Chapter 61: Mom’s Recovery [Volume 6]
Volume 6: Coming Home
Jake’s mother recovered with the stubborn determination of a woman who had survived the apocalypse, the System, and a son who fought cosmic entities and still couldn’t make rice.
The cancer went into remission six months after treatment. The oncologist called it “a textbook recovery.” Jake’s mother called it “too busy to be sick.” She was back to cooking Sunday dinner within a month of ringing the bell, though she let Jake chop vegetables now—a concession that cost her more pride than the chemotherapy had cost her hair.
“I’m not an invalid,” she told Jake when he tried to carry her groceries. “I’m a seventy-four-year-old woman who beat cancer. Carry your own groceries.”
“Mom—”
“Carry. Your. Own.”
He carried his own.
The Academy welcomed him back with a standing ovation that lasted so long Sol had to shoo the students to class. Vex had covered his Advanced Combat course with predictable results (two training grounds destroyed, one new combat technique invented, three students hospitalized with “acceptable injuries”). Kael’s garden had produced a record tomato crop in Jake’s absence, which Kael attributed to “the absence of chaotic mana fluctuations during lunch hour.”
Pi, who had spent the months of Jake’s leave producing increasingly elaborate theorems as a coping mechanism, presented him with a mathematical proof titled “Why Jake Should Never Leave Again (A Rigorous Analysis).” It was 847 pages long and contained, buried in the appendix, the most elegant expression of love a math entity had ever produced.
Jake read every page. He kept it in his desk. On bad days, he’d open the appendix and read Pi’s equation for love, and remember that the universe’s most powerful mathematics could also be its most tender.