A Writer's Transmigration With A System

The ash plain was soft underfoot, the way grave dirt is soft.

Li Jiwen did not move. Neither did the figure, nor the kneeling millions, nor the black clouds overhead that churned with the patience of something that had watched continents be born and die and decided neither mattered.

Everything about this place was mid motion, a single instant stretched across an entire world.

In the distance, the young man stood bleeding from his own back, sword of white bone held wrong handed, too light for what it was.

"Touch nothing," Li Ming said. The ring’s voice had dropped to gravel over glass. "This is the day I died killing heaven. Walk softly or don’t walk."

"You could’ve mentioned you kept your origin story in Baal’s attic," Li Jiwen murmured.

"I keep my everything where my enemies can’t reach it." A whisper. "Formerly."

Bells answered from behind them.

He turned. Processions were crossing the ash, robed figures in slate grey kilts hung with copper bells, forty strong and closing in a pincer.

Their faces were not faces, rather cloud smear sat where features should have been, thinning and reforming like smoke deciding whether to bother existing. Each one carried a hymn scythe.

And with every third toll from those kilts, the distant young man’s silver back wounds opened afresh, bleeding on cue like paragraphs being recopied by a malicious scribe.

"Clerics of the Bellied Sky," the ring said, and for the first time since Li Jiwen had met him, Li Ming sounded old. "The sky’s chosen. Its choir, its wardens, its hands. In this memory they are eternal, because they died sure."

"Bellied?" Li Jiwen asked.

"They swallowed every prayer spoken against the sky so no god would have to hear them. Hear enough pleading, fellow Taoist, and it sits in you."

The procession halted. Forty cloud faces tilted toward the intruders in unison, and when they spoke, their voices came out layered with ten thousand muffled cries.

"THIEVES OF THE TEXT. THIS SCENE IS CONSECRATED. TRESPASSERS WILL BE CORRECTED."

"Corrected," Li Jiwen repeated. "That’s editor speak for killed, isn’t it."

"Now that’s more theater than even I wrote," Li Jiwen said, rolling his shoulders. "Fellow Taoists, we’re just leaving, "

The leftmost rank of clerics drew as one body, and the bells on their kilts tolled.

Sound died.

Not faded, died, murdered in its sleep. Li Jiwen heard his own heartbeat stop being audible. The kneeling chorus of millions went lip silent at once. Even the churn of the cloud ocean above lost its low grinding voice, and the sudden completeness of quiet pressed on his skull like deep water.

Then the scythes came, arcs of grey through absolute silence, and the fight taught him new meanings of the word difficult.

’These aren’t revenants playing at guards,’ he thought, swaying inside the first cutter’s arc by a finger’s width and answering with a God Speed palm strike that rang off a collarbone of enforced stone. ’They’re liturgy. You can’t negotiate with liturgy.’

They fought in a hush so total that he felt wind off each swing instead of hearing it, saw cloaks billow toward him before blades arrived.

He took a slice across the outer left shoulder, shallow but cold, colder than steel should run, and gave back a rising kick that caved a chestplate inward and put one cleric down into the ash, cloud face dissolving upward like steam.

For every one down, three more advanced, and the bell toll didn’t stop coming.

Worse: the ringing did something to the scene itself. Each toll smeared the young man’s silhouette at the horizon, blurred the kneeling millions, ground a decade of meaning down toward static. This was their function. They weren’t guarding a treasure.

They were guarding a story from editors they hadn’t authorized.

And the horror of it landed sideways: every toll also scraped across the ring on his finger. He felt it through metal and skin both, Li Jiwen realized, because Li Ming’s existence beneath the black band had gone rigid as fence posts.

That settled something in him.

"No," Li Jiwen said aloud, to nobody who cared. "Not this story. I know what it’s worth."

When the second wave crested, he stopped retreating.

His clones peeled off him like burning paper, thirty, fifty, eight score, taking the flanks in silent formation. The main line came to him instead, hymn scythes falling like sleet, and inside the murder hush he moved through them the way an author moves through bad prose: cutting without mercy, correcting without apology.

Bell strikes hit the ring a dozen times. Each time, red light rose off its surface uninvited and ate the sound the way the tide had eaten doors.

"Sheathe them," said the ring, low. "I want this fought clean."

"Why?"

"Because he is watching us fight near his death. Because wrecked scenery will be his scenery tomorrow." The red eye stared out across the ash, at the distant figure with the bone sword. "Some things shouldn’t be left broken."

’Well now,’ Li Jiwen thought, elbowing a cleric into next week. ’Look at that. The Grand God of Slaughter has taste.’

The battle rolled them east across the plain, clerics reaping at them in disciplined quads, bell kilts laying down zones of dead sound that turned somersaults into freefall and footwork into guesswork.

He mapped the tolls by feel, two steps past the third corpse bird... silence well, jump it... bells echo left while steel cuts and killed the map makers faster than they could redraw it. His shoulder bled freely. It could continue doing so, shoulders were dramatic and disposable.

A quad managed to flank him, tolls stacking till his knees turned traitor, four scythes converging.

’Rule one of writing horror,’ he thought, dropping flat as steel sang over his spine, ’never let the choir get organized.’

His clones took the quad apart from four directions at once, a geometry lesson executed in elbows.

The figure stepped between him and them.

Nothing visible happened. But forty clerics staggered as one body, cloud faces guttering like candles in a draft, and the nearest quad prostrated itself so fast it cracked kneecaps on the ash.

They understood weight, those things. They knew what the small white remembrance walking among memories was, and their liturgy offered no procedure for it.

Li Jiwen used the reprieve to look at the horizon again.

The young man had raised the bone sword.

Every head among the millions turned, not toward the sky, but toward Li Jiwen and the ring on his hand, millions of eyes arriving on him simultaneously, silently, expectantly. Witnesses awaiting permission for their verdict.

Above, the ocean of black clouds heaved. Something up there leaned its attention down through the murk, vast and bored and freshly interested.

The first drop of the sky’s blood fell slow as syrup through dead silent air.

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