Blueprint for Immortality: a Crafting Xianxia

There was a large pavilion with a pillar at the center where the city’s requests were gathered for the Sect to handle. That pillar was eight feet tall, and every inch of it was covered in request talismans carved from bamboo and hung from cords. They rattled when the wind blew.

Nearby was a large kiosk, with rows of pills, talismans, and other treasures laid out in front of it. This was where people collected their rewards.

And that was where Booker ran into his first problem.

“You’re telling me there are no missions that will reward me a Spirit Vision Pill?” He had originally been looking for herbs that gave Ghost Sight, but since the Sect kept such a lockdown on raw ingredients, he thought he might have better luck using Dialyze to disassemble a finished pill with the Ghost Sight property.

However…

The old woman behind the counter looked at him uncharitably. Her weathered face was the color of oak wood, and her wrinkles came down like a landslide around a monkey-like mouth. A long-stemmed pipe sat between her teeth, which were yellow and brown. “Who would want such a stupid thing as a reward? Are you crippled in the head? Spirit Vision Pills are given out freely as material on any mission that requires them– and there are no such missions now, before you ask. The last one just got snatched up.”

“By whom?”

“A pair of idiots. Mo and something… Mo and Zhao.” Her withered finger ran along a page of names. “They took a mission hunting a ghost. Nothing more than a Pale Spirit that’s been causing trouble at a bathhouse on Thornstreet. They’ve had some two-bit exorcists chase it out of a funeral parlor, a wine barreling factory, and a dumpling restaurant, but it keeps coming back. And so they come to the Sect…”

Booker nodded gratefully. “Thank you granny.”

She just snorted. “Careful who you call granny. I’ll break through the bottleneck and reclaim my youth any day now.”

But Booker was already on his way after the disciples.

— — —

Booker chased down every pair of cultivators he saw as he made his way across the city, and he finally caught them by accident, while he was scarfing down on pork rolls.

The food was amazing. A thin wrapper of cloud-soft sweet bread still warm from a clay oven was wrapped around a hefty chunk of porkbelly, with the exterior crackling and snapping under his teeth as he crunched into gooey warm softness below, a meat so tender it was practically a fatty butter. All of it was smeared in a nutty, sweet sauce that had a hint of chili kick to it.

One silver bought him two and a small glass of a rough, pungent rice wine with a hint of infused herbs.

The other disciples had stopped by the stand to eat their lunch, and they glanced at him, their gazes full of casual contempt.

“Shouldn’t you be busy?” One of them said, leaning over and smirking. “That’s a big meal for someone who doesn’t fight.”

“Who should I fight? Surely you’ve got better things to do than watch cripples slapping cripples.” Booker replied. His answer implied the message, and you’ve got better things to do than bully me.

The man’s companion snorted. “Hey, he’s sharp enough. Why not ask him?”

“Hey runt. We’re on a mission from the Sect.” He dug into his robes and took out a bamboo slip, inscribed with careful writing. Booker took it. The craftsmanship was actually beautiful, every detail cut sharply out of the soft wood. Each letter was stern and blocky with a thick emphasized brushstroke.

“Mission: A Ghost Resides In Thornstreet Bathhouse. Expunge It.”

This was carved into a recessed rectangle carved into the left side of the slip. On the right-hand side, a second rectangle contained smaller, more tightly-clustered letters.

“Material: 3 Spirit Vision Pills. Reward: 15 Liang, 1 Sunflower-Saffron Cultivation Pill, Double Meal Portions For One Week.”

At the bottom was a complex seal imitating a signature.

Amazing. The Sect really puts craftsmanship into every small thing they do.

But while Booker was admiring the art of the bamboo slip and thanking his luck for delivering it, the two elder disciples were waiting impatiently.

“Thornstreet Bathhouse.” The more thuggish of the two grunted. He had an exceptionally square head. “Do you know where it is?”

Booker searched through Rain’s memories. Yes, he did know it. Rain had gone there at least twice while trying to spy on a bathing female disciple.

“We’ll give you a liang if you lead us there.” The slightly smarter one added.

“Sure, I know it.”

— — —

They arrived at the location as the sun was setting, dipping down below the horizon. The sea that had been verdant green was now red-and-honey amber, painted in those bright colors by the descent of the sun. It was a gorgeous view, the clouds turning to imperial purple at their edges and gold at their center.

The street was abandoned. The houses had been adorned with paper talismans.

As they walked, Booker paused to take in the strange ambience of a city without people. Puddles on the empty street reflected the sky, and the wooden shutter windows of the houses were shut tight. The only people around were a group of three at the end of the lane, standing shoulder to shoulder and whispering.

“Hey! Hey you!” The square-headed disciple advanced on the trio, who snapped their heads up in a way that registered to Booker as distinctly guilty.

“All of you, this is an investigation of the Sect.” His cooler-headed brother cut in. “We need to know everything you know about this bathhouse, starting with where it is.”

“Uh, you’re standing in front of it.” The skinniest of the trio answered.

“We don’t know anything.” The fattest of the trio answered.

“I mean, we know what anyone knows.” The precisely medium member of the group added. “Everyone knows the place is haunted.”

“Then fuck off. Ghosts aren’t something for you to gawk at. Hanging around, hoping to catch a glimpse of the spirit? You’ll be lucky if it doesn’t rip your guts out.” Square-Head declared, waving his hand dismissively.

The trio paled and glanced at each other, then tucked tail and ran away.

“Ah, you should have kept them around. Would have been nice to send someone in first.” The lanky disciple sighed.

“Well…” Square-Head glanced back at Booker.

Shit. Booker thought. Serves me right for opening my mouth to begin with…

Lanky reached into his robes and took out a bamboo vial, shaking a pair of sunflower yellow pill into his hand. He passed one to Square-Head and they both bit them down.

“Can I have one of those?” Booker asked. “At least let me see the damn thing.”

“Ha, what good would seeing it do for you? It’s probably pants-filling scary, so we’re doing you a favor not letting you see.”

“Go on, get in there!”

— — —

Booker stepped into the abandoned bathhouse slowly, and immediately as the door opened, a wave of nausea swept over him. A dark wave seemed to unfold from the opened door, crawling outwards to raise the hairs on the back of his neck. It was invisible, insidious, everywhere.

For a moment he stood there, letting his eyes adjust to the gloom. In the background there was the sound of water lapping against the pool’s stone edges, a constant repetitive sound like a tongue licking at his ear.

Faint lights landed on the surface of the water and reflected up onto the rafters, becoming strange rippling patterns of gold in the gloom.

He stepped forward, walking along the pool’s edge and glancing in. Nothing seemed amiss. The bathhouses were fed by natural springs, and the water was clean and steaming. Still. The sense of wrongness prickling at the back of his neck hadn’t lessened at all.

Rows of wooden lockers sat along the baths, with cubbies for rolled linen towels.

One of the lockers was partly swung open. Something was squirming in the shadows.

Stepping back, Booker looked around and spotted a long-handled backscratcher. Digging it into the gap in the locker door, Booker swung it open.

Cockroaches scuttled out in all directions. There were so many, a crawling hoard, that when one moved it pushed a dozen others aside. A landslide of brown-armored bodies spilled from the cubby, pouring down to the floor with their little legs wriggling and struggling, wings buzzing. The sound of tiny squeaking hisses filled the air.

“Ugh.” Booker stepped back and dropped the backscratcher.

“Are you still alive?” Square-Head shouted from the doorway. “How’s it look in there?”

Roaches continued to fall, their shiny brown bodies resembling a flood of excrement. They were absolutely pouring from the open locker now.

Booker stepped back and called, “I think I found something!”

The two disciples burst in, fists up and ready to fight. But they came to a halt behind Booker, their faces furrowing in disgust and confusion as they saw the tide of scurrying insects.

“Ugh.” Square-Head grunted.

Ugh. Booker quietly agreed. Pulling his eyes away from the tiny bodies wriggling their segmented little legs in the air and trying to flip themselves onto their backs, he examined the locker they had poured from. There was still a disgusting amount of insects scurrying about, but beneath them he could see rough gray cloth, and a lumpy shape. There was a large bag stuffed into the locker, its burlap surface covered in red stains.

“There’s something there…” Lanky was just a second behind Booker, and he actually had the fortitude to step forward, his sandal offering no protection from insects scuttling up and brushing across his toes. Wearing a pained grimace, he reached out and tugged at the bag’s corner.

It began to shift, pulling against the sides of the locker. But just as Lanky got a better grip on it, the fabric began to tear, and something began to push out through the hole.

Booker stepped back expecting something vile to burst out–

But just as the drama was reaching its climax, the bag tumbling over to spill against the floor, something glinted in the edges of the room and caught Booker’s attention.

Someone was watching them from the stairs down to the basement.

All Booker really caught was the flicker of motion as they pulled themselves back from peering around the corner, but Booker knew what he’d seen. A young boy with a pale face and dark staring eyes.

“Haaaa…”

“It’s just a load of old clothes!”

When he turned back, Lanky and Square-Head were staring at a tangled lump of bloodstained laundry that had fallen out of the bag. The roaches were swarming up, covering the rags so they were hard to see, but they looked ordinary besides the dark patches of dried blood.

Booker began to walk away, around the pool’s edge.

He didn’t think Square-Head and Lanky were going to be much help. Something was wrong here, and all they had to offer the problem was stupid muscle.

Booker could hear them arguing behind him as he turned to look down the stairway. It was dark, and modern flashlights didn’t exist. He didn’t have a candle or a torch…

But he did have Furnace. Once he reached the bottom, he could light up the area.

Drawing the sword from his scabbard, he began to step down the slimy brick stairway, feeling little drops of humid water collecting on the ceiling strike his shoulders and slide down the back of his neck. There was a door at the bottom, which he pushed open with a rusty scrape like a fork running across a plate, thin and grating.

There was no sound of another creature in that space. Nothing but steady dripping, plucking round notes against the surface of still pools of water. No breathing but Booker’s own…

Furnace.

Blue flame swirled in the palm of Booker’s hand like an azure galaxy, illuminating the scene. Booker’s eyes swept left and right, and he felt a pressure in his chest from the tension.

– there was the old boiler standing tall and round, connected to the ceiling by pipes, its grated entrance shut tight –

– stacks of fragrant soap bars in the corner –

– rows of towels hung up to dry –

– buckets and mops and a staring face and cleaning supplies –

– boxes of lye soap powder on a shelf –

Booker froze, reversing course, swinging back around. There had been a face –

It stared back at him, black-eyed. Black-lipped. So pale its skin was almost blue. It was crouched down, hands on the floor in a posture like a monkey. It – he – was dressed in commoner’s robes.

And coming face to face with a ghost should have been terrifying. There was a moment where it almost was.

As that moment passed, however, Booker realized that the ghost’s posture was one of fear. It shrank back as he approached, making an odd hissing sound.

It was afraid of him.

“Why are you here…?” Booker whispered, crouching down to eye-level.

“Hhhhh…” The man’s mouth opened to speak, but as he tried to push breath up through his throat, a long cut at the base of his neck yawned open. The wound was drained and bloodless. All the air that would have became words leaked out with a ghastly hiss.

“Can you communicate like this?” Booker reached down and tapped the ground. “Once for no, twice for yes.”

It slowly reached out, tapping its finger twice.

“Good, good.” Booker said, trying to comfort the frightened thing. “Why are you down here?”

It pointed behind him. Booker turned to see a blank wall of gray brick. He blinked, trying to see in the fading light of the Furnace-fire. As he lit another from his hand, something scuttled across the wall. A cockroach.

It had emerged from a crack in the bricks.

Booker wandered forward, getting closer and closer to the gap in the wall. More black-bodied cockroaches slithered out, and he could see more of them deeper within, dark shadows scuttling about in the gloom.

For a moment he looked around, trying to see something he could use as a prybar.

But as he looked back, Booker realized the bricks were held together by copious amounts of dry gray mortar.

Maybe…

Dialyze.

As shining water collected around his hand in a swirling disk, he ran his palm along the stone bricks. The mortar began to melt away, dissolving into its components: a mix of ash, lime dust, sticky rice paste, and water.

One by one the bricks began to crumble out of position, and several slid away entirely. Cockroaches fled in all directions as their lair was exposed, and Booker took a step back as they took wing and buzzed through the air in a swarming horde.

But this was no time to be squeamish.

He reached forward and began to pull the bricks away, from top to bottom. With each stone he dislodged there was a waterfall of cockroach bodies, pouring black and squirming from the space behind the bricks.

That space…

Contained something white, that glinted in the fading light of the Furnace. Something pale and curved and smooth. It was concealed beneath a skittering mass of cockroaches, but Booker already knew what he would see.

A skeleton behind the wall.

As he ripped the wall apart, cockroaches scrambled through his robes and up his sleeves, across his body. He wanted to puke his guts out, but was terrified of what would happen if his mouth opened. A final stab of nausea hit as he revealed what he feared. The bones were very small:

It was the skeleton of a child.

A scream ripped through the quiet of the bathhouse, over the squealing hisses of the roaches. Booker stumbled back and retreated up the stairs, towards the source of the screaming. The ghost was gone. He was hoping it had just gone upstairs and startled Square-Head.

But what he saw at the top of the stairs was worse than that.

Blood filled the waters of the bathhouse pool. Dismembered chunks of gore floated there, white with fat, red with gristle. A fragment of a leg. An arm. Something torn open that had once been a face.

Square-Head was torn into pieces. Over the water, Lanky was floating. His legs were bent at strange angles, and as Booker watched horrified, an invisible force seized his right arm and slowly twisted it back against the bone. The joint popped free from the socket, bulged against the skin, and burst through.

A yellow mist covered the ground, rose up the walls in reverse waterfalls, and formed a swirling maelstrom on the ceiling. The center of that whirling landscape of smoke was directly above where Lanky was floating. A shape descended from that center, an upside-down figure made of shadows standing on the ceiling.

He flicked his hand, and Lanky’s arm burst apart midway down the bone, fragments of sharpened ulna and radius ripping through his skin.

Lanky was no longer screaming. His mouth and eyes were weeping pits of red, and he choked, burbling awkwardly with a throat full of blood.

Booker realized, very suddenly, that he wasn’t moving. That his whole body had frozen stiff. And that he needed to unfreeze, because he needed very badly to go back down the stairs and find a way out of here before the spirit saw him.

And as if summoned by that very thought –

The spirit’s head snapped towards him. Its shadowy face stared him down.

Booker unfroze and flung himself down the stairs. A howling sound chase him down, and the yellow mist began to pour down the steps.

He ran for the gap in the wall. There had been different bricks on the other side. He thought – he couldn’t properly remember – that the bricks had been different on the other side.

Which meant the space where the body was buried was between two cellars.

Dialyze!

He slammed his fist into the far side of the wall, punching through cockroaches and ancient dusty cobwebs. As insects squirmed and died under his fist, the dissolving water cut through the mortar. He threw his body into the breach, and the wall caved beneath his weight.

He spilled out into the cellar on the other side, riding a wave of rubble and roaches. Beneath him was the body of the buried child, brittle bones crunching as Booker shifted, struggling to stand up with only slipping brick debris underneath him.

Behind him there was a howl of rage.

That was all the motivation Booker needed to hurtle up and run up the cellar’s steps at incredible speed, smashing through a trapdoor into the living room of the house above. Already summoned by the noise, a man was starting to come down from the upper floor with a sword gripped awkwardly in his hand, bedslippers still on.

“Run for your life! The ghost is in here!” Booker shouted, waving to them as he dove for the door and shoulder-checked the flimsy wood straight off its hinges. He fell as the door fell out of its frame, rolled onto his feet, and scrambled back from the house.

The family within ran out onto the streets with him, the father carrying a girl and a boy under his arms as the wife clung onto him for support.

A yellow mist poured up from the trapdoor to the basement, and the children began to cry. But after an instant, that mist receded back, sinking beneath the earth.

Booker stood watching it. Feeling his heart shake in his chest. That was truly something else; the apparition’s presence had filled him with such fear that it felt like he’d lost control of his body. It was the same feeling he’d had in the final moments of facing down the ape.

Like his life and death was so close his body had become weightless. That things were moving so fast they had become slow.

All the time he had been in this world, Booker had been struggling with his body. Finding it a little too lanky, a little too tall, a little out of tune with the expectations he’d built by living an entire life in his own body.

But under the pressure of life and death…

That stumbling hesitance disappeared and he felt like he was in total control of his own body.

He stood there, shoulders rising and falling as he rode the downswell of a massive wave of adrenaline. His body was prickling with cold sweat.

He was alive.

“Uhm, good sir…” A voice interrupted his after-battle stupor. The woman from the house was looking up at him, knelt down to comfort her daughter. “What are we to do.”

Right. Of course. These people… Have probably been in fear of the ghost for days.

“Do you have anywhere you can go and stay, just for the night?” Booker asked. They nodded, “Then go there. In the morning go to the Sect and say two disciples died on a mission to deal with this ghost. They’ll take you seriously then.”

This wasn’t an ordinary ghost. That was a Yellow-Realm Spirit.

— — —

As the adrenaline washed out of his system, Booker found himself driven to drink.

He took his last silver liang and spent it for a jug of rice liquor and a seat at a bar. It was an open air restaurant, with long tables under a straw awning. Half-clothed women delivered bowls of stewed meat and noodles, and for a little more, stayed and kept pleasant company.

But Booker didn’t want company as he drank his liquor from a wooden bowl. One bowl led to another, and he emptied the jar in no time.

Yellow-Realm Spirit…

Booker rolled the phrase around Rain’s memory. Broadly speaking, spirits could be Yellow, Green, or Blue-Realm. Anything beneath these was considered a Pale Spirit, barely able to touch the physical world. A Yellow-Realm Spirit was bound to the place where it had died, unable to leave. A Green-Realm Spirit could take up residence in artifacts and leave its grave. A Blue-Realm Spirit was totally free; it could roam the world as a full existence.

But this was a measure of how complete the soul was, not of power. A Blue-Realm Spirit could be totally powerless, where a Yellow-Realm Spirit could be terrifying.

And I’ve got no luck at all… That thing seemed powerful…

Come tomorrow, the Sect would learn about their dead disciples, and the spirit would be wiped from the face of this planet. Washed away along side it would be any chance of acquiring the Spirit Vision Pills.

As he lifted up his last bowl of liquor, he noticed something. Three familiar faces were sitting at the bar. The same three he’d seen loitering outside the bathhouse, what felt like a year ago.

Booker watched them carefully as he cradled his last drink. As they got up and left, he slide off his chair and followed.

Like he’d expected–

They went to the bathhouse. They were clustered around the still-open door, peering in nervously, when Booker stepped out of the shadows behind them.

“On behalf of the Sect’s authority – You’re going to tell me everything.” He demanded.

— — —

“Elder brother, the thing is, we really had the best of intentions. Our gang of brothers, we all want to reach your level sir. To be accepted by the Sect. To do that we just needed to gather some funds, after the death of our eldest brother, Brother Han, left us penniless.”

They sat together in a teahouse. The place was abandoned and they had just let themselves in. The fattest of the trio, a man with an egg-shaped head and wide earlobes, lit up the stove and heated them all some water for tea.

Doing the explaining was the tallest of them, a man with big square shoulders and a round-jawed complexion that made him seem very sincere.

Sitting on the table between them was an amulet made of round, flat pebbles of jade strung on a leather cord.

“So this amulet – Brother Han’s inheritance – we thought we could use it to summon him back. It is a Spirit Summoning Amulet, after all. How could we know the bathhouse would have other spirits lurking about?”

“That’s a nice story.” Booker replied. “But did this Han die at the bathhouse?”

The man’s poker face slipped for a second, as he chewed the edge of his lip. “Well, no. But we thought to summon him there–”

“And at the dumpling restaurant? At the wine barreling factory? At the funeral parlor?”

They had frozen stiff.

Booker continued, “I know what’s going on. You’ve been summoning Brother Han all over town and chasing him off again for money.”

“Brother! Don’t make such accusations! Don’t you see that–”

“Hey, don’t say such things about my brother. He’s an honorable man and–”

For a moment the fat one and the middle one tried to argue back, but it quickly became apparent this was a lost cause; the thinnest and youngest member of the trio had begun to tremble violently. He was sat at the table beside Booker and despite curling his hands into fists they were still shaking. His shoulders fell up and down, and his teeth chattered, his face knotted up in misery.

After a few moments they were all looking right at him, but it was a long pause before the man regained control of himself enough to gasp out, "I’m sorry, brothers– but I can’t keep lying! We’re going to get hanged the way we’re going! Necromancy is a crime… We have to confess and beg the Sect’s mercy…”

The fat one had put his head in his hands. “Brother Ji, you are such a fuck-up.”

The middle one reached across his table and put his hand on the trembling man’s shoulder. “You’re not a fuck-up. Don’t listen to him.”

Booker waited politely for his tea.

After the fat one had placed a porcelain cup of steaming red tea in front of him, and the skinny one had been comforted enough to stop shaking, Booker spoke.

“Brother Han must have been your leader when he was alive, right? And you must have been awfully hard up on money to risk being hung for necromancy.”

Booker’s assessment was: they might be useful. They had obviously been taking their orders from Brother Han, and without him, had immediately landed themselves in deep trouble.

They might be considering finding new leadership in life.

“Ah, Brother Han was a great man, but his gambling debts were large… His creditors insisted we take on all his debts when he died…” The middle one explained.

“We only bothered his spirit because our nuts were in a vise, frankly speaking.” The fat one added.

“The first time was probably an accident, right? You just wanted to see your brother again.” Booker suggested.

“Yes, yes. We summoned him at the funeral parlor to ask what to do. From there we simply… fell into using our powers to scam people.”

“And this Spirit Summoning Talisman… Where did Brother Han find such a thing?” Booker found himself enjoying the position of investigator. It was putting together neat little puzzle pieces. It felt much easier to handle than a ghost story.

“He may have been…” The middle one grinned awkwardly. “Doing a little graverobbing at the time. Of course, we didn’t partake. We were all sick at the time…”

“We aren’t confessing to anything.” The fat one said. “But yes, graverobbing.”

“Alright. So he, and only he, went graverobbing and uncovered this treasure.” Booker agreed. It was really astonishing how much social power his place in the Sect gave him: they had to treat this graverobbing business as a matter of life and death, but he didn’t really care at all. “Does it work? Can you really banish ghosts with it?”

“You really can.” All three of them agreed. “It’s a great treasure, Elder Brother. We uh…”

They glanced between each other, and again agreed, “We’d gladly give it to you!”

God, this place really is embarrassingly corrupt. I could collect bribes like this every day, I bet. The city must be full of petty crooks who’d rather pay up than cross a disciple of the Sect, even a crippled one…

Booker massaged his eyebrows, trying to deal with the moral implications of this.

Unfortunately, the trio took this as evidence he was still deciding whether they’d paid enough to escape the gallows. “Er…” The middle one began. “Of course, all the money we made as exorcists is also evidence, and we’ll surrender it right away.”

“No, no.” Booker held up a hand. “There’s no need for that. Look, I’m not concerned with money and bribes. But I need your help. I need these ghosts gone.”

“Elder Brother, how can we handle such a spirit?” The middle one said. “It’s too much for poor people such as ourselves.”

“I have a plan.” Booker said. “And you all have a part.”