Emerson Fortier
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Chapter 29 - Heaven's Own
🕑 Added 2022-09-23 14:17:02 +0000 UTC“Aarrppaa station’s population is recruited from only half of the accessible worlds. Of those worlds, Mubra, the System world, and the races of Kispuhru are the most heavily represented and the oldest inhabitants of the station. The Inscrypti of Nshamti and the Talyaya of the half world of Djabol were only brought to the station three hundred years ago after a race of constructs conspired with the previous governor to break away from Guild control, the Inscrypti because they offered enough power to bring the station back up to schedule, at least in the initial wave of emigrating immortals, and the Talyaya because of their unique versatility and rapid reproductive cycles. You will find none of the Inscrypti of that class on the station anymore but the marks of their influence on the Tangle can still be picked out in the cut lines of the third and fourth stone, just as the bones of Tamotan servants can still be found drifting around the refineries they worked during the transition between governance systems. We all leave our mark. The mark you leave, will be up to you.”
— “Welcome to Aarrppaa station. Your new home” produced by the Terminal Heights Agency, office of Orientation and Re-education.
“Cultivate.” Zihan told Yi Cao when they returned to the bar. “TC won’t be fast, and Xialu will be back. You need to have options by then, or at least be more than helpless. The heavens favor me, but they won’t always throw you into my lap when you’re in trouble. You need to be able to protect yourself.”
So, he did. Yi Cao returned once more to his room and his source, and used the memory of facing down a cultivator three tiers above him in power as the drive to keep him focused on cutting new channels when he couldn’t sleep, and when the food didn’t want to stay down while his hands began to shake and the memories of blue lights and crushing darkness on Elleppu station tried to paralyze him with fear.
When he couldn’t break into the cultivation trance, he pulled the pistol from his belt to run through its training simulations, gradually improving the pistol’s self assessment scores.
“We could have killed him.” The pistol told him at the end of one such session as Yi Cao sat staring down at the little technomancer’s weapon like a toy in his hands.
“You don’t know that.”
“A needle moving at the speed of sound explodes when it comes in contact with flesh. I know that.”
Yi Cao sucked in a breath then blew the tension out through his nose.
“At the third circle he could have ripped off my head before I even got you out of your sheath.”
“And if we were waiting for him?” The pistol replied.
“Maybe.”
“Maybe I’m right.”
Yi Cao rolled his shoulders. “I could haved died.” He said.
“Or you could have killed him, and all these fears would be baseless.”
Yi Cao thought of the piss bots hauling away the offender when he first arrived and the way those same machines had spat lightning over the shoulder of the guardian golems on Elleppu.
“Wouldn’t I get in trouble for that kind of thing?”
“Oh, you’d definitely get arrested.” The pistol replied. “No doubt about that. Murderers always get arrested.”
Yi Cao rolled his eyes.
“But at least no one would be trying to kill you in prison.” The pistol went on. “They’d just put you to work, and I’d get to remember the sweet memory of doing something I was made for.” It sighed, the happy face on the wall flickering in contentment.
“You’re useless. Did you know that?”
“That’s just hurtful.”
“And you’re an idiot.”
“Also hurtful.”
“Drama queen.”
“King.”
Yi Cao laughed. “Fine.” He said.
“Or knave.” The pistol went on. “Sometimes I feel like I’m more of a knave.”
The Urdul word twisted in Yi Cao’s brain to present concepts of laughter and farting. He frowned. “What’s a knave?” He asked.
“Comedic relief.”
Yi Cao shook his head and tossed the pistol onto the bed then stripped off the shirt he’d put on for the practice in order to return to his cultivation.
He’d made so much progress since he’d received the stone. More than he’d ever accomplished at the Hidden Heart Sect and in less time. With no testing stone it was impossible to know how many steps he’d progressed in the first circle, but after perhaps no more than a week of cultivation he had a proper outline of his entire foundation finally in place, channels running like veins through muscle and around his bones, perhaps halfway to the spot where the second stage of his cultivation could begin.
Before he could reach that point, he was interrupted. “TC got us our second meeting,” Zihan told him, “and a whole lot faster this time.”
It called for another bath, and climbing back into the black leather of the technomancer’s faux armor.
This time the half-Talyaya didn’t lead them to the home offices of a bunch of security firms. Instead, they found themselves following TC down hallways that might as well have been painted in flashing lights.
Every door bore a sign above it, and most had signage and mesmeric stones blanketing the walls to either side. Moving pictures flashed across them painted in eye watering colored lights. They showed tropical paradises, men and women weeping for joy, dancing nearly naked women of a hundred different descriptions and races, and along one wall, the violent bloody spectacle of two huge men with horns battling with swords. The whispered roar of an ecstatic crowd accompanied the fighting men, while other stones to either side whispered of pleasures, prizes, and entertainments.
Ghostly women mingled with the pedestrians, mostly naked and glowing at the ends of flickering lines of projected light, dancing through the crowd, or telling passers by what they could do.
“You come inside and I can show you what a real woman can do.” One apparition told TC as they marched through the concourse and music thumped through the floor beneath their feet.
TC jerked away from the apparition as though he’d been burnt. “Fuck off.”
The girl smirked, turning to Zihan and Yi Cao instead. Her legs didn’t move but she drifted along in front of them as she kept pace. “How about you?” She asked, smiling. “Care to find out if what they say about the daughters are true?” Long Iridescent wings on her shoulder’s flickered as she moved ahead of them, and she touched her chest, as though ready to reveal what little was covered. “I promise you’ll find it worth your time.” Her eyes twinkled in the projection with the same rainbow swirls as the wings jutting from pale shoulders.
Yi Cao looked away while Zihan studied the girl.
“Don’t, listen to a thing she says.” TC spat over his shoulder. “Fucking Kispuhru witchcraft.” He added.
The girl pouted at him. “We aren’t all that way, you know.”
“That’s what they all say.”
The girl glanced back at Zihan who just smiled at her, before the apparition huffed, and dematerialized. A moment later she flickered back into existence a short distance down the hall, accosting another pair of men laughing loudly as they clung to one another and the open drinks in their hands.
TC snorted. He led the way up one wall where a narrow strip of red cloth served to indicate there was a “ladder” there, a section of the street where gravity went sideways to allow transition to the floor on the ceiling above them, flipping many of the signs upside down until they came to the new floor and the ones that used to occupy the ceiling straightened out.
A massive glowing projection of a technomancer’s money card slid down the concourse, spinning as the numbers in its center dialed upwards accompanied by the ring of silver clattering in a bag.
They ducked aside as the projection passed them, and TC led them into an establishment advertised as “Heaven’s Own” in every script imaginable.
It was the first place on the station Yi Cao didn’t smell piss. What replaced the usual stink of the station was the sour tang of second hand tobacco laced with the sorts of incense he remembered cultivators burning back home.
As if in response to the stink, Zihan pulled a fume stick of his own from a pocket and lit it as he looked around.
“This is far more promising.” He told TC.
Gambling tables filled the hall, the hall itself a cathedral in comparison to any structure Yi Cao had seen back home. Men in uniform robes like those of some minor sect worked at each of the tables, handling dice, cards, and silver coins for patrons from all four of the stations races. Constructs hanging from the ceiling piped traditional string music into the hall while sparks like Ki lights, but brighter and minus the usual spiritual residue, bathed the place in a gentle and even twilight glow.
Zihan studied it all with a smile as they made their way past tables with the game of leaves already in progress.
“I always liked this place.”
“You’ve been here before?” Yi Cao asked. He watched a technomancer with his face, chest, and arms covered in polished brass plate shake a pair of dice over its head then roar in anger as they failed to find the numbers it was hoping for.
Zihan glanced at him with a smirk. “How do you think I’ve been paying for your meals?”
Yi Cao grimaced and turned away from the games.
A pair of sweeping staircases let up from the floor of the hall to a balcony overlooking the gambling tables, a balcony lined by women who would have looked right at home back in the sect, if they’d worn more modest clothing. A few of them called greeting to Zihan as the three of them made their way up the stairs and Zihan paused at the top to wave in their direction. Doors waited behind each of the women, and TC tapped Zihan’s shoulder to lead him away before the women could move to join them.
A man waited for them in a private grotto, screened from the rest of the gambling hall by a forest of bonsai trees and a pair of burly neckless guards. He faced away from them as they were led though, fingering a black stone and leaning over a Goh board halfway between games with no opponent.
“This must be Zihan.” The man said without looking up from his board.
Zihan pulled the chair out opposite the man and sat, smiling as he tapped ash off his fume stick onto the lushly carpeted floor. “And you must be Hua Feiruhn.” Zihan replied.
The old man just looked at him, then flipped the black piece in his hand towards the Young Master.
Zihan caught it.
“Do you play?” The man asked. Wrinkles around the man’s eyes gave him the look of age not matched by the rest of his physique. Muscles toned by cultivation, hair dark and close cut. Expensive robes.
Zihan examined the piece, then shrugged. “Never been very good.” He replied. “Yi Cao?” He looked to Yi Cao who’d been distracted listening to a song he half remembered sung quietly by a woman plucking at a Pipa in a corner of the room.
“What?”
Zihan flipped the piece in the air then caught it. “Goh.” He said. “Do you play?”
Yi Cao looked at the board and the spread of black and white stones that decorated it. “I… don’t even know the rules.” Yi Cao replied.
Zihan shrugged then flipped the stone back to Feiruhn. “There you have it.” He said.
“Hmm. A shame.” Feiruhn studied the board, then set the black stone aside. “Is a subtle game. Hard to find players who’s understands its complexity.”
“Complexity was never my strong hand.” Zihan said. He sucked at his fume stick and blew the resulting smoke across the grotto towards the balcony railing overlooking the rest of the gambling hall.
Feiruhn studied him and Zihan pulled out a second fume stick.
“Smoke?”
Feiruhn shrugged. “Sure.” He said. “Why not.” He accepted the smoke, then lit it with a tool from inside the table. He flipped the tool to put it out, then eyed the other two who’d accompanied the Young Master into his grotto. TC smiled as he moved to stand behind Zihan while Yi Cao glanced off the balcony at the gambling hall below.
He could feel Ki here, chaotic and jumbled to his new found sensitivity, but still far higher in density than even the meagre cultivation parks provided for the outer disciples of the Hidden Heart sect. Yi Cao felt the eyes of the man they’d come to meet upon him and turned to meet them before he moved behind Zihan and attempted to fade into the background just as he had at the previous meeting, ready to serve if he was called on to do so.
“Sends an odd message, bringing an armed guard to a meeting like this.” The man at the table said as he took a pull from the tobacco.
“Sends another letting him in.” Zihan replied.
The man regarded Zihan coolly. “I’m glad it does.” He said after a while. “Be a shame if you’s was to misunderstand before we could even begin.”
--- Author's Note ---
Managed 5 chapters this week, so there will be new chapters Sat, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday to go with this one, most likely around 12PM. Starting to get into the thick of things with this chapter. Hope you're all are enjoying the story :)
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