Afterlife 2

Once the girl hurried out, the head left alone sank into thought.

What in the world is going on here?

Adapting to something was never as easy as it sounded. And when that something was a situation one had never seen, never experienced in an entire lifetime, the difficulty doubled.

A makeshift workshop tucked into a corner of the waste processing yard. The austere law of adaptation applied just as rigorously to the humanoid hanging there by a cable, nothing left of him but a head.

The optical sensors mounted on his skull swiveled this way and that. Everywhere he looked, it was dark and damp. Machines slicked with waste oil and rust lay sprawled across the floor, and tools of unknowable purpose were piled up in dizzying heaps.

His own state was just as bizarre. Like those very machines, he too hung from the wall — and from a considerable height, at that, so that it felt exactly as if his soul were drifting in the empty air.

Able to see and hear, yet powerless to do anything. What was that, if not a ghost?

Then, all at once, a small realization flickered through his mind.

...A ghost?

The moment that thought took shape, the final thread of his memories surfaced unbidden.

A silent snow mountain. Snow that still fell without end. The Heavenly Demon, coughing blood as he collapsed. And after that?

He had looked up at the sky. Closed his eyes. Fallen.

That was how the Kunlun Blood Immortal's life had ended.

Yes. He had died. And then woken again, in this uncanny place. A form with nothing left but a head, like some wandering spirit. A consciousness roused against his own will. A girl who had greeted him with inexplicable delight. A dark and desolate space. Death — and the strange shapes that came after it.

Fragmentary threads of information gathered and gathered, until at last they wove themselves into a single chilling possibility.

...Could it be — is this the underworld?

The underworld. The place one arrives after death. Where the dead congregate. It might be nothing more than a ridiculous guess, but to make sense of his situation, he had no choice but to guess.

Strangely enough, once he decided to call this place the underworld, every strange phenomenon began to feel perfectly plausible.

The moment his thinking reached that point, everything looked a little different. The data pad casting a faint hologram into the air. Tangles of purposeless tools. Machine parts heaped carelessly, soaked through with grime and rust. These uncanny objects must be the instruments of the afterlife — or perhaps the remains of other beings who, like himself, had tumbled down into the world of the dead.

But then — why had he alone woken in this form, still clutching the memories of the living world?

The answer came to him with surprising speed.

Karma.

In his path of vengeance, the Kunlun Blood Immortal had taken countless lives. Even if his enemies had been disciples of the Demonic Cult, there was no denying that he had willed the slaughter. A bloody revenge pursued to the very end, even casting aside the Dao itself. The karmic weight of such an act could not possibly be light.

Was the underworld not, by all accounts, the place where the sins of the living were weighed, judged, and repaid with fitting punishment?

Perhaps, at this very moment, his sins had been called before the judgment seat. Perhaps that was why he had woken from the eternal rest of death.

There was no way to know. All he could do, for now, was accept this unfathomable space and his own existence within it — and wait for the next moment to arrive.

O Primordial Heavenly Sovereign...

And so the humanoid with nothing left but a head sank once more into thought.

A fortnight.

That much time had passed since he'd opened his eyes in this unfamiliar place. A fortnight was no short span. Much had changed.

He was no longer a disembodied head. A lusterless, pitch-black torso now hung beneath his skull, and he had gained a left leg as well — unpainted, with not even a steel plate over it. Thanks to that, he was spared his dangling captivity; still incomplete, but able to support his body on one leg, at least.

Worth noting, too, was that he could now produce sound. The old voice module made for a crude, static-choked electronic rasp, but it served well enough to convey his meaning.

Yet more important than any of these changes was his relationship with the girl.

"Mister!"

The workshop door swung open just then, and the girl came in hauling a machine arm that looked fairly heavy over one shoulder.

"Mr. Ash! Look at this!"

Akina called him Ash. There was no grand reason behind it — only that the humanoid's head had ASH stenciled on it, an abbreviation for ash-for-incineration waste.

Ash. What remains after the fire.

He had made no effort to correct the name. He had come to the world of the dead, after all — surely he ought to follow the customs of that world?

At that moment the head, roused from his reverie, lifted toward the girl and spoke.

"Ah, young lady. Have you come?"

Unlike the noise-riddled electronic voice, his manner of speech was remarkably refined and archaic. Perhaps because of that, at some point Akina had started using polite speech with him instead of casual talk. It just felt wrong, she'd said, somehow.

"Everything been okay?"

"Peaceful enough."

Akina flashed a grin and lowered the machine arm onto the workbench. It landed with a heavy thud — clearly no lightweight.

As Ash's optical sensors flicked between the girl and the arm, his voice module hummed quietly to life.

"You work hard, young lady."

"Oh, this is nothing. Want me to start now?"

"As you please."

Grinning, Akina gathered her tools and came over to him. She examined the severed artificial neural ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠matrix at his left shoulder — precisely, the joint area — and immediately went pale.

"Huh? The slot doesn't fit? That's weird. I definitely grabbed a C-type. Is it because it's an older-generation model? Why is it flipped the wrong way...?"

Ash, watching her frown at it, called out to the girl without warning.

"Young lady."

"One sec. I'm thinking. Later."

"...Young lady?"

"Ugh, what is it?"

Grumbling, the girl looked up — and met Ash's cyan optical sensors directly.

He held her blue-eyed gaze for a moment, then stated his business calmly.

"Not that side."

"What do you mean?"

"The arm you brought, young lady — it's a right arm."

At his words, Akina turned her head. The machine arm she'd set down moments ago caught her eye. She compared it against her own two arms, and quickly realized that yes, it was indeed a right arm.

Akina's face went bright red — and against her naturally pale skin, the flush showed all the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠more starkly.

"I-I knew that, obviously! I was just checking the left shoulder too, that's all!"

"Is that so?"

"...It really is!"

"Then it seems my needless old-man meddling was unnecessary. If I soured your mood, I apologize."

Faced with such an immaculate apology, Akina could only shut her mouth.

In the slightly awkward silence that followed, she sidled over toward Ash's right shoulder, muttering under her breath.

"...Are all old-generation humanoids like this? How is he this articulate? Back at the start he couldn't understand a word."

It was a small murmur, but the audio input device mounted on Ash's head caught every word.

"That is thanks to the universal language-pack data card you gave me, young lady. I am always grateful for it."

"...That was private."

"It came through too clearly to mistake. I am still unaccustomed to these senses."

Akina shot him a sidelong glare, then quickly broke into a sheepish grin. Then, as if remembering something, she patted at the pouch on her chest.

What emerged, pinched between her fingers, was another data card.

"A new book?"

"A book?"

Akina tilted her head. "Oh. My bad. A new data card, I mean?"

"That's the one. Have you finished reading all the ones from before?"

"I have."

Nodding at his answer, Akina inserted the new data card into the slot beside his head. A small click of the locking mechanism sounded.

"I'm gonna get to work now, so you go through the data, mister. Ask if anything's got you curious."

"As you say."

Ash reached into his own system with senses that had grown fairly familiar by now. Crisp green strings of text began to bloom in one corner of his optical feed.

With each flickering system message, information came pouring down.

This world's method of transmitting knowledge was fundamentally different from the one he'd known. Vast bodies of learning that would have consumed a lifetime to acquire were injected in an instant.

Nothing short of a data storm. It was an incomprehensible, overwhelming sensation — as if hundreds of weathered Taoist scriptures were flooding into his mind in the blink of an eye.

The sound of Akina murmuring to herself, the clatter of tools, the crackle of welding sparks — all of it gradually faded away.

Ash gave himself over entirely to the torrent of information.

It was knowledge annotated with one girl's extremely subjective interpretations — but even accounting for that, this world was, without exception, bizarre and cruel.

Amid the flood, Ash rapidly sorted out the keywords that seemed to matter most.

Sanctum. The Outer. Pathfinder.

The overwhelming majority of the data connected back to those three words. Surely these were the defining pillars of this underworld.

Ash dove into the sea of knowledge and investigated the three entries in depth. Before long, a low groan escaped him.

...This truly is hell.

Humanity's only city. Its final bastion. Sanctum.

For all its dictionary meaning of "a sacred place," Sanctum was, in itself, a brutal arena of survival. Every citizen was obliged, under the grotesque banner of an "Individual Merit Assessment," to pay up an enormous sum of money — credits — every single month.

Akina had annotated this with the phrase breathe-tax, and Ash had to admit it was ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠an apt metaphor.

The trouble was that the breathe-tax was only the beginning. Sanctum demanded credits at every turn, driving ordinary people to the edge of the cliff. And those pushed all the way out to the city's fringes were finally forced into a last choice: to abandon their fragile flesh and rebuild their entire bodies from cold metal — Cyberware.

Bearing those mechanized bodies, they set out for the Outer — the ruins of an ancient civilization, their final hope and their final despair. A fistful of relics and ancient data scraped from a land of death lashed by ion storms: that alone was a chance to buy another day.

Those who wagered their lives venturing into the wreckage of the past to search for a future. Every one of them was called a Pathfinder...

I suspected this world was no easy place, but I never imagined it to this degree. A life crushed beneath an invisible weight, day after day. Is there a hell worse than this? Truly, this is the underworld. Not a fingernail's worth of mercy in it!

His misunderstanding only deepened.

"All done!"

Before he knew it, Akina had finished the work and called out brightly. With her shout, a fresh string of text scrolled across his vision — connection complete.

"Want to try moving it?"

At her prompting, Ash slowly flexed his new right arm. It ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠moved far more smoothly and precisely than the left leg had.

He clenched and unclenched the fist, bent and straightened the joints. The alien sensation was there, along with a faint tremor — but the arm was unquestionably moving at his own will.

It was a strange thing. He'd attached a single arm, and yet an inexplicable sense of steadiness, of freedom, welled up in him. Perhaps it was because he had been a swordsman in life?

A confidence blossomed in him — that he could now stand and face, without flinching, the very laws of this underworld that had so stunned him only moments before.

Ash spoke with sincerity and without a trace of flattery.

"Every time, I am left in awe. You deserve the name of genius without reservation, young lady."

Whether the compliment pleased her or not, Akina burst into giggles. Then, after a moment, she clapped her hands together.

"Hey, mister. Try making this shape with your hand?"

She made a rather peculiar gesture — index and pinky finger extended straight up, the rest folded down.

Ash studied the strange shape for a moment, then folded his steel fingers to match. A little clumsy, but unmistakably the same.

Akina made the same shape with both hands and hollered at the top of her lungs.

"YEAH! ROCK AND ROLL!"

What could possibly be so entertaining, the girl beamed, radiant with laughter.

That smile was something no data card had ever contained.