A Writer's Transmigration With A System

The rib slope ran out of mountain before it ran out of Li Jiwen.

He hit the valley floor of the dead titan in a controlled crash that immediately lost control, through a stand of petrified hair forest, snapping trunks the thickness of his wrist like dry noodles, and finally into a mud flat of warm amber silt that received him with a whump audible for half a mile in every direction.

’Subtle,’ he thought from inside his own crater. ’Truly, the ninjas of this world have much to learn from me.’

He inventoried himself before moving, because shock loves inventories: left forearm rope burned from the chains, still weeping, ribs bruised green black across the whole right side, screaming every fourth breath but unbroken, the merged undershirt armor had caught what the slope hadn’t, both legs reporting for duty with complaints, palm seed quiet now, banked low, merely present, like a coal sleeping in a cave.

The ring stayed silent too. Cracked iron, ember eye, heartbeat warm against his knuckle. But alive. He’d started measuring its silences the way sailors measure swells.

He stood up out of the crater into an autopsy.

The titan lay beneath him the way weather lies over a region: total. Rib mountains marched to horizons, vaults between them sheltering lakes of pale glowing marrow. Vast organs gone to amber geology steamed gently under cold rain. Something enormous had once eaten through this god rather than merely killing it, whole city sized bites chewed out of flesh and left hollow, their interiors now hanging with mineralized stalactites. Dream eaten. He’d landed on the world’s slowest murder scene, dressed as geography.

"Noted," he told the scenery. "Very atmospheric. Hated it."

Then ten thousand eyes opened across the corpse, and atmosphere stopped being the problem.

They came out of the chewed hollows in packs, hollow skinned curs built like starved hounds stretched tall, wax colored hides baggy over other creatures’ bones, no eyes at all in their sockets because their sight lived in open mouths. They did not howl. They drank: each beast lowered its jaw to whatever moisture it found, rain pools, dew, weeping stone, and lapped it up sideways with tongues like wet paper. Marrow scavengers, following the nearest vein of wet: him.

The first pack arrived without a sound worth fearing and died anyway.

’Light,’ Li Jiwen judged instantly, sidestepping the leader’s lunging bite and hammering a backhand through its jaw hinge, the technique flickered, weaker than it should be after sky poisoning and shipwreck, but plenty against a hundred jin of wax and borrowed skeleton. The curs fought like a hunger given feet: fearless, mindless, endlessly replaceable. That made them dangerous exactly as long as they came in dozens and exactly as stupid as they looked.

He killed eight before he stopped counting, conserving his power to quarter flashes, letting them break their own momentum on petrified hair trunks when terrain offered.

A looping pack tried pinning him between two chewed out hollows, he went over instead, wall running the throat slope of one hollow, dropping down behind them into their own stampede, exit stage east while thirty corpses sorted themselves into casualties.

There was always another pack. Worse: there was a hierarchy.

The Marrow Priest came in person on the sixth wave, a wax skinned thing man high wearing a miter molded from fused jawbones, walking upright on ceremonial stilts of bone.

It did not lunge like its flock. It pointed, and the flocks obeyed, and when it got close enough it opened four joints along its forearms and drank directly from an open wound on Li Jiwen’s shoulder, mid exchange, stealing strength straight off his blood like some clerical vampire working the collections plate.

"Rude," Li Jiwen managed through grayness. "Fellow Taoist. Deeply rude."

The Priest tilted its miter, savoring. Its flock crowded in behind, licking their chops in eerie sync.

He made himself go very still inside their tightening ring, breath shallow, power tucked low where the sky teaching had shown him power could hide. Let them think the well was dry. Sieves drink, hunger waddles, and pride, pride is a bone every predator shares with its dinner.

’So it drinks what I bleed,’ thought Li Jiwen, whose right palm had been sitting quietly all this time on the subject of debts. ’Fine by me. Today I bleed concentrated.’

He stopped defending the wounded arm entirely. It cost him a scythe of wax claws opening three more lines across his bicep, real pain, payment honest, and then he seized the Priest’s drinking mouth joint with his ruined hand and let the slaughter seed answer directly.

Red thread flared off his skin into the thing’s gullet.

What happened next took under two seconds and stayed lit forever in memory: the Marrow Priest igniting from within, light blazing out through its wax hide like a lampshade war crime, all four stilt legs folding at once as something older than its devotion burned the devotion out of it. Around the valley, every scavenger crouched flat and poured itself flat away into the hollows at speed, fleeing not him but the radiance, burrowing deep, going home to be very small.

Li Jiwen sat down where the ashes settled, vision strobing at the edges, arm leaking in five places, laughing in short expensive breaths. "Seed says hi," he informed nobody. "Seed needs... labeling. Usage warnings."

A slight motion at the corner of his eye: the white figure, kneeling beside the ash smear, one small hand pressed flat over the remains. Listening to them, or filing them. When Li Jiwen blinked, sweating, the figure was already standing twelve paces farther on, studying something ahead. It never seemed to cross intervening distances so much as lose interest in them.

He followed its pointing finger and forgot, briefly, about bleeding.

Below the hair forest, in a cleared bowl of churned mud, stood a white jade obelisk.

Wrist thick, absurdly thin against everything around it, and absolutely certain of itself, planted at a lean through the silt like a miswritten Chapter, humming. Not ringing. Humming one low patient tone that he felt enter his cracked ribs and set every bruise softly vibrating, sweet tasting relief spreading where it reached.

’Dream Anchor,’ his instincts named it without any system window providing captions. Last known respawn point in this entire false sky. Claim it, and death stops being ending.

Behind him, far off across the corpse continent’s broken east, a howl finally rolled, deep throated, enormous, and organized. Not scavengers.

And under his palm, when he limped close enough to touch jade, the obelisk’s hum climbed pitch sharply, outward, warning, ringing across silt and hollows like an alarm thrown over a garden wall: not welcoming him in so much as screaming him visible to everything else on the drowned god.

"Hell..."

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