Word traveled fast in District 7.
Not about Su Xuan — nobody had seen anything they could fully explain, and people had a tendency to file unexplainable things in the drawer labeled probably nothing and leave them there. What they had seen was Su Ming's three skeletons, which were already a source of discussion, and the fact that a party of two had cleared an F-rank dungeon without taking a single hit on either member.
By the next morning, it was a conversation.
"The Undead Summoner kid from Block 14?"
"He cleared the whole thing. Three summons, no combat from him personally. Just stood there."
"F-rank, though. That's not—"
"He's already Level 11. F-rank should have given him maybe three, four levels. He's at eleven."
"That's not possible."
"The Board doesn't lie. Check it yourself."
Su Xuan sat in the corner of the district's Player Hub — a converted café that served bad coffee and good information — and listened to this conversation without appearing to. He was on his third cup of tea, which was adequate, and his fourth hour of passive EXP accumulation, which was excellent.
[ BINDING SYNC ]
Su Ming: Level 12 | EXP/sec: +1
Su Xuan: Level 37 | EXP/sec: +10
Demon God: Level 19 | Death Sovereign: Level 24
Level 37. He had not killed anything since Kael. He had not entered a dungeon today. He had sat in a café, drunk tea, and leveled up thirty-seven times purely from his brother's passive experience gain.
The System, he thought, was broken in his favor in a deeply satisfying way.
Across the café, the conversation about Su Ming continued. Su Xuan monitored it with half his attention and used the other half to think about the information Ling Xue had given him at the dungeon gate.
Shadow Sovereign. SSS-rank hidden class. She had said there were no others in the top fifty hidden class list.
The top fifty hidden class list was a System database that ranked hidden classes by rarity and base power potential. She was on it. He was, presumably, not — or if he was, the System had listed him as something that didn't have a name yet, which suggested he was either so rare the System hadn't finished categorizing him or so powerful the System was being deliberately indirect about it.
He had a feeling it was the latter.
He also had the feeling that Ling Xue had told him about her own class not because she was careless, but because she had wanted him to offer information in return. She had been testing what kind of person he was. Whether he would posture, deflect, or be honest.
He had been honest.
She had walked away apparently satisfied.
He wondered what she was doing right now.
Then the café door opened and Su Ming walked in, smelling faintly of dungeon and looking extremely pleased with himself.
"Three dungeons," he said, dropping into the seat across from Su Xuan. "I did three this morning."
"I know," Su Xuan said. "I leveled up four times while you were gone."
Su Ming paused in the act of picking up Su Xuan's abandoned tea. "...You leveled up. Without being there."
"The Binding is passive."
"Right." Su Ming set the tea down without drinking it, which told Su Xuan he was genuinely thinking rather than performing casualness. "How far ahead of me are you?"
"Reasonably."
"Xuan."
"Does it matter?"
"I'm curious."
"You're always curious. It never ends well for your peace of mind." Su Xuan reached across the table and moved his tea out of range. "How are the summons developing?"
Su Ming accepted the subject change with the resigned grace of someone who had learned not to push certain walls. "Better than last time," he said, and there it was — the faint crack in the performance, the last time that he hadn't meant to say, and both of them noticed it, and neither acknowledged it. "The upgrade path is faster than I expected. I should have my first A-rank summon within the week."
"Good."
"Everyone still thinks it's a joke class."
"Let them."
"Oh, I am." Su Ming smiled — the real one. "I absolutely am." He glanced around the café, clocked the ongoing conversation about him in the corner, and his smile widened by approximately three percent. "I heard someone from the Iron Vanguard guild was asking about me this morning."
Iron Vanguard. Su Xuan knew the name from the novel. A mid-tier guild, District 7's strongest for the first year, utterly irrelevant by year two when the real players emerged. They had, in the original story, approached Su Ming with a recruiting pitch that he had politely declined and they had then responded to by trying to sabotage his dungeon runs.
"What did you tell them?" Su Xuan asked.
"Nothing yet. They haven't asked me directly." Su Ming leaned back in his chair. "They're going to approach me tomorrow, probably. They'll offer a guild slot, standard conditions. I'll say no and they'll spend three weeks deciding whether to be sore about it."
"And then they'll be sore about it."
"Inevitably." He shrugged. "That's fine. I have plans that don't require a guild."
Su Xuan looked at him steadily. "When they're sore about it," he said, "tell me first."
Su Ming raised an eyebrow. "You're going to do something about it?"
"Not immediately. But I'd like to know in advance."
"...You're going to do something about it."
"I'm going to be informed about it," Su Xuan said. "Those are different things."
They were not, meaningfully, different things. Su Ming seemed to recognize this but chose to interpret it generously, because he was that kind of person. He nodded. "Okay."
"Okay," Su Xuan agreed, and went back to his tea.