Chapter 1: Afterlife

The world was white, all of it.

A cold wind moaned low across the endless snowfield, and the snow that had fallen through the night was slowly burying the ugly traces left behind — the blood, the fire, the corpses.

The world was silent, too. The flames that had roared as though to swallow everything whole, the sword qi that had shredded the very air, the screams and shrieks of the dying, the wet sound of bone and flesh being parted — all of it had burned itself out.

All that remained was a deep hush, and a cold that squeezed the breath from the lungs.

In the very heart of that silent snowfield, two figures stood, barely holding themselves upright.

They stared at one another without so much as a twitch of movement. Even when blood welled up now and again from their gaping wounds, they only went on watching.

One of the two — the black-robed man who had dared to call himself the Heavenly Demon — scarcely seemed to breathe at all.

The black-red demonic aura that had sheathed his body mere moments before flickered faintly now, like a dying ember. His steel-hard frame was so riddled with sword scars it looked ready to crumble where he stood, and worst of all, the black blood he could not stop heaving up spoke of internal wounds deep beyond measure.

Every sign of it proclaimed the black-robed man's death.

The swordsman facing him fared no better. Clad in a worn white robe, he stood every bit as close to death's door.

The blood that had burst from him had dyed his snow-white clothes red. Five swords stood buried in his body; one had already slid loose with a short breath, leaving four. And somewhere in all of that, his left arm was gone below the shoulder.

Yet his spine stayed ramrod straight, and his eyes still glittered like frost. Not once, not for a single instant, had his gaze left the Heavenly Demon.

Since the day his sect had been annihilated to its last soul, his life had existed for this moment alone. Driven by a single, venomous obsession called vengeance, he had repeated ascetic trials that straddled life and death, over and over, until he arrived here. He had reached the end of his revenge.

At long last, he had won. And the price of that victory was his own life.

It was mutual destruction in the truest sense — though strictly speaking, one might have called it a trade that left a handsome surplus. He had stormed the demonic cult's headquarters alone and put every soul within to the sword, and now he would take the Heavenly Demon's life as well.

It was the end of decades of torment.

The Heavenly Demon, barely standing, coughed and spat blood. Shreds of organ came away with the black-red gore, but he paid it no mind. Gazing at the white-robed man through dimming eyes, he spoke.

“Kunlun Blood Immortal… that is what they call you now, I hear? Heh. A most fitting epithet, wouldn't you say?”

There was no burning hatred in the voice, no mad glee. If anything, an inexplicable familiarity seeped through it.

“Still, it falls a little short. How about Kunlun Blood Fiend instead? Try as I might, I can't see a trace of the transcendent Daoist in you anymore.”

His opponent — the Kunlun Blood Immortal — answered in a low voice.

“Call me what you please. I abandoned the Dao long ago.”

The wind blew.

The Heavenly Demon, who had looked ready to collapse at any moment, finally gave way. The pose he settled into looked for all the world like a man sinking to his knees.

Some time passed. He took a long while to steady his breathing, then opened his mouth again.

“…Since I left the mountain, I have met many people. Countless swordsmen who called themselves heroes and champions knelt at my feet or were beaten into handfuls of bloody mist. And yet, of all those heroes, there was not one the likes of you. Amusing, isn't it? That green whelp of the Kunlun Sect — the very first soul I met after I proclaimed my descent into the world — grew to be stronger than anyone else in the martial world.”

The Kunlun Blood Immortal did not answer. He simply watched his opponent in silence.

As though he had never wanted an answer anyway, the Heavenly Demon murmured on.

“It was decided long ago. By the time I first met you, I had already brought the Central Plains to heel…”

The smile caught at the corner of his mouth deepened with every word. It was a smile steeped in hollowness.

“Now and then, I dreamed ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠of that day. The day I cut you down — and let you slip away soon after.”

To that, the Kunlun Blood Immortal gave his reply.

“And what did you do?”

“I chased you down by any means and killed you. You appeared in my dreams again the next night, so I killed you again. Killed you, and killed you once more. Perhaps that is why none of this feels so very strange to me now.”

“I am much the same.”

“Is that so?”

“It is. In my dreams, I died at your hand every time. Died, and died again. So perhaps that is why this moment feels quite familiar to me as well.”

“Died…? Then it seems I was always the victor?”

“There were times you died by my hand instead. Only once, mind.”

“Oh? And when might that have been?”

“Just yesterday.”

The Heavenly Demon finally burst out laughing.

“Hahahaha! So you dreamed a prophecy!”

Bloody froth welled up and burst from his lips along with the laughter.

“…So, how is it? You have what you wanted — does it satisfy you? Is the far end of the road of vengeance… sweet?”

A short silence passed. Then the Kunlun Blood Immortal murmured quietly.

“…I couldn't say. I don't know yet.”

“Realization always arrives late, whatever the matter.”

“And what of you?”

“What about me?”

“Was there any meaning in conquering the Central Plains? I ask whether it was worth killing so many.”

“Worth. Worth, you say…”

The Heavenly Demon, whose thin breaths seemed ready to stop at any moment, managed to lift his head and look at the Kunlun Blood Immortal.

“Do you know? My own descent into the world was for vengeance as well.”

“…What?”

“Then there is no need to ask at all. We are two who walked the same road… fellow travelers of the Dao.”

He bared his teeth in a grin. It was a dead man's smile — dead eyes, nothing moving but the corners of his mouth.

With that smile as his last, the Heavenly Demon fell. For the death of the Great Devil who had ravaged an entire era, it was a pitifully hollow ending.

…

The snow went on falling from the sky.

The Kunlun Blood Immortal slowly raised his head and looked into the gray sky. A single cold snowflake settled softly on his cheek, and for the briefest moment he felt a chill so sharp it stung.

That cold undid everything.

The Kunlun Blood Immortal, who had stood towering as a mountain, quietly came apart. When the fire of vengeance that had burned for decades finally guttered out, the flame of his life, too, had spent its last.

Very slowly, and very quietly, he closed his eyes.

The scenery of the deep-blue peaks of Kunlun hung close enough to touch. The blood-soaked Daoist set out gladly for that place.

Into the deep and silent stillness. Into the white snow. That was how he seeped away.

A cold wind moaned low across the endless snowfield, and the snow that had fallen through the night was slowly burying the ugly traces left behind — the blood, the fire, the corpses.

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

The flames that had roared as though to swallow everything whole, the sword qi that had shredded the very air, the screams and shrieks, the wet sound of bone and flesh being parted — all of it had fallen silent.

All that remained was a deep hush, and a cold that squeezed the breath from the lungs.

The world was white, all of it. And the world was utterly still.

In the heart of that silent snowfield, not a single living soul remained.

Death.

Dissolution — the meaning of perfect, absolute nothing. An eternal stillness in which neither light, nor sound, nor sensation existed.

In that bottomless quiet where even time lost its meaning, everything melted away. Every torment and pain, every joy and sorrow, tangled together and turned to peace. Perhaps this, at last, was the rest he had craved all along.

How much time had passed? A crack, fine as a hair, split the jet-black rest.

Strings of green characters, meaningless to him, flashed in and out of being like strobes. And like a pebble dropped onto still water, that tiny scrap of text began to raise enormous ripples.

The final line flared, pulsing bright and hard. At the same instant, the darkness that had seemed eternal lifted, and sensation came pouring in like a waterfall. It was artificial sensation — so unnatural, so unpleasant, it bordered on the horrifying.

His vision opened. But what spread out before it was not the snow-white field, nor the Heavenly Demon felled moments before, nor any landscape like an ink-wash painting.

Flickering scarlet light, dim and unsteady. Scrap metal of every description. Shards of plastic. Thick bundles of cable and circuit boards of no identifiable make. It was a place past all strangeness, past meaning itself — a space that lay far beyond the reach of understanding.

The shrill beep of electronics and the groan of rusted machinery. It was a racket the exact opposite of the stillness he had known in his final moment.

He tried to clamp his hands over his ears against the alien alarms, but it was no use — he could not feel his arms. The left had been cut away, true, but the right should surely still be there.

It was not only his arms. His legs, his torso — nothing answered him at all. A grotesque sensation, as if nothing of him remained but a head bobbing in empty air.

Only alien streams of sight and sound poured into his mind — senses nothing like his last memory, nothing like the sting of the snowflake that had settled on his cheek.

“Did it… work? This is working, right?”

It was a young girl's voice.

Wait. A girl?There had been a girl?

“Can you see me?”

The humanoid — dumped carelessly in a corner like so much garbage, nothing but a head hung on a stand — adjusted its optical sensors toward the moving figure. Only then did the girl's face come into sharp focus.

Perhaps it was the hair thrown up carelessly, or the grease-stained jumpsuit; something about her read rough and unruly. Her features, on the other hand, were sharply cut, her impression at a glance cold enough to seem almost haughty.

But her behavior was another matter entirely. Both fists clenched tight, a little whoop of triumph escaping her — seen like that, she looked every inch a girl. A bewildering girl, in whom nothing — clothes, face, or manner — agreed with anything else.

“It works!”

Whooping as if beside herself with excitement, she spun a full circle around the workbench, then planted herself in front of the humanoid again. The girl shifted left, then right, in strange crouching poses, and the cyan-glowing optical sensors swiveled left and right, tracking her every move.

“I really am a genius!”

Without warning she leaned in until they were nearly nose to nose and hugged the metal head in both hands. She looked genuinely delighted. The humanoid did not. He could not make the slightest sense of what was happening.

The girl's speech, moreover, was a strange tongue he had never heard once in his life — and so not a word of it reached him as anything but noise. It was maddening. He wanted to say something, anything. Where is this place? Who are you? Why am I like this?

But no voice would come. Every time he tried to speak, all that printed itself was that same string of text.

Forget a voice — he had no limbs, either. The only thing he could do was blink the optical sensors mounted on his head, hard and fast.

The girl watched him for a moment, then ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠tilted her head.

“Hm? What's wrong? Why won't you talk?”

Sensing something off, she picked up the data pad lying beside the workbench and worked it quickly. Her expression soon turned grave.

“Yeah, there it is. Every other module's fried — I'd say the main core's the only thing still limping along. Looks like half the memory section got wiped, too.”

Still murmuring to herself, the girl turned her gaze back to the humanoid — to him. Unlike before, it was calm now, the look of someone taking measure. For an instant her eyes seemed to gleam cold, something entirely unlike the bright, cheerful front she had shown until moments ago.

“No. Going hunting for another core at this point is out of the question. This much is more than I could've hoped for. Long as the main core isn't damaged, it's enough. The rest I can fix myself. It's fine. I can do this. I'm a genius, after all.”

The flint-hard gleam was gone before he knew ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠it. The girl's face softened again, and she came a little closer.

“It'll be uncomfortable for now, so bear with it just a little, okay? I'll have you fixed up like new in no time. I'll bolt on new arms and legs, get your voice back online. So… once I've got you all patched up, then you're gonna…”

She pursed her lips for a moment, then shook her head hard and brought her face in closer still. A mischievous grin filled his vision, hugely magnified.

“You're gonna help me. Got it?”

She pointed at her own face.

“My name's Akina. Akina Greenwood. Let's get along great!”

He still could not understand a word the girl said. But one thing — dimly, faintly — he could tell: this girl's name was “Akina Greenwood.”