The First Day of the Twentieth Life
I took stock of my surroundings. Forest—no. More precisely, the mountains, by the look of it. Birds were chattering, sunlight fell in through the blue-green leaves, and a squirrel went racing along a branch. At the very least, this was not a barren land of death. I was grateful for that.
Civilization? People? I could do without them. No—think on the lives I'd already lived, and it was better if they weren't here at all. Human beings were uglier than anyone liked to admit: animals that betrayed their own without a second thought, so long as it served their want. Then again, I was hardly in a position to sneer. I'd beaten a fellow human to death with a length of wood, out of nothing more than the sting of betrayal and the despair of having no one on my side.
Looking back, it had been a stupid thought. That there was no one on my side anywhere in the world was an obvious truth. Most people had never stood with me, and everyone who had was dead. Judging by the way that damned bastard of a god only ever dropped me into the most fucked situations he could find, he wasn't on my side either. I hadn't even been sure, once, whether any god existed at all—but I'd seen something that looked like one with my own eyes, so something of the sort probably did.
Anyway. The world was shit, people were shit, and gods were shit. That was the lesson nineteen deaths had bought me. Never trust a thing too easily. Trust, and you get betrayed. The only thing that does not betray you is yourself. Your talent, your effort, your years. Things like that.
I'd let the thoughts run too long.
Can't get your head on straight because you didn't die, can you, Yu Hajin.
Smack.
I did my own cheek the favor of a slap. I'd hit as hard as I could; my jaw kicked sideways, but it barely hurt. Well. After dying in so many different ways, trash like this was never going to hurt. Still, pain or no pain, my head cleared a little. From now on, whenever I needed to wake myself up, I'd be making good use of this.
I set the jaw back into place and thought. What had I been about to do, just now?
…
Right. I'd meant to get a rough sense of what kind of world this was. I couldn't even remember that much. It wasn't as if a bird had pecked a hole in my skull.
I let out a hollow laugh and looked around again. Being up in the mountains, there was one direction where the ground kept falling away. Yes. That way. Go down a mountain and a village ought to turn up sooner or later. Another peak might rise in its place, but then I could camp and eat whatever wild animals I managed to catch. I'd starved to death twice, been torn apart and eaten alive by a man who'd gone hungry for days, and been forcibly starved by a lunatic. I'd learned long ago that if there was anything at all to eat, that alone was cause for gratitude. Water was the same. A great many things were. So whatever came, I was confident I could survive it with a grateful heart.
Against whatever might be waiting, I shaved a sturdy branch against a stone until I had a wooden sword worth carrying, and set out.
Two hours passed. And in my crimson eyes, even through the dark of evening, a yellowish light made its presence known. Not a natural light. The light of a civilization made by human hands.
The problem was that I was standing on a cliff. Going the long way around would take a solid half-day and then some. Jump straight off, and I could reach that village inside of twenty minutes.
Then I'll just jump. Why not.
I didn't hesitate another moment. I threw myself off the cliff.
Of course, a fall from a cliff more than a hundred meters high would kill me so thoroughly there wouldn't be bones left to gather, so I had to bleed the speed off in stages, planting my feet on the rock as I went. Flesh split and bone hairline-cracked along the way—trivial wounds—but in the end I made it down in one piece.
"Hah… It's been a while since I worked like that. Takes more out of me than I thought."
I muttered it to myself and wiped the sweat beading on my brow with my sleeve. How long had it been since I'd used my body this way? In my second life I'd spent years unable to move properly at all, buried in medical research, and the lives after that had been so painful that time itself had seemed to stretch. By feel, it was as if I hadn't properly used my body in decades. In truth, it hadn't even been ten years.
Enough of that.
Blood was pattering down, more of it than I'd thought. If only to keep from going anemic, I needed to stop it.
"Mm."
I pressed leaves to the wounds, bound them with plant stems, and let out a low sound of pain. Hard as it may be to believe, looking at me, I used to be a doctor and an apothecary both. Emergency treatment for wounds of this grade was child's play. All I'd actually done, mind you, was pick out leaves that looked somewhat free of filth and wrap them over the cuts. Still, the bleeding had stopped well enough. That would do.
Thinking as much, I started toward the village and its man-made light. By my count, some seventeen minutes later, I arrived.
The place had a palette of colors, brick walls, and tiled roofs reminiscent of China as I'd known it in my first life. Reminiscent—not the same. This was not some past age of the world I'd lived in. It was, literally, another world, and nothing in another world could be taken for granted. Put bluntly, if a horde of jiangshi came pouring out of this village this very moment, it wouldn't even be unreasonable. My past lives had always been like that. I had to be careful.
I tightened my grip on the wooden sword and studied the village. This life, begun already at the age of twenty, must not end easily. Several reincarnations had taught me just how fucked it was to come back as a newborn, and I had no idea when a chance like this one would come again. Throw this life away for nothing and get sent back once more—I didn't know how many more times I'd be made to live, or whether my mind would still be intact when I was.
I couldn't bring myself to sigh aloud. I let a long breath out in the quiet of my chest, and moved my feet.
There was no sound. A fallen leaf, a pebble, a twig—find its center of weight and step on that center, and only the part already touching the ground takes the pressure, so no sound comes of it at all. That, too, was a craft from my first life: fifteen years spent as a Hunter. Stilling the sound of my breath was the same.
I closed on the village without a breath to give me away, then climbed a nearby tree. High ground was better for the view, and harder for the people below to notice.
There were people. They were gathered only toward the inside, laughing together. A festival, by the look of it.
Could I win, if it came to a fight? I looked down at the wooden sword in my hand. Crude as it was, if I used the art that severs the grain of all things, a few dozen civilians would be nothing but puppets in a slaughter. The problem was that nothing guaranteed they were ordinary people. It wouldn't be strange if red beams lanced out of their eyes, or if they turned into robots and fired rockets. This was another world.
But if they truly were like that, wouldn't I already be a dead man? At that level, there was no way they would fail to notice someone climbing a tree.
Then the chance they were simply, stupidly strong? I couldn't dismiss it. Still, I had never actually seen such a case. The high-rank Hunters of my first life, the knights of my second—every one of them had possessed extraordinary senses.
…
Watch a while longer.
I picked their movements apart, one by one. Their steps were sloppy, and the lines of their dancing fell well short of clean. They didn't look as if they'd trained in the martial arts. Closer to ability users, then? For the moment, I ruled out the chance that they were ordinary people. This was a shit world, the kind where optimistic thinking got you killed without fail. What you chose to feel hardly mattered—but when it came time to make a judgment like this, pessimism was the better tool. And if they really were ordinary, there'd be no reason for me to be throwing this fit in the first place.
I drove the stray thoughts out and stared harder. No one was using anything like a power. Ability users had a habit of leaning on their gifts even in ordinary life, purely for their own convenience. The knights of my second life had used that force called aura constantly in the course of daily living. These people weren't doing that. The weight of the evidence leaned toward ordinary folk. I ignored it, and kept watching.
Chopsticks. Handshakes. Embraces. Dancing. No great strength behind any of it. If anything, they were far weaker than the people I'd met in my first life or my second. In that second world, where the average human was stronger than in the first, people's movements had carried a little more force—because for those who lived there, strength beyond my first life was simply what was normal. Judged against that, these weren't brainlessly strong either.
Even so, I couldn't lower my guard. Humans were treacherous creatures. They could hide that much easily enough. I put more force behind my eyes, the better to study their skin. How well they could take a hit. Where the weak points were. Whether the structure of the body was anything like the people I'd known. Things of that sort.
…
Nothing unusual showed itself. Even to my eyes—eyes that could see the minute flow held inside all things, and the grain that followed from it—there was nothing of the kind. So they really were nothing more than ordinary civilians?
No. I couldn't. I must not believe it. Believe, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred you were betrayed. Better to grow eyes in the back of your head than to turn your back on someone and take the blow there.
…
Something unpleasant stirred at the base of my thoughts. I paid it no mind and went on with the judgment. Last of all: would they be well-disposed toward me? Not whether they'd betray me later. Whether, the moment they first laid eyes on me, they would draw a blade.
Appearance, first. Why did racial hatred happen at all? Because, at the root, the shapes were different. People tended to reject living things whose forms were not their own. I'd heard that the reason cats and dogs were widely thought cute was that their bodies resembled a human infant's. All of it was a kind of instinct—sort your own kind, so you could cooperate; sort the predators, so you could flee.
I had black hair, crimson eyes, and skin that was comparatively pale. They had black hair, black eyes, and skin only a little more yellow than mine. Different eyes were a mark against me, but there were people among them with brown hair and brown irises as well, so the odds were better that it wouldn't matter much.
And their temperament? They danced. They sang. They talked and they laughed. I couldn't take them for battle-maniacs, at the least. That sort preferred a festival of blood to an ordinary one.
Yes. This was enough. To sum it up: nine chances in ten they were ordinary people, and about seven in ten they'd be friendly at first sight. Acceptable figures.
I let out a low breath and dropped from the tree. I caught the branches on the way down, closing the distance to the ground, and stepped off the bark to bleed off speed, so the landing made no great noise. My crimson eyes turned on the people gathered in one place. Fortunately, no one had noticed.
Relieved, I undid every leaf bound over my wounds and threw them on the ground. Human beings were animals in the end. They had an instinct to protect their own, for the preservation of the species. Not always. Still. First, show the wounds. Stir pity. Make myself look like something that ought to be protected. They might look down on me and come at me, of course—but in that case they'd have charged whether I did this or not, so it hardly mattered.
"Hoo."
I let the tension out on the breath and walked carefully in toward the village. When I had come within a step of the entrance—
"Who might you be?"
A voice that sounded a great deal like Chinese came from directly in front of me. A young man, dressed in clothes that resembled the Chinese style.
A person. A person. Seeing one up close made it real.
…
Disgusting. Had people always felt this disgusting?
The past reeled through my mind the way film advances, frame by frame. The academic advisor who had abused his authority at every turn, betrayed the trust placed in him, and then turned around and taken me to task. The man—father, or whatever he was—who had tied stones to me and thrown me into the water. The gaunt, wasted man who had eaten me alive to quiet his hunger. The researchers who had experimented on my body to their heart's content and, in the end, brought me to my death. The man who had taken me, starved me, and cut my whole body to pieces. The crone, something like a witch, who had dropped me into a boiling violet bath—water, or a decoction, I never knew which—and reduced me to an ingredient. The crowd that hadn't spared me a thought at all and had simply stepped on me, untroubled, on their way to wherever they were going. And last, the murderous wretch who had been powerless and ignorant and had trusted people: me.
All of it laid itself over the young man before my eyes, and nausea scrambled my mind. Ugly. Disgusting. Horrific. Terrifying. Sad. A tangle of feelings no words could hold seized my thoughts and shook them.
"Ah—hey. Are you all right? You've gone pale…"
The young man's voice felt more horrific, more revolting, than the howl of a demonic beast.
"Hurgh—hk…!"
I dry-heaved and dropped to my knees where I stood. There was nothing in me to bring up.
"Ghk—hk…!"
"Ah… uh…"
The man reached a hand toward me. Dangerous. If this went on—again. I would suffer again.
I struck his hand aside. Tears that had sprung out on reflex ran down my face, and I laughed in broken, hiccuping gasps like a man who had lost his mind. Funny, really. In the whole dizzy wreck of my thoughts, only a single thread of awareness stayed clear.
I would not be able to face them properly anymore—that vicious thing called a human being. Not for a while, at least.