Above the doors, they'd carved CINDERHAVEN into the dead flesh.
Welcome to Cinderhaven, built inside something that used to be able to destroy cities, now just another place where humans figured out how to live in the aftermath.
"Vehicle approaching. Full scan initiated," an automated voice droned. Red laser grids swept over their transport, probing for weapons, contraband, and biological hazards.
"Welcome to the Corpse Market," the guard said through their helmet's speaker, scanning their vehicle. “Biometrics and Domain signatures are clean. You'll want to take the Spinal Elevator to Mid-Spine Commercial. Best shops, decent bars. Stay out of the Lower Intestinal District unless you're looking for trouble. The Marrow Gangs run that sector.”
The guard tapped their rifle, a modified plasma cutter designed to punch through both armor and mutated flesh. "They've been getting aggressive lately. Something about the beast 'speaking' to them in their dreams. Probably just marrow poisoning, but still." The guard waved them through. "Parking's in the old lung. Follow the blue lights."
As they drove deeper into the corpse, Cole pressed his forehead against the window, trying to process what he was seeing. A child, couldn't be more than eight, was playing hopscotch on what had been a nerve cluster. The squares were drawn in chalk on petrified synapses the size of sidewalk slabs.
"How do they..." he started, then didn't know how to finish. “How do they not go insane? How do you let your kid play in the nervous system of this thing?
"You get used to it," Senna said quietly. But her hand had unconsciously moved to one of her lucky charms, rubbing it like a prayer.
Neon signs were bolted directly into petrified flesh, their colors reflecting off scales that had become something between stone and metal. Power lines ran through exposed neural pathways, the beast's preserved nervous system repurposed as natural conduits. Steam vented from wounds that had become geothermal plants, the creature's residual energy still generating heat decades after death.
Lucius leaned forward, studying the settlement with interest. "Look at the new construction. That's its rib cage—turned into an ‘outdoor’ shopping district. And look at the skull it’s the..."
"The administrative center," Senna confirmed. "The brain cavity houses the settlement's government. There's a certain poetry to it, human consciousness filling the void left by a dead god's thoughts."
"That's either profound or deeply disturbing," Cole muttered.
"Why not both?" Lucius grinned. "Look at that! They're using the creature's tendons as suspension bridges. That's actually genius."
"Genius until one snaps," Senna observed. "Considering how old they are I can’t imagine the the structural integrity to be—”
Through the window, Cole watched a tendon-bridge tear loose from its anchor points. A dozen people dropped into the abyss. Emergency response drones immediately swarmed the area, their searchlights creating stark shadows in the organic architecture.
"Point proven," Senna finished quietly.
No one spoke for a moment. The screams had stopped, but Cole could still hear them echoing in his head. He'd just watched people die. Not in combat, just living their lives in a place where the ground could literally give way beneath them.
"Nobody even stops walking when it happens," Lia said quietly, answering the question no one had asked. "Welcome to Cinderhaven."
"That's fucked," Lucius muttered.
The parking structure hit Cole like a fever dream. They'd arrived at what had once been a lung, a cavernous organic cavern with walls that still showed alveoli patterns, now reinforced with industrial steel beams.
"Two hundred credits a day," the attendant announced. She had a woman's torso but spider-like mechanical legs allowing her to navigate the curved organic surfaces with disturbing grace. Her eyes had been replaced with compound optics that tracked multiple targets simultaneously. "Insurance is mandatory. Sometimes the beast... settles. Lost eleven vehicles last month when a liver section collapsed."
"Settles?" Cole asked.
"The corpse shifts," she explained, her mechanical legs clicking against the ossified floor. "Gravity, decay, seismic activity, it all adds up. The beast may be dead, but it's still moving. Millimeters per year, but when you're this big, millimeters matter."
Cole felt it then, the ground beneath his boots had give to it. Something organic that had been processed and preserved but still remembered being flesh.
They paid and made their way to the Spinal Elevator, a massive platform that ran along what had been the creature's backbone. Crowds filled the waiting area with the usual Wastes denizens, hunters checking their weapons, merchants guarding their goods, and the desperate just trying to survive another day.
As they rose, Cole could see the full scope of the settlement through transparent aluminum windows. Thousands of people had carved homes into dead flesh, entire lives built in the shadow of a god's corpse. Children played in hollowed-out organs, their laughter echoing through biological acoustics never meant for human voices. Somewhere, a couple argued through thin walls of muscle, their words carrying further than they knew.
"How many people live here?" Cole asked.
"Approximately eighteen thousand permanent residents," Senna reported. "Plus another five thousand transients. The population is limited by breathable space; only certain sections of the corpse maintain atmosphere."
"And how many die each week?" Cole pressed.
Senna consulted her data pad. "Average mortality rate is five percent annually. Mostly from structural collapses, marrow poisoning, or..." she paused, "psychological breakdown. Living inside a dead god has documented effects on mental health."
The Mid-Spine Commercial district was an assault on the senses. The main thoroughfare ran through what must have been a major artery, now drained and converted into a street. Shops hollowed out of the walls of petrified flesh, their signs creating a bizarre rainbow in the organic tunnel. The ground beneath their feet was polished smooth by thousands of footsteps, but you could still see the vein patterns beneath the surface, like looking at marble that used to bleed.
"GENUINE PRE-WAR TECH!" one vendor screamed. "PULLED FROM THE BEAST'S STOMACH!"
"ESSENCE EXTRACTION!" another advertised. "FRESH MARROW SAMPLES DAILY!"
"MEMORY WINE!" a third called out. "DISTILLED FROM THE CREATURE'S FINAL THOUGHTS! EXPERIENCE DIVINITY!"
Cole paused at that last one remembering the conversation from earlier. The vendor, a woman with silver implants covering half her skull, held up a bottle filled with iridescent liquid that seemed to move on its own.
"Interested?" she purred. "One sip and you'll know what it felt like to be a god. To see reality from outside the cage of flesh."
"And the side effects?" Senna asked clinically.
"Temporary omniscience, high chance of insanity, or sometimes you just die." The vendor shrugged. "But what a way to go."
They moved on quickly.
Competing smells thickened the air, scorched circuitry from exposed electronics, the sweet-sick scent of Crimson Lotus smoke, and underneath it all, something else. A smell like copper and eternity, the lingering presence of the dead god. Street food vendors sold skewers of processed protein, their grills powered by thermal vents that ran directly into the creature's decomposing organs.
They found a food cart, some kind of protein skewer that smelled better than it had any right to. Cole bit into one and immediately regretted it.
"That's... definitely meat," he said, chewing carefully.
"Technically," Lucius agreed, examining his own skewer with his probability sight. "I'm seeing about eight possible origins. Four of them are mammals. That's actually better odds than most places in the Wastes."
"I miss vegetables," Lia said suddenly. "Real ones. Not the hydroponic paste. My grandmother used to grow tomatoes. In actual dirt."
The casual mention of something so mundane, tomatoes, dirt, grandmothers, felt obscene here, surrounded by death. But maybe that's why she said it, a reminder that they'd come from somewhere normal, even if they could never go back.
"My sister makes this pasta dish," Cole found himself saying. "Just noodles, butter, and this specific cheese you can only get in Storm City's upper districts. She saves up for months to afford it." He looked at the skewer in his hand. "This tastes nothing like that."
"Profound observation," Senna said, but she was smiling slightly.
"What I'm saying is, when we get back, I'm buying real food. The expensive stuff. The kind that doesn't come from a beast's stomach or a vat."
"When, not if," Lia noted. "I like the optimism."
A fight broke out near a prosthetics shop. Two hunters traded blows that cracked the ossified ground. The crowd formed a circle, placing bets as blood, both red and synthetic, splattered the walls.
"Should we do something?" Cole asked.
"Why?" Lucius watched with interest. "This is probably the most honest interaction happening on this street."
They tracked down a buyer at a place called "The Precious Offal". The shop was wedged into what had to be a giant pore in the titan's hide. Cole tried not to think too hard about that.
The owner had gutted herself—literally. Her entire digestive system had been ripped out, replaced with cybernetic processing equipment that Cole could see working through a transparent window in her stomach. Tubes pumped. Filters cycled. Chemical reactions sparked behind the glass. Watching someone's lunch get broken down into base components through a viewing window was definitely a new one for him.
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Her fingers clicked with a sound like beetles skittering on glass as she examined each of the Wyrm scales.
"Voltaic Wyrm, Sequence 4," she said. "Electromagnetic signature still active. Cellular structure shows minimal degradation. Killed recently. I can still smell the lingering charge in the keratin." She paused, her eyes zoomed in on Cole. "Your thermal signature suggests recent combat. Micro-fractures in your leg augmentations. You fought it yourself."
"It was a team effort," Cole replied, not liking how easily she read him.
"What's your next hunt?"
"Some horror called the Lacemaker of Agony," Cole replied.
The shop went silent. Every customer turned to stare. Even the owners' mechanical systems seemed to pause mid-process.
"I've heard worse," she finally said, though her voice carried an undertone of doubt. She ran one of the scales through a spectrometer in her palm. A holographic display of its molecular composition bloomed in the air. "Ninety thousand for the lot."
"One hundred," Cole countered instantly, his voice firm.
Her eyes swiveled back to him, calculating. "You won't live to spend it."
"Then you're getting a bargain either way," Cole shot back.
She made a sound that might have been laughter. "Ninety-five, and I'll tell you about Elias," she offered. "The only survivor from the last Lacemaker hunt. The locals say he's cursed, that he brought a piece of the beast's madness back with him. He can tell you exactly where your monster is."
“Deal,” Senna said, cutting in before Cole could speak.
The shopkeeper nodded, the deal sealed. She transferred the credits with a thought. "He drinks at the Broken Circuit in the Cardiac Chamber. A tall man with blonde hair, tan skin, and red eyes that have seen too much. But be careful, speaking to him has a price. Everyone who hears his story comes away... changed."
"Changed how?" Lia asked.
"They start seeing wires in their dreams. Hearing screams that aren't there. Some say it's PTSD. Others say the Lacemaker marks those who learn about it, even secondhand." Her fingers drummed on the counter. "But you're going to hunt it anyway, aren't you? The young always think they're immortal."
The Broken Circuit was exactly what Cole expected from a bar built inside a dead titan's heart. The cardiac muscle had turned to crystal over the years, frozen mid-beat into these twisted red formations that looked like blood waterfalls. The bartender worked behind what used to be a valve, serving drinks where blood once pumped through a god.
The whole place still pulsed. Slow. Rhythmic. A crimson glow from a heartbeat that should've stopped decades ago.
The bouncer at the door was all chrome from the neck down—military-grade combat chassis that made his human head look like someone had stuck a grape on a tank. "Weapons stay holstered," he growled at Cole's team. "Start trouble, and I end it. Permanently."
Inside was a greatest hits collection of Wastes degenerates. Hunters comparing scars and kill counts. Info brokers whispering in corners dark enough to hide the credit transfers. The kind of people who'd looked at a dead god's heart and thought 'yeah, this'll make a good bar.'
Cole caught the holo-board behind the bar, odds shifting every time someone fed it new intel. Current betting favorite for "next idiot to die hunting": some crew from the inner districts.
CURRENT ODDS - FOUR IDIOTS VS. LACEMAKER OF AGONY:
- TPK (TOTAL PARTY KILLED): 3:1
- ONE SURVIVOR (DRIVEN INSANE): 5:1
- SUCCESSFUL HUNT: 50:1
- SUCCESS (ALL SURVIVE & SANE): 200:1
- SPECIAL BET: LACEMAKER LIVES & FINDS CINDERHAVEN: 10:1
“Well that was fast,” Cole noted.
"News travels quickly here," the bartender said, noticing their attention. "That last one's new as of ten minutes ago. Some people think if you fail, the Lacemaker might track back here. It's happened before, hunter fails, monster follows the scent back to civilization. We lost the Kidney Quarter to a Sequence Five two years ago."
"What happened to it?" Cole asked.
"Still sealed off. Sometimes you can hear things moving in there. The Marrow Gangs use it for initiation rites now, survive a night in the Kidney Quarter, and you're in."
They found a booth formed from cartilage and waited.
"I can't believe people choose to live here," Cole said, watching a bar fight break out near the entrance. The bouncer ended it immediately, his combat chassis moving faster than something that size should. One combatant was thrown out; the other was carried out in pieces. "Inside a corpse. It's insane."
"It's the safest place for five hundred miles," a raspy voice said.
He stood beside their table. Or what was left of him.
The guy's face looked like someone had used it for geometry practice. Thin white scars cut perfect patterns across his skin, too precise to be from any fight Cole knew. His arms were worse. Barbed wire marks twisted up both forearms, raised and angry, like something had burrowed under the skin before being ripped out.
Even his chrome eye was bloodshot.
How the fuck did that even work?
Cole caught something else—the man's organic eye kept glitching. Breaking apart into digital static before snapping back to normal. Like reality couldn't decide what he was supposed to look like.
"Name is Elias. Mind if I sit?" he asked, though he was already sliding into the booth. Every movement seemed to cause him pain, his body jerking in micro-spasms as if avoiding invisible obstacles.
"You know why this place exists?" Elias asked, waving for a drink. The bartender brought something clear that started smoking the second air hit it. Cole watched the man's hands shake as he lifted the glass. Thousands of tiny scars covered his fingers. Like he'd been threading needles made of razors.
"The Manifold Sovereign was a reality anchor. Even dead, its presence stabilizes local space-time. Keeps the worst of the Wastes' chaos at bay." He laughed. "Ironic, isn't it? We live in a corpse because it's the only thing keeping us from something worse."
"You came here after the hunt," Senna observed.
"I came here because this is the only place I fit in now," Elias corrected. "Everywhere else people take one look at me and turn in horror. But Cinderhaven? This place understands monsters."
Lia shifted in her seat. "Why don’t you just go to a chrome doc and get fixed up?"
“Because I can’t allow myself to forget. Not after so many of my friends died.”
He told them his story. Six professional hunters, all Sequence Six, with a combined century of experience between them. They'd tracked the Lacemaker for three weeks, following a trail of mutilated corpses and corrupted data streams. They'd been confident, prepared, armed with the best tech credits could buy. They'd been fools.
"It didn't attack us," Elias said, his corrupted eye flickering. "Not at first. We found it in an old data center, surrounded by miles of cable it had... repurposed. It was beautiful, in a horrifying way. Wires flowing like water. And the sound..." He shuddered. "Like screaming through a modem. Digital agony made audible."
The entire bar had gone quiet. Everyone was listening now, drawn to the horror story like moths to flame.
"The attack came from inside," Elias continued. "Our own augmentations turned against us. Every wire, every circuit became a weapon. Marcus's neural implant sprouted micro-filaments that shredded his brain from the inside. He died trying to tear his own skull open. Sarah's prosthetic legs grew barbs that anchored her to the ground while the rest of her was slowly pulled apart. She screamed for two minutes. I counted."
"Gods," Lucius muttered.
"Maria lasted the longest," Elias's remaining eye was crying now, tears mixing with the blood that constantly seeped from his cybernetic one. "The Lacemaker took its time with her. Used her own nerve endings as instruments, playing a symphony of agony that I can still hear. She begged us to kill her, but we couldn't move. The wires had us pinned, forced to watch, to listen. The Lacemaker wanted an audience."
"The worst part?" Elias said, his corrupted patches flickering with fragments of code. "I can still hear them sometimes. Every time I close my eye, I see the wires. They're not dead—they're trapped in pure agony. It preserves the moment of greatest suffering, loops it forever in some digital hell I can't fully perceive."
Cole felt sick. Around them, the bar's patrons had backed away, giving their table a wide berth. Several were already leaving, throwing credits on tables and heading for the exit.
The betting board behind the bar updated: SUCCESS (ALL SURVIVE & SANE) had jumped to 500:1.
"What made you decide to tell us?" Lia asked, her voice steady despite the horror. "Why not try to stop us?"
Elias's eye fixed on them. "Because maybe you'll succeed. Or maybe you'll join them, and I'll stop wondering if I should have stayed to die with my team."
"You think death would have been better?" Cole asked.
"Death ends," Elias replied simply. "What the Lacemaker does... doesn't."
He stood and pulled out a corrupted data pad. The screen was cracked, displaying fragments of code that rearranged themselves constantly. "This is all I salvaged from our equipment. Location data, behavioral patterns, some footage that'll make you wish you'd never asked. The Lacemaker nests where data flows converge, old server farms, communication hubs, anywhere the digital infrastructure is dense enough to web."
"Why those places?" Senna asked, already taking notes.
"Because it feeds on information. Every byte of data that passes through its wires gets tasted, corrupted, repurposed. Our thoughts, our memories, are all just data to consume."
After he left, they sat in silence. The bartender, unbidden, brought them another round. "On the house," he said quietly. "Might be your last."
"You know what's fucked up?" Lucius said finally, downing his whiskey. The alcohol was laced with nanobots that would filter toxins while still allowing intoxication, a necessity in a place where every drink might be poisoned. "We're sitting inside a Sequence One. A god-level beast. And we're about to hunt something that might be worse, because at least the Manifold Sovereign didn't torture for pleasure."
"The Manifold Sovereign just existed," Senna added. "Its very presence warped reality, but not maliciously. The Lacemaker chose to become what it is. It evolved to maximize suffering."
The lights flickered from the beast settling, tons of dead flesh shifting microscopically. Dust fell from the ceiling, dried blood flakes that had been lodged in the cardiac tissue for decades. Someone screamed in the distance, the sound echoing through the corpse's natural acoustics until it seemed to come from everywhere at once.
"We should find lodging," Lia suggested. "Rest before we review Elias's data."
"The Sovereign Inn," the bartender suggested, clearly eavesdropping. "Clean rooms, reinforced walls, and they scan for parasite infections hourly. You'll want the protection. Sometimes things crawl out of the deeper sections at night."
Cole wondered which was worse, sleeping inside a corpse or facing a monster that turned your own body into an instrument of torture. He ordered another drink. If he was going to hunt this thing, might as well have some liquid courage. The burn felt good.
"To hunting nightmares in a corpse city," Lucius raised his glass.
"To survival," Lia countered.
"To probability," Senna added.
Cole looked at his drink, then at his team. To the only people he could crack jokes while staring death in the face because what else were you gonna do? Cry about it?
"To staying human," Cole said. "Whatever the hell that means anymore."
They drank. In the distance, something that might have been wind or might have been breathing echoed through the hollow bones of Cinderhaven.
The corpse-city didn't sleep. How could it? Hard to rest when you're built inside something that should be dead but kept twitching anyway.
Tomorrow, they would hunt the Lacemaker. Tonight, they would try not to think about wires, about screaming, about the way Elias's eye had broken apart into patterns that suggested reality itself could be unraveled. They would fail, of course. In Cinderhaven, inside the corpse of a god, some thoughts were infectious, spreading through the mind like the very thing they feared.
Sleep wouldn't come. Cole lay in the darkness, staring at the ceiling, organic texture visible even in the dim emergency lighting.
He pulled up his comm, fingers hovering over Alice's contact.
What would he even say?
'Hey sis, probably going to die hunting a torture monster. Hope your next gig goes well'?
Instead he typed:
He deleted it without sending. She'd know what "don't worry" meant. She always knew.
Cole's hand moved to the photon accelerator on the nightstand. Then to the fractal blades. His fingers traced the familiar grips, the worn places where he'd held them during other fights, other desperate moments. He'd survived them all.
Would their fight be different? Would they be the ones who broke the pattern? The ones who survived. The ones who proved that horror could be fought, that monsters could be killed, that wire could be cut.
He wanted to believe that.
He had to believe that.
Cole crashed that night with the dead god's heartbeat thumping through the walls. Should've been comforting. Wasn't.
His dreams were all wrong. Wires sprouting from his arm, spreading under his skin like new veins.
The hunt would start tomorrow.
?? Dreams of Jianghu ??
Modern Xianxia ? San Francisco, 1997
"Heaven and Earth is an inn for all of creation.
And time is a traveler throughout the ages."
What to Expect:
- Grounded cultivation based on real TCM and martial arts
- 1990s internet culture colliding with the return of qi
- Slow-burn progression through discipline, strategy, and consequence