Yuan buried Gayak and Polio in the city of the dead.
Telling which pieces of meat belonged to them and which ones belonged to the thousands of victims that the Gun claimed today was a difficult task, even with his qi sight. The bombardment shredded them to pieces alongside Gatling Man’s remains and countless others. Throwing them into a ditch proved much easier than digging individual graves.
Yuan didn’t want to give his enemies a fair burial out of respect–since none of them deserved it–but while a cultivator’s hungry ghost was a pale shadow of what they were while alive, they remained very dangerous. Yuan had no intention of allowing his dead foes to torment the living any longer.
Yuan had heard tales that the Deathsong allowed hungry ghosts to linger after death to give them one last chance to settle their affairs and pass on to their next life without regrets; others said it was to force the living to take responsibility for their dead and ensure a fair burial for everyone.
If so, then she had succeeded. Yuan had spent the better part of the day carrying corpses around to a trench dug by Bucket and the others where Holster had been giving the dead the Last Rites sutra nonstop, silently praying for their souls. Other men gathered everything they could salvage onto the spirit-train; mostly pieces of Metallist tech, weapons, or supplies that survived the bombardment. Getting the vehicle upright again had taken a lot of effort, even with Yuan’s own superhuman strength.
From what Yuan gathered, Orient saved her passengers from the bullet rain by creating a Barrier around herself with Holster’s help. He guessed that spending days around him gave them enough insight to defend themselves against the Gun’s bombardment.
The rest of the city didn’t fare as well. The Gun’s visit thoroughly destroyed every building in town and leveled the ground to such a degree that even the sewers and basements turned into tombs. They’d only managed to find a handful of survivors hiding so far, and the encroaching sunset would put an end to those searches soon.
Moreover, Orient could only rescue around a hundred people; mostly a handful of Bullet Church armed men, their families, and civilians who took refuge with the cult. Hardly enough manpower to cover a ghost town of Fleshmarket’s size.
Too many corpses, Yuan thought grimly as he tossed his enemies’ remains into a trench filled with hundreds of human remains. Too few gravediggers.
Not only were hundreds of dead people still undiscovered and likely to become hungry ghosts by the next day, but the Gun’s bombardment also contaminated the city’s water reservoir with lead. It could no longer sustain itself even if the survivors stuck around to rebuild it.
Fleshmarket was doomed.
At least Yuan could walk again. His broken foot had healed enough to let him stand, though his body ached in so many different places. He would need to find a moment to cycle through his qi in order to fully complete his Third Coil transformation.
When Bucket and the others finished covering the trench with dirt, Yuan took a good look at the sky. The sunset encroached over the horizon. They had run out of time.
“Nightfall comes upon us,” Yuan said. “Prepare to board on the spirit-train.”
One of the gravediggers dared to ask him the question on everyone’s lips. “Board it to where?”
Yuan had no idea, but anywhere would be safer than a ghost-infested city.
“Prepare to board,” he insisted before patting Holster on the shoulder. “You did well. I’ll join you and Orient in a minute.”
He had one last person to pick up before leaving Fleshmarket.
Holster nodded obediently, then returned to Orient with most of the survivors. Only one of them remained behind, staring at Yuan through his helmet with empty eyes.
“Sir…” Bucket said, his voice quiet and subdued.
Yuan froze. Bucket hadn’t spoken a word since he had stepped off the spirit-train to witness the devastation. All of his cheery zeal had turned into quiet, grim contemplation.
“Is this what the Gun Father wanted for us?” Bucket asked, his gaze turning to the destroyed city around them; a smoking ruin agonizing under a gunsmoke sky. “Death to the world?”
“Yes,” Yuan replied bluntly. He saw no point in indulging Bucket’s delusions, especially not after this. “The Gun is not a god. It’s just another mindless killer with more power than most.”
He expected Bucket to insult him or go into another religious tirade, but he did no such thing. The man remained quiet for a while, taking in Yuan’s words. None of his fellow cultists had celebrated Fleshmarket’s destruction either. After this, they’d probably realized that they had projected their own beliefs onto an entity that couldn’t care less for them. They had played at war, only to find that they’d been worshiping the slaughter all along.
“If you value anything on this earth, I suggest you change your faith to someone else,” Yuan suggested. “To a god who will cherish it.”
“Yes… I… I see that now.” For the first time since Yuan met him, Bucket appeared to listen to him; truly listen. “I… will consider it, sir.”
Bucket sounded so crushed and lost that Yuan couldn’t help but feel pity for him. Neither of them had wished for this disaster to unfold.
Yuan left Bucket to his own doubts and looked for Arc. He didn’t have to try too hard; her immense qi and flawed Authority acted like a torch in the night for his qi sight. He found her meditating in front of a makeshift tombstone of rifles and scrap metal.
She had buried the previous Gun there on her own, refusing any help to either raise the tomb or give him the sutras. Yuan suspected that this was her way to grieve.
“Who was this person?” Yuan asked.
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Arc turned her head away from the tomb. “A dear friend.”
“Yet you said nothing,” Yuan accused her, his voice sharper than a blade. He couldn’t keep his anger at her in check anymore. “If I had known–”
“I’ve told many Gunsouls the truth over the last decade,” Arc said dryly. “Half of them thought they would be the exception to the rule, or that they could master the Gun’s power for themselves. The heroes among them tried to destroy it, only to get themselves killed.”
“I would have done neither of those things!”
“Truly?” Arc snorted. “You came to me craving the Gun’s secrets, and unlike the Gatling Man, you showed no wish to change your cursed Path. I’ve seen dozens of you.”
“There is only one of me,” Yuan replied sternly.
“Then how do you explain this disaster?” Arc waved her hand at the desolation around them, at the smoking ruins and collapsed walls riddled with holes. “You wished for it.”
Yuan bristled. “You’re wrong.”
“Oh? Let me remind you what you said to me before leaving for this place.” Arc scoffed and threw his own words back at him. “‘I know many bystanders will die, but the more the sects kill each other, the more it’ll weaken their grip on the region. Maybe some good will come out of it one day.’”
Yuan recoiled as if he had been slapped in the face. An unbearable weight of guilt fell upon his shoulders, crushing and overwhelming.
“You planned to use the techniques I taught you to solve this place’s ammo shortage in the hope that its sects would wipe out each other, and they did,” Arc said coldly. “So answer me: what good came out of it?”
Yuan’s hands tightened into fists. He was angry at Arc, but mostly at himself.
He couldn’t deny the truth of her words. He had hoped to arm the sects warring over Fleshmarket hoping they would slaughter each other, casualties be damned.
Did his own actions help lure the Gun to Fleshmarket? If they did… If they did…
“I didn’t think it would get this bad,” Yuan muttered to himself.
“Maybe, but it’s what you got,” Arc replied coldly. “That’s the Gun Path for you: an endless procession of death, killing, and violence. Your gunslinger friend just became the latest link in a long chain of sorrow.”
Hearing about Revolver’s fate made Yuan’s skin crawl. His fellow Gunsoul was out there roaming the wasteland, a maddened beast trapped in such a painful state of suffering that his predecessor desperately sought death to escape it.
“Is there any way to free him?” Yuan asked. “If the Gun possesses whoever kills it–”
“It doesn’t have to,” Arc interrupted him. “A Gunsoul that kills the Gun comes first in the priority order, nothing more.”
Yuan’s gunpowder blood froze in his veins. Under different circumstances, he might have become the Gun.
“What about sealing it away?” he asked.
“My companions and I have tried everything. We blew up the Gun remotely, lured it into a fight with a caretaker spirit it couldn’t possess, entombed it in a place we believed it couldn’t escape…” Arc shook her head. “Yet it returned each and every time. Any Gunsoul can become the new Gun, and anyone who has ever died from a firearm can rise as one of us. The Gun has plenty of vessels to choose from.”
“‘A soul for a bullet, his immortal fame; the Gun will never die, his boastful claim,’” Yuan muttered under his breath as he recalled the Bullet Church’s song. “‘He'll dance the lead dance, till no one can pull the trigger…’”
Arc nodded, her face wearing a scowl of defeatism. “So long as someone out there kills his fellow man with a firearm, the Gun will never die.”
“What is it really?” Yuan asked. “The Gun?”
“One of the demigods of ultraviolence.”
“Demigods? Plural?” Yuan squinted at her. “How many are there?”
He’d assumed there had to be at least another being similar to the Gun when Arc explained that nuclear cultivators worked along the same principles earlier, but her tone told him there were more than two.
“I don’t know the exact number,” Arc confessed. “Each weapon family has its Gun. The Nuke, the Blade, the Bomb, the Biohazard, the Arson…” She tilted her head to peek over her shoulder, her eyes unseen behind her blindfold. “Why do you think infernals and supernatural beings ask for sacrifices? Why else would the Hitobashira be so precious among these parts?”
Yuan crossed his arms and pondered the subject for a while. “Because spirits get power from death?”
Arc nodded sharply. “When someone is slain, their qi is released back into the world. Dedicating a victim’s death to another gives that big burst a direction. Spiritual entities can harness that flow of qi and gain power from it.”
“So that’s what the Gun is? An infernal associated with death by firearms?”
“No,” Arc replied. “The Gun is death by firearms.”
“I… I don’t see the difference.”
“I told you that a murder victim’s qi goes to whoever the sacrifice is dedicated to,” Arc said. “Where do you think that burst of qi goes when someone is killed, say, in a random gunfight undedicated to anyone?”
The pieces finally fell into place. “To the weapon that killed them.”
“Yes. That’s why you hear tales of dragonslaying blades or guns that never miss. The qi of these weapons’ victims partly rubbed off on them until it gave them supernatural properties.” Arc focused back on her friend’s makeshift grave, and the rifle serving as its foundation. “But most of that energy goes to the idea of a weapon.”
“And eventually all that power incarnates into a spirit, like how a patch of Thunderlands manifests a caretaker,” Yuan muttered to himself as he finally put everything into context. “A demigod of death and ultraviolence.”
“They’re the true lords of the wasteland, growing stronger with each murder no matter who calls the shots,” Arc stated. “They’re not equals in power though. Nuclear weapons are scary, but they didn’t kill all that many people across history when you tally the body count. The Spear and the Blade were the top dogs for a long time before fading out of prominence. The Gun usurped their spot for the most part.”
“Do each of them have their own kind of Gunsouls?”
“They all have a dedicated Path, but their children don’t walk it the same way we do,” Arc replied. “I don’t think they follow the same reincarnation cycle either. The Gun is the only one that’s passed on from Gunsoul to Gunsoul, as far as I know, and I’ve heard that the Blade prefers to possess swords rather than people.”
Yuan’s stomach sank as he pondered his mentor’s words. Revolver warned him that the Gun always returned to visit its Gunsouls, and now he knew why. Either the Gun killed its children, or they won the right to become its new host to further the cycle.
A fate that would befall Yuan one day.
“Is there no way to break the curse?” Yuan asked. “Even if the Gun will exist ‘till there’s nobody left to shoot at each other, it should be possible to free its victims somehow.”
“I met a Long Dragon Sage once, who told me that the Gun curse could only be broken with a ‘Perfect Shot’: the right shot with the right bullet, fired with the right gun at the right place at the right time for all the right reasons.” Arc snorted. “I’ve spent the last few years trying to craft that perfect bullet. You saw how my attempts fared against the Gun when I tried to save you and your friend’s lives. They barely fazed it.”
“Maybe it wasn’t the right shot, gun, place, time, or reason,” Yuan countered.
“When will it be then?” Arc knelt near her friend’s grave. “I’ve spent years trying to free Jim. I’m astonished he lasted that long as the Gun, to be honest… and now he’s gone forever.”
Was that why she had waited in the Ammobog for so long? Praying that she could craft the right bullet by the time the Gun visited her, and that by some miracle no other Gunsoul had taken up the title since? Her subdued reaction told Yuan that she considered it a fool’s hope too; one that had been dashed forever today.
What did that make of Yuan then?
A Perfect Shot… the right shot with the right bullet, fired with the right gun at the right place at the right time for all the right reasons…
It was cryptic as far as prophecies went, but the sight of Revolver struggling against the bloodlust overcoming him continued to haunt Yuan. His fellow Gunsoul had saved his life twice, first from Polio and then from the Gun itself.
Yuan wasn’t a man to leave such debts unpaid. He refused to let one of the few men to have shown him unconditional kindness suffer forever. If there was a way to free Revolver from the Gun’s curse, Yuan would find it even if it delayed his quest for revenge for a time.
He couldn’t let an ally die on him again.