Yuan’s mind was lost in a maelstrom of gunshots and violence.
His bullet-core continued to cycle on its own, for beyond the agony lay a wasteland of bloodthirst and ecstasy. The pain he experienced through the death echoes of gunfire victims blurred with the satisfaction of the shooters, the primal delight of glorious savagery joining with the intoxicating terror of industrialized annihilation.
Mechanized slaughter was a terrible thing to experience, but the freedom, the freedom of it all! There was such pleasure to be found in watching a bullet storm, such enlightened peace to be experienced in the symphony of gunshots! A tidal wave of blood swirled and raged behind walls built on holy bricks and foundations of pointless causes, bound to collapse by the impermanence of all things!
Only violence was honest. Only death lasted forever.
He danced with armageddon amidst falling bombs and the rising tides of revolution. He fought for countless gods and kings, for the nameless state and the glorious leaders, but beyond these idols, he waged wars for its own sake. He shot a million fathers into dirty trench-tombs and won a thousand duels in the desert. He gunned down civilizations and brought down castles back to dust.
He was chaos. He was death by metal and gunpowder. He was Gu… Gu…
No.
He was… Yu… Yu…
Not-Gun!
Not a gun!
He tried to force his mind out of the maelstrom of violence that threatened to swallow him whole, to raise a barrier that would separate his sense of self from the death, murders, and savage mechanical madness that threatened to free him from his earthly limits—that threatened to consume him.
But he couldn’t stop the process. His own soul sang a symphony of gunshots by using his body as an instrument. It reshaped his iron flesh to further improve the music, morphing his hands into miniguns and cannons while setting his breath ablaze with the fires of Bullet Hell.
He struggled to find a reason to stay out of the maelstrom. What purpose was a human will in the lead heart of pointless destruction? A gun didn’t think, didn’t judge, a gun just shot and killed the innocent and the guilty, the young and the old, kings and scraps. To a true gun, everyone was a target.
What use was a name for a firearm? However they were built, they always delivered the same package; a little piece of death wrapped in a lump of lead. A name alone wasn’t enough to keep him grounded in reality, for every gun existed for itself anyway.
But there was something else he lived for… someone else… a girl with crimson hair who believed in him, praying that he would protect her, guide her, and fill her heart with happiness.
Holster.
Her name pierced the fog of bloodlust and madness like a silver bullet through the darkness. The flash of insight let a flood of memories flow back into his brain. His name was Yuan, Yuan Guang; and he was no ghost haunting countless battlefields, but a man sitting alone in a room of steel.
His body remained trapped in an intermediary state, a shifting instability between his evanescent soul and his solid iron flesh. The qi coursing through him threatened to return to the Dao; not as a Wayfinder’s will powerful enough to reshape reality, but as mindless and formless energy. Every round of cycling weakened his bullet-core’s grip on reality, threatening to unbind his spirit and send it floating adrift into the Nowhere.
Crossing the Fourth Coil required engraving himself onto his chosen Path without becoming one of its paving stones.
Holster gave him perspective. Memories of her smiles compelled him to focus. He recalled the time he rescued her, the day he gifted her her first gun, how she saved him from the rad-hag and subtly guided him forward.
Focusing on her allowed Yuan to remember another name too. Orient. Kind Orient, who was always so gentle and caring, who offered him her ear whenever he required it without judgment nor condemnation.
He recalled other Gunsouls too. Revolver, to whom he owed his life and sought to free from the curse consuming him; and Arc, whom he did not wish to disappoint. He remembered Bucket and the civilians aboard the spirit-train, which he had taken under his protection. He couldn’t let them down.
They were his anchor; the weight and bonds that prevented his soul from being absorbed into the Gun Path.
The next few cycling rounds carried so much pain and joy. Yuan witnessed nightmares born of hellish defeats and the glories of overwhelming victories. Neither managed to lull him back into the maelstrom. Focusing on his anchors allowed Yuan to walk the Gun Path without falling.
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He went back, traveling from Kalash Angels to arquebuses and finally, to fire sticks and lances. He gazed upon the first of all firearms, a cone of metal invented in an ancient land long forgotten, and to the first death it inflicted; that of its own creator in a disastrous incident.
The last round of cycling set his soul alight like the sun.
Yuan pierced the illusions of terror and mindless joy to touch the Dao. He had done so before when he crossed the previous Coils, but back then he had only become aware of how everything fit together into a harmonious whole.
This time, Yuan understood his place in the universe. His chosen purpose.
A veil of devastating memories cleared to reveal a different vision of the Gun Path. He fought with soldiers in the name of protecting their homeland from those who would conquer it by right of violence. He saw lawmen hunting down those who preyed on the weak across the ever-expanding frontier. He watched fathers fire at tigers and wolves threatening to eat their children. Some never even pulled the trigger; for a loaded rifle could bring peace without firing a single shot.
A gun without a cause only brought death, but with purpose, it could become so much more. In the right hands, it could serve justice, protect the weak, and punish evil.
That was the gun Yuan wanted to be.
At that moment, Yuan Guang knew himself. He achieved a sense of self-awareness beyond instinct. This taste of enlightenment hardly lasted a second before he returned to reality in a new and powerful body.
Yuan had grown twice as tall as before, with his barrel-face longer than a human arm and his ammo teeth sharp enough to cut through steel. His breath had turned into a stream of flames. Fire qi used to be his weakness, but his new form turned it into a strength. Instead of melting away, his metal harnessed the blaze within him, guiding its boundless appetite while using it to reforge itself into a perfect living weapon. His arms had changed, the left one now a minigun waiting to unleash an endless stream of ammunition and his right hand a cannon exuding heat hotter than plasma.
Iron skulls covered his torso. His flesh remembered the last qi echoes of those he had slain, like proud battle scars forever immortalizing his victories. His back thrusters produced an endless flow of heat and flames. Yuan had to force himself to power them down and stay standing on the wagon’s floor. He no longer required the Recoil Fist to propel himself. He now knew how to fly better than any bird.
And the power… His entire being brimmed with power. His core was a raging furnace filling his veins with superheated qi. The power coursing through him would have set his Third Coil self ablaze.
Yuan Guang felt invincible.
But he had also tasted death and defeat in the past. The knowledge of his own mortality let him retain enough presence of mind to focus on the way his bullet-core was burning through his qi reserves.
Arc had warned him he couldn’t keep up his current state forever. Considering the current rate at which he burned through his qi reserves, Yuan would estimate that length to be about ten, maybe eleven minutes tops; a duration that would shorten with every technique he used. Gun Demon Incarnation provided a short burst of power, but one that should prove long enough to carry him through a fight.
Returning to his humanoid form hardly took more than a thought and a second. Yuan immediately felt crippled, both physically and spiritually. His sharpened cultivator senses seemed so dull after receiving a taste of true infernal power.
Forcing himself to undo the Gun Demon Incarnation felt spiritually awful to Yuan. He was shackling himself, forcing his firearm soul back into a humanoid-shaped prison. He suffocated inside his own metal skin.
“So that’s what it means to engrave an innate technique,” Yuan muttered to himself as he looked at his hands. He was born with them, yet they suddenly seemed so ill-fitting to him. “You live them. Breathe them.”
Gun Demon Incarnation was his natural state now.
His human form had become little more than a security blanket; a restraint meant to let him rest between gunfights without harming himself or others. His bullet-core yearned to return to this exalted state that now fit him so much better than his human form.
Had Gayak felt that way too with his Dance of Endless Mutation? Transforming into an ever-shifting incarnation of evolution seemed to fill him with immense elation during their duel. That explained why the likes of Polio and Jared retained such a bizarre appearance. Their very cores sought to transcend their constrained human shells.
Yuan wondered if he might learn how to maintain Gun Demon Incarnation at all times with the proper training. It was something he would have to look into once he fully mastered his transformation.
“Orient?” Yuan called out to the wagon. “Are you there?”
Orient’s human avatar immediately materialized in the metal wagon, her eyes alight with relief. However, she seemed… sharper than before, for a lack of a better term. Yuan briefly blinked until he realized his vision had a better time identifying those tiny, near-undetectable weak points in the human frame. Orient’s current form was a projection, a lifelike mannequin that mimicked the outer appearance of a human woman while lacking organs or bones on the inside, but it still sported a few defects inherent to its structure: a soft neck, flexible joints, soft spots where her qi traveled…
All these small targets would maximize any bullet impact.
The thought of shooting Orient never crossed Yuan’s mind, but his Fourth Coil senses had developed a laser focus on detecting such weaknesses. His aim probably improved quite a bit as well.
“Have you regained your senses, Honored Conductor Yuan?” Orient asked him, a hint of concern in her voice. “When you transformed into that Gun creature, I feared the worst.”
“Worry not.” Yuan exhaled a deep breath of flame. The gunsmoke in his lungs had now grown hot enough to ignite itself. “I am in control of it, finally.”
“Hearing this soothes my soul.” Orient happily nodded to herself. “While Lady Arc kept faith, Miss Holster and I feared that you would meditate through the competition. You have woken up just in time.”
“Just in time?” Her wording caused Yuan to scowl. “How much time did I spend cycling?”
“Two days and nights.” Orient gave him a grim look, yet one full of determination. “The race begins in two hours.”