Chapter 3: First Sin

Disappointingly, freedom wasn’t a specific, spectacular moment in time like in the old bedtime epics of heroes. They worked through a section of the bars steadily, taking periodic breaks for Suilin to rest before spraying more of her venom onto the iron. The process was equally arduous as frustrating.

While Xin was blessedly free of the chain that held him to the wall, the iron shackle was still stuck on his right ankle. But after seeing what her venom did to solid metal, he wasn’t eager to ask her to conduct such delicate work so close to his foot.

What seemed like hours passed before Suilin’s venom weakened the bars enough for even Xin to pull apart.

He stepped through to the other side tentatively—expecting alarm bells to start ringing or a shrill klaxon to blare. But nothing but the same muffled grinding of gears behind stone walls greeted him.

“We’ve only just begun,” Suilin said, her triangular head pointing toward the door, beady eyes unblinking. “Don’t get your hopes up just yet, servant. From here on out, you must swear to follow my every command.” Her voice was dead-serious, missing its previous condescending tone. “The barriers that stand between us and freedom are far more terrible than mere iron and chains.”

Xin climbed the stairs to the door, shielding his eyes against the flickering rays of torchlight streaming through a narrow slot across it. He peeked through the opening and saw that the doorway opened up into a large walkway with crumbling stone arches for a wall.

The door swung open with no resistance; there was no lock. Apparently, the chains and bars were deemed enough to keep a thirteen-year-old boy confined. And they would’ve been—if a rather rude talking snake hadn’t come to Xin’s rescue. Not that he fully trusted her just yet.

Xin slipped into the walkway cautiously. It was longer than it was wide, with arches forming the wall across from him. Torches were bolted into the supports of the stone arches, casting strange shadows from the debris that littered the ground. Mostly old rocks, but also, strangely enough, the rusted frames of discarded constructs.

Doors, similar to his own, were set in regular intervals into the wall on Xin’s side of the hallway. “Are there people in there?” he asked. “Can we help them?”

“Most are empty,” Suilin said. “And those still left are in such a state that would put our escape into jeopardy, servant.”

Unintelligible mutterings echoed from beyond the door next to Xin’s as if to prove her point.

“Makes sense,” Xin said. “I would’ve lost my mind spending just a full day in there.”

“The mortal mind cracks easily,” Suilin replied. “You are simple creatures who require much stimulus to function.”

Xin nodded absent-mindedly. “Did you run into a girl by any chance?” he asked. “She’s around my age and wears her hair in buns. Kind of a crybaby.”

“I’ve seen no such individual,” Suilin responded.

Xin whispered a short prayer to the Heavens for Rui before moving on. Hopefully, she wasn’t a pile of rat excrement. She seemed nice, if not a little tense around the Orphanarium.

Carefully, he stepped around the rusted torso of an old-fashioned humanoid construct, its limbs and missing from the equation. Before Mechaniks began to mold the exteriors of constructs with more stylized designs, they’d strove to replicate every little human feature in the city’s mechanical servants. The result was rather unnerving, and he could see why the aesthetics of modern constructs had evolved as they did.

“What a sad little corner of the city,” Suilin mused. Trapped in a strange place, Xin felt her presence around his neck somewhat comforting. There was a security in her smugness, as if some brevity implied there was still hope for him yet. “Welcome to the real Kunlun, servant. Not the gilded birdcage they’d like for you to believe exists above the surface.”

Xin frowned. “This place looks like shit,” he said, approaching the arches. “And I mean the Falls are bad enough, but I’ve never seen anything like this place. This must be hell.”

Beyond the arches were rolling, ashen hills. Stone and steel structures alike were half-buried in the earth. Hunched figures shambled aimlessly down below, snarling at each other like more beasts than men. The partially-exposed hallway was high enough from off the ground to not attract their attention.

Steel arches and thick pillars rose from the earth high into the sky, eventually disappearing into the dark fog above. He was truly at the base of Kunlun City, not merely its outskirts like the Orphanarium and Outer Port.

Xin thought back to the old creation myths of the city. Supposedly, they’d built everything atop a holy mountain, one consecrated and inhabited by the gods. There was nothing remotely sacred about what Xin saw.

He walked along the arches, shivering from the frigid air. His wet bottoms and shoes hardly helped. Suilin hadn’t told him otherwise, so he could only assume it was the correct path forward.

“Those... weren't people, were they?” Xin asked quietly. “All those stories were true, then—the ones my mother used to tell to frighten me to sleep? Like Yinzha’s Scroll of Demons and Night Creatures? Who knows about this? The City?”

“You sure like to ask questions in threes,” Suilin replied. “I’m sure the Emperor has a clue, in between sessions of drowning himself in divinely-sanctioned debauchery in his Labyrinth. And his state-scholars must know. And the Emperor’s Shamans, conniving reprobates as they are, have hunted us rather successfully for our parts.”

Xin’s brows lifted. “So, the government knows about… demons?”

He’d never heard such talk against the Red Emperor before. The Red Court hadn’t held the throne for long, but few dared to slander his name—not with their rumored network of spies, the Lanterns, watching the streets.

Loudmouths were usually quick to disappear from their usual haunts in seedy taverns and bars. Others, like Madam Sparrow, embraced the reign of the Reds with open arms and heart.

“Naturally,” Suilin said. “For what reasons do you think the Lanterns exist? A futile effort, however. We’ve been hunting your kind since your first set foot from your dingy caves. We merely have to await your eventual extinction.”

“You’re a demon,” Xin said forthrightly. “Why didn’t you eat me? That’s what you creatures do. Well… in the stories, I suppose.”

Suilin scoffed, a strange mix of hissing and verbal groaning. “Not all of us are like those corpse-eaters down there,” she said, offended. “Our intelligence grows with our age. Decades pass like minutes for us, centuries nothing more than a matter of biding our time. Your precious Restored Dynasty is as infantile as a barely-sentient warty toad demon.”

“Why not have cities of your own then?” Xin asked. “If you’re that much more ascended than us short-lived mortals.”

Suilin quieted at that.

“Silence,” she finally said as they reached the end of the hallway. “There’s danger up ahead, servant.”

Xin didn’t get to enjoy his win for long. The ground descended into a staircase. At its base, a humanoid figure in a tattered tunic was biting into a rat the size of a small puppy, the sickening crunch of gnashing teeth on bones and flesh echoing up the stairs.

“A corpse-eater?” Xin whispered, crouching low. He tried in vain to stop himself from trembling. Thankfully, the figure didn’t seem to notice him, too engrossed in its meal. “How do we get past it? Are you going to fight it?”

“Do you pick a fight with every fellow human that happens to stand in your way?” Suilin asked mirthfully. Xin didn’t answer her, looking away from beady dark eyes pointedly. “My scent will blot out your mortal stench, servant. Simply keep your nerves on ice and the lowly corpse-eater will let us be on our way.”

Xin found each step down the staircase agonizing, but a merchant kept his word, and he’d promised to listen to Suilin’s every command.

Soon enough, every last detail of the corpse-eater was visible in Xin’s sight. The ghoul wore a dark blindfold over his eyes, bone spurs jutting at odd angles all over his body from dark-blue flesh that was covered in festering scabs. His teeth were sharp, jagged, and numerous—barely fitting in his snarling mouth.

Xin cautiously edged around the corpse-eater, taking deep, measured breaths to suppress the scream building in his throat as the ghoul shuffled closer, sniffing the air. The ghoul stood only inches from him, while Suilin coiled tighter around his neck.

The corpse-eater glanced away, shuffling onward up the stairs. Xin's legs almost gave out, but he steadied himself and moved toward the end of the hall.

It led into a lab—or what had once been one, at least. Shallow, man-made ditches of running water lined the walls of the space, surrounding four tables arranged in an auspicious feng shui formation, each facing a cardinal direction.

Various reliefs of holy figures were carved across the walls. Though there was something off about the carvings. Each relief was defaced in some specific, sacrilegious way—such as the Adamantine Budhha missing his usual jolly head. They didn’t mean much to Xin, but he reckoned the Priest would’ve had a field day with them.

He turned his attention to the rest of the room.

The ceiling of the room was nonexistent, the walls stretching up into a vast expanse of darkness.

Across the room, directly in Xin's path, stood a large pair of double doors, sealed by an old first-strata construct resembling a centipede. Its raised form stretched diagonally across the doors, its legs coiled into sockets—serving as what he assumed to be the locks.

“Ah,” Suilin said, studying the room with her beady dark eyes. The white triangle of her head bobbed up and down enthusiastically. “What a fortuitous encounter. Do you know what the Heavens deemed the first sin of mortals?”

Xin contemplated for a moment. “Greed?”

Suilin smirked. “No,” she replied curtly. “The desire to live forever, immortality.”

A blend of scientific and religious relics were scattered over the desks. Whoever previously owned the lab had never bothered to clean up. At the center of the chamber sat a large glass cylinder lined with brass. Whatever horrors had occurred, it left behind a mess, blood staining the circumference of the transparent walls.

To the eastern side, jars filled with exotic beast parts and preserved eyeballs on a shelf beside the ditches, while tattered scrolls spilled across the northernmost table closest to the door.

On the same table as the scrolls sat a small, palm-sized glass bottle shaped like a traditional drinking gourd.

If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

“Whoever owned this laboratory left us a gift behind,” Suilin said. “How kind—a Grieving Ghost Extract.” Xin assumed she was referring to the bright blue liquid sloshing within the gourd. “Bottoms up, servant. It’s as you mortals say: No way but forward.”

Xin picked up the gourd, weighing it in his hand. “I am not drinking this,” he hissed. “This is insane. I can’t be consuming mystery substances off the table of some maniac’s underground sewer lab. What does it even do?”

For some reason, he thought of what Madam Sparrow would think: Young man, you positively cannot be drinking strange liquids at the behest of talking, demonic serpents! Act your age!

A chill ran down Xin’s spine. The temperature of the lab dropped at once, his breath misting in the air. The shrill wail of a funeral pipe filled the room. From the darkness above, the chittering of rats echoed downwards. They were descending… and fast.

“Servant,” Suilin said more forcibly. “Do as I say and drink the fucking elixir!”

He scooped the gourd in his hands and pulled the cork from the lip, hands shaking. “Heavens watch over me,” he whispered. “Can you just tell me what it does?”

Suilin hissed; Xin brought the gourd to his lips and drank.

The bright blue liquid burned as it went down, harsh and rough like the cheap liquor he'd once stolen a sip of.

Xin dropped to his knees. The pain didn’t stop at his throat; he could feel it spreading through his body, leaving a searing trail in its wake. Finally, the burning sensations subsided, settling down in his stomach with a warm fuzzy kick.

Xin rose unsteadily, gripping the table for support. His mind went blank at the sight of his arms—his veins stood out starkly, glowing blue against pale, fading skin. It was as if half of him had turned spectral.

A sharp pain blossomed around his neck, Suilin’s head, fangs dotted with blood, pulling away from his neck. Whatever she’d done, it’d stabilized him somehow. His flesh stopped fading into transparency, but his veins were still glowing with the same blue color.

“Get the locks open!” Suilin demanded, jerking her head in the direction of the wide double doors. “Now, servant. The construct will listen to you.”

Rats swarmed down the walls, their red eyes glowing as hundreds of them stared at Xin from the darkness above. The sharp, staccato click of heels pierced through the flute’s incessant shrieking from the hallway behind, drawing closer to the room.

Xin flung his hand out at the door, screaming: “Open!” The centipede lock remained dormant. “Unlock! Dispel!”

“Not quite,” Suilin said. “Tap into the power of elixir, servant.”

Xin clicked his tongue angrily, shaking. Was it from fear of his approaching demise? Fury at Suilin’s vague instruction? Or perhaps a combination of both factors.

A pale face emerged from the darkness of the hallway. Torches blew out in succession around the room. “Are you lost, child?” the face asked dreamily, his eyelids fluttering open and shut. It belonged to a body far too gangly and tall, limbs freakishly out of proportion. His face was clearly foreign, and not just to Kunlun, but in a way that mocked humanity. His features were all there—two eyes, a hooked nose, pale lips, but so eerily devoid of emotions and movement it made Xin’s skin crawl to look upon him.

The approximation of a human being was hunched by necessity, straightening only to his full height after entering the lab. He wore a patchwork suit tailored in Western fashion and a top-hat over long, straw-colored hair that was matted greasily to his scalp. Put frankly, he was dressed like a man who spent all day in the sewers kidnapping children.

“What are you?” Xin asked. “Why do this?”

The Piper stopped. His mouth stretched into a wide, toothless smile. “Most curious ingredients this time around,” he replied. “Few bother to ask questions. I shall answer. For the pursuit of immortality and nothing more. Your bones will become the foundation of my new eternal life, your flesh the components of my elixirs. Children have so many uses. Wouldn’t you agree, serpent? Now, come to me. Become one with me.”

Xin slowly backed away toward the doors, moving around the table in his way by feeling around the edges. He curled his fingers, and compelled by an unknown force, pointed it toward the locked doors.

“Don’t count on it,” Xin hissed while shivering. Not only from fear, but from the raw power that coursed through his body. His body jolted as if splashed by a bucket of freezing glacier water. No mountain was too high, not while every fiber of his body quivered with a strange sort of ecstasy.

Something sickly and spectral peeled itself from his body. A specter stretched out from Xin’s slender frame.

Within seconds, the specter, cloaked in a hood and burial linens, swept across the room and slammed into the centipede locks. One by one, its legs disengaged from the sockets, the doors slowly rumbling to life. Xin stared at his hand, now covered in a thin layer of frost. Had he just done that?

He saved the questions for later, rushing through the gap in the double doors before they were even fully open.

“Most excellent,” Suilin said. “I was worried for a second you’d end up like the others. You have a talent for consuming elixirs most uncommon among mortals. I suggest you pursue it once we're free of this dreary place, servant. With your ability to resolutely consume liquids of questionable origin, there’s not a Sorcerer alive who would turn you down as an apprentice.”

“Is now really the time?” Xin asked, feet pounding furiously against the grimy stone bricks that made up the floor of an expansive sewer tunnel. “You do have a plan, right?”

Rats poured out through the doorway behind Xin, chasing after him with an accursed shrieking noise that was bound to follow him into the realm of nightmares… if he even lived to sleep another night.

“Naturally,” Suilin replied, looking straight ahead. “Look up. There’s always some sort of construct laying around these parts. Relics of the old wars. They will respond to the Extract burning through your meridians, servant.”

Xin skidded to a halt. Salvation lay in the form of a vertical lift, its rail lines seemingly intact, shooting up through a dim tunnel. The only problem was that it was behind the legs of a massive statue—no, Xin realized, not a rigid stone carving at all, but a construct. It stood as tall as a two-story dwelling, broad faceplate forged to resemble a reptilian beast—the taotie. In the construct’s raised arms was a sword poised to strike down at the ground.

“By the Red,” Xin said breathlessly. He raised his arm toward the ground and thought of control. The elixir appeared to respond to direct, willful commands as opposed to panicked mental jabbering.

With a sharp of hiss, he demanded the construct bring his sword down on the Piper.

Like before with the locks, a specter emerged from Xin's body, its phantom-blue arm momentarily intrapositioned with his own outstretched hand before the rest of its body shot up toward the giant construct.

The Piper walked down the sewer chamber without any sense of urgency. He held a flute in his hands, made of dark wood and adorned with silver patterns, its brassy end flaring out like the maw of a beast gaping open to scream into the darkness.

“Please,” Xin whispered, sweat beading down his face. “I beg of you… work.”

The construct creaked to life like a thousand rusty hinges opening at once. There was a greater tug between the specter and Xin than before.

“The Scripting,” he said, “I feel it somehow—it’s responding to me.”

The Piper was just mere paces away, his rats hidden within his shadows. They weren’t keen on approaching, not with Suilin hissing around his neck.

Whistles screamed from the pipes adorning the construct’s shoulders. Beneath the bronze plates shielding its inner workings, the Scripting flared to life, old Mechaniks parts grinding into motion. The taotie couldn’t move its legs—too corroded to function—but with a forceful push, Xin commanded it to swing the tip of the sword down into the ground.

The Piper frowned for a fraction of a second before the sword came down on his head, smashing through the ground. The sewer chamber rumbled as the floor gave way. Xin sprinted toward the lift, sliding between the construct’s legs as solid ground collapsed at his heels. He leaped over the lift’s railing and pushed down the control level, panting hard.

“Well done,” Suilin said, watching the taotie construct plummet into the abyss in a storm of falling debris and stones. “That wasn’t terribly difficult, was it, servant?”

The lift rumbled up the rails, ascending at a moderate pace. Xin leaned on the railing, exhausted, his gaze drifting into the darkness below, and then toward his hands.

“Is this some kind of Sorcery?” he asked, his eyes tracing the bright blue lines spreading across his forearms like a delta winding through a marsh. “I want an explanation, Suilin. I deserve that much.”

Suilin hissed softly. “Has anyone ever told you’re an especially uncute child?” she replied, staring at him. “Very well. What you’ve consumed is a product of Sorcery, though it certainly doesn’t make you a warlock or shaman by any means. Mortal alchemists on their ill-fated pursuit of immortality discovered that the remains of demon’s hold very special properties that, once refined, can alter someone’s constitution, even granting miraculous abilities.”

Xin nodded along. It made sense so far. He had no delusions of a dormant power awakening within him like an immortal hero from the legends. His survival was owed to the strange blue elixir and, irritatingly enough, Suilin. Though it felt as if he’d done the lion’s share of work.

“Is this permanent?” Xin ventured. His mind wandered toward the possibilities. It would be comforting to know he’d have a special skill that might tide him through after his eventual booting from the Orphanarium. “I don’t know what’s quite real anymore. It’s been a strange morning.”

“Not until you purge it from your system,” Suilin replied matter-of-factly. “Burn it from your meridians, so to speak—a wildly inconvenient method, but one tried and true by your predecessors. They drink in more measured doses, however.”

Xin’s brows lifted. “Predecessors?”

Silence filled the space. The lift crawled up the large vertical shaft, slowly, but surely. A part of him was afraid to see the Piper climbing up after them on the rails. It was impossible to tell what Suilin was thinking, snakes weren’t especially great at visually reflecting emotions, but there was a deep contemplation to her dark, slitted eyes.

“The elixirs were an accidental discovery,” she finally said. “Once the court alchemists saw they were hardly the answer to immortality, but just a mere clue, they passed them off to the Emperor’s Lanterns. His hunting hounds.”

“They hunt monsters,” Xin said blankly. He could infer that much at least. “They consume demons to hunt demons? It all sounds rather far-fetched. The Lanterns I know are the Emperor’s secret police. They round up gossip-mongers and petty criminals, no more.”

“Do I look like a fairy tale to you?” Suilin asked, a hint of humor in her voice. “Keep up, servant. It is not illogical for the Lanterns to hunt my kind—we sustain ourselves by gorging on humanity’s faults. The world acts in response to its various components. That’s one thing those idiot alchemists got around.”

Xin frowned. “The Heavens direct the world,” he recited from the first few verses of Dynastic Decree. It was the guiding hand of humanity. But the next words came from his own heart. “Demons don’t belong in the world. Everyone knows that. Killing your kind is like ridding a field of a vicious fox or bringing bandits to justice. All you do is take from humans. There’s no value you bring to society.”

“Do you know how we, yaoguai, rise from the underworld?” she continued. “How do you think those corpse-eaters came about? They were once human, just as much as you. But when driven to starvation, they chose to consume the flesh of their kind, damning them to their… well, current existence.” She laughed. “Who cares if we bring no value to your societies. We owe our rise to the pitfalls of your miserably short lives. It’s an open secret amongst the bureaucrats of your great courts.

“It’s not just us the Lanterns are turned against. The Four Greater Courts of the Restored Dynasty move their agents like chess pieces on a board, jockeying for power by tapping into forces they’ve scarcely even begun to understand. We kill humans, but just as many of your lives have been cut short by the likes of the very Extract running through your veins. Your kind, Lanterns, cannibalize each other for petty, trivial baubles and stretches of land that will outlive your kings and emperors.

“Peasants sacrificed to the greatest human construct of all… war—all so that your kings may wallow in opulence with their concubines and servants. They’re too short-sighted to see that they’ve crafted the instrument of their own destruction. As you continue to kill each other, more of us will rise from your remains, from your wars and petty conflicts, from your filth…”

Suilin railed off. Her voice had grown softer with each word. Suddenly, it was explicit to Xin just how weak she appeared, her slender body languishing around his neck, head bowed toward the lift’s grime-covered floor.

“Suilin?” Xin said, bringing his hand up to her head, cradling it. It felt as if he were all that was holding her up. “You are not going to leave me up here all alone.”

To his ears, it sounded more like a question than a statement.

Suilin raised her head weakly. “I did promise to take you out of this dreadful place, didn’t I, servant?”

Xin just listened.

“I’m afraid the damage I’ve sustained before meeting you was quite extensive,” she said, flickering her forked tongue against his palm. “You’ve listened to my every command rather prodigiously. I might’ve even taken you on as a demonic servant if circumstances were different.”

“So, you’re dying?” Xin asked. He hadn’t known the snake for very long, but it didn’t feel right to just simply watch her perish in his hand. After everything, how could he simply return to his life in the Orphanarium? Carry on as if the morning’s events had just been a dreadful nightmare?

He stared at his arms, still glowing. “You can cut the facade,” he said. “What do you need?”

Suilin mustered a coy smile, well, as coy as a snake could appear. “There is something you could do for me,” she said. “We are not creatures of flesh and meridians. Our entire system, every last complicated mechanism, relies on the function of our Core. It stores our senses, our powers, our essence.”

Xin stared at her incredulously. Suilin coughed a pale white orb into his hand. It felt dry to the touch but strangely cool.

“All you have to do,” Suilin said, uttering each word slowly and deliberately, “is swallow it.”