Emerson Fortier
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Chapter 23 - Nowhere Near Home
🕑 Added 2022-09-10 14:00:05 +0000 UTCOnly a fool tries to force a soul oath. This is common knowledge. Nine times out of ten, when it has been tried, the one attempting to force the oath explodes on the spot. Caught in one that did not result in your enemy’s cultivation ripping them apart from the inside, however, the one thing you should never do is try to kill the one that bonded you, lest the heavens turn their judgement upon you instead.
Excerpt from: “A Treatise on Soul Oaths Dictated by the Sage of Threefold Wisdoms at the Request of Elder Bou Tian of the Leaves at Sunset Sect During the Festival Held in the Sage’s Honor”
The Ki in Yi Cao’s channels had a weight to it. Deep in the trance that came with proper cultivation, Yi Cao could feel it on his shoulders, on his skin, on his bones and internal organs, even his eyes and in his skull. The Ki washed around him in a torrent. It spun and frothed. It pulled at his existing channels and weighed on him like every part of the world that sought to crush him or drag him somewhere deep and dark and utterly devoid of light.
Yet, faced by the foreign law raging in his channels, Yi Cao prevailed, and every minute, or every hour, or every day, that he remained in the darkness he drew the lines of his cultivation a little further, completed just a little more of the script outlined by Zihan to access an even more powerful source while the power of this one roared outside himself, battering at his incomplete foundations in an attempt to get in and destroy him, and as he cultivated, he thought of home.
Specifically, he thought of his mother.
It felt strange to see her face again after so long. Like being a child again in the confusing world of the Cao family compound, lost amidst the roaring torrent of his cousins and uncles and aunts while she stood at the center, the true home in the home, the shadow, until recently, drawing him back, always back, to the place she’d told him he belonged before sending him out into the world at the age of six.
“You’ll always have a home here. No matter what they do to you there.” She’d told him as he left at six years old. No tears, not her, not even from his father though auntie Jingxiu wept openly as she rocked her own three year old boy and watched from the gate as they said their farewells. “Do us proud.” She told him. “Don’t let anyone say you weren’t their best, and if they don’t want you there after that, you come on home.”
In the memory, she was faceless. As though he’d avoided looking at her eyes while his own burned with tears he’d been ashamed of at the time. He could remember Auntie Jingxiu, standing just behind his father with little tears running down her cheeks as she rocked his chubby little nephew, could remember Zumu’s smile and Zufu’s pensive gaze as he leaned on his stick after saying goodbye, but not his mother. She seemed, inviolate, somehow. As though any memory he could have of her would be insufficient to represent the force she’d truly been.
She touched his eyes, fingers rough with callouses, yet hot in his memory as she dried his tears before pulling him into a too warm embrace to say goodbye.
“My little man.” She’d told him. “It’s a time for growing up.”
There were no days on Aarrppaa station. No nights. Without the sun he couldn’t say how long he spent in silent cultivation in the empty room that smelled of piss, and vinegar, and sour alcohol, and bitter tobacco fumes. He felt weak when he opened his eyes, and cold. The air in the room continued to swirl around the palm sized sapphire in his hand and perspiration from the source had soaked through the leg of his trousers and soaked into the carpet underneath him. The room was cold and clammy, like the depths he’d been immersed in during his trance, and he could feel the weight of the thing in his hand as though his entire body had borne it until his back and his bones ached.
His hand, where he’d cut his newest channels, stank of impurities, competing with the raw stench of the room around him. He lifted it and marveled at the sheer quantity of the stuff he’d expelled. He wasn’t done, but he’d never made so much progress in a single cultivation session before.
He was hungry.
Te’klub bustled with activity when Yi Cao emerged from the hallway leading back to its rooms for the first time. People occupied every table and most of the stools at the bar, and someone had started some sort of music construct which filled the place with an alien melody delivered in an alien language accompanied by an alien instrument.
Zihan wasn’t at any of the tables.
Yi Cao hesitated at the doorway until a fifteen year old boy with the telltale augments of a technomancer pushed past him, grinning as he dragged a giggling teenage girl after him into the hall of rented rooms.
Displaced, Yi Cao pushed his way into a seat at the bar between a slender technomancer and a middle aged man in an orange jumpsuit to wave down the bartender. The man in the jumpsuit seemed almost asleep over his drink, but the slender figure on his opposite side snorted as Yi Cao waved and leaned away from him.
“Hey kid. You’re friends not here.” Izzi told him when he got to him, scrubbing a glass with his usual grimy white towel. His oversized nostrils flared as he got close and he leaned away from Yi Cao. “Holy shit kid. You stink. What’d you do, run the facilities without the lid closed?”
Yi Cao grimaced and wiped self-conciously at his hand. He’d done his best to clean it in the room, but the nature of the impurities expelled from his pores made them difficult to remove.
A hulking man at the end of the bar suddenly stood up ullulated deafeningly in time with the alien music and Izzi threw his glass at him. It shattered on the wall behind him.
. “Shut up Klarg! If I have to tell you again I’ll switch your toy to the news or ban it from the bar!”
Klarg sat with a boom and barked something that might have been technish if it wasn’t mangled by the monster’s single oversized tusk, then banged on the bar several times.
“Yeah, yeah. I’m coming.” The bartender waved his towel at him. “Another fucking cup.” He muttered then turned back to Yi Cao.
“Your friend left a message for you.” Izzi told him. “He said to get you something to eat when you came out, and then send you right back into your room until you’re done with whatever he has you working on.”
Yi Cao gingerly placed his hand onto the bartop between them. “Did he say where he was going?” He asked. “Or, when he would be back?”
“No.” The bartender eyed him until Klarg banged a hand on the bar again.
“Yeah, yeah.” Izzi shook his head and waved at the monster to wait. He looked back at Yi Cao. “You want something?” He asked.
Yi Cao looked at the door and remembered swearing to accompany the Young Master on his adventures as the weight of the heavens pressed down on him through his cultivation. The oath twinged at not knowing where he was, but he’d also sworn to obey, and Zihan had left instructions for him to remain.
“How long has it been?” He asked.
“Shift. Shift and a half.” The goblin shrugged. “Took them girls with him. I couldn’t say.” He waited while Yi Cao continued to study the door and think, then he tapped on the table. “You want something then?” He asked.
“Sure.” Yi Cao pulled his attention back to the diminutive bartender and nodded.
The Goblin jerked a nod and spun a cup off of the shelf behind him to whip it under a spigot before dropping it in front of Yi Cao. “Be a couple of minutes.” He said. “I’ll bring it when it’s done.”
He waddled off to threaten Klarg as the massive monster barked more incomprehensible techish at him and Yi Cao stared at the cup in front of him and the rainbow pattern of oil drifting on its surface. Eventually he drank, and listened as the song changed to something with a slightly faster tempo.
He returned to their room. Sleep beckoned to him, but the pull of the sapphire he’d tucked underneath the mattress was stronger and he sat down again to allow the trance to draw him back into its crushing depths and the memories that waited for him there.
It always took time for the memories to find him while he focused on the pattern growing in his palm, but they always did, like flotsam finding their way to shore while debris kicked and rolled in the surf and he walked the beach, lifting bits of his life from the sand to examine them. In the trance, in this trance, with this source, and this Ki, the memories took on aspects of his cultivation experience. The weight. The power. The rushing force of a life draining away into a darkness he could never escape from, and never truly enter if he wanted to remain alive.
The taste of blood as he ran, crying and unpursued, from a snowball fight in the family compound. Chasing mice in a darkness that stank of grain in the storage building they used through winter and the warmth of the rodent’s bodies in his palm when his sister got them with a broom and broke their little backs. The sound of the rain pounding on the mud outside while he sat by the hearth in his father’s house with his siblings crowded in around him and waited for the rain to end.
He fell asleep, thinking of the rain, only to wake up damp from the perspiration running from the sapphire stuck to his palm.
He cultivated for what felt like days. He ate in the bar when he had to eat. Sometimes the bar was empty, other times it was full. Sometimes Izzi even told him Zihan had been there to pay the bill or have a meal before disappearing again. Sometimes he had the girls with him, sometimes he had just one, or he came alone, but he never stayed, and he never came to check in on Yi Cao. Yi Cao didn’t mind. When he wasn’t in the bar, among patrons he didn’t know or often even understand, he was in their room reading from the treatise on soul oaths, and when he wasn’t reading he was cultivating, and when he wasn’t doing either, it was because he’d fallen asleep, cultivation stone still clutched in one hand while memories and Ki whirled around him in equal measure.
His mother’s face bothered him, in his memories. He knew it, knew it from the memory of her expectations involving language and fools, but found it nowhere else when he rummaged through his other memories, searching for it. He felt her touch, heard her voice, knew her by the weight that came with her presence as he was drawn back to her, but didn’t recognize her by her face. Sometimes, as he pushed the tide of Ki deeper into the tangled channels in his hand, he applied that face to the memories that lacked it. Putting her, frowning, over the pot she always kept going over the fire. Imagined her with the same expression of disappointment as she folded dumplings with the other wives, or sat among the children listening to Zufu’s stories while the sun shone and red samara seeds twisted past them in the wind.
He tried to see her smiling, the way each muscle would shift to pull her lips, light up her eyes, then watched his image of her transform into another woman, a wrong woman, a woman he didn’t know and never had which then swirled into every other memory until he could no longer distinguish which was real, which was reconstructed, and which was pure fantasy of a place he’d called home for fewer years than he’d been away.
At one point he dreamed she had one of the whore’s faces, complete with silver clips beside the eyes and wires in their hair.
He woke from that particular dream to find Zihan in the room, along with both girls, all of them naked, and he’d been forced to make an exit until Zihan came out to inspect his progress before ordering him back in while the girls got dressed.
Eventually he finished the scripture.
Yi Cao sat within the trance and watched the Ki rage in the palm of his hand, incomplete lines running up to the spot where the better source would touch his skin. He emerged slowly, like a diver breaching to take in air. The room seemed bright after so much time immersed in Ki that included a shadow aspect, and dry, and strangely light. He looked at the sapphire then set it aside and lifted his hand to turn it in the light, examining the lines of impurities poured from his flesh over the course of his cultivation. His skin prickled where the contours of the sapphire had cut into his palm.
Something came next but it took his sluggish brain minutes to make its way back to a time before he’d been submerged in the crushing darkness. When he did, he stood up, went to the narrow dresser and pushed through the empty bottles and tobacco stubs left by Zihan until he found the manual for the Pillars of Creation.
He sat with a grunt and stared at the new manual for a while, trying to reconcile the diagrams with the shape he’d spent the last eternity inscribing into his palm before shaking his head. He chose one piece of it, then pulled the source around his neck out of his shirt and dropped it into his palm.
Nothing happened.
The stone rippled, slightly, around its edges, but no Ki rushed out to enter his newly carved channels. No silver light appeared across the scorched script on its surface.
He dropped the stone to rub at the impurities stuck between the creases of his hand then set the stone there again and watched it, waiting.
Nothing happened.
He dropped the stone and rubbed at his face. He stared at the Pillars of Creation scripture waiting for inspiration, then realized the filth he’d clapped to his face and tried wiping his palm on the stinking carpet.
Te’klub’s was empty when he entered the common room. One light in the corner flickered and even Izzi was absent from the bar, replaced by a thing of shining slender arms and glass eyes that didn’t respond when Yi Cao entered. Only one patron sat at a table in the half dark. A man with sallow skin and sunken eyes and the orange jumpsuit Yi Cao associated with the “work suits” advertised by the mesmeric stones that lined the corridors of the rock.
No Zihan. And nobody that Yi Cao knew.
The thing behind the bar wheezed and coughed to life as Yi Cao stepped to the bar then crawled slowly towards him on spider like chrome limbs before the top of the machine turned a narrow brass grille in his directions.
“What…can I get you?” The thing whispered.
Yi Cao could see human lips trapped behind the grille, tucked out of view like an embarrassment, or a horror, that it chose not to inflict on the world.
Yi Cao opened his mouth but it took several minutes for the words to form. “Nothing.” He said. “Just, looking for someone.” He looked around the empty bar once more.
“No one… here… but me.” The not machine whispered slowly through its grille. It waved one slender mechanical arm as though to demonstrate. “See for yourself… No one… that is… but old… Anbert… and… you aren’t looking… for him.”
Yi Cao shook his head and the not machine smacked its lips. “Just… let me know… if you change… your mind.” It whispered. “I’ll be here… all shift.”
It lifted itself and crawled away one spider like step at a time until it settled back into its original position, limbs twitching occasionally as it breathed rhythmically through unseen lungs.
Yi Cao watched the door and thought of all the places he’d called home.
“Welcome.” He remembered an older boy telling him when he arrived, at six years old, at the sect. The boy had waved an arm across the narrow loft he’d introduced his little cousin to twelve years later and telling him he could pick his own bed. “They say you can choose your own fate here, but I’ll warn you ahead of time that if you make the wrong choice someone will let you know.” The boy had told him. “Some of the others have their own beds, and they’ll fight you for it if they find you in them.” A young Yi Cao had tossed his stuff onto one farthest from the hearth. The one that looked the least used, marked more by the bats that lived in the barrack’s rafters than the children who might have slept there.
“Welcome to your new home.” The boy told him as they left. “I hope that things go well for you.”
Engines echoed loudly in the concourse when Yi Cao finally left Te’klub to go for a walk. They’re whirling blades howled behind thin gauge cages at the mouth of tunnels hidden by darkness. The wind from them stirred at Yi Cao’s hair as he passed them, glancing in their direction while avoiding the spells of mesmeric stones scattered down the length of the passageway.
The halls were empty. As empty as Te’Klub’s bars, and in some places just as dark. Light tubes drifted below the ceiling in fewer numbers than when he’d first made the journey down these corridors and many of the signs that glowed above doors to establishments buried in the walls were dark now.
He passed the place where he’d encountered a crowd on his first walk to Te’klub, now with its doors closed, people absent, noise thumping through the floor like a terrible heartbeat.
He followed the concourse past the hole in the floor that would have dropped him down into the higher concourses where more signs and doors stood at ninety degrees to those on his level, and hallways filled with pumping engines and moving air, through an echoing intersection empty except for a handful of benches and a man with a sign in technish that read “spare C’s”.
He was missing one half of his face.
The concourse ended abruptly at a wall, or what would have been a wall if it didn’t turn and become the floor for a station a hundred yards further up, where men and women and things stood beyond the mouth of a narrow gate waiting for narrow screaming machines that whipped in and out of big dark tunnels like worms, disgorging passengers from their doors like vomit before sucking in new cargoes and whipping off again.
It wasn’t the first time he’d woken up in an alien world. He remembered, waking up in the alien world of the Hidden Heart Sect, alone among strangers, obeying men he’d never met, doing strange things, in strange places for strangers who promised that if he just applied himself, he could become strong. Strong enough that he might never die.
And he remembered the woman, the woman who would always be his home even if he couldn’t remember her face, deep deep in the trance, standing with him at the center of his cultivation and telling him to make her proud.
“An oath is still an oath.” The Sage claimed in his treatise. “You can trick the other party into breaking it, but, the heavens would never enforce the oath if some part of you didn’t really want the oath in the first place. My advice is to direct your focus there instead of risking the displeasure of the heavens. But, it can be done, even if it isn’t recommended.”
He found Zihan waiting for him when he returned.
