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“Can you show me that purification spell you mentioned earlier? I feel like I took a bath at least a thousand years ago.” I made a pleading-kitten face at Celes.
“Uhm. It’s not used to clean people,” she muttered. “Also, it’s not a spell. It’s song-art and it’s part of the long, sacred, tea-serving geisha ceremony. I can’t just...”
“I don’t think that you have a great standing with the cult at this point to worry about such trivialities as exposing their secrets!” I tried to push Celes to expand her mind with possibilities. People in cults were clearly limited by rules and constrained by ceremonies. True power came from exploration and experimentation. “Look at how dirty we both are too! Your pretty robe is all stained. Won’t the gate guards super-shame you, if they see you like that upon your return?”
“Oh.” Celes looked at her mud-covered robe. Her eyes bulged as she realised exactly how dirty it had become during the trek across the ruins.
“You don’t gotta reveal your song-jitsu to random strangers. Make me your apprentice! I’ll be an extra-hard worker, I promise,” I alleged. “That way you won’t have to release the super-secret secrets into the wilds. I’m very trustworthy, trust me!”
I was stumbling over my words due to getting over-excited.
“Fine,” Celes cleared her throat, readjusted her sitting posture to a lotus one and started to sing.
She was right about the ceremony thing. It didn’t feel like the song had a beginning, and the rather abrupt start surprised me. I really wanted to learn her purification magic, but unfortunately there was no way for me to easily replicate what she was doing.
The words of the song weren’t anything I could understand - they seemed to be woven from transcendent, rising and falling tones. She must have pushed her Qi into specific parts of her lungs and throat to produce this sort of inhuman, resonating tone that seemed to warp space around her.
I could understand why the cultivators hid this sort of thing from prying eyes and ears in their compound - this was a truly divine experience, magic unlike anything I’ve ever seen in the market. The world around Celes stilled, froze as if suspended in time. Little drops of water coming down from above paused their fall, glittering in mid-air.
The bubble of frozen time engulfed me, drew me into its embrace. A fractal pattern of Qi blossomed from her body, reaching out across the time-bound sphere. As it ran over me, its tendrils hugged my soul, gently caressed my aura and I felt pure, absolute serenity of being woven from calmness and inner peace. The pattern was alive, I felt it rushing across my body, observing me with a thousand invisible eyes. I would have been extremely freaked out by this, was I not practically drowning in serenity.
Low and high tones collided into each other, multiplying, entwining into a single, perfectly resonant, impossible sound emanating from her throat. As the tone of Celes’ song reached its final crescendo, every bit of dust and dirt within the bubble shimmered and vanished as if licked away by a thousand invisible tongues.
The song had dropped off just as abruptly as it started and the bubble of stillness around us collapsed, water resuming its trip down to the ground. Every blade of grass, every concrete pebble, every flower in a perfect circumference around Celes had been meticulously wiped clean.
“Wow.” I uttered. I looked at myself. I had never felt so clean in either of my two lives. My electrical tape shimmered, my nails were pristine even if still chipped in places, my silver-blue hair shined in the rising sun. My skin felt like it had been scrubbed, exfoliated, every single pore cleansed. “This… this is truly divine magic.”
Celes nodded. “It is gratifying, even if it is quite draining on my Qi.”
“So you don’t have to give your body to the cultists and your magic is pretty and enjoyable. Why steal a beast core from the High-Administrator? Why ruin your seemingly cushy position as a geisha? I hear the punishment for stealing from the Enforcer of the will of god is extra painful death with a side of odious suffering.”
“I…” Celes paused, looking like she wasn’t sure if she should reveal her motives to a stranger that she’s just met.
“I wanted to know my future.” Her voice solidified. “I wanted to know my place in the cult, my purpose. After a few years in the compound, I noticed something very troubling - there were no old geishas in the Gold city. It was possible that maybe the cult traded them to another god-city, but I still wanted to know the answer. I’ve been slowly adding confidence, trust, truth and serenity herbs into the High Administrator’s tea. When he saw me as someone he could trust, he told me that… I am to be sacrificed to the Boundless Chorus and turned into a servitor spirit before my voice fades.”
She sniffed, her hands trembling. "I don't… I don’t want to become a servitor ghost, a shattered, broken soul. I think that some of them remember things. They don't look happy.”
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“Damn.” I nodded. “This is some shitty human resources management - no retirement package for local geishas. Good on you for figuring out the truth.”
“I don’t want to serve them or it… anymore.” Celes glanced at the gargantuan, shimmering yellow tentacles with visible worry, perhaps terrified that one of them would reach out and smite her for these words.
"Eh, don't worry about those. I've been to the surface like a thousand times. I doubt that Lord Boundless-butt cares for your vocal blasphemy or whether you die faster or slower. Also, he doesn't pass through the same place twice - there’s a pattern to his walk. I take mundane things from the so-called 'cursed dead' all the time. Where do you think I stole this undershirt?" I pointed at the Pikachu on my torn-up top.
“You got that shirt from here?” Celes blinked.
“Yeppers. See - it’s black and yellow! It fits the god-approved color-theme so I don’t get slapped by anyone for being a blasphemer out on the streets.” I beamed and pointed at a ladder that was slowly moving toward us. “People like me go down here to steal things. Have you never been down on the surface before?”
The kitsune shook her head. “Only the chosen high-cultivators are permitted to walk the dead city. I was told it is extremely dangerous for a low-level commoner to be here - this land is cursed.”
“It’s actually relatively safe down here, as long as you watch out for the soul-grabbing tentacles!” I laughed. “Also, some things around these parts hardly decay. I think Boundless-bum has something to do with it.”
My memories presented me with a double mental map of the city. I now knew what things looked like before and after the end of 21st century human civilization. I smiled cheerfully at the new, vast theft opportunities presented to me. A part of me pulled from the old skull was daunted by the monstrously titanic, hundred-kilometer wide creature that carried the Gold city on its back. Yet, the sixteen year old girl-me wasn’t afraid of god. I had sinned countlessly against his tenets and yet I still lived.
“I can’t believe that you’re still sane after what you’ve done to yourself.” the geisha sighed. “High-Cultivators know that it is extremely dangerous to fully consume human souls. It is said that the conflict of desires between the foreign soul and your own shatters them both. A human mind is not like that of a beast.”
“I’m perfectly fine and unshattered over here.” I waved her off. “Either your high-cultivators are uncreatively square or they’re hoarding all the good, yummy human souls for themselves.”
I thought about myself. Being the new me composed of two people was a little weird. I felt like a fancy sandwich made from many extra delicious memories. Did my desires overlap? Is that why I haven't gone insane? On one hand I loved melons. On the other hand… I also liked melons. Yay.
Except the thing I had stolen wasn't a melon, it was a yellow-and-black striped cantaloupe. Hrm.
I was still Ash, but Ash whose head was now crammed full of ancient knowledge. The extra memory I was blessed with could fill a thousand scrolls worth of information!
It was bewildering that people of the distant past had read so much. That within their hands they held these devices… phones filled with the libraries of the entire world. Wikipedia and Google were the gods that they worshipped, appealed to, for nearly limitless answers. The Immortal cultivators of the Gold city hid all of their knowledge behind thick compound walls. Just one memory of one long dead human was enough to fill me up, to set the sparks in my mind alight into a firestorm of possibilities.
The way back to the city was a lot more difficult because it was uphill and I couldn't use slippery pipes to my advantage. A gun alone wouldn't cut it in the sewers and catacombs of the Gold city. I thought about the geisha's adorable servitor spirit.
"How much can your ferret carry?" I inquired.
"Uhm. About half my weight if I put a lot of Qi into him. Why?"
"Okay, put a lot of Qi into him and send him to buy us a few bags of flour," I ordered.
"Are you planning to bake something... here?" Celes looked at the ruined skyscraper top.
"Nope. It's for… other purposes." I grinned at her.
She looked at me like I was a bit mental.
"Do you mind not questioning my authority and just doing what I ask?" I pressed. "It'll help us get back, okay? I know what I'm doing here, Miss Rada."
"Miss?"
"An ancient honorific used for addressing a woman who is not married, and is known by her maiden name.”
“Are you implying that I’m a clueless maiden? I’m older than you!” Celes huffed.
"Not at all. I'm simply asking you to put trust in my thousand-some year old experience and know-how."
"Fine." The geisha signed. "Knipz. Buy me as many bags of flour as you can carry."
The ferret servitor materialised on her shoulder, grabbed a few coins from her and departed.
“Do you know how Servitors are made?” I asked her. I’ve been chased by them plenty of times, but I had no idea how cultivators shoved them into lanterns and stuff.
“A beast is killed and their core is cut in half. One half of it is shaped and bound into god-blessed metal, secured with containment and command runes.” Celes pulled back one of her sleeves, revealing a golden bracelet with a small beast core gemstone embedded in its center. “This is half of Knipz's beast core.”
“The remaining half of the core is used to summon the soul of the beast from their bones. The cultivator consumes the soul to bind it to themselves,” she explained. “Since Knipz is a very young beast and since I didn’t personally slay him, I did not gain his powers or skills however minute they may be.”
“What about human servitors?” I asked.
“I do not know the process of creating human-ghost servants.” Celes shook her head. “Such practice is kept secret by the high-cultivators. Han told me that it involves a sacrifice of parts of the body and soul to Lord Boundless Chorus in the central well.”
“Can’t be too different from a beast.” I shrugged. “Ol’ Boundy-butt probably just wants a cut. I do wonder if I can summon myself as my own servitor now… is that a thing?”
Celes simply stared at me like I was insane. What? It was a perfectly rational idea. I was in perfect agreement with myself. Both of my memories wanted to work together on solving problems. Why had I not gone insane? Was I just a lucky coincidence? Did I accidentally find my perfectly compatible soul-pal across millennia and fuse them to myself?
“No time for your judgy-looks. Get your fox-butt ready!” I told the geisha as I stood up, dusted myself off and circled towards the back of the building’s roof.
“Ready for whaa?!” Celes yelped as I ran forward, leaping off the edge of the skyscraper towards the passing ladder. Catching ladders was a pain in the butt, but I had yet to fail at it. The ladder swung forward with my person on it and upon its return journey I tried to aim it for Celes.
“Get on!” I yelled at her, as the ladder flew by. It took another two passes of me swingin by, for Celes to get over her fear and leap towards it. She had nearly missed it, but thankfully I was there to catch her by her robe.
She was shaking in fright as I held her in the air. I definitely wouldn't be able to achieve this feat without being twice as strong. I had generously called these ropes “ladders”, but they were basically ropes with occasional knots in them for support.
“Do you mind holding onto the ladder on your own now?” I politely asked, after a minute of swinging. “My arms are getting tired. Even amazing, self-made cultivators like myself have limits, you know.”