Blueprint for Immortality: a Crafting Xianxia

When Booker returned to the ‘real’ world, his present-day life, not a single blade of grass had moved in the hour he’d been away. It made sense to him, anyway – if the vision was a return to something that happened in the past it wouldn’t take any time in the here and now.

The only difference was that a strange mist seemed to have gathered around his body, fleeing away the first time he exhaled.

Straightening up, Booker went to wash himself in the well, splashing water over his bloodstained hands and wringing out his clothes. It was messy work. The first time he touched the faintly-sticky sheen of red on his robes, he almost gagged, revulsion and anger and shame boiling up all at once.

Gritting his teeth he forced them down. It wouldn’t do anyone – not him, not Wild Swan, not even Gargoyle himself – any good to get squeamish now.

The time for that was before you stuck a knife in him. He thought bitterly, and then sighed, pushing away the bitterness too.

His outer robes were beyond saving, so he stripped out of them.

He rinsed water in his mouth and spat…

Gargoyle… Hu Bao… Might have had a family. For all I know, they were relying on him. I should find out at the very least and try to make sure they don’t end up destitute.

Wiping his face with a wet rag, he sighed.

As for the body– Well, throwing it in the river was nearly pointless. It’s probably been found by now. I was witnessed running from him right before it happened…

I should expect a visit from the enforcers, and plan on surviving a whipping.

Planning was good. It made him feel normal, in control…

An animal reacts. A person plans. If a person becomes an animal, they’ve already failed.

I have to go back to being a person.

Leaving his apartment, Booker went to the potter who’d made his oven, a man who lived just down the street. He paid twenty liang to buy the man’s wheel. It was a steep price, but Booker was in a hurry and didn’t want to wait a week. The two of them together rolled the heavy stone pushwheel down the street, and assembled it in his backyard.

“You seem quite taken with clay-work.” The potter said, lightning a pipe as he sat down heavily, sweat dripping from his face.

Booker nodded. “I’m finding I enjoy it.”

“Well, if you ever need any advice…” The man grinned, and Booker passed him an extra silver for the work of getting the wheel here.

“I’ll be sure to come to you.” He agreed.

As soon as the man had left, Booker slapped a piece of clay onto the wheel. Closing his eyes, he tried to remember the rhythm of the cane striking the ground, and pushed with his feet to set the wheel spinning. It was almost hypnotic how the red material flowed away from his hands, moving out from wherever he pushed in. With his eyes lidded low and his mind swept clean, it was easy to sense how the ‘life’ inside the clay wanted to be shaped.

Soon, he had shaped his first little pot. Then a second and a third, all washed in the special glaze solution he’d made the previous day. By the time a few hours had passed, he’d ruined three attempts and succeeded at eight, filling his kiln to the brim with clayware ready to be fired. Froggy croaked sleepily as Booker loaded fresh firewood into his bed, and Booker said, “Alright, light ‘em up.”

The fire flared as Froggy let out a booming warcry, the sack on his throat inflating before golden fire vented from the open craters on is back. The firewood was instantly alight, the tinder curling into ash as the flame licked up the dried oak timber.

Booker sighed in satisfaction. He felt sure at least a few of the pots would survive, if not all of them.

By the end of the night he’d be ready to try his first refinement.

— — —

Booker made his way to the renegade hospital where he’d worked before. Volunteering there wasn’t any good for his relations with the Sect, but at this point, Booker needed to keep himself busy and he needed to feel like he was helping.

The hospital was nothing more than an old house that had been converted to serve the needs of the sick; the waiting room was a foyer, awkwardly stuffed with dozens of people sitting in chairs and on the floor, trying to keep as far away from the diseased and possibly-infectious among them as they could. Booker caught the doctor’s eye as the man stepped out of his operating chamber, blood splashed across his tidy white apron.

“Hmm, I didn’t expect to see you again.” The doctor said, pushing his spectacles up his nose with the back of his hand to avoid getting bloodstained fingerprints on the lenses.

“I didn’t expect to see you either.” Booker admitted. “But… I’ve got a debt to pay, I suppose.”

“Ahhh, absolution. Well I’m not a priest but I have patients in need, bedpans that have to be changed, work that needs to be done. If you want punishment…” He gestured to the… everything here, really.

Booker looked up for a moment, a thought penetrating through his own personal haze of reflection. What did he do? If this place is a punishment, what crime did the doctor commit?

But what he said was, “I’ll get started.”

“Oh, and those three friends of yours? They’ve left messages here for you.”

“Multiple messages?” Booker paused. He hadn’t given the trio an address to reach him at because he didn’t want them traced back to him if they opened their mouths. His plan was to reach out when it was convenient – but they apparently had other concerns.

“Yes, they seemed quite convinced it was urgent.”

Booker shook his head, “It’s not really. I’ll… deal with that after.”

Then he rolled up his sleeves, and got down to work.

The hospital really was in need – there was barely any medicine left, and endless patients who couldn’t seek the Sect’s healing or refused to do so on principle. The latter, Booker waved away unless it was truly desperate. There was too little to go around for him to be wasting time on saving people’s pride. His attention was on the ones who, for whatever reason, would be refused by the Sect; heretics and outlaws mostly, but people nonetheless. He bandaged a stab wound for a rough-cut man who Booker suspected had been the sole survivor of the fight, treated a nasty chemical burn that must have come from renegade alchemy, and helped the doctor perform blood-soaked surgery on a man who’d been badly wounded when a ship’s keel fell out of its cradle in the shipyard, crushing the veins in his leg and leaving the trapped blood to curdle into poison.

He worked tirelessly, moving fast to keep ahead of his own thoughts, changing the beds for the hospital’s immobilized patients and rolling them over to prevent bed-sores from forming. That was another aspect of the renegade hospital. The Sect might offer emergency medicine, but it had no interest in treating long-term illnesses or simple old age, and directly sent those cases to the hospital to fill a bed until they died. Taking care of them was the most thankless work of all, and they had to be handled delicately, with their paper-thin skin and stick-like bones.

I could just keep doing this… Leave the Sect and work here…

I could survive that way, at least, using the book to make better medicines and earn a little money to keep things running.

The thought came to Booker as he heated a cauldron of chicken broth to feed to the invalids. And no matter how long he paused and thought it over, the more it seemed like the right thing to do. He had his ambitions, sure, but they'd already nearly killed him, and led him to a position where killing became nearly inevitable.

On the other hand the hospital asked nothing from him but a willingness to work and get his hands dirty.

But...

I can't just go back to drifting through life.

I remember...

I remember what it was like to be Rain, and have a dream.

Those memories and ambitions are part of me now.

As he meditated on the question, stirring the soup pot over the fire, there was a commotion from the foyer. The sound of the door crashing open echoed into the upstairs kitchen, and Booker headed down to see what the racket was.

To his surprise, the source was two of the three troublemakers he'd teamed up with to scam Wild Swan. Daoist Inchworm and Daoist Egg rushed up to him the moment they saw him, bowing their heads and grabbing for his hands as they sank to their knees.

"Brother Rain! The authorities have seized Brother Roaring Lion! He's going to be-- the guard said-- the guard said someone was killed!"

Booker froze.

"The guards have Brother Roaring Lion?"

Brother Egg shook his head vigorously. "Just one guard! He said we have to fetch you or Roaring Lion is a dead man!"

Booker frowned. "How did they connect us? You were supposed to keep quiet about our arrangement."

"Ah... we... we maybe talked a little bit about our fortunes..." Brother Inchworm admitted.

"Goddamn it. And you expect me to solve your mistakes?" Booker sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. And damn me, I will. I'll do it because nobody else is going to save him, and I have too much on my conscience already.

"Alright." Booker said. "Who is this guard?"

“Valley Tiger.”

Oh. Booker realized. Of course. They’ve sent Rain’s uncle after me.

“GET OUT HERE!” The voice of Rain’s uncle echoed through the building, and Booker felt an aura expand across the hospital, a tremendous weight pushing down on every living soul. It wasn’t as powerful as the aura Master Long had exuded – it lacked the bone-chilling force – but it was ferocious and bloodthirsty, bringing a cold restriction to his muscles like frozen needles were stabbing into his flesh. “YOU WORTHLESS SHIT!”

“Ahhh…” Brother Inchworm quivered, falling to the ground. All around him, the hospital’s patients were clutching their heads and cringing into the fetal position. Brother Egg’s face was pressed flat to the wooden floorboards. “He followed us here!”

Booker felt the urge to collapse, felt his legs begin to shake, felt fear spike through his heart like he was staring into the eyes of a feral tiger hungry for a meal.

But…

He focused on his breathing, and reversed the technique Fen had taught him. He’d never tried this before, but restraining his aura had become a second nature. Now, he pushed it outwards, letting it flare from the center of his breathing. Warmth spread back through his limbs, and he took a step forward. Then another, fighting the dead, numb weight of his own legs and moving unsteadily.

As he stepped out the door, his uncle was waiting for him.

Valley Tiger was an enormous man, broad in the shoulders and thickly muscular, with a constant sheen of sweat to his bulbous muscles. His hair was bound back into a loose bun, and his beard was a shaggy line of black across his squared jaw. His face was so square it could have been used as a jailhouse brick. He wore the gold and blue robes of a guard captain, tied with a belt of golden coins.

“Good. You can still walk– what are you doing in a heretical place like this, you idiot? Do you not even care about the Sect anymore– have you finally given up on embarrassing us in the Sect?” His teeth were gritted. His left hand had a fistful of Brother Roaring Lion’s hair, and the man hung limply from his clenched fist.

“I assume you’re here about Hu Bao.” Booker responded coldly. Rain’s memories of his uncle…

The man had seen fit to take Rain under his wing, teaching him the cultivation arts, after Rain’s father had died. But he was a poor instructor, and vicious with anything he saw as weakness. He’d more or less made Rain’s life hell until he’d decided the boy wasn’t worth bothering with – and ever since then, he’d tried to bully and pressure Rain out of the amulet, his birthright and last token of his father.

There was one key to interacting with him – never back down. Once he saw weakness, the argument was lost.

“Motherfucker, do you think? Everyone saw you running from that boy, and then his body washes up on the banks? What happened – who killed him!?” The look of disgust in the man’s eyes was palpable, like he was looking at a worm writhing.

“I did.” Booker said, lifting a hand. “I killed him.”

“Ridiculous.” Tiger didn’t even consider it. He just snorted and yanked Roaring Lion up, making the man’s neck twist and extend. “Do you want me to execute this idiot? Who are you protecting – give them up now!”

“On what grounds would you execute him?” Booker demanded.

“He’s a thief, a liar, and involved with a murder now. I have plenty of reason to just wring his neck in front of you!”

“Let him go.” Booker replied, not even acknowledging the weak excuse. “And we can talk.”

“Tell me who did the killing, and you can save his life.” Tiger said slowly. Roaring Lion was trying to meet his eyes, but Booker kept his gaze locked on Valley Tiger.

“I did.” Booker repeated.

“You couldn’t–”

“I could and I did!” Booker slammed his open palm onto his chest. “What do you want to know? The sound he made – where I threw the knife, or my bloody clothes?”

“How?” Tiger asked. He was, for once, calm. Booker had survived the storm, although it could still flare up at any moment.

“He took a berserking pill and came after me. Probably he couldn’t have worked up the courage to kill without the medicine. When it wore off, I tried to cripple him, but he ended up dead.”

Tiger tilted his head, and ran a hand through his beard. It wasn’t a story that left anyone with glory, and it was easy to believe. He snorted again.

Slowly, his aura receded. The feeling of pressure faded and collapsed.

“Fine. If you’re so keen on being arrested, let’s take you to the Sect and see what they say about this whole affair…” He spat out bitterly. “But one thing first – the amulet. Give it to me. It’s time that you surrender these dreams of cultivation and face the facts. You’re nothing but an embarrassment to this family!”

“Let him go.” Booker said slowly. “That was the deal.”

Valley Tiger snarled, and threw the unfortunate scam artist to the ground. As Roaring Tiger struggled onto all fours, Valley Tiger drew his sword. It made a horrible rasping sound as it slipped free from the sheathe and swung down – a solid line of silver-edged metal posed at the man’s throat, threatening to decapitate him in a single strike.

“Tell me.” Tiger insisted.

“A deal is a deal.” Booker replied.

“I’ll give you to the count–”

“No. You get nothing. If you can’t hold to your word, why would I bother wasting mine?” Booker cut him off sharply. In his chest, his heart was pulsing so hard his veins felt rigid and unyielding throughout his body. But…

I can’t back down. This isn’t about the laws of man. This is about the laws of the jungle – whoever backs down first, loses everything.

For a moment they held each other’s gaze. Then Valley Tiger sighed, and kicked Roaring Lion out of his way, lifting his sword to aim at Booker’s throat. “Then your head can roll too. I’m sick and tired of your arrogance, cripple.”

Roaring Lion struggled to his feet and ran. Neither of them spared him a glance.

He won’t kill me. He won’t kill me. He won’t kill me. Booker knew on some level it was true – Valley Tiger wasn’t an animal, he just acted like one to get his way. But with the tip of the blade level to the nape of his neck, not moving or shaking even by the slightest measure, and Valley Tiger’s ferocious eyes staring him down, he felt as though he was going to be extinguished by the next turn of the wind. “I am your brother’s son.”

“My brother would weep to see you–”

Booker felt something shake inside him. It was Rain – the remnant of Rain’s soul – weeping in shame. Those words would have destroyed him utterly, broken his foundations.

But what Booker felt was rage.

Rage at a world that had demanded something impossible from the first day of Rain, and judged him a failure, a cripple, for not living up to their damned expectations.

“And where have you been?” Booker lifted his eyes, his jaw setting. “Your brother’s son is branded and shamed as a cripple, and where is your voice, where is your pride, if you didn’t say a word then? You can shut up about family honor. You want the amulet? I have something I need to finish, and then I’ll go with you to the Sect. It will only take a day – two at most. Then whatever justice I’ve earned, happens.”

He let that hang in the air for a moment, and then, Valley Tiger said, “Go on then.”

“I sold it.”

Valley Tiger’s eyes went wide and his face went white with rage. Now the sword did shake, violently, and with a scream Tiger hurled it past Booker’s shoulder and into the wall of the hospital, where it stuck quivering in the wood of the door.

“You CRETIN!” He clutched at his face, seething through his fingers. The shade of red he’d turned was almost funny, but his aura was like a punch in the gut, pouring out in dizzying waves of power. “You sit there lecturing ME about family, and you SOLD our INHERITANCE!?”

“I-I’ll get it back.” Booker gasped out. There was an iron weight pushing him down to the ground, forcing his knees to buckle. His aura was guttering like a candle-flame in the wind.

“YOU’LL DO NO SUCH THING!” Valley Tiger screamed. Booker staggered back and sagged heavily under the sudden wall of pressure, just barely staying on his feet, glaring back defiantly as Valley Tiger lost all control. “YOU’VE DONE ENOUGH!”

But to Booker’s surprise, another voice spoke out, calm and collected.

“Suppress your aura at once, Guard Captain Tiger. There are sick people here, ones who will die under the pressure if you keep going much longer. I don’t have time for your screaming and ranting, so speak calmly, and tell me what is to be done about all of this.”

The doctor had emerged from within the hospital. Sweat dripped from his face as he pushed his way through the field of killing intent. Still, behind the fogged lenses of his glasses, his blue eyes were sharp and stern.

Slowly, still covering his face as if he couldn’t bear to look directly at Booker, Valley Tiger drew his aura back in. The waves of killing intent ceased.

“I ought to arrest you for harboring a fugitive.” Valley Tiger spat out, but without the killing intent backing his words, they came off as nothing more than bitterness.

“There are many things I ought to have been arrested for, hmm? It would be a shame to bring me in on such a small one.” The doctor said, his voice calm and small but carrying. “I believe the agreement was that the boy be allowed to finish something before he is arrested, I will take him into my custody; he will report to you in no more than two days.”

Slowly, the atmosphere cooled. The doctor stood unbothered by the raging torrent of killing intent, as if he was a stone unmoving in a fast-flowing river, white water gathering and lashing around him but not moving him a single inch.

“I…” Valley Tiger looked away and sneered. It was a weak motion; even Booker could tell that introspection and shame was creeping into him, revealing his past screaming and threatening as childish. Now he would want to retreat, to get away from his own display of weakness. “I will let you have three days. After that, if you make me come and find you again, I’ll cut your damn hands off.”

You truly are Rain’s blood – for better or for worse. Only you have the strength Rain could never muster for himself. The strength to demand the world treat you like a king.

“Come back inside…” The doctor said, as Valley Tiger turned away and stomped off into the busy streets. The people watching this show hastily turned their faces down and went back to their proper business. “We should talk.”

Booker felt… so many things. His heart was a confused torrent of regret, rage, sorrow, confusion. Some of those feeling were his and some were Rain’s. The boundary between them had grown thin, and Rain’s dark self-hatred bled into Booker’s guilt.

He allowed himself to be led back into the hospital, where people were sitting, shaking, clutching their faces. The doctor led him to a small back room with a single cot, a weathered writing desk, and a small stove. “Tea?” He asked.

“No.” Booker replied.

“Mmm, must be bad then. Even the dead want tea.” The doctor put a kettle on anyway.

“I killed someone, and everyone seems to ask, did they deserve it?” Booker sighed, sitting down on a small, uncomfortable wooden chair. “Does anyone?”

“It’s hard to say. While the wheel of reincarnation turns, one could say death means nothing. On the other hand… Death is the end. The end of a life, the end of an attempt to put meaning together from the chaos of the world. If we are to ascribe any meaning to life, we must accept its terrible opposite, the meaning of death.” The doctor seemed far away, and Booker closed his eyes.

“I served in the war, you know. The doctor for a legion of… some would call them killers, and they wouldn’t have objected. No, they might have laughed. But I think they were something far sadder. They saw their work as the separation of one piece of meat from another, as a work of red flesh, bone, fat, viscera, all coming apart under their swords. They were butchers and they no longer had any sight of the humanity in their victims.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think… I think in the moment I did it, I only saw him as an obstacle. Not a person.” Booker admitted slowly.

“And perhaps, for a moment, that was all he was to you. That’s the terror of perspective. People will matter only so much to your life – some will be nothing but footnotes. But every one of them has a full life beyond that. Killing is, in so many ways, reducing a person to an object. Turning what was a full human being with a life beyond what you could ever imagine into a stone cold corpse.” The doctor reached out – his hands moved in a flash – and he clapped a fly into a black pulp on the inside of his palm. “But we do it anyway, and we’re not always wrong for it. After all, sometimes a fucker just needs to die.”

Booker snorted, and then shook his head, “No. No he didn’t need to die. I just killed him, I think by accident, but…”

“But who cares.” The doctor said calmly. “A human being is full of reasons. A corpse has none. Pretending your reasons matter, when all the reasons inside your victim are gone and will never be known, is almost selfish.”

“Yeah.” Booker clenched his hands together. “Yeah, looking at him dead, limp like that, it was just… There was so much of being a human being that had gone out of him. There was so much missing. It just…”

“It’s a power nobody should have, but everyone does. Today, you found that out. You probably never imagined you could kill them – you thought that killing was something remote and distant that belonged to the cold-hearted and cruel.” The doctor poured tea into a pair of chipped china cups. “But alas. Good intentions don’t stop death. Nothing does. One can either live their life as far away from it as possible, or become numb to its reality.”

“Which one is better?” Booker asked, taking the cup of tea and letting it warm his hands.

“I don’t know. It was a good war – one of the few good wars – that those men fought in. They fought to defend their homes. They fought for their families. They fought for their lives. But in the end, they weren’t left as men, and they didn’t remember their homes or their families. I think in many ways they were already dead – and so I learned you can die from killing as easily as you can die from being killed.” The doctor settled down, holding his own cup. “If there was a good reason to kill, I think we would have solved the problem of killing by now. Great minds and great hearts have come before you, child, and they have tried to their wits end. I don’t think there is a solution. I think killing is wrong not for the ones it leaves dead, but for the ones who are alive. I think killing takes something from you and leaves a hole.”

“So…”

Booker sighed, and looked down into the tea. Fragments of loose leaf drifted in the amber waters.

“Is that all? I keep going with a hole in me?”

“No, you also make sure you don’t do it again. That’s the most important part. The dead are dead, the living are alive. Whoever you left in a grave, they won’t complain, but you owe it to yourself and the world to hold your hand back the next time you come to a crossroads. What’s done is done – focus on what’s next, because that’s the only thing you can change.” The doctor sat down on the bed, and put his hand on Booker’s shoulder. “I’m sorry for what happened to you, and how you chose to respond. I like to think – I’ve seen how you try to treat people – that you would have done better, if you’d seen a way to do so in that moment.”

“I would have… But I didn’t…”

“And you can look back on that failure, or you can look ahead. Two people could have died, and you were the one to live. What are you going to do with the rest of your life, Rain?” The doctor smiled gently, as if he’d stood on this precipice himself and wanted only for Booker to see the path out.

“I’m going to help people.”

“You do that.” The doctor said. “You do that.”