Gunsoul: A Xianxia Apocalypse

After a short bout with Orient in the panoramic car, Yuan gave her the same assessment as the rad-hag before her: untrained, but strong.

Orient showed little to no combat instincts nor self-preservation when it came to protecting her body. She didn’t even bother moving from her spot unless he closed in on her. She didn’t need to.

The moment Holster sounded the start of the spar with a clap, the train came alive to defend Orient.

Tables and chairs fell into Yuan’s path when he ran at her, alongside shelves and carpets. Pipes burst out of the floor in the form of coiled metal tentacles with the strength to shatter stone. A cloud of steam erupted from nowhere to blind him with searing heat. It was quite overwhelming at first.

Nonetheless, Yuan retained the edge in fighting experience and instinct. Crossing the Second Coil had also reinforced his body in great and small ways. He could keep on using Elemental Infusion at will now, and his legs had grown strong enough to let him jump across a room in a single bound. He quickly closed the gap with Orient in seconds, jumping through the smoke and swiftly repelling metal tentacles with punches of his own.

“I’ve got you,” he said as his hand reached for Orient’s face.

Orient smiled at him. “Do you, Honored Passenger?”

She melded into the metal floor before Yuan could blink and swiftly reappeared two meters behind him. He briefly caught a glimpse of the process through the spirit-train’s qi; Orient simply returned to being primal energies, flowed through the pipes, and then reformed nearby instantaneously.

Yuan quickly realized his mistake. He wasn’t fighting a person, but a place. A sentient location whose human avatar was no more essential than a piece of gear.

He had been lucky that the rad-hag’s greed led her to fight him inside the spirit-train. Their duel might have had a very different outcome had he confronted her on her land.

“You should try to control your opponent’s center of mass,” Yuan warned her. “Control the central line. The more you control a fight’s pace, the better your chances of survival.”

“Duly noted, Honored Passenger Yuan,” Orient replied with a short bow. “I confess that fighting is a new experience for me. I would appreciate lessons.”

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Holster raised a hand, which Yuan took as an indication that she wished to learn the basics too. Yuan couldn’t blame her after her experience with the rad-hag, though her age and Hitobarashi constitution would likely limit her growth.

“Sure,” Yuan replied. He’d often assisted young Stoneskin Sect disciples with their hand-to-hand training, so he had some basic experience with teaching.

“As a caretaker spirit made of qi, I am more suited to using sutras and feng shui than techniques,” Orient informed him. “You are, after all, inside my body. This human avatar is a mere part of me, no different from my wheels and thus unable to develop techniques on its own.”

Yuan raised an eyebrow. “You know sutras?”

“A few,” Orient confirmed. “Many were woven into my frame when the Thunderlands gave me life, and as a caretaker spirit such formulas come instinctively to me. I could teach you a few if you’d like.”

“I would love to.” Any tool could make the difference between life and death one day, and sects jealously guarded those secrets. “How were sutras woven into your frame though? Was that because of the lightning?”

“I rose by the will of the Spiral Dancer when she practiced her Thunderdance and joined the Dao,” Orient replied. “She wished to return spirituality to a world that had lost it. Her wish infuses the Thunderlands created by her desire.”

Yuan crossed his arms as he mulled over her words. It made sense for the will of the Wayfinders to manifest in the form of sutras, since those derived power from the formula itself rather than the world or a cultivator. He now wondered if he could derive powers from them with the proper prayers.

Orient suddenly looked up at the ceiling, as if hearing a message inaudible to human ears. “I will gladly assist you on your journey to reach the Dao, Honored Passenger Yuan, but our lesson will need to wait for another time. I am about to stop near Fleshmarket.”

Yuan took a glance out the window. Great walls of cobbled concrete and steel arose from the wasteland of white flowers, encircling a city a hundred times larger than Gatesville. Fleshmarket included both familiar, packed old buildings and stranger landmarks; Yuan caught a glimpse of a central, fuming caldera of fossilized flesh, a massive broken wheel over ten floors tall, and weathered metal fortresses. Such an enclave couldn’t survive without a source of untainted water, so Yuan assumed its people sat on a large reservoir of some kind.

“I remember this place used to be an amusement park,” Orient commented. “I dropped off many tourists nearby.”

“Tourists?” Yuan repeated. He was unfamiliar with the term.

“Many passengers paid to travel and sightsee,” Orient explained. “This place provided much entertainment to visitors.”

The concept of traveling for its own sake boggled Yuan’s mind. Journeying through the wasteland meant facing constant danger. The reason why he became a courier was partly because nobody wanted to leave their own safe corner of the world.

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The Lost Age must have been a very different time for mankind.

Yuan banished these thoughts from his mind as the spirit-train slowed down. His first order of business was visiting the local caravan office, both to notify his original client of the stolen delivery and investigate how Slash’s band learned of it. His gut told him a local worker likely betrayed his team to the marauders, and they would pay the appropriate price. He would also need to replenish his weapon and ammo stock, having lost the shotgun and destroyed his revolver during the rad-hag’s fight.

“I shouldn’t be long,” Yuan promised to Holster and Orient as he prepared to disembark from the train. “Just an hour or two.”

Holster clearly wished to stick with him, but Orient calmed her down by gently putting her hands on the child’s shoulders. “We will await your return with impatience, Honored Passenger Yuan.”

Yuan nodded sharply, then climbed down the train. It bothered him to leave Holster behind, but he trusted Orient to keep her safe in his absence.

The spirit-train had parked itself near the city’s gate, close to a stopping station for merchant caravans. Groups of kirin consumed dried flowers in the shadow of improvised walls built from stacked-up dead cars. To Yuan’s unease, he saw armed men escort a line of dirtbound slaves bearing explosive collars around their necks through Fleshmarket’s open gates.

Quite a crowd of locals and merchants gathered near the spirit-train in curiosity. The windows and doors immediately closed on their own with metal curtains, blocking access to unwelcome visitors. Though many sent strange glances at Yuan, few dared to question him about his vehicle, though he suspected more daring onlookers would soon approach him.

For now, Yuan walked near the gates without a word. Showing unease was a surefire way of being attacked when walking alone; Fleshmarket was the kind of place where a man should keep his iron close, and his lack of weapon would either mark him as either a cultivator or prey. He knew which kind of reputation he preferred.

He noticed something wrong the moment he stepped through the city’s gates.

Too few guards. Sects in barter-oriented settlements usually understood the importance of reassuring visitors about security, but the only soldiers he saw were the caravans’ escorts. Posters on the walls also advised that visiting mercenaries should report to the Bullet Church, whatever that sect was. I don’t like this.

Whatever the case, no one stopped Yuan at the gates and he soon entered the city proper. A vast plaza bordered by a massive water reserve stretched before him. Impossible structures backed by smaller buildings and bridges sprawled around it in a chaotic maze. The small caldera mountain oversaw the artificial lake from the other side, its surface covered in stitched flesh and Yuan immediately recognized the Flesh Mansion Sect’s handiwork.

A near full-borg stood on an enormous spirit-car nearby, addressing a crowd of dozens. The machine was of a large and fit man’s shape, albeit with polished steel plates for muscles. Only his lower jaw and right leg were still mostly made of flesh, and both boasted pulsing cables instead of veins. The borg scanned the onlookers with round screen eyes, a heavy microphone in his clawed hand.

“Let me ask you,” he told the crowd, his voice a mix of electronic static and human vocals. “Should the value of a man be determined by his birth?”

Yuan briefly paused to take a better look. The presence of heavily armed cyborgs near the speaker—half a dozen half-machines equipped with flamethrowers and rocket launchers—had his curiosity.

“Asthma, cancer, sickness, leukemia, fractures, heartaches…” the borg marked a short pause. “Scraphood.”

Yuan clenched his jaw in annoyance, then stared at the borg’s sleek metal chest. A black gear symbol with a green screen at its center was painted on his metal frame; the Magnum Opus’ mark.

The Metallist Sect.

“These are the many sicknesses that a man can catch, or worse, be born with,” the speaker said as he walked along one edge of his spirit-car’s roof to the next. “Most sects and cultivators would tell you that birth determines destiny; that those who do not possess that magic ticket called talent have no right to survive, let alone thrive, in the wasteland that they have created.”

He pointed at the crowd with an iron claw pulsing with qi-charged lightning.

“But there is a better way,” he said with confidence. “Should the mediocrity of a single part determine the worth of the whole? Should you suffer the tyranny of your organs, simply because of their expiration dates? Should Scraps forever accept the dictates of their birth? I say no!”

He’s quite good, Yuan thought. He would lie if he said the borg’s speech didn’t resonate with him, but he had heard it before many times. The Metallists were the most recent major sect to rise to prominence—their Wayfinder ascending a mere seven years ago—and they aggressively attempted to expand their influence by linking Screen Cities, promoting the spread of cybernetics, and encroaching on the territory of older organizations.

However, since it was easier to poach existing cultivators rather than raise Scraps from nothing, they focused on the former rather than the latter; and the Scraps that they did recruit had to spend fortunes or hefty favors to pay for their enhancements. Yuan had tried to join them once, only to grow sour when he realized they didn’t differ much from any other sect promising the moon and delivering little.

“Your body is not a temple above reproach!” The speaker banged his hand against his chest. “It is a car! A vehicle to house your immortal soul on the road to the Dao! A machine that can be tuned, improved, and repaired! A complex mechanism whose defective parts can and should be replaced with newer, better ones! I know this because I used to be a Scrap too, fit only for the junkyard!”

Yuan’s hand brushed against his bullet-core and the metal spreading from it. Though he knew the Metallist Sect and the Gun followed different paths, he wasn’t blind to the similarities.

“My obsolete flesh was a prison from which the Magnum Opus freed me!” the borg continued. “She peeled away my tumor-ridden skin and replaced it with smooth metal! She gave me iron bones that would never break, a shining heart that would never stop beating, black blood that would never stop flowing! She perfected my silicon soul piece by piece until one day, that stillborn core of mine began to cycle for the first time!”

Yuan wondered why a sect would advertise for commoners and passerbys, considering the limited resources required to chrome up a single individual, when the solution hit him like a spirit-car thrown at full speed.

They were strapped for bodies.

“The heavens have given you flesh, but through your hard work and the sweat of your brow, technology will give you a better future! For what is science, but a gift man gave to himself?!” The speaker extended a hand to the onlookers, inviting them to join him on his chosen path. “So cast away your wayward flesh, children of the waste, and join us Metallists! I make that vow to you: you too can be reforged through the strength of your iron will!”

The crowd erupted in cheers, but Yuan was already walking away when it did. He was certain of it now. The recruitment speeches, the posters advertising for mercenaries, the absence of guards… he recognized the signs.

A sect war was brewing in Fleshmarket.