Chapter 21: The City of Spirits

  As a matter of fact, when life became dull, Mo Fei ascended….

  ***

  My eyes snapped open, a reality that felt more like a dream than reality itself. I gasped, and my breathing was the comfortable, familiar sound. Then I focused on my ribbon with my one eye still covered. The letter 5 (伍) glowed in a faint moonlit glow as it always did.

  “That means I ascended.” I looked around. I was in a beautiful place surrounded by green nature. It was the most beautiful world… Perfect, too perfect.

  My hand raised to open the cloth in my eye, expecting it to get regenerated because of ascension. When I opened it… Nothing had changed. My other small wounds were healed completely, as if I had never got any… yet this one.

  “No! Why?” I asked myself, but no one answered. Now I was alone here, still blind in one eye, but my ear was healed. I could hear everything clearly once again.

  I stared at the cloth, at the bloody fabric. My hand trembled, just slightly, only once. Then I clenched it into a fist.

  “No time for that,” I muttered. “I got plenty of time to think of it later.” A cost… A

  A cost of the curse that remains forever.

  I stood up, put back the clothes to myself again and looked around at a place where I'd never been before, waiting for people who might or might not come.

  The moon hung in the air… Not the blood moon of the world four but the same moon I had missed.

  The air was warm, too warm. It smelled like flowers… Jasmine? No, it was different, or maybe it was the ones my mother used to keep on the balcony. Except those never actually bloomed in the first place. And there were many types of fragrance, some familiar but not at the same time, some completely unfamiliar… like that sweet honeyed smell.

  Longing Heaven.

  “The city of ‘South Cleveland’,” I muttered under my breath. “Will it find you?”

  Lin said the city would find me. What did she mean by that? What kind of answer was that? Ugh, you could have given me a hint, you dumbass. Her voice echoed in my mind, certainly not helpful at all. But anyway, I had to survive till they came. I've got a weapon. I'm not empty-handed this time.

  What could possibly go wrong?

  Yet I walked. The grass whispered under my feet, not the rustle of blades, but something else. Almost words, almost nothing. I was imagining words that had never been there.

  Then I stopped for a second. Nothing… then I kept walking. That's when I heard the breathing. The grass beneath my feet was soft, too soft like walking on something that had felt the weight after decades.

  My hand raised to touch my temple to use my ‘Apprentice's eyes’. I wanted to make sure where others were. But before my hand could touch my head… A voice rang, someone breathing heavily as if they were running away from something, crying.

  My hand stopped from the distraction.

  “Someone… Someone is here.” I looked around, forgetting Lin's words.

  I walked towards the voice, two voices of kids. The very next second I realized my foolishness.

  “Dang, I can't decide whether it's real or not, it could be a trap.” I knew it, I damn well knew it, but my head still turned toward the sound because they were crying, because they were children what if there was even a slight chance. I didn't like to be heroic, but I knew how it felt running from terror.

  Another outcome would be an undeniable trap, of course, with no other possibilities.

  But it wasn't…the next moment, two kids burst through the treeline running towards me, their faces streaked with tears and their eyes wide with terror.

  But behind them… nothing at all. Empty air stillness, yet they ran like death itself was breathing on their necks.

  ‘What do you run from when nothing is there?’ I was about to find out.

  Their eyes laid on me with a hopeful spark. Those two kids ran toward me. The smaller one couldn't have been more than eight and kept looking back over his shoulder… At nothingness.

  The other was barely ten years old, her face the colour of ash, the girl wearing a half done ribbon on her head. She ran looking at the boy whose one shoe was missing, her face tainted with hysteria.

  I saw the girl's lips moving. I could hear them even when the sound was not present.

  “bié guò lái.” Bie guo lai… don't come close. I'd heard these words before, not from others, but from myself… in world two when I screamed at Yan Gu.

  Both of these kids bypassed me and hid behind me. They looked at the Glaive not as a weapon but as a shield.

  “Who're you?” I was still unsure. I didn't know anything about these kids. How were they here? If they were truly real.

  “Please… help us.” The boy said in a cracked voice followed by the terrified voice of the girl.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  “Mei couldn't run fast enough.” The girl's voice was flat now. Too flat. Like she'd used up all her tears.

  “The houses…” The girl couldn't finish.

  “They don't have-” The boy grabbed my sleeve. “They take-” He couldn't finish either. My gaze landed behind them. Nothing had changed, still nothing.

  I asked, “Take what?”

  The girl's hand went to her chest and then at the boy. “Us.”

  The boy tugged my sleeve. “Can you see them? Please say you can see them.” I couldn't truly care about it, but my instinct was as if it was keeping me together.

  “Who?”

  “G-Ghosts.” The boy cried out his hand and clenched my clothes.

  Fuck you mean ghosts? Yes, I wasn't a coward, but if it was true, how the fuck could I fight a thing that was already dead?

  “Ghosts? You mean monsters.” I corrected or perhaps reassured myself. The boy's hand was wet. I didn't ask why.

  Then, when the intestine wrapped him, I realized the boy was already touched. The thing was already on him.

  But before the next words came out, from the deep forest. It stretched illogically long before wrapping the waists of the kids that started tearing up in fear, and then it started pulling them with an intense force.

  My right hand quickly clenched the intestine, wet, slick, and warm in a way living things shouldn't be warm.

  Yet I pulled it toward me. It stretched. A rubber band logic, totally wrong logic. I expected it to snap but it didn't. My feet dug into the grass. When the kid screamed more, I tried to pull, but the thing pulled me instead into the forest. Dang it, of course nothing ever goes in these worlds the way it should. Yes, I recognized, it was certainly not those monsters I had faced before.

  My other hand held the Glaive tighter, Tch and I swung the blade. It bit into the intestine but it stopped. I couldn't. My hands were shaking, not in fear but in an unbalance, or maybe… Maybe a jagged fear that I tried hiding.

  The Glaive slipped from my hand and my heart stopped, going without a weapon? The fear took over me without realizing I let go of the intestine to catch the Glaive.

  I let the kids fall in terror. Those very kids who hid behind me assured themselves that I'd ‘Save’.

  No- I realized my mistake, but it was too late. Two seconds, those two seconds were enough to pull them. I rushed as they vanished into the dark forest. I ran following them.

  ….

  Everything changed the very second I entered the forest. I had crossed a line between death and life, a world of spirits. The perfect beautiful world had faded. Now I was in a place veiled by large trees. I tried finding kids but I couldn't.

  “A lost youth.”

  The voice echoed… Where? Where did it come from? When I looked around. What I saw next was absurd: the trees spoke, faces in the trees spoke. I ignored them and my throat dried in fear. I hated it but I couldn't deny being a coward.

  I took steps, and a splashing sound echoed under my feet, not the mud, but the blood. I looked around from the leaves of the tree didn't fall drops of water, but blood.

  Inside the forest, a town appeared with small houses in a house broken, abandoned. I saw the kids standing at the doorway… I swallowed, realizing that I had fallen into a very simple trap even when I knew it was.

  The children's mouth opened wide, the jaw ripped in four, and from deep inside something looked out at me, not eyes but the attention of something.

  “You let them go,” they said with their voices, their terror. “You really chose that Glaive over them, most choose themselves, but you chose a thing.” I stared, paralyzed, and I couldn't speak for a few moments. I couldn't move.

  “What does that make you? I wonder.”

  My hand found the Glaive, my voice when it came was barely mine.

  “It makes me someone who is holding the blade and could cut off your head!” The thing paused considering, the jaws knit together again.

  “Head? Heh like this?” Both of the kids lifted their hands before snapping their necks and holding their heads in their hands. Yet the mouth twitched… To speak.

  “Feeling joy now?” Hearing those words, my hand twitched to cover my mouth, but I didn't. Instead, I stared flabbergasted and frozen in fear. I needed to control my fear, I had to. Yet I couldn't.

  Suddenly a wind blew near my neck. My breathing hitched. I didn't want to look behind me. I knew it meant death. I had seen horror movies. And I knew if I got killed by any of them, there would be ascension. This time there was nobody that would help me out.

  My one eye looked at my neck. I saw one hand going to curl and then above my head another hand… Someone was going to snap my neck.

  The hands on my neck tightened. Was I going to die? How could I let my dreams end just like that? My instinct kicked in. I quickly raised the Glaive and turned my breathing stopped. When I felt it almost getting too tight to snap my neck, I swung the Glaive blindly. The hands dissolved. For a moment, nothing happened.

  Then the children standing in front of me smiled, their lips curled. It was a playful smile but not by my side.

  “You're fast,” the girl said. Her voice was not terrified.

  “Mei was always slow,” the boy added. “That's why she didn't make it.”

  They both looked at me with the same expression, curious, hungry, patient.

  "But you're fast,” the girl repeated. “Maybe you'll survive in the rattle of death.”

  Beside me, the face of the tree spoke with a guttural tone.

  “You are going to run away, aren't you?” they said, adding another line that sounded honest. “But, these kids are not fake in the church they are alive, you won't leave them dying, will you?”

  I felt the weight of my hand raised to my temple ‘The Apprentice's eyes’. I saw many threads but all of them were dull. None of them were silver, but between them, I saw three threads… true, it was true.

  Should I let them die for my own sake? If it was an ascender, I could have let them die because they were grown. They would die because of their own foolishness, but children didn't know how to survive not yet.

  I looked again at the threads, faint but real, but there were three because I saw only two kids. Then my eye looked at the spirit wearing the face of innocence. I thought of myself three worlds ago, running from monsters screaming for help, yet nobody did.

  No one came for me.

  I survived anyway.

  “Where are they?” I asked if I could see the threads, but because there were so many dull threads I couldn't see the threads clearly. Hearing this, the spirit's smile widened.

  “The church, three miles east. Past the treeline and field of jìng zhǐ, past the place of soul' graveyard.” A trap, but I moved anyway with the question in my mind: ‘Why is it not killing me right on the spot.’

  I kept my ‘Apprentice's eyes’ open. I couldn't fight a thing that was already dead, but I could see the thread if I could stay vigilant.

  I ran past the tree, odd in a spiral. Bones hang on the roots of trees and skulls, crushed. I felt nauseated.

  In the center of the town a tall building, broken, stood. It was made of wood. The church loomed over the trees, a skeleton of wood being eaten by termites as they crawled along the church. Above a vast clock hanged… The time was 6:06, so this world wasn't set in ancient times.

  My eyes stared, the thread's end was inside the church but only two silver and two dull ones… two spirits were there. Without wasting time, I touched the threads, and then I got a sharp shock like a sudden tremor or buzz in my head.

  My hand tightened around Glaive and with a strong swing, I chopped off the thread just at that exact moment, a piercing sound rose from the church. My eyes twitched. I stared inside the broken door of the church.

  “Oh so it works.” It did work, just like when I cut the strand of Xue Lan’s thread, he felt that pain. Right now, I have chopped off a whole thread.

  With some steps, I found myself inside the church. Two kids sat on the corner. Terrified, huddled together, standing between them and freedom… it was easier than expected… Why?

  Suddenly, my eye ached from the aftereffect of using the Apprentice's eyes longer.

  “Already seven minutes”

  Not now, not now why when I needed it most. The children stared at the empty space. I remembered there was another dull thread, they stared like it was the most terrifying thing.

  “What's there?” I whispered.

  The children flinched when they heard the voice, and they looked at me… as if they had seen me for the first time. Yes they did, the one I had was a way to lure me into this, but why would it?

  Something fell from my cheek, my finger traced it… when? How? A few drops of blood fell. I couldn't see it without my Apprentice's eyes. I swung the Glaive blindly around.

  “Don't come close! I'm just a lower ordinal!”

  I looked at the children and shouted.

  “Don't stare and wait, move! Tell me where it is!”

  The boy said: “Ab… Above you…”

  Above me? My head stared at the roof . I saw it now, a face completely burned, the flesh dropping like blood.

  Of course, an unsightly ghost because the world wasn't horrible enough… It lunged at me. I quickly pointed my Glaive at it with a brutal swing. I tore it apart into two pieces. The half body fell, yet it moved with its hand. I touched my temple to see the threads… the dull thread connecting the spirit. I took a few steps back before I slashed it with another swing.

  The spirit screamed and its grotesque figure disappeared.

  I looked at the kids.

  “Let's get out of here.” I quickly grabbed them, but then I heard a loud raspy noise. My whole body shivered, and my throat couldn't breathe for a few seconds.

  No, I couldn't fear I had survived. I would again. If two lives depended on me, I would rather die trying than be a disappointment. No time for words or any explanation. My legs reacted. I sprinted holding the kids.

  The church groaned behind me, I saw through the ‘Apprentice's eyes’ the severe thread still thrashing in the air like a dying insect.

  “Don't look back and don't stop.” The girl found my arm and the boy grabbed my sleeve. I kept looking at threads, avoiding every direction that had the dull threads.

  Left… A dull thread! Move right, I avoided it. I knew it was better to avoid it, instead of fighting recklessly with another dull thread in front, I changed direction.

  Then I saw-

  The alive threads, far from here. It was the threads of Lin, Jian Yue, and Zhuo. But they weren't at the edge of the forest but probably at the entrance of the very city I should've been waiting for.

  ****

  15 miles away at the entrance of the city, Zhuo raised his hands and stretched them before letting out a yawn. His wounds were healed from the ascension.

  Jian Yue’s eyes looking around waiting patiently. He sensed that something was wrong. Mo Fei hadn't come, it had been a while.

  “Where could he be?” His voice came out muffled.

  Lin's voice then broke the silence.

  “Don't tell me he is lost where his big words are,” she sighed, frustrated, but her fidgeting said otherwise. “We are waiting more than he should have.”