Blueprint for Immortality: a Crafting Xianxia

As his body shivered and trembled like a leaf on the wind, Booker’s mind was pulled away, like the wind blowing against his body had picked up his mind and carried it far into the distance.

There was a disorienting rush of memories, flashing through instants of noise, smell, and taste that must have meant something deeply important to Rain, but were just flashes of sensation to Booker. Whatever connection he had with Rain’s soul, it wasn’t enough to know instinctively what made up a core memory for him; what was so important it wasn’t stored as a mere image, pressed into memory like a flower preserved between a book’s pages, but as a smell, a taste, a sound, utterly inseparable from what it had meant to Rain.

But he arrived in an image he could understand.

Rain was young, and lifted onto his sister’s shoulder like a sack of potatoes. They were walking away from home, all of them, his brothers and his sister, his mother…

His father was behind them, walking through the field with a torch. Making sure the soldiers who were on their way would find nothing – not his family and not food to keep marching south. They wouldn’t sleep in his bed or put their boots up at his table; the house was covered in rolling, licking tongues of fire.

Rain saw his life burning and began to cry.

His mother took him off his sister’s shoulder, hugged him close, and said, “Here.”

She hung an amulet around his neck, a heavy lump of unworked jade hanging on a leather cord, twisted and coiled like a ball of serpents knotted against one another. “This was your great-grandfather’s amulet. This is your part of home to carry with you."

Great-grandfather…

The cultivator his father still told stories of, who drove the beasts out of the territory the entire town stood upon, using only his axe and his will.

Rain clutched it closely and turned his eyes away from the fire, towards the distant mountains.

Someday. Someday, he thought, I’ll be a cultivator too. I’ll be strong and fast enough to hold off an army if I need to.

Booker internally sighed.

The belief in Rain’s heart was so strong and so pure and so childish. He’d never planned, or sworn himself to training, he’d just believed.

In the dream Booker was in, he could feel Rain’s hope burning like the sun–

And that was all it would ever do. Warm him on sour days. Promise him better days that had never come.

But what happened to the amulet? He wondered. He’d never seen it among Rain’s possessions. And it was rather hard to miss.

The image blurred, like water disturbed by a falling stone. The world rushed by, years flowing past. He felt the amulet's weight around Rain's neck become familiar and comforting. He saw countless nights where Rain ran his fingers along the knotted, serpentine lump of jade, and imagined himself flying through the sky.

There were all kinds of stories that began with an amulet, or another heirloom.

Where vast and wonderful power was bestowed on someone who needed it.

This was back when Rain was a novice, recently accepted into the Sect. When he could still remember his mother's face. His sister had torn through the entrance exams, and traded nearly all of their family fortune to buy him a place as well.

The image blurred, and snapped back to clarity as a fist drove into Rain's gut.

A foot scythed through the air, hammering into his arms as Rain raised his guard.

A weight held him down as kicks and blows hammered down on his body.

The memories were so disconnected and brutal that Booker couldn't make sense of where or when they were happening. It was just violence, a constant ugly parade of sparring matches, attacks from his classmates, beatings delivered for failing in his studies. Bruise after bruise after bruise.

And always ending with the same angry retort, the same hope that this time would be the last: Rain would think to himself, when my amulet awakens, I'll cripple you and make you beg like a dog. I'll annihilate your family and pull out your roots.

It was easy, stupid talk, the kind of thing applied like a salve for a bruised ego. But he believed the story a little more every time he told it to himself.

He lay awake in bed, body aching with bruises, staring into the green depths of the amulet.

Booker was there too. His ghost lived behind Rain's eyes, observing the memory with a sense of sadness. Rain had always believed he was destined for greatness - but Booker could only relive his fantasies with the knowledge it was already too late.

The memories blurred and stretched. Days flooded past.

Every day, Rain struggled and trained. The daily routine of a novice in the Mantis Sect began with him splashing cold water over his face, brushing his teeth with a rough twig of antiseptic bark, and heading to the training grounds.

There he would practice against the mats until sweat dripped from his face.

But he was slipping behind. Other novices had already leapt past him, earning their formal robes and true admission to the Sect. Novices years younger than him found their cultivation and ascended. No matter how hard he tried, he was running in place.

Desperation grew.

His heart tightened with anxiety.

Dark days were ahead.

— — —

A new memory…

In spring, the Sect announced it would be accepting new apprentices for its honored alchemists. An examination, the Grasshopper's Trial, would be held. The messenger from the Upper Sect laid his hand on a massive book, the size of a wagon wheel around and thicker than a candle was tall.

"This is the Grasshopper Book, a repository of herbs, grasses, roots, and flowers. In it you will find everything you need to complete the exam; merely memorize its contents and learn to recite its passages, and you will succeed."

And in the back of the crowd, Rain felt like a thunderbolt had struck him. This had to be it – maybe his martial talents were weak, but surely he could become an alchemist. This had to be his way out…

The next weeks were spent furiously studying. Day after day, he'd shower off the sweat of practice and find himself a place in the lecture hall, copying down the words read aloud from the Grasshopper Book. His eyes ached and his blood pooled in his aching knuckles as he gripped his quill.

And yet…

The terror gripped him that this would be like everything else. That he would try, as hard as his body and soul would allow, and others would sail past him effortlessly to claim the prize.

The stress began to show. His eyes were tired and he could barely tell one root from another.

Rain…

Rain went to the blackmarket alchemists that night. They held court in a small whorehouse, full of girls, the smell of wine, perfume, incense…

The woman who sat down across from Rain was no whore. She wore blue robes hemmed in green, fine jade jewelry, and many rows of clacking prayer beads wound around her slender wrists. Red nails held a cup of wine. Her right eye was gone, covered by an eyepatch, her hair drawn back into a tight black braid.

"I am Zheng Bai, queen of powders and poisons." She said. "If you want to pass through the trials of the Grasshopper Examination, you could not hope for a better friend."

Rain's hand squeezed into a fist below the table as he nodded. "I brought you a gift." His throat felt dry as he passed over three months worth of silver from the Sect's stipend.

"Silver?" Zheng Bai lifted her one eyebrow and hid a small laugh behind the back of her hand. "I don't need silver, silly boy. Do you find silver often solves your problems? Is there silver enough in your pockets to buy what you want? If so, why bother with me?"

His face flushed. "I just– tell me what you want, and I'll bring it to you." Rain spat out. This whole situation wasn't just humiliating to his pride, but worse, it stung at his sense of morality. Every second he was looking over his shoulders, terrified of being spotted in criminal company.

"I want the same thing you want. For you to become an alchemist – and for you to remember who your friends are, when you reach that goal." But she did take the silver, placing the coin pouch in her robes and taking out a small bamboo vial. "These are Lucid Flower Dreamer Pills. Take them, and you will be able to remember everything. One a day – and this is very important. You cannot miss even a single day."

For a minute, Rain hesitated.

"Of course. I should have known – you don't have the resolve." She reached for the pills.

But before she could, Rain snatched them up. "I have all the resolve I need." He said, standing. "I'll return to you as an alchemist."

He knew it was a mistake, even then. But doing things the right way had already cost him countless years of frustration and fruitless labor.

For once…

He wanted things to be easy.

— — —

The day after Rain took the first pill his studies became so stunningly, perfectly easy. Every answer leapt to mind as soon as the question was asked. Every word of the lecture was preserved inside his head, like his mind had turned to ice, catching and preserving everything.

It felt good.

His confidence grew. He smiled more. His studies, freed from stress and fear, became enjoyable. He liked the dry resinous scent of herbs and the names of the flowers.

The dream was growing brighter and more colorful - but Booker could sense something was wrong. The faces of Rain's new friends and the pages full of flowers he was studying were smeared and uneven, like a half-finished painting, the colors of the paint showing brightly but all the finer points of detail not yet added in.

On the day of the exam, he took the final pill and left his room with a sense of confidence. There wasn't a single question he wasn't ready for. There wasn't a single thing that could stop him.

He went to sleep that night with a smile on his face.

And the next morning he reached, out of habit, for the bottle of pills. It was empty.

Over the next few hours, things began to change again.

A stab of nausea shot through his belly as he ate, nearly causing him to lose his breakfast.

His hands shook and trembled as he practiced at the mats, his skin ice cold beneath a profuse layer of sweat.

By the time lunch came around, he wasn't to be found in the dining hall; he was lying on his straw mattress, kicking at the sheets and clawing at his own face. Relentless, brutal itching left him peeling away layers of his own skin with his fingernails. He was both bone-dead exhausted and nail-chewingly tense, a horrid in-between where neither sleep or the waking world fit him.

But that wasn't filled Rain with terror.

Everything he'd gained – everything he'd memorized – was dissolving into a blur. It was like paint dripping across a canvas. Every detail began to smear in his mind, one thing bleeding into another.

By the next day…

Rain didn't remember a single word of alchemy, a single face among the new friends he'd made. It had all escaped from him in that horrible night.

He walked through his life with a total lack of understanding. His notes made no sense to him; his new friends were strangers. His whole body felt wrong, his throat dry, his heart beating too hard, a strange pulse shifting through the back of his neck, as if a skeletal finger was plucking at the base of his spine like it was a bowstring.

Where did it lead him?

Back to Zheng Bai.

"You've poisoned me." He gasped out.

"Nonsense." She replied, clearly amused. Booker could see her watching Rain squirm in his seat with the expression of a cat catching a mouse. "These are just side effects. Every medicine has them. Or do you not even remember that much?"

"I don't remember anything! I can't be an alchemist! What was the point of this, if I can't make the simplest pill?"

"Silly bug. If a pill could make you an alchemist, why would the Sect bother training you? No. The point of this is that you can be assigned to one of our alchemists, who won't care one bit whether you know your herbs and grasses. Your job will be running packages back and forth between the Sect."

But that didn't end up happening. Booker noted, as Rain made a sound between choking and laughing.

"Why would I do that? I wanted to be an alchemist, not a lapdog!" His voice rose to a cracking roar that brought silence within the whorehouse, people looking their way. Zheng Bai scowled and stood up.

Rain opened his mouth to speak and she slapped him across the cheek, hard.

"What you want doen't matter one speck of shit to me, and you won't speak such stupid words again. Never forget, you've already crossed the line to my world. I could have you expelled from the Sect as a cheater with a few words."

Rain's eyes bulged with hatred, gritting his teeth. But she was right. In every possible way, she'd played him.

"As for your problem, it's really nothing to worry about." From her robes she took a vial of pills. It was smaller than the last one, and Booker recognized the blue pills within. Blue Heaven Fantasy Pills.

She dropped them on the table and departed as Rain clenched his fists in silent, shaking rage.

— — —

That night, desperate, unable to sleep, Rain took the first of the Blue Heaven Pills.

It was…

Freedom.

As he lay on his pillow, he dreamed of Earth. Of skyscrapers and flocks of pigeons that lived among the marble facades of the high towers. Of suit-wearing men and women striding past on smooth concrete avenues. On the gray and austere expanse of the city fading into a landscape of electric warmth and darkness as the sky turned towards night and a thousand windows lit up with the light of internal worlds waiting behind the glass.

It was so far from his troubles.

It was so far from even his dreams.

It was freedom from despair, and better yet, it was freedom from hope. From having to hope, every day, that things would get better when they never had before.

Booker’s ghostly image stood over him, kneeling down to look at his face. Rain looked happy. Truly happy, in an almost ugly sense, a bliss so pure it spoke of desperation as he kicked and readjusted on the bed, eyes closed as he drifted through fantasy-land.

But what happened to the amulet? Booker wondered.

He reached out and tried to push the vision, tried to move of his own accord. The image bent – then snapped back into place. There was a resistance, suddenly. Another will pushing back against his own.

Rain. Booker acknowledged.

But the force he was feeling wasn’t… human, anymore. He’d met two ghosts now, and the will of Rain had that same sad air of finality, like its story was already done.

This was merely the last act of a dead man. Trying to hide his secret shame.

Rain, Booker asked. What did you do?

The image blurred. Time accelerated, and Booker was launched through sharp flashes of memory as whole days passed in the blink of an eye. They were counting down towards the announcement of the Grasshopper Examination – Rain was training, studying, going through his normal routine, but every night he’d place a Blue Heaven Pill on his tongue and drift towards Earth in a happy spiral.

He’d long since run out of the meager supply Zheng Bai had given him. His stipend was exhausted by the time he started to take two a day, then three…

There wasn’t a moment he was fully on the Mountain-Gate World anymore. Every instant of his waking life, Rain was drifting through skyscrapers, subway cars, diners on the edge of Kansas City, anywhere his soul could go on the planet Earth.

His eyes were dull and his martial arts were suffering.

He was whipped for failing a routine kata, beaten for failing to spot an ambush coming from his fellow novices. He was robbed of his last coins – he started to sell his possessions.

But every time Rain tried to step away, tried to quit, the sad reality of withdrawal was waiting for him. His resolve was chipped away at as he chewed his nails, fussed at his hair, fidgeted and scratched desperately at his own skin.

And with every step on this road, Rain knew he was getting farther away from his dream.

These pills were poison – everybody knew that. They could ruin your cultivation – even Rain knew that.

But was he even a cultivator? Every day of his life spent chasing that dream felt like madness when happiness was so close at hand.

And then it happened.

Booker felt the dream growing heavy at the approach of the day. It was a kind of warning, a dense weight settling onto the world as he watched Rain eat his breakfast alone, hiding from his friends, who’d long since realized he was poisoning himself.

He walked to the training room thinking only of a neon-filled casino back on Earth, a gaudy palace of chirps and buzzing sounds rising up to a faux-gold-and-marble dome ceiling from the hundreds of slot machines lining the floor.

As the instructor snapped their cane down to the floor, the practice began. Kata drills, flowing from one form of the Mantis Style to the next in an almost ritualized dance.

His legs were refusing to cooperate. They wouldn’t lift off the floor, like his soles were magnetized. He dragged through the steps. His arms were weak. They barely held any force as his fists slammed into the mat. Cold sweat dripped into his eyes. His lips were cold.

And then he was on the floor, confused.

The instructor’s cane whipped across his arms.

“Up!” The instructor bellowed, white-faced with rage.

Rain tried and failed to roll onto his feet, managing only to turn himself over on the ground. The cane snapped against his back. “UP!”

He tried.

He tried as hard as he’d ever tried at anything.

The cane crashed down on his cheek.

“You…” The instructor hissed, leaning in. “Are a disgrace to this clan and this Sect. You will never be anything but a worm, and a worm we have tolerated for too long.”

“Take him away.” He commanded to his deputies. “Have him branded a cripple. We have no more time for mediocrity.”

Rain tried to protest. He tried to stand up, hoped to fight, hoped to prove them all wrong–

But all he could do was weakly clutch and claw at his assailant’s faces as they grabbed him in a brutal restraint and dragged him – legs trailing against the floor – towards the door.

Booker heard him scream and beg, and turned his face away.

He looked towards the instructor, memorizing the man’s thin face and foppish comb-over trying to hide advancing baldness.

One more score to settle…

If he hadn’t struck Rain at that crucial moment…

No, Booker couldn’t say that Rain would have managed to stand himself up for sure. That was impossible. You could never know.

But he could believe, and he did.

The image blurred, but Booker already knew what to expect.

His face aching with the memory of the tattoo, his eyes wet with humiliation, Rain stumbled into a pawnshop.

For one last moment he held the amulet in his hand, silently begging it to reveal something, anything, a last shred of hope…

And when it stayed still and silent in his palm, he sold it so he could go and buy enough Blue Heaven Pills to die a happy man.

Booker watched and let the image fade there. It turned slowly to black, an empty void, in which he floated almost alone. The only other occupant was a ghost, almost faded to nothing, a swirl of wind and a faint emotion of sorrow.

All that remained of Rain.

“Come on.” Booker said. “We’ve spent a lot of time in your head. Let’s… go somewhere happier.”

And he held out his hand.

— — —

When Booker was fourteen his father found an old record player – a true vintage model – at a garage sale, and spent weeks fixing it up for Booker’s birthday. They sat together in his room, his dad letting him sneak sips of beer as they listened to favorite albums from his own childhood – grungy, punky music his dad still remembered how to sing along to.

It was good.

Booker had never been so grateful for his father. For the life the man had fought to give his son. But even so, he touched the man’s face, whispered “Hey dad,” and sort of wiped him out of the image, erasing him and Booker’s own image from the scene.

All that remained was the room and the record player. It was a comfortable room, full of dorky wallscrolls and posters, volumes of manga sitting on a shelf, a television, a playstation…

Booker lifted the needle of the record player and set it down. The Thin White Duke started to sing.

“This is a safe place, Rain. I don’t know how long you’ll be here – I promise I’ll try to find you again, and show you around Earth some more. But right now…”

He smiled at the nothing that remained of his friend.

“I think you’d like just to relax, for a while. Maybe forever. If it’s forever… that’s fine too.”

The ghost seemed… alright, with that. Happy in the way it could be happy, as its ghostly presence flipped at the albums sitting on the shelf.

Booker turned away, towards the window looking out on the yard. He sighed.

Not everyone gets to live a happy life… Some people just find their mistakes have added up until there are no good options left…

What a mess you made, Rain…

I’d kind of hoped you’d gotten my body. That you’d be running around on Earth somewhere.

But I guess I probably left a corpse behind. I guess that’s okay.

In the end, he was…

So very far from Rain, and so very lucky for that. But his own life…

He had gone from one hobby to the next, one job to the next, one relationship to the next. It was like he’d lived a dozen different lives, each of them aimed nowhere in particular. The line of his life had been an errant squiggle.

Rain had wanted one thing and it led him to total destruction.

Booker envied him, in a strange way. Respected him, even more so. Rain had made so many mistakes…

But he’d fought as hard as he could.

I’d like that, I think. To fight all the way and know exactly what I’m made of… Even if the answer isn’t always flattering.

He looked back. The world of the dream wasn’t exactly like the world outside, and far less linear. Through the open door of his Earth bedroom, Booker could see the halls of the Mantis Sect, and past them, the pawnshop, the whorehouse, Rain’s family home in flames. The whole dream had been set along a single path like a worm of disconnected dreamscapes.

Alright…

Just one more thing to settle while I’m here.

The dream had allowed him to talk to things hidden in his own mind, the remnants of Rain and his memories. To communicate in a way he couldn’t normally.

Now he held out his hand and said, “Book.”

A heavy book bound in green leather materialized in his hand. It was clasped at the corner with bronze, and written on the front was a name that had long since faded.

“You know, everything else, I can at least guess at. I’m probably here because Rain taking that many pills created some kind of connection to me on Earth. He dies, and I get pulled into his body, somehow.” Booker said. “But you? I don’t remember having a book in my head, name aside, and neither does Rain. Where do you fit in all of this?”

The book snapped open, pages flipping past in a blur of vellum.

It landed on an image. It was a beautiful watercolor of a sage in green robes, writing with his own blood. This was his life’s work. He fed his own life and knowledge into every word, and in response, the world around him seemed to bend inwards around the book, swirling into its pages like a whirlpool devouring the landscape around him. Trees rich with cherry blossoms, herbs from the soil, even the light of the sun fell into the pages and became images.

The page flipped–

Now it showed a second book, bound in yellow. It was being lifted by red-hot chains from a cauldron of smelting metal.

A third book, blue, catching lightning on its page.

A fourth– a fifth– sixteen in all!

The final image was of the cultivator surrounded by a wheel of books, standing in a starry field. He held up a hand and created a world in his palm.

Incredible…

But…

It doesn’t answer my question at all.

“Who was he?” Booker asked. There was no response.

Frowning, Booker tried. “What happened to him?”

The page flipped. The next image was dark and dreadful, a scene of betrayal. Black-robed cultivators held the book’s creator down against a stone wheel, his chest pierced with arrows and blades that left blood dripping onto the grass below. One robed figure stood above him, holding up a knife to drive it down into the cultivator’s heart. In the foreground, other figures sat hunched over the sixteen books, tearing out pages with an arsonist’s wild glee.

No…

There were only fifteen books in the image. The green book, the one he held in his hand now, was missing from the scene.

“So you escaped?”

A turn of the page. An image of Earth.

“To home…”

Another page. Booker sitting on the edge of a park fountain, casting crumbs to the birds.

“And found me…” The turning of the pages paused, and Booker scratched his cheek, hand curled around the point of his chin. “But if that’s the case, I just happened to come here? After you chose me? Don’t tell me that was coincidence.”

The book’s page turned, almost reluctantly. This image was different, newer. A man stood over the blue-bound book, studying its word and inscribing them with a glowing quill onto an amulet of rough-cut jade.

Damn. It really was something valuable… And poor Rain would never have known, not if he kept it for another thousand years.

“So. I had you and Rain had – for a while, at least – part of another book? And somehow… Somehow that made a bridge between us, while he was dying…”

The book flipped to a new page. Booker and Rain lying in glass coffins, side by side, drifting opposite directions on a wide and ghostly river. Flower petals were scattered across the water.

Booker closed the tome. He let out a long sigh as the book simply vanished from sight.

“So that’s how I got here.”

He stared out through the window, at Earth.

I guess whether I live a good life from now on, depends on me. And I should. If I never found anything worth fighting for in the last life…

Then if there’s anything I can learn from Rain, it’s how to chase a dream. I wasted my last life, honestly. I shouldn’t waste this one too.

Time to wake up.

— — —

As Booker opened his eyes, ghostly mist fled from all around his body, where it had formed flowers and vines creeping across his back and shoulders. In that moment he felt truly refreshed, as if he was coming home from a long journey.

Standing up and stretching, he examined his face in the water of his basin. The swelling and infection of his cripple-mark was rapidly fading. But the grease and poor care remained. Shaving himself carefully, he washed and donned fresh robes. It was still before the morning proper – outside the sky was a dark blue and the songbirds were just beginning to sing.

He had a little time before breakfast – mm, burnt congee – and the start of his duties.

“Alright book. Time to make some pills.”

Secret Quest: Tools of the Master (Complete)

Goal: Uncover a hidden use of Dialyze or Furnace.

Reward: Page of the Master’s Book.

Quest: Craftsman’s Aptitude

Goal: Create 10 (7/10) useful medicines.

Reward: Materials Box.

Quest: Taste of Heaven (Complete)

Goal: Create 5 (5/5) different useful pills.

Reward: Materials Box.