To Embers We Return — Chapter 31
***
Inside the empire’s Supreme Bureau of Research and Innovation, Li Ruoyuan raised herself on tiptoe before the hulking banks of machinery that ran Chang’an’s city-wide tracking system, but she was still too short to see the central control panel.
Li Shan, who had been at her side since the moment she set foot in the Bureau, stooped and said deferentially, ‘Shall I pick you up, huangjie?’[1]
Her voice was the only sound in the spacious room, so silent that even the faintest noise could be heard clearly.
‘Yes,’ said Li Ruoyuan.
Li Shan lifted her up as one would a child, holding her high enough to see the control panel. Patiently, she began explaining to Li Ruoyuan the significance of the figures on the screen, as well as the improvements which she had made to the tracking system’s capabilities with her latest upgrade.
Standing closest to Li Ruoyuan was the Director of the Lijing Bureau and three of her elite officials. At some distance away were several researchers of the Supreme Bureau of Research and Innovation, who had been ordered not to come too close to the Lijing officials. They were also forbidden to carry any weapons. Most of these researchers were veteran officials who had served at the Bureau for a long time, and had become accustomed to the sight of the emperor being carried in her younger sister’s arms. They stood calmly with their eyes respectfully downcast, careful to avoid glancing directly at the imperial countenance.
The one exception was a young, junior researcher who stood tucked away in a corner of the room. He had overheard the exchange between the two sisters, and his curiosity got the better of him. Lifting his head stealthily, he stole a glance at Li Ruoyuan. He simply had to know.
Before coming to the capital, the junior researcher had heard that a peculiar illness had left Li Ruoyuan stuck with the face and form of a young child. Although she was over forty years old, and had reigned over the empire for the last twenty years, it was said that she still looked like a child of seven or eight. The researcher had been toiling away at the Supreme Bureau of Research and Innovation for the last three years, and had never had the opportunity to catch so much as a glimpse of the emperor — until now. He’d recently been promoted to an official of the lower eight rank, and thus had been permitted to remain in the royal presence when Li Ruoyuan’s arrival was announced.
Through his narrowed field of vision, he saw the tall figure of Li Shan carrying a little girl in her arms. They had their backs to him. The girl’s chubby form was clad in the dragon-embroidered robes which only the emperor was entitled to wear. On her head was a child-sized futou; its corners hung down in a rather fetching manner.
The pair of them looked nothing like sisters. Had he claimed that they were a particularly affectionate mother and child, no one would have doubted it.
A faint smile crept over the researcher’s lips, and he chuckled inwardly.
Just as he was averting his gaze decorously again, a sudden gust of wind slapped him in the face, and his eyes closed reflexively. When he opened them again, a woman was standing in front of him. The upper half of her face was concealed by a half-mask of pure black metal, but from the lower half, he could tell that she was very beautiful. Her face was a perfect oval, and her brilliant red lips made a striking contrast against her fair skin. Yet somehow, there was something macabre about her.
Metallic masks were hardly unheard of in TangPro, but they invariably had cut-outs for the wearer’s eyes. This woman’s mask, however, was solid metal all the way through; her eyes were hidden completely from view.
The woman’s name was Han Fu, and she was the Director of the Lijing Bureau. Where her subordinates’ robes had a single resurrection lily embroidered on their left shoulder, hers was completely covered in the blood-coloured blossoms. They twined seductively about her, sinister yet captivating.
Han Fu raised a slender finger and aimed it at the junior researcher’s left eye. A single droplet of liquid, of a red so dark it was almost black, began to coalesce at the tip of her scarlet fingernail. The researcher, frightened and bewildered, turned reflexively to stare at it.
A jet of liquid shot suddenly from Han Fu’s fingertip, as if from a high-pressure water cannon, and pierced straight through the researcher’s eyeball, puncturing it. The corrosive fluid began eating away at his skin. In mere moments, the left side of his face was disintegrating like a half-melted candle. The researcher clapped a hand to his cheek, howling in pain. One of Han Fu’s subordinates picked him up by the collar and dragged him out of the room.
Han Fu’s upraised arm fell back to her side. The black liquid went on dripping from her fingertip, eating circles into the cashmere rug underfoot. The corners of her red lips lifted ever so slightly. ‘The next time someone tries to look at something they shouldn’t, I’ll make sure they lose something more than an eye.’
Li Ruoyuan half-turned as if to see what was going on, but Han Fu stopped her. ‘I would advise against it, Your Majesty. There’s no need to soil your eyes with such a sight.’
‘Oh,’ said Li Ruoyuan. She did not seem to mind either way. When she turned her little head back to the control panel again, a circle of blue light was flashing on the screen. ‘What does this mean?’ she asked.
Li Shan’s expression had frozen stiff.
‘This is a warning, to alert us that a mutant beast infected with the Black Box has been detected within the capital. The blue light… blue means that it’s a zhulong-level beast.’
Once infected by the Black Box, any organic creature or inorganic construct had a chance of mutating into a dangerous, freakish beast. The Supreme Bureau of Research and Innovation had classified these into five levels based on the degree of threat they presented: zhulong,[2] fengyi,[3] kunpeng, yinglong and taixu. These names had been taken from the Classic of Mountains and Seas, one of the three great mystical texts that had been stored in the capsule from the future. While zhulong-level beasts were the weakest of the five, that did not mean they could be taken lightly — quite the opposite. Any mutant beast powerful enough to fall within the Bureau’s five-level classification was capable of razing a whole city to the ground. A full battalion of soldiers — two hundred and fifty or more — was required to defeat a zhulong-level beast, and all of them had to be hardened veterans besides.
To fell a fengyi-level beast, required the might of a whole brigade, and at least ten of those had to be A-tier warriors or better if one was to have a reasonable chance of success. Kunpeng-level beasts were even worse. Only a force of multiple S-tier warriors, supported by machinists or psychics of equal Talent, had any hope of putting up a fight against one. Ordinary soldiers would find nothing but instant death. And as for yinglong-level beasts, Bian Jin was the only person in the annals of the empire who had ever slain one, and that had been at the height of her powers.
Taixu-level beasts were named after the primordial void from which all life had sprung, and they were as fathomless and unknowable as the universe itself. The only thing known about them was that they were powerful beyond all comprehension, but nobody had ever seen one in the flesh.
Had the zhulong-level beast turned up in some uninhabited location, they could have despatched a battalion to deal with it then and there. But instead, it had appeared in the Eastern Market — the busiest, liveliest place in all of Chang’an. It was not just a simple matter of extermination. The Eastern Market was packed with so many people — and so many cybernetic implants the Black Box could turn to its advantage.
Cold sweat dripped from Li Shan’s temples.
‘Han Fu,’ said Li Ruoyuan calmly.
Han Fu stepped forward. ‘Your servant is here.’
‘Take care of this.’
‘As Your Majesty commands.’
Li Ruoyuan turned to Li Shan. ‘And will the alert reach the Southern Garrison directly?’
‘Yes,’ said Li Shan, in a dry, rasping voice.
‘Very good,’ said Li Ruoyuan. Then she saw that Han Fu was still standing in the same spot, though her three subordinates were already making their way out of the room.
Li Ruoyuan said nothing, but Han Fu understood the question in her silence. She sank to one knee in front of Li Ruoyuan. ‘Your Majesty, it is your humble servant’s duty to protect you. I cannot leave Your Majesty’s side.’
Han Fu followed Li Ruoyuan as closely as a shadow wherever she went, except when Li Ruoyuan was in her private quarters, where no officials other than the Palace Domestic Service were permitted to enter. There, Li Ruoyuan’s safety was guaranteed, as she was watched over by the full might of the Southern Garrison. Whenever Li Ruoyuan set foot outside the palace, however, Han Fu was sure to be with her.
Li Ruoyuan’s little forehead furrowed. ‘Shan’er will be with me, and so will a whole troop of soldiers. No harm will come to me. It’s the people of Chang’an who need you now.’
Han Fu was silent for a moment. Then slowly she looked up.
Even Li Shan could feel the suffocating waves of emotion rolling from Han Fu, though she could not see Han Fu’s eyes.
‘As Your Majesty commands,’ said Han Fu in a low voice, clearly reluctant to comply, but having no choice but to obey.
***
In the Eastern Market, a whole row of taverns and teahouses had already had their roofs ripped off. Broken tiles and bits of brick rained down everywhere.
The two-headed mutant beast was struggling to rise from the huge bushel basket Shen Ni had kick it into. It had just got to its feet when a whip came cracking down mercilessly on its back.
Shen Ni and Bian Jin’s attacks meshed so seamlessly together that they seemed to move as one.[4] Bian Jin had worked out where the creature would land almost as soon as Shen Ni had sent it flying. She’d stepped forward to outflank it, her whip at the ready, and had struck her target squarely. Her whip laid open the flesh of the old man’s body; the high-voltage current that pulsed through it left black scorch marks on its back.
The creature felt as if thousands of red-hot hooks were digging into its skin. It let out a piteous howl — which was rapidly cut off when Bian Jin gave it another kick. The force of the impact sent it skidding across the street, scraping up sparks in its wake, until it pitched headfirst into a shop that sold electronic equipment. It smashed straight into the floor-length display cabinets, shattering the crystal into pieces; glittering shards pattered down noisily around it.
The creature struggled to stand up from the wreck of display cabinets and prototype devices. It had just managed raise the upper half of its body when Bian Jin’s foot landed heavily on its back from behind, grinding it back into the floor. At the same time, she looped her whip around its neck, from which both of its heads sprouted.
The beast let out a confused sound. Bian Jin stamped even more firmly on its back and tugged her whip backwards, severing the creature’s heads from its neck. The old man’s decapitated body collapsed into a heap.
Even though she was wearing gloves, Bian Jin had no wish to touch the misshapen, conjoined heads. She let them drop onto the ground beside her foot, intending to crush them into pieces under her heel.
‘Shijie, stay away from that head!’ Shen Ni called urgently as she sprang in through a broken window.
Bian Jin, who had been about to bring her foot down on the conjoined heads, kicked them away instead, sending them sailing towards the door of the shop with a solid thump. While they were still in mid-air, however, they turned and launched themselves back at Bian Jin at high speed.
Shen Ni darted in front of Bian Jin, swinging her battlestaff in a circle before her. She brought it down hard on the conjoined heads, slamming them into the floor. Like a particularly springy ball, the heads rebounded high up into the air. They bounced up and down a couple of times, then hung suspended in mid-air. The two faces had melded together even more closely than before, becoming one massive head instead of two. Both the child’s and the old man’s features were strewn haphazardly over its surface, and were twisted in the most bizarre fashion. Where the mouth should have been was a pair of eyes: the round one on the left was the child’s, and the clouded one on the right belonged to the old man.
Li Si, leading a troop of Jinwu Guards, arrived at the scene just in time to witness this. She swore. ‘What in the hells is this?’ she demanded, unable to tear her eyes away.
Even as the words left her lips, she already knew the answer. It had to be the Black Box!
As a general of the Southern Garrison, Li Si was fully aware of what the signs of infection by the Black Box looked like. It was just that they manifested themselves differently in each host, so it had taken her a moment to grasp what she was seeing. The grotesque display before them was enough to take even a hardened military veteran like her aback, never mind the younger members of the Jinwu Guards, many of whom had never left the shelter of Chang’an. It was one thing to come across something like this on extranet, quite another to encounter it in the flesh. From the back of the troop came the sounds of violent retching.
Bian Jin looked down, and saw that there was a gash in Shen Ni’s robes at the waist. Blood was seeping slowly through it. Sensing Bian Jin’s gaze, Shen Ni placed her palm over the cut, activating the suturing device embedded in it. In a swift, practised move, she had disinfected the wound and stitched it up. She smiled at Bian Jin. ‘I’m fine,’ she said.
Shen Ni was undoubtedly the most talented machinist in all of the empire, but her skills were ill-suited for close combat. Bian Jin placed an arm briefly around Shen Ni’s shoulders, gesturing silently for Shen Ni to get behind her. Shen Ni understood her meaning. She leaned towards Bian Jin and whispered, ‘The Jinwu Guards are all watching us. As I said before, we can’t let them know that you’ve recovered.’
Bian Jin had not anticipated that she would come so close so suddenly. Shen Ni’s hot breath, laced with the metallic tang of blood and the fragrance of pear-blossoms, engulfed her ear. She felt as if Shen Ni were running her fingers over her heart; a flush of pleasure flooded her body. Reflexively she turned away, seeking an escape.
‘I understand.’
The sensations sweeping over Bian Jin were white-hot, but her reply was ice-cold.
Shen Ni was used to her shijie’s cool manner, so it did not bother her overmuch. All she said was, ‘Let’s lure it to some empty house, where we can finish it off once and for all.’
Macabre though the sight of that misshapen head hanging in mid-air might be, Li Si’s warrior’s instinct was telling her to shoot first and ask questions later. She lifted up a heavy, black Gatling gun, took aim, and emptied all six barrels into the floating head, instantly shredding it into pulp.
The next moment, however, the head had reassembled itself once more. It flew back to where the old man’s crumpled body lay and reattached itself to the old man’s neck.
The body lurched unsteadily to its feet, its bones cracking in a way that set the onlookers’ teeth on edge. It straightened its drooping neck. By now, the two heads had merged together perfectly, and the roaming features were finally shifting back to their proper places.
Li Si could only stare as two of its eyes — one belonging to the child, the other the old man — came closer and closer to one another, like a pair of ships cast adrift on the water. There was no collision when they finally met. Instead, they began to merge gradually into each other, their sockets vibrating wildly up and down. Soon, the two mismatched orbs had melded perfectly into a single eye.
The other pair of eyes followed suit, as did the two sets of eyebrows, the two noses, and the two mouths, transforming the creature’s face into that of an honest, good-natured middle-aged man.
‘Oh,’ it said, and its voice was also that of a mild-mannered, middle-aged man.
All the Jinwu Guards were staring in slack-jawed silence. Li Si’s palms, still wrapped around the Gatling gun, had gone slick with sweat.
It seemed as if her promise of bringing the little boy’s head back to his mother was now impossible to fulfil, thought Bian Jin. She turned to Shen Ni. ‘Its body has changed too.’
And indeed, it had. Through the lacerations which Bian Jin’s whip had torn in the old man’s skin, they glimpsed not muscle or bone, but some metallic substance. It glinted with a cool light.
‘It didn’t have any metal prosthetics or implants when I struck it just now,’ added Bian Jin.
‘That’s not a prosthetic,’ said Shen Ni. ‘The Black Box must have transformed the creature’s flesh and blood into some sort of metallic shell. I don’t know exactly how it’s managed to evolve, but this version of the Black Box is different from the one we faced in the north.’
No one understood what Shen Ni meant better than Bian Jin. The two of them had spent years waging war against the Black Box. They’d come face to face with its cruelty time and time again, and with every wound they took, every drop of blood they shed, every soldier’s life they’d lost, they’d gradually discovered the key to defeating the virus. A creature that had been infected by the Black Box would be rendered inert for a quarter of an hour once its head was destroyed. During that time, they would extract its jade core (if the host was a human) or inner core (if it was a machine or animal) from its body. That would allow them to finish it off once and for all. Having isolated the core, they would seal it away in a specially-designed container. This was tantamount to ‘imprisoning’ the Black Box, cutting it off from its ‘food’ and ‘water’. The container would be placed at the bottom of a hole ten feet deep, which would then be filled up with mercury. Seven days later, the Black Box would be ‘dead’.
Of course, the Black Box was a highly infectious virus. Even if one instance of it was killed, there would still be millions of others left. To eradicate it was no easy task. As brilliant as Shen Ni was, it had taken her three long years to beat the virus into temporary submission — and even then, she’d had to rely the mountains of data Bian Jin had gathered before her. They both knew that the Black Box’s greatest talent lay in concealment. Until it chose to reveal itself, it was impossible to guess where it was hidden. Once the opportunity was right, it would spring into life again, rising from the polluted earth where it had lain dormant.
But now, however, it seemed their old tactics were useless. Mere moments after Shen Ni had crushed the child’s skull to pieces — and certainly well short of a quarter of an hour — it had reassembled itself and come roaring back to life again.
‘There’s a fuzzy energy field linking the beast’s head to its body,’ Shen Ni explained rapidly to Bian Jin. ‘It seems that as long as the body remains intact, the head will be able to regenerate indefinitely. Once the head finds a suitable new body, it’s likely that it will be able to connect itself to that body using the same energy field. The head is no longer the Black Box’s weak spot.’
Bian Jin’s eyelids were throbbing restlessly. ‘Has the Black Box managed to evolve… intelligence? It’s been killed so many times over that it’s found a way to remain functional even without its head, and now it must understand the significance of jade cores and inner cores as well. It must have grown that metallic shell to protect the body’s jade core from damage. That way, Black Box will still retain full control over the body even after the head has been destroyed.’
Shen Ni chuckled coolly. ‘I even suspect that it’s grown a brain inside its body, hence that metallic shell. This is something completely new — something we’ve never seen before.’
An excited smile began to play about the corners of her mouth. She leaned lazily on her battlestaff, which she was holding with one hand. The pose transformed the weapon into an elegant walking-stick. ‘I’m going to take it apart right now,’ she declared, ‘to see what it’s made of inside!’
The mutant beast, meanwhile, was running exploratory fingers over its own throat, looking pleased with itself — until it caught sight of its hands, which were as wizened as the bark of a tree. It frowned unhappily, and shook its hands vigorously from side to side as if to rid itself of these markers of decrepitude, but to no avail. ‘I want a better body,’ it mumbled. ‘The strongest body…’
Its eyes rolled around in their sockets until they settled on Bian Jin. It sniffed deeply in her direction, then pointed at her once more. ‘I want this one!’
Shen Ni thrust her battlestaff forward, aiming it directly at the creature’s chest. Her thumb slid along the smooth, silver-white length of the weapon. It shot from her hands at high speed like an arrow leaving a bow, flying straight towards the creature.
‘Shijie, I want this one!’ she shouted.
***
Author’s Note:
Bian Jin: Children become so difficult once they grow up *pensive face*
***
Footnotes:
- In Chinese, 皇姐, literally ‘royal older sister’. [return to text]
- In Chinese, 烛龙, literally ‘torch dragon’. In Chinese mythology, a giant red solar dragon with a human’s face and a snake’s body. [return to text]
- In Chinese, 凤翼. Likely a reference to the nine-headed bird (九头鸟, pinyin: jiu tou niao) from Chinese mythology. This is a creature with a bird’s body and nine heads with human faces. In mythological terms, it is a precursor to the Chinese phoenix. [return to text]
- In Chinese, 天衣无缝 (pinyin: tian yi wu feng), literally ‘seamless Heavenly clothes’. This chengyu describes something that is perfect and without defects. It originates from a story by Niu Qiao (牛峤), a poet and official of the late Tang Dynasty. The story is collected alongside other writings by the same author in Strange and Ghostly Tales (灵怪录, pinyin: ling guai lu). [return to text]
douqi 随笔 