Chapter Text
To be honest, I had not expected to open my eyes ever again. Despite what that devil said, I was convinced it was a hallucination. A mere trick of the mind in my last moments. The light at the end of the tunnel people would always talk about. That was half the reason I had mouthed off so fervently to it really.
Suspended in time, mid-air. Right before the twenty o’clock train I was supposed to ride back home on would splatter my body against its hull. When a so-called ‘god’ came to speak to me, I was tempted to laugh in its face. Arguing with it on human nature, philosophy, religion, and the modern world was one of the less disrespectful things I could have done.
Even when it threatened a life as a woman, in a superstitious land torn apart by war, and under constant threat, I’d been doubtful. Reincarnation was ridiculous, I thought. As a modern, rational human being, I found the entire concept to be nothing more than fantastical fiction.
That was the last thing I remembered before I regained consciousness once more.
My eyes were heavy now. It took great effort to open them. Wooden beams loomed over me. I was surrounded by rags. I was smaller now, placed in a basket.
I was in a old, dingy house. The wood it was built from was chipped and rotten, with patches of less degenerated planks here and there. Windows were small and hinged with strong metal shutters. Through them, warm orange sunlight bathed me.
The transfer to my new body was instantaneous. Still, I felt a lingering sting of the train’s head impacting me at a hundred kilometers per hour.
It was all mental, of course. The expected damage was nowhere to be found on my new infant form. I checked. Though that checking must have looked quite panicked, because someone came to check on me.
Thunderous steps pounded against my delicate newborn ears and a maternal face appeared before my wandering eyes. She stood out from her surroundings. Her features seemed to glow, brighter than the sunlight.
My mother’s grey eyes stared back at mine. Oddly, it was easy to recognize her as my mother, despite still remembering both of my last life's parents. How could that be? I believed I had more filial piety than that.
I almost raged. I knew it was a betrayal of my previous parents’ efforts to provide a loving home and good education. Though the feeling never materialized. Is this what they call imprinting?
It was logical to attach to one’s parents, assuming they weren’t deplorables. I, a helpless child, needed protection and nurture. They, capable adults, needed heirs. Both parties were in possession of something the other wanted and, thus, decided to engage in trade.
It was an everyday example of the free market, a mutually beneficial exchange. Everyone benefitted. Not to mention the emotional fulfillment from both sides of the trade. To disregard such a rational action was unconscionable.
The lack of accepted currency in the trade might raise a few eyebrows. It was practically barter, requiring a double coincidence of wants for a voluntary exchange to occur. Thankfully for me, the nature of the human life cycle guaranteed such an alignment of wants.
One may be tempted to attribute such fortunate circumstances to the design of an all-knowing god.
Ridiculous. Of course it would be like this. The laws of common sense mean the vulnerable would be protected when the strong had something to gain. There was no need to credit some fictitious ‘god.’ Self-proclaimed, irrational ones like Being X especially.
If such a thing as hell — or something close to it — existed, it should be a place reserved for detestable refuse like it.
Being X was an incompetent and a fool. Unable to understand even the most meager, elementary of laws of human action. It was an existence that demanded credit for the achievements of mankind without ever contributing.
As a former member of the HR department of a prestigious company, and at a rather high position relative to my age at that, I knew a thing or two about managing human resources. I couldn’t help but draw parallels between that incompetent and the incompetents I had to work with then.
Irrational entities, prone to act on emotion and pride, were the worst kind of employee — or employer for that matter. The type that blamed others for their mistakes. I had met his ilk before, worked with them, reported them, drank with them, fired them. There was not a single reason to accept that being as a god, a superior to humanity, when it was worse than its subordinates.
I refused.
There was an embarrassingly long pause before I realized Mother’s eyes had stayed on me for longer than was socially acceptable. More time passed as we stare into each other’s eyes, in deadlock. Her long brown hair tickled my cheek. She furrowed her brows. I laid still.
* * *
I ran down the pathway that wove through my new home. It was a small village, with a population that barely broke into the triple digits by my count. Most of the inhabitants were farmers, along with taking an additional trade to service the other residents as needed. A branch of the local river drained into the farmlands.
The afternoon sun burned brightly in the sky. Flies buzzed in the grasses, near the animal droppings that were spread around. The air around me was hot and humid, almost suffocating.
I had to occasionally beat away flaxen hair from my eyes. My parents had refused to let me cut my hair as short as I liked, citing marriage opportunities. I suspected it was an attempt to rein in my 'rambunctiousness.’
Sweat dribbled down to my roughspun clothes. I held a small sack of coins in my hand.
Physical exertion was not the cause of my heavy perspiration. In my first life, I kept my fitness to healthy levels, enhanced by my towering stature. Unhealthy habits resulted in reduced productivity and shortened lifespan, after all.
The benefits to regular exercise and balanced diet were immense. Whatever cost in time and effort of the activity were offset by the increases in productivity, quality of life, and greater energy. Such a ridiculously large profit margin would make any executive salivate. The sort of people who kept to destructive tendencies in the face of such facts could not be reasoned with.
I had kept a similar level of fitness in this life as well. Helping my family tend to the farms and maintain the structures around it trained my young body to handle whatever they would task me with. I was nowhere near the physical heights of my first life, of course, but I was confident my abilities were above the average girl.
My breathing stayed measured and controlled. Each breath filled me with energy as they filled my lungs with oxygen. My muscles were quiet, as it would take much more stress than a quick run to strain them.
No, the reason I had been sweating so much was the heat. It was scorching today. I was even wearing a rice hat, and its shade only barely reduced the discomfort. My skin turned slick to sticky distressingly quickly.
Still, while the run was miserable, it was also well worth it.
I was running in such heat to deposit the day’s earnings. I had needed a source of income and taken a job assisting the merchants that would come every now and then. They were understandably hesitant to employ an 11-year-old peasant girl, but I was persistent.
I was desperate to move out from the village.
Not to say my current accommodations were horrible per se. The provided housing and amenities matched those of my neighbors. My new family were serviceable enough as well. A mother, a father, and an older brother sheltered the tiny, new slip of a girl that I now was. They were immeasurably helpful in my adjusting to this new world.
Mother had named me Tanyi Ah after some ancestor or hero or other. I took to the name quickly, as I doubted my original Japanese one would blend in. The exact origin of it, however, seemed to change every time I asked. But I wasn’t too fussed about my new name to ask all that often either.
When I came to this world, I resolved to show Being X the errors of its ways. I would prove my case through creating my own success, despite the conditions it put me in. I would prove that reason was superior to religion.
I had conviction, though the poor state of my village did admittedly put a damper on my spirits.
The entirety of the village was sustained through agriculture. Each and every hand in the village was involved in its fields. Even I had to engage in the industry, young and nubile as my body was. There was precious little else of value in the lands or the people to exchange for with the outside world.
Only a few merchants who journeyed along our route supplied everything else — from lumber to fish to iron to paper to clothing. When one came through our village, people would swarm to buy resources in bulk with their funds. That would have made any sales representative of my first life extremely happy but, as it was, they weren’t making enough profit to justify more trips.
Everything else was grown or built by the villagers. They did their best, naturally, but the materials and expertise needed were simply unavailable. It was all they could do to maintain the houses, appliances, and old tools they had. Every other ounce of resources was swallowed by the needs of the farmland.
We lived in hovels, repaired when damaged as the carpenter was available. The utter lack of utilities was intolerable to someone accustomed to modern society such as I. A day did not go by without me lamenting the absence of running water or toiletries.
There was no future for me here.
I couldn’t live in the sticks. It wasn’t in my nature. If I were to prosper, and defy Being X, I needed to get into contact with the real, living, breathing economy. I needed to get to the ladder first before I could start climbing it, after all.
The merchants would be key to my success in this new world. They were the only connection I had to the world outside of my little backwater. It took some time, but I had ingratiated myself with their number and, in short order, set up a rudimentary verbal working contract.
I would take care of sheltering them in town to the best of my ability, sorted their records, and crunched their numbers. They would lend me books, inform me on what they knew of the local political landscape, and compensate me monetarily.
It was without the legal safeguards I would have liked but I would make do with what I had. Their carriages were surprisingly comfortable to work in as well, and I found myself enjoying doing business with them more than I thought I would.
Our conversations on business strategy, commerce, religion, and philosophy were not unpleasant either.
That was not to say I did not make other friends within the village. It was always in one’s best interests to network as much as possible. You never knew what you would need in the future or what your connections would become. Diversifying your network was an essential quality of successful office workers.
Seeing as I was stuck here for the time being, it was doubly important.
I went around the huts and familiarized myself with the local tradesmen. Carpenters, blacksmiths, barbers, tailors, bakers, and ranchers. I sold myself to them similarly as I had to the merchants, earning a tidy commission. They were all literate and numerate, at least at the most basic levels, but preferred to distribute their tasks wherever they could.
Respectable. I would do the same. Any manager worth their salt knew how to delegate. Though they tended to coddle me much too often as I worked.
I shook my head from those thoughts as I crashed through the door to my family’s house. I had opened and closed the door with a confident swiftness that could only be born from experience, and stopped before my bed.
Lifting the thin sheet of hay that comprised my mattress, I eyed the sum total of my wealth. It was my wallet, filled with savings for my eventual departure. A tad childish, but still functional. It mentally hurt that it reminded me of a piggy bank.
I took a moment to think as I emptied my coins into my ‘wallet.’ There were a handful copper coins with a few silver ones mixed in. Taels, they were called. The little clinks and clanks that resounded made me smile. Unfortunately, I still needed more before I would be comfortable leaving for the larger town to the north.
* * *
The first time Mother told me of magic, I had not believed her.
Really, the tales of vengeful ghosts, flying tigers, serpentine wives, and monkeys trapped under mountains were the usual swill adults fed to children. Fanciful tales written to excite, entertain, and keep them occupied so they did not stick a fork in an outlet or swallow their own tongues.
I had not read much of those stories in my past life. Even as a child, I preferred more complex media. Story books, puzzles, and cards progressed to documentaries, war games, politics, and the like. Nuance was the spice of entertainment, I knew.
Of course, I also enjoyed the odd movie or late-night anime program after work. Sometimes, one simply did not have the energy to spare with a good book in the way they ought to and must resort to simpler leisures.
Not to say all anime were straightforward, childish romps, but those that were not had been scarce in my experience. Their episodic nature certainly did not help either.
So, it is no surprise that I just tuned out my mother’s bedtime stories. My eyes would go blank as my mind wandered, and Mother continued seemingly unabated. As I got older, I continued to listen at only partial attention whenever she 'weaved me wonders' at home to pass the time.
This disinterest was exactly what made my first encounter with a monster so bewildering.
The large mouse I later identified to be a ‘six-swirl rodent’ leapt off our roof in flashy manner. It had blasted beams of bright, white light under it to reduce the impact landing on the floor normally would have wrought. Glowing beams propelled its body in the air. The light show was so bright that my father almost fell from the roof as he was repairing it.
He was told to get rid of it by Mother, and she brokered no argument. In the end, the rodent escaped into a burrow far from the village paths and Father had to take some time off work to nurse his injuries.
Seeing the rat’s sorceries came as quite a shock, to say the least.
There it was, concrete proof of the supernatural, right before my eyes. As much as I wanted to deny it, I couldn’t. It was obvious my new world differed from my first in more than standard of living. Magic was now a real tangible force in the universe. One I would need to account for in my plans.
Being X’s hand was obvious in that moment. It was mocking my scientific and rational resolve.
The thought enraged me.
Since, I started to take more of an interest in this world’s myths. Mother was all too happy to satisfy my newfound curiosity as well as she could.
Starting, the creature on our house was a monster. It was a small, weak monster, but a monster nonetheless.
In this world, formally known as the ‘Earthly Realm,’ monsters were commonplace. A monster was anything that cultivated its ‘qi’ and was sentient. Qi being the metaphysical energy field inherent to all life. This granted them supernatural powers that could rend skies asunder and tear castles apart.
Eventually, after a moment of thought, I decided to start planning contingencies if monsters were ever to threaten my livelihood. Even if they were not real, as I now knew was not the case, I would be remiss to ignore the possibility.
Better safe than sorry, as they say.
That saying rang especially true when in a self-proclaimed deity’s ‘experiment.’ I would not put it past Being X to spontaneously manifest monsters in a world where they had not existed before.
Quelling my anger, I asked Mother about how we were supposed to defend against the more dangerous beasts in the Earthly Realm. We weren’t, apparently; we let others defend us.
There were people who trained their qi known as ‘cultivators.’ Cultivators gathered into organizations called sects to practice various arcane disciplines study manuals to achieve the goal of immortality. Along the way, cultivators gained powers and techniques just as monsters did.
Semantically, this meant cultivators were monsters.
I had panicked when I first heard of them. It was not their power or authority that worried me. Of course, I was perfectly content to entrust public safety to others. That was what the police and military were for. It fell within the principles of specialization, where it was in everyone’s best interest to specialize into separate fields and not worry overmuch about what happens in other fields.
This was the division of labor, a fundamental element of capitalism’s prosperity.
No, it was their seclusion and disconnect with the citizenry that unnerved me. What do you mean there are groups of absurdly powerful people in the mountains? What do they want?
What can be done about them trotting down to our little hamlet and blowing it away like last week’s paper?
As it turned out: nothing.
Nothing stopped them from messing about in the affairs of ‘mortals’ such as I. They held a power over every political institution in the Earthly Realm. The courts and magistrates were beholden to the whims of sects.
It took some reading between Mother’s lines, but cultivator sects held a monopoly over force that eclipsed any army. If a fraction of their supposed feats were true, I doubted even a modern military could stand a chance.
What could jet fighters do against men that could annihilate mountains? A nuclear weapon would be needed for even stand a chance with a high realm cultivator. A sect full of them beggared imagination for workable strategies.
Then, it was a small mercy that the sects did not tend to bother themselves with the rest of humanity. They were too busy jockeying over mystical artifacts and trying to grow stronger for that.
However, it is also unfortunate that mortal governance was so incompetent. One look into the realm’s laws would fill any rational actor with despair.
I was baffled when I first saw the losses in my merchant clients’ ledgers. I had interrogated every adult in the village about the local laws, along with the merchants. The few scrolls I had access to said that their political woes were widespread across the Earthly Realm.
The government of the area my village was in — Kaizhe Province — had instated no less than a hundred different taxes, regulations, tariffs, and prohibitions on trade and production. Worse yet, they actually enforced these violations upon the free market, with extreme prejudice.
The government intervention struck me as needlessly excessive. Unlike the Chicago School, which advocated limited government in the market, they would put their grubby fingers on the scales without a second thought.
It was as if they were uncaring of the growth and potential inherent to a free market economy, content to stay in ancient conditions.
I figured it out talking to the merchants, but it really seemed like I was reborn into a fantasy version of ancient China. The stories, culture, ethnic features, architecture, and overall design. The occasional art of culture heroes and pillar mountains accompanied by dime-store philosophy.
It was obvious.
The culture. The people. The government.
The entirety of my new world positively reeked of bureaucracy and politics. I knew from my previous life that it infected all organizations and institutions eventually. I'd dealt with my fair share of red tape, and I had no desire to further engage in office diplomacy.
Of course, order was necessary. I was a supporter of rules and law to tamper down on humanity’s darker tendencies. There were only so many things that could be deemed acceptable in a civilized society. People needed guidelines to bring out their entrepreneurial spirits.
But there came a point when rules became tyrannical and actively detrimental to society. They had a tendency, after a certain point, to depress production and stagnate all progress.
'All things in moderation,' as a certain founding statesman once said.
Where I now found myself in was the most awful and disgusting caricature of ancient politics. Systems of governance based on the Qing Dynasty imposed on fundamental freedoms often, especially as you went up the ladder and gained a corresponding number of watchmen.
Legalism was the preeminent philosophy in the Earthly Realm's intellectual class. Every scholarly book and scroll I could get from the merchants followed that school of thought. It didn’t matter if most of them denounced legalism explicitly if they laid out arguments on implied legalist axioms.
I even found a few texts that praised law for law’s sake, as a necessary element to restrict self-interest from deconstructing society. That to stop people from doing as they please — as is productive, as is profitable — was a positive action.
It was an utterly ridiculous philosophy that could only convince the likes of politicians and the mentally challenged. Self-interest built and reinforced civilization as the foundation of all human action, that should be obvious to anyone who ever had the desire to trade.
This was the problem with ancient civilizations and why the light of modernity was so superior. These people were so preoccupied with gaining and maintaining political power that they neglected the benefits of economic freedom. Ancient China was, if not the worst, then among the worst offenders of this.
The sheer inefficiency and waste was maddening to think about, let alone live through. It was almost worse than the reality-denying communists.
Almost.
Fortunately, superfluous and overbearing rules also tended to be dodged by those who recognized them. They would follow the necessary laws while avoiding the unnecessary ones. Not breaking, so much as bending the law to their benefit.
As I grew up in my last life, I grew a large respect for these people that weaved through regulation with such grace. I studied their techniques closely. The skill to creatively misinterpret the written rules was amongst my greatest skills, though I would never admit it to a superior.
Sometimes, it was necessary for the continued smooth functioning of the company. Other times, it was necessary to propel my position within the hierarchy.
Whether it was legally gray was irrelevant. If it was gray, then it may as well be white. So long as it was not entirely black, then it was perfectly fine. Such a perspective served me well in climbing the corporate ladder.
It would have to be the same in this life too, it seemed. I would just need to be careful not to cross a governing official or wandering cultivator as I climbed this new ladder, which didn’t seem too hard.
Magic and bureaucracy, what a horrid combination.
* * *
Usually, in the mornings, everyone would be woken up by a rooster. Uncle Gu had some in his small farm, kept with hens that laid eggs pitifully slow. Sometimes, it would be little Shin’s pet rooster he had bought from Uncle Gu.
Mother would complain often about the roosters’ shrill cries. She did not see the need for them, as everyone in the village had developed a reasonably accurate internal clock. We knew when it was time to wake up.
Father agreed, and so did Brother, though they were much quieter about it.
Today was no different. There was much grumbling from us all when every rooster in the village collectively decided to scream bloody murder while we were starting our day.
This turned to confusion as every other animal in the land screeched as well and stampeded out in clumsy lines.
Finally, horror crept into all of us as we watched the clouds shake and rumble. Far above us, two small humanoid figures moved around at speeds reminiscent of jet aircraft.
A couple of cultivators were having a spat.
Their attacks and spells thundered thousands of feet high. Their blows were felt more than seen. Enormous pressure came down on us like a smothering coffin. One of the villagers called it out, and suddenly all of us were stampeding as well.
It was hard to fault them. Cultivator spell techniques could annihilate fortified castles, let alone our little hamlet. The only reasonable safety precaution to take against cultivator aggression, even indirectly such as this, was to have as much distance away as possible.
I joined in the chaotic retreat a bit late all things considered. There was a metaphysical feeling in the air that short circuited my brain for a moment longer than everyone else.
My legs were stuck to the ground, and I needed to consciously activate my fight-or-flight response.
Due to my late start, I had trouble finding my family in the roiling sea of bodies. It certainly did not help that I struggled to see over even the shortest of the townsfolk. I would have had to strain my neck fiercely if I tried.
I chose to worry about them later once I was in a safer position.
It was a terrible struggle to run within the crowd. I had nowhere safe to go in mind, so I merely followed wherever they went.
A hard task, since my spindly little legs could hardly keep up with anyone around me.
Suddenly, there was a burst of pure force from above that knocked everyone down. I myself was sent sprawling and desperately grasping at whatever might propel me to safety.
The distinct smell of death rolled over me. I was not expecting it, nor did I expect the wet splatters of miscellaneous organic material across my back.
From what I knew of corpses, disgust and revulsion should have followed. However, I had not vomited — likely due to a combination of shock and adrenaline. I only kept moving forward.
I pushed rocks, dirt, and heads trying to push myself forward, toward any escape, only to stumble as more shockwaves pounded against me.
My head explosively impacted the ground numerous times due to these shockwaves. After the first couple times, I kept my weak arms between my face and the floor. That did little to help.
Were I in a more lucid state, I would worry about concussions and permanent brain damage.
As it was, I considered it a miracle I had not lost consciousness.
The greatest shockwave of all came when one of the cultivators in the air grabbed the other and flew him into the ground at Mach speed. He aimed at the square in the heart of the village. The paved grounds broke like glass.
Stone and brick were launched blindingly fast. Dust and debris billowed out from the crash site. I covered my head from the debris and got my arms broken for the trouble.
I could do nothing but lay there and hope the flying rocks would not dent my skull.
Eventually, the explosion of dirt stopped, and I could relax my body. I laid spread out, surrounded in blood and muck. There were dust and particulates in my nose and throat. I coughed.
I wiped my eyes of debris with the back of my hand. I saw a figure about fifty meters away. Straining my eyes, I could see he was standing in the middle of a crater.
He wore grand, flowing robes and was looking down at another, beaten man. The victorious cultivator crouched down and drank bright, ethereal tendrils from the downed man’s body.
The downed man’s figure withered away as he drank. From my vantage point, the downed man became thin as a stick. The bones were poking through.
Then the cultivator scavenged the husk of a corpse, taking swords and robes and jewelry, and threw it away.
I was entranced and absolutely terrified. I could not take my eyes off the scene. There was a sick sort of entertainment watching him die.
Gruesome. It was as, they say, 'like a train-wreck.'
When I was killed, did everyone watch in morbid fascination on as well? Well, in my case, there was quite literally nothing a little girl could do against a cultivator. Let alone with how injured I was.
Pain suddenly raced through my veins, and I screamed out. My adrenaline had worn off, it seemed.
It was not a particularly long scream, and I terminated it quickly, but it was loud. My eyes widened and my throat constricted. The cultivator heard me and turned toward my direction.
I grit my teeth hard, as if I were trying to shatter them like glass. My face contorted into a grimace. My hands clenched. I could feel my tendons strain.
I did everything I could think of to keep quiet. It was a slim chance, but I hoped to hide away from his attention. Even then, some sound escaped.
A few agonizing moments passed before the cultivator was on me. His eyes locked onto my broken body, evaluating.
I almost resigned myself to yet another death then. Everything I built for myself in this life was destroyed in seconds. My savings, my connections, my assets, everything. I was at rock bottom.
All I could hope for was to not meet that parasite Being X again.
Because of that, I would try to die before it decided to show its face. Maybe then I’d get my peaceful oblivion. I tried to stop my heart with pure spite.
I had an abundance of spite, since I reminded myself of Being X. The loss of my village only added to my supply.
“Greetings, child. I am known as Huang of the Shu clan, Elder of the Cloudy Hand Sect. You are honored to be recruited into my sect as an outer disciple. You need not thank me.”
Unfortunately, it was not enough.