第3章 The First Debt

Qiao Shan found his first volunteer in the most unlikely place — a low-level dungeon recruitment channel. The player was named Aurelia. She was a Lancer — a melee class — and she had been stuck at level 12 for three weeks because no tank or healer would group with her. Qiao Shan sent her a whisper: "Group with me. I can help you level." "Why would a Support want to group with me?" "Because I need to test a build. And I need someone who's willing to take a stat hit for the team." Aurelia accepted. They ran the goblin camp dungeon together. Qiao Shan buffed her with everything he had — attack power, defense, movement speed. His Soul Debt climbed: 50, 100, 150. Each buff added to the debt. When his Soul Debt reached 200, he activated Siphon for the first time. He felt a chill run through his body. The UI displayed: **Siphon activated. Target: Aurelia.** **Damage dealt: 200.** **Aurelia's permanent defense reduced by 200.** Aurelia, watching her character sheet, said: "Hey. My defense just went down." "That's the trade-off," Qiao Shan said. "I get a strong attack. You lose a permanent stat." "And what do I get?" "You get a team member who can solo any boss." Aurelia thought about it. Then she said: "Run it again." They ran it again. Qiao Shan's Soul Debt climbed. He activated Siphon. Aurelia's defense went down by another 200. By the end of the third run, Aurelia's defense was down by 600. But she had also leveled up twice. And the goblin boss that had been killing her repeatedly was now dying in seconds. "This is broken," Aurelia said. "Yes." "Why does the game allow this?" "Because the developers thought Support was useless. They never expected anyone to figure out how to use it." Aurelia looked at him. "You're going to be famous." "Maybe. Or infamous." Aurelia kept asking questions between respawn timers, and most of them were better than the ones the forums asked. How did the debt decide whose stat to take? Why defense first, every single time? Qiao Shan pulled up the tracker's ledger view and showed her: every buff he had cast on her, timestamped to the second, each line ending in a debit column that named the stat it would eventually claim. The fourth run taught them something neither of them expected. When he stacked Haste before Iron Ward, the debt generated fifteen percent more than the reverse order produced. Sequence mattered. The game was quietly punishing sloppy bookkeeping, and only a booster who had spent seven years living inside spreadsheets would ever have noticed the interest rate hiding between two casts. Siphon carried a hidden cost beyond the drain itself — ninety seconds of lockout during which he was exactly what the tooltips promised, a Support who could not scratch anything larger than a training dummy. Twice the goblin boss reached him inside that window, and twice Aurelia planted her lance like a fence post and body-blocked the cleave without being asked. On the fifth run the arithmetic finally bit them. Her defense dropped below the threshold where the boss's critical hits stayed survivable, and one casual swipe took her from full health to release screen. She respawned at the dungeon entrance furious at herself in a way that had nothing to do with him. "We plan around floors," he told her afterward, and they did. An hour of farming green-grade plate in the bandit hollow two zones east bought back four hundred points of armor rating. His attack buffs pushed her damage upward while the gear held her survival net-neutral. On paper she was weaker than a fresh Lancer off the boat. In practice she was clearing content balanced for players eight levels above her, and the content was starting to notice. That evening he wrote the terms into a trade-window note so no one could misunderstand them later: two hundred defense per Siphon, gear reimbursed at auction price, either party free to end the arrangement after any run. Aurelia read it twice, laughed at how seriously he took his own paperwork, and pressed accept anyway. By the weekend three other stuck players had whispered her asking how a solo Lancer was leveling this fast. She sent each of them the same answer: find a Support who tells you exactly what your stats will cost before he ever casts. One of those whispers eventually reached Qiao Shan along with the question he would keep hearing for years — what do you charge? He typed back four words and went to sleep. Alone in his inn room that night, he opened the tracker and found a line he had never seen before, small and grey beneath his lifetime total: Debt Efficiency, 0.31. Whatever the number measured, it had climbed after every run with Aurelia in the party. He copied it onto the notepad beside his keyboard, underlined it twice, and was planning tomorrow's dungeon route before the candle burned out. Morning brought a queue. Seven players stood at the goblin camp entrance when they arrived, and word had obviously traveled faster than any forum thread could carry it. A stocky Guardian named Doran stepped forward first and asked the question everyone else was clearly afraid to ask out loud — whether it worked on classes other than Lancers. The test answered more than either of them anticipated. Doran's deficit did not land on defense at all. It landed on his block rating, then on parry, sliding down a priority list that followed whatever category of buff had generated the debt in the first place. Attack buffs drained attack stats. Utility buffs drained utility stats. The ledger wasn't random bookkeeping; it was itemized billing, and nobody had ever read the fine print because nobody had ever owed this much. Aurelia negotiated her cut that same afternoon. Ten percent of every reimbursement the guild fund ever paid, plus first refusal on dungeon slots, in exchange for handling the whisper queue that had begun eating two hours of Qiao Shan's evening. He agreed before she finished her second condition, which annoyed her so much she added a third just to watch him initial it. --- ---