His feet tread the same path they had before.

A path lined with columns of fire.

Within the withered boughs of the bamboo trees, he saw the faces of the villagers who pursued him, led by the High Eagle flying above them all.

His wounded leg slowed him to a limp, threads of his exposed electrified wiring tripping him intermittently as he bore towards the horizon, following nothing but his fading intuition that told him the end of the stream must lead to salvation.

Behind he could hear their cries of desperation. They begged him to end their lives all over again. They pleaded that he should turn and do it himself this time, rather than leaving them to burn. He tried closing off his auditory sensors – at one point his hands flew to his face and ripped out the side of his metal ears just to be afforded some semblance of silence. Like everything else he tried, this was useless. The voices of the dead now simply penetrated deeper into his head itself.

So he beat on, arms and legs becoming more and more ruined with every burning tree he passed, will wearing down with every call for doom he heard.

Master Longhua has forsaken me, a voice of doubt told him – his voice.

Feng-Lung, Mah-Jung – all of them – they do not want me. They never did…

It would be simple to merely sit down, there in the crisping leaves, and let himself be taken by the fire. He probably would have done so in that moment, were it not for the sight that appeared as he limped meekly through the final set of burning boughs.

There, twinkling amidst the dark, was a simple pool of water. The flames streaking the sky were reflected on its surface, flailing peacefully there as though they were part of a living, sentient painting. XJ-V stepped forward, stumbled, and finally fell to his knees by the side of the pool, looking into its surface to see, now, that the red columns of the sky had bled away to nothing. Only the image of his ruined face remained.

“A monument to human hubris,” a voice said at his back. “You see now what awaits you. You, and all your kind.”

More faces appeared in the dark waters – faces like his. Cogs. Machine-men with eyes that no longer gleamed with fiery life. Their heads, limbs, and broken torsos floated up from every bubbling pustule of the pond and floated on its surface. A sea of Cog corpses stared up at him with vacant, dead eyes.

So he looked away, grief tearing at his heart for his people. Instead, he faced the fiery crowd of Hensha. They watched him. They waited. Macabre smiles filled their faces.

“They have found the only serenity we mortals may find,” the High Eagle said as he stepped through them as though the people were nothing but flimsy cardboard cutouts. “You gave them a gift, Cog. The only gift that you can give to this world.”

XJ-V looked at his shaking hands, seeing rivers of blood boil and spurt from his fingertips.

“You know it is your purpose,” the High Eagle said. “Why deny what you are? Come to them. Take their hands, and be what you must be.”

The Cog at first did not notice that the people had started marching towards him like a horde of flaming zombies.

He closed his eyes to the horror of this realm.

“Perhaps you speak true,” he told the High Eagle out the corner of his eyes. “But death is not all I can give this world.”

He turned back to the pool, seeing his face floating amidst the broken Cogs.

“You know that there is no escape,” the Eagle told him.

XJ-V nodded as he felt the hands of the villagers find the back of his throat.

“I am not escaping,” he told the rippling waters. “I am ending this. Now.”

And without another breath, he threw himself into the pool.

…

For a while, there was nothing.

The sensation of death embraced him. Every light in his being stuttered and died. The Cogs faces swam around him, looking upon another brother to follow them into oblivion. He felt his fingers twitch amidst the dark waters as though they wished to cling to life. His chassis felt heavy. His commands to swim did not register. The world slowly spiraled away – taking the sights of fire floating above the waters away and banishing the narrowed eyes of the evil angel that watched his consciousness slip away from above.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Then: an explosion of light.

Not above. Not below. But within – the fire buried deep within his chest surged like a living flame. It burst from his body, floating before his fading vision, and – in a moment of pure lucidity – XJ-V believed that he saw a face staring back at him.

One that was not his own.

Its voice, crystal clear, seeped into him from a place unknown.

Breathe, it said.

Feeling the waters rush inside his every broken pore, XJ-V obeyed the command, and all at once the world vanished in a blaze of brilliant, crystalline light.

…

He felt soft grass beneath his hands.

Above: clear skies. The tips of willow trees.

Willows. Not burning bamboo.

His eyes buzz with static as the world and its sensations begin to fill his body, and his hand feels for the spots where his wounds had taken in water.

Nothing.

He sat up with a start, confirming the fact by scanning his body, seeing that not one speck of his innards were exposed. Checking his repair protocols told him that he hadn’t employed them since yesterday.

He was lying beside the pool he had thrown himself into. Gone were the corpses of the mechanized dead that had floated up from its depths. Gone, too, were the faces of the burning villagers from the treeline behind. All that remained were the sparkling, crystal clear liquid that stretched out beyond him, beyond the trees, into ever. A dense fog glimmered on the horizon beyond the waters where there were no trees, enemies, indeed, no life at all. There was only that fog, traced with small beads of sapphire, floating up gently like a cloud blanket.

He ran both his hands over his eyes as a persistent buzzing entered his brain, like a wasp ramming its stinger into his prefrontal cortex.

Then, within his memory banks, words blazed into brilliant, neon-lighted life:

Anima Cores: 92

“Slightly above average,” a voice said beside him.

His eyes flew towards the origin of the statement, even as his auditory sensor bars already told him who the speaker was.

Master Longhua was standing beside him, holding a small, ornate cup of piping-hot tea in his hands.

“But this tea is terrible,” he said, taking a small sip.

XJ-V barely moved a mechanized muscle. He stared up at Longhua like he was looking at a malicious ghost.

“Master?” he asked. “Is it really you I see?”

“How am I to answer that question?” Longhua asked with a swish of his pointed beard. “Only a student can truly know their Master.”

XJ-V smiled. “It is you.”

He then felt the distinctive feeling of fur brushing against his feet and looked down with a small start to see a three-tailed fox nuzzling against him.

“Sister, sister, shine a smile!” it said. “The metal man has passed his trial!”

XJ-V looked down at the tiny creature – little more than the size of his palm. Its oval eyes were not those belonging to a mortal animal. It’s paws – they were far too light. He barely even heard the thing’s ‘sisters’ as they rustled the leaves of the willows above him.

“Perhaps it is time for us to cease the rhyming, little one,” the tallest fox said with the voice of a mischievous Madame.

The one beside it snickered as XJ-V caught sight of them both.

“Look at him!” it said. “He stares at us with new eyes, now!”

“Does the metal man not know that it is rude to stare at a lady with such eyes?”

That question came from the little one rolling around on the grass beneath him, exposing its belly for a pat.

And that’s when he knew what they were.

“Spirits…” he said.

“Indeed, Disciple,” Longhua nodded. “I see you have met Minhua, Gigia, and Arha. That this triad of tricksters would serve as your spirit guides on your trial adds just one more nuisance to my accepting you into the Sect’s ranks.”

“Oh, come on, old geezer!” the fox-pup at his feet shouted, wagging her fuzzy posterior in Longhua’s unamused face. “Arha is not that bad, is she?”

Her sister’s spoke in unison above: “She is.”

“Wait,” XJ-V interrupted, rising to a crouch and staring up at his Master. “Trial? Spirit guides? I thought I was here to collect ingredients for your tea.”

Longhua took another liberal sip from his cup. “True,” he said. “And collect them you did, though the brew does nothing to enrich my spirit. Most of the waters you collected you seem to have taken for yourself. As for the tea leaves, well, one can never trust that which is summoned by a fox-spirit.”

“Old meanie!” the fox-sisters chirruped.

“Then I failed, did I not?” the Cog asked, showing his dejection even as he tried to conceal it.

Longhua, however, fixed him with a tiny smile.

“You are no tea brewer,” he said. “But in your fumbling, you found what you needed to. Though, more importantly, it could be said that it found you.”

He cast a withered hand over the surface of the waters before them, watching the surface ripple with life even though XJ-V could see no fish swim within its depths.

“Behold the font of AI-Lee’s Grove,” Longhua said. “Shuiguan. The Waters of Heaven. The source of our Qi. It is said that all water holds the essence of the Qi within it. It is said that the tears the heavens wept during the Sundering pooled in pockets of the blasted earth which were then quartered off by the old Masters – the first Prophets of the new Cultivator Sects. Here, XJ-V, you have drunk of the Dao, and you have returned unscathed. You pushed through visions of fear and of shame – those things which keep you bound to this earth.”

XJ-V was suddenly struck, amidst all this madness, by a sudden realization.

“You came to us as a machine,” his Master said. “Now, you are something more.”

“Something more and what a bore! Now his whole life’s one big chore!”

XJ-V barely heard the fox sisters’ chant, nor did he feel the little one, Arha, snuggle up to his waist.

I…I swam in the waters of the Qi, the robot thought in disbelief. And I came back. It awakened my Anima Cores. It reached inside me and saw…it saw…

“Master,” he said in all but a whisper. “Does that mean…”

“Yes, Disciple XJ-V,” Longhua told him as he turned away. “There is a soul within your chest. Now, we must see if it truly belongs to you.”

###

(If you enjoy Cog Cultivator and would like to read more, consider supporting the story on Patreon)