Jiann did not know what he had expected undeath to consist of. Tending a garden in Surrey was not remotely near the list of things for which he had been prepared.

As a living human being, he had been significantly further along than most in terms of comprehending and accepting himself as a spiritual entity. He hadn't quite attained the coveted third tier of complete spiritual perfection, but he'd been well along in the process, having completely subordinated his physical body to his mind's control -- the further task of subordinating his mind in turn to his spiritual essence was, of course, much more difficult, but he'd been making decent headway. Then he'd abruptly found himself an unbodied mental engram, and an uncountable gulf of time later a revenant -- a spiritual echo of a mental construct possessing a dead physical form. This had quite rudely upended many of the aspects of his personal self-concept, with a correspondingly large number of consequences.

Firstly, the arrow of causality in his particular paradigm of experience had been rather sharply reversed -- rather than having a mind that ran upon the substrate of physical form and strove to be in harmony with its emergent spiritual properties, he now possessed a mind given form by a particular set of spiritual principles which in turn controlled a body entirely via ethereal means. In a lot of ways, this was much more pleasant than the previous state of affairs: he no longer experienced sensations such as pain or hunger as irresistible overrides to his thoughts, for example, and his emotions and moods were significantly less affected by the various physical and chemical circumstances of his brain and body (which was basically a fancier way of saying the first thing). But instead he had new and much more interesting problems, such as his convictions and ideals being heavily influenced by his astral composition (mostly Orton's fault) and having to abruptly confront the specifics of physical existence at a much more intricate and perplexing level than he had when he was alive.

For most humans, the simple act of, say, smelling a flower or digesting a cheeseburger was a fairly intuitive operation, despite being composed of a vast multitude of complex actions and interactions of various mechanical, chemical, and electrical happenstances. For Jiann (who very much did not enjoy contemplating either of his previous existences as Nej), such actions were grueling slogs of meticulous attention that usually involved a good deal of trial-and-error. He'd had an easy time of things at first, but as the various constituent processes of his physical body ceased or died off, he'd had to dedicate increasingly large amounts of his time and effort to working around the emergent difficulties of undeath. Reading had become difficult as his eyes dried out, then nigh-impossible as his optic nerves degenerated into limited conductivity. Speech became progressively more challenging as the mucus of his larynx had dissipated, then onerous in the extreme as his lungs and diaphragm began to accrue holes.

His muscles had been the final straw; he'd been able to ignore their instability for quite a long time by supplementing the vital energies of biology with qi, but eventually the accumulating damage began to manifest as hitches and weaknesses, and that had been quite intolerable. At first, he'd tried to simply replace them outright with astral constructs, but he quickly found that astral limbs were mostly only good for interacting with astral phenomena, and standing upon the idea of the ground wasn't nearly as useful as standing on the actual ground for most mundane pursuits. So he'd had to build new physical body parts.

His early efforts had been fairly crude -- wicker animated by a motile principle -- but in addition to being ugly and inconvenient they'd been shockingly bad at their actual design goals. It had taken him a while to understand that many of the things that had frustrated him about being alive were in fact features rather than bugs; the various layers of skin, flesh, and integument that coated the standard model human were astonishingly good at keeping one's goopy bits inside without being so rigid that they impeded movement. Similarly, the chemical and electrical building blocks of tactile sensation were effected by a rather complicated system which had to balance the demands of a large number of different forces and circumstances. Each time he'd thought he'd gotten to the bottom of a particular problem, he found another one lurking behind the answer; and after independently deriving the necessity of, say, a pancreas for the fourth time, he acknowledged that he probably wasn't going to outsmart nature. If he wanted to have a physical body that worked better than the anthropic equivalent of a rusted-out Volkswagen, he needed to find a new paradigm of harmony to bring his material self back into concordance with his mental one, and from there establish a new mind-body-spirit totality. For a most people, this task would have been daunting, but Jiann had spent nearly half his life being ground against the slow, rough wheel of spiritual refinement and found the very idea both interesting and invigorating. At first, anyway.

But over the past six years, rough-and-ready scientific experimentation had given way to thoughtful, careful design and analysis, which had in turn progressed into deep philosophy and from there gotten very strange indeed. Through herculean effort, he'd managed to locate an environment with exactly the right spiritual characteristics to offset the dissipations and depredations of existence as a revenant, which at least kept him in a sort of holding pattern while he worked out exactly which way was up in his current metaphysical trajectory. Then he'd set about constructing a sort of outside-in approach to a new physical transcendence. It had been time-consuming and painstaking, but eventually, he'd gotten somewhere.

And now, here he was, living in an idyllic cottage in southern England and making a lot of tea. He chatted with his neighbors (those that could understand his accent) when it couldn't be avoided, and stayed inside reading books when the weather was poor (which was often); but every remaining instant of his spare time was otherwise engaged in nurturing and tending his horticultural endeavours. The specifics were fascinating -- rather than blood, his veins now carried a thick ichor made of the essence of rainwater which nourished the plants. He'd bound this particular patch of gardenias to his kidney-analogues, that plot of calla lilies to the intake portion of his respiration model, and had most of the processes which served the purposes of digestion in the living running through an elegantly-positioned quartet of trees which bounded his property at four corners, an arrangement which was both aesthetically pleasing and functionally robust. In short, Jiann was his garden, and his garden was him, on a large and constantly-increasing number of levels -- the process was so exacting that he often had to putter about moving a single leaf or root a miniscule distance, but was astonishingly refined and spiritually nourishing. Not that it wasn't without its tribulations: all the times animals came and pooped directly on his various numinous components -- or worse, pooped on them incorrectly -- ate up a worryingly high percentage of his time. He hoped to automate that eventually, but getting worms to properly integrate into the whole model was taking forever.

Eventually, he knew, he'd be able to reify the entire thing and have some sort of recursive holistic meta-body (or something of that nature), but experience had long since taught him that you couldn't skip the important bits. He hoped Orton was getting along well, a bit despite himself -- even after many years of sharing the wizard's headspace, he still felt apprehensive about what he had caught glimpses of during Orton's frantic secret-dump during the battle with his physical self. There were some things that, once learned, were very difficult indeed to forget.

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Orton looked down at the slip of paper in his hand, then up at the sign above the door. This was the third time he'd checked it, but he wanted to be very, very sure. He was unlikely to get a second chance at this.

As near as he could tell with his incredibly shitty literacy of Lhasa Tibetan, the name was correct -- this was indeed the place his divinations had suggested. The location -- a run-down, shady-looking tenement building -- was exactly the sort of place he could expect to find the person he was looking for, but correspondingly that meant his window was probably very limited. Shouldering aside his doubts, he shoved the paper into his pocket and made his way inside.

The interior, unsurprisingly, was bitterly cold -- places like this were not so much "unlikely to have central heating" as much as "unlikely to have fitting doors and windows". Stepping around piles of trash and discarded broken furniture, he made his way to a particular unit within the building and clapped his hands as respectfully as he could -- he was unable to knock, since the doorway had a curtain instead of a door. After a moment, the curtain was gently pulled aside, and he beheld a vision of loveliness.

The young woman who opened the curtain was perhaps twenty or twenty-one, and was stunningly beautiful. Long, thick hair as black as coal surrounded a heart-shaped face completely free of flaw or blemish, and limpid brown eyes peered up at him guilelessly from under perfectly-formed brows. Orton, caught very much off-guard, stammered out, "Is... are you... Yuan Xiaolian?"

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The girl smiled sweetly, her rose-red lips parting to reveal ivory-white teeth, and she murmured something Orton didn't quite understand in what he thought might be Cantonese, which he did not speak at all. Before he could ask her to clarify, she had pulled the curtain back in between them and disappeared into the interior once more. Orton stood, stunned, for a long moment and tried to comprehend what he could have possibly done to offend her.

Out of nowhere, a young boy in a New York Mets baseball cap appeared at his elbow and winked. "You think she sexy, Mister America?"

Orton winced. "I, uh... I was just trying to understand what she said."

"Ohhh, I see." The youth looked upward for a moment in contemplation. "She say 'wrong floor, you stupid motherfucker'."

"Oh." Orton could literally see his aura retract in embarrassment. "Um, I don't suppose you'd happen to know where I could find Yuan Xiaolian?"

"Is like she say, wrong floor. You want third floor, this floor two." The youth scratched his nose. "Why you want Yuan Xiaolian? Shanjia Li much prettier. She expensive, but worth it."

Orton shook his head. "Let's just say I'm very particular."

"Well, it your money. Yuan Xiaolian third floor, left side, red door." Orton thanked the young man and handed him a crumpled five-dollar bill (enough to make him appreciative, but not enough to get him mugged again) and made his way up an exceedingly treacherous flight of stairs. As he neared the red door, he could definitely tell he was entering a nexus of power; his sight beyond sight could perceive all manner of shifting astral flows, fields of energy, and currents of raw potency. He didn't detect any formal wards, though, which was strange -- he wasn't sure if that indicated confidence or just cultural differences. Taking a deep breath, he raised his fist to knock on the door.

Before his hand could make contact, the door was jerked open, and he almost fell before he could correct his balance. The Chinese woman who answered was short -- barely five feet tall -- and built like a fireplug, with dense muscles and a wide face and body. A cigarette dangled from her lips, and Orton fought desperately not to giggle, because all she needed was hair-curlers to look exactly like the landlady from Kung Fu Hustle. He swallowed his mirth and bowed, deeply and respectfully. "I seek Yuan Xiaolian," he intoned in his best Serious Kung Fu Master voice.

The woman regarded him for a moment, then snorted and turned away to head back inside. Orton paused for a moment, but since she hadn't slammed the door in his face he could assume that she meant for him to follow. Maybe. Probably. Taking a chance, he cautiously stepped across the doorway, hoping he wouldn't be assaulted by magical traps or receive a boot to the head, and closed the door gently behind him.

The woman, ignoring him entirely, walked back to what he supposed was the main living area of the apartment and sat on a small straw mat in a flawless lotus position. She remained silent, but from her manner and positioning he guessed he was supposed to sit in the bare floor in front of her; shrugging, he took off his boots and did so, then waited patiently for her to speak. It took about fifteen minutes, but Orton was very, very patient.

"I'm guessing you aren't here for massage services." her voice was rough and scratchy, but her diction was completely flawless; she spoke English like a native, with no trace of an accent of any kind. He noticed, a bit belatedly, that she was wearing exercise shorts and a sports bra, and felt a little overdressed.

He cleared his throat. "Thank you for speaking with me. I am greatly honored."

Yuan Xiaolian snorted. "Yeah, you look real honored. At least you took off your shoes."

Orton smiled, relaxing a little. "Well, I didn't want to damage your furniture." This was an obvious joke; the interior of the apartment was so empty that he would have guessed it uninhabited if not for her presence. The walls and floor were bare, unadorned concrete, and the straw mat she sat upon was the only piece of furniture in the room.

"So." She shifted slightly, pursing her lips around her cigarette. "What's a Yankee wizard doing on my turf? I assume you're not here to challenge me to a kung-fu battle, because if you are, your wards really suck."

"No, no, not at all." Orton shook his head vigorously. "I didn't want to offend you by coming in warded to the nines. I'm actually here to ask for your help."

"Get to asking, then." She closed her eyes, taking a gentle drag from her cigarette in a way that managed to somehow look contemplative. Her body was that curiously contrasting build one sometimes sees in retired athletes or yoga practitioners, with iron-hard muscles surrounded by pockets of fat and sagging skin.

"Well, it's kind of a long story, but the short version is that I'm looking for a new site to learn the Rite of Repletion. I was supposed to learn it at the Ka-chig-ma monastery, but it's apparently gone now." He carefully avoided specifics. "I threw a couple of divinations, and they led me to you."

"Mmm." She sucked her teeth. "You can pay?"

Orton blushed a little. "Well, I have what I was going to give to the abbot of the monastery... I don't know if it would be valuable to you, but..." He took the coffer out of his pocket. "This is a leaf from the kum bum shù. It's easily the most valuable thing I have."

The woman's eyes opened, gazing upon him in silence for a long moment, then she chuckled. "I think you might actually be the dumbest wizard I have ever met." She took another drag on her cigarette, savoring it.

Orton blinked. "Excuse me?"

"You want to learn the Rite of Repletion so you can purify your body, right?" Orton nodded. "Okay. Eat that leaf."

The very notion scandalized Orton to his core. "Are you joking? It's hundreds of years old! It's a priceless relic!"

"It's a leaf." Yuan Xiaolian rolled her eyes. "Eat it."

Orton opened the coffer with trembling hands, took the leaf out, and held it in front of his mouth for several long seconds. "Are you absolutely, completely sure about this?"

"Oh my God, for fuck's sake." In the blink of an eye, the woman's aura flared with golden light; Orton jerked back, startled, as her forceful presence crossed the distance between them and rammed his own hand into his mouth.

He let out a muffled yelp as he involuntarily bit down on the leaf, then sighed in resignation. What's done is done, he thought, and he chewed and swallowed. It tasted, as he expected, like a dusty-ass leaf that had been sitting in a wooden box for hundreds of years; it was only his own ironclad discipline that kept him from gagging. "Rude," he coughed out as he managed to choke it down.

"Assertiveness can save some time when dealing with the foolish." The woman smirked and arranged her hands a little more comfortably.

"Well, I won't deny that I am often foolish." Orton sighed. "So what do I do now?"

"Do?" Yuan Xiaolian cocked her head. "You digest it, you idiot. You attune your thoughts to the fact of its quintessence, and recognize the identity of your own body."

"Do what now?" Orton blinked. "But that's true of anything my body digests."

"Yeah, you're pretty dumb." She smirked again. "But the leaf was powerful, and that power will let even a dumb-dumb like you sense and understand the mechanisms at work. You don't need your body to be pure, you need to comprehend it well enough to bring it into harmony with your spirit. A Rite of Repletion is only one way to do that, and a pretty crappy way at that." She took another drag off her cigarette. "Purity's only one path to transcendence. Grow up a little, man."

"Hey!" Orton was willing to put up with a lot, but he could be peevish on certain subjects. "You might not believe it, lady, but I'm older than I look."

"I said grow up, not grow old." Abruptly, the woman changed in Orton's perception; she still looked identical, but the disharmony of her features was accentuated. Every wrinkle and flaw of her skin, every sag and droop of her fat, and every hair and mole on her face seemed to blare at Orton, and he felt himself cringing backwards in revulsion despite himself. Then, just as suddenly, she changed again and embodied allure; every muscle and flowing curve enraptured his gaze.

Orton squeezed his eyes shut and shuddered. "Get out of my mind, damn it."

Without transition, she had resumed her normal appearance. "That was just me expressing aspects of myself, gweilo. This is me being in your mind."

Orton's consciousness exploded; he hung, infinitely complex and fractally disparate, in a vast multichronal web of thought. Concepts like stars cast the radiance of reason into shadowy oceans of unconscious desire, and beyond them, like a colossus of cognition, loomed the presence of the mind of Yuan Xiaolian. She was vast, vast beyond imagining, but Orton was neither daunted nor fooled; she seemed large merely because she was external, and thus unified to his perception, rather than being fractured as he was within his own mind. But her power was strange and alien, and he instinctively understood that she was not a magus at all, but rather some practitioner of another tradition of which he knew nothing. He remained calm, and marveled at the strangeness and subtlety of her power even as he absorbed it and channeled it into the runes and structures of his own concepts. As his rite progressed, his own thoughts unified into its singleness of purpose, and his perceptions sharpened and strengthened until he was of one focus and one will.

Within the mindscape, the two cosmic existences beheld each other; time seemed to stretch into an infinity of possibility. And then, just as suddenly as it had begun, reality resolved back into routine, and Orton was sitting in the empty apartment once more.

"Not bad." Yuan Xiaolian took another drag from her cigarette. "Not bad at all."

Orton bowed as low as he could, which was difficult because he was still seated in a lotus position, but he managed it. "I'm grateful to you. How can I repay your kindness?"

The woman snorted. "Leave. Maybe be less dumb in the future."

Orton disentangled his limbs and rose. "The first I can do. But I can't guarantee the second." He turned to leave, but was drawn back by a forceful cough. "Yeah?"

Yuan Xiaolian held out a pack of cigarettes to Orton. "For the road. Maybe they'll help you suck a little bit less."