A Writer's Transmigration With A System

Recovery, Li Jiwen decided, felt like being a house under renovation by an unpaid crew.

He sat cross legged in the sheltered notch between two titan ribs, the claimed anchor ringing its patient note behind him, and threaded lightning marrow along his own meridians one controlled hair’s breadth at a time. Frozen thunder melted into the channels his cultivation had burned scarred during the gate implosion, each pass scrubbed a little rust from pipes that had been screaming for two lifetimes.

Sweat froze on his brow in little golden beads. The System watched with merchant gravity.

Ding!

[Marrow assimilation: 7%. Meridian repair projected: substantial. Please do not sneeze.]

"That," said Li Jiwen through his teeth, "is the single worst instruction you have ever issued, and you once told me to enjoy my stay in hell."

’Left alone,’ he reflected, around the slow bright ache of rebuilding himself, ’this could almost be a training montage. Which of course means, ’

The sky interrupted.

Fourteen shadows came riding the north wind on wings of stretched hide, not birds. Kites. Bone framed carrion kites, each flown by a lean pale figure hanging beneath it in basket rigging, and trailing lines that were not rope but gut cord studded with barbs. They wheeled over the plain once, counting, professional as surveyors.

[Palegrin scavenger band. Trade specialty: corpse field salvage and] The window updated with something approaching distaste. [retrieval of unattended resurrection points. Resale market: robust.]

"They what?"

[Anchors sell for cities, host.]

By the time he reached the obelisk, three kites had already landed and their crews were at work: pale folk with skins like undercooked dough and eyes gone milky from generations underground, hauling a rigged frame off a fifth kite, pulleys, gut lines, a great bone lever shaped like a crowbar married to a drawbridge.

One of them spat on her palms, wedged the lever’s claw into the seam where white jade met ash, and put her whole clan’s ambition into her back.

The anchor screamed its claim note up another octave, and fourteen sets of milky eyes turned toward the noise of one man walking toward them, no weapons drawn, wearing the expression of a landlord who has found tenants subletting his skull.

"Afternoon, fellow Taoists," said Li Jiwen pleasantly. "I believe you’re leaning on the load bearing divinity."

The lever crew scattered like startled fish. The kite riders answered properly instead: six gut lines hissed down around him, barbed hooks biting sleeve and shoulder, six teams heaving to skewer him between them like a river fish brought to boat.

It worked beautifully on things that had never met [God Speed].

The world went syrup slow. He took hold of the nearest line, used it as a road, and toured the skirmish. A palm strike cracked through bone harness joints, Marrow warm muscles swung a severed line as a flail, somewhere in the middle of it all a Palegrin elder began shrieking, "Palebreaker! It’s HIM, the pale one walks!" which wasn’t his name but he was willing to discuss trademarks.

Rolling fight, then, four minutes long, choreographed less like war than like education. He broke weapons rather than bodies, karated harpoons out of grip hands, folded a kite frame flat with [Bell Toll Palm], bounced one enterprising youth off a rib and caught him by the collar before gravity could finish the lesson.

The marrow in his meridians kept singing clean through every exchange, thunder warmth compensating for the old authority usury, and by the end he stood unscratched in a ring of groaning scavengers who had learned, collectively and permanently, fear.

Which was the point. Corpses make martyrs and new enemies roll in weekly. Fear makes neighbors polite.

"Message service," he announced, dragging the eldest Palegrin upright by her trophy cords. "Repeat after me: this field is tenanted. The anchor is NOT merchandise. And if anyone comes asking who holds it, " he considered, savoring it, "’ the AUTHOR declines comment.’"

She nodded so hard her hood fell back.

And there he paused. Because around her neck, beside shell beads and teeth, hung a cord of short sticks, each stick notched, formally, deliberately: tallies. Death counts. Every raider he’d knocked down wore the same cord, some freshly notched that very day.

’These aren’t trophies. These are LEDGERS.’ Something cold walked across the grave of his good mood. ’Someone buys counted deaths out here.’

"For whom do those get tallied?" he asked.

Her answer was a marketplace, not a name: chain of brokers, ends in larger ledgers westward. That did not surprise him, respectable evil always franchises.

He let them limp north minus their rigs, two kites, and all illusions, keeping just their lives. Generous, he told himself. The System logged salvage without comment:

[Skeleton crew kites x2 acquired. Anchor lever rig acquired (novelty value only). Cords of death tallies x13 collected.]

Behind him the evening settled violet over the dead titan. High above, weather was congealing: shredded memory rain tomorrow, maybe tonight. He got a fire going in the rib notch, set a kettle of reclaimed rainwater to boil, and thought about nothing heavier than quartermastering.

Far to the south and a thousand feet up, a small flame was losing an argument with the wind.

She had been drifting nine days since the temple burned. She knew because Lantern counted, that was eleven drops of wax spent past the last roof she recognized, and wax was serious. Beneath her the world lay rumpled grey, worlds inside worlds, and rumor rode the thermals up to meet her in scraps of other travelers’ gossip:

...last flame left over from that fire, see, whole mountain temple ate itself...

...the weeping ones want it BACK, they chained it there once...

Lantern wanted none of chains. Chains smelled of dark cupboards and of hands, and hands had carried her to the cupboard before the burning made her small and free. Also, and here the wind flipped her upside down to underscore the point, far south over her shoulder there was a smudge on the horizon that was absolutely, definitely, RAIN shaped.

"Lantern does not like wet," she informed the wind severely, in third person, because first person felt presumptuous for someone eight inches tall. "Wet is only sad sky. Lantern prefers lit things."

Lit things were scarce in this direction. Except...

A thread of warmth tugged at her somewhere north by northeast, faint as a candle seen through ten fogged windows: the smell of burnt stories, singed paper and gold, someone ELSE out here carrying old fire in their bones. Rumor had followed rumor to find her a survivor flame, now survivor flame chemistry tugged the compass of her instead. Flame must sit near flame. Even silly wet sky respected arithmetic.

So she angled her tiny body into the current, guttering with effort, following burnt book smell across the darkening world.

That was when she heard the singing behind her.

Low, wet voices, many throats braided together, rising from the southern smudge, men weeping while they marched, keeping time for their footsteps with grief song.

She did not know the words yet. Some part of her, the part that was originally fire and therefore understood burning, understood them anyway:

Unborn. Unborn. Unborn.

Beneath her, blue white light flashed briefly against bone cliffs, as if somebody had struck gold on stone. Below lay a broken giant’s skeleton, a plume of kettle smoke, and one warm point stubbornly refusing the general greyness.

"Warm brother!" Lantern gasped, hope outrunning altitude management, and folded herself downward just as the first fat drop of memory rain slapped the sky ahead of her like a warning bell.

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