LATTICE COMPANIONAdaptation threshold reached. Your physical baseline has been updated: 55%. Four this week, Rook! Whatever you're doing, keep doing it.
Saturday, 6:51 AM. Owen read it twice in the grey light and then put the phone face down on his chest, like it might get away.
Fifty-five.
Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. Four points in six days, and not one of them had come from the game. They'd come from a track behind the high school, eleven pushups a night, a liter of salt water, and going to bed when the house told him to. In his first life his ceiling had been fifty-three. In this one, his ceiling kept turning out to be a floor.
Sixty-five by the end of next week. He could feel it coming like a song you know on shuffle. He lay there being smug about it for about forty seconds. Then he heard his father on the stairs, saying "Pill. Pill. Pill," in a fake-cheerful voice, like a man trying to train a dog, except the dog was also him.
Breakfast was oatmeal, because breakfast was oatmeal now. Mom had put the pill organizer next to Dad's coffee mug, so he couldn't drink one without seeing the other. Dad opened SAT AM with his thumbnail and tipped two pills into his palm. One white, one pink.
"The pink one's the cholesterol," Maddie said.
"The white one's the cholesterol," Mom said.
"Then what's the pink one?"
"Blood pressure."
"It should be red," Maddie said. "For blood."
"I'll write to the company," said Dad, and swallowed both with a mouthful of oatmeal, and made a face. "It's like taking a vitamin, except the vitamin is a man telling you you're old."
"You're not old," Mom said. "You're forty-four with a fasting glucose of a hundred and twelve."
She put the cuff on his arm. He sat still and let it squeeze him, staring at the ceiling like a man being knighted. The machine beeped.
"One thirty-eight over eighty-six," Mom read.
Dad turned to Owen with real hope on his face. "Is that good?"
"It's better," Owen said.
"Everybody in this house says better. Nobody says good."
"Good's like one-twenty," Owen said. "You'll get there."
His father pointed his spoon at him. "That," he said to Mom. "That's the thing. How does he know that?"
"He reads," Mom said, and gave Owen a look over her coffee that said we'll talk about you later, and also, somewhere under that, thank you.
The track was cold and wet and almost empty. Dad walked. Owen ran two miles, the second run of the week, and Marguerite was there in her purple windbreaker, doing laps in the other direction like she'd been programmed into the scenery.
"Second day?" she asked, the third time she passed him.
"Second day."
"Good. Wednesday or Thursday next. Not tomorrow." She pointed at his legs without slowing down. "Those are new. Treat them like a rental."
"Yes ma'am."
His father, two lanes over, was trying very hard to look like a man who wasn't racing a seventy-three-year-old, and losing. He finished his fourth lap pink in the face but breathing fine. "She's not even sweating," he said. "Is she a robot?"
"She's a PE teacher."
"Same thing."
Owen logged in at 10:00 on the dot.
[SYNC 55% (base) + 3% (Clear Draft, 3h 58m) + 2% (Primed) = 60%]
He stood in Harrowgate square in the morning light and let the number sit there. Sixty, before he'd done anything. A week ago sixty had been a peak he had to fight his way up to in the dark on a ridge. Now it was where he started.
The Exchange first.
He had a hundred and twenty-seven Copper Bells in his bag. In his first life, week three was the week he'd lost everything: the zone chat chanting a silver, a silver, him buying three hundred at thirty-eight copper, and then the patch. Drop nerf. Cairnfolk vendors stocking bells at two copper, unlimited. The price had gone through the floor so fast it left a hole.
Tuesday or Wednesday. He was pretty sure it was Tuesday.
Which meant you sold on Saturday. You sold all of it on Saturday, because the rule in his notebook said NEVER AFTER WEEK 2 MONDAY, and it was week three, and he'd been greedy for five extra days already. He'd ridden it. Riding was over.
He walked up to the board.
HARROWGATE EXCHANGE — Copper BellLast sale: 38c · 24h high: 41c · 24h volume: 14,206
Top buy orders: 38c ×60 (Lattebear) · 37c ×400 · 35c ×1,100
Lattebear. Lattebear had been buying bells since Day 2. Owen had never met him and felt a very specific pity for him, the kind you feel for the guy in a horror movie who goes down to the basement to check the noise.
He filled Lattebear's order first. Sixty bells, thirty-eight copper each.
Then he listed the other sixty-seven at forty-two, just over the market, and went to stand by the fountain to see what would happen, like a guy who'd left his bike unlocked on purpose.
It took four minutes.
HARROWGATE EXCHANGE — SettledCopper Bell ×60 @ 38c · Copper Bell ×67 @ 42c
Gross: 50s 94c · Exchange fee (2%): −1s 02c
Net: +49s 92c
Forty-nine silver and ninety-two copper. For bells he'd bought for under three copper each, from players who thought they were selling junk to the rat guy.
He stood there and felt something he hadn't expected, which was a little sick. Somebody had just bought sixty-seven bells at forty-two copper. Somebody was going to wake up on Tuesday and find out what Owen had found out once: that the world doesn't care how sure you are.
Theo logged in at 10:20, from bed, at fifty-one.
"Fifty-one," he said, standing in the square in his Elementalist robe with a little ice crystal spinning over one shoulder. He'd gone Rime. He'd listened. "I went to bed at ten. On a Friday. My mom took my temperature." He looked Owen over. "You look weird. You look like you robbed a bank."
"I sold the bells."
"All of them?"
"All of them."
Theo opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened the zone chat instead and turned the window so Owen could see it.
[Zone] ghostbread: someone just dumped like 120 bells at the exchange
[Zone] Thraxxis: the rat guy sold??
[Zone] VelvetAnvil: the rat guy is a coward. 1 SILVER BY TUESDAY
"You're the rat guy," Theo said. "Do you want me to issue a statement?"
"No."
"I have one ready."
"Theo."
"'Rook is unavailable for—'"
"Theo."
They spent the morning on the ridge in daylight, on wolves, and one croft quest about a missing ram that turned out to be standing on the roof of the croft the whole time, which Theo said was the best moment in video game history.
Owen had one goal, and it wasn't XP. Every wolf, the same three beats: step, cut, pivot. Every time, the same gold text.
[Threefold Step — Imprecise (motion)]
His sync was high enough. His timing was inside the window. It was the pivot, where Odran's form wanted his hips to turn all the way around his planted foot and his real hips, lying in a bed outside Tacoma, said absolutely not, we sit in chemistry for fifty minutes a day.
Seventy-one on Tuesday. Seventy-four. Seventy-nine. Eighty-one last night.
At 1:40, on the fourth wolf of a pack, he went into the step, and his number was sitting at sixty-three, the highest it had ever been, the flow buzzing up through the middle of him like the moment a car engine catches. He felt the pivot go further than it ever had. Not all the way. But further.
[Pivot: 83° / 90°]
[SYNC 63% (Flow +3)]
Theo, who'd been chewing up the wolf's flank with frost bolts, said, "Was that it? Did you do it? Your face is doing a thing."
"Eighty-three."
"Out of what?"
"Ninety."
Theo did the math out loud, which he always did, because he was a Theo. "So you're ninety-two percent of a spin."
"I'm ninety-two percent of a spin."
"That's an A-minus, dude. That's better than anything I've ever gotten in my life."
The wolf died. Owen hit fourteen two minutes later, on the next one.
ROOK — Level 14 Vanguard (unclassed)HP 350/350 | Stamina 290/290 | Mana 108/108
STR 13 | AGI 30 | END 30 | FOC 13 | SPI 4 (+1)
SYNC 63% (Flow) — dodge window 126 ms — input lag ~111 ms
Form tolerance: ±66 ms · Crit 5%
Class skill points: 5 (banked)
Coin: 61s 08c
Two AGI, two END, one FOC, same as always. Sixty-one silver, the most he'd ever had this early in either life. Peak sixty-three. Two more points to sixty-five.
This chapter reached you through copying from NovelPhoenix without permission. The author's publication there supports the person who wrote it.
Then the reminder chimed, Stand-up time, Rook!, and Mom's contract said lunch with a person, so he took the headset off and went downstairs to eat a turkey sandwich across from his sister, who had a list.
"I'm going to need a chair," Maddie said.
She had a list on her phone and her elbows on the table, which was against the rules, but Mom was at the store and Dad was in the garage, so nobody was there to enforce the elbows. She looked like a twelve-year-old running a board meeting.
"You have a chair."
"I have a desk chair. I need a diving chair." She scrolled. "The Lattice manual says page fourteen, don't dive in a loft bed, because if you get an emergency disconnect you might sit up fast and fall off. I have a loft bed."
Owen had forgotten her room had a loft bed, with the desk under it and paper stars hanging off the rail. In his first life, by the time he'd thought about her room again, she wasn't living in it.
"So you need a recliner."
"I need a zero-gravity lounger," Maddie said, with great dignity. "It's like seventy-nine dollars at the hardware store. It folds up. Lena's brother has one. He says it's the best thing he ever bought, and he bought a motorcycle."
"Lena's brother crashed the motorcycle."
"Which is why he likes the chair." She went down the list. "Chair. Headset. Mom says she and Dad will pay half of a headset if I find a used one, because new ones are nine hundred dollars, which, quote, is a mortgage payment, unquote. So I need four hundred and fifty dollars, and half of that is two hundred and twenty-five. And I have"—she checked a different app, very fast—"thirty-one."
"Thirty-one dollars."
"And a gift card for the movie theater."
She looked at him with her face set, ready to be told no and ready to argue about it, because she'd spent two weeks watching her brother come downstairs looking like he'd just been somewhere amazing.
He had six hundred and twelve dollars in his checking account. Last summer he'd bagged groceries at Harbor Foods, eleven weeks, and he'd been saving for a car. In his first life, he'd spent it on cosmetic armor dyes and a lot of pizza. He hadn't had a car until he was twenty-four.
"I've got the two twenty-five," he said. "And the chair."
Maddie stared at him.
"It's your birthday present," he said. "So you can't also get me anything for mine. That's the deal."
"Your birthday's in October."
"Long-term planning."
"You're being weird," Maddie said. Her voice had gone thin. She cleared her throat and said it again, louder. "You're being so weird lately. Everybody says. Theo says. Mom says it at night when she thinks I'm asleep."
"What does Mom say?"
"She says you're being nice." Maddie said it like an accusation. Then she got up, walked around the table, hugged him around the neck from behind, hard and fast like she was trying to get it over with, and went back to her chair and picked up her phone again like nothing had happened. "Okay. So. Marketplace."
The bell money had a job too. You couldn't sell Vael silver for dollars; it was against the terms of service, and in his first life he'd watched a whole guild get banned on a Tuesday for running a gold shop. But silver could buy Maddie a real start: a bow that wasn't the starter bow, a decent quiver, enough potions that she'd never grind rats for money. Whatever was left went into a jar in his notebook labeled CHARTER, for a thing he hadn't told anyone about yet, because it was a guild, and saying it out loud would make it a thing that could fail.
The real money went on Marketplace.
The strange part was how many there were. The headset had launched two weeks ago, and already there were thirty listings within twenty miles:
Lattice Gen 1, like new, used 2 weeks. Makes me sick. $500 OBO.
Lattice headset, my sync is 31%, it's unplayable, I'm done. $475.
LATTICE GEN 1. barely used. game is pay to win. pods only. $450 firm.
In his first life, those people had been right about themselves. Thirty-one percent was a dodge window you could barely see. But thirty-one wasn't a fixed number. He'd been forty-four, two weeks ago. He wanted, very badly, to message every single one of them: Drink water. Walk. Go to bed. He imagined an eighteen-year-old stranger messaging a forty-year-old guy in Puyallup to ask have you tried going to bed, and closed the tab.
He found one in Fircrest. Four hundred and forty dollars. The seller was a woman named Dana, who wrote back in eleven minutes:
Still available. It's my husband's. He bought it without asking and now he says it gives him a headache. Honestly please take it.
Dad drove him on Sunday morning, and in a strip-mall parking lot Dana handed over the box with the air of a woman returning a dog that had bitten the mailman. Dad inspected it like it was a used transmission. He turned it over in his hands. He looked inside the box. He held it up to the light.
"What are you looking for?" Owen asked.
"I don't know," his father said. "But I want her to see me looking."
Sunday was meal prep.
This had been Mom's idea, and Mom had then gone to her sister's for the afternoon, which Owen suspected had been part of the idea. The kitchen was his and his father's. The slow cooker was on the counter. It had been a wedding present in 2004 and still had a strip of masking tape on the lid that said DO NOT PUT IN DISHWASHER — R.
"I wrote that," Dad said, with some pride. "After the first time."
The printed recipe from Dr. Mehta's patient portal was taped to the cabinet above it, like a work order. Slow Cooker Chicken and White Bean Chili (Heart-Healthy). Serves eight. Dad had read it three times, out loud, the way he read wiring diagrams, and then highlighted the ingredients in yellow and the steps in pink.
"Why pink?" Owen asked.
"Pink's for procedure," his father said. "Yellow's for parts."
"Is that a real system?"
"It is at the shop."
They worked. It was not graceful. Owen chopped the onions because his father said onions were a "young man's job," which turned out to mean his father cried at onions and didn't want anybody to see. Dad trimmed the chicken with the focus of a surgeon and the technique of a man cutting a hose. The recipe said one teaspoon cumin and Dad measured it with a measuring spoon, then looked at it, then looked at Owen.
"That's not enough cumin."
"That's what it says."
"That's not enough. That's a cumin rumor." He held up the spoon. "Your mom's going to taste this and know I followed the instructions. That's the problem with instructions. You can always tell."
"So add more."
"Is cumin salt?"
"No."
"Is cumin fat?"
"Cumin is a seed, Dad."
His father considered this, then tipped in two more teaspoons like he was betting on a horse. "Then I'm a free man."
They argued about LOW versus HIGH for ten minutes. The recipe said LOW 8 hours or HIGH 4 hours, and it was 12:30, and dinner was at six. They compromised on HIGH for two hours and LOW for four, which was not a thing the recipe allowed and was, his father said, "how engineering works." Then they made brown rice, which was a betrayal of everything rice stood for, and portioned out the week into ten plastic containers, and Dad labeled each lid with masking tape and a Sharpie like they were parts bins.
TUE LUNCH — R. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
WED LUNCH — R.
THU LUNCH — R. (stress test day? ASK)
Owen looked at the last one for a second longer than the others.
"It's the ninth," he said. "The stress test. Not this Thursday. Next Thursday."
"I know." His father pressed the tape down with his thumb, very carefully, all the way along the edge. "I just like having it written down somewhere."
Owen didn't say anything. He took the Sharpie and wrote O. on the lids of four of them, because he was going to eat this too, all week, out of solidarity, which was a word that tasted like beans.
The patch notes went up at 3:12 PM.
He saw them because Theo sent a screenshot with forty-one exclamation points, which was a personal record.
VAEL ONLINE — Hotfix 1.0.5 (scheduled: Wed Apr 1, 2026, 6:00 AM PT)Economy: Copper Bell drop rate from Fenwild rats and Cairn wolves reduced. Cairnfolk general vendors now stock Copper Bells (2c, unlimited). We've seen speculation around Copper Bells and want to be clear: bells are a crafting component and should be affordable for everyone.
Combat: Gravemoss Warden root timing adjusted. Ranger: Sharpshot animation fix.
Known issue: Some players report the Lattice Companion is "too encouraging." This is intended.
He read it at the kitchen counter, standing next to a slow cooker on LOW, with the house smelling like chicken and too much cumin.
Wednesday.
It wasn't Tuesday. In his first life it had been part of the big week-three patch, and in his head that patch had always been Tuesday or Wednesday, and he'd picked Tuesday because that's when he'd lost everything, and memory likes a disaster to happen on the day you feel worst. He'd been off by a day. That was all. One day.
But the notes were up on Sunday, three days early. In his first life the nerf had dropped with no warning. In this one, somebody at the studio had decided to warn people, and Owen wondered whether that was because a lot more people were talking about bells this time. Because the rat guy had bought them all on Day 2, and the bells had become a meme, and a game company had read the forums.
Had he done that?
He opened the Exchange app on his phone.
HARROWGATE EXCHANGE — Copper BellLast sale: 11c · 1h low: 6c · 24h volume: 212,880
Six copper. From forty-two to six in an hour, three days before the patch had even landed. Everybody was trying to sell at once, and the only people still buying were the ones too slow to read the notes.
He'd sold on Saturday. If he'd held until Monday night, the way the clever part of him had wanted to, he'd have been holding a hundred and twenty-seven bells worth less than the water bottles.
He hadn't been right. He'd been lucky. His memory had been wrong about the day and wrong about the warning, and the only thing that had saved him was a rule written in capital letters in a notebook by a kid who knew he couldn't trust himself.
He found that he didn't feel smug. He felt the way you feel walking away from a car accident you weren't in.
He scrolled zone chat on his phone.
[Zone] VelvetAnvil: i have 900 bells and a dream
[Zone] Thraxxis: you have 900 bells and a lesson
[Zone] Lattebear: im fine
[Zone] Lattebear: im totally fine
[Zone] ghostbread: the rat guy sold saturday. the rat guy is a prophet
Owen put the phone down. Then he picked it back up and sent one whisper from the app. To Lattebear.
[Whisper] Rook: hey. don't sell at 6. vendors are 2c but the Shepherd's Charm recipe still takes 4 and the Bell-Ward takes 6. crafters will buy at 8-10 for a while after the patch. hold half, sell half slow. sorry man.
It took a while.
[Whisper] Lattebear: wait are you the rat guy
[Whisper] Rook: unavailable for comment
[Whisper] Lattebear: lmaooo ok. thanks rat guy
That was all. It didn't fix anything. Lattebear had still lost most of his gold. But he wasn't going to sell at a copper and quit for a month and get a lol from a girl in Gilded Ledger, and in Owen's first life nobody had sent him a whisper like that, and he'd always thought somebody should have.
Theo called at 4:00. Theo only called for emergencies and pizza.
"Not the bells," he said, before Owen could talk. "The Quarry. Halcyon and Iron Hollow got into a fight on the ledge at like two o'clock. There's a clip. Two hundred thousand views. Your friend Varga showed up with two Halcyon kids, Iron Hollow wouldn't let them pull, and she dueled four of them. In a row. She didn't say a word the whole time. Then she typed one word in zone chat and logged off."
"What was the word?"
"'Thanks.'" Theo sounded delighted. "Forums are calling it the Quarry Thing."
Owen stood at the counter with the slow cooker ticking next to him. In his first life, Halcyon and Iron Hollow hadn't come to blows for another year. It had started on a Sunday in week three instead, because a girl had come looking for a feet thing and a guy named Rook had said no thanks, I'm making chili.
"She invited me to that," he said.
"I know. You texted me at like ten." Theo's manager voice. "If you'd gone, you'd be in the clip, and Iron Hollow would hate your guts more than they already do. Good call on the chili."
Dinner was at six. Mom tasted the chili and said, "There's a lot of cumin in this," and Dad said, "Is there," with a face so innocent it could have been carved into the side of a church. Maddie ate two bowls. She'd put the headset box on the chair next to her like it was a guest. She'd gone through the manual in the afternoon and wanted everybody to know that the lounger needed to be at least forty-five centimeters from any wall, according to page sixteen, and that her name was a secret.
"Not even a hint?" Mom said.
"No."
"Is it a bird?" said Owen.
Maddie looked at him with total, flat suspicion. "Why would it be a bird."
"I don't know. Rangers like birds."
"It's not a bird," said Maddie, in a voice that meant it was absolutely a bird, and Owen bent over his bowl so she wouldn't see his face.
He logged in for forty minutes on Sunday night, because Sunday was a school night. He bought Maddie's kit from a Ranger crafter in Harrowgate he'd known in his first life, who didn't know him now, and who threw in the quiver free when Owen said it was for his sister's birthday. It was absolutely going to be a bird. The rest of the silver went in the CHARTER jar.
Then he logged out early, at 8:40, and lay still for the ten seconds, and the Companion brought up its summary the way it did every Sunday.
LATTICE COMPANION — Weekly summary (Mar 23–29)Sessions: 9 · Time in Vael: 17h 26m
Baseline: 51% → 55% · Peak: 63%
Hydration check-ins: 18/18 ✓ · Stand-up reminders: 17/18 ✓
Physical adaptation: 4 thresholds this week (top 1% of users)
You're one of our fastest-improving players, Rook! Rest well.
He read it in the dark with the headset still on his face.
Top one percent.
It made sense. Most people's numbers didn't move; most people sold their headsets in Fircrest for four-forty. Of course a kid who'd suddenly started walking and sleeping looked weird next to them. Of course an app that sent him exclamation points would rank him. Be in the top one percent of drinking water! His dentist did that.
He just hadn't known it was ranking anybody.
He took the headset off, and wrote in the notebook by the light of his phone:
Sun 3/29. Bells: SOLD SAT (49s 92c). Notes went up SUN for WED. I said TUE. Off by one, and they WARNED people this time (ripple? me?). Lattebear: told him to hold half. Quarry Thing: Varga vs IH, a year early. NOT MY FIGHT. Maddie: headset (Fircrest, $440, Mom+Dad half), lounger Tues. Dad: pills ✓ ✓. BP 138/86. Chili: too much cumin (Dad).
Baseline 55. Peak 63. Companion says top 1%.
He looked at the last line for a while. Then he added, smaller, without quite knowing why:
Top 1% of what?
Then he turned off the phone and lay there, listening to the house. The dishwasher. Maddie's music. His father, in the hallway outside his parents' room, putting the cuff on and saying to nobody in particular, "Come on. Come on, one-thirty," and then the beep, and then a long pause, and then, very quietly: "Better."
Tomorrow was Monday. Marguerite said three days a week, walk the others.
Marguerite didn't have a deadline.