The way Jin tells it, he mostly just remembers the dark.

He’s explicit on that point, which is interesting. The dark, not ‘a’. He tells them about what he saw in the fortress city, about the weight of revelation and the pain of comprehension that he saw in those Deaths. He tells them of the visions that haunted him in that infirmary and the cold, crawling sensation on his skin of death close by.

And then he tells them about his dreams.

In the dark.

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He was gone. Jin knows this in his bones- he was gone. Taken away. He could not feel his body, could not feel the cycling of Qi in his meridians, could not feel the weight of his own mind collapsing in on him. He felt a sensation not unlike being pulled somewhere far, far away, the sight of all those dead next to all those corpses that used to be people before Death found them sending him deep into himself. He doesn’t know what he was thinking in those moments… but the sense of vagueness, the way that his sense of self went away at the sight of those things, will stay with him for a long time.

And then… he vaguely remembers being picked up. Kinda-sorta recognizes that there is movement and change in the air around him, and then he is someplace quiet, and warm, and safe, and dark, and he cried with relief because he didn’t have to see anymore.

And then he went to sleep.

Only to be pulled awake somewhere else.

Jin blinked, and realized that he did not have eyes or eyelids over which to close them. He looked down at himself, and there was a shape to him, but it was vague, ephemeral. The tips of his nails and an ash-like covering highlighted him, and it took him a while to realize it was probably just dead skin and inert tissue, like big sis Li Shu always said. He remembered the thought he had, briefly, when it touched inside the mind he had retreated from- everyone has Death, all the time. Always dying and being born, always changing, always covered in an infinity of little pieces of themselves with no life.

He looked around, wondering how he could see, how he could feel or breathe in this place- only to realize he couldn’t. See or breathe, that is. It was more like he just knew things, and had no need for breath.

Dressed like an ash-dusted ghost of himself, he looked around in the dark.

It took a while, but eventually he found something.

Stretching… not down. He tries to use that word, but it’s not right. It wasn’t down below, because there was no below, there was only Death and the dark, but somewhere almost like below, there was a cord. A little tunnel of not-death, but tinged with that ashen color, coiling up and up out of someplace he could not see or feel. He tried to follow the cord, and for a while, it seemed like it worked; he began to feel warm, the touch of something soft on skin, the sensation of living lungs pulling in and expelling air…

Something stopped him. Like an impenetrable wall, he thought, only to follow the sensation more closely in the disorienting dark and realize it wasn’t in front of him, but behind. A band or some sort of restraint, wrapped tight around the half-outlined shape of himself.

Once he knew what it felt like, he could begin to comprehend it. When he began to comprehend it, he began to see it.

A long, slender nail, like a single talon of perfectly white bone, hooked ever-so-slightly against someplace deep inside of him. Someplace cold, and quiet, and dark, though not as dark as the dark.

He remembers following that nail towards something like a finger, but not. Like a memory of a finger, made up entirely of ash-colored flesh, dead but pristine… and beyond it, more fingers, too many, around the idea of what might have been a wrist, and going up and up and-

Someone whispered something, there in the dark. He hadn’t realized he could still hear. Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe this was something else.

But he heard a whisper.

Don’t. You’ll END.

And he knew that the whisper was true, deep down, beyond any doubt. He heard a voice that was not Death but which spoke for it, and that voice told him something beyond faith and beyond understanding. It spoke, and he felt, deep down, that sometimes there are things worse than death, and that perhaps to END might be one of them.

So he stopped looking at the hand which was not a hand, but was a corpse-thing of perfect ash, and he waited.

And waited.

And… eventually, got very bored of waiting, and started to look again. Not at the not-hand; that much, he knew, would be a mistake. But without a mind to break, without a stomach to hunger or a heart to beat or Qi to tend to, all he had was his own mind, the Death which outlined him, and the Dark. And so, he thought. Separate and far from the vomit-inducing nausea and fear and horror and despair of those visions that he saw, he reflected on them.

Death is… normal. A part of life, perhaps, a part of the world. Jin has seen more of it than he would like to, and knew, in that Dark place, that he would see more, but it also simply is, just as life simply is, or as the world simply is.

But Death is not equal. He saw that entirely, deeply, the moment that finger of Death by Battle crawled in through the doorway and grew into the Deaths on the surgical tables all around. There are, he realizes, two things left behind, or perhaps created, by the act of dying.

There are ghosts. Qi, a material which underpins all the world’s rules and which responds to thought, does not vanish perfectly or instantly after death- it rushes out from the bodies of cultivators, from any source in which it resides once that source is unmade, free to be reabsorbed by the world or to be used to cause a change or creation. In the case of a person, sometimes, perhaps, that Qi remembers the shape of the mind which held and changed and created it, and keeps that shape a bit longer after the mind has died. The shape of someone who once was, imprinted on a natural energy of the world by their life, yet always fading.

And then, there is Death. This, Jin had and has no real ability to explain, save that, perhaps, in the act of dying, a new shape is made. The universe reflects on the vacuum of what once was a person, and the concept of that vacuum takes up its own space for a moment.

Or maybe it’s just his mind, making up a way to make sense of what he saw. Maybe every Death is created or changed by those who see it, by those who understand or grieve it. As ephemeral as a thought and as final and concrete as a transformation in the world and all those who reside in it.

As he meditated on the two parts of Death, the vacuum of someone going away and the imprint of their shape left behind, he realized that he could ‘see’ more clearly. The space around him grew clearer-defined, every flake of dead skin and inert cells in his body becoming brighter to his impossible senses.

And he began to feel it.

He saw the Death of the soldiers on the operating table before they died. Helped to fight back against it, helped to understand where it came from, but still that Death came before their complete cessation. A shadow of what might be, in the ways that something has been broken and unmade. He felt that same Death, realized or half-formed, all throughout the room and past its edges.

He felt it then. As loud as he’s ever felt it. Louder than all those dead bodies, louder than the endless waves of dead and dying he could feel fighting through the walls at the front. Louder than the sound of the fortress breaking, over towards the Deaths he sensed close to his master.

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There was a DEATH in that place. Far off, wrapped around higher and stranger things, but like waking up from a deep sleep and feeling the sun on your skin, he felt it, radiating out, impossible to not notice once brought to awareness.

He remembered looking toward that long, slender talon once more. Remembered trying to look past the pristine corpse that wore it, up to the thing that wears the pristine and impossible corpse. He felt its words echoing in him, felt the pitch-Black of that infinity he was in begin to shimmer and grow, felt the size of that impossible celestial thing behind him…

There is a DEATH, and it waits there, he thinks. Up above the world, above forever, above everything, and wrapped up in that death, connected to it like a tree branch to a ripe fruit, there is something greater and vaster and stranger than DEATH which is an END.

In that contrast, he understood something. He understood, much more deeply, what that whispered truth had meant when it had said that he would END.

From DEATH can come life. Can come CHANGE. Can come food, and grief, and memory and ghosts and the shape of what was and what ended it. In DEATH, there is meaning and there is consequence and connection.

In the END, there is nothing. Nothing at all.

And then he felt like his ‘vision’ was clouded. It took him a while to realize just how bright the bits of ash and death that made up his shape in that place had gotten, almost like they’d begun to meld with the bright white nail that held him.

This time, though, it was not the first voice that whispered, not some alien thing which had dragged his attention to safety. He got the impression that one warning was all he’d get from it.

No, instead, he’d been brought out of it by something he hadn’t yet felt before, something new in that place. A smell, beyond just cold and ash and Dark.

Tangerines. Faint, but there, right alongside the memory of the not-hand on his shoulder in the infirmary. Right alongside the memory, still ever-bright in his mind, of the boy that his master had spoken to beneath the light of the Cold Sun.

He looked, back towards the cord stretching to where sensation and life were, and found that he could see and feel more there. A shape, wrapped around his cord. No more than a wisp, wrapped loosely around his connection from this death-place back to his life, like a ribbon awkwardly thrown against a branch and tangled with it.

In that wisp of not-shape, he saw something, the same color as the ash of the Death he carries on his skin and nails, but brighter, purer. Less alive. For a brief moment, he saw a face, one that he did not know but which is achingly familiar, something like that of a boy waving with a smile- and something like a mashed lump of meat, separate from anything human.

Part of that same wisp of Death wafted out from the point of connection it had with Jin, up towards the hand holding him in place and towards the things behind it, the wider DEATH above it and the END far, far, far above that. It is not his, he realized. Unlike the cord which connected him to life, it belonged and was of DEATH, in its own much smaller way.

It does not have a name. It doesn’t even have a face, barely even the memory of an impression of one. But from it, the slightest hint of tangerine and kindness.

Slowly, Jin reached out. He felt, straining through that cord that connected him, a little bit of Qi, perhaps, so small and so gradual he could barely tell it apart from the nothing all around.

With those droplets, he managed to reach forward, and pull the little wisp into a ball, bit by bit. Condensing it, tightening its connection to the Death that he was represented as there, both himself and the death of himself. He felt that bit of essence, that memory and concept, meld tighter together, pulling in from the DEATH above and growing heavier against the cord of him.

That took a while. Maybe a really long time. Time was… hazy there, and seemed to go on forever and also flash by like it was never there at all. Next thing he knew, it felt like some great pressure was lifted from the space around him, the Dark and DEATH both pulling away and lessening their presence. A little while later, or perhaps days (again, hard to tell), he felt the cord connecting him to his body stirring, and the nail of the hand of the ashen and impossible corpse pulled away- and he woke up.

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“And then you did that incredibly loud sniffing, which was super weird, and now we’re… here? Where is here?”

Raika looks over at Li Shu, a flash of worry crossing her friend’s face and matching her own. That… was a lot. Jin, for his part, barely even seems to recognize it as a lot, like he just woke up from a weird dream rather than some insanely high-end vision. If anything, it reminded Raika of a lesser form of her Tribulations, perhaps.

“We just went past a desert area,” she says to Jin, “a place made… well, mostly Ruin. Sand made of bone dust that ate things, dead bodies, ruined weapons, that sort of thing. You were unconscious for almost a week.”

Jin shakes his head, flinching at sore muscles from how long he stayed still. “That… huh. Sorry, master, just feels sort of short. Weird.”

Raika gets closer to him again, paying closer attention to his scent. She noticed that his Qi changed when he woke up, but obviously a story like that bears closer examining.

She breathes, slow and deep, letting her brains dedicated to sensory data absorb the data slowly and clearly. Synesthesia helps, the upgrade to her sensory package allowing her to get more than just conceptual impressions from the scent.

Looking at Jin, she sees a dark room. Not pitch black- a comfortable dark, someplace soothing in its own right. What little light there is illuminates smoke, like incense, maybe, or pipe-smoke, and there is a closeness and calm to the scene, turning the space around him into a place both shadowed and intimate.

There are still whispers, bits of sound almost like words, like the room is crowded just out of sight… but now there is one voice that is a little bit louder. It doesn’t speak words, not really, but the tone, the intonation, the energy behind it…

“Jin, did… the wisp you mentioned. Did it have a name?”

Jin shakes his head. “No. I… I think the dead have to be really strong to hold onto a name, or anything really. It really was just a tiny piece of someone else. But it seems… nice? Like… I don’t know how to explain it. That sort of stuff, the Death stuff, it kind of sometimes connects to other things, you know? Like, you can have a fire that’s a campfire that makes you feel warm, or a fire that’s a campfire that cooks food.”

“How did the… the larger Death there feel?” Li Shu asks, stepping in as Raika processes what she’s hearing. “Did it seem like something alien, or-”

“I think it was just big,” Jin says. “And… I mean, it was kinda scary, but it felt like it was there to protect me? Like it was holding me in place, so the really heavy stuff around me couldn’t just squish me. Like a wolf in the woods, and you know it’ll get hungry someday, but none of the snakes come close and it doesn’t try to bite, so you get just a little closer.”

Li Shu sends Raika a meaningful look, one that snaps Raika out of her thoughts a bit. Part of the reason she’d kept them inside her body had been to protect them from a death-saturated wasteland, after all, and apparently, Jin had been seeing some truly horrifying visions well before that place. If some higher being took an interest, kept him from being crushed by the visions of that place…

And then something else. Something that clicks a bit in Raika’s mind, calling back to perhaps the most important conversation she’s had recently.

‘You get to eat and sleep without the Heavens or the gods feeding you little visions and dreams,’ it had said. Right after telling her about how they were on the fringes of its house. Right before it finished putting the band in place around her inner world.

Had leaving the Wall and the parts of the world directly under the Empire’s control let something slip through? Something that could reach out to Jin’s pre-existing connection to death and the Cold Sun?

She frowns. Could it have been…

Maybe. It hasn’t spoken or acted directly since the many-wraith thing spoke to her back when the pond was a pond in the actual ground, and she still has no real name for whatever that thing is behind the Cold Sun. But its avatar had called Jin a window, all those months ago.

She shifts her focus, going over Jin one more time. Another deep breath, this time while she places a hand on his wrist, feeling his meridians under his skin alongside the blood and chemicals a body produces.

A dark room, just bright enough to see the ash and incense and pipe-smoke, just a little brighter than before. Just a little louder in that way which silence makes anything loud, with that one voice, that one young voice coming through a little louder. The room is larger than before, too, maybe… maybe.

He hasn’t quite entered the Foundational realm yet, but it won’t be long, and he’ll have a much more refined sense of his own Qi and his deeper… well, foundations.

She sighs. Above all of that… he’s alive. He’s awake. He’s ok.

She brings him close and hugs him, his body maybe a third the size of hers from age, malnutrition, and her massive frame.

“I’m glad you’re alright, kid.”

He says something so muffled that even her enhanced senses don’t quite parse it, but that can wait. She’s just glad that he’s ok. He’s her responsibility, and it was her fault, and he’s a good kid.

It’s only when he cycles his Qi to push off that she lets him go, where he gasps in a breath (which, Raika thinks, is a bit overdramatic).

“Gods and spirits, master, I thought those things were going to break my neck!”

Raika looks down at her chest, blinking. Huh. They are pretty much the size of his head, aren’t they?

She starts laughing, and Li Shu lets out a giggle of surprise, and Jin goes bright red, and he’s alive and he’s ok and he’s ok.

The vision, the wisp he’s apparently gained more control and ownership of, the potential implications of higher beings interacting with him as they did- all that can wait. For now… he’s ok.

Many-Grasping emanates waves of awkward confusion as Jin blushes harder and both Raika and Li Shu let go of waves of anxiety, laughing their relief out to the sky.