buried under the earth in case of a power outage. Find out where they are, or I'll leave."

One hour later, they acknowledged the existence of other access points but refused to divulge them.

He took it for what it was; posturing. After getting his goodwill, the US wanted him to understand he didn't have free reign in the country. That place didn't belong to him; he was just another person.

Well, they were coming from the wrong premise; they didn't have something he truly wanted to make him submit. He wished to join the training mainly to better coordinate with other people in chaotic situations, not because he needed it. Even his desire to learn to scout wasn't critical for his plans. He wouldn't make himself vulnerable, as in entering an elevator, just for that.

Shen rode the SUV out of the military base without Alicia, who stayed behind.

With the training out of the way, Shen had one month to do whatever he wanted until the trip to Italy.

The English teacher visited him the following day, then once a day in the next weeks. Elsa Brown was an old lady with a strict teaching method.

Her method was thrown out of the window on the second day in favor of just pushing things into Shen's mind as quickly as possible.

Shen learned too fast. His D-rank upgrade plus his Rising Star bonus gave him an 8.8 learning ability score, and the human average was 1.02, so he learned almost nine times as fast as anyone. Having a D-rank mind let him think of multiple things simultaneously, which also assisted.

One week later, Shen talked like an infant. An extra week after that, he had no trouble holding conversations speaking English or writing posts on his social media accounts. He could also figure out what he didn't know by asking the right questions on a search engine. More importantly, after he understood the grammatical basis of the English language, he became able to learn some of it on his own just by reading and memorizing stuff online.

He stopped the classes then, as that was all he needed.

During those two weeks, Shen also cultivated and meditated. He engaged in a weird training of looking at women showing a lot of skin online to identify his reactions and find ways to keep his rationality when exposed to sexual situations.

That led him to find a particular group of people that claimed it was possible to get addicted to porn. Though Shen hadn't gone that far in his "research," a quick test showed that yes, he had been anticipating the time of the day when he looked at sexy pictures. He significantly decreased the exposure then.

He also trained his spear, and thanks to the internet, he got access to information that let him improve his Concepts slightly. He researched everything from modern martial arts to electrical engineering.

That was a strange manner of improvement. Shen was used to connecting to the very Laws of Reality and drinking from them. However, now he was instead drawing knowledge from other people's understanding of Reality and internalizing it to progress little by little. He didn't connect to the Concepts as he had done in the tutorial, and the progress was much slower.

That showed how outstanding the tutorial's magic formation that improved his Concept Intuition had been.

One of the most important things Shen did was research Earth's recent past. He looked into how the world had worked before the Alliance and how it was working now. He combed through forums and social media looking for irregularities. He tried to understand the most he could in the least amount of time possible.

Last but not least, he talked to other Pioneers online. Most of them shared their worry about the future of the human race. They needed one hundred million Guardians to survive whatever happened in one year, but the way the world was going, they might not even have that many humans by then, Guardians or not.

Another atomic bomb had been used in Europe, in France this time. The world was in complete chaos, and people wondered when Russia, China, or the US would end it for good with their arsenals.

So a kind of Pioneer league was forming, swearing to protect the world from itself. They were too weak to matter at the moment, but they agreed they wanted their Maiden, one of them, who they had chosen, to survive. Shen agreed and incentivized it. He never outright said he would go to Italy to protect Marzia, but he insisted it would be a good idea for as many people as possible to go.

Even that suggestion might put him in danger, as people could figure out his next actions from that. Yet, as he had said, it was important for him to have a Maiden who wouldn't sanction his Title. He needed to risk it to give her a better chance.

Time passed between cultivation sessions, training, research, and networking.

Twenty days after Shen left Alicia in the training facility, he received two visits.

The first was from Alicia herself. She said nothing when he opened the door—which had been fixed for free—and entered the house. She was wearing her usual jeans and T-shirt, but there was something different in her. Shen suppressed a frown as he looked at her walking and realized it was her posture and way of walking.

Alicia felt lighter.

When she arrived in the middle of the entrance hall, she put her hands behind her back, smiled, and said, "Thank you."

"Huh?" Shen asked.

"I'm seeing a therapist. I only saw her three times until now, but it's been great. So, thank you for suggesting I seek one."

Shen smiled slightly. "You're welcome." He didn't care much for her absence; he had gotten used to it in the tutorial. He also didn't care if she wanted to stay away from him; they were friends, not master and servant. "How is the training going?"

"It's tiring as fuck," she said, throwing herself at a sofa. "Can you believe—"

The ringing of the bell interrupted her. She gave Shen a curious look, as if asking him who was there, and he shrugged before going to the door.

A soldier was waiting on the other side. Shen had checked how to tell a military personnel's rank by their uniform and could tell the chubby man was a Captain.

"Mister Feng Shen," the Captain said. "General MacArthur asked me to bring you to a meeting to discuss the operation you asked him about."

Shen nodded. He had searched the price of passages to Europe online, only to find out there were none. He had also researched human economics a bit and started wondering where the petrol and manufactured goods were coming from. Almost all production lines seemed to be broken, yet the US was functioning just fine.

Something was clearly wrong. Shen guessed it was a front put up by the government that would crumble soon enough, but he couldn't understand how they were managing that.

Anyway, Shen was already wearing armor and asked for a second as he went to get his things in his bedroom. "Are you coming?" he asked Alicia.

"Can I?" she asked, looking at the Captain instead of Shen.

"I'll need to ask—" the man started, but Shen interrupted him.

"Yes," Shen said. "Let's go."

He hadn't cared about the attempt to establish authority over him in the training facility, but he cared about this trip to Italy to protect Marzia. If Alicia wanted to be a part of it, she would—even if he had to run all the way there with her on his back.

"What is this about?" Alicia asked as she climbed down the stairs with Shen. The Captain had taken the elevator.

"I'm going to Italy to protect Marzia," Shen explained. "I guessed the US will want to go there and do something about her. Perhaps protect her, perhaps kill her. I asked for a ride, whatever their plans may be."

"Kill her?" Alicia asked, surprised.

Shen explained things to her. The Captain had been secretive in the way he had talked to Shen in the apartment, but Shen didn't much care about it. Only the naive or the idiots would think one of the strongest nations in the world would remain indifferent to the Maiden's arrival. Her ability to judge people was too important.

"After making sure Marzia is safe, I'll visit India," Shen said. "I need to find Sai. Then I'll see how to go about finding my clan's ancestral ground."

He had rested enough; he was itching for doing something more adventurous than isolated training.

"I'm required by law to stay in the training facility for the next five months..." Alicia said. "Though you're saying shit will hit the fan by the end of this month, huh?"

"That's my best guess," Shen confirmed. "I took a look at social media pages and accounts from the months before the Alliance arrived. Something is missing nowadays. Guess what?"

"No fucking idea."

"Conspiracy theories," he revealed, and Alicia didn't hide her surprise. "Nowadays, we get some light conspiracy theories that might as well be true, like Crusaders being in top positions in the government. But no one even suggested that the US created the Sorcerer King and other similar people and organizations to legitimize martial law. It's not likely, but it is a possibility.

"I searched for it and found nothing. Not even a single crazy dude screaming about it. But I did find an absence of controversial political commentators. Sometimes even finding mentions to them was hard. Some were completely erased from the internet, and there's so much going on everywhere that it's easy to make people not pay attention to that."

Alicia was frowning when they reached the ground floor. The soldier was waiting for them and led them to a JLTV. It was being escorted by five others.

"I also research a little about information war," Shen continued, uncaring about the driver and the soldier in the passenger seat. "The best way to deal with conspiracy theories that might be true is to discredit the messengers. But when too many people say the same thing, that becomes hard to do. So they made these people disappear. The more I researched, the most I became assured of that." He gave her a slight smile. "In a society where public opinion matters so much like a democracy, making people disappear isn't a great idea. However, the end of the US as you know it is near, and when that happens, public opinion won't matter so much."

"You're talking about a coup," Alicia said.

"Something like that," Shen confirmed. "There are other signs. The most important is the Guardians. They are the most critical resource at the moment, as they will decide the future of the entire world.

"Rebellious Guardians are killed or imprisoned. All other Guardians are given incentives to be pro-government. You're being paid to be trained; I was given free rein to do whatever I want. And the military is both learning how to kill Guardians better and training their Guardians on how to do battle, I'm sure.

"I'm even willing to bet most of the training you received on emergency situations was about how to better integrate with a military operation."

Alicia bit her lower lip and nodded. "There were many classes about command structure and communication."

Shen smiled slightly. "I guess that's why they didn't care about accommodating my misgivings with the elevator. They would rather I don't know how your military actually functions. I just don't understand why they invited me in the first place."

"Maybe they didn't think you would accept?" Alicia suggested.

"Perhaps," Shen conceded. "Or perhaps the General was putting up a show for the President, whom he plans to betray." The soldiers cleared got tense when he said that. "Or even they were both putting a show for someone else." He shrugged. "Either way, I'm done with this country."

"What do you mean?" Alicia asked, tensing.

"I can't trust your leaders, so I can't trust they'll respect the special status they gave me. I must leave." She smiled at her. "You're welcome to come with me, of course. More than welcome. I would love to have you with me, my dear friend."

She relaxed a little. "Where are you going to live? India? China?"

Shen shook his head. "I'm not sure I'll settle down on Earth at all. I don't think Rising Stars are supposed to stay in their worlds. I need to gain AP to make my Title worth it, and I won't earn any AP here unless the rifts are better than the tutorial made them sound like."

Alicia frowned. "That's... a lot to think about."

He nodded. "Take as long as you want to give me an answer. I like your presence, and I would appreciate it for as long as you want to stay beside me."

She nodded back and frowned deeper while thinking of everything.

They kept silent for the rest of the trip.