To Embers We Return — Chapter 33

***

The Jinwu Guards’ standard-issue weapon was the spear of flame. Every recruit who enlisted was given one. It could be used for piercing, slashing and blocking, and could even thrown as a ranged weapon. It could even release superheated bursts of energy that reached well above a thousand degrees. For many years, the Jinwu Guards had wielded these as powerful weapons against the enemies of the empire. Now that it had fallen into the mutant beast’s hands, it was proving to be an equally effective weapon against the empire’s defenders.

Dou Xuanji’s sabre had been seized by the creature, and she’d sent Fang Pan and the soldiers from the Southern Garrison away. All she could do now was pick up a broadsword that someone had dropped — an unwieldy weapon, the hilt sitting awkwardly in her hand — and put up a fight against the mutant beast as best as she could. A large hank of her hair had been burned away, and across the back of one hand — the one with the broken wrist — was a cut so deep that one could catch a glimpse of bone.

She fought on valiantly, paying no heed to her wounds, single-handedly holding back the mutant beast to buy the townsfolk enough time to escape. The creature seemed to become more and more exhilarated as the battle wore on. In fact, it seemed to be growing stronger and stronger.

A suspicion flashed across Dou Xuanji’s mind. She took advantage of an opening to land a sideways blow on the mutant beast. Sparks flew; what she’d struck was no longer flesh and blood, but pure hard titanium. Her guess had been right: at some point in their fight, the creature’s body had been transmuted into a tough metallic shell. No wonder it was growing more energetic with every passing moment.

Dou Xuanji had cybernetic augmentations of her own, and she was an A-tier warrior besides. But ultimately she was still human, and there were limits to her strength and stamina. She had to be careful to maintain a distance from the mutant beast as well, lest the Black Box devour her too.

As Dou Xuanji continued trading blows with the creature, she found herself gradually on the back foot, barely able to keep its attacks at bay. Then the creature swiped savagely at her legs, and she sank to the ground on her knees. This gave the mutant beast a perfect opening — one that might very well prove fatal for her. Excitedly it charged forward, pointing its spear right at Dou Xuanji’s head.

Then, from somewhere behind it came the hiss of a projectile hurtling through the air. The creature whirled instantly, flinging itself out of the way. A heartbeat later, an arrow came whistling past it from a remarkably tricky angle. It scraped along the creature’s back, buried itself in a wooden pillar nearby, and promptly exploded.

Dou Xuanji let out a dissatisfied tsk. ‘It managed to dodge.’

It was Fang Pan, crouched low on a nearby roof, who’d shot that arrow. She and Dou Xuanji had been partners in the field for so long that each could tell what the other was planning without the need for words. In doing battle with the mutant beast, Dou Xuanji had been using herself as bait, luring it into a trap set by herself and Fang Pan. Fang Pan, meanwhile, was in charge of landing the final, fatal strike on the creature. Unfortunately, the mutant beast’s reflexes had been much faster than they’d expected.

When Fang Pan saw that her arrow had flown wide of its mark, a chill crept across her heart. Xuanji’s in trouble, she thought.

Now that the shot for which she’d risked her life had missed, Dou Xuanji set her jaw and began scrambling to her feet, deciding to take cover in a teahouse just ahead.

She’d only just managed to stand up, gritting her teeth against the pain, when the mutant beast sank its foot heavily into her stomach. The kick sent her skidding along the ground for some forty feet, stopping only when her lower back slammed into some stone steps. The dull crunch of breaking bones echoed in her ears. She flopped over bonelessly, sprawling facedown on the ground. Her chest rose and fell heavily; she’d taken some sort of internal injury. Helplessly she coughed into the ground, and blood gushed out from between her tightly-clenched lips.

Fang Pan usually waited at least thirty minutes between explosive arrows, to give her fuel cells time to recharge. Now that Dou Xuanji’s life was in imminent danger, however, she immediately diverted all her remaining power to her arrows and fired off two in rapid succession. As the second arrow left her bow, the world began to spin around her. She sank to her knees on the rooftop, completely drained.

Down on the ground, the mutant beast was just lifting its spear, poised to rip Dou Xuanji’s head from her shoulders, when Fang Pan’s arrows forced it to back away. It managed narrowly to evade the first, but was less lucky with the second. The arrow buried itself squarely in the creature’s thigh and exploded in a cloud of mangled flesh; blood sprayed everywhere.

The beast stared mournfully at what remained of its leg — a few scraps of flesh hanging from the bone — but did not seem to be in much pain. It turned lopsidedly towards Dou Xuanji, who was once again struggling to get to her feet, and grinned broadly at her.

As the mutant beast thrust its spear at her neck once more, a memory flashed across Dou Xuanji’s mind, of the time her head had been chopped off with an axe. She’d been extraordinarily lucky then: the Director of the Lijing Bureau had been able to save her life. Because of that — and because of the debt she owed the other woman for taking her in as a child — Dou Xuanji had turned down a better opportunity she’d been offered elsewhere, and elected to remain at the Lijing Bureau.

And now it seemed she was about to perish in a battle against the Black Box. Well, so be it; at least it would be a worthy end.

Dou Xuanji closed her eyes, waiting for death to take her once more.

What arrived next was not death, but a hail of bullets. They came from behind, sweeping around and past her, a wave of sheer firepower that blasted straight through the mutant beast. The impact sent the creature stumbling backwards, quaking from head to foot. Countless bullets ripped into its body, tearing it into bloody smithereens.

Dou Xuanji stood frozen in the only clear spot in the midst of the barrage. Bullet after bullet whistled past her so swiftly that she could barely make them out. If she moved so much as a single muscle, the mutant beast’s gory fate would be hers.

Li Si stood atop a table outside an eatery some twenty-five feet behind Dou Xuanji, carrying a Gatling gun bigger than she was. Its barrels revolved at high speed, firing out several hundred bullets each second. A pair of sunglasses perched on the high bridge of her nose, and her cheek bulged with the lollipop she was sucking on.

The roar of the Gatling gun was deafening. Li Si planted her feet firmly where she stood, bending her knees slightly against the recoil, and did not move an inch. She fired off tens of thousands of rounds without a pause. Gunpowder smoke choked the air; casing after spent casing tinkled onto the ground, until the street was littered with them. Li Si was drenched in sweat from the exertion.

Dou Xuanji’s robes were singed in a good few places from the rapid-fire barrage, but none of the bullets had touched so much as a hair on her head.

The mutant beast had been reduced to a pile of torn flesh on the ground. Li Si stared unblinkingly at it, panting heavily. Then, just as she’d anticipated, it began to twitch, and the fragments of the creature’s body began to knit themselves back together again.

Some of Li Si’s soldiers advanced towards the mutant beast, ready to destroy it once and for all. With a monumental effort, Dou Xuanji raised her voice to stop them. ‘Don’t… come any closer,’ she called out, clutching at her stomach.

Li Si rushed forward and scooped Dou Xuanji up in her arms. ‘Retreat!’ she barked at her subordinates.

The soldiers duly pulled back. Then, with the smoothness of long practice, they arranged themselves in an orderly circle around the slowly-coalescing mutant beast, raising their shields against it as they surrounded it completely.

Dou Xuanji had never imagined that she would one day find herself in Li Si’s arms, much less that Li Si would be cradling her to her chest as if she were some sort of damsel in distress. She gave Li Si’s shoulder a hard shove. ‘Let go of me!’

Li Si’s rather beautiful eyes peered up at Dou Xuanji over the rims of her sunglasses. ‘Stop yelping, puppy. Let’s get you out of here, otherwise you’ll just be in the way.’

Puppy?

‘Do you want to die?’ Dou Xuanji snarled. She tried to struggle out of Li Si’s embrace, but she was so badly wounded that it was impossible for her to break free.

Fang Pan, who’d regained consciousness, stared down at them from her rooftop. What’s going on?

Having whisked Dou Xuanji a safe distance away, Li Si set her on the ground and grinned down into her face, which was flushed with anger. ‘And now you’re in my debt, puppy, for saving your life,’ she said. ‘How do you plan to repay me?’

Dou Xuanji’s lips were still stained bright red with blood. ‘I was thinking of chopping your head off. Will that do?’

Li Si gazed down at Dou Xuanji, heat rising within her. Her throat began to prickle where the tip of Dou Xuanji’s dagger had punctured her skin earlier. A sensation was welling up inside her that she couldn’t quite describe.

But there was no time for that now. She tossed Dou Xuanji a can of healing spray, then began striding back towards the battle, reloading her Gatling gun as she did.

When she rejoined her soldiers, she was taken aback by what she saw. From the looks of it, they had torched the mutant beast over and over again with their spears, but the creature has still managed to reassemble most of itself. The formation which the soldiers had made around the mutant beast — which they’d practised countless times — had been thrown into disarray. Several fallen men lay on the ground, which was littered with broken prosthetics.

Li Si flexed her fingers where they rested on the Gatling gun. How was one supposed to kill this thing? For a moment she bitterly regretted playing truant from the lectures on the Black Box that had been part of her training.

Just as Li Si was twitching all over with anxiety, a strange woman came walking through the gap in the soldiers’ disrupted formation. The upper half of her face was completely concealed by a mask of black metal. She strolled through the chaos of the battlefield with an ease and self-possession that was completely at odds with her surroundings. Slung across her back was a small black case. Her arms hung naturally by her sides, and she seemed to be carrying no weapons or any means of self-defence. She was clad in black robes embroidered all over with blood-red resurrection lilies, and most of Li Si’s soldiers recognised her at a glance as Han Fu, the Director of the Lijing Bureau.

The newer recruits, however, were perplexed. Was this woman a Lijing official? Why was she walking up to the mutant beast completely defenceless? Was she trying to get herself killed?

Han Fu strolled right up to the mutant beast. It lifted its head and looked at her curiously.

‘A strong body! So strong, very strong! I want it!’

The creature seemed to be beside itself with excitement. It raised its arms; the next moment, its fingertips transformed into ropes of metallic webbing. They shot towards Han Fu, ready to engulf her.

Han Fu made no move to evade them. She simply remained standing where she was as coil after coil of webbing wrapped themselves around her.

The creature giggled gleefully. After some time, however, its laughter began to fade.

Fang Pan slipped down from the roof, hurried over to Dou Xuanji’s side, and propped her up into a half-sitting position. When she saw Han Fu confronting the mutant beast, her tightly-wound nerves relaxed all at once.

Dou Xuanji coughed a couple of times. ‘A beast is just a beast, after all,’ she said, her voice weak from all the injuries she’d taken. ‘As thick as a sack of bricks.’

The mutant beast had flung its web over Han Fu, but absolutely nothing seemed to happen. After a while, it unravelled the webbing in some confusion.

Han Fu was standing right in front of it, still in full control of herself. Not even the smallest part of her body had been infiltrated by the Black Box. The only change was that the corners of her red lips were curved even higher in a smile.

‘Eh?’ said the mutant beast.

Han Fu raised a finger. Once again, a droplet of black liquid was beginning to form at its tip.

‘My name is Han Fu,’ she told the creature by way of introduction. ‘I am the only unaugmented, Talented warrior presently in service to the empire.’

The mutant beast blinked. Unaugmented? That meant she didn’t have a single cybernetic component inside her body, which placed it beyond the clutches of the Black Box. As far as the virus was concerned, she was completely out of bounds.

Thump.

A high-pressure jet of black liquid punched straight through the creature’s skull.

The mutant beast toppled over, its head already being eaten away by the corrosive liquid. A fetid, pungent odour filled the air.

Han Fu shot a few more streams of poison at the fallen creature, and layer by layer, its flesh disintegrated, revealing a soiled black orb.

The child whose body the Black Box had possessed had only been fitted with a cheap prosthetic, and that had been a disability aid rather than a true augmentation, so it could be used without the support of a jade core. He’d gone without one, relying solely on the organic heart he’d been born with. Under the Black Box’s influence, however, his body had produced this black orb — an ‘inner core’.

The orb was made of metal, and appeared to be a container of some sort, though it was tightly sealed. It was tough enough not to have disintegrated under the onslaught of Han Fu’s corrosive poison.

Drawn by the roar of the Gatling gun, Shen Ni and Bian Jin arrived at the scene just in time to see the death throes of the mutant beast. Shen Ni was still carrying the body of the creature they’d defeated, and Bian Jin shocked it with her whip every now and then. They watched as Han Fu unslung the small black case from her back, set it on the ground, and kicked the orb into it.

‘That must be Prince Yong’s latest invention,’ said Shen Ni. ‘A case lined with shielding capacitors, capable of containing the Black Box.’

Shen Ni, of course, had been using a device exactly like this for years — the modified seal pouch that usually hung from her belt. She’d been so relaxed about today’s outing, however, that she’d forgotten to bring it with her.

‘Han Fu’s skill at poisons has improved yet again,’ said Bian Jin.

Shen Ni had heard tales about Han Fu before. Rumour claimed that the Director of the Lijing Bureau had fed regularly on poisons and all manner of venomous creatures ever since she was a child, absorbing their toxins into her flesh. Hers was a strange and sinister art, it was said.

No part of her body was cybernetically augmented. Instead, secreted on and in her person were hundreds of strong poisons. Anyone who came into contact with so much as a drop of her bodily fluids risked death. In an age where cybernetics reigned supreme, Han Fu was undoubtedly an outlier — and something of a freak.

During the early days of the craze for cybernetics, before the emergence of the Black Box, Han Fu had been mocked and jeered at relentlessly. She was hopelessly old-fashioned, she’d been told; the art of poison had no place in this day and age.

And then the Black Box had changed everything. The mere thought of its horrors gave the cybernetically-enhanced sleepless nights, haunted by fears that they too would one day be possessed by the virus. Those who remained unaugmented, once so scorned and disdained, became the envy of all.

Despite the great risks presented by the Black Box, however, most augmented humans were still reluctant to have their costly cybernetic implants removed. Amid the chaos that had was the hallmark of their civilisation, their belief in the power of cybernetics had practically become a religion; the level of augmentation one could afford was a symbol of one’s status. Only the poorest, lowliest subjects of TangPro were undeserving of jade cores and cybernetic implants.

Since the unaugmented had no fear of the Black Box, the elites reasoned, then they should be the ones to do battle against it. Let them be well-supplied with food and weapons, and sent off to face the virus, while their superiors sat back and enjoyed the fruits of their lessers’ labours.

And so, in the first year of the Black Box’s reign of terror, the Ministry of Defence offered a reward to any unaugmented subject who was willing to enlist in the war against the virus. They would each receive a hundred taels of silver, and their families would be exempted from paying taxes for the next three years. Some hundred thousand recruits took the bait, and were sent to the front lines. Before ten days were out, they were all dead.

It was only when the news reached the capital that the ministers finally realised that, for all their supposed advantage against the Black Box, the unaugmented soldiers were — quite literally — mere flesh and blood. If one had a Talent, it was usually awakened by proximity to cybernetics. Among every ten thousand unaugmented humans therefore, there might not be a single one with even a D-tier Talent. These ‘ordinary’ mortals could not withstand a single attack from the least powerful mutant beast.

From then on, the unaugmented were deemed unfit even to die on the front lines, and their status plummeted even further. There was no way out of their plight unless they could somehow afford cybernetic implants, but that called for a great deal of money, and no one at the bottom-most rungs of society could ever hope to earn anything near that much. And so, life for the unaugmented became a vicious circle. Theirs was a highly stratified age. Each person’s destiny was clearly marked out, depending on whether they could purchase a jade core, what type of jade core they could afford, and whether and what sort of Talent would be awakened within them. Few people strayed from their own level within the social hierarchy; most kept their heads down and stayed on the path that had been laid out for them until the very end of their lives.

Han Fu had shattered the established hierarchy single-handedly, but the price she’d paid for it were the poisons that suffused her body; she could never share physical intimacy with anyone she cared for. And in era where the average age was one hundred and twenty years, she had no expectation of living past forty.

It had been more than ten years since Bian Jin had last seen this friend of her childhood. Then, Han Fu’s eyes had still been normal.

Fearing that the whip’s electrical current might not hold out for long, she decided to remind Shen Ni that there was no need for them to see this spectacle through to its end. ‘Let’s go home,’ she said.

‘Mm,’ said Shen Ni. ‘Your full-body inspection is much more important.’

Bian Jin said nothing. That’s not what I meant.

Just then, Han Fu lifted her head and turned her face in their direction. Bian Jin could sense Han Fu’s attention, but she did not look back. She and Shen Ni left the Eastern Market together.

***

As soon as Shen Ni and Bian Jin arrived home in Xinhua Street, Auntie Wan went out to greet them, bearing cups of hot tea. She wanted to ask if they’d heard anything about a disturbance at the Eastern Market. There was a rumour that the Black Box had been sighted there.

She was just stepping out of the main hall when she caught sight of the monstrosity swinging from Shen Ni’s hand. A freakish creature, with a face that would have seemed kindly were it not for the fact that it had a crooked rat’s muzzle growing out of it. The sight was made even more ghastly by the fact that its head was attached to the wizened body of an old man.

‘Auntie Wan,’ said Bian Jin, ‘tell all the servants to go back inside. We don’t want to frighten anyone.’

Auntie Wan took a deep breath. Her face had gone completely pale, and she did not dare to say another word. She paused in the very act of stepping over the threshold, drew her foot back and spun around nimbly, hurrying off to warn the other servants.

Shen Ni and Bian Jin made their way through the grounds and into Shen Ni’s workshop. Shen Ni’s first order of business was to take the snow globe out from her pocket. She inspected it to make sure there was no damage, then set it down in a prominent spot among the three screens on her desk. That meant she would be able to see it every time she sat down.

Bian Jin looked away, feeling a little embarrassed by the frankness of Shen Ni’s enthusiasm.

Having found a place for the snow globe, Shen Ni turned to the mutant beast — which was still groggy from the electric shocks — and dragged it closer. She decided not to place it on her workbench. After all, that was where Bian Jin was going to have to lie down in just a few moments, and Shen Ni didn’t want to make her uncomfortable by contaminating its surface with something unclean. Instead, she set up another makeshift table, placed the creature on it, and proceeded to cut it open. Inside its body was another metallic orb.

Shen Ni tried opening it. Several broken high-powered mechanical arms later, the orb remained stubbornly sealed. But the process had given Shen Ni a good idea of exactly how tough the material was. Just a couple of hours’ work, and she’d be able to contrive a tool capable of breaking into it. She would tamp down her curiosity for now; she had a more important task waiting for her.

Shen Ni tucked the orb into her seal pouch and tossed the whole thing into a basin of mercury, rendering it inert for the time being. Bian Jin, who was watching the proceedings silently, cast a doubtful glance at her.

‘I’m in no hurry to study it,’ Shen Ni explained. She slipped off her stained outer robe, flung it into a laundry basket, then opened the door of the decontamination chamber.

Usually, Shen Ni was in the habit of stripping completely naked before stepping inside. There was a set of sanitised coveralls hanging in the chamber, after all. But she wasn’t quite shameless enough to do that under Bian Jin’s watching eyes, so she made sure to close the door behind her before finally divesting herself of her undershirt and under-trousers. At the press of a button, ultrasonic waves began radiating from the resonators built into the four upper corners of the chamber, stripping all dirt and other impurities from her skin.

Once that was done, Shen Ni began pulling on the coveralls. ‘The Lijing Bureau took an orb like that back with them as well,’ she called out to Bian Jin. ‘They’re bound to hand it over to the Supreme Bureau of Research and Innovation. Li Shan might be none too bright, but as head of the Bureau, she has plenty of resources at her disposal. We’ll let her do the hard work of analysing it, then wait to hear about her findings from Li Ruoyuan. We’ll be able to get the same result with absolutely none of the effort.’^[1]

A faint smile came over Bian Jin’s face at those words. Shen Ni’s attitude had not changed one bit. Even before her Talent had been detected, she’d always displayed an intelligence far beyond her years. Youthful genius that she was, Shen Ni had had very clear ideas about what counted as the ‘best’ use of her time. She never did any of the schoolwork the teachers at the academy set her. Instead, she would stay up all night studying a particularly fascinating blueprint, and when she arrived at the academy the next day, she would bribe one or another of her classmates into letting her copy off them with promises of helping them keep their cybernetic implants in good condition. Of course, she’d hidden all this from Bian Jin — or at least, she thought she had. Bian Jin had always known exactly what she was up to, but had chosen to turn a blind eye.

And now she was waiting for Li Shan to do the hard work for her so that she could crib off it. Though this time, she was no longer keeping it a secret from Bian Jin. Things between them had gone beyond mere sect-sisterhood; it was as if some unseen force were drawing them closer together, propelling them into joining hands in pursuit of a shared goal. Both of them had some indistinct idea of what that force might be. Although they’d never acknowledged it in so many words, they already resembled any other loving couple in many respects — from their seamless rapport in battle and elsewhere to the way each treated the other’s honour as being intertwined with her own.

‘The most important thing right now is your full-body inspection,’ said Shen Ni. She fixed her gaze on Bian Jin, intent and serious. Worry was clear in her eyes. In that moment — or perhaps not only that moment — Bian Jin’s health outweighed the fate of the world itself.

The obstinate and ungovernable streak in Shen Ni’s nature had not diminished with time. Far from it — as she’d grown in age, power and status, that part of her personality only manifested itself more and more flagrantly. Compared to Bian Jin’s wellbeing, the Black Box was but a minor matter.

Shen Ni sent Bian Jin off to the decontamination chamber as well, and when Bian Jin emerged, she was wearing the same kind of coveralls. These garments were white, and looked rather like their nightclothes, but were even easier to put on and take off. Each set of coveralls was secured by a little magnetic clasp at the waist. Once the clasp was fastened, it did not come loose easily, but if the wearer wanted to undo it, that could be accomplished with a simple flick of the wrist.

Shen Ni was standing by her workbench, having already disinfected her hands. A mechanical arm extended from the wall above, swooping around in readiness. Shen Ni glanced at Bian Jin, then at the workbench, indicating that she should climb onto it.

Now there really was avoiding it, thought Bian Jin. Shen Ni was bound to discover her secret sooner or later. She duly sat as Shen Ni directed. The last time, it was Shen Ni who had lifted her frail, broken body onto the workbench. Now, she was the one who stood on tiptoe and clambered onto it, settling herself right between Shen Ni’s open arms.

To spare the machinist’s back, workbenches were usually set at a height that allowed the user to reach the surface comfortably without bending down too far. And so it was that, once Bian Jin had sat down, she found her knees pressing right up against Shen Ni’s hips. The pose felt very much like a prelude to seduction.

Bian Jin was lost in her own thoughts for a good while, and only came back to the here and now when Shen Ni took her hand. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Shen Ni. ‘I’m very clean.’

Cradling Bian Jin’s ungloved hand in hers, Shen Ni ran a finger over the cut across Bian Jin’s palm, inspecting it closely. Her full attention was fixed on the wound. Very delicately, she rubbed at the skin around it.

‘Can you feel that?’

Bian Jin said nothing.

Shen Ni turned her hand over and kneaded it gently, all the way from the joints of her fingers to the back of her hand, massaging the skin. ‘What about that?’

There was still no reply from Bian Jin.

‘You haven’t lost your sense of touch completely, have you?’

Bian Jin’s head drooped. Her ears had turned utterly red from Shen Ni’s ministrations. I can’t go on like this.

Even though she was doing her very best not to think too hard about what was going on, a flush of heat was already sweeping over her. It had come much more swiftly than she’d expected.

‘Let’s try a different spot,’ said Shen Ni, intent on her task.

Bian Jin’s chest rose and fell heavily. Abruptly she put her hand over Shen Ni’s, pressing it down.

Shen Ni looked up, and saw that Bian Jin did not seem like her usual self. Why were her eyes glazed over?

‘Don’t do that, please…’

Bian Jin’s voice was impossibly soft, with a faint tremor in it that she seemed to be trying to repress. ‘I can’t feel anything else,’ she said. ‘I can’t feel anything except you.’

She was finally telling Shen Ni the truth now; she’d accepted her fate.

‘Except me?’ asked Shen Ni. Clever though she was, Bian Jin’s words still left her momentarily puzzled.

I disinfected everything right in front of her, she thought. And I’m only holding her left hand, not her right. What does she mean, ‘Don’t do that, please’?

Once again, Bian Jin had no idea what to say. How was she supposed to tell Shen Ni that those few light touches had been enough to make her body melt completely?

***

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Footnotes:

In the original text, 事半功倍 (pinyin: shi bei gong ban). The chengyu, means, in essence, ‘to get twice the result with half the labour’. It originates from the Mencius (孟子, pinyin: mengzi), an anthology of conversations and anecdotes attributed to the titular philosopher, who lived during the Warring States period. ^{[return to text]}