“The Sun’s Blood”

Book One of Heirs of Sun and Storm

By Jeremy Bai

Copyright © 2021 by Jeremy Bai. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locals, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without expressed permission from the author.

ISBN: 978-1-955252-08-9

Cover Art by Joshua Raphael
Cover Design by STK Kreations
Art Direction by Bryce O’Connor

Acknowledgements

I would like to offer my profound thanks to everyone who helped me along the way. From the advance readers to friends, professionals, and consultants, I couldn’t have done it without you.

Adam Baulderstone, Alex Ruiz, Aljoscha Volk, Álvaro Acción Montes, Aretha Williams, Arya, Astrael, BaronessZen, Ben Ma, Brendan Davis, Cameron Pannabecker, Chandler aka Channdlarrr, Charles E. Bouldin, Davis Ashura, Denise Liu, Edward Pridday Wilson, Henry “Miraclerifle” Shin, Ian Mursell of Mexicolore, I. Hashi, Ishan Kamath, JC Kang, Kate Seger, Lorin Bucur, Manguking, Monty St John, Sara K., Stompound, Xanatrix Zadare, Yascob, Yingfu Ma, my lovely wife Yuanyuan, as well as other who remain unnamed.

Dedicated to my children.

To my 5-year-old son, who dreams of being a robotics engineer when he grows up. I doubt he’ll build a robot army and take over the world. But you never know.

And to my 1-year-old daughter, who is already funny, smart, and tenacious. If I could have a dollar for every time she interrupted me writing this book, I wouldn’t need to publish the book. And I wouldn’t change that for anything.

Author’s Note

How did I conceive the world and story of Heirs of Sun and Storm? I was influenced by a host of films, books, TV shows, games, and comics from around the globe. While I did not specifically emulate or pay homage to any particular works, you can spot splashes of influence from them throughout the story. And you might have noticed an Easter Egg or two!

When I started compiling the major works to cite as inspirations, the list quickly became unmanageable. There are simply too many famous books and movies that are clear influences, and at the same time, I couldn’t bring myself to leave out some of the obscure and niche tidbits that have been percolating in my mind for decades, for instance, various computer adventure games I played in the 1990’s, or TV shows that only lasted a few seasons but left a deep impression on me. I was also heavily influenced by three Chinese fantasy series I personally translated; combined, they total around 8,000,000 words (to put that into context, the Harry Potter series is a bit over 1,000,000 words long).

Of course, living in China for nearly a decade had a huge impact on me and my storytelling. Life as I portray it in the Nine Heavens and Ten Earths is, in many ways, not very different from modern-day life in the PRC. Suffice it to say, there are many things that drove the creation of Heirs of Sun and Storm. If you’re interested in more behind-the-scenes information, head over to my website for further details. I hope you enjoyed this first installment, trust me when I say there’s a lot more to come!

Jeremy Bai

Prologue – Tribulation

Chapter 1 – The Body

Chapter 2 – The Black Corpses

Chapter 3 – The Truth

Chapter 4 – Left or Right

Chapter 5 – Infiltration

Chapter 6 – The Study

Interlude 1 – The Perfect Subject

Chapter 7 – Severed Wires

Chapter 8 – The Sea Dragon Electronics Emporium

Chapter 9 – Photos

Chapter 10 – The File

Interlude 2 – Polite Inquiry

Chapter 11 – Puppetization

Chapter 12 – Seas and Roots

Chapter 13 – The 3rd Hospital

Chapter 14 – A View of the Pillar

Chapter 15 – A Van

Interlude 3 – Cold Fury

Chapter 16 – Rooftop Showdown

Chapter 17 – Worms

Chapter 18 – The Alley

Chapter 19 – Vimalā Balm

Interlude 4 – Relationships

Chapter 20 – A Ring

Chapter 21 – An Oval and Two Circles

Chapter 22 – Sea of Energy

Chapter 23 – Spell Formation

Chapter 24 – Climbing

Chapter 25 – Cigarettes

Interlude 5 – A Game of Go

Chapter 26 – A Mission

Chapter 27 – Life Goes On

Chapter 28 – Life Isn’t the Movies

Chapter 29 – The Kitchen at Midnight

Chapter 30 – Elevator Buttons

Interlude 6 – Just a Dream

Chapter 31 – A Tail

Chapter 32 – The Follower

Interlude 7 – No Choice

Chapter 33 – Two Things

Chapter 34 – Detective Work

Chapter 35 – A Proposal

Chapter 36 – Go Time

Chapter 37 – Take No Prisoners

Chapter 38 – Purgatory

Chapter 40 – Questions and Answers

Chapter 41 – Wind and a Skyline

Chapter 42 – The Mission

Chapter 43 – The Getaway

Interlude 8 – The True Heaven

Chapter 44 – Ossientum Memorandum

Chapter 45 – Procedure

Chapter 46 – The Breakthrough

Chapter 47 – Trust

Chapter 48 – An Unexpected Acquaintance

Chapter 49 – Chaos

Chapter 50 – “I’ll Explain Along the Way”

Interlude 9 – Rooftop Meeting

Chapter 51 – The Crocodile

Chapter 52 – RAT

Chapter 53 – Counter-Surveillance

Interlude 10 – Figure Out a Way

Chapter 54 – Planning

Chapter 55 – The South Third Strip

Chapter 56 – The Calm Before the Storm

Chapter 57 – Going In

Chapter 58 – Aftermath

Chapter 59 – Phone Calls and Pendants

Interlude 11 – A Distress Message?

Chapter 60 – Midnight Snack

Chapter 61 – Back to the Sixth Earth

Chapter 62 – A White Patch

Interlude 12 – Like Soldiers

Chapter 63 – Revelations in the Ninth Earth

Chapter 64 – Privacy for the Lovebirds

Chapter 65 – Orgplant Tour

Interlude 13 – Girl Code

Chapter 66 – Duḥkha Cannon

Chapter 67 – Checking In

Chapter 68 – The Tenth Earth

Chapter 69 – Fierce Fighting

Chapter 70 – The Altar

Chapter 71 – The Sacrifice

Interlude 14 – Savage Indignation

Chapter 72 – The Sun’s Blood

Chapter 73 – Teleportations

Chapter 74 – Six Variables, Sixty-Four Possibilities

Chapter 75 – The Purpose

Thank You All! Please Read!

Name and Pronunciation Guide:

Glossary

Contents

Chapter 1 – The Body

Chapter 2 – The Black Corpses

Chapter 3 – The Truth

Chapter 4 – Left or Right

Chapter 5 – Infiltration

Chapter 6 – The Study

Interlude 1 – The Perfect Subject

Chapter 7 – Severed Wires

Chapter 8 – The Sea Dragon Electronics Emporium

Chapter 9 – Photos

Chapter 10 – The File

Interlude 2 – Polite Inquiry

Chapter 11 – Puppetization

Chapter 12 – Seas and Roots

Chapter 13 – The 3rd Hospital

Chapter 14 – A View of the Pillar

Chapter 15 – A Van

Interlude 3 – Cold Fury

Chapter 16 – Rooftop Showdown

Chapter 17 – Worms

Chapter 18 – The Alley

Chapter 19 – Vimalā Balm

Interlude 4 – Relationships

Chapter 20 – A Ring

Chapter 21 – An Oval and Two Circles

Chapter 22 – Sea of Energy

Chapter 23 – Spell Formation

Chapter 24 – Climbing

Chapter 25 – Cigarettes

Interlude 5 – A Game of Go

Chapter 26 – A Mission

Chapter 27 – Life Goes On

Chapter 28 – Life Isn’t the Movies

Chapter 29 – The Kitchen at Midnight

Chapter 30 – Elevator Buttons

Interlude 6 – Just a Dream

Chapter 31 – A Tail

Chapter 32 – The Follower

Interlude 7 – No Choice

Chapter 33 – Two Things

Chapter 34 – Detective Work

Chapter 35 – A Proposal

Chapter 36 – Go Time

Chapter 37 – Take No Prisoners

Chapter 38 – Purgatory

Chapter 40 – Questions and Answers

Chapter 41 – Wind and a Skyline

Chapter 42 – The Mission

Chapter 43 – The Getaway

Interlude 8 – The True Heaven

Chapter 44 – Ossientum Memorandum

Chapter 45 – Procedure

Chapter 46 – The Breakthrough

Chapter 47 – Trust

Chapter 48 – An Unexpected Acquaintance

Chapter 49 – Chaos

Chapter 50 – “I’ll Explain Along the Way”

Interlude 9 – Rooftop Meeting

Chapter 51 – The Crocodile

Chapter 52 – RAT

Chapter 53 – Counter-Surveillance

Interlude 10 – Figure Out a Way

Chapter 54 – Planning

Chapter 55 – The South Third Strip

Chapter 56 – The Calm Before the Storm

Chapter 57 – Going In

Chapter 58 – Aftermath

Chapter 59 – Phone Calls and Pendants

Interlude 11 – A Distress Message?

Chapter 60 – Midnight Snack

Chapter 61 – Back to the Sixth Earth

Chapter 62 – A White Patch

Interlude 12 – Like Soldiers

Chapter 63 – Revelations in the Ninth Earth

Chapter 64 – Privacy for the Lovebirds

Chapter 65 – Orgplant Tour

Interlude 13 – Girl Code

Chapter 66 – Duḥkha Cannon

Chapter 67 – Checking In

Chapter 68 – The Tenth Earth

Chapter 69 – Fierce Fighting

Chapter 70 – The Altar

Chapter 71 – The Sacrifice

Interlude 14 – Savage Indignation

Chapter 72 – The Sun’s Blood

Chapter 73 – Teleportations

Chapter 74 – Six Variables, Sixty-Four Possibilities

Chapter 75 – The Purpose

Thank You All! Please Read!

Name and Pronunciation Guide:

Glossary

Prologue – Tribulation

As more gunfire rang out, Yu Yitai hunkered down behind the wreckage of the hovertank and cast his senses through his meridians to check his cultivation base.

“I’m running low on energy,” he said, trying to ignore the sting in his nostrils from the smoke that filled the area. He was handsome, with a hawk nose and long hair tied in a ponytail down his back. However, his face was smudged with ash, and he had a cut above his left eye that wouldn’t stop bleeding. He was tempted to consume a medicinal pill to heal himself, but couldn’t justify wasting a pill on a little cut.

Crouching next to him was a dark-eyed young man in body armor that looked like it had been sculpted onto him. He held a long, curved sword crafted from some sort of white metal, except it was dappled with flecks of red blood. “There’s only three of ’em left. I’ll take two, you take one.”

“I don’t know….”

“Come on, I heard those stories about how you and Saito Takakage killed the champion of the Primal-Chaos Nirvana Alliance. Don’t tell me you can’t handle a couple of foot soldiers!”

 “That was different, Luoxiang, and you know it. Tak’s older and stronger than me, and I was basically assisting him. Besides, there’s a reason why the technique is called Touch of Pain.”

“Right, forgot.”

“I strike from the shadows. Set up ambushes. I’m not a soldier who charges across the battlefield in broad daylight.”

“I get it. Hm. They’ve stopped shooting.” Sword in hand, Luoxiang carefully peeked around one of the tank’s crumpled turbine engines and scanned the slope above. “Look, I’m a Gravitational cultivator. With the speed I’m capable of, I can get up that slope in a second or two. Maybe I can take all three of them out.”

“The soft overcomes the hard,” Yu Yitai quoted. “The slow overcomes the fast.”

Luoxiang snorted. “Ancient philosophy is great when you’re sipping tea. But this is real life, and I’m telling you, I can get to that Sinotech goon behind the pine tree before he has any idea what’s going on.”

“And if he’s wearing power armor?”

“I stab his armor through the neck joint next to the collar bone. I’ve done it before.”

“Fine. But what about the other two? They’re too far for me to reach safely.”

“You’re gonna have to cover me.” He tugged his satchel around and pulled something out from inside. “I picked this up farther down the mountain.”

When Yu Yitai saw what it was, he frowned. “Sect rules make firearms off-limits. Cultivators shouldn’t resort to primitive, vulgar weaponry to—”

He was interrupted by another short burst of gunfire. Both young men reflexively ducked their heads down.

“Those are the rules in your sect, not mine,” Luoxiang said. “Besides, are sect rules gonna get you out of here alive? Take it!” He shoved the pistol into Yu Yitai’s hands.

Yu Yitai reluctantly took it and curled his finger around the trigger.

“Shit, get your finger off the trigger!” Luoxiang snapped.

Yu Yitai hastened to comply. “Huh?”

“You don’t put your finger there until you’re ready to shoot something, got it? That’s a Type 77-2 semi-automatic, and there’s already a round chambered. All you have to do is squeeze the trigger.”

Trying to forget about how badly he was breaking sect rules, Yu Yitai gingerly cradled the gun and took a few breaths that failed to stop his heart from pounding wildly.

Luoxiang crouched deeper as he prepared to start moving. “I’m going for it. Hold the gun tight and shoot toward the doors. That’s where the other two are. It’ll kick back pretty hard, so don’t lose control. Just keep pulling the trigger.”

“Got it.”

“Here goes nothing!”

As Luoxiang spun around the corner of the tank and disappeared, Yu Yitai leaned around the opposite corner, aimed the gun at the shadowy figures lurking near the entrance, and pulled the trigger.

Along with the loud bang came a surge of force in his arm that was such a shock he almost forgot what Luoxiang said about holding the gun tight. But he kept his grip and pulled the trigger a second time, then a third.

The two soldiers huddled by the door ducked out of sight, and Yu Yitai’s heart leapt with hope as he continued pulling the trigger. Maybe this really will work.

But then he realized that each time he pulled the trigger, the gun pointed higher, until he was aiming several feet above the door.

He shifted the gun back down, but before he could pull the trigger again, the soldiers started shooting back at him. The pop of the rifles echoed down the mountainside, and he saw puffs of dirt in the ground just a few feet in front of him as bullets hit. Squeezing off one final shot, he ducked back behind the tank and waited for the gunfire to stop. As soon as he had another opening, he suppressed his terror, leaned around, and started squeezing the trigger again.

How many shots is that? Eight? Ten?

The trigger clicked, and the slide locked in an open position. He tossed the gun onto the ground, glad to be rid of the dirty thing. Wiping his hand on his pant leg, he thought, What now? I guess I have to be ready with Touch of Pain. Why haven’t they started shooting again?

A few more gunshots rang out, then a shout. Then nothing for a long moment.

Did Luoxiang get them all?

He heard the sound of footsteps, and tensed. Tapping into his Organic cultivation energy, he prepared to unleash the sole combat technique he was capable of. Touch of Pain. Generally speaking, Organic cultivators used their abilities to accomplish feats of computer hacking that were virtually superhuman in nature. That said, they weren’t useless in a fight. Even the weakest Organic cultivators could use Touch of Pain to inflict agony on an opponent, as well as cause muscle contractions that could potentially immobilize them.

The downside was that it required touching the opponent.

Yu Yitai clenched his hand into a fist and then opened it back into a palm. I’ll only have one chance to hit him. I have to move fast.

However, it wasn’t a Sinotech soldier who stepped around the corner of the tank. It was Luoxiang, a grin on his face, blood dripping from the snow-white blade of his sword.

“Told you it would work,” Luoxiang said. He flicked his sword free of blood before retracting it into the shape of a small sphere, which he tucked into a belt pouch. “Come on.” He extended his hand, and Yu Yitai grabbed it and pulled himself to his feet.

“Thanks, brother.”

As they strode across hard-packed dirt toward the entrance of the complex, Yu Yitai spotted the corpses of the soldiers there, both of whom Luoxiang had beheaded. He tried to ignore the rapidly enlarging pools of blood around them.

“Is everyone from your sect as ruthless as you?” he said, trying to keep his voice from shaking.

“In this war, you have to be,” Luoxiang replied. “Haven’t you heard about what happened at the Siege of the Mogao Caves?”

“Your sect leader took part in the actual fighting, right?”

“Yeah. And at one point he used a Duḥkha Cannon to wipe out entire battalions of Eurocom and Sinotech troops.”

“How many people are in a battalion?”

“Hundreds.”

Damn, Yu Yitai almost said, but he caught the word before it left his mouth. Profanity was forbidden in his sect, as it was in most. “That’s pretty hardcore.”

“Yeah. He’s definitely going to be the first one to become an immortal. I’d bet money on it.”

They stopped in front of the entrance, which consisted of a massive blast door that looked to be decades old. Yu Yitai quickly sized up the locking mechanism. “Exactly as the briefing said. An old-fashioned biometric lock. Thing must be fifty years old. I should be able to open it in less than a minute.”

“Do your hacking magic, brother,” Luoxiang said, turning to look back down the mountain. “That’s why you came along, after all. You Organic cultivators are always…” His words trailed off into silence.

Meanwhile, Yu Yitai had squatted in front of the door and was pulling his satchel around to remove his computer and other equipment.

“Fucking hell!” Luoxiang said.

Yu Yitai’s ears prickled at the language. Looking over his shoulder, he prepared to remind Luoxiang that both of their sects prohibited such profanity. Instead, he froze in place.

“Is th-that…” he stammered.

“Yes. Yes, it fucking is.”

Both young men saw bright pinpricks of light rising up into the sky, leaving behind grey trails. Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds.

“Nukes,” Luoxiang said hoarsely. “Sinotech is launching their nukes.”

As Yu Yitai rose to his feet, he felt his hands trembling. “I thought it wasn’t supposed to happen until next month.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“What about the Pearl?”

Luoxiang shook his head as the two of them watched more and more pinpricks of light rising into the sky. “How should I know?”

“This is bad,” Yu Yitai said. “The mission… it’s pointless now.”

“Yeah. We have to get back to the bottom of the mountain. To the teleportation portal.”

“You can move a lot faster than me,” Yu Yitai said. “Just go.”

“Are you kidding me?” Luoxiang replied. “You think I’m gonna abandon you? Like hell I am. Jump on my back.”

“What?”

“On my back, Yitai! NOW!”

Yu Yitai hopped onto his friend’s back. Luoxiang hooked his arms around Yu Yitai’s legs, and then started running. Trees whizzed by as he sped down the mountain, jumping off of boulders, leaping over fallen logs, sliding down inclines.

Holding on for dear life, Yu Yitai looked into the sky. “Some of them are starting to come back down,” he said.

“We’re past the halfway point by now. We’re gonna make it.”

Yu Yitai looked up at the falling nukes. Are we?

Chapter 1 – The Body

“How much you wanna bet the perp’s an immortal?” Jakobe asked me, looking down at the corpse soaking in blood and water.

I laughed, though there was no humor in it. What’s funny about an innocent person losing their life? “Yeah, right,” I said. “If there were even a chance of that, they would have called in Counter-Cultivation, not us.”

I tugged the collar of my long uniform coat up higher against the rain as I looked down at the body, nestled within the trash piled against the wall. Although the narrow alley was mostly wreathed in shadow, neon light spilled in from the street, piercing through the raindrops and surrounding us with soft pinks and purples. Most people believed the neon illuminated the Heavenly Curse in the rain, but I was skeptical.

Squatting next to the body, Jakobe pushed some of the trash away and reached up to tap the control on the side of his boxy headset, which was grafted directly onto his optic nerve. After scanning the body, he reached down and pulled aside some of the platinum hair plastered over her eyes and down her cheek.

“Shit. Wang Fan, she’s just a kid,” he said softly.

She looked to be no more than fifteen or sixteen, and while her face was unmarked by any injury, the sticky blood that matted her hair conveyed a different story. Her thick makeup was starting to run in the rain; the dark blue stripe covering her eyes had become tears that marred her pure white lipstick. She had an oval face and strong cheekbones that obviously weren’t Han or even Japkor. Her hair revealed her ethnicity; it was natural blonde down to the roots. In this neighborhood, that pinned her as Eurosynth.

To me, it didn’t matter if she was Han, Japkor, Eurosynth, or anything else. She was a victim. Murdered. A child, essentially. From her attire, a short skirt that looked almost like it had been sprayed onto her thighs, and a frilly, sleeveless top that obscured her torso, a rookie detective might assume she was a working girl. But I knew better. The moon tattoo surrounding the metallic jack implanted in her forearm pegged her as a Nitro runner.

In the end, I didn’t care if she was a prostitute or a nun. When young girls like this ended up hurt, I got especially pissed. The perp better hope he didn’t so much as twitch when I found him, otherwise, he’d never make it to jail.

To the living, we owe respect; to the dead, we owe justice. That’s what Dad always said.

My jaw tightening, I pulled my gloves off, shoved them in my pockets, and took out a cigarette. I didn’t like smoking with gloves on. It felt strange. Cupping the cigarette with my hand to protect it from the rain, I lit it and shoved it into my mouth.

Jakobe looked up. In the rippling purple light, his ebony skin almost seemed to glow. “Smoking again, huh, brother?”

I could sense slight disapproval in his tone.

“So what if I am? It’s not like it gives you diseases or something.”

That last bit was a jab. After years together as partners in the Glorious Peacekeepers, Jakobe and I understood each other. But that didn’t mean I wanted to hear his conspiracy theory nonsense. He had all sorts of outrageous claims. For instance, he said Sinotech Corporation had once used computers so advanced they were intelligent, and that ancient cops could identify killers by their DNA. He also had smaller ‘theories,’ such as stories about how cigarettes used to cause diseases. I wanted none of it. Not only was such talk dangerously close to illegal, but it was also plain silly. And who knew who might be listening?

I could see he was considering a retort, but in the end he said nothing.

Letting the cigarette hang from my lips, I pulled out my detective’s pad and thumbed it on, the green text and images making an odd contrast to the purple that surrounded us. Once it chugged to life, I started flipping through our open cases to find this latest one. This was our fourth crime scene today, and we hadn’t even had a chance to look at the casefile ahead of time. “How many cases does this make for us now? Around sixty?”

“Sixty-four. And I wasn’t joking. Look at this wound.” He tilted her head to the side, brushing aside more of her blood-matted hair to reveal a wide swath of charred flesh behind her ear.

Squinting, I looked closer, then knelt to get a better angle of view. “Cauterization?”

“Yeah. The blood is from blunt-force trauma to the back of the skull. Probably some sort of vibrating weapon. But this charred section is obviously from a blast of some sort. I know what you’re going to say. Beam pistol.” He adjusted his headset again, probably to zoom in on the wound and run some cursory analysis. “But it’s too fucking wide and deep. The widest beam I can think of comes from the Spitter X3, but even that’s going to be no wider than 1.2 centimeters. This is reading at 3.05.”

I took a deep drag as I considered his words. Was he implying that the wound was some sort of sorcery? “There’s no way the perp was an immortal cultivator. Come on, brother. How many cases have we worked together? Hundreds? And how many of them involved cultivators? Not a single one. It just doesn’t happen. Besides, what do you think went down? One of them just happened to sneak all the way from the Dark Earths to here, then killed a Nitro runner in a side alley for… what exactly?”

“There are cultivators everywhere, brother. Not just in the Dark Earths.”

I shook my head. “Anything missing from her purse?”

He picked it up and rifled through it. “There’s cash here. And her ID. Look at this.” He pulled out a cheap disposable lighter with some leaves painted on the side. He tossed it up to me.

I grabbed it without looking as I scanned the area for anything else that might be a clue. Marks on her clothes or skin. Items that looked out of place in the trash. Bodily fluids. Nothing jumped out to me, and besides, the crime scene investigators would give everything a once-over anyway. A cockroach scuttled out of the trash and scurried up the wall. I hated cockroaches.

“Look,” Jakobe continued, “anything can happen. I’m not saying it was a cultivator. Just the wound is damn odd, that’s all.” Gently placing the purse back down next to her, he stood and pulled out his own pad. Looking through the casefile, he said, “Name: Halyna Vasylivna... Hrebenyuk. What a mouthful. Typical Eurosynth. She’s been processed a few times before. Possession. Theft. Nothing to get her locked away for good or put to sleep.”

“And she’s how old?”

“Well, fuck me. Born in 904 NE. That makes her twenty-four. I could have sworn she was in her teens. Must have had a lot of work done to keep her looking that young.”

I grunted a response and let a mouthful of smoke tumble out into the purple rain. Twenty-four years old. Just like Xiaoli. My little sister, the kindest person I’d ever known.

The alley around me spun, and suddenly I found myself in a different alley, two years ago.

Xiaoli and I had been walking arm-in-arm, huddled under a dome umbrella, laughing as we talked about our mom’s birthday.

“Do you think she knows?” she asked.

I chuckled. “About the surprise party? Yeah, she knows. She always figures those things out. Dad was the detective, but Mom, well, she’s a much better investigator. She can read people. Especially us.”

“Aw, Wang Fan, look over there!” Xiaoli pulled away from my arm and took a step away. “It’s a kitten!”

“It’s just a stray, Xiaoli,” I said.

Kneeling, she reached out toward the trembling animal but never had a chance to touch it.

That was the last thing I ever said to my sister. I remembered a blurred shadow. A flashing blade. Blood spraying across my face, the tang of it on my lips and tongue. She didn’t even get a chance to scream.

Voice barely audible above the patter of the rain, Jakobe said, “You’re thinking about her, aren’t you? Fuck. Why do we have to get cases like this?”

I’d fought, of course. Not that it did any good. I lost half my forearm that night, from my middle finger all the way down to the elbow. That was nothing compared to losing Xiaoli. So many happy memories, tainted forever by the sight of her severed head. That night almost didn’t seem real. The horror of it had lingered in my cold, sweaty nightmares ever since.

I looked at the hand that held my cigarette, of which only the thumb and first finger were made from real flesh and bone. I’d gladly lose my whole damned arm if that meant I could have Xiaoli back. Ironically, I happened to be holding the cigarette between the first and middle finger. It was almost as if the cigarette itself was the division between the part of me that was real and the part that wasn’t.

I shook my head to clear it. “That's the job, brother. We don’t have any choice in the matter.”

Trust the system, Dad had always said. It’s not perfect, but it works.

Looking down at the lighter, I thumbed it on for a moment, stared into the little flame, then snapped it off. I turned it over in my palm, examining the leaf design. “The Ivy.”

“What?”

“This is from a club called The Ivy. Few blocks down if I recall.”

He tilted his head as he thought. “I know the place. Yeah. It’s not too crowded out tonight, should only take five minutes to get there.”

I looked over my shoulder at the squad cars at the mouth of the alley and the patrol officers huddled there. The silhouette of a surveillance camera dangled sadly from the corner of the building above them.

“What are the chances the whole thing was caught on camera?”

He snorted. “Probably none.”

I nodded. “I’ll put in the request for footage when we get back to the precinct.”

“Patrol can handle things from here. Let’s go ask around The Ivy. Maybe we can get a lead.”

“Sure.”

We headed out of the alley, giving a few instructions to the patrol officers to pass on to the crime scene investigators and the medical examiner. The girl, a mere Nitro runner, wasn’t important enough to get a proper autopsy, but at least the examiner could check the wound and prove Jakobe wrong. There was no way an immortal cultivator killed this kid. More likely, it was a double blast from a beam pistol, a lucky pair of shots that hit the same place twice. That was why the wound was so wide and deep. It was probably a drug deal gone wrong or something else to that effect. That was how cases like these usually ended.

Out on the bright street, we hunkered against the rain, walking past a beverage advertisement that took up the entire face of the building. It featured a bright red background with flowing white text and a smiling face drinking from a can. The most ancient beverage brand in the world, Jakobe often called it. Another of his conspiracy theories.

We left our unmarked hovercar parked curbside behind us as we joined the slowly flowing river of people that clogged the sidewalk. No point in firing up the turbines to fly down a single block, even if we did use the emergency vehicle lanes.

The rain still fell, and people were fully garbed to protect against the Curse it might contain. There were umbrellas, trench coats, plastic ponchos, conical hats, and every other imaginable form of protection. Not a single ungloved hand to be seen, and faces were a blur; none could be made out clearly.

Although we couldn’t see our fellow crowd-members clearly, we could certainly hear them; words spoken in different languages bubbled everywhere. Most people in this part of town talked in Japkor, but in this specific four-block radius, Eurosynth was more common. The neighborhood was colloquially known as Little Kharkiv, though truth be told, I had no idea why. Supposedly the name stretched back hundreds of years. It was one of the few in the 35th Precinct where Jakobe and I couldn’t speak the local language, at least not very well. Order food? Yes. Ask for simple directions? Sure. But run an interrogation? Read subtext? Understand slang? Not even close. Unlike where I grew up in the Third Heaven, the Third Earth was an amalgamation of ethnicities, races, and languages.

The scent of frying food met us as we passed the next alley over. Within its shadows hunkered a glut of food carts serving cheap dishes for low prices. Unsanitary, but so mouthwatering that crowds clustered around them in eager expectation. Plastered on the walls above the carts were public service posters with the usual messages in various languages.

One of them pictured a host of happy people dancing in bright light. Help Break the Curse; Report Immortal Cultivators.

Overlapping it was a Japkor version, plus another poster that said: The Grand Kingdom Brings Life.

There was a Eurosynth one that I couldn’t actually read but knew the text from seeing the Sinese versions elsewhere. It portrayed a shadowy figure with glowing red eyes and fangs, looming over a huddled family whose faces were masks of terror. Reject Evil and Wickedness; Shun the Lies of Cultivation.

“Fucking rain,” Jakobe growled. “There wasn’t any on the schedule for today. How come it seems like the Shield is constantly breaking in the 35th?”

“We’re in the Third Earth, what do you expect? It could be worse.”

“True. We could be in the Dark Earths. Besides, the longer it don’t rain, the sooner it starts raining again.”

The First through Fourth Earths were colloquially known as the Bright Earths, although the moniker was more optimistic than realistic. The Fifth through Eighth were the Dark Earths, which was probably more realistic than pessimistic. And the Ninth and Tenth had an even more sinister street name.

We threaded our way through the crowd until we reached the end of the block, where we stopped for the light to turn. The traffic was bad because of the rain, even in the airborne lanes up above. This was the kind of night I’d rather be back at the precinct working out in the gym or even going through stale casefiles.

As the groundcars crawled past through the intersection, Jakobe said, “I know it’s none of my fucking business, brother, but….”

“But what?”

“At a certain point… don’t you think you should close the case? In your own mind, I mean. It’s been two years.”

I took another long drag to suppress the ache that had suddenly risen in my heart, then blew some curling smoke up into the rain. “I’ve said it before, Jakobe, and I’ll say it again. I’m not going to stop until I find out what was really going on that day. I’m gonna figure out who killed my sister, and I’ll make them pay.”

He looked over at me, and if it weren’t for the headset, he probably would have cocked an eyebrow.

Resisting the urge to roll my eyes, I said, “You know what I mean. To the full extent of the law. That’s what it’s there for. To protect and to bring justice.”

“The investigation was closed, man. The 24th Precinct has a good reputation, and they followed the leads for a full year. You and I don’t go past six months before tagging our dead ends as cold. You’re the one who always says to trust the system, right?”

I shook my head. “I’m not giving up, Jakobe.”

I missed my little sister too much.

The light turned green, and we headed across the street with the crowd.

On the other side, I continued, “She was only a Constable 3rd Class, but she was still a Glorious Peacekeeper. It wasn’t a robbery. It was a hit. She was targeted. There’s no question in my mind.”

A long moment of silence passed as we continued down the street. “Any new leads?”

“Yeah, believe it or not. Charlotte mentioned that Xiaoli had a safe in her apartment. Xiaoli never mentioned it to me, and I didn’t see any safe last time I went over there to look around. Must have missed it. Maybe that’s why I never found that gun I bought her when she graduated from Academy.” I shrugged. “Longshot, but maybe I’ll turn up a new clue.”

“Remind me again why you and Charlotte aren’t together anymore? You two were perfect for each other.”

I smiled and flicked the stub of my cigarette into a waterlogged tray atop a street corner trash can. “We were anything but perfect for each other.”

“Yet you’re constantly talking to her? When was the last time you two had dinner?”

“None of your business. I trust her with my life, but that’s different than wanting to live my life with her. Look, there’s The Ivy up ahead.”

Taking up the lower three floors on the corner of the towering high-rise, it had green neon ivy crawling up its sides. The sign was in Eurosynth, with a Japkor subtitle that read the same thing. The Ivy. There was a line out the door, but not a long one, only about fifteen or twenty people. The bouncers were taller than me by half a head, and they looked like they spent most of their waking time working out. One of them had an entire artificial arm, made from the same bonemetal as my own prosthetic. The other had some sort of eye implant, although it could have been cosmetic, just to make him look intimidating. The first was Eurosynth, the other Asian. Both had jutting jaws and brows that made them look like they were constantly frowning.

Approaching, we flashed our badges.

“Wang Fan, 35th Precinct,” I said in Sinese.

It was the official language everywhere in the Grand Kingdom, and complete fluency was a requirement to even get into the Glorious Peacekeepers. Starting conversations with it, especially in places like these where the people often spoke it poorly or not at all, was one of the quickest ways to assert dominance.

“Jakobe Liu. Who’s in charge of this place?”

The Asian replied in heavily Japkor-accented Sinese. “Boss Gorshkov.”

“Gorshkov? Is that a first name or— you know what, it doesn’t matter.” Not bothering with any more conversation, Jakobe brushed past the bouncers, and I followed.

Inside, the music battered at our ears like ancient drums interspersed with the shrieking of primates. The crowd seemed to be about half Eurosynth, with the rest being either Japkor or Han. Smoke and artificial fog swirled among the packed crowd while laser lights blasted out to match the staccato rhythm. I caught the sweetness of illegal drugs in the air, which was no surprise in a club like this.

Jakobe shouldered his way up to the bar and flashed his badge to one of the bartenders, then had a shouted conversation that I couldn’t hear despite being only three feet away. The bartender pointed to a door at the far end of the club, and we once again pushed through the crowd.

The door was guarded by another bouncer, who reacted nervously at the sight of our badges, as he obviously had a pistol under his jacket, which was technically illegal. However, that wasn’t why we were here. Jakobe took the lead as he usually did in these situations, and moments later, we were climbing a dingy staircase. The door closed behind us, cutting the music down to a barely detectable thumping. From there, we had to proceed through a few more guarded doors and up another long staircase before finally reaching the musty corridor leading to Boss Gorshkov’s office.

As we stepped into the corridor, my law-enforcement instincts suddenly went wild. The door at the end was unguarded and was also ajar.

People like Boss Gorshkov didn’t place five illegally-armed guards between himself and his club's front entrance, then leave his main door open and unguarded.

I didn’t need to exchange a glance with Jakobe. Our instincts were so tightly in tune that we both reacted in exactly the same way.

Reaching into my coat, I pulled out my firearm, a Spitter D4 beam pistol. As I did, two wires snaked out from below the rear sight of the pistol and snapped through my sleeve connector and into the jack in my right forearm. As soon as they connected, narrow strips of blue light appeared down the length of the barrel, indicating it was powered and ready to fire. The gun had a stealth option to operate it in the dark, but I found that the glow was often so intimidating to perps that I didn’t even need to fire the weapon for it to be effective.

Jakobe was more traditional. Instead of a beam pistol, he pulled out his Type 77-16, a gunpowder semi-automatic that he claimed was based on a design over a thousand years old—conspiracy theories.

Aligning sights, I led the way down the corridor, heading toward the tiny strip of yellow light that was the door.

As we took positions on either side of the door, we could hear voices. They were speaking Sinese, but neither were native speakers. One of them was a man with a Eurosynth accent, the other, a female speaker whose accent I couldn’t identify.

“You double-crossed us, Gorshkov,” the woman said. “We had a deal! When my Master finds out about all this, you’ll be sorry!”

Carefully looking into the room, I could just barely make out two or three thugs and a few people on their knees.

“No. No deal with people like you. Yablokov. Zhiglov. Kill those ones.”

Fuck!

Stepping into the room, I shouted, “Peacekeepers! Move, and we shoot!”

As I took the room in more fully, the woman who had been speaking turned to look at me, and my jaw nearly dropped. I was looking into the most captivating pair of eyes I’d ever seen.

Chapter 2 – The Black Corpses

I’d been around beautiful women before. I was a homicide detective, after all, and my cases often led back to the mob. Mobsters love pretty faces. Plus, my ex, Charlotte, could well have been a model. The real type, with no work done to make her into the kind of plastic doll that mobsters like. I rarely had dinner with her, however much Jakobe tried to joke that I did. We were college sweethearts, but in the end, our lives went in opposite directions, and we ended things as friends. I trusted her implicitly, and I wanted to keep it that way, so I avoided anything that resembled a date with her. My other ex, Qian Cui, was more attractive than Charlotte in some ways. The bad ways. She turned out to be a danger to both herself and me.

The girl at the other end of my Spitter barrel was different from either of them. Mesmerizing. We Han people use the most over-the-top idioms imaginable to describe beautiful women. We say they have skin as fair as white jade, and other such nonsense.

This girl wasn’t like that at all. Her skin wasn’t pale; it was olive. Dramatically angled cheekbones led to a wide mouth with full lips, and her face was framed with wavy honey-blonde hair that, despite its currently disheveled state, didn’t take an ounce of beauty away from her. But it was her eyes that nearly stopped my heart from beating. They were as green as the trees in Sea Lake Park.

I’ve never been attracted to ethnic minorities, but this woman was so exotic and stunning that I couldn’t not be attracted to her. She must turn heads on the street wherever she went. Time stopped for me as I stared, wondering who she was and what she was doing in a dump like this.

Don’t let pretty faces distract you, Son, Dad would say.

I broke her gaze and continued the subconscious assessment of the room that had begun before I even entered. I already had a vague sense of how many hostiles we were dealing with, and their general position, but I needed more specific details.

My eyes darted back and forth as I took in the office. It was dingy and smelled of sweat, vodka, and cucumbers—typical Eurosynth.

The green-eyed woman was on her knees, her hands tied behind her back. She had been roughed up. In addition to the disheveled hair, her clothing was torn, her fashionable blouse ripped down, exposing her undergarments and a strange pendant hanging between her breasts. She was flanked by a man and a woman, both of them on their knees as well, similarly bound and roughed up. Lying around them were—I counted their number in another fraction of a second—five more individuals who were either dead or unconscious. The situation was too urgent for me to judge their current state.

Standing over the group were some thugs. Three Eurosynths and a possible Japkor. The man I took to be Boss Gorshkov was seated behind them all, already half out of his chair thanks to me bursting in the door.

The office was big enough for Boss Gorshkov to hold a meeting with thirty men if he wanted to. Maybe even forty. There were decorations on the walls, an assortment of items that seemed to have been selected randomly. A cheap abstract painting. A few concert posters with Eurosynth text. An oversized fan. Bookshelves stuffed with reading material and miscellany. In the corner, a statue of a white unicorn head. A mostly-clean fish tank. I couldn’t tell if the fish inside were real. Probably not.

Another fraction of a second later, I assessed the thugs. Two had firearms, one a pistol, the other a shotgun. Another held an oscihammer, with a smooth head and a rounded peen on a short handle with a black grip. I hated vibrating weapons. The fourth had no visible weapon but was reaching toward the small of his back, where I assumed he had a sidearm. Final fraction of a second. I scanned Boss Gorshkov and couldn’t see any indication of a weapon. Little surprise. Smalltime gang leaders like him usually avoided getting their hands dirty. It was too easy to end up getting put to sleep.

At this point, I don’t think even a second had passed.

Thugs number one, two, and four were either the least professional of the crew or the smartest. Almost as soon as they laid eyes on us, thug number one dropped his pistol, and thug number two started lowering his shotgun. Thug number four kept his grip on his oscihammer, but to his credit, didn’t lift it. Thug number three was obviously the stupidest, as he pulled a dented and battered Spitter X3 out from behind his back.

Sorry, bud. Drawing a weapon on a Glorious Peacekeeper is grounds for immediate liquidation.

Before the gun’s wires could connect to his forearm jack, I shifted aim to his chest and pulled the trigger.

I felt the tingle from my forearm as my own Spitter drew on the energy of my body to create the spark needed to generate the beam. That was the advantage of beam pistols. As long as you were healthy, you never had to worry about running out of ammo. Granted, it was possible to overdraw, but it would require nearly constant shooting for a very long time to do that. Given there was no recoil, it made aiming a lot easier. The blue beam crackled through the air, punching two holes through his sternum, and then three more, just a few inches to the right.

The man looked down in shock, then crumpled to the ground.

As far as I could tell, the next biggest threat in the room was thug number two with his shotgun, so I trained my weapon on him as time returned to normal speed. The shotgun touched the ground, and thug number two slowly raised his hands into the air, while the man with the oscihammer simply stood there with a blank expression on his face.

“Drop the hammer,” Jakobe said in Sinese. No reaction. Switching to heavily accented Eurosynth, he said, “Drop it. No drop, I shoot. Kill you.”

Thug number four blinked, then opened his grip, allowing the oscihammer to clatter to the floor.

“Hands behind head,” Jakobe added in Eurosynth. “Get on floor.”

The three thugs complied, but Boss Gorshkov simply kept his hands up. Speaking in his accented Sinese, he said, “You don’t understand. These people—”

“He said get on the ground,” I growled, shifting iron sights onto his chest.

He swallowed hard and then lowered himself to his knees. “Please,” he said, “if you—”

“Shut up, motherfucker,” Jakobe said, stepping around me to kick the two firearms aside while simultaneously keeping his Type 77 trained on Gorshkov.

“Thank you,” said the green-eyed woman, and when I looked back in her direction, her gaze again tugged me into its orbit.

“It’s our pleasure, Citizen,” I said. “We Glorious Peacekeepers have a duty to help the common people.”

Without even thinking about it, I stepped toward her and reached down to help free her arms from the coarse ropes binding them. As I did, a thought popped into my head. Why had Gorshkov called his guards into the room, and why had he left the door open and unguarded? I would deal with such questions later.

My fingers wrapped around the rope, and I tugged, but despite the knot being relatively loose, I couldn’t undo it with only one hand. It wasn’t about strength, as my prosthetic provided plenty of that. Thumbing the wire release on my Spitter, I holstered it, then reached down and added an extra hand to the effort. In a moment, the knot unraveled.

“Remove your hands from the rope, Detective,” a metallic voice said.

Looking over my shoulder, I found myself staring into the barrel of a gun. Behind it was a man wearing black body armor that looked vaguely organic, as if it had been sculpted rather than crafted. There was no face visible, as he wore a helmet with a reflective black visor covering most of the face. His weapon was a bullpup assault rifle that he held with both hands, giving me a clear view of his shoulder and the logo emblazoned there. It was a metal disk with a skeletal figure, flesh hanging off the bones. It was black.

As it dawned on me that this man was one of the Black Corpses, my heart turned cold, and I froze in place. The Black Corpses were the secret police wing of the Glorious Peacekeepers. They rooted out corruption in the ranks, so it was little wonder that ordinary Peacekeepers got nervous when they started breathing down our necks. Of course, there were constant whispers about who was really corrupt, the Peacekeepers who got taken down, or the Corpses who took them down. Not that there weren’t corrupt Peacekeepers. There were. But there were just too many instances where good cops had their lives ruined because of flimsy charges. The Corpses were also known to be the primary soldiers in the fight against the immortal cultivators; Counter-Cultivation hunted the immortals, the Black Corpses liquidated them.

Eyes flickering over, I saw that Jakobe was as still as a slab of metal.

Looking back at the Corpse, I said, “Sir?”

“Just stand there and don’t do anything. Lieutenant Saito will be here shortly to take charge.”

Swallowing the lump in my throat, I said, “Sir, the rope is already—”

The girl lunged forward and shoved me hard in the chest, sending me stumbling backward, right toward the Black Corpse.

The Black Corpse pulled the trigger of his rifle, and I felt one bullet slam into my shoulder, then another, then a third. He obviously had his QBZ-14C on full auto.

Having me as a meat shield bought the green-eyed girl the moment she needed to lift both of her hands to chest level and interlock the fingers into a strange pattern. Muttering something under her breath, she rotated her wrists, shifting her fingers into another pattern.

As I watched with almost complete incomprehension, a white sphere formed in front of her, starting at pinpoint-size and expanding in an instant to the size of a billiard ball. Then, a white streak of light shot from the center of the sphere, jabbing through the air even faster than a Spitter beam.

It passed my jaw, so hot that I was sure I was being burned even though it didn’t touch me.

By this point, I had fallen far enough to remove myself from the stream of bullets. Unfortunately for the Black Corpse, his aim was off, and the remaining rounds hit Boss Gorshkov in the chest, sending him toppling backward.

I thumped to the ground, then heard another thump. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the Black Corpse on his back, smoke slowly curling up from a perfectly circular hole in his helmet visor.

I felt no pain from the gunshots yet, but I could sense that my left arm was useless. QBZ-14Cs were no joke. My scapula was probably shattered, and arteries had likely been ripped open. Were the shots low enough to have penetrated my lung? If so, it would probably be shutting down soon. Was the artery damage enough to stop my heart? I sensed darkness tightening at the edges of my vision.

The import of what was playing out was slow in hitting me; shifting my gaze, I found myself staring at the girl as she reached to the pendant hanging around her neck. She touched it, and it came alive, becoming liquid gold that flowed around her, forming a strange garment that, to my eyes, seemed almost like a bathrobe, embroidered with graceful flying creatures that resembled hummingbirds. Except… they were glowing with blue light.

What the fuck was going on?

The girl bent and freed her male companion. She had turned toward the other when a voice entered the room from the dark corridor outside.

“Stop moving, girl.”

She spun to face the door, interlocking her fingers again, and my eyes followed, just barely giving me a view of the darkness of the corridor.

“That won’t do any good,” the voice continued, and another Black Corpse entered the room. His voice sounded young. He wore the same distinctive armor as his fallen comrade but didn’t bear a firearm. Instead, he held a long sword, gently curved, clearly made of bonemetal.

“Take another step forward, and I’ll punch a hole right through that helmet of yours,” the girl said.

“Not likely.” Though his visor made it impossible to see his face, I could hear his smile. “We’ve been watching you for a while, Elena. I don’t want to kill you.”

Elena? For some reason, I found my mind racing to identify what type of name that was. It clearly wasn’t a Han name. It was a transliteration from another language, that was for sure. Not Eurosynth. Maybe Westvox? Yingo?

“Put your hands down,” the Corpse continued, “and you’ll live.”

I could see the fear in Elena’s eyes as she took a step back.

“I’m not joking,” she said. “I’ll kill you before you get close enough to use that sword.”

He chuckled. “Do you know how many people from your sect I’ve liquidated? Truth be told, I’ve lost count. So put your hands down. Right. Now.”

Not waiting for a response, he walked toward her.

“Die, you freak!” shouted the man Elena had just freed, and he lunged forward with a speed that defied anything humans should be capable of. My eye could hardly track him.

But what shocked me more was that the Black Corpse reacted with even greater speed. I didn’t even see him move. I blinked, and he was six feet from his previous position, having passed the charging man, whose head subsequently toppled from his shoulders in a spray of blood. Then his body fell forward flat onto its chest.

Shrieking in another language, Elena wrenched her arms so that she was aiming at the Black Corpse again, then shot another beam of light directly at him.

Again, he was faster. His own hand shot out, and it held something that looked like a mirror made of lightning. When Elena’s stabbing beam of white light hit it, the beam angled to the side, where it reached a different target.

Jakobe. This entire time, he had been standing there in complete shock. Before he even had a chance to dodge, the white light hit him in the side of the neck, and he fell. My heart lurched.

NO!

The Black Corpse again moved, and because I was watching for it, I tracked his movement, although just barely. He dashed forward and, instead of using his sword as I expected him to, he clotheslined Elena with an outstretched arm, knocking her off her feet and slamming her into the ground. I heard the crack as her head hit the synthetic wood floor, and her eyes closed.

Next, the Black Corpse’s sword flashed, and Elena’s female friend lost her head, heightening the reek of gore in the room.

“Lieutenant Saito!”

Two more Black Corpses entered, one bearing the same type of rifle as his dead comrade, the other a pistol.

“It’s taken care of,” Saito said. He flicked his sword free of blood, and then it retracted into a spherical shape the size of a marble, which he stashed in his belt. “Take the girl into custody, as well as that other cultivator right there. Kill everyone else.”

“Yes sir!”

A shot rang out, and a thug dropped.

Surely ‘everyone’ didn’t include me. Did it?

Then I saw the Black Corpse with the pistol aiming it toward me. Based on the angle, he wasn’t planning to shoot Elena.

Shit. Shit.

Why did they want to kill me? I hadn’t done anything! My mind raced for a course of action, but there was nothing to work with. Me, shot three times in the back, my partner and best friend down, my weapon holstered, against three Black Corpses?

My eyes darted back and forth as I looked for something to do. To use. Anything.

And that was when I saw green.

Green eyes that locked onto mine.

Elena was right next to me, and she was looking at me. Before I knew what was happening, she grabbed my wrist. I heard a snapping sound, and then light thrummed around us. Next, everything went black.

Chapter 3 – The Truth

I awoke briefly to see green eyes. She was pushing down onto my chest. My shoulder.

I gasped hoarsely. For some reason, it occurred to me that this meant my organs were all were working. That was good, right?

A wave of pain radiated out from the gunshot wounds, and everything went black again.

When I woke the second time, my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth, and my throat felt like it had swelled shut and then been baked in an oven overnight.

“Water,” I croaked, although it came out sounding more like a frog than an actual frog.

I saw the green eyes again and a utilitarian metal cup being held to my lips. As she grabbed me behind the neck and lifted my head, I tried to slurp the liquid down, with most of it spilling onto my chin and chest. A few drops got inside, and my tongue loosened. I took another sip, and a bit of moisture got to my throat. Another sip, longer. Then another. I drained the cup, and she lowered my head back onto the pillow.

“Where are we?” I asked, tilting my head a bit to try to get my own answer. Strangely, there was no pain at all when I moved my head, just some stiffness in my neck. Had those bullets really missed all the bones in my shoulder? I don't care how amazing of a med kit she had. It couldn’t possibly have patched me up so well that nothing hurt. At the same time, I didn’t feel the sluggishness of a painkiller. What was going on? The chaotic, frenzied fight from before was starting to seem like a dream.

We were in a small room, probably no more than ten feet by ten feet. A single lightbulb hung from the middle of the ceiling, casting harsh shadows on the meager furnishings: two cots separated by a cluttered desk and a chair. Floor-to-ceiling cabinets framed a door secured by four different types of locks, as well as a thick metal bar. Another door off to the side was ajar, an unlit restroom visible beyond.

“Somewhere safe,” she replied softly. She stood and shifted position so she was sitting on the cot opposite me, depositing the cup among the scattered items on the metal desk in the process. She had changed clothes. The strange-looking bathrobe was gone, although the pendant still hung at her neck. Gone was the ripped fashionable blouse, replaced by a short-sleeved black leather jacket with faded aqua trim and a high collar that led into a deep hood. Bulky white pants with exterior pockets narrowed until they were skin-tight around her calves, where they disappeared into utilitarian boots.

Looking down at my own attire, I saw that I was wearing the same black service pants as before and my regulation boots. My uniform jacket was draped over the chair underneath my shirt, which was topped by my holster. Jacket and uniform alike were soaked with not-quite-dried blood, and I spotted the holes from the QBZ-14C. That fight was no dream.

Shifting my eyes down, I saw that I was bare-chested, giving me a clear view of my bandaged shoulder. I reached over and probed at it gently to find that it didn’t hurt at all. Impossible. There were whispers that the Black Corpses had advanced medical tech that could patch up wounds that would generally be deadly. But there was no way this criminal had access to gear like that.

“Thanks for patching me up,” I said, sliding my feet off the cot and sitting up. I felt stiff and a bit woozy, but other than that, not much worse for the wear. “What kind of med kit did you use? I feel like I wasn’t even shot.”

“Alchemists can concoct pills that—” she suddenly stopped talking for a brief moment. “Well, anyway, there’s a med kit here as well, and I did everything I could. You got pretty lucky. You’ll have some scars, but that’s about it.”

I nodded. So she’d used sorcery on me. It made my skin crawl, but there wasn’t anything I could do, and I decided not to press the issue for the moment.

“You lost a lot of blood,” she said. Grabbing a boxy canteen off the messy desk, she filled the cup again and pushed it toward me. She also opened the desk drawer and pulled out a sealed ration bar. “Probably ought to finish both of these.”

I accepted the cup, took a long drink, then opened the ration bar and took a sample. Dry. Chewy. But I finished it in only three bites. I drained the cup and then refilled it myself. My mind was starting to work again, and all of a sudden, I thought back to the frenzied moments leading up to… to what? What had actually happened?

Jakobe.

My fingers tightened on the cup, and trying to keep the fury and grief out of my voice, I looked up and deliberately used her name. “You killed him, Elena. You killed my friend.”

The muscle of her jaw twitched. “I didn’t. That bastard Saito intentionally redirected the blast to hit him. From the moment Saito set foot in that room, he didn’t plan to let either of you leave the place alive. He knew he couldn’t take me without….”

I stared at her. “Without what?”

“You saw with your own eyes. The lightning mirror. And that sword. Both were items made by cultivator hands.”

“You’re saying he used magic? Like hell he did. Black Corpses have the best technology there is, stuff that we Peacekeepers can only dream of using.” I drained the cup yet again. It was true. Right? Those things had to be some sort of advanced tech. “I do know one thing for sure. You’re a cultivator.”

She gave me an unreadable look that lasted for a very long moment. Breaking her gaze, I reached over, grabbed my shirt, and pulled it on, blood, bullet holes and all.

“I didn’t kill your friend.”

“Try to spin it however you want. You’re responsible for his death. You and your sorcery. Where’s my gun?”

She hesitated. “I’ll give it back to you after you tell me what you’re going to do next.”

“What I’m going to do next?” I felt my heat rising in my chest and the back of my head. “How about you tell me what you’re going to do? I’m a Glorious Peacekeeper, so I know more than the average citizen about what you cultivators are capable of. You’re killers. Maybe not every single one of you. But those of you who don’t do the actual killing support the people who do.

“Speaking of which, I can guess exactly why you saved me. On the other side of that door, you have six or seven of your buddies, ready to jump in here and blast me with whatever magic light you use to silence witnesses. You want to see if I can be useful to you before you decide whether to kill me now or later. Am I right?”

Sighing, she rested an elbow in one hand and massaged her temples with the other. “Mierda. No. Look, I lost my friends in there, too. All of them.” Her voice trembled a bit in a way that not even the best actor could replicate. “They were more than just friends. I was responsible for them. Jack Lam has a wife and kid. Mary Watanabe and I—” at this point, she choked and had to stop talking for a long moment. Tears slid down her cheeks, but she wiped them away. “I’ve lost everyone, Officer. Everyone. I used to have a brother and parents, but not anymore. Not that you would know anything about that.”

“You don’t know anything about me,” I muttered, thinking of Xiaoli. I immediately regretted my words. What a cliché thing to say. And what a good way to alienate a suspect. I looked down at my feet, my hands subconsciously twitching toward my pockets to look for a cigarette.

Dropping her hands to grip the edge of the cot, Elena took a shaky breath and continued, “Zhang Li. Ivan Petrov. Yoon Yeo-Jin.” She spoke the names with such effort I guessed lifting a groundcar would have been easier. “They all just died, and it’s my fault. So I’m sorry for your friend, but don’t you dare blame me for his death. If I hadn’t fought, you and I would both be dead now.” As she rubbed her eyes with her thumb and forefinger to dry them, I took a box of tissue from the desk and offered it to her.

She took one and blew her nose, then tossed it into a waste bin under the desk.

“There’s nobody on the other side of the door,” she said. “This is a safehouse in an apartment building, and your gun’s in the bottom drawer of the desk. Walk out that door any time you want. But I’d think twice before you do that. Do you really think you can take on the Black Corpses? Un-unh. You’re marked for liquidation now, and it doesn’t matter who you know or what you do. They’ll find you and kill you. They’ll shoot you in the middle of the street if they feel like it.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond to that, and suddenly realized I was clawing through my pockets for cigarettes. Scooting over, I reached into my jacket on the chair, and my fingers closed around a cigarette package and my lighter.

“The reason I saved you is that we cultivators aren’t evil. I can tell you’re a good person, and I didn’t want to see you die. Plus, they were about to execute you. I had the ability to take you with me. To save you. So why wouldn’t I do that?”

She stopped talking, and a tense, awkward silence filled the room. Popping out a cigarette, I lit it, then sucked in a mouthful and let the smoke trickle down into my lungs. Holding out the pack, I offered her one. She shook her head to say no.

“Those were crooked Black Corpses,” I said.

She looked at me out of the hood, and although she said nothing, I could see the faint glimmer of scorn in her eyes.

“It’s not common, but it happens,” I continued. “There was an entire lance of Black Corpses executed once.”

“That was two hundred and fifty years ago,” she said dryly.

How did she know that bit of trivia? I thought. “That doesn’t change that it happened. The only reason they would try to kill me in cold blood is that they’re dirty.”

She didn’t seem inclined to respond.

I eyed the drawer she had indicated earlier and tried to decide if she was telling the truth. Was my firearm really in there? Or was it all some cultivator trick?

Shifting to police protocol, I announced, “I’m going to check on my gun.”

She nodded curtly, then tried to prevent me from seeing her tense as I reached over and opened the drawer. There it was. My Spitter D4, sleek and gleaming in the light cast by the single bulb above. I didn’t touch it.

“What’s your name?” I asked. To some extent, it was a test. I’d used her given name earlier but didn’t know her surname. Her giving it to me would be a small show of trust. She had a unique name, but given the massive population of the Third Earth, there had to be other Elenas out there. Having her surname would make it that much easier to track her down, and she would know that. Privacy wasn’t a right offered to citizens in the Grand Kingdom, but most people tried to maintain at least a bit of anonymity around us Glorious Peacekeepers. Nobody wanted extra attention from the police.

“Elena Ávila. You?”

“Wang Fan.” I chuckled softly, although it was a complete act. After years of detective work, I knew how being personable could defuse tension around a suspect. “It would be hard to get a more common and boring name than mine. Yours is the opposite, though. Very unique. What’s your background?”

She shook her head. “I don’t want to play the cop routine, Wang Fan. Let’s cut to the chase. You asked me what I’m planning to do, so here it is. I’m going to run. They know my name and face, and they’re probably looking for me already. I have to get out of the Third Earth.

“There are emergency protocols in place that I can use to get in touch with my superiors. Get some help.” She looked up at me, her green eyes gleaming. “I can bring you with me. If you want.”

My eyes narrowed. “You don’t even know me. Plus, I’m a Glorious Peacekeeper.”

“You’re a dead Peacekeeper walking, Wang Fan. You know it just as well as I do. It doesn’t matter if you’re innocent or not; once the Black Corpses mark you for liquidation, there’s nothing you can do to stop it from happening. Other than disappearing so thoroughly that they never find you.

“Do I trust you? Not really. But I’m good at reading people, and I stand by my intuition. You’re not a bad person. Come with me and learn the truth about what’s going on in the Grand Kingdom. And live.”

“The truth?” I laughed grimly as thoughts of Jakobe and his conspiracy theories bubbled up into my mind. “What, the Hellscape isn’t real? The Grid used to be some sort of virtual world that everyone in the world played games on? Paper used to be made from trees? Cigarettes were bad for you? Once upon a time?”

I expected laughter in response, or at least a sneer. Instead, she cocked her head to the side and said, “So, you do know some of the truth. Good. That’ll make things easier. You need to make your decision soon; I have to get moving.”

Her reply was so shocking to me I couldn’t think of anything to say in response. I blinked, then shook my head.

“I need to think.” Turning, I took two steps over to the bathroom and slid inside. Closing the door behind me, I flicked on the dirty yellow light, gripped the sink, and looked into the mirror, cigarette hanging from my lips.

The first thing that flashed through my mind was that this was what my mugshot would look like. If I ever got a mugshot. Would they just shoot me on sight? My thoughts scrambled backward through memory after memory as I recalled a case Jakobe and I had worked three years ago. It was a drug racket that led to a Sergeant 1st Class from the 12th Precinct.

When Glorious Peacekeepers ran afoul of the law, the Black Corpses got involved. As we had prepped to go in and arrest him red-handed, the Black Corpse liaison had explained how they worked.

“A single lance has been assigned to the case,” he had said, “no more. After all, this Sergeant Chen is mostly a bureaucrat, so we don’t anticipate any major difficulty taking him down. A lance typically consists of a close-combat specialist, sniper, communications officer, and medical expert, although that isn't always the case. I honestly don’t know which lance they’ll assign to you. You just ride along and follow their lead.”

Sniper.

The word filled my mind as I envisioned myself walking down the street with a red dot on the back of my head, a Black Corpse sniper’s finger slowly squeezing down on the trigger.

Was there a BOLO out already?

All units, be on the lookout for a heretic Peacekeeper. Detective 2nd Class Wang Fan from the 35th Precinct. 6’2, 190 pounds. Black hair, dark brown eyes. Partial prosthetic forearm. The suspect is armed and dangerous. Lethal force authorized.

Heretic. That was the word for traitors and turncoats, the true apostates marked for liquidation on sight.

I turned on the water and washed my face, my mind racing. Then I relieved myself and washed my hands. I’d reached the end of my cigarette, so I looked for a place to stub it out, but couldn’t find an ashtray. What kind of a bathroom doesn’t have an ashtray?

Crumpling the butt into some damp toilet paper, I threw it in the trash can and took a deep breath.

I had made my decision.

I opened the bathroom door and stepped out to find Elena sitting atop the bed, back against the wall, reading what appeared to be a battered, leather-bound book. The title was written in something that resembled Sinese, but more complicated and older. Some of the characters were too difficult to read from a distance, but I could make out a few. Such as “sun” and “cultivation.” My jaw tightened.

I closed the door and leaned against it. “I thought you were in a hurry.”

“I am.” She closed the book and set it down next to her.

“Is that what I think it is?”

She looked down at the book, then reached out as if to grab it before pulling her hand back. “Yes. It’s a cultivation manual.”

“I could arrest you right here and now, just for that.”

Pushing off the wall, she scooted forward off the bed. “You could try.”

Heat rose again inside me, and I had to resist the urge to step forward and grab her arm. I thought back to how quickly she had shot that blast of burning light; it had taken barely more than a second. Although I was confident I could grapple her before she could do that, I didn’t know what else she was capable of. Furthermore, my handcuffs were in their pouch in my jacket. Now wasn’t the time.

“I need to get out of here,” she said, stepping over to the desk and scooping some of the assorted items into a small purse. “Did you make your decision?”

I nodded.

“I’m coming with you,” I lied.

She gave me a level look. “Fine. Come on. We need to get moving.”

As she stepped past me to unbar the door and start unlocking it, I strapped into my holster and then threw my jacket on. I hardly felt any stiffness as I did so. Damned magic. I felt dirty to the core because of it. I’d much rather have laid in a hospital bed for a few days healing up the normal way.

The bloodstains and bullet holes on the jacket were noticeable, but not as much as those on my shirt. I pulled my Spitter out of the drawer, checked it, and shoved it in the holster.

With the door unlocked, Elena grabbed her book off the bed and stuffed it into her outside jacket pocket, grabbed a backpack from the foot of the bed and put it on both shoulders, then stepped outside. I walked past her out of the slightly recessed doorway into a corridor that stretched so long in both ways the elevators at either side seemed pinhead-sized. Dirty fluorescent light bulbs hung every thirty feet or so, barely illuminating the trash-littered tile floor and the occasional blooms of spray paint on the rough bonecrete walls.

Elena closed the door, then placed her palm flat on the surface.

I looked away as some clicking and thumping sounds emanated from the room within as the door locked itself.

Fucking cultivators and their magic. It made me sick.

Brushing past me, she headed left down the corridor. I buttoned my coat as I followed, checking my sleeve to make sure it was connected to the jack in my arm. I wanted to make sure I could draw and shoot my Spitter at a moment’s notice.

We walked from shadow into light, then back into shadow as we neared the elevator at the end of the hall.

When we were about thirty feet out from the elevator, it slid open, revealing the black-armored figure of a Black Corpse.

Chapter 4 – Left or Right

The Black Corpse was wielding the same type of bullpup assault rifle as the one who had shot me earlier, and was holding it at the ready. Before he could lift it and acquire a target, Elena snapped her hands out in front of her and unleashed a blast of white light. Dazzling brilliance filled the corridor, but the illumination only seemed to enhance the grime-encrusted walls and trash piled against them.

Perhaps because of her haste, Elena’s aim was off, and the shot went wide, sizzling into the elevator paneling.

However, it caused the Black Corpse to flinch exactly when he squeezed off his shot, and it went even wider than Elena’s blast, slamming into the ceiling above my head. Chunks of bonecrete rained down on me as the second and third rounds from his burst also missed. Amidst the haze of bonecrete dust, I froze briefly.

Should I put my hands up and surrender? Maybe drop to my stomach? I was innocent, after all.

Then again, these renegade Black Corpses had shot me in the back and then openly attempted to murder me. They had me in their crosshairs, both figuratively and literally.

As of now, the letter of the law was on my side. I’d done nothing illegal or even wrong. Of course, in the streamlined, ruthless legal system of the Grand Kingdom, that usually wasn’t enough. I would have to get to the right people and explain things, get strings pulled, to straighten everything out. Our family wasn’t necessarily the most influential, but we did have influence. For instance, we had a connection to Superintendent Cao. That was just how the system worked. Trust the system.

But what good would it do to pick the high road if it ended up getting me liquidated before I could clear my name? They had initiated all this.

I drew my Spitter and took aim, the wires snapping into the jack and the barrel lighting up bright blue. I could theoretically use stun mode, but that seemed too risky. I squeezed the trigger, hardly noticing the tingle as the weapon drew on me for the spark it needed.

Damn, a miss.

The blast hit the Black Corpse’s shoulder armor, sending black sparks showering down around him. Before I could get off another shot, he shifted to the left, earning almost complete cover inside the elevator.

Elena let off another blast of energy, but it didn’t come close to hitting him.

What to do? Detectives weren’t trained to fight commandos!

The other elevator was far too distant to run for, and for all I know, more Black Corpses would be coming from that direction soon.

The recessed doorways in the corridor would give a bit of cover, but the Black Corpse already had far more cover than the doors would provide. A firefight seemed like a stupid idea. I had to engage. The mere fact that my opponent was using an assault rifle indicated to me that he wasn’t a close-combat specialist. Plus, I hadn’t seen a sign of anything like a knife or sword. I’d been training in martial arts since I was a teenager and was generally considered one of the best in the 35th. If I could get my hands on him, I might be able to choke him out. I would just have to find the sweet spot on his neck where his armor didn’t protect him.

“Cover me, Elena!”

I rushed forward at a near-run, keeping my Spitter trained on the last spot I’d seen the Black Corpse. A blast of white shot past me, then another a moment later.

I was about five paces away from the elevator when I saw a flicker of motion near the floor. It was a hand. Tossing a small, metallic sphere.

Shit. Stun grenade.

I spun, shouting to equalize the pressure in my eardrums and bending my legs to leap in the opposite direction. Even as my arms moved to cover my head, the grenade detonated, releasing a small shockwave along with blinding light and an immensely loud bang. I was thrown forward and to the side, my head smacking into the wall.

Everything went black for an indeterminable period of time. Then my eyes cracked open to the view of the Black Corpse’s boots walking past me. I could feel blood smeared on my face. Was my nose broken?

The blast had ripped my gun from my grasp; it was a good yard or two away from me, the wires still intact. They had popped out of the jacks on my forearm but not snapped in the process. Good. I only had one set of spares inside the weapon.

Farther down the corridor, I could see a mass of white that was Elena, lying prone on the floor.

Perhaps I’d been out for more than a few seconds, as there had clearly been some more fighting going on.

I tried to collect my thoughts but was still stunned from the grenade and could only watch as the Black Corpse reached Elena. Keeping his rifle trained on her, he toed her tentatively, then swung his rifle over his shoulder, reached down, and grabbed her by the hair.

Jerking her up, he gripped her throat with his other hand and shoved her against the wall.

My vision was blurry, but I could see her eyes flutter open and her lips moving. Unfortunately, the only sound I could hear was the ringing in my ears.

Suddenly, the Black Corpse slapped her in the face, hard, causing her head to jerk to the side. Before she could turn her head back, he punched her in the gut, and she spasmed.

Then he reached toward his belt, where I saw a pair of handcuffs.

“Hey!” I managed to croak, and as he turned to look at me, Elena moved, sending her knee flying up into his crotch. As he doubled over and simultaneously released his grip on her, she grabbed his shoulder and shoved him hard, sending him flying down the corridor. His helmeted head slammed into one of the doorways with a thud and he spun around in the air before landing hard on his stomach, groaning.

What the hell? She’d just thrown him like a rag doll!

Walking over to him, she lifted her foot and slammed it down onto his head, causing the helmet to crack loudly. Then she kicked him several more times until he stopped moving.

Fuck. Had she just killed him?

By this point, my hearing was slowly starting to come back; I made out something that sounded like profanity from Elena, and then she spat on him.

She walked back to me, breathing hard as she wiped blood from her face.

“We have to get out of here,” she said, reaching down to offer me a hand.

“I can get up myself,” I said.

“Fine.” She stepped away.

Gritting my teeth, I rolled onto my hands and knees, then crawled to my feet with a groan that I couldn’t suppress. Working my jaw a bit to try to pop my ears, I wiped the blood off my face with my sleeve. I gingerly touched my nose to find that it was swelling up badly but wasn’t broken.

Elena stepped back into my field of vision, holding my gun out for me to take, barrel toward her.

“Thanks.” I took it and let the wires snap back into place. I definitely wasn’t going to holster it this time. And I wasn’t going to hesitate about shooting any Black Corpses. They were the ones breaking the law to begin with.

“I don’t know how the hell they found us so quickly,” Elena said. “But it makes me really worried.”

“Elevator?” I asked.

“Stairs,” Elena said, jerking her head to indicate the stairwell next to the elevator.

“What floor are we on?”

“Twelfth. Stairwell has a back exit.”

I nodded. “Right. Let’s go.”

She turned and nearly ran toward the door.

As I prepared to follow, something caught my eye. There, only a few paces away in a recessed doorway next to where the Black Corpse had held her up against the wall, I saw the corner of a leather-bound book. Her “cultivation manual.” It must have slipped out of her jacket during the commotion.

Elena opened the stairwell door and rushed inside, letting it slam shut behind her.

Can’t blame me, I thought. I stepped over, grabbed the book, and put it into my back pant pocket, inside my jacket, smiling at my luck.

Now I had some evidence. Maybe leverage, too.

Hurrying after her, I stepped into the stairwell and started descending two or three steps at a time.

As we rounded the bend on the sixth floor, she said, “What do you say we split up at the bottom?”

“What? Why?”

“They’ll be looking for us, and we stick out. We’re only a few blocks from the 4th Ring Road, so—” she paused to take a breath “—we head out of the alley in opposite directions, then go to the nearest 4th Ring zont-rail station. Board separately. Take it three stops up to the Central Pass station, and then walk over to Sea Lake Park.” She took another breath. “By that point, we’ll be far enough away that it should be safe to proceed together.”

“If they’ve flagged us in the system, how do you propose we use the zont-rail?”

We were down to the fourth floor. As we hit the landing, she reached into her pants pocket and pulled out two ID cards.

“Forgeries?”

“Yeah. They have some money on them already.”

I scowled inwardly but tried not to show it. I took one of the cards and examined it as I followed her down the stairs. “Huh. Should work.”

“So it’s settled then?”

“Sure. Zont-rail to Central Pass station, then go to Sea Lake Park. If we split up, and I go right, it’ll take me longer to get there. Plus, the park’s big; where exactly do we meet up?”

“The wishing pond. Know it?”

“Yeah. The wishing pond it is.”

“I’ll give you a few minutes to catch up after I get there.”

We reached the bottom of the stairwell.

“You might want to ditch your jacket,” Elena said.

She was right. My uniform was very distinctive and would instantly mark me as a Peacekeeper detective. That wasn’t to mention the bullet holes and blood.  And I couldn’t stop thinking about those Black Corpse snipers. “But my shirt is worse.”

“Right, should have thought of that.” Quickly pulling her backpack off, she unzipped it and pulled out a floppy hoodie made from thick grey fabric. “Use this.”

Nodding, I slipped out of my uniform jacket and took some equipment that could come in handy. Flashlight. Gloves. Multi-tool. Pad. A few other things. Slipping the hoodie on over my head, I stowed the random equipment in the front pocket and pulled the hood up.

“You want these too?” she asked, holding out a pair of metallic glasses that looked vaguely similar to Jakobe’s headset.

“Functional?”

“No night vision,” she replied. “But the general enhancements.”

I shrugged. “Why not.”

I slipped the glasses on.

“All right,” she said. Cracking the door, she looked out down the alley, then slowly opened the door wider and scanned the other direction. “It’s clear. It shouldn’t take more than forty minutes to reach the park. Maybe an hour depending on how busy the streets are and how on-time the zont-rail is.” She turned and looked me in the eyes. “Ready?”

When her green eyes locked onto mine, I suddenly felt my stomach twist a bit. Everything was happening so quickly, and I had been so caught up in the moment that I had forgotten how beautiful she was. But that wasn’t what was provoking the reaction. There was something in her eyes that I hadn’t noticed before.

Fear.

She was scared. Deep inside. And she seemed flustered. No wonder she hadn’t noticed her missing manual.

For a moment, I hesitated. Was it the wrong choice to turn her in? Up to this point, I hadn’t seen her do anything wrong. Well, other than use magic. That in itself was illegal and evil.

But….

She’d only been defending herself. She was technically innocent.

No.

No, she wasn’t.

Help Break the Curse; Report Immortal Cultivators.

Reject Evil and Wickedness; Shun the Lies of Cultivation.

What was I thinking? A pretty girl looks scared, and I forget all about how she represented the very people who had forced humanity to shelter against the Heavenly Curse for centuries while the Hellscape loomed around us? They were the cause of all our problems. And she represented them.

But why were my instincts telling me that she was an innocent? That she deserved to be treated with justice?

Trust the system, Son, Dad had always said. It’s not perfect, but it works. He often followed it up with a secondary piece of advice. But also, trust your instincts.

I took a breath and cleared my mind. Worst case scenario, I could just leave out her last name. I could turn her book in as evidence and say that she tried to bribe me, but she ran off when I refused. Something like that. By that point, she would have long since disappeared as best she could.

“I’m ready,” I said.

She smiled, although it seemed forced. “Okay.”

She hesitated for a moment. Reaching out, she clasped my shoulder, leaned forward, and brushed my cheek with a light kiss that some ethnic minorities use when greeting each other or departing. My heart flip-flopped, and I almost wondered if she had used some sort of magical technique to strike me to my core.

She stepped back and again speared me with her green eyes.

“Thank you, Wang Fan. I owe you.”

“N-no,” I stammered. “Er, I’m the one that owes you.”

She smiled. “See you.”

Stretching out her jacket’s built-in gloves to cover her hands, she stepped out the door.

Shit.

What the hell was I doing? I stood in the stairwell for what seemed like several minutes but was really only a few seconds. Maybe it was the stun grenade coupled with everything else that happened before that, but my mind felt like stir-fry.

You’re a Glorious Peacekeeper, I told myself. She’s a cultivator. An evil criminal. She’s using sorcery to try to confuse you.

Why didn’t I believe my own line of reasoning?

Cracking the door, I decided to make my own assessment of the outside. Where were the rest of the Black Corpses? Hadn’t they called for backup? Apparently not. It lent weight to my theory that they were crooked and were hunting me alone.

If it was a single lance after me, and two were dead, that meant there were only two left. Lieutenant Saito and one other.

Pulling the hoodie as far forward over the glasses as it would go, I stepped out and looked in the direction I knew she’d taken. I barely caught sight of her as she reached the end of the alley and melted into the crowd.

Sighing, I strode off in the opposite direction and did the same. Looking over my shoulder as I blended into the crowd, I saw the huge marquis of the building I had just been in: The Grand Kingdom Highrise. Like many buildings, the name sounded a lot more amazing than the building was.

It had stopped raining. Or perhaps I had just walked out of the rainy area. As I drifted along with the sea of people, bombarded by the colorful neon light and the jabber of the crowd, I pondered my next move.

Unfortunately, I didn’t come to any brilliant conclusions, and before I knew it, I was staring up at the grimy escalator leading into the zont-rail station. I stopped, and people flowed around me, some of them muttering curses at me for blocking the way.

What to do?

I stepped onto the escalator and headed into the station. Here on the Third Earth, budgets didn’t allow for proper security on the zont-rails. There weren’t even detectors to flag firearms. I swiped the card Elena had given me but stopped at the stairs leading down to the platforms.

The left side would take me to Central Pass station, and beyond it, Sea Lake Park. The right side… would give me other options. I could return to my apartment and, from there, call Charlotte. If I could rely on anyone to have my back and save my life, it was her. Wait. No, the Black Corpses would obviously go to my apartment. If I wanted to get in touch with Charlotte, I’d have to do it from a payphone. I could go to Sergeant Zhang, who ran the 35th Precinct. Better yet, I could go above his head. Superintendent Cao. Call in that old family favor he owed because of Dad. It would be ballsy but probably a lot more effective.

I thought back to the feeling of Elena’s cheek brushing against mine, and when my heart started pounding, I gritted my teeth and turned right.

Chapter 5 – Infiltration

I hated the rails, especially after the rain. My skin crawled at the idea of being pressed shoulder to shoulder with people who could theoretically be Cursed. In truth, I hardly ever used zont-rails unless necessary. And although the vert-rails were a bit better, I only stepped onto them when I occasionally left the Third Earth to visit Mom down in the Third Heaven.

The zont-rails here were old and loud. Advertisements fought with public service posters for visibility, and most were scrawled over with graffiti. Trash was piled up under the grime-coated plastic seats. The car smelled like a mix of mold, sweat, and lingering disinfectant. At the end of the line, the entire train would be sprayed, but little more. As far as I knew, they never actually cleaned them, save for an occasional run-through with a broom to remove the biggest piles of trash.

Leaning up against one of the metal poles in the middle of the car, I retracted my head like a turtle, pulling it as far as possible into the hood, trying to keep my facial features concealed. I glanced around. Despite the car being packed and everyone jostling each other for space, I didn’t see a single person looking at me.

Not that it meant I was safe.

Granted, the vast majority of security cameras in the Third Earth were in a state of constant breakdown and repair, and those that worked were rarely monitored. But if a camera caught my face, and there did happen to be someone watching, I could have Black Corpses all over me. For some reason, the weight of the Spitter underneath my hoodie wasn’t particularly comforting given the circumstances.

As the train car accelerated, I considered my next move. I had to decide who to seek help from.

Charlotte?

Sergeant Zhang?

Or Superintendent Cao?

Charlotte had always had my back and had even saved my life on one occasion. Things got a bit stiff between us after we broke up, but after some encouragement from Xiaoli, I patched things up with her. We were as close as siblings now, and I trusted her. Plus, she trusted me. She knew me. I had secrets that only she knew, and I had full faith that she would never reveal them. For instance, she was fully aware that, in a moment of ignorance and desperation, I’d destroyed evidence of Qian Cui’s drug use and mob connections. If the department found out about that, I’d be done for.

If I told Charlotte corrupt Black Corpses were chasing me for unknown reasons, she would believe me. But what about Elena and her dead cultivator friends? Were I to tell Charlotte the truth about that part of the story, she might hesitate. No matter how innocent I claimed to be, she wouldn’t want to get wrapped up with cultivators.

Besides, did I really want to drag Charlotte into this? If I couldn’t clear my name, and she got involved, wasn’t it possible the Black Corpses would go after her as well? Would they torture her for information about me? I didn’t even want to think about it. The Black Corpses were essentially above the law; however much I detested that, I couldn’t do anything about it.

Charlotte was out. For now.

What about Sergeant Zhang? He liked me, but that was only so long as I kept solving cases. I didn’t consider him a friend, and although he had put in a good word for me for my most recent promotion, there was no telling how he would react to this situation. Most Glorious Peacekeepers hated the Black Corpses, but at the same time, wouldn’t dare to defy them. I couldn’t recall ever hearing of a precinct closing ranks behind an officer when the Black Corpses started circling, and I didn’t want to place bets on my precinct offering anything other than a staunch defense at best. I had no evidence to prove my innocence, so as long as there was a warrant out for me, I would be fighting a losing battle.

I suddenly thought back to what Elena had said.

It doesn’t matter if you’re innocent or not; once the Black Corpses mark you for liquidation, there’s nothing you can do to stop it from happening.

Fuck me if she wasn’t right.

That was why the Glorious Peacekeepers hated them so much. In the Nine Heavens and Ten Earths, life was hard, and criminal behavior had to be crushed without mercy. But what happened when those who enforced the law were accused of breaking it? What happened when the criminals turned the law against law enforcement? What happened when a Peacekeeper was framed?

We all knew a fellow officer or two who everyone believed had been wrongly taken down by the Black Corpses.

Sergeant Zhang was out.

That left Superintendent Cao. Family friend.

In Han culture, relationships were more important than anything else, and debts were never forgotten. Although I didn’t know the man personally, Dad’s relationship with him might end up being my salvation.

I felt the zont-rail lurch a bit and looked up to see that we were at Peony Garden Station. I closed my eyes and recalled the solitary occasion I’d visited Superintendent Cao’s apartment to deliver an urgent report regarding one of our cases that affected the higher-ups. He lived near the Third Grand Sports Stadium, which was only three stops away.

I scoured my memories to recall the story Mom had told me about Superintendent Cao and Dad, back when they were both patrol officers. There had been a firefight, and Dad dragged him to safety.

He owed your father a favor but never paid it back. Your father passed away before he could.

I remember Mom’s words as clear as a freshly printed translucent cash bill.

This was my chance. My only chance.

Nodding to myself, I wrapped my leg around the pole to stabilize myself against the rocking of the zont-rail train and waited as it rumbled two more stops. Getting out, I switched trains and headed to the next stop, the Third Grand Sports Stadium.

Although it only took a few minutes to pass each stop, to me, it seemed like hours. With every moment that passed, the Black Corpses were widening their search. And by now, the BOLO must have reached every precinct in the Third Earth.

That wasn’t to mention that Elena got closer to Sea Lake Park with every moment that passed. If I really planned to turn her in to earn my freedom, I had to make sure they apprehended her cleanly while she waited for me at the wishing pond.

I felt an uncomfortable twinge inside of me about how I planned to betray her trust. Sadly, it was a necessary evil. She was a criminal, after all. As I thought about her, I suddenly realized there was a big elephant in the room. The Black Corpses had been after her. Why?

It was a moot point now.

I emerged from the zont-rail station on the side of the street occupied by the hulking sports arena. Jakobe had told me once that the tradition of putting stadiums in this spot in the various Heavens and Earths began because of an original version that had existed in the ancient times before the War of Tribulation. I’d always scoffed at that, but now, Elena’s words kept popping into my head.

So, you do know some of the truth.

The stadium looked like an enormous shelled aquatic creature, with concentric sloping metallic roofs lit with neon and spotlights. There was no event tonight, so the streets weren’t particularly crowded.

Superintendent Cao lived in one of the residential towers opposite the stadium, in building 14. Because of the restricted traffic area around the stadium, there were no aerial lanes near here, and thus, the high-rises rose into nothing but gloom overhead. It was darker here than in the busier parts of the Third Earth and also a bit more peaceful, although the light of the Heaven-Propping Pillar still touched it during the day. Little wonder that so many important and powerful people had residences here.

Taking measures to ensure I wasn’t being followed, I quickly crossed the street, then slowed down to a stroll as I headed toward the complex. Security was light, with a single guardroom at the main entrance. The guards in places like this usually did little more than check deliveries and give directions, and were easy to sneak past. Rarely did they go so far as to check residency cards or ask for identification. The lone guard inside the booth seemed primarily interested in reading whatever he held beneath the level of the window.

As I strolled closer, I spotted an elderly woman nearing the gate from the other direction, walking with the help of a cane and simultaneously pulling an overloaded cart of groceries behind her. From the tattered nature of the greens, I guessed she must be coming back from getting clearance items at the nearest supermarket.

I timed my approach so that I arrived just as she fumbled to pull out her card.

After catching a full view of the front of the card, including her name and picture, I loudly said, “Allow me to help, Mrs. Guo!”

At the same time, I reached out to grab the handle of her cart with one hand and support her elbow with the other.

“Thank you, young man!” she replied in the heavily accented Sinese of a low-class citizen. Not everyone who lived in these complexes was rich. The lower levels were usually packed with cheap, cramped apartments for citizens just like this old woman.

She scanned her card, and the gate opened. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that the guard hadn’t even looked over.

As Mrs. Guo and I entered, me pulling her grocery cart, the gate swished shut behind us.

Rubbing the small of her back, she said, “Do I know you, young man? My memory isn’t what it used to be.”

“I’m Little Zhang,” I replied smoothly. “From building 14.”

“Ah,” she said, “that must be why you look so familiar. I’m from building 14 as well. Do you mind helping me to my door? I feel a bit more exhausted than usual tonight. The lines at the market were atrocious, and—”

Dammit, I thought as she prattled on. The last thing I wanted to do was waste time on something as pointless as helping some old lady with groceries. But would two or three minutes make that much of a difference?

“Of course, Mrs. Guo,” I interrupted gently. “Follow me.”

As we walked down the path to building 14, she regaled me with a recounting of the deals she had encountered at the supermarket and a smattering of gossip regarding her neighbors on the third floor. I nodded and grunted at all the appropriate points. At the same time, I tried to remember the various ways in and out of this particular complex. If the superintendent wasn’t friendly after all, how would I make my escape? Down to the parking garage and out the back? Out a side gate, then circle back around to the zont-rail station? The latter seemed the best choice.

The main door to building 14 was locked, but we approached just as someone emerged.

“Well, if it isn’t you, Mr. Qing,” Mrs. Guo said. I stood by with a smile cemented on my face as they exchanged pleasantries and news. Then Mr. Qing held the door as we walked into the building.

I spent more time helping Mrs. Guo than I’d anticipated. Her apartment was a sharp contrast to the corridor outside it, which had advertisement stickers pasted onto the walls left and right, and smelled like a mix of old rice, dust, and cheap plaster. I had to tactfully decline her offer of tea several times in a row before I could head back to the elevator. If it had been coffee, I might have been tempted. It was getting late, and my eyes were getting a bit prickly.

After freeing myself from Mrs. Guo, I took the elevator to the forty-fifth floor, then walked down to Superintendent Cao’s apartment. This corridor smelled cleaner than below, as if the building maintenance workers gave it a harder shove with the broom and a few extra spritzes of disinfectant when they passed through.

Before pushing the buzzer, I confirmed the location of the stairwell in case I needed it to make an escape. Any path to the ground floor other than the elevator would be less than ideal, but in a worst-case scenario, I could theoretically go up or down a few floors and reassess the situation.

Taking off the metallic glasses and putting them in my pocket, I took a deep breath and pushed the buzzer.

No response.

I pushed again.

From inside, I heard a muffled, “Delivery, at this hour? Why didn’t you buzz in from the main gate?”

I heard a whir as the interior lock disengaged, and the door opened to reveal a middle-aged woman with her hair loosely piled in a bun, wearing striped pajamas, and a wine glass in her hand.

As soon as she laid eyes on me, she could tell I was no delivery boy.

Before she could ask for my name, I flashed my badge.

“Madam Cao? I’m from the 35th Precinct, ma’am. Sorry to come unannounced, but Sergeant Zhang sent me with an important update on the Anderson Initiative.” The words were an almost exact repetition of what I’d said when I came here on the previous occasion, with a few key aspects changed. The “Anderson Initiative” was an undercover operation being run out of the 35th Precinct. Although Jakobe and I weren’t assigned to it, we couldn’t help but hear about the details here and there. Hopefully, it would be enough to get me in the door, at least.

Her cheeks seemed a bit flushed from the wine, but she was far from drunk.

“35th Precinct? Can I see that badge again, Officer…?”

“Wang. Officer Wang.” I produced my badge again, my heart pounding. There was no way the Superintendent himself had been notified about me. Was there? And even if he were, he wouldn’t have told his wife about it. Would he have?

She peered closer, checking the name and badge number. She nodded. Gesturing with the wine glass, she said, “Right this way.”

As I stepped inside, the door shut behind me, and I heard the locking mechanism whine into place. Last time I’d handed over a packet at the door, so this was my first time being able to take in the interior. The paved marble foyer featured statues and living plants that only someone of Superintendent Cao’s position could possibly afford. My jaw tightened a bit. Based on what I knew of the pay scale, his salary probably couldn’t afford it.

“My husband is in a meeting in the other room. Why don’t you wait in the study?”

“Of course, ma’am.”

She opened a heavy wooden door, allowing me to step into a room full of books, paintings, and overstuffed sofas and chairs. It smelled like a library, with a tinge of smoke. But not cigarette smoke. Cigars. One corner featured a china cabinet stocked with bottles of alcohol behind a small bar. I frowned slightly at the luxury of it all, but I couldn’t stop myself from breathing in deeply to enjoy the aroma of real books. That wasn’t the sort of thing an ordinary citizen encountered often.

“Have a seat. I’ll go let him know you’re here.” Turning, Madam Cao let the door shut.

I took a step forward and looked at the books on the nearest shelf. There were police procedure manuals and legal theories. Historical treatises and biographies. Even a few works of fiction. Supervisor Cao seemed to be a very well-read man. Either that or he wanted people to think he was.

Running my finger along the edge of the shelf, I followed it to the end, where I found a tiny atrium filled with more living plants. I even saw some sort of animal inside, a snake or a lizard, something along those lines. It looked real, although I couldn’t say for sure. I’d never been an animal person.

All of a sudden, I realized I was wasting time. I still hadn’t formulated the words I would use to explain the situation. I’d come up with a few possibilities on the zont-rail, but none had seemed perfect. Did I start with the corrupt Black Corpses? Or the murder case that had started this? Should I mention the cultivators right from the beginning? When did I bring up Elena? How did I explain her healing me? What was the best way to explain Sea Lake Park?

Before I could make any decisions, I heard the door open, and Superintendent Cao stepped in. He was a thin man with pronounced cheekbones and a well-trimmed mustache, his hair cut in military style. He wore at-home casual attire, a pale-blue collared shirt with elbow-length sleeves, and dark slacks.

“Hello, son,” he said, a frown tugging at the corners of his mouth. I eyed him up and down, and my initial impression was that he wasn’t armed. He must not know about my situation. Otherwise, why would he step into a room defenseless?

A short, muscular man with coal-black eyes and a graying goatee followed him. I didn’t know him, but I did recognize the insignia on the shoulder of his military-style uniform. It was a metal disk with a skeletal figure, flesh hanging off the bones. A corpse. And it was black.

Chapter 6 – The Study

My heart leaped into my throat when I saw a Black Corpse walk into the room behind Superintendent Cao, and my hand immediately twitched toward the bottom of the hoodie.

“Now now, Detective Wang,” the superintendent said, waving his finger. “There’s no need for that. Please, have a seat. Would you like a drink?”

The superintendent seemed completely at ease, but I wasn’t sure if that made me feel better or worse. His body language made him seem confident and in control as he stepped behind the bar. Peering into the china cabinet, he continued, “Perhaps some baijiu? I have all the common types, as well as a few rarities. Or do you prefer ethnic alcohol? Vodka? Tequila?”

What the hell was tequila? I’d never heard of it. Besides, I was having a hard time processing this sudden development, and I could hardly keep my attention off the Black Corpse. He wore the uniform of a Black Corpse officer. Glancing at the usual places, I didn’t see any indication of a concealed weapon. Not that it meant much. There were plenty of firearms that could fit inside a palm, not to mention bladed weapons. He could have poison needles in a sleeve sheath or an osciblade at his ankle, and I would never be able to spot them.

Clearing my throat, I said, “I’m not much of a drinker. Have coffee by chance?”

“We favor tea here,” he replied primly. “Besides, three men like us should drink baijiu, don’t you agree?”

Typical. When men like this wanted subordinates to drink, they drank. I could fight it by making up a story about why I couldn’t drink, but in the end, it wouldn’t be worth it. Besides, I needed his help.

“Good point,” I said. “I’ll have whatever you’re having.”

“Excellent. Would you like a cigar?”

“I’d prefer my own smokes if it’s all the same.”

“Of course.” Gesturing at one of the overstuffed armchairs, he said, “Sit, sit.”

My eyes flickered over to the Black Corpse. I had never worked undercover, and felt very uncomfortable having my weapon as inaccessible as it was under the bulky hoodie. Trying to calculate how long it would take me to pull the Spitter out if I needed to, I lowered myself into the chair and pulled out my cigarettes and lighter. I saw him watching me as I did and felt like his gaze was piercing into my deepest secrets. He knew I was armed, and from the way his eyes flickered up and down my person, I got the feeling he was deciding how he would liquidate me if a fight broke out.

“What about you, old pal Zhong?” Superintendent Cao said. “Drink? Cigar?”

“I’ll have baijiu with the two of you,” the Black Corpse replied. His gaze fixed on me, he continued, “Given the circumstances, I feel like slumming a bit. Have any Red Star?”

“Of course, old friend. Please, sit.”

As I held my cigarette between my first and middle finger and lit it, Mr. Zhong slid onto the sofa to my right, crossing one leg over the other and placing an arm on the top of the backrest behind him.

The superintendent pulled a bottle out of the cabinet that featured a white and blue label with a large red star. Then he produced three crystal drinking glasses, each the size of a billiard ball, which he filled to the halfway point with baijiu. The pungent aroma tingled in my nose.

After handing me a glass, he joined Mr. Zhong on the couch.

“Cheers!” he said

We echoed his call to drink, and given that he was the host and had initiated the drinking, Mr. Zhong and I both kept our eyes on the level of his glass and were careful to match his intake. He swallowed about half of the baijiu.

Mr. Zhong swallowed, then let a breath hiss out between his teeth. “It’s been years since I’ve had Red Star. Just as I remembered, it’s like drinking hot sand.”

I didn’t disagree.

Superintendent Cao chuckled. “Indeed. It’s always a nice reminder of what it’s like for the common people. From what I’ve heard, Red Star was a favorite among the Grand Workforce.”

“Very true. If it weren’t for the centuries of sacrifice on the part of the workers, the Nine Heavens and Ten Earths wouldn’t exist, and we would all be dead.”

“To the Grand Workforce!”

“To the workers.”

They looked over at me. These hypocrites didn’t give a damn about the poor workers who had given their lives during the Climb. Of that much, I was certain. Jaw clenching, I said, “To the Grand Workforce,” then raised my glass to join them in another drink.

I let out a hiss along with the two of them, then took a drag from my cigarette. At this point, my mind was starting to clear. Obviously, the superintendent knew about my situation. And considering I hadn’t been ambushed on the way in, I guessed that things weren’t as bad as I’d imagined it. Perhaps everything was going to work out after all.

A moment of silence ensued that seemed to drag out for an eternity. Finally, I broke it, saying, “Sir—”

The superintendent raised his hand slightly to cut me off.

“I’m aware of everything,” he said. “And Deputy Commissioner Zhong came over to sort it out personally.”

Holy shit. A deputy commissioner? Truth be told, the command structure of the Black Corpses was mostly a mystery to those outside of their ranks. Although they technically operated as part of the Glorious Peacekeepers, they were functionally autonomous. That said, in the Glorious Peacekeepers, the rank of deputy commissioner was incredibly high. The commissioners headed the directorates, which meant that the deputy commissioners who aided them were very powerful. I wouldn’t be surprised if the highest rank in the Black Corpses was commissioner, although it was possible they were led by a vice minister.

The point was that this Deputy Commissioner Zhong was obviously an important person. And he had come to talk with Superintendent Cao about my situation?

Maybe Lieutenant Saito’s lance was crooked, and they’d known all along! Yeah right. Even I was starting to doubt that theory by now.

“Yes,” Deputy Commissioner Zhong said. “It’s unfortunate how everything played out. You stumbled right into an operation we’d been planning for months. Granted, the complication with Boss Gorshkov was none of your doing. His job was merely to round up the cultivator coterie members so that Lieutenant Saito could move in and take the leader captive. The fact that you got in the line of fire, well… it was a very unexpected development.”

“I was shot in the back!” I grated.

“Such things happen in the line of duty. As I’m sure you agree, the lives of the rank-and-file officers such as yourself pale in comparison to the chance to put an end to the evils of the cultivators.”

I closed my lips over my cigarette to prevent myself from responding. The truth was that I’d heard plenty of talk like this during my career as a Peacekeeper. The leadership often emphasized the sacrifices we had to make for the greater good. But that didn’t mean I liked having it shoved down my throat, especially given the circumstances.

“It’s sad but true, Detective Wang,” the superintendent said. “Deputy Commissioner Zhong already explained the details to me. The leader of this coterie, a young woman named Elena Ávila, is a violent psychopath. A depraved criminal with a record of cold-blooded murder and other such crimes. Did you know that her coterie kidnapped a local schoolgirl recently and sacrificed her in an evil cultivator ceremony? I’d rather not get into the gory details, but suffice it to say, being skinned alive and forced to drown in your own blood is a horrible way to die. Anyway, this Elena left the crime scene and took you with her, is that correct?”

I nodded. “That’s right.”

“And where is she now?” Deputy Commissioner Zhong asked, his coal-black eyes piercing into my own.

All of a sudden, I realized what this was about. They wanted information. And they couldn’t care less about me and my life. The only reason they hadn’t arrested me already or simply shot me dead was that they wanted Elena and thought that I could help them get to her. Was she really that important? Why?

I inhaled some smoke, then let it out slowly, gripping the arm of the chair hard enough to prevent my fingers from shaking, but not hard enough that it would be obvious terror was slowly constricting my heart. If I gave them what they wanted, would they just kill me afterward?

I’d waltzed right into the tiger’s den.

I had been so convinced that a rogue lance of Black Corpses was to blame for all of this that I had let my judgment be clouded. Take the time to step back and look at the bigger picture, Dad had often told me.

I bet Deputy Commissioner Zhong had come here hoping to get help from the superintendent in tracking me down, only to have me come knocking on the front door. They’d probably given each other high fives of delight when they heard I was waiting in the study for them.

Microseconds ticked by as I tried to decide what to do. There wasn’t exactly a lot of time to formulate a plan.

“I made a deal with her,” I said. “To meet up later.”

Deputy Commissioner Zhong’s eyes flickered over as he exchanged a brief glance with Superintendent Cao.

“Meet up?” the deputy commissioner said. “For what purpose? What exactly happened in the hours you were missing? We had reports indicating you were in the Grand Kingdom Highrise, but apparently that was false. In fact, the men we sent there to investigate will likely be returning even as we speak.”

Oh shit. Word hadn’t reached him about the Corpse Elena had taken out. Why? Perhaps he didn’t have a radio on him?

“She took me to use as a hostage,” I said as smoothly as possible. “Healed me up to keep me alive. I managed to… you know,” I flashed what I hoped was a roguish grin, “convince her I was on her side. I said we should split up and meet in a few hours at Kunming Lake. As soon as she was out of sight, I headed directly here. I considered going up the chain of command, but I knew the people at the precinct wouldn’t be in the loop. And time is of the essence.” I glanced meaningfully at a nearby grandfather clock that appeared to have been carved from real wood. “Besides, Superintendent Cao and Dad were gambling buddies years ago, so I knew he’d have my back.”

I caught a nearly imperceptible twitch in the superintendent’s jaw in response to my words. However, he didn’t rise to the bait regarding Dad. My heart sank a bit more.

“Kunming Lake?” Deputy Commissioner Zhong said. “Why there?”

 It was a short distance from Sea Lake Park, so it gave me options. On the one hand, it would ensure that they wouldn’t swoop in and arrest her without me there. And it was close enough to the real rendezvous point that, if necessary, I could surely come up with some excuse to lead them to the correct destination. Or, if everything went to shit, and I wanted to escape and meet up with her, I wouldn’t have far to go.

“It was her idea. She said that her coterie does secret preaching there a lot, so she’s familiar with the area.” I glanced at the gaudy clock again. “You know, time’s ticking here. She’ll be arriving at the meetup spot soon, and she won’t wait for long.”

“In that case, well done, Detective,” Deputy Commissioner Zhong said. “With you to take point and lead us to her, we should be able to conclude this operation shortly. Did you happen to get any evidence we could use against her once we apprehend her?”

“No.” Her cultivation manual felt like it was on fire in my back pocket, and my heart was beating so wildly I could hear it. Hoping to forestall another follow-up question, I asked, “What about Detective Liu?”

“Your partner?” Deputy Commissioner Zhong said. “He’s alive but in critical condition. We took him to the Number 3 Hospital for emergency surgery. With luck, he’ll pull through. And don’t worry, I assigned a full lance of Black Corpses to watch over him. This Elena Ávila is known for her ruthlessness in exterminating witnesses, and we wouldn’t want to risk losing a loyal Peacekeeper.”

Said the man who had literally just claimed that our lives weren’t important compared to the greater cause. My nostrils flared in anger at his blatant hypocrisy, but I hid it in a puff of smoke.

Of course, there was a subtext to his words, and I had no difficulty picking it up. They had Jakobe. They were tightening the noose around me, slowly but surely, and as they did, my hope of clearing my name dwindled.

How was I going to get out of this situation? Run? But how? Shoot my way out? Take them hostage? Even if I successfully escaped, that would just cement my guilt and ensure that I’d be hunted down until my dying day. The only way I could possibly survive would be if I went completely heretic and holed up in the Ninth or Tenth Earth. But the last place I wanted to end up was the warzone of the Netherearths with the degenerates and most savage of criminals.

“Deputy Commissioner,” said Superintendent Cao, “as Detective Wang just mentioned, I was close with his father, years ago. It’s a debt I never fully paid, so how about this: if the detective here helps us bring in this Elena Ávila, we can reduce the charges against him.”

“Charges?” I found myself asking.

Deputy Commissioner Zhong’s dark eyes somehow grew even darker. “Detective, the fact remains that you absconded the scene of a crime with a cultivator. That alone is a crime most people would be put to sleep for without trial.”

“She took me with her against my will!”

“Did she? According to Lieutenant Saito, the officer in charge, the two of you reached out and held hands before using sorcery to escape.”

“That’s not true! I was just lying there, and she grabbed me.” My conviction that Lieutenant Saito was a rogue Corpse was a thing of the past. I was a disposable pawn, and my usefulness was rapidly nearing its end.

Deputy Commissioner Zhong made a perfunctory placating gesture. “Regardless, Detective Wang, I’m willing to accept Superintendent Cao’s offer. If you lead us to Ms. Ávila and we successfully detain her, I’ll reduce the charges. You’ll go from ‘aiding and abetting a known cultivator’ to something more like ‘contributory negligence in impeding the apprehension of a cultivator.’ You know how those things work. You’ll serve a short sentence down in the Third Heaven, and in a few years, you’ll be back patrolling the streets.”

I have to go to prison and get demoted? All because you shot me in the back? I wanted to spit the words in his face, but despite the rage burning within me, I held my tongue. Every Peacekeeper knew that you didn’t try to negotiate with Corpses. In any case, this might be the opportunity I needed. If I could just get out of this apartment and out into the open, I might be able to escape into the night.

I still had one option left. Charlotte.

She was only a Sergeant 3rd class in the Cross-Level Control department, and while I didn’t want to drag her into trouble, she had better connections than I did. I came from a family of cops; she came from a family of administrators. There was a huge difference. Her family’s connections might be enough to counter the power of a deputy commissioner. And if I really ended up needing to get out of the Third Earth, she might be able to make it happen.

“Fine,” I said. “Thanks for the leniency. I’m glad my efforts fit into the greater plan.” I stubbed my cigarette out in a fancy marble ashtray next to the chair. “I’ll take you to her. That was my intention all along, anyway. When do we leave?”

Interlude 1 – The Perfect Subject

“Your father is out on the veranda,” said the guard in the chocolate, double-breasted suit and glossy dress shoes. “Please, go ahead.”

As the guard held the door open, the beautiful young man stepped out of the main house and onto the wood floor of the veranda, which squeaked slightly beneath his feet. The windows were open, and a breeze wafted through, carrying with it the scent of flowers and freshly-trimmed grass. His father had all sorts of ancient relics on display in this part of the house—a jaguar-shaped stone vessel created by an ancient culture, designed to hold the hearts of sacrificial victims. A wooden rack used by the same culture to display skulls. A circular calendar made of stone. A host of other antiques and rarities.

His father was in hushed conversation with a middle-aged man with a scar on his lip. The young man recognized the scarred man and hated him. He stopped several paces away and stood there respectfully.

A moment later, the two men shook hands, and the visitor raised his voice and said, “That sounds wonderful, Johan. Let’s move forward with that in mind.”

Johan nodded. “Until next time, Nicolas. I have an appointment with my son, so please see yourself out.”

Nicolas gave the young man a faint nod as he walked past. The young man ignored him.

Meanwhile, Johan looked over and said, “Itsuki. Sit.”

Itsuki Saito sat at the long hardwood table, upon which was a spread of delicacies the likes of which would never be seen outside of a house like this.

“Your latest mission didn’t go very well,” Johan Saito said, sitting down across from him.

“That’s right, father.” Picking up a pair of gold-plated chopsticks, Itsuki selected a sushi roll filled with pink fish and foie gras.

“Lost nearly your entire personal lance?”

Itsuki nodded. “I made the mistake of treating the operation as a training exercise.”

His father tsk-tsked. “Not what I expect of a Saito. I gave you complete autonomy on this mission, Itsuki. But I didn’t think it would include letting the initial quarry out of your grasp and losing two men in the process.”

“I’m sorry, Father. A couple Peacekeepers showed up unexpectedly. And while our informant had provided the location of the girl’s safehouse, my men went in blind and on radio silence. The one they killed was taken by surprise when—”

“You know I don’t like excuses, Itsuki.”

Itsuki’s eye twitched slightly. “Yes. I’ll bring the girl in, Father.”

“See that you do. Unfortunately, you’re a mere lieutenant in the Black Corpses, so you have to take responsibility for the failure.” He speared a chunk of crispy smoked sausage with a fork. “Have I ever told you the way my father raised me?”

Yes, Father. At least a thousand times. “No, Father, please tell me.”

“Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime.” Johan looked at his son over the sausage. “If you expect me to use my influence to get you off the hook for your failure, you’re sadly mistaken.”

I don’t expect that. You summoned me here. I didn’t ask to come. Itsuki poured himself some wine. “I’ll fix the situation, Father.”

“Good.” Johan bit the sausage in half, chewed, and swallowed. “There’s an upside to all this, though. You’ve been wanting to run a puppetization experiment for some time, correct? I think we may have found the perfect subject for you.”

Itsuki did his best to prevent his eyes from lighting up. “Really?”

“Yes.” Johan crunched down on the rest of the sausage. “It’s all to further the mission. Remember, the Saito name rides on this. Forget about rising through the ranks of the Black Corpses. Find out how to get to the True Heaven, and you’ll become more important than Vice Minister Diao himself.”

“Of course, Father. The mission above all else.”

Chapter 7 – Severed Wires

Superintendent Cao and Deputy Commissioner Zhong loomed behind me, making me feel naked as I watched the elevator doors close. I had a cultivation manual in my back pocket, and though the hoodie was long enough to cover it, I still felt like it might as well have been a loudspeaker calling out, “Look over here! Look over here!”

And then there was the Spitter, snug in the holster under my left arm, beneath the thick fabric of the hoodie. Deputy Commissioner Zhong knew that I had a weapon, which was not comforting. If he’d looked at my file before coming to see the superintendent, he probably already knew its make and model.

After some concluding back and forth conversation in the library, we had risen and filed out into the foyer. Superintendent Cao held the door for the deputy commissioner as he walked out in front of me. I felt like Deputy Commissioner Zhong was deliberately putting his back to me as some sort of taunt. Or maybe it was just pure arrogance.

 As we headed toward the foyer and they slipped into long coats, the superintendent called out to his wife that we were going out for a few hours to Kunming Lake. Meanwhile, I had another chance to quickly check the deputy commissioner to determine if he was armed. I saw no obvious bulge at the small of his back or anywhere else. Was he really without a weapon?

I was frankly surprised that he’d put his back to me, but it only went to further my rage. If he truly believed me to be guilty of crimes worthy of prison time and demotion, that would mean I really was a heretic Peacekeeper. And in that case, he wouldn’t have exposed himself so recklessly. No, he obviously trusted that I wouldn’t make a move on him. But if that was the case, why the sham of accusing me of ‘absconding’ with Elena?

He wanted to use me. To him, I was a disposable tool to get to the cultivators, nothing more. Cultivators were the source of all evil and had to be purged at any cost. But if that was the case, why had Elena saved me?

The reason I saved you is that we cultivators aren’t evil. I can tell you’re a good person, and I didn’t want to see you die.

I felt like the world was spinning around me. A cultivator saved me because I was a good person? In contrast, the Black Corpses shot me in the back and then tried to execute me. Why? Why had I been marked for death by Lieutenant Saito?

The lightning mirror, I heard Elena saying. And that sword. Both were items made by cultivator hands.

Was that lightning mirror really some sort of sorcery? It sure didn’t look like any tech I’d seen before. If Elena was right, that meant the Black Corpses were using cultivator magic. Now, one of their top leaders was threatening my career and life to get to the same cultivator who had saved me. He knew I hadn’t committed any crime, but he didn’t care. In contrast, she was taking a huge risk to help me. Because I was a good person?

I felt my mind and emotions starting to whirl out of control, so I took a deep breath and forced some clarity into my head.

“Everything alright, Detective?” Superintendent Cao said from behind me.

“Sure,” I replied, watching as the elevator readout went from 30 to 29.

Superintendent Cao wasn’t armed. But Deputy Commissioner Zhong had to be. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be so confident. It must be an osciblade or two. Or a stun baton.

Furthermore, there was a security camera glaring at me from the front corner of the elevator, a soft red light blinking in its depths. That didn’t necessarily mean it was recording what it saw. Did I want to take that chance?

Folding my arms over my chest, I pretended to look down at my feet, giving me a perfect view of both officers’ legs via peripheral vision.

As I thought, the superintendent had one leg locked and one knee loose. Meanwhile, the deputy commissioner had both knees slightly bent, with his weight on the balls of his feet. He was ready for melee fighting. I cursed myself for not looking at his hands when I had a chance back in the study. Would I have seen the calluses of a close-combat specialist? From the look of him, Deputy Commissioner Zhong was no desk jockey. He must have risen through the ranks of the Black Corpses and probably felt fully comfortable taking me to the ground.

Plan, plan, plan. What was my plan?

Fifteenth floor.

It would be suicide to try to take them down in the elevator. I had to wait. But how long would it be before Deputy Commissioner Zhong got word about what happened in the Grand Kingdom Highrise?

“Shall we use your vehicle or mine, old pal?” asked the superintendent.

“Mine,” the deputy commissioner replied. “I left my files and radio there. I’ll call for an additional lance or two to be ready near Kunming Lake.”

That was it. I had my deadline. I had to extricate myself from this situation before getting to his vehicle.

First floor.

Sub-basement one.

Sub-basement two.

The doors opened, and we stepped out into a poorly lit garage that smelled of dust, rubber, and metal. Most of the vehicles here were groundcars, although I saw a few hovercars. Half the ceiling lights were out, leaving most of the vehicles wreathed in various forms of shadow. At least two or three lights flickered on the verge of dying, assailing the eyes with a jarring pulse that seemed to contain a rhythm just barely beyond grasp.

“See the aqua four-door, Detective? The one with the side air inlets? Go ahead in that direction.”

I led the way across the parking lot, my plan clicking into place. I had to take down the deputy commissioner with my Spitter, but wrestling it out from under the hoodie was going to be time-consuming. I needed to wait until we were close enough that I could leap into a spot between two cars, tumbling into a roll that—

A beam of crackling white light shot out of the line of cars parked opposite the aqua four-door, and I saw Superintendent Cao stagger backward two steps before falling onto his back, a burning hole in his chest.

My vision snapped back toward the source of the blast, and I saw a flash of honey-blonde hair. Elena? What the hell was she doing here?

I saw motion in the corner of my eye as Deputy Commissioner Zhong rushed past me in the direction of Elena. Yet again, placing his back to me.

Me, the loyal Peacekeeper. Me, the patriotic detective who had been shot from behind, his partner nearly killed, all in the line of duty, only to be discarded like trash. Me, the dutiful officer who would ‘gladly’ be imprisoned and demoted, despite being innocent, all so that Elena Ávila could be brought in.

I raked the hoodie sleeve back, pulled my Spitter out, and tracked Zhong as the wires snapped into my forearm. Should I put it on stun? Hell no! Barely taking time to aim, I pulled the trigger… and immediately wished I’d taken more time to aim.

The shot barely grazed the collar of his long coat. Reacting with a fluidity that seemed almost inhuman, he ducked and spun, then propelled himself back toward me with outstretched arms.

No weapon?

I squeezed off another shot, which pierced through the side of his neck, but not deep enough to do anything other than surface damage. Another shot went through his palm as he reached toward me, but missed everything else, as he had shifted his head and body in anticipation of the follow-up shot.

Then his hand closed around my Spitter, and he pulled back with seemingly little force. However, he wrenched the gun out of my hand so violently that the wires snapped, leaving two tendrils attached to the jack in my arm.

Before I could recover, his other arm shot forward, his palm hitting my sternum with the force of a zont-rail train, shoving me off my feet and sending me flying backward through the air until I smashed into the windshield of the car next to his, glass caving in around my back.

What the hell? I couldn’t even breathe! The wind had been knocked out of me, something that hadn’t happened since my first competitive martial arts match. I worked out almost every day! How could the simple thrust of a palm knock the wind out of me and send me flying through the air?

Then another beam of white shot through the air, just barely missing Deputy Commissioner Zhong. Vision swimming, I pulled myself out of the windshield, struggling to bring air into my lungs. As I stumbled to the ground in front of the car, I saw the commissioner closing in on Elena. Before she could do anything else with her white light, the commissioner threw a punch at her, forcing her to raise a hand to block it. The force of the blow was so great she staggered to the side.

He followed through with more jabs, forcing her back as she struggled to keep the blows from landing. Then he got his hands on her, throwing her to the side, where she slammed shoulder-first into the wall before dropping onto the bonecrete floor of the garage in a clutter of dislodged wall plaster. She struggled to her feet as he approached, but before she could right herself, he was on her, grabbing her hair and unleashing blows that she only managed to partially divert by cradling her head in her arms.

This was bad.

Forcing myself not to feel the pain coursing through me, and my throat making ugly rattling noises as I tried to get air into my system, I limped toward my Spitter a few yards away.

In my peripheral vision, I saw Elena sweep her leg out and catch the commissioner off-balance, giving her a moment to step back and throw her hands into one of those complicated gestures. Not bothering to wait to see what happened next, I wrenched the broken wires out of my arm jack, picked up the Spitter, and hit the wire release on the side of the stock. Normally that would pop the wires out from my arm, but since they had been severed, it ejected broken fragments instead. Opening the base of the grip, I pulled out the spare wires from inside.

Looking over my shoulder, I saw Elena and Deputy Commissioner Zhong were fighting, and she was losing. Her face was bloody, her hair disheveled, and she was barely holding her own. She wasn’t going to last for long.

The instant I snapped the new wires into the Spitter, they slid into the jack in my arm, and the weapon lit up.

Rising and turning, I saw Deputy Commissioner Zhong, his back to me, his hands curled around the back of Elena’s neck as he shoved his knee up into her abdomen, causing her to drop to her knees. Snorting coldly, he took a step back as she remained doubled over in front of him. Then her arms twitched as she placed her palms onto the bonecrete to push herself up.

“You’re no match for me, girl,” he said. “That sea of energy of yours is well-developed. You’ll form a root soon, but you’re not there yet. Keep your hands on the ground, and—”

My Spitter pierced him through the base of the neck, and the next shot was an inch above.

He collapsed in a heap, and I finally took a wheezing breath.

Keeping the Spitter in hand, I walked unsteadily toward Elena.

She was bloody and battered, but as I neared, she looked up, and I could see her eyes narrow slightly. I stopped in my tracks and slowly put my hands up, simultaneously fingering the Spitter’s wire release, causing the gun to power down. All of a sudden, I realized my hands were starting to shake, even the prosthetic fingers. What had I just done? I pulled up the bottom of the hoodie and holstered the gun, then lowered into a squat about two yards away from her, keeping my hands on my knees to still their trembling.

Breathing in ragged gasps, she pushed herself back until she was sitting against the wall.

“Fancy running into you here,” she said.

A faint smile crept onto my face. “It was this, wasn’t it? This is how you found me.”

I pulled out the cultivation manual. It was the only logical explanation for how she’d tracked me.

She nodded. I tossed it to her, and she grabbed it. “I’m connected to it.”

“Look…” I said, but I honestly didn’t know what to say, so I let the words hang.

“We’ll talk about it later. You just killed a deputy commissioner of the Black Corpses.” She took a shaky breath. “If you weren’t a heretic Peacekeeper before, you are now.”

What had I done?

And what was I going to do?

What about all the people who were close to me? Mom. Charlotte. Hell, even Qian Cui, who was crazy but didn’t deserve to be hurt by the Corpses. They would go after all of them eventually.

Now wasn’t the time to make plans. I had to keep myself alive if I was going to help them later.

Ignoring the ache in my back and the sharp pain I’d just noticed in my chest, I forced myself to my feet, then stepped to Zhong’s corpse and rifled through suit pockets.

A moment later, I had a wallet and a set of keys. Grabbing him by the wrists, I tugged him into the stairwell next to the elevator. Then I took care of Superintendent Cao, tossing his keys into the shadows but keeping his wallet. Walking out of the stairwell, I saw Elena on her feet, wiping the blood from her face with the back of her hand.

“Are you alright?” I asked.

“I’ll live. Let’s go. You drive.”

Chapter 8 – The Sea Dragon Electronics Emporium

Trying to ignore my aching body, I slid into the driver’s seat and waited for the car’s wires to connect to my arm jack. Then I turned the key in the ignition, and the car’s engine drew on me to start the turbines. A tremor passed through the hovercar, and then everything went smooth as it rose a foot off the surface of the garage.

Putting the metallic glasses back on, I flew the car out of the parking garage and onto the same street that separated the complex from the stadium. I’d given the vehicle a very quick once-over to make sure it didn’t have tracking devices in any of the obvious places. I’d worked enough cases involving cars to know the basics. It didn’t surprise me that a high-ranking official such as Zhong would prefer freedom to move about without being watched. A quick check of his license plate confirmed that it had a thick gauze over it, which would make it invisible to surveillance cameras. Tech like that was illegal for everyone except the extremely rich and powerful. We were safe from detection. For now.

A light rain had begun falling, so I flicked on the wipers. It seemed odd. Residential areas such as this were occupied heavily by government officials and people high in law enforcement. As such, rain usually wouldn’t be scheduled here, and if it were, it would be during work hours when most people weren’t around. However, as Jakobe frequently complained, the Shield for the Third Earth often malfunctioned.

I flicked on the deputy commissioner’s portable radio to find that it was already tuned to one of the Black Corpses’ primary communication channels on the Third Earth. Everything they said was in code, but based on my knowledge of the situation, I could tell that the body in the Grand Kingdom Highrise had long since been discovered. And they were clamoring for Deputy Commissioner Zhong to weigh in with new orders, as apparently he’d taken direct charge of the operation. The clock was ticking.

I switched to some other channels and confirmed that there were BOLOs out on both me and Elena. Shit. Not that I expected anything else, but it was still chilling to hear myself being called a heretic Peacekeeper. The upside was that our descriptions didn’t reflect the new clothing we were wearing—another slight advantage in our favor.

We reached the 4th Ring Road, and I changed to the highest lane of aerial traffic.

Next to me, Elena was fiddling with an attaché case that had been on the passenger seat when we unlocked the car.

“Any luck?” I asked.

“Un-unh. It’s a fingerprint lock. Very high tech. There’s a manual override, but I don’t have any tools. I’m not exactly an expert lock picker.”

“He was a deputy commissioner in the Black Corpses. There’s definitely stuff in there worth looking at. It could even be about us.” I had no idea if she knew she had been in the Black Corpses’ crosshairs from the beginning, but now didn’t seem like the time to get into the subject. I’d save it for later.

“I have a friend who can probably open it.” She tossed the attaché case into the back seat, and from her wince as she did so, I could see that she was probably in as much pain as I was. She had just taken quite a beating.

“Where are we going?”

“Do you know the Sea Dragon Electronics Emporium?”

I thought for a moment. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“Just keep heading down the 4th Ring Road in this direction, toward the Stars of the Ancient City.”

I frowned. “That’s gonna be thirty minutes at least. Maybe more if traffic gets bad.”

“That’s where we have to go. We have the radio, right? If we hear that they found the bodies, we can ditch the car.”

“Fine.”

“Could you check the glove compartment to see if he has any pain killers in there?” I asked. The ache was spreading from my back and chest into the rest of my body. “I can’t imagine you’re feeling particularly well yourself.”

She opened the glove compartment and rummaged around, then checked the center console. “Well, would you look at this?” She pulled out a small orange bottle with a white cap. “Diclonythrine. This is strong stuff. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s illegal.”

“Illegal only if you don’t have a prescription. And they don’t give them out except to important people. Black Corpses get access to drugs you wouldn’t even believe. I heard they come useful in combat against—” I cut myself off.

“I know,” she said. Looking at the side of the bottle, she continued, “It says one pill every eight hours, and avoid driving or operating machinery during that time.” She opened the bottle, but hesitated.

“What’s wrong?”

“I just wonder if it’ll cloud my mind too much.”

“Diclonythrine?” I tried to dredge up what I knew of it. It wasn’t exactly the most common of drugs. “I’m not sure what you mean by ‘cloud your mind,’ but you just have to ask yourself which will be worse. The drug or the distraction of the pain. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a real fight like this before, but it’s going to hurt a lot more before it starts getting better.”

“Fine.” She dropped a single pill onto her palm and popped it into her mouth, then held the bottle out to me before pulling it back again. “It says no driving.”

I considered the pain and stiffness spreading through me and how much I would love for it to stop. But then I heard Dad talking to me. Wang Fan, remember, we Peacekeepers aren’t above the law. We uphold the law, and we live within it. Break it, and you’re no worse than the criminals.

“I’ll wait till we’re off the 4th Ring Road,” I said. “In the meantime, mind if I smoke?”

She scrunched up her nose. “At least crack the window.”

“Sure.” I lit up and inhaled deeply, feeling as exhausted as if I’d been running at a sprint ever since I woke up in the Grand Kingdom Highrise.

Traffic was light on the 4th Ring Road, and soon we were cruising along at a comfortable speed. Enormous buildings loomed on either side of the road, interspersed with orgplants here and there, making it seem like we were on a boat sailing through a narrow canyon. It was getting late, but in the city center, things never went completely dark. Looking to my right, I could clearly see the Heaven-Propping Pillar rising up in the very middle of the city. It was the primary way the divisions between day and night were maintained; it would be lit brightly in the morning and turned dark in the evening. Right now, it was little more than a shadow rising to connect to the Shield overhead. Of course, at this hour, the Shield was barely visible.

That was preferable as far as I was concerned. Seeing the Shield only reminded me that on top of it was the Fourth Earth. And on top of the Fourth Earth’s shield was the Fifth Earth and after that the Sixth. Citizens were taught starting in grade school that Sinotech’s amazing bonemetal and bonecrete technology made it perfectly safe to stack entire cities on top of each other. But all of that oppressive weight hanging overhead was still unnerving when I thought about it.

I continued to monitor the radio, but everything seemed to be in a holding pattern as the Black Corpses waited to hear from the deputy commissioner. I only hoped that the superintendent’s last words to his wife would buy us the time we needed.

Elena looked out the tinted window as we drove, seemingly lost in thought.

For the first time since the frenzied fight, I started thinking again. What the fuck was I doing?

I had just balked at taking a pill while driving, yet moments before had shot Deputy Commissioner Zhong in the back of the head. Why had one act been so difficult and the other so easy? In the chaos of the fight, I hadn’t even been thinking about security cameras in the garage. After the fact, I’d glanced around and hadn’t seen any. But there had been a camera in the elevator. Even if it hadn’t been recording, I was surely on some other camera somewhere else nearby. In the unlikely event that I wasn’t, a canvas of the building would eventually lead them to Mrs. Guo. Or something. There were always clues, no matter how well a crime was planned. And I hadn’t even planned mine or done much to cover up after. I shook my head in frustration. Maybe I should have spent more time cleaning things up in the garage. Erase more evidence and make a false trail to follow?

Once they found the bodies, the entire police force of the Third Earth would be mobilized. Deputy commissioners just didn’t get murdered. In fact, digging through my memories, I honestly couldn’t remember any such case. I wasn’t an expert on the history of the Nine Heavens and Ten Earths, but I was no slouch. Outside of the First and Second Cultivator Wars, or perhaps the Crime War of 528, people as important as a deputy commissioner were never killed. Besides, those wars had all taken place hundreds of years ago. They were virtually ancient history.

Of course, worse than murdering a deputy commissioner, I had thrown my lot in with a cultivator. How had they described her? A violent psychopath. A depraved criminal.

Glancing at her out of the corner of my eye, I saw that she had her hands in her lap, her fingers interlaced so tightly that her knuckles were pure white. They were even trembling slightly. Her shoulders shook as she breathed, and I suddenly realized her cheeks were wet. She was crying, and she seemed to be in shock. I somehow doubted that she had ever killed before this day.

She was no psychopath. They wanted me to believe she had skinned someone alive? I thought back to the poster I had seen earlier this very evening featuring a shadowy figure with red eyes, claws, and fangs. Did she look anything remotely like that? It made me want to laugh.

I stubbed my cigarette out into the car’s ashtray, let a bit more air in through the window, then closed it.

“You okay?” I asked quietly.

She started, then unlocked her fingers and reached up to dry her cheeks. “Yeah.”

“I, um….” I had a lot of questions but wasn’t sure which one to ask first. An awkward silence followed until I wished I had just kept the window open and lit another cigarette.

“Thank you,” she said. “You saved my life back in that garage.”

“I guess that makes us even.”

“Right.”

Another short silence.

“Can I ask some questions?” I asked hesitantly.

She shrugged. “Sure.”

The first one that popped to mind was strange, but it had been gnawing relentlessly at the back of my mind all day.

“Back at The Ivy. What was going on there?”

She hesitated. “I screwed up. Everything.” There was a tremor in her voice as she spoke the last words, and she didn’t say anything for a long moment. “We needed some unique alchemical ingredients for a kind of medicinal pill.” She looked over at me briefly. “The same kind I used on you. Anyway, Boss Gorshkov was our connection, but everything went wrong when we met in the alley. I don’t even know how it happened. One moment we were about to exchange the goods, the next, one of his goons punched Jack and knocked him flat. Another of them put Mary in a chokehold. Halyna was the only one who fought back, but one of the goons shot her in the neck. Two times? Maybe three? She was too tough to go down like that, though. She kept fighting until one of them hit her in the back of the head with some kind of hammer. There was so much blood.” She shuddered, then continued talking faster and faster. “I was useless. They hit me first, with some sort of drug or something. Maybe it was a stun gun. In any case, I just watched the whole thing happen. They tied us up and hit us with paliprox patches, dragged us into a car, and that was it.

Paliprox patches? What were those?

“I left Halyna there bleeding,” she continued, her voice quavering. “At least she was still moving last I saw her. I can only hope she got to a hospital quickly.”

Halyna? I thought. Halyna Vasylivna Hrebenyuk. It brought me little joy that the puzzle pieces were clicking together. “This Halyna, did she have platinum hair and white lipstick? A dark blue stripe over her eyes?”

Her head jerked over to look at me. “How’d you know?”

I already regretted asking my question. I had interrupted Elena from her weeping only to make things worse. “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, Elena, but she didn’t make it. That’s how I ended up at The Ivy. I’m a homicide detective.”

Her jaw tightened, and she looked back out the window, her fingers once again interlocking and turning white.

Jakobe had been wrong. Halyna hadn’t been killed by a cultivator. Her killer was a two-bit thug with an oscihammer, presumably the same one we had encountered in Boss Gorshkov’s office. And his friend with the Spitter. Both men were dead now, but that wasn’t justice according to the law. Was I glad that my theory was right and Jakobe’s was wrong? Not the least bit.

I had more questions about the incident. What happened after the alley? By the time the body was discovered, and Jakobe and I were called in, hours must have passed. What happened in the intervening time? Why had they been working with Gorshkov specifically? Was it their first time? If so, who made the introduction? Based on what Deputy Commissioner Zhong had said, it all related to an operation targeting Elena. What, if anything, was special about her, other than her being the leader of a coterie of cultivators?

Now wasn’t the right time to proceed with some sort of interrogation, so I didn’t say anything.

The silence wasn’t particularly awkward, but I wanted to listen to something other than the radio, so I lowered the volume a bit and turned on some music. As I might have expected, Deputy Commissioner Zhong had a traditional Han opera queued up. It fit my mood, so as we sped through the night along the 4th Ring Road, the sounds of percussion blocks, skin drums, gongs, and various stringed instruments drifted around us. The lyrics were in an ancient version of Sinese, but I could follow along; my parents, like many older ones, were fans of this type of music. The opera told the story of General Mu, a patriotic woman who led an army to defend battling invaders.

A few exits before the Stars of the Ancient City district, Elena suddenly said, “Pull off here.”

I complied wordlessly, then followed her directions to a run-down public parking garage. Along the way, I turned the radio back up to make sure the situation hadn’t changed significantly. Inquiries were becoming more heated and impatient, as if they were pleading for Deputy Commissioner Zhong to respond as soon as he was back on the radio. It occurred to me that he might have left orders such as “don’t do anything without my approval,” in which case his own arrogance and authoritarianism were going to be a huge asset to us. We abandoned his car in the public garage, in the darkest corner we could find. I even went so far as to pop the license plate off and roll a nearby dumpster over to block the vehicle from view.

Meanwhile, Elena searched the back and found the deputy commissioner’s sidearm in the trunk, along with an inside waistband holster. The gun was an NZ-85G.2, which was standard issue among Peacekeepers and Corpses alike. She gave the weapon to me, along with the portable radio, but kept the still-locked attaché case from the back seat.

As we walked out of the garage, I popped a pill of diclonythrine.

Keeping our hoods up and avoiding surveillance cameras in general, we took the zont-rail up a stop to the Stars of the Ancient City district. By the time we arrived, the pill had kicked in, and my pain had faded away like the light of the Heaven-Propping Pillar at evening-time.

This was primarily a residential area, but unlike the apartments by the sports arena, it wasn’t inhabited by the rich and powerful. Trash littered the shadowy streets, and I even saw occasional vermin scurrying in the shadows. A light rain fell, although whether it was scheduled or not, I had no idea. After meandering our way through a few apartment complexes, we reached the main thoroughfare for this area.

Buildings huddled over the main street like Black Corpse surveillance agents, as well as an orgplant, keeping the neon and brightness from shining up into the night. There were restaurants, massage parlors, pharmacies, hotels, one or two supermarkets, and a fair number of language schools. The signage on the street was primarily Sinese, but the Third Earth’s diversity of ethnic groups ensured there was a big market for language instruction. Many Han parents wanted their children to have an extra edge in their neighborhood, whether for business purposes or because they wanted to steer them into law enforcement or government work.

The languages being taught here were similar to those just about anywhere in the Third Earth, such as Eurosynth, Japkor, and Yingo. But there were other, more obscure ones that I wasn’t familiar with. I’d never even heard of Southmer or Pino.

A pleasant stream of warmth ran up toward my shoulder as, without a word in advance, Elena wrapped her arm around my elbow and pulled me along the street. I knew she was doing it out of practicality, but I couldn’t help but enjoy the feeling of her pressed up against my side.

Looking around, I noticed a single patrol hovercar slowly approaching in the emergency vehicle lane on the other side of the street.

“Keep your head down,” I murmured into her ear.

The patrol car passed.

There were no officers on foot that I could see. Apparently, this place wasn’t particularly well policed. A thoroughfare such as this would normally have a much bigger police presence. The place had to be crawling with pickpockets and petty criminals.

We moved with the flow of the foot traffic for a minute or two until I noticed a sign up ahead: Sea Dragon Electronics Emporium.

Revolving doors led through a short entryway with ubiquitous overhead fans designed to flush rainwater off of the entrants. Then we were inside. A few snack stands lined the main entrance, adding the scent of fried protein cakes and grilled squid to the aroma of oil and plastic that hung over everything. All of a sudden, it occurred to me that I hadn’t eaten anything since the protein bar she’d given me earlier in the evening, and at the moment, my stomach was an empty pit.

“Hey, are you hungry?” I said.

“Now that you mention it, yeah.”

We picked an empty stand and got some cheap fried foods as well as some milk tea. Then she led me further into the emporium, where we were soon surrounded by the muffled buzz of customers negotiating with salespeople. Nearly every other stall seemed to be selling speakers or audio players. All of them were playing music, leading to a confusing jangle that was distracting at first but eventually faded into a loud but tolerable background hum. Only about half of the signage was in Sinese, with the other half a random assortment of Japkor, Eurosynth, as well as some of those other languages I didn’t recognize.

The bottom floor seemed devoted primarily to audio players and calculators. The second floor sold mostly digital screens. The third, boxy computers. The fourth, every kind of wire, cable and plug imaginable. Up and up we went, passing all sorts of electronic items until we were on the twelfth floor. By this point, there was no theme to the stalls, and the aisles were so cramped that no more than three people could walk shoulder to shoulder through them.

Elena took a step forward, uncurling her arm from my elbow and letting her hand slide down my forearm toward my flesh and blood hand. I almost thought she was going to clasp me by the hand, but instead, she stopped at my wrist.

“Don’t get lost. This place is a labyrinth,” she said, pulling me forward.

She was right. We went through several turns, beyond what looked like a set of blast doors, and past two cloth curtains hanging from plastic cords, the fabric grimy and stiff from age. There, beyond a screen door, on the other side of a battered vending machine underneath a stairwell, was a stall packed with a random assortment of electronic equipment. An old neon sign hung askew above it: Grid Monkey Zhao. Beneath it was a tattered poster that said: Hacking. Gridwork. Encryption. ALL LEGAL and GUARANTEED!

Behind the counter was a stocky young man with dual prosthetic eyes nearly hidden beneath a floppy hat, a cigarette dangling from his lips. He hunched behind a keyboard so well-used that few of the keys bore any labels, and the green glow of his monitor reflected oddly off of his eye implants.

“Elena!” he said in Sinese.

“Ol’ Zhao,” she replied with a smile.

I scanned his desk and workspace, looking for relevant items. I saw three different types of calculators, a scratchpad with equations on it, an ashtray that needed to be emptied a few weeks ago, and a comic book. My eyes slid to a corkboard on the opposite wall, which was festooned with various snapshots, advertisements, and coupons. Zhao with three buddies on a paddleboat at Sea Lake Park. A menu from a noodle shop. And underneath that menu, a half-covered photo, the sight of which caused a roaring sound to fill my ears.

Reaching under the hoodie, I pulled my Spitter out, the wires snapping in place as I pointed it right between the young man’s prosthetic eyes.

“Who the fuck are you?” I growled.

Chapter 9 – Photos

“What the hell, Wang Fan!” Elena barked, and I could tell she was barely holding back from grabbing me.

“Whoa, chill, bro,” the young man said, slowly raising his hands from the keyboard.

My initial flush of fury was already subsiding, but the cold facts still remained. A cultivator had led me to a virtually lawless part of the Third Earth, into a maze that I probably couldn’t track my way out of without making ten wrong turns. And that cultivator took me to see a grid monkey on whose wall was a picture that definitely should not have been there.

“I want to know who exactly you are,” I repeated. “Clear and simple.”

The young man swallowed and, keeping his hands at his own ear-level, said, “I’m Zhao Shenchuan, bro. Grid Monkey Zhao. I mean, what else do you want to know? I’m nothing special.”

“If you’re not special, then why’d she bring me to see you?” I asked, nodding in Elena’s direction.

“Put your gun down, Wang Fan,” Elena said. “Ol’ Zhao is a grid monkey I hire to send encrypted messages. Not even he knows what’s in them.”

I let a long, tense moment pass, then thumbed the wire release on the Spitter and stowed it back under the hoodie.

“That picture right there,” I said, pointing at the bottom left of the corkboard. “Who is she to you?”

Zhao Shenchuan swiveled in his chair to look at the picture I’d indicated. Squinting, he leaned forward and I heard the mechanisms in his prosthetic eyes whine faintly. “Oh, that’s Xiaoli.”

My nostrils flared. “Wang Xiaoli? How do you know her?”

I felt like I knew exactly what was going to happen next. He would turn to Elena, and she would look back with a surreptitious but meaningful glance. It would confirm that she was somehow involved with my sister’s death, and that I had just been pulled into a devious trap.

I was wrong. Zhao Shenchuan didn’t even glance at Elena. He looked back at me, his brow furrowed in confusion. “We went on a couple of dates.”

I snorted a laugh. “You went on a date with my sister?”

“Your sister?” he said, his jaw dropping. But it wasn’t with the shock or horror I expected, more like the surprise of hearing a random coincidence.

I replied with a curt nod, and when he saw that I didn’t plan to say anything further, he drummed his fingers on the counter, a thoughtful expression on his face.

Crushing his stub of cigarette into the overflowing ashtray, he said, “Let me think. Yeah. It was maybe two or three years ago. She came down here to pass some messages, and we hit it off.” He looked up at me with a grin and a shrug. “Hey, bro, I have a way with the ladies. I might not look like much, but I know a few good jokes. And I know how to treat ’em well, ya know? With respect. That’s how my dad raised me.”

I stared back at him, and his grin faded. He pulled a packet of cigarettes out from his shirt pocket and offered one to Elena and me. She wrinkled up her nose, but I obliged, and he took one for himself then lit them both.

As the smoke curled up above us, he continued, “Anyway, like I said, we went out a few times. It was nice. Just had a few pleasant evenings, no shop talk or anything like that. Then one day, she just disappeared. Never came back. I didn’t really think much of it. Figured she’d decided to move on.”

“You never called her? Never left a message?” I’d listened to every recording on Xiaoli’s answering machine and would have remembered this young man’s voice or any message talking about a social life. And I’d gone through her rolodex, card by card, desperate to find clues. As far as I recall, she didn’t have any contact information for someone surnamed Zhao.

But while I had to admit that Xiaoli and I had been about as close as a brother and sister could be, she had never been very upfront with me about dating. At least, not since she was about seventeen years old. That was when I was nineteen and high on being accepted into the Academy. She’d told me about a fight with her boyfriend, and I’d confronted him a few days later to explain some matters relating to domestic law. The resulting altercation turned into a brawl that left me with a black eye and him with a lost tooth and a hyperextended elbow. She stopped talking to me for nearly a month after that, and I never asked her about boyfriend matters again.

“I never got her number,” Zhao Shenchuan said. “She always called me. That’s how it generally goes in my line of work, ya know. Safer that way.”

I looked at Elena and saw her staring at me with an unreadable expression. Then I looked back at the corkboard and the picture of my sister. She was facing the camera with her arms outstretched, a slight smile on her face. I’d never seen this photo before. But from the length of her hair and the little necklace she was wearing that I’d given her for her twenty-third birthday, I knew that it had been taken in the year before her death.

My voice quieter than I intended, I said, “Do you mind if I…?”

Zhao Shenchuan looked at me blankly for a moment before realization hit him. “Sure, bro. You can have it.”

He moved aside the menu, plucked the photo off, and offered it to me. I took it and cradled it in my palm, memories suddenly flooding through me. Her fifth birthday party when she accidentally smashed a piece of cake up my nose. When she was fifteen, and the two of us snuck up to the Ninth Heaven to visit a gambling hall, then got grounded for a month when mom found out.

The last night I saw her.

I shook my head as I stared at the photo. It occurred to me that I was now a fugitive and that I would probably never go back to my apartment again. I definitely wouldn’t visit my desk at the precinct. All of my pictures of Xiaoli, including the ones of us together, were in those places. I would never see them again.

This might be the only picture I would ever have of her for the rest of my life.

Or maybe I was being too dramatic. Maybe I could turn things around.

“How’s your sister nowadays, bro?” Zhao Shenchuan asked. “If you don’t mind, give her a hello from me.”

“She’s dead,” I replied flatly.

“Oh shit…” he said, trailing off.

In the long silence that followed, I felt something warm on my forearm and looked over to see that Elena had placed her hand on it. She was looking at me with a strange expression that could have been pity. Either that or... compassion?

Given her reaction and body language, I didn’t get the impression that she had anything to do with my sister. At the same time, all of this seemed far too coincidental. Xiaoli had ties to the very same grid monkey Elena was using to send messages to cultivator friends?

There had to be a connection.

But what was it? If the messages were encrypted, it was entirely possible they had been in communication without knowing each other’s identity.

“Wang Fan,” Elena said, “you—”

“We’ll talk about it later,” I said, putting the picture away. “Let’s get on with this. We need to keep moving.”

“Right.” Shoving aside some of the clutter on the counter, Elena put the attaché case down on it. “Before we get to this, Ol’ Zhao, I need to send a message. Bubble Protocol.”

“On it,” he said, swiveling back to his keyboard, whereupon a clatter could be heard as he typed in a few commands. “Routing cipher?”

“Lie Yukou.”

“Hold on.” He clattered away at the keyboard a bit more, and I was tempted to try to get a glimpse of the screen. But I was no grid monkey, so it would have been mostly pointless.

“Alrighty. Message?”

She looked up in thought for a good half-minute, then uttered what seemed to be little more than a string of random words.

“Stupidity. Rewarded. Addicted. Generation. Abandon. Recession. Vertical. Goat….” She went on for a bit longer, and while I tried analyzing the words, making connections based on the components that made up the characters, and other such things, I quickly gave up. I was a detective, not a code-breaker. Give me all the characters and a few weeks to work, and I still might not have been able to make heads or tails of them.

“Hold on,” Zhao Shenchuan said, his eye implants reflecting the green and black of his monitor as he issued some more commands. Then he reached over to a boxy phone wired to the back of the computer and plugged it into a modem next to the keyboard. Wires from the modem snapped into his forearm jack and he flipped the switch. I heard a technoaural screech for a few seconds and then silence. He tapped the modem to release the wires.

“I’m ongrid,” he said. More key clacking for no more than thirty seconds, and then he pulled the phone off the modem, flipped the switch back, and looked at Elena. “Done. Message sent. Can’t say when it’ll be picked up, though.”

“I know. Thanks, Ol’ Zhao. Now before we leave, can you help with this?” She looked down at the attaché case.

“Let me see,” he said, spinning it around to look at the lock. “Ah, a Li Industries design.” After fiddling with it for a moment, he chuckled. “Seems really hi-tech, but it’s actually complete junk. Watch this.”

Rummaging around behind the counter, he produced a dented tin fork, which he wriggled in between the lid and the body of the case. Then he started probing around the inside.

“To reset the fingerprint, you have to hold down a button on the inside. But they didn’t protect the actual button. It’s… got it!”

He put some pressure on the fork, then placed his thumb onto the scanner three times in a row. The lock beeped, and he pulled the fork out. Then he put his thumb down again, and the lock popped open. I couldn’t believe it. A top leader from the Black Corpses relied on locking technology this weak? I thought the Corpses had the best tech there was.

“You rock, Ol’ Zhao,” Elena said, reaching out and slapping him on the shoulder.

“It’s what I do,” he said, sounding a bit bashful. He spun the opened case around to reveal the contents. There were no magazines or newspapers, only a handful of file folders.

Elena picked them up. “How much is this going to set me back?”

“Nothing. On the house.”

“Then I owe you,” she said. Leaning over the counter, she brushed his cheek with hers, which for some reason, I found slightly irritating.

“Can you get rid of the case?” she asked. “Very permanently? And soon?”

“You know I can.”

“Thanks. We have places to be. Until next time.”

“Stay safe, Elena. You too, Mr. Wang. And… I’m sorry about your sister.”

I nodded but didn’t say anything. Elena grabbed my elbow, and we ducked our heads to pass back under the staircase and into the maze of the Sea Dragon Electronics Emporium.

“Where to now?” I asked.

“That snack from before just got me hungrier. Want to get some real food? We can take a look at these files at the same time.”

“Hold on.” I pulled out the radio, turned the volume control down, and then flipped it on. Shoving it close to my ear, I switched back and forth between a few channels. “No change. Fine, let’s eat really quickly. I’m famished.”

It was getting very, very late, and eventually we were going to need some sleep. We couldn’t sit around listening to the radio forever.

Numerous twists, turns, and elevators later, we stepped out of another set of revolving doors into a dark, narrow alley. Warm light glowed at the far end, where I could just catch a glimpse of food carts with short tables and small benches laid out in front of them.

However, before we got more than five paces from the electronics emporium, a broad-shouldered man stepped out from the shadows of a doorway, the glint of a blade in his hand as he flashed a smile.

“Gotta pay the toll to go this way,” he said in badly-accented Sinese.

“Luka, it’s me,” she snapped, and then she said something in another language.

“Elena?” he said and proceeded to reply in the same language.

I had no idea what they were saying, but I could tell that she sounded pissed, and he sounded surprised. What language were they speaking? It was starting to drive me crazy, and I decided to ask her directly the next time I had a chance.

The two of them proceeded to have a short conversation that I couldn’t understand until a certain point when he looked over at me and gave a sneer that couldn’t have been mistaken for anything other than raw contempt. Their voices raised briefly, and then she took a hard step forward, raising her hand as if to plant it on his chest.

Snarling, he stepped back. She said a few more words, and then he turned and opened the door of the stoop he had been lurking in, walked inside, and slammed it shut after him.

“Puto pendejo,” she murmured, making a rude gesture after him. Then she turned to me. “Sorry. Come on.”

We stepped out of the alley into a side street that was closed off to vehicle traffic and had been converted into a large, outdoor eating area, mostly covered with tarps to keep out the rain. Half the people here had skin tones similar to hers and spoke the same language.

She steered me to one particular cart selling a variety of food I’d never encountered before. Savory protein-meat stuffed into a dough, wrapped in some sort of synthetic leaf. It was served along with a small bowl of seasoned rice, a milky beverage, and a sweet dessert—forks and no chopsticks.

It was delicious, and I was so famished I inhaled it. A few minutes later, we sat digesting the food and sipping the sweet, milky beverage. Despite how delicious it was, I suddenly realized that I could really use a cup of coffee right now. The exhaustion was building inside me. I needed a boost.

“I don’t recognize your language,” I said.

“Southmer,” she replied. “Not very common in the Grand Kingdom. Before the War of Tribulation, people like me were rare in this part of the world. In fact, I think this is the only neighborhood like it in existence.”

“Southmer,” I murmured, remembering the language school signs outside the emporium.

“It’s a combination of a few different dialects and languages, like Japkor. In ancient times, the original version was the second most common language in existence.”

I gave her the same type of nod I would give Jakobe when he popped out his random ‘facts’ that didn’t have any proof to back them up. It seemed unlikely to me that the second most common language in existence would now be relegated to a back alley in a remote suburb of the Third Earth.

“Maybe Japkor isn’t the best analogy,” she said. “Eurosynth is a better one. It and Southmer both developed naturally and by necessity. Different but similar ethnic groups and languages created a fusion of convenience. Japkor is different.”

“What do you mean?”

“Didn’t you know the Japkor people started out as two very different ethnic groups, with different languages? They were forced to combine, and they never really accepted it.”

“Is that so?” I remember Jakobe mentioning something along those lines before.

“Yeah. You never noticed how different some Japkor names are from others?”

“Not really. I never really had any Japkor friends.”

“Anyway, the point is that Southmer has a really long history. It’s a beautiful language.”

“I can sense that from hearing it.”

She smiled. “Anyway, why don’t we take a look at those files now?”

I nodded in the affirmative. There were four files, and she handed two of them to me.

The first seemed to be a budget, featuring lists of weapons, equipment, vehicles, and the like. I leafed through it but didn’t see anything noteworthy. The second was a case file involving corruption in the Sixth Earth. Apparently, the Black Corpses were investigating the 156th, 253th, 324th, 334th, and 367th Precincts there.

Peacekeepers, in general, believed that the Black Corpses went down hard on us and ignored evidence. And there were plenty of whispers that they abused their power. I myself remembered a case from the neighboring 34th Precinct in which a friend of mine had been accused of accepting bribes. Jakobe and I had cooperated with him on a few cases, and I’d always found him to be honest, forthright, and down-to-earth. I simply couldn’t believe that he was a bribe-taker. But that didn’t matter. In the end, he was taken away by the Black Corpses and was still rotting in prison as far as I knew. It wasn’t justice. The only upside was that he hadn’t been put to sleep.

Sometimes justice comes at a price, Son. All you can do is work hard to uphold what you can.

As I leafed through the file, I had to admit the evidence was damning. These officers had clearly orchestrated a system to defraud the department and give favors to criminals, all to get rich. They deserved what was coming to them.

Closing the file, I put it down on the table and looked up to find Elena staring at me, her expression ashen.

“Wang Fan,” she breathed and handed me the file she had been looking at. I opened it, and the first thing I saw was the photo clipped to the top. A photo that sent a chill running down my spine.

Chapter 10 – The File

I heard a thump above me as a drop of rain hit the tarp overhead, then another, then several in quick succession. Within a moment or two, it was a loud drumming that faded into the back of my consciousness.

After graduating from the Peacekeeper’s Academy in the Third Heaven and being assigned to the Third Earth, the climate difference had been a bit jarring. Where I came from, rain was rare, and it fell with mechanical precision, having been scheduled days in advance. Furthermore, it was only sent into the least-occupied and least-trafficked zones. The only exceptions came on occasional important holidays, like when the Grand Kingdom celebrated Shielding Festival, a commemoration of the ancient success of the first Shield, the creation of which gave humanity a measure of protection from the Heavenly Curse. During the holiday, the areas immediately surrounding the Heaven-Propping Pillar on all Heavens and Earths were scheduled for an entire day of rain. Normally speaking, those areas were kept as rain-free as possible, so it was an unusual event that people flocked to attend. All penthouse suites, top-level bars and clubs, and even the rooftops were reserved by the elites, who partied the night away, surrounded by the drum of Cursed rain, but safe from it.

In contrast to the translucent party tents used during the Shielding Festival, the tarps protecting this little food street were far from secure. Moments after the rain started, drops of water began seeping through holes and overlaps.

Some people scurried to get indoors; others just huddled deeper into their coats, cloaks, and hats, tugging gloves down tighter and continuing with their meals. You didn’t get the Curse from being hit with a drop of rain or two. It came over time. No one really knew how it worked, just that enough exposure to the rain increased your chances of getting it.

Deputy Commissioner Zhong’s files were printed on standard waterproof paper. Not that it mattered. By chance, Elena and I had selected a table that was fortuitously far from any rainwater leaks.

The file in front of me had a photo clipped to the inside. Male. Dark skin. Tightly curled hair groomed into a stylish pile atop his head. A boxy headset.

My partner and brother, Jakobe Liu.

The first page contained all his basic information. Born in the Sixth Earth. Ethnicity: Beifei. Height, weight, known addresses, schooling, and acquaintances. It even listed his traditional family name: Lmrabet. According to Jakobe’s stories, the Beifei people had been targeted years ago for assimilation, and part of it had involved forcing them to accept Han surnames. The names had stuck, but the Beifei people had long memories and a tradition of oral histories, and thus they retained many ancient memories. According to his claims, the reason he knew so many ‘truths’ about the Grand Kingdom was because of the spoken histories he’d grown up around. I’d always pooh-poohed such talk, but now….

I began leafing through the file and soon felt awkward. There were records of Jakobe’s romantic relationships and details about complaints against him that had been filed with the department. A whole section detailing the circumstances leading to him getting a headset implant. I reached a page entitled Threat Rating, which I soon realized was an analysis by Black Corpse surveillance agents. It was commonly believed among the Peacekeepers that the Black Corpses loomed behind us at all times, but to see the hard evidence right in front of me was chilling.

914-08-14 - Overheard telling classmates the Grid was once accessible without wired connections.

That was when he was only fifteen years old! I scanned down a few lines.

923-10-01 - Report filed by classmate claiming he said humans once lived under a blue sky.

927-05-15 - Captured on surveillance audio telling Detective 2nd Class Wang Fan that cigarettes were once dangerous and caused disease.

The Threat Rating section spanned two pages, and at the bottom were the following words:

927-12-22 - Threat Rating 4. Recommend reassessment in six months.

What was a Threat Rating 4? Low? High? I’d often told Jakobe to stop spouting what I’d always labeled conspiracy theories and alternative assessments of history. Given everything, I wondered if I should have tried harder to get him to stop or, instead, listened more.

“Keep going,” Elena said. “It’s the last page you need to see.”

I leafed to the final page, a short letter, little more than a note, time-stamped only a few hours ago.

Deputy Commissioner Zhong:

As per your request, I performed an assessment on Detective 2nd Class Jakobe Liu. He received a serious neck injury and sustained heavy blood loss. His condition is critical but stable, and he is currently in a coma. Given the resources at hand, I suggest waiting for 24 hours to see if he regains consciousness. If not, we can proceed with the Saitos’ puppetization experiment. Barring further communication from you, I’ll initiate the process at that time, transferring primary control to Lieutenant Itsuki Saito afterward.

Dr. Gongsun Rui, Chief Surgeon, Number 3 Hospital, Third Heaven

My brow furrowed subconsciously as I re-read the letter. Puppetization experiment? What was that? It didn’t sound good. Jakobe was in a coma, and if he didn’t come out, they were going to perform some kind of surgery? I looked up at Elena.

“What does it mean?” I asked.

She opened her mouth, then shut it and looked up at nothing for a moment, as if trying to find words to speak. Then she looked left and right as if suddenly remembering that we were in the middle of a street market. Lowering her voice, she said, “I can explain, but we need to go somewhere safer.”

“Where?” I asked, closing the file and picking up the others from the table as I joined her in standing up.

“There’s a safe place around the corner from here. I was planning on taking you there anyway.”

Hopefully it’s safer than the last safehouse we used. I was tempted to say the words aloud, but didn’t.

After dumping our plates and cutlery into a waste bin, Elena stopped at another cart to buy three bottles of water, one of which she handed to me. Then we left the market, keeping our hoods up against the rain as we ducked out of the tarped area, crossed the sidewalk, and entered a squat apartment building that, at a quick glance up, seemed to be only ten to twelve stories tall.

It was clean inside, unlike the building where I lived. The construction was strange to me, neither the worn bonecrete typical of the big housing complexes nor the wide smooth tiles of the nicer buildings. The floor had charming decorative mosaics, and although it had layers of dirt baked into it from age, it was obvious that someone mopped it regularly. Furthermore, there was no trash visible. The walls didn’t look grimy like the buildings I was used to, and I even picked up a whiff of paint in the air, mingling with a food smell that was foreign to me, something similar to that from the market outside. The staple food here was clearly based on cornmeal, unlike the flour-based fare that I had grown up with.

For some reason, this place reminded me of Xiaoli. She had intentionally picked an apartment in Yang Mansion, further out from the city center, where short, quaint buildings housed people less interested in climbing the ranks and more interested in living in peace. To this day, I still regret how I’d poked fun at her for that decision.

Elena led me through the building and into a central courtyard. To my surprise, there were live plants here, which were obviously tended to by the residents. There was even a vine climbing the metal staircase that spiraled up the walls. It was no small feat to raise plants this far from the light of the Heaven-Propping Pillar.

We headed up to the roof, which contained squat structures in the four corners, as well as various vents and pipes. Rising up just behind the building was an orgplant. Orgplants were essentially waste-processing facilities, from what I understood. Backlit by the Heaven-Propping Pillar, its gunmetal blue surface looked like the deepest of shadows.

She led me to one of the structures, which I guessed housed airflow units for the building. A sturdy padlock secured the door, which she opened with a key fished from her pocket.

“Come on,” she said, and I followed her inside.

There were no airflow units to be seen. This structure must have been intended to serve as a storage shed for building maintenance workers.

“My apartment is a few blocks from here,” Elena said. “The manager is a distant relative, and I worked out a deal with him. This is where I come when I need privacy.”

Slipping off her shoes and backpack, she stepped forward onto a rug that covered most of the floor, then knelt to plug in a string of lights that hung in the ceiling corners. A soft yellow glow spilled into the space. The little room was barely more than three paces wide and the same long, and it seemed completely empty other than the lights, the rug, and a boxy coat rack next to the door. I scanned the area looking for oddities, clues, or context, but I got nothing beyond it being a pleasantly warm environment.

“Mind locking the door?” she asked, slipping out of her short-sleeved leather jacket and hanging it on the coat rack. Beneath, she wore a white V-neck t-shirt, atop which was that pendant of hers.

I stepped in and removed my shoes, then locked the door behind me.

As I turned, I saw her fiddling with the pendant, whereupon the entire back wall of the room rippled, revealing a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. I couldn’t stop a faint wave of disgust from rising in me, and I could hear Dad’s voice.

The cultivators took almost everything from humanity. Maybe you won’t end up in Counter-Cultivation, but even still, as a Glorious Peacekeeper, your duty is to make sure they don’t take everything else from us.

I was starting to wonder if the ‘facts’ that had been crammed into our heads in school were true or not. And for the first time ever, I found myself questioning whether Dad had been right in all the advice he gave me. I would always love him and cherish his memory, but that didn’t mean he was all-knowing.

The bookshelf's top two shelves were filled with books, including a few of the leather-bound kind I assumed were cultivation manuals. There were also history books, mathematical texts, scientific works, and even novels.

Below the books, the shelves were packed with a seemingly random assortment of items. I saw a mortar and pestle, some sort of elaborately decorated pot with three squat legs, a collection of glass and ceramic jars with rubber stoppers, a microscope, a jewelry box, a statue depicting a sinuous dragon, a pile of neatly-folded clothing, and other things. I tried to take everything in and note anything unusual, but it was almost all unusual, especially when considered part of the same collection of items.

Elena pulled a tasseled pillow from one of the shelves and tossed it to me. “Sit.”

I complied, sitting cross-legged on the pillow as she pulled another out and put it down opposite me. Then she removed a wide, flat box from the bottom shelf. Sitting down on the pillow, she pushed her fingers into two hidden buttons on the side of the box, causing four legs to pop out of the bottom, turning it into a small table.

As she placed it between us, the surface of the box split and slid open, revealing a small tea set with a built-in water heater. Pulling out the water bottle she had purchased earlier, she filled the reservoir.

“Tea isn’t a big thing in my culture,” she said. “But after I started studying cultiv… after I started spending more time with Han people, I developed a taste. And the tea ceremony is so charming. I couldn’t help but learn it.”

As she busied herself preparing the tea, she continued to talk, and I kept my eyes on the tea-table to avoid staring at her. Although we had been close to each other in the safehouse after our initial meeting, the circumstances had been extremely tense, and I had been in a daze. Earlier, we had been eating across from each other, but it was in public, and we had both been starving to death. This was different. A cozy room, a fuzzy rug, soft pillows. And I was sitting close enough to reach out and touch her. The more time I spent around her, the more I was coming to realize that she was exotic in a way that I found deeply attractive. Her face was swollen from the fight earlier and was already starting to form bruises. Yet I still found her beautiful.

“To explain the situation with Jakobe, I have to first tell you some things you aren’t going to want to hear.” She opened one of the small bowls on the tray and presented it to me, revealing some dried tea leaves. Despite growing up with parents who drank tea constantly, I hardly knew a thing about it, so I couldn’t tell what kind of tea it was or whether the quality was good. It smelled nice, though, so I nodded. After some graceful hand motions, she took some boiled water and poured it over the smaller teapot to cleanse it inside and out. As the water trickled through the slots of the tea table and back into the reservoir, she filled the pot. For an ethnic minority who hadn’t been raised around Han tea ceremonies, her efforts weren’t half-bad.

“Normally speaking,” she continued, “this kind of information isn’t revealed until after months of study. But given the circumstances, I don’t think we have any choice.” After swirling the small teapot a bit, she emptied some of the water, then poured the rest into a larger teapot. “I know you don’t want to believe it, but the truth is that the Black Corpses are cultivators. Not all of them. But most.”

I felt my jaw tightening, and I wanted to interrupt her, but instead I focused on watching her fill two teacups and then empty the large teapot.

“As for puppetization, it’s—”

 A knocking sound interrupted her, and we both turned to look at the door. As we did, a glow sprang up, and the lock turned of its own accord.

My hand slid toward the bottom of my hoodie to draw my Spitter, but as I did, Elena murmured, “Master!”

Interlude 2 – Polite Inquiry

“What do you mean Deputy Commissioner Zhong can’t be reached?” Itsuki Saito growled.

“Last he checked in was a few hours ago. He said he had a meeting with Superintendent Cao of the 35th Precinct. Said he would check back in when the meeting was over and to not take any action until he personally ordered it.”

“35th Precinct?” Itsuki’s eyes narrowed. “That’s where those two detectives were from, correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Must have left his radio in his car.”

Itsuki Saito stepped to the window and looked out into the rain. It’s easy for you to criticize my work, Father. You sit down there in the brightness and warmth of the First Heaven, giving orders and making deals. Meanwhile, I trudge through the trash that fills the streets of the Third Earth, rubbing elbows with simpletons and fools. All for the sake of your mission. Why must the Saito Clan pursue pipe dreams like the True Heaven? Why can’t we just follow the Purpose like everyone else? I fear you’ve led us astray, Father. Perhaps the time has come for new leadership for the Saitos....

“Have someone call the superintendent and make a polite inquiry.”

“Yes, sir.”

Chapter 11 – Puppetization

Considering Elena’s words, I left the Spitter holstered. The door opened, and a short figure stepped in from the rain-spattered night, clad in an orange rain poncho, facial features obscured by a wide-brimmed rain hat made of glossy black material. Closing the door, the figure waved a gloved hand, sending the water on the coat and cap sliding off with unnatural efficiency to form a puddle on the ground beneath.

The figure removed the cap, revealing an elderly woman with steel-gray hair, plump cheekbones, and a slightly cleft chin. The smile in her eyes and mouth made her seem incapable of frowning, although there was something in her gaze that seemed like it could become as biting as an osciblade at a moment’s notice.

“Elena, child,” she said, doffing the raincoat and tossing it onto the coat rack. Underneath, she wore utilitarian slacks and a nondescript sweater.

“Master!” Elena said, this time louder, and she scooted out from behind the tea table, then dropped onto her hands and knees and kowtowed. “Master, I failed!”

What the hell? Kowtowing? Although the word was commonly used in conversation, the literal practice of kowtowing was a thing of the ancient past. I don’t think I’d ever seen it outside of a movie or opera.

The gray-haired woman quickly reached out to stop Elena from kowtowing. “There’s no need for that child. I was just around the corner when I received your message.”

“Master, they’re dead. All of them. Mary, Halyna, Jack. We tried—”

“Hush.” The woman cut her off and opened her arms wide.

Elena fell into them and, to my shock, started sobbing. I looked away, tilting my head in the direction of the bookshelf.

I’d seen tears on Elena’s face before. But little more than that in the way of emotion, other than a sniffle. I’d seen her shoot a Black Corpse in the face with her magic and crush the skull of another. She’d killed Superintendent Cao seemingly without hesitation and had held her own against the brutal fists of Deputy Commissioner Zhong. I remembered seeing her blood splattered on the surrounding bonecrete after he beat her mercilessly, and yet the defiant snarl had never left her lips as she glared back at him. A few minutes ago, she had done little more than take a step forward, causing that thug in the alley to bolt like a stray cat.

But here she was, bawling like a child.

The sound of it wrenched me back to the days after Xiaoli had been killed. The damage to my arm had been severe, but as a Peacekeeper, I got priority for my surgery and prosthetic. I was out of the hospital in less than a week, although the full recovery had taken longer. Mom met me at the hospital entrance to take me home, and while I kept a stiff upper lip during the car ride, in the living room, surrounded by pictures and memories of Xiaoli, I broke down. I collapsed into Mom’s arms, and I wept like… like Elena was doing now.

Why was life like this?

I had always followed orders. I had worked hard. Scored well. Obeyed the rules. I had listened to my dad’s words. To the living, we owe respect; to the dead, we owe justice. I had brought in countless killers, only to end up like this? My sister, murdered. Mom, sick and dying. Me, a fugitive.

Then again, what of Dad? Had he deserved the end he met, killed in a random hovercar collision?

What of Elena and her friends? I didn’t believe a word of Deputy Commissioner Zhong’s claim that she had been involved in some sort of sacrificial ceremony. It was ridiculous.

I looked back at the cooling tea set, folded my hands in my lap, and waited.

The grey-haired woman patted Elena on the head as they knelt into each other. Elena’s sobs had lessened, and she simply huddled there, weeping faintly.

“You can’t blame yourself, Elena,” the woman said. “Our enemies are ruthless and show no mercy. Just be glad you made it out alive.”

Taking in a shaky breath, Elena said, “But Master, I froze. In the critical moment, I couldn’t do anything. Halyna fought. She was so brave, but I—”

From the corner of my eye, I saw the woman wrap her arms around Elena and hug her tightly. “Stop. You can learn from this later. But now isn’t the time. Why don’t you introduce me to your new friend.”

They separated, and Elena sat back down behind the tea-table. Wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, she pulled another pillow out. “Please, Master, have a seat.”

A quiet moment passed, whereupon the woman said, “May I join you, young man?”

My face flushed as I suddenly realized that, according to every form of politeness and etiquette, I should have stood and offered my seat to her. On the one hand, she was probably some elite cultivator, a dangerous sorceress that only a day before I would have shot on sight. On the other hand, she was clearly in the same generation as my grandparents, and all things considered, I should be showing respect.

“My apologies,” I said, and I tried to stand as quickly as possible but failed; my foot somehow got tangled in one of the pillow’s tassels, ending with me falling backward onto my elbows.

I saw Elena’s eyes go wide, and her Master placed her hand over her mouth to cover a smile.

Fuck. It’s not as though I went around sitting cross-legged all the time. I wasn’t a Japkor after all.

Hoping that the flush in my face wasn’t obvious in the dim lighting, I untangled my foot and stood, inclining my head and extending my non-prosthetic hand. “Ma’am, please, have a seat.”

Nodding slightly, she placed her pillow down in a way that gave me room to place mine equidistant from the table. Considering how disrespectfully I had already acted, I didn’t dare to sit down right away, so I simply stood there, head slightly bowed, looking at my toes as I held the pillow across my chest.

As she lowered herself onto the pillow, I saw that she kept her back perfectly straight, which made her seem less like an amiable grandmother and more like nobility.

Tilting her head, she said, “Sit, young man.”

It was an order, and for some reason, I didn’t feel disgruntled at all in following it.

“I imagine the tea is cold, Elena,” she continued. “Why don’t you start over.”

“Right, Master,” Elena replied and busied herself, emptying the teacups and boiling more water.

Almost immediately, the atmosphere became somewhat awkward. According to traditional culture, Elena should take the initiative to make the introductions in a situation like this, but she wasn’t. She wasn’t Han, so there was no shame in it, but still, it wasn’t right for me to take the lead in the conversation, and it seemed her Master wasn’t going to jump in either. The moment stretched uncomfortably, and just when I was about to try tapping the side of the tea-table to get Elena’s attention, her Master cleared her throat slightly.

“Elena, as the disciple, you should be the one to introduce me.”

“What? Oh, sorry, sorry. Wang Fan, this is my Master, the venerable Eldress Cheung.”

Forcing myself to ignore the surreality of exchanging formal introductions with a high-ranking cultivator, I clasped my hands in front of me and formally said, “Greetings, Eldress Cheung. I’ve long since heard of your esteemed name, and it’s my deep honor to be able to meet you this day. I am Wang Fan, a humble detective of the Glorious Peacekeepers.”

Elena looked over in surprise, but Eldress Cheung took it all in stride.

“Well met, Detective. It’s all thanks to you that my apprentice is alive. I won’t forget this, and one day in the future, I’ll make sure the favor is returned.”

Elena seemed even more surprised at her Master’s words than she was at mine. Obviously, she still wasn’t familiar with traditional Han culture or the way introductions were made. I’d never heard of this Eldress Cheung before, but that didn’t preclude me from offering some praise. And while I doubted her Master had any idea what her apprentice and I had gone through this evening, she wasn’t averse to offering me some kindness in return.

 “Presumably, the two of you were in the middle of talking before I barged in,” Eldress Cheung said. “Why don’t you continue the conversation while you prepare the tea?”

“Yes, Master,” Elena said, and she proceeded with the various complexities of the tea ceremony. “I was about to explain puppetization. Is that… permitted?”

“Puppetization? I wasn’t aware you knew much of the subject.”

“I read about it in The Annals of the Duḥkha Temple that you gave me last year.”

“Ah, of course. It’s been a few decades since I read it myself, but I do remember it goes into detail about puppetization. Why does Detective Wang need to know about such topics, though?”

“Er…” Elena stammered, her hand nearly faltering as she poured tea into three cups this time instead of two.

“I’m not criticizing your judgment, Elena. Just curious.”

“Master,” she said, “it’s his friend. His detective partner. The Black Corpses took him, and they’re planning to puppetize him.”

I was sitting at an angle, creating almost a perfect triangle with Elena and Eldress Cheung. As such, I could see the eldress’ lips tighten in response to Elena’s words.

“I see,” she said. “This is obviously a very serious situation. Carry on with the explanation.”

“Yes, Master. As I said, Wang Fan, many of the Black Corpses are cultivators. Or at least, they practice cultivation. However, their school of thought is different from ours. They come from a different lineage, from a sect called the Duḥkha Temple that, among other things, specialized in puppetization. It’s a process whereby a living person has their personality erased or altered, and their mind hijacked, turning them into a puppet that another person can control.

“It’s a difficult process that requires immense resources and extremely competent command of cultivation technique. Of course, there are different versions. For instance, some Black Corpse lances use puppets as cannon fodder on dangerous missions. Other times, puppets retain some of their original personality and memories, and are used as spies or moles. Regardless, the process is generally irreversible.

“That letter didn’t go into detail about what type of puppetization they were planning. But unless your partner wakes up from that coma, well….”

I reached out and took my teacup, then sipped the steaming liquid as I pondered her words and contemplated my response. Black Corpses as cultivators. It seemed inconceivable. I didn’t even taste the tea as it went down, and as I placed the cup back on the table, she proceeded to fill it again. I had truly been struck speechless.

The silence lengthened. Finally, Eldress Cheung said, “Elena, while the detective thinks, can you explain the details of what led to all of this?”

I half-listened as she started out recounting the alley fight that led to Halyna Hrebenyuk’s death, then went into how I burst onto the scene in The Ivy. She talked of treating my wounds and force-feeding me something she called a Pure Cloud Pill, then went into our second fight in the hallway. Eldress Cheung seemed concerned about how the Corpses found us, but I was too wrapped up in my own thoughts to follow the subsequent back-and-forth. However, my ears perked up when Elena spoke of us going separate ways. She worded things carefully and somehow avoided revealing that I had gone against the plan, abandoning her and heading instead to Superintendent Cao’s apartment.

Occasionally, Eldress Cheung would interject a question or two.

By the time Elena finished her story, I had digested her explanation of puppetization. I didn’t want to believe it. It seemed outrageously fantastic and also completely incongruous with my understanding of reality. Puppetization was cultivator magic, yet the Black Corpses used it? They were supposed to hunt down and liquidate cultivators. They couldn’t be cultivators at the same time. It just didn’t make sense.

But I had seen their superhuman abilities. And I had read the letter in Deputy Commissioner Zhong’s attaché case with my own eyes. For a brief moment, my loyal Peacekeeper’s brain theorized that Elena could have planted the paper in the briefcase. Maybe in the moments after leaving Zhao Shenchuan in the Sea Dragon Electronics Emporium? Had the thug in the alleyway slipped it to her? No. It was too complicated.

There was an ancient principle Dad had often talked about called Occam’s blade, which was supposedly a reference to a famed swordsman in the ancient world. Son, the simplest explanation is usually the right one. If the answer is staring you in the face, don’t sit around making theories about why it’s wrong.

The time had come for me to do something. For me to take the initiative. I was tired of things just happening to me and me reacting. I had to take control of the situation.

“I’m not going to let it happen,” I said. I drank the final cup of tea Elena had just served, then put it back down. “Jakobe’s my brother. I know that he’d rather die than become some sort of cultivator puppet. I’m not going to let that happen to him, and I’m not going to let him die. I have to get him out of that hospital. Tonight.”

Chapter 12 – Seas and Roots

When I said I had to stop Jakobe from being puppetized, I expected some sort of criticism or admonishment from Eldress Cheung. My bold statement must have sounded completely laughable. Me? Take on a bunch of Black Corpses alone to save my friend?

 Instead, she finished her tea quietly and looked at me.

“Puppetizations are generally carried out in secret laboratories or bases,” she said. “In most cases, we have no way of knowing where the surgery and ceremony will take place.”

“He’s in the Number 3 Hospital,” I replied.

“You’re absolutely certain?”

It was Elena who answered. “Why don’t you show Master the note?”

I picked up Jakobe’s file, opened it to the final page, and handed it to Eldress Cheung. After reading the note, she flipped back to scan through the rest of the content.

“I see,” she said and handed the file back to me. “Tea, Elena.”

“Of course, Master.” Elena resumed her tea-making, and silence filled the small room for a short time as Eldress Cheung apparently considered the matter. Around this time, the drum of the rain on the rooftop faded away, and the silence deepened.

“It’s already been hours since this letter was written,” Eldress Cheung said. “Which means there’s much less time to work with than the twenty-four hours he mentions. Do you have any other relevant information besides what’s in the file?”

“There’s only one lance of Black Corpses guarding him,” I said. “At least that’s what Deputy Commissioner Zhong said.”

“A single lance?” She looked down at her hand and made some calculations on her fingers. “It might be doable. Although, I wonder why it says puppetization experiment. It might as well be a routine procedure as far as the Black Corpses are concerned.”

“Maybe because he has a prosthetic headset?” I said. “It’s a standard model, but he’s upgraded and customized it over the years.”

“Removable?”

“Permanent.”

“That could be it,” she said. She sat there quietly for another long moment, tapping her knee. “Fine. I agree.”

“Eldress Cheung,” I said, “do you mean…?”

“Yes. I’m willing to help get your friend back. But there are a few things to make clear beforehand. First of all, this is highly unorthodox. Normally speaking, I need approval from a chief elder before taking any overt action, especially against Black Corpses. Unfortunately, time is of the essence here. In the days it would take me to go through the proper channels, our window of opportunity would be gone. I run the risk of punishment for breaking protocol, but I’m willing to take that chance. Besides, the spirit of the law is more important than the letter.”

“Many thanks, Eldress,” I said, clasping hands formally and bowing my head.

“You’ll owe me.”

“Understood.”

“Next, I need you to know that I’m not making any promises. I truly hope we can save your friend, and I would love nothing more than to deprive the Corpses of another puppet. If things go wrong, or if it turns out we have no chance of succeeding, I’ll retreat immediately. I won’t risk my life and the life of my apprentice in a hopeless endeavor. I’m only doing this because it seems like a great opportunity to strike a blow at the Corpses. Plus, my apprentice trusts you and wants to help you, and I trust her.”

“It’s perfectly reasonable, Eldress.” Inside, I frowned. If she backed out, maybe I could somehow pull it off myself. I’d already killed a deputy commissioner, and he was a cultivator with superhuman strength. As long as I had the jump, I could pick them off one by one with my Spitter. As Dad would say, the element of surprise is often your best weapon. Or maybe I was being overly optimistic about my chances.

“Good. Finally, you need to understand more about the Black Corpses before we go in, so you understand what we could be up against. Based on what Elena has told me, the two of you got very lucky today. And if my apprentice has been paying attention to my lessons, she should be able to explain why. Elena, why don’t you start with the Black Corpse you killed at the Ivy. How strong do you think he was?”

“Likely a trainee who didn’t even have a single sea of energy.”

“Exactly,” the eldress replied. Looking over, she saw the flash of confusion in my eyes. “You probably ought to explain to Detective Wang what that means.”

Simultaneously working with the tea, Elena said, “The practice of cultivation initially involves absorbing energy from the world around you by means of meditation, and using it to form a sea of energy. A person with a single sea develops enhanced senses, becomes up to twice as strong as they were before, and they end up much more durable, physically. There are other benefits as well.”

“Yes,” Eldress Cheung said. “Suffice it to say, I find it hard to believe that a fully trained Black Corpse with at least one sea of energy would have fallen victim to Elena so easily. The fact that he shot you in the back, Detective Wang, but missed Elena, further gives weight to the theory that he lacked experience. You did well, my apprentice, but I truly believe that you got lucky.”

“I think you’re right, Master.”

“We’ll talk about Lieutenant Saito in a moment. What about the fight in the corridor, outside the safehouse?”

Elena frowned slightly as she poured more tea into our cups. “It’s hard to say, but I think he had only recently formed a sea of energy. When he hit me, I could sense he had abnormal strength. But my own sea is developed enough that it’s near the level of a root, plus, I caught him by surprise, so it’s little wonder I beat him.”

“I agree with your assessment,” Eldress Cheung said. “Now, what about Deputy Commissioner Zhong?”

Elena bowed her head slightly. “He had a root of energy.” Glancing at me out of the corner of her eyes, she said, “After you practice cultivation to a certain point, you can exert immense effort to compress your sea of energy into a solidified state. A root. It provides a big increase in strength and toughness. There’s almost no way I could ever defeat someone with a root of energy. At least not in hand-to-hand combat. My guess is that Zhong’s cultivation didn’t focus on combat skills, which is why he relied on hand-to-hand fighting and brute strength. Even still, he would have killed me if you hadn’t stepped in.”

Eldress Cheung gave me a slight nod. “My apprentice owes you her life, Detective Wang.”

“She saved me to begin with, Eldress. I’m fine with calling us even.”

“Very well. As you learned first-hand, Detective, even a powerful cultivator can be killed with a gun, assuming the aim is true. But there are plenty of precautions we can take to protect ourselves. This Deputy Commissioner Zhong was apparently too arrogant to consider doing such things.”

It reminded me of advice Dad had given me about being a police officer. He’d said that even though we had guns, a crazed psycho with a knife or a brick could still end our lives—similar principle.

“The reason I’m telling you all of this is that the biggest variable in rescuing your friend lies with the Black Corpses. They have cultivators on their teams, but not every single Corpse is a cultivator. Elena. Do you remember how they operate? The makeup of their lances?”

Elena looked up in thought, then began to recite as if from memory. “Generally speaking, a lance is led by someone with at least two seas of energy. As for the remaining members, in some cases, they could all lack seas of energy. In other cases, they might all have them. Furthermore, there’s no rule about how it works. Some lances are even led by cultivators with one or more roots of energy.”

“That’s right,” the eldress cut in. “For instance, Lieutenant Saito, who I’m familiar with by name and reputation. He’s a two-sea cultivator at the very least. Perhaps he even has a root. And there are Black Corpses much more powerful than him. While they usually occupy leadership positions and don’t often go into the field, it’s not unheard of for special operations to be led by elite Corpses with multiple roots of energy.

“And thus we’ve come to the big question. What type of lance is guarding your friend? We have only a few hours to work with, so there’s no time to contact other elders or coteries. If we do this, it will be the three of us acting alone.

“You have your firearm, Detective, and that will be useful, so long as you’re up against mundane squad members. As long as you group your shots well, you should be able to pierce through their armor. Elena has a sea of energy, and has already proven herself competent in real combat. As for me, let’s just say that I could almost certainly deal with Lieutenant Saito if I had to. But what if the lance guarding him has two Lieutenant Saitos? Or worse, someone stronger than him? What if a second lance has been assigned there since you got your information?

“Worst of all is that we’ll be going in completely blind. No idea what we’re facing, and no way to get further information. Can you see now why I say I might have to back out?” Letting the words hang, she reached down to drink another cup of tea.

“Eldress, we won’t be going in completely blind,” I said. Digging into my hoodie's pouch, I pulled out Deputy Commissioner Zhong’s portable radio and flicked it on.

After a staccato crackle, we heard voices; it was the original channel it had been tuned to. Although code words were being used, it was obvious they were still calling for Deputy Commissioner Zhong to report in. However, there was new information. I guessed that they had contacted Superintendent Cao’s wife, as they were now on the lookout for activity near Kunming Lake. It seemed the bodies were still undiscovered.

We were getting very lucky today.

“Eldress,” I said, “the clock is ticking. Once they discover those bodies, all hell is going to break loose. I wouldn’t be surprised if they called out every Thirder Peacekeeper to help. If we’re going to do this, we need to act quickly.”

“You’re right. I was focused on those twenty-four hours and wasn’t thinking about the bodies.”

She closed her eyes for a few seconds that to me seemed like several hours.

During that brief moment, I considered all of the new information in my mind and tried to determine what it meant to me. For some reason, I found it all to be somewhat anticlimactic. In school, we were taught that cultivators kidnapped children off the street and used them in sacrifices to improve their magic. Instead, it involved meditation? Seas and roots? I felt like the world as I knew it was a sham. And the new world was far more fantastic than reality, yet at the same time, more mundane than I could have guessed.

Eldress Cheung opened her eyes and smiled faintly. “Let’s do it.”

She rose to her feet and turned to put on her raincoat.

As Elena cleaned the tea set and put it away, I asked her, “Do you have earphones?”

She looked at me, puzzled, until I held out the portable radio and pointed at the earphone jack on the top.

“Oh. Yeah.” She stowed the tea set in the bookshelf, then rummaged through a box off to the side before producing a set of black earphones.

I plugged them into the radio and put them in my ears, then followed Eldress Cheung outside. Elena emerged, once again clad in her short sleeve jacket. She locked the door, and we headed across the damp rooftop toward the stairwell. Everything smelled of the recent rain, and we hit random puddles as we walked, splashing up water.

Eldress Cheung led the way. We didn’t go back through the Sea Dragon Electronics Emporium but via a different route. Going down another apartment building and along a few back alleys, we eventually found ourselves on one of the main streets. There were no high-rises, and only a single lane of aerial traffic. I took advantage of being out in the open to indulge myself in a cigarette.

I briefly wondered if Eldress Cheung had a car, but realized she didn’t when she stepped forward and held out her arm to hail a cab.

The rain had been replaced by a stiff wind, which surprised me. The wind stations in the Third Earth were generally located in the neighborhoods surrounding the Heaven-Propping Pillar. For every station outside the 3rd Ring, there were two or three inside. However, there was clearly a station nearby, and it caused me to hunch into my hood a bit more deeply.

An aerial cab floated down from above almost as soon as Eldress Cheung stuck her hand out. We piled in, and the cabbie asked our destination, speaking a faintly accented Sinese that indicated he was a local.

“3rd Hospital,” Eldress Cheung said. “But a few blocks away. We want to clear our heads on the way.”

“Sure thing. Card?”

“No meter,” she said. “Cash.”

“Allow me,” I said, reaching into my coat.

“No need,” she replied, pulling out a small wad of bills that had once been glossy and transparent but were now so grubby they were almost opaque. “This should cover most of it. Get us there fast, cabbie, but make sure you don’t get pulled over.”

He took the cash and hit the accelerator, sending the cab zipping up into the aerial traffic above.

Pop music blared from the radio, and we settled into the pulsing rhythm as we cruised in the direction of the Heaven-Propping Pillar. I kept switching back and forth between various channels on the radio, hoping to get an idea of what the Corpses and the Peacekeepers were up to. My heart was in my throat at this point. Once the bodies were found, I had the feeling any rescue attempt was going to become impossible. Not only would the Peacekeepers be out in greater force than they had in decades, but there would surely be more Black Corpses called in from the other Heavens and Earths.

If it weren’t for Jakobe, I would have already been scrambling for a way to get out of the Third Earth.

The radio chatter altered my sense of time, and before I knew it, we reached the destination. The cab dropped us off three blocks from the hospital entrance at an alley corner stuffed with street food vendors.

As soon as the cab lifted off and we were left in relative silence, Eldress Cheung said, “Any updates?”

“None. However, I heard some talk from over there.” I nodded in the direction of the hospital, which loomed high over many of the surrounding buildings, but was dwarfed by the high-rises in the area. “There’s only one group assigned there, nothing more.”

“They won’t see what hit them. Here, take these.” She produced two bolus pills of a deep green color. “I know the two of you are exhausted and battered. These Serene Clarity Pills should help. They won’t heal you up as well as Pure Cloud Pills will, but they’ll give you a jump start.”

“Master,” Elena said hesitantly, “both of us took diclonythrine an hour or two ago.”

Eldress Cheung cocked her head. “It’s fine. We’re going to need every advantage we can get.”

Chapter 13 – The 3rd Hospital

The lime green wall of the hospital corridor had a hazy patina of age that made it look dirty, but I hardly noticed. I leaned back against it, my shoulder only an inch from the corner, my Spitter in hand. Closing my eyes, I rested my forehead on the cool barrel and took a deep breath. I’d switched the gun to stealth mode, so there were no blue lights to indicate that it was powered and ready to fire.

Half or more of the corridors in this hospital had concave mirrors at the intersections, but not this one.

Lucky.

Everything today seemed to be working out in our favor.

Sadly, that didn’t make me feel very good. When luck runs your way for long enough, it eventually runs out. I would always love Dad and look up to him, but he did have a vice. Gambling. While he had been forbidden from talking about it in front of Mom, he had peeled back the veil a bit once I was in high school. You have to learn to quit while you’re ahead. For me, it’s the rule of five. When I get five lucky breaks in a night, I call it quits. Doesn’t matter how much I want to stay. I take my winnings, pack up my dice, and walk away. Based on how frequently I’d overheard him and Mom argue about gambling, I suspected he actually hadn’t followed his own advice very often.

As for me, how many lucky breaks had there been today? The fight in the hallway at the Grand Kingdom Highrise. The brawl in the parking garage. The fact that they hadn’t sent a patrol unit or a Black Corpse liaison to check on Superintendent Cao and Deputy Commissioner Zhong yet. How easy it had been for me to get into the hospital’s local grid and locate Jakobe. Now this mirror. There were probably more I wasn’t thinking about. Such as how easily Zhao Shenchuan popped open that attaché case.

According to Dad’s rules of gambling, I should walk away.

But that wasn’t going to happen. Jakobe lay in a coma just down the hall, and I couldn’t leave him to the wolves. To the Black Corpses. The bastards.

In the short minutes we had spent on reconnaissance, we had confirmed to the best of our ability that only one lance stood guard over him. I was no grid monkey, but what little I knew had proven very useful in tapping into the hospital’s cameras and other systems.

We had come up with three possible plans. The first was to steal some white coats and a gurney, and use them to get as close to the Black Corpses as possible. It seemed too risky. The second plan had revolved around getting into an accompanying room so that Eldress Cheung could blast through the adjoining wall. Too dangerous for Jakobe. The third had involved starting a fire, but I thought it would create too much chaos and confusion, and Eldress Cheung pointed out that it would endanger innocent people in the hospital. So, in the end, we decided on the most direct version—a surprise assault followed by a quick getaway.

Elena would take point, I would come in second, and Eldress Cheung would wait for a critical moment to enter the fray. I was still confused about how she planned to do that, considering she was on the floor above us. They’d told me they’d explain later.

I opened my eyes and was tempted to peek around the corner but resisted the urge. Every second was crucial, and if one of the Black Corpses noticed the flash of motion, I could easily give myself away.

The minute hand on the nearby wall clock ticked to 58. Then 59. It was almost 2:00 a.m. Despite the pain killers and the Serene Clarity Pills, my eyes felt gritty, and I could sense exhaustion slowly closing in around me. The minute hand slid forward again. Go time.

I lowered the Spitter into a ready position and waited for the crashing sound that would be my cue to walk around the corner and start firing.

As my heart pounded, I waited, seconds ticking by. What was going on? I heard no crashing sound.

Eyes flickering to the clock, I saw it was 2:01. Something was wrong. It had to be. I took a breath and prepared to walk away when—

The sound of breaking glass tinkled down the hallway.

I waited one full second, then turned the corner.

Elena was rising from the white and black tile floor after crashing through the window at the other end of the corridor; she wore that strange robe of hers, and she was already performing a hand sign as she dashed toward the three Black Corpses that stood outside the door. All three had turned to face the new threat.

Walking forward as quickly as possible, I took aim at the nearest Black Corpse, who was far enough off to the side that I knew I wouldn’t accidentally hit Elena.

I gently squeezed the trigger.

I hit my target right in the back, causing black sparks to fly from his armor. However, the shot didn’t penetrate. No surprise. Not pausing for a microsecond, I fired over and over again with as much speed as I could manage, causing my arm to tingle wildly as the Spitter drew on my body’s energy. I hit almost the exact same spot two times before he even noticed what was happening. I didn’t know precisely how many shots it would take to pierce that Black Corpse body armor, but I knew I had to do it fast.

Either the Black Corpse’s suit notified him of the damage, or he heard the crackle of the beam, as he turned to face me. The boxy handheld computer he had been holding fell to the ground as he drew twin Type 77-16s.

My forearm itched so badly it burned as I squeezed out shots as fast as I could manage, peppering his shoulder and chest with more pits of damage as he faced me.

Then he started firing his pistols, and deafening bangs echoed in the narrow corridor as the bullets flew.

His shots went wide, but I could swear I felt bullets grazing my cheek. I was too focused to care.

The itch in my forearm became an ache as I tapped my finger on the trigger of the Spitter so rapidly my knuckle started to stiffen up.

Bullets whizzed by, but I kept my Spitter aimed just right of center mass. Black sparks flew.

Then I pierced the armor, and the gunfire ceased.

I didn’t bother to watch him fall as I looked over to see that Elena had dropped another of the Black Corpses. We only had one more in the corridor and another inside the room with Jakobe.

The one in the corridor was a close-combat specialist, and as he closed in on Elena, a short spear popped into being in his hand. It looked very similar to Lieutenant Saito’s sword.

Elena was using a fighting technique that I hadn’t seen before. Instead of sending out narrow beams of energy that resemble Spitter blasts, she threw fist-sized balls of white light that faded away after only a few feet of flying through the air.

The Black Corpse dodged each ball, then pulled his spear back to deliver a stabbing blow.

Shit. They were too close to each other for me to risk firing my Spitter.

Suddenly, the ceiling caved in with a rumbling boom, and Eldress Cheung dropped into the corridor. Gone was her raincoat. Instead, she wore a strange garment similar to Elena’s. However, she didn’t have the short skirt and tall boots; her skirt reached her ankles, and the long, voluminous sleeves were embroidered with glowing clouds and stars. Her foot landed right on the Black Corpse’s back as the rubble crushed him. Surprisingly, he wasn’t completely done in. As he struggled to free himself, she snapped her fingers, sending a bowling-ball-sized ball of white dropping down right into his head.

A moment later, his head was gone; only a headless body with a cauterized neck remained.

Eldress Cheung turned toward the door, and I shifted my Spitter to cover the same area. Meanwhile, Elena took a step forward to stand just behind the eldress.

A long moment passed, and nothing happened. Then Eldress Cheung took a step forward and reached toward the door handle. Before she could touch it, a voice spoke from within.

“Stop right there, Ávila. You too, Detective Wang. I have my weapon pointed right at your friend’s head. Another move and I liquidate him.” As Eldress Cheung had pointed out, they would have no way of knowing that she’d come along for the rescue.

Eldress Cheung closed her eyes and tilted her head to the side as if listening.

I looked over questioningly at Elena, who looked back at me as she raised her voice and said, “We know about your plan, and we’re not going to let you puppetize him. We’d rather he die than end up like that. In fact, go ahead and just shoot him. We don’t care.”

My eyes widened, and I tilted my head in anger. Just wait, she mouthed, making a placating gesture.

I looked back at the door, trying to decide what move to make next.

Before I could, Eldress Cheung opened her eyes and interlocked her fingers, then twisted her hands into another shape. A ball of white appeared, no larger than an eyeball but burning vastly brighter than anything I’d seen Elena summon. The difference between the two was like the difference between a spark and a raging fire. A wire-thin stream of white shot out from the sphere, piercing through the door. As it vanished, we heard a thumping sound from within.

Eldress Cheung pushed the door open and stepped inside. I followed while Elena stayed in the corridor.

The Black Corpse lay dead on the floor, a tiny hole melted through his forehead, still smoking. Jakobe lay in the room’s only bed, numerous wires and electrodes attached to his arms, chest, and head.

“That went very smoothly,” Eldress Cheung said. “Almost too smoothly. This was a surveillance lance, and the leader didn’t even have a root of energy.” She stepped forward to examine Jakobe. “Help me.”

Together, we removed all the electrodes and wires, and then I reached forward to lift him out of the bed. She held her arm out to stop me.

“I’ve got him.” She picked him up as if he were as light as a pillow. “Let’s go.”

We stepped back out into the corridor.

“Elena,” she said, “the teleportation slip. Now.”

Elena pulled out a narrow slip of what appeared to be jade, no more than half an inch wide but about six inches long. She clasped Eldress Cheung’s forearm, and the eldress put her hand on my shoulder.

As Elena put pressure on the slip to break it, I detected motion out of the corner of my eye and looked over to see a black-armored figure stepping around the corner, sword in hand. Then there was a snapping sound and a bright light, and we were gone.

**

This safehouse wasn’t just a room with cots like the previous one I’d been in. It was designed for groups, and the rooms reminded me of dorms, as they were filled with bunk beds. Each dorm room had a wardrobe full of spare clothes and a bathroom. There was also a living room with sofas and another bathroom, a kitchen, and a laundry room.

Upon arrival, Eldress Cheung placed Jakobe down gently on one of the sofas in the living room. I spent a moment hovering over him, feeling his burning forehead, and talking softly in the hope that he would regain consciousness. I also did a quick search to make sure he didn’t have some sort of tracking device attached to his clothing or in his hair. I suppose it was possible they could have hacked his headset, but based on my limited knowledge of such things, it didn’t seem likely they would have had time for that.

The adrenaline from the fight was starting to wear off, and I felt myself teetering on the verge of a crash. Eldress Cheung told us to get some rest while she cared for Jakobe, and I was too exhausted to ask any questions. Leaving the radio with her, I trudged into the bedroom and fell into the deepest sleep I’d had in a long time. At first, it was dark and dreamless, but as I neared waking, it became almost frenzied, with flashing images of white spheres, green eyes, and explosions. By the time I woke up, the clock on the wall said it was late afternoon. I still felt tired, but I knew it was time to get up.

The bathroom had a shower, so I cleaned up, had a smoke, then walked out into the main room.

Elena was nowhere to be seen. Jakobe still lay on the sofa, and I could hear sounds in the kitchen and smelled the comforting aroma of frying food.

Approaching the sofa, I knelt and put my hand on Jakobe’s forehead, just above his headset. He felt a bit hot but not as feverish as he had been the night before.

“Hang in there, brother,” I said. “You’re gonna be fine.”

After observing him for a bit longer, I walked over to the kitchen and stuck my head inside. Eldress Cheung wore flannel pajamas and had her hair tied up in a bun. I could just barely see a pendant hanging from her neck, similar to the one Elena had, except that this one resembled a cloud. She looked like a typical grandmother, and if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I would never believe that she had burst through the bonecrete ceiling of a hospital and killed two Black Corpses the night before.

Sensing me, she glanced over. “Good morning, Detective. Or should I say afternoon. Care for a late breakfast of scallion pancakes and congee? The scallions are real. Freeze-dried but real. Grew them myself.”

“Sure,” I said, stepping into the kitchen. “Where’s Elena. Still sleeping?”

“Yes. Please, have a seat.” She inclined her head toward the table in the corner. “Something to drink? There’s boxed milk in the fridge. Or you could boil some tea. The water heater is in the far cupboard.”

I sat down. “I’m more of a coffee person.”

She nodded. “You’ll find instant coffee in the far cupboard as well.”

I busied myself and soon had a cup of steaming coffee. It tasted… passable. A few sips into it, I felt my thoughts finally getting to normal speed as I continued to wake up. Questions bubbled up in my mind, and anxiety mounted as I considered our situation.

“Any news from the radio?” I asked.

“They found Zhong and Cao,” she said. “As you suspected, they’re holding nothing back in trying to find you. In fact, they’ve locked down virtually the entire Third Earth. Well. Everything within the 4th Ring Road, that is.” Pulling a bowl out, she filled it with congee from the stove, then placed a scallion pancake on a napkin and put both down in front of me. Going back to serve herself, she continued, “This particular safehouse is very secure. We could stay here for several days without being discovered. Maybe even weeks. But we can’t hide forever.”

I wondered about that, considering Elena and I barely escaped with our lives from the last one we’d been in. But I felt like it would be too presumptuous to bring up the question right now.

Eldress Cheung sat down on the other side of the table and started to eat.

I took a bite of the scallion pancake and couldn’t help but say, “Delicious. Just like my mother makes.”

She smiled.

Taking another swallow of coffee, I said. “If you can teleport us into a safehouse with those slips, why can’t you teleport us out of the Third Earth?”

“First of all, you need to understand that teleportation slips aren’t easy to make. They require several extremely rare and expensive components, such that a single teleportation slip is probably worth more than most citizens earn in a month. Because of that, they aren’t given out randomly. Elena only had one because her coterie was on a sensitive public mission. Even I have to submit a formal application to get them.”

“Can’t you get in touch with one of those chief elders you mentioned? Couldn’t they give you another one?”

“Even if I did that, each teleportation slip is tied to a specific location. And the range is short. I do have one more slip with me, but it leads to a safehouse much further away. We’d have to get a lot closer before it would work. Furthermore, as it relates to your question, while it might be possible to create a teleportation slip that would get you through one of the Shields, it’s just not practical. I haven’t thought about the subject in-depth, but I suspect the range is too great. That’s not to mention the interference that the inherent properties of the Shield would cause.”

“I take it you don’t have some other way to get from one Earth to another?”

“I was hoping you might have some ideas about that, Detective.”

I did have a vague idea of how I might be able to get out of the Third Earth.

Charlotte. She worked in Cross-Level Control, so if there was anyone I could call on for help getting through security, she was the one. I knew I could trust her implicitly. But I considered that option as an absolute last resort. Human trafficking was profoundly illegal, and could get Charlotte imprisoned or worse if she were found out. That wasn’t to mention that, while she might agree to help me, would she really help out me, Jakobe, and two cultivators?

I loved Charlotte like a sibling, and though I wouldn’t hesitate to trust her with my life, I couldn’t rest everything on the assumption that she would violate the law so flagrantly.

“Getting from the Third Earth to the Fourth isn’t going to be easy, Eldress. Have you ever been through the process?”

She shook her head. “I’m a Thirder born and bred, and I’ve never left. I’ve never stepped on a vert-rail, and I don’t even have a passport. But I know how it works. Document checking. Scanning. Fingerprints. In the end, sneaking through the border is designed to be impossible.”

“It might as well be. The budget for Cross-Level Control gets worse as you go from Greater Heavens to Lesser Heavens, from Lesser Heavens to Bright Earths, and from Bright Earths to Dark Earths. Maybe if we were going from the Fourth Earth to the Fifth, transitioning from Bright to Dark, then we might have an easier time. But the Third and Fourth are both Bright Earths. Sneaking through the border just isn’t going to work.”

“What about going through the Shield itself?”

I stared into my coffee for a moment. “Wait a minute. Don’t you people have connections with smugglers? How else do you get back and forth?”

 “While it’s true we occasionally make use of the services smugglers offer, it’s not as though we make it a habit. When cultivators take the vert-rails, they do it like everyone else. There’s no way to tell if someone practices cultivation just by looking at their papers or even by scanning them.”

I thought about it a bit longer. “Sneaking through the Shield wouldn’t be impossible. That’s what smugglers do. But there are a lot of factors to deal with. The air patrols. The guards and workers inside the Shield. The fact that the interior is like a labyrinth. I don’t see how we’re prepared to deal with any of that.”

“We still have time to think about it.”

I didn’t respond, and we finished the rest of our breakfast in silence.

Chapter 14 – A View of the Pillar

Elena woke up a few hours later, and Eldress Cheung fixed her something to eat while I sat with Jakobe. He lay there on the sofa under a knit blanket, his hands folded over his midsection, breathing steadily. He had no visible injuries other than the wound on his neck. Eldress Cheung apparently knew a bit about medicine, and had tended it and changed the bandage a few hours before.

“I’m sorry, brother,” I murmured. “You’re gonna pull through this, you hear? I’m going to make all of this right.”

Was I? How, exactly?

You’ll figure it out, I remembered Xiaoli telling me once. You always do. Then she’d pulled me into a hug, after which she punched me softly in the side and took me out for a night of billiards. That was back when Charlotte and I had just split up, and I’d gone from being on top of the world to the bottom of the barrel. Xiaoli had always believed in me, and had always supported me. And she’d been right. Although Charlotte and I never got back together, I did patch things up enough that we could be friends. And that tenuous friendship eventually grew deeper until the two of us were like family.

After Elena finished eating and emerged from the kitchen with Eldress Cheung, things turned somewhat awkward. I felt like I ought to be talking about things with Elena, but it seemed strange to do it in front of the eldress. The bunks in the dorm rooms weren’t appropriate for a conversation, and the adjoining kitchen didn’t offer any privacy. So a heart-to-heart was out.

What were we supposed to do to pass the time? Stare at each other? Whoever had set the room up didn’t enjoy games. There wasn’t even a chessboard or a deck of cards to be found. So, we took spots on the sofas in the room while Elena tuned the TV to an old drama show I remember Mom watching when I was a teenager.

The scene felt oddly domestic and reminded me of the boring days during Shielding Festival Eve, when the whole family was stuck home together with nothing to do. After about an hour, I went back and retrieved the radio to listen in on the Peacekeeper and Black Corpse chatter.

As expected, the police were in chaos compared to the usual state. The Peacekeepers were out in full force looking for us, and although it was hard to say how much the Black Corpse presence had increased, based on the volume of radio traffic on the various channels, there were many more than usual. If I had to guess, I’d say they’d increased their number by tenfold.

There was no mention of us on the news, which was little surprise. Nothing important ever showed up on the news.

Eldress Cheung made dinner; Elena and I washed the dishes and cleaned up the kitchen afterward.

A few hours ticked by, and we went to sleep.

The following day, Eldress Cheung and Elena spent time meditating in the morning, and I realized it had been a long time since I had done any training, so I went to the kitchen to go through a few martial arts katas.

The next day passed in roughly the same manner. As did the following day. And the one after that. Thankfully, we had a washing machine and spare clothes in the wardrobes.

There was a bookshelf, but all it contained were medicinal recipe books and historical texts written by cultivators. Eldress Cheung took one to read, but I had no interest. I spent time coming up with numerous plans for getting out of the Third Earth, all of which I abandoned in the end. The files from Deputy Commissioner Zhong’s attaché case were tattered from how many times I’d poured through them, and my detective’s pad had long since run out of batteries.

I hung over Eldress Cheung’s shoulder whenever she tended Jakobe. She fed him medicinal pills to aid in his recovery, and I helped force water and congee into him to prevent weakness and dehydration.

One morning after breakfast, Eldress Cheung said, “Elena, have you mastered the Sunrise Rampart?”

“I think so.”

“Why don’t we go to the bedroom for some training. I want to see your progress.”

They disappeared into the room, and I lay on the couch for a nap.

Later that afternoon, when Elena and I found ourselves in the kitchen together, I said, “Can I ask something?”

“Sure.”

“That pendant of yours. And the dress. What are they?”

She reached down and cupped the pendant in her hand. “It’s called a dimensional pendant. It’s like a storage device. And the garment is what we call a ‘cultivator robe.’ When you become a disciple, you learn the crafting method and make one for yourself. It’s not quite armor but does provide certain levels of protection in a fight.”

“So, you all have pendants like that? And ‘robes?’”

“Pretty much.”

“Oh.” I’d been working on theories about why the Corpses were targeting Elena, and thought that the pendant and robe might have something to do with it. Apparently not.

I rummaged through the cupboard looking for coffee and found there were only three or four more packets left. That was going to be a problem, as was the fact that I only had a few cigarettes left.

“Elena, just as we left the hospital, did you notice that person step around the corner?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“I’m pretty sure it was Lieutenant Saito. He had a sword.”

Her eyes went wide. “From The Ivy?”

“Yeah. Do you have any idea what he wants with you?”

“I wish I did.”

I hesitated. “Based on something Deputy Commissioner Zhong said, I think they were targeting you specifically.”

“Me? But why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I misunderstood.”

There was genuine confusion in her eyes, so I chose not to press the subject. There was definitely something strange going on, but I couldn’t quite identify what it was.

The clock turned and turned.

As I checked the radio throughout the fifth day, it was exactly as I expected: the search for us was winding down. Of course, that didn’t mean that we had been forgotten. Given the obvious involvement of cultivators and the death of a high-ranking Black Corpse, it was a given that the case would be handed over to a Counter-Cultivation task force. And they would pour resources into our case until they closed it definitively with our public execution. There was a saying in the Peacekeepers: “There are no cold cases in Counter-Cultivation.”

And who knew what steps the Black Corpses were taking?

I was starting to feel more than a little cabin fever. Another day went by. Jakobe had stirred a few times but hadn’t fully woken. I was starting to get worried. Why wasn’t he regaining consciousness?

The following morning, I ran out of cigarettes, and it wasn’t long before the urge to smoke started to claw at my mind. I started pacing, but it didn’t help. I took a book off the shelf but couldn’t get past the first paragraph. I organized the refrigerator. Didn’t help.

After dinner, Elena turned the TV off and threw the remote down onto the sofa next to her.

“This is driving me crazy,” she said. “Eldress, can we please go out for a walk?”

Eldress Cheung looked at me. “Detective? Is it safe?”

Trying to ignore the craving, I considered the situation. As long as we were careful, the chances of being spotted on camera were low. And if I didn’t get cigarettes soon, I wasn’t sure what would happen. I’d been a regular smoker since my late teens and had never attempted to quit. Could I quit?

I turned the radio back on and flipped between a few different channels. The talk was spirited but didn’t sound as frenzied as before. They were still looking for us, but I knew that funding and politics wouldn’t allow for a protracted manhunt. Population statistics weren’t made public, but it was widely believed that the Third Earth had about 200,000,000 people in it. Anyone who took the time to do a bit of math could calculate that there were over a million Peacekeepers watching over it all. As shocking as the deaths of Zhong and Cao were, even they were just cogs in the machine. And the machine wouldn’t slow down for their sake or ours.

“As long as we keep covered up and don’t do anything to attract attention,” I said, “I think it should be fine.”

“I’m going to change!” Elena said, jumping up excitedly and rushing toward the room.

“Try to find some heels,” I said after her. “Changing your height will help.”

“Sure!”

As she disappeared, I paced from the front door to the kitchen door and back a few times. “What neighborhood are we in, Eldress Cheung?”

“We’re about halfway between the hospital and the 3rd Ring Road. Right next to the Glee City Mall.”

I closed my eyes to think about the layout of the city, then nodded. “I’ll take her to the mall. To be honest, I’m starting to feel a bit stir-crazy myself.”

“I noticed,” she said with a half-smile.

 Deciding I ought to change clothes as well, I walked back into the room, opened the wardrobe, and picked through it to find the most nondescript outfit I could manage. Gray slacks like a businessman would wear, a button-up shirt and tie, and some battered dress shoes. I topped it with a tan coat. There was a selection of headgear, from which I picked a soft-brimmed hat that would do a passable job at obscuring my facial features from any functional surveillance cameras. After only a moment of debate, I holstered my Spitter in its usual spot, and tucked Deputy Commissioner Zhong’s sidearm into my waistband. Just in case.

It took Elena fifteen minutes longer than me to get ready, and when she emerged, I saw why. I nearly snapped, “I thought we were trying not to attract attention!”

But then it occurred to me that she looked like a completely different person than before.

She wore a choker plunge dress of shiny black leather, with a high collar and a host of zippers, buckles, and ties, most of them on the back. Knee-high leather boots nearly reached the hem of the short skirt and had exaggerated soles and heels that made her at least five inches taller than before. I could just make out fishnet stockings on her thighs. Her honey-blonde hair was now bright aqua and in a short bob; it was a wig, but a good one.

The dress hugged her every curve perfectly, and the sight caused my breath to catch in my throat for a moment. But it was the makeup that slew me. Somehow the combination of dramatically dark lipstick, mascara, and eyeshadow made her eyes a thousand times more alluring than before.

 I would be a fool to try to convince myself I wasn’t attracted to her.

Focus on the mission, Wang Fan, I told myself. Now wasn’t the time for romance. Besides, I hardly knew a thing about her. And there was no way I could allow myself to fall for a cultivator!

“I should have known you would pick that dress, my apprentice,” Eldress Cheung said, just a touch of disapproval in her voice.

“Whoever packed that wardrobe had good taste,” Elena replied, tilting her chin up a bit.

“It wasn’t me,” Eldress Cheung said. “In any case, please be careful out there. And don’t stay out too long.”

“We’ll just stretch our legs, Eldress,” I said, then viciously suppressed my cravings as I went on to touch on a few contingency plans in case anything unexpected happened.

Promising to return before midnight, we stepped out into the corridor. I could tell immediately that this building was a remnant from the original construction of the Third Earth, which would make it a good three or four centuries old. The walls had once been covered with plaster, and there had obviously been tile on the floor in the past. But all that was gone. It was a wonder that the place hadn’t collapsed into rubble already. It didn’t even have an elevator, so we picked our way down the barely-lit stairs, delicately toeing trash and junk out of our way until we reached the foyer.

I wanted to jump with delight when I saw a dented cigarette vending machine next to the metal entry door. I quickly purchased two packs.

“Mind?” I asked.

She frowned slightly. “Go ahead.”

As I lit up and filled my lungs with cool, calming smoke, Elena peeped out of the metal door to scan the street.

“Seems like a calm night,” she said. “No rain.”

“Good,” I said, looking at the glowing tip of the cigarette as it hung between first and middle finger. “How about we go get a drink at Glee City Mall?”

“Sure. I heard they opened a new bar on the top floor.”

I finished my cigarette. “Shall we?”

I held the door for her as we stepped out onto the street, which was so dry I could tell it hadn’t rained for the entire day. The sounds of the city wrapped us up, voices echoing on the street, vehicles honking and turbines revving, and faint pulses of music from indeterminable sources.

“Glee City should be down the street that way,” I said.

I felt a warm tingle as Elena grabbed my arm and tugged me down the street. Then her perfume drifted up, and I couldn’t help but take a deep breath. I detected coffee and vanilla, as well as a hint of orange and jasmine. Damn, it made her smell good.

The sidewalk wasn’t empty, but it wasn’t packed either. As we walked along, I looked at her out of the corner of my eye and considered saying something. But what? I’d never had trouble striking up a conversation with women before, yet right now, I felt tongue-tied. Maybe it was because the last time I’d asked her a question out of the blue, it ended with a discussion about how all her friends had been killed. And all the questions I’d wanted to throw her way a few days ago seemed wrong.

Maybe I should ask about her family. But then I thought back to what she’d said in our very first conversation. I’ve lost everyone, Officer. Everyone. I used to have a brother and parents, but not anymore.

Inquiring about family probably wasn’t a good idea. Work? Favorite music? Pets?

Shit.

“Why did you become a policeman?” she asked.

Although the question caught me off guard, it wasn’t difficult to answer. “To help people.”

“Really?” she said, not in an accusatory tone, but out of what seemed genuine curiosity.

“Yeah. My family has been Peacekeepers going back for generations. Not leadership. Mostly just patrol officers, although a few climbed the ranks. My great grandfather was a superintendent in the Sixth Heaven. And my dad was a detective. He used to tell me that the people on the street need someone to have their backs and that, in the end, we Peacekeepers work for them. Not Sinotech. To the living, we owe respect; to the dead, we owe justice. That was what he said. He was really proud when I made detective.”

She didn’t respond for a short while, and I thought I’d killed the conversation. Then she said, “So you’re from the Sixth Heaven?”

“No. The Third.”

“Wow.” I could see her looking up at me, her eyes wide. “What’s it like there? Is it really as nice as they say?”

I shrugged. “I suppose so. Less crime. Everything is maintained better. The rain runs on schedule. It’s cleaner and brighter.”

“It’s funny. We live in the Bright Earths, but the truth is, they’re not so bright.”

“I suppose. Except, there’s a lot more character to the Third Earth. A lot more life.”

“Life?”

“I don’t know how to explain it. There’s just an energy here. People everywhere, crowding the streets. Music and sound no matter where you go. All kinds of food. Different languages. If only they could clean up more of the trash and the criminals along with it.”

“Isn’t catching criminals your job?”

I smiled. “You got me there.”

“Hey, I just thought of something. Since I’m from the Third Earth, I call myself a Thirder, right? But you’re from the Third Heaven. So what are you?”

“Thirder. Sixther. That’s Ten Earths slang. We don’t use words like that down in the Nine Heavens. We just say, ‘I’m from the Third Heaven.’”

“Oh. That’s kind of boring.”

“See what I mean? Things in the Bright Earths are a lot more exciting.”

All of a sudden, I caught the dark blue and white of a patrol hovercar coming from the opposite direction. Tugging my hat down over my eyes, I released my arm from Elena’s grasp. I switched positions on the sidewalk, putting my arm around her shoulder in the process, which kept her slightly shielded from the vantage of the vehicle. I was certain that no patrol officer would identify us, given we’d changed our clothing and that there were at least a dozen other couples on the street in addition to us.

But I didn’t want to take any chances.

It suddenly struck me how absurd it all was. As a patrol officer, I had cruised the streets countless times, scanning the faces of the passersby looking for the subjects of BOLOs. Now I was the one hiding from the patrol cars with my arm around a cultivator. A sorceress. A criminal. And a damned beautiful one at that.

The patrol car passed us, and her perfume tingled in my nostrils as I let my arm slide away from her shoulders.

Crossing a street, we walked underneath a holographic projection of an enormous swirling phoenix and through the revolving doors of the Glee City Mall, where we were met with a louder pulse of background music and buzz of conversation than on the street. Bright fluorescent light filled the ground floor, which contained mostly clothing and jewelry stores.

 “It does seem alive here,” she said. “You know, it’s a clear night. We should be able to get a great view of the Heaven-Propping Pillar.”

We headed up the crisscrossing elevators, passing shoe stores, computer shops, makeup stands, and just about every other type of business conceivable until we were on the fourteenth floor.

She led me to a place called the Skill Kill, a dimly-lit bar that was so recently built it smelled of new plastic and fresh paint. The thrum of guitar music embraced us as we found a table nestled in the corner against floor-to-ceiling windows that gave a perfect view of the Heaven-Propping Pillar.

I wasn’t a huge drinker, but it felt like the right time for a beer.

“Snow beer,” I said to the waitress. “A pint.”

“Same,” Elena said, to my surprise.

“You drink beer?”

“Yeah. Habit I picked up from my mother.”

I nearly asked about her family but bit my tongue.

As we waited for our drinks, we looked out at the city. The Heaven-Propping Pillar was lit for evening, casting a gentle orange glow onto the Third Earth, at least the parts nearest the Pillar. The farther suburbs were too far away to receive the light of the Pillar, even in the middle of the day. And Purgatory, where the Shield connected to the ground, was in perpetual darkness.

“No matter what you think of the thing, it’s beautiful,” she said, her voice so low I wasn’t sure if she meant for me to hear her.

The beer arrived, so I pulled mine over and took a sip. “What do you mean ‘no matter what you think of it’? The Pillar?”

She smiled and tucked some aqua hair behind her ear. “Sorry, sometimes I forget that you’re not one of us.”

Just as I’d guessed. I felt more than ever like I was a fish out of water, unsure of what to say or ask, and starkly aware that my understanding of the world differed from that of my new acquaintances.

“Shouldn’t be talking about that kind of thing in public anyway,” she said after a moment. “Let’s just enjoy the moment.”

Sipping our beers, we watched as the Pillar slowly turned dark and evening gave way to night.

Chapter 15 – A Van

As we slowly drained our beers, she asked me what kind of music I listened to and thus commenced a long conversation about nothing. I learned that she liked ancient rock music, spicy food, frogs, and hummingbirds. She gained similarly useless facts about me, for instance, how I hated garlic chives and how I’d been afraid of cockroaches as a child. And we laughed about inane stories. I told her about the time Jakobe and I had chased a perp into a supermarket and somehow ended up crashing into a rack of cooking oil. She had similarly ridiculous tales to tell, such as how she nearly burned her apartment building down after leaving a pot of beans on the stove.

We avoided sensitive topics.

We ordered snacks with the second round of beers, and before I knew it, several hours had passed, and my head was spinning a bit. I didn’t drink very often, so my tolerance wasn’t great.

The night remained clear and rain-free, and the view from the Skill Kill was spectacular. The highest lanes of aerial traffic were visible, chugging amongst the high-rises, most of which glowed brightly with neon and advertisements. High above, it was just barely possible to make out the winking lights of the Cross-Level Control hovervehicles that guarded the Shield. I was often amazed at how beautiful the city looked when you had only the skyline to fill your eye. From up here, you didn’t see the trash on the streets. And looking up from the ground, it was easy to forget that half the buildings were crumbling and that criminals scuttled in just about every dark alley and shadowy corridor.

The city center never went dark, but as it got later, the brightness faded. We settled into the alcohol and the flow of conversation, and eventually things turned a bit less silly.

“What do you do for work?” I asked.

“Street cart,” she replied. “I sell stuff. Mostly headgear and gloves. Remember that black hat Eldress Cheung wears?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“From my cart,” she laughed. “That’s how we met.”

“Maybe I’ll pick something up from you as well.”

“On the house!”

I smiled, but it occurred to me that selling hats and gloves on the street couldn’t possibly bring in much money. What kind of a life did she live? One of poverty? Trying hard to prevent the conversation from slipping in the wrong direction, I asked questions about hats and gloves, and before long, we were talking about something else.

It felt strange but good. Even liberating. It had been quite a while since I’d been on a date. In fact, ever since the spectacular failure of my whirlwind relationship with Qian Cui, I’d been keeping to myself, spending nights working out and reading, not hanging out at bars and clubs.

 Although I hadn’t forgotten that the Black Corpses were hunting us, the crazed events that had played out a few days ago were far from mind. I was sitting across the table from a beautiful young lady who laughed at my stupid jokes and seemed genuinely interested in my stories. And she had tales that captivated me even when, logically speaking, they should have bored me.

Although I was barely conscious of it, a kernel of thought had come to exist in the back of my mind: this was what cultivators were really like, wasn’t it? Elena wasn’t a shadowy, evil villain who held secret meetings plotting the demise of humanity. She wasn’t a ruthless murderer who sacrificed children in bloody ceremonies to gain magical powers. No, Elena was an ordinary person. A young woman struggling to survive in the Grand Kingdom. Running a cart selling hats and gloves.

At a certain point, the conversation lulled for the first time in several hours, and Elena said, “Should we go back?”

“Yeah, it’s almost midnight.” I held my beer mug out. “Bottoms up?”

“Bottoms up!”

We finished our beers and I paid the bill. When we slid out of our chairs, Elena stumbled slightly, and I extended my arm for her to grab onto. She righted herself, and we laughed. She had to weigh at least fifty pounds less than me, so my guess was that her head was spinning even more than mine was. We half-leaned against each other as we left the bar and walked back out into Glee City, which wasn’t nearly as crowded as before. Given the hour, most of the shops were closed or closing.

Once out on the street, we strolled back in the direction of the safehouse.

“Thanks, Wang Fan,” she said. Now that we were away from the bar's musical drone and the clamor of the mall, I could sense the faintest lilt in her speech from the alcohol. “It’s been a long time since I did something like this.”

“Same here. It was nice.”

Her hand slid down my arm, and her fingers found mine. They curled together, and I felt a warmth spreading through me that had nothing to do with alcohol. As we walked back along the same way we had come, I suddenly wondered if I should kiss her. The apartment entrance neared, and we’d soon be through the metal door and into the foyer. What about while we waited for the elevator? Or maybe inside the elevator? Wait. The building didn’t have an elevator.

As I pondered what to do, a flicker of motion vied for my attention. I ignored it at first, preferring instead to think about what it would be like to lean down and brush her lips with mine. Would she grab my neck and pull me toward her? Slip her arms inside my jacket and wrap them around my waist?

The motion tugged harder at my attention, and I looked over to see a vehicle heading in our direction in the emergency lane. It had just turned the corner at the end of the block, a good distance away, but as my gaze locked onto it, I realized why it had grabbed my attention. It wasn’t blue and white like a patrol hovercar, nor white and red like an ambulance. It wasn’t a sedan, the type we detectives used, nor one of the bulky buses driven by crime scene investigators. It was a long, sleek hovervan with black, reflective windows and turbines that whirred so smoothly they hardly made any noise at all.

I’d been in a van like that once when Jakobe and I rode along with a lance of Black Corpses to arrest Sergeant Chen from the 12th Precinct.

My hand tightened around Elena’s. “Shit!”

She tugged her head off the side of my arm. “What’s wrong?”

“Just keep walking,” I said. We were only about ten paces from the entrance of the building, but I was hard-pressed not to break into a sprint. I suppressed the urge. It wouldn’t do anything but draw attention. “Don’t turn your head, but look up ahead, in the emergency vehicle lane.”

“The black van?”

“Yeah. That’s a Black Corpse transport. They found us.”

“Mierda,” she breathed, gripping my hand back just as hard as I was squeezing it. “You sure they’re here for us? Maybe it’s a patrol.”

“Black Corpses don’t go on patrols. They have to be here for us.”

“What do we do?”

“It’s not as if we can turn and run. Just walk at the same pace until we’re inside.”

The last few steps through the metal door felt like they went in slow motion. I kept my eyes on the black van as it continued its approach, wondering if they planned to enter the building from the roof or the ground floor. Wondering if they’d seen us and knew who we were. The van didn’t accelerate, so I could only hope that they hadn’t noticed us.

As soon as the metal door clanked shut behind us, our hands separated, and we rushed into the stairway. I jumped up four steps at a time, my heart pounding and my head cloudy. I reached the door a few seconds before Elena, which was when I realized I had no way to open it. I clenched my fist and pulled it back to start banging, then stopped and stepped out of the way as she reached my side. She placed her palm on the door, and a moment later, it swung open.

Nearly jumping inside, Elena said, “Master, we have to go!”

Right behind her, I said, “Eldress, the Black—”

Jakobe sat on the couch next to Eldress Cheung, a mug of steaming coffee in his hands.

“Wang Fan!” he said, looking up.

“Brother!” I rushed forward and patted his shoulder. “How are you?”

“Tired. Confused. Head hurts. Mrs. Cheung said there was some sort of accident at the hospital but that you would explain the details.”

I took a few breaths to steady my breathing after running up the stairs. “There’s no time to explain now. You’re going to have to trust me. Are you able to walk?”

“I haven’t tried yet.”

I looked at Eldress Cheung. “They found us,” I said. “I’d say we have two or three minutes before they’re walking up the stairs. Or down them. Or both. Five if we’re lucky.”

She stood. “Elena, activate the self-destruct talismans. Detective Wang, you tend to your friend. We walk out the door in one minute.”

Elena walked over to a strip of paper with complicated symbols on it, housed in a glassless picture frame on the wall. Placing her index and middle finger onto the paper, she started chanting under her breath, and the paper glowed briefly. Turning on her heel, she stepped into the kitchen.

Crouching down next to Jakobe, I said, “It’s complicated.”

He grinned, but the effort it took him betrayed how weak he was. “I guessed. I remember what happened right before I went down in The Ivy.” Lowering his voice, he said, “That girl, she’s a….”

“Yeah… a cultivator.”

“And when you said they found us. You meant…?”

“Black Corpses.”

“Fuuuuck,” he said.

Elena walked out of the kitchen and hurried into the men’s dorm room.

“Back at the hospital,” I said, “they were going to do something to you. Something… really bad. I’ll explain later. Point is, Elena and Eldress Cheung helped me save you. If it wasn’t for them, you wouldn’t be alive any longer. Well, it’s more complicated than that, but you get the point.”

“Yeah. All right, help me up.”

He set his coffee aside, and I gave him a hand as he rose shakily from the sofa.

“Damn, I’m weak,” he said, rubbing his forehead. “And why the fuck does my head hurt so bad? How long have I been out?” He checked his wristwatch, which had made it through his whole ordeal without being removed.

“Nearly a week,” I said.

Elena emerged from the men’s dorm room and stepped over to the other bedroom.

“A week?” Jakobe said.

“Like I said, there’s a lot to explain. Can you try taking a step?”

He put one foot in front of the other, then another. “I can walk. Barely.”

“I’ll help you if you need it. Here, get this on.” I pulled a random hat and coat off the rack next to the door and handed it to him. “Hasn’t rained for a while, and you know what that means.”

“The longer it doesn’t rain, the sooner it starts raining again.”

I nodded. “Also, this.” I pulled out the firearm we’d taken from Deputy Commissioner Zhong’s car.

He tucked the holster inside his waistband, then checked the firearm. “An NZ-85G.2. Not bad. It’ll work.”

Elena and Eldress Cheung emerged together. Eldress Cheung had changed out of her flannel pajamas into a red jogging suit with white trim and had her dimensional pendant hanging on the outside of it. Elena had ditched the heels for her old utilitarian boots, but still wore the black leather dress; she obviously didn’t have time for a full wardrobe change.

Almost exactly a minute had passed.

Eldress Cheung shrugged into her raincoat and put on her black rain hat. Then she took out a slip of jade and handed it out to Elena.

“Take this, just in case.”

“Master…” Elena said, hesitating.

“I said take it!” she snapped, and Elena immediately complied. “We don’t know what’s going to happen out there, but if it gets bad, I’m going to be the one to hold the line. That slip leads to a safehouse out in the suburbs. But it’s too far away to use from here; you’ll have to get past the West 4th Ring Road before activating it. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

“Yes, Master.”

“Take these as well,” Eldress Cheung continued, and she handed two paper talismans to Elena, one of them brown, one blue.

“Detonation talismans?” Elena said.

“Yes. Peel the backs off and touch them together, and they’ll create a small explosion. They might come in useful.” She looked at Jakobe and me. “Detectives, you keep up and try to stay safe.”

We nodded.

She placed her hand on the door and closed her eyes for a moment. “Hallway’s clear.”

Opening the door, she stepped out and led us toward the stairs. As we entered the stairwell, I could just barely hear muffled voices coming from below. The Corpses were already coming up.

We climbed as quietly as possible. Eldress Cheung produced a talisman on each landing, slapped it against the wall, and pressed her finger against it to activate it.

At the top, she said, “Those talismans will collapse the stairwell in about 2 minutes.”

The stairs led directly out onto the roof. The night was still clear. No rain.

“There’s an access walkway leading to the next building over,” Eldress Cheung explained, heading toward it across the rooftop. “From there, we’ll—”

She stopped talking at the same time as she stopped moving, so abruptly that Elena nearly walked into her and I into Elena.

As I leaned to look past Elena, my heart sank.

A Black Corpse was with us on the rooftop, leaning up against the parapet, his hands folded loosely in front of him. His helmet visor was up, revealing the face of a middle-aged man with a scar on his lip. He smiled.

“Hello, Ursula.”

Eldress Cheung’s hands slowly curled into fists as they hung at her side. “You of all people. I should have guessed they would call you out once they knew I was involved.”

“That was quite the dramatic scene in the hospital. You exposed yourself just to save some piece of trash Peacekeeper? Although, I suppose it’s no surprise. Your bleeding heart has always gotten you into trouble.”

Eldress Cheung turned her head and, out of the corner of her mouth, quietly said, “Elena, keep them from coming up the stairs until those talismans go off.”

As Elena ducked back into the stairwell, the Black Corpse pushed off of the parapet and took a step forward. Cracking his knuckles, he said, “You still have no idea how badly you fell for our trap, do you?” He grinned at her lack of response. “I hate to say it, Ursula, but I’m going to enjoy this.”

“I’m sure you will, Nicolas. The fact that you still hate me for breaking up with you seventy years ago just shows how twisted your mind is.”

“You didn’t break up with me, Ursula. You cheated on me. With my—”

Eldress Cheung lunged forward and sent a beam of white light straight toward his forehead.

Interlude 3 – Cold Fury

“You sent who after them?” Itsuki Saito asked coldly.

“Don’t take that tone with me, boy,” the gaunt-faced Black Corpse replied, speaking in an odd drawl because of his prosthetic bonemetal jaw. “Your father might be on the Sinotech board of directors, but that doesn’t mean you have any right or authority to speak out of turn.”

Itsuki inclined his head deferentially. “Yes, Colonel.”

“Do you have a problem with Lieutenant Kun?”

“No, sir. I just fear that Nicolas’ personal involvement with this Ursula Cheung will be problematic.”

“I doubt that, Lieutenant Saito. Lieutenant Kun has years of service under his belt. Many more years than you do. And he never lost his entire personal lance on a mission.”

Itsuki Saito felt like he had been slapped in the face, and his mind burned with cold fury. I lost two men, not three, Colonel Bei. It doesn’t matter. I’ll see you dead one day. I’ll make sure that you’re sacrificed to the Purpose like the lowliest criminal.

Chapter 16 – Rooftop Showdown

The Black Corpse named Nicolas threw his hand up, and a shield of lightning appeared, deflecting Eldress Cheung’s beam off to the side toward an air duct. A pop rang out, and sparks showered.

Lunging forward, Eldress Cheung reached up to tap the dimensional pendant hanging from her neck, and her cultivator robes flowed out, replacing her raincoat, jogging suit, and hat. She dashed forward, a white sphere growing in her hand, while Nicolas twisted his fingers into a complex pattern, causing a wind to spring up from behind him. In the span of a single blink of an eye, the wind became a gale that pushed against Eldress Cheung so hard she stopped in her tracks and leaned forward to maintain balance.

Meanwhile, Jakobe and I were shoved so hard we staggered backward until our backs were against the wall next to the door.

Twin spheres of energy now glowing in each hand, Eldress Cheung labored to lift a foot, then took a step forward. “When did you break through, Nicolas? I thought you only had a Wind sea, not a Wind root.”

His fingers blurred, and the wind suddenly ceased. Eldress Cheung lurched forward off balance, and then Nicolas shifted to another hand gesture, causing the wind to hit her from the side.

As she stumbled to the left, I reached into my coat, pulled out my Spitter, and leveled it at Nicolas’ head.

“Un-unh, Detective,” he said, shifting hand positions again. The wind hit Jakobe and me from the side, and we tumbled to the ground in a heap.

Nicolas curled his fingers into another sign and waved his hands in a circular motion. A stream of lightning shot from one of his hands up into the air until it was about ten feet overhead. Then it spread out like an inverted bowl, with him and Eldress Cheung inside and us on the outside.

Eldress Cheung had regained her footing, and she leaped toward Nicolas, simultaneously throwing two spheres of white at him.

He dodged, and while one sphere hit the lightning behind him, the other hit his shoulder. He was knocked off his feet, spinning in the air and landing hard on his hands and knees.

While Eldress Cheung continued to rush toward him, I got to one knee and checked my Spitter wires to make sure they were intact. Then I took aim at Nicolas and fired.

The inverted bowl of lightning absorbed the Spitter beam like a dry sponge taking in water. Shit. Not that I expected any different.

I reached over to help Jakobe up, keeping one eye on the fighting inside the lightning.

“This is fucking crazy,” he said, standing with his hands on his knees.

“You get used to it,” I replied, half to convince myself.

Before Nicolas could get to his feet, Eldress Cheung reached him and kicked at his head. He blocked it with a forearm but couldn’t stop the momentum of her foot, which nearly knocked him off his hands and knees.

She threw out another kick, but this time he was ready; he grabbed her leg as it closed in, then twisted onto his back, using the momentum to throw her over him.

She sailed through the air and slammed into the lightning, causing a hail of sparks to rain down as she dropped to a kneeling position on the rooftop surface.

Springing to his feet, Nicolas said, “You can’t beat me, Ursula. I have three roots. Even if you get in a lucky shot or two, I’ll win in the end. Why don’t you surrender? You’d make a great puppet. Don’t worry. I’ll have them leave a bit of your personality behind.”

Eldress Cheung didn’t respond. Instead, she put one hand on top of the other and flicked her thumbs out, then drew her hands away from each other. As she did, a white spiral of light stretched between them.

“Suna Flail?” Nicolas said. “Not going to work.”

He slapped his palms together and rotated them, causing a vortex of air to spring up in front of him that resembled a mouth.

Before anything else could happen, I heard a muffled thumping sound from below me, and the entire building seemed to tremble.

Nicolas’ face darkened slightly. “What did you just do, Ursula?”

She grinned as the spiral of light lengthened in front of her. “I didn’t do anything. But it seems my apprentice just took out the rest of your lance.”

He snorted. “I didn’t bring a lance with me. Just puppets. All of them former cultivators.”

Eldress Cheung’s grin didn’t fade. “Nice try. You still have the same tells, Nicolas. You’re lying.”

Then she sent the spiral of light swirling out like a whip.

Elena emerged from the door, panting for breath, a trickle of blood running down from a cut on her temple.

Meanwhile, Jakobe had pulled out his pistol. “Maybe this will punch through that lightning.”

“It won’t,” Elena said. “Don’t waste your bullets.”

“Well fuck,” Jakobe said, re-holstering his weapon.

“Is it clear down there?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said.

Eldress Cheung’s whip of light hit Nicolas’ vortex, and the vortex immediately snagged the whip and started pulling it in.

“Elena, how strong is your Master? I mean, with those roots and seas.”

“She has two roots and a sea.”

I flipped the wire release on the Spitter and stowed it back under my coat.

“I think we need to get out of here. That Black Corpse has three roots.”

“I’m not abandoning my Master, Wang Fan. A two-root cultivator can still win against three. It’s not an impossible fight. And he can’t keep that Fulmina Shield up forever. Once it drops and I can join the fight, he’s done for.”

Nicolas’ vortex sucked at the light until Eldress Cheung let it vanish. “Elena,” she called out, “get them out of here.”

“That’s not going to happen,” Nicolas said. The lightning shield suddenly dissolved, and he reached to his side to draw a gun that he aimed in our direction.

“Yes, it is,” Eldress Cheung said, and her hands blurred.

Nicolas pulled the trigger, but in the same moment, another shield of lightning appeared, thanks to Eldress Cheung. The bullet hit the lightning and disappeared.

“I’m not leaving, Master!” Elena called. “Drop the shield so I can help you. We can take him down together.”

“I said leave. Now.” Eldress Cheung was walking toward Nicolas, who turned and shoved his hand out, sending a blast of wind into her that nearly knocked her off her feet. “NOW!”

I could see tears of frustration and anger welling in Elena’s eyes, and her hands were balled into fists.

“Elena…” I said.

“¡Joder!” she said, and though I had no idea of the word’s definition, from the way she spat it out, I could tell it was a curse word.

Eldress Cheung fought against the wind as she closed in on Nicolas, her hands glowing brightly, almost as if she were wearing gloves of light.

I looked at Elena, who was standing in place either in shock or defiance.

“Elena, we need to get out of here while we can,” I said, but she didn’t respond.

Jakobe suddenly reached out and grabbed my elbow to steady himself. “My head is really killing me,” he said.

If I left Elena, where would I go? I had no safehouse to hide in. I had no magical teleportation device. Even if I managed to get Jakobe out of the city center and into the suburbs, how long would we last on our own? And why was his head hurting? Something to do with his headset? I couldn’t very well take him to a hospital.

Regardless, sticking around on this rooftop seemed like suicide. Based on what little I knew about cultivators, I didn’t see how Eldress Cheung stood a chance.

“I think we need to leave, brother,” I said to Jakobe. “Come, this way.”

“No,” Elena said. “I’ll carry him.” She grabbed him, and before he or I knew what was happening, she had him slung over her shoulders. “Let’s go.”

A zapping sound filled the air behind us, and I looked over my shoulder to see the lightning shield shimmer out of existence for a short moment before it popped back up.

“Your lackeys can run, Ursula, but they won’t get far. I know you used a teleportation slip to get out of the hospital, which means you have no way to escape from here. Elders don’t rank high enough to get more than one slip at a time. After I finish with you, I’ll track them down however far into the shadows they’ve slunk.”

“You made a mistake coming here alone, Nicolas,” Eldress Cheung replied. “You people always underestimate us.”

Elena carried Jakobe onto the access walkway that led to the next building. It was little more than a metal ladder with rails. She crossed it in a surprising display of sure-footedness, and I followed. On the next roof, she looked back to see her Master exchanging blasts of energy and lightning with the Black Corpse. Then she kicked open the locked door to the stairwell.

We hurried down the stairs as quickly as possible, then out the back entrance to an alley. Near the mouth of the alley, Elena put Jakobe back onto his feet. Reaching up to a spot behind her ear, she touched a button that disconnected her aqua wig. She tossed it to the ground and shook out her natural honey-blonde hair.

“Give me your coat,” she said to me, and I complied without asking any questions. She stepped out onto the street.

Leaning back against the alley wall, Jakobe let out a low whistle.

“Are you and her…?” he asked.

“No.”

“If you say so, brother. How the fuck did she just carry me down five flights of stairs on her shoulders?”

“Cultivators are physically stronger. Don’t ask me how. It’s just how it is.”

“Wonder why that’s not common knowledge. There’s no way Counter-Cultivation doesn’t know.”

“I don’t know. I have a lot of questions about a lot of things. I guess I owe you an apology. For all my years of laughing at your theories. I suppose I shouldn’t call them theories, should I?”

He smiled. “I tried to tell you. Did I ever mention what the Grand Kingdom used to be called?”

“The Middle Kingdom,” I said. “Yeah, you told me. Why was it called that again?”

“No clue.”

Elena stepped back around the corner. “Cab’s here. Let’s go.”

We ducked out of the alley and into the waiting cab, Jakobe into the front seat, Elena and me in the back. The seats were sticky from age, and the interior smelled like stale smoke.

“Driver, could you turn some music on?” she asked. A moment later, a soothing piano sonata filled the car. As we drifted up into the aerial traffic, I craned my neck to catch a glimpse of the rooftop we had just occupied. The angle was wrong, but I could see Elena looking in the same direction.

Suddenly, her eyes went wide, and she covered her mouth with her hand. Tears started welling up in her eyes as she looked in the opposite direction.

“She’s gone,” she whispered.

I opened my mouth to speak but couldn’t think of what to say. I closed my mouth.

Elena’s hands clenched into trembling fists, and I saw her jaw clench and her lips tighten. Suddenly, she punched driver’s seat in front of her, simultaneously letting loose a hoarse shout of rage, frustration, and sorrow.

The driver was so startled the cab swerved to the side, but Jakobe quickly said, “No worries, man. Bad night at dice, that’s all. You know how it goes.”

“Right…” the driver said hesitantly, and then Jakobe reached over and turned up the music.

Shifting a bit in place so that I was facing her more directly, I leaned forward and said, “Elena, you—”

She abruptly lunged forward and wrapped her arms around me, burying her head beneath my chin. She made no sound, but I could feel her chest heaving, and soon, damp tears were trickling down into the pit of my neck.

The sonata wrapped us both up as I held her tight.

Chapter 17 – Worms

Despite the hour creeping toward midnight, we hit traffic about halfway to the 4th Ring Road, and the cab slowed to a crawl.

Eventually, Elena went still in my arms. I assumed she had cried out all her tears, and expected her to pull away from me. Then I realized she’d fallen asleep. I twisted slightly in place so that my back was to the door, and leaned my head against the window to look out at the buildings and orgplants drifting by. A raindrop hit the window, then another, and soon it was pouring around us.

The piano music surrounded me, and as my breath fogged the window, I closed my eyes. What the hell were we going to do next? How long could we keep dodging the Corpses? How long before they pulled out all the stops and plastered our faces on the news? Once that happened, we couldn’t step outside without being reported.

I thought and thought but couldn’t come up with a single good idea. Before I knew what was happening, I had dozed off as well.

I roused when the cab’s turbines shifted, and we banked down toward the street. We’d arrived at our destination, although I wasn’t sure what it was.

Moving my hand up to Elena’s shoulder, I shook her gently until she woke up. She looked up at me with puffy eyes and gave a faint smile as she pushed away from me.

“Sorry,” she murmured.

“For?”

“Using you as a pillow.”

“You can do that any time,” I replied, and my face immediately flushed as I realized how awkward the words sounded. Before she could respond, I cleared my throat and said, “We’re here. Wherever that is.”

“I know this area,” she said, looking out the window. “I’ve never seen it from this angle, though. I always come here by zont-rail.”

The cab landed in a drop-off zone, and the doors opened. Elena must have pre-paid with cash.

As we climbed out into the rain, she returned my coat to me, and I tugged my hat down over my eyes. Meanwhile, she pulled out a built-in hood from her dress's collar and long gloved sleeves from the shoulder pads. Jakobe’s coat had a similar hood, as well as gloves in the sleeves. It seemed odd. No matter how dramatic the circumstances, we never stopped thinking about the Heavenly Curse. Rain could be scheduled, but the Curse couldn’t be removed. That was our life.

While Elena straightened her garment and fiddled with her stockings, I stepped over and clasped Jakobe’s shoulder. “How you feeling?”

“Hungry,” he said. “And my head still hurts. I’m a bit less dizzy, though.” Leaning forward and lowering his voice, he said, “You two sure got cozy there in the back. Are you sure you’re not…?”

I gave him a stony look that forestalled any further conversation but also brought a crooked smile to his face.

 “We’re just past the 4th Ring Road,” Elena said. “I picked this spot because I come here a lot for meetings. Plus, I usually set up my cart a few blocks over. There are plenty of places we can use the slip here.”

Looking around, I saw that we were in a residential suburb. Most of the apartment buildings here were similar to the one we had just been in across town: crumbling centuries-old structures that were generally between five to eight stories tall. Occasional high-rises peppered the skyline here and there, as well as hulking orgplants. The ground-level floors of most of the buildings featured shops, restaurants, and markets of every kind.

Foot traffic was light at this hour, but there were still people about.

“Should we just duck onto a side street?” I said.

“Yeah,” Elena said. “There’s a dead-end alley in that direction.” Although her voice was level, her eyes flickered with something I had seen in the mirror when Xiaoli left me: pain. Elena’s Master had just died, and frankly, I was surprised she was holding herself together so well.

As we headed down the sidewalk toward a nearby complex she pointed out, she continued, “We use this area for meetings because there’s hardly a working surveillance camera anywhere.”

We stopped halfway to the alley to get Jakobe something to eat at a food cart. The sizzling smell of fried protein strips elicited a bit of rumbling in my stomach, so I partook as well. As we hurried along with skewers of fried sustenance, I glanced around to ensure no one was in earshot of us, and quietly said, “What I don’t understand is how they found us. How safe are those safehouses of yours?”

Elena shrugged. “My understanding is that they’re very safe. Most of them have spell formations in the walls that make them invisible to scanning.”

“Spell formations?” I asked.

She cocked her head in thought for a moment. “They’re a way to imbue something with permanent ‘magical’ properties. Or produce some sort of effect.”

“That’s well and good, but… look, I don’t want to sound overly critical. Are you really sure we can trust them?”

“What do you mean?”

“Elena, the Black Corpses showed up right outside the first one you took me to. And the same thing happened at the second one.”

“Eldress Cheung thought the first incident probably had something to do with you. A tracking device in your prosthetic or something.”

“My arm doesn’t have a tracking device. Peacekeeper beam guns do, but the range is very short. Plus, if you’re saying safehouses can’t be scanned, then that explanation doesn’t work.”

“The Grand Kingdom Highrise safehouse isn’t intended for long-term use. And I never even asked if it has a spell formation. Maybe it doesn’t. So the explanation has to be your gun. As for just now, you and I probably got picked up on a camera somewhere. Outside the mall, maybe.”

“The chances are small,” I said. “Astronomically small. The vast majority of cameras aren’t used for active surveillance. They record, that’s all. Besides, even if we did get caught on camera, why would they go to the apartment? They would have sent people to the mall to pick us up.”

“Exactly,” Jakobe said. Wincing and rubbing his forehead, he said, “That Black Corpse Nicolas obviously knew Eldress Cheung, and it sounds like he was sent specifically to deal with her. I don’t think it had anything to do with you two.”

“We can theorize later,” Elena said. “It’s not as though standing out on the sidewalk is going to be safer. We cross here.” On the other side of the street, she continued. “See that alley up ahead? It’s always deserted.”

The alley in question was a dead-end nestled between two apartment buildings. One side was a sheer wall, and the other was made up of storage units. From the dust and trash that covered the ground, it didn’t seem it saw much foot traffic.

Elena led us deep into the alley where the shadows were darkest, then took out the teleportation slip.

“Ready?” She lifted the slip and prepared to snap it in half.

I held out my hand to stop her. “Wait.”

She looked at me, her brow furrowed.

“There’s something off here,” I said. I had that feeling I sometimes got when my detective’s intuition told me there were puzzle pieces just waiting to click together.

“What do you mean?”

My eyes narrowed in thought. “That Black Corpse said something about a trap. Remember?”

Jakobe snapped his fingers. “You have no idea how badly you fell for our trap. Those were his exact words.”

“What trap was he talking about?” I murmured, a sickly feeling gnawing at the pit of my stomach, as though a bunch of cockroaches had just woken up there.

A long moment dragged out in which all three of us just stood there. Then Elena blinked, lowered the hand with the teleportation slip, and looked at Jakobe.

“Mierda,” she said. “Jakobe, how long were you awake before we returned?”

From the tightness in Jakobe’s lips, I could tell that he already suspected where this line of questioning was leading. “Fifteen, twenty minutes?”

“¡Mierda!” she repeated. “There’s no way.”

Jakobe and I exchanged a glance, and I wished I could read him better, except he had no eyes to reveal what he was thinking.

“Are you trying to say that I sent a message to them?” Jakobe asked. “I didn’t even get off that couch!”

She looked back at him with her mouth half-open.

“Elena, the theory works based on the timing,” I said, “but that’s it. If the Corpses were waiting with units on standby, that would be more than enough time to use emergency traffic lanes to get to us. But Jakobe wouldn’t have any reason to wake up and immediately call in his position. What’s more, he didn’t have a radio. And on top of it all, I checked him to make sure he didn’t have a tracker on him.”

“That’s not what I meant at all,” she said, folding her arms and biting her lip in thought. “Just last week, I read about something in The Annals of the Duḥkha Temple. Centuries ago, during the war but before the Hellscape, the Duḥkha Temple raised creatures called taṇhā worms, which they would use for a special type of puppetization that didn’t involve any ceremony or rite. But the results weren’t very reliable, so they fell out of common use. Wang Fan, do you remember the note in Jakobe’s file? Specifically, what it said about the puppetization?”

“The note said it was an experiment.”

“Exactly. What if they started breeding taṇhā worms again? What if they used one on Jakobe as a test?”

“What do these worms do?” Jakobe asked, his lip slightly curled with disgust. “And what’s puppetization?”

“Puppetization is basically a way to mind-control someone. As for the worms, they fuse with your brain, a process that causes a severe headache. But the pain only lasts for about a day. Afterward, the worm stays inside you, feeding on your blood and waiting. All the while, it remains connected to the worm that birthed it. Eventually, the person in control of the parent worm can use it to activate the parasite worm, which causes the host to go on a murderous rampage. Long ago, the Duḥkha Temple would infect hostages with the worms, then release them to sow chaos and death behind enemy lines. But the headache aspect makes the infection easy to diagnose. As long as the enemy knows you’re using taṇhā worms, they aren’t very effective.”

“So you’re saying this Duḥkha Temple is still around?” Jakobe asked. “How would they have infected me with one of these worms?”

“Black Corpses are the Duḥkha Temple,” I said. “There are different lineages of magic, and the Corpses’ version is different from Elena’s and her people.”

“Cultivation,” she said. “We prefer the word cultivation over magic.”

“Cultivation,” I said.

“Hold on!” Jakobe said, throwing his hands up. “You’re saying the Black Corpses are cultivators?”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

Elena and I spoke the words at the same time.

“Shit,” Jakobe said. Then he shoved his hands in his pockets. “Honestly, I’m not surprised.”

“To be clear,” Elena said, “the Black Corpses are not the Duḥkha Temple. They’re descendants of it.”

“Fine,” I said. “Descendants. The point is, you think they used one of these taṇhā worms on Jakobe? But according to the note, there were still many hours before the doctor intended to go through with the procedure.”

She inclined her head thoughtfully. “Deputy Commissioner Zhong left the note behind in his car, presumably after reading it. For all we know, he might have radioed for them to go ahead with the procedure early.”

“Okay,” Jakobe said. “So they put one of these worms in me. Three questions. One: how did they find me with it? Two: how the fuck do I get rid of it? Three: if it’s still in me, doesn’t that mean we’re sitting ducks?”

Elena put the teleportation slip away. “The taṇhā worms’ psychic connection to their parent worm make them like living tracking devices. And the spell formations in our safehouses are designed to make them invisible from the outside, not prevent communication from inside.”

“Motherfucker,” Jakobe growled, rubbing his forehead.

“What do we do, Elena?” I asked. “If he’s got this worm inside him pinging the Black Corpses, it means they could swoop down on us again at any moment.”

“Based on what I read, the psychic pulse goes out randomly, and not that often. Every few hours or so. That said, you’re right. If he has a taṇhā worm in him, we have to get it out. The process isn’t extremely complex, but it requires at least two rare items.”

“Well fuck me,” Jakobe said.

“We’ll render you unconscious in the meantime,” Elena said. “The worm sleeps when the host sleeps.”

 “If that’s the case, knock me out,” Jakobe said. He turned to me and stuck out his chin. “Come on, brother. Hit me.”

“I’m not hitting you,” I said. “You just got shot in the neck. There’s no way I’m going to bludgeon you unconscious. Why don’t we just get you drunk or something?”

“We don’t have that time,” Elena said. “How long was the cab ride? An hour?”

How would I know? I’d been asleep most of the time just as she had. I looked at Jakobe.

“Yeah, about an hour. Hey, what about a chokehold? Your rear naked choke is pretty good. You could put me out in five seconds.”

“Yeah, but you’d wake up in minutes. We’re going to need more time than that, right Elena?”

“Right. Plus, Jakobe, we need to get you unconscious before we teleport to the safehouse. Once we’re in a secure location, I can get that worm out of you. Thankfully, there’s another reason my people have meetings in this area. One of the best apothecaries in the Third Earth has a shop around here. Follow me.”

Jakobe and I followed her out of the alley. Not waiting for the light, she crossed the street through the traffic, which wasn’t heavy at this hour. On the opposite sidewalk, she walked up to a pharmacy. “I need a few ordinary supplies from this place. Wait out here.”

Two minutes later, she walked back out holding a package of syringes and needles.

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Jakobe said.

“Nope,” she replied. “This way.”

We walked back to the other side of the street, then hurried down two more blocks as fast as we could without running. Stopping outside of a building that had all the windows boarded up, she said, “I think you ought to wait here. People in places like this can smell Peacekeepers regardless of what clothes you wear.”

I frowned. “Doesn’t sound very safe.”

“I could handle myself plenty well long before I met you, Wang Fan.” Not waiting for a response, she climbed the stairs and entered the building.

“Fuck,” Jakobe said. “I just got out of a coma, now she wants to put me back in one?”

I shook my head helplessly. “I don’t think we have any other option.”

“Guess not.”

We stood in tense silence for a few minutes, looking up and down the street in case a black van or patrol vehicle turned the corner.

Elena emerged a few minutes later with two brown bags in hand.

“Dare I ask what’s inside?” Jakobe asked.

She opened one of the bags for him to look inside.

“Nitrotropin eroprodol,” he said. “You’re going to put me under with Nitro? Is it clean?”

“It is. I know the supplier personally.”

“Just don’t OD me. Remember, you can’t administer a second dose until after the lucid dream state ends.”

“You don’t need to tell me. My brother died from OD’ing on Nitro.”

Eying the bag with a slight frown, I said, “You’re sure it’s pure, Elena? If it’s not….”

“It is. Like I said, this dealer is one of the best apothecaries around.” She opened the other paper bag to reveal a handful of items, including vials and flasks, packets of powder, a small burner, and sundry chemistry equipment. “He had both of the rare ingredients I need to deal with the worm. I’ll have to jury-rig the alchemy setup with ordinary chemistry equipment, but I should be able to make it happen. Downside is that I’m completely out of money now.”

“We’ll worry about money later,” I said. “For now, let’s get Jakobe under. Then get to the safehouse.”

“There’s another alley around the corner. This way.”

Moments later, we were in an alley that looked almost identical to the previous one. Deep in the shadows, Jakobe sat down on the ground opposite the storage units, his back against the wall.

“Can’t believe I’m doing this,” he said as he pulled his belt off and rolled up his sleeve.

Elena crouched down next to him, peeled open a syringe, and fitted the needle on. Then she took out one of the vials of Nitro. I wasn’t happy with how this was playing out. Nitro was dangerous, and this whole idea seemed like a big gamble. I’d just got my best friend back, and now his life was on the line again. If she didn’t give him enough Nitro, he might not end up unconscious, and could lead the Corpses right to us. Too much, and he might never wake up. And that wasn’t to mention the complications that came with administering a second dose if that became necessary.

In the end, I didn’t have a better idea.

As she plunged the needle into the vial, a shadow filled the mouth of the alley, and I looked over my shoulder to see two figures silhouetted there. From the distinctive hats they wore, it was easy to identify them.

“Patrol officers,” I said quietly.

“For fuck’s sake,” Jakobe said. “What are the chances?”

I kept looking for a moment. “I think they’re just having a smoke.”

“Yeah, but how long until they notice a junkie shooting up in the alley?”

Elena had frozen and was looking up at me for direction.

“Keep going,” I said. “I’ll keep an eye on them.”

Chapter 18 – The Alley

Leaning my shoulder up against the wall, I folded my arms over my chest, hoping that the long flaps of my coat would obscure Elena and Jakobe behind me. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched her fill the syringe while he affixed the belt to his bicep.

The officers were just standing there smoking at the alley entrance. I could barely make out their voices as they conversed, as well as an occasional squawk from their radios. I kept my head at an angle so it didn’t seem like I was staring, while simultaneously staring directly at them.

Elena pulled the needle out of the vial and tapped the plunger; Jakobe tightened the belt and extended his forearm.

“Ready?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“What’s the time?”

He turned his wrist over to look at his watch. “12:14. Remember, if you end up having to administer a second dose, don’t give me an overdose.”

“Promise,” she said.

One of the officers turned to look into the alley, and I tensed, but remained motionless. He said something to the other officer, who also looked into the alley. Then, a flashlight snapped on, sending a harsh beam of light right at my face. As I lifted an arm to shade my eyes, a second beam of light joined the first.

Leaning away from the wall, I took a step forward.

“Evening, Officers,” I called out, holding my hands out briefly at chest level, palms clearly visible, before letting them drop to my sides. Angling my head down so the hat brim shaded eyes, I strolled forward and said, “How can I help you?”

One was about my height and build, the other was shorter and stockier. Because of the flashlights, I couldn’t make out their faces. Not that it mattered. Off the top of my head, I couldn’t remember which precinct operated in this neighborhood, but it was far enough from the 35th that the likelihood of me recognizing or knowing either of these officers was minuscule at best.

“What’s going on back there?” the tall one asked, leaning away from the wall and shifting the angle of his flashlight so it fell on Elena’s back. He sounded young.

I glanced over my shoulder. From this vantage point, all I could see was Elena hunched over Jakobe.

Stopping a few paces away from them, I smiled broadly. “Friend had a bit too much to drink, that’s all.”

“ID,” the other officer said. He sounded just as young as the first.

Glancing again over my shoulder again, I lowered my voice and leaned forward slightly. “I need you two to move along. I’m undercover here. Operating out of the 101st. The fellow on the ground is a grid monkey working for the Green Riders, one of the primary gangs that funnel Nitro out of the 1st Ring. This guy is the key to taking them down.”

It was a shit story that hardly made sense. Although I couldn’t remember exactly which Precinct we were near, it had to be in the 300s. What would someone from the 101st be doing way over here?

The two officers looked at each other briefly. “You’re pretty far from home,” one of them said. “Who’s your commanding officer?”

I would have laughed if my heart wasn’t blocking my throat. How would two patrol officers know anything about the leadership of a precinct halfway across the city? It was a foolish question. Were these two rookies or something?

“I report to Inspector Ting, and my badge number is 3162314 if you want to call it in. Please, just step out into the street before you do it, so you don’t spook him. We came here to visit the mook’s grandmother, then we stopped by the bar. Had some shots. You know the drill.”

“You call in and check this badge number, Deng,” the first officer said. “I’m going to take a closer look.” He stepped past me, his hand dropping to rest on his sidearm as he kept his light trained on Elena and Jakobe.

The other officer turned and reached up to key the mic on his shoulder. I could just barely make out his words as he said, “Dispatch, 680 here. Check an officer badge number for me. 3162314.”

“Copy that 680. Stand by.”

It was a time for snap decisions.

I lunged forward, slipped my hands around the first officer’s waist, then turned and threw him backward over my leg. He slammed into the ground back first, and though his head smacked the pavement, his hat cushioned the blow, and it didn’t knock him out. Letting out a shout, he kicked at me and simultaneously scrambled to draw his weapon. This fool had to be a rookie. And he obviously didn’t have much training in hand-to-hand combat.

I didn’t have any time to play with, maybe a second before his partner drew down on me. Scrambling over him, I grabbed the wrist of the hand that was fumbling for his weapon, then started pummeling him in the face with blow after blow. Shrieking, he threw his free hand up to defend himself and tried to wrench his wrist out of my grip.

I let him, then spun, slipping my arm around his throat to put him in a rear chokehold, simultaneously dragging him half to his feet.

“Let him go!” the other officer shouted. His weapon, an NZ-85G.2, was aimed straight at me.

“I don’t think so,” I growled as the first officer tried to pull my arm away from his throat. Idiot. And definitely a rookie. He could easily grab his gun or do any number of things to try to get me off his back. Instead, he was trying to pull my arm away? Amateur.

Keying his mic again, the second officer said, “Dispatch, this is 680. I have a 12-65 in Jadespring Village, 36th Street.”

“Copy that 680.”

 Taking a step forward, he kept his gun trained on me as he said, “I don’t know who you are, but you’re doing something really stupid here!”

I let his words hang unanswered for a few seconds, which was enough time for the chokehold to do its magic. His partner stopped struggling and went limp in my arms, sagging back into me. I loosened my grip around his neck; there was no reason to harm these officers unnecessarily. But what was I going to do about the second one?

“What’s your name, Officer?” I asked. “Is it Deng?”

“Shut up. Put him down right now, or I’ll shoot!”

“I doubt that, Officer Deng. Not while I have your partner as a shield.”

“Put him down! I’ll put a bullet between your eyes, asshole!”

I glanced back down the alley to see Elena rising to her feet.

Officer Deng shifted his sights to aim at her. “Don’t move!”

“Careful,” I said to Elena.

“I know,” she replied. “We can go now. It’s safe.”

I looked back at Officer Deng. “This is what’s going to happen next. You’re going to drop your gun, and I’m going to lower your partner. I’m n—”

“Like hell! You put him down right now, and when my backup gets here, maybe I’ll tell them not to shoot you.”

I was starting to get a little bit annoyed. Having spent years working patrol myself, I wasn’t a complete stranger to hostage situations, and I would never have handled one this way. Furthermore, his hands were trembling visibly, and he was switching back and forth between threats faster than a cabbie changing lanes.

“We don’t want any trouble,” Elena said with a placating gesture. “Look, your partner’s fine.”

All of a sudden, I caught a bit of movement on the sidewalk behind him and noticed his head turn reflexively to look at it. I burst into motion, dropping his partner into a heap and lunging forward in a wild leap.

Time seemed to slow as I chopped one hand toward his wrist. It connected, and his wrist bent. If I wanted to prevent the gun from discharging, I knew I’d only have a microsecond to pull it off. I needed to ease the slide back and force the weapon into an out-of-battery state. I grabbed the barrel of the gun with my other hand, pushing the slide back while turning it away from me and toward him.

He pulled the trigger, but nothing happened, and I continued forward with my momentum, knocking him to the ground. Even through my pants, I felt my knees scraping on the rough bonecrete as I tried to wrench the gun out of his hand.

I failed but managed to keep it pointing away from both of us. Holding the gun tight, I pulled my right hand back and smashed it into his face, breaking his nose. I didn’t stop there. I pounded him with several blows, ignoring the crack of breaking bone and teeth, as well as the pain in my flesh-and-blood knuckles.

Roughly six or seven blows into the pounding, he went slack.

I pulled the gun out of his hand as I stood, pressed the magazine release, dropped the magazine, and cleared the chamber. I tossed the gun into a trash can at the mouth of the alley, but kept the magazine.

“Shit,” I murmured under my breath, my heart pounding as I looked at the blood splattered on my right hand. It flowed slowly down the flesh but dripped rapidly down my bonemetal prosthetic, forming tiny beads along the way. I glanced down at the officer’s bloody and mangled face. He’d live, and the department would pay for the surgery.

He was lucky. If I was a real bad guy, he and his partner would have bullets in their head by now.

Kneeling, I wiped my hand clean on his pants, then looked up to see an old lady staring at me, a horrified look in her eyes, her hand held tight over a gaping mouth. It was her passage that had distracted Officer Deng and given me the moment I needed to close the distance.

“Carry on, ma’am,” I said.

Nodding slowly, she backed away and then hurried down the sidewalk. It was hard to say if she would call 119 on me when she got to a phone. Sadly, there was enough corruption in the Peacekeepers that many citizens distrusted us. In fact, some downright hated us.

Rising, I flexed my right hand, feeling the twinges of pain in the parts that were real flesh. I headed back into the alley. If Elena was in any way surprised by my outburst of violence, she didn’t show it. Then again, I’d seen her crush in the head of a Black Corpse, so was knocking out a couple of Peacekeepers anything worth noting?

Jakobe lay against the wall, a faint grin on his face, his eyes closed, and his head tilted to the side.

“You sure that’s going to be enough to stop the worm?” I asked.

“I’m mostly certain,” she said. “I read about taṇhā worms in a book and never received formal instruction about them. But my guess is that it should work. As soon as he entered the lucid state from the Nitro, the worm should have gone dormant.”

“Well, what’s the delay? Let’s get out of here.”

She pulled out the teleportation slip. “We need to be touching.”

I clasped her hand, then reached down to put my hand on Jakobe’s shoulder.

A moment later, a snapping sound rang out, and bright light surrounded us.

**

This was the third cultivator safehouse I had been in. I tried not to wonder about how safe it actually was.

It was neither a cramped room with two cots nor a dorm facility designed to fit a dozen or more occupants. There were two bedrooms, each with a bed, closet, and end table. The living room had two sofas, no TV, but a long bookshelf. The kitchen was attached to the living room and contained all the usual paraphernalia, including a wall clock. The place smelled of stale air and dust, like an old person’s house. I was starting to get tired of safehouses, regardless of how big or small they were.

Elena carried Jakobe into one of the rooms and put him in the bed. There was only one bathroom for the entire apartment, which I headed to for a smoke. After emerging a few minutes later, I found Elena in front of the bookshelf, running her finger through the titles.

I flopped onto the couch, leaned my head back, and looked up at the ceiling with its dimpled tiles.

 “What do we do now?” I said.

“Get that worm out,” she said. Her finger stopped on one of the books on the shelf. “This is it.”

She pulled it down and sat on the arm of the couch opposite me. Opening it and leafing through it, she said, “This book is stocked in a lot safehouses, as it contains plenty of useful remedies. I know exactly which recipe we need. It doesn’t specifically mention taṇhā worms, but it’s designed for parasites, and that’s what they are. The worms are just so rare that nobody considers them outside of the context of ancient history. That must be why it didn’t occur to Eldress Cheung that we might be dealing with them. Why would she look for something nobody’s seen in centuries?”

Reaching a certain page, she smiled. “Here. It’s a recipe for an emergency extrusion salve called Vimalā Balm.” She read for a minute or two, then continued, “Okay, this is definitely doable, but I need to act quickly. Jakobe was right about the risk of overdosing.”

“The initial lucid dream state from the Nitro should last for three hours,” I said. “After that, there’s a very short window in which you can safely give another dose. But even if you time it perfectly, it’s still dangerous.” Nitro deaths were so common that the drug was also a popular choice for a murder weapon. I’d learned a lot about it from EMS workers and coroners over the years.

“So we only have a couple hours,” she said. “Hand me that bag, will you?” Nodding at the second of the paper bags she had recently acquired, she got off the sofa and walked toward the kitchen. I picked up the bag and followed her.

Placing the book down open on the kitchen table, she took the bag and emptied it.

Meanwhile, I glanced at the book, the text of which was written in a very archaic script that was difficult to read. The top of the page read Vimalā Balm. Beneath it was a bullet list of ingredients, then a numbered list with directions on how to make it. Much of it was incomprehensible to me. I could read most of the characters with effort, but I had no idea what half of them meant.

“What can I do to help?” I asked.

“For now, nothing. Let me get ready. Once I start, I might need your help.”

Chapter 19 – Vimalā Balm

I left the kitchen to check on Jakobe, who was so sound asleep he was drooling. Then I headed over to the bookshelf. There were a handful of volumes in other languages, but most were in Sinese, and I instantly realized that none of them were the kind you would find at the library or bookstore. The titles alone made that abundantly clear.

Ramifications of the Heavenly Curse on Hydric Cultivators

Death Rates: Orgplants and Other Sinotech Lies

Commentary on Karnavati Panja’s Treatise on the Singularity Pearl

Heavens below Earths: An Inversion of Historical Cosmology

Pre-Tribulation Tensions between the Duḥkha Temple and the Naturalism Sect

Given what I’d heard of the Duḥkha Temple and its connection to the Black Corpses, the latter caught my attention, so I took it off the shelf and flipped through it. It might as well have been written in another language. Not only was the script so ornate it was hardly legible, but also, it was filled with names I’d never heard of, unfamiliar locations, and events that could have been fictional for all I knew.

My mood was sinking fast, and I didn’t feel like reading. Despite how I’d determined to start doing things instead of just reacting, I felt increasingly helpless. My best friend was infected with some sort of magical worm, and I couldn’t do anything but wait for Elena to fix the problem. Could I have been more useless?

Resisting the urge to throw the book against the wall to ease my frustration, I headed back to the kitchen.

Elena had finished setting up her ‘alchemy’ station, which was essentially just a chemistry rig with various flasks and beakers connected by tubes and wires. As for Elena herself, she was rummaging through the cabinets next to the refrigerator.

“We have a problem,” she said.

That was the very last thing I wanted to hear. “What problem?”

“I’m missing an ingredient. I got the rare components back when I picked up the Nitro. And I assumed the safehouse would have all the mundane ingredients. Except there’s no cubeb pepper here.”

“Cubeb pepper?”

“It’s not very common outside of ethnic minority communities, but you find it in a lot of alchemical formulas. I figured the kitchen here would have some.”

“So what do we do? Can I go out and buy some?”

She thought for a moment. “I don’t need it until the third stage, which won’t be for about an hour. Okay, go see if you can find some. Look for minority markets. Or a pharmacy might have some. If you can’t find anything, we’ll have to use a substitute. I found black peppercorns, and if I mix them with allspice, it should do. Except there’s no allspice here either, so look for that too.”

“Got it. Do you know what neighborhood we’re in?”

“The visitor log says we’re in the Applefarm District.”

The talk of a visitor log surprised me, but there was something else even more unanticipated. The Applefarm District? I’d walked through that area numerous times, from the zont-rail station to Xiaoli’s apartment in Yang Mansion, which was right across the way.

Did it mean something?

“I’ll be back within forty-five minutes,” I said.

“Sure.” Elena was already back at the table, fiddling with her equipment.

Unlike the previous two safehouses, this one was located in a relatively nice building. Not every residential structure in the Third Earth was on the verge of collapse. There were some areas out in the suburbs, such as here in the Applefarm District, which were relatively well-maintained. I welcomed the lack of trash and graffiti as I headed to the elevator and took it to the ground floor.

The first thing I saw outside was a cockroach. I stepped on it, my lip curling in disgust. I hadn’t seen a roach since the alley that had sucked me into this whole mess. Seemed like a bad sign.

Trying to forget about how much I hated bugs like that, I commenced a hurried search of the local shops and markets, hoping to find either of the things Elena had sent me out for. The entire time, my thoughts kept coming back to Xiaoli. Being this close to her place, I found myself reminiscing about my last conversation with Charlotte, and how she’d mentioned a safe in Xiaoli’s apartment. After the 24th Precinct closed the case, and I decided to take up the investigation on my own, I’d gone through her place with a fine-toothed comb. At least, I thought I had. Apparently, I hadn’t looked close enough to uncover the safe.

What was in it?

Maybe it was some extra cash. Jewelry. Her spare firearm.

But maybe there was something else. A secret file. A recording. Some clue as to why she was targeted, and by whom.

At the second market I visited, I found allspice, so I took a packet and got in line. As I waited, I pulled out my picture of Xiaoli and looked at her, her arms outstretched, that slight smile touching her lips.

I wish I could talk to you right now, sis. I wish I could ask your advice. Maybe it was strange, but despite how insane my life had become in the past few days, with Black Corpses trying to kill me and me siding temporarily with cultivators, what had me most confused were my feelings about Elena. Right now, as I hastily rushed around trying to buy special spices and the clock ticked down toward potential disaster, I felt irritation bordering on anger. Deep down, I felt like everything that was happening was Elena’s fault. The Black Corpses had been targeting her, not me. And the situation with the worm was a failure by both her and her Master.

But despite that, I liked Elena. I admired her fighting spirit and tenacity. She was smart and focused, and she didn’t crack under pressure. She also made me laugh, at least she had on our date.

Xiaoli and I hadn’t talked about relationships much, but if I could have asked her about Elena, I would have. I miss you every day, Xiaoli.

I paid for the allspice and strode over to a pharmacy across the way. As I did, I felt my gaze being tugged in the direction of Yang Mansion. It was only a five-minute walk. I had the key to Xiaoli’s place on my keyring. If I really was going to leave the Third Earth, this might be my last chance to uncover whatever clue was hidden there.

The pharmacy didn’t have any cubeb pepper, so I widened my search. Two markets and another pharmacy later, time was running out. Cursing under my breath, I looked in the direction of Yang Mansion. There just wasn’t enough time.

I headed back to the apartment. Elena let me in and returned to the table, where her chemistry set bubbled.

“No cubeb pepper,” I said, “just this.” I handed her the allspice. Somehow, just thinking about Xiaoli had cooled my frustration a bit.

“Okay, it’ll do.” Elena used a mortar and pestle to grind black peppercorns and allspice together. She put the resulting powder in a beaker, added some pure alcohol and a drop of a viscous substance that might have been honey, then shook it. Afterward, she produced a medical dropper. “Three parts to one,” she murmured to herself, then put nine drops into a round-bottom flask with a small burner underneath it, which was filled with a blue, bubbling liquid.

Pulling a chair out and flipping it around, I sat down and folded my arms on the chair back. I watched her work for a bit, having no idea what exactly I was looking at. Five minutes passed.

“Got an estimated time of completion?” I asked

“Almost done,” she said. “Fifteen more minutes.”

Those fifteen minutes dragged out longer than anything I could remember in recent memory. After five of them went by, I couldn’t watch the chemistry any longer and went out into the living room. I sat on the floor and pulled out my Spitter to disassemble and clean it, as well as remove the tracking device, which I crushed.

Beam weapons didn’t need to be maintained as well as gunpowder firearms, but they still needed attention. I took the main components of the weapon apart and used the included brush to give everything a good cleaning. I hadn’t had any chance to replace the backup wires, which made me nervous. I put that on my mental list to do as soon as I had a chance. The last thing I needed was to have my only set of wires severed in a crucial moment and suddenly be unarmed against a bunch of Black Corpses.

Years ago, I’d become obsessed with speed-cleaning my weapon, and although I’d eventually fallen out of practice, I could still do it faster than most. After reassembling it, I stared at it a while, then went through the entire disassembly and reassembly process again.

I paced the room, went to check on Jakobe again, then went back into the kitchen.

Elena was pouring a pungent, sludgy substance out of a flask and into a small plastic dish.

“Is that it?” I asked.

She finished pouring, then smiled up at me. “Yes. Vimalā Balm. We just need to let it cool for a few minutes. In the meantime, I’ll clean up.”

“I’ll help.”

A few minutes later, we were in Jakobe’s room. As I hovered, Elena sat down on the bed next to him, plastic dish in hand.

“According to the description, you smear the salve beneath the nose, and the worm will emerge. It’s very small. The size of the tip of your fingernail, so watch closely the entire time. I’ll grab it as soon as I see it, using this.” She held up a pair of tweezers. “If you notice it before me, say something.”

“Okay, let’s do it.”

Using a cotton swab, she picked up a large glob of the salve and wiped it beneath Jakobe’s nose. Then we waited.

If the previous fifteen-minute wait had been nerve-wracking, this one was downright torturous. My eyes kept flickering to the wall clock to check it, but other than that, I kept them glued to the spot beneath Jakobe’s nose, looking for even a hint of motion.

Five minutes went by. Ten. Fifteen.

Twenty.

“Nothing’s happening,” I said, trying to keep the tightness out of my voice. The frustration from before was building up again.

“Maybe I should have used more.” She put an even larger mass of the salve onto him, and more minutes trudged by.

Fifteen minutes after the second dose, my frustration exploded far beyond its previous level. I couldn’t take it any longer.

“It’s obviously not working!” I snapped.

Her shoulders hunched down slightly. “I did everything right, I’m sure of it. I followed all the instructions. Every ingredient.”

“Are you sure? What about that cubeb pepper? Maybe you can’t just switch one ingredient for another and expect it to work.”

“Allspice and black pepper are a perfectly suitable substitute. I even used that combination a few months ago when I was concocting a—”

“Well it obviously didn’t work this time!” I interrupted.

“I need to start over. Maybe I overheated the—”

“We don’t have time for experiments, Elena! This is my friend’s life you’re playing around with. And our lives. If we give him another dose of Nitro at the wrong time, his heart could stop or he could go brain dead!”

“You think I don’t know that?” she replied, her eyes flashing as she stood up. “You think I don’t know that if he wakes up, we’re all dead? You don’t have to tell me!”

Struggling to keep my voice down, I said, “Then what are you going to do about it? Do we really have time to make another batch of the—”

“We aren’t going to be making anything, Wang Fan. I am. How about you go back out and get the ingredient I actually asked you to get? Cubeb pepper isn’t that rare!”

Heat rose up in the back of my head, and the muscles in my jaw twitched. “Maybe your magic chemistry isn’t the answer. How do you even know you’re right about those worms? What if it’s something else entirely? What if that lotion isn’t the way to get it out? You yourself said the recipe doesn’t mention them.”

“He’s infected with a taṇhā worm, I’d stake my life on it. In fact, I am staking my life on it. They’re parasites, and Vimalā Balm gets rid of parasites. This is the answer.”

“Fine. Except, that dose of Nitro will wear off in less time than it’ll take you to make another batch. So what the hell is the plan?”

She took a breath and opened her mouth to respond, but then said nothing. A moment later, she exhaled sharply. “I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know, Elena? I’m trusting you in all of this. I hardly know what the hell’s going on anymore, and you’re telling me stuff about magic worms and special peppers. And I’m going along with it, but… fuck. Do you even know what you’re doing?”

“NO!” she blurted, her voice quavering.

My head still burned with frustration and anger, but the tone of her voice sliced through that, and I suddenly realized I’d pushed too hard.

“No, I don’t know what I’m doing!” she continued. “I didn’t want all of this to happen, Wang Fan, but I’m trying my best. Do you know who I am? I’m just a disciple. Do you have any idea what that means? I’m nobody! That’s who I am. Recruit—” she held out a finger “—novice—” two fingers “—disciple—” she kept adding fingers with each word, her voice rising into a shout “—senior disciple, elite disciple, elder, chief elder, grand elder. Those are the ranks. The recruits and novices are people who’ve just started studying. So do you get it now? I’m just a disciple. A nobody in my sect. I hardly know a thing. I get sent on missions to pick up ingredients or pass out fliers. I’m not supposed to be fighting Black Corpses and dealing with ancient parasites.

“So if you want me to perform some miracle, sorry, it’s NOT GOING TO HAPPEN!”

She threw the tweezers down onto the bed and stepped to the door. “Maybe I should just leave. I’m not the one with a taṇhā worm inside me. I could just walk off into the night. It would sure as hell be a lot easier for me to survive on my own than having two heretics dragging me down with them.”

She stood with fists clenched at her side, tears glinting in the corners of her eyes as she glared at me. This time, I was the one who was at a loss for words.

“If you have a better idea of how to fix your friend, go ahead and tell me what it is. Do you? Well, do you?”

I grimaced slightly as I tried to come up with something to say.

“I didn’t think so!” she said. “So either stop being an asshole or do something helpful for once! I’m going to go come up with a plan B.”

She walked out, and then I heard a loud bang as she entered the adjacent room and slammed the door behind her.

I let loose a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding, and was trying to figure out what to do next when I heard the door open. From my position next to Jakobe, I could see her stomp across the living room to the kitchen, where she grabbed the book with the recipe in it. Then she stomped to the bookshelf, grabbed an armful of books, and went back to her room. This time she slammed the door even louder than before.

In the silence that followed, I sat down next to Jakobe and wiped the salve off his nose. After, I went to the restroom to wash my hands, which was when I noticed they were trembling slightly, although I wasn’t sure if it was from fear, anger, anxiety, or something else.

I lit a cigarette and leaned up against the wall, trying to think what Dad would have told me in a situation like this.

Son, sometimes you get backed into a corner, and you don’t see any way out of it. That’s when the best opportunity you can imagine will drop in front of you. You just have to make sure to see it when it comes.

I splashed some water on my face as Dad’s words rang in my mind.

If Dad was right, where was the opportunity? I needed it.

Now.

Interlude 4 – Relationships

Itsuki Saito took a sip of the rich, black coffee, savoring the woody flavor of the beans and the hand-whipped cream made from real, fresh cow’s milk. He sat in a coffee shop in the Sinotech Governing Spire, a building that most citizens could only dream of entering. Obviously, the coffee shop therein was a place ordinary people would never lay eyes on. This single steaming cup in front of him cost him more than a week’s salary. Of course, that amount of money was nothing compared to the wealth of the Saito Clan, and he’d put the charge on the family tab.

I have to admit, there are benefits to being a Saito.

He looked down at the glowing city below, off to the shadowy suburbs, and beyond everything to Purgatory. “Where are you, Detective Wang?”

The taṇhā worm ploy had almost worked. But then the worm went silent, begging the question of whether they had extracted or killed it, or if the subject had merely been rendered unconscious.

He looked at the contents of the file, which he had spread out in front of him on the table. All of Wang Fan’s associates from the Academy and in the department were there. His past romantic relationships. Known addresses. Service record. Habit and addictions. A host of details.

You have a very low Threat Rating, Wang Fan. So why are you doing this? Are you being coerced by this Elena Ávila? I know more than a few men who would sell their soul to be with a woman like her. Could you be that shallow?

He picked up a mugshot sheet that depicted a sultry-looking young Han woman with heavy makeup. The name printed on it read: Qian Cui. He looked at the details. A prostitute and drug dealer? Diagnosed with two mental illnesses. Not very becoming for a Glorious Peacekeeper to date someone like this. If this is your taste in women, Wang Fan, perhaps it does explain why you’ve gone rogue. You were seduced by a cultivator, weren’t you? Worse mistakes have been made by simple men such as yourself.

Itsuki frowned and put down the picture of Qian Cui.

That said, you’re resourceful. You’ve eluded a city-wide manhunt for days, with Peacekeepers and Corpses alike chasing you. I wonder. Perhaps liquidating you isn’t the answer. Perhaps adding you to my arsenal of tools makes more sense.

But where are you hiding? And what’s your next move?

He picked up another sheet containing information about another of Wang Fan’s previous relationships.

Sergeant Charlotte Pan. Cross-Level Control. The shadow of a grin broke out on Itsuki Saito’s face. You’re planning to run, aren’t you? To the Fourth Earth, perhaps? I think I ought to pay Sergeant Pan a visit.

Chapter 20 – A Ring

The safehouse had a single packet of instant coffee, and it looked like it had been stuffed into the back of the drawer at least a decade ago. There wasn’t another option at the moment. I boiled some water and poured it over the powder, and when the aroma hit my nose, I wondered if it was possible for instant coffee powder to expire. I took a sip. I mused that while I must have had worse coffee at some point in my life, I couldn’t remember exactly when. It was sickly sweet, but at the same time had a bitter tang that made me wince with every mouthful.

The clock on the kitchen wall slowly, inexorably, sluggishly ticked toward three.

We’d arrived in the safehouse at nearly half-past twelve. Nitrotropin eroprodol was designed to provide a lucid dream trip for approximately three hours. Afterward, the user usually crashed into a deep sleep or complete unconsciousness. They would usually remain in that state for a few hours, although in some cases, it could last for as long as a day.

Another possibility was that the user would wake up quickly. Although waking wasn’t particularly common, it wasn’t impossible. I was no doctor, so I had no idea what condition Jakobe was in regarding sleep. Only a few hours ago, he had woken up after being in a coma for days. Did that mean he was generally well-rested? Or was he exhausted? Did that aspect even matter?

Regardless, it seemed risky to simply assume that he would keep sleeping.

On the other hand, administering another dose of Nitro was risky. Junkies often did it. But if the lucid states overlapped, it was considered an overdose. I couldn’t remember the statistics, but it was only something like a tenth or quarter of overdose victims that came out the other end in one piece. Those who survived usually told astonishing tales of dreams that bordered on the miraculous. Some people claimed to have seen the future or to have entered astral planes of existence. Unfortunately, the vast majority suffered heart failure, brain damage, or even brain death.

There was more. With every additional dose of Nitro, the post-lucid crash lasted longer, and the risks of entering a coma increased. Jakobe had just beaten a coma, so the last thing I wanted was to put him back into one.

The final factor at play was that the longer you waited to administer a second dose of Nitro, the more likely the secondary crash would lead to a coma.

Long story short, a second dose had to be given as close to the end of the lucid state as possible. And based on the timing, that point was rapidly approaching. Unfortunately, Jakobe’s headset covered his eyes completely, making it impossible to determine if he was dreaming or not.

I finished the last of the disgusting coffee, rinsed my mug, and walked back out into the living room. I stopped halfway to the other side and looked at the two doors. The right-hand one was open, and I could see Jakobe laying in exactly the same position I’d left him.

The other door was still closed, and I heard nothing from inside. Had Elena fallen asleep? My temper had cooled since the earlier outburst, and I felt much more clear-headed. I completely deserved the tongue-lashing she’d given me. She was right. I’d been a complete asshole. And given our circumstances, I knew that the two of us needed to be working together right now, not quarreling.

I stepped to her door and knocked softly.

“It’s unlocked.”

I pushed the door open to see her on the bed, her back to me, knees tucked under one arm as she peered down into a book. She didn’t look up.

There was no point in dragging things out.

“I’m sorry for yelling,” I said.

After the slightest pause, she said, “Me too.”

I wanted to walk over, sit down next to her, and put my arm around her shoulder, then go into some sort of speech about how we were under stress and needed to focus. But my head was telling me that was the wrong move. “I’m going to give him another dose in a minute or two. It’s almost 3:14.”

“I see.” She tilted her head and took a breath as if she wanted to say something but wasn’t sure of the right words. I gave her a moment. “I haven’t found the answer yet,” she continued. “I need some more time.”

“Take the time you need. After I administer the drug, I’ll go back out and find that pepper.”

Uncurling her arm, she lowered her legs over the side of the bed, then turned to look at me. Her emerald eyes were bloodshot and puffy, and I bet if I asked, she would say she was tired, but I could tell she had been crying. “Wang Fan, I’m sorry. I really am. I should have done a better job, and—”

“Stop it,” I cut in. “You are doing the best you can, and… this is a crazy situation. Let’s keep our heads on tight and keep going forward.”

She nodded, and I felt a powerful urge to step forward, pull her up into my arms, and kiss her.

Instead, I returned her nod. “There’s something else I’m going to do while I’m out.”

“Oh?”

“My sister, Xiaoli, her apartment is only five minutes away. I’m going to go there to look for something.”

She frowned slightly. “Are you sure that’s safe?”

“It’s probably not, but this is just too important. I’ll be careful. If they have people watching the place, I’ll stay away.”

She stood. “Just be careful. Please.”

“I will.”

I remained in place, fighting the impulse to step forward, and wondering if she would choose to take a step toward me. In fact, I was hoping she would.

The moment stretched out.

“I’ll be back,” I said, turning and closing the door behind me.

I felt like some sort of automaton as I went back to Jakobe and administered the Nitro. I waited for a few minutes to make sure he seemed to be in good shape. Of course, I had no idea what it would look like if he wasn’t. Kneeling down next to him, I said, “I don’t know if you can hear me, brother. But hang in there. We’re going to fix you.”

Putting my coat and hat back on, I left the apartment.

It was drizzling outside, usually a sign that rain had been scheduled for an adjoining neighborhood and was drifting over on breezes from distant wind stations.

I headed through the Applefarm district toward Yang Mansion, ducking into every market and pharmacy along the way. Although I didn’t find the cubeb pepper, I picked up a few packets of instant coffee, just in case I needed them later. At the main side gate, I entered the final market that was attached to Applefarm. By chance, it was a minority market, filled with all sorts of ingredients and food items that the common supermarkets didn’t stock. I cruised the aisles looking for the pepper, and when my eyes locked onto a small packet on a bottom shelf, I nearly let out a whoop of victory. Grabbing it, I rushed over to check out.

It was a good sign, and it put a spring in my step as I tugged the collar of my coat up and crossed the street toward Yang Mansion.

I took my time approaching the sprawling complex, scanning the street for anything out of the ordinary. Given that it was past three in the morning, traffic on the street was light, and there were few pedestrians. I didn’t see anything unusual. Truth be told, it seemed unlikely the Corpses or the Peacekeepers would have sent units to stake out Xiaoli’s place. While I had never given up on my sister’s case, and had been pursuing leads and asking questions ever since the case was closed, it wasn’t as if I frequently visited her apartment. In fact, I hadn’t been here in over six months.

I strolled past the front gate, taking note of the guards half asleep in the booth. Heading around the corner, I leaned up against the wall and took the time to smoke a cigarette and make sure that I wasn’t being followed. The intersection had several cameras, but it looked like only one of them was on. As a homicide detective, I had often cursed the clunky surveillance network in the Third Earth. Now, I seemed to be relying on its decrepitness at every turn. Why was it that Sinotech could build the Heaven-Propping Pillar, the Shields, and the Nine Heavens and Ten Earths in general, yet they couldn’t create better surveillance systems?

Jakobe had told stories of how, before the War of Tribulation, law enforcement agencies could track people with ‘facial recognition’ and computers as smart as people. Now I wondered. If that was true, why didn’t Sinotech give that technology to law enforcement? What about Jakobe’s other stories of the fantastic machinery of the past? Was our government holding back such technology? Or had it been lost in the War?

The more truth I learned, the more questions popped up in my mind.

After finishing my cigarette, I ambled down the ramp that led to the subterranean parking garage. It had an automated gate that would rise for incoming cars after they swiped their card. However, there was an easy way to bypass the card reader. Half the complexes in the Third Earth used this same system, and it was notoriously useless.

Stepping behind the boxy machine, I pulled out the multi-tool I’d removed from my Peacekeeper’s jacket back in the Grand Kingdom Highrise and used it to pop the rear maintenance panel. Peering inside at the inner workings, I located a barely-visible switch nestled at the top, designed for emergency use. I tapped it, and, as the gate rolled up, I shoved the panel closed.

A moment later, I was in the shadows of the garage.

I walked past a dusty alcove that had once been home to a car wash service, keeping my eyes and ears open.

Two parking lanes down, I stopped and looked very carefully around the corner toward the stairwell leading into the building above. There wasn’t anyone in sight.

The door was unlocked, so I slipped inside and closed it softly behind me.

I went up to the third floor. I paused for a moment at the door, reaching inside the coat to draw my Spitter. The last thing I wanted was some sort of gun battle, but I had to be prepared.

Cracking the door, I looked out into the corridor. Empty.

Staying as quiet as possible, I crept over to Xiaoli’s door, opened it, and stepped inside. My flashlight was something else I still had from my Peacekeeper’s jacket, and I pulled it out and flicked it on. Why turn on the lights if I didn’t need to?

The little apartment was exactly as I’d left it last time I was here, except with a fine layer of dust on everything. Just looking down at the floor, I could tell no one had been by for a long time. I’d talked with Mom about packing up Xiaoli’s things and selling the place. But we’d both decided that, for the time being, we’d rather have it there as a memorial.

The front door was attached to a small living room, with a bathroom and kitchen to the left and a bedroom to the right. It was furnished simply but tastefully, and the family pictures on the wall caused a twinge of melancholy to rise in my heart.

Before beginning my search, I took all of the pictures out of the frames and put them in my interior coat pocket. If I was really going to flee the Third Earth, I wanted to take as many memories with me as possible. I’d checked all the pictures before, including their backs, hoping to find scrawled notes or phone numbers. None of them had anything other than names and dates that I already knew.

Putting my coat and hat on the rack next to the door, I looked around and tried to identify any location I hadn’t searched before. Like a dunce, I’d decided to show off to Charlotte when she told me about the safe.

“Wait, Xiaoli had a safe?” I’d said.

“You didn’t know?” Charlotte had replied. “It’s right in the—”

“Don’t tell me,” I’d interrupted. “I’m a detective, remember. I’ll find it myself!”

Fool.

If Xiaoli had a safe, where was it? I’d turned the place upside down in my original search; at least, I thought I had.

I started in the bathroom, checking behind the mirror, under the sink, behind the toilet, and in the shower. I even opened the toilet tank and looked inside. I’d watched a movie once in which a spy hid a file in the toilet tank in a plastic bag. But there wasn’t anything there. I probed the floor tiles with my feet in case she had a ground safe. I unscrewed the lightbulbs, stuck my finger down the shower drain. I peered and poked in every corner but found nothing.

Next, I went to the kitchen, starting with the areas behind the major appliances.

Time was ticking by, and I didn’t want to stay here any longer than necessary, so I tried to combine thoroughness with speed.

Eventually, I found myself under the kitchen sink.

Suddenly, the phone rang, startling me so bad I lurched back and smacked my head on the sink pipe.

What the fuck?

Scrambling out from underneath the sink, I jumped to my feet and pulled my Spitter out.

The phone rang again.

It was mounted to the wall just outside the kitchen door, so I stepped out cautiously. The apartment was so small that I could take in its entirety in a single glance, and there was no one present.

Why the hell was the phone ringing? The clock read 3:45.

It rang again.

How many rings before the answering machine picked up? Five. Xiaoli had always set it to five.

Logically speaking, I knew I should let the answering machine get the call. But something inside my head was telling me different. Who would possibly be calling this apartment at nearly four in the morning?

Fourth ring.

It had to be some sort of trap. Maybe they’d bugged the apartment or set some sort of alarm that I’d unknowingly tripped. Now they were calling to see who would answer. And if I picked up the phone, Black Corpses would bust down the door.

What if I answered the phone and it was that grid monkey, Zhao Shenchuan? What if it was a stranger? What if it was Lieutenant Saito?

The fifth ring began, and I reached out and picked up the phone. Holding my breath, I put it to my ear and listened.

There was silence at first, then someone inhaled softly and slowly. They exhaled. I heard muffled scraping sounds, as if the person on the other end was lying in bed and had just turned over.

Then, a voice spoke, and even though it was in the faintest of whispers, I recognized it instantly.

“Wang Fan? Is that you?”

“Charlotte?” I whispered.

Chapter 21 – An Oval and Two Circles

“Holy shit, Wang Fan. I knew you’d go to Xiaoli’s eventually. I’ve been calling every night.”

“Is this line secure?”

“Of course. You know full well I nearly went into the Surveillance department instead of Cross-Level Control. I know how to secure a phone line.”

“Are you safe?”

“I’m fine, Wang Fan. Are you safe?”

“Yeah. For now.” I wasn’t sure what to say next.

“Is it true?” she asked.

“I don’t know what they’ve told you…. It’s complicated.”

I heard more rustling, as if she were sitting up in bed.

“You didn’t really go heretic, did you?” she asked. “What happened?”

“I’m going to tell you everything, Charlotte. Except, now’s not the right time. Plus, the less you know, the better.”

She released a long, trembling breath. “So you really have gone to the other side?”

“No,” I said. “It’s not like that. I would never join those people. The Black Corpses are the ones who… well….” I trailed off for a moment, trying to decide on the most believable thing to say. I wasn’t going to lie to Charlotte, but I couldn’t very well dump all the truth on her in one burst. She wouldn’t believe even half of it. “They shot me in the back. For no reason. And they nearly killed Jakobe. Charlotte, there’s so much going on here I can hardly wrap my mind around it. I wish I could sit down with you and talk it all out. I need your advice.”

She breathed in and out a few times. “Where have you been holed… wait. No, forget that.” She paused. “They showed me a picture of… some girl. She’s pretty. Is all of this happening because of her?”

“What?” The question took me by surprise, as thoughts of Xiaoli had completely swept Elena out of my mind for the moment. “No, it’s not like that at all.”

“Ever since what happened with Qian Cui, I’ve been worried about you, Wang Fan. I know you. You need someone. I’m just worried you’re picking the wrong people.”

I shook my head and briefly clenched my jaw in frustration. “Charlotte. You know that I love you, right? As a friend.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Then trust me when I say there’s nothing going on between me and that girl. The Corpses would have killed me if it weren’t for her. And Jakobe would be dead too. She saved both of our lives.”

“If you say so.”

I couldn’t tell from her whispered voice whether or not she was convinced.

“So they talked to you?” I asked.

“The Corpses? Yeah. Some guy named Saito.”

Saito? Shit!

“He led the lance that nearly killed me.”

“I could tell he knew you.”

“I’m sorry you’re getting dragged into this, Charlotte.”

“Don’t apologize. Look, I spun a good tale for Lieutenant Saito. Gave him a few clues that’ll lead him nowhere. But I could tell he’s a clever bastard. He’s going to keep going until he finds you.”

“I know.” I paused for a moment. “I’m planning to get out of the Third Earth, Charlotte.”

She sighed. “I guess you have to. Stick around here and they’ll catch you for sure. Do you have a plan already?”

Feeling like I was about to throw myself off a bridge without knowing if there was water beneath, I said, “To be honest, a part of me was hoping that you could help.”

She didn’t reply.

My heart lurched as my feet left the rail of the bridge, and I plummeted down into darkness.

“But,” I quickly added, “I wouldn’t put you in that position. So I’m not really sure.”

There was another silence, and I wondered if she’d hung up the phone.

“I saw a report the other day that section 892 of the Third Shield was damaged. A week or two ago, because of some flooding in the Fourth Earth. They evacuated the control stations and won’t be going in to repair them until the flooding above is cleared. It’s supposed to take a month.”

My heart swelled in my chest. “Thank you, Charlotte.”

“Just be careful. I didn’t mention anything about that to Saito, but if he does his homework, he might be watching that area.”

“Thank you.”

“Promise me you’re going to make it out of all this alive.”

“I promise.”

“And promise you’ll get word back to me once you make it through.”

“You know I will. Charlotte, there’s another thing. You mentioned something about a safe here. In Xiaoli’s place. Where is it?”

I heard a smile on her face as she said, “The fake plant in the corner, Detective.”

My gaze shifted to the plant, which rested in a bulky white pot. That was a safe?

“I see it. Thanks. By the way, how’s my mother doing?”

“She’s taken it pretty badly. I’ll head over tomorrow and do my best to pick up her spirits. Remember, don’t call her. Her line isn’t secure.”

“I know. Tell her I love her.”

“I will.”

“I’m going to hang up now. Stay safe, Charlotte. If it comes down to it, don’t do anything stupid for me. If Saito comes back… you know what I mean.”

“I can take care of myself, Wang Fan. You do the same. Remember, not all of those people are killers, but even the ones who aren’t still support those who are. Don’t let a pretty face distract you from that.”

Come on, Charlotte, you know I’m not like that. Don’t tell me you’re jealous!

I might have joked that way with her in the past. In fact, I think I had, when she warned me about Qian Cui. Instead, I just said, “I know. I gotta go.”

“Call me any time, Wang Fan. As long as it’s after midnight. That’s when I set the line to secure.”

“Got it. Bye.”

“See ya.”

I put the phone back on the wall and turned to the potted plant.

“So, it was you all along,” I murmured. Although I might have eventually looked inside the pot, I doubt it would have occurred to me for quite some time. I pulled the plant out and set it aside, then peered into the pot to see that it was filled with rocks. I turned it upside down to dump the rocks out, then righted it and looked back inside. It had a false bottom, inside of which was a circular safe with a combination lock. Unfortunately, it was affixed to the bottom of the pot with some sort of adhesive, so I couldn’t just take the whole thing with me without breaking the pot. And I didn’t want to leave behind evidence that obvious.

 Not hesitating for a moment, I spun the lock to the numbers corresponding to my birthday. It popped open. I love you, sis.

Inside, I saw a small assortment of items, all of which I grabbed. A silver necklace. A small firearm I’d given her as a gift. I’d assumed the 24th Precinct had taken it away during their investigation.

There was also a brown envelope tied shut with a string. Fumbling a bit in my haste, I untied it and pulled the contents out. Slips of paper with notes scrawled on them. News clippings. Photos. A quick scan didn’t reveal anything that seemed relevant. I saw pictures of random buildings. An article about a new orgplant going into the north side of the city. Another article featuring an interview with someone from the Cross-Level Control department. What did it mean? There was a folded piece of paper that turned out to be a printed map of the Third Earth, with a few random areas circled with a red marker.

I hurriedly stuffed everything back in the envelope, then put it in my coat pocket next to the family pictures.

I scooped the rocks back into the pot, replaced the plant, and then stuck my head into the bedroom to glance around.

The last thing I did was check her answering machine. There were ten messages. Last time I’d been here, there were nine.

I pushed the play button and skipped the first nine. The tenth was from about a week ago at 3:30 a.m. and featured nothing but silence for about three seconds, then a click.

Probably Charlotte.

Throwing my coat and hat back on, I left as I’d come, checking around all the corners, watching my back, and taking every other precaution. I exited the parking garage via a different route.

As I headed back toward the Applefarm District, my mind swirled with thoughts of Charlotte and Xiaoli. Theories clicked into place and fell apart. Nothing made sense. Yet with each step I took, my spirits lifted.

I’d known all along that Charlotte would have my back. I couldn’t hold it against her that she was suspicious of Elena, and in fact, it would have been odd if she wasn’t. It just felt comforting to know that the one person I was sure I could trust really did trust me in return.

And I had my clue. I’d known all along there was something out there that would help me unravel the truth of Xiaoli’s death. Now I had it in my coat pocket. There wasn’t time to analyze it now. But it was there.

As I stepped through the side gate back into the Applefarm District, I realized that I was letting myself get distracted. Pushing aside thoughts of Charlotte and Xiaoli, I swept the area ahead with my gaze, looking for any indication that something was amiss.

Threading through the buildings along a slightly different path, I returned to the safehouse and rapped on the door lightly.

Elena opened it, and I entered, tossing my coat and hat on the rack.

Smiling, I held out the cubeb pepper. “I found it.”

She gave a half-smile in return as she took the pepper. Stepping over into the kitchen, she said, “You were right.”

“Huh?”

“The Vimalā Balm isn’t going to work.”

My enthusiasm faltered for a moment, and it showed on my face.

“But I figured out another way,” she added quickly. “Sit down.”

She took a place at the table, which had been cleared of chemistry equipment, and was now littered with books.

“First of all, this.” She spun an open book around to face me, then pointed at a passage.

“Vimalā Balm was originally designed for use on taṇhā worms,” I read. “However, even after repeated experiments, success was minimal. Further, exposure to the balm seems to create genetic immunity in successive generations of worms. While the solution is extremely effective when used on other sorts of parasites, taṇhā worms specifically are resistant to its effects.”

I felt like cursing out loud, but held back.

“I never read this particular book,” she said, “so I didn’t know. Again, I’m sorry, Wang Fan.”

My mood had soured a bit, but I was still being propelled forward with the boost I’d received in Xiaoli’s apartment. Reaching out, I put my hand on top of hers and curled my fingers around it slightly. “You don’t need to apologize.”

She squeezed my hand back for a moment, then pulled it away as she grabbed a book from a pile off to the side.

“That book led me to another book, which led to another, and then I found this.” She opened the leather-bound tome to reveal an illustration that stretched across two pages and was surrounded by scrawled notes.

It depicted a large oval with two small circles opposite each other on either end. Within the oval and circles were smaller interlocking circles and other designs, as well as strings of text in a language I couldn’t read.

“What’s this?”

“Remember when I told you about spell formations? That’s what this is.”

Bending down to look closer at it, I traced a finger down the side of the oval. “How does it work?”

“The drawing itself isn’t the formation.”

Face flushing, I leaned back. “Right.”

“It’s like a blueprint. The real version will be about ten times as large, and I’ll set it up in the living room.”

“And it’ll get the worm out of him?”

“No. It’ll kill it. Flip the page back, and you’ll see the description of the formation.”

I did just that. The previous page had several paragraphs of text, and while I didn’t read them in full, a scan revealed that this ‘formation’ was designed to kill parasites inside of a human. It even mentioned taṇhā worms by name.

I looked up at her. “Why do I feel like there’s a catch?”

Eyes averted, she said, “There is.”

I tried to guess what the problem could be but came up with nothing. “Elena, just tell me. I won’t snap like earlier.”

She bit her bottom lip slightly. “I can’t power the formation alone. It takes two people together.”

I turned back to the illustration and noted the two circles on either side of the oval.

“So you’re saying you need my help? No problem. I’ll plug right in!” I held out my forearm with the jack in it.

“Not like that,” she said, and all of a sudden I realized what she was hinting at and why she seemed so embarrassed. I pulled my arm back.

“You mean…” I said, but I couldn’t quite make myself say it.

She nodded curtly. “It has to be powered by two seas of energy. And I only have one.”

I exhaled sharply and leaned back in the chair. What had I just said to Charlotte only moments ago? I would never join those people. Thankfully, my enthusiasm from earlier continued to buoy me, and I refused to let my mood turn dark.

What do I do, Dad?

I thought back to a story he’d told me once about a fellow officer he’d come to learn was accepting bribes. They had been close friends and gambling buddies, and the man had even been to Dad and Mom’s wedding. Sometimes there’s no right choice, Son. You just have to decide which option will hurt you the least.

What choice had Dad made? I honestly couldn’t remember that part of the story.

So what would hurt the least? Turning into something I’d hated for my entire life? Or losing my best friend?

When I considered it that way, the decision wasn’t hard to make. I thought about Jakobe and me, cracking dark jokes as we tracked down killers in the Third Earth, bringing them to justice. He was my brother, and we’d been watching each other’s backs for years.

Could I really just leave him with some bug inside his head, slowly driving him crazy until his mind was wiped out?

There was no way.

To the living, we owe respect….

“How do I do it?” I asked.

Chapter 22 – Sea of Energy

“Normally speaking, people have to study for at least a year before they’re allowed to form a sea of energy,” Elena said. “Often it takes longer.”

“Great. So it would be like joining the Glorious Peacekeepers but skipping the Academy.”

“Yes and no. I’ve actually thought a lot about this in the past. Recruits are basically put through a vetting process in which they attend meetings and receive instruction while at the same time are observed closely, both to confirm they’re serious about it all and also to vet them and make sure they’re not moles. As recruits, they learn about basic cultivation theory, safety protocols, and True History.”

“True History?” I cocked an eyebrow.

She inclined her head as if to say, ‘are you really asking that question?’ “Much of what the Grand Kingdom teaches in schools is either distorted or outright false. One of our sect’s main responsibilities is teaching people the truth about what led humanity to this point, as well as what happened before things changed.”

“What’s this sect of yours called?”

“The Naturalism Sect. It was one of the original sects from before the War of Tribulation and the Hellscape, which means it’s been around for well over a thousand years.”

“There’s something I always wondered about,” I said. “I thought the immortals were all killed. Wasn’t their dying act to cast the Heavenly Curse on us? So how are you people even here?”

“We’re getting off track here,” she replied. “But let me clear one thing up. There are no immortals in the Grand Kingdom. In fact, there were never any immortals. That’s one of the big lies they tell.”

“Hold on, aren’t you an immortal?”

She laughed. “Of course not. During the golden age of cultivation before the War of Tribulation, the most powerful cultivators only got close to becoming immortals. Then the war broke out, ending with the Heavenly Curse, which blocked the path to immortality. Until it’s lifted, nobody can truly become an immortal.”

Mind spinning, I pushed the chair back from the table. “I need some coffee. You keep talking.”

“Let’s forget about everything except what’s important right now. As I was saying, after a recruit masters the basics, they take a test to get promoted to novice. Novices start learning actual cultivation methods and begin working on forming a sea of energy. Generally, it takes a year of study as a recruit before you can become a novice. The thing is, nothing the recruits learn has any actual bearing on technique. In other words, you could skip it if necessary.”

As I waited for the water to boil, I pulled out a packet of instant coffee and tore it open. “Okay, so I skip all the learning and go right to the doing. But what, specifically?”

She took a small, leather-bound book off of the stack on the table and put it down in front of the chair I’d just vacated.

“You’ll be using the techniques in this manual. In a moment, you’ll need to read the first few pages, but before you do, I’ll summarize a few fundamentals. The human body contains a system of meridians through which energy flows. There are eight main meridians that we use in cultivation, plus a ninth that unifies them all, as well as numerous smaller vessels that branch off of them. And there are other meridians that generally aren’t used in cultivation, but those aren’t relevant to the current situation.

“For thousands of years, the existence of meridians was common knowledge among our ancestors. After the War of Tribulation, though, when Sinotech Corporation founded the Grand Kingdom, they did everything possible to make people forget. Of course, the meridians didn’t just disappear. They’re a part of human physiology as much as your brain or heart. And although citizens of the Grand Kingdom aren’t aware that they exist, most people tap into them on a daily basis.”

I looked over my shoulder in surprise.

“Using this,” she continued, and she pulled back her sleeve to reveal the jack on her forearm. “The jacks we have installed at birth are connected to a meridian vessel. That’s another of the major deceptions propagated by the Grand Kingdom: cultivation is illegal, but the basic principles behind it are a fundamental aspect of how our society functions.”

Information was being dumped into me faster than the coffee powder I was dumping into the cup. I poured boiling water over the powder, stirred it with a spoon, and went back to the table.

“I know this is a lot to take in,” Elena said. “Usually, recruits are fed this information in little bits over weeks and months.”

“Yeah, I honestly don’t know what I’m thinking right now. Just keep going. I don’t have the time to sit around ruminating.” This coffee didn’t taste a decade old, but it was still borderline disgusting.

“There are different types of cultivation, and they all involve circulating energy through the meridians and smaller vessels. You’ll be working on Thermal cultivation, which is different from the type I practice, Solar cultivation.”

“Why teach me something different?”

She smiled wryly. “Because that’s the only manual here. I left my Solar manual in my backpack, back in the safehouse we destroyed, and frankly, I’m not confident enough to teach you without a reference. Normally speaking you have to get special approval to form a Thermal sea, but obviously we’re in unusual circumstances here.”

The moment she mentioned her backpack, it suddenly occurred to me that I’d left my detective’s pad back in that safehouse, along with Deputy Commissioner Zhong’s files. Not that it mattered. “Fair enough.”

“Besides, the different types of cultivation are all part of the same family. The path to immortality involves mastering all of them. But I digress.” She opened the book in front of me and flipped it a few pages in. “As you can see in this picture, you would normally inhale deeply, then take the energy from here—” she pointed to a specific spot in the chest “—and send it to here.” She pointed to another spot near the left toe. “And from there, to here, here, and finally here.” She ended at a location near the pit of the stomach.

“Okay, but how? There’s energy in the air or something?”

“That’s where we get into dangerous territory.” She leaned back and crossed her arms. “Normally speaking, a novice would spend time perfecting the breathing exercises that allow you to sense and absorb the energy from your environment. However, there’s a way to fast-track all of it. I can force some energy into you and even guide it through your meridians.”

“You can force someone to become a cultivator?”

“‘Force’ probably isn’t the best word. The person has to open themselves up to it. Furthermore, the practice is forbidden. At least in the Naturalism Sect. The Black Corpses are rumored to force it on people, using drugs instead of getting consent.”

“You’re going to do something forbidden by your people? What happens later, if they find out you’ve broken the rules?”

She raised her eyebrows and shrugged. “Normally speaking, I’d be risking expulsion. But we’re in a life-or-death situation here, and I honestly don’t think we have any choice. Our sect values the principle of the law above the letter, so hopefully I’ll get off with a reprimand of some sort.”

“And me?”

“They won’t do anything to you.”

I took a long sip of coffee. “I don’t understand why it’s against the rules. You could use this method to make an army virtually overnight. And if the Corpses do it, doesn’t that put you at a big disadvantage?”

“It’s against the rules because it’s dangerous. First of all, a mistake could lead to immediate cultivation deviation, destroying your sea of energy before it finishes forming, and making it impossible to build another one. Second, because you’re building your cultivation without a foundation of understanding, you’ll end up in an unstable state. If you don’t stabilize yourself soon afterward, the result will be the same as a slip-up; you’ll experience cultivation deviation and destroy your sea of energy. And there are worse things that could happen if you experience deviation. Even death.”

For some reason, this actually gave me a glimmer of hope, as it indicated that a sea of energy could be destroyed or removed somehow. Maybe I didn’t have to actually become a cultivator. Just dip my toe in the water for a bit to save Jakobe. Then back out later.

“Do you have any questions?” Elena asked.

“I have so many questions we could probably sit here for weeks talking about them. But I feel like I know enough to proceed. What’s next?”

“You need to read the first few pages of the manual so you have an idea of how the process is supposed to work normally. Then we begin. To start out, go back to page one.”

Nodding, I turned back to the introductory parts.

“Put your thumb onto that red design there.”

When I did, I felt a slight prick in my thumb. “What did that do?”

“You’re bound to the manual now,” she said. “If you concentrate, you’ll be able to sense its location. It’s a failsafe to prevent the loss of manuals. Remember how easily I tracked you down after the Grand Kingdom Highrise?”

I closed my eyes and concentrated, but I didn’t feel any different.

“You won’t feel anything in close proximity,” she explained. “Only when you get a good distance away. Now, turn the page and start reading.”

Thermal cultivation, more properly known as Li cultivation, focuses primarily on controlling the temperature of the body and environment, as well as the metabolism. The primary benefit to this type of cultivation is increased longevity; however, there are other practical advantages as well.

Yeah right. Whenever I saw anything that claimed to provide increased longevity, I immediately discounted it. Then again, this wasn’t some over-the-counter medicine or specialty food item.

“When it says increased longevity, that’s just a figure of speech, right? My grandfather swore by his medicinal baijiu. He said that drinking a cup a day would increase his lifespan by decades. Then he died in his sleep at age 58.”

She hesitated for a brief moment, then said, “I’m sorry about your grandfather. But no, it’s not a figure of speech. When you form a Thermal sea of energy, you’ll be able to live to around three hundred years of age.”

My eyes narrowed. “You’re joking.”

“I’m not. Eldress Cheung practiced Thermal cultivation. She was 162 years old. If she hadn’t experienced cultivation deviation about ten years ago, she would have looked the same age as me.”

Holy shit. Although I was still skeptical, my gut was telling me that now wasn’t the time for arguing. I looked back down at the manual and kept reading.

Before I could get to the second paragraph, I encountered terminology I didn’t understand, but Elena helped me. It took about twenty minutes to read up to the page with the picture of the meridian system.

“It seems simple enough,” I said. “I mean, I still feel like the world has been turned upside down. That said, I get how the energy is supposed to flow.”

“Then let’s start.”

“Hold on.” I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and then exhaled slowly. “I understand the process, at least conceptually. Are you sure it’s best for you to do all the work? I mean, if I was going to teach you to shoot a gun, and I held your arms and pulled the trigger for you, it wouldn’t do you any good.”

“Usually new novices put a lot of study in before trying. They even do dry runs. Are you that confident?”

“I think so. I mean, you’re going to be there to help if I need it, right?”

“Yeah, I’ll still need to provide the energy, though.” She paused in thought for a long moment. “Okay, let’s try it.”

She rose from the table and walked into her bedroom. I followed.

“Sit down,” she said, hopping onto the bed and sitting down cross-legged.

I sat opposite her and was crossing my own legs when she said, “Get closer. So our knees are touching.”

I complied.

“Now, put your hands on your thighs, like this. Close your eyes, and breathe steadily in the way you just read about.”

I breathed slowly and steadily for a minute or two, performing the visualizations required.

“Good,” Elena said. “Now, I’ll send a stream of energy into you. Once it’s inside, you’ll sense your meridian system. Then, guide the energy according to the path in the book. I’ll be here the entire time if you need my help.”

A moment later, I felt something warm in my throat and lungs. Then, my entire body seemed to light up inside. I ‘saw’ the nine pathways going through me, each of them a different color, as well as numerous tendrils branching off from them. I also saw a swirl of white light in my chest that was obviously the energy Elena had sent into me.

“Do you see it?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Take control. Let the energy flow toward that spot in your toe.”

In response to my will, the energy left my chest and slid down my leg. I could sense Elena there, ready to step in if necessary. However, she didn’t. I led the energy throughout my body, ending in the spot near the pit of my stomach.

“You’ve completed a cycle,” she said. “Now you need to do it again. Send the energy back to the starting point.”

I struggled at first but managed to get the energy to flow back to my chest, and then I started the process again. Elena offered a few words of advice this time, but I did everything myself for the most part.

“Again,” she said. “Keep going until you can do it without any effort.”

This time, as I moved the energy toward my chest, I noticed that a tiny pinprick remained behind near my stomach.

“See that?” Elena said, a touch of excitement in her voice. “So fast! You’re a natural! That’s the beginning of your sea of energy. Keep cycling it.”

Each time, the process went faster and smoother. Each time, the bit of energy in my stomach grew larger.

I lost track of time. The energy reserve grew until it looked like a tiny lake inside me, its surface rippling with golden light. More time passed. The lake grew larger and larger, and the ripples turned into waves.

Suddenly a tremor passed through me, and I felt the hair on my arms and neck stand on end. My muscles tensed, then relaxed, and I exhaled deeply.

“You did it!”

I opened my eyes to find Elena leaning forward to me, her arms open to embrace me.

Kiss her! I yelled to myself.

Instead, I met her embrace and hugged her back. She laughed.

“I can’t believe it worked!” she said, then immediately backtracked. “I mean, I knew it would work. It’s just I’ve only read about people fast-tracking a sea of energy.”

“Let’s just hope you don’t get kicked out of your sect because of it,” I said.

I didn’t intend it to be a joke, but apparently she took it as one, as she laughed again. Hopping off the bed, she said, “I’ll be fine. It took you about an hour, which means I don’t have much time to set up the formation. You wait here while I go into the living room. Keep circulating your energy, and take some time to examine the changes to you.”

“Changes?”

“The sea of energy, obviously. Also, you’ll find that over the next several hours, your muscles will respond differently as you get physically stronger. Further, your divine sense is going to awaken.”

“What?”

She stopped at the door. “Your mind and psyche. Remember how Eldress Cheung knew when to burst through the ceiling in the hospital or how she shot that Corpse without being able to see him? Or how we lock and unlock doors? It’s all using divine sense. It grows within you as soon as you form a sea of energy. With some people, it gets strong right away. With others, it takes more time. Like hair growing on a child.

“There are many things to explain, but the spell formation and Jakobe are the priority for now. I’ll come get you when I’m ready.”

I nodded, and as she walked out the door, I closed my eyes and cast my senses inward.

Chapter 23 – Spell Formation

“It’s ready,” Elena said from the door. I opened my eyes and slid cautiously off the bed. I could already detect the changes to my mind and perception, which was the ‘divine sense’ Elena had mentioned. If I concentrated, I could mentally perceive and interact with things outside the range of my physical sight. After some cautious experimentation, I’d even made the sheet in front of me stir without actually touching it.

And though I couldn’t quantify how much stronger I was, I knew that my muscles were behaving differently.

Stepping carefully out of the room, I found that Elena had drawn a large version of the oval and circles onto the tile floor of the living room using some sort of dark powder. Just like the drawing in the book, it had smaller interlocking circles and other designs within it. If it were simply a work of art, I would have said it was complex and beautiful.

“Since we’re only using the formation temporarily, I made it with Cinnabarium Talc,” she noted. “You sit in the circle on the right while I get Jakobe. Be careful not to disturb the powder.”

I settled into place, and she came out of the other room with Jakobe held in her arms. She placed him gently down in the oval, then sat across from me and put her hands on her knees.

“I’ll be operating the formation,” Elena said. “You won’t need to do much but send your energy into it. And manage the output. Start by using your divine sense to observe the formation. Can you do that?”

“Sure.”

I closed my eyes and sent my thoughts out of my head. The world around me seemed both monochromatic and, at the same time, filled with an infinitude of color. In front of me was the formation, every particle of powder glowing with a faint light. Across from me, Elena looked like a shadowy outline of herself.

“See the smaller circles on either side of you? In a moment, place your palms on them. Then send energy through your arms and into the formation. As soon as you connect, the formation will draw on your sea of energy automatically. You just need to make sure that the flow rate matches mine. In other words, don’t send more energy than me, or less. Got it?”

“Yeah.”

“Place your hands down. We begin in three, two, one, now!”

I sent energy into the two circles on either side of me, and the lines around them turned white as a result. And as soon as my energy was inside, I sensed the formation latching onto the two energy streams and pulling at them. Hard.

Energy tumbled out of me like the air from my lungs when Deputy Commissioner Zhong hit me.

A wave of light-headedness hit, making me feel like I might pass out.

“Stay focused,” Elena said.

I breathed in deeply and forced myself into clarity. Light flowed from both Elena and me into the formation, spreading until the outline of the oval shone brightly. After, the light snaked through the complex designs of the interior formation, heading toward Jakobe.

When it reached him, he twitched briefly as the energy entered him. White light passed through his meridians, filling him until his entire meridian system was visible to me.

“Keep this same flow no matter what happens,” Elena said. “I’m going to activate the main function of the formation to reveal the taṇhā worm, then crush it out of existence. It may struggle or fight.”

As energy coursed from me into the formation, I looked toward Jakobe’s head.

Where are you, you fucking worm? I thought.

A minute passed. Then two.

All of a sudden, I noticed a glimmer of red near Jakobe’s forehead.

“There it is,” Elena said quietly. “Here we go.”

Green specks appeared on either end of the oval, which spread, causing the white lines to turn green. As the green entered Jakobe, he twitched again.

The greenness filled his meridians, slowly but surely, until every corner of him contained green light.

Suddenly, the red glimmer flared brightly, causing a redness to surge out, pushing back the green light. As it did, a sliver of pain pierced up my right arm toward my sea of energy. I gasped and reflexively pulled my hand off of the circle.

“Your energy just dropped!” Elena said.

“Sorry!” I pushed my hand back down and sent energy back into the formation. “That hurt!”

“I feel it too. It’s the worm fighting. Just keep going through the pain. We’re almost there.”

It felt like a needle stabbing all the way from my palm up to my shoulder, and it was almost completely unbearable. Elena was experiencing the same thing? She didn’t seem to be reacting at all. Was it because of my prosthetic?

“Channel more energy,” Elena said. “Increase your output by about half.”

It was a struggle considering the pain, but I managed. The green light pushed back against the red light, which now pulsed with more and more rapidity.

When the green light had the red glimmer completely surrounded, the redness twitched and jerked as if it was trying to escape. But the greenness crushed onto it, and after a final spasm, the redness vanished. Along with it, the pain started fading from my arm, and I exhaled softly.

“Maintain the flow,” Elena said. “I want to make sure it worked.”

Minutes passed in which Elena and I observed the formation and Jakobe. I wasn’t really sure what I was looking at, but I didn’t see any hint of red.

Finally, Elena said, “It’s done. You can retract your energy and divine sense.”

Shaking the residual pain out of my hand, I opened my eyes and looked down at Jakobe. He didn’t seem any different from before.

“What now?” I asked.

“We wait.”

**

She transferred Jakobe back into the bed, and then we waited, watching for any sign that there was a change. I was nervous, but Elena seemed even more nervous. She could hardly stand still and kept chewing her bottom lip as she walked in and out of the room.

An hour passed. I’d helped myself to another cup of instant coffee, and Elena was currently in the kitchen making tea for herself.

I was looking down at Jakobe when, out of the blue, he said, “That was fucking wild.”

I nearly jumped off the bed, and he laughed. This wasn’t the first time he had startled me when I thought he was asleep.

“You’re back!”

“Yeah. And my headache’s gone.” He slid back into a sitting position against the headboard. “The worm’s gone?”

“Obliterated.”

“Is he up?!” Elena nearly shouted, and I could hear her rushing across the living room. Before either Jakobe or I could reply, she was in the room. “You’re awake!”

She leaned over the bed and hugged him, both to his surprise and mine. No, I wasn’t jealous.

“I’m awake,” he said. “And I have a question.”

“Okay...” I said. “What is it?”

A faint grin on his face, he said, “Which of you two motherfuckers OD’d me?”

“You OD’d?” I blurted. “But I timed it down to the minute.”

“That Nitro must have been damn pure,” he continued. “Because I was still in a lucid state when you gave me the second dose.”

“Mierda,” Elena said. “It’s my fault, Jakobe. I—”

“It’s not her fault,” I jumped in. “What happened in the double lucid state?”

“I saw things. Really strange things.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think I saw... the future.”

I guffawed. “Shut up.”

“No joke, brother. The first thing I saw was the two of you using some sort of magical light to save me. And then came other things.”

“It’s not possible,” I said, but then I found myself looking over at Elena. “Is it?”

She looked back at me. “I don’t know. I don’t think there’s any type of cultivation that can be used to see the future, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“There’s no way Nitro does that,” I said. “Whatever you dreamed, it was just coincidental.”

“Section 892,” Jakobe said. “Does that mean anything to you?”

“Fuck,” I said under my breath. “You overheard my conversation with Charlotte?”

“No. Wait, you talked to Charlotte?”

“Who’s Charlotte?” Elena asked.

“Er, an old friend,” I said.

“How the hell did you end up talking to Charlotte?” Jakobe repeated.

“We’re in Applefarm District,” I said.

He cocked his head. “You went to Xiaoli’s place, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. While I was there, Charlotte called.”

“Bro. I know you trust Charlotte, but that seems really fucking coincidental. It’s what, two or three in the morning? And she just happened to call? How did she know you were there?”

“She knows me better than just about anyone, Jakobe. She guessed that if I had to go underground, I’d end up at Xiaoli’s at some point. She’s been calling every night, just in case.”

He shook his head. “I guess what’s done is done. What did she say about section 892?”

“It’s been shut down because of flooding in the Fourth Earth. If there’s anywhere we can sneak through, that’s going to be the spot.”

“I saw us heading up there. Landing next to a huge beam that had the numbers 892 painted on them. But then things got fuzzy. I saw a tunnel. Some pillars or something. Not much else.”

“What’s section 892?” Elena asked.

“It’s part of the Shield,” I said. “I’d have to check a map to see where exactly that section is. Suffice it to say, if the control stations have been abandoned, then we have a chance to get through the Shield at that spot. The only thing is, I have no idea how we could get up there without being spotted.”

“You’re going to do it for us,” Jakobe said. “Based on what I saw, you have some new abilities now, don’t you…?”

I looked down at my hands. “Yeah.”

“If Jakobe is right,” Elena said, “then you’re going to need to read more of that manual. Thermal cultivation can be used to create illusions. Make things disappear.”

I let my hands drop. “Is there a map of the Third Earth in this place?”

“I’ll check,” Elena said.

After she walked out, I sat on the bed opposite Jakobe. “How the hell did we get to this?”

“I don’t know, brother,” he replied. “But if we can get to the Fourth Earth, then we might have a chance of coming out of all this alive. The Fourth is the last of the Bright Earths, which means that it’ll be even easier to get from the Fourth to the Fifth. And once we’re in the Dark Earths, we can disappear. Hell, we could even go to the Sixth Earth, where my family is. They’d keep us safe.”

He’d told me plenty of stories about where he grew up in the Sixth Earth, in a neighborhood where the Glorious Peacekeepers rarely showed their faces. In fact, his family engaged in activities that I found distasteful, which on the one hand made me reluctant to take him up on his offer, but at the same time, made it a tempting prospect considering our situation.

“There’s no map,” Elena said, walking back in.

“Damn,” I muttered. “Wait.” Pulling out the brown envelope from my inside pocket, I said, “Almost forgot about this.”

I opened it and took out the map. “Check this out. The numbering system for the Shield isn’t widely known, but it’s not some sort of secret. Charlotte explained it to me once. You just take the Ring number and multiply it by ten, then….” I trailed off as I performed the mental calculations.

When I saw the location in question, I nearly laughed. “I should have known. Right above the 35th Precinct. Jakobe, remember all the unscheduled rain?”

“How could I forget? So we head back over to the 35th, sneak into the garage, and take a car from there?”

I shook my head. “If a car goes missing, that would just raise red flags. I wonder….”

“What?”

“I wonder if Deputy Commissioner Zhong’s hovercar is still back in that parking garage.”

“Brother, you never filled me in on everything that happened while I was out.”

“I’ll explain,” Elena said. “You need to start reading that manual, Wang Fan.

Chapter 24 – Climbing

We found Deputy Commissioner Zhong’s car right where we left it. While Elena and Jakobe used a few cans of cheap spray paint to give it a new look, I scoured the area for some appropriate plates. A level down in the parking garage, I found a beat-up old hovervan that, judging by the grime on the windshield, I was fairly certain hadn’t been driven in a few months. Thankfully, the plates were still valid, and the screws were easy to manage with the strength of my prosthetic fingers. Moments later, I headed back to the level above, plates in hand.

Before, the car had been a flashy aqua, and while some of the original color still peeped through, it was now mostly a combination of flat brown and deep orange. They’d done a hasty job of masking the tinted windows, but plenty of overspray had drifted past the tape and newspaper.

“Think it’ll do?” Jakobe asked, ripping the last bit of newspaper off the front windshield.

“Looks good to me,” I said.

I tossed a plate to Jakobe, along with a few screws and my multi-tool. While he put it onto the front of the hovercar, I went to the back to do the same.

Less than a minute later, the plates were on.

“Are we ready?” Elena said.

“I don’t think I’ll ever be ready,” I said, and while I’d intended it to come across as a joke, it didn’t really sound that way.

“You’ll do fine,” she said.

“Right.” I’d spent several hours with the Thermal cultivation manual, specifically on a section halfway to the end of the book, which detailed how to make things invisible. The technique had a name: Thermal Ripple Cloak.

To use it, I took energy from my sea and sent it through a series of meridians while simultaneously performing several complex hand signs designed to shape the energy into a specific pattern. The energy would then leave my body, forming something akin to a cocoon around whatever object I targeted. There was a limit to the size of the object I could cloak. If I had multiple seas of energy, I could cover objects the size of buildings. And while the manual didn’t specifically say what a cultivator with a root of energy was capable of, I guessed that the limit had to be something akin to a high-rise building. Unfortunately, I only had one sea of energy, and I’d just formed it. As such, I wasn’t sure if I was strong enough to cloak even a single vehicle.

My experiments in the apartment had been of middling success. I’d cloaked a sofa and the refrigerator before Elena told me to stop wasting energy. Then she’d helped me through a meditation session to fill up my sea of energy again.

“I’ll drive,” Jakobe said, opening the door and slipping behind the wheel. Next to him in the passenger seat were three backpacks filled with supplies we’d brought along. “You two can have the backseat.”

As the two of us climbed in, he grabbed the steering wheel, and the wires swirled out to connect to his arm jack. The turbines hummed to life, and the hovercar trembled slightly as it lifted off the ground.

Jakobe and I disagreed about which was the safer route. I said to use the 3rd Ring Road, but he said that we would stick out more and that it would be better to drive through the city. I noted that it would take longer, and he pointed out that although the situation was urgent, we weren’t on a timetable, and a few minutes of extra driving wouldn’t matter. In the end, we did it his way. He stuck to the middle aerial lanes, not the highest, again with the goal of staying as inconspicuous as possible.

Elena and I had both rested back in the safehouse, taking the edge off of our exhaustion. In addition to that, on the way over to the parking garage, I’d insisted on finding a proper coffee shop. I simply couldn’t stomach any more instant sludge.

The result was that we were alert and energetic, and although that was good considering the plan we were about to go through with, it also left me slightly disappointed. I looked over at Elena on the other side of the car and thought back to the cab ride when she’d snuggled up against me and fallen asleep. I wanted her to do that again. Unfortunately, the gap between us on the seat was like a ravine that I didn’t dare to cross.

Jakobe turned on the radio to some edgy jazz music, and before long, we hit rain and traffic.

When we got past the 3rd Ring Road, Elena turned from the window and said, “Are you ready? How is your sea of energy? Full?”

I closed my eyes to check. “Yeah. I’m as ready as I can be.”

“Remember, you have to control your energy outflow. Only use as much as necessary. It would be a disaster if you ran out before we reached the Shield. At the same time, you want to avoid completely draining it, if possible.”

“I know.” I subconsciously balled my hand into a fist and started tapping it down onto the car seat next to me. “Are you sure there isn’t anything you haven’t thought of? If there’s a cultivation technique to make things invisible, there’s got to be one that sees invisible things. What if they just shoot us out of the sky?”

Her hand settled over mine to stop it from tapping, and our fingers intertwined. “Stop worrying. With cultivation, just about anything is possible. But that also means that they can’t plan for anything and everything.”

I squeezed her hand gently, and I swear that if Jakobe hadn’t been sitting two feet away, I would definitely have pulled her into a kiss.

She let go of my hand and looked back out the window. I did the same, and the jazz music wrapped around me as the city floated by, awash with neon and shadow.

I knew that both Elena and Jakobe disliked smoking, but I couldn’t resist the urge at a certain point. I cracked the window and indulged myself, enjoying the feeling of my nerves slowly calming.

About an hour after leaving the parking garage, we were only a few blocks from where Jakobe and I had crouched over the corpse of Halyna Vasylivna Hrebenyuk. It had only been a few days, but it seemed like a lifetime ago.

“Where do you want to do it?” Jakobe asked. “The invisibility thing. Maybe an alley?”

I shook my head. “The higher we get, the better. I’m not sure how long I can keep it going after I start.”

“There’s a building on the corner of Flower Garden Road and Tower Courtyard Street,” Elena said. “It has an aerial-only garage near the top floor that should work.”

“I know the one you’re talking about,” Jakobe said. “Next to that middle school?”

“Exactly.”

“Wang Fan?”

“Works for me.” As we headed toward Flower Garden Road, I reviewed the mnemonics associated with the Thermal Ripple Cloak and then practiced the hand signs yet again. I’d worried that my prosthetic would cause problems. I only had seven real fingers, after all. But that wasn’t the case. Apparently, prosthetics were common among cultivators.

“Your pinky needs to curl around the ring finger there,” Elena said.

I adjusted my fingers, then started over.

“The angle of your wrist is wrong,” she said. She twisted it a bit to the side. “Like that.”

Started over again.

The last few minutes before we parked, I went through the hand signs several times, with Elena providing more corrections and advice. The last few times, I got them perfect.

“Even if you make a tiny mistake, the technique should still work,” Elena said. “There’s an acceptable margin of error.”

“I don’t like ‘shoulds,’” I said with a dry smile.

“You’ll be fine,” she said. “Some novices take months to master techniques even less complicated than the Thermal Ripple Cloak. The fact you did it on almost the first try shows that you have innate talent.”

I wondered how many novices she had known. Had she met any other than those in her own coterie? And weren’t they all dead? I felt a spark of pity in me but ignored it. I needed to focus on the task at hand.

We reached the building, and Jakobe found a shadowy corner to park in.

“Do I turn it off?” he asked.

“No, keep it going. I’ll do it from inside.” I took a deep breath, held it, then let it out slowly. “Everybody ready?”

“Yeah, brother.”

“You can do it, Wang Fan.” Elena leaned across the car, and while I prayed that her lips were going to meet mine, she simply brushed them on my cheek. “Just take your time.”

A cheek kiss was still good, and the warmth it sent into my chest was a welcome boost.

Steadying my breathing, I tapped into my sea of energy and began the process of sending energy into my meridians. Then came the hand signs, my fingers slipping in and out of the prescribed positions. I sensed tingling within me and watched with divine sense as the energy spread out over the car like a wide blanket and then wrapped it up.

That was it.

It only took about twenty seconds.

I opened my eyes.

“Did it work?” Jakobe asked.

“Hold on,” Elena said, closing her eyes. I felt her divine sense stirring, spreading out to examine the car from all angles. “I don’t see any seams. You did perfect, Wang Fan.”

“Go,” I said. “The energy is already draining out of me.”

“On it,” Jakobe said. The turbines whined, and the car lifted up, then flew out of the garage and into the rain. Not needing to worry about traffic lanes, he hit the accelerator, and we shot straight up above the city. Looking over my shoulder out of the window, I could see the high-rises and orgplants growing smaller behind me. The car spiraled as it climbed, and the light from the Heaven-Propping Pillar shifted wildly, alternating us between brightness and darkness.

Within moments, we flew past the level of the tallest skyscrapers and were in the empty space between the city and the Shield that was commonly called the sky.

The real sky is blue, Jakobe had once told me. And it goes on forever.

In contrast, the Shield was either dark gray or black depending on the time of day, at least here in the Third Earth. In the Third Heaven, it had star lights built into it that shone brightly at night. And during the day, it had paneling that turned it a bluish-gray color.

As we climbed, rain smacked into the windshield, and energy seeped out of me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a Cross-Level Control hovervehicle.

“My sea is halfway empty,” I said.

“We’re almost there,” Jakobe said. “Keep it up.”

Imagine having a cup of water and slowly pouring it out, knowing that once it was empty, you would die. That was how I felt.

I closed my eyes and focused on maintaining the Thermal Ripple Cloak while simultaneously keeping the energy flowing as slowly as possible.

I felt a hand close around mine.

“Only got a third left,” I said.

No response.

The vehicle leaned to the side, then lurched back to level. I felt a thump as the car dropped to a hard surface. The hand slid away.

“We’re here,” Jakobe said.

“Can I drop the cloak?”

“Yes,” Elena said.

I severed the connection between the cloak and my sea of energy, then assessed my reserves. I had about a tenth of my total potential energy reserve. Damn. I’d hoped to save more than that. And refilling the sea would require rest and meditation.

I heard a door open as Jakobe stepped out of the car. “Well fuck me,” I heard him say. “What a view.”

Elena followed him. “Come on, let’s go.”

I opened my eyes and stepped out of the car.

The sight was overwhelming. Jakobe had parked us on what was essentially an enormous metallic girder that rose up into complete darkness. Painted on the side of the girder in yellow were the numbers 892. Only a few yards away, past the edge, we could see the city blinking below like a toy model.

Other than the girder, everything around us was a mass of enormous pipes, gigantic tanks the size of orgplants, stairways, ladders, bridges, cables, chains, and vast expanses of steel and bonemetal. Water descended everywhere thanks to the flooding above. In some places, it simply dripped down drop after drop. In other places, it flowed like streams and rivers, eventually becoming waterfalls that fell down into the city as rain. Unscheduled rain. The air tasted both humid and metallic, and I detected a faint odor of mildew. Thankfully, Jakobe has parked in a dry spot beneath the girder.

Some distance away, I spotted some metal stairs that climbed up the side of the girder.

“Over there,” I said.

Jakobe distributed the backpacks, and we pulled out the rain gear we had purchased, which included thick rain boots. The gear would serve to keep the water off us and obscure our features from any surveillance cameras we couldn’t avoid. Dressed and ready to go, we headed in the direction of the stairs.

“How thick is the Shield again?” Jakobe asked.

“In school they said that each Shield is roughly as thick as the highest building that rests on top of it. But for all I know, that’s a lie. Elena?”

“I remember learning that in school too. I think it’s true.”

We reached the stairs, which were made of corrugated metal and had a flimsy rail. Jakobe jumped on first, and I let Elena go in front of me, allowing me to bring up the rear.

“I don’t know about the Fourth Earth,” Jakobe said, “but I’m pretty sure the biggest building in the Third Earth is the Sinotech Governing Spire. How tall is it? Two hundred stories?”

“Less than that, I think,” I said. “More like a hundred and fifty.”

“A hundred fifty fucking stories. If the Shield is that big, and it’s really a maze like they say, how long is this going to take? A few hours?”

“Probably longer.”

We climbed.

The ambient light from the city below soon faded, and though there were lights built into the walkway, none of them were on. Elena and I took out flashlights, which we covered with strips of cloth, so their light didn’t go far past our immediate vicinity. Jakobe’s headset had a night vision mode, so he didn’t need any light at all.

We took the creaky steps two at a time, climbing up past immense pipes and reservoirs, passing valves, wheels, and dim electronic readouts, most of which were dead. Water fell all around us, but it was light enough that our rain gear sufficed for protection. On one occasion, we had to walk right through a waterfall, forcing us to use the umbrellas to get past.

We ran into numerous surveillance cameras, but most were off. We did our best to avoid the active ones, and when we couldn’t, huddled as deeply into our raincoat hoods as possible.

After about ten minutes of straight climbing, we reached a landing occupied by what seemed to be a workstation or control room nestled beneath a sloping expanse of corrugated steel that sheltered it from the rain. It was abandoned.

Jakobe panted for breath as he leaned against the wall. “We’re going too fast,” he said. “I can’t keep this up.”

Gulping air, I said, “Agreed. Let’s rest for a minute or two.”

I sat down on the top step of the staircase, beneath the corrugated steel, and pulled a protein strip from my backpack. I checked my sea of energy, and as expected, there was virtually no change to it.

A moment later, Elena sat down next to me and took out a packaged pastry.

“Who’s this Charlotte you mentioned?” she asked casually.

I bit off the end of the protein strip and considered if I should deflect the question. Maybe fib a bit. I decided not to.

“Ex-girlfriend,” I said. “We kind of grew up together. Then started dating in Peacekeeper’s Academy. But she stayed in the Third Heaven, and I was sent here. We drifted apart, and in the end, it just didn’t work. You know. Long-distance relationships.”

“Never been in one,” she said.

I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye. It was getting awkward quickly.

“Well, anyway,” I said, “we’re still friends, that’s all.” I very nearly went on to talk about Qian Cui but stopped myself.

“Lucky you,” she said. “Most of my exes are assholes I have to hold back from slapping if I ever run into them. Remember that guy in the alley by the electronics emporium? He was one of them.”

We continued eating in silence.

Five minutes later, we resumed the climb, this time at a reduced pace.

Two staircases led up from the landing, and we picked one randomly, only to reach a dead-end ten minutes later, which forced us back to the landing and the other set of stairs.

As we got higher, we took more wrong turns. This climb was going to take more than a few hours. That much was obvious.

All the while, Cursed rain fell around us.

After about two hours, we were taking a break inside an abandoned workstation when we heard clanking and voices from above. Turning our flashlights off and keeping within the deepest shadows of the room, we watched as a group of five figures in raincoats made their way across the landing.

When they passed directly in front of the station’s sloping front window, we caught sight of tattooed limbs, prosthetics, guns, and what appeared to be night-vision masks. There wasn’t a single flashlight to be seen, and they all had bulging packs strapped to their backs.

Smugglers.

After they passed us, we started climbing again, and this time we only used one flashlight, mine, heavily covered with cloth to keep it as inconspicuous as possible.

Our thighs and calves burned, and our ankles and knees ached as we continued on through the metallic labyrinth.

We experienced wrong turn after wrong turn and nearly stumbled into at least three groups of smugglers.

Apparently, we weren’t the only ones taking advantage of the temporary emptiness of section 892.

Our umbrellas served us well as we passed through numerous waterfalls. And thankfully, we’d picked up rain boots, as some areas were virtual rivers or lakes to cross.

Eventually, we noticed ambient light building up around us. Continuing our climb, we reached a point where, up above, we saw a vast expanse of bonecrete stretching in all directions until it disappeared in the gloom. Out of it, enormous pipes emerged into tangles that led downward. There were landings on various spots, most of them lit with dim fluorescent bulbs.

“That must be where the Fourth Earth starts,” Elena said.

Jakobe looked at his watch. “That went a lot longer than I expected. We’ve been climbing for six hours already.”

The stairs led to one of the landings, which was connected to a tunnel that led up into the bonecrete, a built-in ladder inside of it. As we stopped to catch our breath, I put my hands on the rail and leaned over to look back down at the labyrinth disappearing into the darkness.

“I never in my life imagined I’d see a sight like this,” I said.

“You and me both, brother,” Jakobe said.

“Guys, look,” Elena said.

Jakobe and I turned and saw that she was looking in the direction of the nearest landing, which also had a tunnel mouth and was far enough away that we had to strain our eyes to see it clearly. My heart nearly leaped into my throat when I realized that someone was standing there, just barely illuminated by the fluorescent bulb attached to the outside of the tunnel mouth. They wore voluminous rain gear that made it impossible to get a hint at their facial features or physique, and although it was difficult to tell with absolute certainty, they seemed to be looking at us.

“¡Joder!” Elena said. “Didn’t you say this whole area was evacuated?”

“I thought it was,” I said. “Who do you think it is, a worker?”

“Maybe.”

The figure turned and climbed into the tunnel above, leaving the landing empty.

“Forget about the motherfucker,” Jakobe said. “Let’s just keep going. We’re almost there.”

“I’ll take the lead this time,” I said.

“No,” Elena said, stepping in front of me. “My sea of energy is full. If we run into problems, I’m the best equipped to deal with them.”

I had to admit she was right. I nodded, and she grabbed the bottom ladder rung and pulled herself up into the tunnel.

Jakobe and I followed.

The ladder went up for what must have been a hundred feet, and then we emerged into a larger tunnel that had masses of pipes running along the sides and tops.

“Access tunnel?” I said.

“Which way do we go?” Elena asked.

“That person we saw was in that direction.” I pointed. “I say we go the other way.”

“Agreed,” Jakobe said, climbing out of the ladder tunnel.

“It’s too late for that,” a voice said.

Blurting exclamations of shock, we spun to find the figure in the raincoat standing only a few dozen feet away from us. That other landing must have been hundreds of feet away. How could this person have possibly reached us so quickly, unless….

Elena took a few steps forward and brought her hands up in front of her chest, locking her fingers together. “Who are you? A fellow disciple from the Fourth Earth?”

“Oh, no,” he replied, pulling back the hood to reveal a face so stunningly handsome it was beautiful and a grin that seemed both malicious and arrogant. “I can see why you might think that, but no. I left my armor off as a show of good faith.”

Armor? I thought. Fuck. I only knew of one group that wore armor. I reached into my coat and wrapped my hand around my Spitter. The wires clicked into place.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Elena said.

The figure extended his arm, revealing a long, curved sword in his hand.

“I didn’t come here to liquidate you,” he said. “If I did, you’d be dead. That doesn’t mean I’m not ready to fight, though. Last time, you got away by a fluke. But I won’t let it happen again.”

“Saito,” I growled.

“Hello, Detective Wang. I trust you’ve been well since we last met?”

“Fuck you.”

“That was a nice trick with the car. I admit, it caught me by surprise, which is why I failed to intercept you earlier. It seems Ms. Ávila helped you force an initial breakthrough. Welcome to our little club.”

“What do you want, Saito?” Elena said. “Give me a reason not to kill you right now.”

“I can move faster than you can hit me with a Sunflare Blast, and you know it, Elena. Fine, I’ll cut to the chase. I want the three of you. All of this started because of you specifically, Elena, but after everything that’s happened, I believe you could be incredible assets. I’m building a team, and I want you three on it.”

She suddenly burst out into bitter laughter. “You killed all my friends!”

“And shot me in the back,” I added. “And tried to puppetize my best friend.”

“And murdered my Master,” Elena growled.

“I can’t explain everything right here and now, so please, come with me. There’s a control station ahead. We can sit down and talk.

“Detectives, I know that both of you are loyal defenders of the law in the Grand Kingdom. My father is on the board of Sinotech. We can easily clear your names. And becoming Black Corpses will make you even better equipped to defend justice.

“As for you, Elena, I know that you won’t be easily convinced, but at least let me make my case to you. If you join me, you won’t be alone. One of your friends from your coterie already saw the wisdom of switching sides.”

“You’re lying. They’re all dead. I saw it.”

“You weren’t paying attention, Elena. How do you think I found you so easily at the Grand Kingdom Highrise? But what’s more important is the truth about your sect leader, Yu Yitai. You people talk about True History, but in reality, your entire sect is based on a lie. Yu Yitai and his cronies are using people like you to achieve goals they don’t dare to explain. Have you ever heard of the True Heaven? I doubt it. Because they don’t want you to know it even exists. I can prove it, Elena. I have the evidence right here.”

He extended his hand to reveal a pendant that resembled a circular cloud.

“That’s Eldress Cheung’s dimensional pendant,” Elena said, her voice cracking with emotion.

To the living, we owe respect; to the dead, we owe justice.

“It was her pendant,” Saito corrected. “And inside of it is—”

A blast of white light shot from Elena’s hand directly toward Saito’s head.

Chapter 25 – Cigarettes

Saito dodged to the side, and as the beam shot down the hall behind him, he blurred into motion, reaching down to grip his sword with both hands as he closed in on Elena.

I pulled out my Spitter, but before I could get a shot off, Elena’s hands moved, causing a wall of shimmering light to rise from the base of the tunnel, creating a barrier between Saito and us.

He stopped short, right in front of it. Then he pulled the sleeve of his raincoat back to reveal a bracelet that he tapped. Darkness flowed out from it, sucking in the rain gear and replacing it with the distinctive armor of the Black Corpses.

“Sunrise Rampart,” he said, grinning faintly. “Clever. Lucky for you we met in a tunnel.”

She pushed her hands forward, and the shimmering wall inched toward Saito, forcing him to start walking backward.

“Let’s go,” Elena said, turning and breaking into a run.

Jakobe and I joined her.

“This’ll buy you two minutes at the most,” Saito called out behind us. “Less if I break it before it collapses.”

“Go!” Elena said, and we started running even harder.

Within seconds, we reached a four-way intersection, and Elena went left, so we followed. Next came a frenzied scramble through two more intersections, up ladders, and through corridors. We circled around a control station manned by two uniformed workers, and eventually, we crawled into a utility shaft. At the top was a closed hatch that I assumed I would have to push against with full force to open. However, I barely nudged it, and it flew open. I was stronger than before. A lot stronger.

I climbed out of the tunnel to find that we were in an enormous chamber that resembled a temple, with dozens of massive bonecrete pillars rising to connect to a ceiling at least fifty to sixty feet overhead. From the water marks that stained the walls, I could tell it was a containment chamber.

It was filled mostly with shadow, but some of the pillars had dim lights on them, and the floor was filled with slowly-flowing, ankle-deep water. We were on a raised platform at the far end. The sounds of dripping water echoed in our ears.

“Where to now?” Jakobe asked as he climbed out behind me.

“There’s a tunnel at the far end over there,” I noted.

“But Saito is going to catch up very soon,” Elena said. After climbing out, she let the hatch clank shut behind her.

“Why is he so fast?” I asked.

“He practices Gravitational cultivation,” she replied, “which allows you to manipulate your body weight and move at incredible speed. That said, I can tell that he doesn’t have a root of energy.”

“Which means we have a chance at beating him,” I said.

“Exactly.”

“We have to come up with a plan fast.”

“Hide behind those pillars and start shooting as soon as we see his face?” she said.

I shook my head. “Too predictable.”

I looked at the pillars, the nearest of which was at least thirty feet away. Then I looked around the chamber, confirming that there were no other obvious entrances. Finally, I glanced back at the hinged utility tunnel cover.

“No,” I said, an idea exploding into my mind. “Those talismans Eldress Cheung gave you. Do you still have them?”

“Yeah,” she said, and I saw something flicker in her eyes as she pulled them out. “I see what you’re getting at.”

She handed them to me. Not wasting a microsecond, I peeled the back off the brown one and stuck it to the ground in the spot where the hatch handle had formed a groove after hitting the platform over the years. Then I removed the back of the blue talisman and pasted it to the handle.

“Okay, I’m going to stand off to the side of the hatch,” I said. “Jakobe, you get behind that pillar over there. Elena, you stand about halfway to that other pillar. Right there. When he comes up, I’ll use the Thermal Ripple Cloak to go invisible. You two keep his attention on you. As soon as the moment is right, I’ll get him into a chokehold. His armor will probably prevent me from rendering him unconscious. But I should be able to hold him long enough for you to hit him with everything you’ve got, Elena. Can you do the same thing your Master did when she covered her hands with light?”

“Solis Gauntlets? Yeah.”

“Will that be enough to kill him?”

“If I hit him enough times in the right spot.”

“Okay. Who knows, maybe I’ll actually be strong enough to choke him out despite his armor.”

“What about me?” Jakobe asked.

“Stay behind the pillar, brother,” I said.

“Aw, come on,” he said. “You got to be fucking kidding me.”

“Bullets bounce off of Corpse armor,” I said. I pulled out my Spitter and handed it to him. “But beam weapons can punch through it. You’re going to be our backup. Let’s just hope we don’t need you.”

“Got it,” he said, taking the weapon.

“There aren’t any spare wires in there, so be careful.”

We took our places, Elena tapping her dimensional pendant to summon her cultivator robes. Meanwhile, I closed my eyes to cast my divine sense into the tunnel below. With each drop of water that echoed in the chamber, seconds ticked by, and my anxiety mounted.

Finally, I sensed something.

Saito was here.

I looked over and gave a thumbs up to Elena, then tapped into my sea of energy and started the hand signs.

At almost the same moment that Saito pushed the hatch up a crack, the cloak of invisibility settled around me.

I heard a laugh. “A last stand in the sewers? I’m disappointed.”

The hatch slowly opened further, and we saw Saito’s head rise up. He was facing Elena. “That was a fun chase, and while I’m impressed at how you’ve dragged things out, my patience is running thin. I’ll make my offer one more time. Drop your weapons, and put your hands at your side. I can explain everything clearly.” He climbed up a rung on the ladder until his chest was out of the utility shaft and the cover rested straight up behind him, just on the verge of tilting backward.

“I’m not stupid, Saito,” Elena said. “There’s no way a Black Corpse like you would ever recruit a cultivator from the Naturalism Sect.”

He placed a hand on the platform in front of him as he climbed up another rung.

“My ultimate loyalties are to the Saito Clan. And myself.”

“So? Does that somehow make you trustworthy?”

He chuckled. “I know things about you, Elena. Things even you don’t know. Why do you think a lance of Black Corpses was sent after a coterie as useless as yours? The reality is—”

The cover slowly tipped beyond its center of gravity and fell backward. Before Saito could say another word, the hatch hit the ground behind him, causing the two talismans to connect.

BOOM!

A massive explosion rocked the chamber, sending the cover whipping around to hit him directly in the back, shoving his torso forward but causing his head to snap back.

Shouting a curse, he threw the hatch off of his back and lunged into the open.

That was when I sprang into motion, jumping forward and sliding my hand under his jaw. As my hand latched onto the bicep of the other arm, my other hand swung up toward the back of his head.

Then I felt him tense through his armor, and he threw his head back, smacking me in the side of the face. He threw his head back again and again as I struggled to get my second hand in place.

Elena dashed forward, water splashing up around her, bright light shining on her hands.

My hand finally landed on the back of Saito’s head, and I started pulling back, hoping I could exert enough pressure on his carotid artery and vagus nerve that I could actually render him unconscious.

Suddenly, Saito leaned forward, bending his knees and then pushing up, throwing his entire body off the ground before falling back down. As he slammed into the ground, he pulled me forward with him, then twisted to the side to try to slip out of my grasp.

Shit.

I pulled back harder, but I could sense my grip on him weakening. And he was stronger than me, by quite a bit. We fell, and he scraped at my second arm, trying to free himself. I tried to get my feet around his torso as Elena arrived, and white light shone as she slammed her fist into his side. Black sparks flew. She hit him again. I pulled back harder.

Then he twisted and was out of my grip.

His foot slammed into my face, shoving me backward onto the hard bonecrete of the platform.

Fuck.

As I scrambled to my feet, Elena threw another punch, but he dodged, then came back with two jabs and a cross.

Elena was no boxer. She somehow ducked away from the first jab, but the second hit her on the cheek, and the other blow hit her on the jaw, dropping her.

I lunged forward and tried to take him to the ground again, but he sidestepped and knocked me down, then kicked me in the ribs.

“You’re really starting to piss me off!” he growled.

Elena’s arms wrapped around him from behind, but before she could do anything, he twisted around and threw her backward.

Smashing a foot into my face again, he sent me tumbling back into the water. Then he turned, reached to his waist and pulled a marble-sized sphere from his belt. He squeezed it, and his bonemetal sword flowed out into his hand.

Stepping toward Elena, he raised the sword.

“NO!” I shouted.

Then I heard a crackle as a Spitter beam punched Saito in the back. Black sparks flew as another beam came in quick succession, then another.

Saito turned, and I saw his knees bend as he prepared to start running.

Still prone, Elena threw her hands out in a hand sign I knew well. A small white sphere formed, and a beam of light shot forth, stabbing Saito through the neck.

He staggered to the side, and Elena shot him again, this time hitting his shoulder. Again, the side.

Spitter beams hit him as well, again and again, and I could tell some were piercing the armor.

Finally, Saito reached for his belt, pulled out an oblong disc, and snapped it in half. Light flared, and he vanished.

**

It took another five hours of climbing to reach the Fourth Earth. Once on the street, we walked an hour away and checked into a seedy hotel that took cash and didn’t require IDs. As soon as we stepped into our room on the fiftieth floor, we collapsed into sleep.

Even counting what we had taken from the wallets of Zhong and Cao, we only had a bit of physical money left, not nearly enough to purchase fake IDs even if we’d had the right connections. I was from the Third Heaven and Jakobe was from the Sixth Earth, so neither of us had much in the way of contacts in the Fourth Earth.

But while Elena had never left the Third Earth, her division of the Naturalism Sect operated throughout the Bright Earths, which meant she knew code words, secret signs, and other ways of reaching her people.

The next day, she left to make contact.

I felt a deep emptiness in me and was compelled to meditate. Following the methods prescribed in the Thermal cultivation manual, I went through the breathing exercises necessary to start filling up my sea of energy again. I was still convinced that, later on, I would get rid of it. But as long as it existed in me, it felt as uncomfortable to leave it empty as it felt to leave one’s stomach empty when hungry.

Elena returned in the evening and said she’d sent a message. Now we just needed to wait.

Another day passed.

It seemed we’d hurt Saito bad enough that he’d given up chasing us. For now.

I wondered what would happen when other cultivators showed up. Would they be willing to help two heretic Peacekeepers? What if they asked us to join them? I already had a sea of energy after all. What about Elena? Would she be punished for breaking their rules? And what clues would I uncover from the brown envelope I’d recovered from Xiaoli’s apartment.

Jakobe was taking everything in stride. Perhaps it was his background as a Beifei, with all of his knowledge of secret history. He actually seemed excited about what was to come. After lunch, I came back inside from having a smoke on the balcony and found him reading the Thermal cultivation manual.

I sat down across from him. “Are you really going to turn your back on the Peacekeepers, brother? Just quit and go rogue?”

“I’m not sure. You know, other than you, I don’t really have any friends in the Third Earth. My family has been Sixthers for generations. And they weren’t really happy when I joined the Peacekeepers anyway.”

“Yeah, I remember why you joined the Peacekeepers to begin with.”

“To help people.”

“You think this Naturalism Sect can help people better than the Peacekeepers?” I asked.

“Maybe. Just maybe.”

**

Later that night, I was on the balcony with Elena, looking out at the city, which was lit by the glow of the Heaven-Propping Pillar. The office building across the way was sixty stories tall and twice as wide, and the entire side was a neon advertisement for Red Star. Next to it was an orgplant, its gunmetal blue surface forming an odd contrast to the baijiu ad. Aerial traffic cruised by just a few yards below us, and a light rain had just begun to fall.

A lit cigarette rested between my thumb and forefinger, the smoke slowly wisping out into the glittering rain beyond.

Elena leaned up against the wall opposite me, her green eyes alive with reflected neon as she gazed out at the traffic.

“There’s a pill you can take to get rid of cigarette addiction,” she said.

“Is that so?” I tapped my cigarette clean in the ashtray affixed to the railing, then lifted it to my lips and took a drag.

“You should think about it.”

I exhaled smoke into the rain. “But why? It’s not like it gives you diseases or something.”

She turned to look at me. “Do you know why they did that?”

“Did what?”

“Took the diseases out of the cigarettes.”

I laughed. “You mean they really were bad for you in the past?”

“Yeah. Sinotech wanted to use cigarettes as a tool of control and pacification, but too many people were dying.”

I looked at the smoldering tip of the cigarette in front of me. “Tool of control?”

“They’re addictive.”

I shrugged. “So’s coffee.”

“When they took the disease out of them, they made them more addictive. Just another way the government keeps people focused on things that don’t matter. But there’s another reason why you shouldn’t smoke.”

“What’s that?”

“They took away the disease in them, but not the stink. They still smell disgusting.”

“You get used to it.”

She put her hands on the rail and looked back out into the rain. “Some people can’t get used to it. I’ve even heard of girls who won’t kiss a guy who smokes.”

I looked over at her.

“That’s good to know.” I looked at the cigarette again, then stubbed it out into the ashtray.

Interlude 5 – A Game of Go

Hu Jingyi wore an old baseball cap and tattered clothing that made him look like an average lower-class citizen in the Fourth Earth. But there was something about his eyes that was anything but average. For one thing, he was a Han, yet his eyes were light gray, instead of the typical dark brown or black. Furthermore, his gaze was piercing, not in a terrifying or intimidating way, but in a way that made him seem particularly insightful and wise.

Crouching down in the alley, he pulled a tin can out from his pocket, peeled back the lid, and dumped the contents into a paper bowl he’d fished out of a nearby trash can. Shoving aside some of the alley trash, he put the bowl down in front of him, then took out a second tin can, opened it, and added the contents to the bowl. Finally, he rose to his feet and took a few steps back.

As he did, a scrawny cat with a round head and tabby brown fur slunk out from a dumpster halfway down the alley and crept up to the bowl. Keeping its eyes on Hu Jingyi, it started eating. A moment later, it was joined by a skinny black cat and then one with silver fur.

Hu Jingyi leaned against the wall and watched the cats eat for a minute or two. I wonder if the Fourth Earth is the only place that has stray cats like this, he thought. Although he had traveled out of the Fourth Earth for both business and pleasure, he had never had occasion to check on cats in other places.

Before the animals could finish all the food in the bowl, a drunk couple staggered into the alley, spooking the cats, which scattered. After the couple passed, the tabby returned and licked the bowl clean, then stood there looking at Hu Jingyi.

Squatting, he rubbed his thumb against the tips of his fingers and said, “Hey buddy. Wanna let me scratch your ears?”

The cat hesitated, then cautiously approached and let Hu Jingyi massage its head and neck.

“That’s a good boy,” he said. “I got something special for you this time.”

He pulled out small plastic bag, within which were a few chunks of fish meat that the cat devoured. Hu Jingyi rose, and as the cat rubbed purring against his shin, he said, “Until next time, little one.”

The cat watched as he left the alley and walked out onto the sidewalk. Picking his way through the crowd, he approached a limo hovercar idling at the curb. He tapped the window, which rolled down.

“Sir?” said the driver.

“I feel like stretching my legs. I’ll walk from here. Take the car back and then go home early. Have dinner with your family.”

“Sure thing, sir. Thanks!”

Hu Jingyi nodded, and as the limo rose into the aerial traffic, he joined the milling crowds on the sidewalk.

Heading up the street to the zont-rail station, he boarded a rattling train that took him to the Sea Lake Park. Most of the Heavens and Earths had a version of Sea Lake Park, all of them in roughly the same geographical location. As for the specific layout and quality, different versions varied. In the Fourth Earth, it was well-maintained, the lake full of water, a lush, artificial forest surrounding it, as well as a handful of public squares. Unlike many other versions of Sea Lake Park, however, this one had long since become a gathering place for retired citizens. In most other Heavens and Earths, the park was a haven for families or young people. But here, elderly folks did everything from ballroom dancing to playing poker or chess. Virtually all of the gathering areas had permanent pavilions set up to ensure that the ‘outdoor’ activities could continue even when it rained heavily.

Because of the large number of older ones, the park was generally avoided by the young crowd. As for Hu Jingyi, he wasn’t actually retired, but he still frequented Sea Lake Park. Sometimes he would watch the older experts playing chess or Go, other times he would join the crowds practicing dancing or Tai Chi. Today was different, though.

Skirting a public square occupied by line dancers, walking over an arched bridge, and threading his way through some decorative rock formations, he reached a long, covered path lined with permanent game tables. Some were surrounded by groups of onlookers, those being the tables occupied by well-known players. Other tables were empty, or had players who no one was inclined to observe. He counted among the latter. Elders in the Naturalism Sect would occasionally come here when they wanted privacy to discuss sect matters outdoors, and that was exactly why he’d come here.

About eight tables down the path, he found the table he was looking for. It was occupied by a man with a prosthetic ear and a prominent mole on his cheek who was around the same age as Hu Jingyi. It was a Go table, and the man had already set up the game pieces.

“You’re late,” the man said.

“Sorry about that, Ol’ Qing,” Hu Jingyi said, sitting down. As he did, he detected the patter of raindrops on the path covering above them. “Had an errand that took longer than expected.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m in no rush. If I remember correctly, it’s your turn to go first.”

“Right.” Hu Jingyi picked up a black stone and placed it onto the table. Ol’ Qing responded by placing a white piece onto the table, and then the two of them went back and forth, placing a handful of pieces down in various locations. Ol’ Qing was also an elder in the sect, a member of the same elder circle as Hu Jingyi. Elder circles were generally comprised of ten elders, each of whom oversaw an assembly of ten coteries, and were led by a chief elder.

Ol’ Qing made a grunting sound. “Interesting. A Kobayashi fuseki? That’s not your usual opening, Ol’ Hu.”

“Figured I would try something different.”

“Intriguing.” Ol’ Qing thought for a good minute before placing his next stone. “Have you decided how you’re going to vote at the council?”

“Regarding the three newcomers?”

“Exactly. It’s quite a unique situation. It’s not every day the Corpses chase a Peacekeeper into our fold. Much less two of them.”

The rain was picking up. As it drummed steadily overhead, Hu Jingyi ran a black game piece through his fingers. “I’m going to vote to let them stay. The girl’s not particularly important, but the Peacekeepers could definitely prove useful.”

“Wasn’t the whole situation instigated when the Corpses targeted the girl? And you think she isn’t important?”

“It’s not unusual for outer sect coteries to get targeted once they attract too much attention. They were careless, that’s all.”

“I don’t know,” Ol’ Qing said. “There’s something suspicious about her. Of the group of three, I have an instinct telling me she’s the important one.”

“Is that so?” Hu Jingyi placed his piece down, and Ol’ Qing responded almost immediately. They went back and forth for a few minutes, placing stone after stone until Hu Jingyi stopped to stare at the board for a long time. It was raining in earnest now, to the point where they had to raise their voices slightly.

“You see it, don’t you?” Ol’ Qing said.

Hu Jingyi smiled faintly. “You set me up ten moves ago. Very clever.”

“The upside for you is that you noticed earlier than I anticipated. Which means you still have a chance.”

Another two minutes passed before Hu Jingyi placed his piece down, followed by some heated back and forth. Eventually it was Ol’ Qing’s turn to sit staring at the board.

“What do you think?” Hu Jingyi said. “Not quite the setup you pulled off...”

“But not bad,” Ol’ Qing said. “I’m impressed.” A few seconds passed, and he put a white stone onto the board. “I have a spot in one of my coteries. I’m thinking of requesting the girl be sent my way.”

Hu Jingyi looked up at him. “Why?”

“Like I said, I have the feeling there’s something important about her. Somebody should be keeping an eye on her. In the times we’ve visited, you can tell she’s nervous.”

“I would be too if I was locked up in a hotel room like they’ve been for all this time.”

“They’re not locked up!”

“Not literally, but figuratively. Anyway, she’s just on the verge of a breakthrough. Wouldn’t it make more sense to promote her to the inner sect now and avoid the hassle of two sets of formalities?”

“Argue the point all you want, Jingyi, you’ll never convince me that rushed cultivation is a good thing.”

“After more than a thousand years, we don’t have any hard evidence to prove accelerated cultivation is statistically more likely to lead to problems. I really don’t get this traditionalist insistence on holding people back. Not even the sect leader endorses the idea.”

“One of Yu Yitai’s many faults,” Ol’ Qing said with a frown. “In any case, I’m still going to submit a bid to pull the girl into my coterie.”

Hu Jingyi shrugged. “Suit yourself. I have no reason to object.”

They continued to play as the rain poured down around them. The entire time, Hu Jingyi felt confident he had the upper hand. However, as the middlegame stretched into the endgame, the tide turned. At a certain point, Ol’ Qing snapped a white piece down onto the board and looked up at Hu Jingyi. “You weren’t paying attention,” he declared.

Hu Jingyi sighed. They finished the game, and when they counted the score, Ol’ Qing came out on top by three points.

“Good game,” Hu Jingyi said, starting to gather up the black stones.

“Agreed. Next time, keep your eyes open.”

They finished cleaning up the board, whereupon Ol’ Qing put the game pieces away in a small pack which he slung over his shoulder. He stood. Giving a curt nod of farewell to Hu Jingyi, he turned and walked toward the far end of the covered path.

Hu Jingyi watched him for a moment, then went in the opposite direction. The drum of the rain was getting louder. Looks like it’s going to turn into a full-on storm, he thought. Better get going before it gets bad.

Chapter 26 – A Mission

“Turn right!” I nearly shouted.

“I know how to drive, Wang Fan!” Kang Jianhong growled. He was young, barely more than a teenager, with a few hairs on his upper lip that he claimed was a mustache. He thought the skull tattoo on the side of his neck was intimidating, but it had the opposite effect on me.

I grabbed the roof handle above the door as the hovervan lurched to the left, careening through oncoming traffic as Jianhong tried to ditch the patrol hovercar behind us. As we left the bright green and blue neon of the main street and entered the shadowy darkness of a side alley off the 7th Ring Road, I heard clattering and clunking sounds from the back of the van, as a person was thrown to the floor and covered with a small avalanche of computer equipment.

“Shit, Jianhong,” a woman barked, “watch what you’re doing!”

“Shut up, Svea!” Jianhong said.

He hit the accelerator, sending us shooting between two high-rises. Glancing out the window, I saw someone staring wide-eyed at us out of the dingy window of a thirtieth-floor office. Even this high above ground level, the walls were plastered with graffiti. I had to hand it to the thugs in the Fourth Earth; they really went out of their way to make everything look ugly. My eyes shifted to the side mirror, and I held my breath as I waited for the flashing red and blue lights of a patrol car to appear behind us.

In the back, Svea Göransson brushed a tangle of black hair out of her face and muttered curses as she pulled herself off the floor, then picked up various pieces of equipment from around her and put them back into place on her workstation.

“Use the Thermal Ripple Cloak, Wang Fan!” Jianhong said.

“No,” I replied firmly. “I need my energy for the actual mission. I can’t waste it.”

“We won’t get to the fucking mission if we get caught!”

“We wouldn’t have to worry about getting caught if you’d just driven normal!”

“I was driving normal!”

Now wasn’t the time for a petty argument. Red and blue lights finally appeared in the side mirror, and all of a sudden I wondered if maybe I should use Thermal Ripple Cloak after all. We could abandon the mission if we had to.

“They’re still on us,” I said.

“Ssibal,” Jianhong spat, using a Japkor curse word that was popular among young Fourthers. “Svea, get ready to change the plates and switch the exterior.”

“I was ready, before you knocked half my equipment down,” she shot back.

Jianhong shoved the steering wheel forward, and the van went into a nosedive toward the ground. More equipment clattered.

“Fucking shit, Jianhong!” Svea shouted.

He didn’t respond.

Bracing myself against the front console as we dropped at breakneck speed, I nearly closed my eyes at the sight of the ground zooming toward us.

“Jianhong…” I murmured, then shut my mouth. He wasn’t going to listen to anything I had to say anyway.

At the last possible moment, he yanked back on the wheel, and the van lurched again as it leveled out. The bottom bumped hard onto the surface of the alley, and I heard more clattering from the back. This time, Svea didn’t let loose any curses. I glanced back to see her face red with fury as she shoved equipment back into place yet again. If she’d had any idea the plan would go to shit like this before we even got to our destination, I’m sure she would have taken efforts to secure her equipment. This mission was supposed to be quick and easy, not a brush with disaster.

Don’t get involved in high-speed chases, Son, Dad had once told me. Especially off the ground. It’s too easy to lose control and hurt yourself or some innocent citizen.

It was obvious Jianhong wasn’t thinking at all about innocent citizens. He stepped down on the accelerator again, pushing me back into my seat as we shot toward the other end of the alley. Scattered raindrops smacked against the windshield. Was it just me, or did it really rain more here in the Fourth Earth?

Looking over my shoulder out the window, I saw the patrol car dropping down after us. “You know they’ve already called this in,” I said. “There’s got to be a dozen more patrol cars converging on this location already.”

“Shut the hell up, Wang Fan. I know what I’m doing.” Near the end of the alley, Jianhong jerked the steering wheel, sending the hovervan into a drift toward the dark maw of a ground-level parking garage. It was a bad drift. The side of the vehicle slammed into the entrance, and then we heard a long scrape as Jianhong hit the accelerator again.

“This is my van, Jianhong!” Svea shrieked.

“My dad’ll pay for it. Wang Fan, get your Thermal Ripple Cloak ready, now. That’s an order. I’m the disciple in charge of the West Airport coterie, and that means you have to do what I say.”

“Fine.” I curled my fingers into the opening hand sign for the technique and closed my eyes to check on my sea of energy.

“Svea, what’s your ETA?” Jianhong said.

Her ETA? Apparently Jianhong didn’t know what the term actually meant. Not surprising.

“Forty seconds,” she said, plugging a wire into the side of her keyboard.

Jianhong drove us on a careening path through the parking garage, which was packed with decades-old ground cars and motorcycles illuminated by flickering fluorescent lights. We went down three levels, then through a dark tunnel so long it obviously connected to an adjacent building. At the end of the tunnel was another parking garage filled with cars just as dilapidated as those we’d passed by moments before, but Jianhong stopped just short of entering. I glanced at the faded digital clock on the dash. 3:12 p.m. Good. I still had plenty of time to make my date with Elena.

“Svea?” Jianhong said. “Svea?”

The only response was the clatter of the keyboard. I looked back again.

She finished typing, then reached across her makeshift desk to grab a tangle of wires. Pulling three specific ones out, she shoved them into the three jacks in her forearm. Before meeting Svea, I’d never seen a person who had two additional jacks added to their arm.

As the wires clicked into place, she said, “Here goes.”

She went through a series of hand gestures to unleash one of her Organic cultivation techniques, and the wires lit up bright yellow. Then, after a final frenzy of typing, she hit the ENTER button.

We heard a succession of buzzing, clicking, and clanking noises. Looking at the side mirror again, I could see the exterior of the van changing. The color went from off-white to bright red, the turbine covers extended dramatically, and several fins emerged that hadn’t been there before. Other changes were going on as well, although I couldn’t see them. The entire process took about fifteen seconds. Although mundane technology existed that could do the same thing, combining ordinary tech with Organic cultivation produced results much faster and more efficiently. I was curious how the transformation would affect the damage to the side of the car from when we entered the tunnel, but I couldn’t see the scrapes from my vantage point.

My gaze shifted to the pinpoint of light that was the mouth of the tunnel behind us. How long until red and blue lights flashed into it?

“Done,” Svea said.

“Alright,” Jianhong said. “Wang Fan, you keep that Thermal Ripple Cloak ready to go. I don’t care if we’re in the middle of the biggest intersection in the entire fucking city; if I say to use it, you use it.”

“That’s against the rules.”

“My dad’s a chief elder!” he snapped. “If I tell you to break some rules, it’ll be fine.”

As Jianhong peered into the driver’s side mirror, I looked back at Svea. Our eyes met, and then she rolled hers dramatically. I might have smiled if it weren’t for the fact that we had a Peacekeeper patrol right on our ass and an inexperienced hothead in charge.

What was more, I wasn’t convinced about what he’d just said. Using cultivation abilities in public was strictly forbidden in the Naturalism Sect. From what I understood, not even his father’s lofty status as a chief elder would get me off the hook if I used a Thermal Ripple Cloak in the middle of a crowded intersection to make an entire van turn invisible.

We lapsed into silence as Jianhong drove into the parking garage, then up three levels and out onto the street. I tried not to think how crazy it drove me that I was forced to sit in the passenger seat. When Jakobe and I worked cases back in the Third Earth, I’d always been behind the wheel.

As soon as we entered traffic, a few patrol cars screamed past overhead in the emergency vehicle lane. A minute later, we heard more sirens as another three zoomed through the intersection ahead.

The atmosphere in the van was stiflingly oppressive as Jianhong slowly passed through that same intersection, which was operating sluggishly thanks to the traffic lights being out of service. Based on what I’d seen in the past three months, the lights here broke twice as often as they did in the Third Earth. Jianhong sent the van drifting up into a higher lane of traffic, and another minute passed.

Finally, he chuckled. “Fuck yeah. That was wild,” he said.

“Yeah, a real blast,” Svea said, and I could sense the dryness in her words.

Apparently Jianhong didn’t, as he let out a whoop, then pushed down on the accelerator.

“We’re barely on schedule,” I said. “Meeting’s supposed to be in about ten minutes. Should we back out?”

“We have plenty of time,” Jianhong laughed, then zoomed into an even higher lane of traffic, cutting off a sleek green hovercar and provoking an angry horn blare.

“Slow down,” Svea said. “It doesn’t matter if your father’s a chief elder. If you get the cops on our tail again, and we get arrested—”

“Ain’t gonna happen,” Jianhong interrupted. “What went down earlier was a pure fluke.”

I resisted the urge to shake my head. It was his reckless driving that had caught the patrol car’s attention to begin with. Spooked, he’d sped off before I could even coach him on what to say to the officers. They would have given him a ticket and let him on his way. Instead, he dragged us into a ridiculous chase.

And now, our van was eye-catchingly red instead of white, and he was yet again zooming in and out of traffic on the way to our rendezvous with the mob.

If his father wasn’t a chief elder, Jianhong’s mission proposal would never have been approved. In fact, I suspected his father’s influence was the only reason he had been promoted to disciple and entrusted with an entire coterie.

The lurching of the van was making me feel a bit nauseous, and I could tell that Svea was fuming after more equipment tumbled here and there. One thing was for sure: she would never again go on a mission in a vehicle without strapping down her gear ahead of time.

After circling around a bit, Jianhong pulled into a top-floor parking garage of a combination office building and mall not too far from where the chase had initially started. Heading to one particular corner we had scouted in advance and knew wasn’t covered by any of the functional surveillance cameras, he backed into a parking space. To the left of us was a rusted flatbed hovertruck and to the right, a pair of glossy violet hoverbike choppers. We barely fit in between them.

The lighting here was steady, unlike the flickering chaos of most parking garages. That was one reason we picked the spot. The bonecrete walls were only half-covered with grime, and the graffiti wasn’t too thick; this was obviously a fairly new building. Either that or it had been recently renovated.

“See?” Jianhong said, opening the driver’s door. “Two minutes to spare. Now, get the Thermal Ripple Cloak up.”

He stepped out, pulling back his layered coat so it didn’t touch the rusty truck. The coat had a jaunty collar and looked like a jumbled mess to me, but from the brand name emblazoned on the sleeves in Japkor, it was obviously an expensive garment.

“I can only keep it up for so long, Jianhong. Make sure to follow the plan and—”

He slammed the door shut and walked a few paces away to lean against the wall.

“Prick,” I murmured, my hands flashing as I tapped into my sea of energy and laid a Thermal Ripple Cloak over the van, causing it to vanish.

“He’s always been like that,” Svea said. “But it got worse when he was promoted to disciple.”

I sighed. “If he feels like being a hotshot on his own time, I couldn’t care less. But he’s risking all of our lives.”

“It is what it is,” she said.

“Yeah. How’s your setup?” I asked, looking back. “Still in one piece?”

Svea was one of the tallest women I’d ever met, coming in at almost six feet, although that wasn’t obvious at the moment, hunched as she was atop a plastic crate. Her hair was as dark as the farthest corners of Purgatory, but the hint of blonde at the roots revealed her heritage. She was Eurosynth, with a strong nose that you’d never see on a Han or Japkor and curves even more pronounced than Elena’s. Just hearing her talk, I would never have guessed she wasn’t Han, as she spoke Sinese with the fluid perfection of a news anchor.

She wore a shoulderless, frilly-sleeved navy-blue top cut off at her midriff. Tight shorts covered mesh tights, which led to bulky black boots with lots of metal buckles. Her entire left arm from the shoulder down was a bonemetal prosthetic, and it wasn’t the kind you could buy at the local mall. It was a work of precision, the joints sculpted like fine art and seams so tightly fit that they were hardly visible. The internal mechanisms were exquisitely crafted, such that they didn’t emit the slightest mechanical whine when she moved her arm. Her hands, both the prosthetic one and the natural one, were covered with fingerless, elbow-length black gloves that made for easy typing.

Fiddling with stacks of equipment, she said, “Most of the stuff seems fine, no thanks to Jianhong, the asshole. Not sure about this.” She picked up a boxy contraption that I couldn’t quite identify. I was no grid monkey, after all. Holding it to her ear and tapping it, she said, “I think the head and the platter might have been knocked off alignment. If I lose the data in this thing….”

“Make him pay for it,” I suggested.

“It’s not the money, Mr. Detective, it’s the principle. At least this thing wasn’t flying around full.” She held up an empty energy drink can before tossing it over her shoulder.

I often forgot she came from a rich family. A very rich family. She did her best not to let that show, but her roommate had been all too eager to let me in on the secret.

Looking out the windshield, I saw Jianhong light up a cigarette as he leaned with dramatic nonchalance against the wall.

“Would you look at that,” I said.

Svea looked over and then made a spitting sound. “I can’t believe he’s ballsy enough to smoke right in front of us. Not even his father would let that slide.”

“He’d claim it’s for the mission, or some such nonsense.” Smoking wasn’t just frowned on in the Naturalism Sect, it was outright prohibited and came with the punishment of immediate demotion.

“I should start the video recording early and then ‘accidentally’ send it to the elder circle.”

I laughed. “That would just make things harder for us down the line.”

“Maybe.” She made a few more adjustments to her equipment, then started typing at the keyboard. “Isn’t your test coming up? After you’re a disciple, you’ll get your own coterie. Once you do, the first thing I’ll do is apply for a transfer. The sooner I’m out of Jianhong’s coterie the better.”

“Yeah, my test’s coming up,” I said. “But it’s the novice test, not the disciple test.”

“Right, forgot. Damn. You have a sea of energy and they’re still going to make you go through all the same hoops? Stupid.”

I shrugged, watching Jianhong blow smoke rings. “Rules are rules.”

“Yeah.” She unplugged wires from one piece of equipment and plugged them into another. “You want to put in a few extra study sessions?”

“Sure, why not.” Svea and her roommate had been tutoring me in True History and other bits of foundational knowledge that would be on the test I had to take.

She tapped a few buttons. “Mmkay, mics are ready, video feed is good.”

“Boss Ting better show up soon, or else I’m going to run out of energy.”

A few moments of silence passed.

“How’s your girl?” she asked. “She still on probation?”

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I felt an academic urge to smoke. But ever since taking the pills to remove my addiction, I could dismiss the urge with a thought. “Elena? She’s fine. She actually made a breakthrough and formed another sea. They ended her probation early and promoted her to senior disciple.”

“No shit! I didn’t hear that. Well, congratulations to her. You know, I still can’t believe you two actually fought and killed a bunch of Corpses back in the Third Earth. That shit’s crazy.”

“Yeah, pretty crazy.” I sighed. “I can’t tell you how nice it is to not be looking over my shoulder constantly. It’s all thanks to her.”

“You make sure to treat her right, hear me? She’s a real cutie. I’d ask her out myself if she wasn’t with you.”

I gave her a deadpan look. “I thought you already had a girlfriend.”

“One or two.” She grinned. “A third wouldn’t hurt.”

I caught a flash of motion out of the corner of my eye. “He’s here.”

A stocky man in a suit was approaching Jianhong, flanked by two tattooed thugs. Back in the Third Earth, I’d found that one of the easiest ways to identify what type of mobster I was dealing with was to assess their suit. The more expensive the suit, the more powerful the mobster. And from the cheap synthetic fabric and scuffed shoes, I could tell Boss Ting was neither very rich nor very powerful.

 Jianhong crushed his cigarette against the wall and then flicked it down into the crumpled newspaper advertisements and beverage cans beneath him.

“Go time,” Svea said. “Alrighty, starting the recording in three, two, one… we’re live.”

The mission was simple. The man in the suit was Boss Ting, a drug dealer who had been putting pressure on members of the local coteries, including ours, driving up prices on alchemical ingredients and making vague threats. There were even reports he was trying to blackmail some of the recruits and novices. Elder Hu Jingyi, who was in charge of our coterie, wanted hard evidence of the blackmail. If we got it, he could get approval to take overt action. So Jianhong had hatched this plan to set up a meeting, show up early with surveillance equipment, and catch Boss Ting in the act.

I was skeptical about the whole thing. Jianhong was the type of person who preferred flash over finesse, and I didn’t peg him as the kind of person who could glibly get a mob boss to spit out crucial information. But Elder Hu had taken the proposal to the elder circle, and it had been approved. Of course, it was little surprise to me, considering Jianhong was the beloved son of Kang Duan, the chief elder who oversaw the elder circle.

Svea turned a dial, allowing us to hear the conversation playing out a few yards away.

“... to see you, Boss Ting!” Jianhong said. “My man!” He took a step forward with his hand extended for a handshake, but one of the thugs reached out to block his path. He shrugged and stepped back.

“What was so important you had to talk about it in person, Kang?” Boss Ting said, craning his neck as he looked around the parking lot. His gaze lingered momentarily on the ‘empty’ parking space where we were parked, and my heart skipped a beat as I wondered if I’d accidentally dropped the invisibility cloak.

“Hey, hey!” Jianhong said loudly. “I’m a man of privacy! Plus, I got some juicy news for ya. Get this….”

As the conversation played out, I checked my sea of energy. Over the past several months, my regular routines of meditation and cultivation had increased its capacity significantly. Unfortunately, I’d already been drawing on it for several minutes while we waited for Boss Ting to show up.

“I’m at three-quarters,” I said.

“Come on, Jianhong,” Svea said. “Stop shooting the breeze and get down to business.”

Jianhong was bantering with Boss Ting, and while I had to admit he was making a fair attempt at steering the conversation in the direction we needed, he wasn’t succeeding.

“I thought you people didn’t smoke,” Boss Ting said. “Why were you smoking just now?”

“Huh?” Jianhong said. “Oh, uh. I mean, we generally don’t smoke. But it’s not like it’s a rule. My father—”

Inside the van, Svea cursed. “Moron. Now I have to cut that part out.” She hit a few buttons to remove the section about smoking.

“What if they ask about the missing footage?”

Svea shrugged. “‘Technical difficulties’ I guess. I can come up some tech jabber if I have to. Jianhong is gonna owe me.” The conversation went back and forth with little headway, and it was obvious Boss Ting was getting suspicious.

“I’m half empty,” I said.

“Remind me why there’s no plan B again,” Svea said.

“To quote Jianhong, ‘We don’t need no Plan B.’ He said if he couldn’t get what we needed in time, he’d cut things short and walk off.”

“You were a Peacekeeper for nearly a decade. Probably arrested more mooks than Jianhong has ever talked to. You should be out there taking point.”

“I’m the only Thermal cultivator in the West Airport coterie,” I noted, “and the cloak on the van is key to this whole operation.”

“True.”

We listened for a bit longer. “The conversation isn’t going anywhere,” Svea said.

“I’m down to a quarter in my sea.”

She looked over. “Are you going to end it?”

I clenched my jaw. If you completely drained your sea of energy down to the last drop, it made it a lot harder to fill it back up again. It wasn’t impossible, just difficult and time-consuming. And you also ran the risk of injuring yourself if you weren’t careful. Not to mention that draining myself would leave me completely out of options to deal with whatever fallout would result if our van popped into being right in the faces of three mobsters.

“It’s a rules violation if I uncloak the van in front of them, right?” I asked.

“Yeah. But it’ll be Jianhong’s fault if you do.”

Energy trickled out of me.

“What’s his dad like?”

“Huh?”

“Do you know anything about his father? Yeah, he’s a chief elder, but what kind of person is he?”

“I’m not really sure. I do know that Jianhong hardly ever gets in trouble for anything. Would Chief Elder Kang blame you for dropping the cloak early instead of holding his son responsible? Not sure.”

Shit. I was down to about one-tenth of my total energy reserve. I had to make a decision. Fast.

“Look, never mind,” we heard Jianhong say through the recording feed. Outside, he turned away from Boss Ting.

“Hold it,” Boss Ting said. “We’re not done talking.”

“Yeah, we are,” Jianhong said, throwing a middle finger at Boss Ting over his shoulder. Was this guy for real?

Boss Ting turned to look at the thug on his right, then tilted his jaw in Jianhong’s direction. The thug nodded and took a step forward.

“Down to five percent,” I said.

“This is going real bad real fast,” Svea said.

Suddenly, Jianhong let out a yelp and broke into a run. The two thugs gave chase while Boss Ting strolled after them.

I was almost out of energy, but within about two seconds, we would be out of Boss Ting’s line of sight, as well as his peripheral vision. Reaching under my coat, I pulled out my Spitter D4, keeping my finger on the wire release so it didn’t connect to my arm jack.

“I have a question, Svea. Do you know how to shoot?”

She grinned. “Give me that gun, Mr. Detective.”

Chapter 27 – Life Goes On

“Here, keep it on stun,” I said, tossing Svea the gun as I crawled over into the driver’s seat. She caught it, and the way she kept the wire release depressed was telling; she had obviously handled a Spitter before. “You’ve got about five seconds to throw your equipment back into that bag and get ready.”

“On it, boss,” she said, hastily scooping equipment from her workstation into a big black duffel bag on the floor of the van.

My energy was down to a fraction.

Zipping the bag, Svea pulled her fingers off the wire release, allowing the wires to snap into one of her arm jacks. I dropped the Thermal Ripple Cloak, grabbed the keys, and turned them. The van trembled as the turbines thrummed to life, lifting us about a foot off the surface of the garage. Caressing the accelerator, I sent the van creeping out of the parking spot. Boss Ting’s back was still to us, and Jianhong was about halfway down to the next level of the garage, the thugs chasing him.

“You want me in the back door, right?” Svea asked.

“Yeah. Make sure there’s something nearby to grab onto. Don’t want you falling out.”

“This ain’t my first time around the block, Mr. Detective.”

“Right. Get ready. I’ll be punching it in a moment.”

She pushed open the back doors of the van and locked them in place, then leaned up against the frame, bracing herself with her legs as she gripped the Spitter with both hands. From the way she held the weapon and kept her finger off the trigger, I could tell that she wasn’t just a grid monkey; she was also an experienced shooter.

I eased down on the acceleration pedal, and the van picked up speed. It wasn’t until we closed the distance about halfway to Boss Ting that he noticed the sound of the vehicle behind him. As soon as he started turning his head to look at us, I stepped down hard on the accelerator.

The van veered past him, and before he could react, Svea leveled the Spitter and pulled the trigger.

She hit him in the left thigh, and through the driver’s side mirror, I saw him topple forward, a look of shock on his face.

“Damn, good shot!” I exclaimed. Unfortunately, when using the stun function on a Spitter, even a few layers of clothing could dilute or entirely block the beam, resulting in a failure to render the target unconscious.

As we zoomed toward the thugs, she laughed and squeezed off a few more shots, two of which went wide. However, the third hit Boss Ting in the face as he was trying to struggle to his feet. He flopped back down, unconscious.

“Where’d you learn to shoot like that?”

“The arcade,” she said. “Monster Destruction 4.”

I grinned and shook my head. There was no way she’d learned to handle a real firearm by playing a video game; she had to have put in time at a civilian shooting range to develop this level of competence. I gripped the steering wheel firmly as we bore down on the thugs and Jianhong.

The thugs heard us approaching, and when they turned to face us, they got a clear view of Boss Ting lying on his face further back.

They immediately scrambled for handguns tucked into waistbands, and when we were only about ten yards away, they opened fire. Popping sounds echoed out in the parking garage, and I reflexively hunched down behind the steering wheel. However, the bullets plinked harmlessly off the windshield.

“We’re bulletproof?” I asked.

“You know it!”

Suddenly, a white beam of light pierced through the windshield, then another, zipping past my face so close I could feel the heat.

“Fuck!” Svea blurted, hunkering down. “I’m gonna kill him!”

Jianhong, the idiot, was shooting Sunflare Blasts at the thugs. And, by extension, us.

We tore past the thugs, and Svea let loose some more blue crackles of light. A thug dropped.

“Hold on to something!” I said. She grabbed a handle on the doorframe, and I tapped the decelerator and simultaneously turned the steering wheel, flipping us into a drift. It was a better drift than the one Jianhong had attempted, which was no surprise considering I’d trained in offensive driving back in the Peacekeeper’s Academy. As the back of the van loomed down on the shocked Jianhong, I shifted the turbines and stepped fully on the decelerator. The van lurched to a halt only two paces away from him.

Taking advantage of the momentum, Svea leaned out of the back and extended her hand to him. He reached forward, grabbed her arm, and as she pulled him into the van, I hit the accelerator and turned the wheel.

We heard popping sounds as the second thug opened fire again, and the turbines whined as we spun into another 180-degree turn. Now Svea had a clear line of sight on the thug, and she tapped the Spitter trigger repeatedly. All of her shots missed, but it was enough to send the thug scrambling for cover instead of shooting at us. Meanwhile, I sent the van at top speed around the corner.

Svea slammed the doors shut. Her teeth bared in rage, she grabbed Jianhong by the collar of his jacket.

“What the fuck was that?” she said. “You shot straight at us!”

“It-it was a m-mistake!” Jianhong blubbered. “I forgot that—”

“Fuck off.” She shoved him away from her, and his head thumped dully into the side of the van.

“Ow,” he muttered, reaching back to rub the back of his head.

Turning away from him, Svea crawled up to the front of the van and slid her long legs into the passenger’s seat next to me. Meanwhile, I headed toward the nearest exit.

“Hey,” Jianhong said, “where are we going? Boss Ting is still—”

“Mission’s over, kid,” I said. “We almost got out of there without revealing any cultivation techniques. Until you brilliantly used Sunflare Blast. What were you planning to do, kill them?”

Outside of combat initiated by the Black Corpses and the Counter-Cultivation department, the use of deadly force was prohibited in the Naturalism Sect.

Jaw jutting defensively, Jianhong said, “I wasn’t—”

“Stow it!” Svea said. “Like Wang Fan said, the mission’s over. Just be glad we made it out of there in one piece. Where to now, Mr. Detective?”

I flew out of the exit and into the sluggish aerial traffic lanes and scattered rain.

“We have to report this to Elder Hu and get further instructions,” I said, although I wasn’t too happy about the idea of sitting around waiting for the elder to show up. I hadn’t seen Elena in person for two weeks, and I didn’t want to be late.

“Call him? Send an encrypted message?”

Calling would be faster. But encrypted messages were safer. “Probably a message,” I said reluctantly. I really didn’t want to be late.

“Tom’s Tavern?” Svea suggested.

“Sure.”

**

Tom’s was one of our coterie’s main haunts, for a couple reasons. It was one of the rare non-smoking establishments in our area, and it was located on the fourteenth floor of an office building, which made it slightly more private than places that got foot traffic. Svea had her van, and Jianhong and some of the other coterie members had hoverscooters, so accessing it was never a problem.

Leaving the van on the parking platform outside, we hurried in. In addition to the main bar, the place had some tables and chairs, a wall of booths, two pool tables, and a few electronic game boxes. It catered to a younger crowd; the walls were covered with posters of famous rock singers and Japkor-Pop groups, and the decor was hip and modern. This early in the afternoon, the place was virtually empty, save for a couple of young men at the game boxes and a few regulars nursing drinks at the bar.

Tom, the owner, was a stocky fellow with a perpetual grin, and he was currently polishing glassware behind the bar. Looking over as we entered, he nodded in greeting.

“Hey Tom,” Svea called, “send over a snack tray and some water, will ya?”

“Sure thing.”

After piling into a booth, Svea powered up her mobile computer and sent a message to Elder Hu. Another benefit to Organic cultivation was that it could be used to get ongrid without a physical modem. As I’d learned, in ancient times before the War of Tribulation, it had been common to do gridwork without using wires. But those days were long gone for everyone except cultivators. Needless to say, some of the best grid monkeys in the Nine Heavens and Ten Earths practiced Organic cultivation. I thought briefly about Zhao Shenchuan, the grid monkey my sister Xiaoli had dated shortly before she was murdered. What if he was actually a cultivator? I’d seen him use a modem to get ongrid, but that could have just been a show. Questions about his relationship with my sister still popped into my head on almost a daily basis.

After Svea sent the message to Elder Hu, she and I played a few rounds of pool while Kang Jianhong went over to one of the game boxes, Monster Destruction 2, where he went back and forth between biting his nails and staring daggers at us. At one point, he approached to start a conversation, but Svea glared him away. All the while, I kept glancing at the clock, wondering if I should call ahead to let Elena know I was going to be late.

Thankfully, Elder Hu arrived about an hour later. He was of average height, with piercing eyes and wavy hair tied in a ponytail. His signature baseball cap and tattered clothing made it impossible to infer what he did for a living. The rumors ranged from him being a rich businessman who dressed down intentionally to a beggar who cared for stray cats.

I’d only interacted with him on a few occasions, and he’d always struck me as being reasonable, but at the same time, someone who wouldn’t bend the rules.

When he sat us down, pulled his cap off, and asked for an explanation, Jianhong immediately launched into a spirited and very one-sided version of events. Elder Hu stopped him a couple sentences in. “Recruit Wang. Novice Göransson. Please step over to the bar and wait for me to call you over. I’d like to have reports from you individually.”

Elder Hu spent about fifteen minutes with Jianhong, then dismissed him. Glowering at Svea and me, Jianhong stalked over to a side corridor where the restrooms and payphones were.

“Svea?” said Elder Hu.

She stepped over. A minute later, Jianhong emerged from the corridor and walked out onto the parking platform. He must have called for a ride using a payphone.

Svea was only with Elder Hu for about five minutes before she returned.

“I hit the main points and gave him the tapes. At this point I wish I hadn’t deleted that part about the smoking. Oh well. You’re up, Mr. Detective. I’ll give you a ride home when you’re done if you’d like.”

“That’d be great, Svea.”

I hurried over, slid into the booth, and said, “Elder Hu, please allow me to apologize for disturbing your evening.”

“It’s no bother, Recruit. Now, why don’t you tell me what happened, starting from the beginning.”

For years, Jakobe and I had been pulled into Sergeant Zhang’s office for everything from reports to reamings to accolades. I knew how to talk to a superior, so I went into a detailed and analytical explanation of the night’s misfortunes. It took me about ten minutes to get through it all. I left nothing out, not even the general gist of the frustrated banter between Svea and me while we waited in the cloaked van.

“I see,” Elder Hu said. “Thank you for being so forthright. Unfortunately, because of Kang Jianhong’s use of cultivation techniques in front of non-cultivators, I’m required to bring the matter to the elder circle.”

“I completely understand, Elder.”

“I can’t say what the result will be. However, the matter seems fairly cut-and-dry. Furthermore, you have footage of most of what occurred. Disciple Kang will receive discipline for his actions, with the only question being how quickly Chief Elder Kang will intervene….”

Corruption. In the end, whether it was the Glorious Peacekeepers or the Naturalism Sect, there didn’t seem to be a way to get rid of it. To the living, we owe respect; to the dead, we owe justice. That’s what Dad always said. Lately, I’d started wondering about that. Why didn’t we owe justice to the living as well? It was just a saying of Dad’s that I’d always liked, but did it contain a deeper truth about the Grand Kingdom?

Elder Hu must have seen the flicker of frustration in my eyes. He smiled faintly. “Fear not, Recruit Wang. The truth is that you couldn’t have handled yourself any better than you did. Chief Elder Kang is a proud man who shields his son from harm. But he’s also a good man. You won’t suffer any ill consequences from tonight.”

“Thank you, Elder. Is there anything else I should do?”

“No. You have an upcoming test, so make sure you’re prepared. It’s obvious that Disciple Kang doesn’t like you, and I’m sure he’ll do everything possible to unnerve you or undermine your chances of success. Just keep your cool, and you’ll do fine.”

“Yes, Elder.”

He crawled out of the booth. “I have other matters to attend to. Take care.”

Putting his cap back on, he left.

I breathed a sigh of relief. There was still plenty of time to meet Elena. I headed over and leaned up against the bar next to Svea.

“Well?” she asked.

I made a ‘no idea’ gesture. “We’ll see.”

“Jianhong screwed up,” she said. “In the end, nothing will happen to him. But I don’t see us getting in trouble. Come on, I’ll give you a ride.”

“Thanks.”

**

After arriving in the Fourth Earth and making contact with the cultivators here, Jakobe, Elena, and I had gone through a series of meetings and conversations, primarily with Elders Hu, Guo, and Qing of the elder circle. In the end, they agreed to give us sanctuary after we swore all the required oaths. Of course, I wasn’t simply going to go with the flow. I’d escaped the Third Earth with a packet of clues about Xiaoli’s murder and a sea of energy inside me that I wanted gone. I had plenty of work cut out for me.

After the swearing of oaths, we’d been assigned to different coteries. As we’d found out, coteries were generally named for the district they were in, the street they operated near, or a local landmark.

“Isn’t that a bit of a risk?” I’d asked. “What if someone gets captured?”

“It’s never been a problem,” was the answer I got from Elder Hu.

Jakobe was in the Hilton coterie, where he was making good progress. In fact, he was on the verge of taking the test and getting approval to develop his sea of energy. Unlike me, he seemed happy to move on with his life and leave his Peacekeeper days behind him.

I was in the West Airport coterie, which was so-named because it operated in the West Airport district, a neighborhood with more skyrises than I was used to seeing in the residential parts of the Third Earth. The Third Earth only had five Ring Roads, while the Fourth Earth had a full seven. It was also more recently built, yet seemed even more crowded than the Third and in worse repair.

I vaguely remember the Third and Fourth Heavens having West Airport districts as well and had never thought much about why those areas bore the name. The explanation had come as a shock.

“Before the war,” Svea had explained, “people had things called ‘airplanes’ that flew through the sky with hundreds of people in them.”

“Like hovercars?” I’d asked.

“Yeah, but different. A lot faster and bigger. And they would take off and land from places called airports. Back in the old world, before the Climb, this area had one of those airports. Or at least, this area down on the surface.”

“And what about ‘hilton?’”

“Nobody’s sure about that one. There’s a story that’s been floating around for years that there were two rival gunslingers, one named Hilton, the other Marriott, and that they killed each other in a duel. But other people say Marriott and Hilton were rival automotive corporations in the old world. Who knows that the truth is.”

Jakobe and I had been assigned a cramped two-room apartment in a high-rise in the Airport Benevolence complex, which was about halfway between the main meeting locations for our two coteries. The place was mostly for low-income citizens, except two buildings on either end with glitzy penthouse suites. Rich and famous citizens were much less common this far away from the city center.

Svea stopped at the main entrance. “Next meeting is on Thursday,” she said. “You gonna need a ride?”

“Nah, I’ll walk.”

“Wanna do that study session some time tomorrow?”

“Sure. I’ll call in the morning to coordinate. See ya.”

“Bye.”

As I stepped out of the van, I reached into my coat and pulled out the same metallic glasses Elena had given me back in the Grand Kingdom Highrise when we first met. I had a short beard now, and my hair was longer, so the addition of the glasses made me a completely different person. While my prosthetic was somewhat unique, of the hundreds of millions of people in the Fourth Earth, I wasn’t the only one with a three-finger forearm replacement. The Curse usually affected the extremities first, often the pinkie and ring finger, the little toes, or ears and noses. And given that the only surefire way to deal with the Curse was amputation, those were the places most often seen replaced by prosthetics.

Besides, I usually kept my hand hidden under a glove. For the time being, I wasn’t particularly worried about being spotted by any Black Corpses or Counter-Cultivation agents.

This place didn’t have an actual gate, much less a gate guard. I entered the complex, kicking aside trash as I walked along, pondering the day’s events.

Anger and frustration were slowly building in me. Elena had made the Naturalism Sect out to be a group of altruistic heroes. But dealing with Kang Jianhong made it evident that they were ordinary humans, with all the weaknesses and vices that came with the territory. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a rat scuttle out from under one of the artificial shrubberies and into a drainage grate. Rats seemed a lot more common here, and though I didn’t love them, at least there seemed to be fewer roaches.

I passed the crumbling, decades-dry ornamental pond that separated the two primary subsections of the complex and turned right toward building 8.

I had learned a lot by going to cultivator meetings, but I still didn’t trust everything they taught me. They claimed that it wasn’t just the Black Corpses who were cultivators. They said that other people in the government practiced cultivation, even board members of Sinotech. I hadn’t seen any evidence, though—just claims and speculation.

After the years of Jakobe telling me things I didn’t want to hear, but that later proved to be true, I wasn’t going to jump the gun and cry “conspiracy theory.” But I still wanted proof. After all, there were things Jakobe had long believed that also turned out to be false. For instance, he had often said that the Hellscape wasn’t real, only to learn that it was. We’d even been shown photographic and video evidence of it.

Trust the system, Dad had always said. But if the system was a lie, then what?

I felt less sure than ever of who to trust. At least back with the Glorious Peacekeepers, I knew how to navigate the corruption and do my best to fight for justice. But here in the Fourth Earth, I felt like a square peg in a round hole, struggling just to fit in.  

Worse, I had no choice but to continue practicing cultivation. Without frequent meditation, one’s sea of energy would slowly run dry, and leaving it empty was as difficult as it was for a starving person to refuse to eat while sitting in a kitchen full of food. Honestly, it seemed like just as much an addiction as cigarettes were, if not worse. I kept that opinion to myself, though.

I knew that it was possible to destroy a sea of energy, but recruits didn’t have access to information about how to do that. I wasn’t even sure if full disciples would be given that knowledge. And I couldn’t very well ask Elena about it. She seemed thrilled that I was making progress and even inching toward another breakthrough.

It was just starting to rain in earnest as I neared the corner store opposite my building. I nearly passed it, then stopped in my tracks.

Almost forgot. Promised Mrs. Lai to get some milk.

Mrs. Lai was a kindly old woman who lived on our floor but rarely left her apartment due to being afflicted with the Heavenly Curse. Because of her condition, she relied on a lot of help from family and friends. Considering my own mother was afflicted, I knew how difficult her life was and didn’t hesitate to help out whenever possible. Ducking into the store, I picked up a jug of synthetic soybean milk, then dashed through the rain to the foyer of my building, where I had to wait for the crowded elevator to empty twice before I managed to squeeze inside. I scrunched my nose shut. It smelled faintly of vomit and urine, an aroma that had lingered even after I personally doused it with bleach late one night. I ended up in the front of the elevator, so I hit the various buttons people called out for, including mine, the thirty-ninth floor. More than one required a good smack before lighting up.

The elevator dinged its way toward the top floor, slowly emptying along the way. I still almost couldn’t believe a building this large only had one elevator serving it. And half the time, it was broken, forcing everyone to climb up and down the stairs. It was bad enough for Jakobe and me on the thirty-ninth, let alone the poor people who lived above us.

When it reached my floor, I stepped out and stamped my foot, hoping the sound-activated lights would flicker on in response. They didn’t. The lights had stopped working two days before, and the building maintenance workers hadn’t been by to fix them. As the door shut behind me, everything turned dark, the only light coming from the red glow of the ‘exit’ signs.

Apparently having heard the sound of me stomping my foot, the occupant of unit 3902 opened the door a crack, spilling some light into the corridor.

“It’s just me, Mrs. Lai,” I said.

“I was worried you’d forgotten about me,” she said, her voice scratchy and hoarse. She had a blanket wrapped around her, with the fingers of one hand visible, covered with the crusty lesions typical of early-stage Heavenly Curse.

“I’d never forget about you,” I said, offering her the jug of milk, handle facing her so I didn’t risk touching her skin. “Just got held up at work, that’s all.”

She accepted the milk with her other hand, the one that didn’t have any lesions. “You’re truly a gift from the Lord,” she said with a smile.

“Do you need anything else?”

“Not today. Have a good evening, my boy.” She closed the door.

Walking to my own door, I pulled out my key and slid it into the lock. As was common among cultivators, our apartment door had a spell formation that made it impossible to unlock with divine sense. I turned the key and pushed the door open.

Elena was sitting on the couch with Jakobe.

“You’re just on time!” she said, standing up.

“Sorry. Mission turned into a disaster. I thought I was going to be late.”

She stepped forward and hugged me. “I want to hear all about it.”

Chapter 28 – Life Isn’t the Movies

“The story isn’t that exciting,” I said.

“You always say that,” Elena replied as she pushed away from me gently and grabbed her coat off the rack. She’d taken to wearing her hair in a bun nowadays, which made it easier to throw a voluminous hood over her head and hide her facial features. Her knee-length coat had just such a hood built into it, and she combined it with baggy pants and nondescript sneakers. Along with a pair of glasses similar to mine to hide her stunning green eyes, she didn’t stand out from the crowd the way she usually would have.

Things were different here in the Fourth Earth. It wasn’t the ethnic melting pot that the Third Earth was. The vast majority of the population was Han, and in fact, Elena was the only minority in her coterie. Svea was the only one in mine, and while Jakobe’s coterie had a Japkor member, according to him, you’d never know she wasn’t Han unless you heard her name or she told you.

One thing that helped was that many Fourthers preferred to wear face coverings in public. Sometimes they were fashionable, but more often than not, they were blue or yellow surgical masks, the disposable kind. Svea and her roommate had mentioned a few common theories about why they were so prevalent, ranging from the belief that wind stations spread the Curse in the air to speculation that a rise in building renovations had caused increased problems with dust.

“Where you two going?” Jakobe asked as he lounged on the couch in a pair of faux-silk pajamas, legs crossed, gently bobbing his fur-slippered foot. He had also changed his appearance; his head was as shiny as a bowling ball and he had a neatly-trimmed goatee.

“Did you have somewhere in mind?” I asked Elena.

“Yeah,” she smiled. Pulling the hood up, she put on her glasses, which were reflective and yellow. “It’s a surprise. Ready?”

“Hold on.” Slipping out of my coat, I unstrapped my shoulder holster and tossed it and my Spitter onto the bench by the door. Even though enforcement of gun laws became laxer the closer one got to the Dark Earths, it still wasn’t common for ordinary citizens to pack heat at the local mall. “Won’t be needing that on a date. Okay, let’s go.”

“Don’t come back too early,” Jakobe said with a crooked smile.

As I held the door for Elena, I looked back at him and asked, “You have plans?”

“I got a date too.”

“Oh?” I said. “Same girl as last weekend?” Not likely. He rarely stuck with a girl for more than a date or two.

“Nope. I’m having drinks with Bunny later.”

Elena slowly turned around. “Bunny? Bunny who?”

“Bunny Bai.”

“My roommate?”

“I figured if we click, the four of us could go on a double date.”

I wanted to facepalm. Jakobe’s habit of dating a different girl nearly every week hadn’t done much to impress Elena. Now he was going out with her roommate?

“Jakobe,” Elena said, “Bunny is a really nice girl. You’d better not be messing with her.”

He cocked his head slightly. “I would never.”

She gave a very faint harrumph. “Just remember, she and I talk about everything together. She’s going to tell me all the details of what happens. All of them.”

“Er, okay.”

She grabbed my arm. “Come on, Wang Fan, let’s go.”

I gave Jakobe a wry grimace and let the door close behind me. The lock clicked shut automatically as we walked over to the elevator. It was just as crowded going down as it had been coming up.

Once out in the rain, Elena said, “Come on, this way,” and we headed out of the Airport Benevolence complex and down the street. A minute or two later, she asked, “Is that how Jakobe was back in the Third Earth?”

“A ladies’ man?” I said. “Yeah. But I think there’s more to it than that. He’s picky. It’s like he’s looking for something very particular.”

She snorted.

“Don’t worry,” I added. “I’ll have a word with him. So, where are we going?”

“Bunny took me to an amazing new mall the other day. They have an ice skating rink.”

“Ice-skating? I’ve never tried that before.”

“You’re going to love it.”

We took the zont-rail up a stop, chatting about trivial things along the way. Although it was pleasant, the entire time, I felt a faint anxiety lurking inside me. Something seemed off. In the three months since we’d arrived in the Fourth Earth, we’d only been on five dates. The last one, exactly two weeks ago, had ended very awkwardly. I’d finally tried to kiss her, and she had turned away from me in rejection.

I hadn’t seen her since. We’d talked on the phone a few times, but she hadn’t offered any explanation, and I felt too embarrassed to ask. Jakobe gave me advice about it, but none of it seemed right. He and I had very different ways of handling relationships.

Now here we were, heading to dinner and ice skating, still not having discussed the previous incident. I wondered if she intended to just pretend it hadn’t happened, or if she was planning to talk about it when we sat down to dinner.

I glanced up at the signage as we entered and was confused by the Sinese characters, which commonly meant “foe” or “rival.” Once inside, though, I realized what kind of shopping center it was and how the characters in the name should be interpreted. It was a dating mall that catered to couples. The place was packed with restaurants, boutiques, and entertainment facilities such as the ice skating rink and a movie theater. It was all set up to be a perfect date destination. There was a lot of pink. And hearts everywhere. As for the name, I realized it was a term I’d also heard occasionally when my parents listened to traditional operas, which meant ‘destined lover.’ So, Elena had brought me to the Destined Lovers’ Shopping Mall.

From the crowd, it seemed the target age was late teens. I felt a bit out of place. Elena, on the other hand, seemed very excited. She tugged me to the ice skating rink, and I spent the next hour and a half trying not to look like a complete fool while she held my hands and twirled around me. Every time she let go, I ended up either on my ass or my knees. By the time I unstrapped the skates, I could tell I was going to have some nasty bruises the next day, and I was half-convinced I’d broken my wrist. A cultivator with a single sea of energy was tougher than an average human but wasn’t superhuman.

Next came shopping. I managed to keep my eyes from glazing over as she bought me two new outfits. The first was a matte black poncho with fluorescent green Eurosynth writing on it and a matching hat. These things were all the rage now, and if I had to guess, just about half of the population under the age of twenty had one. The second outfit was a variation on the first, the primary color being aqua, with the Eurosynth being in black.

“Please toss your old coat,” she said. “You’ve been wearing that since the safehouse by Glee City.”

I obliged, saying goodbye to the crummy old-fashioned coat. I’d started to take a liking to it but had to admit it was getting a bit threadbare. I guess the new coat was a good thing. Now I would blend in on the street a bit more.

“You hungry?” she asked. “There’s an awesome hotpot place on the fourth floor.”

 “Sounds great.”

She seemed to be having a wonderful time, but to me, things were turning more and more strange. What was going on? Was she really going to just pretend that I hadn’t gone in for that kiss?

We chatted as we ate, mostly about movies and books, until we ordered our last bottle of beer and threw in some thin rice noodles to end the meal.

As I emptied the bottle into our glasses, I couldn’t take it any longer. “Elena, what’s going on?”

“What do you mean?”

“Our last date. It… didn’t end very well. Then we didn’t see each other for weeks.”

She reached into the pot and stirred the noodles on her side. “It didn’t end that badly.”

I stirred my side. “If that’s how you feel, then okay. I just don’t understand. Everything before that was fine. Things seemed great.”

“They were. They are.” She pulled out some of the noodles and placed them into her bowl.

“But…?” I prompted.

“But nothing. Just. I’m worried we’re going too fast.”

Too fast? It felt to me like things were proceeding in slow motion. “If that’s how you feel, we can slow down. There’s no rush. I’m sorry if I was putting pressure on you.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong at all.” She slurped up some noodles, then continued, “It’s just that the way we met isn’t exactly normal, right?”

“That’s true.” I raised my glass. “To meetings that aren’t normal.”

She laughed. “To abnormal meetings.”

We drank.

“We all know what happens in the movies,” she went on. “The girl meets the guy, they go through a crazy adventure, then kiss in the end. But what happens in the sequel? They break up. It happens every time!”

Elena, life isn’t the movies, I wanted to say. Besides, it didn’t happen every time. But now that she was finally speaking her mind, I wasn’t going to turn the conversation into an argument. I wanted things to go back to normal, not get into a debate.

“That’s a fair point,” I said. “Relationships should be built on something solid. And just getting through a dramatic situation probably doesn’t count.”

She looked up with the warmest smile I’d seen the entire night. “You do understand!”

To be honest, I didn’t. Maybe I would after I thought about it some, though. I raised my glass again. “To building on something solid.”

“Bottoms up!”

We drained our glasses and finished our hotpot. When I saw the tab, I nearly winced. The elder circle had arranged a job for me, but bussing tables didn’t bring anything close to the salary of a homicide detective. I had to watch my spending, which meant that I would have to stick to protein strips and instant noodles for the rest of the week to make up for this hotpot meal.

She held my hand the entire way back, and though I still felt confused, I was happy that the awkward tension had been defused.

I walked her to her apartment complex, where we parted ways at the main gate with a long embrace. No kiss, obviously.

Her scent lingered in my nostrils as I headed back toward the zont-rail station. I walked down a block, mulling over the implications of the evening’s conversation, then turned a corner onto a side street that led to the station. Two steps down the sidewalk, I looked up to see that three burly fellows in leather jackets had backed a young teenage couple into the recessed entryway of one of the apartment buildings. As I neared, I could hear one of the thugs speaking.

“Just hand over your ID card and cash, bud. Don’t try to play the hero.”

Another thug laughed and reached out to grab the young lady.

“Hey!” I said sharply, and all five people looked over at me. I might not be an officer of the law anymore, but that didn’t mean I would stand by while petty criminals mugged a poor young couple. “Get lost before I call the Peacekeepers.”

The thug nearest me, who had a dented and scuffed prosthetic right arm, turned and took a step in my direction. “Who the fuck are you?”

As I continued to walk toward them, the thug reached into his pocket, pulled out a knife, and flipped it open. Annoyed, I stopped a single pace from him.

“I’m just an ordinary citizen,” I said. “But I’m not going to let you break the law and hurt people.”

“Oh yeah?” he replied, extending the knife threateningly. “And what do you think you’re going to do about—”

Moving faster than he could react, I stepped forward and grabbed him behind the elbow of his prosthetic arm with one hand, while shoving my opposite forearm against his. His arm snapped at the elbow, causing a shower of sparks and lubrication fluid. As he shrieked in shock, I slipped my foot behind his leg and shoved hard, sending him slamming into the sidewalk.

Kicking his knife away, I stepped forward to deal with the next two thugs, but they immediately turned and ran away down the street.

I looked back as the thug with the broken prosthetic arm scrambled to his feet and took off in the opposite direction, spitting curses under his breath.

I turned to the teen couple. “You two okay?”

“Yeah, mister,” the boy said. “Thanks.”

“Be careful out here,” I replied. “Might want to look into getting some pepper spray or a civilian Spitter.”

“Sure.”

I continued on to the station. As thoughts of the scuffle faded away, I resumed pondering the situation with Elena.

In the train, I lowered myself onto a grimy plastic seat and leaned back against the window. Was she right? Was our relationship a sham? Did we even have a relationship? I’d been attracted to Han women my whole life and had never paid much attention to ethnic minorities. Plus, I’d started to develop feelings for her before I knew anything about her. But wasn’t that how relationships usually started? With physical attraction? I tried to consider the matter from different angles, but by the time I reached my stop, I hadn’t put my thoughts into any better shape than before. If anything, I felt more baffled.

I tried to shove my hands into my coat pockets, except I was wearing a poncho with no pockets. Feeling very silly having edgy Eurosynth writing emblazoned all over me, I stepped out of the train and joined the flow of foot traffic up to the street. It was late, and a steady rain fell, forcing me to tug my hat down a bit tighter.

About halfway to the Airport Benevolence complex, I realized I was walking past an orgplant, its gunmetal blue surface covered with a faint mist from the pelting rain.

All of a sudden, my thoughts shifted from Elena to Xiaoli. One of the first things I’d done after settling in my new apartment three months ago was to take out the envelope I’d recovered at her apartment and spread all the contents out on the bed. Then I studied each one in detail.

Xiaoli had obviously been collecting news articles, interviews, pictures, and other things related to orgplants and Cross-Level Control, the Peacekeeper department that monitored and controlled passage between the various Heavens and Earths. Based on the map that was part of the set of clues, I could tell Xiaoli had been mapping orgplant locations in the Third Earth. And from notes she had scrawled onto various articles and printouts, I knew she had been looking into shipping companies that operated between the Fourth Heaven and the Third Earth. But why? Strangest of all was a clipping of an article from the Third Earth Times featuring an interview with an officer from Cross-Level control, with one paragraph circled in red marker, with the words THIS IS IT written next to it.

According to Officer Shu Qige, while Red Star is often the choice for new recruits and grizzled veterans, most fashionable Peacekeepers prefer Luzhou.

“It just tastes better,” said Officer Shu. “Last time my buddies from Qin City came through, we knocked out four bottles between the three of us!”

The article was a fluff piece about what types of baijiu different Peacekeeper departments tended to prefer. So what was so important about that line? Was it the brand of baijiu? Or was it that Officer Shu had friends in Qin City, which was the biggest prison in the Fourth Heaven? I didn’t know what to make of it.

What were you wrapped up in, sis?

It had occurred to me to ask Elena about orgplants, but we hardly saw each other outside of the handful of dates we’d gone on, and a date didn’t seem like the right time to bring up my dead sister. I’d asked Charlotte about the situation, considering she worked in Cross-Level Control, but she’d been as mystified as me. Eventually I bought a cheap corkboard to pin all the evidence onto. I reviewed it as often as possible, usually daily, hoping something would pop out that I hadn’t noticed before.

It wasn’t the first time I’d walked past this hulking blue orgplant, but I’d never actually looked closely at it. Like all such facilities, the place was surrounded by a ten-foot-tall bonecrete wall topped with razor-wire. It was squeezed between two high-rises, each of them part of a different apartment complex. As I walked past the access pathway formed by the orgplant wall and one of the complexes, I paused for a moment and then, on an impulse driven by curiosity, stepped off the street. After all, now that I thought about it, I’d never taken the time to look at an orgplant up close. The pathway was barely wide enough for two people to walk through shoulder-to-shoulder and was choked with so much trash I couldn’t see the ground beneath my feet. Keeping my nose wrinkled shut, I picked my way through it, looking up at the orgplant as I did. A cockroach scuttled out, and I crushed it with cold disgust.

I honestly had no idea what I was doing. Now that I thought about it, of all of the various cases I’d worked in the Third Earth, not a single one ever involved an orgplant. I’d been in just about every structure you could imagine in the Nine Heavens and Ten Earths, from bonecrete factories to zoos. But never an orgplant. In fact, I’d never talked to a single person who worked in them.

What were they like inside? What did they do there?

They were rarely mentioned in the news and never talked about at school, and while my understanding was that they were waste-processing facilities, I didn’t remember where I’d learned that. Jakobe didn’t have any insights either, and I hadn’t yet reached the point of wanting to broach the subject with my new friends in the West Airport coterie.

When I was about fifty feet from the opposite end of the pathway, the thud of music reached my ears. Someone was playing very loud music on the other side of the wall; perhaps it was a bar or club.

Suddenly, I heard the crash of glass from somewhere above me, then the clang of footsteps on metal. Looking up, I saw someone running down the fire escape above.

“This way!” I heard someone shout and then additional clanking as more people climbed onto the fire escape and started chasing the first person down.

“Get back here, our deal isn’t done yet!” came another voice.

“Fuck you!” the first person shouted, vaulting over the metal rail and dropping two stories down to land in a crouch about fifteen feet in front of me. As he rose to his feet, revealing his face to me, my jaw dropped.

Kang Jianhong.

What the hell was he doing here?

He burst into motion, running toward me at a full sprint, barely glancing at my face. Of course, I had my mirrored glasses on and was wearing the new outfit Elena had picked for me. Apparently, he didn’t recognize me.

I flattened myself against the wall as he neared.

“Out of my way!” he growled, and then he was past.

I looked at him, running away down the narrow pathway, and then glanced back up at the fire escape. The sounds of boots on metal clanked as the other figures ran down to the bottom level and then leaped down onto the trash-littered pathway.

I recognized their long uniform coats immediately. They were similar to my old Homicide department jacket, but with slightly different shoulders and an extra pleat on the front.

Counter-Cultivation department.

The officer in the lead, a burly man with a prosthetic eye and a bent nose, pulled out an NZ-85G.2 semi-automatic pistol and took a shooting stance.

Shit.

The long access pathway gave Jianhong virtually no options for evasive maneuvering; he couldn’t have been an easier target for the officer if he had a red circle painted on his back. And I was too far away to do anything.

Jianhong spun, sending a Sunflare Blast sizzling toward the officers. The shot went wide, and the officer opened fire but missed, thanks to the distraction of the blast.

Spitting a curse, Jianhong continued to scramble toward the end of the alley. Meanwhile, I kept myself pressed back into the wall as far as I could go as the officer steadied his gun and pulled the trigger again.

Three popping sounds rang out, and Jianhong dropped.

Keeping his NZ-85G.2 trained on Jianhong, the burly officer started walking forward through the trash.

“Stay right where you are, Citizen,” he said as he passed me.

I nodded curtly. Suddenly I thought back to that alley in the Third Heaven where I’d taken down two Peacekeepers. Should I try the same thing here? The difference was that those two officers had been rookie beat cops, and these were Counter-Cultivation agents. Not exactly elite Black Corpses, but still, they were no amateurs. Furthermore, they had special training in dealing with cultivators.

Beyond that, this burly fellow looked like he had seen more than a few street brawls in his time. I wasn’t even sure if the added physical strength provided by my cultivation would give me the edge I would need to overpower him.

That said, if Jianhong was still alive, I couldn’t let them take him in. Jianhong was scum as far as I was concerned, but for the moment, we were allies. Besides, he knew too much about me. Were he to be arrested, and he talked, it could put me, Jakobe, and Elena in immense danger.

The burly officer’s partner was a middle-aged woman with a square jaw and hard eyes. She had her weapon drawn as well, a Spitter D4 just like mine. If only I hadn’t left mine back in my apartment.

Taking a few steps forward, she stopped about two paces away from me. “What are you doing here, Citizen?”

“Cutting through, Officer. My apartment’s in that direction.” I gave a vague wave of my hand.

She nodded. “Carry on.”

“Yes ma’am.”

She walked past me, and I made my move. I pounced, my arm sliding around her neck like a python and locking onto my opposing bicep. She tried to let out a shriek, but it came out as nothing but a muffled wheeze as I secured the chokehold in place.

I could tell she had some training in grappling, as she made a valiant effort to pry herself out of my grip. But I had a strength that ordinary people didn’t have. She kicked and flailed for a few seconds, then went slack. Thankfully, the pulsing music provided enough cover that her partner didn’t pick up on her struggle.

Lowering her to the ground, I grabbed her Spitter and slid my thumb to set it to stun.

Shit.

It was a custom model with no stun setting. I hesitated briefly. Theoretically, I could just shoot the other officer in the back of the head. He’d be dead before he knew what happened. I shook my head. No, he hadn’t done anything even remotely threatening to me personally, so I wasn’t going to murder him in cold blood. I removed the live wires, took out the spares for good measure, and then chucked the gun a few feet away into a pile of trash. The wires I stuffed into my pants pocket; it never hurt to have extras.

“Jiang!” the other officer said over his shoulder. “He’s still breathing. Get a paliprox patch ready.”

As I’d learned recently in my studies, paliprox was a drug that could temporarily cut off a cultivator from their sea of energy. It was primarily put into medical patches but could also be added to liquids or gases. There was even a version that could render the cultivator unconscious in seconds, leaving them in a state of suspended animation for as long as the drug was administered, usually by IV. It was primarily used by Counter-Cultivation and the Black Corpses and was the same drug that Boss Gorshkov had used on Elena to incapacitate her. As for how a two-bit crook like him had ended up with a top-secret drug, I could only assume that the Corpses provided it to him.

The burly officer was about twenty feet away from me. I could charge him, but if he turned, either by chance or because he heard me, I might end up running smack dab into a hail of bullets.

I quickly assessed my sea of energy. It was still dangerously low, as I hadn’t had any time for meditation. But there was enough to last for a short time. I had to take the risk. Tapping into it, I threw a Thermal Ripple Cloak over myself.

I acted not a moment too soon. The burly officer turned, and when he caught sight of his partner on a heap, he muttered a curse and hurried in her direction.

Secure in my invisibility, I lurked to the side as he approached.

“Jiang? What happened?” The burly officer looked up and down the alley, then holstered his NZ-85G.2 and knelt next to his partner.

When he reached down to feel for her pulse, I jumped on him, sliding my hand around his neck to try to choke him out.

Before I could even connect my hand to my bicep, he reached up and grabbed my arm with both hands. The moment he did, I knew I’d made a critical mistake. From the painful pressure exerted by his fingers, I could tell they weren’t made of flesh and blood. Both of his arms were bonemetal prosthetics.

I could just barely hear the whine of their internal mechanisms as the officer used the immense strength they provided to hurl me over his shoulder.

I smacked hard into the opposite wall, dropping awkwardly onto my neck and shoulder. At exactly the same moment, my sea of energy went completely dry, causing a spasm of pain to ripple through me as my Thermal Ripple Cloak dropped.

“Motherfucker!” the officer growled, pulling his arm back and punching out.

I just managed to twist out of the way, and his hand slammed into the wall, smashing a huge chunk out of it and sending bonecrete fragments spraying everywhere. I was in a very awkward position, but I saw an opportunity. Ignoring the pain in my forearms from where he’d grabbed me, I latched onto his wrist, then whipped my legs around his neck and locked them. He jerked back in an attempt to escape, but I had him. He hit me with his free arm, and I felt piercing pain in my side, but I kept exerting pressure. Seconds ticked by. His trapped prosthetic arm whined, but I refused to release my grip. He struggled, continuing to strike my side, obviously aiming for my kidney but hitting the wrong spot.

Then he went unconscious.

Shit, I thought as I unwrapped my legs and crawled to my feet. That was too close. Cradling my side where he’d struck me, I looked down at the unconscious officers. I needed to get out of here. Fast.

I turned toward Jianhong, but then, struck by a sudden thought, I reached into the female officer’s coat and fumbled around. A moment later, I pulled out a black packet with the word paliprox printed on it.

Tucking it into my pocket, I hurried over to Jianhong and scanned him with divine sense. He was alive. He had been shot two times, and one bullet was still lodged somewhere in his shoulder.

Scooping him up, I hurried toward the end of the access way.

Chapter 29 – The Kitchen at Midnight

We were in the suburbs of the Fourth Earth, but this area was a main thoroughfare with plenty of skyrises and businesses. Every other block was a mall of some sort, and the sidewalks were packed with pedestrians. The only upside to the situation was that it had started raining, resulting in most people huddling under umbrellas and hats, or into the hoods built into their garments. People were keeping their eyes to themselves, at least I hoped they were. Hunching over to protect Jianhong from the rain as much as possible, I hurried into the crowd, walked down to the intersection, and crossed the street. Ducking into an alley, I went around a corner and found a payphone booth.

Had anyone noticed me? I had no way of knowing.

Cramming into the phone booth along with Jianhong, I slid the door shut, swiped the fake ID card I’d been assigned, and punched in Svea’s number. As the phone rang, I scanned Jianhong again with divine sense, hoping to find a Pure Cloud Pill. Every disciple and novice in the coterie had such a pill for emergency use, and disciples usually had spares. Unfortunately, Jianhong clearly hadn’t brought his with him.

“Come on, come on,” I muttered as the booth began to fog up.

Three rings later, a male voice answered. “Tao’s Dazzling Dumpling Domain. What’s your poison?”

It was Tao Heng, Svea’s roommate.

“Is Svea there?” I asked.

“Who’s this?”

“Me. The new guy.” Cultivator rules were strict regarding phone conversations, and we generally avoided using real names when discussing sect matters.

“Hold on, buddy,” Tao Heng said, and I heard him cup his hand over the receiver. “Svea, it’s your new boyfriend!”

Tao Heng was a joker, and sometimes it made me want to smack him in the face. I had the feeling Elena wouldn’t think it was funny to hear someone calling me Svea’s boyfriend.

A moment later, Svea picked up. “Hey, Mr. Detective. I thought you were going to call tomorrow.”

“I was on my way home when a dog bit my friend.” There weren’t a lot of set code words for phone conversations. We were just supposed to be as vague as possible in case someone was listening in. But “dog bite” was one of the prescribed phrases used to describe a violent interaction with the Corpses or Counter-Cultivation.

“Shit. Who got bit?”

“Our friend with the scraggly mustache. I’ve got him right here. Could use a lift ASAP.”

“Where are you?”

I wiped a circle clear on the fogged-up phone booth and checked to see what was directly across the street. “Auntie Ying’s Wine Shop. 409th Street.”

“Got it. Be there in five to seven. Should I bring a pill?”

“Yeah.”

I hung up and tried to keep my heart from pounding out of my throat.

Those two Counter-Cultivation agents wouldn’t be out for long. And once they got back to their radio, it was likely they’d lock down the entire area and call in every patrol officer in the precinct to canvas it.

I took time to study Jianhong a bit more carefully with divine sense. One of the bullets had pierced his lung and gone out the other side, but the second was lodged in a mass of shattered bone in his shoulder. He was bleeding, and he had a collapsed lung, but he wasn’t hurt so badly that I was worried he would bleed out before Svea arrived. I’d suffered similar gunshot wounds at the hands of a Black Corpse and knew how easily a Pure Cloud Pill could fix the damage.

Putting pressure on the wounds as best I could to staunch the flow of blood, I let the minutes tick by, occasionally wiping some of the condensation off the side of the booth to peer out. My body was really starting to protest. My side hurt. My forearms ached. On top of it all, my knees and wrists twinged thanks to that damn skating rink.

Before long, I saw a red van cruise past on the other side of the street, then circle around and pull up near the phone booth.

Hauling Jianhong up, I kneed the door open, immediately regretting it thanks to the ice skating bruises. As I stepped across the sidewalk, the van’s back doors opened, and I saw Tao Heng, a pudgy young man with plump, pimply cheeks, clad in camouflage cargo pants and a T-shirt for a band called A Box of Fourther Eyeballs.

“Nice outfit,” he said, eyeing my poncho. Reaching out for Jianhong, he continued, “I got him. You get up front.”

I passed Jianhong to him and hurried around to the passenger seat.

As I closed the door, Svea tapped the accelerator and eased the van up to the highest lane of traffic possible.

“Is he gonna be alright?” she asked.

“Should be.” I looked back. “But there’s still a bullet in him.”

“I see it,” Tao Heng said. “I’ll get it out.”

“It was the weirdest coincidence,” I said, then went on to recount the events.

“You took down two Counter-Cultivation cops?” Svea said, sounding incredulous. “And one of them had dual prosthetic arms?”

“That’s pretty fucking badass,” Tao Heng said. “The heretic Peacekeeper lives up to his reputation! Okay, bullet out.” Tossing it to the side with a clink, he picked up a rag and wiped his hands clean of blood as best he could. “Svea, hand me the Pure Cloud Pill, would ya?”

“Here,” she said, grabbing it out of the center console cup holder and tossing it back to him.

As he stuffed the pill into Jianhong’s mouth, Tao Heng continued, “What the hell was Jianhong doing over there anyway? And how did he get two C-C agents on him?”

“Not sure,” I said, thinking back to how one of the agents had shouted something about a deal. “That’s twice in a day. Is the idiot trying to get himself arrested and put to sleep?”

“Where do you think we should take him?” Svea asked.

“Our place, I guess,” Tao Heng said. “We should be able to get him from the parking garage up into the apartment without anyone seeing. Then you can call Elder Hu.”

“Second time in a day,” she said.

“All right, the wounds are already starting to close up,” Tao Heng said. “He’s gonna be fine.” He suddenly laughed. “This is fucking hilarious.”

“What is?” I asked.

“You saved Jianhong’s ass twice in a day. How’s he going to have the face to talk down to you ever again?”

“I’m sure he’ll find a way,” Svea said. “If his dad wasn’t a chief elder, he’d definitely end up demoted. Where do you want to go, Wang Fan? Back with us?”

“Do you need me?”

“Nah. He won’t wake up for at least another hour. But you’re welcome to hang out if you’d like.”

“I probably ought to go back and get some sleep. It’s getting late. Plus, my sea of energy is empty.”

“Shit!” she exclaimed. “That can be serious. You know how to handle it on your own?”

“Yeah, I’ll be fine.”

**

About fifteen minutes later, I unlocked the door to our apartment and stepped inside.

“Jakobe, you back yet?”

No answer. He was still out. I took off my new outfit, kicked off my shoes, and hung my keys up next to the door. Given that the officers I’d jumped had both seen my outfit, I supposed I would have to retire the black poncho for now. Not a huge loss, as far as I was concerned.

First stop was the bathroom, where I pulled my shirt off to inspect my various injuries. My side ached where the C-C agent had battered me, but not bad enough that I worried about broken ribs. My knees didn’t feel great. Give it a day or two and I would have a whole collection of very nasty bruises. Behind the mirror, I had that bottle of diclonythrine I’d taken from Deputy Commissioner Zhong’s hovercar in the Third Earth. But I didn’t hurt badly enough to need it. I’d rather just have a nice, cold beer.

Putting my shirt back on, I stepped over to the kitchen, opened the fridge, and got out a bottle of Snow.

Sitting down at the table, I took a long swig. What a day. For months, I’d essentially been doing nothing but working a meaningless day job and studying cultivation in the evenings. Today, I ended up in a high-speed chase, got shot at by thugs and cultivators alike, ran into two Counter-Cultivation agents, and saved Kang Jianhong twice. I’d also patched things up with Elena, at least to a degree. I was still unsure of what to make of the situation with her, but at least things weren’t as awkward anymore.

Running my finger around the mouth of the bottle, I pondered my situation. Where was I with my two main objectives in the Fourth Earth? After three months, I hadn’t made any progress on Xiaoli’s case. And I was only getting more entrenched in my life as a member of the Naturalism Sect, as opposed to getting rid of the sea of energy and making a clean break. What was I doing with my life? Did I really have no choice but to dive deeper into the world of the cultivators?

The clock on the wall read 11:45—almost midnight.

I looked at the phone by the door and pondered whether I should use it. There was someone I wanted to talk to. Someone I hadn’t spoken with since our last monthly chat. Someone I trusted implicitly. Someone I couldn’t call until after midnight.

I watched the clock tick, finished my beer, then opened another.

At 12:01, I rose from the table and walked over to the phone. Taking it off the wall housing, I punched in the numbers to dial out of the Fourth Earth. Then I tapped a number I’d memorized many years ago. A number that should be secure, as long as I called at this time.

The phone rang, and I stretched the cord back to the table to sit down with my beer.

“Hello?” Charlotte answered.

“It’s me,” I said.

I heard her smile. “Hold on.”

She covered the phone, and I heard a short conversation play out that included a male voice. Then she removed her hand and said, “I have company. Can you call back in sixty seconds?”

“Sure.”

I hung up, counted out sixty seconds mentally, then called back.

“Sorry,” she said. “Had to switch to the bedroom and secure the line.”

“Company, huh?” I said with a smile. “Are you trying to make me jealous?”

She laughed. “It’s Bill Kwok. Remember him? From the Academy?”

“The bodybuilder? Dear lord.”

She laughed even harder, “He’s not a bodybuilder.”

“Well, he acts like one. Anyway, I won’t keep you long. It’s been one of those days, and I feel like I need some advice.”

“It’s fine. I have a couple of minutes. Are you all right?”

“I’m alive. How are things down there? How’s Mom?”

“She’s as well as can be. She’s trying a new Curse treatment she heard about on the news a few weeks ago. Hasn’t gotten any worse lately. Hasn’t gotten better either, though.”

“Same old situation. How about you? Everything okay?”

“I’m fine. What’s eating at you, Wang Fan? I can hear it in your voice. You’re more stressed than usual.”

I hesitated. “I feel like I’m in a rut, Charlotte. I have all these clues about Xiaoli but don’t know what to make of them. And I’m getting sucked into the cultivation world. I have friends now, and they’re—” I shook my head as I tried to come up with the right word to describe them “—they’re cool. Just ordinary people. I… I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.”

“Okay.” She took a breath. “Let’s talk about your friends in a minute. Get this: I looked into the Qin City connection.”

“And?”

“The officer in that article, Shu Qige, was convicted of misconduct and sentenced to life. In Qin City.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. It took some work, but I figured out when it all happened. He got taken away right after that interview in the Third Heaven Times.”

I exhaled slowly. “Something he said in that article got him in big trouble.”

“My guess is that it has to do with Qin City itself,” Charlotte said. “I’m going to keep digging.”

“If Xiaoli died because of this, Charlotte, then you know you have to be careful, right? Very careful.”

“Of course I know that. By the way, Saito came for another visit.”

Shit. “Saito? What did he want?”

“He made it sound like he knew the two of us have been talking to each other. But it was a bluff. When I secure a line, P4R0DY herself couldn’t eavesdrop.”

“Parody? Who’s that?”

“Famous hacker. One of the best grid monkeys out there. Anyway, Saito followed up on those fake leads I gave him. Came back to let me know. He didn’t say it out loud, but I got the implication. He knew I sent him on a wild goose chase.”

“You have to watch out, Charlotte.”

“I am. Oh. He wanted me to pass a message to you.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“I wish I was. I told him I had no way to communicate with you, and he just laughed. ‘Tell him I’ll see him in the Fourth Earth,’ he said.” She sighed. “You’re the one that has to be careful, Wang Fan. He hasn’t given up on you. Or that girl, Elena.”

I hadn’t told her Elena’s name, and she hadn’t mentioned it in any previous conversations. She’d only called her ‘that girl.’ Saito must have told her.

“This whole thing started because of her,” I said. “They were targeting her. Specifically. But Saito never said why.”

“Are you and her, you know…?”

The last time Charlotte asked if I had feelings for Elena, I’d denied it. Although I hadn’t lied, I hadn’t exactly been forthright. The way I saw it now was that if I was going to trust Charlotte, I really needed to trust her. Besides, she knew all of the sordid details about me and my ex, Qian Cui, so what was I worried about? “Are we together? Maybe. Sort of. I honestly don’t understand what goes on inside her head.”

“She sounds like a normal woman.”

I chuckled. “Got any secret tips?”

“Just be honest and be yourself, Wang Fan.”

“Figured you’d say something like that.”

There was a short lull in the conversation in which I took another drink of beer.

“Wang Fan, these new friends of yours, are you sure you can trust them? Are you really never coming back home?”

“That’s the question I keep struggling with. I trust the ones I’m with, mostly.” Not Kang Jianhong, that was for sure. “But I don’t know about their people as a whole. I’m kind of stuck right now.”

“Do you have a plan?”

I frowned as I thought about it. “My gut is telling me I have to go in deeper. Find out the truth about everything.”

“If that’s what your instincts are telling you to do, Wang Fan, you should probably listen to them. Whatever your choice is, I’ll have your back. Always.”

I suddenly heard the front door being unlocked.

“My roommate’s back,” I said. I heard footsteps, and then the door closed.

“Jakobe?” she asked.

“Yeah. I should go now.” I stood and walked back to the phone housing.

“Say hi to him for me. Wang Fan, you know I love you like my own brother, right?”

“Yeah, I love you too.”

“Then keep your ass in one piece. Watch out for Saito. And figure out a way to come back here. I want to see you. Alive. Your mother wants to see you, too.”

“I want to see you as well. And I will. Soon. Say hi to my mother for me.”

“Bye, Wang Fan.”

“Bye.”

I hung the phone up, then sat back down at the table. Raising my voice, I said, “Where have you been, brother? It’s after midnight.”

I sensed motion behind me and looked over my shoulder to see Elena standing in the doorway.

Chapter 30 – Elevator Buttons

“Elena?” I said, rising from the chair. “What are you doing here?”

“Jakobe’s at my place tonight. He lent me his key.”

“He’s staying the night there…?”

“Yeah.”

While that news wasn’t surprising, it should have been enough to fuel a spirited conversation between Elena and me. Our roommates went on a single date and were already spending the night together? It would surely lead to some sort of drama.

But speculation about Jakobe and Bunny was the last thing on my mind at the moment, and my heart was already pounding. There was no way Elena hadn’t overheard me talking just now. How was she going to react? Further in the back of my mind, I wondered about the implications of her showing up at my apartment after midnight and letting herself in with a key. What had she intended to do? Where had she planned on sleeping?

“Who were you talking to just now?” she asked, her eyes and face as emotionless as cold bonemetal.

I opened my mouth, and from the heat I felt rising up my neck and face, I knew I was flushing madly. What was I supposed to tell her? The truth? That I’d just told my ex-girlfriend that I loved her and wanted to see her?

Don’t lie to women, Son. It’s never the right thing to do. Yet I couldn’t forget the fights Dad and Mom had gotten into over his gambling. I had to wonder if they were because he didn’t lie to her or he did.

“It was Charlotte, wasn’t it?” she continued.

“It…” I said, trailing off. I couldn’t very well claim it was my mother.

Elena’s nostrils flared slightly, and I could see that she was breathing heavily. This was bad.

“Look,” I said, “you don’t understand.”

“I don’t understand? What do I not understand? I heard what you said.”

“It’s not like that. She said she loved me like a brother!”

“Puto pendejo,” she spat, then turned back toward the front door.

I walked out of the kitchen after her. “Elena, you have to let me explain.”

“I don’t have to do anything,” she said as she threw her coat on. “So you’re planning to leave, is that it? Go back to the Third Earth?”

“No, I’m not going anywhere! I couldn’t go back even if I wanted to.” I reached out toward her, but she took a step back.

“Don’t touch me,” she said sharply.

“You can’t storm off into the night, Elena. Just listen.”

“I don’t want to hear it, Wang Fan. Not now.” She flipped the lock and started opening the door.

I stepped forward and placed my palm flat on the door in front of her, closing it. “You have to listen.”

Before I knew what was happening, she put her palm on my chest and shoved me away from her. I staggered backward three steps, and she opened the door.

In the heat of the moment, I wasn’t thinking. I completely forgot that I only had one sea of energy, and she had two. In terms of physical prowess, it didn’t matter that she was several inches shorter than me and fifty pounds lighter. She was stronger than me, plain and simple.

I regained the three steps, reached out, and grabbed her arm. “Just wait, we—”

She spun, swiping at me with her free hand. Her nails raked across my cheek, and I felt a sting as they dug into my flesh. I threw my free hand up to my cheek in shock but stupidly kept a firm grip on her arm with the other.

“Get your hands off me!” She pulled her foot back and launched a kick that I should have been able to avoid. Unfortunately, I was too shaken to react appropriately. Her foot connected with my hip, just next to my groin, and the force knocked my legs out from under me and sent me flying backward. I smacked onto the ground face first.

Fuck. I lay there for a moment, face stinging, abdomen throbbing.

The door shut.

Groaning, I crawled to my feet, knees screaming at me, my side burning. I gingerly touched my cheek, and my fingers came away dappled with blood. Wiping it on my pants, I walked to the door and opened it to hear a dinging sound. As I stepped out into the corridor, I just barely caught sight of her entering the elevator.

“Hey, wait!” The doors closed, and the elevator started going down. At this hour, there weren’t many people coming and going, so it was entirely possible it would go all the way to the ground level without stopping. I dashed past the elevator and started taking the stairs down two or three at a time. How quickly could I get from the thirty-ninth floor to the ground?

Down I raced through the murky stairwell. Half of the lights were out, maybe more, but there was enough of an ambient glow that it didn’t slow me down much.

In my haste, I hadn’t even put shoes on, but at least I still had my socks to protect my skin from the rough bonecrete. Soon my feet burned and my thighs ached. At one point, I stepped on a slick advertisement flyer and nearly lost my footing. Time seemed to move in slow motion and fast forward at the same time. At around the twenty-fifth floor, I ducked out into the corridor to check the elevator. Shit. It was coming back up, which meant Elena was already out.

I ran down a few more floors and checked again. The elevator had gone past me and was now on the twentieth floor and rising.

By the time I reached the foyer, the elevator was coming down from the fiftieth floor.

Outside, there was no rain, but the ground was wet. I ran toward the main entrance, craning my head left and right as I did. No sign of Elena.

I loped out onto the sidewalk and looked both ways. Nothing.

Shit. I spent the next fifteen minutes running around checking other parts of the complex, even the alley that cut by the manager’s office, which few non-residents knew about. My hope was that she’d found a dark corner to brood in, or was lurking near one of the side entrances. But I didn’t see even the ghost of her shadow.

Finally, lungs burning and feet aching, I trudged back to my building and into the elevator. Muttering to myself, I hit the button for my floor, but nothing happened. I hit it again. It didn’t budge.

Shouting in frustration and anger, I punched the elevator console. The button lit up, but the elevator didn’t move. I tried the thirty-eighth and the fortieth, and while the buttons lit up, the elevator remained motionless.

“Fucking piece of junk!” I stabbed some other buttons randomly, then ran my palm across the panel until about half of them were lit up. Finally, I stalked out of the elevator and into the stairwell.

Up I went, a stair-crawling zombie, all the way to the thirty-ninth floor.

Back in the darkness in front of my apartment door, I shoved my hand into my pocket to grab my keys. Which were hanging inside, next to the door. And, of course, the door had locked automatically like it always did. I leaned forward and rested my head against it. Even though I knew it wouldn’t work, I tried to use divine sense to unlock it. The spell formation inside made that impossible. If it was a normal lock, I might have been able to go to building maintenance and have them force it open. Sadly, Maintenance couldn’t help with magical locks. I was out of luck.

Rotating until my back was to the door, I slowly slid down until I was sitting on the doormat. My feet throbbed. My cheek stung. My waist ached where she’d kicked me. My knees, my wrist, my side. Everything hurt.

I sat there in silence until my breathing steadied.

A short while later, I heard a faint ding from the stairwell. Then another. The elevator was finally coming up. Perfect timing.

I tried to guess where Elena might have gone. Back to her apartment? It seemed unlikely. Maybe to one of her other friends from her coterie, or even a cheap hotel.

At a certain point, the elevator opened on my floor, casting light into the corridor. It closed, and I was back in darkness.

Eventually the elevator reached the fiftieth floor. I could just barely hear the last ding coming from the stairs. What was I going to do? Sleep on my own doormat? I glanced over at Mrs. Lai’s apartment. No. As much as I felt bad for her, I wasn’t going to ask to sleep on the couch of a Cursed citizen.

I shoved my hands into my pockets, hoping that I really did have my keys and had just missed them before. Nope. All I had was a grubby wad of cash.

Perhaps I could crash with Svea and Tao Heng. But the cash wasn’t enough for a cab, and my ID card was in my coat pocket inside, which meant taking the zont-rail would be more trouble than it was worth. My feet felt so bruised that there was no way I was going to walk across town.

Sighing, I stood up, hobbled over, and hit the DOWN button on the elevator.

On the ground floor, I trudged to the corner market and bought a medium-sized bottle of Red Star baijiu and a bag of sunflower seeds. Back up the elevator I went. Then I leaned against the door, opened the bottle, and took a swig.

It was like fire going down my throat, which was just what I wanted right now. Ripping open the bag of sunflower seeds, I started methodically cracking them open, washing every handful down with baijiu.

Before long, my head was spinning like a gyroscope.

About an hour later, I drained the last of the baijiu from the bottle. Setting it down against the wall, I crumpled up the sunflower seed bag and threw it toward the stairwell. It didn’t make it past the elevator.

Bunching up the doormat to serve as a pillow, I laid down, curled my arms around my knees, and fell asleep.

Interlude 6 – Just a Dream

Jakobe screamed, lurching upright into a sitting position and clasping the sides of his head with his hands. He felt sweat dripping around the rough metal of his headset and dribbling down the ebony skin of his bare chest. Following the scream, he panted for breath, his heart racing.

“What’s wrong, baby?” Bunny Bai said, sitting up next to him. Reaching out, she gently placed her hand on his forearm.

“I’m fine,” he replied, reaching over to the glass of water on the nightstand. He took a long drink. “It was just a dream.”

“A bad one?”

Leaning over, he kissed her gently on the forehead. “Just go back to sleep.”

As she turned back onto her pillow, he also lay down.

What the hell was that? he thought. Much of the dream was a blur, but he remembered seeing Wang Fan strapped to a table, a figure in a gas mask looming over him. Bloody footprints. A huge tunnel. A pinpoint of light, like a candle or an incense stick.

It was just a dream, right? He suddenly thought back to a conversation that had played out when he first arrived in the Fourth Earth.

“They extracted the taṇhā worm with a spell formation made from Cinnabarium Talc, is that correct?” Elder Qing had asked.

“I honestly don’t remember that detail, Elder,” he’d responded. “I’d have to ask Wang Fang or Elena.”

“All while you were in a lucid dream state in which you had visions of the future?”

“Yeah.”

“My concern is that the combination of the powder and the nitrotropin eroprodol could have caused permanent side-effects.”

“Like what?”

Elder Qing never gave a clear answer.

Jakobe thought about the images he’d seen and what they might mean. Eventually such thoughts lulled him back into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Chapter 31 – A Tail

“What. The. Fuck.”

I opened my bleary eyes with difficulty and saw Jakobe standing over me. Given the light struggling in through the grime-encrusted window at the other end of the corridor, it was obviously morning.

Groaning, I struggled into a sitting position, the doormat sticking to my face briefly before flopping down my shoulder and onto the ground. I accidentally kicked the empty Red Star bottle as well, sending it clattering away from me down the corridor. The pain from the night before had become a dull ache that seeped to the tips of my fingers and toes. And I had additional sources of agony: my head throbbed from the baijiu and my empty sea of energy was gnawing at me like my stomach might after a week without food. Damn. I really needed to start working on filling it up. Letting it stay empty past a few days could be dangerous.

“Not the best night,” I said.

“What the hell happened to your face, brother?”

“How about we don’t talk about it in the hallway?”

“Right. Here.” He extended a hand to help me up, then unlocked the door.

The next hour was spent cleaning up, bandaging my face, making coffee and breakfast, and telling Jakobe the story of the previous night.

After I finished, we sat there in silence, sipping coffee.

“What about you?” I asked. “Bunny, huh?”

He grinned. “There’ll be time for that later. I got lots to tell you, believe me. Right now, we have to deal with your situation.”

“How? She’s not going to believe anything I say. What she overheard sounded bad. There’s no getting around that.” I laughed, but it sounded hollow. “If I heard her tell her ex-boyfriend she loved him and wanted to see him, I’d be pissed off too. I met one of them once, and he was a dickhead.”

“You met one of her ex-boyfriends?”

“He tried to mug us.”

I recounted the story briefly, and Jakobe laughed, then let out a sigh. “Anyway, nothing’s unfixable, brother. Besides, I’m tight with her roommate now. That’ll count for something.”

I got up for more coffee. “I don’t know. She was really pissed off. I shouldn’t have grabbed her arm. She told me not to touch her, and I did anyway. That’s when she got really angry. I should have just let her go and talked about it later.”

“It all happened in the heat of the moment. Sounds to me like you both handled yourselves poorly in your own way.”

“So what do you suggest I do?”

“Give her some time to cool off. Meanwhile, I’ll talk to Bunny. Explain things a bit, and get her help to smooth things out with Elena. As much as I joke with you about Charlotte, I know the deal. You and she are friends, that’s all.”

“No one will ever replace Xiaoli. But if I’d ever call anyone else a sister, it’d be Charlotte.”

“I know.” He stood. “I think this is something that needs handling in person, not over the phone. I’m heading back to Bunny’s.”

I rose as well. “Come on. You can’t fight my battles for me.”

“I’m not. I’m just going to do some prep work for you. You stay here and get some fuckin’ rest. You obviously need it.”

I nodded.

He left and I went into my bedroom. Other than the bed, the only other furniture was a small closet built into the wall and a study desk with a chair. Taped to the closet door were all the family pictures I’d taken from Xiaoli’s apartment back in the Third Earth. And propped up against the wall on the desk was the cheap corkboard with all the evidence I’d uncovered in her safe.

I dropped onto the bed and looked at it. The map. The newspaper clipping. Her silver necklace hanging on the side. What did it mean? Why had Shu Qige been removed from society for talking about a friendship with people from Qin City prison?

Minutes ticked by until I finally let out a growl of frustration, picked up my pillow, and threw it against the wall.

I was done. I didn’t want to think about Charlotte, Xiaoli, or Elena. I couldn’t care less what decision the elders made about Kang Jianhong. I wanted to empty my mind. Besides, the situation with my sea of energy wasn’t anything to take lightly.

Getting into a cross-legged position, I reached over to the desk and grabbed my Thermal Cultivation manual. I flipped through it for a few minutes to review some details, then tossed the book back onto the desk.

After taking some deep breaths, I placed my hands on my thighs and started meditating. As my mind cleared, I focused on taking energy from my surroundings.

During the months I’d been studying, I’d received no formal training regarding cultivation techniques. According to the directive laid forth by the elder circle, I was required to go through all of the proper steps required of recruits and novices. And because I hadn’t yet been promoted to the novice position, I wasn’t given cultivation training. However, I had to keep up a routine of meditation for the health and wellbeing of my sea of energy, so the elders had seen fit to let me keep my cultivation manual, which contained all of the basic information I needed.

For now, I was essentially self-taught.

Breathing in the prescribed fashion, I focused on the flow of energy, and thoughts of daily life and drama trickled away into nothing.

It was never advised to allow one’s sea to drain completely. Once it happened, refilling it required immense effort. While I understood how the process worked on a theoretical level, I’d never actually done it.

After bringing some energy inside my body, I sent it along the familiar path toward my toe, then to the other prescribed locations before ending in my sea. There, I sent it through a swirling pattern the cultivation manual described as the key to refilling an emptied sea. The stream of energy vanished without a trace.

I repeated the process. Again. And again.

Every time, the energy reached the sea and vanished.

I felt like I was flicking an empty lighter over and over again, hoping to see the flame appear, only to be disappointed every time.

As I sat stock still in my meditative pose, sweat trickled down my face and back. It soaked into the bandage on my cheek, causing a tiny sting when it hit the cuts beneath. However, the sensation barely registered. I concentrated on repeating the cycle, keeping my divine sense focused on the spot where my sea of energy should have been flourishing.

An hour passed. My back ached, and my neck was tightening up.

Two hours.

Finally, I exhaled deeply and exited the session of meditation, flopping back onto my bed. Although I’d been sitting in place and not moving a muscle, I felt more exhausted than if I’d run a marathon. As soon as my head hit the mattress, I was asleep.

I woke up a few hours later. I actually felt rested this time, and my baijiu hangover was nothing but a tickling sensation at the base of my skull. As I rolled out of bed and headed to the kitchen, my bruised feet made me wince with the first few steps. When I entered the kitchen, the phone rang, but I ignored it and got some water from the dispenser next to the fridge. A couple of rings later, the machine picked it up.

“Hi, you’ve reached the Wang and Liu apartment. Leave a message.” Beep.

“Hello Mr. Wang, this is Mr. Hu. I’d like to talk to you about yesterday’s events. I’ll be in your neighborhood this evening. Please be expecting me.” Click.

So Elder Hu was coming over. It wasn’t his first time, as elders occasionally made visits on various members of the coteries they oversaw, sometimes announced, sometimes not. In any case, it might actually prove fortuitous, as I could ask him about the situation with my sea of energy.

But what should I do in the meantime?

I knew that I ought to wait for Jakobe to get back, but I wasn’t in the mood to kill time watching TV. What was more, I felt a sour disappointment from having failed to jumpstart my sea of energy, and wanted to take a break from cultivation. At least my empty sea wasn’t aching as badly as before, which I hoped was a good sign I was making progress.

I looked at the phone for a long moment as I considered calling Svea and taking her up on the offer to put in some extra study sessions. Maybe ask her opinion about my situation. I decided against it. Given my luck, I could just imagine some strange scenario in which Elena happened to be over there, and Tao Heng answered the phone and yelled, “Hey, Svea, it’s your boyfriend, Wang Fan.” Or some other ridiculously unlikely coincidence. Another option would be to call Charlotte. She would probably have some good advice, except that talking to her was what had landed me in this mess to begin with. I needed to let some more time go by before I got back in touch with her. Not to mention the fact I wasn’t supposed to call her until after midnight.

I paced a bit, thinking back to when I could have relaxed with the help of cigarettes.

“This is ridiculous,” I murmured a few minutes later. Throwing on the second outfit Elena had bought for me, I grabbed my keys and opened the door. Then I stopped. Going back into the bedroom, I took my Spitter and holster out from under the bed. I took the poncho off and slipped my holster on, then checked the Spitter before securing it under my arm. Cracking the shades, I looked out to see that it was raining heavily. Putting the poncho back on, I grabbed an umbrella on the way out, then hit the elevator call button. Nothing happened.

Muttering to myself, I took the long way down from the thirty-ninth floor. Along the way, I passed several groups of people heading up.

Walking out into the foyer a few minutes later, I looked over to see the elevator doors open and the maintenance workers tinkering with the internal mechanisms.

Thinking back to the frustration from last night, I stepped over.

“Is that thing gonna actually work from now on?” I asked.

One of the workers looked up and grinned. “For a few days, if you’re lucky.”

Rain drummed around me as I ambled out of the main entrance and onto the street. I walked without a destination in mind, keeping my mind occupied with meaningless things like Spitter disassembly routines and martial arts katas.

Two blocks away, I walked out of the rain area, so I folded up my umbrella and tucked it into my back pocket under the poncho.

Continuing along, I tried to decide what to do. Go to a billiards hall? Coffee shop? I realized I had subconsciously started walking in the direction of Svea’s place, but I was still determined to stay away from my grid monkey friend for the time being.

About thirty feet from the next intersection, I suddenly felt something tingling in the back of my head. A feeling. An intuition.

Someone was following me.

At the intersection, the light was red, so I turned to hit the crossing light button and took advantage of the moment to glance behind me. The sidewalk was too crowded to identify anything suspicious.

My Peacekeeper instincts thrummed as I crossed the street and proceeded halfway down the next block to where a covered walkway spanned the street between the two intersections. I climbed the stairs, and when they turned back on themselves halfway up, I had another chance to study the way behind me. No one stood out in the crowd.

On the other side of the street, the entire ground floor of the block was taken up by a shopping mall that I often cut through on my way to Svea’s. I entered and threaded my way slowly through the corridors, stopping about halfway through at a coffee shop. Inside, I ordered my drink, then pretended to look through the coffee mugs for sale. Picking one up as if to examine the handle, I looked past it to the corridor beyond. That was when I spotted someone outside dressed in a bulky, parka-style jacket and a breathing mask that covered their entire face. They were leaning up against the opposite wall, looking down at a book or magazine. I remembered seeing this person when climbing the stairs to the walkway.

My coffee came, and I strolled back out into the mall. Next, I stopped at a store that sold electronic pets such as fish, turtles, and the like. Glancing into tanks and bowls for a few minutes, I again spotted the parka-clad figure some distance away.

That was my tail. But who was it?

Someone from the sect? A Counter-Cultivation agent?

Tell him I’ll see him in the Fourth Earth.

It couldn’t be Saito, could it?

I walked out of the mall and crossed over another suspended walkway onto a residential block. I was now about halfway to Svea’s place, and though I still didn’t intend to go there, I stayed on this route intentionally, as I was familiar with it. This complex was filled with squat buildings that reminded me of the Applefarm District back in the Third Earth, and their management crew was clearly well paid, as there was less trash than average. After reaching the opposite side of the residential complex, I was certain my follower was too amateurish to be Saito. There was no way he, a two-sea cultivator and Black Corpse lieutenant, would have revealed himself to me so obviously. Nor would a Counter-Cultivation agent be so clumsy.

Two main options presented themselves: first, lose the tail; second, force a confrontation.

This person wasn’t a Peacekeeper or a Corpse. And I had my Spitter. So why not the second?

Grinning at the thrill of the situation, I hurried across the street and ducked into an alley. As soon as I was around the corner, I burst into a sprint, then kicked a plastic crate out of a doorway and hunched down out of sight. Pulling my Spitter out, I switched it to stealth and stun. Then I waited.

Sure enough, seconds later, I heard someone running down the alley in my direction. At the very last moment, I stuck my leg out, and my pursuer’s foot snagged it.

“Shit!” a male voice blurted with the electronic twang of a voice amplifier. He lurched forward and fell on his face, causing his mask to clatter to the side.

I jumped out with my Spitter. “Move and I’ll fry your brain.”

The figure in the parka threw both hands in the air. “Don’t shoot, Wang Fan!”

With his mask off, his voice had no electronic buzz. When he looked at me, I cocked my head at the sight of the scraggly mustache. “Jianhong?”

“Don’t shoot!” he repeated, getting up and brushing off his knees and elbows. “Dammit, Wang Fan, this is a brand new Bosideng parka! Look at the elbows now!”

“The hell?” I growled, thumbing the wire release and stowing the Spitter.

“I wanted to talk with you privately. Bro, what happened to your face?”

“None of your business. Why didn’t you just call me?”

“This conversation needs to happen off the record.”

“Off what record? You could have just called and told me you wanted to meet. It’s not like I record my calls.”

“Whatever. Look, thanks for saving me from those C-C cops.”

“Just doing what had to be done.” I folded my arms across my chest, waiting for the ‘but’ that I knew was coming.

“But you need to back off about the mission with Boss Ting.”

I knew it. “Oh?”

“There’s going to be a formal inquiry, and they’re going to ask questions.”

“I’ll answer them truthfully.”

Lips tightening into a near-snarl, he said, “You’d best remember that I’m the disciple in charge of our coterie. And your test is coming up.”

Is that a threat? I wanted to say. But I held back. “I thought you didn’t have anything to worry about, considering your dad’s a chief elder. Besides, I already told everything to Elder Hu.”

“Just say you were confused back when you first talked to him. That one of the thugs had a Spitter, and you mistook it for a Sunflare Blast.”

“Did Svea agree to cover for you already?”

“She will once I talk to her.”

I decided to try and throw him off balance by shifting the conversation. “What were you doing at that orgplant, Jianhong?”

“Huh?”

“You heard the question. What the hell were you doing right outside an orgplant with two C-C cops after you?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“If you want me to cover for you, I’d say it is.”

“Fuck you, Wang Fan. I was handling something for my dad.”

I noticed a very faint twitch at the corner of his mouth that could have meant many things. But I’d been around Jianhong enough to guess what it indicated. “You’re lying.”

“Go ask my father about it then,” he said.

I was convinced he was bluffing, but I also got the feeling that if I kept pushing, he would just dig in. There wasn’t any point.

Dropping my arms and finding my pants pockets under my poncho, I sighed. “Jianhong, I have no desire to see you get in trouble. But let’s say both Svea and I agreed to lie for you. What are you going to do about the video footage?”

He didn’t even try to hide the look of shock that overtook his face. The fool. He’d forgotten the entire thing had been recorded and that Elder Hu had the tapes. How could he be so dense? The mission had been Jianhong’s idea to begin with! One second stretched into two, then five. For ten full seconds, he stood there with his mouth hanging open. I actually felt sorry for him.

“Motherfucker,” he said, then angrily kicked a nearby trash can, sending it rolling across the alley, spilling junk along the way.

“Unless you plan on breaking into Elder Hu’s place and stealing those tapes, I’d say there’s not much any of us can do.”

“I bet you’re real happy about that, aren’t you?” he spat.

Jianhong was an asshole, but I remembered what Elder Hu had said. Disciple Kang doesn’t like you…. Just keep your cool.

“I’m not going to lie for you, but I’m not going to screw you over. It was a frantic situation, and you got flustered. It’s understandable. I’ll do my best to convince them to look at it that way.”

He narrowed his eyes. “You’ll really tell them that?”

Truth be told, I did want to screw him over. But I knew it would be counterproductive. I held my hands out palms forward in conciliation. “Yeah. I’ll make sure Svea does the same. We’re all on the same team, Jianhong, and you’re in charge. All of us want things to work out in the end.”

He looked at me for a long moment. “Nice to see you know what’s good for you. Just don’t have second thoughts.”

With that, he brushed past me and walked back toward the street. I watched him go. Bastard.

I thought about continuing my stroll but decided against it. At this point, I needed to call Svea to update her about the Jianhong situation. If I was going to keep my word, she needed to know about what I’d told him. Besides, maybe Jakobe was back.

I headed out of the alley and back toward my apartment, retracing my path and taking my time. When I reached the rain zone again, I pulled out my umbrella. I was just about to enter the entrance of my complex when I felt another tingle.

I stopped on the sidewalk.

Was I being followed? Again?

There was no way. Followed twice in the span of a handful of minutes? Maybe it was just nerves. I looked over my shoulder into the slowly-moving crowd of people. Nothing. Should I go through another counter-surveillance routine again? I decided I might as well. Better safe than sorry.

Inside the complex, I entered one of the corner markets and spent my remaining cash on a bag of spicy protein strips, using the opportunity to search for followers.

Outside, I saw two men under a tree, one of them with a lit cigarette in his mouth, holding out a lighter for the second man, who wore a nondescript coat and hat. Two kids in raincoats hurrying back from school. A young woman with a dog on a leash. From the stiff way the creature walked, I pegged it as being electric.

Leaving the corner market, I continued toward my building. I stopped just inside the entrance to let the fans blow the water off me and my umbrella. As I did, I looked back the way I’d come.

There was now only one man smoking under the tree. Where was the second?

I walked over to the stairwell and leaned up against the doorway, where I still had a good view of the walkway beyond the doors but wouldn’t be easily spotted by someone outside. For ten minutes, I waited. People came and went. I didn’t see anything suspicious.

What did it mean? Was it nerves coupled with the tail end of my baijiu hangover? Or was I being followed again?

Frowning, I walked over and hit the UP button on the elevator.

Chapter 32 – The Follower

The elevator got stuck between the fourteenth and fifteenth floors, leaving me stranded with a ten-year-old boy, an elderly man with a chirping cricket in a wicker cage, and two teenage girls.

“Third time this week,” the elderly man said. “Back in my day, the elevators only broke once a month.”

“I saw people working on it just a few hours ago!” one of the girls said.

“Gotta be kidding me,” I growled, hitting the OPEN button. Nothing happened.

“What do we do?” the other girl asked.

“I’m scared,” the boy whined.

Tapping the OPEN button a few more times didn’t do anything, not that I expected it to, so I wormed my prosthetic fingers into the crack between the doors. When the right door creaked open a bit, I used my other hand to grab the left-hand door.

“You can’t do that!” the old man said.

I looked over my shoulder at him. “Huh?”

“When the elevator breaks, you’re just supposed to wait. You can’t force it open.”

“Oh really.” I pulled in opposite directions, and a metallic grating could be heard as the doors jerked open halfway. Another shove and they were completely open. Three-quarters of the doorway led into the fifteenth floor, with only a quarter of the fourteenth floor showing.

“Don’t climb out,” the man said. “If the elevator starts moving again, it could cut you in half.”

I knew it was risky to climb out of a stalled elevator, but I wasn’t in the mood to sit around in the odor of stale urine and vomit.

“I have a law enforcement background,” I said. “Used to be… a security guard.”

I clambered out onto the fifteenth floor, then looked back down at the group. “You four wait here. I’ll go to Maintenance for help.”

“You hear that, children?” the elderly man said. “The security guard says we’re going to be fine.”

I headed to the stairwell and went down. Around the thirteenth floor, I heard a ding. I stopped walking. Jaw clenching, I walked out into the corridor to see that the elevator was climbing again.

For fuck’s sake, I thought. I was pissed enough that I considered taking the stairs up to the thirty-ninth floor just to spite the elevator. Unfortunately, I was still too battered from my recent escapades to do it. I waited for the elevator to go all the way up to the forty-second floor, then back to the ground, and then back to me on the thirteenth. About ten minutes later, I was home.

“Brother?” I said as I walked inside. There wasn’t a response.

Hanging up my keys, I saw the light blinking on the answering machine. It flashed four times in succession before going dark, indicating there were four messages. I walked over and hit the REWIND button. The first message was the one from earlier, from Elder Hu. The second was Jakobe.

“Hey brother, it’s me. This message is for your ears only, got it? So if someone else is there with you, maybe listen later.” He paused briefly. “You’re not out of the woods yet, but I think it’ll all be fine in the end. Elena was here, and we talked about Charlotte. She gets it. What really pissed her off is that you grabbed her. Guess you were right about that part. She hasn’t cooled down yet, but I feel like half of it is her being angry at herself. And she’s embarrassed she hurt you. She didn’t say it outright, but I’m pretty sure she’s going to call you later. Or maybe come over. Just… I don’t know, don’t do something stupid. If I were you, I would eat crow. Lots and lots of crow. By the way, I ain’t coming back tonight.” In the background, I heard a female voice call out to him. “Be right there, Bunny. Alright, Wang Fan, hang in there.”

After a short pause, the third message played. “Hello, this is Mr. Hu again. Due to unforeseen circumstances, I won’t be able to visit you today. Another time. Take care.”

The fourth message was about three seconds of silence, then a click. I wondered what that meant. Had Elena tried to call? Or was it the wrong number? Hitting the REWIND button, I turned the volume all the way up and listened to the message again hoping to identify some clue as to the nature of the call. I could make out some honking, as well as a bit of music. Whoever the caller was, it seemed they’d been using a payphone. I listened to the empty message a few more times before finally hitting the ERASE button.

Now what?

Out of nowhere, a wave of feelings hit me. Frustration. Irritation. As well as something else that it took me a moment to identify. Loneliness.

I came from a family with generations of Glorious Peacekeepers in it. I’d dreamed of carrying on Dad’s legacy, of becoming a decorated detective. A hero. But now I was a heretic. Stuck in a dump of a neighborhood with a meaningless job, studying something I’d been brainwashed my entire life to believe was evil. I’d screwed up my relationship with Elena. Worst of all, I felt alone. Very, very alone.

Son, you are in control of your emotions. Don’t let them get the better of you. That’s what Dad told me years ago when I broke up with Charlotte. Xiaoli had been my cheerleader in those days, but Dad had been the one to help me climb out from the youthful pit of angst I’d fallen into.

I had matured since then, and had learned a lot about life, so there was no way I’d let myself give in to the negativity right now.

“Come on, man,” I murmured to myself. “Get ahold of yourself. Things aren’t that bad.”

I needed to keep moving forward. Deal with my sea of energy. Wrap up the situation with Jianhong.

And most importantly, pass the test and get promoted in the Naturalism Sect. However much I didn’t like it, there was no denying that it was the only way I was going to get access to the knowledge and resources I needed. It didn’t matter whether I ultimately decided to get rid of my cultivation base or keep it. I had to make progress first.

As for Elena, I would follow Jakobe’s advice and wait for her to reach out. When she did, I’d make everything right again. I’d apologize. I’d accept all the responsibility. Feeling my mood rise slightly, I called Svea and told her about my chat with Jianhong, and she said she was fine with following my lead on it. I was tempted to ask her opinion on my fight with Elena but decided against it. After a bit of back-and-forth banter about skewered street meat, I hung up.

See? You have friends. That’s always good.

I spent the evening working on my cultivation. After two hours of sweaty, cross-legged motionlessness, I succeeded in reforming my sea of energy. When it happened, I nearly shouted out in triumph. I honestly had no idea what led to the success. Was it just the mere determination of doing it over and over again? Or had I subconsciously adjusted my breathing or meridian usage? I guess it didn’t matter.

It only took an hour to fill up my sea after that point. Given my low level, it didn’t take much meditation to be completely ready to go. From what I’d learned in my studies, though, I knew that the time requirements to fill one’s energy to maximum climbed rapidly as you made progress. Cultivators with multiple seas, with seas that were more fully developed, or with roots, had to spend many hours in meditation, sometimes days, to accomplish what I had just done in a few minutes.

After my sea was full, I inspected it with divine sense.

Shit.

It was leaking.

Normally speaking, the energy built up inside the sea or root would remain there until used. But it was like my sea of energy had holes in it. Energy slowly drained out of it, drop by drop, drifting away and fading out of existence.

Given the rate, I guessed that it would be completely empty again within a few days if I did nothing.

I wondered if it was because of how Elena had helped me to jump-start my cultivation with a forced breakthrough or because of how I’d emptied the sea earlier. Perhaps it was both.

I opened my eyes. There wasn’t anything I could do about it at the moment. I’d ask Elder Hu next time I had a chance.

I went out to see if Jakobe had returned by chance, even though he said he wouldn’t. He hadn’t. After scrounging dinner together, I reviewed Xiaoli’s case again, then slept.

**

I had work the next day. It was raining hard when I left the complex and headed to the zont-rail station. There was a time in the past I’d refused to take zont-rails unless necessary. Now, I had no other way to get around. How my life had changed.

Before I reached the station, I got that tingling feeling again. I was definitely being followed.

Sitting in the corner of the train, I kept my eyes half-closed for the four stops it took me to reach the neighborhood where I worked at a bustling noodle shop. Stepping out of the station, I went through a similar routine as the day before. I took the long way, stopping for coffee along the way. I picked up a magazine, pretended to look for a sweater at a department store, and all the while, tried to identify my stalker. None of the efforts were successful. Either I was being paranoid or the person following me really knew what they were doing.

My employers were a gregarious husband and wife that were both cultivators, from a coterie about as far from the restaurant as my own apartment, except in the opposite direction. We didn’t talk about cultivation matters. There wasn’t time, nor a private place to do so. The restaurant was popular and generally had a line out the door an hour before the lunch rush.

The specialty was hand-pulled noodles served in a savory broth, usually accompanied by a cold side dish of cucumber chunks, tofu strips, or pickled radishes. I bussed the tables and did other random things. It was mindless work that I already hated after only doing it for a few months. I’d asked the elder circle if I could set up shop as a private investigator, but they rejected the proposal, saying I needed to stay low for at least a year.

I kept my eyes peeled as I worked, hoping to identify my follower. Nothing popped. I wasn’t supposed to use my divine sense in public places, as it was forbidden by the sect. There was too much risk that a Black Corpse or some other Sinotech cultivator might detect it.

At the end of my shift, I went into full spy mode and was prepared to use every trick I could conceive of to identify my follower. Except this time my instincts told me nobody was following me. I wasn’t sure if I was disappointed or relieved. I went through the counter surveillance routine anyway, just to be safe.

Back inside my apartment, I looked over to see the answering machine blinking. I nearly tripped rushing over to it, hoping to hear Elena’s voice.

“Hey brother, it’s me. I’m gonna be gone another night. Hope you don’t miss me too much. Elena told Bunny she’s gonna go stay with another senior disciple from their coterie. Have you talked to her yet? Lemme know. See ya.”

He was staying another night? What was he doing over there anyway? Actually, I didn’t even need to ask the question.

It was a boring evening. I turned on the news to find myself watching a report about cultivator activity in the neighborhood. They even mentioned that two Peacekeepers had been injured. The mere fact the story was on the news told me they weren’t pursuing the case with as much gusto as I’d feared they would. If the higher-ups were taking it seriously, the story would never have made it to the TV.

I spent some time meditating to keep my sea of energy full. After dinner, I studied my cultivation manual again. There was only one other technique in the book, an illusion method called the Igneus Mask. However, I was hesitant to work on it without direction and had stuck to perfecting the Thermal Ripple Cloak. After cultivation, I spent more time with Xiaoli’s evidence.

The last thing I did before sleeping was something I’d been meaning to do for a while. I sawed off the heel of my boot and used some parts I’d purchased from the local hardware store to turn it into a small compartment that I could fit a few tiny objects into. It took some work to make sure it would remain waterproof, but I managed to pull it off. Snapping it open and shut a few times, I nodded in satisfaction and slipped in the paliprox patch I’d taken from the C-C agent, as well as a tiny multi-tool.

Finally, I slept.

No one followed me on my way to work the next day. After my shift was over, I headed toward Svea’s place for the West Airport coterie’s weekly meeting. I got something to eat on the way, arriving at the apartment at the prescribed time. It was important to show up promptly so that knocking wasn’t necessary. We tried to do everything possible to avoid attention.

Being the lowest-ranking member, I was scheduled to arrive first, about thirty minutes before the meeting was set to start. To my surprise, when Tao Heng opened the door and I slipped in, I saw Elder Hu sitting in the living room. He wasn’t scheduled to join our coterie’s meeting until next month. Presumably, it was because of the Jianhong situation.

Their place smelled strongly of incense, a special type used to make the entire apartment invisible to divine sense scans. A computer scrambler ensured that mundane technology couldn’t do the same thing.

It seemed like a typical apartment belonging to two young people. There were music posters on the wall, a bit of clutter here and there, and furniture in an odd assortment of styles. But there were clues that pointed to how wealthy Svea was. The TV mounted on the wall was flatter and bigger than anything I’d seen outside of a Peacekeeper conference room. The rug in front of the main couch had so many knots per square inch you couldn’t count them without getting down on your hands and knees. And the water machine by the door was a brand that ordinary folks generally couldn’t afford.

One by one, the other coterie members showed up, about three minutes apart. With the exception of Svea, every member of the coterie was a typical Han. Of course, we had Kang Jianhong as the disciple leading us. Under him were the novices: Svea and Tao Heng, plus a pink-haired young woman named Xian Xinyu, and a friend of hers, a middle-aged lady named Huang Yun. The newest of the recruits other than myself was Leslie Cai, a teenager whose makeup made her look like a Nitro runner. In addition to us, we had Lu He, who looked to be around the same age as Jianhong, and Yi Yun, a grizzled man who seemed almost as old as Elder Hu.

The meeting went as normal. It started with general announcements, then we had a lecture about cultivation, which today was presented by Elder Hu. Usually, it was Jianhong or one of the novices who did it. Afterward was a question-and-answer session guided by Jianhong, and then Elder Hu dismissed the recruits so he could focus on advanced instruction with Jianhong and the novices.

As we rose to leave, Elder Hu said, “Recruit Wang, you stay behind. You can wait in the kitchen until we’re done here.”

The other recruits left, and I went to the kitchen. It had the same youthful clutter as the living room, but the appliances were top-of-the-line. Snapshots of Tao Heng, Svea, and their friends covered the sleek black refrigerator, which was packed with a greater variety of food than all the corner stores in my neighborhood put together. Helping myself to a soda and a cold piece of pizza, I sat down at the table.

I could hear Elder Hu’s voice as he lectured the disciples and novices, and while I tried not to listen, my ears pricked up when I heard the word ‘orgplant.’

Stop it, Wang Fan, I told myself. Don’t even think about eavesdropping.

Then I heard Svea’s voice, and she said ‘orgplant’ as well.

Quietly sliding my chair closer to the door, I closed my eyes and focused on listening.

“… more dangerous, orgplants or Peacekeeper precincts?” Elder Hu asked. There was a slight pause as he waited for someone to raise their hand to answer the question. “Novice Tao?”

“Orgplants.”

“That’s correct, but why?” Elder Hu said. There was another pause. “Novice Göransson?”

“Precincts are generally open to the public; orgplants aren’t.”

“Exactly. Show up at a Precinct without an invitation, no one will look at you twice. Do the same at an orgplant, you could end up in the Fourth Heaven before you know what’s happening. Now, let’s move on to the subject of proper emergency protocol….”

I shifted the chair back to the table. The rest of the meeting lasted about ten minutes. Afterward, Elder Hu called me back, which was when I realized that two more people had arrived in the meantime. Elders Qing and Guo. What followed was the formal inquiry regarding Jianhong’s various shenanigans. The elders set up at the kitchen table, calling Svea, Jianhong, and myself in to give our accounts and answer questions.

Jianhong went in first, and he came out looking somewhat haunted. Hardly looking at Svea and me, he slipped out of the front door without a word of goodbye. Svea went into the kitchen next. Finally, it was my turn, and frankly speaking, it felt refreshing. I had interrogated serial killers and offered official testimony against mass murderers. Having a few elders ask me some questions about a teenager acting the fool was a walk in the park for me.

After I recounted my version of events, they asked questions.

“Did you personally see if the thugs were looking at Jianhong when he used Sunflare Blast?”

“Was it Jianhong that insisted on going through with the mission after the patrol hovercar incident?”

“Did Boss Ting get a close look at either you or Novice Göransson?”

I answered them all in the same precise and analytical way I would handle cases back in the Third Earth. When they had no more questions, Elder Hu said, “We appreciate your attention to detail. Is there anything else you’d like to say?”

“Elders, my opinion is that it was a very frantic situation, the likes of which Jianhong has probably never been in. He made a mistake using Sunflare Blast, but it was an honest one. I hope you’ll take that into consideration.”

“Noted,” Elder Hu said.

To the left of him, Elder Qing said, “You’ll be advised of the results at the next meeting.”

With that, the elders left. I’d hoped to find time to ask Elder Hu about the situation with my sea of energy but never had the right opportunity.

“What a waste of an hour,” I said, sitting down on the couch in the living room.

“You can say that again,” Svea said from her position on the beanbag chair opposite me.

Tao Heng, who sat cross-legged on the couch next to me, said, “Hope he gets demoted, the asshole.”

“Yeah right,” Svea said. “Chief Elder Kang would never let that happen.”

“True. Oh!” He spun on the couch to face me. “Bro, what the hell happened to your face? Did you get mauled by a cat or something?”

I felt myself flushing as I reached up to the scabbed scratch marks on my cheek. I’d thought about trying to cover them, but the bandage would have been just as eye-catching. “Uh….”

Suddenly a pillow flew across the living room and smacked Tao Heng in the head.

“Hey!” he said with feigned indignation, throwing it back at Svea.

“Don’t be rude, Tao Heng!” she said. “I’ll kick your ass personally if I have to!”

“I’ll keep my fat ass firmly planted on this couch if you try anything like that!”

They laughed, and I shook my head.

“It’s fine,” I said. “It’s not like it’s some big secret. I had a bit of a fight with Elena.”

“Story,” Tao Heng said. “Now!”

Sighing, I explained what happened, leaving out a few details I didn’t feel comfortable sharing. I had to admit that it all sounded borderline comical when I described it out loud. For the rest of the evening, I hung out with Tao Heng and Svea, getting their advice and swapping stories. I toyed with the idea of asking about the problem with my sea of energy, but it didn’t feel like a huge priority at the moment, and honestly, I was slightly embarrassed about it. A few beers and a couple of hours later, I left, feeling a bit less lonely than before. It was nice to have friends.

Interlude 7 – No Choice

Itsuki Saito stood in front of a shop window, behind which rested a host of gleaming bonemetal prosthetics displayed on blue velvet. He wasn’t looking at the prosthetics. His attention was focused on the reflective surface of the glass, which gave him a perfect view of the covered walkway behind him, which spanned 406th Street.

He’d been standing there for a good two minutes and knew that he would have to move soon.

Come on, Wang Fan, he thought. Minutes passed, and he left the window and entered the next shop over, a tea shop. As he pretended to look at a shelf of compressed tea cakes near the window, a grin appeared on his face. Gotcha.

Wang Fan had just walked down the stairs onto 406th Street, clad in an aqua poncho and matching hat.

Did you intentionally pick that ridiculous outfit to blend into the crowd? If so, bravo. You’ve only managed to outdo yourself in being bland and boring. Itsuki waited for a few seconds, then slipped out of the shop and onto the street. The foot traffic had thinned at this hour, but there were still enough people to call the sidewalks crowded.

The time has come to sit down and have that conversation we should have had three months ago. Itsuki had no idea how it would end. Perhaps with the Peacekeeper’s death. Bring back the heretic’s head and he would make headway in restoring his lost reputation among the Black Corpses.

Because of his father’s position on the board of Sinotech, Itsuki had been spared the worst punishment possible. But he had not escaped all repercussions. He had been demoted from lieutenant to the lowest rank possible: private. He had also been put on indefinite leave. He hadn’t been expelled from the Black Corpses, but for all intents and purposes, he might as well have been.

On the one hand, it irked Itsuki that he had been forced to rely on his father's interference. On the other hand, he knew that an ordinary Corpse would have been quietly put to sleep for a failure as bad as his.

There were few options at hand. The only way to restore his position in the Corpses would be to bring in Wang Fan and Elena Ávila. Alive or not, it didn’t matter. Except that bringing the girl to the Corpses went contrary to his father’s mission for the Saitos. His father wanted her. Alive. He’d even offered Itsuki the Shell of the Hešeri as a reward if he succeeded.

“A relic from the War of Tribulation, Father? It’s priceless.”

“Perhaps it will help you to understand how valuable this girl is to me.”

But what did he need the Shell for? It could break through powerful spell formations and temporarily negate the Heavenly Curse. Neither were things he needed at the moment.

Who do I appease? The system? Or you, Father? Which will benefit me the most?

Itsuki was playing a delicate game, and he knew it. Few people in the Grand Kingdom were aware of Sinotech’s Purpose, but as the son of a board member, Itsuki was privy to many secrets. And he was well aware that his father’s thirst to find the True Heaven had nothing to do with the Purpose. Other than his father, there wasn’t anyone who thought of the True Heaven as anything more than a foolish attempt by Yu Yitai at escaping the Nine Heavens and Ten Earths. Was his father right? Was there more to it than that?

Suddenly, Wang Fan picked up speed in the crowd, shouldering his way forward with obvious urgency.

He noticed me. How? Well, there’s no choice now.

He started walking faster. I need you alone and in a quiet place, Wang Fan. Will tonight be the night?

Chapter 33 – Two Things

As I crossed the walkway and fixed my eyes on the main entrance of the Airport Benevolence complex, I sensed it again. Someone was following me.

I could feel the beer in my head, but I was far from drunk. And I was starting to get angry. I’d had a nice evening with Svea and Tao Heng, but now my mysterious stalker was back. Unless I veered off course and went ‘shopping,’ there wasn’t enough distance between the walkway and my apartment for any proper counter-surveillance beyond stopping in the corner market I frequented. I didn’t care. I was done.

I walked at normal speed through the crowd until the main entrance was only about thirty feet away. Then I sped up, pushing past people hard enough that a few of them threw curses at my back. One person even shoved me.

Turning into the entrance, I broke into a run, heading by the crumbling pond and past the corner shop. Before reaching my building, I ducked into a walkway that separated two of the high-rises. Looking around and up to make sure I was alone, I quickly formed the hand signs for the Thermal Ripple Cloak. A moment later, I was invisible.

Moving cautiously, I stepped out of the walkway and looked back toward the pond.

Only a few seconds later, someone jogged around the corner, then immediately slowed to a walk.

Gotcha.

He was tall and clad in the most nondescript clothing imaginable. Gray pants, faded brown coat, old black shoes. His hands were stuffed into the pockets of his jacket, while his face was obscured by a blue surgical mask and an old-fashioned type of hat people my grandparents’ age favored.

Who are you, motherfucker? I thought. Was it Saito? I wasn’t a gambling man like Dad, but if I were to make a wager, I’d say the odds were high. He was certainly tall enough to be him. If he was my old nemesis from the Third Earth, it meant that my Thermal Ripple Cloak wouldn’t be as much of an advantage. He would surely be on guard against it. In fact, considering his background as a Black Corpse and his father’s position, he probably had access to the best assets in the Nine Heavens and Ten Earths. Whether with technology or cultivation resources, few could match him.

He ambled along until he passed my location, and I just stood there watching. It seemed like he was about to turn into my building, but he just kept walking in the end. I followed. As I did, I made some quick calculations about Saito’s divine sense. Last we’d clashed, he was at the level of two seas of energy. Divine sense was linked to the highest cultivation aspect one had reached, which meant that as long as he hadn’t achieved a breakthrough since last time, the range of his divine sense should be less than ten feet. However, if he had achieved a breakthrough to the root level, it was possible his divine sense could reach anywhere from ten to thirty feet, although it was likely on the low side unless he was making miraculous cultivation advancement.

Just to be safe, I stayed a bit more than thirty feet behind him. His divine sense shouldn’t be able to pierce my Thermal Ripple Cloak, but he could theoretically detect my footfalls or other evidence of my presence.

After leaving my building behind, he circled through the complex toward the exit near 405th Street. He initially stuck to the main walkways but then ducked into an alley that cut by the manager’s office. The fact he was going in this direction chilled me. How long had he been coming and going in my apartment complex that he knew of this path?

My quarry walked through an open wrought iron gate onto a path of stepping stones that meandered through a gravel bed. Just as he reached the other side, I stepped onto the first stepping stone and simultaneously reached into my poncho and let the Spitter wires click into place.

He suddenly stopped walking, then slowly turned to look over his shoulder. There was no way he could have heard that tiny click, was there? Quietly pulling the Spitter out, I aimed it at him. Unfortunately, when using the stun function of the Spitter, the beam was much weaker. Plus, it needed that flesh contact to work. It could easily get through a layer or two of ordinary clothing in a single shot. Thicker than that and the results varied. That was one reason why few Peacekeepers ever used the stun function and many modified their guns to remove it, which supposedly increased the lethality of the normal mode.

 If this guy was wearing a vest, shirt, and an undershirt, I might not down him with the stun beam, especially if he had any sort of protective gear underneath.

My index finger hovered over the selector as I considered whether or not to switch it out of stun mode. Peacekeepers were permitted to shoot first and ask questions later, so it wasn’t as if I’d never shot someone before they could shoot me. But morally, I felt very hesitant to cut someone down in cold blood.

I could barely make out the man’s eyes in the shadows of his hat brim. If I could hit him right there, the stun would work. But that wouldn’t be an easy shot to make at thirty feet.

The moment dragged out, and then the man slowly looked down, causing the hat brim to completely cover his eyes.

I watched as he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out what appeared to be a geomantic compass. I had no idea what its function was, but the mere sight made me nervous. If this was Saito, and he suspected I was following, what if this thing was a device designed to counter my Thermal Ripple Cloak? I knew for a fact that such items existed as I’d been told so directly by Elder Hu.

I took a quiet step back. Then another.

He fiddled with the device, then looked up while simultaneously tapping the center of the compass. A pulse flowed out, immaterial, like waves of heat. It moved faster than I could react, shooting through me before fading away.

I could sense the Thermal Ripple Cloak dropping. Shit.

I flipped from stun to kill.

Keeping eyes on me, my quarry slowly put the geomantic compass back into his pocket and pulled his surgical mask down.

“Hello, Wang Fan,” Itsuki Saito said.

I wanted to shoot him right then and there, but I still felt that killing him that way would be outright murder. He was dangerous, but he wasn’t holding a weapon, and he hadn’t done anything aggressive.

“Why have you been following me?” I asked.

“To talk. I’ve been looking for the right moment to do it. Last time I tried, back in the Third Earth, you ambushed me. So, needless to say, I’ve been erring on the side of caution. Did you get my message?”

He was obviously hoping to confirm that I was in communication with Charlotte. Come to think of it, why had he told Charlotte to send that message in the first place? It had only put me on guard. Instead of answering his question, I threw him a red herring. “The note? That was from you?”

He ignored my comment. “We really did get off on the wrong foot, Wang Fan. I have no desire to harm you.”

“Why are you after Elena?”

“Cutting right to the chase, I see. I like that. The simple answer is that my father wants Ms. Ávila. And what my father wants, he gets. I don’t know all the details.”

“Daddy’s keeping you in the dark? That’s either sad or a complete lie.” I could tell that he felt he was in control of the conversation, and I wanted to get him off balance.

It seemed to work as his lips went tight with anger for the briefest moment. “My father values privacy. He wants her blood, I know that much. For some sort of ritual. He’s obsessed with the cultivation practices of other cultures, and he’s convinced she’s special because of her ancestors.”

“He wants to kill her? And you think I’m going to help?”

“You can use someone’s blood without killing them. In fact, it would make it much easier if she agreed to the process. Neither he nor I want her harmed. He just wants some of her blood, that’s all.”

Cultivators took matters of blood very seriously, but I didn’t feel like now was the time to press him for information. “It’s going to take a lot more to convince me of that than your word. Get to the point, Saito.”

“Call me Itsuki.”

“Fine, Itsuki. What do you want right here and now? Why the cloak and dagger games?”

“I wanted to get you alone in a quiet and private place. And I knew you wouldn’t be quick to accommodate me, so I followed you a bit to pin down your schedule. I want two things. To give you something and to request something.”

“You have thirty seconds.”

“First, I want to tell you about the True Heaven. It’s a location built by the Naturalism Sect, by Yu Yitai himself. Or at least, he led the project. It exists beyond the Heavenly Curse, far above the Nine Heavens and Ten Earths.”

“What does that have to do with Elena and me?”

“Because, believe it or not, Wang Fan, I really do want the Curse ended and the Hellscape done away with. And I hate corruption. Did you know that the Saitos are the only non-Han family on the board of Sinotech? It’s been that way since the beginning. Yet, no matter what we do or what we accomplish, the corrupt board sees to it that our position is the lowest of the low. You and I really aren’t very different at all, Wang Fan. We both want justice.”

I spontaneously laughed. “We’re very different, Itsuki.” I could think of several sarcastic things to say in the heat of the moment, but at the same time, I wasn’t interested in banter or a debate. “What’s the second thing, the request?”

“I’ll tell you in a moment. First, I have to point out that you shouldn’t ask questions about the True Heaven to your new friends. It’s dangerous knowledge. Most elders have never even heard of it. Say the wrong thing to the wrong person, and it could end very badly for you.”

I hadn’t forgotten our last meeting and how he claimed Eldress Cheung’s dimensional pendant had evidence proving the existence of this supposed True Heaven.

“The request, Itsuki. I’ve given you a lot more than thirty seconds at this point.”

“Convince Ms. Ávila to meet with me. I just want to talk, explain myself, and make an offer. You can pick the location. Somewhere public. Somewhere I don’t know about until right before the meeting.”

“I’ll mention it to her.” Assuming we patched things up. What if we didn’t? I shoved that thought out of my mind. I would patch things up with her.

“I have a phone number here in the Fourth Earth,” he said. “14-7955-3366-0629. Got that?”

I repeated the number a few times mentally to commit it to memory. “14-7955-3366-0629.”

“Good. I’ll give you a week. In the meantime, I won’t come back here or contact you. You call me when you’re ready. Deal?”

“How do I know you aren’t going to call a bunch of Corpses or C-C agents on me the moment you walk off?”

His face turned serious. “Because this is personal. It has nothing to do with the Corpses or Counter-Cultivation. You have my word on that. In fact, if my actions were reported to them, my own life could be forfeit as well. Besides, think about it. If I planned to turn you in, why would I arrange this meeting to begin with? Why wouldn’t I just have you arrested immediately?”

I watched him closely as he spoke, looking for the tiniest flickering expression that might indicate he was lying. I got nothing.

“Fine,” I said. “It’s a deal.”

He took a step back. “Good. I’ll take my leave now.”

“Next time you surprise me, Itsuki, I’ll shoot you. Don’t show up unexpectedly. Don’t follow me.”

“You have my number.” He backed up a few steps, then turned and left.

Stowing my Spitter, I headed back to my apartment.

My head was spinning. The Naturalism Sect was hiding the existence of some supposed True Heaven? Elena had special blood? The Saitos claimed they didn’t want to hurt her? They were operating outside of the authority of the Peacekeepers?

What was true and what wasn’t?

Could I trust Itsuki even a little bit?

I had no idea what to think, and that was frustrating. Very frustrating.

Inside my apartment, I checked to see if there were any new messages on the machine. There weren’t, so I settled down to meditate and work on my sea of energy. After filling it up, I changed breathing routines, focusing instead of the one designed to expand the sea. I wasn’t sure if growing my sea was wise considering its state, but I figured if I went slowly and was careful, I could find out on my own.

I still felt the desire to rid myself of it. At the same time, I realized that my weak and unstable cultivation base was holding me back. What if I hadn’t had that tiny scrap of energy left when I faced the Counter-Cultivation agents? Could I have taken them out and rescued Kang Jianhong? And what if the timing hadn’t worked out so well in the van before that? What if we had uncloaked right in front of Boss Ting? The point was that every bit of energy was important.

And the larger my sea of energy was, the more reserve I could draw on.

I worked hard for the entire evening, forcing myself not to dwell on the loneliness that tugged at the back of my mind. After about an hour, I saw that the sea had expanded by a tiny bit, while the leakage rate actually seemed fractionally less. Perhaps growing the sea was the way to heal the damage to it. I continued working.

When I was done, I showered and checked the machine again. Why wasn’t Elena calling?

Starting to feel irritated, but trying not to let it get the better of me, I ate a dinner of instant noodles and went through some martial arts katas. Then I spent some time mentally reviewing for my upcoming test. If I was going to advance through the ranks in the Naturalism Sect, I needed to ace that exam. Finally, my mind occupied by thoughts of Elena, I drifted to sleep.

Chapter 34 – Detective Work

According to sect protocol, I was supposed to contact Elder Hu and tell him that I’d been compromised. I chose not to. I didn’t feel the need to follow every arbitrary rule created by the Naturalism Sect, especially when the complexities of the situation called for a more nuanced approach.

Although I didn’t trust Itsuki Saito, my instincts told me his goals had little to do with apprehending or killing me. Given his capabilities as a two-sea cultivator—possibly even a root cultivator—there had to be numerous ways he could have done either of those things. He was playing a long game and, for the time being, wanted to use me to achieve more important goals. As for what he truly wanted from me, I had no clue. Was it really as simple as arranging a meeting with Elena? Or was there more?

Regardless, I felt safe. For the moment.

Besides, if I relocated, it would only draw out the cat-and-mouse game. For now, I wanted to stay in place, on familiar ground, rather than have to move apartments and start over. It would also give me an opportunity to figure out Itsuki’s true motives.

Monotonous days chugged by as I waited for Elena to contact me. How much time should I give her? I’d go to work in the morning and return home in the evening. My bruises had shown up, but the pain from them was starting to fade away. Two nights later, I had dinner with Tao Heng, Svea, and her girlfriend. Or was it one of her girlfriends? I still wasn’t sure if her bit about “girlfriends” was a joke or not.

We had skewered street meat at a trendy spot on Long Peace Boulevard and then went for an evening of billiards around the corner. When Tao Heng joked that it was a double date, I punched him in the arm.

In the days that passed, Jakobe called a few times, but always when I was away. Apparently, he’d really hit it off with Bunny. I checked the news a few times, and by this point, they had long since stopped mentioning the cultivator incident near the orgplant.

Why wasn’t Elena reaching out to me? Was she really that mad? Every day that passed, such questions burned hotter in my mind. I was more and more tempted to call Charlotte. She always gave me good advice when it came to relationships. But I resisted the urge. I had to get through this on my own, not rely on advice from my ex-girlfriend.

Finally, five days after my encounter with Itsuki Saito, I called over to Bunny and Elena’s place after work. Bunny answered.

“Hello?”

“It’s me, Wang Fan.”

“Oh hey. Have you talked to Elena yet?”

“No, that’s why I’m calling. What’s the latest from her?”

“Hm. She went to stay with Jin Li a few days ago. Over on 400th Street, not far from your apartment.”

“Wait, you haven’t heard from her in days?”

“I guess not.”

“What about at your meeting? You meet on Fridays, right?”

“Now that you mention it, she didn’t show up. I got there late, and I had to leave early, so I didn’t have a chance to ask anyone about it. Sorry, I’ve been kind of… distracted.”

I felt my heart rate increasing slightly. “Your roommate disappears for almost a week, and you don’t think anything about it?” And what the hell was Jakobe thinking? He was a better detective than me in many ways and should have been more on his game. Before Bunny could respond, I said, “Sorry, I’m a bit on edge.”

“It’s fine, Wang Fan, I understand. Why don’t you call Jin Li? I saw her at the meeting on Friday. I bet Elena was just in a bad mood and decided to skip until next week. Everybody misses a meeting once in a while.”

“You’re probably right. What’s the number?”

“14-7932-1433-2255.”

I repeated the number to confirm it. “Thanks, Bunny. Say hi to Jakobe. And let me know if you hear from Elena.”

“Sure.”

I hung up and dialed Jin Li. After six rings, the line connected.

“Hi, this is Jin Li. I’m probably at work right now, so if you—”

I put the phone back on the wall and paced a bit. I tried the number again, only to get the answering machine. While I was tempted to leave a message, I decided against it. I called Bunny again.

“Hello?”

“Bunny, it’s me again. There’s no answer over there. Do you mind giving me Jin Li’s address?”

I could sense her hesitation.

“I’m not going to do anything crazy,” I said. “Just head over and see if anyone’s home. If not, I’ll leave a note.”

She gave me the address. I equipped my Spitter, grabbed a pen and a piece of scrap paper in case I needed it, and headed out in the rain.

No zont-rail ran in the right direction, and I didn’t want to waste money on a cab. Besides, 400th Street was close enough that I could just walk.

I tried to keep my thoughts clear and focused. There was no reason to panic right now, especially when I had no information to work with. Just because Bunny and Elena hadn’t connected for a few days didn’t mean Elena was missing. Bunny was probably right. Elena most likely skipped the meeting because she wasn’t in a good mood. Or maybe she ended up staying with someone other than Jin Li. She could even have gone to a hotel somewhere. There were always back alley locations to get inexpensive rooms. Elena was street smart and had lived on her own for years back in the Third Earth. She could take care of herself.

Unfortunately, I didn’t know where she worked. Elder Hu had arranged for a small loan for her to start up a street cart business similar to the one she had operated back in the Third Earth. And while I knew the general neighborhood where she did business, I wasn’t sure of the exact spot. If it came down to it, I supposed I would prowl the streets looking for her.

Jin Li’s complex consisted of three immense skyrises that were half again as tall as the tallest in my complex and separated by a bit more open space than was usual around here. There were walkways lined with plastic shrubberies and white statues that emulated ancient Eurosynth aesthetics. Each building had four elevators, and they were in much better repair than mine.

At Jin Li’s door, I hesitated for a moment, then knocked softly. A minute passed, and I knocked again.

“Who is it?” I heard through the door.

“I’m Wang Fan, a friend of Elena’s.”

Nothing for a few seconds, then the door unlocked and cracked open. The security chain was attached inside, preventing it from opening past about an inch. I saw the face of a plump, middle-aged woman on the other side.

“Wang Fan? Is something wrong?”

“I’m looking for Elena. Any chance she’s here?”

“No, why would she be here?”

“Bunny Bai said she was staying with you.”

“Oh, that. No. She called and asked if she could come over, and I said yeah. She said if she needed to, she’d stop by that evening. But she never did.”

Fuck.

Trying to sound calm and detached, I said, “I see. Any idea where she might have gone instead?”

She shook her head. “Sorry.”

“Thanks anyway.” I turned and left.

There was another sect protocol regarding what to do if a member of a coterie went missing. Generally speaking, unless there was a specific reason to suspect a dangerous situation, an elder wouldn’t approve any sort of overt action unless that person hadn’t been seen for at least two meetings in a row. It wasn’t unheard of for people to take unexpected vacations or travel to visit family members. If I called Elder Hu about Elena, he would probably just say to wait until the next meeting. That was especially the case if I mentioned we’d had a bit of a spat.

As I rode the elevator down, the heat of anger began to rise up my neck.

You can use someone’s blood without killing them.

It had to be Itsuki. Toying with me. He probably already had Elena in his hands when he revealed himself to me.

Around the corner from the complex, a payphone booth rested against the wall like a crumpled tissue box. The doors were in such bad repair I could barely force them open. Climbing in, I tried not to let my hands shake with fury as I swiped my card and punched in Itsuki’s number.

There was only one ring.

“Yes?”

Trying to keep my voice even and cold, I said, “What did you do with her?”

“Wang Fan?” When he spoke, I could hear him smiling.

“Where is she?”

“I can only assume you’re talking about Ms. Ávila.”

“If you hurt her, Itsuki….”

This time, he wasn’t smiling. “What happened?”

“You know damn well what happened.”

“I don’t,” he said, and now his voice was as cold as mine. Maybe colder. “I haven’t made contact with Ms. Ávila. I’ve been waiting to hear from you.”

I let his words hang for a short time. Could he be telling the truth? “I haven’t heard from her in nearly a week. Neither have any of her friends.”

He didn’t say anything in response. I let a few seconds pass. “Itsuki?”

“Like I said, I haven’t contacted her. I need to look into this. Give me two or three hours. If something’s happened to her, it will be very detrimental to my plans.”

The narcissism in his response made me want to hit him back with a sarcastic quip. But at the moment, trying to get a rise out of him seemed counterproductive. “Fine,” I said. “I’m going to do some looking of my own. I used to do this kind of thing for a living, after all.”

“I’m not a Corpse anymore, Wang Fan.”

“What?”

“My failures resulted in me being expelled. I’m a free agent now. I kept that tidbit from you because it wasn’t relevant at the time. But now, it’s something you ought to know. Like it or not, you and I really do have a lot more in common than you realize.”

“If I find out you’re lying about Elena, Itsuki, I’ll kill you.”

“I wouldn’t expect anything less.” He hung up.

I resisted the urge to slam the phone down onto the receiver and instead replaced it in a civilized fashion. The rain had picked up outside, and I watched it smear down the side of the phone booth as I pondered my next move.

After a moment, I swiped my card again and punched in another number.

“Hello?”

“Hey Bunny, can I talk to Jakobe?”

“Sure.”

A moment later, Jakobe picked up. “What’s happening, brother? Did you track down Elena?”

“No, and I’m starting to get worried. Can you do me a favor? If I remember correctly, she has six other friends in her ‘close circle.’ Three guys, three girls. Can you have Bunny give me the numbers of the guys? I’ll call them from here. And you two call the girls. Ask them if they’ve seen her.”

“Shit. Hold on.”

I dialed the first number and got an answer after three rings.

“Yo.”

“Is Darius there?” I asked.

“Speaking.”

“I’m Wang Fan, a friend of Elena’s. Haven’t seen her for a few days and trying to get in touch. Any chance you saw her last Friday?”

“She called and mentioned she felt under the weather.”

“I see. Thanks.”

The next two numbers connected, but no one had seen Elena.

I called back to Bunny’s apartment, and while the first attempt got me a busy signal, the second one went through. Bunny and Jakobe had also reached everyone on their list. We were lucky it was the middle of the week and everyone was home. No one had heard from Elena.

“Fucking shit,” Jakobe said. “What do you want to do next?”

Back in the Third Earth, the two of us would have had all sorts of resources to draw on. Databases. Files. Phone records. Informants.

But not here.

“You and Bunny get together a list of all the cheap hotels in the area,” I said. “Start making the calls and see if she’s checked in to any of them. Right now, I’ll see if I can find her vendor booth. Does Bunny have any idea where she usually sets up?”

A short back-and-forth later, Jakobe said, “She says at the West Gate Promenade.”

“Okay, I’ll head over there shortly.” I paused for a moment. “There’s something else. Remember that dog that tried to bite us a few months ago, right before we arrived here?”

“The one that climbed out of that hatch in the Third Shield?”

“Yeah, him. Well, he showed up. In person.”

Jakobe didn’t even utter a curse word. He just let loose a long breath through pursed lips. “You think he has Elena?”

“Actually… no, I don’t think so. It’s complicated. I’ll fill you in later in person. Just stay on guard.”

I heard some talking in the background.

“Bunny wants to know if she should call Mr. Hu about it.”

I thought about Itsuki Saito and the complications he brought to the matter. I got the feeling he knew something about Elena’s disappearance or at least had suspicions regarding what was going on. Would bringing the elder circle into the matter help right now? We still had no evidence whatsoever to indicate that Elena was in any trouble.

“Let me do a bit of looking around at the West Gate Promenade first,” I said. “I’ll check in with you a bit later. Then we can decide about Mr. Hu.”

“Sure thing. Stay safe out there, brother. Good luck.”

I extricated myself from the phone booth and headed back out into the crowd. A short walk and a quick zont-rail ride later, I reached the West Gate Promenade, a shopping district that hung over an artificial river. The water was only about a foot deep and was covered with realistic plastic lily pads. Fake fish were occasionally visible, as well as the odd turtle or frog. Music filled the air from various sources, and the place was crowded.

I scoured the promenade, heading into various back alleys and corners, checking all of the outside vendor stalls for ones that sold hats and gloves. I did locate a few such stalls, but no Elena. I ventured inside some of the malls, but none were the kind of place that allowed independent sellers inside.

After about two hours of searching, I gave up and headed back to the Airport Benevolence complex. Turning the corner by the crumbling pond, I saw Itsuki Saito leaning up against the outside of my building.

Chapter 35 – A Proposal

Itsuki wasn’t dressed to blend into the crowd this time. He wore a charcoal gray suit that looked to be custom-tailored, with the sharp lapels and dramatic cuffs that were in fashion right now. The buttonholes looked like pieces of art, and the fabric patterns matched over the seams. From the look of it, I’d guess the suit probably cost more than my old yearly salary as a Peacekeeper.

Atop the suit, he wore a transparent coat, also of the most fashionable cut, and his shoes were made of some sort of synthetic reptile skin and had shiny golden tips.

In a neighborhood like this, the outfit was more than a bit eye-catching.

I approached, stopping four or five paces from him.

“I thought I said not to show up unexpectedly,” I said.

“You called me,” he replied, “not the other way around.”

“Did you find something out?”

“We need to talk. Somehow I doubt you’re going to invite me up, so how about we go somewhere public? You pick the location.”

“The coffee shop on 406th and Long Peace Boulevard. You lead the way.”

“Not the most upscale place around here, but that’s fine.” Pulling a large pair of reflective glasses out of his jacket pocket, he put them on and strolled toward the main entrance.

I followed several paces behind.

Upon arriving a few minutes later, he entered the coffee shop, and I followed.

“What’ll you have?” he said. “I’m buying.”

“I don’t need anything.” I would have loved some coffee, but I didn’t want to give Itsuki the upper hand by letting him do me a favor.

“Very well. Get a seat. I’ll join you in a moment.”

Squeezing between two tables occupied by raucous high school students and two old ladies, I crawled into an empty booth off to the side. The shop was loud, with ancient jazz music competing with the cacophony of conversation.

I kept my eyes on Itsuki the entire time, taking note of his body language, movements, and anything else that might give a clue as to what he was planning. After ordering, he waited for the coffee, then walked over with two cups. He placed one down in front of me.

“I know you prefer yours black,” he said. “To my surprise, they stock peaberry beans from Viet-Guam in the Seventh Heaven. Have you tried this type before?”

“Nope. Sounds a bit expensive for my taste.” I didn’t touch it. I’d never heard of peaberry beans or Viet-Guam, although to be fair I’d never been to the Seventh Heaven either.

Hanging his coat on the back of the chair, he sat and took a sip. Then he leaned forward and said, “I appreciate you sitting down to talk.”

“What did you find out?”

“It requires a bit of explanation.”

The steaming coffee in front of me smelled wonderful, and I was very tempted to pick it up. But I still felt like it would be giving a point to Itsuki, so I resisted the urge. “Well, get on with it.”

He sighed. “Where to begin? I suppose with politics. As I mentioned before, the board of Sinotech isn’t united. There are factions. And while the balance of power has remained largely the same over the centuries, there’s always a level of intrigue and plotting. Machinations and cabals. Even assassinations.”

He took another sip of coffee.

Although details about the inner workings of Sinotech weren’t exactly public knowledge, I didn’t find Itsuki’s statement very surprising. “What does that have to do with Elena?”

“My father’s interest in her is personal. You stumbling onto the scene back in The Ivy was problematic, as it thrust Saito business into the spotlight. Then you went and killed a superintendent and a deputy commissioner. Very dramatic, by the way. I have to say I was impressed.”

I looked down at the coffee and again resisted the urge to take a drink. “Come on, Itsuki. I’m not interested in story time. Get to the point.”

“The point is that my father was very intent on keeping his interest in Elena a secret. After the initial craze caused by those two killings, he did more string-pulling than he’s done in centuries.”

“Centuries?”

He looked at me over his coffee cup. “My father has been around for a long time. He’s a third-generation board member.”

I raised my eyebrows. If Itsuki’s father was that old, it meant he practiced Thermal cultivation, just like me.

I started to do some quick math, but before I could get far, Itsuki grinned and said, “That’s right. My great-grandfather was alive during the War of Tribulation. Anyway, you didn’t want story time, did you? So I’ll continue with relevant matters. You and your friends are still in the crosshairs of Counter-Cultivation, but the truth is that the Black Corpses couldn’t care less about you. Thanks to my father.

“That’s point number one. Point number two is that I wasn’t sent here. I came on my own. I need Elena to get back in his good graces.”

I couldn’t resist any longer. I picked up the coffee and took a drink. Damn. It was good. And here I thought the stuff I usually drank was high quality. “Why are you telling me this, Itsuki? Do you really think I’m going to help you kidnap my girlfriend and hand her over to your father?”

“I’m not that foolish. Which is why I want to offer some assistance. I’m going to help you get Elena back and then let you go on your way. To prove that I have good intentions.”

I still didn’t believe him, but playing along seemed like my best option at the moment. “What do you mean ‘get her back?’”

“Someone took her.”

My hand tightened on the cup handle. “Who?”

“An associate of my father. Someone I’m not particularly fond of, who would love to see me remain completely fallen from grace.”

My years of work on the force had instilled in me the ability to hide my feelings if I wanted, so instead of letting the distress I felt touch my voice, I gave a faint snort of disdain. “If he gives Elena to your father instead of you, then you lose your only shot at a comeback.”

“Exactly.”

“How noble of you to offer assistance.”

“I never claimed to be an altruist.”

I shook my head. “Forgive me for being skeptical, but I find it very coincidental that, only a few hours after getting a call from me, you happen to know exactly where Elena is. Sounds to me more like you’re in on the whole thing.”

“I don’t know exactly where she is. But I have a good idea.”

“Okay. What idea?”

“Take a look at this.” He pulled a twice-folded photograph out of his inside jacket pocket and placed it on the table in front of me. “Recognize him?”

I unfolded it to reveal a snapshot of a middle-aged man with a scar on his lip. “Yeah,” I said.

“Nicolas Kun, a longtime friend of my father and a lackey through and through. He thinks of himself as a cohort, but in the end, he really is just a dog. He was sent after you back on the Third Earth, and just as I suspected, the fool failed in the true objective of that mission. I happened to catch sight of him on the street about a month ago.”

“Where exactly?”

“Around 398th Street.”

“398th in this neighborhood?”

“Yes. I’ve been here for quite a while trying to track you down.”

“How did you even know where to begin?”

“Because I knew the general area you would surface in the Fourth Earth. And I know that the Naturalism Sect likes keeping things compartmentalized. Wherever you showed up and made contact, that’s where you would end up settling. Or at least, somewhere near there. With that knowledge, I called in a few favors of my own. Asked questions in the right places. Pulled the right records. Given I had nothing else to do, I was quite determined, and determination usually pays off.”

I frowned. “I don’t like coincidences, Itsuki, and they’re piling up here. You randomly ran into the very person you claim kidnapped Elena?”

“I’m no fan of coincidences either, and I admit it’s coincidental. But not that coincidental. You see, Nicolas isn’t here officially any more than I am. My father sent him on Saito business. And one of the first things he did after he got here was to start making contacts with the local underground. Weapons suppliers. Drug dealers. That type. I did the same thing, which is how I spotted him. At one of the Fourth Earth’s main black market paliprox shops, over on 398th. As soon as I saw him, I knew what he was doing here. So I followed him and figured out where he’s holed up. When you called earlier, I headed over there and did some discreet asking around. My contacts confirmed that he and his men showed up two nights ago with a human-sized bag that they dragged in through the alley entrance of the building they’re staying in.”

“Elena?”

“I believe so.”

If he was right, it meant Elena had gone for three days without contacting me before being snatched. Where had she been during those three days? A hotel somewhere? I guess it didn’t matter. Draining some more of my coffee, I asked, “Why wouldn’t he just take her directly to your father? Or call your father here?”

“I don’t know for sure. My guess is that he has another objective to accomplish here before he leaves. Either that or he’s playing another angle. Perhaps trying to gain an edge on my father. It’s not unheard of for lackeys and cohorts to hatch clever schemes. Regardless, all he has to do is keep Elena pumped full of paliprox-D, and he can stick around indefinitely.”

“But you don’t know their exact location in the building, is that right? What kind of building is it?”

“Mixed residential and commercial. And, correct. I don’t know.”

“Fine. Give me the name of the building, and I’ll handle it.”

He smiled. “I think not.”

“Don’t trust me?”

“Do you trust me?”

“Fair point. What’s your suggestion then?”

“We go in together—the two of us. We’ll need a team to back us up. A cultivator grid monkey to hack into the building’s local grid. Figure out where Nicolas is holed up and take down the cameras. We’ll have a spotter in the group as well. Maybe two. You can pick all the people. We wait until Nicolas leaves, then go in fast and hard. You use your Thermal Ripple Cloak as necessary to get us close without being detected. Extract Elena.”

“Extract her? How?”

“Teleportation. There are ways to prevent such devices from working, but Nicolas is too cocky. He won’t have anything like that set up.”

“And afterward?”

“I walk. I’ll swear a blood oath to forget the names and faces of everyone involved. You give Elena a few days to recuperate. Then you present her my offer.”

I considered the plan objectively for a moment. I’d heard that blood oaths were a thing among people who practiced cultivation, and while I didn’t know exactly how they worked, I knew that they were taken very seriously. “Do you have any idea who he has on his team? What if they’re all root cultivators?”

“Unlikely. I know how Nicolas thinks. He’s arrogant but insecure. He would never pick people to work for him unless he could dominate them in a fight. He’s also slightly paranoid and quick to lash out. So I doubt he’d put together a team that could gang up on him, either. I could regale you with stories of his checkered past, but… no story time.”

“He has three roots, correct?”

“Yes. So I’d wager he doesn’t have anyone with more than two seas working for him. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s using all non-cultivators. First, he only trusts Black Corpses, and it’s not easy to get them to do side jobs, as that’s against regulations. Second, he thinks he’s operating completely under the radar here.”

“Don’t you people use puppets?”

“He’s here on personal business. ‘Off the record,’ so to speak. So he won’t have any Black Corpse puppets with him. What’s more, I know for a fact that Nicolas doesn’t have a personal puppet. He’s not rich enough for that.”

I finished my coffee and stared at Itsuki for a long moment. Then I started tapping the table as I thought.

“I’ll get you a refill,” he said. “Think it through. I’m happy to answer any other questions you might have.”

He walked back over to the counter.

During the entire conversation, I’d watched Itsuki like a hawk and listened with rapt attention. Dad had taught me a lot about how to read people, things that didn’t get mentioned in general Peacekeeper training, and I’d used every technique he’d imparted to me. I’d searched for any signs that Itsuki was lying and hadn’t detected any. He didn’t stall, evade, or dance around questions. I saw no clues in his eyes, mouth, facial expression, or anything else. Of course, it didn’t mean he wasn’t lying. I got the overall impression he was a smooth talker who could spin lies without any effort at all. But at least my instincts weren’t blazing.

The details of the situation as presented were probably true. Or at least mostly true. As for his assurance that we would simply part ways after getting Elena, I didn’t believe it. Why would he abandon his quarry when she was right there for the taking? All it would take would be a teleportation slip. If he had one of those and he got his hands on her, he could be gone with her in the blink of an eye.

What other angles was I overlooking? Could it be some sort of elaborate trap to arrest me? It seemed unlikely. If he wanted to do that, he could have had a hundred Peacekeepers waiting at the Airport Benevolence complex. Or a squad or two of Black Corpses. Hell, he could have taken me alone.

I pondered the matter for a minute or two until he placed another cup in front of me. I took a sip.

“Well?” he asked. “Not to rush you, but we have no idea how long Nicolas will stay put.”

“There’s something that doesn’t make sense.”

“Oh?”

“How did Nicolas know where to find Elena? Assuming I buy your explanation of how you tracked me down, how did he? He had no idea where we surfaced in the Fourth Earth.”

“I don’t know for sure, but my guess is he has an informant in her coterie. Or yours. Or both.”

“If the Corpses have so many informants in so many coteries, why don’t you just wipe them all out? You have enough firepower.”

“Because there’s a larger game being played. Sinotech doesn’t want another cultivator war, they want to keep the status quo. Besides, cultivators proliferate like cockroaches. Wipe out one coterie, another will pop up in its place within months. It’s just not possible to eradicate them.”

I drank some more coffee and considered his words. “All right, I want insurance. Something I can trust in to ensure that you won’t screw me over at the last minute.”

“A fair request.” He reached back into his jacket and pulled out two oblong discs. “These are how we’ll extract. You know what they are?”

I thought back to the final chaotic moments of our fight in the Third Shield and how he’d teleported to safety using such a device. “Yeah.”

“I made them myself, and they haven’t been imprinted. You can do the honors. It’s intuitive, as our discs are functionally the same as your slips. Simply set up destinations for both of them. The same target, so we end up together after we teleport out. Or different destinations. Up to you.”

I scooped up the discs. “Fine. I already have a team in mind, but I’m going to have to talk to them all. I have no clue if they’ll agree to work with a Black Corpse. Grid monkey, two spotters. I think we should add a driver to the list. Backup in case something goes wrong with the discs, or even for after we teleport.”

“Agreed. What else do you want?”

“I suppose we’re going to need special gear.”

“I have all the firepower we’ll need. If there’s anything else—” He smiled broadly and slid a card across the table. “There’s enough money on that to get anything you need. Within reason. How long do you think it will take to convince your friends?”

“Not sure. I’ll try to get it done tonight.”

“We have to move fast. I didn’t spend enough time watching Nicolas to establish his routine. But considering the late hour, I imagine he’s asleep right now. I suggest we be ready before he wakes.”

Fuck. How was I going to explain all of this to my friends? I stood.

“Thanks for the coffee.” I picked up the money card. “And this.”

He rose to his feet. “My pleasure. It’s good to be working with you instead of against you. Perhaps it’s old-fashioned, but why don’t we finalize our deal the old-fashioned way?” He extended his right hand.

Frowning slightly, I infused my hand with divine sense to ward against any trick from the physical contact. Then I reached out and shook his hand.

“You’re a cautious person,” he said. “Stay that way. And remember, we need to move quickly.”

“I’ll call you soon.”

“I’ll be waiting by the phone.”

“Until then.”

I walked out of the coffee shop and into the rain.

Chapter 36 – Go Time

My work started with Jakobe. It took three minutes to convince him. He suggested adding Bunny to the team as the second spotter. She agreed in five minutes. It wasn’t as easy with Svea and Tao Heng.

For one thing, although they knew and liked Elena, they weren’t exactly bosom buddies of hers. They had a lot of questions. What if it was a trap? Even if it wasn’t a trap, was it safe to reveal their names and faces to someone with such deep ties to the Corpses and Sinotech? And there were many others. It took an hour before they finally said they were in.

As soon as they said “yes,” I called Jakobe and Bunny and told them to meet us at a dance joint on 397th Street called Club Delirium, where we could rent a private room to make more detailed plans. Svea drove us there in her van, stopping along the way to pick up a few key pieces of equipment we needed.

“Don’t you already have a Hosaka unit?” Tao Heng asked.

She grinned. “Yeah, but it’s old. If this guy Itsuki is buying, why not get a bit of an upgrade?”

The club was a trendy place that catered to a young crowd. Everything was lit with blue and pink neon, and the wall had lighting strips that pulsed with the rhythm of the music. The air felt damp from the sweat of the writhing crowd packed on the dancefloor, and surprisingly, I didn’t detect the odor of any recreational drugs. Given that this was the first club I’d been to in the Fourth Earth, I wasn’t sure if that was typical or not. Back in the Third Earth, clubs were notorious for drugs, with both legal and illegal varieties being common even in the city center.

The private room had three walls lined with overstuffed white leather couches. The other wall had a huge display screen for singing karaoke. In the middle of it all was a faux-crystal table laden with complimentary snacks and drinks. After the door closed, we could barely make out the pulse of the music outside.

Svea opened her black duffel bag and pulled out a dented metal box with two antennae and some dials and switches on the front, which she placed on the table along with an incense burner.

Flipping a switch on the box, she said, “This is the same jammer we use for meetings at my place. Rigged it myself. Tao Heng, you wanna handle the incense?”

“On it,” he said. He jabbed a stick of incense into the burner, then snapped his finger to produce a spark. He was a Solar cultivator, which was another reason why I wanted him as the driver. If everything went south and some sort of fight broke out, it would be good to have some proverbial muscle on our side. “This is Golden Milkvetch incense that Elder Hu gave us for meetings. I suspect he wouldn’t be happy if he knew we were using it for this. But hey—” he grinned “—what he doesn’t know can’t hurt him.”

Within moments, the room filled with a pungent aroma that indicated we were invisible to divine sense.

“First of all, thanks to all of you for agreeing to help out,” I said. “I’m going to be in your debt big time. All of you.”

“We’re going to get Elena out of there safely,” Bunny said. “Don’t worry.”

Never in my wildest conjecturing could I have ever guessed that Jakobe would end up falling for Bunny Bai. She was dressed in her usual getup: a black, lacy dress, long black stockings, and black gloves. She had a wide-brimmed black hat and round, oversized glasses with metal frames. The only color on her was her blood-red lipstick and the maroon rose tucked into the wavy hair that cascaded down to her waist. She had knee-high boots with thick soles that reminded me of ground car tires. This type of fashion wasn’t prevalent in the Third Earth but was all the rage here in the Fourth. As I knew well, Jakobe usually went for blonde Eurosynth types in tight dresses and heels.

“You don’t need to butter us up anymore,” Tao Heng said. “Let’s get down to business.”

“Agreed,” Jakobe said. He wore a suit of deep purple with a white vest that matched his shoes and the bowler hat atop his head. It was snazzy, but a trained eye would quickly note that it was nowhere near the quality of Itsuki’s getup. “I know you’ve thought this through, brother, but have you taken time to plan for all the ways Itsuki could stab you in the back?”

“I think so,” I replied. “I mean, the most obvious is that it’s just a plain old trap from the get-go. For instance, after I call him here to meet with us, he alerts Counter-Cultivation and rounds us all up. But that would be tricky since he doesn’t know where we’re meeting, and I’ll lead him here personally.”

“What if he has a third teleportation disc?” Bunny said. “If he does and he gets to Elena before you do, she’s screwed.”

“That’s obviously a risk,” I said. “The only thing I can do about that is try to make sure I get to her first.”

“You should demand he submits to a strip search ahead of time,” Tao Heng said. He had a different T-shirt this time, from a band called the Wild Bleeding Spiders. “I’m sure Svea would be happy to do the honors.”

Svea threw a candy bar at him, but he dodged.

We threw out more ideas and possibilities, coming up with contingencies for as many as we could. After about twenty minutes of discussion, we were ready.

I went to the payphones near the restrooms, then hesitated. What if Itsuki had set up equipment to trace my call? As I left the club and walked down the street to a mall to find another payphone, I realized I was still buzzing with energy from the peaberry bean coffee. Damn, that was some strong brew. After finding a payphone, I dialed Itsuki’s number.

“Yes?” he answered.

“We’re ready. Come meet me on the corner of 396th and Long Peace Boulevard.”

“I’ll take a cab. Be there in five minutes.”

I met him on the street then led him to Club Delirium, keeping my eyes open in case we were being watched or followed. The atmosphere in our private room was more than a little tense when he entered.

“Everyone, meet Itsuki Saito. Itsuki, this is Svea, our resident grid monkey. Mr. Tao here will be our driver. For spotters, we have Ms. Bai and Jakobe who you’ve… met before.”

Itsuki nodded to each individual as they were introduced. “Pleasure to meet all of you,” he said. He looked at Jakobe. “My apologies for everything that happened down in the Third Earth. Bygones for now?”

“That remains to be seen,” Jakobe said, and I saw his lips move after he stopped talking as he left the word ‘motherfucker’ unsaid.

“Fair enough,” Itsuki smiled.

I sat on the middle sofa with Jakobe and Bunny, while Svea and Tao Heng took the one to the right of us, leaving the one by the door for Itsuki. Carefully hanging his translucent coat on the rack, he poured himself a glass of sparkling water from a sealed bottle on the table, then sat down. Reaching into his jacket pocket, he produced a worn envelope.

“First things first,” he said, pulling out a sheet of paper. “This is a written oath, formalizing my promise to never breathe a word of your names or physical appearance to any person. Take a glance. If you’re all satisfied, I’ll sign it with blood, brand it with divine sense, and burn it.”

He handed it to me, as I was the closest to him. After examining it, I passed it down the line. When he got it back, he produced a tiny blade that he used to cut his thumb and mark the oath with his fingerprint. Then he branded it with divine sense and burned it in a trash can. I wasn’t sure of the true ramifications of making an oath in this way. Many cultivators took them very seriously, and when I originally explained Itsukis’ offer, Tao Heng had proclaimed that the universe itself would punish him if he broke it. Svea had disagreed, though, saying belief in blood oaths was nothing more than superstition. I tended to agree with her.

Itsuki took out a tiny glass bottle with some salve in it, put some on his thumb, and as the wound healed, said, “With that out of the way, take a look at the information I gathered on the location in question.” He emptied the rest of the envelope's contents, which included a few snapshots of the building itself, some architectural plans, and a piece of paper with a list that included individual names and companies.

“Blue Mountain Commerce Building,” I said. I glanced at each item and passed it down the line.

“I originally didn’t anticipate the place being of much importance,” he said, “otherwise I would have gathered more information. And the recent developments haven’t given me much time for further research. That architectural schematic is old. Not the original, as the building was remodeled about a hundred years ago. But still old. The name list is my best guess at their permanent tenants, a compilation of three different lists bought from separate sources, none of which I would consider particularly reputable.”

“I remember seeing this building before,” Bunny said. “It’s next to Phoenix Fashion Mall. That’s thirty minutes away by cab.”

“What type of operating system does it run for security?” Svea asked.

“No idea,” Itsuki replied. “Sorry, I’m not a grid person.” He looked at me. “Have there been any changes to the plan we originally talked about?”

“No,” I said.

“Good. Then let’s hammer down a few more details. For instance, what do we do if Counter-Cultivation or other Black Corpses show up?”

“Or other members of our sect,” Svea said.

“Exactly. We have a lot to discuss.”

**

Itsuki and I sat in a cafe half a block down from the Blue Mountain Commerce Building. The rain had stopped a few minutes before, but the sidewalks outside were still slick with water.

Itsuki had provided changes of clothing; we wore long black coats, navy suits, and soft-soled sneakers. We both had cheap briefcases. Mirrored glasses and blue surgical masks provided almost complete anonymity, although we currently had the masks pulled down as we sipped coffee. With the touch of a button, the mask and glasses would link together, turning into a temporary gas mask that would protect our eyes and lungs.

Right now, we looked like a pair of moderately successful businessmen preparing for a meeting.

“Are you in, Lemur?” Itsuki asked, talking in such a way that his mouth hardly moved. Given his experience, he had taken the main leadership role in the mission and had been the one to assign radio code names for us. Just about everyone in the group hated the names, but none of them had mustered the gumption to tell Itsuki.

“Roger that… Tycoon One,” Svea replied. If Itsuki noticed how she sounded like she was choking when she used his call sign, he didn’t show it. We heard a bit of keyboard clacking, then she continued. “ToneLoc worked like a charm. The building’s local grid is using some really outdated software. Give me a minute or two.” She and Jakobe were set up in a high-rise hotel across the street, which was also the destination for both teleportation discs. The room offered a clear view of the front of the Blue Mountain Commerce Building with its mirrored glass windows and blue neon marquis.

“Wheelman, where are you?” Itsuki asked.

“In location on Long Peace,” Tao Heng answered.

“Stay put. Eagles, check in.”

“I’m here,” Jakobe said. “I’ve got eyes on the front entrance.”

“Call signs,” Itsuki said in a steely voice.

I could sense Jakobe’s scowl in his reply. “Eagle Two in position.”

“Eagle One here,” Bunny said a moment later, breathing hard as though she were climbing stairs. “Not quite at the spot.”

Another minute went by.

“I’m into their public records,” Svea said. “Searching. Hold.” Silence for a moment. “I can’t believe it. He used his real name. Nicolas Kun, suite 13-F.”

“Like I said, he’s arrogant,” Itsuki said to me off-mic. “They’re in an F suite. Do you remember the floor plan?”

Svea had managed to pull up room layouts for the building, and Itsuki and I had planned out basic strategies for the three main types.

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s the big one.”

He nodded. “With the front door being in the corner of the end corridor, we won’t be able to do a standard tactical breach. We blow the door, and I go in first. You follow. As we discussed, it’s most likely she’s being held in the extension of the large room at the back. We clear the common room and smaller rooms first, then go in with tear gas. She’ll be unconscious from paliprox-D, so the gas won’t affect her.”

To say that I was nervous would be an understatement. I almost couldn’t believe I was actually going through with this. But what other choice did I have?

Itsuki hadn’t been joking about having enough firepower. He had enough weaponry to equip a small army, giving us more than enough options to pick from. In addition to my Spitter in its usual spot, I had two NZ-85G.2s at my waist, armor-piercing rounds already chambered. I also had an extendable baton on my belt and a briefcase containing a 38mm tear gas launcher as well as an explosive strip to breach the door.

Itsuki was similarly equipped, except that his briefcase contained a short-barrel HP9-9 shotgun and two mini-grenades.

I’d asked Itsuki why he brought so many guns when he was a close-combat specialist, and he’d said it was because he usually went into missions with an entire lance for support. Close-combat specialists worked best when they had firepower backing them up. What was more, he said his Black Corpse armor had been confiscated.

“Remember,” Itsuki said, “although our primary objective is to get Elena out of there, it never hurts to get as much inside information as possible. If you see anything that looks like a notebook, hard drive, computer diskette, or anything like that, grab it.”

“Yeah.”

I finished my coffee and ordered another. They didn’t have any fancy beans at this place, so we were drinking the type of coffee I was used to. I looked over and noted that Itsuki’s cup was still mostly full.

As the minutes ticked by, Itsuki occasionally checked in with Bunny and Jakobe, asking for updates. Halfway through my second cup of coffee, Bunny said, “Eagle One here. I got eyes on Alpha Tango. He just walked out the back.”

“Are you certain?” Itsuki said.

“He’s not wearing a mask or glasses or hat. It’s definitely him. He’s heading south, away from you.”

“Arrogant fool,” Itsuki muttered. “Let’s go.”

I stood with him, and we left the cafe and walked down the street.

“Proceeding to phase two,” I said on the radio.

We moved with the crowd until we reached the building. There, as we walked through the revolving doors, Itsuki said, “You’re up, Wang,” under his breath.

We walked past the fans, which were currently off because it wasn’t raining, and into the main entryway. Glancing left and right, I found the front desk and hurried over.

The security guard behind the counter didn’t even look up at me.

“Hi there,” I said. “I’m here for a meeting with a client, but I forgot which room to go to.”

“Name?”

“Er, mine?”

“Your client.”

“Ah. It’s Mr. Li.”

He looked up. “You’re going to have to be more specific than that.”

I pulled my mask down and gave a wry smile. “To be honest, I can’t remember. Here.” I held out a computer diskette. “If you just pop that in and open the file called InvitationLetter.docg, it has the address at the top.”

He took the disk, eyed it, then inserted it into his computer. He pecked at the keyboard for a moment.

“Suite 25-C,” he said in a bored voice.

“Thanks so much,” I said as he handed the diskette back. I turned and headed back to Itsuki.

“The RAT program is in,” Svea said. “Man, security here is lax. My skills are really going to waste, my friends.”

“Keep the chatter to a minimum,” Itsuki said.

“Right.”

Itsuki and I continued through the entryway and headed toward the back, past a wall of mailboxes, to the access elevator. He punched the button, and we watched the elevator descend from the eighth floor.

It opened to reveal a maintenance worker with a cart of trash cans, mops, and other cleaning paraphernalia. He trundled past us, and we entered the elevator alone.

“Elevator, going up, Lemur,” Itsuki said. “We need those cameras.”

“I know,” Svea said. “Just give me three… two… got it. Cameras are live. Damn. The surveillance here is as bad as you’d expect. Let’s see if the thirteenth floor is online.”

The elevator climbed, and although it moved slowly, as I watched the numbers heading to thirteen, I felt like they were racing at top speed.

When we passed the tenth floor, Svea finally said, “Shit, guys, I see at least four guards in the main elevator room and one at the door. No camera in the access corridor.”

Itsuki looked at me. “The cloak. We’ll go with Plan C. You stay behind me at first.”

I put my briefcase down next to me as the number shifted from eleven to twelve. My fingers slid through the hand signs, and the cloak surrounded Itsuki and me, briefcase included.

The elevator shuddered to a halt at the thirteenth floor, and the doors opened. A guard lounged against the opposite wall, a semi-automatic rifle leaning next to him. He looked curiously into the elevator, but seeing it empty, went back to picking his nails.

I grabbed the briefcase and followed Itsuki out. The Thermal Ripple Cloak made us both invisible, but since we were inside the cloak, we could use divine sense to “see” each other. Keeping a firm grip on his briefcase, Itsuki extended his hand, and his long sword flowed into being. He thrust it forward, piercing the guard’s trachea and spinal cord. The man’s eyes went wide as the blood flowed out, and he made a gurgling sound as he slumped forward.

Itsuki grabbed his arm to prevent him from falling, then lowered him to the ground.

“He didn’t have any cultivator powers, Itsuki,” I whispered. “You didn’t have to murder him!”

“This isn’t a game, Wang Fan,” he replied quietly. “Like we talked about before, it’s combat. These people are scum who deserve to die, and besides, they’ll cut you down faster than you can blink, if you give them the chance. Or shoot you in the back.”

I wanted to offer a retort but honestly couldn’t think of anything to say.

Keying his mic, Itsuki whispered, “Lemur, I need the positions of the guards by the elevators.”

“One in each corner of the entryway.”

“Cut the cameras on my mark.” Going off-mic, he turned to me. “Are you going to have a problem taking out the guards?”

“I have a Spitter. I can—”

“No. No stun.”

I frowned. I suspected even Dad would agree with Itsuki. Criminals are criminals, Son. There’s a reason why most of them get liquidated or put to sleep.

“Fine,” I said.

“You take point. Drop the two on the opposite side. I’ll handle the closer ones. Be ready in case the door guard joins.”

“Got it.” I pulled out my Spitter and forced my heart and mind into a state of empty calm.

“Mark,” he said into the mic.

Two seconds later, Svea said, “Cameras are out.”

Giving me a nudge, Itsuki said, “Go.”

I strode out into the hall with him behind me, right into the main room. I took aim at the first thug, hitting him right in the face. He dropped with two shots. I swiveled, and while the other was still lifting his gun, hit him in the eye.

I glanced behind me to see Itsuki flicking the blood off his sword, red lakes forming around two headless corpses on either side of the room.

Still invisible, I stuck my head around the corner to see the final guard approaching, an oscihammer held in each hand. I stepped into the corridor and shot him between the eyes.

“Well done, Wang Fan,” Itsuki said, and I couldn’t tell if he was being condescending or sincere. As I dragged the corpse of the thug out of the hallway, he stepped past me and neared the door that was our destination. Stopping a few steps from it, he paused, then looked back to me. “As expected, it’s shielded against divine sense. Get out the breaching strip.”

Chapter 37 – Take No Prisoners

I dropped the Thermal Ripple Cloak, holstered my Spitter, and bent to one knee. Opening my briefcase, I pulled out the explosive strip. Ignoring my pounding heart, I tossed it to Itsuki. At the same time, I affixed the tear gas launcher to my chest harness.

Itsuki unrolled the strip, peeled off the adhesive back, and started attaching it to the door near the hinges.

“Remember, we didn’t come here to take prisoners. Shoot to liquidate. It’s likely the door is alarmed, so once we go in, we need to get out as soon as possible.”

Putting the detonator down, Itsuki opened his briefcase and took out the shotgun, along with earplugs which he slid into his ears. He clipped the grenades to his belt.

Putting in my own earplugs, I got my Spitter out again. I left the briefcase lying there.

He picked the detonator back up and keyed his mic. “Team, we’re going in. Maintain silence unless necessary.”

He took a step back. “Three. Two. One. Fire in the hole.”

He hit the button, and a loud thump filled the corridor, along with a haze of dust and debris. As the tattered remnants of the explosive strip wafted to the ground, Itsuki stepped forward and kicked the door, sending it clattering back into the entryway beyond.

Before even entering the room, he pulled the trigger of the shotgun, sending a blast into a target I couldn’t see. Pumping another slug into the chamber, he stepped into the room. I followed.

I heard another blast before I even crossed the threshold. Inside the door, I stepped over a crumpled body and scanned the room with a single sweep of my gaze.

The shotgun blasted again, and another thug dropped. A very short entry hallway led into a large L-shaped main room filled with couches, coffee tables, and chairs. Several doors were visible. Other than the thug Itsuki had just taken down, there were three other hostiles, all of them in various stages of pulling out weapons.

As Itsuki drew down on one of the thugs, I took aim at the one I had the clearest line of sight to and started tapping the trigger of my Spitter. The beam hit him in the chest, and he dropped. I swiveled to the second target as he pulled the trigger of his pistol. His shot went wide, and I sent a beam into his face.

Itsuki hit the final thug with a blast in the chest.

Scant seconds had passed. There was no denying that Itsuki and I worked well together.

As the room went quiet, I eyed the doors, all of which were closed. On the north side were two single doors that we knew opened into small rooms, a set of double doors that opened to a corridor and a larger room at the other end, and finally, a smaller set of doors that opened to a closet. The south side had a single door, a set of double doors, and a closet.

Following the plan, I approached the first door on the south side and sent my divine sense inside. No one was there. I crept to the south double doors and did the same thing. My range wasn’t long enough to get to the end of the hall, but I could determine no one was directly behind the doors. The closet was also empty. I looked over to Itsuki and used hand signals to say, “All clear.”

Pointing to the second single door on the north side, he replied with his hands, saying, “Enemy with a shotgun. You cover me.”

I nodded and took two steps to the side to get a clear line of sight.

He slid until his back was next to the door, then reached out to place his palm on the wall, just next to the door handle. Using divine sense, he turned the handle and let the door swing free.

Before the door even opened, the thug inside let off a shotgun blast, which slammed the door open. As it swung back toward a closed position, the thug kicked it open and stepped out.

What a fool to leave cover like that. My Spitter beam hit him in the left bicep, but before he could even shriek in pain, Itsuki blasted half his head off.

Itsuki rose and took two steps over to stand next to the double doors.

“Cover me again.”

“Okay.”

He used the same method as the moment before, but this time, when the doors swung open slightly, no one came charging out. He reached into his pocket, produced a mini stun grenade, and eased the pin out. He tossed it through the doors. A few seconds later, there was a bang and a flash from inside. Nothing else.

“Tear gas,” Itsuki signaled. “Hurry.”

Holstering my Spitter, I gripped the tear gas launcher with two hands.

“Eagle Two here,” Bunny said on the radio. “I have eyes on Alpha Tango. Heading to the alley entrance.”

Shit! Nicolas was coming back already? Either the front door had been alarmed or some other security device that had notified him of our presence. Or was it just a coincidence?

“Go,” Itsuki signaled. He tapped the side of his metal glasses, and wires snaked out, connecting to the blue surgical mask, which then turned into solid bonemetal. I did the same. With the gas masks active, we would have roughly three minutes of protection from the tear gas.

I stayed right behind him as he entered the short corridor. At the end, he made the “freeze” gesture and then took a few seconds to scan the room beyond with divine sense.

“Three left, two right,” his hands said. “I go left, you go right.”

“Okay.”

“Three, two, one.” He shoved the doors open with divine sense, and I pulled the trigger.

The teargas canister shot into the room, spewing white smoke.

We waited until we heard coughing sounds, then Itsuki entered the room and went left. Dropping the tear gas launcher to hang at my chest, I drew the Spitter. The glasses compensated for the smoke, making the view of the room much clearer. One thug was trying to pull his shirt up over his nose, and was so distracted I hit him with my Spitter before he knew what was happening. The second thug managed to send two rounds in my direction before I downed him.

I turned to see that Itsuki had already dispatched the other thugs.

“Alpha Tango is in the building,” Bunny said.

Itsuki gestured at the single door at the opposite end of the room.

Although Nicolas Kun returning so quickly was not an ideal development, everything else seemed to be too easy. Was he really so arrogant as to leave such an important quarry guarded only by mundane thugs, none with even a single sea of energy?

When Itsuki was only two paces from the door, it opened, and a figure stepped out. Perhaps most eye-catching was the mass of bonemetal augmentations that adorned her. Both arms from the elbow down were prosthetics, as was most of the left half of her face, including her cheek, nose, and eye, which was nothing more than a glowing red pinpoint of light. But none of that drew my attention. It was the steel-gray hair and slightly cleft chin.

Eldress Cheung?

I froze. None of my training as a Peacekeeper could prepare me for a moment like this. Kind, grandmotherly Eldress Cheung, who made scallion pancakes just like Mom’s, who had nursed Jakobe back to health, then sacrificed herself so we could escape into the night. Elena’s Master, whose death had caused her to collapse weeping into my arms.

Eldress Cheung was alive?

There was no time for hand signals. “Tycoon One, that’s—”

White light flared around Eldress Cheung’s prosthetic fist and forearm as she launched a punch at Itsuki.

He dodged back with unnatural speed, dropping his shotgun as he summoned his bonemetal sword. Her hands blurred as she sent a sliver-thin beam of light shooting at him, which he barely avoided.

I was still frozen. My initial thought was that Eldress Cheung must be here to save Elena. After all, there was no way she could be working for Nicolas.

Itsuki danced forward and slashed at her with his sword, but she threw up a Fulmina Shield of lightning that blocked his blade. Then she threw a kick which he vaulted over.

“Eldress Cheung, it’s me!” I yelled, “We’re here—”

Her red eye locked onto me, and she threw a sphere of white light in my direction. I barely leaned out of the way.

“She’s been puppetized!” Itsuki barked, his voice loud enough to make it through my earplugs. He kicked out, catching Eldress Cheung in the hip but hardly fazing her.

She swiped at him with a glowing white hand, then threw a sphere at him.

Fuck. Puppetized? The concept had skipped my mind in the chaos of the moment. Unfreezing, I squeezed the Spitter trigger. The beam just barely missed, then Eldress Cheung threw a Fulmina Shield up between us. Stepping forward, she reached out to grab Itsuki, but he skittered backward, then awkwardly flipped back over one of the sofas in the room.

Gripping my Spitter with both hands, I kept it trained on Eldress Cheung as I walked forward and to the left, hoping to get a line of sight around the lightning shield.

The shield vanished, and I pulled the trigger. It hit her square in the shoulder, but her only reaction was to turn toward me and take a step. In my peripheral vision, I saw something rolling out from under the sofa Itsuki had jumped behind. A mini-grenade.

He had packed one stun grenade and one fragmentation grenade. And he’d already used the stun grenade.

I scrambled backward just as the grenade detonated right behind Eldress Cheung, knocking her forward to the ground, leaving her back shredded and smoking. Given that she had taken the brunt of the force, I now had a clear path to the door. Not pausing for a moment, I ran forward and planted my right foot to jump over her.

All I had to do was get a hand on Elena, and I could teleport us to safety. I sailed over Eldress Cheung until I felt her grab my ankle. She threw me like a stuffed toy animal, and I soared across the room to crash into a nearby table and chairs, the tear gas launcher flipping up and smacking me in the face in the process. Thankfully, I kept hold of my Spitter. Dazed, I extricated myself and looked over to see Eldress Cheung on her feet and shooting white beams at Itsuki, who deflected her shots with a palm-sized disc made of lightning. I took aim and squeezed the Spitter trigger.

Eldress Cheung dodged, and Itsuki blurred into motion, tapping into the inhuman speed of his Gravitational cultivation to bear down on her with his sword.

She sidestepped to avoid the blade. Itsuki, instead of following up with another attack, continued past her and into the room beyond. Growling, she jumped after him.

I was about to go after them when, all of a sudden, the brilliant light caused by an incoming teleportation erupted off to the side, so bright I had to shield my eyes. When it faded, I saw myself looking at Nicolas Kun.

“What the fuck is going on here?” he said, and it only took a fraction of a second for him to see me. “Who are you?”

Then he coughed from the teargas, prompting him to wave his hand and clear the space around him with divine sense. My eyes flickered to the doorway, where I saw Itsuki flying through the air as though he had been thrown. I heard a crashing sound and saw Eldress Cheung flash past as she headed after him.

“You’re Wang Fan, aren’t you?” he said.

I still had the gas mask on, so there was no way he could make out my facial features. He had to be making a wild guess. Taking a step toward me, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a jade medallion.

Fuck.

I had no idea what that medallion was, but it couldn’t be good. A field to prevent teleportations? A beam to render me unconscious? Something worse? Regardless, he was a three-root cultivator, and Eldress Cheung, before being puppetized, had two roots. Itsuki and I didn’t stand a chance against them. I had to get out of here.

“Wang who?” I said, fingering the wire release on my Spitter. “I’m Zhu Meng from the Lion Gang.”

His eyes narrowed, and he paused for the briefest moment. That was all the time I needed.

My hand jabbed into my coat pocket, found the teleportation disc, and snapped it.

Chapter 38 – Purgatory

The light faded away as I materialized into the same room as Svea and Jakobe.

Jakobe crouched at the window, Svea sat hunched over her keyboard on the other side of her room, her computer station sprawled out in front of her on a folding table. Both of them looked at me with expressions that were quickly turning from hopeful to trepidatious. It clearly wasn’t lost on them that I didn’t have Elena.

“What happened?” Jakobe asked.

Ripping the gas mask off, I keyed my mic. “Tycoon One. Status?”

There was no response.

“Fuck!” I breathed.

“Tycoon One, do you copy?” I said. I unclipped the tear gas launcher and threw it onto the nearby sofa.

“Wang Fan—” Svea began, but I held up my hand to silence her.

Three seconds passed, and grim foreboding gripped my heart.

Then light flared in the room, and I averted my eyes for a moment. When it faded, I looked over to see Itsuki, with Elena unconscious in his arms. He sagged momentarily, then released one arm, letting her feet slide to the ground and keeping the other arm loosely cradling her neck and shoulders.

I took a step forward. “Give her to me, Itsuki.”

“Do you know what this is?” he asked, holding something up for me to see with his free hand.

I looked at it—a teleportation disc.

I didn’t say anything.

“My third one,” he said. “All I had to do was snap this one instead, and she’d be mine for good. I could have vanished without a trace. No need for negotiating and intrigue.”

I stood there, stock-still.

“Yes, I planned this all along. If you don’t trust me now, I’d say the problem is with you.” He put the disc back in his pocket, then shifted his hands to under Elena’s armpits. He leaned her toward me, and I pulled her into my arms.

“Eagle Two, check in,” Itsuki said.

“All good here,” Bunny replied. “Are you okay?”

“Wheelman?”

“Ready to go.”

“Stand by.” Holding his abdomen and side tightly with one arm, he limped over and eased himself down into a chair.

Meanwhile, I gently carried Elena over to the sofa, kicked the tear gas launcher out of the way, and lay her down. After scanning her with divine sense, I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary, either technological or cultivation-related. Not that I had any skill diagnosing people. I couldn’t help but think about what happened to Jakobe after falling into Black Corpse hands. As I tried to straighten her hair, my eyes were drawn to a black patch on the side of her neck.

“Paliprox-D,” Svea said, stepping over to the couch.

Itsuki nodded.

“You can just pull it off,” Svea told me. “The sedative will keep her unconscious for at least a few hours.”

I carefully pulled the patch off and tossed it into a trashcan off to the side. “What happened back there, Itsuki?”

“That Eldress Cheung of yours really did a number on me. But I managed to grab Elena just in time. That’s it, nothing more.”

“Eldress Cheung?” Jakobe said. “As in, Ursula Cheung?”

“She’s been puppetized,” I explained.

“Fucking shit.”

I turned back to Itsuki. “How badly are you hurt?”

He peeled his arm off his abdomen and looked down. Even from my vantage point, I could see the blood matted on the sleeve of his suit. “Bad, but not that bad. I’ll be fine.”

“Do you need medicine?” Svea asked. “We have a Pure Cloud Pill.”

“Save it,” Itsuki replied. “I have better pills than that back at my place. I just need to catch my breath.”

I could see Svea bristle slightly out of the corner of my eye. Now that the adrenaline from the fight was wearing off, I felt the pain of being tossed across the room by Eldress Cheung. Thankfully, I hadn’t received any broken bones in the process.

“I thought you said he didn’t have a puppet, Itsuki,” I said.

“I said he didn’t have a Black Corpse puppet. And as far as I knew, he didn’t have a personal puppet either. My father clearly provided the funding and pulled the right strings to make it happen….”

I put my hand on Elena’s forehead, worried she might be feverish, but she wasn’t.

“Is there any chance he put a taṇhā worm in Elena?”

Itsuki didn’t answer immediately.

“A what?” Svea said.

“Long story,” I said. “I’ll tell you later.”

“I’d rather not make a definitive judgment call on that,” Itsuki said. “But I’d say it’s highly unlikely. The new variant we’ve been breeding isn’t easy to work with. That’s why we had to do the process in a hospital.”

All of a sudden, I thought back to a question that had long plagued me. Had our rescue of Jakobe back in the Third Earth caught them off guard? Or had they been expecting it? Had the whole thing been a trap? I wasn’t going to forget to ask Itsuki about that when I had a chance. Just not now.

“By the way, look what else I grabbed,” Itsuki said. He held up a blue computer diskette and looked at Svea. “Mind checking to see what’s on it?”

A spark of suspicion arose in my mind. How long had Itsuki taken to teleport out of that room? It had been several seconds. What if it was all a setup? What if, the moment I teleported out, the fighting stopped? What if this thing was some other convoluted trap, and what if this diskette was part of it?

“I set up this rig at the last minute,” Svea said, “and I didn’t spend much making it secure. If that disk has some sort of malicious autorun software on it, it could be a problem. I’d rather take a look at it back at my place, on my main setup.”

“In that case, I guess it’ll have to wait.” Pushing off the couch, he dropped the diskette back into his pocket. Keying his mic, he said, “Eagle Two, disengage and head to the rendezvous point. Wheelman, swing around to pick up the package.”

“Copy that,” Bunny said, and Tao Heng echoed her words.

“I’m calling this mission a success,” Itsuki said.

I stood and faced him, wondering if it was really going to end this simply. He’d had numerous chances to betray me, and it seemed unlikely that he would do so after retrieving Elena and handing her over. But who knew what devious plots might be at play. He reached into his pocket, and my hand twitched toward the NZ-85G.2 at my belt.

He gave me a look that said, “Really?”

He pulled his teleportation disc back out. “I lived up to my end of the bargain, Wang Fan. Now it’s your turn.” He snapped the disc, and light flared. He was gone.

“Motherfucker,” Jakobe said. “He throws around teleportation discs like they’re candy.”

“He’s rich,” I said, kneeling back down and running my fingers down Elena’s cheek. “So rich he makes Svea’s family seem like paupers.”

“Seriously?” Svea said as she started powering down her rig. “Damn. That’s pretty rich.”

“Tao Heng will be here in two minutes,” Jakobe said. “Let’s get gone.”

**

We took Elena back to the apartment she shared with Bunny. I held her the entire way back, and after I laid her down in her bed, I held her hand in mine and kissed it.

“Can I have a chair?” I asked. “I want to be here when she wakes up.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, brother,” Jakobe said.

“He’s right, Mr. Detective,” Svea said, placing a hand on my shoulder. “Girls need privacy sometimes. Trust me, she won’t want your ugly mug hovering over her when she wakes up.”

“But…” I said, except I knew they were right.

“Svea and I will be here to take care of her,” Bunny said. “Once she’s feeling up to it, we’ll make sure she calls or heads over to your place. All right?”

I sighed. “Okay.”

Tao Heng gave Jakobe and me a ride back to our apartment in Svea’s van. Thank god the elevator was working. As the door closed behind us, Jakobe said, “Damn, we’ve been up for over twenty-four hours at this point.”

I dropped onto the couch. “Yeah, I’m beat. Luckily I don’t have to go to work later today.”

Jakobe headed to the kitchen and got two sodas out of the fridge. Tossing one to me, he said, “What do you think’s the deal with that fucker Itsuki?”

“I wish I knew. On the one hand, he did keep his word. On the other hand, he’s playing a bigger game, and it’s driving me crazy not knowing what it is.”

We chatted for a few minutes until the conversation shifted to Xiaoli. I told Jakobe about the article from the Third Heaven Times and what Charlotte had dug up about the fate of Officer Shu.

“Shit, man, that’s bizarre. What do you think it means?”

“That’s what I can’t figure out.”

He stood and started pacing, reminding me of the old days back in the 35th Precinct. “So this Shu fellow says something about friends in Qin City, then gets permanently retired within a couple days. There’s a connection.”

“Qin City is in the Fourth Heaven,” I said. “It’s the biggest prison there is. Somehow it’s connected to Cross-Level Control in the Third Heaven.”

“Shu Qige said he had friends from Qin City ‘coming through.’ And you said Xiaoli was collecting shipping records? Transport records? Something like that?”

“Yeah. What if there’s some sort of smuggling operation going from Qin City through the Third Earth.”

“Smuggling?” Jakobe said, stopping in place. “What the hell would they be smuggling out of a prison.”

We looked at each other, he into my eyes, I into his headset.

“Prisoners.”

“Prisoners.”

We said it at the same time, after which silence filled the living room for several seconds.

“Some sort of prison break?” Jakobe said.

“But what does that have to do with orgplants?” I asked.

Before he could respond, we heard a knock on the door. I drew my Spitter, and Jakobe drew his pistol as well. Putting his back to the wall next to the door, he dropped to one knee and said, “Who’s there?”

“Mr. Hu,” came the reply.

Jakobe and I exchanged a quizzical glance, after which I nodded. We holstered our weapons, then Jakobe opened the door to reveal Elder Hu, clad in his usual tattered garments and a baseball cap.

“Morning, gentlemen.”

“Good morning, Mr. Hu,” I said, using slightly more formal language than I normally employed. “What are you doing here, sir? Would you like to join us for breakfast?”

“I’ve already eaten. If you haven’t, you’ll need to eat on the way. We have a matter to attend to.”

Are you fucking kidding me? I thought. Every time I blinked, I felt like my eyelids were sandpaper scratching my pupils, and my back and shoulders twinged from being thrown across the room by Eldress Cheung. On top of that, I knew Elena would be waking soon, and I wanted to talk to her as soon as I could. But what was I supposed to say? Sorry, Elder Hu. We just went on an unauthorized mission, joining forces with a rogue Black Corpse to attack another rogue Black Corpse, which led to us fighting a puppetized elder. Oh, by the way, Elena was held captive for a few days, and we have no idea what information they might have dragged out of her. So I’ll take a rain check if that’s alright.

Instead, I said, “Yeah, I could use something to eat. And some coffee.”

“There’s no time to waste, then,” he said, and he turned toward the elevator.

I looked at Jakobe, who shrugged.

“Guess I’ll be back later,” I said.

“Good luck.”

I hurried after Elder Hu. When the elevator doors closed, nothing happened.

“This thing breaks a lot,” I said.

“My building is the same,” he replied. “There’s a trick to it.”

He reached toward the elevator panel, and while I was sure he was about to use some divine sense, he simply smacked the panel with the heel of his palm, just next to the emergency speaker. To my surprise, the elevator chugged to life and started going down.

Elder Hu gave me a faint smile. “Try it next time. Works more often than not.”

Once outside the complex, he led me to a nearby side alley packed with street food vendors, where I got some congee and fried dough sticks to eat. While I waited, I glanced at the public service posters plastered on the alley walls. They were all in Sinese.

Avoid the Deadly Curse; Always Carry Your Umbrella.

Sinotech Protects the People; We’re Here For YOU.

Help Break the Curse; Report Immortal Cultivators.

“That cart over there sells coffee,” Elder Hu said, urging me over.

Their main fare was soybean milk, but they offered instant coffee as well.

“Fuck that, Elder. I’d rather drink piss than instant coffee.” That’s what I wanted to say. Instead, I dutifully bought a cup.

“This way to the zont-rail station,” Elder Hu said, and before long, we sat on the trundling train as it headed further out into the suburbs.

I devoured the congee and dough sticks, then inhaled the coffee, which was so weak it didn’t make a dent in my exhaustion. I couldn’t help but think back to the buzz of energy I’d received from the peaberry bean coffee Itsuki had treated me to. If only I could get another cup of that stuff.

The rocking of the train was tough to resist, and I nearly nodded off a few times, despite choosing to stand instead of sit.

The second time, Elder Hu noticed. “You look tired.”

“Didn’t get much sleep last night, Elder,” I said. “I was up… training.”

He nodded a response.

About thirty minutes later, we exited the train.

I’d never been so far from the Heaven-Propping Pillar in my life. Although I’d been born and raised in the Third Heaven, where there were a total of nine Ring Roads, I’d always lived close to the city center. The Third Earth only had five Ring Roads, so even the most distant suburbs were still closer to the Pillar than my neighborhood in the Fourth Earth. And right now, we were past the 7th Ring Road. The further you got from the Pillar, the less light there was, and the closer you got to Purgatory.

Whether Heavens or Earths, the dead zone between the edge of the remotest suburbs and the area where the Shield connected to the ground was called Purgatory. According to what we were taught in school, it had been given that name because it was the final buffer between the Grand Kingdom and the Hellscape. The rain from the Heavenly Curse was more likely to collect there in pools, and it was a potentially deadly location. No one ever dared to enter it other than maintenance crews equipped with hazmat suits, and parents would often use it to threaten their children. If you don’t brush your teeth, I’m going to throw you into Purgatory!

The cultivators taught a different story. They said Purgatory had been created as a wide-open space easily monitored by cameras and snipers. In the early days, they claimed, people wanted to escape the Grand Kingdom, so Purgatory had been set up to keep them inside. It was the same during the Climb, when citizens forcibly recruited into the Glorious Workforce would sometimes try to flee. The first thing I’d asked after that meeting had been, “Why would people want to escape into the Hellscape?” Elder Hu had answered the question in detail.

“In the early days,” he’d said, “the Hellscape was still inhabited by rogue factions and dissident groups. Even the Grand Kingdom maintained outposts and bases out there, in the ruins of the old world. Survival wasn’t impossible. Just difficult. People out there lived rough lives, but at least they were free from the oppressive rule of Sinotech.

“As the centuries passed, the rogue groups were wiped out, and the outposts and bases were abandoned. Common citizens came to trust their government so much that they forgot about trying to get past the Shield. The Shield, they believed, was their only protection. Little do the people know the Shield functions more like the walls of a prison.”

“But if it’s possible to survive in the Hellscape,” I’d said, “why keep everyone stuck inside?”

“You’ll be taught those details when you become a disciple,” Elder Hu had said and then moved the discussion in a different direction.

At long last, I was finally getting a glimpse of Purgatory up close. Or at least the areas bordering it. Out here, the environment was as dark as late evening, even though it was about ten in the morning. There were no high-rises to be seen, only dirty, crumbling apartment buildings, many of the units seemingly abandoned, with the windows either missing or boarded up. Most people would rather live like ants in the city center than exist in shadowy darkness like this.

“This way,” Elder Hu said, leading me into a complex that depressed me just looking at it. There wasn’t any graffiti, yet somehow that made it feel worse. As if these decaying structures were so insignificant, they didn’t deserve to be defaced. There was litter everywhere, but most of it was so old it was rotting into dust.

Turning a corner, we climbed up a staircase so dark I could hardly see my feet as we went up, although I noticed there wasn’t any trash present. Someone swept this staircase regularly. On the third floor, Elder Hu knocked softly on the door, which opened a moment later, spilling light into the corridor as we entered.

Once inside, with the door closed behind us, it was easy to forget we were in spitting distance of Purgatory. It was brightly lit and very clean. The furniture, rugs, and art were all in blues and greens that reminded me of Sea Lake Park, and the place smelled faintly of rice beneath a strong aroma of incense. Glancing off to the side, I saw a scrambler and an incense burner located near the door, indicating that this was a secure area. I had to wonder if that was even necessary, given the remote location. I had the vague impression Counter-Cultivation focused their efforts on the city centers, where the population was higher. That said, I wasn’t exactly an expert in how C-C operated.

The kitchen and dining room were attached to the living room, and seated at the far end of the rectangular table I saw Elders Guo and Qing.

Taking off our shoes and putting on slippers, we walked over to the table.

Clasping hands formally, I bowed and said, “Greetings Elder Guo, Elder Qing. It’s my sincere pleasure to meet with you this night. Er, this morning.”

“Sit,” Elder Guo said. He was an old man with white eyebrows and a perpetual frown. I’d always got the impression he didn’t like me, although I wasn’t sure why.

I complied, sitting opposite the elders.

Elder Hu sat at the head of the table at the empty spot, in front of which was a thick envelope of brown paper. A few other items were laid out on the table, including another incense burner, a pile of incense sticks, a bowl of fruit, and a pitcher of water with four matching cups.

“Elder Guo,” said Elder Hu, “Recruit Wang had a long night training and didn’t get much sleep. Do you have coffee by any chance?”

Elder Guo frowned slightly. “I prefer the traditions of our ancestors. I can provide oolong tea if Recruit Wang would like.”

He looked at me with a level expression.

“Oolong tea would be wonderful, Elder Guo,” I said. He rose and headed into the kitchen.

“Recruit Wang,” Elder Hu said, “I apologize for the suddenness of this meeting, but the unexpected nature of the proceedings is part of the test.”

I blinked. “Test, Elder?”

“A situation has come up which requires your assistance. A mission. Elder Qing was the one who pointed out that we could use your help, and the rest of the elder circle agreed. Unfortunately, protocol dictates that the sensitive nature of the mission is only appropriate for full disciples. Elder Qing and I suggested an accelerated promotion for you, and because of the urgent nature of the mission, Chief Elder Kang agreed. After all, you meet the cultivation requirements already.”

Elder Qing, a middle-aged man with a prosthetic ear and a prominent mole on his cheek, said, “Chief Elder Kang himself pointed out that taking the test immediately and without any forewarning would prove your qualifications beyond any doubt. Assuming you pass it. Elder Hu seems fully convinced that you will.”

I was too stunned to say anything, so a short silence followed. Apparently, they’d expected me to ask questions. This was when Elder Guo returned with a steaming cup of oolong tea.

“Thank you, Elder Guo,” I said. Picking it up, I had to admit that the floral, fruity aroma was enticing. It wasn’t coffee, but maybe it would help.

“The exam for recruits and novices generally has three stages,” Elder Hu said. “A written part, a practical demonstration, and a formal evaluation of your sea of energy. You’ll take the written tests for both levels but skip the practical aspect for recruits, as the novice test makes it redundant.”

“I understand, Elders. Are you sure I’m ready for the written test, though? I’ve barely attended more than ten meetings.”

“You only need to score sixty percent or higher to pass,” Elder Qing said. “It’s a given that you won’t know all the answers, but you have enough foundational knowledge that you should manage.”

“Besides,” said Elder Hu, “with the tutoring you’ve been getting from Novices Tao and Göransson, you should be more than ready.”

I nodded. “Very well. While this does come as a surprise, I’m ready. When do I begin?”

“Now,” Elder Hu said, and he pulled a small booklet of paper out of the brown envelope, as well as a pen.

Chapter 39 – Being Tested

“This is the novice test,” Elder Hu said, sliding the booklet and pen across the table to me.

“Is there a time limit?” I asked.

“You have the time it takes this incense stick to burn,” Elder Qing said, placing one of the incense sticks into the burner. Cultivators often used incense as a timing method, although I wasn’t sure why. Generally speaking, the standard sticks burned for thirty minutes. “Are you ready to begin?”

“Sure.”

“At any time during the test, you may use the restroom over there.” He gestured toward the other end of the room. “Now, begin.” He snapped, causing a tiny spark to appear and light the incense stick.

Trying to ignore the sleep clawing at my eyes, I took another sip of tea and opened the booklet. It was made of low-quality paper, not the waterproof type, and was bound with a spine of basic adhesive. Grabbing the pen and clicking it a few times, I read the first question. The topic happened to be something covered in the first cultivator meeting I attended.

Why do some people believe neon signs illuminate the Heavenly Curse in the raindrops?

a) Early tests done during The Climb indicated it was the case

b) Verified studies by Sinotech have confirmed it

c) Propaganda spread by Sinotech convinced people it was true

d) Ancient cultures believed neon was a gift from God

I checked C and went to the next question. As I continued down the first page, I realized the elders were just sitting there looking at me. I got the feeling it was supposed to be intimidating, but it had the opposite effect on me. In fact, it made me want to laugh. Where I grew up in the Third Heaven, school was a lot stricter than in the Bright Earths. You took a test to get placed in middle school, then another to get into high school. The exam for college was grueling, although in my case, I’d applied for Peacekeeper’s Academy, and that test was even harder. During the Peacekeeper’s Exam, the test-takers sat in an enormous auditorium filled with cameras and patrolled by armed Black Corpses, who shot cheaters in the back of the head without warning. And somehow, there were always cheaters. The whispered rumors stated that the Corpses would just shoot a few test-takers at random to intimidate the crowd, and while I’d always argued with people to the contrary, nowadays, I had to wonder if it was true.

Compared to a test where random people were liquidated, having some old men stare at me was nothing.

I continued down page one and was confident I’d selected the right answers for most of them. It was the same on the second page.

The first question that stumped me was on page three. I closed my eyes for a moment to think about the answer, then quickly opened them as I realized I’d almost nodded off.

Which of the following were not major cultivation factions or sects in the time period leading up to the War of Tribulation?

a) Duḥkha Temple

b) Reliance Sect

c) True Dao Association

d) Primal-Chaos Nirvana Alliance

Other than the Duḥkha Temple, I hadn’t heard of any of these groups. The Reliance Sect didn’t seem like a made-up name, nor did the True Dao Association. Primal-Chaos Nirvana Alliance? I thought. That definitely sounds over-the-top.

I checked D, then moved on. I wasn’t the type of person who would sit staring at a question for minutes on end. I either knew the answer or I didn’t. If I didn’t, I’d make my best guess and move on.

I finished the novice test before the incense stick was even half burned. Closing the booklet, I slid it back across the table.

The elders exchanged glances.

“Are you sure you don’t want to review your answers?” Elder Hu asked.

“I’m sure. I’m ready for the next test.”

Elder Hu pulled out a larger booklet from the envelope and passed it across the table. “For this test, you have the time it takes three incense sticks to burn.”

Elder Qing licked his lips, snuffed out the burning incense, and then replaced it with three fresh sticks.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Yes.”

While he lit the first incense stick, I opened the booklet and started going through the questions. Some of them were foundational knowledge that even recruits understood—for instance, the last question on page one.

Cultivation is based on

a) The Eight Immortals

b) The Nine Dragons

c) The Five Phases

d) The Eight Trigrams

I suppose it was intended to be a trick question. The human body contained nine primary meridians used in cultivation, so someone who really hadn’t been paying attention might select the Nine Dragons. But even the biggest daydreamer of a recruit would know that there were eight primary paths of cultivation. That must be why “the Eight Immortals” was listed first, to trip up someone who wasn’t paying attention. The correct answer was D.

As I proceeded along, I quickly realized that this test was harder, which made sense. Some of the questions required a good amount of guesswork on my part. Furthermore, the test wasn’t solely multiple choice. There were some devious true and false questions, as well as a few that required short paragraphs to be written. I soon ran into trouble spots.

The Black Corpses were founded as a direct result of the First Cultivator War.

True

False

That one made me pause to think. It seemed logical that the Corpses would have been founded after the First Cultivator War, given that their primary task was hunting and killing cultivators. However, that war ended sometime around the year 400 NE, which was fairly late in history. It wasn’t the First Cultivator War, I thought. It was the First Uprising.

I checked False. I was fairly certain the Corpses had been around since almost the beginning. And the First Uprising happened well before the year 100.

I was about three-quarters of the way through the booklet when the first incense stick burned out, and Elder Qing lit the second. For about six out of ten questions, I knew the answer immediately. For most of the rest, I made educated guesses, with only about one or two forcing me to go with my gut.

Eventually, I reached the last page.

Why do you want to be a disciple in the Naturalism Sect?

The question caught me by surprise. The reality was that I didn’t want to be a disciple in the Naturalism Sect. My dream had always been to be a Glorious Peacekeeper back in the Third Heaven, climb through the ranks like Dad, and maybe even become an inspector or superintendent one day.

Or did I?

If even half of what I’d learned so far in the Naturalism Sect was true, could I ever go back to being a Sinotech pawn? And that wasn’t to mention that I’d only scratched the surface of what the Naturalism Sect taught. It was common knowledge that with each promotion in the sect, one gained access to further secrets and truths.

I put pen to paper and began writing.

I believe in truth and justice. I’ve been lied to my entire life, and I want to know what’s really going on. I want to help people.

There was a lot more room to write, but I didn’t feel it was necessary. I re-read my words, nodded, and closed the booklet. The second incense stick wasn’t even half-burned yet as I pushed the test back to Elder Hu.

“Please wait here while we evaluate your answers.”

As soon as they left, and I found myself alone, my eyes drooped. How I longed for a nap. Instead, I rose and walked over to the restroom, where I splashed water on my face and did a few stretches. Then I strolled into the living room and looked around for anything that might give me more insight into Elder Guo’s personality. After all, he didn’t seem to like me very much, and if I wanted to make advancement in the sect, the last thing I needed was a superior who had it out for me.

His living room was clean and almost minimalist. He had some ink brush paintings, bamboo furniture, and no television. He really was into tradition. He had a small bookshelf filled with historical books with titles like How Sinotech Could Have Lost the Second Cultivator War and Heavens below Earths: An Inversion of Historical Cosmology. I remembered seeing the latter in the safehouse in the Applefarm District back in the Third Earth. Curious, I picked it up and flipped through it, but the text was so dense I didn’t dare start reading it in my exhausted state. I would probably fall asleep in seconds.

There was no clock that I could see, and I didn’t wear a watch, so I wasn’t sure exactly how long it took them to go over my test papers. It felt like roughly twenty minutes before I heard the elders emerging, so I went back to the table.

As we all sat, Elder Hu said, “Well done. You achieved a perfect score on the novice test. On the disciple test, you missed two questions.”

Damn. Even I was surprised by that result. I’d assumed I would miss a lot more than that. Good old detective’s intuition.

“Might I ask which questions I missed and what the correct answers were?” I asked.

“The question about sects before the War of Tribulation. The Primal-Chaos Nirvana Alliance was indeed an organization from those days. The Reliance Sect, on the other hand, is a complete fabrication. No such sect ever existed.”

“Noted,” I said.

“The other question related to Hydric cultivation, which you incorrectly categorized as a yang-type when in fact it’s yin-type.”

I nodded. “Thank you for the clarification.”

“Now for the practical testing. In general, novices are required to master at least one technique before promotion. We’re aware that you can use the Thermal Ripple Cloak. Can you please demonstrate? Step away from the table and cloak yourself.”

“Yes, Elder.” I pushed my chair back and stepped away from the table. Quickly assessing my sea of energy, I saw that I was down to roughly a quarter of its full potential. My hands flashed through the signs, and the cloak fell in place over me.

“Impressive,” Elder Qing said.

I detected a tingle as the shield was scanned by multiple streams of divine sense. Thermal Ripple Cloaks were generally invisible to divine sense unless the person doing the scanning knew exactly where to look and could focus on the seams.

“No seams at all,” Elder Hu said. “Not bad.”

The streams of divine energy retracted.

“You may drop the cloak now,” Elder Qing said. “Please, sit back down.”

As I sat, he waved his hand, causing an apple to rise up from the bowl, float over, and lower to the table right in front of me.

“Next is a test of your divine sense. Use it to push the apple across the table.”

I concentrated, sending out my divine sense to tap the apple, which rolled forward.

“Good. Now pull it back.”

I did.

“Can you lift it?”

I wrapped the apple up and lifted it off the table.

“Excellent. Now, try to keep it from moving while I pull on it.”

A moment later, I sensed a much stronger divine sense than mine, trying to pull the apple away from me. I held tight as the force increased until the apple slipped away.

Elder Qing nodded. “Now, Elder Guo will evaluate your cultivation base. Open yourself up to give him access.”

I bared my sea of energy and then sensed an even stronger stream of divine sense than before grab hold of me, then pierce inside to my sea of energy.

Elder Guo grunted. “Mm-hmm. I see. Your sea of energy is nearly empty. Presumably from your night of training?”

“That’s right,” I replied immediately.

Elder Qing nodded. “The level of mastery he displayed with the Thermal Ripple Cloak doesn’t come without a lot of practice.”

Elder Guo grunted again. I could ‘feel’ the divine sense inside me, and it was a very odd sensation.

“Well, look at this,” Elder Guo said. “His sea of energy is fractured.”

“What?” Elder Hu said. A moment later, I sensed another stream of divine sense within me. “I see.”

Elder Guo pursed his lips. “This is what happens when you rush cultivation.”

“A forced initial breakthrough shouldn’t result in this, though,” Elder Hu said. “Wang Fan, did anything else happen recently in your cultivation? Any mishaps or unexpected developments?”

“In the process of getting Disciple Kang away from those Counter-Cultivation agents, I used a Thermal Ripple Cloak. Unfortunately, I was already very low on energy from Disciple Kang’s mission earlier that day, and after only a short time, I drained my sea.”

The second stream of energy vanished.

“Kang Jianhong again,” Elder Hu said.

The first stream of energy retracted as well. Frowning, Elder Guo said, “Jianhong had nothing to do with Recruit Wang forcing his first breakthrough. That initial shortcut is what led to this.”

“I have to agree with Elder Guo,” Elder Qing said. “My apprentice has his faults, but Recruit Wang’s cultivation is his own responsibility.”

“In any case,” Elder Hu said, “a damaged sea of energy isn’t the end of the world. As long as he maintains a steady meditation routine, there shouldn’t be any long-term side effects. Now that it’s clear Recruit Wang meets all the requirements to become a disciple, he has my approval. Elder Qing?”

“He has my approval as well.”

The two elders looked at Elder Guo, who was staring at me with an unreadable expression.

“Mine as well,” Elder Guo said. “However, I propose his sea of energy be reassessed after the mission. An unstable cultivation base can be dangerous.”

“That’s reasonable,” Elder Hu said. “Now, let’s go through the various formalities.”

Next came the swearing of an oath, more incense-burning, and some kowtowing.

When it was all over, Elder Hu said, “Wang Fan, you are henceforth a disciple of the outer sect. An announcement will be made in your coterie at the next meeting. Furthermore, you’ll likely be assigned your own coterie by month’s end after you pass a follow-up test regarding sect protocols. If you have any associates you wish to bring with you to your new coterie, you or they may submit applications to me. In addition, you’ll receive personal instruction from me on a recurring basis.”

“Many thanks, Elder Hu,” I said, clasping my hands formally.

“Regarding your sea of energy,” Elder Qing said. “You can repair it in two ways. Either advance the damaged sea to the level of a root, or create a second sea. Both types of breakthroughs will strengthen your original sea to the point where it will stabilize naturally. But remember, rushing toward that solution could make things worse.”

“I understand, Elder Qing.”

“That’s not important right now, though,” said Elder Guo. “With the formalities out of the way, we need to discuss the mission.”

Chapter 40 – Questions and Answers

The last thing I was interested in hearing about now was some sort of mission. I wanted sleep. That said, life as a Peacekeeper had involved occasional sleepless nights when top-priority cases required it. I could handle it.

Blinking hard to try and get some moisture in my eyes, I did my best to keep alert. “What kind of mission?”

“First of all,” Elder Hu said, “be aware that this is a highly confidential operation that, normally speaking, only elite disciples would qualify to participate in. As such, you mustn’t breathe a word of any detail to anyone except those who are part of it.”

I nodded. “Understood, Elder.”

“The same goes for anything you might see or hear while on the mission,” Elder Qing said. “It’s possible you’ll learn things that are normally kept from lower-level disciples. If that happens, consider that information confidential.”

“Yes, sir.”

“The mission is straightforward but delicate,” Elder Hu said. “And, of course, potentially dangerous. It involves the Black Corpses.

“As you may or may not be aware, the study curriculum for novices contains a detailed history of the Corpses, as well as their current operations. Unfortunately, we don’t have time to impart all that information, so a summary will have to suffice. As descendants of the Duḥkha Temple, they’ve always excelled in Bone cultivation. Although the Naturalism Sect also has Bone cultivators, none can compare to the level of mastery achieved by the most elite Black Corpses.

“However, there’s a catch. Although the highest level of Bone cultivation was achieved in the old world, all of the elite Bone cultivators were killed in the War of Tribulation. As a result, their techniques died with them. The Duḥkha Temple cultivators were always arrogant, and their refusal to put their top methods into writing was a decision that proved quite detrimental to their descendants.

“In any case, for many years, the Black Corpses have been attempting to replicate the ancient success of the original founders of the Duḥkha Temple and once again unleash the true potential of Bone cultivation. All to no avail. Until recently. Black Corpse researchers have developed a substance called Euneirophrenia Marrow that they believe can be used to achieve rapid advancement in Bone cultivation and yet again reach the highest level.

“Call it a serum, although technically speaking, it’s more like an expression of energy. After testing the serum in secret for years, it seems they’re getting close to succeeding.”

I didn’t like where this mission description seemed to be going, but I kept my face expressionless, only nodding at appropriate moments during the explanation.

“The testing has ramped up recently, and we need to get our hands on the latest version of the serum. The last time we tested it was nearly three years ago at this point. That’s where you come in. We’ve uncovered the identity of the next test subject—a local Peacekeeper detective who has an arm prosthetic similar to yours. Half of a forearm replaced. The subject is male and is the same height and build as you. With an Igneus Mask, you could easily pass for him in a way that no one else in the Frugality Division ever could.

“And that’s not to mention your understanding of how Peacekeepers talk and act. There couldn’t be a more perfect choice than you. Peacekeepers aren’t exactly common in our sect.”

They wanted me to smuggle the serum out using my own body as the carrying case? I didn’t like the idea at all. It seemed far, far too risky. “Is the serum dangerous?”

“No. In early versions, there were dangerous side effects, but not anymore. For nearly two years now, none of the test subjects have suffered any ill effects at all. The point of the serum isn’t to cause harm. It’s to stimulate the growth of a specific type of bone cell used in Bone cultivation. The test subjects are injected with the serum, then allowed to return to their daily routine. They return a week later to be scanned. In some cases, the serum will naturally stimulate the subject’s meridians so that they begin forming a sea of energy. Such subjects ultimately become new Black Corpse recruits. That won’t affect you, though, as we’ll extract the serum before it does anything.

“All you have to do is go in, get the injection, and walk out.”

Just walk in and out? That was all? Why did it seem unreasonably optimistic? I sighed as I considered the matter.

“Disciple Wang,” Elder Hu said, “missions aren’t forced on anyone in the Naturalism Sect. If you feel uncomfortable with the idea, you’re well within your rights to refuse.”

“That said,” Elder Qing added quickly, “a truly loyal disciple would want to do everything to further the interests of the sect.”

I saw Elder Hu cast a hard glare at Elder Qing, but the latter pretended not to notice.

“We do have a backup plan in place,” Elder Guo said, “but are much more confident in your skills and abilities than that of the disciple set to stand in for you if needed.”

“I’m not going to refuse the mission,” I said. “That said, I do have some concerns. For instance, there’s a Counter-Cultivation task force hunting me. What if this is some sort of ploy to flush me out? It just so happens a Peacekeeper detective with a prosthetic like mine is part of this test program? It makes me wonder.”

“We considered that, Disciple Wang,” Elder Qing said. “But based on the information we have, it really is just a lucky coincidence. The Corpses have been running quarterly tests like these for decades, like clockwork. Because of the relationship between bonemetal prosthetics and Bone cultivation, the test subjects always have significant prosthetic augmentations. And they almost always pick Peacekeepers, to keep things simple.”

“Wait a moment. What do you mean ‘the relationship between bonemetal and Bone cultivation?’”

“Both bonecrete and bonemetal are the products of Bone cultivation, Disciple,” Elder Guo said. “That’s confidential information, by the way.”

I almost couldn’t believe it. “But I’ve been in a bonecrete factory before. Back in the Third Earth. We were given a tour because it connected to a case. They told us bonecrete is created using dust filtered out from the Hellscape that they—”

“How much of the factory did you actually see?” Elder Hu interrupted.

I searched my memories. “Not much, I guess. I remember seeing slabs of bonecrete rolling down a conveyor belt. Big machines. Things like that.”

“Suffice it to say,” Elder Hu said, “you saw little of what actually goes on in a bonecrete factory. It’s another Sinotech lie. They claim it’s the result of advanced technology, but like so many other things, it’s a product of cultivation.”

“In any case,” Elder Qing jumped in, “the point is that there isn’t anything unusual about this particular test subject. Furthermore, the subjects are selected a year in advance. He was on the schedule long before you even showed up in the Fourth Earth.”

I was too tired to ask more questions. “Fine,” I said. “But I obviously need time to master the Igneus Mask technique. My manual contains it, and though I’ve glanced at it before, I haven’t made any attempt to learn it.”

“Including today, you’ll have three days to prepare,” Elder Guo said. “At some point during that time, Elite Disciple Darius Xiang from the West Gate coterie will contact you. He’s leading the mission, so you’ll be taking orders from him. His coterie is one of the few in the Fourth Earth that specializes in Thermal cultivation, so he’ll get you up to speed on the technique.”

West Gate? That was Elena’s coterie.

“I understand.” For some reason, my mind was having a hard time coming up with questions. “Where exactly will I be impersonating this detective? A hospital somewhere?”

“No, an orgplant near the city center.”

“An orgplant?” I felt my heart rate increasing as thoughts of Xiaoli fluttered in the back of my mind. “Elders, what exactly are orgplants? Why are they so important?”

“Now that you’re a disciple,” Elder Guo said, “you have the right to learn of such matters. And while your future studies will provide further enlightenment on the subject, we can give you a summary. Elder Hu?”

“Orgplants are manifestations of evil that are closely tied to a fiendish operation being carried out by Sinotech, something they call the Purpose. Without the orgplants, the Purpose can never be accomplished, and thus, we do everything we can to sabotage and even destroy orgplants.”

I frowned slightly, as the explanation was ambiguous and smacked of hyperbole. “But what exactly are they?”

“Research and storage facilities,” Elder Qing said.

“Storage? But they’re huge. What’s being stored in them?”

“That,” Elder Guo said, “is something you’ll learn when you become an elite disciple.”

“You can direct any other questions to Elite Disciple Xiang,” Elder Qing said. “Is there anything else you’d like to ask while you have our ear?”

I considered the question for a moment. “No.”

“This is for you,” Elder Hu said, producing a pendant that appeared to have been crafted from jade. “Your dimensional pendant. Look inside with divine sense, and you’ll see a glowing symbol. Insert your divine sense into the symbol, and the pendant will be linked to you. Do it now, before you leave.”

He tossed the pendant to me, and I caught it. Following instructions, I linked myself to the item. The interior looked like a cave hewn from jade, lined with shelves, and with a table in the middle. Resting on the table was a scroll and a box.

“As your cultivation level increases, the interior of the pendant will grow, and you’ll be able to reshape both the interior and exterior as you see fit. Don’t put living things inside; even plants will be killed by the vacuum state that results when you seal it shut. The scroll on the table contains the instructions for crafting your cultivator robe, while the box has certain special materials you’ll need to do so. Please refrain from spending time on the robe until after the mission. Also, don’t take the pendant with you on this particular mission for safety reasons.”

“Yes, Elder.”

“Congratulations, Disciple Wang,” Elder Qing said. “You’ve made excellent progress in the three months you’ve been with us. Succeed in this mission, and you’ll prove that you’re even more valuable.”

“Many thanks, Elders.”

“You’re dismissed,” Elder Guo said. “I suggest you wait to work on the Igneus Mask until after you’ve rested a bit. You’re clearly exhausted.”

Nodding, I rose.

“I’ll see him to the zont-rail station,” Elder Hu said.

Outside the apartment, with the oppressive darkness of Purgatory looming behind us, Elder Hu led the way back toward the station. Across the street from it, he stopped.

“Take this,” he said, and he held out a small white envelope. “It’s a talisman designed to exponentially increase cultivation speed for a short time. It includes words of instruction. Despite what some people say, there’s no direct evidence that accelerated cultivation is dangerous. That said, you need to be careful with the talisman. It can be harmful if you don’t use it correctly.”

I took the envelope. “Thank you, Elder Hu.”

“Henceforth, you may address me as Master,” he said. “We’ll do the kowtowing and whatnot later.”

“Yes, Master.”

“Now, head back, get some rest, then start getting ready for the mission. Elite Disciple Xiang will head over at some point for further planning. Good luck.” He turned and walked off into the afternoon ‘night’ of Purgatory.

The train was empty. Sitting on a grimy seat, I glanced through the instructions for the talisman. Then I crossed my ankle onto my knee, slid open the secret heel, and put the talisman inside. Clicking the heel shut, I leaned back and heaved a long sigh.

**

I fell asleep and went three extra stops before a band of giggling schoolgirls tromping onto the train woke me up. After doubling back, I trudged into my apartment, collapsed on my bed, and slept like a lump of bonecrete.

I woke in the evening feeling rested but achy from the clash with Eldress Cheung and very hungry. After meditating to refill my sea of energy, I trudged out of bed and into the kitchen, where I found Jakobe frying some protein strips. A half-full pot of coffee was waiting on the counter, and the rice cooker was beeping, indicating the rice inside was cooked.

“Hungry, brother?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

He tossed a few more strips into the sizzling pan. I poured myself a mug of coffee and took out two bowls from the cabinet. After filling the bowls with rice, I grabbed two pairs of chopsticks and sat at the table.

“What did Elder Hu want?” Jakobe asked.

“You won’t believe it. I’m a disciple now.” I blew on the coffee to cool it, then took a sip. It was scalding hot, just how I liked it. It wasn’t on the level of Itsuki’s peaberry beans, but it was vastly superior to the sludge I’d had on the street earlier.

“No shit! Congratulations.”

“I guess. They fast-tracked my promotion because they want me to go on a mission.”

He looked over. “Mission?”

“I’m not supposed to talk about the details.”

“When?”

“Couple days.”

“If it’s confidential, I won’t ask any more questions.” He flipped the strips. “You know what I was thinking we could do later? A bit of sparring. I even picked up some used grappling gloves earlier today.”

“You do realize I’m twice as strong as you, right?”

“Not anymore,” he grinned.

“What? You broke through? When?”

“Couple days ago. What did you think I was doing with Bunny this whole time, just—”

“Congratulations,” I interrupted. “And yeah, I’d love to do some sparring!”

“Great. I’m curious to see how we measure up now that you’re not the only one with a sea of energy.” He divided the protein strips between two bowls, then sat down with me at the table.

After munching one down, I asked. “Any word from Bunny or Svea?”

“Yeah, brother. Elena woke up. First person she asked about was you.”

I shot to my feet. “I should call over there.”

“Might as well,” he said.

I dialed the number, and Bunny answered after only two rings.

“It’s me,” I said.

“Hey. Elena’s in the shower right now.”

“Oh,” I said, failing to mask the disappointment in my voice. “Well, tell her I called.”

“I will. Bye.”

“Later.”

I sat back down at the table and chatted with Jakobe as we ate. When we were finished, he did the dishes, and I cleaned up the rest of the kitchen.

As I put the uncooked protein strips back into the fridge, I said, “So, you and Bunny. Spill. What’s happening there?”

He smiled. “I like her.”

“‘Like’ her? Meaning… what exactly?” I had this horrible vision of Elena and I making up, then Jakobe causing some sort of drama with Bunny and everything turning awkward again.

“I don’t know. There’s something about her. We just kind of click. The girls I usually date, they tend to annoy me pretty quickly.” He paused for a moment, dish in hand under the running water. “Not her, though.”

“She doesn’t seem your type.”

“I know. The weird clothes. The fact I like blondes. Nothing seems right. Fuck, bro, I just realized something!”

“Oh?” I said.

“You like Han girls, but you’re with a blonde. I like blondes, but I’m with a Han girl. What the hell?”

I laughed and shrugged. “My dad always said don’t judge a book by its cover. Guess he was right. You know. Worry less about the outside, and focus on the inside?”

“Hunh. Maybe so.”

I looked over at the phone. “You think I should try again?”

“Nah. Don’t make yourself seem obsessive.”

“I guess you’re right.”

Out in the living room, we put on some rock music and started warming up.

“By the way, I learned something new about orgplants,” I said, going into some jumping jacks. “Apparently, they’re storage facilities.”

“Storage? For what?”

“The elders wouldn’t say. Only elite disciples get that info.”

 “So what are you thinking? They’re smuggling escaped prisoners into orgplants?”

“Who’s ‘they?’” I asked.

“Sinotech?”

“But why? They run everything anyway. Why would they need to smuggle anything anywhere?”

“Maybe a rogue faction in Sinotech? Or maybe it’s not Sinotech at all. Maybe mobsters are doing it?”

“It’s possible.”

We threw around a few more theories before finally moving on to the exercise. We had no equipment other than the grappling gloves, so we took it easy. After the boxing, we did a bit of grappling, made easy by the springy carpet that came with the apartment.

It reminded me of the old days back in the 35th Precinct.

Jakobe kept getting the upper hand on me, especially with the grappling. Eventually, after tapping out five or six times in a row, I decided to call it quits.

“You’re pretty distracted,” he said, wiping the sweat from his forehead with a cloth.

“Yeah. Keep wondering what’s going on with Elena. You want the first shower?”

“Sure.”

After he was done, I took my turn and then dressed. Fifteen minutes later, I was on my bed flipping through my Thermal cultivation manual to the section on the Igneus Mask. Before I could get past the introductory paragraphs, the front door chime rang.

I heard Jakobe open it.

“Is Wang Fan home?” Elena asked.

Chapter 41 – Wind and a Skyline

“He’s in his room,” Jakobe said, just as I pulled the bedroom door open.

Elena stood in the corridor, clad in a pink rain cloak, the hood thrown back.

Our eyes met over Jakobe’s shoulder, and she raised her hand in a half-wave. “Hi.”

“Hey,” I replied.

Jakobe took a step back to let her in the door, but she just stood there.

“Maybe I’ll head out to give you two some privacy…” he said.

“That’s okay,” Elena said. “I was thinking we could talk outside.”

“Sure,” I said. “Let me get a jacket.”

I ducked back into my room and opened the middle drawer in my dresser. As I rifled through the handful of clothing items I’d accumulated, I noticed a hoodie folded up in the back corner. It was the same one Elena gave me back in the Grand Kingdom Highrise, when I’d tossed aside my Peacekeeper’s coat. The mere sight brought a smile to the corner of my mouth. I pulled it on, then looked at my Spitter nestled in the shirts on the other side of the drawer. After a moment of consideration, I closed the drawer and walked back out into the living room.

As I did, I looked at her a bit closer and noticed something odd. Her makeup. It reminded me of the time we went on the sudden outing to Glee City back in the Third Earth. I’d never seen her so made up since then, not even on the handful of dates we’d been on here in the Fourth Earth. She seemed like she was ready for some important occasion. What did it mean?

Making sure to grab my keys, I stepped out into the corridor.

“Should I wait for you?” Jakobe asked.

“Yeah, sure,” Elena said.

My heart was in my throat as the door shut behind me and the locking mechanism engaged. Why did she want to talk somewhere else? What did her answer to Jakobe mean?

She has a breakup speech planned, I thought. That had to be it. She wanted me out of the apartment so she could walk off when she was done. What should I do? Just agree to call it quits? Or should I refuse?

“Come on,” she said, turning toward the elevator and, at the same time, reaching out and grabbing my hand.

As her fingers slipped into mine and she pulled me toward the elevator, my mind went blank with confusion. Then she hit the UP call button, and the confusion deepened.

What was going on?

As the elevator climbed up from a few floors down, we waited in silence, holding hands. Oddly, it was a comfortable silence.

“It’s not raining,” she said, “and the wind stations on 404th Street are running. I figured the roof would be a nice place to talk.”

“Yeah,” I said, “should be.”

A moment later, the doors opened to an empty elevator. Our hands slipped apart as we stepped inside and turned around, but it felt natural. She hit the button for the fiftieth floor, and we ascended straight up without any stops. On the top floor, we walked to the end of the corridor and up a half-flight of stairs that ended with a locked and barred door. She waved her hand as she used divine sense to unlock the door, then slid the bar to the side manually.

We stepped out onto the roof of the building, and I felt the breeze immediately. Other than a few large puddles, everything was dry. Part of that was because the average temperature in the Fourth Earth was slightly higher than in the Third, a trend that continued the higher one went through the various Earths. When the rain ceased and the wind stations turned on, things got dry a bit more quickly.

Elena stuck her hands in her pockets and strolled toward the parapet. I followed.

I’d never been up here, and in fact, I hadn’t had a chance to go anywhere high up during my time in the Fourth Earth. As one would expect, the view was amazing this high up, where the trash on the streets wasn’t visible and the graffiti wasn’t so obvious. From the parapet, we had a bird’s eye view of the whole neighborhood. Far off in the distance, the Heaven Propping Pillar was barely visible above the skyline of the city center; only bits of its brilliance reached this far. Not too far away, a black streak that was a vert-rail tunnel could be seen, running up toward the Shield, and beyond it, the Fifth Earth. Looking over my shoulder, I could see the darkness of Purgatory not far off.

“It’s so different here,” Elena said.

“I know. Reminds me of what you said that one time. How the Bright Earths aren’t that bright after all.”

She smiled. “If it’s like this here, I wonder what it’s like higher up in the Dark Earths.”

“Hotter and darker, I guess.”

Reaching out, she took my hand again and stepped closer to me. Running her fingers gently down my cheek where she’d scratched me, she said, “I’m sorry I did that.”

I averted my eyes. “I shouldn’t have grabbed you. I’m really sorry.”

“I overreacted.”

I shook my head. “You said not to touch you, and I did. It was my fault. Everything just happened wrong. About what you heard—”

“I get it. Jakobe explained.”

“I know. But I should tell you my version. The whole thing, so you know it all.”

“If you want to. If you don’t, then you don’t have to.”

“I do want to.”

She let my hand slip out of hers as she turned to lean on the parapet and stare out at the view. As her honey-blonde hair swayed in the breeze, her eyes glistened in the soft glow of the Pillar, as green as emerald. “I’m scared, Wang Fan.”

I wanted to put my arm around her, but I wasn’t sure if I should. Leaning on the parapet next to her, I said, “Scared of…?”

“Everything. This place isn’t my home. I had never left the Third Earth before all this. I hardly know anybody here, and now it seems the Corpses have tracked me down again.”

“I don’t think they have,” I said.

“But Bunny said that Saito found you, that he was there when you rescued me.”

I sighed. “I don’t know how much of the story Bunny told you. It was actually Itsuki that rescued you.”

“Mierda,” she said. “Bunny danced around the details.”

“He and I went in as a team, but things got hot, and I had to teleport out. If I didn’t, I would have been killed. Or worse. He stayed behind and got you.”

A blur of motion caught my attention, and I turned to see a tiny bird flit by and land an arm’s length away. It cocked its head at me.

“Look, a hummingbird,” I said.

She leaned to look around me, and when she saw the bird, she smiled. “I want to hear the whole story about Saito, and everything else. But first, are we okay? You and me?”

I hesitated. “You tell me, Elena.”

She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it.

I waited a moment, then continued, “I know I screwed up, and I’m sorry. I guess the answer to your question is... I want us to be okay.”

“I do too,” she said in almost a whisper.

“I like you. A lot. I think you’re funny and smart and tenacious, and—”

“Tenacious? What’s that mean?”

I’d used a Sinese four-character idiom that wasn’t necessarily very common. “It means you’re tough. You’ve got grit. You don’t back down.”

She grinned. “I guess I am like that, aren’t I?”

“Yeah, you are. You say what you think and you don’t give in to fear.”

Her grin faded. “But I still feel scared.”

“That’s different. Everybody gets scared, Elena. It’s how you deal with the fear that shows what you’re made of. I’ve seen you under pressure. You don’t give up. You fight. And… I like that about you.”

She nodded, and we stood there in the breeze. The hummingbird’s wings thrummed to life as it rose up into the air and looked at us for a moment before speeding off into the breeze.

Now was the key moment. My chance to say what I really thought. “You know what, I have something I need to get off my chest; I’m gonna take back something from before. Remember when you said relationships need a good foundation and that it can’t be some dramatic thing? Well, I disagree. I think a dramatic thing can be a good foundation. You and I fought for our lives together, and we came out on top, and that’s good enough for me. I like you, and you like me, so let’s not sit around analyzing everything, let’s just get to know each other more and keep going forward. What do you think?”

Damn, I thought, that came out a lot faster than I meant it to. I said the whole thing in one breath.

She turned to look at me, a faint smile turning up the corner of her mouth.

I was looking into her eyes and she into mine, and I desperately wanted to pull her to me and kiss her. But I couldn’t. Not after everything that had happened.

Then she took a step closer, wrapped one arm around my waist and the other behind my neck. Her scent of chocolate and jasmine filled my nostrils, and before I knew what was happening, she pulled me down and kissed me. When our lips met, it felt like fire running into the pit of my stomach. My heart, which had been in my throat, exploded into nothing. I didn’t sense raw passion from her, but rather, a deep longing coupled with fragility, as though she were a delicate dandelion that, if not cradled with the utmost care, would drift through my fingers.

It lasted for two or three hours. At least, that’s what it felt like to me. It was probably only a second or two. Then her lips left mine, and she leaned up against my chest and snuggled her head against me.

There wasn’t a need for any words.

I wrapped my arms around her and looked over her head at the amber glow of the distant Pillar. Then I closed my eyes.

This was a perfect moment.

**

We started talking. Looking abashed, she explained how she’d rented a room near the West Gate Promenade and didn’t remember how she’d been taken by Nicolas Kun. In fact, she didn’t remember anything from the ordeal. Apparently, she’d been kept in a paliprox-induced sleep the entire time. The fact that Nicolas didn’t awaken and question her only seemed to lend weight to Itsuki’s explanation that they wanted her blood and nothing more.

The way the conversation flowed, we didn’t end up talking about Charlotte. That part didn’t seem like a big priority at the moment anyway. Soon we reached the subject of Itsuki. I explained everything. How he’d been following me and how he revealed himself near my apartment. When I told her about his offer, I could see the confusion in her eyes.

“Why would they think my blood is special?”

“He didn’t say. Something about your ancestors.”

She frowned slightly in thought. “My abuela used to tell stories about our ancestors.”

“Abuela?” I asked.

“It’s Southmer for grandmother. She said our people used to be royalty, in the old world. Nobody in the family believed her, and even she seemed to treat those stories like fairy tales. I mean, can you really trust a story that starts out with ‘once upon a time?’”

“I wouldn’t think so. But who knows. Maybe there’s some truth to them.”

“Maybe.”

I went on to describe how Itsuki suggested we work together to save her and how I’d convinced everyone to help. As the details unfolded, I realized I was heading toward a very tough subject. Eldress Cheung.

I really didn’t want to break the news to Elena that her Master had been captured and puppetized. On the other hand, it didn’t seem right to keep the information from her. If I was going to make this relationship work, I couldn’t hide things from her, and I couldn’t lie to her.

“Itsuki blew the door down and we went in guns blazing,” I said. “Literally. Thugs were falling left and right. We cleared the main room in a matter of seconds, and then—”

The door opened, and Jakobe stuck his head out. “Everything alright?”

“Yeah, what’s up?” I said.

“Thought I’d find you two up here. Darius Xiang knocked on the door about a minute after you left. Said he didn’t see you in the elevator, so… not many other places you’d go.”

“Darius Xiang?” Elena asked. “What’s he doing here?”

“Looking for the two of you. He’s been waiting this entire time.”

Shit. Darius Xiang? And he was looking for both of us? I could guess what that meant.

“We’ll be right down,” I said.

The door closed.

“You can finish the story later,” Elena said. “There must be something really important for Darius to come over here looking for me.”

“Not just you. Us. I didn’t get a chance to tell you. I got promoted to disciple.”

“What!” she blurted. “Congratulations!” She kissed me again, and I reveled in the sensation.

As we pulled apart, I said, “They want me to go on a mission led by Darius. And if he’s here for both of us, I bet you’re going to get pulled into it as well.”

“You don’t sound happy.”

“Let’s head down and see what’s going on.”

I’d tell her about Eldress Cheung later. There would be plenty of time. We hurried back to the elevator.

“What kind of guy is this Darius?” I asked.

“He’s nice,” she said. “And very patient.”

Darius Xiang looked young, although that didn’t necessarily mean much when it came to cultivators. As soon as you developed a Thermal sea of energy and gained an extended lifespan, your body started aging differently. For all I knew, Darius could be fifty or even a hundred, not the twenty-plus he appeared to be.

He dressed similar to Bunny Bai, all in black. He had long hair that covered half of his face when he didn’t sweep it aside, as well as black lipstick and dark eyeshadow. Definitely not my style.

When we entered, he rose and stepped forward with his right hand extended.

“I’m Darius,” he said. “You must be Wang Fan.”

I gripped it and gave it a firm shake, which he returned.

“That’s me,” I said.

“I’ve heard a lot about you.”

I smiled. “Hopefully only the good parts.”

He chuckled in response. Looking at Elena, he said, “Good to see you, Elena.”

“Same here,” she replied.

“We missed you at the last meeting. Have you recovered from that stomach bug?”

Her gaze flickering to meet mine briefly, she said, “Yes, feeling much better.”

“Well, have a seat. Jakobe, we need to go over some confidential matters. Do you mind giving us some privacy?”

“No problem. I was about to head over to Bunny’s anyway.”

As Elena and I sat, Darius pulled a scrambler and incense burner out of his bag. After the apartment was secure, he said, “The elders already explained the mission, right, Wang Fan?”

“To me, yes,” I said. “Jakobe said you were asking about Elena as well? Will she be coming along?”

“That’s right,” he replied.

“Coming along to what?” she asked.

“It’s like this….” He went into a basic overview of the mission, including everything the elders had mentioned to me and a few other new details. All the while, I kept clenching and unclenching my jaw at the thought of Elena being involved in the mission. Not only was it going to be risky in general, but also, she had just been in a coma for several days. Was she really in the position to be going out on missions? Paliprox didn’t have any adverse side effects that I knew of, but still, I couldn’t prevent myself from worrying. That wasn’t to mention the fact that Nicolas Kun was still out there with Eldress Cheung on a leash. And what about Itsuki?

Elena should probably relocate to the Dark Earths, where there was less “enforcement” of law and more of a war to establish it. If you wanted to disappear, that was where you went. Regardless, she shouldn’t be putting herself on the front lines of the fight between the Naturalism Sect and Sinotech Corporation. I supposed the same went for me.

When Darius finished explaining, the first thing Elena asked was, “But what do you need me for?”

“Remember, Elena, missions are usually assigned to a single coterie. Wang Fan is only being brought in because of his Peacekeeper background. But the mission is officially assigned to the West Gate coterie. You’re the only Solar cultivator we have. Our only fighter.”

She blinked and opened her mouth.

“Of course,” Darius continued quickly, “it’s a stealth mission, so as long as everything goes smoothly, there won’t be any fighting. For you, it’ll be a good way to see how we run missions in the inner sect. Get your feet wet, so to speak.”

She shrugged. “Makes sense.”

“Okay, any questions from the two of you?”

Elena shook her head.

“Generally speaking, no,” I said. “It’s only going to be the three of us?”

“No,” Darius said. “We’re going to split the mission up into two phases. The first phase will involve getting our hands on the Glorious Peacekeeper you’ll impersonate, a fellow named Jia Chong. That part will be handled by other members of my coterie. As for the getaway, it’ll just be us three. Elena and I will wait nearby to pick you up. We’ll have teleportation slips in the getaway van, just in case. As long as things go smoothly, we’ll just drive back here and be done with the matter. It should only take a few hours.”

“I think we need to go over the specific plan a few more times.”

“Of course. But the most important thing to do right now is to make sure your Igneus Mask is up to par. Have you been working on it?”

“Not really.”

“That’s fine. No other coterie in the Fourth Earth has as many Thermal cultivators as we do. That’s why they paired us, so we could help you out. Go get your manual, and we can start from the beginning.”

**

I realized I needed to call Itsuki at some point, but kept putting it off. Elena and I hadn’t finished that conversation, much less come to a decision about how to respond to his offer.

Given all of the training, planning, and a dry run of the route we needed to drive, I never found the right moment to tell Elena about Eldress Cheung. In the handful of moments we found time alone, our lips would meet, and time would fly by. Once the mission was over, we would have some quiet time to sit down and talk.

Darius was an elite disciple, and the fact that he had more information about orgplants was maddening. I pushed him for details, but he was tight-lipped. At a certain point, I stopped asking, as I didn’t want him to realize I was digging for information.

I considered using Elder Hu’s talisman to advance my cultivation but felt it would have been too rushed. I was already well-enough equipped to deal with the mission, so much so that not even breaking through to the root level would give me any significant advantage.

Chapter 42 – The Mission

The day of the mission arrived. The first phase, kidnapping the Peacekeeper I was to impersonate, went off smoothly and without a hitch. We rendezvoused near the target destination, where I took a long look at the man’s facial structure before donning his clothing. I’d already poured through the dossier of information about him that the sect had compiled, reading up on everything from his medical history to his known associates. His father held the lofty rank of commissioner in the Eighth Heaven, but it wasn’t relevant to the mission given how far away that was. I felt as ready as I would ever be.

Ten minutes later, I hopped out of Darius’s van around the block from the destination orgplant, Igneus Mask in place. With Darius Xiang’s tutoring, I’d quickly mastered the technique, and my face was now a perfect copy of Officer Jia. I looked older, middle-aged, with long sideburns and a crooked nose. Considering Jia and I were almost exactly the same height and build, I doubted anyone could tell the difference between the two of us even after a close inspection. And thanks to a method Darius had taught me, I’d been able to invert the final energy knot, which meant that the Igneus Mask took virtually no energy to maintain. Sadly, the inversion trick would only work with the mask, not my Thermal Ripple Cloak. That would have been very handy.

At the outside gate, I flashed my badge and said I had an appointment. The guard let me in.

On the other side of the razor wire, I opened a pair of thick bonemetal doors that led into a large waiting room. The first thing I noticed was that the temperature was a good ten degrees cooler than outside.

“I’m here for an appointment,” I said to the guard behind the protective glass.

“ID?” he replied.

“This is all the ID you need,” I replied, flashing the Peacekeeper’s badge I’d just acquired. The dossier indicated Jia was on the arrogant side and liked to flaunt his position to those beneath him.

The guard glanced at it, then looked back down at the sheaf of paper on the clipboard in front of him. “Officer Jia Chong?”

“Were you expecting another Peacekeeper with an arm like this?” I waved my prosthetic hand in front of his face.

His lips formed a tight line as he pulled out another clipboard with a pen attached to the top and slid it to me via the slot beneath the glass. “Sign in. And I still need your ID. The badge isn’t enough.”

I made a spitting noise as I dug the ID card out of my pocket and passed it under the glass to him. As he examined the card then peered at my face, I scrawled my name and the date onto the sheet of paper and shoved it back.

He returned the ID card, then turned to tap a few keys on his keyboard. While I waited, I glanced around the waiting room, trying to look bored. There were green plastic chairs, a table with some reading material on it, and a few art prints on the wall. I found it very strange. According to the Naturalism Sect, orgplants were dangerous and evil, so much so that they were targeted for sabotage and destruction. But nothing in this room seemed unusual. It looked like the most typical and ordinary waiting room imaginable.

“You’re just on time, Officer Jia. Firearm, please.”

I pulled Officer Jia’s pistol out and slid it through.

“Go to the end of the corridor, to the green door,” the guard said. He flipped a switch, and I heard a buzzing sound as the door to the left of the guard station unlocked.

I pushed through it and found myself in a long, brightly-lit corridor that smelled of polished metal and disinfectant. My only accompaniment as I walked along was the echo of my boots on the hard floor.

I was alone. I had no radio to get in touch with my team. No backup to call on. Earlier today, I’d felt nervous, but now that the mission was underway, I felt calm. Everything was going according to plan, and in fact, things were ahead of schedule. It was like the opposite of the mission with Kang Jianhong.

At the end of the corridor, I opened the green door and stepped into another waiting room, except much smaller. It was basically an empty box with a white tile floor, a desk, a fancy medical scale with a height rod attached, and a set of double doors on the other side. Sitting at a desk behind a sleek computer was a technician in a white coat, with a yellow surgical mask covering his mouth and nose.

“Detective Jia?” he asked, looking up.

“Yeah.”

“Please sit down. Did you follow the instructions we sent? No food or drink since last night? No alcohol?”

“Yeah, yeah, all that.” I sat, and as he took my blood pressure, I took in every square inch of his desk, hoping to find useful clues. Unfortunately, he had the screen tilted away so that I couldn’t see it, and the file folders he had stacked on the other side of me were closed. “How long is this going to take? I got four new cases today, and the clock is ticking.”

“It’ll take as long as it takes. If you have a problem, you can file a complaint with the Black Corpses. I’m sure they’d love the feedback.”

I snapped my mouth shut at his clear sarcasm and tried to make myself look discomfited by his words.

“Step over there onto the scale,” the technician said. I did as he asked, and the machine automatically measured my height and weight. That was new and unexpected. I'd never seen an automated scale like this in all the physicals I’d undergone throughout the years. After recording the information, the technician continued, “Go on through. The guard there will take you to the lab.”

On the other side of the double doors was an armored Black Corpse. I nodded in greeting.

“Follow me,” he said and then proceeded to lead me through a maze of corridors that looked identical to the one from earlier. I focused hard on memorizing the twists and turns as we went through several intersections.

Straight. Left. Straight. Straight. Right. Left. Right. It went on. I managed to keep track of the sequence and commit it to memory. The last thing I wanted was to get lost trying to make my way out if things went south.

The guard swiped his ID card on a card reader next to the doors, and they swished open.

“Go in and find the blue plastic chair,” he said. “Might as well take your coat off along the way.”

Shrugging out of my coat and hanging it on my arm, I walked into what was clearly a lab. A dozen or so technicians bustled about attending to various tasks, threading their way through hulking equipment the likes of which I’d never seen before. There were robotic arms tending to vials and tubes, plexiglass cases filled with what appeared to be water vapor, and other things I couldn’t identify.

Glancing about, I saw the blue plastic chair the guard had mentioned and went over to sit down, throwing my jacket over the back before I did. The chair sat next to a smooth metal desk, atop which was a computer that had to be the most advanced bit of technology I’d ever seen. The monitor had color on it instead of being black and green. And next to the keyboard was an odd, oval-shaped object the technician moved back and forth, apparently controlling the computer in some way.

“Welcome, Officer Jia,” the technician said.

Looking at her name badge, I said, “How long is this gonna take, Sara?”

“Only a few minutes.” She pulled out a wire and handed it to me.

Rolling my sleeve up to reveal my arm jack, I snapped it in. “Does it hurt?”

“No. At this stage of development, the serum won’t cause any pain. You might get a fever later in the day, and you could have trouble sleeping. If you experience anything other than that, call and ask for help.” She slid a card across the desk. “Someone will answer that line twenty-four hours a day.”

I glanced at the phone number printed on the card, then slipped the thing into my pocket.

She moved the oval-shaped object back and forth, pushing on it a few times, which produced a sharp clicking sound. Then she examined the wires to make sure they were connected properly. “All set to go, Detective. Sit tight for two or three minutes.”

She hit a key on the keyboard, then got up and walked off.

I felt a faint tingle in my forearm and was tempted to use divine sense to examine what was happening. However, Darius had repeatedly emphasized not to do that.

“Orgplants are dangerous places,” he’d said. “Don’t do anything to attract the attention of any cultivator-types they might have there.”

I sat in the chair and looked around, trying to seem bored. In reality, I was trying to soak in as many details of my surroundings as possible. I made mental notes such as the number of technicians, the room's general configuration, how many computers they had, and other such details. I also tried to commit visual images of the equipment to memory, so I could describe what I’d seen. Unfortunately, nothing was sitting around unattended that I could risk swiping. It was made worse by the two security cameras on opposite ends of the room.

What were these people doing here? Was it all related to this supposed serum I was trying to smuggle out? Were they all attached to the Black Corpses? Did they know the truth about how the Corpses were cultivators? I couldn’t imagine they did. How could information so shocking and monumental be kept secret if it was that widely known?

About three minutes later, Sara returned.

“I’ll unjack you now,” she said, tapping a button. The wires popped out of my arm.

“That’s it?”

“Yeah.”

“Hardly felt a thing,” I said, standing. “So I just come back next week?”

“Right. Oh,” she said, “the new overseer wants to talk with you. The office over there.” She nodded toward the back of the lab, where I saw a door with the title “Orgplant Overseer Nakamura” printed on it in black stencil. Next to it was a window with the shutters closed tight.

“What’s it about?” I asked, putting my jacket back on.

“You two know each other, right?” she said. “Said something about your father.”

My heart skipped a beat. There hadn’t been any information in the dossier indicating Officer Jia had contacts inside the orgplant. Not saying another word to the technician, I walked over to the door and rapped twice.

“Come in.”

I stepped into a cramped office piled high with boxes and file folders. The room’s ceiling light was off; all the illumination came from a desk lamp with a green hood, as well as whatever seeped through the closed curtains. I didn’t see an ounce of dust anywhere, and I got the feeling the occupant of this office must have just moved in. Now that the door was open, a shaft of light pierced inside, revealing an older woman at the desk. She had a rumpled lab coat and frizzy hair, and her nose was stuck into a bunch of papers.

“Dr. Nakamura?” I said, purposefully making my voice a bit gravely.

“Ohayō!” she said in Japkor, setting the papers down in front of her.

I nodded in response.

“Well,” she continued, “it took long enough, but you finally managed to get into the program. Happy?”

“Absolutely.”

She cocked her head. “Something seems off about you. Do you have a cold?”

“Just allergies,” I said, clearing my throat.

“I don’t remember you having a problem with allergies before.”

“Neighbors remodeling. Lots of dust.” I coughed.

“Remodeling? At Jing Mansion? Isn’t the entire complex brand new?”

I raised my eyebrows dramatically. “You know how rich people are.”

She laughed. “True, true. Would you like a prescription for some antihistamine?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“How about the serum? Did the injection go smoothly?”

“Fine. Arms still tingling a bit, that’s all.”

“Oh, that’s normal. You might feel a bit uncomfortable later tonight, but you won’t notice a thing after that. If this goes as planned, you’ll be in Black Corpse training by the end of the year. Your father will be thrilled, don’t you think?”

“Thrilled,” I said with a nod.

Her eyes narrowed slightly, and suddenly I sensed a buzzing sensation that I recognized as divine sense sweeping through me. This woman was a cultivator! And she was getting suspicious. It wasn’t possible to detect another cultivator's cultivation base, so I wondered what she was looking for. The sensation passed quickly, and she smiled again.

“Dr. Nakamura,” I said, “my father mentioned he wanted to have you over for dinner to say thanks. Would tomorrow work?”

Her eyes lit up. “That would be perfect!”

“His place at six?”

“Well, isn’t this a surprise! It’s been years since I’ve been down to the Eighth Heaven. I can’t wait. Let me write this in my calendar.” She reached across the desk to a flip calendar and, in the process, knocked a pile of folders, envelopes, and papers off the other side of the desk toward me. “Oh, silly me.”

“I got it,” I said, stooping. I piled the papers up and managed to slip a random envelope into my sleeve. I plopped the pile back onto the desk. “There you go.”

“Thank you, dear.”

I edged back out of the door. “I got four new cases today, Doctor. I really need to get back to work.”

“Of course, of course. Go ahead and ask Sara to escort you out. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Breathing a sigh of relief, I left Nakamura’s office. The technician Sara led me halfway back to the entrance until she ran into an armored Black Corpse, who she handed me over to. As she disappeared back toward the lab, the Corpse said, “This way.”

“I know the way, buddy,” I said, trying to brush past him.

He extended his hand to block me. “I’m not your buddy. Follow me.”

I’d hoped to win a chance to ‘get lost’ in the orgplant and poke around a bit, but that obviously wasn’t going to happen. It had been worth a shot.

The mission was a success, although I shuddered to think about the substance that had been inserted into my body. I rubbed my arm subconsciously as I walked back out into the main waiting room. After retrieving Officer Jia’s firearm and signing out, I strolled out of the orgplant proper, through a walled corridor, past the razor wire, and out onto the street.

Around the corner, a van pulled up next to me, and the side door opened. I hopped in.

Chapter 43 – The Getaway

Darius was at the wheel, and Elena sat behind him on the bench seat.

I closed the door behind me and flopped down next to Elena, letting the Igneus Mask drop. As I did, she leaned over and pulled me into a kiss. The warmth it brought was a welcome contrast to the cold, sterile interior of the orgplant.

Darius eased out into traffic and simultaneously tapped a talisman pasted to the front console. It glowed briefly, then went dark. The talisman was similar to the incense burned at meetings and provided a temporary shield from divine sense scans. As for tech, the van had built-in equipment to keep us safe.

“Well?” Darius said.

I exhaled slowly. “Something unexpected came up, but I handled it.”

“What happened?” Elena asked.

“Apparently, the lead scientist in there is friends with Jia Chong. Or at least, with his father.”

“Shit,” Darius said. “How did our people miss something that obvious?”

“She’s new,” I said. “Not sure how new, but it looks like she just took over.”

“What did she want?”

Suddenly realizing I was fishing in my pockets for a cigarette, I said, “To say hi, apparently. Somehow it ended with me inviting her to Jia Chong’s father’s house for dinner.”

Darius and Elena both laughed.

“Seriously?” Elena asked.

“Yeah.”

“Damn, man,” Darius said, brushing a lock of black hair to the side of his face, “the heretic Peacekeeper lives up to the hype. In and out with no problems at all.”

“It’s all thanks to your help, Darius. I wouldn’t be so good with the Igneus mask if it weren’t for you.”

“Nah, you’ve got a knack for Thermal cultivation. Not everyone does, you know. Did you get anything else while you were in there?”

“Yeah. This.” I held up the envelope, which was stamped “confidential” in red ink.

“Whoa, jackpot!” he said. “The elders will be happy.” Shading his eyes as he looked out the window, he said, “Sometimes I forget how bright it is here so close to the city center.”

“You should see what it’s like in the Third Earth,” Elena said. “It’s even brighter.”

“Say, Wang Fan,” Darius said, “you’re from the Fourth Heaven, right? What’s it like down there? Even brighter?”

“Third Heaven,” I corrected. “It’s a bit brighter during the day, but not much. Honestly, the Third Earth and the Third Heaven are about the same when it comes to light. The Pillar doesn’t start fading until here in the Fourth Earth.”

“Wouldn’t you know it. We Fourthers really have it the worst.” I’d heard the sentiment before. People from the Fourth Earth lamented their position right below the Dark Earths and often spoke of their desire to see the Heavenly Pillar grow brighter.

For the next several minutes or so, we chatted randomly as Darius drove us out of the city center and back in the direction of home. As we passed the 2nd Ring Road, there was a lull in the conversation

Looking down at the envelope I’d acquired, I scanned it with divine sense. It appeared to be nothing more than an ordinary envelope. Looking closer, I saw that it was addressed to Vice Minister Ke.

Holy fucking shit! A letter to a vice minister? There were only four vice ministers in the entire Grand Kingdom!

Working a prosthetic finger under the seal flap, I pulled it open. Inside was a single folded piece of paper.

Vice Minister:

The shipments from the Fourth Heaven haven’t been enough to keep up with our quotas. We need more bodies! Suggest authorizing the precincts here to clear out all orphanages outside the 6th Ring Road. We’re currently at 65% storage capacity, that influx would do a lot to get us closer to completion.

Overseer Nakamura

p.s. Don’t forget, you promised to take me to an opera date! XD

My first reaction was to stare at the paper in blank confusion. More bodies? Clear out the orphanages? It couldn’t possibly mean what I thought it meant. I read it a few more times, until I was sure there wasn’t some subtext I could be missing out on. Eventually my lip curled with disgust. These were the people I had been giving my loyalty to? These were the people running our society? I wanted to crumple the note into a ball and throw it out the window, but I knew the elder circle would want to see it.

“Are you okay?” Elena whispered.

Fingers trembling slightly, I handed the note to her. She read it, and I saw her jaw tighten in anger.

“What does it mean?” she asked, handing it back to me.

“I don’t know for sure,” I replied, folding the note back up and putting it into the envelope. “But one thing’s for sure, they’re monsters.”

I was done.

I knew there were plenty of Peacekeepers who were good officers, people who wanted justice for the commoners and who hated criminals. But if the leaders were rotten, the organization was rotten. Plain and simple.

I hereby renounce my loyalty to the Glorious Peacekeepers, I thought. I am no longer a Sinotech tool.

We were passing under the 3rd Ring Road, and I was about to try and force Darius to tell me more about orgplants when he suddenly said, “I think we’re being followed.”

I looked over my shoulder out of the mirrored rear windshield. “What caught your attention?”

“The black sedan. See it? Two cars back, in the next lane over.”

We were in a ground car, which limited our mobility to a certain extent. Darius said it was an advantage because it made us less noticeable, but I think it was more because no one in his coterie was rich enough to have a hovervehicle.

Whoever was following us also appeared to be driving a ground car, although it was impossible to say. Some top-of-the-line hovercars had convertible turbines which could shift into ordinary tires with the flip of a switch.

“How long have they been on our tail?” I asked.

“I noticed them back when I turned off the 2nd Ring Road. I was looking in the mirror when I saw them cut someone off behind me. And just now, they stuck out as we circled around past the 3rd Ring. Shit, we’re out of range of both of the teleportation slips. Should we just follow standard protocol? Find a payphone and make a call? Or keep going until we can use the slip.”

Honestly, some of the safety protocols in the Naturalism Sect seemed foolish at best. Such as the rule of finding a payphone to call for help if you thought you were being followed. And I wanted to know who exactly was following us and why.

“Let’s switch things up,” I said. “If we’re really being tailed, it’d be a lot better to lose them before we get back to our home turf. I’ve done my fair share of mobile surveillance, so I know a thing or two. Wait for a few exits, then get off. Do you know the neighborhoods around here?”

“Not really. I’m 7th Ring born and bred.”

“In that case, just pick an exit at random. Once you’re off, drive like normal for a bit, then make a right turn at a major intersection. Go a few blocks and make another turn. If it’s still behind us at that point, we’ll know we have a situation.”

The mood in the van became tense as we continued along for a minute or so. Then Darius exited and did just as I’d instructed.

After the first turn, I kept my eyes on the street behind us.

“There it is,” I said.

“Shit,” Darius murmured. He drove for a bit longer, then took another turn.

I kept watching. Sure enough, the sedan made the same turn. Whoever was driving obviously didn’t know much about mobile surveillance. Either that or they didn’t care about standing out. They shouldn’t have followed us so closely through two turns.

Darius saw the car in the rearview mirror and cursed again. “What now?”

“First, continue driving just as you are. Keep your eye on the lights ahead. You want to try to hit one of the lights right when it just turns from yellow to red. Run that light, and make your first right turn as quickly as possible. After that, make a few turns as fast as you can. Then look for a public place to pull over and park. A fuel station or a corner store market where there are other cars. The goal is to lose him, got it? If you can’t, then we need to find a place to safely cast a Thermal Ripple Cloak and disappear. A parking garage or something.”

“All right, boss.”

Squeezing Elena’s hand, I said, “Get ready for a bit of lurching around.”

She nodded.

It took six intersections for Darius to get the timing right, as two traffic lights weren’t functioning. When the light flicked to yellow at the sixth intersection, he slowed slightly, reaching the intersection just as the light turned red. Then he punched the accelerator, and we shot through the intersection.

Looking back, I watched as the black sedan also sped up.

“They’re not giving up,” I said. “Turn right, Darius!”

Just before the next corner, he hit the brake to decelerate and turn. The force pushed Elena and me against the side of the van.

“Go, go, go!” I said. “This is our chance!”

Darius hit the accelerator, zooming down the street before making a sharp left turn into an alley. Then he swerved right onto the next main street. As Elena and I were jostled back and forth, I kept looking behind us. However, Darius was driving too erratically for me to tell for sure if the black car was still behind us.

We were currently in a residential neighborhood filled primarily with squat brown buildings of no more than five stories.

Next, Darius pulled into a narrow alley barely wide enough for the van to squeeze through. Once inside, he hit the accelerator, sending us barreling toward the other side, knocking aside trash cans and piles of junk along the way.

“Shit!” Darius blurted, and he hit the brakes. After lurching forward, I looked out the front window and saw the black car descending into the mouth of the alley ahead, its turbines kicking up dust and sending the rubbish in the alley swirling about in tiny cyclones. Damn, it was a convertible hovercar, after all.

Darius threw the van in reverse, looked over his shoulder, and was preparing to back up when he said, “What the fuck?”

Looking back, I saw a figure standing behind us in the alley. We were halfway through the alley, so they were roughly two hundred feet away, making it impossible to pick out any meaningful features. They appeared to be clad in a raincoat and hat, making it even more difficult to identify them.

I looked back and saw the black car slowly driving toward us through the alley, once again on wheels.

“You have to go back,” I said. “The person behind us is probably just a local going for a walk.”

He stepped down on the accelerator, and the van lurched into motion back the way we’d come.

Looking out the rear windshield, I saw the figure walking toward us. Darius let off the accelerator.

“What are you doing?” Elena said. “The car’s still coming!”

“I can’t run over an old lady!”

Narrowing my eyes, I looked more closely at the figure behind us and saw her fingers flashing. A sheet of brilliant white light suddenly rose up from the ground, stretching from one side of the alley to the other.

“Elena,” I said. “I think—”

“That’s a Sunrise Rampart!” she said, staring out the back window.

“This is bad,” Darius said. “Elena, get ready to fight.”

The black sedan stopped about thirty feet in front of us, and the door opened. A man stepped out, clad in a tan suit and a gas mask, holding a bulky gun in his hand.

“Teargas launcher,” I said. I pulled out Officer Jia’s pistol, chambered a round, and opened the van door.

Even as I heard the pop of the teargas launcher being discharged, I stepped out and took aim at the suited man. I pulled the trigger but couldn’t tell if I hit him. If I had, there was no effect. I pulled the trigger again and again.

The suited man’s hand flashed, and a wide disk of crackling lightning appeared in front of him. Electric cultivator.

Around this time, I realized black smoke was starting to pour out from beneath the van. However, I didn’t have time to worry about that. A beam of white light shot over my shoulder as Elena climbed out of the van clad in her cultivator robe. Unfortunately, our assailant’s Fulmina Shield absorbed her Sunflare Blast with ease.

The suited man walked forward, keeping the shield in front of him, and Elena let off a few more shots, to no effect.

All of a sudden, I inhaled some of the smoke and reflexively let loose a heaving cough. Elena also fell into a fit of hacking and coughing.

“Shit, look!” Darius said. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw the figure in the raincoat was now on our side of the Sunrise Rampart and was approaching at a fast walk.

I put my forearm over my nose and mouth as I tried to breathe but got more smoke and devolved into coughing.

Making a gagging sound, Elena turned and thrust her hands out. Nothing happened.

“¡Joder!”

Coughing, Darius opened the door of the driver’s seat and stumbled out, his cultivator robe swirling out of his dimensional pendant to cover him with voluminous black silk and dark leather strips. As the robe settled into place, he threw up a hand sign, except it had no effect. As he did, I reached toward my sea of energy but sensed nothing.

“It’s not tear gas!” Darius said. “It’s paliprox gas!”

Suddenly, Eldress Cheung thrust a hand out, and a beam of white light stabbed Darius through the back of the head. He dropped onto his face, dead.

I aimed the pistol at the approaching figure in the raincoat, only to be thrown off my feet by a massive gust of wind. I landed half on top of Elena, and as we struggled to disentangle from each other, I felt someone grab my hair and jerk me back.

My shoulders twinged painfully as I was wrenched away from Elena, and then I felt a hand slap the side of my neck. Almost immediately, I sensed myself going numb, starting from that spot.

Eldress Cheung reached Elena and grabbed her by the hair as well. That was when everything went black.

Interlude 8 – The True Heaven

Jakobe opened his eyes and saw shadows and flickering light. I don’t have eyes. I’m dreaming.

The light and shadows swirled, and he saw hovercars, red taillights glittering in the rain. He saw streets, a person falling, a bird soaring through high-rises. Trees and water appeared, then people milling about with cotton candy and popcorn.

Two people were talking, having a conversation about the latest movie release. He heard complaints about the traffic, muttered curses regarding the rain, and coughing. Light and color blurred, and he felt like he was the bird, flitting through the buildings with spastic energy.

Wang Fan lay on a table, a figure in a gas mask hovering above him.

“Where is she?” the figure grated through the gas mask.

Jakobe saw lights flashing, strobe-like, piercing into the depths of his mind. He closed his ‘eyes,’ but the light still hammered at his psyche.

Bloody footprints filled his field of vision. He somehow tilted his view and saw another footprint, then another. He found himself following them until he glimpsed Wang Fan stepping into an elevator.

“The bodies and blood are going to get noticed real fast,” Wang Fan said.

“I know,” someone replied gruffly.

I recognize that voice, Jakobe thought, but then everything spun, and he found himself speeding through a tornado of blue smoke and green stars. He flew up, left, right, catching sight of the Heaven-Propping Pillar at high noon. A succession of dizzying images passed, people he knew, people he didn’t, places he recognized, places he’d never seen.

He heard voices.

“Are guns really going to do us any good?”

“Well, well. Look who decided to go slumming in Tom’s Tavern….”

“¡Chigen su madre maricas!”

“Did you just purchase illegal drugs a moment ago?”

Everything blurred again. He felt himself rising. Going up. Up. Up. And further up.

How high can I go? he thought.

He saw darkness and heard gunfire. Screams.

Then more darkness, filled with water and crashing sounds. Everything went silent, and a flame appeared. A candle, or a stick of incense.

“You’re certain this is true?” a man said. Jakobe saw him. He had a hawk’s nose and a beard, and he was smiling faintly.

“Yes. Kang Duan worked tirelessly to secure the evidence.”

“Kang Duan?”

“A chief elder down in the Fourth Earth.”

The man with the beard sat there silently for a long moment. “They’re getting close to fulfilling their Purpose. If we don’t act soon, all our work will be for nothing.”

“But the True Heaven….”

“If this information is true, then the riddle is solved.”

“Yes, I suppose it is.”

The bearded man sighed. “We need this girl, but according to the report, we’re many steps behind. Perhaps too many.”

“Sect Leader, the True Heaven is the culmination of hundreds of years of work. If there’s even the shadow of a chance we can salvage it, we have to act. Now.”

“I fully agree. Now, who is this heretic Peacekeeper the report says is—”

Gasping, Jakobe sat up in bed. “What the fucking….”

Bunny stirred next to him. “Honey?”

He gripped the bedsheets in his fist. “It’s happening again.”

She sat up, her black hair cascading down her back. “You’re sure?”

He nodded. “Have you ever heard of something called the True Heaven?”

Chapter 44 – Ossientum Memorandum

I woke to find myself in a long metal box of a room, lying on a simple foam mattress stretched over a metal bed built directly into the wall. A bright fluorescent bulb stared at me from above like the eye of an angry robotic parent.

I sat up.

It was essentially a cell containing nothing other than the bed—no restroom, desk, or chair. The door had no handle.

I reached up and rubbed my neck but didn’t feel any patch. Tentatively sending my thoughts into the pit of my stomach, I sensed my sea of energy. Apparently, I was no longer under the influence of paliprox.

Pulling my divine sense out from inside, I sent it toward the door. It felt like pushing against hard rubber. The walls were similarly impossible to get past. There was obviously a spell formation securing the room.

Standing, I pushed against the door with my hand, but as expected, it didn’t move.

All of a sudden, I heard a voice, startling me.

“So, you’re awake, Detective.”

I looked up and realized there was a speaker in the corner of the ceiling, next to a tiny round half-sphere that was presumably a camera.

“Sit back on the bed,” the voice said. “I’ll be right down to chat.”

A short time later, the door opened, and Nicolas Kun strolled in, hands stuffed into the pants pockets of the tan suit he’d been wearing earlier. It was the same fashionable type of garb I’d seen Itsuki Saito wearing, but the quality was inferior.

I sized him up, and he gave me a smile just short of a sneer.

“Presumably, I don’t need to point out that someone with a pitiful, defective sea of energy like yours couldn’t possibly harm a three-root cultivator like myself. Don’t get any ideas.”

“Wasn’t planning to,” I replied, remaining seated on the metal bed. I knew full well he could kill me with his bare hands if he wanted to, much less considering what he was capable of in terms of cultivation techniques. “What do you want from me and Elena?”

“No beating around the bush, I see. Good. We’ll talk about your girlfriend later. For now, all you need to worry about is this.”

He reached inside his jacket and produced a spiral-bound booklet made from standard waterproof paper, with front and back covers of translucent plastic. He tossed it to me.

Catching it, I saw the words ‘Ossientum Memorandum’ on the front.

“Read that,” he said. “Shouldn’t take more than an hour. I’ll be back.”

He walked out and closed the door behind him.

Before opening the document, I looked around the room a bit more carefully, hoping to find something that would give me more information. Wear marks in certain areas. Debris. Anything.

Unfortunately, the room seemed as empty and sterile as an operating table in the best hospital in the First Heaven. Of course, I’d never been to the First Heaven, much less a hospital there, but in my imagination, they were beyond pristine. This room shone as if it were brand new. The metallic surfaces gleamed; either they had never been touched by anyone, or they’d been polished to a shine with the finest cleaning agents imaginable. Inhaling deeply, I detected the faint tingle of disinfectant in the air. It didn’t seem likely I was going to find anything noteworthy or useful.

Opening the document, I started reading. While it initially seemed like some sort of scientific treatise, I soon realized that “Ossientum” was a cultivation technique.

Bone cultivation.

I stopped reading. What did this indicate? Nicolas Kun wanted me to work on cultivation? But why?

I skimmed through the rest of the book and realized that much of the last half was redacted. It seemed the information left for me to read was enough that, if I mastered it, I could form a sea of energy, but nothing more. There were no techniques left to be studied.

Even after some thought, I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. Did he want to puppetize me? But if he did, wouldn’t he want me to have some techniques to use after the process was over?

I felt like something strange was going on but wasn’t sure what.

Given that I had nothing else to do, after skimming to the end, I went back and started reading more carefully. Around the time I hit the redactions, the door opened, and Nicolas Kun stepped in again.

“Any questions?” he said.

“Yeah. What the hell is this about?”

“It’s about you practicing the cultivation in that manual,” he said. “Form a Bone sea of energy. That’s all. Are you saying you can’t do it?”

“Of course I can do it. But why? And what about Elena? Where is she?”

“In the next room over, sound asleep with a patch of paliprox-D on her neck. If you want to see her awake and alive, then do as I say. Got it?”

I gritted my teeth. “Yeah. So you’re not going to tell me what’s going on here?”

“What did you expect, some sort of monologue where I tell you all my plans? Sorry. I’m not in the mood.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out an oblong medicinal pill, and tossed it to me. “Eat it.”

I looked at the pill. “What is it?”

“Forming a second sea is always a challenge, and that will give you a boost. Nine times out of ten, it’ll lead to an immediate breakthrough. Now start cultivating.”

He left, and the door clicked shut behind him.

Fuck you, I thought, and while I was tempted to say the words aloud, I didn’t.

Grinding my teeth in frustration at my helplessness, I reviewed the manual, going over the breathing techniques and meridian paths. Then I consumed the pill and settled down cross-legged on the floor to start meditating.

The breathing technique was different from the Thermal cultivation I was used to. The meridian paths were dramatically different and the energy flows deviously challenging to master.

During my initial forced breakthrough, Elena had provided me with the spark of energy I needed to start and had overseen the entire process, giving advice that made everything move more quickly. But things didn’t go as smoothly this time. Although I was able to absorb some energy from the surroundings almost immediately, nothing happened after sending it through the proper channel of meridians. Of course, I didn’t expect it to work on the first try.

I did another cycle. And another.

There was no clock in the room, and it was easy to lose track of time when meditating, so I had no idea how long it was before the ache in my back became so distracting that I had to take a break. I also realized my bladder was full.

Rising to my feet, I stretched out and said, “I need to take a leak.”

Nothing happened. I walked over to the door and banged on it. “Hey, anybody there? I need a restroom!”

Nothing.

I banged one more time on the door. “Hey!”

Sitting down on the metal bed, I leaned back against the wall. What must have been only thirty seconds later, Nicolas spoke to me through the speaker. “To your right.”

I looked over and watched as a seam appeared on the previously smooth wall. It stretched from the floor up, then over, then down—a door.

What the hell kind of technology was this?

I walked over and pushed on the door, which slid open noiselessly to reveal a gleaming restroom. The toilet, sink, towel dispenser, and trash can were all plated with chrome or something similar. The door closed behind me. Apparently, this wasn’t truly a prison cell. After relieving myself and washing my hands, I quickly checked the secret compartment at the heel of my boot. The contents were there. The paliprox patch I’d taken from those Counter-Cultivation agents, the talisman Elder Hu gave me, and the little multi-tool. If Nicolas had searched me, he hadn’t done so very thoroughly.

When I walked out of the restroom, Nicolas spoke again from the ceiling. “Did you make any progress?”

“Not much. I need more time. This type of cultivation is all new to me.”

The speaker went silent.

“By the way,” I said, “I’m getting hungry. And I could use some coffee.” I could sense a faint tightness in the back of my head that was my caffeine addiction. If I didn’t get some coffee soon, it would turn into a full-blown headache. From that, I could calculate that I’d probably been imprisoned for somewhere between four to six hours.

Ten or so minutes later, I heard a swishing sound and saw that a slot had opened up at the bottom of the main door to the room. Someone on the other side slid a tray in, atop which was a bowl of millet congee, a styrofoam cup of lukewarm coffee, black, and a plastic spoon.

I ate and drank, then slid the tray back outside. The slot closed.

“Try again, Mr. Wang,” Nicolas said through the speaker. “The sooner you succeed, the sooner I can guarantee not to liquidate your girlfriend. Or worse.”

His threats caused anger to burn within me, but I tried to ignore them. It wouldn’t do any good right now. After a few stretching exercises to get my blood flowing, I settled down and started meditating again. After what must have been a few hours, my back was burning again, and I hadn’t made any progress. I stood up and did some more stretches.

The speaker clicked on. “I’ve heard mixed opinions about your cultivation, Detective. Some say you’re talented. Others say you’re a hack. I’m starting to feel that the latter is the more accurate assessment. I suggest you try harder.”

I bit my bottom lip to hold back from releasing a curse. Was he serious, or was he just trying to bait me? Who were these multiple sources of information he was vaguely referring to? One could have been Itsuki. But who else had he been talking to that had information about my cultivation abilities?

“How about some water?” I said.

A couple of minutes later, another tray came through the slot in the door, this time with a cup of water and a black paliprox patch. I didn’t see any letter on the patch, so presumably, it was the ordinary variety that didn’t contain a sedative.

“The patch is for when you succeed. Put it on, and you can see your girlfriend.”

Was that supposed to be some sort of motivation? I drained the cup of water, tossed the patch onto the bed, and pushed the tray back out.

Then I paced the room a bit and did a few exercises such as pushups and sit-ups.

As I did, I considered my next move. If Nicolas wanted me to form a new sea of energy, I doubted it would be for a reason that would benefit me. On the other hand, I was starting to worry about what he would do if I kept failing.

I entered the restroom again, and the moment the door closed, I clicked open my boot heel and took out the talisman from Elder Hu. If I had to achieve a breakthrough to survive, then I might as well pull out all the stops. I could feel that my heart rate was still elevated thanks to the pill I’d consumed earlier. Would using the talisman cause some sort of harmful interaction? The talisman’s written instructions didn’t mention anything like that.

Pulling up my sleeve, I placed the talisman onto my forearm just next to the metal jack. Then I activated it. It glowed brightly and sank into my skin. Immediately, I felt my heart rate increase even more dramatically. I also felt a dull heat throbbing in the pit of my stomach.

Walking out of the restroom, I rolled my shoulders to loosen them and sat down for another session of meditation.

The talisman made a big difference. After what seemed like only about twenty minutes, I made the initial step toward success.

A tiny bit of energy remained near my golden Thermal sea of energy and then began to grow as I went through more cycles. It expanded, eventually turning into something like a lake. However, unlike the golden color of my other sea, this one was dark gray. More time passed, and then a tremor pushed through me, and my hair stood on end. I’d done it!

At the same time, the energy fluctuations rolling through me caused my golden Thermal sea to shrink down briefly, then expand to normal. It was solid once again!

I now had two fully functional seas to draw on. Continuing with the session, I made sure both seas were absolutely full and opened my eyes.

Now that I had the required sea of energy and knew that I could meet Nicolas’ demands, I felt a bit more confident. Furthermore, I figured I had a chance to carry out a quick test. See what was really on his mind. Perhaps shift the balance of control.

Rising, I stretched, then slumped on the edge of the metal bed.

“Well, Detective?” the speaker asked.

“Not yet.”

Silence.

Barely a minute later, the door opened, and Nicolas Kun stormed in. Grabbing me by the throat, he lifted me up and slammed me against the wall. Holding my throat so tightly I could barely breathe, he said, “You’d better not be playing games with me, boy!”

I felt a tingle as his divine sense ran through me. However, as I’d learned long ago from Eldress Cheung back in the Third Earth, cultivators couldn’t scan a sea of energy without the consent of the person to whom it belonged.

Lips pressed hard against his teeth, he said, “It’s been decades since I gave up on carnal pleasures, but I have men here working for me who are quite hot-blooded. Do you really care so little for your girlfriend?”

A nuclear burst of anger exploded within me when he said that.

I’m going to kill you for that, I thought.

When I tried to speak, it came out as little more than a wheeze, so he loosened his grip.

“I’m trying,” I said. Gasping some air back in, I continued, “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”

Snarling, he dropped me. “I know you had help with your first breakthrough, but I had no idea you were such a useless buffoon.”

Grabbing the Ossientum Memorandum document from the edge of the bed, he stepped back, seized my hair, and shoved the manual in my face.

“Read the manual and figure it out!” he shouted. “You have fucking Euneirophrenia Marrow in you, plus a Sea Expanding Pill. You’d have to be crippled to fail with all that.” Then he kicked me, spat on me, and cuffed me on the side of my head, knocking me onto my side. He stomped out and slammed the door behind him.

I wiped the spittle from my cheek and got back to my feet. The side of my face stung, and my thigh hurt where he’d kicked me. He’d obviously been controlling his strength; a three root cultivator could easily cave in the skull of someone like me if he wanted.

Sitting on the bed, I pretended to read the manual, while inside, that nuclear hatred settled into simmering fury. I’d hoped to shift the balance of control slightly by not giving Nicolas what he wanted. I hadn’t expected him to react so dramatically.

Itsuki had been spot on with his description of the man.

He’s arrogant but insecure… also slightly paranoid, and quick to lash out.

Nicolas’ threat against Elena was what angered me the most. Although I felt slightly surprised to find overtly murderous intentions rising up within me, I couldn’t help but think that if anyone deserved to be put to sleep without trial, it was this psycho.

For some reason, I found myself focusing on all of his talk about my skill in cultivation. He’d emphasized the point that I have a pitiful, defective sea of energy.

Where had he come across that information? I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone, neither Jakobe nor Elena. The only other people who knew about my problem were Elders Hu, Qing, and Guo. Furthermore, how did he know about the Euneirophrenia Marrow?

Fuck.

Was one of the elders a traitor?

It couldn’t be Elder Hu, could it? Between Qing and Guo, the latter seemed to overtly dislike me, but that didn’t necessarily indicate he was a traitor. And Elder Qing was the friendliest of the group. In my current situation, I didn’t see how it mattered. Suspicions wouldn’t do me any good, and even if I did know the truth, it wouldn’t help me.

As I wrestled with the question of what to do next, the speaker echoed out.

“Put the paliprox patch on,” Nicolas said. “Now.”

Chapter 45 – Procedure

I looked at the black patch for a moment. I considered refusing, but there was no point. It wasn’t as if my cultivator abilities were going to help in this situation. I didn’t even know how Bone cultivation worked and had no techniques to draw on. And what good would it do me to use Thermal Ripple Cloak to gain invisibility? In other words, having access to my cultivation base didn’t seem like an advantage at all right now.

Peeling the back off the patch, I stuck it on my neck. Inside, my seas of energy seemed to disappear.

About thirty seconds later, the door opened. Instead of Nicolas, I saw a pair of armed thugs that he must have hired at a local dive bar. Considering the things they were seeing, I wondered what he planned to do with them after the job was over. Probably kill them.

“Come with us, buddy,” one of them said, gesturing with a battered Type 77-14 semi-automatic.

I raised my hands to shoulder level briefly as I walked out. As I did, I realized that my heart was still racing. Apparently, the effects of the pill and talisman were still at play, and I couldn’t help but wonder what effects the Euneirophrenia Marrow might produce.

The corridor outside had a tile floor and smooth bonecrete walls lit by white neon strips every ten feet or so. Glancing over my shoulder, I noted that the door I’d been behind was labeled I-3. Inset into the wall next to it was a small alcove where my Spitter rested. As we proceeded to walk past door I-2, I looked into the alcove there and spotted a flash of gold that was Elena’s dimensional pendant. The alcove next to door I-1 was empty. We went through a short succession of turns, and I spotted surveillance cameras throughout, all of them blinking red.

Every camera is working? I thought. What were the odds of that?

Eventually, we reached a set of double doors that looked like they belonged in a hospital. One of the thugs swiped a card in the reader to the side, and the doors swung open.

The inside reminded me of an operating room. A hodgepodge of equipment could be seen, all of it gleaming and new. There were computers and machines, a handful of metal carts with blue paper cloth on top of them, and most notably an operating table with arm and leg straps of a thick, glossy black material.

Nicolas was pacing back and forth in front of the table when the doors opened. He looked over.

“Get him strapped down,” he growled.

“What the hell is this, Nicolas?” I asked as the thugs shoved me over to the table.

“I don’t have the time for you to piddle around like a brain-damaged baby trying to learn to walk.”

I cooperated as the thugs laid me down and tightened the straps around my arms and legs. When they were done, Nicolas told them, “Get out.”

As the door closed behind them, he wheeled over a cart that had some sort of computerized machine on it. Pulling out a handful of wires with electrodes on them, he slapped them onto my temples, neck, and the backs of my hands.

“Who’s the traitor in the Naturalism Sect?” I asked.

He stopped for a moment and looked at me. “Been doing a bit of detective work, have we? Cute.”

He pulled over another cart and dragged out a wire. Pulling my sleeve up, he connected the wire to my forearm jack.

“But I’m not the type of person to blurt out all my secrets,” he continued.

So much for getting a clue in that regard. “Fine. At least explain what you want from me.”

“I want you to form a Bone sea with the Ossientum technique and the Euneirophrenia Marrow. It took quite a lot of conniving to arrange this whole thing, and I’m not going to let your lack of talent in cultivation screw it all up. Unfortunately, I have limited time. While my rank allows me access to these facilities, it’s technically forbidden to use them for personal projects. The longer I stick around, the more likely someone will—” He stopped talking. “Never mind. You don’t need to know all that. Suffice it to say I decided to speed things up.” With that, he sat down on a rolling stool and pulled a computer over, then typed a few commands in.

“You’re going to force me to break through? With Black Corpse technology?”

“You’re on a roll, Mr. Wang. I’m starting to see how you made detective.”

I didn’t know much about how the Black Corpses forced people to form a sea of energy. I just recalled Elena mentioning it back when we first met. But I did remember she’d emphasized how dangerous it was. A prickle of anxiety suddenly took hold in the back of my mind. “Just give me some more time. One more shot. I can make the breakthrough. In fact, I already have.”

He laughed. “I wish you had.”

“I’m serious. Just scan me. You’ll see.”

“You’re already under the influence of paliprox, so you couldn’t open yourself to me even if you wanted to. You might as well be unconscious when it comes to that. Besides, I’ve already prepped the equipment and drug mix. If you do have a sea, maybe it’ll turn into a root. Which would benefit me even more.”

He jabbed a button on the keyboard, and I felt a tingle in my arm.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I’m going to take the sea away from you after it’s formed. Or the root. Whichever it is.”

“Take it?”

He looked down at me. “Surely you learned in your little cultivator classes that seas and roots can be forcibly extracted.”

“Right,” I said, although I actually hadn’t heard that. Shit, he wanted to steal my cultivation? Only days ago, that thought would have delighted me. But at this moment, I knew that I didn’t want that. It was my cultivation base. Without it, how could I advance in the Naturalism Sect? How could I find out what I needed to solve Xiaoli’s murder? How would I ever figure out what the hell was happening in the Nine Heavens and Ten Earths? How could I bring to justice these monsters who ran the Grand Kingdom?

“Did you know paliprox was originally designed for use in growing additional seas of energy? You see, it’s the act of tricking the body into thinking it has no sea that enables us to forcibly create additional seas. We’re almost ready to begin.”

Hopping off the stool, he went off to the side, where he produced a needle and syringe, which he filled with a glowing blue fluid that he injected into the base of my neck. Instantly, icy coldness spread through me, and moments later, I sensed myself shaking slightly.

“It’s begun,” Nicolas said. “As you can probably feel already, your muscles are going slack. In a few moments, you’ll be unable to move.” He walked to the door. “I’ll be back in an hour, and you’d better pray you have a new sea of energy.”

“If I don’t?”

“I’ll probably just cut my losses and liquidate you.” He hit a button next to the doors, causing them to swing open.

When he walked out, I was alone. The coldness spread, as did the trembling. As I lay there strapped onto the table, staring up at the bonecrete ceiling, it soon felt like I was being violently shaken back and forth, although in reality I was just trembling a bit. I tried to lift my head to look down at my body, but the paralysis had already gone too far. I couldn’t move.

The edges of my vision darkened and turned cloudy, and as the effect spread, I closed my eyes. At first, it didn’t hurt. But at a certain point, pain exploded in the pit of my stomach, coupled with a sickening sensation like being unexpectedly punched with full force.

I writhed through the horror like a rat caught on top of a zont-rail train.

Then the pain intensified, and I wanted to scream but couldn’t. This time, I really was shaking violently.

After a time, the pain faded away, although it took what seemed like an eternity. The trembling also ceased. I remembered Nicolas saying he’d return in an hour, but it felt like days had passed to me.

Opening my eyes, I tried to move but couldn’t even wriggle a toe.

I heard the door open. Nicolas. Returned. How would he extract the new sea of energy? Surgery? Or a cultivation technique? Was it going to hurt?

A moment later, someone stepped into my field of vision, and it wasn’t Nicolas. A black gas mask with a reflective visor protruded from the hood of a deep navy rain cloak. The newcomer stopped above me, looked down, then tapped a button on the side of the gas mask.

“Where is she?” The voice was gritty and metallic through the gas mask speakers and was so distorted that I couldn’t begin to guess who it belonged to. It seemed male.

I opened my mouth and tried to speak but managed only a rattling exhalation.

“Where’s Elena?” the newcomer repeated.

My lips trembled, but I simply couldn’t speak.

The figure reached down and peeled the paliprox patch off my neck, then disappeared from my field of vision. I heard sounds that indicated he was rummaging around the room. Then he returned, peeling the back off of a white patch that he then stuck on my neck.

“That’ll flush the drugs from your system a bit more quickly. As soon as you can talk, you tell me where she is. Got it?”

The figure picked me up like a sack of protein flour, throwing me over his shoulder as he walked to the door. There, he reached down to his belt and produced a small device the size of a wristwatch. He hit a button on it, and I heard a high-pitched whine. Next, he opened the doors and walked out of the operating room. We went down the corridor and through three intersections before stepping into a dark room that smelled of rust and cleaning solvent.

He dropped me onto the ground, carefully enough that it seemed he was trying to refrain from hurting me, but with enough force that I felt a jarring sensation run up my spine as I thumped against the bonecrete wall. I looked around. We were in a storage room of some sort. Metal racks lined the walls, covered with a miscellany of items from paint cans to cardboard boxes.

The figure squatted in front of me. “I suggest you hurry. If I’m going to get Elena out of here, I need to know her location.”

“Who?” I managed to wheeze out. I breathed in. “Who are you?”

“Who do you think?” The tap of a finger caused the gas mask visor to slide away, revealing Itsuki’s perfectly straight nose and delicately curved eyebrows. “Where is she?”

I wriggled my toes and managed to curl an index finger. I took a few more breaths. Should I tell him? On the one hand, perhaps he could get her away from Nicolas. But wouldn’t it be like the old Sinese expression ‘escaping the tiger’s mouth only to enter the wolf’s den?’

“Why are you hesitating, Wang Fan?” he said. “Didn’t I already prove my trust to you back in the Blue Mountain Commerce Building?”

“You’re not bound by any promise here, Itsuki.”

“If you don’t tell me where she is, and Nicolas realizes you’re out of that room, he can lock down this place so tight none of us will ever leave it. Tell me where she is, and I’ll come back for you.”

“He’s going to see you on the cameras.”

He lifted the device he’d taken out moments before. “Mobile scrambler. Creates a distortion field that fools cameras like that.”

What other choice was there? “From the operating room, go left, straight, right, left.” I took a moment to breathe again. “I was in room I-3. Nicolas said he had her in the room next to mine.”

Without a word, Itsuki stood and left.

As the seconds ticked by, feeling and strength returned to me. My hand twitched, and I could bend a knee. I managed to turn my neck. Soon my shoulders and arms were mobile. I stretched, feeling my joints pop and my muscles quiver. Planting my hands on the ground on either side of me, I groaned as I slid my back up the wall into a standing position.

I stood there, simply breathing for a moment, until the door opened, revealing Itsuki with Elena in his arms. “Let’s go,” he said.

I took a hesitant step forward, and though my knee trembled, I didn’t fall. Another step. And another. By the end of the corridor, I was walking like normal and was feeling stronger and stronger.

Itsuki led me down three corridors toward a door with a glowing “emergency exit” sign above it. As we neared, I reached out with divine sense to find that the door itself was protected by a spell formation so strong I could never hope to penetrate it.

Itsuki stopped at the door and turned to me. “Are you strong enough to hold her?”

I nodded, and he handed Elena over. As her warmth filled my arms, I leaned down and softly kissed her forehead.

Meanwhile, I could see Itsuki eyeing us as he pulled two items out of his pocket. The first was the same geomantic compass he’d utilized to negate my Thermal Ripple Cloak. The second was a teleportation disc. He fiddled with the concentric rings on the compass, for a moment, then pushed the button in the middle. A pulse raced out, and with my divine sense, I could see that the spell formation had retracted, making it possible to open the door.

A fraction of a second later, the white neon lights in the corridors turned an angry red, and a claxon blared. Itsuki grabbed my arm and snapped the teleportation disc.

Chapter 46 – The Breakthrough

When Itsuki tried to activate the teleportation disc, nothing happened.

“Shit,” he said. It was the first time I’d heard him curse; was he that rattled?

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

He closed his eyes briefly, and I sensed a tingle of divine sense from him. “He locked down the entire facility just now. Doors sealed. Teleportations restricted. We were seconds too slow. Give her to me.”

“I’m strong enough. I’ll hold her.”

Nodding as he turned, he said, “Fine. This way. Hurry.”

He headed down the corridor at a near-jog, and I followed, feeling myself getting stronger with every passing moment.

We rounded a corner and nearly collided with the same two thugs who’d taken me to the operating room. Itsuki reacted so quickly their jaws barely had time to drop before he removed their heads. Their bodies dropped, blood spilling out from headless shoulders onto the white tile floor.

Itsuki flicked the blood from his razor-sharp bonemetal sword and stepped over their corpses. I went after him, trying to avoid stepping in the blood but failing. Looking down, I saw the battered Type 77-14 one had been holding and hesitated. Juggling Elena’s unconscious form, I knelt, grabbed the weapon, rose, and resumed following Itsuki, leaving crimson footsteps behind me.

Itsuki stopped in front of an elevator around the next corner and pushed the solitary button next to it. Three seconds later, the doors opened to reveal a middle-aged woman in a white lab coat, holding a clipboard. Her mouth opened in surprise, and Itsuki's sword flashed, cleaving through the roof of her mouth and out the top of her head. As she slumped forward, he grabbed her coat, extracted his sword, and tossed her body into the corridor.

My eye twitched at his ruthlessness, but I said nothing. We stepped into the elevator, and he pressed the DOWN button.

“Your scrambler may make us invisible to the cameras,” I commented, “but the bodies and blood are going to get noticed real fast.”

“I know.”

The elevator doors closed, and I felt us moving down at such an incredible rate of speed that my body temporarily felt lighter. I suddenly felt more embarrassed than ever for the sad excuse of an elevator back at the Airport Benevolence complex. It only lasted for about two seconds, then the doors opened again.

We jogged down another corridor, and two more technicians fell to Itsuki’s blade.

Elena seemed to be getting lighter in my arms, and suddenly, it occurred to me that I should check my cultivation base and see what the ‘procedure’ had done to me. As soon as we had another moment of pause, I would.

The next door we encountered had a lock with a keypad. Itsuki tapped in a sequence of numbers to open the door, and we walked into a room with a circular layout and walls that rose to a height of about four feet before curving into a domed ceiling. The room's diameter was probably twenty-five feet, and in terms of furniture, there were some couches, a few work desks with computers on them, plus various chests and wardrobes, all of them metallic. Next to the door was a workstation, a bank of small television monitors, and a control board resting atop it. The place smelled dusty, despite appearing to be immaculately clean.

The door closed behind us, and Itsuki flipped a large throw-switch on the wall. A whining noise entered my ears, and patterns of yellow light appeared on the walls, starting at the ground level and rising to the peak of the dome. A moment later, they faded away.

Looking around, I realized there was only one door in the room, that being the one we’d just entered. “A dead end?”

“A safe room,” Itsuki said. “As you may be aware, the Naturalism Sect is known to raid locations such as this, so most of them have secure areas that can withstand assaults by both powerful weapons and cultivator techniques.”

“But where do we go from here?”

“I’m working on that,” he said, walking over to one of the desks and turning the computer on.

Heading over to a sofa, I lay Elena down on it. Then I did a quick once-over on the Type 77-14. Ejecting the magazine and emptying the chamber, I worked the slide a few times, then loaded it back up.

“Nicolas isn’t just going to disappear,” I said.

“He very well might. He’s not operating here in any official capacity, so at some point, he’ll have to scuttle off. Corpses aren’t supposed to saunter into facilities like these and use them for personal matters. That’s especially true considering he’s apparently chosen to betray my father.”

“And why would he do that, do you think?”

“Like I said before, minions sometimes let their ambition get the better of them. That’s my guess.”

I knelt back down by Elena and straightened her hair out as best I could. “Do you have another of those patches you gave me? To clear her system.”

He reached in his pocket and tossed over a white patch. “You can take yours off. It’s already done its job.”

I peeled the back off the fresh patch, put it on Elena’s neck, and then took the patch off my own. “What’s your plan?”

“Give me a moment.” He started pecking at the computer's keyboard with his index fingers, and a moment later, I heard the chirps and buzzes of a modem. “Nicolas was trying to force another sea onto you. Did he succeed?”

“I was planning to check right now.”

“Either way, these safe rooms have spell formations that hoard energy. If you need to fill up, now’s a perfect time.”

I looked back at Elena and, seeing she was unconscious, sat down next to the couch and closed my eyes. Steadying my breathing, I sent my divine sense inside myself to examine my seas of energy.

To my surprise, the golden Thermal sea was visibly larger. And the edges were starting to curl up, which was a sign it was nearing the point where I could attempt compressing it into a root.

Apparently, the combination of the Euneirophrenia Marrow, the pill from Nicolas, the talisman from Elder Hu and the drug cocktail had proven effective.

What came next, though, didn’t surprise me. It shocked me. There was no Bone sea in me. Not anymore. In its place was an odd blackish-gray object that resembled the root of a tree, gnarled and winding, with numerous offshoots that twisted around themselves like tentacles. In fact, there were so many such tendrils that they had the root almost completely wrapped up, almost like a cocoon.

Holy. Shit. I knew exactly what I was looking at. A root of energy. And not just an ordinary root. Although I wasn’t an expert on the subject, I did know that the initial version of a root looked like a sausage or a carrot. At least that’s how Svea had described it to me.

“You know,” Tao Heng had said, winking, “some people describe it in a different way.” Svea had thrown a stuffed bear at him after he said that.

What I was looking at didn’t resemble a carrot at all. It was more like an ancient ginseng root, which meant one thing: this root was advancing toward the next higher level.

Truth be told, I didn’t even know what came after the root level. That information was reserved for disciples, and though I’d been promoted, I never had any chance to learn any of the confidential information I now had the right to know.

What was more, the tendrils were slowly expanding, even as I looked at them. In fact, the entire root seemed to be quivering. What did that indicate?

I opened my eyes and looked over to see Itsuki staring at the computer screen.

I closed my eyes again, crossed my legs, and placed my palms on my thighs. Then I started the Ossientum breathing exercises. The moment I inhaled, energy rushed into me like a mighty river.

Shit! Itsuki was right! This safe house was packed with energy ten times as dense as the outside. It slammed into the root, and the tendrils extended, wriggling almost like snakes as they spread out and tightened around the central core of the thing.

The ‘cocoon’ grew thicker, wrapping around the root so rapidly that I soon lost sight of it. Minutes passed, and as I sucked the surrounding energy, the root shrank and tightened. The tendrils grew denser, sleeker. At this point, I didn’t need to make an effort to suck in the energy around me. It came of its own accord, pouring into me as surely as if I were an open drain at the bottom of a swimming pool.

“What’s happening?” I vaguely heard Itsuki say, but I was too focused to respond.

The root shrank, collapsing in on itself, the top and bottom forming into sharp edges. I shook physically, and I could feel my body hair standing on end and the hair on my head floating up. Then, a massive shockwave erupted from the pit of my stomach. I rose at least two feet up into the air as the couch Elena was on tilted back so far it nearly toppled over, and Itsuki, who had been rising from his chair, fell backward onto the ground.

All the furniture in the room either tilted back or fell over, and the lights flickered.

I felt myself vibrating, and then everything went still. I floated back down to the ground, and the energy flow ceased. In place of the root, I saw a diamond, black and glistening, its edges seemingly sharp enough to slice through the toughest bonemetal. Power radiated through me, and I could feel my muscles growing stronger and the limits of my divine sense skyrocketing.

I took a deep breath, then exhaled and opened my eyes.

“What the hell was that?” Itsuki asked, climbing to his feet and righting the chair he’d been sitting in. “A breakthrough?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Not even a root breakthrough should result in a shockwave like that. Don’t tell me you broke past the root level.”

Why lie? “Yeah, I did.”

“Impossible,” he said, stepping over to me. I felt his divine sense enter me, and feeling slightly annoyed, I pushed it away with my divine sense, and once it was out of me, I continued pushing.

He stumbled backward and might have fallen over again if he didn’t run into a table first.

“Holy hell!” he said. “You did break through! You’re a diamond cultivator!”

“I suppose I am,” I said, rising.

“Do you know what that means? There are hardly more than a dozen diamond cultivators in the entire Grand Kingdom!”

Looking at my palms in front of me, I clenched them into fists. “Does that make me strong enough to deal with Nicolas?”

“I don’t understand it. Not even Black Corpse tech should do that. Hold on. In which aspect did you break through? With your Thermal sea, right?”

I shook my head. “Bone.”

His jaw dropped, and his face turned pale. Then his lips moved, but no words came out. It was an odd sight. Glib, cool Itsuki, struck speechless?

“There haven’t been any Bone cultivators at the diamond level since the War of Tribulation,” he said, returning to his chair and sitting down. “A millennium ago. This is monumental.”

“You didn’t answer my question. How strong am I now?”

He looked up. “Do you know how to assess strength?”

“Not really. I know that one sea makes you twice as strong as normal.”

“At first. But you can develop that sea until you’re four times stronger than an average person.”

“And that goes for each sea, right? The levels of strength stack on top of each other.”

“Yes. That’s why someone with several seas of energy could easily be stronger than someone with only one or two roots. Nicolas is a three-root cultivator. Electric. Wind. Thermal. If they were all fully developed, he could be thirty times as strong as a normal person. But his Wind root is new. Given that, my guess is that he rates at no more than twenty-five or twenty-six. How advanced is Elena, do you know?”

“She broke through recently. She has two seas, and the original one is almost at root-level.”

“A fully developed sea would make her four times as strong. But add that new sea, and the number jumps to six. My second sea is stronger than hers, so if you combine the two of us, the number could be thirteen or fourteen. Then we add in you. Your sea brings us the power of three or four, and the diamond… do you have any sense of how developed it is?”

I shook my head.

“Let’s play it safe and say it’s the lowest possible level: eleven. Add everything together, and we three reach…”

“Twenty-eight or twenty-nine times the strength of an ordinary person,” I said. “That’s a lot more than Nicolas.”

“Just adding the raw numbers, yes. But it’s not that simple. Five children, each a fifth as strong as an ordinary person, couldn’t best a trained adult in combat. Fighting Nicolas would be risky, and even more so considering he has the puppet. It’s entirely possible he could take one of us out right at the outset. Probably me, considering he wants the two of you alive. Unless we took him by surprise, there’s no way we could beat him.”

“On the other hand, the fact that he wants us alive means the fight will be trickier for him. He’ll have to avoid any attacks that could result in a kill. If worse comes to worst, we can at least make a stand.”

“It’s not going to get to that.”

He sounded confident, which didn’t make me feel very good. “Why’s that?”

“Because I just sent a message to someone. Help should arrive within an hour or two.”

“Help? From whom?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

Possibilities flitted through my mind. I knew he had criminal connections, but would such individuals be able to break into a Black Corpse facility and deal with a three-root cultivator? It seemed unlikely. Who did Itsuki know that was both strong enough to deal with someone of Nicolas Kun’s cultivation level and could also come and go freely anywhere in the Grand Kingdom? “You messaged your father, didn’t you?”

He just looked at me.

“That wasn’t our deal, Itsuki,” I growled.

He leaned back in the chair.

“Isn’t it? You told me where Elena was, and I came back for you. I didn’t promise anything other than that.”

“I’m talking about our original deal. You said you’d give me a chance to talk it out with her.”

“Didn’t you?”

“Talk? Yes. But there wasn’t time to make a decision.”

He tilted his head to the side. “That’s not my concern. Obviously, things have changed.”

I exhaled sharply. I hated to admit it, but he was right. I couldn’t blame him for our mission going so badly wrong. And it would be naïve to expect him to show any sort of benevolence to me. I never claimed to be an altruist. Those were his exact words not too long ago. In any case, it sounded like I still had some time to come up with another plan to gain freedom. Pulling a chair over and sitting, I said, “How did you know to find us here?”

“That diskette I recovered had information that led me to a fence operating out of Purgatory, plus an equipment locker in a zont-rail station near 300th. The subsequent leads I uncovered led to further information. Then I hired that grid monkey friend of yours, Svea, to help me hack into a few key data centers and do some data analysis. I won’t go into the boring details. Long story short, it led me here.”

“How’d you get in touch with Svea?”

“I have my ways. In any case, I only came here to do some reconnaissance. Imagine my surprise when I saw them dragging you and Elena out of a car out at the main entrance. Unfortunately, I was missing a few key pieces of equipment, so I left to prepare. By the time I came back and got inside, you were strapped to that operating table.”

I shook my head. “The mission must have been a setup.”

“Mission?”

“I went into an orgplant near the city center. Smuggled something out.”

His eyes narrowed. “You stole some Euneirophrenia Marrow, didn’t you? That’s how you reached the diamond level.”

I nodded. “Anyway, Nicolas started following us just past the 2nd Ring Road, trapped us in an alley, and you know the rest. But how did he know we were there? How did he even know I had the marrow in me? There was no way it was coincidental. We were betrayed.”

Itsuki smiled. “I told you Naturalism Sect has traitors.”

“Any chance you know who this one is?”

He just looked back at me, smiling. The moment stretched a bit until I sensed motion out of the corner of my eye.

Looking over, I saw Elena stir. Then she groaned, and her eyes fluttered open.

Chapter 47 – Trust

Elena sat up straight and looked around wildly, gripping the loose black leather of the sofa tightly in both hands. “Master!”

“We’re safe, Elena,” I said, putting a hand gently on her shoulder.

After getting her bearings, she slumped a bit. “What happened? I saw her.”

The moment I’d dreaded was here. Given everything Elena had been through, did she really need to know the fate that had befallen her Master? The answer was she did. I just didn’t want to have to tell her. But she had proven over and over again that she didn’t need my protection, and was stronger than the grittiest cops and most intimidating crooks I’d encountered in the Third Earth.

I’d considered different ways of wording the news, but in the end, I figured saying it directly was the best option.

“Eldress Cheung was puppetized,” I said. “I’m sorry. She and Nicolas Kun hit us with paliprox-D, then took us here.”

“Puppetized?” I saw tears glisten briefly in her eyes before she closed them and took two shaky breaths. “What type? Maybe it can be undone.”

“He used a Puppet Lace,” Itsuki said, stepping around me so she could see him.

She scrambled backward on the couch, her hands slipping into the sign for Sunflare Blast. I reached out and put a hand on top of hers to stop her. “He’s not going to hurt us.”

Her eyes flashed with anger, and it suddenly occurred to me that the last time I’d laid hands on her, it had been a big mistake. I retracted my hand. However, she wasn’t even looking at me.

“You killed my friends right in front of me,” she said, her voice tinged with emotion. “Mary and I were sworn sisters! Jack had a family!”

I looked over at Itsuki.

His expression calm, he said, “Corpses and Peacekeepers alike have the authority to eliminate cultivators on sight. I’m sorry about your friends, but casualties are a part of war. And in case you forgot, you killed two of my men without hesitation.”

“Both of them shot at me first,” Elena said through gritted teeth. “But Mary’s hands were tied behind her back when you killed her. That’s not war. That’s execution.”

“As I said, I was operating within the bounds of the law. In any case, debating this subject won’t do us any good. I’ve saved your life twice now. That makes things more than even between the two of us.”

“I’m not just going to forget what you did,” she said. Sliding off the couch, she took a step toward Itsuki. “Last time, I only had one sea of energy. Now I have two. Wang Fan and I handled you before, when we were weak. Why shouldn’t we finish what we started back in the Third Shield?”

Smiling coldly, he took a step forward. “You ambushed me and fought dirty. The situation is different now.”

I had to wonder how shaken Itsuki was. Why was he escalating the situation by antagonizing Elena? Had he forgotten that I was a diamond cultivator now? “The two of you need to back down,” I said. “This isn’t the time or place for an altercation.”

“He’s right, Elena,” Itsuki said. “We have a three-root cultivator after us. And he has your Master as a puppet. You think teaming up on me will do you any good if they get their hands on you moments later?”

“You deserve to be put to death for everything you’ve done,” she spat.

“According to the law, so do you.”

“Enough, Itsuki,” I said.

He held his hands up in conciliation. “You’re right.” He took a step back. “Elena, please accept my apology. I know it doesn’t change what I did, but for now, we need to work together to survive. Trust me, I have no desire to see you fall into Nicolas Kun’s hands. Can you at least trust me on that?”

Although her eyes still burned with anger, she nodded curtly and then sat back down on the sofa. “I need some water.”

“Naturally,” he replied and walked over to a cabinet off to the side.

During the interchange, I’d been watching Itsuki’s body language. Although reading subtle expressions and nonverbal signals was an art and not a science, I didn’t get any impression that his apology was sincere. On the other hand, I didn’t get the sense that he was lying.

Retrieving a water bottle from the cabinet, he said, “As I was saying before, Elena, Nicolas used a Puppet Lace. He wants your Master’s mind intact so she can witness the ways he humiliates her. Such as having her kidnap her own apprentice for him. The salient point here is that Puppet Laces can be removed. There’s hope for your Master.” He tossed her the bottle of water.

Catching it, she twisted the top off and took a long drink. “Where exactly are we?”

“In a safe room at the bottom level of a Black Corpse facility,” Itsuki said.

I wanted to discuss options but also didn’t want to just outright tell Elena that Itsuki’s father was on the way. Not yet. “Do we really have no choice other than to wait for help?” I asked, being careful with how I worded the question. “Isn’t there some other way to get out of here?”

“If there was, I would have gone with that option.”

“It’s ridiculous,” I said. “You’re telling me that Black Corpse safehouses don’t have emergency exits?”

“It’s not a safehouse,” he replied. “And no, there isn’t an emergency exit. As long as the room is secure, those inside don’t need to consider making an escape. They just wait for backup to arrive.”

I kept my eyes glued to Itsuki’s face to read the slightest fluctuations in his expression, hoping to get a clue as to whether or not he was lying. As usual, I got nothing.

Suddenly, the ground vibrated beneath our feet, faint but noticeable.

“What was that?” I asked.

Itsuki frowned slightly, then walked over to the workstation next to the door. Reaching under the desk, he flipped a switch, and the monitors lit up one by one.

There were fully twenty-five of them, each showing a different corridor or area in the complex.

“Every single camera is working?” I said. “You’ve got to be kidding me!”

As Itsuki scanned the screens, he said, “What do you mean?”

“Half the surveillance cameras in the Bright Earths are broken. But here, they all work perfectly?”

He laughed. “The cameras work where Sinotech wants them to work. Here.” He pointed at one of the screens on the lower left. “That’s the corridor outside.”

The ground shook again, this time with more force.

Water bottle in hand, Elena joined us in front of the screens.

Looking at the one Itsuki had just indicated, I saw two figures. The puppetized Eldress Cheung stood directly in front of the door, with her palm on it. Nicholas Kun was behind her, his palm flat on her back.

“What does he think he’s doing?” Itsuki said. “He knows just as well as I do that you can’t break down the door of a safe room.”

As we watched, Eldress Cheung’s arm lit up with bright light. The light flared, and the screen turned white momentarily. At the same time, the floor trembled again.

When the screen turned normal again, Itsuki said. “Wait. No… there’s no possible way.”

Spinning a pair of dials on one of the control panels, he zoomed the camera in, providing a closer view of Nicolas, albeit somewhat blurry.

“He’s holding something,” I said.

“Jojdwaess-eo,” Itsuki growled, a Japkor curse. I was getting the feeling he was definitely a lot less settled than he seemed on the outside.

“Something’s wrong?”

“He has the Shell of the Hešeri. It’s a relic that originally belonged to the greatest Hydric cultivator of all time, the same one who devised the Heavenly Curse.”

Elena looked at him. “You mean... it has the power of a diamond-level Hydric cultivator in it?”

“Yes.”

“Mierda. Infusing my Master’s attacks with that power would be enough to punch through even the toughest defensive spell formation.”

“Yes,” Itsuki said. “That’s not to mention the shell is specifically designed to break spell formations. I can’t believe my father gave it to him. It was supposed to be mine.”

“Your father must really want to get his hands on me,” Elena said grimly. “Mind explaining about that?”

“Later.”

“How long before they get through?” I asked.

He tapped at the desk as he stared at the screen, apparently making some more calculations. Another flare of light erupted, and the ground shook.

Without answering my question, he stepped over to another cabinet and opened it to reveal a host of firearms. Glancing through them, he pulled out a gleaming QBZ-14C, a bullpup assault rifle with a folding stock, which he slung over his shoulder. Then he grabbed a Type 77-16 with a waist holster.

“Help yourself,” he said to me, stepping over to another wardrobe, from which he produced a long black trench coat.

“Are guns really going to do us any good?”

“You never know. Elena, I’ve seen your Sunflare Blast. Presumably, you don’t need a gun?”

“No,” she said.

“Fine,” I said, “what’s the plan?” Putting down the battered Type 77-14 I’d picked up earlier, I looked through the collection in the cabinet and chose a Spitter X3. I wasn’t as good with an X3 as a D4, but they were similar enough that it only took a few seconds for me to disassemble it and remove the tracking device, which I crushed under my heel.

Again ignoring my question, Itsuki walked back to the desk he’d been working at earlier and typed a command into the computer. I heard the whine of equipment and gears as the white tiles in the far corner of the room sank down, revealing a staircase.

Itsuki, you motherfucking liar, I thought.

The ground trembled, and the lights dimmed momentarily.

“Let’s go,” Itsuki said. “We don’t have much time. Opening that passage also activates a self-destruct sequence that will collapse the safe room behind us.”

Elena approached, put her hands on my cheeks, and kissed me. “We can’t trust him,” she said quietly.

“I know. But we don’t have many options right now.”

We helped ourselves to coats from the other wardrobe, then climbed down the spiraling stairs until we found ourselves in a narrow bonecrete corridor that disappeared into the darkness. Itsuki hit a switch on the wall, and dim lights flickered on. With the illumination, we could see that the corridor curved slightly to the left, making it impossible to see the end or tell how long it was.

Itsuki broke into a jog, and we followed.

“Where are we?” I asked. “The Third Shield?”

“We’re not that deep down,” he said. “We’re still in the foundation of the Fourth Earth.”

At a certain point, we felt a faint shudder beneath our feet.

“That was the self-destruct,” Itsuki said. “It’s only going to buy us a bit of time. He’ll know what we’re doing, and all he has to do is pull up the schematics to find out where we’ll emerge. If he doesn’t know already.”

“And where’s that?” I asked.

“Just up ahead.”

The corridor ended in a door, which opened as we approached. We stepped out onto a very narrow landing in a large tunnel, like a huge vertical tube. The door slid shut behind Elena, and it was almost seamless. You would never know it existed unless you knew what to look for. I looked around at the tube going up and down into darkness. I saw a pair of tracks running up it, opposite of us, as well as all sorts of conduits and pipes.

“This is a vert-rail tunnel, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Yes. One of the high-speed ones. This way.” As Itsuki led us down the narrow walkway, we heard a faint rumbling sound that grew louder rapidly. Then, a moment later, the vert-rail train shot by, only feet from our noses. A buffeting wind accompanied its passage, and we instinctively flattened ourselves against the wall as our ears popped. It only took a few seconds before it was gone, shooting up into the tunnel above us.

“Here,” Itsuki said, and the narrow landing ended in what was obviously a service elevator.

There was barely room for the three of us. Itsuki hit a button on the control panel, and the elevator whisked us up. Ten seconds later, it stopped. What followed was a jog up several metal staircases and into a vert-rail control center, which was mostly deserted.

Itsuki paused at a few turns as he considered which path to take, but we never had to double back. A minute later, we were out on the street. Thankfully, it wasn’t raining.

“Where are we?” Elena asked.

“I have no idea,” Itsuki said. “But we need to get mobile. Fast.”

“Hold on,” I said. “Maybe we should just part ways, Itsuki. Not to be dramatic, but Elena’s right. We lost to you last time, but you know just as well as I do that you don’t stand a chance against us now.”

He hesitated, and Elena looked at me.

“I had a big breakthrough,” I said.

“He’s a diamond cultivator,” Itsuki said. Elena gasped, but before she could say anything, he continued, “You two want answers, right? Well, there’s no better time than now. Let’s get somewhere safe, and I can tell you everything I know. We go back to the previous arrangement. We can even shake on it, the old-fashioned way.”

He extended his hand to me.

I looked at it. “You promise not to reveal our location to anyone, your father or otherwise? Until we put all the cards on the table?”

“You have my word,” he said.

“I’ll take a handshake as a down payment on a blood oath. Agreed?”

“Done.”

I infused my hand with divine sense, and we shook.

He extended his hand to Elena, and although she looked as disgusted as if she were grabbing an oversized maggot, she shook it.

“Over there,” Itsuki said, pointing to a bar across the street, where a host of bikes and scooters were parked in a neat row.

“I don’t have my Peacekeeper’s override key anymore,” I said. “Do you have one?”

Itsuki smiled. “It just so happens I do.”

We jogged across the street, and, using Itsuki’s override key, we commandeered two sleek hoverbikes. Elena, who had never driven a hovervehicle in her life, hopped on with me and wrapped her arms tightly around my waist. We tightened the safety harnesses, and as the turbines fired up, we rose into the air.

“Is there a place nearby that you’d feel safe?” Itsuki said above the hum of the turbines. “Preferably somewhere public.”

Glancing down the street, I saw we were close to the 7th Ring Road. “Yeah. Tom’s Tavern. This way.”

Turning the hoverbike, I revved the turbines and sped off into traffic.

Chapter 48 – An Unexpected Acquaintance

As Elena clung to my waist, I wove through traffic as fast as I could without risking drawing attention from Peacekeeper traffic patrols. We zipped along the 7th Ring Road and then zoomed up Long Peace Boulevard toward Tom’s Tavern.

A lone hovercar was parked on the fourteenth floor parking platform, a battered coupe with decades-old rust covering most of it. I also saw a pair of black choppers with chrome turbines and blue flame paint jobs, as well as a group of three scooter hoverbikes, pastel, with bulbous fenders and bug-eyed rear-view mirrors. The scooters seemed familiar, but given the rush, I didn’t spend time studying them. After we parked our racing bikes at the end of the line, Itsuki folded up the stock of his assault rifle and left it in the bike’s seat storage compartment. He kept the pistol holstered at his side, and I held on to the Spitter. We hustled inside.

The tavern was busy. Rock music blared and both pool tables were taken. There wasn’t any open seating at the bar. As we headed toward the only empty booth available, I noticed a familiar face walking out from the bathrooms.

Kang Jianhong.

He was flicking water from his hands as he made a beeline toward the game boxes, where I saw two other people I recognized. Pink-haired Xian Xinyu, another novice from the West Airport coterie, and Leslie Cai, one of the recruits, whose face was covered with heavy makeup. Both were young women, and while Xian Xinyu wore the layered, messy garb common among Japkor-Pop fans, Leslie was trying her best to look like a Nitro runner, complete with a skin-tight miniskirt and a frilly, sleeveless top.

Xian Xinyu was busy with the game, which was an old classic, Monster Destruction 2. Leslie Cai happened to look in our direction as Elena and I squeezed into one side of the booth and Itsuki the other. She smiled and waved, and I nodded back.

“Friends?” Itsuki asked.

“Acquaintances,” I replied.

“Maybe this wasn’t the best choice of locations. We need to be keeping a low profile.”

“We’re already here, so we might as well roll with it.”

I glanced over to see that Jianhong had thrown his arm around Leslie’s shoulder, and the two of them were making out dramatically.

A waitress arrived, and we put in a quick order. After she walked off, Elena left for the restroom.

As soon as she was gone, Itsuki looked at me and said, “I noticed you didn’t mention my father to her. Probably a wise move.”

“What exactly was the message you sent him?”

“It was in code. I said I needed urgent assistance. Nothing more.”

“Didn’t mention Elena?”

“No. I’d love to see Nicolas Kun squirm when he tries to explain the situation.”

“I’m still not convinced you have Elena’s best interests at heart, Itsuki.”

“You might—”

“Well, well,” someone interrupted. “Look who decided to go slumming in Tom’s Tavern with us locals. The famous heretic Peacekeeper, Wang Fan.”

We looked over to see Kang Jianhong looming over the booth, his arm slung around Leslie Cai. She was young and pretty, the type of girl I probably would have pursued if I was ten years younger. Although there wasn’t any rule forbidding romantic relationships between the lead disciple of a coterie and a new recruit, I couldn’t imagine the elders would approve of him lip-locking with someone who hadn’t been fully vetted yet. I was tempted to say that right in his face but decided not to.

“Nice to see you too, Jianhong,” I replied.

“Who’s your friend?” he said, casting a derisive glance at Itsuki.

A Black Corpse who would take your head off if he could.

“I’m John Takahashi,” Itsuki said with a flashy smile. “Nice to meet you.” He extended a hand, but Jianhong just looked at it.

“Japkor, huh. Don’t see many of your type around here. Don’t you people usually live in shacks out in Purgatory? At least that’s what I heard.”

I saw a glint in Itsuki’s eyes that caused my jaw to tighten anxiously as I wondered if he might punch Jianhong in the stomach. Or worse.

However, he kept the smile plastered on his face as he dropped his hand and said, “As a matter of fact, I do live near Purgatory. Out by the Ming Tombs Fourth Apartment Project.”

“Whatever,” Jianhong replied. He looked back at me. “Where’s your girlfriend, Wang Fan?”

Spotting Elena returning from the restroom, I nodded in her direction. Jianhong looked over at her, then back at me.

Keeping my voice even, I said, “What do you want, Jianhong? We’re just here to hang out and have a bite to eat.”

“What, I can’t come over and say hi?”

“Of course you can,” I replied as Elena slid back into the booth next to me.

“Well, hi,” he said. “Have fun, you three. Come on, Les.” Not waiting for a response, he dragged Leslie back toward Xian Xinyu and Monster Destruction 2.

“Nice acquaintances you have,” Itsuki said.

“I’m here with you, aren’t I?” I growled.

“Who was that?” Elena asked.

“Jianhong,” I replied.

“Ohhhh.”

The waiter came with the drinks and food we’d ordered, and we dug in. As I took a bite of my sandwich, I glanced over and noticed Jianhong leave the two girls at the game box and walk out onto the parking platform. Probably going for a smoke.

“Now,” Itsuki said, “before we begin, I want to provide another show of faith, Elena. These are for you.”

He placed two pendants onto the table and pushed them toward her.

“Those are…” she said, reaching out and picking them up.

“The first is yours. The second….”

“It’s my Master’s,” she said.

“Yes, take a look at it later when things aren’t so tense. For now, let’s get down to business. What do you want to know first?”

Rubbing Eldress Cheung’s cloud-shaped pendant, Elena said, “Wang Fan says you want my blood. Why?”

“As I explained to him, I don’t know every single detail. My father is….”

I half-listened as Itsuki went into roughly the same explanation he’d given me the day I initially confronted him. Barely a minute in, I noticed that Jianhong had just walked back into the bar. Heading back to the game box, he caressed Leslie’s rear end as he leaned up and whispered into her ear. He hadn’t stayed outside long enough to smoke an entire cigarette. What was he up to? It suddenly hit me that the three scooters outside must belong to them. Maybe he’d gone out to check on them?

Itsuki and Elena went back and forth, and I didn’t pick up on any new information. She wasn’t happy, and although Itsuki was very convincing, I could tell she was far, far from trusting anything he had to say.

“Why don’t you tell her about the True Heaven, Itsuki?” I jumped in at one point. “Isn’t she wrapped up in that?”

I finished my sandwich as they continued the conversation. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Jianhong glance in our direction, then leave the girls again. This time he headed toward the bathroom. Hadn’t he just come out of the bathroom when we arrived? Why was he going back in that direction? My eyes narrowed as he disappeared into the hallway. What else could he be doing in there?

“I’m sure Wang Fan would agree,” Itsuki said, and then he looked at me. “Wang Fan? Are you even listening?”

Payphones. There were two dingy payphones back there, right at the far end, beyond the restrooms.

“Hold on,” I said, and I closed my eyes. Although I hadn’t done any tests so far, I knew that on reaching the diamond level, your divine sense grew a lot stronger, and the range increased. Mine should be roughly thirty feet by now, and the hallway leading to the restroom was only about twenty feet away. Without any hesitation, I sent my divine sense in that direction.

I could ‘see’ Jianhong standing there. At the payphones. Focusing my divine sense, I honed in on his speaking.

“... right now. Yeah. Both of them are here.” A long pause. “Uh-huh. Yeah, I’ll make sure they don’t go anywhere.” Another pause. “Yes. Sure thing.”

I retracted my divine sense and opened my eyes.

“We need to leave,” I said, getting out of the booth. “Right now.”

“What happened?” Itsuki asked.

“That little bastard called someone about us. Said he’d keep us here.”

As Itsuki climbed out of the booth, I extended a hand to help Elena out.

“Isn’t he the son of…” she said, then trailed off.

“Yeah, he is,” I said.

“There’s no way he’s working with the Corpses,” Elena said. “Is there?”

Itsuki chuckled. “You think there aren’t any cultivators who switch sides? There are. Plenty. In case you forgot, I had one in your coterie.”

We walked toward the door.

“Hey, where do you think you’re going?” Jianhong said, scurrying like a cockroach around one of the pool tables to stand between us and the door.

I walked right up to him. “We’re leaving, and if you’re smart, you’ll step out of my way.”

To my surprise, he reached out and grabbed me by the front of my shirt. Lips twisting into a snarl, he said, “Remember that I’m in charge, Wang Fan. And I’m a lot stronger than you. So don’t threaten me.”

Smiling back at him, I said, “Who did you just phone?”

“W-what?”

“Who were you just talking to?”

“Nobody, I don’t know what you mean.”

I reached up and grabbed his hand at the wrist but didn’t make any other move. “I’ll give you one chance to tell me the truth. Who did you just call on the payphone by the restrooms?”

“Fuck you, Wang Fan, I don’t—”

I pulled his hand down, and before he knew what was happening, I had him in an armbar and was putting just a touch of pressure on his elbow. He let out a yelp of mixed surprise and pain.

“No games, Jianhong. Tell me right now. Otherwise, I snap your arm. Trust me, I’d rather snap your arm.”

“I’m serious, I wasn’t—” He shrieked as I increased the pressure, pushing his elbow toward the point of hyperextension. I had to be very careful. My physical strength had increased dramatically with my breakthrough, and I was still getting stronger.

“Last chance.”

“My dad, it was my dad!” he blubbered. “You went missing, and everyone’s looking for you.”

I released the pressure and let him stagger away from me. He spun, gripping his elbow with the opposite hand as he glared into my eyes. I searched for signs to indicate whether or not he was telling the truth. But it was too tense of a moment. If he’d called his father on us, what did it mean? Was his father in on the conspiracy? Did it go higher than the elder circle?

“You’re going to regret that, Wang Fan,” he said. I felt a tingle as he tried to wrap me up with his divine sense.

I snorted and forcibly drove his divine sense away, then sent mine slamming into his chest. He staggered backward with a look of shock. “What the hell?”

I walked past him out onto the parking platform.

“Who is he?” Itsuki asked as he climbed onto his hoverbike.

“Son of a chief elder,” I said.

Itsuki thumbed the ignition switch, and the bikes’ turbines thrummed to life. At the same time, I climbed onto my bike, and Elena jumped on behind me.

“You think the chief elder turned traitor?” she asked.

“It’s possible. Nicolas said some things that only the elder circle knows about. Those elders report directly to Jianhong’s father.”

As our bikes lifted off the platform, Itsuki said, “Traitors are common. But traitors that are chief elders? Not so much. Do you have any other reason to think he might be working with Nicolas?”

“Maybe. I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t want to find out the hard way. I think we should get really far away from here. Regroup. Come up with a plan.”

“I know a place out near Purgatory,” he said.

“Fine.”

Again we sped into the traffic, and this time Itsuki led. He stuck to Long Peace Boulevard for some time until hitting the 7th Ring Road, which we took to almost the other side of the Fourth Earth entirely. Before long, we were near the gloomy shadows of Purgatory.

Itsuki eventually dropped down toward a cluster of grimy, four-story apartments next to a half-constructed parking garage.

That was when the first blue beam crackled through the darkness. It missed Itsuki’s bike but was followed by a second and a third.

He reacted quickly, sending the bike into a spiraling dive.

A blue beam shot past my shoulder, and I glanced over to see a dozen or more streamlined hoverbikes racing in our direction, followed some distance back by a black hovercar sedan.

Half of the bikers had Spitters, and they seemed to be splitting fire between Itsuki and us.

“Hold on!” I said to Elena and banked hard to the left, then twisted the throttle, dodging a Spitter beam as I sent us away from the incoming bikes. The bikers split up, about half of them going in Itsuki’s direction, the others chasing Elena and me.

As for the black hovercar, it also veered in our direction.

As I swerved back and forth, avoiding the Spitter fire, I felt Elena’s thighs tighten against me as she released her hands from my waist, turned, and sent a Sunflare Blast behind us. Glancing in the mirror, I saw that the shot went wide, missing one of the pursuers.

All of a sudden, I felt the bike going out of control as a blast of wind hit us. I kept a tight grip on the handlebars and managed to keep us both on the bike as I swerved around the corner of the parking garage. Before I could do anything else, another wind blast hit us, then another. It made me feel like I was a gnat with a gigantic hand swatting at me.

The bike swerved back and forth until, finally, I lost control. We slammed into the ground, and the safety harnesses snapped, sending Elena and me tumbling into a patch of rubbery gravel. I felt almost no pain as a result of the fall, and I was on my feet a second later. However, Elena was groaning.

“Are you alright?” I asked, stepping over to her.

She reached up and grabbed the hand I’d offered her. “I’m okay,” she said, using me to pull herself to her feet. She tapped her pendant, and her cultivator robe flowed out to cover her with golden fabric and graceful hummingbirds.

We heard the whine of turbines as the pursuing bikes banked around the corner. Without hesitation, Elena sent a Sunflare Blast up, and this time it hit, stabbing one of the bikes right through the center and sending it careening into the parking garage.

At the same time, I drew on my diamond-level divine sense to knock another biker off his vehicle, sending him flying down thirty feet to smash onto a bonecrete sidewalk with a sickening crunch.

I pulled out my Spitter and combined crackling blue beams with my divine sense to take out two more bikers, while Elena shot another out of the air with Sunflare Blast.

In less than ten seconds, the bikers were all dead or unconscious.

“Damn,” I said, looking over to see Elena with a grim smile on her face.

“¡Chigen su madre maricas!” she spat.

“Yeah, that,” I said. I wasn’t sure what it meant in Southmer, but my guess is that it was something along the line of, ‘Fuck you, motherfuckers!’

Meanwhile, the black hovercar had turned the corner and was descending to the ground a good thirty feet away, kicking up dust and sending trash spiraling away from it.

I knew exactly who was inside. And while I didn’t feel completely powerless, considering I had a diamond of energy in me, I had virtually no techniques to help me in combat. I was stronger and tougher than before, and my divine sense had been given a significant boost, but unless I could somehow get Nicolas Kun in a chokehold, I wasn’t going to be much help in this fight.

The hovercar doors opened, and Nicolas stepped out of one side, the puppetized Eldress Cheung the other.

To the side, I saw Elena prepare for another Sunflare Blast.

“It would be a lot less painful if you just surrendered,” Nicolas said in a loud voice.

“That’s not going to happen,” I said. “How did you find us?”

“That insect Jianhong did something right for once and planted a tracker on your bike.”

Fucking Jianhong. I’d make sure he paid for his treachery. But first, I had to get us out of this situation alive.

Chapter 49 – Chaos

Keeping my voice low, I leaned toward Elena and said, “There’s no way Itsuki’s getting taken down by a few hired thugs. As long as we can hold out for long enough, he’ll circle back around, and we might have a chance.”

She was already in a ready stance, her knees slightly bent and her hands ready to shoot a blazing beam of light. “How do we do it?”

“Take out the weakest target first.” Your Master, I thought, not wanting to say the words.

“The puppet,” she said, her cheek twitching.

Itsuki had claimed the type of puppetization used on Eldress Cheung could be reversed. That meant that while she couldn’t control her actions, her mind was still there, observing everything. We couldn’t just kill her. I had a Spitter, but wasn’t confident it was the right tool to use. Both Eldress Cheung and Nicolas were Electric cultivators who could easily deflect beam weapons and bullets alike.

“I’m gonna hit her with paliprox,” I said quietly. “Just keep Nicolas pinned down while I do.”

Nicolas strolled in our direction, his hands held loosely in his pockets. “No amount of clever planning is going to help the two of you, you know.”

Turning slightly to Eldress Cheung, he said something in a voice too low for me to make out. She started walking toward us rapidly, and as she did, a hand sign caused her prosthetic right arm to glow with white light. Solis Gauntlet.

Elena unleashed a Sunflare Blast right toward Nicolas, who reacted by throwing up a Fulmina Shield that absorbed the attack.

My hands flashed in a sign as I summoned a Thermal Ripple Cloak. The instant the invisibility covered me, I dropped, opened my boot heel, and pulled out the paliprox patch. Then I dashed toward Eldress Cheung, ripping the peel off as I ran. As I closed in, I saw Nicolas reaching into his coat pocket. He leaned to the side to avoid another sizzling beam of white light, then Black Corpse armor rippled out to cover him.

Meanwhile, time seemed to crawl as I neared the puppetized Eldress, and my heart sank as I realized her head had turned in my general direction. She appeared to be tracking the sound of my footfalls.

Then she clenched her hand into a burning white fist and, as I neared, launched a punch in my direction.

“I said don’t kill him!” Nicolas shouted as he sent forth a gust of wind that caught Elena at just the wrong angle and threw her off her feet. Before she hit the ground, she threw out another Sunflare Blast, grazing Nicolas’ shoulder.

Dodging the glowing fist, I lunged forward to try to slap the paliprox patch onto her exposed neck. However, she swung her hand back at me, forcing me to retreat. I had no armor and no cultivation protection from a Solis Gauntlet, so if she landed a blow, I was going to be in trouble.

She struck out, again and again, taking a step forward with each step I took back in retreat.

Having no spare attention to check what was happening with Elena and Nicolas, I focused completely on avoiding the blows.

Then I sidestepped, and as Eldress Cheung pulled her hand back for another strike, I dropped and swept my leg out. In a fight against an experienced opponent who could see me, it would never have worked. But it caught her right in the ankle, sweeping her leg out from under her and sending her tumbling off her feet.

As she slammed onto the ground, I lunged forward and hit the side of her neck. The patch connected.

Her fist punched into my shoulder, and I felt searing pain. The aroma of burned flesh bit at my nose as she pulled her hand back for another blow. Before it landed, the light went out; the paliprox had done its magic.

Ignoring the pain in my shoulder, I jumped forward and wrapped my arm around her neck. She fought, but without access to her cultivation base, she had no advantage over me. She was a two-root cultivator, but I had a diamond; I was clearly superior in terms of physical strength.

She clawed at me with prosthetic fingers, but within a matter of seconds, she was unconscious.

I dropped her and looked up to see that Nicolas had Elena trapped in a Fulmina Shield of crackling lightning. Her right fist was covered with bright light as she punched the shield as hard as she could. Sparks flew, and Nicolas laughed.

“You’re too weak,” he said.

I started walking toward them.

As if he sensed me, Nicolas turned and spotted Eldress Cheung on the ground, and an expression of surprise danced across his face.

“Well done, Detective,” he said, his voice metallic through the speakers of the Corpse armor. “So the procedure worked. And your Bone root clearly progressed past the initial stage.”

He had no clue how strong I really was.

My eyes darted back and forth in the hopes of catching a glimpse of Itsuki somewhere nearby. Unfortunately, all I saw were crumbling buildings and shadows.

Come on, where the hell are you?

I crept forward as quietly as possible.

“Thermal cultivation tricks aren’t going to help you,” Nicolas said, reaching to his belt and pulling out a geomantic compass.

Shit. I pulled out the Spitter X3, and the moment the wires connected to my arm, I pulled the trigger.

Nicolas dodged to the side, and while the initial shot missed, the follow-up shot caused black sparks to fly off of his Corpse armor. Then a pulse rolled out from the geomantic compass, disabling my Thermal Ripple Cloak.

I kept pulling the trigger, my forearm tingling as the weapon drew on my body’s energy.

Nicolas threw out a hand sign, and a blast of wind hit me from the side. I was ready, and the wind did nothing more than ruffle my hair and cause my coat to flap wildly.

Dodging another Spitter blast, he said, “You’re strong. But even a root cultivator will succumb to Baromatris!”

His left and right pinky and ring fingers interlocked, and he pressed his thumbs together.

Suddenly, I felt immense pressure around me. My ears popped, and a wave of dizziness swept through me, causing my steps to falter momentarily. After the initial shock, though, I shook my head clear and continued walking forward.

“What?” Nicolas blurted. “You couldn’t possibly—”

A succession of popping sounds rang out, and Nicolas’ head jerked slightly. Looking over, I saw a figure in a gas mask walking out of a nearby alley, squeezing the trigger of his QBZ assault rifle. Itsuki. Just in time.

“Damn you!” Nicolas growled, throwing up another Fulmina Shield to defend himself. Reaching to his waistband, he drew a pistol, pointed it at me, and pulled the trigger.

I leaped to the side, going into a roll to gain cover behind a pile of bricks and debris. Bullets plunked into the bricks as I hunkered down to wait for an opening to return fire.

That was when I saw Eldress Cheung stirring.

Fuck. She’d recovered that quickly?

The bullets stopped, and I looked over to see Itsuki being thrown to the ground under the force of a blast of wind. I took aim and shot at Nicolas again, hitting him in the back of the head. Black sparks flew as he turned and fired at me with the pistol. I ducked back into cover.

Eldress Cheung was getting to her feet and ripping the paliprox patch off.

Flicking the X3 to stun, I took aim and fired. It was a good shot, but it missed her flesh and harmlessly hit the prosthetic part of her face.

A beam of white stabbed through the air in my peripheral vision; Elena was free from the lightning and was attacking Nicolas. At the same time, Itsuki got up on one knee and pulled the trigger of the QBZ, causing more staccato popping sounds to echo around us.

I aimed at Eldress Cheung again. However, she dodged the crackling blue light as she sprinted toward me. I rolled to the side just as she arrived, her prosthetic arms smashing into the bricks. She spun in the direction I’d moved and attacked with a hammer fist, but I was already crab-walking backward, and she hit nothing but the ground.

Over her shoulder, I saw Itsuki climb to his feet, only to be hit with another gust of wind that knocked him to the side, toward Elena. His head smacked the pavement, causing the visor to slide open.

“Who the fuck are you?” Nicolas shouted at his back. “That’s Black Corpse tech you’re using, isn’t it? Is that you, Itsuki?”

Continuing to scramble away from Eldress Cheung as quietly as possible, I watched as Itsuki reached out and grabbed Elena’s ankle. He looked over at me and our eyes met. He smiled and nodded.

As Elena looked down at him in surprise, he pulled out a small disc and snapped it.

They disappeared in a flash of light.

“Fucking hellfire!” Nicolas screamed.

I was thinking similar thoughts as I threw on another Thermal Ripple Cloak and skittered away from Eldress Cheung, who flailed around randomly in the hopes of hitting me.

Pulling out the geomantic compass, Nicolas headed in our direction.

By then, I was on my feet. Stepping over to the corner of the nearest building, I eased around it, then jumped into a run as fast as I could. What was the range of the compass? I remembered Itsuki’s went at least forty feet.

A pulse passed through me, and the cloak dropped.

I ran.

As hard as I could. Not bothering to look over my shoulder.

Then something slammed into me from behind.

Eldress Cheung.

As her prosthetic hand latched onto my throat, I punched her in the jaw, jerking her head to the side. It hardly fazed her. My body moving on pure instinct, I tried to slip my legs around her and get her into some sort of hold but failed. She hit me in the side of the head with a bonemetal fist. Then a third time.

I suddenly felt the air pressure around me increase, much more dramatically than last time. My vision swam, and I felt blood leaking out of my nose.

Eldress Cheung was bashing the side of my head with all the strength she could muster, but I ignored the pain and elbowed her under the jaw. As her head snapped back, I grabbed her hair and pulled her further away from me. Forming a knife hand, I chopped it at her exposed throat, but the blow never landed.

Nicolas’s hand clamped onto my forearm, and he punched me in the kidney. Pain lanced through me, and as I tried to spin to face him, he punched me again and again. I let out a hoarse scream of agony, then felt his palm land on my neck, along with the cool bite of a paliprox patch. I fell backward, my vision turning black before I hit the ground.

**

When my bleary eyes flickered open, I found myself looking at my boots. They were barely visible, as the room was dark, with the only light coming from the crack beneath the door, directly opposite me.

Before doing anything else, I reached out to my cultivation base but felt nothing.

My head hung down, stretching the back of my neck painfully. My arms were extended above me, and my shoulders ached. I was shirtless. I lifted my head, and as I gained my bearings, I realized I was secured against a bonecrete wall. My wrists were bound with metal rings that were apparently built or screwed into the wall. I couldn’t tell what type of metal it was, but it seemed to be at least an inch thick. I made an attempt to flex my arm, but it didn’t do anything.

Looking back down, I saw that my legs were similarly bound. My feet were planted on the ground, so I could stand if I positioned myself properly. From the aches that filled me, I had to wonder how long I’d been hanging there unconscious.

Just about every part of me hurt, especially the burned shoulder where Eldress Cheung had landed a blow with her Solis Gauntlet. The sight of the charred flesh oozing blood and pus briefly gave me the urge to vomit. I held it down.

The room was completely empty, a bonecrete box with nothing in it save for me.

After I was completely awake, I struggled a bit more, but it didn’t do anything. There was no way I would be able to break free from these bonds. By tilting my head to the side and rubbing my neck against my shoulder, I was able to confirm the presence of a paliprox patch.

Shit.

I’d been captured, and the only upside I could think of was that this obviously wasn’t some sort of high-tech Black Corpse facility. Itsuki had been right. Nicolas was operating outside of the authority of the Corpses. Maybe I could use that to my advantage somehow.

Minutes passed that stretched into what seemed hours, although I couldn’t be sure. Eventually, I heard footsteps outside, and the door opened. Nicolas Kun stepped in. He flipped the switch next to the door, causing the solitary bulb overhead to fill the room with dirty yellow light.

I narrowed my eyes against the glow as Nicolas walked up to me.

“You’re awake. Good.” He ripped the patch off my neck and replaced it with a new one. “What happens next is really going to be up to you.”

He held a bottle of water up to my mouth and poured some inside. I swallowed a bit before choking and coughing water everywhere.

“What do you want?” I said.

“You know what I want. That root of energy inside you.” He still didn’t realize I had more than a root. That was another advantage I had.

“Go screw yourself,” I said.

He laughed, then punched me in the stomach. As the pain and nausea rippled through me, he poured the rest of the water over my head.

“If that’s your attitude, then I guess we’ll be doing things the hard way. Sadly for you, I can’t access any Black Corpse facilities now, which means I’ll have to do everything via the black market. It’s going to hurt, Detective. A lot.” He reached out and jabbed a gloved finger into the wound on my shoulder, and I screamed. He retracted the finger, and the pain faded, leaving me panting hoarsely.

He wiped the blood on his finger onto my chest, then stepped back to the doorway.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked shakily.

He shook his head. “Still hoping for a monologue? It won’t happen.”

He turned off the light. Silhouetted by the light of the corridor, he said, “I’ll be leaving now. Have fun hanging here in the dark and the pain. When I return, I’ll pump you full of a lovely cocktail of paliprox-Z and a few other drugs that might very well fry your brain out of existence. Not that I care. Before that happens, I’ll be able to rip that Bone root out of you and take it for my own.

“My puppet is out here watching the door. If you need anything, just call. Oh, there’s no restroom available. Sorry.”

He closed the door.

Chapter 50 – “I’ll Explain Along the Way”

Alone in the darkness, I listened to Nicolas’ footsteps fade away. What now? Itsuki had Elena. I was immobilized and helpless, bare-chested and bare-footed, without any tools, weapons, or equipment. Was everything over?

I didn’t know why, but I felt no fear. There had to be a way out. Something I could do. Some trick, be it related to cultivation or otherwise. I tried twisting my legs and arms again, even though I knew it wouldn’t do any good.

A few plans flashed into mind, but none made sense as long as I was so utterly restrained.

I gritted my teeth in frustration.

Son, I could hear Dad saying, sometimes you get backed into a corner, and you don’t see any way out of it. That’s when the best opportunity you can imagine will drop in front of you. You just have to make sure to see it when it comes.

What opportunity? Where? How?

I closed my eyes and sent my divine sense out of me. Paliprox cut off the cultivation base, but not divine sense. Of course, there were ways to do the same to divine sense as well, but, generally speaking, the limited strength that divine sense could unleash on corporeal objects wasn’t considered particularly useful or dangerous.

I checked the metal shackles and could see that they were mechanical in nature. And it was complex machinery. Too complex for me to “pick” them open with my mind.

I examined the room in general but didn’t see anything noteworthy. No spell formations or other things related to cultivation. Outside was a hallway, with Eldress Cheung standing motionless next to the door.

To my shock, I could actually see her single sea of energy and two roots of energy. It was Eldress Cheung herself who’d taught me that it was impossible to scan someone’s cultivation base without their permission. Were things different for diamond cultivators? Or was it because she was a puppet?

Looking closer at Eldress Cheung, I saw that her head contained a pulsing sphere of white light, covered with something that looked like a web of purple thread. What was that white sphere? Her mind? Her consciousness? If so, then the purple web had to be the Puppet Lace I’d heard about from Itsuki. Was it dangerous? I cautiously reached out to touch the sphere with divine sense but was rebuffed by the web. As it pushed back against me, I ‘heard’ something like the squeal of dying cockroaches. Pushing harder with my divine sense, I ignored the screaming and forced my way through the web and into the white light.

“Who’s there?”

Holy shit. It was Eldress Cheung’s voice, just like I remembered it. Itsuki was right. Her mind was still there.

“Eldress, it’s me, Wang Fan.”

“Wang Fan?” she said, her mental voice shaky with emotion. “My god, it’s so good to talk to a familiar voice. But... how are you doing this? Only diamond cultivators can communicate via thought, at least without using special spell formations.”

“I formed a Bone diamond, Eldress.”

“WHAT? That’s… that’s incredible! It could change everything in the Naturalism Sect, and maybe even the Grand Kingdom. But time is pressing now. You need to get to safety as quickly as possible. Nicolas has some bags in the other room. In one of them, you’ll find a device that looks like a two-pronged fork. You can use it to remove the bonemetal shackles binding you.”

My heart was already pounding into my throat as the hope of getting free grew in my mind. “Eldress, is there anything I can do to help you? Can I get you out of here with me?”

“No. The Puppet Lace can’t be removed without the key. And Nicolas sent the key down to the First Heaven. Don’t worry about me. He wants me alive to torment, so as long as I’m alive, there’s a chance I can get free. You need to get out of here and find a way to get in touch with the grand elders.”

The grand elders ranked higher than the chief elders and were among the most powerful members of the sect. Other than that basic fact, I didn’t know anything about them.

“Why, Eldress?”

“Elder Qing is a traitor. They must be told.”

“Wait, Elder Qing? I thought it was Chief Elder Kang.”

“The chief elder’s son has been seduced to their side, but not the chief elder himself.”

“Is there some kind of evidence we can use to prove it?”

“Not that I can give you here and now. There’s much I wish to tell you, Wang Fan, but we mustn’t waste time. Once Nicolas returns with the drugs he needs, he’ll rip your cultivation base out of you, and you probably won’t survive. You need to get out of here.”

“I understand, Eldress. How do I contact the grand elders? And what do I tell them?”

“Use the grid monkey courier that operates out of the booth on 407th. Torment Protocol. Then give her the following code phrase. Vincent. Be. Can’t. Company. Of. Robots….” She went on for a bit longer, then repeated the sequence. “Have you memorized it?”

“Yes, Eldress.”

“The message itself is all the evidence they’ll need to take action against Elder Qing.”

“Understood. By the way, do you know what they want with Elena? Why they’re after her?”

She sighed. “They believe she’s a descendant of an ancient cultivator from a distant land and that her blood is intrinsically linked to the True Heaven. They think they can use her to get there and also activate its potential.”

“They ‘believe?’ They ‘think?’ You’re not convinced she has special blood?”

“I don’t know. What’s more, I don’t understand how our leader Yu Yitai could build something inherently linked to the blood of my apprentice without knowing about that link. It seems implausible. Speaking of my apprentice, what happened to her? The Puppet Lace didn’t allow me to look over my shoulder as I pursued you.”

“Itsuki Saito took her.”

There was a long pause. “That’s very unfortunate.”

“I don’t think he intends to hurt her. Once I’m out of here, I’ll find her.”

I knew that the clock was ticking, and I didn’t have time to sit around asking all sorts of questions. But I couldn’t resist a final request.

“Eldress, what are orgplants?”

This time, it took several seconds before she responded with hesitancy, “The truth about orgplants is restricted to elite disciples.”

“Eldress, I already know about the True Heaven,” I pointed out. “Besides, I get the sense orgplants are wrapped up in all of this.”

Another long pause. “It’s too complicated to explain in a few sentences. Suffice it to say, they’re profoundly evil. They’re part of the Grand Kingdom’s plan to end the Heavenly Curse, but in a horrific way.”

“Eldress, my younger sister was killed after she started looking into orgplants. I need to know the truth.”

“Anyone who pokes into the truth about orgplants is marked for liquidation. I’m sorry for your sister, Wang Fan, but that’s all there is to it. The Black Corpses guard those places with even more passion than they hunt members of our sect. If the circumstances were different, I would consider explaining the truth. But it really is too complicated given the urgency of the situation. The orgplants, the Heaven-Propping Pillar, the Heavenly Curse, the Shields, the Climb. Everything is tied together in what the leaders of the Grand Kingdom call their ‘Purpose.’ You’ll understand it all, just not today.”

Virtually none of this was new information to me. Gritting my teeth with frustration, I said, “Fine. Considering your husk is standing guard outside the door, how do you suggest I get out of here?”

“Nicolas has paliprox-D patches among his supplies. Snag one of them with your divine sense, and you should be able to get it onto my neck. The Puppet Lace is like a machine that only follows orders. All he told it was, ‘stand outside the door and make sure he doesn’t leave.’ Just bring the patch along the edge of the corridor, and it won’t notice it.”

“Eldress, if I can render you unconscious, I could just carry you with me when I leave.”

“No,” she said, her mental voice laced with sadness and regret. “Nicolas instructed the Puppet Lace to destroy itself if captured, and me along with it. You can’t keep it inert with paliprox-D indefinitely.”

I paused briefly, hoping to come up with another alternative. In the end, I couldn’t. “Okay. I’m going to get to work.”

“Good luck. Tell my apprentice I care for her very much and that I’m proud of her.”

“I will. And we’ll find a way to get you back, Eldress. Mark my words.”

“Go, child.”

I retracted my divine sense, then sent it further out to get an idea of what else was around me. We were in what appeared to be an abandoned apartment building, on the second floor, with four stories overhead. On the ground floor, I detected a few people in the main stairwell. Presumably more hired thugs.

I was able to get a glimpse of what lay outside the building, but there wasn’t anything to tell me where exactly we might be. Possibly near Purgatory, but not necessarily.

I found the room Nicolas was using for sleeping quarters. He had a duffel bag with clothing and other random things, and a second duffel bag with weapons, equipment, and the like.

As an experiment, I wrapped some divine sense around the handle of the bag with the equipment and tried to pull it off the ground. It lifted up as easily as if I’d been there in person. I let it back down, then scanned the bag more thoroughly. I noticed the device Eldress Cheung had mentioned, and then I found the paliprox-D.

It took some effort to peel the back of the patch, as I hadn’t taken the time to practice such a fine level of manipulation before. When it was ready, I slid the patch along the floor, outside the door, and down the corridor.

Just as Eldress Cheung had said, the puppet didn’t notice it as it approached. I slid it up the wall, then gently set it onto her neck. She didn’t even notice. A moment later, she slumped onto the ground.

Next, I sent my divine sense racing back to the room, where I grabbed the ‘key’ device and sent it flying through the air back to my location.

The bindings made clicking noises as they unwrapped, freeing me. Out in the corridor, I rubbed my sore wrists as I looked down at Eldress Cheung’s unconscious form. I hated the idea of leaving her behind but knew that taking her wasn’t an option. To the living, we owe respect; to the dead, we owe justice. I couldn’t help but wonder where Eldress Cheung fell into Dad’s old catchphrase.

“Stay strong, Eldress,” I murmured.

Hurrying to Nicolas’s room, I dumped both bags out on the floor. I helped myself to the Spitter X3 he’d taken from me after rendering me unconscious and grabbed all the paliprox patches I saw. There was also a roll of cash and some combat bandages. I quickly used one of the bandages on my wound, then grabbed the clothing items that were mine and dressed. Taking the cash and an umbrella, I hurried outside and down the stairs. I hit the thugs like a cat pouncing on unsuspecting mice. One, I slammed so hard against the wall with divine sense that he immediately fell unconscious. The second and third, I stunned with the Spitter. The fourth, I downed with another burst of divine sense. It barely took three seconds.

 As I made my way out of the building, I scanned the area ahead and didn’t see any signs of life. Once outside, I saw that we were indeed near Purgatory. In fact, this building was on the very edge.

Fat drops of water dripped down here and there, not really rain. It was more like runoff.

Peering into the darkness, I could barely see where the Shield connected to the ground off in the distance and the no-mans-land that lay between. Purgatory was filled with rubble and junk, interspersed with pools of water that resembled lakes. For the most part, though, it was just an expanse of bonecrete, covered with especially humid air.

Now wasn’t the time for sight-seeing.

From what I could tell, the complex around me was abandoned. I hurried across the cracked sidewalks, trying to keep to side paths that didn’t seem like common thoroughfares and keeping my back to Purgatory. After walking for a minute or two, my divine sense started picking up signs of life. I saw people huddled in some of the rooms of the buildings I walked past, and soon I detected pedestrians. I turned the collar of my coat up.

I had no idea where I was going, and that was a problem.

Most of the people I could see in the dim light of the street lights looked to be vagrants or miscreants of some sort. Homelessness and begging were prohibited in the Grand Kingdom; any who violated such laws would be carted away to the prisons in the Fourth Heaven. Out here near Purgatory, the law was less strictly enforced, and there were plenty of abandoned buildings to take advantage of.

Up ahead, I spotted a girl in a tight skirt and thigh-high boots, with a moon tattoo around the jack on her forearm. A Nitro runner. She seemed as good a person as any to get directions from.

As I approached, she smiled and said, “Looking to relax, handsome?”

“Sure,” I replied, pulling out some cash. “How much’ll this get me?”

She eyed the cash. “Three doses.”

“Fuckin’ kiddin’ me?” I said, then ‘reluctantly’ handed over the cash. “Say, where’s the nearest rail station?”

Glancing around, she reached into her fluffy jacket and pulled out three vials. As we made the exchange, she tilted her head in the direction I’d been walking and said, “Down that away about five minutes.”

“Thanks.” I continued on.

At the end of the block, I saw the blue and white of a Peacekeeper ground patrol vehicle suddenly roll around the corner only twenty feet ahead of me, then pull over and park.

Seriously? I almost laughed. Really? The old “hide in the alley and snag a junkie” trick? These patrol officers must be running low on their arrest quota to be resorting to this. I wanted to turn into an alley or cross the street, but I was too close to the car for that. It would draw them to me like a cockroach to rotting trash.

I kept walking.

The doors opened, and two uniformed officers stepped out.

“Over here, Citizen,” one of them said, beckoning. Both had their hands on their sidearms.

“Me?” I replied, trying to look surprised.

“Now.”

I walked over.

One of the officers peered at my face. “Did you just purchase illegal drugs a moment ago?”

Given my cultivation level and capabilities, I could easily deal with them using force. But I didn’t want to do that if I didn’t have to. Could I pull a fast one? Last time I’d tried that on two patrol officers, it failed miserably.

If at first, you don’t succeed, Dad had said, try, try again—a saying from the minorities.

Lowering my voice, I said, “Officers, I’m Specialist Li Zhao from the Drug Control division. Badge number 3162314. I’m here on an undercover operation being run out of the 36th Precinct by Inspector Yu Yitai. I know I’m a bit far from home here, but things led to this neighborhood, and we’re closing in on one of the biggest Nitro Rings in the Fourth Earth. I just purchased three doses from that runner back there, and I have an unlicensed Spitter X3 in a shoulder holster. I suggest two courses of action here. One is that you pretend to arrest me and then give me a ride back to the 36th. The other is just let me go on my way. I’d prefer the latter, as I’m fairly certain I’m being followed, and if they see me getting in a car with you two, it could blow my cover. So please decide quickly.”

The officers exchanged a glance, then a ghost of a nod.

“Carry on, Citizen.”

Nodding, I continued walking.

At the zont-rail station, while I was waiting for the train, I noticed a battered payphone. On a hunch, I dialed Itsuki’s number. It rang once.

“The number you have dialed is no longer in service. If—” I hung up. Then I picked up the phone again, put it to my ear, and started to dial Charlotte. I stopped halfway through and hung up again. She couldn’t help me right now.

On the ride back, I slumped in the rearmost train and contemplated my situation. Nicolas Kun was going to be madly furious when he returned. I hoped that he wouldn’t vent his anger on Eldress Cheung’s physical form, but in all likelihood, he would. For now, I was fairly certain I was safe from him. He had no idea where I lived, and without the resources of the Corpses and Peacekeepers, he wouldn’t find it an easy task to track me down.

But what was I going to do about Elena? And when should I contact the grand elders? Immediately? The pain in my shoulder was building, and I needed to dress the wound properly and take some painkillers. Maybe even go so far as to ask Svea for a Pure Cloud Pill.

Plans and possibilities flitted through my mind, but nothing good stuck. I exited a stop before the Airport Benevolence Complex, then took a circuitous route back home, taking every precaution to make sure I wasn’t being followed. Outside of the complex, I carefully threw on a Thermal Ripple Cloak and climbed the stairs, being especially quiet on the last ten flights before my floor.

I peeked out of the stairwell, and when I was sure the hallway was clear, padded over, unlocked the door, and entered.

“Brother, that you?” Jakobe asked from the kitchen. Something seemed strange about his voice; it was taut as if with urgency. Not bothering to hang my keys, I stepped over.

Bunny was there at the table with him, clasping both of his hands in hers. Her eyes were red and puffy, her head hung low. They were both in pajamas. Svea was there, as was Tao Heng.

“What’s going on?” I said.

Jakobe turned to look at me, his headset glinting in the fluorescent light overhead. “Elena’s gone, isn’t she?”

“How’d you know?”

“I’ll explain along the way,” he said, rising. Bunny stood as well, as did Svea and Tao Heng.

“On the way where?” I asked.

“The True Heaven.”

Interlude 9 – Rooftop Meeting

Hu Jingyi stepped out onto the roof of his apartment building, tugged his baseball cap down tighter against the light rain, and scanned the rooftop. It only took a few moments to spot a figure leaning against the parapet in the shadows cast by a hulking Luzhou baijiu billboard that occupying nearly half of the rooftop space.

Hu Jingyi put his hands in his pockets and hurried over. As he approached, the figure looked over, revealing the face of Elder Qing beneath a broad-brimmed rain hat.

“An odd choice of location for a meeting, Ol’ Qing,” Hu Jingyi said by way of greeting, leaning up against the parapet a few feet away.

“You weren’t home, and this seemed a good enough place as any.”

“You said you had news about my apprentice?”

“Yes and no. Any chance he’s checked in with you since… disappearing?”

A spark of suspicion burned to life in Hu Jingyi’s mind. “Since ‘disappearing?’ What do you mean?”

Elder Qing sighed. “Come on, Ol’ Hu. How long did you think you could cover for them before word spread? All three of our newest recruits vanished, along with various members of their coteries. If they were just random people, maybe it wouldn’t matter. Except they’re anything but random people.”

“They went on vacation,” Hu Jingyi replied smoothly. The truth was that he had suspected from the beginning that Wang Fan and his friends hadn’t gone on a sightseeing trip to the Fifth Earth. For one thing, there had been no update about the mission to recover the Euneirophrenia Marrow, which was very troubling. What was more, although Wang Fan’s message mentioned Jakobe Liu, Elena Ávila, Bunny Bai, Svea Göransson, and Tao Heng, it said nothing of Darius Xiang. Hu Jingyi knew for a fact that Darius’ coterie had successfully initiated the mission by kidnapping the Peacekeeper Wang Fan had been told to impersonate. But Darius never checked in after that. What happened to the mission? If Wang Fan had been injected with the marrow, why would he suddenly go on a vacation? If he had failed to acquire the marrow, it led to even more troubling questions.

As the neon strips on the billboard above buzzed faintly, Elder Qing said, “Vacation? Please. We have two heretic Peacekeepers and a girl being targeted by a Sinotech board member? Possibly in possession of Euneirophrenia Marrow. And you want me to believe they just went on vacation?”

Hu Jingyi cleared his throat to buy time. Targeted by a Sinotech board member? he thought. Where did he get that bit of information?

Elder Qing shifted so that he was facing Hu Jingyi, placing his hand into his jacket pocket in the process. “I really don’t want to go up the chain of command with this, Ol’ Hu. You know Chief Elder Kang. If he finds out those Peacekeepers broke the rules, there’ll be hell to pay. And even worse if you knew about it and are covering for them. Look, just come clean to me, and I’ll do everything I can to make sure things go smoothly. For old times’ sake.”

Hu Jingyi put his palms on the parapet in front of him and looked out at the city, as if he were considering the offer. Something’s off here. Very off. He’s digging for information, isn’t he. But why?

The reality was that he did have an idea of where Wang Fan and his friends were, and that information was all contained in handwritten notes in his notepad, which was tucked into his pants pocket. Although the group had been careful, they had obviously left in a rush. Svea had broken up with her girlfriend, and the yelling match that had ensued was caught on a security camera that Hu Jingyi managed to hack. He was no Organic cultivator, but he still knew his way around a computer. Svea had ended the argument by shouting something about leaving for the Sixth Earth. And Tao Heng hadn’t cleared his search history on his desktop computer in their apartment, making it even more obvious what their destination was.

Why are they going to the Sixth Earth? Hu Jingyi thought. It feels like they’re running. But are they running away from something? Or toward something? Trying to do some information-digging of his own, he looked at Elder Qing and said, “Where’s Kang Jianhong?”

Elder Qing smiled faintly. “What does he have to do with the situation?”

“Tom from Tom’s Tavern told me that he saw Wang Fan and Elena on the evening following their mission. Darius Xiang wasn’t with them, but someone else was. A good-looking young man dressed in an expensive suit. Wang Fan and Kang Jianhong got into some sort of argument. That was the last anyone saw of any of them.”

“When the Peacekeeper never checked back in from the mission, I mentioned it to Jianhong and asked him to keep his eyes open. When he saw Wang Fan at Tom’s, he tried to stop him from leaving. Wang Fan nearly broke his arm, and he’s been resting up at my place ever since.”

The spark of suspicion in Hu Jingyi had turned into a burning flame. “Why would he go to you and not his father?”

Elder Qing stepped away from the parapet. “I need to know where Wang Fan went, Ol’ Hu. It’s a matter of life and death.”

He’s being evasive. Hu Jingyi cleared his meridians and reached out to his Wind root. His instincts were telling him that a fight was coming, although for the life of him he couldn’t understand why. Why was Elder Qing so interested in Wang Fan? What did Kang Jianhong have to do with it, and why were the two of them seemingly working without the approval of Chief Elder Kang? Was it some sort of power grab? Then he thought about how Elder Qing had tried to get the girl assigned to his coterie back when they arrived. The clues were all there, but how did they fit together?

“What’s this all about, Ol’ Qing?” Hu Jingyi said, also taking a step away from the wall, his eyes sweeping the rooftop to assess it in case fighting really did break out. “I really don’t have anything to hide here. I’m interested in my apprentice’s safety, and you said you have news about him.”

“I just need to know where Wang Fan is. Tell me, and I’ll explain everything.”

“I have no idea where he is.”

“That’s unfortunate.” Elder Qing took his hand out of his pocket, allowing Hu Jingyi to just barely make out a metallic sphere gripped between his thumb and index finger. “You should have paid closer attention to events in the past several days, Ol’ Hu. You should have kept your eyes open. Sadly, though, that’s never been your strong suit. And even more sadly, this meeting of ours needs to end with your silence. I simply can’t let you go blabbing to the chief elder about all these questions of mine.”

He flicked his fingers, and the metal sphere flowed out into the form of a long sword.

Hu Jingyi’s jaw tightened. “That’s Black Corpse weaponry, Ol’ Qing.”

“It is.”

“You’ve turned traitor, then?”

“I’ve been enlightened about which side is on the right in this conflict.”

“You’re a Gravitational cultivator, Ol’ Qing. I’m a Wind cultivator. You know that a fight between—”

“I have a few tricks up my sleeve. For instance, this.” He reached into his other coat pocket and pulled out what appeared to be a purplish medicinal pill.

Hu Jingyi recognized it. “A Puppet Lace.”

“This is your one chance to live through this night. Remember, Puppet Laces can be removed. After everything blows over, you’ll have a chance to have your life back. All you have to do—”

Hu Jingyi’s fingers flashed, causing a concentrated blast of wind to surge toward the medicinal pill. It hit true, batting Elder Qing’s hand to the side, and dislodging the pill, which tumbled over the parapet, out into the rain, and down toward the street thirty stories down.

Elder Qing’s lips twisted into a snarl. Pulling the sword into a ready position, he growled, “You’re going to regret—”

Before he could complete his sentence, Hu Jingyi sent a blast of wind directly onto his chest, shoving him backward across the roof until he smacked into one of the supporting beams of the billboard.

I have to get out of here, Hu Jingyi thought. I need to get to my distress talisman and notify Sect Leader Yu what’s going on.

He glanced at the stairwell. Last thing I want to do is get stuck running down a staircase. What if he has backup?

Sending a third blast of wind toward Elder Qing, Hu Jingi burst into a sprint toward the east parapet. The gap between buildings was only about fifteen feet, and the opposite building was a few stories shorter. I can make that jump, he thought.

Chapter 51 – The Crocodile

White neon light illuminated tentacles of cigarette smoke that slowly crept their way toward my throat. I exhaled sharply but quietly, sending those nearest me crumbling into oblivion, only to be replaced by new tendrils. In the past, a tingle of addiction would have rustled in the back of my mind, but no more. All that remained were occasional bursts of muscle memory that sent my hands rifling toward my pockets, looking for a nonexistent packet.

Hot rain dappled the angled plexiglass ceiling above, beyond which was an enormous building sign that was the only source of light. It was glaringly bright, casting strangely shifting shadows through the water that ran down the glass.

I sat in an overstuffed leather chair, a glass held in my left hand, within which was a pungent liquor I’d never encountered before. Give me baijiu any day of the week; I had a hard time stomaching the type of liquor the ethnic minorities favored. Jakobe sat in a similar chair next to me, his glass nearly empty. He wore a suit, less flashy than the type he’d preferred back in the Fourth Earth, but snazzy nonetheless. It was dark gray, with sleek lines, accompanied by a black shirt and a red tie. He wore a short-brimmed hat, tilted at a jaunty angle, and his goatee was now a short beard. I had a similar suit on that he’d picked out for me, except with a white tie.

We sat in front of a wide desk of black synthetic hardwood, across from a man who vaguely resembled Jakobe in the curve of his lips and the shape of his ears. His suit was sharper than Jakobe’s; the hand-stitched edging, custom buttonholes, and a few other clues made it obvious it was an extremely expensive garment. He had cufflinks made from a white metal that could have been bonemetal but was more likely silver or platinum. They were crafted to resemble crocodile skulls, with emerald-green gems for eyes that could have been synthetic, but for some reason struck me as being natural emeralds. The man didn’t have a single prosthetic from what I could see, but he did have tiny metal studs implanted within a complex design of scar tissue on his face and neck.

“Good to see you back in the Sixth Earth, cousin,” the man said, his Sinese clear and fluid but spoken with an accent similar to Jakobe’s, except much stronger. The cigarette in his hand appeared to be made from real paper, with gold leaf decorating the middle section. Back when I used to smoke, I wouldn’t have been able to afford a single cigarette like that, much less an entire pack.

“It’s good to be back, Timsah,” Jakobe replied with a smile. “I couldn’t find a good hummus down there to save my life.” He took a sip of alcohol from his cup, and I followed.

Al-Timsah was the Boyu word for “the crocodile.” No matter what language mobsters spoke, they loved to come up with colorful noms de guerre. Al-Timsah sipped at his glass, and for a moment, the only sound we could hear was the faint thump of music from beneath our feet, presumably from a club or bar.

This cousin of Jakobe’s was someone I’d heard stories of in the past. When Jakobe and I had first become partners, I’d had a tough time coming to terms with the fact that his upbringing was the polar opposite of my own. His family operated a sprawling criminal empire, with him being something of a pariah for having joined the Peacekeepers. I’d initially distrusted him, often quoting Dad’s words to myself: Criminals are criminals, Son.

In the end, I came to understand him for who he was, not where he came from. And I also realized his background was an asset in fighting crime. His familiarity with the mob was one reason he’d always taken the lead in talking with mobsters back in the Third Earth.

As we waited for Al-Timsah to speak, my eyes flickered back and forth, trying to find items of note in the room that might give me information about him beyond what Jakobe had provided. There were strange wooden masks on the wall, brightly painted, with exaggerated facial features. A crude spear hung in a display case on the opposite side of the room. The titles of the books on the bookcase weren’t written in Sinese, and the wardrobe opposite it was closed. None of it gave me any new insights.

“I never thought you’d return,” Al-Timsah said. “Your father didn’t want you in the family business, so he sent you away. And you were happy to join the other side. No?”

“Things got complicated, and I had no choice but to come back. So here I am.”

“Adjusting to the changes of life.”

Jakobe nodded. “Exactly. To your health, cousin.”

They drank, and I joined them, wincing as I drained my cup.

Al-Timsah uncorked the crystal drinking vessel on the desk and refilled the glasses. “I admit I was surprised to hear you wanted to see me. Are you and your friend looking for work?”

He glanced at me briefly, causing a tingle to run down my spine. His eyes were dark and intense, a type that I’d seen before many times in the Third Earth. They were the eyes of a killer, and not the ordinary kind. This man could take lives without so much as batting an eye. He wasn’t a junkie who had cut someone down during a mugging gone wrong; he was a man who could fill swimming pools with the blood of his victims.

Long ago, I would have felt naked and afraid in the presence of a mobster like this without my trusty Spitter at my side. Things were different now. As a diamond cultivator, I was so strong physically I could rip Al-Timsah limb from limb with my bare hands, and my divine sense was powerful enough that, if I caught him off guard, I could break his neck without touching him.

“We aren’t looking for work,” Jakobe said. “We need information. Some very specific information.”

Al-Timsah’s eyes narrowed slightly, and he exhaled a few ringlets of smoke before saying, “That’s not my specialty, but you obviously know that.”

“Yes. I know it’s an unorthodox request. Of all our various cousins and relatives, you and I always got along the best. So I’ve come to you, hoping you’ll have it in your heart to help. If you can’t fulfill the request, I’ll understand completely.”

Silence once again permeated the penthouse office. The rain picked up, beating against the plexiglass and causing the shadows to flicker even more wildly. I tried not to stare as I studied Al-Timsah, hoping to notice any changes in facial expression that might reveal what he was thinking.

Finally, he smiled. “Is this going to be a favor, Jakobe? Or a business transaction?”

“It’s not a favor, Timsah. We can pay. Cash.”

Al-Timsah chuckled. “I guess you didn’t waste your time as a Peacekeeper, eh?”

I glanced at Jakobe out of the corner of my eye, wondering how he would respond to the implication that he had used his position in the Peacekeepers for personal gain. If anyone hated corruption in the force more than me, it was Jakobe. Neither he nor I had ever made a single crooked yuan, and between the two of us, he had always been the one to take offense if someone hinted that he might take money under the table. Instead of answering the question, he looked at me, giving me the floor.

“We’re not here on our own behalf,” I said. “We’re just the messengers.”

“So you’re representing someone,” Al-Timsah said, again piercing me with his killer’s eyes. “I need to know who. I don’t do business with anonymous forces.”

“Nicolas Kun,” I replied without batting an eye.

“Who?”

“A rogue Black Corpse trying to make a power grab. He’s never run an operation in the Dark Earths before, and he doesn’t have the right connections here.”

He stared for a moment, and I held my breath as I waited to see if he would take the bait. “What information are you looking for?” he asked. “My skills and abilities lie in other fields, but I do have friends who deal in such things.”

“We want the location of the central offices of Cross-Level Control here in the Sixth Earth. An address. We’ll pay extra for access codes, building schematics, personnel rosters, et cetera.”

Al-Timsah leaned back in his chair, let loose a low whistle, and looked away from me and back to Jakobe. “You’re wrapped up in some heavy shit, cousin. Messing with Cross-Level Control will get you dragged down to the Fourth Heaven faster than just about anything else.”

Jakobe smiled. “Only if we get caught.”

Al-Timsah took a drag on his cigarette, and we sat there waiting, the tension mounting, smoke building up.

After what had to be a full minute, he said, “I need to make some calls. Before I do, Jakobe, let me just point out that information like this isn’t going to be cheap. I can’t say for sure, but it will likely cost this much, at the very minimum.”

He took a fountain pen from the penholder on the desk and scribbled something onto a pad of paper. When he spun the pad around for us to look at, I had to exert a lot of control to prevent my eyes from widening at how huge the sum was. The vast majority of our money came from Svea Göransson, our grid monkey friend who came from an eye-poppingly rich family. Her father provided her a monthly allowance that, as she’d revealed to me in private, amounted to more than what most citizens of the Grand Kingdom made in a year. Because she detested the extravagant lifestyle of the ultra-rich, most of the money had gone into savings over the years, making her quite wealthy in her own right. That said, she didn’t have infinite funds.

Jakobe eyed the numbers on the paper. “We can accept that.”

Al-Timsah raised his glass. “To our deal.”

Jakobe and I nodded and raised our glasses. We drank, and the pungent liquid nearly made me cough.

“We’ll wait to hear from you,” Jakobe said, pushing his chair back and getting to his feet. I stood as well.

“I have your number,” Al-Timsah said. He flipped a switch built into the desk, and we heard a buzzing sound as the door behind us unlocked and opened.

“Until then, cousin,” Jakobe said.

We left, retrieving our guns from the guards outside and maintaining silence as we walked down the corridor and took the elevator from the fortieth floor to the ground level. Outside, we opened umbrellas and joined the sweaty crowds packing the street. It was hotter here in the Sixth Earth, and it rained more, which meant that the environment was generally more uncomfortable in every way imaginable. It was also darker. Despite it being early afternoon, it felt like evening did in the Third Earth. That was the result of the Heaven-Propping Pillar growing darker in higher levels of the Grand Kingdom.

Even here, close to the 2nd Ring Road, the sidewalks were so full of people that we crawled along in what seemed like slow motion. The Sixth Earth was laid out oddly. There were a total of nine ring roads, but high-rises were prohibited between the 3rd Ring Road and the 7th. Because of that, everything between the Heaven-Propping Pillar and the 3rd, as well as areas past the 7th, were vastly more crowded than in the Heavens and Earths below.

The chatter of language enveloped us, and I couldn’t make out a single word spoken in Sinese. In some ways, I felt like I was back in the Third Earth. Han people were a minority here, to the point where signage often left out Sinese and stuck to other languages such as Eurosynth or Boyu. This particular neighborhood featured Boyu everywhere; it was Jakobe’s native language, its script written from right to left in flowing strokes that looked like little more than scribble to me.

Cabs were virtually impossible to hail at this hour, so we walked two blocks up to a zont-rail station and boarded the last car in the line, which was surprisingly empty considering how packed the sidewalks were.

As the train picked up speed, I leaned back against the rickety plastic bench seat and said, “It’s one thing hearing stories about your family. It’s another to meet one of them in person.”

“Is it how you imagined?”

I thought about it. “Pretty much. He’s… frightening.”

“He’s changed,” Jakobe replied. “Especially those fucking eyes. I can only imagine what things he’s done in the years since I saw him last. Back when we were teenagers, before he started calling himself Al-Timsah, the two of us cared about two things.” He gave a short laugh. “Impressing girls and trying to beat the high score on Monster Destruction 3 at the local arcade.”

“Life goes on.”

“That it does, brother.”

The train trundled into the next stop, and we sat in silence as passengers exited and entered.

After the doors closed, Jakobe said, “Being back here makes me think I might be wrong.”

“About?”

“Staying in the Sixth Earth. I’m not sure having Bunny around my family is the best thing. You know the mob. You might think you’re out, but they’re just waiting to drag you back in. Bunny deserves better.”

He was right. It was hard to say how many murder perps we’d brought in were members of crime families who had attempted to lead clean lives, only to get pulled into the criminal life against their wishes. “You’re really serious about Bunny, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Like… marriage serious?”

He cocked his head. “Maybe.”

Four stops down from Al-Timsah’s neighborhood, we left the station and walked up the block to the Summer Meadows Hotel, which overlooked the 2nd Ring Road. It wasn’t the most luxurious establishment, but it was a nicer place than I’d ever stayed in. The elevator opened, and we slipped our shoes off as we walked across a plush carpet to the end of the hall. I knocked in a prescribed fashion on the door and detected a flicker of light from the peephole as someone looked out. Then came clicking sounds as the door unlocked and swung open to reveal Tao Heng, wearing a T-shirt for a band from the Fourth Earth called One Horny Girl, Two Guillotines.

“Welcome back, fellas,” he said, extending his arm invitingly.

We walked in, stowing our umbrellas in a golden-colored bin next to the door as edgy rock music reached our ears from the entertainment unit on the far wall.

“Did he agree?” Svea asked, peering at us over the top of one of her computer monitors.

Tossing my hat and jacket onto the rack and shoes onto the ground beneath, I loosened my tie and walked over to sit on the white plush couch next to Svea’s computer station.

“Seems promising,” I said. “What was your read, Jakobe?”

He sighed as he lowered himself into a seat at the table, which straddled the common area and the kitchen. “I didn’t get much of a feeling from him. Bunny’s not back yet?”

“Not yet,” Tao Heng replied, joining Jakobe at the table, where he started cracking sunflower seeds. “I take it he didn’t give an outright yes?”

“Nope,” I said. “Now we wait for however long it takes him to call us. How are things going on your side, Svea?”

Pushing her chair back on two legs, she took a sip from her energy drink and then stretched her arms. She wore a black nylon turtleneck with long sleeves covering her prosthetic arm and a partially translucent purple mini-skirt above mesh tights and thigh-high leather boots. “Not bad, not good. I’ve narrowed it down from a thousand buildings to about a hundred. Sinotech ICE isn’t anything to look down on. Getting into any of them without being noticed is time-consuming and delicate. I’ve got into two so far, and neither are Cross-Level Control buildings. If I have to go through them one at a time, it’s gonna take… I don’t know, days, I guess. And it’ll be at least an hour or two before I get into the next one on the list.”

On the one hand, I knew Svea had a tough task dealing with Sinotech’s systems. Regardless, we needed her to break through that ICE as quickly as possible.

“We don’t have days to work with,” Jakobe said.

“I’m sorry,” Svea said, leaning her chair back down onto four legs and tapping a few keys on the keyboard. “It’s just….” She trailed off.

“You don’t need to apologize,” I said. “Seriously. Whether we get the information from Jakobe’s cousin or your hacking, it’s all you. I really can’t thank you enough, Svea.”

“Come on, Mr. Detective,” she replied, “I said to stop thanking me.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Maybe I should get a few more terminals. That would speed things up.”

“Guys,” Tao Heng said, “if Jakobe’s cousin is Plan A, and Svea’s hacking is Plan B, and neither will work in time, maybe we should just go with C.”

Plan C involved packing everything up again and journeying higher in the Grand Kingdom in our quest to find the True Heaven.

For the most part, Jakobe’s dreams came in fits and starts and were a mix of lucidity and obscurity. From the way he described them, they were glimpses of certainty, as opposed to possibilities of what might happen. He saw things that couldn’t be changed. And he had seen clearly that, sometime soon, Elena was going to be stretched out atop a stone altar with a gleaming black knife held over her heart. We knew the location was the True Heaven. As for what happened after the knife was raised, his dreams didn’t give any clue.

All I knew was that I had to be there to stop that knife from descending.

But how were we supposed to get to the True Heaven, a secret location that only top figures in Sinotech and the Naturalism Sect knew of?

Plans A and B were just two different ways of achieving the same goal. We needed to find Cross-Level Control’s local headquarters and get Svea’s custom RAT program into their systems, which would be the first step into identifying which vert-rail line Itsuki Saito and his father would use to travel up to the Ninth Earth. In turn, that information would help us solidify our plan for how to get Elena out of their hands. Whether we forced some sort of confrontation or just followed from the shadows depended on the circumstances.

Their date of travel was something Jakobe had overheard Johan talking about in a dream; we knew that they would be on the move in two days, traveling via ordinary vert-rail instead of the exclusive Sinotech lines that ran through the Heaven-Propping Pillar. Presumably he was doing that in an effort to keep a low profile. Jakobe had also learned that in order to reach the True Heaven, the Saitos would be going to the Tenth Earth. Except, no vert-rail led to the Tenth Earth. In other words, they would be forced to disembark in the Ninth Earth and make the final leg of the journey another way.

“The Sixth Earth is the best place to be for now,” Svea said. “Jakobe’s family is here, and he knows the place. What’s the point of going to the Netherearths until we really need to?”

“The sect headquarters is in the Ninth Earth,” Tao Heng said. “Wang Fan, you’re a fuckin’ diamond cultivator now! Once the leadership finds out about that, they’ll promote you to grand elder. Then you’ll have all the resources you need to get to the True Heaven.”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “Look, I know you two are loyal to the sect, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t be. But this business about the True Heaven is tricky. Remember, we’re not even supposed to know about it. Not to mention the issue of the traitor. We have no idea who else Nicolas Kun and Elder Qing are colluding with.”

Tao Heng picked up a pen from the table and twirled it between his fingers. “You sent that message from Eldress Cheung to the grand elders, though. Right?”

“Yeah.”

“Then for all you know, they already arrested Elder Qing. I’m telling you, we should make contact. If not right now, soon.”

Before anyone could say anything else, there was a knock on the door. Bunny Bai was back with dinner. We continued our back-and-forth as we ate, rehashing the possibilities we had discussed numerous times in the past days.

It was hard to believe a month had passed since Itsuki Saito disappeared with Elena and I narrowly escaped Nicolas Kun’s clutches. We had agreed from the get-go that we couldn't take the matter to the sect, considering there were traitors in high positions of power. In fact, we quickly came to the conclusion that we needed to get out of the Fourth Earth. Sending a vague message to Elder Hu to explain our upcoming absence, we left for the Sixth Earth, taking separate paths via different vert-rails. After regrouping at our destination, we took several days to get settled, then got to work. Of course, Svea got the lion’s share. The rest of us did small tasks here and there while she worked day and night trying to identify the Cross-Level Control headquarters. But as her work dragged on and our hope faded, Jakobe finally agreed to contact the necessary people and arrange a meeting with his cousin.

Overall, I felt torn. Barely a month ago, I’d made the decision to cease giving loyalty to Sinotech and instead throw my lot in with the Naturalism Sect in the hope of solving Xiaoli’s murder and finding out what was really going on in the Grand Kingdom. Then everything fell apart. Now I was leading a ragtag bunch of low-level cultivators in a desperate attempt to get Elena out of the clutches of the Saitos.

Halfway through dinner, the phone rang. We all went still as Jakobe walked over and answered it.

“Hello?” He was silent for about twenty seconds. “That’s fine. I’ll be right over.” He hung up the phone and looked back at the table. “He wants 10K more than we budgeted. And that’s just for the address. No access codes. Nothing else.”

All eyes shifted to Svea. She was financing our crazy little adventure, and in situations like this, she called the shots.

“I’ll head to the bank,” she said.

Chapter 52 – RAT

There wasn’t time for a protracted stakeout. As soon as we got the address, Svea gathered as much information as she could find on the Grid. Unfortunately, not much of it proved helpful in terms of getting inside the building. It was located halfway across the Sixth Earth. Like most of Sinotech’s administrative offices and facilities above the Greater and Lesser Heavens, the building looked like nothing more than a run-of-the-mill office complex. In reality, it was a very secure location, which was why not even Al-Timsah’s powerful connections in the criminal underworld had been able to get their hands on floor plans or any other inside information.

And unfortunately, Svea’s Organic cultivation abilities weren’t enough to get her past the building’s security from outside. As expected, we needed to manually install the RAT to allow her to hack their systems.

It was similar to what we’d done when rescuing Elena from the Blue Mountain Commerce Building back in the Fourth Earth. Of course, there was one wildcard. We didn’t know with absolute certainty that Johan Saito would even need to apply for a Cross-Level permit.

We were betting that he would. Based on conversations I’d had with Charlotte in the past, my understanding was that even members of the Sinotech board were required to abide by the travel protocols when they went up and down through the various Heavens and Earths. She herself had overseen such a travel arrangement once.

I was currently out on the street, clad in my gray suit, mirrored glasses on as I drifted along with the crowd down the sidewalk. Thankfully the rain had taken a break for a bit. As I neared the entrance of the building, I carefully sent out my divine sense to inspect the doors. It was immediately rebuffed.

Damn, triple spell formations, I thought, noting the types of formations. The security in this building was no joke. At the end of the block, I crossed the street, then headed into a parking garage and up four flights of trash-littered stairs. Emerging, I spotted a gray van parked so the mirrored front windshield was facing our target building. It was Svea’s van, the same one from the Fourth Earth; getting vehicles up and down through various Heavens and Earths was possible, as long as you were willing to pay for the permit and submit to a background check. For a grid monkey of Svea’s caliber, submitting falsified information and getting it past the background check hadn’t been very difficult.

I hurried over, opened the passenger door, and got in. Tao Heng, our designated getaway driver, was behind the wheel, and Svea was in the back with her computer setup, every piece of which was attached with plastic zip cords and velcro to the van’s built-in workstation.

“Well?” Tao Heng asked, turning the music down so we could talk over it.

“They’ve got three formations set up,” I said. “Including one to dispel Thermal Ripple Cloaks. But they aren’t protecting against Igneus Masks.”

Svea stopped typing and looked at me. “You know I trust you, but are you sure you want to do this? You have no idea what other security measures might be in place inside.”

I gnawed the inside of my cheek as I considered the question and the timetable we were working with.

Tao Heng tapped the steering wheel to the beat of the music as he said, “Even I gotta admit, we’re cutting it really close. If this doesn’t work, we’ll have nothing left but Plan C.”

“We can’t afford to wait,” I said. “I’m going in with the mask.”

“You don’t have a teleportation slip,” Svea pointed out. “If something goes wrong, you’ll be stuck.”

“I know. Believe me, I know.”

Using the very same set of radios we’d used on the Blue Mountain mission, I updated Jakobe and Bunny about my decision.

“We got your back, brother,” Jakobe replied. “We’ll stay in position up here and keep an eye from above.” They were on a rooftop bar a few buildings away, situated at a table that gave them a clear view down.

I rolled my shoulders a bit to loosen them. “All right, hand me those White Erasers, Tao Heng.”

He tossed me a packet with two white, round pills in it. Pocketing them, I said, “I’m going in. Radio silence unless necessary.”

“You got it, boss,” Tao Heng said.

Svea smiled at me. “Good luck, Mr. Detective.”

“Thanks.”

I hopped out of the van and headed down to the second level of the parking garage, where I had a clear view of the building entrance but could get down to the street within moments once I spotted my mark. There, I waited, keeping my eyes glued to the doors.

Minutes ticked past, moving slower than the masses on the sidewalk. Eventually, the doors opened and two women walked out, dressed in business suits. I ignored them. Although I had a Bone diamond of energy, my Thermal cultivation was still at the sea level, which meant that my Igneus Mask could only create artificial images roughly the size of my own head. Whoever I impersonated to get into the building needed to be roughly my same physique.

More time passed, and I played with a stretch of rope in my pocket that I planned to use in restraining whoever my target ended up being. Eventually, two men emerged, but one was significantly overweight and the other was probably a foot and a half shorter than me. Nope.

A woman came out, voluptuous and clad in a tight dress. She wouldn’t work.

A light rain began to fall.

Two men entered, both of them wearing military uniforms.

Come on.

I was just about to key the mic and ask Svea if she was really sure she couldn’t break through the building’s ICE when the door opened and a man walked out wearing the clothing of a maintenance worker or janitor. He wore a much-patched gray shirt, a pair of stained pants, an old red cap, and had a satchel slung over his shoulder. He huddled under a threadbare umbrella as he joined the sea of people on the sidewalk.

Bingo.

I raced down to street level and quickly spotted the old umbrella sticking up in the crowd. It took about a block for me to get within thirty feet of my target, as I pushed my way forward through the other pedestrians, passing an odd assortment of street-level shops. When I was close enough, I carefully sent my divine sense toward him for an assessment.

He had no cultivation base, making him the perfect target. He was a blind rat, and I was a tiger. There was no suspense as to how the situation would play out. The only question was how I would get him alone.

As it turned out, he lived three blocks away in a recently renovated high-rise that seemed quite a mismatch considering his worn-out umbrella and clothing. I got in the cramped elevator with him and let him get off on his floor while I exited one above him, keeping my divine sense locked on him the entire time. I was padding down the stairwell when he was locking his door behind him.

I watched with divine sense as he kicked his shoes off and put on slippers. That was when I realized that, while the building had been recently renovated, his apartment itself had not. It was shabby and run down, the various pieces of furniture scuffed and dented so badly they looked like they might fall apart at any moment. The appliances were decades old at best, and I even noticed a cockroach scurry under the couch as he entered. As he hung his bag by the door and went into the kitchen, I scanned the rest of his apartment to make sure he was alone. Putting on a Thermal Ripple Cloak, I used divine sense to open the lock and slip inside. Before he had any idea what was happening, I had him in a chokehold. Seconds later, he was unconscious on the floor.

The easiest thing to do would have been to make the situation seem like a robbery. But that would have involved taking money and valuables from the poor man, and after seeing his sad living conditions, I couldn’t bring myself to do that. He had a dreary enough life as it was without me making it worse.

After looking around the place briefly, I scanned the kitchen with divine sense, hoping to find something useful. When I saw a mostly full bottle of Red Star baijiu, my plan solidified.

Taking the white pills out of my pocket, I crushed them with divine sense and force-fed the janitor. They would keep him unconscious for hours, and he would wake up feeling woozy and hungover. After stripping him down to his undergarments, I put him in a seat at the rickety kitchen table and splashed a bit of baijiu around his mouth and onto his chest. After laying his head down on the table, I poured the remainder of the liquor down the sink and put the empty bottle in his hand.

Finally, I used divine sense to study my victim’s face, including the bone structure, muscle configuration, and skin irregularities. After about five minutes, I put on the Igneus Mask, checking in the mirror in the bathroom to confirm I looked exactly like him. I used the mask to hide the microphone in my ear as well.

His clothing smelled like cleaning solution, machine oil, and sweat. After donning it, I went through the man’s bag and found an ID card.

“William Donnovan,” I murmured. It wasn’t a Han name, that was for sure. All of a sudden, I realized I had no idea what his voice sounded like. Thankfully, I spotted an answering machine next to the entertainment center in the living room, and his recorded greeting gave me a good twenty-second sample of his voice. He spoke Sinese with the accent of a working-class citizen, and I noticed a slightly different twang than the accents I was used to hearing back in the Third Earth. I listened to the message a few times until I felt confident that I could do a passable job imitating him.

At the door, I looked over at William slumped at the kitchen table with an empty bottle of baijiu in his hand. A sudden twinge of pity hit me, so I reached into my dimensional pendant and pulled out a wad of cash. It wasn’t a huge amount, but it would be enough for a night on the town, or maybe a new piece of furniture or two. Stuffing the cash between two cushions on his couch, with just a bit of it protruding so he would notice it, I went back to the door.

“Thanks for your help, William,” I murmured. Out in the empty corridor, I keyed the mic. “I’m going in.”

“Copy,” Tao Heng replied.

Shouldering the bag, I took the elevator back down and returned to the Cross-Level office building. The outer doors led into a small lobby with a narrow desk set into the wall next to a metal detector and an X-ray machine flanked by armed Peacekeepers. A quick glance confirmed there was a surveillance camera in the corner of the ceiling. As soon as the doors closed behind me, the female guard behind the desk looked up. “Didn’t you just clock out, Billy?”

“Forgot my wallet. Just need to run in and grab it.”

“Nah, don’t worry about it.” She picked up a walkie-talkie. “Hey, ol’ Wu. Your partner left his wallet—” she released the talk button and looked at me. “Where’d you leave it?”

Shit. I didn’t need favors; I needed to get in the building. Making an ‘I don’t know’ gesture, I said, “Honestly, not sure. Maybe it fell out in the bathroom?”

She cocked her head slightly. “You weren’t on bathroom duty today, were you? What were you doing there?”

Were employees not allowed to use the restrooms or something? Not sure exactly what she meant, I reached up and rubbed the bridge of my nose. “Ah, you’re right. Sorry, was getting confused with the other day. It couldn’t be in the bathroom. Lemme think, maybe—”

The crackle of the radio interrupted me as an old man said, “I ain’t seen no wallet. Tell Billy to find the goddamn thing himself. I’m not his errand boy.”

The guard gave me a wry smile. “Head on in,” she said.

I put my bag on the X-ray conveyor and stepped through the metal detector.

First obstacle: passed.

How many more would there be?

On the other side of the metal detector, I slung the bag over my shoulder and walked down a corridor lined with numbered doors. Unfortunately, I had no idea what lay behind them, and I didn’t want to just randomly start opening them. What was more, although my diamond-level divine sense had quite a range, I had no idea what defensive measures might be in place to detect such activity and didn’t want to take any chances.

There were surveillance cameras in the corridor, so I walked slowly, trying to make my footfalls seem labored, as though I was exhausted. Toward the end of the hall, one of the doors opened, and a suited man emerged, giving me a brief view of a bullpen office with half a dozen people at various workstations, all of them with computers.

The door closed, and the man gave me a curt nod as I passed him. I went through two hallway intersections at random until I found myself at a staircase leading up. There was also a detailed map marked “Emergency Exit Routes.” Some key building locations were marked, to my relief, including the restrooms, stairwells, and the maintenance department, which was on the fourth floor, roughly in the same position in the building as the entrance foyer. If I couldn’t find a room with a computer that was easy to access, I would hopefully find one in the maintenance office.

The stairs didn’t continue to the third floor, so I entered the hallway. It had fewer doors than the one below, and I could see stenciled writing on many of them. A quick glance informed me of the position of the surveillance cameras. I had just stepped out of the stairwell when a woman emerged from the door in front of me, clad in a white lab coat. She didn’t even look at me as she passed.

I glanced at the door and saw that it was stenciled with the words ‘Orgplant Liaison.’ Dammit. This wasn’t why I was here. But what if something in there could shed some light on Xiaoli’s case? Could I really pass on an opportunity like this?

Glancing over my shoulder, I saw the woman in the lab coat disappear down the stairs, so I shoved my hand out and caught the door just before it closed. I entered the room and was immediately disappointed.

I’d hoped to find some sort of lab with computers, but instead, the place contained a desk with a phone, two chairs for visitors, and a filing cabinet. Nothing more. Hurrying to the filing cabinet, I found it locked. However, it was a simple locking mechanism that was no match for my divine sense. I opened the top drawer and scanned the files. They were partitioned into several main sections related to financial matters: audit reports, expense reports, etc. The second drawer seemed to be personnel records of workers. Nothing exciting. The third drawer contained miscellaneous files: insurance statements, maintenance schedules. I was about to give up when I noticed a file in the very back that wasn’t labeled. I opened it and saw a spiral-bound booklet with a clear plastic cover. Behind the plastic were the words: Ossientum Memorandum.

Holy shit! What luck!

I stuffed it into my bag, closed and locked the cabinet, and slipped back out the door.

Continuing down the hall, I refrained from randomly opening doors and instead made the maintenance office my target destination. I saw a handful of people along the way, but none of them spared me a second glance. On the fourth floor, I walked to the end of the hall and pushed open the door. The first thing I did was breathe a sigh of relief when I saw a battered computer station on a desk, squeezed between a set of closed floor-to-ceiling storage cabinets and some metal shelves overladen with random tools and hardware.

Dropping into the chair in front of the computer, I tapped a few keys to see if it was on. It wasn’t.

Who turns their computer off? I thought. Back at the precinct in the Third Earth, the only time anyone turned off their system was when it crashed. I reached around and flipped the power switch on. Various beeping and humming sounds could be heard as it booted up, and the screen flickered with green light. The whole process took about two minutes, during which time I sat there nervously tapping the desk and staring at the screen.

Finally, when the command prompt appeared, I inserted the diskette Svea had given me. I breathed a sigh of relief when the auto-execute file worked. It saved me the trouble of going through the extra steps she had mentioned might be necessary otherwise. Once the screen finished flashing, I popped the disk out.

I keyed the mic. “Done. Did it work?”

“Gimme ninety seconds,” Svea replied.

I stood, went to the door, and cracked it open. Walking toward me from the opposite staircase was an old man wearing the same type of gray worker’s outfit as me. Shit. This must be the ol’ Wu whose voice I’d heard in the lobby.

I pushed the door open and walked out. If the RAT program wasn’t working, then I’d just have to try again in another room. But I definitely didn’t want to get stuck in a conversation with a close coworker of the man I was impersonating. Hopefully he didn’t find it suspicious that I’d left the computer on.

Again adopting an exhausted trudge, I walked toward the staircase at the opposite end of the hallway. When the old man was a few feet away, I nodded and said, “Hey.”

“Find your wallet?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I replied, throwing a nod behind me toward the office. “Got knocked under the shelves.”

As I walked past him, he said, “Ah, yeah. Happened to me before. Have a nice evening.”

Not stopping, I said, “Later.”

Come on, Svea, come on.

I went down the stairs, pausing at the door to the third-floor hallway. I keyed the mic.

“Well?”

Five seconds passed. “It didn’t work. That terminal isn’t connected. It’s probably just for local record-keeping.”

Fuck. Now what?

I pushed open the door to the third floor, my gaze flickering up to assess the security camera placements. There were no full blind spots. That said, the locations directly beneath the cameras would likely be the least noticeable to whoever was monitoring them. Knowing that time was against me, I picked the first door out of the stairwell and opened it.

It led into a two-person office with both desks occupied by suited men. They looked up.

“Was it the two of you who reported the broken light fixture?” I asked.

They both looked up to the fluorescent light overhead, which illuminated the room brightly.

“My mistake,” I said, then closed the door and turned to the one opposite. This one was an empty office with two computers at desks.

Heart pounding, I repeated the process of booting one up and shoving the disk in.

Keying the mic, I said, “Second try. Check.”

I popped the disk out and got to my feet. I slipped back into the corridor and headed toward the opposite stairwell, moving a bit faster this time. Thirty seconds passed, and I was on the second floor. Another thirty, and I was on the first floor. If the effort failed again, I was going to be hard-pressed to find a third chance. Come on, Svea. Come on!

I waited for another tortuous thirty seconds before Svea said, “It worked. Get out of there.”

Chapter 53 – Counter-Surveillance

An hour later, we were back in the hotel room, sitting around the table with beers and munching on local food Jakobe had recommended. I couldn’t remember the names of any of the dishes except the one called ‘hummus.’ Everything was delicious, but the last thing on any of our minds right now was enjoying a meal.

The only person not at the table was Svea, who stared into the green glow of her monitor and occasionally typed on the keyboard.

The mood was tense. Our desperate and half-cocked plan had apparently worked, and we were now waiting for Svea to gain access to the data she needed, then sift through it. Tao Heng tried to get some conversations going around the table, but every effort stalled out after a minute or two. Nobody was in the mood.

After about two hours, Svea said, “Almost there, guys.” Tossing an empty energy drink can into the nearby trashcan, she continued, “I found a flaw in the way the system's memory management works. Basically, requesting memory following a certain pattern causes the system to return a writeable buffer to the privileged memory space. It doesn't always work, but the good news is that it’s virtually guaranteed to work before the system runs out of assignable userspace memory. The difficult part is to make sure that one, the code remains undetected and two, it can be executed.”

I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about, and glancing at the others, it seemed I wasn’t the only one. However, Svea didn’t notice our looks of confusion.

“I've implemented a completely new packer for the payload,” she went on. “I can't guarantee it's not going to be detected, but if there’s something that can bypass their security system, this is it. Self-modifying code, divided into two stages, and scattered around a boring executable file. It's been crafted to match the original file's entropy and avoid their signature scans. Heuristics aren’t a problem either.”

I opened my mouth to interrupt, but Svea was talking too quickly.

Not pausing to take a breath, she continued, “They’ll only see a program requesting memory in a seemingly random pattern for no apparent reason and writing to it. There’s almost no chance they’ll be monitoring memory allocation and access patterns for all the programs in the system. After the exploit is triggered, it will overwrite some critical sections in the kernel—”

At this point, Svea realized that we were all staring at her blankly.

“Sorry,” she said. “I just get excited at fun stuff like this. Anyway, the point is that once I get the backdoor in place, I can do whatever I want with this machine. I’ll use it to attack the other machines on the network, and once I've got those under control as well, the whole thing will be my personal playground. And it’ll go undetected for years unless P4R0DY herself starts poking around. But I doubt she cares about Cross-Level Control stuff.”

“Who’s Parody?” Jakobe asked.

“A top Sinotech grid monkey, right?” Tao Heng said.

“Exactly,” Svea said. “Something of a legend for the past decade or so, right up there with ZEOnon and MudPug77. Not that any of them could match up to the sect leader.”

“The sect leader?” I said. “As in Yu Yitai? He’s a grid monkey?”

“Oh yeah,” Svea said. “It’s not common knowledge. But a few months ago, right before we got to know you, Wang Fan, I was assigned a routine mission to break into some Sinotech machines. While I was inside, I found some traces that led me to an old rootkit someone left behind. It was hidden well, but there were some deviant patterns that—” She looked around at us. “Sorry, I’m doing it again, aren’t I? Anyway, the point is that I figured out Yu Yitai and Stomdollar are one and the same.”

“The same Stomdollar who basically shut down the Second Heaven a few years back?” Jakobe asked.

“Exactly. He’s so famous he’s basically a household name. And there’s a reason for that. I’m telling you, Yu Yitai is basically god-level.”

“That’s crazy,” Bunny said.

“I know, huh. Can one of you toss me another energy drink?”

I was closest to the kitchen, so I opened the fridge to get a drink for her, only to find that it was empty. “We’re out,” I said. “Want me to go to the corner market to get some more?”

“Sure,” she said as she started typing at the keyboard again.

“Anybody else need anything?”

“Grab another case of beer,” Tao Heng said. “Get Snow this time, not that Yanjing crap.”

“And some sunflower seeds,” Bunny added.

“Sure. Be back in a few minutes.” I took the elevator down and left the hotel, heading into the rain toward the store at the end of the street. Halfway there, I sensed a faint tingle of instinct in the back of my head.

I’m being followed? Don’t tell me this has to do with the Cross-Level Control mission. It couldn’t be. That place is halfway across the Sixth Earth.

Heart sinking, I kept walking with the crowd, passing the market and crossing the street. I wasn’t very familiar with the neighborhood, but I knew where the closest mall was, so I walked in that direction. Once inside and out of the rain, I went through the same sort of counter-surveillance routine I’d used to flush out Kang Jianhong back in the Fourth Earth. It wasn’t long before I identified my tail.

It was an attractive woman, not quite middle-aged, but not young either. She had dark, messy hair and wore clothing I’d come to find was typical in this part of the Sixth Earth: an oversized coverall with a vaguely military look and feel. The baggy pants were bunched up atop heavy boots, and she had the top of the garment unzipped and open, with the weight of it hanging from suspender straps at her shoulders.

Given how easily I’d identified her, I pegged her as an amateur. She’s no Corpse or Peacekeeper, I thought. It was possible she was intentionally putting on an act to get me to underestimate her, but it seemed unlikely.

I sent out a stream of divine sense, which immediately revealed that she had a cultivation base. As I’d come to find, Eldress Cheung had either intentionally given me incomplete information or herself was ignorant of the fact that diamond cultivators actually could assess others without the target willingly opening their cultivation base. The fact that the woman was a cultivator meant one thing to me.

She’s from the Naturalism Sect.

She had three seas of energy, which meant she was likely an elite disciple. Putting down the snow globe I’d been pretending to examine, I walked out of the shop, the gears in my head turning. Given how unskilled she was at following me, I was confident I could lose her using mundane methods without resorting to a Thermal Ripple Cloak. On the other hand, perhaps it would be good to get some information from her. If the local cultivators had somehow been tipped off about our presence, it could complicate things. Or had they become aware of my infiltration of the Cross-Level Control office? Regardless, if they knew we were staying at the Summer Meadows, then shaking this tail would only gain me temporary freedom.

I meandered through the mall for a bit until I spotted a pair of doors labeled ‘employees only,’ which I pushed through to find myself in an access corridor that was obviously used by cleaning staff and building maintenance. I was alone, and there weren’t any security cameras, so I quickly threw up a Thermal Ripple Cloak and stepped off to the side.

A minute later, the door cracked open, and my follower carefully stuck her head inside.

“Shit,” she murmured to herself, stepping through the doors. After looking both ways down the corridor, she hurried off in one direction for about twenty feet until she reached an L intersection, where she nearly bumped into a janitor.

Glancing into the hall past the janitor, she said, “You seen someone walking this way? Tall? Shoulder-length hair? Bit of a beard.”

“Ain’t seen nobody,” was the reply.

“Dammit,” she said, rushing past me and checking the opposing corridor.

I nearly laughed as she angrily smacked the wall, then walked back out the doors she’d entered through. I followed her stealthily.

She wound her way out of the mall and back onto the street, where it was difficult but not impossible for me to ease through the crowd while invisible. It was good it wasn’t raining; that would have made things challenging. She was obviously heading back toward the Summer Meadows. Around the corner, she stopped at a payphone and swiped her card to make a call. I leaned up against the wall a few feet from the phone and listened in via divine sense.

I could just barely hear the sound of the ringing and the muffled voice of a person answering her call.

“I lost him,” she said. “He never noticed me. I just got too far behind.”

The person on the other end said a few things that I couldn’t make out.

“Tell me again why I’m not just confronting him? Ten yuan says he’s not even an Earther. Probably from down in one of the Heavens, here on vacation or something. This whole thing is a waste of time, I’m telling you.”

More talking on the other end.

“Fine. I’ll try to figure out what floor he’s on. Call you back later.” She hung up, then went into the hotel and took a seat on a sofa in the lounge, where she folded her arms and alternated between looking at the elevators and the main entrance.

It sounded to me like I’d attracted the attention of local cultivators, and they wanted to know who I was and what I was doing here. What had I done to tip them off? Regardless, the situation didn’t seem to be very bad. I ducked into the lobby bathroom where I dropped the Thermal Ripple Cloak, then walked back out and made a beeline for the woman in the chair.

She didn’t notice me until I was only a few paces away, whereupon she stiffened.

Dropping onto a chair opposite her, I said, “Hi.”

She cleared her throat. “Can I help you?”

“Yeah, you can tell me why you were following me.”

Her eyes darted left and right, and her mouth opened, but no words came out—a real amateur.

“Let me explain a bit,” I said. “My friends and I are here on vacation from the Second Earth. Just came to do some partying and have a bit of fun. Didn’t bother to check in as we’re only planning to stay for a few days. Are we in some sort of trouble?”

She exhaled in what was clearly a sigh of relief. “Not per se. But you’re not following proper protocol.” She looked around again. “I’m not comfortable talking unless I have a lot of incense around me, know what I mean? Why don’t we go up to your room? Either that or you can come with me to my shop. It’s around the corner.”

I considered the options. After all, a neutral venue would be the best option. But my instincts were telling me this wasn’t some sort of elaborate trap or plot. This girl seemed like most cultivators; a complete novice when it came to things like surveillance and counter-surveillance. My gut said she was telling me the truth. “Hold on a moment.”

Walking across the lobby to one of the hotel’s complementary phones, I dialed our room number.

“Yo,” Tao Heng said.

“We attracted the attention of some local ‘friends,’” I said. “One of them followed me, and I confronted her here in the lobby. She wants to come up to talk. I figure there’s no harm in it. She’s stronger than you and Svea, but only by a bit, so it’s not as if she’s a threat. Besides, we can always check out and move across town if we feel the need. What do the others think? I’ll call back in two.”

“Got it.”

I hung up and watched a nearby wall clock until two minutes had passed, occasionally glancing over to keep eyes on the woman as well.

When I called back, Tao Heng answered and said, “Everybody agrees to let her come up.”

“Be there shortly. Tell everyone to just follow my lead. We’re here on vacation, nothing more. Don’t use real names.”

“Roger wilco.”

I walked back over to the woman, imbued my hand with divine sense, and extended it in greeting. “My surname is Huang.”

She stood and shook my hand. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Huang. I’m Ember.”

“Pleasure, Ember. My friends agreed it’d be best if you just came up. Please, follow me.”

A short elevator ride later, we were outside the hotel room, shoes in hand. I knocked, and Tao Heng opened the door.

“Welcome back,” he said.

“After you,” I said to Ember.

She peered into the room cautiously, and I could see she had her hands ready to form a sign at a moment’s notice. Then she stepped inside.

As the door closed, I made the introductions. “This is Mr. Dao and Lea.” Tao Heng nodded, and Svea stuck her head out from behind her monitor to wave. “My friend, Mr. Jiu, and his girlfriend, Ms. Hei.” Jakobe threw up two fingers in a casual salute, and Bunny waved. “Everybody, this is Ember. Ember, as you can see from the incense burner and the scrambler, this room is secure, as you requested. Please, have a seat wherever you’d like.”

She chose a sofa facing the door, and I sat down opposite her. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m sorry for this inconvenience, but as I mentioned, you broke protocol by using divine sense on the street. You happened to walk past my shop with your divine sense active, which tripped a spell formation I have set up in the door. I notified the eldress in charge of our coterie, and she told me to follow you and find out who you were.”

“So, it was the divine sense,” I said. I tried to recall when exactly I might have scanned something on the street but couldn’t. Regardless, it was a stupid slip-up. What if it had been the Corpses who noticed and not a cultivator from the sect? “Yeah, I did use it, but only because I got freaked out thinking I’d run into some Black Corpses.”

“Corpses?” she said, clearly trying not to laugh. “You think they patrol the streets in broad daylight?”

“He’s new,” Svea said. “Might as well still be a recruit as far as I’m concerned. You know how they are.”

Ember finally couldn’t hold back and laughed.

“Hey,” I said, casting a glare in Svea’s direction. “That guy was looking at me really strangely. I was sure he was a Corpse in disguise.”

“A Black Corpse in disguise?” Tao Heng said. “Chilling on the street looking for you? I thought you kicked the Nitro habit.”

“I did!” I said, turning to glare at Tao Heng.

“Calm down, Wang Fan,” Bunny said. “You know we’re joking around.”

Dammit, Bunny, you used my real name, I thought, but I didn’t let my frustration show on my face.

It seemed Bunny realized her mistake, as she quickly continued, “Would you like a beer, Ember? Or some juice? Water?”

“I’m fine,” Ember said, standing. “There’s no need for you to entertain me. I’ll report this information back to my Master, Eldress Jaziri, and this will probably be the last you hear from me. Unless you need recommendations for sightseeing or something along those lines.”

“No need,” Jakobe said. “I have a friend who grew up a few blocks from here. He gave us plenty of tips.”

“Oh really?” Ember said, walking toward the door. “What’s his name? Maybe I know him?”

“Benjamin Meziane? He’s not one of us, so I doubt you’ve heard of him.”

She reached the door and opened it. “Nope, I haven’t. Well, again, sorry to disturb you. I’ll see myself out. Have a nice time in the Sixth Earth. Oh, if you need anything, just call me. Number’s 16-3166-9729-2900.”

I repeated the number to confirm it. “Take care, Ember.”

After the door shut behind her, Tao Heng went up and put his eye to the peephole. A moment later, he turned away. “She’s in the elevator,” he said.

“Do you think she bought it?” Svea asked.

“Who knows,” I said. Looking over, I said, “Bunny, you—”

“I know,” she said, frowning. “I said your name. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s probably fine. I told her my name was Huang. Hopefully, she chalks up you saying Wang to accent issues. Anyway, she’s obviously a civilian through and through, not some trained Peacekeeper detective. I’d be surprised if she even remembers it.” The truth was that I said that only so that Bunny wouldn’t feel bad. It really had been a big flub on her part to mention my name. “Going forward, everyone watch your back and be careful. In fact, it’s high time Jakobe and I teach you some counter-surveillance tricks.”

“Good point,” Jakobe said.

Tao Heng smacked his palms together and rubbed them vigorously. “The heretic Peacekeepers are teaching lessons? I’m in! When do we start?”

I looked at Jakobe. “How about now? You want to go first, brother?”

Interlude 10 – Figure Out a Way

Johan Saito snapped the prawn in half, ripped off the legs, then jerked out the interior meat. Dipping it in a small bowl of garlic butter, he popped it into his mouth, being careful not to splash anything on his suit.

Itsuki Saito watched, keeping his face expressionless and his hands folded behind his back. He wore a navy blue suit over a checkered polo shirt, both of them spun from real silk. They were expensive to the extreme, but were subdued and professional, not the stylish cut he generally preferred.

“Father,” he said, “I gave my word to Elena. I can’t just go back on what I said.”

Johan licked his fingers clean, grabbed another prawn, and snapped it in two. “Come now, Itsuki, did you really believe I would just let the girl go? That I would just take a blood sample and let her on her merry way? I never said anything of the kind.”

He sucked the prawn flesh into his mouth with a flourish.

“You told me you just needed some of her blood,” Itsuki said. “I used that information to convince her to cooperate. I made a deal with her.”

Johan sighed. “I never said anything about freeing her, so you were foolish to make assumptions. What’s more, I don’t need her cooperation. I’ll take her blood whether she agrees or not.”

Itsuki’s jaw tightened momentarily before he forced himself to relax it. “I gave my word, Father, it—”

Johan slapped his hand down onto the table and glared at his son. “Enough about your so-called word! Where did you pick up such foolish notions? Certainly not from me.”

Itsuki bit his tongue, fully aware that he was in a dangerous situation. Everyone in the Saito Clan knew that it wasn’t wise to anger Johan Saito. Itsuki had no brothers or sisters, but he had heard whispers among the house staff that, decades ago, Johan had sired other offspring. As for what happened to them, Itsuki didn’t know, but from the way the staff talked, his long-departed siblings hadn’t died of natural causes.

He stood there stiffly while his father devoured a few more prawns.

Finally, Johan wiped his hands clean on a cotton napkin and said, “Itsuki, you mustn’t forget that family is above everything else. It’s regrettable you made a promise to the girl, but frankly speaking, I couldn’t care less about that. Using her blood to locate the True Heaven is only the first step of the plan. I have other uses for her. So she’ll be coming with us. Don’t bring up any other objection. Ever. Again. Now go.”

He waved his hand dismissively, and Itsuki turned on his heel and walked out, his heart burning with shame, anger, and also… fear. Only a fool would have failed to notice the threat in his father’s words.

Outside his father’s room, he walked down the hall of the hotel suite to the window, where he looked out into the rainy evening of the Fourth Earth. Red taillights illuminated his face from the nearby aerial lane of traffic, but he wasn’t paying attention to the vehicles.

Why am I so unsettled? he thought. Father is right. The clan should always come first.

He snorted coldly. The words seemed hollow even to him. The clan didn’t really matter to Johan, except how it functioned as a tool to benefit him. Everyone bent to Johan’s will, and everyone followed his orders. There were cliques and factions, but none that openly opposed Johan. Little did the others know that right now, the clan worked not for the Purpose of Sinotech but for his father’s twisted dream, whatever that was.

Why do I even go along with it all? Why not use what I know to take Father down?

He snorted again: such thoughts were ridiculous. If his father lost his position on the board of Sinotech, the clan would fall from grace and could possibly be dismantled. Unless a strong leader filled Johan’s shoes immediately, everyone who bore the name Saito would either be puppetized or sent to the orgplants. Including Itsuki himself.

Do I have what it takes to lead the clan? he thought. To bring the factions under control? Uncle Kiyotoshi certainly doesn’t, nor do his two useless sons.

He looked down and realized that his hands were clenched tightly into fists. Willing them to loosen, he turned and walked to the front door of the penthouse suite and down the corridor to the elevator. Ten floors below was a smaller room where Elena was being kept. The guard out front knew Itsuki and gave him a respectful nod as he opened the door.

Elena sat in a chair by the window, her back to him as she looked out into the rain. It wasn’t possible to see from the angle, but Itsuki knew her hands were bound with bonemetal manacles, which were in turn affixed to a bonemetal band that ran around her waist like a belt. The restraints were well-crafted, so tough that not even a diamond cultivator could break them with physical strength, much less a two-sea cultivator like Elena. Restrained in this manner, it was impossible for her to reach the paliprox patches on her back.

Shutting the door behind him, he stepped into the room and took a breath as he tried to choose the words he would use to explain the situation.

“Your father isn’t going to let me go, is he?” Elena said. She turned to look at him, her green eyes flashing with anger.

Her words caught him off guard, and he closed his mouth.

She looked back out the window. “You think you’re smart, Itsuki, but you’re actually naive.”

“I’m going to get you out of here,” he said, and as the words left his mouth, he wondered where they’d come from. Had he really just spoken them? He nearly looked around to see if there was someone else in the room.

What the fuck did I just say? he thought to himself.

Elena turned to look at him again, this time bewildered. She couldn’t have appeared more confused if he’d just told her gravity pushed up.

“I’ll figure out a way to do it,” he said, and again he felt the bizarre sensation that he was hearing someone other than himself speaking. But no, it was his voice coming from his mouth. There was no doubt. “You can go find Wang Fan, and the two of you can just run. To the Ninth Earth. You can disappear there.”

She continued to stare at him for a long moment before looking away. “Go away, Itsuki. Leave me alone.”

Feeling anger and humiliation threatening to overwhelm him, he bit down onto his lip until it bled. The flash of pain gave him what he needed to calm down.

“I’m serious, Elena. You’ll see.” He walked out of the room, not even hearing what the guard asked him as he headed toward the elevator. You’ll see.

Chapter 54 – Planning

The following night after dinner, a loud beep echoed out from Svea’s computer.

“Yes!” she said with a whoop, rushing over to look at the screen. “We got it. Date. Time. Route.”

I joined her, looking over her shoulder at the screen to where she was pointing at an entry on a long list of passengers.

“Saito, Johan,” I read. “Saito, Itsuki. Saito, Noriko. Ban, Shigeki. Ávila, Elena. Traveling on Vert-Rail 7, Train 1. A private car being shipped up as well.”

The date was in two days. Evening. Roughly forty-eight hours away. That was how much time we had to come up with a plan, set up, and get Elena away from the Saitos.

“Two fucking days,” Jakobe said.

“To figure out how to deal with a board member of Sinotech,” Tao Heng added. He took a swig of beer. “We’re fucked.”

“Come on, guys,” Bunny said, “stop being so negative.”

The rational part of me had to agree with Jakobe and Tao Heng. We had no idea how powerful Johan Saito was in terms of cultivation, but if he was on the board of Sinotech, that meant he had to be roughly on the same level as the grand elders of the Naturalism Sect. In other words, he had to be a diamond cultivator at the very least. I remembered Itsuki saying he was centuries old, which meant that he surely had full command of all his cultivator abilities. I might also have a diamond of energy, but I didn’t have any useful techniques or abilities to go along with it. What’s more, when it came to abilities in general, I was an amateur. Me trying to take on a man like Johan Saito would be like a kid who’d taken a few martial arts classes tangling with a seasoned tournament fighter. There would be no contest whatsoever.

“We’re gonna make it happen,” I said. I pointed at the screen. “Svea, there are three vehicle slots open. Can you put us on that train?”

“I have backdoor access now, so just about anything’s possible.”

I leaned back against the wall, my hand operating on muscle memory to reach for a packet of nonexistent cigarettes. I turned the motion into a frustrated snap of my fingers.

“What are you thinking?” Jakobe said, rising to his feet to pace like he did when we spitballed ideas back in our precinct days.

“I have a couple of ideas, but I need a beer first.”

Tao Heng grabbed one and threw it over to me, then said, “By this point, I’d say you’re an expert at the whole ‘save Elena’ thing.”

All of a sudden, a pen flew across the room from the computer station and smacked Tao Heng in the forehead.

“Not funny, Tao Heng!” Svea said with a glower.

“It was just a joke!” he said, rubbing his forehead.

“One of the most powerful men in the Grand Kingdom has his sights set on her,” Bunny said. “It’s not something to joke about.”

“Fine,” he said, rolling his eyes.

“The point remains,” Jakobe said, “it’s yet another rescue job. How about this. We get on the train and snatch a cabin crew uniform. You put on that mask of yours, brother, get your hands on Elena, and teleport out.”

I shook my head. “There are two problems. First of all, the Saitos aren’t stupid. Itsuki and I used that exact method to get Elena away from Nicolas Kun. They’ll definitely have an Electric Pacification formation set up to prevent teleportations. And probably ones to dispel Thermal Ripple Cloaks and Igneus Masks. But the second problem is the most relevant.”

“We don’t have any teleportation slips,” Svea said. “It’s not like there are shops on the side of the street where you can buy them.”

“Exactly,” Tao Heng said. “Maybe we should call that Ember lady and see if we can talk our way into getting one.”

“Seems like a longshot to me,” I said.

“Forget the specifics for a moment,” Svea said. “Itsuki has seen all of our faces, remember? He swore a blood oath to not rat us out, but that doesn’t mean he’ll just sit back and hold his tongue if he spots us. And... hold on, I just noticed something.” She tapped at the keyboard. “Look at this.”

I leaned forward and peered at the screen. “What is it?”

“They’re getting off at the Eighth Earth.”

“Why not the Ninth?” Jakobe asked.

“Good question,” I said. “Okay, thinking caps on. What’s special about the Eighth Earth compared to the Ninth? It’s known for red-light districts, for one thing.”

Pacing, Jakobe said, “I doubt Mr. Saito plans on pausing his diabolical plan to go whoring.”

“True.”

“I heard there are a lot more Peacekeepers in the Eighth Earth than the Ninth,” Svea said. “Is that true?”

“It is,” Jakobe said. “For years, the Peacekeepers basically abandoned the Eighth and Ninth Earths. After retaking the Eighth, they’re finally making forays into the Ninth. So the Eighth acts as the base of operations for activities there. Maybe Johan Saito has cop connections in the Eighth Earth, and he’s planning on using them to help navigate the Ninth and get to the Tenth.”

“Okay, let’s put that on the board as one possibility,” I said. “The Saitos are possibly meeting up with someone who will escort them through the Ninth Earth.”

“What board?” Tao Heng asked.

“Huh?”

“You said to put it on the board.”

“Figuratively,” I replied with a deadpan stare. Then I looked back at Jakobe. “There’s another thing the Eighth Earth is known for.”

He stopped walking. “The black market.”

“Fifth trumps the Heavens. Eighth trumps all,” I said.

“What’s that mean?” Svea asked.

“It’s a Peacekeeper saying,” Jakobe explained. “The Fifth Earth has a bad reputation for black market drugs and equipment. Supposedly, there are more convictions there than in all the Heavens combined. But the Eighth Earth trumps everywhere else in the Grand Kingdom. When new drugs pop up, it’s always there. And if you want the latest illegal gadgets, that’s where you go. There are entire criminal organizations there focused solely on researching and developing new illegal substances and items.”

“There’s more,” I said. “Remember that case we worked? The triple homicide outside of Sea Lake Park?”

Jakobe thought for a moment. “Yeah. Three thugs got offed in an obvious execution. We dug up info indicating they’d been working with a group in the Eighth Earth. Led by somebody called… what was it? The Physician?”

“The Doctor,” I corrected. “They were breeding rats to use in smuggling operations.”

“Genetics?” Tao Heng said, accompanying it with a low whistle. “That’s forbidden by both Sinotech and the Naturalism Sect.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Maybe Johan Saito’s going to meet with someone like that.”

“For what purpose, though?” Jakobe said. “And how could we possibly determine who he’s meeting?”

I didn’t have a good answer. We explored other theories and possibilities for a good hour, but in the end, there was no way to confirm anything.

At a certain point, I said, “Svea, are they scheduled for any subsequent travel?”

“Let me check.” As her fingers flew across the keyboard, I took a long drink of beer.

“We should definitely beat them there like we talked about,” Jakobe said, continuing his pacing.

I looked at him. “Hit them on the road right outside the station?”

“Or figure out where they’re headed and set up an ambush. Think about it. Whether you’re dealing with murder suspects or the Saitos, you want to catch them off guard. Definitely not after they’ve holed up and set up their defenses. It’s like that saying of your dad’s.”

“The element of surprise is often your best weapon,” I quoted.

“Guys,” Tao Heng said, “don’t forget that we’re going to need a lot of gear to pull off some sort of ambush. And we won’t know what gear we’ll need until we figure out where we’re going to make our move. Without Jakobe’s contacts, how will we contact black market people?”

“My cousin has enough connections that he should be able to point us in the right direction,” Jakobe said.

“Alrighty, people,” Svea said. “I found it. They have a booking on another vert-rail three days later, heading to the Ninth Earth. Get this. They have four additional seats reserved, no names attached to them yet.”

I clasped her shoulder from behind. “Good work. So, Johan Saito is picking up multiple people in the Eighth Earth. And he thinks it’s going to take him three days to do it.”

“Add in today,” Jakobe said, “and that gives us five total days. I still say we should get there first and make our move as quickly as possible. It really doesn’t matter who he plans to meet or take with him, as long as we can get Elena away from him.”

“I second that,” Tao Heng said.

“So we leave right away,” I said. “No delays. Svea, can you get us on a train in the next few hours?”

“Of course.” She tapped a few keys. “Looks like I can get us onto... Vert-Rail 6 in four hours. It would give us more than enough time to pack up and drive over to the station.” She turned her head toward me. “Is that the plan?”

I looked at Jakobe. “Can you call Al-Timsah?”

“Yeah,” he said. “This time I’ll ask for a favor. I think he’ll give it to me.”

I nodded. “Bunny, are you in?”

“Yeah. I want my roommate back.”

“Tao Heng?” I asked.

He grinned and opened his mouth, and I was sure he was going to throw out some clever quip. But then he caught Svea glaring at him before simply saying, “I’m in.”

“Alrighty,” she said. “Let’s pack and go.”

**

Svea kept her backdoor into Cross-Level Control’s systems, which would make traveling much easier going forward as long as the program wasn’t discovered.

Less than fifteen minutes later, we were ready to leave.

Out in the corridor, Svea said, “How about you boys lug the bags to the parking garage. Bunny and I will check out. You fly the van down and pick us up at the front.”

She held out her black duffel bag in my direction.

“Sure,” I said, accepting the bag, then reaching down to pick up one of the suitcases piled against the wall.

Between me, Jakobe, and Tao Heng, we were able to drag the bags over to the stairwell in one trip and down the single flight of stairs to the hotel’s hovervehicle parking garage. With the luggage crammed in the back, there was hardly enough room for everyone to fit inside, but we could make it work.

“I got the wheel,” I said.

“Hey, I’m Wheelman,” Tao Heng said. “Rock paper scissors you for it. Best out of three.”

I beat him twice in a row, and as he grumbled his way into the passenger seat, I got behind the wheel. The wires snaked into my forearm jack, and I felt the familiar tingle upon turning the key. As I eased out into the crowded aerial traffic lanes, we were struck by a waterfall of rain. Turning on the wipers, I circled around the hotel, dropping down until I could enter the porte-cochere, where the valets lounged about smoking and waiting for customers.

As soon as I pulled up, one of the valets approached, but Tao Heng shooed him away. Meanwhile, I looked out the passenger window into the lobby, past the revolving doors, to where I could just make out Svea and Bunny at the front desk.

“We’re goddamn lucky to have Svea,” Tao Heng said. “Without her, we’d be nothing more than broke-ass wannabes.”

“Yeah. I owe her big time. I can’t believe she broke up with her girlfriend over this trip.”

“Meh,” Tao Heng said. “That was coming for a long time. She and Zhao Xiaojing were on the rocks for a while before all this. And don’t get too carried away about thinking you owe her money. Her family is about as rich as you can get without being part of Sinotech, but she hates all that corporate stuff. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her happier to be spending money as she has been the past few days. If her father knew what she was doing with his hard-earned cash, he’d probably blow a gasket. He thinks she has it invested in nightclubs and bars in the Fourth Earth.”

“Seriously?” I said.

“Yeah, no joke.”

“Look, here they come.”

As Svea and Bunny approached the revolving doors, a flash of motion in my peripheral vision drew my attention, and I looked over to see two figures walking in from the rain. I narrowed my eyes as I looked closer at them, and then my heart leapt into my throat.

“Holy hell,” I said hoarsely. “That’s Nicolas Kun and Eldress Cheung.”

They looked the same as they had last time I’d seen either of them, Eldress Cheung with her numerous prosthetic augmentations and Nicolas Kun with his faux-expensive suit. Flicking water off of their umbrellas before folding them up, they headed through the revolving doors just as Svea and Bunny were walking out. My hand jerked to my Spitter, but Nicolas’ head didn’t so much as twitch in their direction as he passed them, which I took to indicate they hadn’t stood out to him. I had no idea what sort of intelligence he’d gathered on my friends and associates, but given his power and connections, it would be foolish not to have put together some sort of dossier at this point. Either foolish or arrogant.

“Fucking shit,” Jakobe said as he peered out of the circular window in the back of the van. “What the hell are they doing here?”

“It can’t be a coincidence,” I said. I eased the van forward a few feet as Jakobe opened the back doors to let Svea and Bunny in.

As soon as the doors closed behind them, I pushed down on the accelerator, sending the van back out into the downpour.

“You just walked right by Nicolas Kun,” Tao Heng said, turning to look back at Svea and Bunny.

Svea’s jaw dropped. “What?”

“And Eldress Cheung,” Tao Heng said. “It’s weird. I always pictured them looking younger.”

“What the hell are they doing here?” Svea said, echoing Jakobe’s question.

Bunny craned her neck to look out the back windshield as we drove off. “And how did they find us?”

Ember, I thought.

“Ember,” Jakobe said.

Brow furrowed, Svea said, “But how? How could some random cultivator in the Sixth Earth be connected to Nicolas Kun?”

“Probably not her directly,” Jakobe said. “More likely that Eldress Jaziri she mentioned. Or maybe someone higher than her. I’m telling you, this conspiracy in the sect doesn’t stop at Elder Qing.

“I think Jakobe’s right,” I said. “Right now, my name is probably on the top of all the wrong lists, which means that as soon as Ember reported in, alarm bells started ringing in all sorts of places.”

“I’m sorry, Wang Fan,” Bunny said, and it sounded like she was about to cry. “This is all because I blurted out your name when you said not to.”

“That’s not what I meant,” I replied quickly. “Really. If nothing else, we’ve flushed out another traitor.”

“He’s right, baby,” Jakobe said, rubbing her shoulder.

“The only thing I can’t wrap my mind around,” I said, “is that Nicolas Kun seems to have gone rogue. Yet he’s still connected to his Black Corpse lines of communication?”

“Maybe it’s the other way around,” Jakobe said. “According to what Itsuki Saito told you, his father is out for his own interests. Maybe he’s the rogue, and Nicolas Kun has managed to bill himself as the good guy.”

We threw around more theories and conjectures on the way to the station, but in the end, that was all they were: guesswork.

Thanks to the backdoor access Svea had been able to take advantage of, the vert-rail trip to the Eighth Earth went much more smoothly than the one from the Fourth to the Sixth. Only a few hours after securing the information about the Saitos’ travel itinerary, I drove Svea’s gray van out of the vert-rail station and onto the streets of the Eighth Earth.

This place seemed a lot cleaner than the Sixth Earth, with less trash on the streets and almost no graffiti in sight. I guessed that the businesses in areas like this preferred to have things look a bit more upscale.

But while businesses could pay to clean the streets up, they couldn’t do anything to make the Heaven-Propping Pillar brighter. Everything was darker here, which served to accentuate the red glow from the neon signs adorning virtually all the buildings surrounding the train station. Although much of the wording on the signage was vague, it was apparent this area was filled with sex shops, peep shows, strip clubs, and cabarets. I saw one building where the entire side featured windows with scantily clad women behind them in pink booths, posing provocatively. Another had an enormous holographic projection of a near-topless woman dancing on a blue neon pole.

Tao Heng let out a low whistle. “Guys, I’m going to have to back out on the mission. Can you drop me off over there? I think—OW!”

Svea punched him hard in the shoulder.

“It’s like the Ninth Heaven, except a lot more vulgar,” I said. The Ninth Heaven was also known for red-light districts and the general atmosphere of carousing and revelry, but it was slightly more restrained. I couldn’t help but think back to the time Xiaoli and I had snuck there once to go gambling, only to be punished severely by Mom when our escapade came to light.

“Eyes on the road, Mr. Detective,” Svea said. “Get up into the highest lanes of traffic and find a hotel. I’ll see if I can get a good signal and tap into the Grid.”

While Tao Heng drooled out the window, I sent the van upward and away from the train station until I spotted a hotel. As I neared, Svea said, “Ongrid. Okay, we’re operating under the assumption Johan Saito will book a room in the most expensive hotel in the Eighth Earth, right?”

“Yeah.”

Chapter 55 – The South Third Strip

Jakobe and I joined the milling crowd that filed out of the zont-rail station into the pouring rain. The first thing that met our eyes was a huge marquee set up like an arch over the street with the words ‘South Third Strip’ in golden calligraphy inset with yellow neon. The street was closed to ground traffic, with the nearest vehicles being in an aerial lane a good thirty feet overhead. Buildings loomed on either side, lined with storefronts, while the middle of the street was a smorgasbord of vendor stalls covered with plastic tarps.

As we entered the market, we smelled a mixture of frying food, cigarette smoke, plastic, and sweat. The Eighth Earth was oppressively hot; virtually every window had an air-cooling unit hanging out of it, and half of the people had personal cooling units strapped around their necks.

The South Third Strip was a sprawling district where you could find anything and everything, most of it at wholesale prices. The stores on the first block were devoted to household items, from furniture to wall decorations. At the intersection, the building to the right had a sign that read ‘Toy and Game Heaven,’ opposite of which was the ‘New Electronics Megatower.’ We saw a Peacekeeper patrol car at the corner, two officers leaning up against it clad in light body armor with QBZ-14C assault rifles cradled in their arms.

“This way,” Jakobe said, nodding to the left. We walked past the cops and down the street to another building with no marquee and street-level storefronts that didn’t conform to any theme whatsoever. One shop sold printed invitation cards, the next offered mops and buckets. After that was a used book store adjacent to a tea wholesaler. Halfway down the block, a curtain of thick rubbery bands framed the entrance of a low-ceilinged tunnel that led into the interior of the building. Past the curtain, cool air brushed our faces along with the aroma of plastic and cigarette smoke. I couldn’t even imagine how hot the place would have been without the air-cooling units on full blast. Criss-crossing escalators led both up and down. Above us were eight full levels of random stores, with the downward escalators disappearing into the floor, making it impossible to see what was beneath.

We went down, eventually walking out into a shadowy corridor lined with tiny stores that were little more than stalls, all of them selling weapons and other items related to self-defense. Everything I saw was legal: knives, batons, stun guns, non-lethal Spitters, body armor, and the like. The place was packed. We shouldered through the crowd to the end of the corridor, where a staircase led further down. Halfway down the stairs, I saw a cockroach crawling up the wall and squished it. We emerged into another corridor, this one only about half the length of the previous and ending in a set of half-closed blast doors, in front of which stood two burly thugs vetting the customers who entered.

There was a line. For every group of customers that left, one was allowed in, and we had to wait for ten groups before we reached the front of the line.

The guards patted us down, looked at our IDs, and then let us through.

Beyond the doors was a wide room, a hall really, with an open center and a handful of stores, as well as a lounge at the far end. Between the shops, the central area, and the lounge, there were probably a hundred people present, making it neither crowded nor empty. The air was cooler here than outside, so much so that if I wasn’t a diamond cultivator, I probably would have started shivering.

Although the entire purpose of our visit here was to purchase illegal weaponry, it still surprised me to see such a wide array of prohibited goods on open display. Granted, we were literally underground in a room with armed sentries outside. But minutes before, we’d passed a Peacekeeper patrol. How could they not be aware of this location? What was most shocking to me was that these shops weren’t newly erected, as you might expect of a temporary black market outlet. They were all permanent establishments that, from the look of them, had been here for years.

Even back in the Third Earth, a location like this could never have existed. Of course, we were right beneath the Netherearths, so I supposed it was little surprise.

We quickly scanned the names of the shops until we found the one we were looking for. The marquee was a large curved arrow, backlit with green light, with the words “Aim to Head” written on its surface. A security guard lounged next to the sign, an oversized oscihammer slung over the shoulder of his prosthetic arm. The shop itself wasn’t particularly large, and it was crammed with all sorts of gear. A host of firearms were nestled behind the plexiglass counters, from NZ-85G.2s to Spitter D4s. There weren’t just weapons. Cases of gas masks and respirators were stacked in the corner next to a pile of tactical bags and nylon ropes. A box of shuriken rested on the counter flanked by an assortment of grenades, their pins bound with plastic ties.

There were a few other customers present, picking through handgun accessories and boxes of ammunition.

“Holy shit,” Jakobe said, noticing the massive machine gun mounted to the wall behind the counter. “Is that really a Type 67?”

“Type 67-13 A,” said the woman behind the counter. Exhaling a stream of cigarette smoke, she continued, “Fresh out of the factories in the Fourth Earth.” She was dressed in typical Eighther fashion; a black studded bra was all she had on underneath a translucent overcoat with numerous air vents that could be sealed with the touch of a button when outside in the rain. A pair of goggles held back pink hair, and she had tattoos, a lot of them. Her right arm was a full sleeve depicting a mishmash of flowers, thorns, bones, phoenixes, and gemstones, while the left arm sleeve was a host of black dots and lines interspersed with special glowing ink.

I noticed a pistol in a glass case, and when I saw the description on the label in the bottom right, my jaw nearly dropped. “No way,” I said. “Is that real or a replica?”

“It’s a real NZ-85B.”

“From before the War?”

She grinned and flicked some ash from her cigarette onto the ashtray on the counter. “Over a thousand years old, that one. And yes, it’s still fully operational. I picked it up about ten years ago from a private collector.”

“Well,” Jakobe said, “we’re not here as collectors. We need gear for an operation.” We had already fallen back into our old Peacekeeper routine in which he took point in dealing with criminal types. It felt good. He pulled out a piece of paper and handed it to her. “Here’s a list.”

She picked it up and scanned it. “Is this a rush order?”

“Yeah.”

She grunted. “I can get all of it together in, say, thirty minutes. Except for the paliprox gas. I don’t deal in that stuff. But jump down two shops and talk to Punny. He specializes in it.”

There was no way our group could handle a fight with Johan Saito, so our plan was to make sure no fight broke out at all by dosing him with paliprox. The main question was how to go about doing that.

“All right,” Jakobe said, “how much’ll it come to?”

She pulled out a boxy calculator from under the counter, tapped in some numbers, then flipped it around for us to look at. “How’s that sound?”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Jakobe said. And thus proceeded a lengthy negotiation that ended with us paying about two-thirds of the original quote.

I pulled out a roll of cash from my interior coat pocket, counted out some bills, and handed them to her.

“Pleasure doing business, gents. Go see Punny. I should have your order ready by the time you get back.”

“Will do,” Jakobe said, and we left the shop.

Punny was a short fellow with a braided beard, a chestful of tattoos visible beneath his translucent, elbow-length coat, and not a single prosthetic to be seen on him. He was concluding a deal with another customer as we walked in, and there was one other buyer in line after that one. This particular shop was little more than a room with a counter. There were no wares visible; the walls had faded travel posters and random advertisements on them, and on the ground, there were a few round stickers labeled ‘wait in line here.’

Five minutes later, we were up.

“Welcome, fellows,” Punny said. “Get this: the Heavenly Curse, the flu, and the common cold walked into the room. I asked, ‘What is this? Some kind of sick joke?’” We looked at him silently for a moment, and he shrugged. “What are you looking for?”

“Paliprox,” Jakobe said. “We heard that’s your thing.”

“What type and what delivery method?” Punny asked. “You’ve got the standard stuff and the D variety, which is a lot more expensive. I also have a bit of paliprox-D2 gas, the colorless kind. That’s rare, you know, so it goes for a pretty penny. If you want paliprox-Z, you have to special-order it. The Corpses don’t let that stuff out of their sight. Ever.

“For delivery, you have your sprayers and foggers, with options like cones and streams and also types that shoot gels and foams. Of course, you have the fog machines, too, which are only good if you can set them up in advance. Grenades are also an option. Oh, I have a very unique in-house design that fits in the mouth. Just out of the prototype phase. If used properly, it can deliver a single stream of mixed paliprox and concentrated capsaicin in a very unexpected way.

“And get this.” Punny leaned forward. “All of my paliprox delivery systems have built-in spell formations that make them impossible for cultivators to detect or disable, at least not with the usual ways.”

“Do they come with a guarantee?”

“Of what?”

“That they won’t be detected or disabled.”

Punny gave us a long-suffering stare. “No written guarantee. Like I said, using the ordinary and common methods of cultivators, they won’t be detected or disabled. But you know those damned cultivators. They’re always coming up with new ways of doing things. So I advise you to always have backup measures in place.”

“Fair enough,” Jakobe said. “Let’s talk fog machines. How much area can they cover, and how fast?"

“I have two types. One can do 3,000 CFM, the other 10,000.”

Jakobe looked at me. “The suite is 3,000 square feet, right?”

“Yeah.”

He looked back at Punny. “Alright. Two of the 10,000 CFM fog machines. Six stream sprayers and six cone sprayers. Five of the mouth sprayers. And how much of the paliprox-D2 do you have?”

Looking somewhat taken aback, Punny said, “I need to double-check my stock. Wait here a moment.” He turned, but before disappearing, looked back and said, “Say, given the fact you obviously have a nice budget, any chance you’re interested in a Bohr Fulmina Convertor? I got one in just last week.”

“A what?” Jakobe asked.

“A Bohr Fulmina Convertor. It can prevent incoming and outgoing teleportations for a hundred-yard radius.”

Jakobe and I exchanged a glance. This was our first time hearing of such a device. But the idea that a machine could negate teleportations, while intriguing, didn’t seem particularly relevant to our mission. Besides, there were spell formations that could do the same thing. I shook my head.

“We’ll pass,” Jakobe said.

“Your choice. Let me check on that other stuff. Be back in a moment.”

As we waited, I looked over my shoulder out into the main hall, and a shop across the way caught my eye.

‘Zeng’s Magical Potions and Mystical Artifacts.’ It wasn’t open to the main hall like Aim to Head or Punny’s. There was a single door with a peephole in the middle and a doorbell off to the side, with dirty mirrored windows flanking it.

There’s no way they sell cultivation resources there, is there? I thought. Another minute passed, and I couldn’t help but look at the ‘magic’ shop again. At the moment, my Thermal sea of energy had its edges curling in on itself so dramatically that I knew I was on the verge of a breakthrough. Unfortunately, I’d only had short bits of time here and there to meditate in the past few weeks, and none of the sessions had pushed me past the brink of a breakthrough. But if I could get something like the talisman Elder Hu had given me or a medicinal pill with similar effects, it could theoretically give me the edge I needed. And given we were preparing for an encounter with an extremely powerful cultivator, every advantage I could get would be worth it.

Leaning over to Jakobe, I said, “Can you handle this? I wanna check out that shop over there.”

He looked in the same direction as me, then nodded. “Sure, I got it.”

I peeled a handful bills off for myself, then handed him the roll and walked across the hall. Upon reaching the shop, I stretched my hand out to push the doorbell, then hesitated. I was thinking about using my divine sense to scan the area beyond the door, but then I remembered how I’d revealed myself that way back in the Sixth Earth. Abandoning the idea, I infused my finger with divine sense and pushed the doorbell.

A moment later, I felt a tingle that was either divine sense or a spell formation. Shit, this was some sort of cultivator shop, wasn’t it? Right in the city center, with Peacekeepers minutes away? The tingle vanished, and I heard a click as the door lock disengaged and swung inward slightly. I pushed it open and stepped inside.

The first thing I noticed was the lack of cigarette odor; instead, the pungent aroma of incense wrapped me up. Looking down, I saw a scrambler set up next to the door and, next to it, an incense burner. There was a counter, but I didn’t see anyone behind it. The decor was antique, the walls lined with wooden shelves, or at least synthetic material that looked like wood. They were covered with an assortment of items, from golden statues of dragons to smooth crystal balls with complex landscape scenes painted inside them. There were boxes of incense and tea, ancient swords, pairs of iron health balls in custom-carved cases, and more.

I wondered if these items were functional in terms of cultivation use but didn’t want to use my divine sense to check.

“Hello?” I said.

“Coming,” a voice said from the back, and a moment later, a girl walked out who couldn’t have been older than fourteen or fifteen. Unless she was a Thermal cultivator, in which case she could be decades old or even hundreds of years for all I knew. She looked more like a Sixther than an Eighther, with bulky camouflage overalls suspended from her shoulders with thick black straps, but unzipped and hanging down to her waist, revealing a black tube top beneath. She wore bulky headphones with animal ears on top, and coupled with the glowing purple glasses, I would never have pegged her as anything other than a teenage schoolgirl. Then I noticed she had two items hanging from her neck. One was a pendant that resembled a fox. The other was a chain with dog tags and a black metal disk with a skeletal figure, flesh hanging off the bones. The former was likely a dimensional pendant, and the latter was a Black Corpse medallion. Who the hell was this girl?

Plopping down on a stool behind the counter, she said, “Well? What do you want?”

I hesitated. Could this place be a Black Corpse trap to snag unsuspecting cultivators?

“You’re new here, aren’t you?” the girl said, and at this point, I realized she was chewing on a mouthful of gum. She extended her hand in greeting. “I’m Isabel Zeng.”

Infusing my hand with divine sense, I shook hers. “Name’s Huang.”

“Pleasure, Mr. Huang. As you can see from the incense and scrambler, this place is secure, so we can talk freely. I’m guessing you’re a cultivator from much farther down in the Grand Kingdom. The Bright Earths? Maybe the Lesser Heavens? I’ve seen your type before. Got in some trouble with the law and ran up here to the Dark Earths hoping to start over again?”

“Sure, something like that. What about you? Your pendant there is making me a bit nervous.”

She laughed and pulled the Black Corpse medallion away from her chest to look at it. “This thing? I traded for it. Don’t worry, I don’t run with the Corpses. I’m a rogue cultivator.”

“A what?”

She cocked her head slightly. “Ah, you’re one of those. Must be a recruit. Maybe a novice? I guess you didn’t go to enough meetings to know what happens if you break the rules in the Naturalism Sect.”

“You got me there. What happens?”

“You get kicked out.”

“I had no idea,” I said, and I was being honest. I knew there were punishments for violating rules in the sect, but I’d never heard anything about being expelled.

She smiled. “It’s not a huge deal. Most of the time, punishments involve getting demoted or being put on some sort of restriction. If you break the rules bad enough, though, you end up like me. Out for good. Down where you come from, they’re a lot stricter in recruiting, so it doesn’t happen very often. Folks are more straight-laced. But up here so close to the Netherearths, things run looser, and it’s more common for people to get expelled.”

My old detective’s mind was curious, and I wanted to know more about this aspect of cultivator life that had never been mentioned to me before. “What did you get kicked out for? Or is that too personal of a question?”

Hooking her fingers under the straps of her coveralls and flashing a cocky smile, she said, “I stole a Thermal cultivation manual and formed a Thermal sea without authorization.”

“That’s all? You got kicked out for that?”

Her eyes narrowed slightly. “How new are you, exactly? Don’t you know that you have to get sect approval before you can practice Thermal cultivation?”

I remember hearing something along those lines when I was interviewed after arriving in the Fourth Earth. But those days had been such a whirlwind that I’d forgotten more than I remembered.

“Yeah, I knew that. I just didn’t know it was such a serious thing.”

“Oh, it’s serious, all right. You think they want everyone suddenly being able to live for hundreds of years? After I got found out, Sect Leader Yu himself got involved with my case. I think the only reason they didn’t cripple me is that Yu Yitai was friends with my great-grandmother.”

“Wow,” I said, literally at a loss for words. It led me to wonder why a thermal cultivation manual had been lying around a safehouse in the Third Earth, right out in the open. Was it just dumb luck?

“Anyway,” Isabel continued, “the point is I’m a free agent. Disciples from the Naturalism Sect aren’t supposed to associate with us, but as you can imagine, there are plenty of people who don’t follow all the rules.”

“Good point. So you like life as a rogue cultivator?”

“Hell yeah. Way more freedom. Nobody telling you what to do all the time. It’s great! And since we’re not part of the sect, the Corpses and Counter-Cultivation leave us alone, as long as we keep our heads down. So here I am, making good money selling everything from medicinal pills to teleportation slips. What exactly are you looking for?”

I almost couldn’t believe it. Who could have guessed that there were rogue cultivators not affiliated with the Naturalism Sect or Sinotech? I’d been operating under the premise that we had no way to get teleportation slips or anything else cultivation-related. If we could, it could change our entire plan for the better.

“I could use some teleportation slips. And pills. I’m on the verge of a breakthrough.”

Blowing a bubble with her gum, she hopped off the stool, leaned down behind the counter, then straightened up with a lacquered box in her hand, its surface covered with carvings of sea creatures. She opened it to reveal a pile of seven or eight jade slips.

“Unimprinted teleportation slips,” she said. “41,500 yuan each.”

Holy shit, I thought and nearly said it aloud. Based on my understanding, that had to be at least triple what they were worth.

“Will you cut me a deal if I buy a few? Say five for 30,000 each?”

“Sorry, Mr. Huang, but I’ve got a sick mother to take care of and a brother to put through private school. Remember, these things are considered so precious that in the Naturalism Sect, even elders are usually restricted to having only one at a time.” When I hesitated, she sighed. “Fine, I’ll shave off 1,500 each and even throw in a box of Leaf Anvil Incense on the house.”

“Leaf Anvil Incense?”

“You really don’t know much, do you? When you burn Leaf Anvil Incense to secure a room, it not only blocks divine sense, it also prevents people from sneaking in with an Igneus Mask. It’s what I’m burning right now.”

Damn. I was aware of spell formations that could dispel an Igneus Mask, but hadn’t heard that there was incense that did the same thing. What if they’d been burning it in the Cross-Level Control offices when I went in?

I did the math. “200,000 for five teleportation slips, plus that box of incense? Fine, deal. What do you have in the way of pills?”

Pushing her purple glasses tighter onto her face, she smiled and said, “What kind of breakthrough are we talking about here? Into sea? Or out of sea and into root?”

“Into root.”

She blew a bubble, which grew larger and larger until it obscured her entire face before it deflated. She sucked the gum back into her mouth. “Exactly how close are you to the breakthrough? Are the edges of your sea curled? If you open yourself to me and let me check it out, I can provide the best recommendations.”

I shook my head. “You seem like a great girl, but I’m not opening myself up to a complete stranger. My sea has very curled edges. It’s right on the breakthrough point.”

“What type of root?”

Given what I’d just learned about Thermal cultivation, I didn’t think revealing the details of my cultivation base would be wise. “I’d prefer to keep information to myself as well.”

“You’re not exactly making this easy, my friend. Most breakthrough pills are designed for specific paths of cultivation. You really want to cut your options down like that?”

“Sorry, but yeah.”

“All right, if you insist. In that case, I only have two options for you. One is a Violet Radiance Pill. The other is a Murky Ātman Pill.”

“What’s the difference?”

“In my opinion, not much. But some people think the Violet Radiance Pill is safer because the Murky Ātman Pill provides a much more rapid and violent surge of energy. You have to handle it well, or it could hurt you.”

“Is one more expensive than the other?”

“The Murky Ātman Pill will set you back 150,000. The Violet Radiance Pill is 10,000 cheaper.”

Wow. That was more than a year’s wages for most people. No wonder average cultivators couldn’t afford to use medicinal pills to make cultivation advancements.

“I’ll take the Murky Ātman Pill,” I said.

Chapter 56 – The Calm Before the Storm

“Let’s go over the plan one more time,” I said. “Tao Heng, you want to lead us through it?”

“You got it, boss.”

Laid out on the table in front of us was a crude model of the penthouse suite of the Eighth Earth’s finest hotel, which Svea had confirmed Johan Saito had booked for his stay here.

The more I saw Svea in action, the more I realized how good she was. I wasn’t an expert in such matters, but it seemed to me she was operating at a caliber far beyond ordinary grid monkeys. It had taken a lot of digging to confirm the booking information, as Saito hadn’t made the reservation using real names. Svea had also dug up background information on Shigeki Ban, who was merely hired muscle that worked for the Saitos. As for Noriko Saito, Svea suspected it was a fake name, as there wasn’t even a scrap of information to go along with it. From what she could tell, no one named Noriko Saito actually existed.

Svea had acquired a floor plan for the penthouse suite; with some scissors, a few cardboard boxes, and some plastic straws, we’d created a model to use in our planning. Next to the penthouse suite model was a smaller representation of one of the rooms located on the floor below, which was where we planned to set up our own outpost in the hotel. We also had a tourist map of the neighborhood.

“Jakobe and Bunny are spotters again,” Tao Heng said. “Jakobe will be here, across the street from the main entrance, on ground level in the coffee shop—” he put a beer bottle cap down onto the map “—and Bunny will be here, in the rooftop bar with a good view of the back entrance.” He put down another bottle cap.

“Wang Fan will be waiting ahead of time in the hotel room down below.” Reaching into his jeans pocket, he produced a plastic toy tiger, which he placed in the smaller room next to the penthouse.

“Wheelman, that’s me, will park the getaway car right here.” A small toy car appeared in his hand, which he put onto the map around the corner from the hotel.

“Where the hell did you get the toys?” Jakobe asked.

“Hotel lobby,” Tao Heng replied, raising his eyebrows imperiously.

“Why?”

“Wang Fan gave me the job of running the briefing, and I decided we needed them!”

“Forget the toys,” Svea said. “We agreed to change call signs. You’re not ‘Wheelman,’ Tao Heng.”

Tao Heng slumped slightly. “But I like Wheelman.”

Svea glared at him. “You’re the only one who liked the original set of call signs. The rest of us hated them. Besides, Itsuki was the one who came up with the names, and he’ll be there. We can’t very well use the same ones!”

“He’ll recognize our voices even if we use new call signs,” Tao Heng pointed out.

“We have to change things up,” I said. “How about you just pick a new call sign? Something you like.”

He thought. “I’ll be Bleeding Spider.”

We all looked at him for a moment before Svea threw a plastic fork toward his face. He caught it one-handed.

“Are you serious?” Bunny asked.

“Bleeding Spider,” he said. “That’s my call sign. I’ll park the getaway car here where there’s free street parking. Then I just walk in the front and take the elevator up to meet Wang Fan here.”

Reaching into his jeans pocket again, he produced a second toy tiger, which he ‘walked’ from the car to the smaller hotel room.

“Svea, you’ll set up in this building over here.” Taking out a plastic monkey miniature, he put it onto the map to form a triangle with the two bottle caps. “We don’t know exactly when Johan Saito and his people will show up at the hotel with Elena, but we do know their train arrives tomorrow at 17:30.”

“19:30,” I corrected. “Which is 7:30 p.m. 17:30 would be 5:30 p.m.”

Tao Heng cleared his throat. “Right. Slip of the tongue. Anyway, they’ll arrive at the hotel about an hour later.”

“Assuming they don’t make any stops along the way,” I added. “Svea, you’ll try to track them with traffic cameras.”

“Remember, there’s no guarantee on that,” she said. “Surveillance is incredibly loose here compared to where we come from, so gaining access won’t be a problem. But the system, in general, is worse than anything I’ve ever seen. Hardly a third of the traffic cams are functional at any given time.”

“Hopefully Svea can track their progress,” Tao Heng said, “but if not, Jakobe and Bunny will be there to fill in the gaps. Based on the Cross-Level Control info Svea pulled, we know they have five people in their group. Itsuki, his father, and two others—” he took out four plastic skulls and put them into the penthouse suite model “—and Elena, who might be in a paliprox coma, but maybe not.” A tiny plastic figurine of a princess appeared between his thumb and forefinger, and he put it into the penthouse.

“The key to everything comes to the prep-work,” Tao Heng said. “Tonight, Wang Fan and I will infiltrate the hotel—”

“Infiltrating isn’t really the right word,” I noted.

“We’ll infiltrate the hotel,” he continued, “using your Thermal Ripple Cloak to make sure we get past the security cams in the lower levels. The top floors offer surveillance-free privacy for guests who request it, and the Saitos did. So we’ll place one of the mini cameras we bought in the light fixture at the end of the hall and another in the main room of the suite. We’ll also install the paliprox-D foggers in the air ducts.

“This hotel is so mega-high-end that they don’t have a hovervehicle parking garage. They’re too exclusive. So that means Johan Saito and gang will take the elevator up to the top floor. As soon as they close the door of their room behind them, we activate the foggers and knock ’em out.” Reaching into the suite, he put the four skull figurines onto their sides. “Wang Fan takes the stairs up a floor—” he moved one of the tigers from the small hotel room to the larger suite “—busts inside and grabs Elena.”

He took the tiger and the princess out of the suite and put them back into the small hotel room. “From there, we have options. We can use a teleportation slip to get back to the van or take the long way, a.k.a. the elevator. Either way, Wang Fan and I end up here with Elena.” He put the two tigers and the princess next to the car.

“Meanwhile, you three head to the rendezvous point in this alley here.” He scooped up the two bottle caps and the monkey, then placed them on a street corner two blocks down from the hotel. “That’s where we pick you up. Mission accomplished. Easy peasy.”

“Easy peasy?” I said. “Don’t jinx us.”

“I have a question,” Jakobe said.

“Sure, brother,” I replied.

“Not for you. For Tao Heng. You somehow managed to get a toy car, two tigers, four skulls, a monkey, and a princess. So why the fuck are Bunny and I bottle caps?”

“I bought the presentation materials with my own money,” Tao Heng replied. “And I come from a humble family, unlike Svea. I had to make some sacrifices when allocating the budget.”

“Tao Heng, you motherfucker, I’m gonna—”

“It’s fine, Jakobe,” Bunny said, pulling him over into a kiss.

“That’s the basic plan,” I said. “Now, let’s go over the contingency options.”

We spent an hour going through possible twists and turns that could unfold. After everything was hashed out, we had dinner, then Tao Heng and I went to the hotel to put the cameras and fog machines in place.

The hotel had impressive security, but nothing Svea couldn’t handle. The entire process took three hours. The most difficult part was setting up the fog machines so they could be activated remotely. Everything went off without a hitch.

That night, I retired early and locked myself in my bedroom with the medicinal pill I’d purchased earlier. I didn’t feel the need to tell anyone what I was attempting. Everyone I was with was a friend, but Bunny had already let the ball drop once.

Loose lips sink ships, Dad would have said—another of his catchphrases that he picked up from a minority ethnic group.

Upon consuming the Murky Ātman Pill, I felt a massive rush of energy that would have been difficult to manage if I hadn’t already experienced a breakthrough to the diamond level. Thankfully, I had experience now. Plus, my Bone diamond gave me a higher level of control.

Sending the pill’s energy through my meridians in the prescribed course, I forced my Thermal sea to expand until the edges started rippling like waves. I guided the process so that the sea folded up into something that resembled a carrot, which was when a shockwave rolled out. Before the shockwave could leave the room, I used my diamond-level divine sense to suppress it.

When it was over, I peered inside myself to see a golden ‘root’ hovering across from the gray-black diamond in the pit of my stomach. It seemed somewhat anticlimactic.

My divine sense wouldn’t benefit from the breakthrough, but my physical toughness would receive a small boost, and the effects of many of my techniques would improve. My Igneous Mask would be able to create much larger illusions and, as I practiced, multiple different illusions at the same time. My Thermal Ripple Cloak would be able to hide larger objects. But the most dramatic of all was the change to my longevity. Supposedly, I would now have a lifespan of around six hundred years.

I wasn’t sure why I felt the need to use the word ‘supposedly.’ I had no reason to disbelieve that added longevity came with the practice of Thermal cultivation. But the idea of being able to live six hundred years was almost beyond comprehension. I’d once wondered what it would be like to live to sixty, let alone six hundred. That wasn’t to mention how a Thermal diamond could sustain a person for a millennium.

To think that, not too many days before, I’d been trying to come up with a way to get rid of my single, tiny sea of energy. I guess I had, technically. I didn’t have any sea of energy now, but instead, a root and a diamond.

Glancing at the clock, I saw it wasn’t even midnight, so I figured I would keep going for a few minutes. To date, I still hadn’t made much progress on my cultivator robe. The process required a full uninterrupted day, and I just didn’t have that much time to spend locked in a room. So I pulled out the Ossientum Memorandum I’d swiped from the Cross-Level Control office down in the Sixth Earth. There wasn’t a way to link myself to the document like there generally was with manuals from the Naturalism Sect, which I found interesting. I’d skimmed through it before, but this was my first chance to read it carefully. Bunching up the pillow against the headboard, I stretched my legs out and flipped to the first technique.

Ossientum Lapis Growth is the foundation of Bone cultivation and involves tapping into one’s own marrow to create a substance tougher than concrete but lighter than paper. Unlike either bone or concrete, it has immense tensile strength. Practitioners must note that marrow depletion can be profoundly harmful, so care must be taken in both training and practical usage.

The process for creating bonecrete seemed simple enough. After about an hour of reading and re-reading, I felt ready enough to do a test. Crossing my legs, I circulated my energy through my Bone diamond, then tapped into my marrow in the way described in the manual. As my fingers slipped through the proper hand signs, the energy flowed out of my palms, where it solidified into a six-inch-long sliver of gray bonecrete.

I put some pressure on it, and sure enough, it took some effort before it bent far enough to snap. That said, my diamond-level cultivation base made me much stronger than the average person.

Using divine sense, I checked my marrow and didn’t notice any significant change from before. That didn’t seem right. Flipping back through the manual, I found the passage that described energy loss.

For a low-level sea cultivator, creating a sliver of bonecrete will drain one’s marrow by one percent. Creating a brick will drain five percent. It is not recommended that beginners drain more than five percent of their marrow, lest they experience dangerous side effects. Even a five percent drainage will take many weeks to recover from. Of course, output and efficiency increase with familiarity and practice. 

Granted, the energy capacity of a diamond of energy was vastly superior to a sea of energy, but the loss should still have been detectable, minute as it was. I checked again, this time more carefully, but didn’t notice any change to my bone marrow levels.

All of a sudden, I thought back to the words of Elder Hu. Black Corpse researchers have developed a substance called Euneirophrenia Marrow that they believe can be used to achieve rapid advancement in Bone cultivation and yet again reach the highest level.

Damn. Was it the Euneirophrenia Marrow that was doing this? Taking a deep breath, I did another experiment, tweaking the meridian paths and spending a bit more effort. This time when the light faded, I was holding a brick of bonecrete roughly the size of a loaf of bread. I immediately sent my divine sense inside to check my bone marrow. This time, I could see that the levels had gone down slightly. But even as I watched, they increased, and within seconds were back to normal.

My question was answered. Unfortunately, I didn’t see how creating bonecrete would be much of an advantage, even if I could create it faster than the average cultivator. If I was a Wind cultivator, maybe I could combine those abilities with Bone cultivation, for instance, to develop bonecrete spheres that I could propel at high speed with a blast of wind. But wouldn’t a gun work just as well in that regard? What if I could create small walls, hide them with a Thermal Ripple Cloak, and trip an enemy that was chasing me?

The thought made me laugh. Trip people? No, that wasn’t going to be high on my list of combat assets. Tossing the brick into my dimensional pendant, I flipped ahead to the next technique, the one to make bonemetal. After skimming it a bit, I decided to call it a night. I climbed under the covers, closed my eyes, and allowed Elena to occupy my thoughts. Her green eyes, her aroma of chocolate and jasmine, and her soft lips. Before I knew it, I was asleep.

Chapter 57 – Going In

“Bleeding Spider in place,” Tao Heng said. “Van parked. Heading up.”

“I’m here in the coffee shop,” Jakobe said.

“Call signs, people. Use your call signs.”

There was a long pause from Jakobe in which I was sure I could hear him grinding his teeth. “Bottle Cap 1 here,” he said. “I’ve got eyes on the ground level entrance.”

“Bottle Cap 2 has eyes on the roof,” Bunny said.

Jakobe had complained in private about the call signs, but I’d reminded him we weren’t dealing with professionals. “Tao Heng talks big, but he’s really just a kid. Let’s try to keep things focused but light-hearted.”

I’d also had words with Tao Heng, reminding him that this operation wasn’t a joke. If we screwed up, it could end up with people dying. He’d promised to take things seriously.

“I’ve still got eyes on the Wagon,” Svea said. “The camera gods are on my side tonight. It’s a black limo hovercar. Plate number is… hold on… looks like A·Z34.”

“Make and model?” Jakobe asked.

“Sorry, I’m not a car person. It looks old. Maroon and white. Exaggerated fins on the back, like in old movies.”

Based on the license plate, it was a car registered in the First Heaven, and my guess was that it was hundreds of years old.

You could hear the smile on Tao Heng’s face as he said, “We got this in the bag, guys.”

“Keep the chatter to a minimum,” I said without thinking about it, only to realize that I was echoing Itsuki’s words from the Blue Mountain Commerce Building mission.

On the bed in front of me was an array of weaponry and equipment we’d purchased at the South Third Strip market. In addition to various pistols, rifles, and shotguns, we had a sound suppressor kit, night vision scope, and numerous neatly arranged magazines and grenade pouches. There was also a door-breaching strip, bolt cutters, medical kit, grappling hook, three ropes, pry bar, tactical tomahawk, and a pair of binoculars. If things went well, I wouldn’t need any of them. It reminded me of a line Dad would quote from one of his favorite ancient books. Better to have, and not need, than to need, and not have.

To the side, on the hotel room’s work desk, were the controls for the paliprox foggers, as well as two televisions that were directly tied into the secret cameras we’d installed.

A minute or two later, I saw Tao Heng emerge from the elevator and head in my direction. I opened the door when he was two paces away, and he slipped inside.

“Damn,” he said, looking at the items laid out neatly on the bed. “Looks a lot more badass laid out like that.”

“You stick to your Solar cultivation abilities,” I said. Keying my mic, I said, “Monkey Master. Status?”

After a short pause, Svea came on. “I’m getting lucky with the cameras. The Wagon is about halfway there.”

Tao Heng sat on the bed and ran his finger down the QBZ-14C. “I still think you should take them all out while you have the chance.”

“We’ve been over this, Tao Heng. We’re not executioners. I’m not going to shoot unconscious people in the head. If a fight breaks out, then sure. I’ll even take out enemy combatants from within a Thermal Ripple Cloak. But not if they’re just lying there completely helpless.”

“Even the sect authorizes assassinations sometimes. They won’t say that out loud at meetings, but everybody talks about it. I guarantee that if the grand elders knew you had a chance to take out a board member, they would tell you to take it.”

“The point of this whole thing is to get in, get Elena, and get out. I’ll say it again. Combat is one thing; mobster-style executions are another. Besides, Itsuki isn’t exactly a friend, but he kept his word to all of us. Don’t pay back evil with evil. That’s what my dad always said. Didn’t your parents teach you something like that?”

“My pop’s favorite idiom was pay back tooth for tooth. Except mom would always yell back the idiom repay evil with good. I usually agreed with whichever one benefited me the most.”

On an intellectual level, I knew that it would make perfect sense for the Naturalism Sect to want to take out someone like Johan Saito, even if it meant poisoning him or killing him in his sleep. But I wasn’t an assassin. Morally, I couldn’t stomach the idea of shooting someone in the head while they were in a drug-induced coma.

“They just crossed the 2nd Ring Road, and I lost cameras,” Svea said. “I’m trying to pick them up again.”

“Shit,” Tao Heng said.

“It’s fine.” I keyed the mic. “Bottle Caps 1 and 2, be on the lookout.”

Agonizing minutes ticked by.

“I lost them,” Svea said. “It’s a needle in a haystack at this point.”

“Bottle Caps, stay on it,” I said. “Remember, we’re not in a rush.”

“Not in a rush,” Tao Heng said off-mic. “Not in a rush.”

It wasn’t long before Jakobe said, “I got eyes on the Wagon. Coming up Prosperity Avenue. Circling around."

“I see it,” Bunny said. “It’s dropping down to street level. They just stopped near the back entrance, and Itsuki and a burly guy stepped out. That must be Ban Shigeki.”

“Van’s heading back around to the front,” Jakobe said. “Johan, Elena, and some woman with white hair just got out. White-hair must be ‘Noriko.’ Elena’s fully conscious.”

My heart flip-flopped as I thought about reuniting with Elena. Everything so far was going roughly as expected. I wasn’t sure why Itsuki was going in the back entrance, but it was nothing that seemed worth worrying about.

“Is she restrained?” I asked. “Acting oddly in any way?”

“No restraints. She seems normal to me. The woman is walking off. Looks like she’s not going with them into the hotel.”

A moment passed.

“They’re through the front door,” Jakobe said. “Valet is taking their car to the garage.”

“I got eyes inside,” Svea said. “Itsuki and the burly guy are there in the lobby already.”

I felt the urge to grab some weapons and head out the door, but I knew that wasn’t the plan. We needed to wait until the right moment to release the paliprox-D gas.

“Johan went into the men’s restroom,” Svea reported. “The others are waiting in the foyer.”

“Couldn’t wait two minutes?” Tao Heng said.

I shook my head. “He went in there for some other reason. Maybe to set up a Black Corpse teleportation disc or something.”

A minute passed.

“He’s out,” Svea said. “Now they’re getting in the elevator.”

I hovered over the televisions, my eyes glued to the feed from the hallway. The doors opened, and the group walked out. Johan Saito was in the lead, followed by a burly fellow we knew was Ban Shigeki, who worked security for the Saito Clan and spent most of his time in their estates in the First Heaven.

Next was Elena, and when I laid eyes on her, my heart swelled. I’d missed her silly stories, her listening ear, and the warmth I felt when we held hands or our lips met. She had been there for me when my life fell apart after the events in the Third Earth. Despite the snag in our relationship in the Fourth Earth, those days had only drawn us closer together. Then came weeks without seeing or hearing from her. Each of those days without her had felt like months, and it was all culminating at this moment. I’m coming, Elena. Just hold out a bit longer.

Last in line was Itsuki, and the sight of him caused my blood to simmer toward a boil. I would never forget how he’d left me for dead, but could I really blame him? In a no-win fight against Nicolas Kun and the puppetized Eldress Cheung, he’d seized the moment to escape with Elena. He’d said all along he wanted to take her to his father. It wasn’t as if he’d done anything dishonest or deceitful.

As they walked toward the door at the far end, Itsuki reached into the coat pocket of his suit and pulled out his geomantic compass. I could just barely see it emerge from his pocket before his body obscured it. Scant seconds later, the TV monitor went dark.

“Dammit,” I said. Although we’d known it was possible they might take out the cameras with a device like that, I’d hoped fate would be with us and they wouldn’t take such precautions.

“If he uses that thing inside,” Tao Heng said, “we’re going to lose the camera there, too.”

“Given he’s cautious enough to use it in the hallway outside, I can’t imagine he won’t do the same on the inside. But the foggers should be fine thanks to the built-in spell formations.” On-mic, I said, “We’re switching to plan B-2. Radio silence going forward unless necessary.”

Plan B-2 was our backup option if the cameras went out. In that case, Tao Heng would activate the paliprox foggers immediately, and I would go in blind. Not knowing what the Saitos planned, we’d decided that making a move right away in that scenario, before they could set up an Electric Pacification formation to prevent teleportations, was the best option.

I stepped back to the bed, picked up the modified tear gas launcher, and clipped it to my chest harness. Then I grabbed four paliprox-D sprayers and attached them to my belt, two that shot streams and two that shot cones. Next, I grabbed the rolled-up breaching strip and shoved it into my inside coat pocket. Taking one of the Spitters, I put it in my left shoulder holster and put an NZ-85G.2 on the other side, a round chambered in it. I glanced at the QBZ-14C assault rifle but decided against it. Instead, I picked up another Spitter, switching it to stealth mode as the wires connected to my forearm. Throwing one of the paliprox mouth-sprayers into my other pocket, I grabbed a gas mask.

“I’m going up,” I said. “Update me as necessary, but keep it short and sweet.”

“You got it.”

Sending divine sense out into the corridor to make sure no one was outside, I poked my head out the door, confirmed the hall was clear, and headed to the stairwell. When I was about halfway up the stairs, Tao Heng came on.

“They’re in.”

I stopped at the doorway leading into the penthouse suite’s hallway, holding the Spitter in a firm but relaxed grip. Come on, Itsuki, be lazy this time.

“Cam number two is out,” Tao Heng said.

“Activate the foggers,” I replied.

“Done.”

I started counting out the seconds I knew it would take for the machines to kick in and begin filling the suite with paliprox gas. Fitting the sprayer into my mouth, I put the gas mask on and threw on a Thermal Ripple Cloak. Cracking the door to check the hall and seeing it was empty, I stepped out and walked quickly toward the door. The hallway was long, fully fifty feet, but it felt longer—more like five hundred feet.

When I was halfway to the door, I reached in my pocket to pull out the breaching strip, but all of a sudden, the door opened and Johan Saito stepped out. I froze for a millisecond before remembering I was invisible. Hand dropping away from the breaching strip, I gripped the Spitter in both hands, took aim at his chest, and pulled the trigger.

Crackling blue light shot out, and my aim was true. The beam hit him directly to the right of his sternum and should have pierced into his heart. Instead, I saw a spark of electricity and then nothing. Was he wearing protective gear underneath his clothing? Was it some defensive cultivation technique? Not knowing for sure, I didn’t dare to waste even a fraction of a section.  As he looked down at his chest in surprise, I jabbed the wire release, dropped the Spitter, and took aim with the tear gas launcher.

Even as my finger slid around the trigger, something invisible hit me from the side, slamming me into the wall so hard the plaster cracked, and a nearby mirror shattered. It wasn’t wind. It was divine sense, and the raw strength in it was terrifying. Johan Saito was definitely a diamond cultivator of a much higher level than me.

 After bouncing off the wall, I flopped to the ground, losing control of my Thermal Ripple Cloak and dropping the tear gas launcher. Before I could gain my bearings, I saw Johan Saito’s hands flash, and then there was a flicker of lightning as he vanished, then reappeared only two feet away from me. He had an Electric root, making him capable of line-of-sight teleportations.

Shit.

My hand darted to the paliprox-D sprayer at my belt, but as my fingers wrapped around it, his divine sense grabbed me and pulled me up into the air, squeezing around me so hard I felt a rib fracture. At the same time, my right hand ended up bent at an odd angle against my hip until I heard a crack and felt a sharp pain as my wrist snapped. I wanted to scream but couldn’t. I was completely bound and immobilized with the invisible tendrils of his divine sense.

“And who might you be, little ant?” Johan said, looking me up and down. “So many toys. Is this a paliprox-D sprayer?”

He reached down, grabbed it, and flipped it over in his hand a few times.

“How quaint.” He waved his other hand, and my gas mask flew off to the side. When he saw my face, he smiled. “Detective Wang Fan. I should have known. Thank you for being so kind as to deliver yourself to me, although the reality is that I don’t have much use for a nobody like you. Perhaps I should keep you alive to track down whatever friends you have with you.”

I wiggled my tongue to the side of my mouth to confirm the placement of the mouth sprayer but failed, as his divine sense had my jaw clenched shut as well.

“Trying to speak?” he said.

I felt the divine sense around my head loosening.

“I wanna make an offer,” I wheezed.

“An offer?”

“Yeah. How about you let me go, then go fuck yourself.” I bared my lips, shifted the mouth sprayer into position with my tongue, and bit down, causing a narrow stream of paliprox and capsaicin gel to shoot right into Johan Saito’s face.

He shrieked and staggered backward, his divine sense unwrapping from around me.

The mix contained ordinary paliprox, so it didn’t render him unconscious, nor did it affect his divine sense. But the capsaicin definitely hurt. That and the shock of losing connection to his cultivation base was enough to disrupt his divine sense for the second I needed.

As I dropped back to my feet, I didn’t hesitate for a moment. My left hand darted into my coat and came out with the NZ-85G.2.

I aimed it at his chest and pulled the trigger.

Chapter 58 – Aftermath

Johan Saito staggered backward as a hole appeared in his chest. I pulled the trigger again, and another hole appeared. I kept squeezing, filling him with smoking lead. He toppled backward, and as he did, he reached into his pocket, causing a flare of light to appear. When it faded, he was gone.

Damned Black Corpse teleportation discs.

Johan Saito was out of the picture, but that wouldn’t last for long. I highly doubted a few bullets were going to slow him down. Even disciples of the Naturalism Sect kept Pure Cloud Pills on hand, which could heal injuries like gunshot wounds, pierced lungs, broken bones, and the like. I couldn’t imagine what miraculous medicines a board member of Sinotech would keep in his pocket. Furthermore, I would bet hard cash that he’d linked that teleportation disc to the bathroom downstairs. I didn’t have much time to work with.

After throwing on a new Thermal Ripple Cloak, I grabbed my gas mask off the ground, pulled it on, and walked quickly toward the open door of the suite, clutching my broken right wrist against my abdomen and trying to ignore the pain seeping up my arm. Before I could reach the door, it opened, and the burly man stuck his head out. Tapping into my divine sense, I could see that he only had three seas of energy.

My hesitation lasted for less than the blink of an eye. This was combat, no doubt about it. I pointed the gun between his eyes and pulled the trigger. He fell flat on his back.

What happened to the paliprox-D gas? I wondered. Keeping my divine sense ahead of me, I stepped over the corpse and into the foyer of the penthouse suite, my gun out, the pain of the broken rib and wrist burning constantly. I could have used the modified tear gas launcher but didn’t see the need. Itsuki wasn’t a match for me in terms of cultivation, and for the moment, he should be the only hostile to worry about. Besides, it wouldn’t be easy using it one-handed.

Another question prickled at the back of my skull. Johan had called me a ‘nobody.’ But according to Itsuki, I was the first person in a thousand years to have a Bone diamond. If the measly three-root Nicolas Kun could rip out my cultivation base for his own, then surely Johan Saito could do the same thing. Did that mean Itsuki hadn’t told his father about my monumental breakthrough? Why hadn’t he? What game was he playing?

Attached to the foyer were a closet and bathroom, both of which were empty. I kept going through a hallway and into a study of some sort. It was also empty. Then I was in the main room, which had a sofa, two chairs, a coffee table, and a television, but no people.

To the left was a staircase, which I crept up slowly, keeping my divine sense surrounding me.

On the second level of the suite, I found two bedrooms with attached bathrooms. They were all empty. I stepped out onto the terraced balcony. Empty. There was no sign of Itsuki or Elena anywhere in the suite.

What the hell?

I considered searching the place again, but then Bunny spoke, startling me so bad I nearly jumped.

“I just saw Itsuki and Elena get in a cab behind the hotel.”

“What?” I nearly shouted. Heart pounding, I walked out of the suite and into the hallway.

“I didn’t see where they came from. It literally just happened.”

“Get the plate numbers!” I said, feeling like I was shrieking. I broke into a run toward the stairs, wincing at the pain from my chest.

“It’s raining,” Bunny said, her voice trembling in a way that made it seem like she was about to cry. “I couldn’t make out the numbers. I think it started with A3. It was a green hovercab.”

When she stopped talking, Jakobe jumped on. “What happened, Wang Fan?”

Slamming the stairwell doors open, I leaped down multiple stairs at a time. “Explain later. Svea, anything on the cameras?”

“I’m trying.”

As I ran down the hall, Tao Heng said, “Call signs, people.”

I reached the door and, fueled by anger and urgency, kicked it with all the strength of my diamond cultivation base. Splinters of synthetic wood showered everywhere as it slammed open.

Tao Heng jumped in shock as I burst in.

“Shut the hell up, Tao Heng. Get the TVs packed. Now.”

As he started unplugging the monitors, I used my left hand to shove the equipment from the bed into a big duffel bag. Then I used my right elbow and left hand to zip the thing shut.

“What about the foggers?” Tao Heng asked. “They—”

“There’s no time,” I snapped. “If—”

“Johan just stepped out of the lobby bathroom,” Svea said.

“Fuck,” I growled. Keying the mic, I said, “Everyone, head to the rendezvous point.”

My wrist screamed as I placed my right hand onto Tao Heng’s forearm, then shoved my other hand into my pocket and snapped the teleportation slip.

**

Tao Heng didn’t say a thing when I jumped behind the wheel of the van, not even to ask why I was cradling my wrist in my lap. We picked the rest of the group up and returned to the hotel in silence. Back in our room, we sat down around the table. Tao Heng brought out beers for everyone except Bunny, who asked for water. She seemed shaken, and Jakobe had his arm wrapped around her shoulder and was rubbing her knee.

I popped a Pure Cloud Pill into my mouth and, ignoring the itching sensation of my rib and wrist bones being mended, told the story of what had played out.

When I finished, everyone sat there quietly for a long moment that stretched for minutes on end.

Jakobe was the one to break it. “Itsuki Saito must have heard the gunfire when you took down his father. Then he heard the second gunshot, and he put two and two together. He had a teleportation disc linked to the back corridor from when he entered, so he took Elena out rather than worry about whoever was coming in the front door.”

I shook my head. “He’s a Black Corpse lieutenant and a close-combat specialist. He took on Eldress Cheung single-handedly and held his own against Nicolas Kun. There’s no way he would just run away because he heard some gunshots.”

Drawing a pattern on the table in the condensation from her beer bottle, Svea said, “Maybe it was part of their plan all along. Dad goes out the front; Itsuki takes the back exit.”

Jakobe frowned. “They go to the hotel room, then the dad leaves, and Itsuki teleports out to take a cab? They’re rich, but why would they waste a teleportation disc on that? And if their plan was for Itsuki to take Elena somewhere in a cab, why go to the room to begin with?”

“Maybe he has enemies in Sinotech,” I said. “He’s worried they’re following him, so he created a diversion to confuse them. Snuck Elena out the back door.”

“If they were sneaking,” Bunny said, “why did I spot them so easily?”

I didn’t have an answer. We talked for an hour but made no headway. Frustrated, I drained my second beer bottle, pushed my chair back, and stood from the table. “I’m done for now, guys. I need to think.”

I went back into the room I was sharing with Tao Heng. As soon as the door closed, I clenched my hand into a fist and threw a punch at the dresser next to the bed. I stopped my fist before it made contact. No matter how much I wanted to break something, that wouldn’t do any good. Forcing my fingers from a fist into an open palm, I took a deep breath. I needed to calm myself and clear my head.

Sitting on the bed, I went into a Thermal cultivation breathing exercise routine. I’d lost energy on the mission thanks to using a Thermal Ripple Cloak, but I still had plenty in reserve, so instead of focusing on refilling, I went into the routine concentrated on expanding the root.

I lost myself in meditation. The flow of energy through my meridians became my universe, and time lost any meaning. As the chaos of my thoughts turned orderly and as the flow of energy became everything, something clicked in my mind. I suddenly felt like it all meant something. The energy. The meridians. The seas, roots, and diamonds. There was a point to it all, although it was just beyond my grasp. That state of deeper understanding didn’t last long, though. Eventually, I reached a point where the energy circulation didn’t seem to be doing anything. My root wasn’t expanding, and I felt like I was spinning my wheels. Whatever meaning existed in my cultivation, it seemed further away than ever. Ending the meditation session, I emerged from my trance to realize that someone was knocking on the door.

“Hold on,” I said, and the knocking stopped. I got to my feet. Although I had been focused during this cultivation session, I hadn’t been working particularly hard, so I barely had a sheen of sweat on my forehead. Stepping forward, I opened the door.

Elena stood there, flanked by everyone. Time froze as I wondered if perhaps I’d fallen asleep in the middle of meditating and this was really a dream. That was the only logical explanation. Elena? Right here?

For a moment, I wondered if she could be an imposter wearing an Igneus Mask, except we were burning Leaf Anvil Incense, so that wasn’t possible. It was really her.

While I stood there in shock, she stepped forward and embraced me, burying her face in my chest. I couldn’t have been more stunned.

I put my arms around her and looked over her head at everyone else. They seemed to be as shocked as I was. Svea looked at me and made an ‘I have no idea what’s going on’ gesture. I looked at Jakobe, and he mouthed, “We don’t know.” Then Bunny stepped forward quietly and closed the door.

As I held Elena, she squeezed me harder and harder, and I supposed that without my enhanced physique, it might have hurt.

“Elena…” I said, then trailed off.

She looked up, and I could see tears streaming down her face. Then her hands were behind my head, pulling me down so that our lips met. Veins filling with molten lava, I slipped my hands around her waist and tugged her tighter against me.

Then, just as abruptly as it had started, it ended. She turned her head away and pushed out of my arms.

“Are you okay?” I asked. “What happened?”

She dropped to a crouch at the foot of the bed, curling her arms around her knees as a cascade of honey-blonde hair fell, hiding her face.

I knelt next to her, my mind spinning. What the hell was going on?

I reached out and put my hand on her shoulder; she released her grip on her knees and reached up to clasp my fingers. And then she cried. She didn’t make any noise, but her shoulders shook.

Minutes passed.

Eventually, she calmed, and the heaving ceased. Taking a shuddering breath, she lifted her head and pulled her hair away from her face. Spotting a box of tissues on the bed stand, she leaned over to grab one. After clearing her nose, she tossed the tissue in the trash can and wiped her cheeks with the heels of her hands.

“Sorry,” she said.

“For what? Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m fine now.” Giving me a weak smile, she pushed up until she could sit on the edge of the bed. As I sat next to her, she reached out and took my hand again. “They told me about how you went to get me. I… I had no idea.”

I shrugged and smiled. “I’m just glad you’re safe. How…?”

“It was the coffee.”

“What?”

“The coffee. Itsuki bought you some back in the Fourth Earth. Do you remember?”

How could I forget? He had treated me to expensive peaberry coffee, the best brew I’d ever tasted. And I’d never enjoyed it again since that occasion.

“Yeah. I remember.”

“He put something in it. Something that stays in you and lets him track you. That’s how I got back to you.”

Damn you, Itsuki. “So… he let you go?”

She nodded.

“But why?” I asked

She looked away from me. “It’s complicated. To be honest, I’m not really sure. He betrayed his father to help me escape, except he thinks his father doesn’t realize that because of how you jumped in. So he’s going back.”

“To what end?”

“To be there when they get to the True Heaven. His father took some of my blood, and that’s all they need. They can go there anytime they want now.”

Chapter 59 – Phone Calls and Pendants

“What do we do now?” I asked. “You’re safe, and Johan Saito has no way to pick up our trail. Assuming Itsuki is telling the truth and actually intends to let us go free, we could go back to the Third or Fourth Earth. Get a place and lay low until everything blows over.”

Elena shook her head. “No. I have to get my blood back.”

“From Johan Saito,” I said, feeling dumb for stating the obvious.

“He didn’t just take a drop or a syringe-full. He took a whole pint the first time. Then he gave me some sort of medicinal pill to stimulate blood regeneration, and after that, he took more. And more. I lost track of how many times. He doesn’t just want my blood to get to the True Heaven. He’s going to do something with it later. Something bad.”

“Do you know what?”

“No. Neither did Itsuki. But Johan kept mentioning something called the Sun’s Blood and said that I was the key. Whatever he plans to do, I can’t just sit around and let him do it. He has my blood, which means I’m involved. Besides, haven’t you heard of blood puppetization or blood doppelgängers?”

“No.”

She bit her lip. “The point is, I’m getting that blood back. I have to.”

Although I took note of everything she’d told me, my detective’s mind flagged one sentence in particular. Neither did Itsuki, she’d said. What did that mean? I didn’t want to jump on her words, so I filed the point away to ask about later. “Elena, you’re a two-sea cultivator. Even with all of our friends working together, including me with my single diamond, we’re not even close to being a match for Johan Saito. Do you know how strong he is?”

“He has a Thermal diamond,” she replied. “Three roots: Gravitational, Organic, and Electric. On top of that, a Solar sea and a Wind sea.”

“Damn. That makes him….” I started to add numbers together.

“Over fifty times as strong as a normal person. Itsuki already did the math for me. And he made the same point as you. That his father is too strong for any of us to deal with. You caught him by surprise in that hotel, but it could easily have gone another way. I’m telling you, Wang Fan, I’m not going to stand for this. I won’t be a commodity that Johan Saito and his people fool around with as they please. They can’t just steal my blood and use it however they want. I’m going to take the fight to them.”

“I don’t disagree. But how do you plan to do it?”

“I’ll contact the sect. That’s the only option right now. I can’t do it alone.”

She had a point, but her third mention of Itsuki since she’d returned was too much for me to ignore. “What happened with Itsuki? You say he betrayed his father? Why?”

She stared at her hands folded in her lap, the tips of her index fingers making endless circles around each other. “He and I… we talked. About a lot of things. His father’s obsession with the True Heaven has nothing to do with Sinotech.”

“What does that mean? Is Itsuki... on our side now?”

“I don’t think so. He’s out for himself. But his goals align with ours. We can at least work together.”

There were multiple directions I could steer this conversation, and I wasn’t sure which one was best. I closed my eyes. “Elena, haven’t you wondered how we found you?”

Her fingers stopped moving, and she looked at me. “Oh yeah. How did you do that?”

I explained about Jakobe’s dreams, and gave her a brief rundown of our activities over the last month. Finally, I said, “As far as I’m concerned, the most important thing to consider in all of this is Jakobe’s dream of you on that altar in the True Heaven. We can’t be sure who’s holding the knife over you, but I’d bet everything it’s Johan Saito.”

I stopped talking to give her a chance to jump in, but she just sat there quietly.

“My point,” I continued, “is that it doesn’t seem wise for you to head directly toward the location where you know you’ll be thrown onto an altar to be sacrificed.”

She frowned. “Jakobe might think his visions are set in stone, but we don’t know that for sure. When was the last time he had that specific dream?”

I considered the question. “We haven’t talked about it in a while. He’s definitely dreamed of it since we left the Fourth Earth.”

I paused again, but for the second time, she remained silent. Based on how she just sat there with her head bowed, I could see she was hesitating.

“Why don’t we ask the others what they think?” I asked. “They should have a chance to weigh in on this, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, you’re right.”

Out in the main room, we joined everyone at the table, and Elena told her story. When she described the bonemetal restraints Johan Saito had strapped her into, I fumed inwardly. She seemed humiliated just talking about it, let alone having to live like that for a month.

All of us were horrified to hear that Johan hadn’t been gentle in how he took her blood. He didn’t use an IV or a syringe. Instead, he cut her wrist with an obsidian knife and gathered the blood in a stone bowl. The way she rubbed her wrist when she told the story made me wish I’d shot Johan Saito in the face instead of the chest.

She provided other details about her ordeal, ending with more about her interactions with Itsuki.

“His father put him in charge of taking care—of keeping watch over me. He tried to talk to me, but I wasn’t very nice to him.”

“I wouldn’t have been either,” Bunny said.

Elena smiled faintly. “At first. But there was nothing else to do, so eventually, we did talk a bit. He told me a lot of things.”

“Like what?” Jakobe said, echoing my very same question.

“He’s torn between loyalty to his father and loyalty to Sinotech. At least, he was torn. In the end, he decided to go against his father. To undermine his mission to get to the True Heaven. It wasn’t until we reached the Eighth Earth that Itsuki found the opportunity he needed to get me away from his father. Now here we are.”

There was a lot more going on than Elena was explaining, that much I could tell. What had prompted Itsuki to confide these things in her? Why did he make a completely illogical decision to defy his father, with whom he had worked tirelessly to reconcile? And why go running right back into his arms afterward? I didn’t buy the previous explanation, not that I felt Elena was lying about it. It seemed more like the typical Itsuki chicanery I’d come to expect from him.

But now wasn’t the moment to press Elena for answers. After she finished her story, I looked across the table and made eye contact with Jakobe. He was obviously thinking precisely the same thing as me. There was more to this situation than Elena was revealing.

“So even though you got away,” Tao Heng said, “his dad got your blood, and he’s still going to go to the True Heaven.”

“Yeah,” Elena said. “At least, I’m pretty sure. I have no idea what happened after I got away from him.”

“What about the people he came here to meet?” Svea asked.

“He didn’t offer any other explanation, at least not to me. Look, everyone, I want to thank you for everything you did to save me. It really makes me feel… I don’t know. Special. I never had friends like you before. Friends who would do so much for me.

“But I don’t expect you to keep fighting this fight. You could get hurt or even killed. Like I was telling Wang Fan earlier, I want to contact the sect and let them know what’s going on. Get the sect leader’s help to deal with Johan Saito. Once he finds out what’s going on, I’m sure he’ll help. So if any of you want to head back to the Fourth Earth, I completely understand. In fact, I think maybe you should. There’s no reason for any of you to risk your lives for me.”

“First of all,” Bunny said, “we’re not just going to abandon you now, Elena. We came all this way just to get you. You think we’ll give up on you now?”

“I think Bunny speaks for all of us,” I said. “Right?”

Svea and Tao Heng nodded.

“That’s a given,” Jakobe said. “We came here to help you, Elena, and we’ll see it through. The big problem is we know with absolute certainty that there are traitors in the Naturalism Sect. If word leaks to the wrong person, we could end up with Peacekeepers or Black Corpses knocking at our door. Or worse, just breaking it down.”

“The question is, how do we make contact?” Bunny asked. “Who do we talk to that we can trust?”

“I feel like we should call Ember,” Tao Heng said.

Elena looked at him. “Ember?”

“Long story,” I said. “And no, Tao Heng, that doesn’t make any sense.”

“It makes total sense,” he shot back. “Mathematically speaking, the likelihood of her being a traitor is minuscule, which means we know we can trust her.”

“Shut up, Tao Heng,” Svea said. “I bet you just thought she was hot.”

“That has nothing to do with it!”

“Enough,” I said. “First of all, I disagree with your logic, Tao Heng. If she’s the apprentice of a traitor, that makes her far more likely to be one herself. Who is Kang Jianhong’s Master?”

Tao Heng thought for a moment. “Elder Qing….”

“Exactly. Both of them are traitors. So, for the time being, Ember is off the table. If we’re going to call anyone, we need to start with Elder Hu. We already know we can trust him and Chief Elder Kang as well. Those two are our best bet.”

A short silence filled the room as we considered the situation. One by one, everyone voiced their agreement.

“I guess I’ll do the honors,” I said. Rising from the table, I went over to the phone and dialed Elder Hu’s number. It rang six times, and then I heard, “The number you have dialed is no longer in service, if—”

I hung up and looked back to the group at the table. “Not in service,” I said.

“What the hell?” Svea said.

“Maybe he got a new number,” Tao Heng suggested.

“Try someone else from the coterie,” Svea said. “Leslie Cai?”

“No,” I said. “She and Jian Hong are an item, remember? And Xian Xinyu is in their little clique, too.”

“How about someone from me and Bunny’s coterie?” Elena said. “Except, I’m not good with phone numbers.”

“Me either,” said Bunny. “That’s why we have a rolodex.”

“Jin Li,” I said. “I remember her number. But she doesn’t really know me. Bunny, do you want to give it a shot?”

“Sure,” she said, walking over to the phone. “What’s the number?”

“14-7932-1433-2255.”

As she dialed, I walked back to the table.

“Hello? Jin Li? This is Bunny.” She paused, and we could barely make out a voice talking on the other end. “Yeah, I know, we had to—” The voice interrupted and talked for a bit. “That’s why I was calling. We need to get in touch with Elder Hu, but—” More talking.

All eyes were glued on Bunny, and I could tell right away that whatever Jin Li was telling her, it wasn’t good. Bunny’s eyes went wide and then somewhat dull. She didn’t say anything for a minute or two, until finally ending the conversation with, “I see. Okay, don’t tell anyone I called, all right? I’ll be in touch again later. G’bye.”

She hung up and looked back at the table. “Elder Hu is dead, and Chief Elder Kang is missing.”

There were no exclamations of surprise, just silence.

Bunny walked back to the table and sat down.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Elder Hu was found dead. Decapitated and thrown off the roof of his apartment building. It made the local news, and the Glorious Peacekeepers investigated. Said it was a mugging. According to what Jin Li said, they never found his wallet.”

“Bullshit,” Jakobe said. “No mugger cuts off their victim’s head and throws the body off a high-rise.”

“And who mugs people on rooftops anyway?” I added. “We worked hundreds of cases in the Third Earth, including muggings-turned-murders. One thing I can guarantee is that none happened on a rooftop.”

“Nobody in any of the coteries believes it,” Bunny continued. “But there’s more. Chief Elder Kang went missing around the same time. And guess who’s standing in for the chief elder until someone gets officially assigned to replace him?” When no one responded, she said, “Elder Qing.”

“Fuck!” Svea shouted, banging the table with her fist, causing the sunflower seeds to jump into the air. “Sorry. Just. Fuck. Maybe that message you sent for Eldress Cheung didn’t go through to the grand elders, Wang Fan.”

“Worse,” I said, “maybe it did.”

The implication of my words sank in, slowly casting an even worse pall over the room. And as the silence stretched out, I thought back to Elder Hu, who had always treated me kindly and with fairness. Last I’d seen him was at that zont-rail station near the shadows of Purgatory.

“Henceforth, you may address me as Master,” he’d said. “We’ll do the kowtowing and whatnot later.”

There had never been time for that formal ceremony.

“Are we just completely screwed here?” Tao Heng said. “We basically don’t know who we can trust other than the sect leader himself. And it’s not like we can just call him.”

“There must be something we can do,” Jakobe said. “Some asset we’ve forgotten about. Come on, people, think. Svea, is there some computer disk we picked up somewhere that you never looked at? Wang Fan, do you have any clues tucked in the back of your mind that you haven’t dredged up recently? Anything.”

“I might have something,” Elena said, and she reached into her pocket to pull out a cloud-shaped pendant. “In this. My Master’s dimensional pendant. Itsuki got it when he rescued Wang Fan and me from Nicolas Kun. He kept it hidden from his father and gave it back to me when we parted ways.”

Thinking back to the events in the Third Shield, I said, “Itsuki implied there was evidence inside proving something about the True Heaven.”

“What if it has her distress talisman?” Bunny said, her eyes lighting up.

“Her what?” Tao Heng asked.

“You should pay better attention at meetings,” Svea said. “All elders in the sect have them. They’re talismans that allow an elder to send a direct message to Sect Leader Yu Yitai.”

“They’re only used in the direst emergencies,” Bunny continued excitedly, “and based on the way you told the story, I don’t think Eldress Cheung ever used hers.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Svea said. “Distress talismans are linked by blood to each individual elder. Even if that pendant still has Eldress Cheung’s talisman in it, we couldn’t use it.”

Elena looked up. “Eldress Cheung was my Master. But she was more than that. Because I have no family, she took me in as a daughter. We did a special ceremony where we intermingled our blood and offered it to our ancestors.”

Tao Heng’s eyes widened, “That means—”

“Elena should be able to use Eldress Cheung’s distress talisman!” Bunny said.

Elena looked at the pendant in her hand. “What do they look like?”

“Like an ordinary paper talisman,” Svea said. “But they can be put into just about anything. A paper envelope. Rolled up and put inside a pen. There was an eldress who visited our coterie to give a lecture last year who kept hers inside her bra.”

“I’ll look everywhere,” Elena said, closing her eyes. “Give me some time.”

After that, she remained motionless for seconds that led into minutes. Then the minutes started stacking, one on top of the other.

“I need a drink,” Tao Heng said. “And not beer. Anyone wanna join me for some baijiu?”

“Sure,” I said.

“I’m in,” Svea added.

Jakobe agreed as well, with Bunny saying she’d prefer tea.

Tao Heng produced a bottle of Luzhou he’d purchased the day before and retrieved thumb-sized drinking glasses from the kitchen, along with a stack of leftovers from the fridge. After we all had a few bites of food in our stomachs, Tao Heng poured a round of drinks.

“Here’s to our health,” he said, “and our continued survival.”

We drank together, and he refilled the glasses.

Around then, faint light swirled around Eldress Cheung’s pendant, then resolved into the shape of an envelope.

“Sorry,” Elena said. “It took me a while to find it.” Not pausing for a moment, she slid her finger into the envelope and tore open the top. Overturning it, she dumped out a long strip of yellow paper covered with spidery red calligraphy and arcane symbols.

“Bingo,” Svea said.

Interlude 11 – A Distress Message?

Yu Yitai had a hawk’s nose and a well-trimmed beard, with long hair tied back in a suave ponytail. He wore a navy tailored suit that was neither expensive nor cheap, with the sleeves pushed up to his elbows as if he had just been doing light work such as unloading boxes or washing dishes. He looked to be hardly past his mid-thirties, but he was actually one of the oldest people in the Nine Heavens and Ten Earths.

He sat at a two-thousand-year-old mahogany table that had been in his family for generations. It was nothing short of a miracle it had survived the War of Tribulation, as well as the Climb. The reddish-brown wood had grown on another continent in the old world, but now it was here in the Ninth Earth, a rare relic and a constant reminder to him of what things had been like before.

 In front of him was a scroll that also pre-dated the War of Tribulation by many centuries. He could recite the contents of the scroll from memory without the slightest effort, yet he still preferred to look at the words with his own eyes. He liked the smell of the ancient paper and the beauty of the delicate calligraphy. It conveyed more meaning.

“Using mind games to govern the state,” he read aloud from the scroll, “is being a thief of the state. Not using mind games to govern the state is being a blessing of the state.”

He smiled faintly. If the Old Master could have known things would reach a state like this, what would he have thought? Have I gone too far in ignoring his wisdom? Hei Luoxiang threw away those teachings centuries ago, and his Purpose is rapidly coming to completion. What have I done wrong?

Picking up the steaming cup of tea off to the side, he took a sip.

That was when he noticed a flare of light from the wall on the other side of the room. Putting the cup down, he rose from his chair and walked over to a rack of talismans, one of which now glowed faintly.

“A distress message?” he murmured. He looked at the name written in calligraphy at the top of the talisman in question. “Ursula Cheung.”

His heart nearly skipped a beat. Eldress Cheung fell in combat to Nicolas Kun. And she has no offspring. No one should be able to use this talisman. Unless she’s been puppetized. Wait. The girl who went missing was her apprentice and was also connected to Elder Hu and Chief Elder Kang. What does it all mean?

He sent a stream of energy into the talisman, activating it. The voice of a young woman entered his mind, speaking with a faint Southmer accent. “Greetings, Sect Leader Yu. I am Elena Ávila, senior disciple from the West Gate Coterie in the Fourth Earth and apprentice to Eldress Ursula Cheung. She and I intermingled blood in a rite of familyhood, which is how I’m using this talisman. I was recently taken captive by Johan Saito but escaped. He took my blood and plans to use it to get to the True Heaven and do evil things there, although I’m not completely sure what. My friends and I want to stop him, and we hope you can contact us with further instructions. We have a grid monkey on our team. Perhaps you could send her a secure message on the Grid….”

Yu Yitai went on to listen to the details of the contact method. A very clever way to set up a messaging protocol, he thought. What kind of grid monkey do you have on your team? Genius!

After the message was complete, the talisman crumbled into ash, and Yu Yitai walked back to his desk. Random disciples knowing about the True Heaven is bad. Very bad. But if they’re truly loyal….

Rolling up the scroll, he placed it back on the shelf to the side, then tapped a button beneath the desk, causing its surface to slide back and a color monitor to rise up along with a keyboard and mouse. As Yu Yitai extended his hands, letting the fingers rest on the keys, two wires emerged from either side of the keyboard and snapped into the jacks on his forearms. Then his fingers flew.

Chapter 60 – Midnight Snack

“I knew it!” Tao Heng said, laughing. “I totally knew it!”

“You didn’t know anything,” Svea said.

“I said from the beginning we should call Ember.”

“Before we got this new mission. You had no idea things would end up like this.”

“The details don’t matter. The fact remains that I was right all along.”

“All right, all right, Tao Heng,” I said. “You get credit for the idea to call Ember. Happy?”

“Yes, Chief Elder Wang.”

I nearly rolled my eyes. “Come on, stow it with the title.”

“Bro, the sect leader himself just appointed you a chief elder. Speaking of which, we have to name our new coterie!”

“We don’t name the coterie, Tao Heng,” Bunny said. “Wang Fan is our leader, and he gets to pick the name.”

“Can we submit suggestions, Chief Elder?” he said. “I vote for The Corpse Killer Coterie. It makes sense. You and Elena both took out heaps of Corpses down in the Third Earth, right?”

Before anything else could happen, a balled-up napkin smacked him in the nose. “Quiet, Tao Heng,” Svea said. “We have some ass-kicking to do, and I’d be happy to warm up on you.”

“She’s right, Tao Heng,” I said. “Consider this my first official order as a new chief elder. Shut it! And what’s more, we’re not calling Ember unless it makes sense based on the plan.”

Grunting, Tao Heng proceeded to pour another round of baijiu. Only moments had passed since Svea finished the ongrid chat with Sect Leader Yu Yitai. And less than an hour had gone by since Elena sent the message with the distress talisman. Yet, in that short time, everything had changed.

I was now an acting chief elder, in charge of a new coterie directly approved by Yu Yitai himself. Of course, the only members were my friends.

The most shocking revelation of the text conversation was that Yu Yitai was completely unaware that Elder Qing from the Fourth Earth was a traitor. I’d given him the string of code words from Eldress Cheung, and Yu Yitai had confirmed that the message was damning.

This is a very unfortunate turn of events, he had said via chat. The only possible explanation is that one of my grand elders is a traitor. However, it’s not entirely surprising. I’ve suspected for a long time that one of them has turned. The only question is which one.

“Let’s recap,” I said. “The sect leader is going to triple the security on the True Heaven and assign three elite coteries to keep an eye on Johan Saito, both in the Eighth Earth and the Ninth. In the meantime, we’re tasked with tracking down Nicolas Kun and bringing him in alive for Yu Yitai to interrogate, with the goal of exposing the traitor amongst the grand elders.

“The sect leader himself is funding our efforts, and the first thing I’m going to do is go to the South Third Strip and buy whatever medicinal pills, enhancement talismans, and cultivation manuals I can get my hands on to boost our cultivation bases. Meanwhile, Svea is going to check the Cross-Level Control systems to pin down which Earth Nicolas Kun is in.”

“After we get him, we go to the Ninth Earth,” Bunny said. She reached out and clasped Elena’s hand. “We’re going to get your blood back, Elena.”

“To Elena,” Tao Heng said, raising his glass, and we drank again. “By the way, what is this True Heaven thing anyway?”

“He didn’t say,” Svea replied.

“You’re not even supposed to know about it, Tao Heng,” I said. “Don’t forget that we’re all sworn to secrecy, so the best thing would be to just not bring it up.”

As we got deeper into the baijiu, our conversation shifted from talking about upcoming plans to random chatting. One bottle of alcohol wasn’t enough to get six people drunk, but it was enough to loosen our hearts for a short time. I even managed to stop thinking about how Itsuki Saito could apparently track me down on a whim, and how I’d failed to ask Yu Yitai about that when I had the chance.

Jakobe and Bunny retired first. Then Tao Heng.

Eventually, it was just me, Elena, and Svea at the table. Svea plied us with questions about the Third Earth for a while until her eyes started drooping.

“Alrighty,” she said, “time to crash. I’ll get my stuff together and drag it over to the next room so you two can have some privacy."

“Actually,” Elena said quickly, “I have some girl things I’d like to talk with you about if that’s okay.”

I saw Svea’s eyes flicker to look at me for a short moment before she said, “Sure, no problem. Night, Wang Fan.”

“Night, Svea.”

I can’t say I was happy Elena didn’t want to share the room with me. But it wasn’t much of a surprise; back in the Fourth Earth, we hadn’t even moved past the kissing stage. And that wasn’t even considering the ordeal she’d gone through.

After Svea was gone, Elena scooted her chair closer to me and leaned her head onto my shoulder. We sat there for a while, feeling each other’s warmth.

“I knew you’d come for me,” she said. “I kept telling myself you would.”

I smiled. “How could I not?”

Her hand slipped into mine, and then she ran a finger up my forearm, sending a wave of tingling sensations toward my throat.

Turning my head slightly, I pulled her chin toward mine. But instead of meeting my lips, she turned away. Thankfully, she couldn’t see the expression of mixed confusion and frustration on my face. What the hell was going on?

“I need some time,” she said. “Just a little bit of time.”

“Of course,” I said, forcing the frustration away from my voice. Thinking back to how badly I’d screwed up with Elena in the past, I decided to just let her do things her way. “You take however much time you need.”

Squeezing my forearm, she slid her chair back and stood. “Good night, Wang Fan.”

As I looked up at her, she leaned over and kissed me on the forehead, then my temple, and then my cheek. And while I was extremely tempted to turn my head at the very last second to meet her lips, I held back.

Then she was gone.

I sat at the table for a few minutes cracking sunflower seeds and trying to wrap my mind around her behavior. Then I drank a big glass of water and went into the bedroom to sleep, only to be met by Tao Heng’s thunderous snoring.

I was tired, but I couldn’t fall asleep. It wasn’t the snoring; my ex, Qian Cui, actually snored even worse than Tao Heng. Rather, my mind kept running over the events of the day, and now that I finally had a chance to step back and analyze things, questions kept popping up. Troublesome questions that I didn’t really want to think about. After tossing and turning for what must have been an hour, I got up to answer a call of nature. Then I headed around the corner to the kitchen to pour another glass of water.

There, I saw Bunny Bai with her head in one of the cupboards next to the refrigerator. She was wearing fuzzy black slippers and a long white nightgown with a frilly collar and cuffs.

“Hey,” I said quietly, not wanting to startle her.

Looking around at me, she said, “Hi. Insomnia?”

“Yeah,” I said, refilling my glass from the water dispenser.

Pulling a paper cup of instant noodles out of the cupboard, she said, “Midnight snack. Care to join me?”

Come to think of it, my stomach was grumbling a bit, and I didn’t feel like I was going to fall asleep anytime soon. “Sure,” I said, sitting at the bar that separated the kitchen from the main room.

She grabbed a second cup of noodles, then filled them both with boiling water from the dispenser. Pinning the paper lids in place with the plastic forks, she slid one to me, then went over to get some drinking water for herself. Finally, she sat down opposite me on the other side of the bar.

“Happy to have Elena back?” she asked.

“Of course.”

She looked at me for a moment. “That didn’t sound very enthusiastic.”

“I’m tired, that’s all.”

“Didn’t you say you couldn’t sleep?”

Raising my hands in a ‘you caught me’ gesture, I said, “I thought I was the detective around here, not you, Bunny.”

She laughed softly. “Jakobe’s rubbing off on me. Elena is acting a bit strange, isn’t she?”

“You noticed?”

“We lived together for months. I got to know her pretty well.”

Glancing over my shoulder in the direction of the rooms briefly, I lowered my voice and said, “I tried to kiss her, and she turned away.”

She looked surprised. “That again? Didn’t you two make up? Back in the Third Earth, after the Blue Mountain building?”

“Yeah,” I said. “And she kissed me then. A lot. She also kissed me earlier tonight, in the room. It’s weird.”

“She’s complicated, Wang Fan. Has she ever talked about her family with you?”

I’ve lost everyone, Officer. Everyone. I used to have a brother and parents, but not anymore. That’s what Elena told me when we first met. I never asked her for further details about that, as the right moment had never arisen. “Not much. I know she lost her family.”

Bunny peeled the paper lid off her noodles and blew the steam away from her. “It’s not my place to tell her story. But let’s just say she’s had a lot of tragedy in her life. My guess is that this whole thing with the Saitos rattled her a lot worse than she’s letting on. She needs some time, that’s all.”

I peeled the lid off my noodles. “I guess you’re right.”

“You know,” she said, “a lot of cultivators have issues. The Naturalism Sect doesn’t target happy, oblivious citizens for recruitment. People who completely buy into Sinotech propaganda aren’t going to risk their lives for a dream.”

“What about you, Bunny?” I asked. “What’s your story?”

She grinned. “Always digging, huh ‘Mr. Detective?’”

“It’s not like that. I’m just curious.”

She slurped some noodles. “I said ‘a lot of’ cultivators have issues. But not all of them. And not me. I’m just a normal girl.”

“No skeletons in the closet, huh?” I said with a smile.

“I wish. Sounds exciting. I’m a third-generation cultivator. Grandparents and parents were all members of the sect. I was raised into it.”

“It must be nice to have a family like that.”

“It was. Only Mom is alive nowadays. The rest have passed. Dad got hit by a car. Grandpa Bai died of the Curse. The others died of old age. None of them were lucky enough to get approved for Thermal cultivation. I’m the first in my family.”

“Sorry to hear about all that,” I said, feeling a sudden tingle of melancholy. “You know, my dad passed in a car crash, too.”

“My condolences,” she said.

“Thanks.”

We both slurped some more noodles.

“At least we all have each other, right?” Bunny said. “Friends who stick together can be like a family.”

“You’re right,” I said.

Finishing her noodles, she deposited the cup and fork into the trash can. “And now, good night for the second time, Wang Fan. Don’t worry, everything will work out with Elena. I’m sure of it.”

“G’night to you too, Bunny.”

She left me alone in the kitchen, where I finished my noodles, cleaned up, then went back to bed. Tao Heng had turned onto his side and wasn’t snoring.

This time, sleep took me within minutes.

Chapter 61 – Back to the Sixth Earth

Elena took the trip with me to the South Third Strip to visit Isabel Zeng’s shop. On the street, she held my hand, and on the zont-rail, she wrapped her arms around me. Thinking back to Bunny’s advice from the night before, I pushed any confusion or frustration to the back of my mind and just enjoyed the feeling of her being next to me.

When Isabel realized how much money we were willing to spend, her bubble of gum popped, plastering itself onto her chin and lips and forcing her to go into the back of the shop to clean up.

She emerged with a foolish grin and a freshly made-up face. “And here I thought you were throwing money around last time. It’s going to take me a while to get this order together. Want to wait in the lounge? I’ll come get you when it’s ready. Maybe thirty minutes or so.”

“Sure,” I said.

Elena and I went to the lounge, where we sat at the bar and chatted randomly while we waited. If I wasn’t a detective used to questioning suspects, I might not have noticed that she kept steering the conversation away from her ordeal. I let her. We exchanged stories from our childhood. I told her of schoolyard scraps I’d gotten in and the friends I’d had in middle school. I learned about how she’d helped her mother run a street food cart and how she eventually dropped out of high school to help the family with medical bills of some sort. I told her an embarrassing story about a pet dog I’d had once, and she explained how, when she was young, she’d always wanted a pet frog but had never been able to afford one.

During a lull in the conversation, I realized someone had sidled up to me at the bar. I looked over to see a swarthy fellow with a pink mohawk and half his face tattooed.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

“Saw you come out of Zeng’s,” he said.

“Yeah? So?”

He looked around, then lowered his voice and said, “She deals in goods, not services. You lookin’ for services?”

“What kind?”

“You tell me. Need muscle? A genetics expert? I know all the famous free agents. Angela Hawk. Yamashita. The Doctor. The Six-Root Rogue. You name a name, I can get you a number. Maybe even an actual meeting. For the right price.”

Six-Root Rogue? If this person’s name was indicative of their cultivation rating, it meant they could theoretically be on the same level as Johan Saito, and definitely far beyond Nicolas Kun. For a second or two, I considered the idea of getting hired help. But in the end, it seemed too risky.

“We’re good, bro,” I said. “Thanks for the offer.”

“Suit yourself,” he replied and drifted away.

Without touching on any serious subjects, Elena and I continued talking until Isabel came to get us. Then, dimensional pendants filled with highly illegal cultivation resources, we boarded the zont-rail and returned to the hotel room.

“Kun’s still in the Sixth Earth,” Svea said as soon as we were in the door. “It’s not going to be easy to track down his exact location, though.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” I replied. “I was thinking about the situation. Presumably he was at the Summer Meadows looking for us, right? When he realized we weren’t there, do you think he went to the trouble of going to another hotel? Or did he book a room right there and stick around doing whatever he’s doing?”

“There’s no way he stayed at the Summer Meadows,” Jakobe said. “He knows we want Eldress Cheung back, and also knows we might get in touch with the sect. Staying there would make him a sitting duck.”

“Wait,” Svea said. “Remember back in the Blue Mountain Commerce Building, how easy it was to figure out which room he was staying in?”

Tao Heng chuckled. “He used his real name.”

“That’s true,” I said. “The main word Itsuki used to describe him was: arrogant. He couldn’t possibly have….” I trailed off, and we exchanged glances. Picking up the phone, I dialed out of the Eight Earth.

My call was answered after two rings. “Summer Meadows Hotel, how can I help you?”

“Can you put me through to one of your guests? I’m not sure of the room number, but his name is Nicolas Kun.”

“Which Kun is that?”

“Like from the Eight Trigrams.”

“Please hold.” I heard the clatter of keyboard typing. “Yes, he’s a guest here. I’ll connect you right now.”

The line clicked, and before it could ring, I put the phone down.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Jakobe said.

“He’s there. Summer Meadows.” I turned to Svea. “See? Things are already shaping up.”

“Priorities, people, priorities,” Tao Heng said. “Did you get everything on the list, Chief Elder?”

Tapping into my dimensional pendant, I pulled out Tao Heng’s items. “She didn’t have everything we wanted. But whatever she didn’t have, there were alternatives. For you, I picked up two Bio-Heaven Lozenges and a stick of Sunrise Incense.”

Tao Heng let loose a whoop as I handed him everything.

“Elena, you have Svea’s stuff, right?”

“Yeah,” she said. “There weren’t any Amino Vermillion Pills in stock, but we did get a Yang Meridian Pearl, which is actually rarer and more effective.”

“Damn,” Svea said, accepting the pearl, her eyes flickering as they reflected some of the blue light it emanated. “It’s beautiful.”

We distributed the various resources we’d purchased and then spent the rest of the day meditating and working on our cultivation. Tao Heng and Bunny were traditionalists who favored the belief that rushing cultivation was dangerous. But given that the sect leader himself had urged us to do so, they put their beliefs aside.

Everyone made significant progress, leaving me wondering what Yu Yitai would do regarding our sect ranking. Would he simply promote us based on our cultivation level? Or would we have to go through all the testing and formalities, similar to what I’d gone through in the Fourth Earth? Probably the latter, if my previous experience was any indication of how Yu Yitai wanted his sect run.

By the end of the day, Jakobe had pushed his Wind sea to the brink of the root level. Tao Heng accomplished the same with his Solar sea.

Bunny had chosen a different route. Instead of strengthening her existing cultivation base, she added to it. It was something she’d been struggling with for many months before our current situation, but access to the proper medicinal pills gave her the edge she needed. In addition to the Wind and Thermal seas that she already possessed, she added a Gravitational sea. And after forming the third sea, she had the time to strengthen her Thermal sea. She was now a three-sea cultivator, with her Wind sea being the strongest and just on the verge of reaching the root level. By this point, if you added everything up on paper, Bunny was probably stronger than Itsuki Saito.

It made me wonder: why did Itsuki have such a low cultivation base? His family certainly had the money to buy whatever pills or resources he might need to advance. Perhaps he was also a traditionalist like Tao Heng and Bunny.

Svea added to her cultivation base, successfully forming an Electric sea and strengthening her Gravitational sea. She was also a three-sea cultivator now, her strength lying in her Organic sea, which was poised on the point of a breakthrough.

As for me, I didn’t make any dramatic progress. Although I used a few medicinal pills to grow slightly stronger, my main focus was on the second technique in the Ossientum memorandum, Ossientum Metalum Growth. After several hours of practice, I managed to produce a sliver of bonemetal. Then I honed my skill until I could create small bonemetal objects of different sizes and shapes. I’d come up with a few concepts for combat applications of Bone cultivation, but nothing that felt truly amazing. Forming throwing stars or knives could theoretically be useful in a pinch, but given the resources and equipment I had on hand, I couldn’t imagine a scenario where I would have to rely on weapons like that. Granted, Itsuki’s bonemetal sword was flashy, but I’d started to wonder what advantages it offered when dealing with techniques like Fulmina Shield or Baromatris. What was more, being able to create a weapon didn’t automatically make you able to use it. Who knew how many years of sword training Itsuki had under his belt.

There had to be something out there that Bone cultivation was good for in combat.

It was Elena who accomplished the most. She pushed her Solar sea over the edge, turning it into a root. And with the momentum from the breakthrough, she advanced it past the initial, weakest state, resulting in her being roughly on the same level of strength as Bunny.

After everything was said and done, our group had made significant progress. In terms of the numbers and raw power, we surpassed Nicolas Kun by at least double. That said, I wouldn’t put the weaker ones in our group, Tao Heng and Jakobe, at risk. If open fighting broke out with Nicolas Kun, he could kill cultivators like them with hardly any effort.

In terms of fighting, I was confident that the strength from my Bone diamond and my utilitarian Thermal cultivation techniques, combined with the raw assault power of Elena’s solar root, would be enough to handle Nicolas Kun. Of course, there was also Eldress Cheung to consider. On the one hand, I knew that taking them captive without a fight was the safest option. But after the humiliation both Elena and I had suffered at his hands, I badly wanted to rough Nicolas up before slapping a paliprox-D patch onto his neck.

With Svea’s access to Cross-Level Control, the trip back down to the Sixth Earth went just as smoothly as the trip up. Tao Heng won rock-paper-scissors and, with it, the right to drive. Our van sailed into the aerial traffic lanes outside the vert-rail station shortly after midnight. Traffic was light, and the rain wasn’t bad. Before we knew it, we were pulling into the Summer Meadows’ parking garage.

Svea was into the hotel’s local grid before Tao Heng had even parked.

“I got the camera systems,” she said, sandwiched in the back of the van with Elena on one side and Bunny on the other. “Wow. Light security for such an expensive place. We should have been more careful back when we were staying here. Hold on.” After a flurry of typing, she said, “Alrighty, Jakobe, can you hold that TV up?”

He complied, and she grabbed a spare wire and connected the screen to her keyboard.

“Looks like they keep a day’s worth of recordings. Not bad.”

After a few minutes of skimming through the recorded video footage, we confirmed that both Nicolas Kun and Eldress Cheung were in the hotel room. Returning to the live feed, Svea said, “So what’s the plan?”

“Any chance you can get a schematic of the hotel?” I asked. “What if—”

“Brother, look,” Jakobe interrupted.

I looked back into the van at the screen to see Eldress Cheung emerging from the room.

“Master,” Elena murmured.

“Where’s she going?” Tao Heng said.

“Toward the elevator,” Svea said. “Let me switch the feed.” She tapped a few keys, and as Eldress Cheung stepped into the elevator, the screen switched to that camera.

“She’s going to the bottom floor.”

“Tao Heng,” I said, “start the van back up and take us down to street level.”

“You got it, boss.”

“Bunny, the radios are in the cabinet behind you. Mind getting them out? And Jakobe, toss me two of those paliprox sprayers.” Bunny gave me the radio, and I strapped it on.

“Let’s just hope she goes out the front entrance,” Elena said.

“Yeah,” I said, catching the two paliprox sprayers and clipping them to my belt. “And that I can get her alone somewhere.”

I hopped out of the van just as Eldress Cheung was walking out of the front of the hotel. Throwing on an Igneus Mask disguise that turned me into a random person, I hurried after her through the crowd.

“Try to keep eyes on her from above,” I said into the mic.

“Roger wilco,” Tao Heng replied. About a minute later, he said, “She just went into the corner store.”

“I saw,” I said, stopping at a magazine stand, where I bought a periodical devoted to bowling and then leaned up against the side of the building in a way that let me maintain a line of sight on the store.

She came out only three minutes later with a bottle of wine in her hands.

“He made her go buy a bottle of wine?” Tao Heng said, and right before he cut the mic, I heard Elena saying something angrily in the background in Southmer.

“Ask Svea to cut the cams in the elevator,” I said.

“Copy that,” Tao Heng said.

I kept my eyes on my magazine as Eldress Cheung walked right past me. Then I folded it up, put it under my arm, and stepped into the flow of foot traffic. She walked woodenly back into the hotel and straight toward the elevator. I followed her inside, placing myself between her and the door.

An overweight businessman with a supermodel hanging to his elbow joined us inside, but he got off on the third floor. As soon as the doors closed again, I pulled the spray bottle out, aimed it over my shoulder, and let it loose. It filled Eldress Cheung’s face, provoking a shriek of rage. I saw light flare as she summoned a Solis Gauntlet, but before she could use it, her hand went slack, and she collapsed. I spun, grabbing her by the armpits to prevent her from hitting the ground. Then I threw her over my shoulders.

“I got her,” I said. “Meet me in the parking garage.”

There wasn’t room for all of us in the van, so everyone piled out except Svea, who continued to monitor the hallway via the camera she’d tapped into.

Placing a black paliprox-D patch to Eldress Cheung’s neck, I laid her down in the back in the van.

“This is how plans are supposed to work,” Tao Heng said. “Smooth and simple.”

“I feel like plans usually go the opposite for me,” Elena said. “What now, Wang Fan?”

“I’ll use an Igneus Mask to impersonate her,” I said. “Walk in and spray Kun in the face as well.”

“You’re almost a foot taller than her, brother,” Jakobe said.

“I’ll go,” Elena said, turning to look at me. “It has to be me.”

My Igneus Mask was now powerful enough that I could make my entire body seem a different size. But I knew that Elena needed this. Besides, she was a lot more familiar with Eldress Cheung, which could help. I nodded. “I’ll be right behind you with a Thermal Ripple Cloak. Between the two of us, he won’t stand a chance. Let’s hurry. He’s expecting her back any minute.”

We quickly equipped ourselves, including a handful of zip ties to bind our quarry once we had him. Two minutes later, we were back in the elevator. Elena was the spitting image of Eldress Cheung, with a wine bottle in one hand and a paliprox sprayer in the other. I was right behind her, invisible, my Spitter out and on stun mode.

The elevator door opened, and we walked down the hall. Just before we reached the door, it opened, and Nicolas Kun glowered at Elena.

“What took you so long, bitch?” he said. “Give me that wine.”

Elena took two steps further, extended the wine bottle, and sprayed him in the face as he reached to take it.

He never saw it coming; the paliprox spray enveloped him before he could move a muscle.

Chapter 62 – A White Patch

Despite being caught off guard, Nicolas Kun reacted quickly, using divine sense to dispel the spray around him.

Shit, he was reacting without even thinking, and my instincts were telling me the situation was already going badly. Had he inhaled any of the spray? This wasn’t supposed to turn into a full-on brawl.

As he staggered backward, he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a white patch which he barely managed to peel the back off of and stick onto his neck before he toppled backward.

This was definitely bad. That white patch was going to clear his system of drugs, including the paliprox. In other words, it was highly likely we could be facing a full-fledged high-level cultivator in a matter of moments.

It suddenly occurred to me that Elena probably hadn’t seen those white patches in action. Either that, or she was too focused on venting her anger; she stepped forward, grabbed Nicolas Kun by the front of his shirt to prevent him from hitting the ground, and growled, “This is for what you did to my Master!”

Before I could do anything, she balled her hand into a fist and punched him in the face.

“Elena, that patch—”

She punched him again, causing his head to jerk back.

“—it’ll clear the paliprox—”

She went in for a third blow, which didn’t land. He reached up and intercepted her fist, his eyes fluttering open at the same time.

“What…?” he said groggily.

“I’m going to make you pay,” Elena said through gritted teeth, and she tried to rip her fist out of his grip, but failed.

“You little—” he said, but got cut off as she kneed him between the legs and shoved him backward. At the same time, she tapped the pendant hanging around her neck, causing her cultivator robe to ripple out around her. The flow of energy interrupted my Igneus Mask, and her disguise dropped, causing Nicolas’ eyes to flicker with recognition.

I tried to line up a shot with my Spitter, but Elena was still standing right in front of me, blocking my line of sight. I was a good shot, but not good enough that I wanted to try shooting past her while she was in motion.

Nicolas grunted as he fell back into a sitting position. I had to admit he deserved whatever high position he occupied in the Corpses, if for nothing else than his combat expertise. Before he even hit the ground, he flashed a hand sign, causing crackling lightning to spread out in front of him.

Elena was no trained combat expert like him, but at least she had good instincts. As Nicolas Kun’s Fulmina Shield appeared, she put one hand on top of the other, flicked her thumbs out, and then drew her hands away from each other to summon a white spiral of light.

Not hesitating for a microsecond, Elena lashed out with the whip, which hit the shield, provoking a shower of sparks.

“Your Master tried using a Suna Flail on me, too,” Nicolas said, getting onto his haunches. “It didn’t work.”

Meanwhile, I stepped forward and to the side, earning me a better line of sight. Unfortunately, that Fulmina Shield made it impossible to tag him with a Spitter beam.

Elena’s whip hit the shield again, and sparks showered down, but nothing else. Dammit. I knew she was pissed and wanted to throttle Nicolas Kun. Hell, so did I. But if we didn’t end this fight quickly, we might not get out alive.

Keep focused, Elena, I projected via divine sense. Use your emotions as fuel, don’t let them control you.

I know, she replied. I’m going to make him drop that shield. Be ready with your Spitter.

Got it.

“If Master hadn’t been focused on buying us time, I bet she would have used this,” Elena said. Her hands flashed, and a pillar of light rose up almost directly under Nicolas, as wide as a cooking wok.

He danced back to avoid it, simultaneously dropping the shield. “Even Black Corpse recruits train in dealing with Pillars of Sol,” he said. “You think—”

I let loose a beam from my Spitter, which was invisible within the radius of my Thermal Ripple Cloak, but quickly turned into crackling blue light once outside of it. Instead of tagging his face, it hit his suit collar, which was thick enough that the beam didn’t reach his skin.

“Detective Wang is here as well?” he said. “What a lovely reunion!”

Before the pillar of burning light could reach the ceiling and eat a hole through it, Elena dispelled it, then prepared to go through another hand sign. That was when Kun threw his hands out, unleashing a blast of wind that sent Elena staggering back toward me. I stopped her motion by placing my palm on her back, and the two of us pushed forward against the wind.

The wind ceased, and both Elena and I lurched forward. However, Elena again proved herself to be instinctively relentless and undaunted in combat; even before her foot hit the ground in front of her, she swung the bright whip of light toward Nicolas. As it flew through the air, it hit a lamp on the table to the side, slicing it in half.

Nicolas reacted with blinding speed, summoning a wind vortex that looked like a mouth, which grabbed the Suna Flail. Then he jerked his hand, and the vortex flew backward, tugging Elena off balance until she let go of the whip, causing it to vanish.

I tapped the trigger of my Spitter, and crackling blue light stabbed into Nicolas Kun’s shoulder. Unfortunately, the stun beam was too weak to penetrate the cloth of his suit.

“Bleeding Spider here,” Tao Heng said on the radio. “What’s happening?”

There obviously wasn’t time to respond.

Ignoring me and my Spitter, Nicolas stepped forward, and while Elena was still off-balance, he grabbed her by the hair and flung her to the side, where she hit the wall with a thud that made me wince. As she dropped down, I pulled the trigger again, hitting Nicolas in the chest, but then he threw up another shield of lightning.

“You bugs are really starting to annoy me.” His fingers flashed, and before I knew what was happening, the air pressure around me changed. My ears popped, a wave of nausea rose up in me, and I felt intense dizziness filling my head. My Thermal Ripple Cloak dropped. Grinning, Nicolas said, “Baromatris can—”

Before he could say another thing, a whip of bright light slashed toward him, and he leaned backward from the waist, just barely avoiding the blow.

This long-range fighting wasn’t working. Nicolas Kun could defend himself too easily with Electric cultivation techniques, and his Wind abilities were perfectly suited to dealing with enemies at a distance. I needed to get my hands on him. I lunged forward.

“Guys?” Tao Heng said. “Are you okay?”

As Nicolas Kun leaned back up, I slammed into him, grabbing him beneath the thigh and behind the back. A moment later, we were on the ground, and I scrambled behind him, my hand sliding around his neck. Unfortunately, while he wasn’t a close-combat specialist, he was clearly no stranger to grappling. Before my second arm could lock in place, he grabbed it and tried to pull it away from him. In response, I slid it back, locking my two hands together, then pushed my elbow into his back and started squeezing with all my might.

He battered at my arm for only a moment before abandoning the effort and launching into another hand sign. Shimmering lights flared around us and a feeling like sparks of electricity. A millisecond later, I found myself staring at the ceiling, which was only about a foot away from my nose.

Electric cultivators could perform teleportations, and that was exactly what Nicolas had done. I was beneath him, and now we were eight feet in the air. Clearly, he was hoping that either the surprise or the impact when we fell back to the ground would be enough to break my grip.

He was mistaken.

As I felt us go weightless and plummet back toward the floor, I tightened my grip and braced myself for impact. We slammed onto the carpeted ground, me back first, him onto me. But I held firm. A little fall like that couldn’t hurt a diamond cultivator. Seeing his trick had failed, Nicolas again started flailing in an attempt to escape. I kept squeezing, Elena just barely registering in my peripheral vision, hovering off to the side in combat readiness.

A few seconds later, he went limp.

Scrambling out from beneath him, I ripped the white patch off of his neck, then pulled out my paliprox sprayer, opened his mouth, and discharged the entire contents into him. For good measure, I pulled out a patch and put it on his neck as well.

That was when Elena stepped over, and to my surprise, she stomped him right in the hip, as hard as she could. I got the feeling she might have been aiming for his groin, but the angle was wrong.

Spitting something in Southmer, she slammed her foot into him a second time.

“I think that’s good enough,” I said.

Growling, she kicked him one more time before stepping back.

“Guys, do you need backup?” Tao Heng said, and this time his voice was taut with urgency.

I keyed my mic. “We got him. Is the way clear?”

Pulling the zip ties out of my pocket, I bound his ankles together, then his wrists. Next, I used zip ties to secure his fingers so he couldn’t perform any hand signs, just in case he somehow regained consciousness unexpectedly. Heaving him off the ground, I threw him over my shoulder.

“You can go,” Tao Heng replied. “Svea says nobody’s in the hall or elevator.”

I looked at Elena and gave a grin. “We did it.”

She grinned back. “Yeah. Come on, let’s go.”

Interlude 12 – Like Soldiers

Johan Saito leaned closer to the terrarium and knocked on the glass. On the other side, a multi-colored mantis that had been climbing up an artificial tree branch stopped moving, its antennae twitching back and forth slightly.

“Please don’t tap the glass,” said the man behind him, who was tall and gaunt with pasty skin that hung loosely off of sharply angled facial bones.

“My apologies, Doctor,” Johan replied, leaning back and stepping over to the next terrarium. The entire room had such terrariums built into the walls, and the room itself was dimly lit with white recessed floor lighting. The floor was polished bonemetal, and the walls lined synthetic wood.

“I find all of this so very intriguing,” Johan said. “These are the ones?”

“Yes,” replied the Doctor, stepping next to Johan and looking into the terrarium with him. “The third successful generation.”

Johan narrowed his eyes as he scanned the terrarium. Then he closed them. “I don’t see anything. Not with divine sense either. Good.”

“When I transfer ownership to you, you’ll be able to control them. They’ll remain motionless and dormant until you issue a command. Watch.”

Johan sensed the Doctor extend his divine sense into the terrarium, whereupon eight cockroaches scuttled out from underneath leaves, rocks, and various other terrain elements. Within two seconds, they were lined up in front of the glass, like soldiers in front of a drill sergeant.

“Amazing,” Johan said, a wide grin on his face. “And their bite is effective?”

“Very. Will you be taking them with you today?”

“Yes. Prepare them. I’ll be leaving shortly. And remember, as per our agreement, these are never to be offered on the open market.”

“I haven’t forgotten, and I completely understand the ramifications if these beauties became available publicly. Please, follow me to the waiting room.”

Chapter 63 – Revelations in the Ninth Earth

The Ninth Earth was hot and dark. Thankfully, Svea’s van had a decent air-cooling system. Even though it was still early afternoon, the Heaven-Propping Pillar provided so little illumination that the streetlights were all on. Those that functioned.

In the Third Earth, the alleys were piled with trash, but the streets and sidewalks were generally clear. The Fourth Earth was bad, but not dramatically worse than the Third. And while the Eighth wasn’t perfect, it might as well have been an operating room compared to the Ninth Earth, which looked and smelled like a massive trash heap.

Graffiti covered more graffiti on virtually every surface, a chaotic mess that made you dizzy just looking at it. There were literally piles of trash bags on every other corner, and some entire lots filled with heaps of garbage. There were more abandoned buildings than I’d ever seen in my life, and it seemed to rain constantly everywhere, creating puddles, pools, and in some cases lakes for the trash to ferment in.

The Peacekeeper presence was minimal, and the vehicles we did see were all armored, making them look more like tanks than cars. But that was only within the 2nd Ring Road. Past that point, we didn’t see any Peacekeepers at all.

The only nice thing about the place was that it wasn’t as crowded. In fact, it felt eerily empty in many spots. As we drove along, we passed entire high-rise complexes that were either abandoned or had never been completed. There were even stretches of open ground filled with nothing but puddles of rainwater and stunted vegetation.

Another thing that jumped out was the rain. It never stopped. Even in the Eighth Earth, there were times when certain areas were rain-free. But not here.

“Mierda,” Elena said, “this place is depressing.”

“I almost can’t believe our sect’s headquarters is here,” Svea said.

“I can think of lots of reasons to pick this place,” I said. “Plenty of space to hide. Fewer Peacekeepers.”

“Exactly what I was thinking,” Elena said.

As we approached the 3rd Ring Road, we stopped at a red light, and I saw an old man shambling across the street in front of me. He was clad in a bulky poncho and a floppy rain hat, but I could still see the scaly lesions on his hands. He was Cursed.

After passing out of the brightness of our headlights, he rounded the front of the car, stopped a pace from the window, and held out cupped hands toward me, fingers loose so the rain didn’t pool in his palms. I shuddered at the thought of being exposed to the rain so casually.

“He wants money,” Svea said.

“But he has the Curse,” Elena said.

“The Cursed deserve pity more than anyone,” I said. I pulled out a few bills and rolled down the window. Hot, humid air flooded into the van. Folding the bills a few times over, I tossed them into the man’s hands.

“May the Lord bless you,” the man said.

“And you,” I replied. I rolled the window back up and continued onward.

Following the instructions given by Sect Leader Yu, we drove beyond the 3rd Ring Road to a hotel called the Celestial Mercy Resort. The name didn’t seem to fit, but then again, neither did the names of any of the other places we passed along the way. If cheerful and boisterous names could ward off the Curse, this place would have been a paradise. The hotel looked like a fortress, with huge bonecrete walls topped by razor wire and rusty, wrought-iron spikes. The walls were tall enough that I couldn’t tell if there was a roof or not. The enormous metal gate at the front was closed, and the guard booth to the side had a single mirrored window protected by metal bars. I stopped the van in front of the gate, then opened up an umbrella and stepped out into the rain and heat. It was so hot I wondered how people stayed out in the open for any amount of time at all.

Sweat beading on my brow, I pushed the doorbell next to the guard booth window, and a moment later, the speaker built into the window emitted a metallic voice.

“Got a reservation?”

“Yeah,” I replied, and I repeated the information Sect Leader Yu had said to use. “Surname Yang. Given name Guo.”

Silence for a moment. “Reservation code?”

I recited a string of numbers and letters.

“Welcome to the Celestial Mercy. You’re expected. You have suite A-2, first one on the left. I’ll open the gate, key’s in the door. Go ahead and bring the ‘package’ inside, then wait for further instructions.”

“I have some friends on the way.” I caught some motion out of the corner of my eye and saw a cab pulling up. “In fact, that’s probably them.”

“They can walk in with you.”

Nodding, I headed back to the van, waving at Jakobe as he stepped out of the cab and opened an umbrella for Bunny. He waved back, and I made a beckoning gesture indicating he should follow us. The gate slid open with surprising fluidity, and I drove inside.

Once through the entrance tunnel, we were surprised to find the interior of the complex to be drastically different from the outside. For one thing, there was a roof covering, so there wasn’t any rain. And to my shock, the interior ceiling was bright blue, with white decorations that I knew were supposed to represent clouds.

The entire complex was brightly lit, and on top of that, everything was clean. A single street ran the length of the complex, with six two-story villas, three on each side. They had front yards with artificial grass and hedges behind fences of burnished copper. The place seemed newly constructed, but it was hard to tell. I didn’t see any other cars present and wondered if that meant we were the only guests.

I backed the van into the parking space in front of suite A-2. We climbed out as Jakobe and the others approached. Another difference from the outside was the air temperature; it was cool and refreshing, and there was even a light breeze.

“What the hell is this place?” Tao Heng said.

I sent some divine sense out and immediately ‘saw’ that the whole place rested on an enormous spell formation.

“It looks like it’s some sort of safehouse,” I said. “Or a complex of safehouses. Let’s head inside.” I opened the back of the van, slid Nicolas Kun out onto my shoulder, and took a step back. “Elena, would you like to care for your Master?”

“Yes.”

‘Packages’ in hand, we entered the villa. It was simply decorated but very clean and orderly. The floors were made of smooth gray tiles, there were ink paintings on the wall, and it smelled faintly of rice.

I dropped Nicolas Kun onto the sofa in the living room, and Elena gently placed Eldress Cheung on the opposite sofa. Before we even had a chance to look around, the phone rang. I answered.

“Chief Elder Wang?” a voice said.

“Yes,” I replied.

“This is Yu Yitai. Welcome to the Ninth Earth.”

“Sect Leader,” I said, “it’s my sincere honor to hear your voice. I take it this line is secure?”

“Secured by me personally. As is the entire complex. You’re safe here. I’ll be over to visit you and your coterie in person a bit later. You have Mr. Kun sedated, I presume?”

“Yes, Sect Leader. And his puppet as well. Eldress Cheung.”

“Excellent. You’ve done well. The kitchen is fully stocked. Help yourself while you wait. See you in a bit.”

He hung up.

“The sect leader himself?” Tao Heng said. “Crazy!”

I put the phone back down on the receiver. “Yeah, it was strange. It felt like talking to any ordinary person.”

“So, what now?” Jakobe asked.

“We wait. He’s coming here to see us.”

“Holy shit,” Tao Heng said.

“Anyone hungry?” I asked. Everyone was.

The sect leader hadn’t been exaggerating in the least bit. The kitchen was packed with all sorts of food, much of it fresh. And thus, we set about piling together a literal smorgasbord. Jakobe heated up some sausage patties, Bunny and Elena put together a salad, I made some fried rice, and Tao Heng tried hard to convince us to open one of the bottles of baijiu he found above the refrigerator. His proposal was immediately vetoed. There was no way any of us wanted to have liquor on our breath when the sect leader arrived.

About three hours later, we were contentedly full and in the middle of cleaning the kitchen when the doorbell rang.

I couldn’t help but feel that this was one of the oddest situations I’d been in for a long time. Despite all the dramatic and unusual circumstances I’d encountered over the past months, having the leader of all the organized cultivators in the entire Grand Kingdom ringing the front bell was surreal, to say the least.

As the bell echoed out in the villa, everyone froze for a moment.

Then, Tao Heng said, “You’re up, Chief Elder Wang.”

Drying my hands on my pants, I walked out of the kitchen to the entryway and opened the door.

A man stood there, dressed in a blue suit, his hands in his pocket. He had a hawk’s nose and long hair tied in a ponytail, and if I had been forced to use one word to describe him, it would be: cool. He held himself with casual confidence, and his eyes glittered with both intelligence and amusement. Almost immediately, I felt drawn to him.

“Chief Elder Wang?” he said.

Clasping hands, I bowed my head, “My respects, Sect Leader Yu. I’ve long since heard of your esteemed name, and it’s my deep honor to be able to meet you this day.”

“Well met, Chief Elder. I appreciate your service to the sect.”

Extending my hand invitingly, I said, “Would you like to come in?”

“Of course. And going forward, there’s no need for excessive formalities.”

He stepped past me and into the main room. As I closed the door behind him, he looked at the figures on the couch. “After all these years, I finally got my hands on Nicolas Kun,” he said. Then he looked at me over his shoulder. “Or rather, you did. Where’s your coterie?”

“In the kitchen. Would you like me to…?”

“Ask them out? Yes, please do.”

Raising my voice, I said, “Come on out, everyone!”

My friends filed out the kitchen like a group of schoolchildren called into the principal’s office for commendation; they were visibly excited, but at the same time anxious and intimidated. Jakobe seemed to be the only one who was completely calm, although he did keep his head inclined downward slightly out of respect.

Yu Yitai looked the group over. “You must be Novice Göransson,” he said.

“Yes, Sect Leader Yu,” Svea replied, bowing her head even deeper.

“I’m not exaggerating when I say you’re one of the best grid monkeys I’ve encountered in years. That app you created to have permanent access to Cross-Level Control is sheer genius. Did you name it?”

Svea smiled, and to my shock, she actually seemed to be blushing. “I decided to call it Train Reaction.”

He laughed. “I honestly can’t believe you kept under the radar in the outer sect for so long. Chief Elder Kang must have had his head up his ass.” He turned to look at Elena. “Senior Disciple Ávila?”

“Yes, Sect Leader.”

“Lamento lo de tu Sensei,” he said.

Her eyes went wide. “¿Hablas mi idioma?”

He nodded, and thus proceeded a short conversation that the rest of us couldn’t understand. When he switched back to Sinese, he looked at Jakobe and said, “Now, let’s see. You must be Recruit Liu, partner to Chief Elder Wang. Welcome. And you’re Senior Disciple Bai. I looked into the sect records and saw that you come from a long line of loyal members. You make a fine asset to the chief elder’s new coterie. As for you, young man—” he looked at Tao Heng “—while I remember your surname is Tao, I’m sorry to say that your given name is skipping my mind at the moment.”

“Novice T-Tao Heng,” he stammered. “I’ve long since named of your esteemed heard, and it’s my deep day—er, no I’ve heard of your name, and my day is—no, it’s my, I mean—”

Yu Yitai laughed and held out his hand to stop Tao Heng. “No need for formalities.”

I then sensed a tingle as Yu Yitai swept the group with his divine sense, starting with me. I could have hidden my cultivation base from him, but didn’t. When he peered into me, I saw his eyes widen for a short moment before he moved on to Jakobe, who was standing nearest me.

When he was done, he said, “I can see that some of you made good use of the funds I provided to prepare for the mission. Chief Elder Wang, you can consider your position as a chief elder to be permanent. Senior Disciple Ávila, given that you have a root of energy, you qualify for a promotion. I hereby name you an eldress. Senior Disciple Bai, with three seas of energy, you can rise to the rank of elite disciple.

“Recruit Liu, I’m directly appointing you as a novice, without the need for any of the tests. Novices Göransson and Tao, you are hereby appointed as disciples. No testing needed.

“Normally speaking, sect protocol would require Eldress Ávila to join an elder circle and begin overseeing a local coterie. Senior Disciple Bai would then take charge of her own coterie in the inner sect, and Disciples Göransson and Tao would be assigned coteries in the outer sect. But I run this organization, and I can do things however I want. For the time being, I’d prefer for all of you to remain under the leadership of Chief Elder Wang, where you will act as a special coterie that reports directly to me. Are there any objections to that?”

We shook our heads.

“Good,” he said. “Moving on—” He waved his hand, and both Nicolas Kun and Eldress Cheung suddenly vanished.

“Master!” Elena blurted.

Yu Yitai held up a placating hand. “Don’t worry, Eldress Ávila. Ordinary dimensional storage devices aren’t suitable to hold living beings, but mine isn’t typical. It can hold people for a short time without any dangerous side effects. Your Master will be fine.

“Now, I have a few private matters to discuss with the chief elder and the eldress. The rest of you, please see yourself out for a few minutes. If you walk to the end of the street, you’ll find a small public square with benches and a pond. That would be a fine place to wait.”

As they filed out, something occurred to me, and I sent my divine sense into Jakobe’s mind.

“Brother,” I said, “can I ask him about your dreams?” As I projected the words, I glanced over at Yu Yitai to see if there was any reaction. Based on my understanding, there was no way to eavesdrop or even detect communication carried out via divine sense projection. However, I was still nervous that it might be noticed somehow. I didn’t see any reaction.

“I’ll let you be the judge,” Jakobe replied. “Remember, I told Elder Qing all about them before. But if he was a traitor, who knows if he kept that information to himself or not. You need to know something. Remember the two figures I dreamed of, talking about the True Heaven and of you and Elena? One of them was Yu Yitai! I recognize him.”

“Damn, seriously?”

“He said something about needing ‘that girl,’ and he was obviously talking about Elena! He mentioned you too. Keep on your toes, brother.”

At that point, he left the range of my divine sense.

Elena, Yu Yitai, and I took seats in the living room. As we settled down, the sect leader waved his hand, causing a system of complex lines and decorations to appear on the floor, shining brightly for a moment before fading away. Another spell formation, presumably designed to make our conversation private.

“Item number one relates to your Master, Eldress Ávila. I can keep her in a state of suspended animation for a time, but eventually, we need to get the key Mr. Kun used to puppetize her. That’s the only way to reverse the process. Do any of you have any idea where it might be?”

Without even thinking about it, I raised my hand.

“Go ahead, Chief Elder,” he said. “And there’s no need to raise your hand.”

Feeling a bit silly, I said, “I penetrated the Puppet Lace to speak to Eldress Cheung for a brief moment. She said he sent the key down to the First Heaven. Also, she said the puppet lace was instructed to destroy itself and her if captured.”

Yu Yitai leaned back in the chair and frowned. “That makes things difficult. Did she say anything else?”

I shook my head in the negative.

“Very well. I should be able to get more information from Mr. Kun.” He thought for a second or two. “Given the circumstances, we’ll have to worry about freeing Eldress Cheung at a later date. I’m sorry we can’t do something now, Eldress Ávila, but the other matters are far more pressing.”

“I understand, Sect Leader,” she said. “Is there any way I can talk to her?”

“There are dangers to consider when dealing with a Puppet Lace,” he replied. “And the self-destruct order makes it even more complicated. But I might be able to arrange for it later. Moving on to item two. The True Heaven. As I’m sure both of you are aware, even the mere existence of the True Heaven is a tightly-kept secret in the Naturalism Sect. On the one hand, the fact that you and your coterie learned about it the way you did is troublesome. On the other hand, it makes things simpler, especially as it relates to you, Eldress.”

“What do you mean, Sect Leader?” Elena asked.

“You’ll understand shortly. The True Heaven is something I built personally. A device, except... more than that. It’s like a room or a building. A station. That’s what it would have been called long ago, before the War of Tribulation. A space station. It’s something I built as part of my plan to end the Heavenly Curse.”

“Sect Leader, might I have permission to ask a question?” I said.

“Go ahead.”

“According to what I was told, the True Heaven exists beyond the Heavenly Curse. Far above the Grand Kingdom. Is that right?”

“Yes and no. It’s currently hidden in the Tenth Earth. But I can send it above the Curse Storm at any time. I won’t go into the full details now, but suffice it to say, one of the primary functions of the True Heaven is to tap into the raw, elemental power of the sun itself.”

“For what purpose?” I asked.

“What I’m about to reveal to you is confidential information that only members of the sect ranked as elders or higher can hear. Both of you now qualify, but your friends do not. As the Old Master said, silence is a source of great strength. Do I have your word that you won’t reveal these secrets?”

Elena and I exchanged a glance.

“Yes, Sect Leader,” she said.

“Yes,” I echoed.

“Good. First, you need to know about the Singularity Pearl. It’s the physical object that generates the Curse Storm, and it hovers directly above the Grand Kingdom. Destroy the Pearl, and the Storm will be dispelled. Sinotech built a weapon to do just that. An enormous cannon of sorts, aimed at the Pearl, which they will fire when they’ve built up enough energy to power it.”

“The Heaven-Propping Pillar!” Elena said.

“Yes.”

“I knew it!” she said. “Master never told me, but I could guess from some of the things she said.”

Yu Yitai frowned slightly. “She ought to have been more careful with her words. In any case, yes, the Heaven-Propping Pillar is a weapon designed to destroy the Singularity Pearl and end the Curse. However, the cost paid to power up the weapon over the years has been horrific and enormous. What’s more, based on plans I had smuggled out of the First Heaven when the project first began, I learned that the discharge of the cannon will cause such a destructive shockwave that many residents of the Grand Kingdom will be killed because of it. Perhaps most or even all of them.”

“What!” I blurted.

“Horrific, don’t you think?” he said. “Now you can see why I’ve been working on an alternate plan to deal with the Pearl. My version also requires a massive source of energy, but a different one. After much thought and analysis, I turned to the sun. Which brings us to item number three. You, Eldress.”

“Me?”

“Yes. You. And your blood. To explain fully, I need to tell a story from many years ago. A story from True History that few people in existence know about.

“In the years leading up to the War of Tribulation, during the resurgence of cultivation in the old world, ancient ways were revived near and far. One group that rose to prominence in a distant Western country was the Huītzilōpōchtli Sect, who claimed that they descended from an ancient god of the sun and battle. They were a member of the core group of cultivator sects that resisted the corporate governments of the world.

“In the final days of the War, the governments of the world devised a killing move against our alliance, and our plan to stop them was to create the very Singularity Pearl I just told you about. However, the cultivators from the Huītzilōpōchtli Sect warned against using the Pearl, saying that it would cut humans off from the sun, leading to a worldwide catastrophe. In retrospect, it turns out they were right.

“In any case, the sects of the time refused to believe them. Little did anyone know that when the Huītzilōpōchtli Sect realized they couldn’t convince the other sects to believe them, they came up with another plan: to destroy the Pearl as soon as it came into existence. To accomplish this, they created a deadly weapon that could channel the ultimate power of Solar cultivation. It had a name, this weapon, but that isn’t important right now.

“The act of creating the item was fueled by human sacrifice; their leader offered his heart to the sun, and then gave all of the blood in his body to create the weapon.

“The creation of the weapon was a success, but in the age-old story of human existence, the members of the Huītzilōpōchtli Sect couldn’t agree on how to use it and even fought over the right to possess it. At the critical moment, they failed in their effort to destroy the Pearl. Their weapon was melted into slag, and every member of their sect was slaughtered, save one, the daughter of the sect leader. Sadly, her cultivation base was crippled, and she disappeared in the years immediately following the War.

“The Naturalism Sect recovered the slag of the weapon and kept it in isolation for many years, studying it in an attempt to repair it. Such attempts always failed, as the slag of the weapon contains the lingering will of the dead sect leader, who refused to give control of even the slag to an outsider.

“Fast forward many years, to when I discovered the truth about the Heaven-Propping Pillar. That was when I came up with my idea to create the True Heaven. Unfortunately, after I rode the tethered station beyond the Heavenly Curse, I found that I wasn’t able to channel the amount of Solar cultivation power I needed. And thus, I once again turned to the slag of the ancient weapon created by the Huītzilōpōchtli Sect, which was so deeply tied to the sun itself. I integrated it into the structure of the True Heaven, and with it, I experienced success in tapping into the sun's power. Unfortunately, the effects were temporary, thanks to the will of the dead sect leader. I am personally incapable of maintaining control of what rightly belongs to the Huītzilōpōchtli Sect.

“And thus, we come to you, Eldress. I had no idea of your existence until the dramatic events in the Third Earth. After you and the Chief Elder arrived in the Fourth Earth, I started doing some digging into your past. Based on what I uncovered, I believe that you are a descendant of that final member of the Huītzilōpōchtli Sect, the sect leader’s daughter. And that means that your blood is linked to the slag of the ancient weapon. The will of the sect leader will likely allow you to control what remains of the weapon. With you, we can finally create a stable connection to the sun and get rid of the Singularity Pearl in a way that won’t harm the people of the Grand Kingdom. Simply put, you could save us all, Eldress.”

After he finished his story, Elena and I sat in stunned silence for minutes. As for me, my head was spinning, and I almost couldn’t process everything he’d just said. It sounded like some sort of fairy tale.

“What about Johan Saito?” Elena said, breaking the silence. “Why does he want me?”

“During the Dust Settles period immediately following the War, Johan Saito’s grandfather desperately tried to track down the daughter of the Huītzilōpōchtli Sect. He had always been fascinated by their ways and even dabbled in their techniques. His desire to find her was no secret; he made great fanfare of trying to locate the sect leader’s daughter, even printing posters, offering rewards, and the like. However, he never found her. His son followed through with similar efforts, but eventually, other matters took priority. Later, Johan Saito took up the cause. As for how he found you, I can only guess. But he also believes that you are a descendant of the Huītzilōpōchtli Sect and that with you and your blood, he can find the True Heaven I built.

“Like me, he surely wishes to tap into the power of the sun to carry out whatever plans he’s hatched. If he’s anything like his forebears, he probably wishes to bring the practices of the Huītzilōpōchtli Sect back and with them gain further power and influence on the Sinotech board. Perhaps even take over.”

Chapter 64 – Privacy for the Lovebirds

“Sect Leader,” I said, “it sounds to me like the Saitos are basically trying to do the same thing as you. Why not sit down and talk with them? Maybe work out some sort of deal.”

Yu Yitai smiled faintly. “Many, many years ago, I was close friends with Johan Saito’s grandfather. But I learned early on that he was only loyal to his clan and, ultimately, himself. His progeny have all followed in his footsteps. I’ve experienced it personally. Trust me when I say that the Saitos will stab you in the back the moment it suits them, and they’ll sacrifice anyone they feel necessary to achieve their goals.”

When he said the word ‘sacrifice,’ something clicked in my mind.

“Sect Leader, given that Elder Qing is a traitor, I wonder if you ever got a report about Jakobe, er… Novice Liu’s dreams.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“In that case, there’s something I need to tell you.”

With that, I went into the story of Jakobe. Elena took over when it came to the taṇhā worm and the spell formation she’d created to remove it. And I concluded by explaining our belief that doing so while he was under the influence of nitrotropin eroprodol had somehow bestowed him with the ability to see the future.

Yu Yitai was visibly surprised, but not as much as I expected him to be. “Throughout the history of cultivation,” he said, “there have only been three people who developed the ability to glimpse the future. If your friend Jakobe has acquired this gift, he would be the fourth. What sort of things did he see?”

I described some of the past events Jakobe had successfully foretold, and then I explained his vision of Elena, stretched out over a sacrificial altar in the True Heaven. I even mentioned how Jakobe had seen Yu Yitai himself, to which he responded with no small amount of shock.

After I was done, he sat there quietly, his elbows resting on the arms of the chair and his fingers interlocked in front of him. “And you say Jakobe believes these to be glimpses of certain future events? Not possibilities?”

“So far, everything he’s seen has played out exactly as he saw it. Sect Leader, this is an area where Elena, er, Eldress Ávila, and I have differing opinions. I’m not particularly fond of the idea of sending her right into the hands of Johan Saito or whoever else it is that wants to plunge that knife into her chest.”

“Sect Leader,” Elena said, “Wang Fan’s just being overprotective. Johan Saito has my blood, and I want it back. I want to go after him. And I don’t think some dream is any reason to just give up. I know Wang Fan is just looking out for me, but still.”

He looked back and forth between the two of us. “Ah, so the two of you…?”

She looked away with a shy smile, and I gave a curt nod.

Yu Yitai chuckled. “I should have expected.” Then he sighed, and any trace of a smile faded from his face. “Perhaps we can discuss this matter further after I’ve interrogated Nicolas Kun. If I were to make a bet, I’d say the figure in Jakobe’s dream is indeed Johan Saito. You see, the Huītzilōpōchtli Sect embraced the concept of sacrifice, especially human sacrifice, although the words used in their language to talk about the subject differ from those in ours. I know for a fact that Johan became even more obsessed with that sect than his grandfather was. In any case, although I generally agree with you, Chief Elder, the two most relevant factors here are the success of the True Heaven project and also Eldress Ávila’s blood. There are all manner of sinister things Johan Saito could do with that blood, and I agree it needs to be recovered.”

“There’s a problem with Wang Fan’s blood also,” Elena said. “Er, Chief Elder Wang’s blood.”

“Oh?”

“Itsuki Saito, Johan’s son, put something inside the chief elder to track him.”

“Thankfully, the spell formation covering this compound should negate any such effects. Do you happen to know what he used? My guess is either Wind Horse Powder or cloven bonemetal mites.”

“The latter,” Elena said. “He mentioned them specifically.”

“And you never removed them, Chief Elder?”

“We don’t know how,” I said.

Yu Yitai snapped his fingers and grinned. “A rookie mistake on the part of the young Saito progeny. Chief Elder Wang, what if I told you that you can use the bonemetal mites against him?”

“How?”

“Bonemetal mites are one of the most common tools Black Corpses use to track cultivators. However, not only are they easy to purge from the system, but if you take the right medicinal pill, you can turn them into receivers, not just transmitters. That’s why the Corpses rarely use them on any cultivator ranked higher than a disciple.”

“So I could use them to track down Itsuki?”

“Yes. Or, at the very least, know when he gets close to you. Which would you prefer? To purge them? Or use them against him? They could theoretically come in handy when trying to get back the eldress’ blood.”

“Sect Leader, I can’t tell you how much I would love to use Itsuki Saito’s machinations against him.”

“Perfect. The pill is rare, but I have a few in stock. I’ll send one over as soon as I get back to my study. Now, with that taken care of, let’s move on. As far as I’m concerned, the most pressing matter on my plate at the moment is dealing with Nicolas Kun. If I can determine who the traitor is among the grand elders, then we’ll have one less loose end to deal with. After that, we can decide how to handle the Saitos and what to do about the True Heaven.

“Before I leave, we need to discuss your cultivation base, Chief Elder Wang. I have a general idea of how you ended up the first cultivator in a thousand years to have a Bone diamond, but do you mind going through the specifics?”

“Of course.” I went on to do just that, recounting the story of being abducted by Nicolas Kun and how I ended up being pumped full of Euneirophrenia Marrow, a Sea Expanding Pill, the talisman from Elder Hu, and a Black Corpse drug cocktail.

“Quite a unique combination,” he said. “It must have come as a big shock when you made the breakthrough.”

“Yes. I’m actually curious what I’m capable of now. I got my hands on a book called the Ossientum Memorandum, but it’s clearly designed for sea and root cultivators.”

“Indeed. Ever since Bone diamonds became a thing of legend, there was little need for the Corpses to tantalize their people with techniques they could never use. I can help you with that later, but for now, why don’t you focus on simple tasks that you know you can accomplish quickly. For instance, your cultivator robe. You still haven’t crafted it, have you?”

“I haven’t had the time.”

“Handle that before you start down a complicated path of cultivation that will likely take weeks or months to see any progress. Besides, it wouldn’t do for a chief elder to lack one of the primary symbols of advancement in cultivation.”

“Understood, Sect Leader.”

“Now, I have a minute or two before I need to be off. Do either of you have questions for me?”

Elena and I exchanged a glance, and she nodded at me to go first.

“Sir, what are orgplants?”

“Ah, orgplants. The truth about them is something generally revealed to elite disciples. Obviously, you both qualify, as does Elite Disciple Bai. In short, they provide power to the Heaven-Propping Pillar. Think of them as enormous batteries. And when the time comes to fire the Heaven-Propping Pillar as a weapon, they’ll be drained dry. Of course, there’s more to orgplants than that simple explanation, but rather than tell you, I’d like to show you in person. Perhaps tomorrow, after I’ve had some time with Mr. Kun. Will that do?”

I resisted the urge to shrug in disappointment. The description didn’t seem particularly earth-shattering, and it didn’t do anything to provide more context to Xiaoli’s case. I wondered what seeing the inside of one of the places could do that a simple explanation couldn’t.

“Sure,” I answered.

“Anything else, Chief Elder?”

“How about the Heavenly Curse? What exactly is it?”

“That is a complicated topic about which volumes of books have been written, but I can give you a summary. In the old world, the corporate governments came to view cultivation as a threat, which is how the War of Tribulation broke out. Eventually, when it became obvious we cultivators had the upper hand, they turned to their trump card: weapons of mass destruction they believed were even more powerful than our abilities. The cultivator response was the Singularity Pearl, which was designed to literally absorb the destructive power of the weapons being aimed at us.

“The plan was a catastrophic failure in four ways. First, the Pearl was unleashed too late; the world governments fired their weapons before it was fully activated, destroying the old world and creating the Hellscape. Second, while the Pearl was intended to function for a short time, it never stopped operating. The storm it spawned churns endlessly above us, as it has for nearly a millennium. Third, the Pearl’s primary function of absorbing the power of the weapons did, in fact, work. But it only kicked in after the Hellscape came to be. Simply put, it absorbed the toxic elements around it, which, when they contacted the elemental forces in the Storm, created the Curse. The fourth and final catastrophe related to the Pearl is that its very existence has cut off Hydric cultivation, which makes it impossible to walk the path of the immortals.”

I blinked in shock.

“I know,” Yu Yitai said, “it’s a lot to take in.”

“I need some time to process it, I think.”

“That’s normal. Usually, these matters are revealed slowly over time. For now, let’s move on to Eldress Ávila. Do you have any specific questions?”

“Yes. Sect Leader, you say I’m connected to this ancient weapon, or whatever remains of it. But what exactly do you want me to do with it?”

“After we get your blood back, Eldress, I want to take you to the True Heaven and test the theory. If I’m right, and your blood is connected to the weapon, which is now an integral part of the larger structure, it means you’ll be able to control the True Heaven in a way I never could.”

“Control it?”

“You’ll understand more fully when I explain my own plan to end the Curse. Suffice it to say, you’ll own the True Heaven. For all intents and purposes, it will be yours.”

Yu Yitai seemed adept at providing vague answers when it suited him. However, I could sense that he was anxious to leave and didn’t want to sit around telling any more stories. And Elena didn’t seem to have any more questions.

“Unless you have further issues—” he stood “—I’ll be going for now.”

Elena and I rose respectfully.

“Please, let me see you out, Sect Leader,” I said.

“There’s no need,” he said, walking to the door. “The two of you have been through quite a lot over the last month or so. Take some time to rest and recuperate. I have my people in the Eighth Earth keeping tabs on Johan Saito at all hours; I’ll keep you apprised of the situation. Once I’ve had some time with Mr. Kun, I’ll get back in touch. It was wonderful meeting all of you.”

**

After the sect leader left, Elena and I sat together in silence for what must have been ten or fifteen minutes. The information which had been dumped on us was overwhelming, to say the least. Eventually, everyone else returned, and we did our best to update them without revealing any of the confidential details to which we were privy. Elena took Bunny off to the side to explain the new revelations and tell her that Yu Yitai wanted to show us an orgplant the next day.

A few hours later, the doorbell rang, and I opened the door to find a package sitting in front of the door, addressed to me.

Inside was a medicinal pill and a note.

Chief Elder Wang,

This is the pill I referred to. All you need to do is consume it. Afterward, the bonemetal mites will be visible to you in your bloodstream. Touch them with your divine sense, and you will sense the presence of the person on the other end.

Until tomorrow,

Yitai

The villa had six bedrooms, which meant we all had privacy. Upon arriving, I’d hoped that Elena might invite me to share her room but ended up disappointed in that regard.

There were meditation chambers in the villa as well, but I wasn’t planning on a long session of cultivation, so I just went to my room, where I sat down cross-legged and consumed the pill. The process only took about fifteen minutes. When it was over, I saw the microscopic bonemetal mites in my blood and reached out to them with my divine sense. They shivered in response, and then I sensed a resonance stretching from below me and in the direction of the Heaven-Propping Pillar. He was obviously still in the Eighth Earth at the moment.

“Itsuki,” I murmured. After a minute or two of observation, I let the resonance fade away.

The rest of the evening was spent making dinner and having a good time. It was a strange feeling. For many weeks, we had all been living under constant pressure and fear. This was the first time in a long time that we could simply enjoy ourselves.

We agreed to let Tao Heng open a bottle of baijiu, and after it was drained, we opened a second.

The evening stretched into night, and everyone was laughing and talking loudly. When Bunny and Jakobe retired to their room, Svea, Tao Heng, Elena, and I found a deck of cards and started playing poker.

Eventually, Svea went to sleep.

“Hey, you two should check out that pond,” Tao Heng said. “They have real fish in it.”

“Wanna go?” Elena asked.

“Sure,” I replied.

“I can show you the way,” Tao Heng said, pushing his chair back.

I gave him a level look. “I’m sure we can find it.”

“Ah, gotcha. Privacy for the lovebirds. Well, I’m bushed anyway. Shower and bed for me. See you in the morning.”

We walked hand in hand to the pond, where we found a bench to sit together. After talking about nothing for a while, we lapsed into a comfortable silence.

“Something happened between Itsuki and me,” she said suddenly, as she lay against me, her head tucked beneath my chin.

I wasn’t sure how to respond.

“There was nothing to do but talk,” she said, “and he kept talking to me. At me. Asking questions. Trying to convince me to just go along with their plan. Finally, I couldn’t take it. I started yelling at him. Screaming. Cursing him. Saying really horrible things until he walked out. When he came back, I did it again. The third time he came back, I didn’t talk to him. The fourth time, I screamed more. Eventually, I got tired of being so angry. I was just exhausted in every way you can imagine. So I talked. Slowly at first, but then it all came out. I told him things about myself that I haven’t told anybody before. And then he started crying.”

“Wait, what?” I really couldn’t envision it. Suave, merciless Itsuki Saito. Crying?

“Like a kid. Just crying. It was really strange. He got on his knees in front of me and told me his own story. About his life.”

She stopped talking for a while, and again I tried to come up with words to say but couldn’t.

“It’s not my place to repeat some of the things he told me,” she said. “They were… personal. In the end, it made me realize that he’s not the evil villain I thought he was. I mean, he’s a killer. There’s no questioning that. But in his mind, he always does the right thing. And what’s more, the things he’s been through….” She shivered. “I think… I feel sorry for him.”

I knew that I had to say something. “What about what the sect leader told us? About what the Saitos are like?”

“The sect leader has never met Itsuki. How could he know anything about him?”

I recalled something Dad had told me once. Children imitate their parents, whether they know it or not.

Elena stood and took a step forward so she was at the edge of the pond. I did the same. Looking down, we didn’t see any fish. Maybe they were asleep.

“He used to have siblings,” she said.

“Used to?”

“He thinks his father killed them. Or had them killed.”

A chill ran down my spine. “What kind of monster would do something like that?”

“Johan Saito,” she said. “He’s insane, I think.”

A silence built as I processed everything and tried to decide how I felt about Itsuki pouring his heart out to my girlfriend, and her to him. Elena squatted, picked up a pebble from the ground, and tossed it into the pond.

As the ripples spread, she said, “Anyway, I’m not saying we should be friends with Itsuki.”

I found the words slightly comforting, and I nearly said, “Good!” but held back.

“But I really believe he wants to do the right thing for the Grand Kingdom and for the people. You know. Justice, like you always talk about.” She stood again.

I thought back to what Saito had told me back in the Fourth Earth. You and I really aren’t very different at all, Wang Fan. We both want justice.

I’d laughed in his face.

“Elena, this is the same person who killed your friends. Mary. Jack. Are you telling me you’ve forgiven him for that?”

“No, but….”

“But what?”

She wrapped her arm around mine and leaned against me. “Maybe I should.”

Chapter 65 – Orgplant Tour

Elena kissed me with fiery passion at the door to her room, but to me, it was a strange and awkward kiss. Thankfully, she didn’t seem to notice my reaction. She pulled me closer, and for a moment, I thought she was dragging me into her room. But then she pushed away from me, said good night in a husky voice, and closed her door.

I took a shower, trying the whole time to stop thinking about Elena in a room with Itsuki Saito, the two of them revealing the deep secrets of their pasts to each other. Here I’d been pussyfooting around, fearing I might upset Elena if I asked about her family, while Itsuki kidnapped her, kept her against her will, and mentally tortured her, yet got the stories without even asking. On top of it all, he had somehow gained her sympathy.

I fell asleep thinking about how nice it would be to use his bonemetal sword on his own neck. Maybe I would, next time we met.

The next day I woke parched and exhausted. The anger I’d felt while falling asleep had vanished along with the buzz of the baijiu. In its place was a desire to unravel the mystery that was Itsuki Saito and figure out what game he was playing.

My fledgling coterie woke one by one. Eventually, Jakobe and I put breakfast together. The amount of fresh food stocked in the kitchen was astonishing to me. Normally, things like lettuce, eggs, and milk were luxuries that rank-and-file Peacekeepers only enjoyed on special occasions. Not to mention some of the other things in the refrigerator, such as kiwifruits and raspberries. My guess was that Yu Yitai had filled the kitchen especially for us in the hopes of earning goodwill. There was no way ingredients like this were easy to get in the Ninth Earth.

As we were cleaning up after breakfast, the phone rang, and Tao Heng nearly trampled Bunny in his rush to be the one to answer it.

“Corpse Killer Coterie, Tao Heng speaking, how can I help you? Yes. Of course, Sect Leader, just a moment.”

Drying my hands on a dishtowel, I went to take the phone.

“Sect Leader?”

“Is that your official coterie name?” he asked.

“No, I haven’t decided on an official name yet,” I said, glowering at Tao Heng.

Yu Yitai laughed softly. “Well, Corpse Killer certainly sounds edgy. I might have picked something like that when I was young. In any case, I’m going to take you, Eldress Ávila, and Elite Disciple Bai to visit an orgplant. I’ll be by in about ten minutes to pick you up.”

“Yes, sir.”

I hung up and felt my heart pounding already. What was I going to see in this orgplant? Would it provide any more answers about Xiaoli?

“Well?” Tao Heng said.

“I explained last night, don’t you remember?” I said. “The sect leader is taking me, Elena, and Bunny out for a confidential operation.”

“Right. Dammit, it’s not fair. You guys get all the secret info.”

“You focus on your cultivation,” Bunny said, “and you’ll qualify soon enough.”

“Easy for you to say, Ms. Grew-Up-In-the-Sect. I’m just a poor kid from the streets who got suckered in by talk of living forever.”

Yu Yitai arrived punctually, and Elena, Bunny, and I got into his car, an ancient-looking ground vehicle that had to be older than the Dark Earths or possibly even the Bright Earths.

“Before we leave the compound,” Yu Yitai said, “consume this.” He handed me a medicinal pill. “It will put the bonemetal mites into a state of hibernation for a few hours or until you touch them with divine sense.”

I popped the pill into my mouth and swallowed it. As we pulled out of the resort complex and into the rainy darkness, Yu Yitai turned up the volume on the car’s speakers.

“Have you heard this type of music before?” he asked.

“Never,” Elena said.

I listened for a moment to the twangy guitar and a man singing passionately in a language I didn’t understand. “Is it some kind of blues?” I asked.

“Good ear, Chief Elder. Yes. Delta blues. It was old before I was even born. Even if you can’t understand Yingo, you can still feel what they’re singing about.”

I liked it.

The music surrounded us as we drove along, with Elena, Bunny, and me looking out the mirrored windows at the dreary landscape. After about twenty minutes, we entered a more populated area on the other side of the 2nd Ring Road, with a collection of high-rises surrounded by smaller residential complexes, malls, and the like.

“The majority of the orgplants are in the Bright Earths and the Lesser Heavens,” Yu Yitai said, “which is why the Heaven-Propping Pillar is bright down there but dark up here. The project started during the construction of the Fifth Heaven and has been ongoing since then. Based on my calculations, it will only be a matter of years before they have the orgplants filled to capacity and the Pillar ready to fire.”

“Filled with what?” Bunny asked.

“You’ll see.”

I thought back to the clues of Xiaoli’s case, specifically the newspaper clipping of an interview with a Cross-Level Control officer named Shu Qige, who ended up arrested and sent to Qin City prison in the Fourth Heaven. I could almost recount the exact words of the conversation as we tried to break down what it meant. As I recalled them, it seemed obvious how to fit the puzzle pieces together, but my mind resisted.

Yu Yitai drove us farther along until the gunmetal blue orgplant was visible just ahead. We passed it and entered a parking garage a block down.

Turning the car off, Yu Yitai said, “Chief Elder Wang and Elite Disciple Bai are both Thermal cultivators. However, I am too, and I’m at the diamond level. Therefore, I’ll cast a Thermal Ripple Cloak to cover all four of us in the stairwell going down to the ground level. Once outside of the car, communicate only via divine sense. I’ll connect all of our minds so we won’t need to speak out loud. We’ll enter the orgplant through a rear entrance. While inside, make sure to stay close to me, and don’t use any cultivation powers or abilities, including divine sense. Orgplants are filled with all sorts of security measures, from spell formations to technology. For instance, they do have countermeasures to deal with Thermal Ripple Cloaks, although I’ll negate them.

“And they’re guarded by Black Corpses. Granted, I’m strong enough that it would take far more than an ordinary lance of Corpses to cause problems for us. But we still want to get in and out without being noticed. Everyone understand?”

We all responded in the affirmative, then followed as he opened the door and stepped out of the car. In the stairwell, the Thermal Ripple Cloak covered us.

“We’ll be out in the open in a moment,” he projected into our minds. “Remember to ‘think’ in response to me. Understand?”

“Yes, Sect Leader,” Elena said.

“Understood, Sect Leader,” Bunny said.

“Affirmative,” I said.

We stepped out of the parking garage, crossed the street to the outer wall of the orgplant. Yu Yitai stopped right next to an enormous bonemetal gate built into the back wall.

“Now I’ll use Gravitational cultivation to lighten your bodies,” Yu Yitai said. “You’ll be nearly weightless, so simply jump over the wall. Make sure not to get tripped up on the razor wire.”

Using divine sense, I watched as he flashed a hand sign. Then I sensed a tingling sensation and felt my body weight drop.

“Let’s go,” he said. He tapped the ground with his foot and floated up into the air. I followed, with Elena and Bunny right behind me. We rose up over the wall and the razor wire in a neat arc. On the other side, Yu Yitai gradually increased our weight as we descended. Bare bonecrete lay between the wall and the actual structure of the orgplant. In addition, curbs framed a lane going from the wide gate to the orgplant itself and what appeared to be some sort of loading dock.

Yu Yitai walked forward to a door built so seamlessly into the orgplant next to the dock that I didn’t notice it at first, where he pulled out a device that resembled a calculator, except with a screen the size of my entire palm. He flipped a switch on the device and extended it toward the doors; wires flew out of it and connected to two tiny jacks next to the door. He hit a few buttons, and a moment later, the door opened.

We walked inside, after which the door slid shut. It was cold, just like the orgplant I’d visited in the Fourth Earth, and it smelled like oil and disinfectant.

Yu Yitai led us through a few intersections and corridors until we stood in front of a set of double doors.

“Chief Elder Wang, I know you’ve been inside an orgplant before. But you were in the research wing, near the front of the larger structure. That section, and the short set of corridors we just passed through in the rear, are only a fraction of what makes up an orgplant. The primary function, and the majority of what lies within, are what you will see in just a moment.”

Stepping forward, he pulled out the same device from before and used it on the doors in front of us.

They slid open, and we stepped into what I could only think to describe as an enormous warehouse, with racks that stretched from the ground level all the way to the arched ceiling, at least two or three hundred feet overhead at the highest point. Filling the racks were storage drawers, perhaps cabinets, that glowed with blue light. In fact, most of the light present came from those drawers, with the rest coming from recessed lighting built into the floor. At the end of each rack structure was an elevator leading to catwalks above, and higher up, it was possible to see that the racks were connected by pipes, bundles of cords, walkways, and ladders. The entire space was filled with an ambient thrum that could have been the whir of machinery or the buzz of computers.

“As I explained before, orgplants are like enormous batteries. You’re looking up at the individual cells that make up the battery. They call the structures slab racks. Come, look closer.”

He led us toward one of the huge racks. Stopping in front of it, he grabbed one of the individual storage units and pulled it open like a drawer, causing a coffin-like box to slide out.

Bunny gasped aloud involuntarily, then covered her mouth with her hand. “Sorry.”

“Exercise a bit more control, Elite Disciple Bai,” Yu Yitai said. “Remember, we don’t want to be discovered here.”

“Yes, Sect Leader.”

Inside the ‘drawer,’ beneath a thick window of plexiglass, was a person, eyes closed as if asleep. It was a man, middle-aged, with a hint of a beard. He had tattoos covering his arms and chest in the manner of certain criminal gangs, which, coupled with the bone structure of his face, suggested that he was Japkor.

“Note the arm,” Yu Yitai said, and I glanced down to see a thick wire connected to the jack there, which led to a computer console inside the drawer.

Yu Yitai stepped to the next drawer and opened it. Inside was another ‘sleeping’ man, this one younger and stockier, with a prosthetic hand. The next drawer contained a pretty young woman with a scar on her face—the drawer after that, a child of no more than eight years old. Stepping to the other side, he opened more drawers, revealing more bodies.

I looked up at the thousands of drawers that rose up overhead, then looked out into the main walkway at aisle after aisle of towering racks.

“All of them have people inside?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied. “All the ones that are lit up.”

The racks near us were full of lit drawers, but further down in the bowels of the orgplant, I saw that the racks there only had the bottom sections lit, and beyond them, the rest were completely dark.

“Who are they?” Elena asked. “Are they alive?”

“Alive? Technically speaking, yes. They’re citizens of the Grand Kingdom, most of them convicted criminals, but not all. Sinotech primarily draws on the prisons in the Fourth Heaven to fill the orgplants, but they occasionally tap into other sources.”

“Like orphanages?” I said reflexively, and I would have growled it if I knew how to growl with my thoughts.

“Or hospital emergency rooms,” Yu Yitai answered. “And what do you think happens when they purge squatters by Purgatory? They take people from wherever they won’t be missed. They wipe their minds clean, leaving their physical husk behind. Then they stack them here in a drug-induced state of suspended animation that causes their bodies to age at one hundredth the normal rate. Meanwhile, the orgplant taps into the Organic meridian in their body to siphon away power, but not so much that it can’t regenerate naturally. So these poor victims lie here, their bodies’ energies keeping the lights going in the Grand Kingdom. And one day, when the time comes to fire the Heaven-Propping Pillar, the orgplants will suck every last drop of energy out of them to generate the blast necessary to destroy the Singularity Pearl, leaving them as nothing but desiccated chaff.” He started closing the ‘drawers’ he had opened, stopping to stare down at the child for a moment.

“For roughly six centuries, they’ve been building orgplants and stacking them full of people. As I mentioned, the date of completion nears. When they get enough ‘slabs of flesh’ into the orgplants, the project will be complete and the Pillar ready to fire.” He closed the drawer with the child, then the one with the woman.

Bunny stood there with her clamped tightly over her mouth, and Elena had both her hands clasped against her cheeks. As for me, my skin crawled, and I felt both sickness and fury swirling in my gut. This was wrong. There was no other word to describe it.

It had to stop!

“How many are there?” I asked. “People, in the orgplants?”

“Harvested so far? Or the total goal they wish to reach? I guess at this point, the numbers are so close it doesn’t matter. Fifteen trillion is the final target. It’s actually a slightly larger number, generated by means of divination regarding the eight trigrams, the five phases, and the properties of the Pearl. In any case, they’re near the target number.”

I felt like my mind should be reeling, but instead, it was blank. There was no stopping this thing. It was beyond stopping. Wasn’t it?

“Fifteen trillion people?” I knew the number, but it was hard to put it into perspective.

“consider this. Immediately after the War, during the Dust Settles period, the population dropped below a hundred million and stayed there well into the Shielding period. Right now, the combined population of the Nine Heavens and Ten Earths is over two billion. In other words, the ‘slabs’ they have stacked up outnumber the living by several thousand times over.”

I couldn’t think of anything to ask in response, and Bunny and Elena were similarly just standing there in stunned silence.

“Although it’s not public knowledge, the Climb was never supposed to result in nineteen cities stacked on top of each other. But after Sinotech conceived the orgplant project and knew how many ‘slabs’ they would need to fire the weapon, they encouraged population growth and just kept stacking the cities up. Of course, crime was also encouraged.”

“Crime?” I said. “Encouraged? How?”

“Many ways. Take the surveillance cameras, for instance. Once you get past the Bright Earths, why do you think surveillance is so bad? If all the cameras worked, it would deter crime. And that would be counterproductive considering how many bodies they need to meet the yearly target numbers. The more people sent to the Fourth Heaven prisons, the better, as far as they’re concerned.

“That doesn’t take into consideration the slaves and puppets they use in the bonemetal and bonecrete factories. It’s all very scientific. For centuries, birth rates and death rates have been carefully tracked and manipulated to ensure healthy population growth.”

He let the words hang as Elena, Bunny, and I looked around at the horror.

“Why didn’t you do something about it?” I said. “Why haven’t you stopped them?”

“I’ve tried. What do you think the First Cultivator War was about? Or the Second?”

“But you’re so strong!” I said. “You could personally destroy this entire orgplant, just on your own!”

“I think you overestimate how strong non-immortals are,” he replied. “Besides, over the years, I’ve done many things to impede their progress, and I have tried to outright stop them. We’ve destroyed entire orgplants. But the subsequent crackdowns are fierce and bloody. And we’re untrained civilians going up against elite soldiers. Although you’re right that I’m powerful, as are the patriarchs and grand elders, Sinotech will send in their high-level cultivators if we get involved. Battles like that can become incredibly destructive. I don’t want to risk damaging the structure of the Grand Kingdom so severely that it collapses, either in part or in whole.

“Forgetting all of that, there’s also the big picture to consider. The Curse and the Pearl have to be dealt with eventually. Whatever time I spend trying to hamper Sinotech takes time away from my own efforts. For numerous reasons, there’s only so much we can do about the orgplants. Besides, if the population of the Grand Kingdom continues to grow at its current rate, it won’t be long before the Nine Heavens and Ten Earths can’t contain it. In other words, we’re racing toward a cliff. Either I succeed with my plan to get rid of the Pearl and give humankind the tools necessary to deal with life outside the Grand Kingdom, or the Pillar is fired, destroying the Pearl and humanity along with it.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say in response. Everything he said made sense.

I’m so sorry, sis. As I thought back to Xiaoli and her research, this time, everything made sense. Somehow she had uncovered suspicious activities related to the transport of prisoners from the Fourth Heaven to orgplants in the Third Earth. Or perhaps beyond the Third Earth. When she started investigating, she got a target painted on her head. It was as simple as that. Sinotech would never allow the truth about orgplants to be revealed.

Would I ever be able to track down the actual culprit? It seemed unlikely. Unless… I could somehow get into the Black Corpses’ records. Did they keep records of such things?

Yu Yitai closed the other drawers and stepped out into the main walkway. “Let’s leave. I don’t like to be in these places any longer than necessary.”

On the way back, he answered further questions and provided more nuanced explanations but didn’t offer any more astonishing revelations. Most questions came from Elena and Bunny, as I was too taken aback to put many thoughts into words. He also repeatedly emphasized the need for confidentiality.

“You might wish to talk about what you just saw with a close friend or lover,” he said, “but unless they qualify based on sect ranking, you mustn’t give in to the urge.” That was obviously meant for Bunny.

Perhaps I was just too numb to form feelings. All I knew was that, although my decision to reject Sinotech and the Peacekeepers had been made back in the Fourth Earth after recovering that horrific note from Director Nakamura’s office about ‘clearing out the orphans,’ this visit to the orgplant ensured that my decision went from as firm as a sheet of bonecrete to as hard as a massive slab of bonemetal. Before, I’d simply decided to abandon my old life, to refrain from giving any loyalty to the system I’d previously served. Given what I’d just seen, that wasn’t enough.

I couldn’t just stand by and let the descendants of the Duḥkha Temple carry out their nefarious plan.

To the living, we owe respect; to the dead, we owe justice.

Were the victims in the orgplants alive? Their minds were gone, but their bodies existed. They weren’t exactly dead, but they weren’t alive either. Were they? What about their souls? Some people believed people have souls, but I’d always been skeptical.

I wondered what Dad would think if he knew about all this and what he would tell me to do. He was a good man, and he wanted what was best for the people. He’d even taught me that, in the end, Peacekeepers were supposed to serve the citizens, not Sinotech. I couldn’t imagine him continuing to support the system if he knew the truth.

I couldn’t let it stand. Sinotech couldn’t be allowed to fire that weapon and kill billions of innocent people. Nor could I let them get away with the crimes they had perpetrated over the centuries. It was silly to pretend that I personally had the strength and resources to defy Sinotech and its board of directors in my current state. But I would do whatever I could to further the cause. I would devote myself to the Naturalism Sect’s fight against Sinotech. There was no other option.

Yu Yitai dropped us off directly in front of our villa in the Celestial Mercy Resort.

“Chief Elder Wang, Eldress Ávila, we’ll be taking an initial trip to the True Heaven in a few days. Add this spell formation to your cultivator robe. It will provide further protection from the Curse and also contains a cooling function. If you think it’s hot in the Ninth Earth, just wait until you get up there.” He handed a scroll case to me.

“Sect Leader,” I said, “I still haven’t crafted my robe.”

“Make that your priority. The slight edge it can give you in combat is an asset you don’t want to be without. And when you finish, take a look at this information. It’s a copy of the original, which has been in my personal collection for many centuries.” He handed me a spiral-bound book with dark plastic covers obscuring the interior content.

“Yes, Sect Leader.”

As he drove off, Bunny walked somberly into the villa, and Elena turned to me.

“It’s almost too much,” she said.

“I know.” I reached out and took her hand. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. What about your robe? Do you need help?”

“I read through the instructions before, and they seemed straightforward.”

“Let me know if you have any trouble.”

By the time we entered the villa, Bunny’s mood had already infected everyone else. Tao Heng was bouncing a ball against the wall while Jakobe was on the couch, holding Bunny in his arms. Svea leaned up against the frame of the kitchen door, her arms crossed. When I met her eyes, she raised her eyebrows in a “what’s going on?” expression, but I simply shook my head in response. She nodded.

I hadn’t had time for the cultivator robe during our effort searching for clues about Elena in the Sixth Earth or in the frantic traveling and activity after that. But now, I had direct orders from the Sect Leader to take the time to make it. There couldn’t be any further delays.

Thankfully, the villa had two rooms set aside expressly for secluded cultivation, so I notified everyone of what I intended to do, kissed Elena, and locked myself in one of the chambers. The first thing I noticed was how dense the energy was; clearly, these places were designed to hoard the stuff when they weren’t in use. After sitting on the reed mat in the middle of the room, I steadied my breathing and cast my mind into my dimensional pendant. There, in one of the stone alcove shelves, were all of the materials I needed.

The process involved three stages. First, the initial shaping of the garment. Second, the infusion of the spell formation. In the third and final part of the crafting process, I had to connect the robe to my dimensional pendant so I could don or doff it at will. Of course, there was an additional step to go through, as I had that second spell formation to add, which meant it would take me longer than normal.

According to the written instructions, the first leg of the process depended primarily on intuition and mental clarity.

The path to becoming an immortal revolves around understanding oneself. Crafting the cultivator robe is only a tiny step along that path, yet it is a crucial one. You must have a clear vision of who you are and who you strive to be. The physical manifestation of that understanding will see its first outgrowth in the form of your garment.

I thought back to the test I’d taken in the Fourth Earth and my response to the question about why I wanted to be a part of the Naturalism Sect. Back then, I’d still been reluctant to think of myself as a member of the sect. Dreams of being a Glorious Peacekeeper had still filled my mind, and my vision of being a champion of justice in the Grand Kingdom had still been alive.

Now, I knew that I could never again think of myself as one of the Glorious Peacekeepers. However, that didn’t mean that I had to abandon my pursuit of justice.

My answer to that test question had been simple.

I believe in truth and justice. I’ve been lied to my entire life, and I want to know what’s really going on. I want to help people.

I still felt that way. I wanted to help people.

As I contemplated such matters, hours ticked by, and a garment began to take shape in front of me. It resembled a long coat, with an extremely high collar and wide lapels, voluminous sleeves, and twin columns of buttons running up the front. It had thick shoulder straps, built-in gloves, and flaps that reached all the way down to my ankles.

When the physical form was finished, it looked like my old Peacekeeper’s coat, except… better, somehow. More idealized. More perfect. And somehow… ancient, like something from primeval times.

That was when I realized I still wanted to be a Peacekeeper, even as a member of the Naturalism Sect. Not a loyal, brainwashed Peacekeeper. But a heretic Peacekeeper who would do what the real Peacekeepers wouldn’t and couldn’t: fight the system and champion the people.

With the shape of the garment set, I moved on to the second phase, in which I took one hundred and eight beads of bonemetal and inserted them into the garment, then used divine sense to link them. Together, they formed the robe’s primary spell formation.

Next came the process of connecting the cultivator robe to my dimensional pendant, and, finally, adding the spell formation Yu Yitai had provided.

After finishing, I tested the robe a few times to make sure it worked properly. It was at this point that I realized my stomach was screaming at me. Leaving the meditation room, I headed to the kitchen, where Tao Heng and Jakobe were playing some sort of card game.

“There you are, Chief Elder,” Tao Heng said. “Finished your robe? Let’s see it!”

“No fashion show,” I said, opening the refrigerator and pulling out some cold dumplings, a jar of pickled vegetables, some spicy protein strips leftover from the day before, and two cans of coffee drink. “Where are the girls?”

“The pond,” Jakobe said. “Girl’s picnic.”

“Any word from the sect leader?”

“Nope,” Tao Heng replied, pulling the cards together and shuffling them. “Should I deal you in?”

Stuffing some dumplings into my mouth and swallowing, I said, “No. Got more work to do.”

“Aren’t you tired? You were in there all night.”

I shook my head and guzzled some coffee. “Hardly sleepy at all, actually. Just famished.”

Twenty minutes later, I was back in the meditation room.

Interlude 13 – Girl Code

Svea sat cross-legged on a sheet spread out on the artificial grass next to the pond. Just beneath the surface of the water, she could see the gold and white glint of the fish. Elena sat across from her, and Bunny lay on her back, half on the blanket, half on the grass.

“If you squint your eyes, they look like real clouds,” Bunny said. “Or at least, what I imagine real clouds would look like.”

Svea looked up. The ceiling of the entire complex was painted to look like a sky. During the day, when it was lit, it was blue with white swirls. At night, there were lights inset to imitate stars. “Can you believe ninety-nine point nine percent of people in the Grand Kingdom have never even heard of a blue sky?”

“What do you think is worse,” Elena asked, “knowing the truth about the sky but not being able to see it? Or not knowing the truth at all?”

“Not knowing,” Bunny replied quickly.

“I think you’re right.” Elena picked up a raspberry, closed her eyes, and put it into her mouth. She sighed. “You know, this is the first time in my entire life I’ve had one of these things. They’re as delicious as I imagined.”

 “Second time for me,” Bunny said. Leaning up onto one elbow, she reached over and took a raspberry of her own. “This one bowl probably cost more than I make in a day waiting tables.”

Svea felt like both of the other girls were staring at her, even though they weren’t. “They’re delicious,” she said. She didn’t want to mention that she’d loved raspberries growing up, and once her father realized that, he’d arranged to add them to her Sunday breakfast every week. They were a luxury even in the Nine Heavens, let alone the Ten Earths, and Svea attempted as much as possible to avoid talking about her family’s extravagancies. Trying to shift away from the topic of food, she said, “How are things with Wang Fan?”

“Good,” Elena replied. “Sometimes he’s so dense! But that kind of makes me love him.”

“Love?” Bunny said. “That’s a strong word.”

Elena hesitated. “Maybe I’m using it wrong. Southmer and Sinese are pretty different.”

Svea picked up a French roll and carefully tore off a piece. “Love. Like. Whatever word you use, we get the idea. But Elena, given our last conversation, are you sure you’re falling in love with Wang Fan and not just the idea of Wang Fan?”

Elena sighed again, but this time it was a very different sigh, laced with uncertainty and emotion. “I don’t know. I think about him a lot. Even though he seems boring and cliché, I know he’s more than that. When we talk, he tells me things he’d never tell any of you. For example, did he tell the story of how his pet dog—” She stopped talking. “I shouldn’t say anything. It’s not my place.”

“We get it,” Bunny said.

“He’s done a lot for me,” Elena continued. “Or at least tried to do. If it weren’t for him, would I have escaped Nicolas Kun in the Fourth Earth? And even though the rescue mission in the Eighth Earth didn’t go as plan, just think about what he did there.”

Bunny and Svea looked at her with slightly confused expressions.

“He took on Johan Saito single-handedly!” Elena exclaimed. “And beat him. It’s a miracle he didn’t get himself killed.”

Svea thought for a moment before responding. “You’re right. He didn’t hesitate for a second about that.”

“Exactly. You know what he suggested afterward? That we run away to the Third Earth and settle down.”

“Aww,” Bunny said. “That’s so sweet.”

Svea tossed a small chunk of bread into the pond to be gobbled up by a fish a moment later. “You should do it, Elena. Forget all this drama and adventure. Just go enjoy life.”

“I’m tempted,” Elena said.

“I get what you’re saying about Wang Fan. Don’t forget he hung out a lot with me and Tao Heng back home. He tries to come across like this straight-laced tough guy, but deep down, he’s a softie. Did you know he used to buy milk for an old lady in his building?”

“Really?” Elena said. “I had no idea!”

“Because he refuses to talk himself up,” Svea said. “That old lady was even Cursed. He said, ‘It just shows how much she needs help.’ Or something like that.”

Elena reached out, her hand hovering between a raspberry and the French roll for a moment before picking the raspberry. “I like him a lot, and I know he likes me. But that doesn’t mean I want to settle down. Besides, Svea, you’re not one to talk about settling down. You broke up because of this whole adventure, didn’t you?”

“That’s different,” Svea replied, tossing more bread to the fishes. “Zhao Xiaojing was into me because of the excitement. Because I’m exotic.”

“You can’t blame her for that,” Bunny said. “You’re tall. Blonde. Curvy. You’re pretty unique in the Fourth Earth. Who wouldn’t be attracted to you?”

“I guess,” Svea said. “A lot of Fourther Hans look down on Eurosynths, you know. Xiaojing’s family basically hates us. She was dating me to shock them, that’s all. It’s totally different from Elena and Wang Fan. In fact, you know what he told me, Elena?”

“What?”

“He said he never dated any non-Han girls before. Never even looked at them. Us. You know what I mean.”

“He never told me that.”

Bunny laughed. “You think he would just outright say it? There’s no way. It would be weird.”

“Exactly,” Svea said, echoing Bunny’s laugh. “Think about his exes. Qian Cui. Charlotte Pan. They’re both Han.”

Elena looked at the ripples on the pond for a long moment. “Sometimes I wonder what he and Charlotte talk about on the phone.”

“You should ask him to let you listen in,” Svea said.

Bunny tsk-tsked. “Definitely not. That would come across as way too obsessive. By the way, Svea, I think you might have broken the girl code accidentally.”

“Huh?”

“You said, and I quote—” she closed her eyes and assumed a poised posture “—‘Given our last conversation, Elena, I think you’re falling in love with the idea of Wang Fan, not Wang Fan himself.’” She opened her eyes. “‘Given our last conversation’? Are you two keeping a secret from me?”

There’s a girl code? Svea thought. She opened her mouth and then closed it almost immediately, at the same time looking over wide-eyed at Elena. Svea had fallen into this group of friends by a combination of chance and necessity, and it had blindsided her. Growing up in an ultra-rich Eurosynth family in the predominantly Han-populated Fourth Earth, she’d never had many friends. In fact, she could use one hand to count the number of friends she’d had growing up. Three. And none of them had been female.

After graduating from college and striking out on her own, she had quickly been sucked into the world of the cultivators, which led to being roommates with Tao Heng. Counting her first crush in high school, she’d dated five women but had never had any as close friends.

To Svea’s immense relief, Elena laughed softly. “You look like you just saw a ghost, Svea.”

“I just, er, I didn’t know about the girl code. I mean—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Elena said. “Bunny should know about what happened. As long as you don’t say anything to Jakobe. Agreed?”

“Girl code, Elena,” Bunny said. “You don’t even need to ask.”

“Right. Well, it’s about Itsuki Saito. I didn’t tell Wang Fan everything…”

Chapter 66 – Duḥkha Cannon

I opened the spiral-bound book Yu Yitai had given me and found a hand-printed note inside. Yu Yitai’s calligraphy was flowing but precise and reminded me of writing you might see on a painting.

Chief Elder Wang,

This is a cultivation technique from before the war which can be used to create a powerful weapon. Believe it or not, that weapon was the original inspiration for the Spitter line of beam pistols. After Bone cultivation experienced a decline, this technique disappeared. Considering you have a Bone diamond, you might find it useful.

- Sect Leader Yu

I opened the book and started reading, and was immediately shocked. The technique was called the Duḥkha Cannon, and it relied on a Bone cultivation method called Ossientum Caro Growth.

Wait a minute, I thought to myself. Ossientum Lapis Growth creates bonecrete. Ossientum Metalum Growth creates bonemetal. What does Ossientum Caro Growth create? I read through the information in the scroll and found my answer toward the end.

The combination of bonemetal and boneflesh gives the Duḥkha Cannon both durability and flexibility in usage.

So Bone diamonds could be used to create boneflesh? What was it? What could be made with it other than this weapon? The benefits and applications of bonecrete and bonemetal were obvious. Everything from high-rises to sidewalks were made from bonecrete, and bonemetal was used as a primary element in everything from prosthetics to hovervehicle frames. But what was boneflesh? What had the ancient diamond-level Bone cultivators done with the ability to create it?

Putting such questions aside, I re-read the information two or three times until I felt I understood it thoroughly. It was a truly amazing weapon. It could fire incredibly destructive projectiles, the size of which could be altered at will by the wielder of the weapon. And what was more, it could be used to “paint” a target with a mark that would then allow you to fire at them even if you couldn’t see them. It was almost like it was specifically designed to take down Thermal cultivators with their invisibility techniques.

The more I thought about it, the more I needed a weapon like the Duḥkha Cannon. All my cultivation techniques were utilitarian in nature and didn’t help me much in knock-down-drag-out fights. Elena could charge into battle, shooting burning blasts of light, and Itsuki Saito could move with inhuman speed. All I could do was turn invisible and create building materials. Granted, my chokehold combined with a Thermal Ripple Cloak could be very effective, but it simply wasn’t the ideal way to fight an all-out battle.

This weapon would up my game a lot.

The creation technique seemed simple, but my first attempt was a failure. After directing the energy through the proper channels, it swirled out in front of me, taking a vague shape before collapsing into infinite sparks.

I tried again. And again. And again.

Hours passed, though I wasn’t aware of that.

Eventually, frustration took root in my heart, and I opened my eyes.

“What am I doing wrong?” I murmured, looking down at my open palms.

Why had I succeeded so easily with the cultivator robe, but not this? I picked up the scroll and read it yet again, which was when I noticed a passage that I realized could be interpreted in more than one way.

When the energy stream passes from your Governing meridian into your Yin Motility meridian, make sure to put a divine sense sheath in place.

Did it mean to sheath the energy or the meridians? Come to think of it, other passages could also be interpreted in different ways.

Breathe in slowly, filling your lungs to eighty percent capacity. Then recite the mnemonic. Accomplish this in exactly twelve seconds.

Did it mean to recite the mnemonic in twelve seconds? Or did I need to accomplish breathing and the recitation in twelve seconds?

And those were just two passages that stuck out immediately. After reading the scroll more carefully, I found even more areas open to interpretation. Then I started calculating how many possible variations and realized there were over sixty. Given that the ideal method would be to spend several minutes per possibility, I clearly had some work cut out for me.

I sat there for a good time just reading through the various passages before I was confident enough to try again. I only met with further failure. I felt the distinct desire to cuss at whoever had written this document. Couldn’t they have been at least a bit more precise?

Unfortunately, I had no one to consult about the matter. I spent more hours studying and attempting to figure out the technique, but nothing worked.

Frustrated, I finally gave up. Although I really wanted that cannon in my arsenal of tools, it wasn’t as if I had an urgent need for it. It was time for a break. Standing, I shook out my hands and shoulders, did some stretching, and then sat back down. I wasn’t tired yet, so I might as well take time to meditate and do some breathing exercises. Life was different now that I wasn’t a lowly single-sea cultivator.

Someone with a single sea of energy could refill their sea with a few hours of meditation. But the time requirement rose rapidly as one got stronger. My Thermal root took days of meditation to fill to capacity depending on how low it got, and the diamond’s requirements were even higher. An ordinary diamond-level cultivator who drained their energy to the lowest level possible without emptying it would then need to spend nearly two hundred hours of accumulated meditation to refill it. And that hour requirement only grew as the diamond became stronger.

Thankfully, I had Euneirophrenia Marrow, which helped my Bone diamond refill at a much higher rate than average. After my diamond was full again, I gave the Duḥkha Cannon technique one final attempt, only to fail.

I’m done, I thought. For now, at least.

Before leaving the meditation chamber, I cast my divine sense into my blood, touched the bonemetal mites, and used the resonance with Itsuki to determine his general location. He was in exactly the same place as before, down below, presumably in the Eighth Earth.

Rising to my feet, I left and joined the others for dinner.

Chapter 67 – Checking In

After a protracted session of meditation and cultivation, it was nice to relax with friends. We ate, drank, and enjoyed ourselves. For now, we could forget about our situation and the world around us and just have a good time. I was a bit tired, but time spent in meditation sometimes had a similar effect to sleep, so I didn’t feel the need to get in bed.

Eventually, the conversation turned to family, and we started swapping funny stories. Jakobe told about the time he locked his entire family out of their apartment and lost the key, five minutes before the series finale of the hottest TV show at that time. Svea and Tao Heng both had tales to tell from when they were in high school. After Bunny went, even Elena joined in. Then everyone looked at me.

I smiled and went into one of my favorite stories, the time Xiaoli and I snuck to the Ninth Heaven for a night on the town. For two teenagers to get from the Third Heaven to the Ninth Heaven and back in one night was no small feat. Just getting all the travel documents approved was something that normally took weeks, and the details of how we’d accomplished that without our parents finding out were borderline unbelievable. Not to mention the hilarity of two kids from a family of cops trying not to stand out in a seedy gambling hall. Needless to say, the story was a hit.

It was the first time in years that I’d talked about my sister with a smile on my face.

After the evening was over and everyone headed into bedtime routines, Elena took my hand and said, “Join me for a little walk?”

“Sure.”

The Celestial Mercy Resort wasn’t exactly a huge place; a stroll up the block and back would only take a few minutes.

Outside, she tugged me toward the pond at the end of the street, curling her arm around mine as we walked.

Halfway there, she said, “Do you trust him? Sect Leader Yu?”

“I don’t trust people easily,” I replied. “Although… he hasn’t given me any reason to distrust him yet.”

“You’re a detective. Don’t you have instincts about this kind of thing?”

I laughed lightly. “I suppose. You want to know what my gut is telling me?” I thought for a moment. “He seems trustworthy. But again, I haven’t exactly had much interaction with him.”

“Do you know how old he is?”

“Pretty old, I suppose.”

“I heard a rumor back when I joined my coterie in the Third Earth. Supposedly, he was around before the war.”

“Are you kidding me? That means he must be nearly a thousand years old.”

“Yeah, crazy, huh? When he was telling those stories before, it was almost like he’d seen those things happen himself.”

“Wow.” I couldn’t help but wonder what living that long would do to a person’s mind.

We stopped at the pond beneath the twinkling, artificial stars, where I sank into the warmth of Elena’s embrace and the softness of her lips.

About thirty minutes later, we headed back. As we walked toward the villa, I thought of the earlier conversation about family and was hit with a sudden wave of melancholy. How long had it been since I had heard Mom’s voice? Too long.

Just before entering the front door, I stopped in place.

“Wang Fan? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. But… I want to ask—” your permission, I thought, but held back from wording it that way “—what you think about something. I miss my mother, Elena. I haven’t gotten any updates about her for months, so I was thinking, well, I don’t know. Maybe I could, you know, just, er, that is, well... never mind, it’s probably not—”

“You want to call Charlotte, don’t you?” she asked, and the faintest of smiles I caught on her face caused cool relief to wash through me.

“Yeah,” I replied simply.

“Call her,” she said. “You don’t need to ask my permission or anything like that. I understand you and Charlotte.”

“I know. But… why don’t you stay? Listen in. That way, there aren’t any sort of secrets between us.”

“No, I don’t need to eavesdrop,” she said, but I sensed the faintest hesitation in her answer and also noticed the way her eyes flickered. She wanted to stay and listen in, but she didn’t want to say it aloud. I’d be a fool to let her refuse.

“I insist,” I said.

“No, I—”

“Elena. Please. Just do it for me.”

She looked away. “All right, fine.”

Back inside, the villa was quiet except for the sound of the shower in the main bathroom at the end of the hall.

Glancing at the wall clock to confirm it was after midnight, I picked up the phone and dialed out of the Ninth Earth. Meanwhile, Elena got some cake from the refrigerator and started nibbling at it.

Charlotte answered after only one ring. “Is it you?”

“It’s me,” I replied.

“Dammit, Wang Fan, it’s been weeks. What the hell happened? Are you alright?”

“I’m fine. A lot of things happened. In fact, I don’t even know where to start. What about you? Everything okay on your end? How’s my mother?”

“I’m okay. I did more digging into Xiaoli’s case but haven’t come up with anything yet. And your mother is doing well. She said to tell you she loves you and wants to see you.”

“What about that new treatment you mentioned last time? Has it helped?”

“It’s hard to say. She seems more energetic, but I think only time will tell.”

“I really miss her, Charlotte. Is there any way you could somehow get her line secure so I could call her?”

She thought about it. “I don’t think so. Too risky. Counter-Cultivation is still looking hard into your case. They’ve asked me questions a few times, not to mention your mother. It’s tricky enough just getting messages between you and her, much less installing equipment in her place.”

“Well, tell her I’ll figure out a way to get in touch with her when it’s safe.”

“I will.” There was a short lull, after which Charlotte said, “What about you and Elena? Have things gone well?”

Shit. I hadn’t forgotten how I’d promised myself to be honest with Charlotte about things, but I couldn’t very well go into detail with Elena sitting in the same room. “Uh, yeah. Fine.”

I could almost ‘hear’ her eyes narrowing. “Fine, huh? What happened? Did you get in a fight with her or something?”

“Umm….”

“You did. Wang Fan, don’t pull this embarrassing ‘cool guy’ routine on me. You refused to tell me about Qian Cui until it was too late; don’t make that mistake here. What happened?”

“I… I mean… I can’t really….”

“Wait. Is she there with you right now? She is, isn’t she?”

NO! I wanted to say. But Charlotte knew me too well. “Yeah.”

“Well, at least that means you didn’t have some sort of dramatic breakup. Okay, put her on.”

“What?”

“Get her on the line. I want to talk with her.”

“No, Charlotte, that’s not a good idea….”

By this point, Elena was looking at me curiously over the cake.

“If you don’t put her on, Wang Fan, there’s going to be repercussions. Big repercussions. Got it?”

I wasn’t sure what was more shocking to me, the truth about orgplants or what was happening on this phone call. “Er, fine. Elena? She wants to talk to you.”

Elena’s eyes went wide. “Me? Now?”

I extended the phone in her direction. She walked over and took it.

“Hello?” she said. “Yes, that’s me.” A pause. “Nice to meet you too, Charlotte. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

My heart was pounding in my throat as I sat at the table, poking at the cake with a fork while simultaneously watching Elena. She stood there silently, and I could just barely hear the buzz of Charlotte’s voice on the other end. I was sorely tempted to use divine sense to boost my hearing but resisted the urge.

Suddenly, Elena laughed. “Yes, I totally agree,” she said.

There was more conversation on Charlotte’s side.

Elena sighed, and her eyes shifted to look at me. “This is going to be awkward,” she said, “but I don’t like beating around the bush. Do you remember the last conversation you had with Wang Fan? Yeah? Well... I happened to overhear the last bit.”

Oh god. How could this be happening?

At first, there was silence from the phone, but then I heard Charlotte talking for what must have been two minutes straight.

It ended with Elena laughing again. “It’s fine, I understand. And to answer your question, no, I didn’t react very well. I actually kicked him. Scratched his face, too. But don’t worry, he’s fine now.”

Whatever Charlotte said in response, Elena laughed yet again even harder than last time. She even wiped a tear from the corner of her eye. They talked back and forth for a bit more, and I was glad Elena wasn’t looking at me, as I could sense my face flushing bright red.

Finally, Elena said, “I will, Charlotte. I hope we can meet in person one day. Take care.”

She extended the phone to me.

I took it. “Charlotte?”

“I like her, Wang Fan. You make sure not to screw this one up.”

“I wasn’t planning to,” I replied dryly.

“You can start by not telling ex-girlfriends you love them. That was my fault, though. Sorry.”

“Noted.”

“It’s late. You should probably go.”

“Yeah, pass that message to my mother for me. And by the way, put Xiaoli’s case on hold for a bit. Seriously. I’ll explain more next time.”

“If you say so. Okay, bye.”

“Bye.” I hung up, then looked at Elena. “Well… that was kind of awkward.”

She smiled. “I like her, Wang Fan. She’s funny.”

We finished the cake, by which time my eyes were really starting to sting for lack of sleep. We cleaned up the kitchen, and after a protracted goodnight kiss, I collapsed onto the bed in my room, Tao Heng’s snoring just barely audible through the wall.

The next day over breakfast, Elena said, “Oh, guess what, Jakobe? I talked to Charlotte.”

No, I thought. Please. Not this.

He looked up from his bowl of congee. “Shut the fuck up.”

“Who’s Charlotte?” Tao Heng asked.

“Wang Fan’s ex-girlfriend,” Bunny said.

Tao Heng’s eyes went wide. “Whoa. Sounds heavy. We need details, Elena. Details.”

Thus began a conversation that everyone except for me seemed to love. I couldn’t get out of the kitchen fast enough. Closing the meditation room door, I went into what ended up as another frustrating failure to create the Duḥkha Cannon. I took a lunch break, then continued until a voice spoke into my mind.

“Sorry to disturb your secluded cultivation, Chief Elder, but the time has come. Please come meet me out front.”

It was Yu Yitai. I didn’t need to make any further preparations, although it would have been nice to be a bit more full of energy. I walked out to find Elena waiting by the front entrance. Our friends were already gathered in the living room to see us off.

After the goodbyes, Elena and I walked out to where Yu Yitai was waiting in his vintage car. He gave me another pill to negate the effects of the bonemetal mites, and we drove out of the Celestial Mercy Resort into heavy rain. This time we headed even further from the city center toward the darkness of Purgatory.

“I didn’t get the information I wanted from Nicolas Kun,” Yu Yitai said a few minutes away from the hotel. “I’ll continue to interrogate him in the days to come, but for now, I don’t anticipate making much headway in terms of identifying the traitorous grand elder. Mr. Kun wanted to uncover their identity as much as I do right now but never succeeded. All the communication was done via intermediaries. And while I managed to track down everyone he communicated with, they were all dead. Killed just in the past few days.”

“Damn,” I said.

“And before you ask, Chief Elder, yes, I dug up background information for all of them. There were four people Mr. Kun worked with. All of them used disguises when dealing with him, or other means to keep their identities secret. Yet, he managed to learn who three of them were. The fourth, I pieced together.

“Two lived in the Bright Earths, one lived in the Lesser Heavens, and one in the Greater Heavens. Three were female, one was male. One was a member of an elder circle, two were inner sect members, the last, in the outer sect. There are other clues and bits of information, but despite sorting them a variety of ways, even using a computer program I personally coded for such data analysis, I couldn’t come up with anything.”

“What about Elder Qing?”

“Apparently, the two weren’t in direct communication.”

“If the intermediaries were all killed in the last few days,” I said, “then the traitor obviously knows Nicolas Kun was taken. And they know you’re onto them.”

“Yes, which is very concerning. It’s for this reason that I want more than ever to activate the full potential of the True Heaven before the traitor learns of the developments regarding you two.”

After several minutes of driving through the dreary rain, we reached a location where a vert-rail tube emerged from the ground and disappeared into the haze overhead.

“The Heaven-Propping Pillar extends directly into the Tenth Earth,” Yu Yitai said. “But regardless of which Heaven or Earth, the Pillar is probably the most heavily guarded location in the Grand Kingdom, outside of the First Heaven itself. So we’ll be using this abandoned vert-rail tunnel, one of several that make traveling to the Tenth Earth relatively easy.”

He parked in a mostly empty parking structure a few blocks down.

“The chances of running into any Sinotech people out here is extremely low. To be safe, though, I’ll still use a Thermal Ripple cloak until we’re inside the tunnel itself. Once the cloak is in place, summon your cultivator robes. I’ll also use an advanced Igneus Mask technique to ensure that our passage through the rain couldn’t possibly be noticed. Now, are the two of you ready?”

We nodded.

“Then, let’s go.”

Chapter 68 – The Tenth Earth

When Yu Yitai saw my cultivator robe, he simply said, “Interesting.”

As for his robe, it looked deceptively simple, like what I imagined a reclusive hermit might have worn in ancient times. Except it glowed with magical symbols and designs that made him look like a saint or sage.

With the help of his Gravitational cultivation abilities, the trip up the empty vert-rail tunnel was as easy as walking up a flight of short stairs. It was pitch black in the tunnel, but light wasn’t a factor when ‘seeing’ things with divine sense.

The last several hundred feet, the tunnel became nothing but bonemetal girders, forcing us to exercise care as we jumped up.

Then we were in the Ninth Shield, traversing rickety staircases and rusting ladders. I was no engineer, but even my untrained eye could see how shoddy this Shield was compared to the only other Shield I’d glimpsed up close, the Third. Whether it was because of lack of maintenance or poor construction, it hardly seemed an obstacle at all to the falling Cursed water. It was little wonder the Ninth Earth had to deal with almost constant rain.

Yu Yitai had obviously made this journey before, as we never hit any dead ends and didn’t have to double back. It was a quick trip up, and then we stepped out into the Tenth Earth. As we did, the rain lessened, and I looked up. For the first time in my life, I didn’t see one of the metallic Shields above me.

“Eldress, Chief Elder,” Yu Yitai said, “behold, the Curse Storm.”

I hadn’t seen real cloud cover before; virtually no one in the Grand Kingdom had. But I knew what I was looking at. Clouds. Thick, black clouds that stretched as far as the eye could see. They formed a vortex overhead, slowly spinning in an endless circle. Then I saw a white flash of light. Lightning, followed a moment later by a dull rumbling sound. Thunder. Things I had learned about in school and even seen in movies and games but had never encountered in reality.

It wasn’t raining hard where we were, but not too far away, I could see sheets of it so dense they obscured anything beyond them. I stared up until my neck ached, straining my eyes as I looked toward the central part of the cloud vortex off in the distance, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Singularity Pearl. Although Yu Yitai hadn’t offered us a physical description, I imagined it as an enormous glowing sphere that could be spotted from miles away. Apparently, it was too far into the cloud layer, as I didn’t spot even a hint of its existence.

Given that the Tenth Earth was the absolute top of the Grand Kingdom, with no Shield above it, I wondered if it would be possible to see the Hellscape beyond, or the real sky. The heavy rain and the darkness caused by the clouds made that impossible.

Then, scant moments after we’d stepped out, the rain turned heavy again, reducing visibility dramatically.

Shifting my gaze from the vortex above, I examined our immediate surroundings. We stood in a partially-constructed building, which I supposed had been intended to serve as a vert-rail station. There was a road in front of us, and across the street, a crumbling building, over which loomed a construction crane. More buildings could be seen stretching off in all directions, few of them complete, and I had to wonder if they were half-built or half-collapsed. Perhaps it was a combination of both. Off to the side, I noticed a rat on the wall, which scurried away moments later as if it knew I’d spotted it.

There was no graffiti and no trash. Yet somehow, this place seemed more defiled than the depressing slums outside of Purgatory, or the vermin-and-criminal-infested city centers of the Dark Earths. In fact, one thing that struck me was how the rain hissed when it hit the ground. There was also a thin layer of mist everywhere. And it was hot. Oppressively hot. It felt like walking into a bathroom where someone else had been taking a hot shower for fifteen minutes. And that was with the added measure of cooling provided by the spell formations in our cultivator robes.

“The trip is going to be even easier thanks to this,” Yu Yitai said, and he pulled out a fist-sized shell. “I picked it up from Mr. Kun.”

“The Shell of the Hešeri,” Elena said.

“Yes. No need for umbrellas or hoods. Let’s go.” With that, he walked out into the rain. As he did, a bubble of rain-free air formed around us, thanks to the Shell.

The streets were empty, and the surroundings devoid of life or movement. It was eerie. Whether it was during my youth in the Third Heaven, my time spent as a Peacekeeper in the Third Earth, or my adventures in the other Earths as a cultivator, I was used to seeing people. Everywhere. Even on the handful of occasions when I’d been near Purgatory, I hadn’t ever gone for more than a few minutes in the open without spotting other human beings.

But here, there was no one other than me, Elena, and Yu Yitai. It was unnerving.

After about ten minutes of walking, Yu Yitai led us underneath the overhang of a partially-constructed building, apparently intended for use as a warehouse. Leaning against the wall, he pulled out a handheld radio and turned it on.

“Deva 4, Deva 4,” he said, “this is Deva 1.”

There was no immediate response, causing Yu Yitai to frown slightly and check to make sure the radio was on.

Then he repeated, “Deva 4, Deva 4, this is Deva 1. Are you there?”

A man responded, “Deva 1, this is Deva 4.”

“What’s your status?”

“Everything’s clear and good.”

If I hadn’t been watching Yu Yitai closely, I wouldn’t have noticed the brief moment of hesitation before he responded. Nor would I have caught the way his eye twitched.

“Roger that,” he said. “See you in five or ten. Out.”

As he put the radio away, I said, “Something wrong?”

He looked at me, and when he spoke, it was via divine sense. “You’re perceptive. He used a code phrase that means the opposite of the words he just spoke. The team guarding the entrance to the True Heaven has been compromised.”

“The Saitos?” Elena asked.

“I checked in with the surveillance team in the Eight Earth right before I left, and they had eyes on the Saitos. Unless….”

“Unless what?” I said.

“Johan’s specialty is Thermal cultivation. It’s conceivable that if he realized he was being watched, he could have created an illusion to fool the elite disciples I have on him. Chief Elder, when was the last you checked on Johan’s son?”

“Not for some time. Hold on.” I closed my eyes and sent divine sense into the bonemetal mites in my bloodstream. They shivered in response, and then I sensed the warm resonance spring into being. This time, it tugged at me from a direction shortly up ahead. I opened my eyes. “He’s here. That direction.”

“And that means my blood is here,” Elena said, clenching her hands into fists.

“Probably,” Yu Yitai said, “but it also means things have gone awry. Very awry.” He lapsed into a short silence, then leaned off of the wall. “I need to see the situation with my own eyes. Follow me.”

He led us out the side of the warehouse, through a roofless structure, and into a crumbling three-story apartment building. On the top floor, there was an opening in the wall that might have had a window in it at one point but was now empty.

Crouching down behind it, Yu Yitai waved his hand, and a device appeared, a telescope handcrafted from leather and gold. Putting it to one eye, he flicked a switch on the side, then carefully looked out the window.

“Damn,” he said. “Four of my people have been replaced. Presumably killed in the process.”

Taking the binoculars away from his eyes, he waved his hands to produce a pair of translucent green lenses that he affixed to the front. Then he looked through the device again.

“No foreign spell formations in place.” He put the binoculars away. “Johan Saito is a diamond cultivator and is also the strongest member of the Saito clan. How strong is Itsuki? Two seas, if I recall correctly.”

“That’s right,” Elena replied.

“Even if those other two are high-level Saitos, there’s no way they could be a match for me. Why are they so confident?”

“What makes you certain they’re Saitos?” I asked. “Based on the information we dug up, he went to the Eighth Earth on a recruiting mission of some sort.”

“Good point. The Eighth Earth has a sizable population of rogue cultivators, but not even the strongest among them have diamonds of energy. Sinotech simply wouldn’t stand for a threat like that. But there are plenty of skilled operators there. Who might he have hired? Isabel? No, she’s a dealer, not an operator. Xie Fengyin? Anders Yamashita?”

“Are you sure none of them have diamonds of energy?” I asked.

He looked at me for a long moment. “No one can be completely sure of anything.”

“They have to have a reason for being confident. This is obviously a trap, Sect Leader. Is it really that urgent that we proceed? Surely you have security measures in place to prevent them from getting inside the True Heaven. Otherwise, why would they have set a trap for you?”

“You’re probably right. There’s only one grid monkey in the Saito Clan who could conceivably break the True Heaven ICE, and that’s P4R0DY. Even taking Sinotech as a whole, she’s one of the best. But it’s unlikely Johan would take her out of the safety of the First Heaven. Losing her would be a big setback for the Saitos.” After a final pause for thought, he scooted back and stood. “Regardless, we need to return with a larger and stronger force. Let’s go.”

We hurried down the stairs and out onto the street. We were halfway down the block when, all of a sudden, we heard the crackle of the radio.

“Mr. Yu, this is Johan. Given that we can now sense Detective Wang on the scene, it seems you saw through my little ruse. How about we sit down and have a talk?”

Yu Yitai stopped walking and slowly lifted the radio from his side. “Yes, let’s talk. I have a secure location in the Ninth Earth that would be perfect.”

“I don’t think so. Let me make this simple for you. Either come here to chat, or I liquidate all six of your guards.”

“You can’t kill people who are already dead. I just scanned you from across the way. I know you’ve taken four of them out.”

“The four whose places we took aren’t dead.”

“Why exactly would you keep them alive?”

“To have bargaining chips. I know you have a soft spot for your followers, Sect Leader. If you want them alive, then just give me a chance to talk.”

Yu Yitai looked at the two of us and we at him. Then he waved his hand to produce two jade slips, which he handed to us. “They’ll take you to one of the other vert-rail tunnels. Use them without hesitation if things turn bad.”

Then he clicked the talk button on the radio. “Two blocks down is a rain diversion channel. I’ll talk with you there.”

“See you shortly.”

Yu Yitai started walking at a brisk clip, down to the end of the block, around a corner, then down another block. Just before arriving, he said, “Hoods up,” and then pulled a hood out of the collar of his cultivator robe to shield against the rain. Elena and I followed suit, and he put the Shell of the Hešeri away. Immediately, we were surrounded by the downpour.

 The rain diversion channel was almost like a river, filled with churning water. We arrived at almost the exact same time as Johan Saito, who was alone, a fashionable umbrella slung over his shoulder to keep the rain away. He also had sleek cooling units at his throat, wrists, and ankles. He strolled up to a position a bit more than thirty feet away, alone, putting him out of the range of my divine sense, but well within Yu Yitai’s. Itsuki wasn’t anywhere in sight.

“Pleasure to meet you in person after all these years, Mr. Yu,” Johan said.

“Likewise. Where are my people?”

Johan waved his hand, and glittering light flared as six bound individuals appeared on the ground in front of him.

“Alive and well,” he said.

Yu Yitai used divine sense to pull them within range of his dimensional pendant, at which point they vanished.

“Thank you for that,” Yu Yitai said. “Now, what do you want?”

“The girl. And the access code to the True Heaven. I can break in with force if I have to, and in fact, the Saito clan’s best grid monkey is already on it. But I’d rather not expend the effort.”

“You have little Noriko up here?”

“I didn’t realize the two of you were on a first name basis.”

“‘P4R0DY’ and I have clashed more than a few times, but I’m sure you knew that. And while she’s done a good job of keeping her identity a secret, the truth is that she’s not quite on my level. I find it hard to believe you’d risk her in an operation like this. She’s your only talented grid monkey in this generation.”

“That should tell you how seriously I’m taking this matter. Noriko is confident she can get the door open on her own, but again, I’d rather do things the efficient way.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a cockroach scuttle by and was tempted to step on it, but I wanted to remain balanced on the balls of my feet, ready to take action at a moment’s notice.

“In the time it takes Noriko to break into the True Heaven,” Yu Yitai said, “I can leave and return with enough force to crush you out of existence. Whatever allies you picked up in the Eighth Earth won’t help you against the combined might of Matriarch Liang, Patriarch Nguyễn, and myself. And that’s not to mention the grand elders.”

“I’m surprised you still trust your grand elders. Given that you captured my erstwhile minion Nicolas Kun, you surely know about the traitorous element in your organization.”

“I’m not interested in bantering, Johan,” he said, turning as if to walk off.

“You will be when you hear who I visited in the Eighth Earth and what he gave me.”

Yu Yitai looked over his shoulder at Johan.

“Keep your teleportation slips ready,” he projected to Elena and me.

“Who might that be?” he said out loud.

“For forty years or so,” Johan said, “this person has been working on a very secret project for me. A genetics program.”

“You’re a Sinotech board member, Johan. Your grandfather voted on the measure to outlaw genetic manipulation. I also forbade such practices in my sect. When Sinotech and the Naturalism Sect agree on something, you’d think someone of your intelligence would take it seriously.”

“I didn’t vote on that measure. If I had, I would have voted against it. In any case, this friend of mine has many skills and talents, and among them is blattology.”

Yu Yitai inclined his head in thought. “The study of cockroaches? You’re talking about the Doctor, aren’t you?”

“Yes. And he bred a very interesting species for me. Not only can these roaches be controlled with divine sense, but they also deliver a precise and painless bite to whatever target they’re set upon. What’s even more fascinating is that, while it took several decades of very frustrating failures, we managed to get these cockroaches to naturally produce paliprox.”

“Leave now,” Yu Yitai said to Elena and me. “I’ve lost connection to my cultivation base.”

Heart pounding, I cracked the teleportation slip in my hand, and Elena did the same. Then a third cracking sound echoed out as Yu Yitai snapped his teleportation slip.

Nothing happened.

Johan Saito smiled. “I’ve been planning this moment a very long time, Sect Leader. Did you think I’d let you escape with a method even the lowliest disciples in your sect can use?”

Chapter 69 – Fierce Fighting

I looked down at the broken pieces of useless jade in my hand, then let them tumble to the ground beneath me. At the same time, I tentatively reached out to my cultivation base… and connected to it. Maybe the sect leader had been hit with paliprox, but I wasn’t under the influence. I detected a sudden motion out of the corner of my eye and saw a roach scurrying toward me. I stepped on it.

Yu Yitai tossed his broken teleportation slip to the ground. “There are three ways to negate teleportation slips. But I don’t see a Bohr Fulmina Convertor. You didn’t have time to set up an Electric Pacification spell formation, and you couldn’t possibly have taken the risk of bringing a eusara sloth out of the First Heaven.”

“Technically, you’re right, but at the same time, completely wrong,” Johan said. Pulling a cylindrical device out of his coat pocket, he continued. “I used this. It’s a prototype micro version of a Bohr Fulmina Convertor, except infused with a spell formation etched in bonemetal and infused with eusara sloth marrow.”

“Interesting,” Yu Yitai said. “You harvested bone marrow from the sloths? Risky to run a procedure like that on endangered creatures so valuable to the board.”

“Big risks bring big rewards. Such as catching the leader of the Naturalism Sect.”

“This isn’t the first time I’ve been cut off from my cultivation base.”

“I’m aware of that,” Johan replied. “Which is why I brought friends.” He raised his voice and said, “Show yourself, Mr. Xie.”

We heard footfalls from behind us, and I looked over my shoulder to see a bearded man walking out of the shadows, tall and muscular. He wore a long, transparent coat with built-in cooling units, beneath which was a chiseled physique and host of tattoos.

“Xie Fengyin,” Yu Yitai said. “The Six-Root Rogue. So you’re throwing your lot in with the Saitos? Abandoning your neutrality?”

“Everyone has bills to pay,” Xie Fengyin replied. “And the Saitos made an incredibly generous offer. By the way, I had to change my nickname recently. I’m now the Seven-Root Rogue.”

“You have seven roots of energy? Impressive.” He looked back at Johan Saito. “Together, the two of you outmatch me, at least on paper. But do you really want to escalate this to the level of fighting? I earned my reputation in the War, fighting against the odds and beating enemies with higher cultivation levels than me. Surely you remember the story of how your grandfather and I killed the champion of the Primal-Chaos Nirvana Alliance. He was a diamond cultivator, and we were both at the level of two roots.”

While they talked, I considered my options. In terms of Johan Saito’s cultivation rating, I remember Elena saying he was in the fifties. As for this Xie Fengyin, having seven roots could put him anywhere from twenty-eight to over sixty. That was a big range, but it still made him far beyond my level, even if he were on the low side.

“If we don’t fight our way out,” Yu Yitai projected, “We won’t get out of here alive. Let’s seize the initiative. We’ll make a move in five, four, three….”

 “What I want is immediate access to the True Heaven,” Johan Saito said. “I don’t want to destroy it, take it, or do anything that would harm your interests. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to—”

Suddenly Elena turned in place, hands flashing before she threw them out, sending a white beam of light shooting toward Xie Fengyin.

It pierced his shoulder, provoking a shriek of anger as his own fingers slipped in and out of the sign to summon a Fulmina Shield. Then, as he proceeded to go into another hand sign, Elena spun and sent a beam of light toward Johan Saito, who leaned away, barely avoiding it. At the same time, Yu Yitai leapt into motion, running toward Johan Saito in an outright sprint, moving with a speed that only the enhanced muscles a multi-diamond cultivator could produce.

As for me, I threw up a Thermal Ripple Cloak large enough to encompass both Elena and me, then drew my Spitter. As the wires snapped into place, I took aim at Xie Fengyin. Before I could pull the trigger, a blast of wind hit me from the side, knocking me a few paces to the left. Elena also staggered to the side, giving Xie Fengyin time to start running in our direction, all the while slipping his fingers into a new gesture.

A fraction of a second later, the air around me grew scorching hot, shocking me so much that I gasped. As the air rushed into my lungs, I felt a burning sensation that provoked an instinctive cough, and my concentration broke, causing the Thermal Ripple Cloak to drop.

Closing in rapidly on Elena, Xie Fengyin waved his hand, and at the same time, I felt divine sense latch onto my Spitter and rip it out of my hands. Trying to ignore the insane heat around me, I used my divine sense to shove Xie Fengyin so hard that it nearly knocked him off his feet.

The surprise he experienced due to my diamond-level strength caused his previous technique to end, and the air temperature around me went back to normal.

Not pausing, I flashed the sign for an advanced version of the Igneus Mask, and ten duplicate images of Elena popped into being around her. Simultaneously, I focused my divine sense and aimed it like a fist at Xie Fengyin. As his eyes flickered back and forth between the different versions of Elena, my divine sense delivered a focused blow that landed on his cheek.

His head jerked to the side, and in a development that nearly made me laugh out loud, he fell to the ground! However, I hadn’t knocked him out. As he crawled to his feet and looked over at me with rage in his eyes, I pulled my Spitter back to me with divine sense.

Which was when Elena launched herself through the air toward him, her entire right arm shining with the bright light of a Solis Gauntlet.

He tried to mount a defense but was too slow, and her burning fist hit him in the eye, scorching flesh and sending him stumbling backward, a hoarse scream rattling out of his mouth.

She hit him again and again, pounding him with a hand that could melt metal, not to mention bone and flesh.

He was dead by the second blow, but she delivered at least five, leaving his face and head in such a sickening state I was surprised she didn’t retch at the sight of it. I supposed her adrenaline was pumping too hard for that.

Looking over to the fight between Johan Saito and Yu Yitai, I tapped the wire release of the Spitter, slipped out a pair of replacement wires, and jacked them in.

Johan was scrambling backward, hands flashing as he summoned immense columns of burning energy by means of the Pillars of Sol technique. Given how focused he was on his own battle, I doubted he would have noticed the unusual range and power of my divine sense. Hopefully, he still didn’t realize how high my cultivation level was. If he knew the truth, he would definitely want to seize me and rip out my diamond of energy.

Yu Yitai danced between the Pillars of Sol with dazzling agility as he closed in on Johan.

I knew that Yu Yitai was far above Johan in cultivation level. However, the fact that he couldn’t access his cultivation base or use any of his abilities was a huge disadvantage. He was physically stronger than Saito, but that wouldn’t be of much use if he couldn’t actually touch him.

Johan switched tactics; the pillars vanished, and a gale-force wind battered Yu Yitai from the side. The sect leader simply leaned into it at exactly the right angle, resulting in only a slight deceleration on his part. He was now about two paces from Johan. I leveled my Spitter at the Saito clan leader but didn’t pull the trigger, as I needed a cleaner line of sight.

At the last minute, Johan switched to a Thermal Ripple Cloak and vanished. In response, Yu Yitai leaped forward in a desperate attempt to grab him.

He succeeded.

His hand wrapped around Johan’s ankle, and then Yu Yitai started moving so quickly I could hardly identify the technique he used. I was a good grappler, but compared to Yu Yitai, I might as well have been an amateur. In a matter of seconds, he had Johan Saito immobilized.

When the Thermal Ripple Cloak dropped, I could see Johan in a chokehold, his face turning purple as he tapped Yu Yitai’s forearm rapidly.

Yu Yitai released some of the pressure and said, “As you know, Johan, I could kill you in less than a second if I squeeze hard enough. If I have to, I’ll rip your head clean off.”

Johan nodded and made a wheezing sound.

“I want you to very carefully reach into your coat pocket and take out the paliprox patch there,” Yu Yitai continued. “Pull off your glove and put it on the back of your hand.”

Johan did as he asked. Afterward, Yu Yitai let several seconds go by, then released Saito.

Standing, he took a few steps back, then reached into his pendant and produced a pistol, which he aimed at Johan Saito’s forehead. I kept my Spitter trained on the man as well, for good measure.

Johan sat there catching his breath. Then he wiped some blood from the side of his mouth, smiled, and in a gravelly voice said, “You live up to your reputation, Sect Leader Yu. Even without your cultivation base, you got the jump on me. Well done.”

“Where’s my blood, you bastard!” Elena said, taking a step toward him.

“Safe in my dimensional bracelet,” he replied, his eyes locked on Yu Yitai as he got to his feet. His hands loosely raised, he said, “Point to you, Sect Leader. You disarmed me.”

Keeping his pistol leveled at Johan, Yu Yitai took another step back. “Keep your eye on him, Chief Elder. You can’t—”

All of a sudden, Johan Saito curled the four fingers of his right hand, leaving the thumb protruding. I heard a distant crack, followed a split second later by a second cracking sound.

Yu Yitai stopped walking and looked down at his chest, where I could just make out two small holes. Two more cracking sounds rang out, and two more holes appeared. Blood was already staining the fabric around the first two holes as he dropped down to one knee, the pistol clattering away from him. Then light swirled as a glowing medicinal pill appeared between his fingers.

However, as he lifted the pill toward his mouth, another cracking sound rang out, and his thumb vanished in a haze of blood. The pill tumbled to the ground.

Johan Saito took a step forward and retrieved Yu Yitai’s gun, and I sent my divine sense rushing forth to hit him right on the shoulder. He lost his balance and fell onto his side, but as he did, he shoved me with his divine sense, knocking me onto my back.

Struggling up on my elbows, I saw Elena running toward Johan, a whip of white light streaking through the air ahead of her. Then Johan’s divine sense struck her, and she flipped backward twice before slamming face-first into the ground. She didn’t get up.

Johan was on his feet by now, gun in hand. He stepped toward Yu Yitai, who had retrieved the medicinal pill and was trying to get it into his mouth. At the same time, Johan’s divine sense wrapped around me and lifted me into the air, just like he’d done back in the hotel in the Eighth Earth. I struggled, to no avail. My hands were clamped at my sides, and all I could do was to watch as Johan reached forward and grabbed Yu Yitai’s disheveled hair.

“Well fought,” he said. A black patch appeared in his hand, and he placed it carefully onto Yu Yitai’s neck. “Sadly, I outmaneuvered you. Like I said, I prepared well.”

Yu Yitai slumped onto the ground.

“This makes me the first person in three hundred and forty-four years to best Yu Yitai in combat. I might just have a plaque made for myself. Or maybe a trophy.” He turned and pointed the Type 77 at me. “Game over, boy. Right now, you have three choices to pick from. One: die. Two: come along for the ride. I know the girl likes you, so perhaps you could be of use. I like bargaining chips. Three: join us. Itsuki has said good things about you, and I know you were a loyal Peacekeeper for years until my son’s botched mission ruined your life. You could have everything back if you just return to the fold.”

There wasn’t an ice cube’s chance in the Hellscape I was going to become a pawn again, whether of Sinotech or the Saitos. However, I didn’t exactly have a lot of options.

I suddenly heard Dad reciting an old saying among the Han people. If you can’t bite someone, don’t bare your teeth.

“They told me that once you join their sect, you get marked,” I said, scrambling to come up with something that sounded believable. “And that Sinotech will never take you back after that. That you get put to sleep if you try.”

Johan laughed scornfully. “Complete fiction. Do you know how many agents we have in the Naturalism Sect? And the majority were turned, not sent in. Trust me, I can take care of you.”

I pretended to hesitate, then said. “Fine. That’s all I wanted anyway.”

“Itsuki!” he said loudly, and a moment later, his son appeared, clad in Black Corpse armor, a QBZ-14C cradled in his arms.

I looked over at him, doing my best to hide the fiery murder I felt in my heart.

“Yes, Father?”

“As you suggested, the detective here is willing to switch sides. Of course, he’ll need to prove his loyalty first. Go take his pendant and pacify him.”

Johan’s divine sense vanished, and I dropped back down to the ground. Itsuki started walking toward me, and I considered trying to snap his neck with my divine sense. However, that was when I noticed he was looking me directly in the eyes. Then I saw his lips moving as if he were talking, except no sound came out. His back was to his father, so Johan couldn’t see. I looked closely at his lips, reading the words they mouthed.

Talk to me with divine sense. Talk to me with divine sense.

He was repeating the same thing over and over. After a moment of indecision, I sent a stream of divine sense to his mind.

“What,” I said.

“Play along. We’ll move against my father when the time is right. He has no idea you’re at the diamond level of Bone cultivation, so he won’t suspect we can communicate like this.”

I didn’t trust him but was just as out of options as before. He stopped about two paces away from me, produced a black patch, and tossed it over.

I peeled the back off and put it on my neck, and my cultivation base disappeared.

“Pendant and gun,” he said. Maintaining eye contact, I thumbed the wire release on the Spitter and handed it to him. Then I pulled my pendant off and threw it over.

Meanwhile, Johan squatted next to Yu Yitai and waved his hand over his chest. A faint sucking sound could be heard above the patter of the rain as he used divine sense to pull the bullets out of Yu Yitai’s chest. They didn’t look like any bullet I’d ever seen. They were black, with a faint sheen of green, and they emanated a blackish-green smoke that trailed behind them to create wisps and swirls that lasted far longer than ordinary smoke should.

“These were worth every yuan I paid for them,” Johan said. They vanished into his dimensional bracelet. Finally, he picked up the medicinal pill from the ground and shoved it into the sect leader’s mouth.

“I wasn’t lying when I said that Noriko is more than capable of getting into the True Heaven,” he said with a chuckle. “What I really want are your lovely diamonds of energy.”

After the medicinal pill disappeared, Johan said, “Itsuki, you carry the sect leader.”

“Yes, Father,” Itsuki replied.

Johan walked over to Elena, who moaned as she regained consciousness.

Reaching down and grabbing her hair by the back of her head, he dragged her up. She moaned again as he slapped a patch onto her neck. “My plan is finally working. After all these years.”

Keeping Elena in his grip like a rag doll, he turned. “Come, Itsuki. Back to the complex. The time has come to crack open the True Heaven.”

Chapter 70 – The Altar

The building that housed the True Heaven had apparently been originally built as a shopping mall. Either that, or Yu Yitai had constructed it to look like one. The rough bonecrete exterior was pitted and mottled with age, without a single window visible anywhere.

Johan led the way through the main doors into a small chamber that barely fit all of us. After the doors behind us closed and sealed, the inner doors opened, and we were inside an entryway of sorts. The interior of this building couldn’t have been more different from the outside. The bright light, sleek surfaces, and crisp smell actually reminded me of an orgplant.

The room clearly wasn’t intended as any sort of waiting room or foyer, as it lacked any chairs or sofas. It was small, only about five or six paces long, and a bit less than that in width. In the middle of the opposite wall was a single closed door with an access terminal set into the wall next to it.

Set up next to the door was a mobile computer system atop a plastic folding table. Behind it sat a woman who had to be Noriko Saito, also known as P4R0DY. She wore garments of white, shiny leather, with long sleeves and a short skirt that clasped directly to white socks at her knees. They looked expensive, and my guess was they must be something people wore in the First Heaven. I remembered Yu Yitai saying she was from there. Her hair was as white as her clothing and it wasn’t from age. It was as glossy as plastic and done up in a complex series of braids that I could only speculate was also First Heaven fashion.

Her computer was something the likes of which I’d never seen before. The glossy screen was lit with bright colors, and instead of being boxy, it had smoothly curved edges. Not even the computers I’d seen in that orgplant back in the Fourth Earth looked anything like it. As we entered, the woman’s fingers ceased their dance across the keys, and she looked up.

“Well, Noriko?” Johan said.

“Like I said, Uncle Johan,” she replied, “Yu Yitai is one of the best grid monkeys in the Grand Kingdom, but not the best.”

“How much longer until you get the door open? The hash list I provided was costly, and I distinctly remember you saying it would save time.”

Noriko looked back at her computer and tapped a few keys. “My guess is that, at most, we have another hour to go.”

Johan tossed Elena down next to the door as carelessly as if she were a sack of beans. As she flopped over, I had to resist the urge to curse him verbally. What was more, Itsuki was standing off to the side in my field of vision, and I could see him stiffen at the same time as me. What did his reaction mean?

“Itsuki, put the sect leader down there,” Johan said. “Detective, go sit against that wall.” I complied wordlessly, as did Itsuki.

After that, time began to pass with agonizing slowness. Johan Saito simply stood there, motionless, until I realized he must be meditating to refill some of the energy he’d used during the brief fight.

A few minutes later, I tentatively reached out with my divine sense to touch Itsuki’s mind again.

When I didn’t see any reaction from Johan, I asked, “What’s your plan?”

“I’m working on it,” Itsuki replied a moment later.

“You have no plan? Don’t you know what the True Heaven is? If it detaches and floats up into the storm overhead, we’ll be completely stuck! You should have acted earlier!”

“My father is a diamond cultivator with three roots and two seas. Do you know how strong that makes him? We can’t make a move unless we’re absolutely certain it will succeed.”

“You usually throw teleportation discs around like candy. Don’t you have at least one on you?”

“No.”

“Dammit Itsuki, you had all this time to come up with an idea, and you did nothing? Don’t you know what he’s planning to do to her?”

It took a moment for him to respond. “I don’t.”

“He’s going to cut her heart out and sacrifice it to the sun!”

This time he didn’t respond.

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes, I heard you. I… I had no idea. Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m Fucking sure. We need to come up with a plan NOW!”

“You yelling at me isn’t helping. Get out of my mind and let me think! Check back in five minutes.”

I did as he asked. However, before I could speak to him again, Noriko’s computer system made a chiming sound, and she exclaimed, “Got it! Much earlier than expected!”

Moments later, the console lit up, and then the door vibrated as the interior locking mechanism disengaged.

“Excellent work, Noriko,” Johan said.

She let out a whoop. “At long last, P4R0DY comes out on top! You have been officially pwned, Stomdollar!”

Ignoring her, Johan continued, “Detective Wang, you carry the sect leader. Itsuki, you bring the girl and keep an eye on the detective. Noriko, pack up and follow. Next up, you need to get into the control systems.”

Rubbing his palms together eagerly, he stepped through the door.

Itsuki picked up Elena, one arm under her legs, the other supporting her back. The sight of it irked me, but I refrained from commenting as I did the same with Yu Yitai.

“The plan, Itsuki?” I asked. “What if we just run now while your father’s distracted?”

“We’d need a teleportation disc, but my father has them all. He knows I used one in the Eighth Earth without his authorization, and though he doesn’t know exactly what I did, it aroused his suspicions.”

“He has them in his dimensional bracelet?”

“Yes. And as you know, breaking into dimensional storage devices isn’t easy, so you can forget about pilfering one.”

Walking past Noriko, who was breaking down her computer station, we followed Johan into the interior of the True Heaven. A short corridor lit with white light led into a longer, curving corridor that went both left and right. Johan went right.

“Amazing,” he said. “I can’t believe you built this right under our noses, Yu Yitai. Oh, a laser tripwire? Easily disabled, of course. What’s this?” He laughed. “Apparently you planned for trouble. Jail cells.”

Behind transparent doors were small cells, each of which contained a cot, a chair, a desk, and behind a waist-high partition, a toilet, and a sink.

Johan reached out to touch a smooth keypad next to the door of one of the cells. The cell door opened. “Modeled after the Sinotech versions. Surprise, surprise. Put the sect leader in here.”

I stepped into the cell he’d indicated and deposited Yu Yitai on the cot. After I was back out in the corridor and the door hissed shut, Johan said, “Look away,” then pushed a series of buttons on Yu Yitai’s cell door. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a complex network of lights appear inside the transparent door, then fade away.

Johan laughed. “You used almost exactly the same spell formations, too. And here I thought you were an innovator.”

With another chuckle, he turned and continued down the corridor. There were a few other security devices in place, but Johan identified and disabled all of them with his divine sense. After we’d walked far enough that the entrance wasn’t visible behind us, we reached an intersection. The curve of the corridor continued onward, but to the left, a straight passage led to what appeared to be a large central area.

“This must be it,” Johan said. “The home of the Sun’s Blood Huitzauhqui.” We followed him, eventually walking into a circular promenade. Looking up, I saw a domed ceiling, beyond which was a set of metal doors, presumably bonemetal. A walkway formed the perimeter of the promenade, with steps leading down to what looked like a massive circular table covered with strips of reflective black material. It must have been twenty feet in diameter and rose to roughly thigh-level.

Other corridors led out in the cardinal directions, and the first thing Johan did was glance down each of them.

“There,” he said, pointing. “That one leads to the control room, Noriko. Set up in there, and watch for tripwires and the like. I want this station operational as fast as humanly possible. Seal the outside doors, but disable all internal security measures.”

“You got it, Uncle Johan,” she said, juggling bags and wires as she headed off in that direction.

Johan walked down the steps and ran his finger along the surface of the table. “So this is how he planned to do it. Interesting. He couldn’t have set it up better for me.”

He summoned an enormous stone disc from his dimensional bracelet with the wave of his hand, which settled onto the circular table, causing it to creak momentarily. The disc was about half the size of the table and was one of the most bizarre things I’d ever seen. On the top, in the very middle, a face was carved into the stone, surrounded by four squares and a series of concentric rings filled with complex designs. Some of the designs were recognizable; I saw snakes, skulls, birds, and other animals. But many of the other designs were incomprehensible. The outer edge was formed by what I eventually realized must be two dragons. What struck me most about the thing was that it looked old. In fact, I got the sense it was the oldest thing I’d ever seen. Buildings in the Grand Kingdom often crumbled from age, but that happened over a period of decades or perhaps hundreds of years. This stone disc seemed completely different; if I had to guess, it must have been ancient even before the era of the Climb.

“You have no idea the effort my grandfather expended to acquire this altar,” Johan said, jumping up onto the table and stepping up to the edge of the stone disc. “It was created on another continent by a culture long lost, and many members of the Saito Clan died in the Hellscape during the mission to get it. Itsuki, bring the girl up here and lay her in the middle.”

My heart immediately started pounding in my chest. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this! Not here! Not now!

“Don’t let him hurt her!” I said into Itsuki’s mind.

“I won’t,” he replied with oddly grim confidence. However, even as his words echoed in my thoughts, he stepped onto the table and did as his father had asked.

Johan looked at Elena stretched out in front of him and arranged her arms so they were over her head. Then, without any warning at all, an obsidian knife appeared in his hand, which he raised overhead. This was just like Jakobe’s dream! NO!

I took a step forward.

“Father,” Itsuki said.

Johan looked over. “Yes?”

“Didn’t you say the whole point of this was to be above the Curse? Beneath the sun?”

“We will be, shortly,” Johan said. He flipped the knife around in his hand, then ran it slowly down the side of Elena’s face, between her breasts, and toward her abdomen. “I’m just giddy that this is finally happening.” He laughed, making him sound like a child. “The famous Yu Yitai, vanquished. The subject of our clan’s thousand-year search, in our hands. Everything is coming together.

“Actually, now that I think about it, she should be arranged like this.” He pushed her arms apart into a splayed position, then did the same with her legs. “Just like Tlaltecuhtli, who screamed as she was torn apart, becoming the mother of the world. Her hair became the flowers and trees, her skin grew the grass. The water leaking from her eyes became the rivers and streams, and her mouth, the caves.”

I shuddered involuntarily, then glanced at Itsuki to see that his face, while expressionless, seemed harder than the stone of the altar.

“But,” Johan continued, “the mother of the earth doesn’t matter now, Itsuki. It’s Huītzilōpōchtli we must appease. In ancient times, millennia before the War of Tribulation, there existed a people who knew the truth. They understood that without making sacrifices to Huītzilōpōchtli, humankind would fall into infinite night. But they were wiped out, and the calamity they had sought to forestall ended up playing out exactly as they predicted. It took time for Huītzilōpōchtli’s wrath to grow. But when it blossomed, it ended the world. And since then, for nearly a thousand years, human eyes have not seen the glory of the sun or the beauty of the moon. Except perhaps for Yu Yitai, the bastard.”

“What the hell is he talking about, Itsuki?” I asked via divine sense.

“I have no idea. Maybe he’s gone insane.”

The knife disappeared, and Johan hopped off the altar.

“Take the girl and the detective to the cells, Itsuki. Do you remember the code to activate the spell formation?”

“Yes, Father.”

Chapter 71 – The Sacrifice

“Come on,” Itsuki said gruffly. I followed wordlessly.

“This is going from bad to worse,” I projected.

“I have an idea,” he replied.

Back around the corner, Itsuki placed Elena in the cell next to Yu Yitai, then opened the next cell down and gestured for me to enter.

“What’s your idea?” I asked as I went in.

He closed the cell, tossed me a white patch, and activated the spell formation. Then he leaned back against the door of the cell opposite mine. I put the patch on my neck.

“When the moment is right, I’ll give you a paliprox-D patch. Later, when my father calls for Elena, you use an Igneus Mask to impersonate her. I’ll carry you over. When he’s not expecting it, for instance, when he’s dropping the knife, you reach up and slap that patch onto him.”

“Are you kidding me? That’s got to be the most ridiculous and risky plan imaginable! What’s more, I’d be taking all the risk. If I screw up, I’m dead, and you can just stand off to the side, none worse for the wear.”

“Do you have a better suggestion?”

“Yeah. You put on the Igneus Mask.”

“I’m not a Thermal cultivator, and the inverted knot trick only works when you disguise yourself or make stand-alone illusions.”

Retracting my divine sense from Itsuki’s mind, I sat on the cot and started analyzing the situation from different angles, trying to come up with other plans. Minutes passed.

Then, we heard Johan yelling from down the hall. “Itsuki, come. I need your help.”

Giving me a final glance, Itsuki left.

Once he was gone, I poked around the cell a bit but found nothing of note. I tried punching and kicking the cell door but could immediately tell it wasn’t going to give. There was no way Yu Yitai would have built cells that cultivators like me could easily break free from.

I considered a variety of plans. I could try to get the jump on Itsuki, knock him out, then take Elena and just run. But how would I open her cell? What if I knocked out Itsuki, took his gun, and surprised Johan? I could shoot him down before he knew what was happening. That seemed like a more promising plan but not a surefire win by any means. Was it worth the risk?

About twenty minutes later, I felt a faint tremor beneath my feet which quickly grew into a violent rocking back and forth. Was the True Heaven lifting off the surface of the Tenth Earth?

It had to be that. The shaking stopped after a few seconds, but I felt a sensation of upward motion.

Shit. Things really were going from bad to worse.

Several minutes later, I felt more chaotic movement. Instead of a steady rise upward, the entire station lurched this way and that. We’re in the Curse Storm, I thought. I soon felt sick to my stomach and lay down on the cot, closing my eyes in the hope it would dispel the nausea. It didn’t.

It got so intense I nearly vomited, but I managed to hold it back. Then, after what seemed like an eternity of shaking, everything went still and steady. Slowly, my nausea began to subside.

Sometime after that, Itsuki returned with Noriko. Opening the door of Elena’s cell, he stepped inside.

As he did, I heard Noriko say, “Your father doesn’t waste time, does he?”

“Never has,” Itsuki said.

“You’d think he’d savor the moment, somehow. Have some sort of celebration.”

“The new patch is on. Get to work.”

He and Noriko switched places, and he leaned up against the corridor wall with his back to Elena’s cell. Meanwhile, Noriko started to hum a Japkor-Pop tune I recognized.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“We’re above the Curse. The Sun will be shining on us in a few minutes, and my father doesn’t want to wait. Noriko is… preparing Elena.”

“Meaning?”

“Removing her clothes and… painting her.”

“What the hell?”

“My father instructed to put her undergarments back on afterward for modesty. He’s traditional when it comes to such matters. As he prepares to cut her heart out. Will you still be able to replicate her in that state?”

I’d never seen Elena unclothed outside of my own imagination, but as long as I was able to look at her for a moment, I felt confident I could do it. “Yeah. You’ll have to use a patch on Noriko as well, right? She could spot us on the cameras.”

“I doubt it. Noriko gets bored unless there’s code on the screen to look at. She won’t be watching the cams.”

I heard rustling and thumping sounds from the other cell for a few minutes, then Noriko appeared again.

“She’s ready to go,” she said cheerfully, wiping some sort of blue paint or dye off of her hands with a wet cloth that she then carefully folded up and put into a plastic bag. “I’ll head back to the control room now.”

Itsuki stepped aside to let her pass. When she was gone, he quickly tapped the keypad next to my cell door to open it.

I walked out into the corridor, then stepped over to look into Elena’s cell. Itsuki did the same.

She lay on the cot, head tilted to the side, her long hair bound in a loose bun. She was clad in white undergarments, with the rest of her clothes in a pile off to the side. And virtually her entire body was blue, excluding her hands, feet, and head. Although I had to admit I’d fantasized about seeing Elena with less clothing on, this was a bizarre sight I immediately wished I could unsee.

“Hurry up,” Itsuki whispered.

Shaking my head to clear it, I forced myself to look at her analytically, the same way I’d examined countless murder victims over the years, even those who were unclothed. After I was sure I understood the structure of her body, I sent my cultivator robe back into my dimensional pendant, which Itsuki still had. Knowing that the more I conformed to the target of my duplication, the better the results, I stripped down to my underwear. Then I performed the hand signs and felt the tingle of energy as the Igneus Mask took shape. When it was done, I inverted and tied the energy knot so it would remain in place without any effort on my part. A moment later, I looked down at myself. I was Elena, from what I could see, blue paint and all.

“Ssibal,” Itsuki cursed in Japkor, and then he looked away from me.

“Is it good enough?” I asked.

“It’s fine. You even got the paliprox patch.”

“We can’t just leave her lying out in the open.”

“If we fail, hiding her isn’t going to do any good. Here, take this.”

He handed me the paliprox-D patch.

“There’s a Black Corpse trick,” he continued, “Peel the back off, then put it inside your waistband, sticky side out. That way, you can grab it easily. Just don’t grab the part with the chemical on it.”

I peeled the patch and stuck it in the appropriate spot. “I’m ready.”

“here goes. Get your eyes closed. Remember, you’re unconscious.”

I’d been in many strange situations in the past weeks, but this took the cake. Itsuki wrapped his arms around my legs and back, and lifted me like a sack.

Down the corridor we went, then into the promenade area. I kept my eyes closed and divine sense retracted, and therefore, I wasn’t able to see anything. As soon as Itsuki walked in with me, I heard Johan speak.

“Excellent. She looks perfect.” Raising his voice, he said, “Good job, Noriko!”

I felt Itsuki walk down the steps and then jump up next to the altar.

“Put her right in the middle, just like before. Wonderful.” I felt divine sense grab my wrists and ankles and force them apart, so I was splayed out like an X.

“Father,” Itsuki said, “what’s going to happen? Afterward.”

“I’ll have a Solar diamond! And then I’ll extract Yu Yitai’s diamonds and become the most powerful cultivator in the Grand Kingdom! Soon, the Saito Clan will run the board, and we can preside over the triumphant conclusion of the Purpose as I become an immortal! Now, you head into the control room with Noriko and keep the door closed. Don’t disturb me until the process is over.”

“Yes, Father.”

“Oh, wait,” Johan said. “I forgot. Hand me that small case over there. The paralytic. Yes, that’s the one. Now, off you go!”

Paralytic? I thought. What does he need that for?

A few seconds later, I felt a sting in my shoulder.

“That’s better,” he said. “This will wake you up a bit but keep you immobile. That way, you’ll be able to feel everything.”

My eyes shot open, and I prepared to grab the patch from my waist, only to find that I couldn’t move. I desperately tried to send my divine sense to grab the patch, but trying to connect with divine sense felt like trying to pick up a handful of water. Whatever paralytic drug he’d given me apparently cut off from that as well.

Johan loomed above me, dressed in strange clothing, his face and body painted with bizarre designs, an odd feather headdress atop his head.

“Awake that quickly?” he said. “Wonderful. We can begin.” Then he started talking in a language I’d never heard before, babbling in something like a chant.

He moved out of my field of vision, and my gaze was drawn to the dome directly overhead. The panels were darkened, and beyond it, I saw an orange-white ball, so bright that I would have squinted my eyes if I could. The ball was moving slowly, heading toward the direct center of the dome.

Johan continued to chant, and then I saw him lift that obsidian knife into the air above.

Wait, I thought. Stop. This isn’t supposed to happen like this. Stop!

I tried in vain to force a connection to my divine sense. It didn’t work. Itsuki. Do something! Can’t you see the plan’s gone bad? Your father will realize what’s happened. He’ll know you betrayed him. Just shoot him in the back of the head!

Unfortunately, I could only think such thoughts in my head. I couldn’t speak them aloud, nor could I project them via my nonexistent divine sense.

Johan continued to chant, and fear welled up in me, grasping at my mind and causing nausea ten times worse than before to fill me. I had to do something! Things couldn’t end like this! I had to avenge Xiaoli. I had to stop Sinotech! Elena! Charlotte! Jakobe! I needed—

The knife descended, plunging into my abdomen just beneath the ribs. As white-hot pain stabbed through me, I longed for the Igneus Mask to drop and reveal my true features, but I’d inverted the knot and tied it tightly. I still looked exactly like Elena.

I wanted to scream but could only do so silently inside my head. Johan, who was over fifty times as strong as an ordinary human, didn’t need to exert any effort at all to move the knife along, slicing my abdomen open from one side to another. Except the angle was wrong, and he shoved the knife into my ribs.

“Dammit,” he mumbled, twisting the knife a bit to pull it out of the bone.

My mind trembled, and darkness gathered at the edges of my vision.

After finishing the cut, he shoved his hand into the open cavity of my abdomen and pushed his arm up inside my torso. I felt like vomiting as his hand bumped into my lung. Tears leaked out of my eyes as he rifled about inside of me until his fingers curled around my heart. He pulled, and I felt veins and arteries popping as he ripped the organ out from my body.

I saw it in his hand, pumping, blood dripping down his arms as he lifted it over me toward the sun above.

His chanting faded into nothing as I stared at the heart. My heart.

Then the darkness at the edges of my vision expanded, slowly clouding out Johan, leaving only the pinprick of the sun visible for a short moment before everything went completely black.

Interlude 14 – Savage Indignation

Johan Saito held the beating heart up to the sun and howled as the blood dripped down his arm. Then his howl changed into laughter. Shrill, maniacal laughter that echoed coldly off the gleaming metallic walls of the True Heaven.

When the heart went still, his laughter turned into chuckling.

He lowered his hand and gazed at the heart, his chuckles fading into a long, faint growl. Then he looked down at the sun stone and the lifeless body lying atop it.

He expected to see the carcass of a beautiful young woman with honey-blonde hair, her skin painted blue. Instead, he saw a blood-splattered young man in his undergarments, shirtless, his skin pale and lacking a single speck of colored dye.

Johan couldn’t process the scene at first. He simply stared at the corpse for a long moment, and then, without even looking at it, he tossed the young man’s heart down onto the stone. It flipped and flopped until it fell over the edge of the altar. Johan turned up to the sun again, then back at the corpse. As he did, realization dawned with him, and along with it, savage indignation.

His first thought was that the vile Wang Fan must have somehow pulled off an incredibly clever trick that Itsuki had fallen for. But then, something clicked in his mind. He thought back to his son’s behavior over the past few weeks, and as he did, his burning rage transformed into icy murderous intent.

His request to free the girl, he thought. His flimsy story about teleporting away when she was taken in the Eighth Earth. All the other clues. He was working with the pathetic heretic Peacekeeper.

His lip curled in disgust as he looked at Wang Fan’s corpse, and then he spat on the body.

“Your effort will be for nothing!” he growled. After unceremoniously kicking the body off of the altar, he turned and walked slowly toward the control room.

“Itsuki!” he said in a thunderous voice. “Do you realize what you’ve done?”

Chapter 72 – The Sun’s Blood

I was alone in the darkness for only a short moment. Then the sun flared to life, sending out awe-inspiring warmth and radiance that both comforted me and filled me with a sensation of power.

The scene remained static for only a moment as I realized the sun was starting to grow larger.

I looked left and right but didn’t see the True Heaven around me. I looked down and didn’t see my body. I tried to move my arms to touch my face but realized I didn’t have arms. Nor did I have a face. I didn’t have a body. Where was I?

I turned left again and kept turning until I was looking in the opposite direction. If I’d had a mouth, I would have gasped. I saw an immense blue and white circle, a large portion of which was stained by an enormous black whirlpool. Wisps of darkness extended from the main body of the whirlpool out into the rest of the circle, seemingly connecting the two. I saw pinpricks of light surrounding the circle and realized they were stars—an infinitude of stars, including a wide belt of them that seemed like a river. There was also a small white disc off to the side of the circle. I realized that the blue circle was shrinking, so I turned again and focused on the sun.

By this point, it dawned on me that the sun wasn’t growing larger. Instead, I was moving toward it. And I was accelerating.

As I shot forward, I noticed a white dot off to the left, which grew larger and larger. I neared it and realized it was a sphere, every bit of it covered with swirling white clouds. Moments later, I passed the white sphere and continued toward the burning sun.

I could tell that I was still picking up speed and felt the instinct to shade my eyes from the brilliant light, except I had no eyes, much less a hand to cover them. The surface of the sun zoomed toward me, then I was inside, moving through burning clouds and lakes and other things that were so bizarre I wasn’t sure what they were.

I reached a vast expanse of molten liquid, like a sea. After flying over the gently lapping waves, I passed onto an island of white sand, covered with dark, interlocking circles and designs which I could tell constituted a formation. In terms of complexity and size, it surpassed any formation I’d laid eyes on, studied about, or even heard of. The formation seemed to go on and on, without end, me flying over it until I saw a seated figure ahead, in the middle of some sort of amphitheater.

As I got closer, details became clear. The figure was seated on a throne carved from stone, with iconography similar to the altar from the True Heaven. As for the figure, he was bizarre, to say the least. He looked like a man, except he was blue from head to toe and wore clothing consisting of leather straps, a wide girdle, and strips of colorful cloth. A helmet covered his head, decorated with a multitude of bright feathers, most of them blue or green, and a long skeletal beak that reminded me of a hummingbird. Resting next to the throne at his feet was a curved scepter that resembled a snake and a shield decorated with balls of brown feathers.

He looked at me as I approached until I stopped in front of him.

“Otiquihiyohuih,” he said, his voice sonorous and seemingly filled with power. Then he continued to speak a few sentences in an incomprehensible language before stopping. “My apologies. It’s been many centuries since I spoke to any but my servants.”

I looked at the surrounding amphitheater, which seemed to rise higher than I could see, and realized that all the seats were packed. The figures seated in them shone brightly, and their faces were impossible to make out clearly, but they were definitely people, sitting there quiet and motionless.

“I.... Where am I?” I asked. “And… who are you?”

“I am Huītzilōpōchtli,” he said. “To use words you’ll understand, think of me as a god. This is my home. And my prison. The sun. I am a god of the sun, not the first and hopefully not the last. But I’m the first to be imprisoned past my time.”

I thought back to the story Yu Yitai told me of the final days of the War of Tribulation and his supposition that Elena was a descendant of a group called the Huītzilōpōchtli Sect, who in turn claimed to be the progeny of a god. Apparently, that god was… this very being sitting in front of me?

“I can sense your confusion,” Huītzilōpōchtli said, “and your questions. Sadly, we don’t have much time.”

“I’m dead, aren’t I?”

“Physically, yes. Spiritually, no. The sacrifice that ended your material life was carried out correctly, sending you on a journey to me that no one has undertaken for many centuries. Your body is still warm, which means there’s time to send you back. It’s unorthodox, and in fact, is something I’ve never done. But the time has come for the unprecedented.”

“You’re going to… resurrect me? Why?”

“Yes, I will resurrect you. I will give you a new heart so that you can break open the Pearl and end the Curse. I know of the foolhardy plan cobbled together by the foolish descendants of the Duḥkha Temple. I don’t approve of it.”

“You know of everything that’s happened in the Grand Kingdom?”

“I know of the important things. I watch but can do nothing, thanks to the spell formation that traps me. For years upon years, I looked on as my descendants live pitiful lives, unaware of who they were. Imagine my delight when the spiritual side of humanity was rekindled. Only for it all to come crashing down. After that, centuries passed, and my hope dwindled further. Until my daughter of many daughters finally awoke her spirituality.”

“Elena?”

“Indeed. Johan Saito is a misguided and insane fool. He studied the ancient texts that spoke of me and learned some of the ways of those who once served me. However, his understanding is incomplete. He thinks that I’m the one who unleashed the Curse when that couldn’t be further from the truth.

“Instead of choosing to respect me, he picked bits and pieces of the old ways and sought to twist them for his personal gain. Had he offered up my daughter of many daughters in a show of respect and reverence, perhaps I would have shown him favor. Instead, he thought that offering her up to me would make him become like me. For that, I hereby sentence him to death. Will you act as my executioner?”

The truth was that I didn’t know what to think. Was Huītzilōpōchtli implying that if Johan had been respectful, a sacrifice of Elena would have been pleasing? I shuddered at the thought. That said, I wasn’t going to defy a supposed god. Furthermore, Johan Saito had ‘killed’ me. If this god was giving me a chance to repay the favor, I would take it.

“I will be your executioner,” I said.

“When the task is complete, tell my daughter of many daughters to touch the huitzauhqui at the center of the True Heaven. Your leader’s plan is an interesting one, and I will give more of my blood to see it through. Now, your husk cools. The condemned has cut down his own child and is approaching my daughter of many daughters. Time is limited. Have you any questions?”

Johan cut down his own child? Itsuki was dead? I felt as though I should be happy about that, but for some reason, I wasn’t.

“Huitzauhqui? Is that the weapon created by the Huītzilōpōchtli Sect?”

“Yes. The last time I gave my blood to mortals was to forge that weapon. Unfortunately, my squabbling children failed to use it properly. The Pearl was created, trapping the heart of an old friend inside, cutting off the path of Hydric cultivation, Cursing the lands, and making my prison even more impossible to escape from. The huitzauhqui will be of use in fixing the many errors of the past. Now, are you ready to return?”

“Yes, but… I have one final question, oh great Huītzilōpōchtli.”

“Yes?”

“Who killed my sister?”

“I know not of your sister, much less who killed her.”

Reaching to his girdle, he pulled out an obsidian knife, stuck out his tongue, and pricked it with the blade. A drop of reddish-orange blood appeared, which he reached out and took with the tip of his finger.

Sheathing the knife, he said, “With this drop of my blood, grow strong, and strengthen those you deem fit. To do so, touch their heart and utter the words ‘quicemitqui in yollotl’ while thinking of me. Can you remember the words?”

“Quice… quicemitqui in yollotl.” I said them again to imprint them into my mind.

“Good. To conform to universal balance, you can call upon my name four times. Now, execute the blasphemer Johan Saito. Break the Curse. Free me. These are your tasks.”

He curled his finger then flicked the blood, which shot toward me so rapidly I didn’t have a chance to say another word. It surrounded me, and as I raced out of the sun, I turned in place to view my destination. I sped past the white sphere and then toward the blue one. It got closer and closer, and the vortex on its surface became larger, like a vile maw gnawing at the azure around it.

Then I saw a speck of brightness that was the True Heaven. I neared at breakneck speed, passing through the dome toward the chest of my blood-soaked corpse.

Gasping hoarsely, I rose into a sitting position, my hands instinctively reaching toward my abdomen. I looked down, and while I saw pools of blood around me, not a speck existed on my skin. And there was no gaping wound beneath my ribs. Closing my eyes, I sent my divine sense inside and saw my heart, surrounded by a faint, reddish-orange glow of light. It beat steadily, calmly, and as it did, that reddish-orange light spread through my veins. I followed the spreading light until I realized it was going toward the pit of my stomach, where my golden root and gryish-black diamond hovered. As the glow gathered there, it formed a collection of light that was little more than a drop. But then another drop joined the first, and a third after that. The drops collected, pooling together until they resembled a puddle.

I opened my eyes and looked around. I was next to the table in the promenade of the True Heaven, surrounded by blood but nothing else. Johan must have kicked my corpse off to the side after his sacrifice failed. Standing shakily, I looked at the stone altar and the blood, mine, that had filled the carvings atop it. Johan Saito wasn’t present.

My thoughts turned to Elena, who we had left in the cell, unconscious and helpless. I heard a peal of laughter coming from that very direction, opposite the control room.

“The task will still be accomplished!” I heard Johan saying, and then he started singing in that strange language.

Fuck. What was I supposed to do? My life was restored, but there was no way I could stand up to Johan Saito. Maybe I could catch him unawares. Shoot him from afar. As had been made abundantly clear with Yu Yitai earlier, bullets could inflict deadly damage on even the most powerful cultivator. And I had plenty of weapons and equipment in my dimensional pendant, which should still be on Itsuki.

I turned toward the control room, then just as quickly turned back. Hands flashing, I used the Igneus Mask technique to create a copy of my ‘corpse’ in the place I’d just been laying, tying the energy knot so it would remain without effort on my part. Seconds later, inside the control room, I saw Noriko’s headless corpse off to the side in a pool of blood. The bright red of the blood contrasted with her white hair and garments was particularly striking in a horrific way.

Itsuki lay on the other side of the room, a long bonemetal blade embedded in his chest. It looked like his own. I glanced at the bloody footprints in the room and the way the blood was splattered on the walls, and for the briefest of moments, I felt like I was back in the Third Earth, working a case. Obviously, fighting had broken out between Itsuki and Noriko, and while he’d prevailed over her, his father had arrived moments later, taken his sword from him, and killed him with it.

Seeing him dead, I realized that I felt sorry for him. I had thought of him as a betrayer and a rival, but in the end, he lost his life because of siding with me. And defending Elena.

I knelt next to him and sent my divine sense out to examine him and look for my pendant. I found it in his pocket, but during the process, I also noticed… that he was breathing!

He wasn’t dead!

I looked at him closer with divine sense. Johan had plunged the sword into his chest, but it missed his heart, passing through the ribs and out the other side without hitting anything but his lung.

I hesitated. I needed an ally if I was going to take down Johan. Would Itsuki fit the bill?

After taking my dimensional pendant, I put my foot onto his chest, grabbed the hilt of the sword, and pulled it out of him. He let out a wheezing breath that I might have found sickening if I hadn’t just experienced my own beating heart being ripped out of my body. As blood spilled from the wound, I lay his sword down and used divine sense to pull a Pure Cloud Pill out of my pendant. I stuffed it into his mouth, then quickly summoned my cultivator robe.

Around that time, I heard shuffling from outside.

Shit. Time was running out.

As Itsuki’s wound closed, I thought back to what Huītzilōpōchtli had told me.

With this drop of my blood, grow strong, and strengthen those you deem fit. To do so, touch their heart and utter the words ‘quicemitqui in yollotl’ while thinking of me....

I didn’t know what would happen, but there was one way to find out. If I could somehow make Itsuki stronger, it could give us an advantage. And we would need every advantage possible.

Again closing my eyes, I pictured that strange blue god in the sun, and sent divine sense into Itsuki, and cradled his heart in it.

“Quicenitqui in follotl,” I murmured, the strange words awkward on my tongue. Even as the words left my mouth, I knew I’d misspoken.

I tried again. “Quice… quicemitqui in yollotl.”

As soon as I finished speaking, reddish-orange light flared in my own heart, swirling out along the path of divine sense connecting me to Itsuki. It surrounded his heart, sank into it, and then only a moment later, began spreading through his bloodstream.

There’s no way, I thought. As I watched, the reddish-orange light started doing the same thing in him that it was doing in me: gathering in his cultivation base.

Holy shit.

I examined my own cultivation base, and as I did, a tremor passed through me, and I felt the hair on my arms and neck standing on end. Then my muscles tensed briefly before relaxing. Looking inside, I saw a Solar sea of energy within me. And it was expanding rapidly!

Chapter 73 – Teleportations

“I should have brought more doses of the paralytic,” I heard Johan Saito say from the promenade.

Itsuki’s eyes snapped open, and I put my hand over his mouth before he could let out an audible gasp. Loosening my fingers so he could breathe, I sent divine sense into his mind.

“Do you remember everything that happened?”

“Yes,” he replied. “Wang Fan? What the hell? I saw you dead! He cut out your—”

“There isn’t time now. Elena’s on that altar, and we need to get her off. Now.”

He leaned forward into a sitting position, rubbing the spot where the sword had been sticking into his chest moments ago. “What do you want me to do?”

“You practice Gravitational cultivation, so you’re faster than me. I’ll cover you with heavy gunfire. You grab Elena and get back here into the control room.”

“There’s a blast door,” he said. “See the console over there? Everything happened so fast I didn’t have time to close it. ”

I looked over to the doorway and saw the console. “Last one inside hits the button. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

We heard a smacking sound from the promenade, then Johan shouted, “Wake up, bitch! Wake up!”

Was he slapping her? Nostrils flaring, I stood, simultaneously reaching into the dimensional pendant to retrieve an HP9-9 shotgun with dual pistol grips. I considered taking out the paliprox mouth sprayer but doubted Johan would fall for the same trick twice. Besides, I needed to do everything possible to prevent him from laying hands on me. The shotgun already had a round chambered. Tightening my fingers around the grips, I asked, “You ready?”

Itsuki rose to his feet and took a few experimental steps before turning to me and nodding. “Let’s go.”

I padded out of the control room and down the corridor toward the promenade. The True Heaven wasn’t huge; there was only about thirty feet to go.

“I said wake up!” Johan shrieked, and he raised his hand over his head.

I wanted to shoot him right then and there, but I knew that every extra fraction of a second we had on our side, the better. As long as Johan wasn’t lifting that knife up, it meant we had more time to work with.

At the end of the corridor, I averted my eyes as Johan slapped Elena again and quietly stepped out of the door and into the promenade area. There was no point in making myself invisible with a Thermal Ripple Cloak, as I was supposed to be the distraction. Furthermore, the concentration needed to cover Itsuki would have made it impossible to focus on shooting a weapon.

Reaching out to Itsuki, I said, “I’ll shoot at him from the side, try to confuse him. Get Elena back inside as fast as you can.”

“Yeah.” Looking like a stalking cat, he prowled closer to Johan, who was now shaking Elena by the shoulders. Then he threw her down, and the sound of her head hitting the stone made me wince.

Johan straightened up, his chest heaving and his hands clenched into fists. “What’s taking you so long?”

Raising the shotgun, I took aim at Johan. Although I hadn’t spent as much range time with shotguns as I had with my Spitter, I was still a competent shot. As long as I aimed high, there was no risk of hitting Elena.

Itsuki was down the steps and only a few paces from the table.

“HEY!” I shouted. And I pulled the trigger.

The boom of the shotgun echoed in the promenade, and Johan staggered as the shot hit him in the shoulder and back, shredding skin and muscle.

As I pumped a new round into the chamber, Johan rose and spun, a look of rage and surprise on his face, and that was when Itsuki made his move. He blurred into motion, quietly grabbing Elena in his arms and spinning back in the direction of the control room.

I snarled to prevent a smile from breaking out on my face as I realized Johan hadn’t noticed Itsuki.

When he laid eyes on me, Johan’s expression became one of raw incredulity. “You? What—”

I pulled the trigger again, and the tiny lead balls tore into his chest and arm, causing him to pivot slightly as his flesh was mangled into gore. By now, Itsuki had already bounded up the stairs and was in the corridor.

The HP9-9 had a four-round magazine, which meant I had two shots left. I pumped another round in and aimed at Johan’s face.

That was when his hands flashed, and he vanished in a crackle of electricity.

Shit. He’d teleported, but to where?

I stepped into the corridor, worried he’d beat us into the control room, but thankfully, there was no sign of him. Itsuki lay Elena down gently while I walked to the console, flipped up the plastic covering, and hit the button to close the blast door. An immensely thick section of metal rumbled out of the wall, sealing us inside.

“What happened?” Itsuki said, tucking the unused paliprox sprayer into his pocket. “You obviously didn’t take him down.”

“Hit him twice before he teleported away.” I sent the shotgun back into my dimensional pendant.

“He keeps multiple Eightfold Restoration Pills on his person at all times.”

“Meaning what?”

“You know your Pure Cloud Pills? They’re like a child’s toy tricycle, while Eightfold Restoration Pills are like high-end hovercars. My father is going to be bashing at that blast door within minutes.”

Kneeling next to Elena, I scanned her with divine sense, but she just seemed asleep to me.

“Why isn’t she waking up?” I asked.

“He already started flushing her system, so she should awaken shortly.”

With this drop of my blood, grow strong, and strengthen those you deem fit.

Would it work again? I wrapped up Elena’s heart with my divine sense, thought of Huītzilōpōchtli, then murmured, “Quicemitqui in yollotl.”

This time I didn’t stumble over the words. The reddish-orange light connected with her then started spreading via her blood.

“What did you do?” Itsuki said.

“Same thing I did to you,” I replied. “Check your cultivation base.”

“Huh?”

“Just do it.”

He closed his eyes. “What the hell?”

At that same moment, I felt a shockwave building within me that I suppressed before it rolled out. I now had a Solar root of energy, and I could tell that the root was growing.

Itsuki looked at me. “I have a Solar sea of energy. And it’s expanding.”

“Yes. I’m not sure when the process will stop.”

“How?”

“Later. The point is I have a Solar root, and now you have a sea. Add our numbers together. We’re almost at fifty.”

He looked up briefly as he made the calculations. “That’s not going to be enough to deal with my father, at least not going head-to-head.”

“What if we can get to Yu Yitai? If we wake him up and clear his system of paliprox, your father will be completely outmatched.”

“Not a bad plan. Let’s see where my father is.” Itsuki stood and walked over to the control panel off to the side, nudged Noriko’s corpse away with his foot, and started tapping on the keyboard with his index fingers. “Thankfully, I was watching when she pulled up the security feeds.”

A moment later, one of the screens flickered to life, providing views from all the security cameras in the True Heaven.

“There,” I said, immediately catching the flash of motion that was Johan Saito. “Where’s that?”

“No idea,” Itsuki said. “But it doesn’t matter. He’s on the move.”

“Fuck,” I said. “He’s healed up already?”

“I told you those pills are amazing.”

We watched on the cameras as Johan navigated through the True Heaven to the corridor outside the control room.

There, he reached out and put his hand on the console next to the blast door.

“What’s he doing?” I asked.

“He’s an Organic cultivator at the root level. He might not be capable of the superhuman hacking of Yu Yitai, but he can open a door.”

I closed my eyes, examined my cultivation base, and saw what resembled a young ginseng root, reddish-orange, surrounded by a host of offshoots that twisted around themselves like tentacles.

“What’s going on?” Elena said weakly, and we both turned to look at her. Then she looked down at her nearly-naked body covered with blue paint. She yelped, crossing her arms over her chest and folding her legs up.

“It’s a long story,” I said. “Short version: We’re in the control room of the True Heaven, above the Heavenly Curse. Johan Saito is on the other side of that door. Once he’s through, we’re all dead. Check your cultivation base.”

She closed her eyes. “What’s happening to me?”

“You’re getting a boost to your Solar root. What’s its current state?”

“It’s wrapped up like a cocoon.”

“Damn,” Itsuki said. “You’re about to reach the diamond level.”

“So am I,” I said.

We looked at each other, and I saw the faintest of smiles tug at his mouth.

“We might have a chance after all,” he said.

Before we could say anything else, a buzzing sound entered our ears, and the blast door started rolling back.

Elena rose to her feet, clearly self-conscious about her disrobed state, but her fingers locked and ready for a hand sign.

Projecting my voice into both Elena and Itsuki’s minds, I said, “Be ready for Elena’s breakthrough shockwave. Remember, diamond breakthroughs have very powerful shockwaves compared to the root level.”

Johan Saito stood in the doorway, the strange painted designs adorning the parts of his body I hadn’t hit with the shotgun. The rest was covered with pale, recently-healed flesh. He had plenty of blood on him as well, presumably both mine and his own.

“I’m not going to liquidate either of you,” he announced. Looking at Itsuki, he said, “You, boy, are going to live a life of torment the likes of which not even the most worthless of your former brothers and sisters suffered.

“And you, Mr. Wang, will be forced to watch as—”

Right in the middle of his speech, a massive shockwave erupted from Elena, catching Johan so off guard he stumbled backward. At exactly the same time, I threw my divine sense at him with all the force it was capable of, hitting him right in the pit of the neck. He toppled onto his back. As Elena floated up into the air, her hair swirling around her, I threw on a Thermal Ripple Cloak and walked toward Johan.

Before I could, his hands flashed, and he teleported away, popping into existence on the other side of the promenade, a good sixty feet away. I pulled a QBZ-14C out of my pendant, took aim, and pulled the trigger. The staccato popping of bullets filled the corridor as I walked forward.

Unfortunately, Johan was fast and used another teleportation to disappear down another corridor. I eased out into the promenade, and as I did, I sensed Itsuki step into the corridor behind me. Then, a massively powerful divine sense grabbed onto me and threw me across the room. However, slamming against the wall didn’t really hurt, and I was back on my feet in the blink of an eye.

As my eyes darted around looking for Johan, a pulse of energy rolled out from Itsuki’s geomantic compass, causing my Thermal Ripple Cloak to drop, as well as Johan’s.

Johan was standing at the entrance of the corridor opposite me.

At that moment, a shockwave erupted from me, and I floated involuntarily into the air. Before the shockwave could hit Johan, he performed a hand sign and vanished.

Dammit.

As soon as my feet touched solid ground, I ran back into the corridor, simultaneously glancing inside myself with divine sense to confirm that I now had a Solar diamond.

I was standing shoulder to shoulder with Itsuki, with Elena just behind us.

That was when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a bit of motion. Looking down, I saw a cockroach crawling toward Itsuki along the roof. I smashed it with divine sense.

“Move back, both of you,” Elena said into our minds.

We complied, and then a sheet of burning fire rose up to cover the mouth of the corridor.

“Sunrise Rampart will buy us a very short bit of time,” Itsuki said. “We—” He stopped talking as a root shockwave rolled out from his cultivation base. “Damn. This is insane.”

“We already outmatch your father in terms of numbers,” Elena said.

“Numbers are just numbers,” Itsuki replied. “He has three hundred years of experience in cultivation and got the upper hand on Yu Yitai himself. We’re not out of the woods yet.”

Chapter 74 – Six Variables, Sixty-Four Possibilities

I sent my divine sense into my dimensional pendant to double-check what equipment I had. The majority was weaponry I’d purchased in preparation for our mission in the Eighth Earth to extract Elena. Most of it had been selected to assault a secure location, not defend against such an assault. I had everything from bolt cutters to a bonecrete brick, but none of it was going to be of much help.

“Your Sunrise Rampart can last for a lot longer now that you’re in diamond,” Itsuki said to Elena. “But my father’s strong. He’ll break it down eventually. The only question is how long it will take. Before he does, he might also try hurting us with techniques that don’t need line of sight. Things like Pillars of Sol or Flood of Suffering. He’ll probably try direct assaults with divine sense as well.”

“The True Heaven’s got to have defensive capabilities,” Elena said.

“None of us are grid monkeys,” Itsuki said. “We don’t have hours to tinker with the system and figure out what it’s capable of. Our opponent is stronger than us, has better equipment, can teleport, and is invisible. We have no equipment or weapons designed to deal with anything like that. We—”

“Wait,” I interrupted as an idea formed in my head. “Maybe we do.”

Itsuki looked at me, his eyes flashing. “What, exactly?”

I considered the possibility for a moment. “A Bone cultivation technique. I haven’t been able to get it to work, but if I could… it would be the perfect weapon to deal with him.”

“What’s it called?”

“The Duḥkha Cannon.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“It’s a diamond-level technique that Sinotech hasn’t exactly been passing out to everyone.”

“What do you mean you haven’t been able to get it to work?” Elena asked.

“There are six passages in the technique that could be interpreted in different ways. I’ve experimented but haven’t found the right combination.”

“With six variables,” Itsuki said, “you could have as many as sixty-four possible combinations, assuming only two possible interpretations each. With that many possibilities, even if you tried one per minute, it could take an hour to succeed. That’s not to mention that you could theoretically get the right combination but make a mistake in technique and not even realize it.”

“I’ve already eliminated quite a few possibilities. It shouldn’t take that long.”

“You’re willing to bet our lives on it?”

“Do you have a better idea?”

I saw Itsuki’s jaw muscles tighten momentarily. “Fine.”

A thump met our ears, and a handful of sparks showered down off the Sunrise Rampart.

“He’s started,” Elena said.

“Keep on guard with your divine sense,” Itsuki said. “At some point, he’ll try an assault on that level.” Then he reached into his dimensional bracelet, causing a QBZ-14C rifle to appear in his hands. “Get behind us, Wang Fan, and hurry the hell up. Elena, if your Sunrise Rampart breaks, I’ll fill the corridor with lead, and you let loose as many Sunflare Blasts as you can manage.”

Closing my eyes and ignoring the thumping sound of Johan Saito attacking the Sunrise Rampart, I circulated my energy, trying to summon the cannon for the first time since my failure in the villa in the Ninth Earth. The first passage that had caused me trouble related to a method of sheathing either the meridians on the energy stream itself.

When the energy stream passes from your Governing meridian into your Yin Motility meridian, make sure to put a divine sense sheath in place.

In my previous sessions, I’d experimented with different ways of employing that sheath. When using it to cover the meridians, I generally experienced failure within nine steps. When sheathing the energy itself, failure usually occurred within three steps. To me, that indicated that the former was probably the best option.

I went through the various steps of the technique until energy started coalescing in front of me in the vague shape of a large gun. However, at a certain point, the energy collapsed.

Almost at the same time, an immense wave of divine sense battered against us, forcing me to fight back with my own divine sense.

“Give up!” I heard Johan Saito scream in rage. I shoved him away.

“I have diamond-level divine sense now,” Elena said. “I’ll keep him off you. You concentrate.”

Ignoring Johan, I started over with the cannon. Confident that I was right about the first variable, I tried a variation on the second variable and continued through the steps. Failure.

Johan continued to batter at the Sunrise Rampart.

In the back of my mind, I heard Elena say, “Itsuki, you’re a Solar cultivator now. You can bolster the rampart!”

On my next attempt, I returned to the original way I’d handled the first two variables and instead changed the third. Energy flowed through my meridians, swirling out in front of me… to collapse into fragments of light.

I switched to another combination and tried again. And failed.

“My root’s about to upgrade to diamond!” Itsuki said. “Brace yourselves.”

Moments later, a diamond shockwave rolled out, but I was ready, and it didn’t budge me as it rolled past.

Combination after combination failed, and time seemed to move at a crawl for me. I had no idea how many minutes had passed, and I soon lost track of how many attempts I’d made. Thankfully, the Euneirophrenia Marrow within me ensured my energy was far from the point of running dry.

“We can’t keep this up forever, Wang Fan,” Elena said. “Before long—urgh—”

I heard Itsuki groaning as well, so I opened my eyes to see both of them physically trembling.

“T-told you,” Itsuki said. “He’s using... F-flood of Suffering. Got lucky hitting us without... line of sight. Interrupt his t-train of thought, Wang Fan….”

Flood of Suffering was a root-level Organic cultivation technique that could cause dangerous nerve damage and even abnormal heart rhythms. In other words, it had the potential to kill the target if it went on long enough.

Luckily, I was standing a few feet back and hadn’t been caught by the technique. Abandoning my current attempt with the cannon, I sent my divine sense through the Sunrise Rampart, to where I saw Johan Saito standing at the end of the corridor, a snarl on his face. I sent my divine sense right toward his mind, but he saw the attack coming. Intercepting with his divine sense, he shoved back at me.

“You’re losing, Detective,” he said. “I don’t know what trick you’re trying to pull, but it won’t work. I’ll be through the Sunrise Rampart within—”

“We’re free,” Elena said.

I retracted my divine sense, ignoring whatever Johan was saying.

Again, I started an attempt at the cannon.

One failure. Two failures.

The thumping of Johan’s assault on the Sunrise Rampart ceased momentarily, then resumed with a boom so intense I could feel it in my chest. A minute or two later, a second massive thump echoed out.

“I’m losing my grip,” Elena said. “Can’t hold on much longer.”

“Stay strong, Elena,” Itsuki said.

How many combinations had I tried? Twenty? Thirty? Had it been more? What if I’d tried them all but hadn’t realized it? Frustration and anxiety were building within me, rising to an intensity that could only be called one thing: fear.

This was it. There wouldn’t be any second chance.

“Elena,” Itsuki said, “What if you hit him with Pillars of Sol when he gets through?”

“Wouldn’t A simple Sunflare Blast be faster?” she replied.

They went back and forth a bit, trying to come up with a better plan for when the Sunrise Rampart dropped.

That was when I thought back to something Dad had often said to me. Take the time to step back and look at the bigger picture.

Inhaling calmly, I cleared my thoughts and examined the meridians in my body, not individually, but as a system. I looked at how they connected, and then I superimposed the paths of the Duḥkha Cannon technique over them. I thought about the result and how the process was supposed to lead up to the weapon forming in front of me.

Sometimes in a murder case, it was possible to get so focused on the individual clues that you lost sight of how they fit together. Throughout the years, Jakobe and I had developed an instinct for how to avoid that. At this moment, I realized I could apply the same principle to my cultivation.

As I studied my meridian system as a whole, I saw the solution. I understood the deeper meaning of the technique. The combinations I’d been struggling with were important, but I had been focusing on them as if they were standalone issues instead of considering them as parts of a whole. If I sheathed the energy in the beginning, of course it would transition smoothly during the twelfth step. And in turn, that provided the solution to the problem of lung capacity. The sticking points collapsed like a line of dominos.

A massive thump echoed in the control room like a thunderclap, causing Elena to take a step backward.

“This is it,” she said. “I can last for one final volley.”

I sheathed the energy as it went from my Governing meridian into my Yin Motility meridian, then directed the flow onward. Breathing in slowly, I filled my lungs to eighty percent capacity and recited the mnemonic, taking exactly twelve seconds to do it all.

I was forced to take a step back as a huge thudding sound caused my ears to pop.

“Just need a few more seconds,” I managed to say.

“The Sunrise Rampart is still up, Elena!” Itsuki said out loud. “Come on! You got this!”

“It hurts!” she said, then let out a growl of anger that turned into a sustained shout.

As her voice echoed in my ears, I tapped into my Bone diamond, converted the energy by a ratio of four to one, and sent it back through my Governing meridian.

“I got it!” I whispered.

Sleek, shining bonemetal corkscrewed into existence, out of which grew a pale, organic substance, curving and elegant.

A rumbling boom threw an infinitude of burning sparks showering into the control room, and Itsuki, Elena, and I were sent staggering backward. I maintained focus, and the bonemetal and boneflesh continued to take shape. Three long barrels appeared, one on top of the other, the middle one larger and shorter. There was a stock that reminded me of some sort of shelled sea creature and an extension of boneflesh that burrowed into the jack in my arm, connecting it directly to my body. And finally, a grip sprouted from the base of the stock, something that resembled the branch of a tree.

The Duḥkha Cannon was bulky but sleek, fitting tightly under my arm as I closed my fingers around the soft grip and used my other hand to cradle the forestock. It was nearly four feet long from end to end, and it pulsed with power. It felt… alive.

As the Sunrise Rampart fell and Johan appeared in the corridor, I connected to the weapon with my divine sense. I was its creator, so all it took was a glance to understand how it functioned. There were no mechanical parts in it, no physical safety or trigger, no pump or slide. It operated by connection to the mind of whoever wielded it.

Johan took a step forward, and I aimed the gun at him.

I saw his gaze lock onto the weapon, and his eyes went wide as if he recognized what it was.

A beam of blackish-gray light stabbed out, hitting him right in the chest. Even as the light faded away, I saw him performing a hand sign and looking over his shoulder. He vanished in a field of electric sparks.

Sadly for him, I’d already painted him with the cannon, meaning there would be no escape.

As he popped into being on the other side of the promenade, I ‘pulled the trigger’ with my divine sense, causing a needle-thin projectile to shoot out from the muzzle. It stabbed into his shoulder, then exploded, causing blood and muscle fiber to spray out.

He screamed and teleported away again, but I simply held down the ‘trigger’ in the gun. A deceptively gentle whine could be heard, almost like the purr of an animal, as more projectiles erupted from the gun like a wave of angry insects.

They shot down the corridor, then curved to the left. Only seconds later, we heard more screams. Then the projectiles shifted trajectory, taking a different curving arc once they left the corridor.

More screams.

The projectiles shifted again.

A final scream, and then it was over. Through the gun, I could sense that the target was no more.

I looked down at the Duḥkha Cannon I’d summoned, its glassy surface and combination of harsh lines and angles with sinuous spirals and coils, both alien and beautiful.

“Mierda,” Elena said. “Is he…?”

“He’s dead,” I said, continuing to look at the gun.

“Are you sure?” Itsuki said, his voice faint and strange, filled with a tremor of emotion I’d never detected from him before.

“Yes.” I reached out to the gun again, and the bonemetal and boneflesh began to move, shrinking down, breaking the connection to my flesh, and then vanishing only a second or two later. “I’m sure. But we should check anyway. Keep your guard up.”

The entire time I’d been firing the weapon, I’d been aware of the path the projectiles were taking, so I led Elena and Itsuki out into the promenade, down the opposite corridor, then to the right.

There, on his back on the floor of the True Heaven, was Johan Saito. At least, what remained of him. The needle-like projectiles created very small but deadly explosions that had ripped him nearly to pieces, leaving behind a mangled conglomeration of blood and flesh with limbs and head barely attached. To think I’d used one of the more precise and least explosive of the gun’s projectiles….

Elena turned away and retched, while Itsuki simply took a step past me and looked down at the corpse.

I remained in combat readiness, knees slightly bent, my energy circulating and ready to draw on at any moment. Would Itsuki blame me for killing his father? Try to get revenge?

He did nothing of the kind. Instead, after a long, tense moment, he turned around, looked me in the eyes, and said, “Good job.”

I nodded slightly. “What now?”

“I suppose we wake up Yu Yitai.”

Chapter 75 – The Purpose

After I flushed the drugs from Yu Yitai’s system, and he regained consciousness, the first thing he did was step out into the corridor and wave his hand. Six people appeared, lined up in a row. Sweeping them with divine sense, he breathed a sigh of relief. “If they’d been inside much longer, they might not have survived.”

He looked up at me. “I’m impressed, Chief Elder. It seems I owe you my life. It’s been many centuries since anything like this has happened to me. Let me guess. You succeeded with the Duḥkha Cannon?”

“Yes, Sect Leader.”

“Tense situations often make it easier to gain cultivation enlightenment,” he said. “But the level disparity is still immense. Presumably, you caught him by surprise?”

“Not quite,” I said, hesitating about how to explain all of the developments. “Sir, why don’t you scan my cultivation base. That will explain a lot.”

His brow furrowed slightly, and then I felt a tingle of divine sense as he scanned me and saw my Solar diamond.

The divine sense faded away, and he looked at me with an unreadable expression. “It seems another promotion is in order. Henceforth, you’re a patriarch of the Naturalism Sect.”

“Many thanks, Sect Leader,” I replied formally, clasping my hands in front of me. “But there’s more. Eldress Ávila and Itsuki Saito also have Solar diamonds now.”

This time, his expression flickered with surprise that he couldn’t hide, and I could see his eyes shining. “That’s unprecedented. What happened?”

“I died,” I said simply. “Johan Saito cut my heart out and held it up to the sun. Afterward, everything went black, and I found myself flying to the sun. I met someone there.”

“Huītzilōpōchtli,” he said.

“How did you know?”

He let loose a long sigh, almost a hiss, and leaned back against the wall of the cell. “Damn it all, they were right.”

I narrowed my eyes in confusion, unsure of what he meant.

“The Huītzilōpōchtli Sect,” he continued. “They claimed their namesake was alive, but we didn’t believe them. We thought all higher beings had long since abandoned our solar system. Clearly not. So, by means of an ancient rite of sacrifice, you were sent to this entity from primordial times. And he blessed you?”

“Yes. Brought me back to life.”

“Did he make demands or ask for services in exchange for this blessing?”

I thought back to the conversation. “Sort of. Well, yes. He asked me to do a few things. For one, he wanted me to act as his executioner to punish Johan Saito. I guess I already followed through with that.”

“What else?”

“He told me to break the Curse and free him. Also, he said your plan is ‘interesting’ and that he would give more of his blood to help you. What’s more, he told me that Elena is his ‘daughter of many daughters’ and that the weapon in the center of the True Heaven belongs to her.”

Yu Yitai’s eyes went wide, and he opened his mouth briefly before closing it. Then he crossed his arms over his chest and stood there quietly. “So Elena isn’t just the descendant of a sect leader. She’s the descendant of a Risen one.”

“Risen one?”

He looked at me. “Beings more powerful than immortals.”

“Like gods.”

“Yes. Many historical gods were Risen.”

He lapsed into silence, rubbing the stump of his thumb that had been shot off in the fight on the Tenth Earth. I let him think for a time before finally saying, “Sect Leader, what do we do now? Itsuki said that the Saito Clan probably already knows about his father’s death.”

Sighing, he rose from the cot. “Take me to Itsuki.”

“Yes, sir.”

I led him to the promenade, where Elena and Itsuki stood on opposite sides of the table and altar. Elena had on a white jumpsuit she’d found in a locker near the entrance, and Itsuki had traded his Black Corpse armor for a flashy suit.

Yu Yitai gave one look at the blood-soaked altar and waved his hand. The blood disappeared.

“Chief Eldress Ávila, this object rightfully belongs to you. Please stow it in your dimensional pendant. With your diamond cultivation base, you shouldn’t have trouble making the room and getting it inside.”

She was clearly surprised by the form of address he used, but complied immediately, closing her eyes briefly to manage her pendant before sucking the enormous stone altar inside.

“And now for you, Mr. Saito,” Yu Yitai said. “What are you planning to do after all of this?”

“I think that’s the question I should be asking you. Sir. I have the feeling you won’t just let me go my merry way.”

“That depends.”

Itsuki looked at Yu Yitai for a long moment. “I want to go back and take control of the Saito Clan. I’m the rightful heir, and—”

Yu Yitai held out his hand but didn’t verbally interrupt. Itsuki stopped talking.

“You might be Johan’s son, but you know full well there are other members of your family superior to you both in rank and cultivation level. For instance, your uncle Kiyotoshi. You’ll never win the bid to take over. Even if you did, could you stand up to the board? They’ve been trying to take down your clan for centuries, and the death of your father could prompt them to finally take overt action.”

“I have to try,” Itsuki said. “I have enough influence to….” He trailed off. “It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. I have no love for my father, but I never thought he would get himself killed like this. And by amateurs.” He looked at me. “No offense, Wang Fan. I mean the three of us.”

“No offense taken,” I said.

“It’s unexpected, yes,” Yu Yitai said, “And we’ll go into all the details about the situation in a moment. First, I want to ask you about Sinotech’s Purpose and what you think about it.”

Itsuki shifted in what I took to be an expression of discomfort. “The Purpose is humanity’s only hope.”

Yu Yitai raised an eyebrow. “I’m not asking you to regurgitate Sinotech slogans. I want to know what you think about it. Personally. As the nominal heir to Johan Saito, I know that you’re privy to more secrets than the average Black Corpse. Do you truly believe that killing trillions of people over centuries, then firing a weapon which will kill most everyone else, is the way to ‘save’ humanity?”

“The Heaven-Propping Pillar won’t hurt anybody when it’s fired,” Itsuki said. “That’s Naturalism propaganda. Besides, there’s no other way to get rid of the Curse. The heroes in the orgplants will be remembered as the saviors of humanity. Only by destroying the Singularity Pearl can we bring down the Hellscape and finally repopulate the planet.”

“Wrong,” Yu Yitai said. “We’ll get to the Curse and the Pillar later. Before that, let me dispel a lie propagated both by Sinotech and to some degree myself. Patriarch Wang, Chief Eldress Ávila, you pay close attention to this as well. The Hellscape isn’t real. Not anymore. At least, not the version you were taught about.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Itsuki said.

“I’m sorry, Sect Leader,” I said, “but I have the very same question. We were shown videos of it!”

“Videos that are centuries old,” he replied. “The true Hellscape existed for a time after the War of Tribulation. In the old world, they would have called it a ‘nuclear winter,’ although the addition of cultivation ‘magic’ made it far more complicated. In any case, you might be surprised at how quickly the planet repairs itself.”

“Why would you lie to us about it?” I asked. Was anything true in this world? I’d left the lies of the Grand Kingdom and thrown my lot in with the Naturalism Sect, yet even they had been pulling the wool over my eyes?

“The idea of the dangerous, radioactive Hellscape makes people content to live in the Grand Kingdom,” Yu Yitai said. “And the reality is that the world outside is even more dangerous than it was when the Hellscape existed. Vile entities roam the lands that humans aren’t equipped to deal with. Not even I would step foot there unless absolutely necessary. For the time being, we’re safer here within the walls of the Grand Kingdom than we would be trying to defend ourselves if it were gone.”

“I don’t believe it,” Itsuki said. “You Naturalism people have always been liars. And now you’re trying to convince me you’re telling the truth by admitting to a lie! Why should I believe you?”

“I’ll show you,” Yu Yitai said, turning and walking toward the control room. We followed.

There, he started typing at a keyboard, which resulted in a tremor, then faint grinding noises.

“I’m sending the True Heaven to the very edge of the storm,” he said, “while still keeping it tethered to the Tenth Earth. In a few minutes, you can look down and see with your own eyes.”

I thought back to the brief glimpse I’d obtained of the sphere that was the ‘planet’ Itsuki and Yu Yitai were referring to, with the stain of the Curse covering a large section of it. Those areas not covered with the Curse were mixtures of blue, green, brown, and white. Now that I thought about it, they didn’t seem at all like the Hellscape I’d seen in the videos, which was a dreary wasteland where life couldn’t exist.

“Mr. Saito,” Yu Yitai said, “in addition to the mere sight of the world beyond the storm, I have many other bits and pieces of evidence that I can show you to prove my case about the Hellscape. What’s more, I have a complete copy of the original blueprints for the Heaven-Propping Pillar, including estimates of the shockwave it will produce when fired. I’ll show that to you later. Suffice it to say, Sinotech’s Purpose has nothing to do with the good of humankind. The firing of the Heaven-Propping Pillar will wipe out most human life in existence and might even result in the collapse of the Nine Heavens and Ten Earths.”

“It makes no sense,” Itsuki said. “Why would the board want to do that?”

“It’s simple if you think about it. Who’s the CEO of Sinotech?”

“Hei Luoxiang,” Itsuki replied immediately.

“Do you know how old he is?”

“He was alive during the War of Tribulation, which means he’s probably around nine hundred and fifty years old.”

“Nine hundred and forty-seven, to be exact. The same age as me. Vice-Chair Diao Yu is a year younger than us, and he was also alive in the War.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“How much longevity does Thermal cultivation provide?”

Itsuki answered the questions so quickly it made him seem like a schoolchild who’d been called out by the teacher in front of the rest of the class. “Sea: three hundred. Root: six hundred: Diamond….”

He trailed off.

I knew the answer to the question just as well as he did. A Thermal diamond brought a thousand years of longevity.

“He’s going to die soon,” I said.

Yu Yitai nodded. “As will I. As will Vice-Chair Diao Yu and Matriarch Liang Rong of the Naturalism Sect. All four of us were alive during the War, which means our longevity is running out.”

Itsuki’s complexion suddenly seemed ashen. “The only way to live past a thousand is to become an immortal.”

“Exactly,” Yu Yitai said. “And is that feasible?”

“The Singularity Pearl made it impossible to practice Hydric cultivation.”

“To become an immortal, you have to form diamonds of energy in all eight major paths of cultivation. If they don’t destroy the Pearl, they’ll die. They realized this centuries ago, which is what led to their Purpose. Destroy the Pearl, and Hei Luoxiang and Diao Yu will have a shot at becoming immortals. And they’ll sacrifice as many people as it takes to achieve that goal. Think about it. Even if the path of Hydric cultivation re-opened right now, they would have only about five decades to cultivate a Hydric diamond. And that’s not to mention they have other diamonds to form. To say that they’re anxious about the whole matter is an understatement to say the least.”

Silence settled in the control room, penetrated only by the occasional whir and beep of the computers and instruments.

Finally, Itsuki said, “Are you saying you’re willing to die rather than join them?”

“Yes. I am. There are worse things than dying.”

“But you’d rather live,” I said. “Thus your plan that you mentioned.”

He smiled. “Well, there is that.”

“Plan?” Itsuki said.

“I’ve thought of a different way to get rid of the Pearl. A way that doesn’t involve killing everyone.”

The True Heaven lurched, not so violently that we were thrown off our feet, but enough that we had to shift our stance to keep balance.

“We’ve reached the end of the tether,” Yu Yitai said, “and the border of the storm. Come with me to the observation deck.

We left the control room and went down a series of corridors and staircases until we stood on a narrow landing above a circular room with plexiglass walls and floor.

Below us, the black Curse clouds roiled, interspersed with flashes of lightning. Beyond the clouds was something else. The first thing I noticed was that, off in the distance, there was a curved line. On top, it was pitch black, and beneath it was a swirl of blue and white. And the sun was there as well, made darker by the plexiglass. It was my first time seeing it with my physical eyes, and its touch on my face felt comforting.

“Sinotech and the Naturalism Sect teach different versions of the Hellscape,” Yu Yitai said. “While neither are real, does that look like Sinotech’s Hellscape to you, Mr. Saito?”

Itsuki stood there looking at the scene for a long moment. Then he said, “It doesn’t.”

“No fire. No smoke. No brimstone. Sinotech’s Hellscape is a lie, even more than my sect’s version. There are no fires of hell out there.”

It was a mesmerizing sight as we stood there, just watching the cloud formations swirl beyond the angry black Curse. Elena’s fingers found mine, and I wrapped my arm around her shoulders. As we watched, the sun climbed downward, turning the clouds deep red and casting long, dramatic shadows. Finally, it disappeared. The sun had set.

“We have a lot to talk about, Mr. Saito,” Yu Yitai said. “And I have a lot to show you. The same goes for you, Patriarch Wang, Chief Eldress Ávila. We won a victory today, but the war is far from over. In fact, today wasn’t so much winning a victory as it was barely escaping ignominious defeat.

“But now we know we’re going in the right direction. With you two able to tap into the Sun’s Blood, I can finally move my plan into its final phase. And that coincides well with one of your goals, Chief Eldress.”

“What do you mean, Sect Leader?” Elena asked.

“The key to getting your Master back lies in the First Heaven. As it happens, that’s exactly where I need to go. And whether Mr. Saito decides to join our cause or not, I’m sure he’ll want to look into clan matters there. Our next destination is set. We’re going back to the Ninth Earth to get your coterie, and then we’ll head to the most secure and tightly defended location in the Grand Kingdom. To where the firing mechanism of the Pillar is located and the mainframe of the Grand Kingdom is housed. To the heart and soul of the Nine Heavens and Ten Earths. The last place I need to visit before my plan can be carried out.”

“The First Heaven,” I murmured, holding Elena just a bit tighter.

Thank You All! Please Read!

Thank you so much for investing the time to read The Sun’s Blood. At this point, I’ve been working full time on this novel for almost a year straight; I hope all of the passion and love I’ve put into the story came across to you as you read it. As you surely know, it’s the support of readers like you that make it possible for writers to practice our craft. YOU are what makes this job worth it!

On that subject, a few notes:

First: Please, please, consider rating and reviewing The Sun’s Blood on Amazon, as well as any of your other favorite book sites. Many people don’t know that there are thousands of books published every day, most of those in the USA alone. Over the course of a year, a quarter of a million authors will vie for a small place in the massive world of print and publishing. Authors like me have to fight to get even the tiniest traction, fight to climb upward one inch at a time towards the bright light of bestsellers, publishing contracts, and busy book signings.

Thing is, I need all the help I can get, and that’s where wonderful readers like you come in!

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Regardless of whether or not you choose to review, reach out, or support me elsewhere, thank you again for taking the time to read The Sun’s Blood. If you think you have your mind wrapped around what’s going on in the Nine Heavens and Ten Earths, just wait until the mind-blowing sequel!

Your biggest fan,

Jeremy Bai

Name and Pronunciation Guide:

The lingua franca of this story is not English. For all intents and purposes, the default language spoken by the characters is Standard Mandarin Chinese, although there are other languages and dialects spoken as well.

Many characters in the story have Chinese names, written in pinyin, the official Romanization system for Mandarin Chinese in mainland China. In some cases, characters with Chinese names might have names spelled using different Romanization systems to reflect the variety of subcultures and dialects that exist in the setting.

In some instances, you can simply pronounce the names intuitively. In other cases, the correct pronunciation differs from the way you might initially guess. Here are a few guidelines to help:

C. Pronounced like TS in “cats”

X. Pronounced with a soft SH sound

ZH. Pronounced with a hard J sound

Q. Pronounced with a soft CH sound

Ending E. Pronounced like “uh.” So He sounds like “huh” and Ge like “guh.”

Ending U. Pronounced like “ooh.” So Hu sounds like “who” and Yu sounds like “you.”

Ending ENG. Pronounced like “ung.” So Heng sounds like “hung” and Deng sounds like “dung.”

Wang Fan (王凡). Pronunciation: Pronounce Wang so it rhymes with “long” and Fan so it rhymes with “lawn.” Phonetically: Wawng Fawn.

Meaning: The surname 王　Wang is the most common Chinese surname in use today. The given name 凡　Fan has a variety of meanings including “ordinary, commonplace, mundane, mortal, etc.” Combining these two characters creates a very common and ordinary-sounding name, similar to a name such as John Smith or Robert Jones.

Wang Xiaoli: Pronunciation: Pronounce Wang as explained above. Xiao rhymes with “how” but starts with a combination between SH and Y. Li rhymes with “bee.” Phonetically: Wawng Shyow-Lee.

Yu Yitai: Pronunciation: Pronounce Yu like “you” and Yitai like “ee-tie”. Phonetically: You Ee-Tie.

Glossary

Warning: This glossary contains spoilers and is intended to be referenced and not read beginning to end (unless you’ve finished the whole story first)!

Baijiu – A distilled liquor typically made from sorghum. It generally has a very high alcohol content.

Beifei – An ethnic minority group in the Grand Kingdom.

Black Corpses – The secret police wing of the Glorious Peacekeepers. Highly skilled and well equipped. Responsible for internal policing of the Peacekeepers, they also act as frontline soldiers against cultivators.

Bonecrete – A very tough and durable product reminiscent of concrete.

Bonemetal – A very tough and durable product reminiscent of steel.

Boyu - A language spoken among certain ethnic minorities.

Bright Heavens – See Nine Heavens and Ten Earths

Bunny Bai – Elena's friend and roommate and Jakobe's girlfriend.

Charlotte Pan – Wang Fan's ex-girlfriend with whom he still associates and trusts. Sergeant 3rd class in Cross–Level Control.

Chief Elder – An extremely high-ranking member of the Naturalism Sect. Most chief elders have at least two roots of energy.

Chief Elder Kang – Kang Duan, father of Kang Jianhong.

Coterie – A group of cultivators who meet regularly for instruction and to practice cultivation. Outer sect coteries consist of recruits, novices, and disciples and are led by disciples. Inner sect coteries consist of senior disciples and elite disciples and are led by elite disciples. Groups of coteries are overseen by elders.

Counter–Cultivation – A department in the Glorious Peacekeepers that specializes in investigating cultivator activity.

Cross–Level Control – A department in the Glorious Peacekeepers responsible for monitoring and controlling travel between Heavens and Earths.

Cultivator Ranks – Cultivators in the Naturalism Sect have ranks that represent a combination of seniority and cultivation level. From lowest to highest, the ranks are: recruit, novice, disciple, senior disciple, elite disciple, elder, chief elder, grand elder, patriarch, sect leader.

Dark Heavens – See Nine Heavens and Ten Earths

Dimensional Pendant – A necklace that cultivators carry. It allows them to store items and also quickly equip their cultivator robes. The pendant’s shape depends on personal whim. Black Corpses use bracelets with the same functionality.

Disciple – A member of the Naturalism Sect who has at least one sea of energy and oversees a coterie.

Divine Sense – A sixth sense that can be used to perceive one’s surroundings and self and interact with them to a limited degree. At higher levels, it can be used to communicate with another person by speaking directly into their mind.

Duḥkha Temple – A sect of cultivators that existed before the War of Tribulation. Reputed to be arrogant, they specialized in Bone cultivation and puppetization. They also bred taṇhā worms. The Black Corpses carry on their legacy.

Elder – A high-ranking member of the Naturalism Sect. Generally, an elder will oversee a group of ten coteries and will be a member of an elder circle. Most elders have at least one root of energy.

Elder Circle – A group of ten elders overseen by a chief elder.

Elder Hu Jingyi – An elder in the Naturalism Sect from the Fourth Earth.

Elder Qing – An elder in the Naturalism Sect from the Fourth Earth.

Eldress Cheung – Elena's Master and an eldress in the Naturalism Sect from the Third Earth.

Elite disciple – The highest rank a disciple of the Naturalism Sect can achieve before rising into a true leadership role. Most elite disciples have two or three seas of energy.

Eurosynth – An ethnic minority group in the Grand Kingdom. Also the name of the language spoken by members of that group.

Glorious Peacekeepers – The primary law enforcement agency in the Grand Kingdom.

Grand Kingdom – The official name of the ‘country’ occupying the Nine Heavens and Ten Earths.

Grand Elder – One of the highest ranks in the Naturalism Sect. Grand elders have at least one diamond of energy.

Greater Heavens – See Nine Heavens and Ten Earths

Grid – A commonly used global network. Connection is made through modems and wired connections. Government organizations, buildings, stores, malls, and even neighborhoods might have their own local grids.

Han – The ethnic majority group in the Grand Kingdom.

Heavenly Curse – Something in the rain that causes a deadly disease. Also a colloquial term for the storm which gives birth to the cursed rain.

Heaven–Propping Pillar – A massive pillar in the center of the Nine Heavens and Ten Earths that maintains the cycle of day and night and also serves as a support structure.

Hellscape – The area outside of the Grand Kingdom.

ICE – Intrusion countermeasures electronics.

Inner Sect – The term to describe the organization of higher-ranking disciples in the Naturalism Sect, including senior disciples and elite disciples.

Itsuki Saito – A Black Corpse lieutenant who nearly killed Elena and Wang Fan. 

Jakobe Liu – Wang Fan's partner in the Peacekeepers. Has a headset grafted directly to his optic nerve. Of Beifei decent, he speaks Boyu and has the traditional family name Lmrabet.

Japkor – An ethnic minority in the Grand Kingdom. Also the name of the language spoken by that group. A combination of two distinct ethnic groups with their own languages who were forced by Sinotech to assimilate. The two groups have generally maintained their own distinct cultural identities, but sadly, despite their best efforts to oppose it, their languages were combined into one.

Johan Saito – Itsuki Saito’s father, a board member of Sinotech Corporation.

Kang Jianhong – An arrogant and entitled disciple in the Naturalism Sect, from the Fourth Earth. Son of Chief Elder Kang Duan.

Leslie Cai – A recruit in the Naturalism Sect in a romantic relationship with Kang Jianhong.

Lesser Heavens – See Nine Heavens and Ten Earths

Luzhou – A popular brand of baijiu.

Naturalism Sect – An ancient sect that was founded before the War of Tribulation

Netherearths – See Nine Heavens and Ten Earths

Nicolas Kun – A powerful Black Corpse who was in a relationship with Eldress Cheung many years ago.

Nine Heavens and Ten Earths – The nineteen cities that make up the Grand Kingdom. Built around the Heaven-Propping Pillar, they are stacked one on top of another, with the First Heaven at the bottom, and the Tenth Earth at the top.

Greater Heavens – The First through Fifth Heavens.

Lesser Heavens – The Sixth through Ninth Heavens.

Bright Earths – The First through Fourth Earths.

Dark Earths – The Fifth through Eighth Earths. Said to literally have less light, they are known for having a lower quality of life compared to the Bright Earths.

Netherearths – The Ninth and Tenth Earths.

Nitro – Nitropropin eroprodol. A drug that puts the user into a lucid dream state. Can be addictive or lethal depending on the dose and method of administration. A moon tattoo marks someone as a Nitro runner.

Novice – A relatively new member of the Naturalism Sect who has been vetted and passed a test to be able to form a sea of energy. Generally, novices have at least one sea of energy.

NZ-85G.2 – A standard issue gun for Peacekeepers and Corpses. A 9mm gunpowder semi-automatic pistol.

Orgplants – Facilities the public generally understands to be waste-processing plants.

Ossientum Memorandum – A cultivation manual printed by the Black Corpses, detailing Bone cultivation techniques.

Outer Sect – The term to describe the organization of the lowest-ranking members of the Naturalism Sect, including recruits, novices, and disciples.

Paliprox – A drug that prevents the use of cultivation by blocking the connection with the sea of energy.

Paliprox-D – A version of paliprox that knocks the victim unconscious.

Paliprox-Z – A version of paliprox that can be used as part of a process to extract elements of a cultivator’s cultivation base against their will.

Puppetization – A process that turns someone into a controlled puppet. The most common methods take away the will of the victim.

Puppet Lace – A type of puppetization that leaves the will of the victim intact.

Pure Cloud Pill – A healing pill that cultivators of the Naturalism sect often carry. It can cure wounds as serious as punctured lungs and broken bones.

QBZ–14C – A 5.8×42mm gunpowder bullpup assault rifle.

Qian Cui – Wang Fan's ex-girlfriend. Their relationship ended on a bad note. She used drugs and had connections with mobsters.

RAT – Remote administration trojan. A software program that can give the user control of a device remotely.

Red Star – A popular and cheap brand of baijiu popular among lower-class citizens.

Recruit – A new member of the Naturalism Sect who is still learning how to circulate energy.

Senior Disciple – A more experienced member of the Naturalism Sect. Generally, the requirement to be promoted is to have two seas of energy.

Shell of the Hešeri – An ancient artifact from the War of Tribulation. It can break through powerful spell formations and temporarily negate the Heavenly Curse.

Shields – Barriers protecting the Heavens and Earths. Complaints of malfunctions with the Shields are common. Connected to the Heaven–Propping Pillar, they act as ceilings and floors for the Heavens and Earths. Designed to protect the citizens from the Heavenly Curse.

Sinese – The native language of the Han people and also the official language of the Grand Kingdom.

Sinotech Corporation – The governing body that runs the Grand Kingdom. Overseen by a board of directors.

Snow – A brand of beer popular throughout the Nine Heavens and Ten Earths.

Southmer – An obscure language spoken among certain ethnic minorities.

Spitter – A popular beam weapon that comes in both law enforcement and civilian models. It has a stealth mode and two wires that connect to a jack in the forearm for energy. The Spitter D4 has a 9mm beam and the Spitter X3 has a 12mm beam. Wang Fan's weapon of choice is the D4.

Svea Göransson – A tech-savvy Fourth Earth cultivator companion of Wang Fan. She comes from a rich family and claims to have more than one girlfriend. Her entire left arm from the shoulder down is a high quality bonemetal prosthetic.

Taṇhā worms – Parasitic worms that turn the victim into a puppet that ultimately goes on a murderous rampage.

Tao Heng – Svea's roommate, from the Fourth Earth. Also a novice in the Naturalism Sect.

True Heaven – A mysterious location.

Type 77-16 – A 7.62×17mm gunpowder semi-automatic pistol.

Ursula Cheung – See Eldress Cheung.

Vert-Rail – Public transit trains with a vertical rail system.

Wang Xiaoli – Wang Fan's deceased sister. Was also a Glorious Peacekeeper and held the rank of Constable 3rd Class. She was murdered by someone with a sword.

War of Tribulation – The war that ended the previous age and led to the rise of the Grand Kingdom.

Wars (other) – First Cultivator War, Second Cultivator War, Crime War of 528.

Westvox – A language spoken among certain ethnic minorities.

Xiaoli – See Wang Xiaoli.

Yingo – A language spoken among certain ethnic minorities.

Zhao Shenchuan – A grid expert working at the Sea Dragon Electronics Emporium. Claimed to have dated Wang Xiaoli in the past. Also known as Grid Monkey Zhao.

Zhao Xiaojing – Svea’s ex-girlfriend from the Fourth Earth.

Zont-Rail – Public transit trains with a horizontal rail system.