A private farm, the scent wafting around on the morning breeze of grass fresh-plucked from the soil by nibbling ponies.

Henry, after another night of rejuvenating retiree rest, was joined by his guildmate Kara, i.e. Caramel. She'd ventured to the farm to inspect her gifted land and take a needed break from organising affairs in Suchi for the fast-approaching tournament. On horseback, the pair had surveyed the rural property. They’d galloped down gullies, through groves of totara and rimu, into ankle-deep creeks, and along the spines of hills rolling through the end of spring to summer’s dry advance.

Beneath the shade of a tree overlooking the farmstead, the two of them now lay lazily, their horses grazing beside them. Henry occupied his restless hands by tearing apart a leaf and studying the world contained in the textured mapwork of its veins. Kara beside him savoured the green, unpeopled relief from Suchi’s sea of shacks and savannah. The pair’s conversation had been meandering as those of long-time friends do, through pockets of silence and meaningless remarks on revisited topics, on frustrations and boredoms with recent events, on the myriad peculiarities of their youth - like being able to purchase pony farms on a whim, or how this place hardly felt any more substantial than their farms in-game.

Kara frowned. “Are you really going to win every event?”

"Standard 6’s might be a challenge against the pro-teams. Tier-0 1v1 has a bit of random chance.”

"What about the Standard 1s?"

"lol."

Kara sighed. “I wish I had your brain.”

“Eh. It has plenty of downsides.”

“Hmm? Like what?”

Discarding the leaf he’d been studying, Henry leapt to his feet and climbed the tree to inspect an abandoned bird’s nest. He flew rapidly up the trunk and into the branches like a ninja, the non-augmented acrobatics he’d learned in Saana usable in real-life due to his choice to model his avatar after his fleshbag body. The nest was from a native tui he believed, inspecting its structure.

“The French intellectual, Georges Bataille,” he replied to Kara’s question, “wrote of an intriguing theory in his socioeconomic treatise, La Part maudite. He argued that much of the story of mankind was the possession of an excessive energy whose insatiable call for expenditure underpinned our stranger, sillier behaviours.

"Injurious spectacles of the arena, catastrophic gambling that swallows the player's possessions in hours, back-breaking pyramid building, religious sacrifices of children and self – history’s preeminent thinkers have strained their brains concocting utilitarian-rationalist explanations behind these pervasive habits that seem, in many respects, utterly pointless or detrimental. Retarded, even. But the point others had missed, as Bataille realised, was that the point behind this retardation may have been the pointless irrationality itself. You could interpret all of these non-productive activities as safe outlet valves for man’s burning superabundance, each pointless pursuit making up for a stimulatory deficit unmet during the grind through life's dull but necessary duties of tending fields or pushing papers in a cubicle. What, we might wonder, if society didn’t address man’s energetic surplus? What if we failed to feed our bread-munching plebs the second vital non-nourishment of the circus? Then, Bataille claimed, the unused excess would accumulate and accumulate, like pus swelling in a festering boil. And, eventually, with nowhere productive to go, the building energy would explode, culminating in an orgy of self-destructive revolutionary violence. Or, perhaps worse, it might go nowhere. Instead, society might diminish into a smaller pseudo-depressive state, one no longer burning with so much energetic demand, the collective brain shrinking and shutting down as it entered a mental hibernation that matched the languor of its winter-enbarrened surroundings.

"So, if you follow Bataille’s through-line to its logical conclusion and apply the formulation back to the individual giga-genius, whose swollen skull smoulders with the most intense intellectual excess, you arrive at one of the downsides of joining our uberpatrician class: the smarter you are, the more—paradoxically—retarded you have to act.”

Kara glanced up at him in the tree, Henry having been jumping around the canopy like a monkey and karate-chopping branches off. "Right. So your stupid tournaments are, in fact, a sign of your genius.”

“Of my genius and its accursed burden.”

Kara meditated on the thought for a while, then her mind migrated elsewhere, like the fluffy white clouds puttering past above. "What’s Karnon plotting with my stolen rapier?"

Henry answered with silence, refusing to discuss or think about those annoying matters anymore.

Kara nodded. "What does Silver think about your dumb tournament?”

“No clue,” Henry lied. “Once the mask slipped off, she blocked me and sailed away. Guess the ugly mug behind wasn’t to her taste.”

“Is she angry you hid your identity? That’s a bit dramatic.”

“What can I say?” Henry landed beside his guildmate, holding an armful of snapped-off twigs, which he began to assemble into a miniature tower. “The alpha-pleb values the virtue of honesty above all.”

“Eh. You’ve never owed anyone full insight. Don’t let her hold that against you forever. How’d your family react?”

“They’re indifferent to these gamer shenanigans. Were more interested in the fat stacks of moolah.”

Kara, suddenly remembering Henry’s humble background, took a second look at the pony farm. “You know, I don’t...I don’t reall—”

Henry bonked her on the head with a twig. “Forget it. These days, I’m filthy rich. Plus, the cash incinerated on this bonfire came from my Frivolous Fun Fund.”

“…what’s your Frivolous Fun fund?”

“Oh, you don’t know about the Frivolous Fun Fund? That’s what I’ve renamed, right this second, my discretionary spending allowance.”

Most of the profits from his career had gone back into the humanitarian ventures of Flaming Sun, both in-game and out. Of what he’d kept for himself, he’d earmarked a small portion purely for luxury expenditures, for tasting the hedonistic delights of retirement. So far, however, finding any outlets for spending this had been difficult, in part due to the enormous size of the fund, but mostly due to the conditioning of growing up broke, which’d drilled into him a type of material austerity.

Instead of wasting money on clothes and what not, he’d learned as a kid to prioritise the intangible—and, generally, cheaper—wealth in pursuits like art and education, in cultivating talents that cost nothing except the very greatest premium of time. An Italian writer had once said that the ultimate purpose of Christian Western civilisation had been to create people who were themselves cathedrals, who carried a portion of our immense cultural heritage wherever we went. A poor soul could take much solace in that notion. Whether in a ritzy palace or a squalid shack, a man who'd sufficiently decorated his internal cathedral could allow the richness stored inside him to effuse back upon his bleak surroundings. Hang up some paintings in your heart, and you’d see flowers blossoming in a snowstorm. Build an organ, and you’d hear sweet music in the quiet of a prison cell or cemetery.

That’s how Henry’d lived, but, now that was he filthy rich, he should rationally discard some of these now redundant psychological restraints, which merely served to limit his imagination. Even if his sole focus remained on building that cathedral inside, his interior could be renovated through paywalled novel experiences. While hot-air-ballooning with Little Liu the other day, he’d been inspired to compose a cheeky symphony on Australia’s ugly landscape. Riding around this farm on horseback with Kara had given him other new ideas.

But—the more important point, and the restraint much harder for him to shatter—was that his decorations didn’t have to be confined to his interior. He could go beyond merely hearing and seeing the divine with his own cultivated senses; he could spread pretty baubles all around him, could make reality whatever artistic vision sprung to mind. Hell, if he wanted to, he could construct an actual cathedral. Multiple.

Hence, he’d set aside funds to be wasted, for this struggle to divorce from his conditioning. It’d also hopefully help to translate some of his pointless labours in a virtual world into a tangible, material benefit.

Naturally, being a nutjob, he’d been spending that money in Saana, paying for the mega-quest chasing down The Cap of a Thousand Dreams. But, with the hat in hand, he now needed something else, preferably not in a videogame. A stupid farm for a friend - why not?

The explanation he gave Kara omitted The Cap in exchange for a baloney rant about an ancient Olmecian school of utilitarian hedonism that he’d entirely made up - it wasn’t like his lazy gamer guildmate would ever bother to fact-check him.

“Oh,” Kara replied. “If you’re really that desperate, then why’d you cheap out on my pony farm? Upgrade the stable, at least.”

Scanning around them, the farm looked kind of trash, the fields unkempt, the infrastructure decrepit.

Henry winced at the suggestion of spending more on this wasteful crap. “Old habits die hard…I haven’t been retired for a month yet. Still finding my footing on this frivolous ground.”

The two returned to their quiet cloud-gazing and fidgeting.

Henry, thinking of old habits, death, and cathedrals, recalled his chat with Walker last night at Byzantine’s recreation of the Hagia Sophia in the middle of a slum, another type of retirement frivolity.

From there, his sleep-deprived mind branched between several other loosely-connected oddities: his guild’s developmental efforts with Flaming Sun, his filthy riches, his retirement at seventeen, his global wanderings ahead in the fight to reconnect with his neglected reality, and his guildmate's request to fix the stables.

Then, in one sudden, miraculous flash uniting these scattered thoughts, he had an epiphany that would determine the course for the rest of his life beyond Saana, Henry receiving from the heavens of inspiration what might just be history's greatest idea.

“GENIUS!” He declared.