Patience was not the easiest thing in the world.

It took real effort and practice and (annoyingly enough) patience to have patience.

Years of watching pots boil, managing a garden, and reading books so old and dusty you had to be careful opening them had done a great job in training his patience.

…but everything had a limit.

And six days was pushing that limit.

Six days, Ken sat with his face in his hands, the door leading to the outside just steps in front of him. It might as well have been on another floor for all it mattered.

The heavy quiet that had settled on the herb shop was almost like the waste-dirt he remembered growing up, thick and gritty and choking the way it got in your throat. All that hope from Wei’s words had finally guttered out somewhere around yesterday, five days of waiting doing the job at killing it pretty good.

Six days is crazy. He hadn’t just sat here doing nothing. Ken had cleaned the first couple days, something to keep his hands moving when his feet didn’t want to stay still. He even tidied things that were already tidy, wiping down already spotless and shining counters.

Anything and everything that he could find to do, from watering the garden in the back, to sweeping the stairs, and even rearranging the perfectly organized jars of herbs in the back rooms, he’d done it all.

When there was nothing left to clean, he tried to study.

Ken sat down with the old man’s books, the heavy leather covers familiar in his hands, and stared at the pages till all the handwritten words blurred into a bunch of meaningless squiggles.

His eyes hurt by the time he was looking at his fifth book of the day, one with diagrams of parts of the body that started looking more and more like unfamiliar maps as he fought to stay awake. There wasn’t much else to do at this point, other than more reading, considering he’d cleaned all four of the already-spotless brewing hearths.

Hell, he’d gotten on his hands and knees and scrubbed the heavy wooden workbenches too, until the only smell left on them was the faint scent of a hundred different herbs.

At this point, the only thing left to do was just wait.

So, he did.

Outside, the massive lamps the whole city used as fake suns had already made their slow crawl across the metal ceiling and dipped below the horizon of stacked buildings, plunging the world into a neon-bathed twilight.

It was nothing new. He’d seen them set a thousand times before.

And rise again.

And set.

And rise again.

This last week was no different.

I know this place is supposed to be giant, but it’s still… Well, insane was the only real word for it. When it came down to it, Ken wasn’t an idiot, years of Wei’s teaching and encouragement giving him that much in the way of confidence.

Honestly, even without his master’s teachings, he was sure he remembered enough from before to at least get close with his own math.

All the time he spent in the junk-hills before Wei, he had stared at the Wall almost every day he could trying to make sense of it of the black stretch that ate up an entire horizon. It literally blocked out everything else, stretching up so high that you couldn’t think it was anything else but literally the edge of the world. If this city, this single floor, was even half as wide as that impossible horizon… has to be the size of a whole country, at least.

And there were supposed to be a hundred and forty-three more floors stacked on top of it?

I mean… Ken shook his head slow, unsure how to even deal with that. Makes as much sense as anything else, I guess.

Pushing the pointless thought away, Ken went back to staring at the door.

The only light in the shop now came from the single lantern burning low as it flickered on the small table next to him. Well, that and the colorful neon bleeding through the front window from the city street outside. Long moving stripes of bright red and harsh purple bled through the windows and across the floor, twisting the shadows of the apothecary into something scarier than usual.

Seriously, it doesn’t make sense. Old Wei had never been gone this long before. Not once in three years. Two days, maybe three at most for the really rare ingredients, but never six.

Something was wrong. It had to be that.

Old Wei wouldn’t just leave him here like this without a reason; the old man not the type to make promises, especially about something like this, and then just disappear all of a sudden.

Unless… The thought was dumb, ridiculous even, but it still hit him no matter how much Kenshi wanted to push it away. His hands curled into tight fists against his knees as the apprentice shook his head. Unless he couldn’t come back.

He knew Wei was strong, fast too even. He’d seen the old man carry several stacked crates as easily as Ken could carry one regular filled box. The old man was stupid strong, sure, but Ken knew what the Outside was like.

Past the apothecary, past the City walls, the Outside had rivers of poison, crumbling towers of trash and roaming beasts strong enough to rip an arm off as easy as anything. There was a reason the village treated its Hunters so well, and it wasn’t just because of war.

Soon enough, the massive lamps that lit the city rose again, the lamp behind Ken long having died. He sat there still, brown eyes tired and drooping, from a night of no sleep as the seventh day rolled around.

The seventh day.

No Wei.

“...where are you, old man?” His gaze stayed fixed on the heavy, bolted door in front of him, on the thick iron bar he’d slammed into place.

He willed it to move, almost demanding something t-

Thump… thump… thump. Ken’s eyes widened as the door in front of him thudded loud with the sound of a knock. Thump-thump. Thump… thump… thump.

A sudden, heavy SLAM against the door made him jump to his feet. A grunt spilled out of his lips, pain and shock and everything else that came with hitting your head on the edge of a table making his vision spin. I’m good, I’m g-

A wicker tray full of dried sun-petal blossoms lay scattered all over the floor in front of him, the fragrant yellow flowers just annoying him with a new mess he’d have to clean up.

But none of that mattered, not right now. Not with Ken’s gaze still on the door, eyes wide as he scrambled to his feet. The knock… Three slow, two fast, three slow.

Ken swallowed a mouthful of nothing. “M-master?”

No voice spoke back.

Instead, a shaky, dragging scrape against the door answered him, Ken almost taking a step back as he heard it. The sound was weak, but heavy, the sound of a fist with no strength behind it sliding down the thick wood, a thump of flesh and constant movement back and forth.

“Old Wei!” His voice went louder, deeper, the apprentice unsure what to do. The knock was exactly what his master had told him, but…

“K-Kenshi…” A voice pushed through the door; weak, strained, ragged and wet with so much pain he almost didn’t recognize it. “b-boy... Ken...”

It’s him! Relief hit like a punch to the gut, Ken suddenly able to breathe again as he moved forward. Terror vanished, all joy and relief pushing him as he scrambled toward the door. “Old Wei!”

His hands, usually so precise with the delicate, patient work of alchemy, fumbled with the heavy iron bolt, clumsy and uncertain all of a sudden. But he didn’t let that stop him, and soon enough, the apprentice lifted the bar and slid back the bolt with a loud, scraping groan of protesting metal.

The door burst inward, slamming against the wall behind it, as if all of Wei’s weight had been leaning against it.

With another groan leaving his lips, the old man stumbled in on jerky legs and Ken felt his mouth dry up as the world just… stopped.

He was pale.

Not… not him him.

His master… his master was pale.

Wei’s face was gray, gray like wax; the sort of color Ken had only ever seen on the dead and dying back in the Junk Valley. The old man’s clothes were torn and soaked in blood, the red dark and glistening against darker cloth.

“N-no, Wei, Wei!”

Ken’s chest heaved, breath coming out almost as rough as his master’s as his gaze trailed down to the hole. The massive, gushing hole right through the shredded fabric of Wei’s tunic and the mangled, pulpy flesh staring right back at Kenshi.

H-how... The fifteen-year-old flinched backward, jaw hanging open. How is he even… standing?

As if just now realizing how badly he was hurt, the alchemist collapsed, not just falling but dropping forward, the entire weight of his master crashing down right on top of him. Ken grunted at the sudden force; a crushing, sudden impact that drove the air from his lungs in a single, shocked gasp. His unprepared body was slammed to the floor, the old man’s heavy form pinning him down like a slab of rock.

Wet.

Sticky.

Warm.

It took all the effort in the world to keep his tongue in his mouth, vomit forcing its way up as blood drenched him. N-no. So much red splattered his face and soaked right through his own tunic in a way that made him want to crawl out of his own skin.

Then the smell hit him; coppery, sharp and so metallic, it forced its way into his nostrils and coated the back of his throat till he had to swallow down the mess working its way up. He gagged again, mouth still shut as spit sputtered out through gritted teeth.

“W-Wei?” The words came out choked, his hands slipping in something thick and hot as he tried to push himself up. “H-hold on, j-j-just—”

His brain went blank for a second, then kicked back into gear running through every lesson he’d ever learned way too fast for any of it to stick. Stop the bleeding. He’d need a clotting agent, something to seal it up. Red-vine? No, that just made blood replenish faster, that’s the opposite of what— scrap, what stops it? Gray-fur moss; that would do it.

Need moss, need to make a poultice, need to get up a-

He tried to squirm out from under the old man, tried to push Wei off him so he could actually move, but his hands just kept slipping in all the blood. “Wei, let me up! I can help you, I just need t-”

Wei’s head lifted from his shoulder.

“Mas-”

The word died somewhere in his throat as those purple eyes blazed with light, something burning behind them that made every muscle in his body lock up. The friendly round face was gone, all of it pulled tight and sharp into something else, the mouth a thin cruel line.

This isn’t...

This thing wasn’t his master, wasn’t his grandfather, definitely not the old man who made bad jokes and taught him how to grind herbs.

“W-Wei?”

The thing wearing Wei’s face didn’t say a word, no answer for it to give. Before Ken could pull back, a hand shot out and grabbed his arm, the grip so strong he felt his bones grinding together under the pressure. “Mas-AAAAAAHHH!” His voice filled the room, a scream so sharp and high he had a bare moment of shame in his chest.

Only a bare moment, before the pain lancing all the way up to his shoulder forced all his attention to it.

Another hand clamped over his mouth before he could scream again, a bloody palm sealing his lips shut as clawed nails dug into his face. “Mmmmpf-mpppffff!!!!” His head was forced back and down against the floorboards, hard enough he felt his head shudder as it slammed against the wood.

“KEEEEEEEN!” Wei had never made a sound like that, so ragged and raw and hungry.

Ken wasn’t sure a person even could.

Something thick poured from its mouth and nose, the deep ugly purple of a settled bruise. It was nothing like smoke because smoke didn’t-couldn’t-wouldn’t move like that. No, this was alive, buzzing and writhing and pushing itself at him; a swarm of angry wasps rushing at his face, forcing its way past sealed lips and into his nose, his eyes…

No no no—

Pressure built inside his head, his chest, deeper than that even. An agonizing expanding force like he was a clay pot being filled with way too much water, the cracks spreading through him as something scraped away at his thoughts. His memories. His name.

Every piece of himself, all he knew was his, slipped loose one by one.

Too fast to grab.

Too thin to touch.

They fled his body, leaving only the screaming part of him; the part that didn’t have space for thought and only knew fear.

The hand clamped tighter over his mouth even as Ken screamed against it, a choked wet sound that went nowhere. His heel kicked out before he even felt the motion, the boy thrashing with instinct and strength enough to finally tear himself free.

The fifteen-year-old scrambled backward on his hands and feet, away from the thing wearing Wei’s face, away from those burning purple eyes with a searching hunger that had nothing of the old man in them. The room was already fading, his chest hurting as the shelves chose to vanish next. Each breath he tried to take came out a useless gasp, each one snagging in his throat as his hands clawed the wood.

Can’t breathe can’t breathe can-

Ken crawled blind, hands slipping in the spreading pool of blood, back slamming into a wall hard enough to rattle his teeth. The back room, he’d stumbled into the dark shadowed back room somehow. His legs gave out and he collapsed onto the floor, body seizing up in tremors that shook him harder than he’d ever felt.

A new hurt to add on top of everything else.

The world was all just pain.

Pressure packed his chest tighter, the feeling of something foreign and painful and wrong crawling through his insides where nothing was supposed to be.

I’m dying. The thought came easier than his own name. This…this is how I die.

What was inside him was nowhere near as solid but even more real; squeezing something out to make room for the buzzing that had been forced inside.

Then through all the chaos roaring in his head, Ken heard it; a memory of a voice.

The emptiness comes… His grandmother, her knobbled fingers on his chest, her rough voice in his ear.

G-Gram?

You breathe. Feed it... or it eats you.

Ken took in a shudder of a breath and held it for a second that felt like forever, the pressure in his chest building higher still as his ribs clenched tighter.

Then he let it out, long and desperate.

In-out. In-out.

He took another breath, forcing air into a throat desperate to close on him. And another. The exercises, the stupid exercises Gram had beaten into him twelve years ago.

Feed it slow.

The world went black.

Not just blood, but fresh blood, metallic and earthy like it was just spilled onto the ground.

It… it wasn’t his favorite smell.

It brought back memories, one particular memory actually, and nothing about it was something Ken liked to think of. He certainly didn’t need help bringing back something he still had nightmares over, anyway.

His likes or dislikes didn’t matter much though, because iron-vine was a common smell in the shop. They couldn’t afford not to have some constantly ready, considering Scarlet Tonic was a common purchase, and iron-vine was the base ingredient in that specific serum. He’d grown used to it by now, anyway, years and years of it allowing Ken to ignore it half the time.

Half the time included now as the scent drifted through the air, the aroma coming from the pot on the hearth bubbling constantly behind him. More than anything, the young apprentice of Wei’s Apothecary had better things to think about than old memories as he sat at his own little workstation with his eyes firmly on a heavy, leather-bound book on alchemy, one of many with a snake on the cover.

Ancient pages made from thick yellowed paper held recipes so complicated he still barely understood them after three whole years, but Ken read them anyway. After all, that was the only way he was going to get anywhere and, more than that, he could almost swear that the words on them seemed to make more sense every day that passed.

Even now, his fingers, barely trembling at all, traced the intricate lines of a symbol for purification, the page across from that showing a detailed illustration of a bundle of gold-leaved roots.

The soft shuffling of cloth shoes on worn wood reached his ears, the sound familiar. Ken didn’t look up, though. He didn’t need to, the presence behind him could only be one person and he doubted he was wrong. Master…

That wasn’t what left his mouth.

“Old Wei,” the nickname slipped out the way it often did, more than anything else, Ken’s voice still low and respectful. Even with the address, he didn’t turn around, all his focus still on the complex script of the book. Mourning Silk powder needs a binding agent, sure, he knew that much, but the book said a water-base would dilute the qi in it. Oil, maybe? But which kind?

A few seconds passed, with the old alchemist silent despite Ken’s greeting.

Ken blinked as the quiet stretched on, actually confused as it went on just long enough for it to feel strange, the bubbling from the hearth suddenly too loud. Maste-

A soft hand came to a gentle rest on his shoulder. The feeling of it was warm, as Wei always was, but there was a strange stillness in the touch; not the usual light, passing gesture.

No, this had a heaviness to it, more deliberate and serious than Wei almost ever was.

What is… The fifteen-year-old finally looked up, turning around to face his master with a question on his lips.

Wei’s round, friendly face stared back at him, the usual smile still there, but…

“Master?”

It didn’t reach his eyes this time. “Good morning, Kenshi.” No, the purple gaze of his master held a different light today.

“...good morning, master?”

“You up early.” Wei’s voice was a little softer than Ken remembered it, the sing-song cadence drawn out for some reason, like the old man was tasting each word just a little more. “You study hard. Good, good.” Ken blinked as that heavy hand on his shoulder squeezed, a tight grip that almost hurt, before Wei set him free. “I must go out. An important errand.”

A familiar, slight disappointment pricked at him, settling in his chest like one of the dense herbal pills he had helped Wei make over the years. You just left two weeks ago. The thought came with that same disappointment thickening and condensing, the feeling inside him hardening like a rock.

Yes, it was selfish, he knew that. But Ken couldn’t deny that he hated everytime Old Wei headed out and left him behind in the shop. The city was still a big, scary, unknown thing, a hungry beast just outside the door, and the thought of being alone with nothing but wooden walls to protect him from the world outside them…

Ken gripped his fingers tight into fists to keep from shaking again. “...for ingredients, Old Wei?”

“For something better.” Those purple eyes almost seemed to flash as they looked at him, Ken staring right into those eyes he used to have to look up at.

Wh… no? The idea of letting himself believe it was almost too much, Ken unsure if he could even allow himself to hope. He can’t… he can’t mean…

“...master?” The apprentice leaned in a little, voice dropping to a whisper as his master’s long white beard brushed his skin, the smell of dried herbs coming off the old man suddenly too strong for his nose.

“When I return... I have gift for you, Kenshi. A special gift.”

The alchemist paused, letting the words hang in the air.

“It will change your life. Forever.”

Change your life.

He could feel the hair on his arms stand up as those words ran through his head. My life… Years of careful patience and practiced calm trained into him by Wei burned away, almost all of it replaced by a desperate frantic energy he hadn’t felt since… since he was twelve. The fix.

The thought might as well have been a shout the way it echoed in his skull. The… the fix.

The dark-green drink every single night for three years; the bitter tonic that hardened his bones, and thickened his skin, but never touched the core of the problem. The failed rituals with the silent stone and the itchy paste; every single part of the last three years he and Wei had spent rebuilding his body from the outside in.

The old man had done his best, but nothing he’d tried had ever managed to touch the part of him deep down.

The part that stayed empty.

Stayed hungry.

He’d read the texts; dozens of them Wei had all over the place, each and everyone of them all about the body and energy flows and all the things he needed to know.

After all, he didn’t have much else to do but read them.

In different ways, all of those books said the same thing, pretty much; that a healthy root was a living thing, and an especially healthy one was supposed to be especially alive, sprouting like a real plant the more you used and mastered qi. Eventually, it would grow out like a tree into healthy meridians and sub-meridians, each one capable of drawing in the world’s energy, the world’s qi, to grow strong.

His own…

Ken clenched his fists. His was pretty much dead, shriveled up and useless. All the bitter medicine was just watering the dirt, hoping something would happen.

He thought of being strong, of not having to fight his own body half the time, of the shakes being gone for good...

It was a dream so old and so deeply buried he’d almost forgotten how to have it. I wanna walk outside, into the noise and the stink and the people. I wanna see the city.

More than that, he wanted not to have to count every breath.

Ken tried to keep his face calm but he couldn’t help the wide grin that spread across his lips, the feeling unstoppable as it pulled at muscles he barely used. “A gift?” His words spilled out of his mouth, faster than he could manage them. “Is it... is it the thing you were working on? For my root?”

One warm hand patted the side of his face, Wei chuckling as if Ken had just said something funny. The touch was as gentle as it was grounding, but it didn’t do a thing to calm the storm inside him.

Three years of waiting. If Old Wei could actually fix it now…

“Patience, patience.” Another pat to the cheek came with those words. “Good alchemist does not rush steps.”

The answer wasn’t a yes, but it wasn’t a no. For now, that was enough.

Wei’s hands reached for the small, dark satchel hanging by the door, the thing placed over one shoulder. “Kenshi…” The alchemist turned around, friendly crinkles around his eyes smoothing out as the man suddenly became serious.

“Master?”

“Now, you listen,” The warmth was gone, the sing-song gentleness almost nowhere at all in Old Wei’s voice. This was the other voice, the one his master used when explaining a particularly dangerous alchemical reaction, the one that meant a mistake could cost a hand or an eye. “Lock this door behind me. Use the big bolt. You hear?”

“Y-yes, Old Wei.”

“You let no one in. No one. Not for any reason.” Purple eyes scanned the dark corners of the shop, as if seeing things that Ken couldn’t. “City today is hungry. Hungry and full of vengeful spirits.”

Ken stared his master in the face, those purple eyes making it hard for him to look away as the old man patted the door. “This door… you keep lock, until you hear me knock. Three slow, two fast, three slow. You understand?”

Thump... thump... thump. Thump-thump. Thump... thump... thump. “I understand, master.” Ken had already put the pattern firmly in his memory, locking it in tight. A simple rule. He was good at following rules.

Wei gave him one last, long look, a look that felt strangely sad for some reason.

Then, just as quickly, it was gone, the crinkles returning to the corners of his eyes as his master smiled back at him “Good boy.”

Without another word, the old man walked out, the thick wooden door slamming shut in the apprentice’s face.

…okay. Ken let out a low breath and dropped the heavy iron bar into place with a heavy and solid thunk, the sound of it echoing in the quiet room. With a grunt of effort, he pulled on the heavy iron bolt and slid the thing firmly to the right above the bar.

Another low breath left him as his back slapped against the door, the sound nearly as loud as the door lock. Alone again.

But he didn’t feel lonely.

No, he felt electric.

His feet hit the ground with quick steps as he crossed the length of the room, from the door to the front desk. All nervous energy and nothing to do with it, he turned around and walked back, covering the entire length of the room in ten quick strides. I can’t…

He couldn’t.

I can’t…

Believe it, at least.

Wei had never sounded so sure before. In three years, three whole years of trying, the old man had been clear with his ‘attempts’ and ‘we’ll see’s’ and ‘something to trys’. As much as his master knew, Old Wei had done his best to avoid getting his hopes up. Pretty much everything they had tried were just tests.

But this…

This didn’t sound like any test.

Ken’s soft-soled shoes whispered with every step on the worn floorboards as he crossed the room for the half-dozenth time. I’m gonna be…

He didn’t want to imagine it yet, no point giving himself more hope if it didn’t work. But Ken knew very well that what he wanted almost never mattered, because he could already see it every time he closed his eyes.

Finally walking outside into the grimy streets of the city, no worries or fear about everything his master had told him. No worries with that power inside him; real power making him stand tall with his body his own, and the shakes gone forever.

His brown eyes trailed the room; bundles of herbs hanging everywhere, heavy books lining the shelves, all the way to the still bubbling pots simmering in the back room.

This was his world.

And it was about to change.

Or something like it.

All of it was enough to smear together, one day blending into the next, in a long quiet period with no sharp edges to it.

The him that had been carried into this place, the tiny terrified twelve-year-old, was long-gone.

In that boy’s place was a fifteen-year-old, still thin, but taller now; built no different than a thick stick someone forgot to throw on the fire. Shoulders that had grown used to a hunch were relaxed now, and much broader, no longer tense from the fear of a rock or a fist. The messy tangle of his hair had grown out, something he’d since tamed into long, dark locs now tied back in a messy ponytail.

The scent of brewing tea, bitter and earthy on the morning breeze, tangled with the sharp citrus of sun-petal blossoms laid out to dry on a wide wicker tray. The floorboards were cool under his bare feet as he swept, his morning chores something he had long grown used to years past. Scrape-swoosh. Scrape-swoosh.

A quiet meditation to start the day, he even looked forward to it now, the act of it enough to push back the sleeping hum of the thing in his chest. He wore a simple green tunic, the fabric softened from a hundred washes, and soft cloth shoes that made no sound. Clothes that were clean, clothes that fit, clothes that didn’t come from a mountain of junk, oversized and filled with holes.

Across the room, an old man with a big white beard and an even bigger stomach sat in his favorite chair by the roaring hearth, a heavy thing of dark, scarred wood and worn leather. Old Wei was silent as he read from a heavy, leather-bound book, the old man’s impossible purple eyes scanning the pages.

It only took minutes for Ken to finish sweeping, practice and experience enough to quickly turn the small pile of dust and stray herb bits into a neat little mound. Smiling at his first work of the day done, Ken moved to wipe down the alchemy station. The workbench was a massive slab of dark wood, its surface covered in a geography of stains, burns, and knife-cuts from so many years of work. He ran a damp cloth over it and caught his reflection in the curved surface of a polished brass measuring cup.

The face that stared back was his, but… not.

The bones were sharper, the face still thin.

But it was a different kind of thin.

Three years of proper eating had done their part in helping him grow; Ken’s body much better off after three full meals of the old man’s delicious cooking. Anything’s better than roasted junk-rat. The nightly drink had worked its own slow magic on him too, that bitter green poison that still made him gag every time he drank it before bed. Ken could work for hours now, lifting crate after crate after heavy crate of dried herbs and plants for the cellar, up and down however many creaky sets of stairs this place had.

Sure, he was tired at the end, a deep ache settling in his bones every evening, but it was a good ache.

An earned ache.

Day after day passed like this, Ken never really bored as he always had something to do, whether it was his chores, learning from Wei, or his own self-study in alchemy.

A few times, though, Ken would stare out the thick, warped glass of the front window, watching the city, watching the people; a constant endless river of them always moving somewhere.

The world outside almost looked like the world he remembered, the world from before he woke up in the Outside Wastes.

Sure, it was a bit more… Asian than he remembered it.

To be entirely honest, it was a lot more; the signs all in a language he was still learning to read, and almost all the faces much paler than his but he was pretty much used to that after the first twelve years on the Outside.

Weird how dirty it is, though. Not that he wasn’t used to dirt or anything, but he remembered cities in the old world being… neater. Maybe Wei’s shop was just in a bad part of the city, but everything he could see from outside was so cramped together and dirty, a thousand layers of grime caked on every surface.

It wasn’t the world he saw when he closed his eyes.

But it was close enough to hurt sometimes.

It was a little, though, whenever Ken would think about the differences. Not about the old world and the new one, but the shop and the city. Real weird.

Old Wei’s apothecary was all dark wood and paper books and soft-glowing oil lamps. It looked nothing at all like the grimy dirty concrete and neon grunge that Ken blinked at every free moment he had. It wasn’t like the city was new either; some of the buildings had looked almost as beaten down and rusty as the junk-hills in the Wastes, but that only brought up more questions, like… how old is Wei’s place, then?

Even more confusing was how the old man had electricity in here—he’d found a light switch by accident in the early days, a shocking, modern-looking thing on the ancient wall—but Wei almost never used it.

The clothes, too.

Plenty of people walked around outside in t-shirts and pants; ratty, patched and grimy outfits that still looked like things he remembered. But he and Wei only wore simple, loose tunics and soft cloth shoes, like something from back when people still rode horses or something.

Nothing was wrong with it, honest; he really didn’t mind. It was just… weird living in a quiet little island of the past and surrounded by a noisy, angry ocean of the future.

Still, Ken had nothing to complain about.

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

The afternoons usually brought a lesson. Today, a white mushroom flecked with silver streaks sat on a small, slate cutting board between them both. Ken’s eyes were on it, the thing pale enough that it almost looked like it was glowing the longer you looked at it.

“Ahh, the Mourning Silk. Very tricky, this one.” Wei held it up between his thumb and forefinger, those twinkling purple eyes looking over at Ken. “You crush too fast, the spirit in it flees. Too slow...spoil the mix. Like telling pretty girl joke, yes?” The old man nodded with a smile on his face as he slid the slate over to Ken. “As always, the timing is everything”.

Ken blinked up at his master. “Old Wei…”

“Grind it, Kenshi.”

Ken took the mushroom, the flesh of it surprisingly firm. Memories of the dozens of texts Wei had him read were clear in his head, detailed diagrams of so many other mushrooms he’d memorized already coming to mind. …huh, I could draw this from memory.

He bit down the smile crawling its way across his face as he felt the delicate, paper-thin gills under his fingers, well aware of the precise point of weakness at the base of the stem where the cap joined it. Pressure here… twist just so… not too much force.

Dropping the Silk in a heavy stone mortar in front of him, Ken began to grind exactly the way he’d been taught and exactly how he’d practiced. Slow. He always started slow, careful and cautious to make sure he didn’t do anything to mess up the rare and expensive ingredients Old Wei let him touch.

Careful. He was careful, of course, hands moving in a gentle crushing motion with the heavy pestle in his grip. It only took seconds before he started to move the stone tool faster, as the cap began to break apart; then slow again, faster, slower, and then fast again.

In no time at all, the pieces of the mushroom had crumbled into a fine powder, the grains in the bowl actually glowing now with a silvery light.

Wei nodded slow, beard doing nothing to hide the widening smile on the old man’s face. “Good. Good. The spirit stays.”

Ken nodded back, allowing his own slow smile to spread wider as he looked his old master in the eye. “I-”

The bell over the front door, a small brass thing, jangled loud and sharp as they both looked up, Ken’s words dying on his lips and eyes going wide at the sight of someone standing in the doorway. …oh.

Now, while a customer was not a new thing to the shop, it was a bit of an uncommon thing for Ken to see. He was busy in the back handling his chores or in his room doing self-study most of the time, his work keeping him busy while Wei handled the front, so seeing people from outside the shop’s walls was still rare to him.

Still, this customer was different from the few he’d seen before, from those he’d taken money from and sold tinctures to. Ken was used to older women, sometimes with children or babies with them. This massive frame blocking the light from outside was none of those things. Built like a wire tree, he was tan, tall and thick-muscled, all hard angles and harder scars. He was also wearing rough, patched-together black leather, from his jacket to his pants. and he was bleeding.

A lot.

A dark, wet stain was spreading across the side of his shirt, as he clutched at the clear wound with a hand that was missing two fingers.

“H-heard you fix people.”

Ken swallowed a mouthful of nothing at the sound of that voice, gravelly and rough; no different than flint on stone.

Wei didn’t move from his chair. His friendly, crinkly smile didn’t waver. “Sometimes,” he said, his voice still gentle, still calm. “If they in need.”

The man took a stumbling step inside, a wave of stink washing in with him—sweat, blood, and a cheap chemical smell over every inch of him. He looked from Wei to Ken, eyes narrowed as his voice came out a hiss through gritted teeth. “I got a need. I need you to fix this hole in me.”

“Ahh, a hole,” Wei said, his tone still light as he finally stood up, the old man unhurried as he stepped toward the stranger. “Many men have holes. Some in body, some in soul. Which is yours?”

The rough customer just stared at the old man for a few long seconds, both fingers and lips visibly twitching, the room silent as Ken blinked back at him. Finally, he just pointed at the bloody stain on his side. “This one”.

“Apprentice,” Wei said, not looking away from the man. “Water. Clean cloths. And the silver-needle set”.

Ken quickly made his way out of the front room, doing his best to ignore the weight of the gangster’s eyes on his back as he walked around the corner; heart a steady drum against his ribs. Just another bully.

Bigger than Joric, but the same.

It only took him a minute or two of searching before he found what he had been sent for, and in less than half that, he was back at the front desk with the supplies.

“Thank you, apprentice.”

Apprentice. Wei never said his name in front of customers. Ken simply bowed and took a few steps back, watching from the doorway as Wei worked. The old man was a healer as much as he was an alchemist, Ken knew that, but every time he saw the man doing his thing, it was almost like he knew other’s bodies better than he knew his own.

With the man’s shirt and jacket off, Wei’s fingers cleaned the wound in seconds, a nasty-looking gash that was deeper than it looked, as the large man hissed and spat muttered curses through gritted teeth. Both master and apprentice were silent, though, as the old man quickly threaded a needle with thin silver wire, each movement precise and practiced.

Soon enough, the customer, who had been a storm of angry, violent energy a minute before, was quiet now, breathing ragged and eyes wide as he watched the old man work.

“You are Junker Fist, yes?” Wei asked, his voice a soft murmur as he pushed the needle through the man’s skin. “Certainly not a Scrapper.”

Junker Fists? Ken blinked as the man looked up at his master’s words. The hell’s that?

The man grunted, Ken unsure if it was a sound of pain or surprise. “How you know that?”

“Knot on belt,” Wei said, not looking up from his work as one finger pointed in the direction of the man’s black rope belt. “Only Junker gang tie it so. Sloppy. Easy to come off in fight.” He pulled the stitch tight with the last few words. “Loose belt can lose life”.

The gangster stood up slowly, eyes dropping down to take in the neat row of silvery stitches holding his skin together. He looked at Wei for a second longer, the man’s lip still twitching, before he reached behind him.

With another grunt, the man tossed a small bag onto the counter, square gray coins spilling out of it. “How much?”

Wei just smiled his crinkly smile, eyes never even dropping to the money. “You pay what you feel is right. Life hard to put a price on, yes?”

The gangster grunted again, the man shaking his head. “Whatever.” He turned around, but not before jabbing a hand into the bag and grabbing a handful of the coins back. Without another word, the ‘Junker Fist’ stomped out of the shop, the bell jangling furiously behind him.

Wei looked at the remaining coins, before he glanced back up at Ken with a chuckle on his lips already, the sound low and a bit wheezy. “See, Kenshi? Power is not always in the fist. Sometimes, it is in the needle.”

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

“What’s a Junker Fist?”

Old Wei looked up from his book, purple eyes blinking slow.

Ken sat at the front desk, the question already out of his mouth as he looked back at his alchemy master. The gangster had left the day before, Ken having kept the question to himself since then. Curiosity about the city outside, the city inside the Wall, had been rolling around in his head the more he thought about it.

The sigh that left the old man was heavy enough for him to feel across the room. “...bad boy follow bad man, become bad man himself. It is the way of things, Kenshi.”

Ken understood. He knew enough, enough not to ask any more questions. With another nod toward his master, he went back to the quiet rhythm of reading and managing herbs.

Things were often like that, him and Old Wei. Many days were quiet steady work; nothing but master and student learning with little to no disturbances or anything to really shake up each individual day.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t always so quiet.

It was a simple day in a quiet week, Ken perfectly fine one moment as he poured a measure of water from a clay pitcher into a beaker.

The next, he felt it, the pitcher shuddering in his grip

No. That familiar, hated tremor as it started in his fingertips. Not now.

It didn’t matter what he wanted, the shaking growing more violent as it traveled further up his arm. The simple clay pitcher slipped from his grasp and struck the wooden floor with a sharp crack, the thing shattering into a dozen pieces.

The boy’s breath caught in his throat as the pitcher shattered loud enough to drown out the sound of his heartbeat in his ears. Ken’s mouth fell open as he looked up at his master, ready to apologize to the patient gentle man he had grown used to.

Instead, he couldn’t find the words as Wei looked at him from his chair, the alchemist’s face a hard and unfamiliar mask. Friendly crinkles around his eyes gone, those purple eyes were stone as they froze Ken in place.

“...m-master?”

Like it was never there at all, the look vanished, almost so fast he could believe he’d imagined it. The old man sighed, long and low, the patient gentle smile coming back as he rose from his chair.

“Boy still weak…” A laugh spilled out. “Old Wei still old.”

The words were kind, especially kind considering Wei helped him sweep it up, but Ken couldn’t forget that look.

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

A few weeks later, Wei was preparing for one of his trips.

The old man never talked much about where he travelled to, whenever he went out for ingredients. All he said was “outside the Tower”, whenever Ken would ask.

The Tower wall that was miles and miles and miles away from the apothecary, so far that it was hard to make out in the distance through the windows of the building. It was almost impossible to believe Wei could make it all the way there and back in less than three days, but qi…

Qi was powerful, and he knew how strong it made people that had it.

Ken sighed and shook his head as he looked at Old Wei, his master packing his small dark satchel right in front of him. The reason for the trip was the same as it always was; rare ingredients, herbs and fungi that only grew in the qi-starved fields outside the Wall.

Qi-starved… Ken wanted to frown at the thought. He couldn’t imagine the outside being starved of qi like his master had told him compared to the insides of the Tower, having seen so many of the warriors in his village using their own inner fire. ‘Little qi, but even less people,’ apparently meant that little amount of qi could go into the plants, without that many people using it. Makes sense, I guess.

He guessed, but only because he didn’t really know.

There wasn’t much he could know given that he couldn’t cultivate, he couldn’t make use of the stuff, he couldn’t “light his spirit root” like Wei said. His body might have been older, stronger, and tougher, but the core weakness, the shakes, the emptiness… it was still there.

He was still broken.

But he had his mind.

No matter what, he had his mind.

He could read the old, complicated diagrams in the books, the insanely complicated recipes, the intricate balances of ingredients that formed a reaction.

And all of that was because of his master.

“...those fools on high, sitting on their thrones…”

Ken blinked, eyes still on the old man as Wei added a water flask to the satchel. Old Wei was barely looking at what he was doing, the man’s eyes firmly on the window looking out onto the main street as he muttered under his breath.

“...think their games have no price... but the debt always comes due...”

Master? Ken opened his mouth to ask a question but a loud commotion from the street outside drew him to the window. His eyes widened further as he watched a parade go past him on the street full of cheering people, a river of people in bright clothes and strange masks painted half-purple and half-red, carrying colorful banners with the same colors with giant snakes painted on them. The sound of drums and horns and a strange, wailing string instrument, muffled and distorted by the thick glass, pulsed through the floor.

“...what’s that, master?”

The old man shook his head, purple eyes looking at nothing. “A festival for a dead god. Nothing for you.” He turned his head aside, looking back at his satchel again. “The city is a hungry beast, Kenshi. It chews up little boys with weak roots and spits out the bones. This shop... this is your sanctuary. The only one you need”.

Ken nodded back, brown eyes pulling away from the window as he gazed around the front room of the apothecary; shelves lined with jars, herb bundles hanging from the ceiling, and the gentle bubbling of a simmering tincture.

It was his whole world.

A safe, comfortable world he had grown to love.

Ken wasn’t sure how else to describe it but it just made everything feel so much more right than the fear and hunger he was used to. It was like breathing different air, almost.

Literally, even.

A whole different everything.

Days of his new life, new pattern, new routine went by quickly.

So quickly they almost seemed to bleed into one another, the passage of each day marked only by the slow mechanical crawl of the city’s fake suns across the metal ceiling high above, their light flat over-bright yellow, nothing like the real thing but still warm through the glass of the apothecary window, and he’d never felt safer.

Never felt better.

Wei’s apothecary was always warm, the wood structure both large and small at the same time. Massive when compared to the shacks he’d known all this life, but also tiny against all the huge buildings he spent his time staring at from the windows.

Paradoxical or not, the place was a pocket of life in a giant scary city that sounded like it was always dying, full of distant clanking and grinding noises that echoed through the walls. Still, the outside stayed outside, the way Ken preferred it.

Nothing got past the walls, past Wei’s herbs and the old man’s quiet humming and the way he moved like he had all the time in the world. The place smelled of things that grew; dry herbs and sweet smoke, deep resinous scent of the dark wood that made up the walls, constant gentle burble of simmering pots on the hearth.

Ken sat smiling, grinding dry herbs and reading dryer books, slapping labels on glass bottles and putting away light gray pestles that stood out against the darkness of his skin. This was a new world for him and he had no desire to leave it, at least not any time soon and definitely not by choice. A world away from rust and rot.

The permanent stink of that other world, decay and old iron, had clung to everything back there because it was everything. It was only now, after being away from it all, that he could see how bad it had been. He tried not to think about it too much, though.

Thinking about it…

Ken’s hand went to his chest, the pain of rocks and fists coming back as if it never left. The taste of blood and waste-dirt and Joric…

Joric’s eyes rolling back white…

Don’t.

A shudder tore out of him, followed by a few long seconds of heavy breaths as he sat there on a stool made from wood no darker or denser than the floor beneath it. Brown eyes flickered up as his lungs filled slowly in the same breathing pattern that came to him quicker than instinct.

That other thing, the one in his chest, the gnawing hunger that had been his shadow for twelve years, was quieter than it had been in a long time.

From that very first day he woke up in this dimly lit back room, even.

Fire wit’ no wood. It hadn’t left though, not when he could still feel it. That low sleeping hum just under his ribs, a cold spot in the warmth of the shop; Ken doubted it was going anywhere soon, maybe at all.

But at the very least, it didn’t scream anymore, and it definitely didn’t wake him up at night with the shakes after a bad dream.

The whole deal between him and the old man wasn’t something they talked about; it was just there in the way the old man would slide a cup of hot sweet tea onto the workbench without a word. It was there in the way his own hands, steadier than they’d ever been, would grind gnarled stubborn roots just the way Wei liked them.

“Powder fine as dust, Kenshi, no chunk left behind.”

He was doing good work and he only wanted to be better at it. He found himself watching the old man in everything. From the slow careful way he moved, and even down to the little way he hummed his little songs while he worked.

Something about it all, it just made him feel…

Safe.

He’d felt so safe he’d even started calling him “Old Wei” in his head.

It was a natural thing, something that felt as right as any other. He’d wondered about it for a second, but no… it only made sense, just as much sense as the way he’d called his grandmother “Gram” without ever thinking about it. Besides, the man was ancient, his face a roadmap of wrinkles layered so deep they looked carved into wood, long hair the color of sun-bleached bone found half-buried in the wastes. What else am I gonna call him?

Then one day, after what must have been weeks, it slipped out.

Ken had just brewed up a fresh pot of blood-leaf tea, the kind Wei liked in the afternoons; the spicy fragrant steam warming his face as he poured it.

The twelve-year-old had walked from the back room with the cup, no shakes keeping him in fear of spilling even a drop. With careful steps, he set the heavy clay cup down on the small table next to Wei’s book, the one with a cracked leather cover that felt like old dry skin. The book was open but the old man’s eyes were closed, chest rising and falling in slow even rhythm.

The words came out anyway, quiet so they wouldn’t wake him.

“...for you, Old Wei.”

Ken’s muscles went tight the same heartbeat his eyes went wide, the second half of that sentence not something he meant to leave his lips. D-did I… why did I… Breathing shaky, the boy just stood there with that old instinct to brace for a blow running through him as he stood there, a statue carved from nerves. Stupid.

Impossible purple eyes slid open, the action so quick and sudden that he knew deep down the old man couldn’t have been asleep.

Not even for a second. He heard me.

That thought only made the deep fear around his heart grip tighter.

Even as those same eyes crinkled at the corners, and a low wheezy chuckle rumbled deep in his chest, Ken could only stand there unmoving, waiting for what came next. A slap, a beating, whatever…

But no, Wei just kept laughing, the sound like old paper tearing slowly, or maybe wind through the wire-trees back in the valley. He’s laughing at me.

But it wasn’t mean laughter; nothing like the sharp barking sound that usually came before the rocks started flying.

Wei reached for the cup, his old wrinkled hand brushing against Ken’s as he took it. “Ahh, very old, yes.” Wei nodded, a real smile reaching his eyes, almost making them glow in the dim light of the shop.

Fingers worked their way through that long white beard as the old herbalist stroked the thing slow and thoughtfully. “Very very old.”

For some reason he never bothered to explain, Wei laughed like that every single time Ken said that name. Not as loud as it had been before, more a soft private sound, but it was always a real laugh; like it was the best joke he’d ever heard. Old Wei.

As old as Wei was, the man hadn’t forgotten his promise, though.

The one to “fix” him. The old man might have been as old as the beard made him seem, but that was just his body fooling you. Wei was sharp, for one. He didn’t forget things, not like Gram did near the end when she’d tell him the same story three times in one afternoon.

And the old man definitely knew what he was doing.

By the end of the first week, he’d started with the attempts, strange quiet things that were sometimes confusing and sometimes a little scary, but never anything Ken couldn’t handle.

One week, every morning before the city’s hazy suns were at their brightest, Wei had him sit cross-legged on the smooth cool floorboards for an hour. The wood was worn in this spot, grain smoothed down by years of someone sitting in the same place over and over till they’d rubbed the roughness away. Wei would place a smooth, small but heavy black rock in his lap, a perfectly round thing that felt cold like it had just been pulled from a deep river.

Pretty, though.

“A spirit stone,” the old man’s voice was as gentle as ever as he finally let the heavy rock go, Ken taking it with a grunt. “If root is strong, stone will sing. You listen, you focus.”

Listen to a rock.

And he had listened, because what else was he gonna do? Ken closed his eyes, breathing falling into the slow steady rhythm he knew as well as anything else. In-out. In-out.

He focused as hard as he listened, doing his best to think of nothing but the stone itself.

Ken focused till his head hurt, till everything else fell away, till he felt a sinking pit open up inside him that made his stomach lurch. He did nothing but focus the entire time he sat there, eyes closed till his back ached from sitting so still, till his legs went numb and his hands cramped around the stupid rock.

Please. Even as he begged, he knew it wouldn’t do anything. Begging had never once fixed anything before in his life; it hadn’t yet and that definitely didn’t change as he begged now, eyes shut and almost stinging wet. No, the stone just stayed cold as ever, the thing dead in his hands; no humming or singing or heat or anything.

Course it doesn’t work. Sitting there was it’s own torture, just ignoring the time that passed by while Old Wei watched with those purple eyes, patient and waiting for something that was never gonna happen.

Fire wit’ no wood.

But even Wei couldn’t make wood grow where there wasn’t any. Some things just stayed broken.

A week later with the spirit stone mess forgotten and tossed aside, Wei had tried something entirely new.

Ken sat on the floor in the dimness of the back room, in the center of a chalk-drawn circle, surrounded by twelve different candles already burnt down to the halfway point. Even with the flickering light from the burning candles, he was cold and for good reason too.

He’d been shirtless for a while now, his upper body exposed to the world, the only clothes he had on being his light brown pants held to his waist by the thick rope belt he’d grown used to.

His nose wrinkled, the boy doing his best to keep silent and not mention the stink as Wei did what he had been preparing for days. Still, the smell was… it was a lot.

Wei’s fingers, middle and index, were thick, knobby and layered with a thick gunk; the stuff really a cold, green paste the man had mashed together for hours earlier in the day. As colorful as it looked, the stuff stank like old mud and feet, to be honest.

It definitely didn’t help that that gunk was all over his body, Wei drawing complicated, spiraling symbols all over his back and chest with it.

For nearly the last half hour, he’d had to sit perfectly still on a low stool in the center of the room while Wei traced his body in slow, measured circles, chanting in a low, strange language and adding more and more and more layers of the stuff as it dried; each individual layer was already so thick he felt more mud-person than human.

Still, the smell and feel was the worst part.

The words themselves were… not words.

Not really.

Ken’s eyes tracked Wei as best he could, every time the old man was in his field of vision at least. He didn’t know the language, and couldn’t even hope to understand the words; nothing he’d ever heard before in this life or the last even coming close to the soft, thick hums and clicks that left the man’s mouth.

Whatever the old man had to say, it made the air in the room feel thick and heavy, like it was vibrating against his skin. He knew it was doing something, especially when he felt a faint tingle as the fourth layer of gunk began to harden around his stomach; an almost-electric prickle that made the tiny hairs on his arms stand up.

But that prickle was where it stopped hard.

Nothing else happened. There was no sudden rush of power. No magic spark lighting up his insides. Nothing to even get his hopes up. Just a weird, foot-smelling itch.

The sigh from Old Wei was strong enough to nearly wipe out the little bit of candle left, four of the twelve nearest him flickering out as smoke curled up from the puddles of wax. “...we try something else, Kenny.”

And they did.

They tried.

And tried.

And tried.

Every time, Ken tried to act like it didn’t bother him when he saw the sad smile on Wei’s face as nothing worked. His face stayed as calm as he could make it, not saying much as the old man would pat him on the back and say something like, “Try again, try something else.”

Something else? Like what? The words were on his lips every time the old man said it, frustration and bitterness thick in his throat every day,

But the old man always did have something else to try.

And like before, that something else just didn’t work.

Above all else, Ken wanted to be angry. He wanted to rage and scream and cry that it wasn’t fair. How was he still bad meat? What was so wrong with him that he couldn’t be strong? Why was he the broken one?

He wanted to be angry, but he couldn’t.

Not when Wei wasn’t.

Not when the old man never even seemed to get upset that all his effort seemingly went nowhere, no matter how many hours or days or weeks he spent preparing for everything he did for Ken.

The old man didn’t even frown.

“Ahh… well,” Wei nodded his head as he helped Ken sit up, the boy’s nerves tingling and his body loose after hours of needles being pushed into his back. One hundred and forty-four of them all over, each one dipped in some sort of potion that made his skin tingle deep when they were pushed in and after Old Wei had pulled each one of them out. “Very weak root, then. Very deep. Some trouble but…”

Wrinkly but strong hands patted his shoulders as he gave the boy his friendly, crinkly smile, a look that pushed back the heat in Ken’s chest. “Ten years to grow tree, hundred years to grow a man.”

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

Wei refused to give up on him, the old man determined to do what he could. Ken could appreciate that, a lot in fact, but sometimes the man’s attempts were… hard on him.

Almost two months into living with Wei, the old man had changed up their routine just the tiniest bit. Every night, just before he went to sleep on the soft, clean mattress that still felt like a miracle, Wei would bring him a small clay cup to drink.

The cup itself was filled with a thick liquid, smooth but dense, and the same color as some of Wei’s darkest and greenest herbs. As if to make things worse, it smelled worse than the gunk the old man had caked his chest with weeks ago.

Only nowhere near as colorful.

Mud, rotting leaves, crushed bitter-weeds, and the worst of the sludge river runoff from the dumping pits forced its way into his nose with a force that was almost physical, Ken already gagging before his lips even touched it.

This was a smell that just screamed poison.

That first night, he’d stared down at the swirling, steaming liquid for far too long. His hands were wrapped around the cool clay of the cup, swallowing a mouthful of spit before he looked back up at Wei’s smiling, patient face. “Do I… really…”

He didn’t finish what he had to say, the words trailing off as he looked back down at the cup in his palms. It wasn’t like he needed to finish it anyway. Ken knew well enough Wei understood everything he did and didn’t say.

As he expected, the old man just chuckled, that same low sound, like wire-trees rustling in the wind at night.

“Good for bones,” the old man’s purple eyes twinkled his way. “Makes the body strong even with weak root, Kenny. You drink.”

So he drank.

It was awful, worse than he expected if that was even possible. The drink coated his entire mouth, slathering his tongue even as Ken tried to chug it and making him shut his eyes as he tried to force himself past all of this as quickly as possible.

Eyes watering, stomach screaming, Ken drank it all, every single drop.

Wei smiled at him and took the cup. He did the same thing every single night, as soon as Ken finished downing the drink that probably tasted just as bad coming up as it did going down.

But after the first few days, he kinda got used to it and more than that, he began to notice something.

After the first few weeks of his new nightly routine, that deep, familiar ache in his muscles, the one that had been there so long he never even thought about it…

It wasn’t as bad anymore.

A few months in and he noticed much more than just a little less pain. Boxes he would have struggled with, crates he could never have budged before; they were suddenly something he could push around, if not outright lift without his arms feeling like they were going to give out immediately.

The drink might have looked and tasted like poison, but it was a poison that was killing the weakness inside him.

And that was all he cared about.

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

One evening, Ken sat by the front counter, the boy carefully grinding sun-petals into a fine, bright yellow powder with a heavy stone mortar and pestle. The work was its own meditation, Ken’s movements slow, quiet and careful.

The grinding was both a process and a skill all its own; a steady, rhythmic scrape-and-turn that had become as natural as breathing. Weeks of quiet repetition had taught him this much, and while it took focus, it wasn’t something that had Ken stressing out over whether he was doing it right anymore.

At a certain point, you just knew.

Old Wei sat silently in his comfortable chair by the hearth in the front room of the apothecary, no book in his hand as he simply kept his attention in one direction.

His direction.

“Kenshi.”

Brown eyes blinked, first down at the golden powder in the pestle in front of him, then up over at Wei. The voice had been soft as ever, but the sound of his proper name cut through the quiet rhythm of his work just as sharply as if the old man had yelled it.

Wei almost never used that name. It was almost always Kenny or just Ken. Kenshi… that name was for something serious. “...yes, Old Wei?”

The old man leaned forward on his chair, eyes purple and shining as they caught the light from the hearthfire, flames dancing in them as he stared Ken’s way.

His gaze wasn’t on Ken’s face, though, the old man just watching his hands work as he ground the petals into powder. “Your body...” Wei started, voice slow as if each word was glass, shattered pieces he had to pick up with his bare hands. “The root is stubborn. The martial path will be hard road for you. Maybe too hard.”

What?

The words hit like a rock to the chest, all the air knocked right out of along with all the hope and everything else good he’d felt these last couple months. Too hard. The words echoed in the quiet space where the hope used to live.

Same old story, wasn’t it? Broken. Bad meat.

Muscle memory did its work, hands still grinding even as his thoughts were everywhere but here, everything but focused as his brain tried to make sense of what he’d just heard. What was I thinking?

No, seriously, what had he expected? That maybe this time would be different? That maybe Wei could fix what was wrong with him? Stupid.

“But the martial path is not the only one.” But Wei wasn’t finished talking as the old man smiled, a different kind of smile this time, not just kind but something else. Proud? Of who?

Of what?

What was there to be proud of, about the village freak?

He pointed a wrinkled finger at the mortar and pestle in Ken’s hands, the tools that felt right in his grip, felt like they belonged there. “A keen mind. Skilled hands. This is also power, Kenshi. A different kind of power.”

Different power?

Wei stood up from his chair with a quiet groan, the old man shuffling past the hearth as he crossed the room over to the big shelf against the far wall. A book on the lower shelf fell into his hand and Wei moved over to the counter, turning the heavy leather-bound thing over in his hands. The dark leather was worn smooth in some places, cracked at the spine like dry sun-baked earth from the wastes. Ancient.

“The body is a vessel,” Wei said, voice dropping to that low thoughtful murmur he got sometimes when he was thinking about big things. “But the soul shapes the body. The body follows the mind. The mind fills the soul. If you cannot fill the vessel with the power of the world...” He tapped the cover of the old book with one long gnarled finger. “You will learn to use the power of the world for your own means.”

Power of the world?

His purple eyes burned with sudden fierce intensity, bright enough to make Ken blink. “I will teach you. The real art. Alchemy.”

Alchemy. Ken stared at the old book, then up at Wei’s friendly face, the crushing disappointment from a moment ago washing away like dirty water down a drain, replaced by something bright and hot and so full of hope it almost hurt to hold it.

A different kind of power.

His voice came out shaky when he finally managed to speak, words tripping over themselves in his excitement, the old breath-conscious caution forgotten for once. “...yes. Yes, please, Old Wei. Teach me.”

Wei’s smile widened, wrinkles stretching deep into his face. “Good, good, good boy.” The old man patted Ken’s head, his hand warm and gentle through the thick curly hair. “We begin tomorrow.”

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The only sound Ken could make out was a soft, steady shhhh-pop… shhhh-pop and a quiet, peaceful bubbling from the tea on the stove. Both of them were a million miles away from the constant quiet ringing in his own ears, something he always dealt with after a really bad case of the shakes.

Ken just sat there on the impossibly soft bed, hands clutching the thick, warm blanket tight to his chest, unsure what to say.

Hell, he didn’t even know if there was anything to say. Everyone he’d ever known had been in the village, eight hundred or so people. People had died and new babies had been born, but nobody new had ever come into his life his entire life.

And now…

The old man sniffed, nose wrinkling slightly as those impossible purple eyes stayed on him, clearly waiting for him to say something.

Ken wasn’t sure what it could be, even as his mouth worked silently, tongue half-useless in his mouth as he just stared back at the old man. The man’s face still had that strange, gentle expression, the one that wasn’t a mean grin or a hungry sneer. A smile. That’s what it was called, Ken blinked as his brain slowly but steadily started back up. You’re being an idiot, just staring. He gave you his name already.

“K-k-ken.” He finally managed a single syllable. “I mean, Ken. Me, I’m… Ken.”

Wei raised an eyebrow. “Your name is Ken, yes?”

Ken nodded, not trusting himself to say anything again without sounding like he had brain damage.

A sound rumbled low in the man’s chest, Wei letting out a low, wheezy chuckle. Ken flinched at first, something flickering hot in his chest, only to blink in confusion a few seconds later. He’s not making fun of me.

No, Wei’s laugh was different from the villagers; no cruelty or anything mocking in it. It was… warm. His voice followed, soft, with that same weird, gentle up-and-down rhythm, like a song he’d never heard before.

“Ahh, a quiet one.” The man paused, his purple eyes twinkling. “Good, good. A still pond runs deep, my grandmother used to say.”

What’s he mean? Still pond? The words made no sense, just sounds in the quiet air. The man, Wei, took a small, slow step closer, the way someone might approach a scared, cornered animal. Which, he guessed, was exactly what he was.

“No worries. You are safe here, boy. I found you in the wastes. Near death.” Wei let the words just… sit there for a second. “I brought you... inside.”

The word was wrong.

It felt heavy in the air, like a piece of salvage that wouldn’t fit. He knew the outside, he was almost always outside; the Valley, the wastes, the village. The outside had an edge—the Wall. There was no inside, not like this. Not with wood, and warmth, and mattresses like this. His own voice finally pushed its way out, a soft, airy whisper that cost him a breath he wasn’t sure he could spare.

“...inside?”

Wei nodded, the old man’s round, friendly face serious now. “Inside.”

The word was a key, something twisting inside Ken like a key finding its lock. Inside. Inside. Inside? His brain felt like it was buzzing as the word repeated over and over inside his head, a wire pulled too tight. Inside what?

If what Wei was saying was true… no. I have to see it.

No. He needed to see.

Ken pushed the blanket off him and slid off the edge of the bed. The second his bare feet touched the floor, the boy flinched, pulling back for a second. It was wood, perfectly smooth and cool under his soles. He’d never stood on a floor like this before, a floor that wasn’t dirt, or grit, or a dented, rusted sheet of metal. …wow.

He shook his head, no, not right now, and focused his attention back on the window, on what he needed to see.

The scrawny boy hobbled across the room, whole body screaming with the deep, profound ache of the long chase. Ngggh. Soreness was deep in his muscles, tight and aching in a way he didn’t know was possible, but he wasn’t going to let that stop him. He glanced over at the old man, Wei still watching patiently, and grit his teeth. I need… I need to see this.

He reached the window after a few more painful seconds, blinking as he saw glass—a perfect, clear sheet of something that wasn’t cracked or grimy—and dark-skinned hands pressed themselves up against it, surprised at the sight of the clear cold material.

Then something else caught his attention, and his surprise shot as high as his eyes went wide.

Oh… oh god.

The world he knew was gone.

There was no gray sky. There were no mountains of rust and junk piled hundreds of feet high scattered across the horizon.

No, in front of him was a city.

No mere village, or even one of the rare towns.

A real, actual city.

With skyscrapers stretching up into the sky and everything else.

The buildings were all smashed together, a chaotic jungle of dark metal and stained concrete, fighting for space, rising up into the gloom. Black wires were strung between them like messy, tangled spiderwebs, and puffs of steam vented from unseen holes in the streets below. It looked dirty and broken and all packed up together in a way he’d never seen before, but it was a city. With lights — electricity — and signs — English — and streets — concrete — and thousands and thousands of people moving around like they lived in a giant anthill. He pressed his forehead against the cool, smooth surface of the window, his eyes trying to follow the crazy, impossible shapes of it all.

Then he looked up.

And his stomach dropped, a sickening lurch that made the room tilt.

There was no sky.

Just a ceiling.

He’d always called the gray sky he’d grown used to a ceiling or a lid, because it looked so dull and lifeless. It made sense to him back then, because what else could he call a sky where even the clouds blended into the dullness of the sky in shades of dark gray. It was nothing like the bright blue he remembered.

Still, he knew he wasn’t serious when he called the sky a ceiling.

But this, above him now, was literally a ceiling, nothing to exaggerate.

All Ken could see was a giant ceiling made of dark metal, so high up he could barely see it, stretching out over everything. Massive, glowing lights were set into it at even intervals, looking like a grid of fake, hazy suns slowly but surely rotating over the sky, the entire thing on a mechanism so large he knew even the smallest gears would be several times his size.

The thought hit him so hard he felt dizzy. I’m inside the Wall. It was wrong. It broke all the rules. The Wall was the edge of the world. Everyone knew that. You couldn’t be inside the edge.

His hands shook, not from… not from the shakes… but something else.

I didn’t know that, Ken tried to deny it. I didn’t believe it.

He wasn’t sure of it even as he thought it. At some point, he must have accepted it as just the way it was, even if he tried to pretend like he didn’t. I… I…

Ken turned away from the window, eyes still wide, a million questions stuck in his throat, choking him as they all tried to get out at once. Wei was just watching him, his face calm, as if he knew exactly what was happening inside his head.

Finally, he forced out one strangled question. “Wh-whatisthisplace?”

Wei’s voice was soft again. “This place... the Divine Ladder of Samsara, as it is known,” the old man closed his eyes as he said the name, Ken almost sure he could hear the emphasis, the capitalization in them as he said them. “We are on the bottom rung. The lowest floor… as it is known.”

More words that didn’t make sense. Ladder? Floors?

“I-I don’t…” he swallowed a mouthful of nothing as he looked the old man in those bright purple eyes. “F-floors…” The Wall had always been the wall, taller than God and wider than the Earth. He knew it had to be manmade, he’d accepted that much but a building…

A building this big couldn’tshouldn’twouldn’t exist. It wasn’t possible. There was no way to build that big, not with any science that… that he knew.

Ken almost laughed, the sound escaping his lips as another cough. Knew…

That was the thing. He didn’t know anything. Not about the Spark or the Wall or the World and he still thought he could talk about anything. It was funny… well, it would have been funny if it also wasn’t making him feel like he was losing his mind right now.

Again, he finally repeated. “F-f-floors?”

Wei nodded slowly, patiently. “Floors of the Grand Tower…”

“N-no!” Ken’s hands flew up, palms up as he interrupted the man. “Sorry, but… you just said this was called the Divine Ladder.”

Wei nodded again, just as slow as before. “It is known by many names, as many names for every century it has persisted. Shí’èr Mén, the Heaven-Piercing Pillar, Rōkuten Hashigo, and of course…” the old man paused to stroke his beard, hand moving down through the white hair with care. “Neo-Jiating.”

Ken nodded, his much more jerky and unsure than the old man’s. “O… okay.”

Wei stepped closer, one hand still on his beard. “One-hundred-and-fourty floors make up this Grand Tower. Each one larger than the last and none small at all.”

Ken nodded again, this time much more sure of himself. That’s… that’s just insane. He still couldn’t understand how that was possible but, more than anything, he was getting used to not understanding anything. “I…” Unsure of what else to ask, what else to even say, Ken said the only thing he could. “Thank you.”

The old man’s head tilted to the side. “You thank Wei? For what?”

Ken blinked. “For… for saving me? Outside? For bringing me inside.” This place might not have been the home he remembered but it was the closest thing to it, and that was… honestly, that felt even more important than his life being saved from the villagers.

Wei shook his head. “And if I were to watch you die, what good would that do me? Wasting a life?”

Ken blinked. “I… I don’t know?”

“You wish to thank me? Thank me. You stay here. You learn from me.” Wei waved a hand across the back room. “This shop is your home now.”

Brown eyes darted around the cozy, herb-filled room. “I can…” He had nowhere else to go, and no one else he could trust. The option was in front of him, the only one and the only good one. “I can do that.”

“Good.” Then Wei’s face got serious, and the friendly crinkles around his purple eyes disappeared with a smile. “But one thing… This shop, you must not leave. Not yet. Not unless you heal. Not a step outside these walls.” He took a step closer, his voice low but firm. “The city is not kind to a boy like you, your constitution is… weak. And many have strength greater than normal men. You know this?”

“Y-you mean the spark?” He’d seen plenty of people with that, at least two dozen men in the village able to use the power that came with what Gram had told him was “the fire of the soul”.

Wei nodded his head slowly, the man’s left hand rising again to stroke his long beard. “...Spark, you say… old old world, but not incorrect. The spark of the soul, you call it, the tower calls it, among many names, qi.”

Qi. The word… it was familiar for some reason, but Ken wasn’t sure why exactly it seemed like it. Qi…

“Qi is the power of nations and cities and kingdoms, the greatest power in this city, in this tower. And those without it…” Wei shook his head. “They are nothing.”

That made sense, as much as anything else did. It was almost no different than the outside, the village he left.

“But here, in my shop, you are safe. Here, you will be well.”

A new cage. A different kind of cage. But the door wasn’t locked. And it was warm. He gave a small, jerky nod, just happy to be somewhere the rocks couldn’t reach him.

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

The next few days were a blur of new, strange things as he grew used to Wei’s ‘apothecary’.

That was the word for it, his herbal shop.

Ken hadn’t even known something like that came with a name.

He was a ghost in this place, afraid to touch anything, afraid he’d break the quiet but Wei was so patient it was weird. The next morning, Ken had stared into a mirror for the first time in Wei’s bathroom, staring at a face that he’d never seen this clearly before, a face that he wasn’t sure was familiar.

One hand went up to his eye, the cut where the rock had cut him deep almost invisible just a day later. Wei… the old man knew what he was doing, that was something Ken could never deny. Not only the cut on his eye, the gashes on his legs had all sealed up too, even the cuts that had gone deep into his soles. If anything could have further convinced him that learning from Wei was the best idea he’d ever had, it would have been that.

Most meals were the best he’d had in as long as he could remember; simple but good. Usually a bowl of hot soup with real meat and rich broth, something other than rat. It came with soft warm bread that wasn’t hard or stale or full of grit, almost softer than he could believe. That first day, he ate slowly, carefully, almost convinced it would all disappear if he looked away.

He was given clothes. A simple, green tunic and cotton pants that were soft and actually fit his scrawny body. When he put them on, the feeling of the clean, smooth cloth against his skin was so strange, so nice, that his eyes started to burn. He had to turn away and pretend to look at the jars on the shelf so the old man wouldn’t see.

During these days, Wei would watch him. When he was eating, or just sitting quietly, Wei’s friendly eyes would get sharp and focused; the eyes of a scrapper knocking around a piece of junk from the wastes, tapping and shaking it to see if it was good salvage or just something to break down to add to the village’s waste-walls.

One night, while Wei was checking the bandage on his foot, the old man gently took his wrist, his warm, dry thumb pressing down right where he could feel his pulse. Wei closed his eyes and hummed one of his strange little songs to himself. After a long time, he let go and nodded.

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“Ahh, a weak spirit root, I see.” He patted Ken’s shoulder, the touch light. “No trouble, no trouble. A long fix, but we fix.”

Fix? Fix me? The idea felt impossible. Like telling him the sky outside wasn’t gray. To be strong, like the chief, like the village warriors? It was a dream he’d given up on so long ago he’d forgotten how to even have it.

Wei started teaching him. Not about being strong, not yet. He started with the herbs.

“This one, sun-petal,” the old herbalist held up a handful of yellow, dried flowers, Ken turning his head to the side as something he could only describe as citrusy bleach punched him in the nostrils. “Strong yang. Good for chills.”

Then, Wei pulled out a twisted, dark root so coiled up and tangled together, it looked more like a piece of old, rusted wire than anything else. “This, iron-vine. Makes the blood strong.”

All Ken did was listen. He wasn’t going to turn down something like this, and definitely wasn’t going to waste it. Gram would have hit him over the head with her cane if he did something like that.

It didn’t take long for him to get used to it, the old man letting him know he was good at remembering the names and smells of herbs. He didn’t know how to deal with the fact that just hearing that put a smile on his face.

More than anything else, though, the quiet work felt good. It was like helping Gram in her shack all over again, but like a real job. Not just following an old lady with a cane on her walks around the village to dig up the plants she needed for the day. All of it made his day better; the sorting, the grinding, the mashing, all of it felt just like a language he understood.

For the first time since Gram had died, the big, hungry emptiness inside him, the fire with no wood, felt… a little smaller, a little quieter.

Sure, he was still trapped inside the edge of the world.

But it was better inside than outside, even with a fake sun and a fake sky, and massively huge walls that went higher than anything ever should.

More than anything, Ken felt safe. And in this strange, impossible place, surrounded by the ghosts of a thousand different plants, he felt happy.

His eyes were heavy, too heavy to open, the world too hazy for him to even think. a dream-thing floating in his head, but it was there. Arms around him, strong and solid but not rough like the angry grabbing hands of the scrappers in the village. No squeezing, no bruising grip born from a life of hard work and casual meanness.

Just strength.

A quiet strength that held him secure against a firm chest.

Who?

Something cut through the fog in his head; a smell filling his noise and pushing so much else out. No rot to it, the stench of chems or death from the waste nowhere near it.

Clean, like Gram’s good herbs. Smells expensive.

The strangest thing, though, was the quiet inside him. The shakes were gone. The gnawing hungry emptiness in his soul, the constant aching void that he fought every second of every day with his breath, wasn’t screaming anymore.

It was just still.

That’s wrong.

A warm stillness where he’d been fighting a freezing cold fight his entire life. It was wrong, unnatural, more frightening than the pain he was used to. Fire wit’ no wood.

The rocking, the smell, it pulled something loose in his head, a memory falling out not in pictures but in feelings. Warmth. The crunch of waste-dirt under smaller feet. The steady tap... tap... tap of a cane.

Gram.

The junk-hills were mountains then, towering cliffs of rust and twisted metal that looked even taller than they were back when he was six. His own hand was in Gram’s, her skin wrinkled and dry like old canvas, but her grip was sure. Her other held her cane, the thing a half-jagged piece of white pipe wrapped in dirty cloth.

The thing made a steady rhythm against the ground, its weight keeping her upright as it sounded off on the dirt. Tap... tap... tap.

Good sound.

Ken remembered trying to use it as a spear once, pretending he was a warrior as he waved the pointy end around. Gram had chased him around with it for a good few minutes when she’d caught him. Heh.

“Dis de one, Kenny-boy.” Her voice was the valley’s voice—flattened, thick and stretching some words odd, but it was the only one that didn’t sound like rocks grinding together. Her finger, bent and knobbled, pointed at something in the dirt. “B’ot-root. Good for breath.” She smiled back at him, mouth yellowed as the sun. “Good for teeth.”

Brown eyes twisted up, Ken squinting down at the little brown lump pushing its way out of the grit. Ugly It looked like a dead thing, all wrinkled and gross. “I... uh... don’ like it.”

“Not for eatin’, Ken-boy. Is medicine.” The old woman poked at the plant with her cane, the plastic bit of pipe sounding off as it thunked against the lumpy root. “Chest get tight, dis make it loose. You remember.”

Ken nodded, the little boy making jerky movements as a hand went up to his chest, already feeling tight from the walk. The air always felt thick here, and every breath was already work, every step cost something. “Gram... uh... tired...” He wheezed out again, almost stumbling on a patch of dirt as he tried to keep up.

“...Gram…” Ken’s breath puffed out in short gasps, familiar tightness squeezing at his chest like a fist. “...hurts.”

Always hurts.

His Gram made a noise as she stopped walking, the old lady leaning heavy on her cane as she turned to look at him. Bright eyes, brown just like his, stared back at him through a face deep with layered wrinkles, soft and kind just for him. “Come here, Kenshi.”

The six year old shuffled over, feet dragging in the waste-dirt. She reached out as he neared her, hand coming to a rest on his chest right over his heart. The palm was warm, rough from years of digging in the dirt, but still gentle.

“Breathe wit’ me, boy. In... slow. Hold. Out... slower.”

In-out. In-out.

Her hand lowered from his chest and tightened around his small, grasping fingers. “Breathe, Kenny-boy. Slow. Like I show you.” Gram waited, her dark eyes patient, watching him as he stared back at her through the haze. “Good boy. See? Not so hard.”

She gestured with her cane toward a shimmer of green-gray growing in the shadow of a massive half-buried engine block. “Dat one... gray-fur moss. Good friend. Stops the bleedin’.”

Gram.

The feel of the memory dissolved, Gram’s face and voice going with the warmth of the sun as it all faded, the sound of her cane turning into something else. Shhhh-pop... shhhh-pop.

What?

Ken’s eyes fluttered open, still heavy, but not so much that he wasn’t used to it. I… The dream-feeling shattered, breath stolen right out of his chest as he felt his lungs tighten up all over again. Where-

Eyes went wide as he stared up, breath gone but now for a different reason completely.

What? The ceiling…

It wasn’t scrap.

No jagged rusted metal anywhere to be seen, not the patched-up grime-stained canvas of the communal shack either.

Wood.

The real thing; dark, smooth, polished wood that seemed to glow, surface reflecting soft warm light that came from a lamp he didn’t know. One piece… He’d never seen a ceiling that was all one piece before, a single unbroken surface without gaps or holes or stains.

His nose twitched, distracting him for a second as that herby smell pricked at his nostrils.

It was stronger now, and Ken could pick out a few things he knew; the sharp almost spicy scent of ginger-root, that deep earthy smell of dried moss, but dozens of others were strange and new, weaving together into something that was a world away from the decay he’d breathed his whole life.

The air didn’t even taste like dust and metal. Just air. Clean and warm and still.

How?

Ken blinked again as he realized he was lying on something soft. Impossibly soft. A blanket, thick and heavy and warm, he ran his hand (his steady, shaking-free hand) over the surface, woven texture foreign under his fingertips. Soft. Not rough. No patches. Underneath was a mattress that didn’t have lumps or sharp bits of forgotten scrap poking through.

Bare toes curled atop the blanket and another shock went through him. Clean. They were clean, no dirt, no blood. Even the black chemical goo from the valley was gone; his feet, his legs, his hands scrubbed clean, skin a shade lighter than he was used to seeing it.

Who cleaned me?

Even the clothes were different. Rough, sure, but in a new way. Unworn. It may have just been a siimple dark shirt, but it actually fit, instead of hanging off him like a tent.

Shhhh-pop... shhhh-pop.

A quiet peaceful bubbling came from somewhere around him, the sound clearly of something cooking. Sound of life.

Where am I?

All of his thoughts were just confusion back-to-back, until a spike of fear shot right through his gut pushing that to second-place. Did they catch me? He sat up fast, his whole body protesting with deep ache from the chase, muscles screaming at him for moving too quick. Is this the chief’s shack?

But that made no sense for a hundred reasons, at least. The biggest one was that the chief’s shack was all rough salvage and patched metal, like the rest of the village. The only difference was it was a lot bigger, and had more things inside it with the head’s family having first right to all salvage.

Not the village.

His heart slammed in his chest again, that familiar thump-thump-thump loud enough he could hear it clear as day. The breathing exercises, he had to do the breathing exercises. In-out. In-out. But his chest wasn’t tight, it wasn’t fighting him for every gulp of air.

Th-that’s wrong.

The shakes weren’t there either. Hands were too steady, his legs not vibrating with exhaustion and fear. The hungry empty thing that lived in his chest, always gnawing, always eating at him from the inside...

It was quiet.

Fire wit’ no wood.

But where was the fire? Where was the hunger? The thing that Gram taught him to feed slow or it would eat him?

What did they do to me?

Ken’s head turned, wide eyes scanning the room as he tried to understand, trying to piece together what could have happened to him after the dark scrap-cave in the wastes.

Looking around didn’t seem to help much, the entire place looking like nothing he had ever seen before. For one, the walls were lined with shelves, all the same dark polished wood as the ceiling.

Not a single piece of scrap metal or salvage anywhere, which was… weird.

On the shelves were hundreds of jars, his eyes going even wider as he realized they were actual jars. Glass… how? Nobody had glass, not anything still together. It was all just shards and sand and dust, all of it broken down over who knows how many years in the wastes.

But this was the real thing, glass jars all sealed and labeled in a different language, one he couldn’t read. Each of the jars were packed full of different things; some dried leaves, strange-colored powders, twisted roots floating in clear liquids that caught the light and threw it back.

So many.

Bundles of dried herbs hung from the ceiling beams, far more than he’d ever seen in one place, even in Gram’s shack when she was still around to collect them. This was like her little healing corner but bigger. Way bigger.

He turned his head again and realized the bubbling sound was coming from a simple black kettle over a small fire on top of what looked like a stone stove. But none of that was important.

No, what was important was what was in front of the stove.

Standing over the kettle, his back turned, was a man.

Small. A small man.

Not big and scary like the chief or Jax, no strength to announce and brag over with thick muscle and heavy hands, this man wasn’t much taller than him for one.

From the back, his shoulders were round over a broad back, weight to the man’s body hidden under a simple brown tunic. He was humming something quiet and strange, a melody Ken didn’t know as he adjusted the kettle and moved over to another pot, stirring that slowly with a wooden spoon, movements slow and careful.

“Who…” The word slipped out of his lips before he could stop it.

Just like that, the old man stopped humming as both he and Ken froze.

The silence in the room lasted a few seconds with only the steaming puffs of the kettle breaking it, until the man at the stove started moving again. Wiping his hands with a cloth, he set the spoon down on the edge of the stove and turned around, finally facing Ken.

His face was round. Friendly. That was the word that jumped into Ken’s head before he could stop it, even though friendly was dangerous, even though friendly people usually wanted something. Long white hair fell past his shoulders, an even longer white beard reaching past his chest, it was clear the man was up there in years. Old as Gram was.

Maybe older, even.

Still, just like Gram, the man had a gentle face layered deep and heavy with wrinkles crinkling it at the corners, like he smiled a lot.

But his eyes...

His eyes were what made Ken sit up.

They weren’t brown or black or any color he knew.

No, these were purple.

A bright impossible color that seemed to glow with its own light the longer Ken stared at the man. Is that real? He’d never seen a color like that on a person, not even in the strange faded picture-books he’d sometimes found in the wastes.

…how does he have purple eyes?

The man smiled, and Ken almost forgot the color of the eyes as he found himself looking at a real smile, kind and clean with a mouthful of white teeth. It was something unimaginably different than the mean yellowed jagged-toothed grins he was used to. This was warm and real, reaching all the way to those impossible eyes.

Too good to be true.

Foreign.

“Hello boy, I am Wei.” His voice was smooth, not the flat clipped guttural junk-talk of the valley, with a weird gentle rhythm, up and down like a song. He gave a small nod of his head as he spoke, like Ken was somebody worth being polite to.

“You sleep well, yes?”

C’mon. There was apparently a thing called runner’s high.

He remembered people talking about it before, way back when he lived in a world where people talked about stuff that was more than just about fighting, food and fixing things. He even remembered looking it up on the internet, just because… C’mon…

Apparently, runner’s high was when you ran so long and so hard that your brain made you feel really really good, so good you wanted to keep going even when you were dead tired.

Ken hadn’t thought a lot of it back, then. Kids with asthma didn’t do much running anyway, but he figured it had to make sense. Why else would people be talking about it all the time?

C’mon! He’d never run this much, not in this life or the last, but he was pretty sure anything anyone had ever said about runner’s high was just a hunk of rat-shit.

Everything was a gray mess swimming through his eyes, a messy blur of breath and water in his eyes and blood running down his feet. He kept himself on his feet, running past the shakes, with them somehow, adrenaline and fear and everything else in his body keeping him going no matter how much he wanted to turtle up.

His lungs felt packed full of hot sand, broken glass grinding against each other every time he tried to pull air in. In-out. In-out. Still doing the breathing thing even when everything else was falling apart.

Good.

Each breath was a fight.

More than that, a no-holds barred money in the bank wrestling match with his own chest that he was losing so bad it had to be rigged. His legs had never been this numb, so disconnected they felt like they belonged to somebody else, just stumbling forward with a rhythm that seemed more like the longest attempt at not-falling-over there ever was. Bad meat giving up.

Then he saw it.

A dark spot in the side of a junk-mountain, a shadow darker than all the other shadows. A hole. A place to disappear.

Not a real cave, just a space where huge metal things (the skeletal hulks of old haulers maybe, or pieces of a fallen building from before the world broke) had collapsed way back, their massive rusted frames leaning against each other like tired old men trying to stay upright. It left a hollow spot inside, a dark waiting mouth in the mountain of trash.

There.

No room for thinking anymore. Just the need, a single desperate all-eating need burning in his gut. He scrambled for it, his weak legs finding one last burst of strength from somewhere, probably the same place where the shakes lived.

The opening was a tight squeeze, the jagged toothy grin on the side of the junk-pile chewing at him as punishment for going where he shouldn’t. It would have to bite down harder to stop him, though.

Not that it didn’t try.

Sharp rusty edges of torn metal scraped his back and his shoulders, tearing at the already ragged and barely-there fabric of his green shirt. He could feel it giving way, cold air hitting the sweat-slick skin underneath.

He wriggled through anyway, the metal catching and pulling, Ken not caring as it scraped at his clothes and his skin underneath. Almost there.

He fell.

Eyes went wide in the darkness, hands grasping at nothing and a scream dying in his throat as the ground vanished beneath him. NOOO-”Ooof!”

Thankfully, the fall didn’t last long. Barely a few feet down from where he’d been crawling, it was short for any fall, but far enough and unexpected enough to knock the little bit of air still inside all the way out of his lungs.

Definitely enough to force a groan out of his lips as he landed back first in a pile of scrap. I… I don’t even care anymore. The lying thought popped up in his head as he groaned on his side, both eyes closed as he held his ribs tight.

He knew it was a lie as much as he knew he very much cared about staying alive, but today was… Today…

He didn’t have words for today.

One eye finally creeped open as Ken let out a low hiss of pain, finding himself staring at nothing but blackness all around him.

Not just dim. Not just shadowed.

Black.

A perfect light-eating darkness so complete he couldn’t see his own hands held right in front of his face. Oh… grea-

His thoughts flew sideways as his throat seized up, a sound like a dying animal leaving him as something invaded his nostrils. Like a fist to the face, his head snapped back and Ken felt a mouthful of nothing try to claw its way up from his stomach. Wh-what is that…

Whatever it was, the smell was thick and rank, the sort of stench that forced its way down your nose and coated your tongue like it was its job and it was very very dutiful. Old and wet and sour and rotten and…

He ran out of words before he even slammed a hand over his mouth and nose, but it didn’t help much. His palm was already damp with sweat and blood anyway.

Safe, though.

Maybe. Prolly. For now.

Rank as it was, the dark was good. The dark meant hidden. The dark meant they couldn’t see him even if they found the hole, and it meant they definitely couldn’t drag him out easy. They would have to crawl in after him, one at a time, and that gave him chances.

…chances for what, though? He blinked slowly, nothing in his vision changing as it went from black to black again. Can’t fight back.

The thought sat there in his head, small and cold. What was he gonna do, hide in this stinking metal cave forever? Wait till they got bored and went home? Wait till he starved?

Don’t think about it.

Yeah, thinking about it was a waste of energy, energy he didn’t even have to spare in the first place. All I gotta do is just… just…

He nodded slow. All he had to do was stay quiet, stay hidden, and stay alive long enough to figure out what came next.

His heart still rushed, a constant th-thumpth-thumpth-thump, and to make things worse, the shakes were getting worse now that he’d stopped moving. He knew what this was too, Ken blinking as he held one hand still with the other. He knew it the same way he knew ‘runner’s high’. Adrenaline crash. His legs trembled where they pressed against the rough and cold metal floor, whole body still vibrating with exhaustion and fear and everything else.

Fire wit’ no wood. Feed it slow or it eats you.

But there wasn’t anything left to feed it with. Just him, sitting in the dark, breathing rank poison air and trying not to fall apart completely.

He lay there for a moment on the cold damp ground, his mind buzzing like a nest of sludge-wasps somebody had kicked too hard. Get up. Gotta get up. Trembling arms fought for control as he pushed himself up but Ken wasn’t going to give in now, not after everything. He crawled forward on hands and knees, pushing past the dizziness as he kept on moving forward and th-”...what the hell?”

The words left his mouth in a gasp of breath as his palms sunk into something soft and just the slightest bit slimy. What is that?

He reached out, palms gripping into the ground again, fingers closing tight around a patch of something cool, rubbery, and slimy just like he remembered. Moss. The word jumped into his head, Gram’s soft voice with it.

‘Grey-fur moss, Kenshi. The stuff, he knew that stuff. It was the major kind that grew all around the junk-fields. Good friend. Eats the rot. Stops the bleedin’.’

His Gram didn’t have the exact words for it, but Ken had figured it out long ago. It was pretty much a homemade antiseptic, an antibacterial moss. Thank you, Gram.

He pushed himself up again, sitting up in the darkness. He didn’t have to fumble again this time, his hands going right to his feet. Tired shaky fingers found the gashes on the bottom of his feet, gifts from the glass-grass field. Least I still got my toes.

Silver linings aside, his feet were still dripping with blood, legs still so numb from all that running he barely felt the warm stickiness against his skin. Not good, he knew that in his heart and head both. Could bleed out like that and not even know.

Grunting, Ken tore a clump of the strange slick moss from the ground and crammed it into the wound, the coolness of it shocking as it quickly spread through the pain like ice on a burn.

Better.

Not good, but better. The glass-shard pain dulled to something he could ignore if he had to, the moss both an antibacterial and good at getting blood to stop flowing. Wish I had more of it, though.

It always came in handy, but it took some real hard looking to find the stuff. Only grows in the real dark spots. Ken almost laughed, but regretted it a second later as that same stench crawled up his nose. I… I gotta move…

One hand went back to his nose as Ken held the other out in front of him, grasping out in front of him as he looked for— There.

His palm found it, pressing flat against exactly what he’d been searching for. A wall.

A wall was good, a wall meant something to help him. Ughh. Even a wall that smelled like something rotting was still a wall.

Doing like his palm, Ken pressed his whole left side against the wall. It felt wet and lumpy, a strange uneven surface of decaying things he didn’t want to think about too hard. His back pressed against what might have been old fabric, or old skin, or something else that used to be soft before it got pressed into this wall of trash.

One side firmly attached to the wall, he started moving, something solid to press up against keeping the shakes from hitting too hard.

Just enough to let him keep going as he kept himself on the move.

One foot after the other.

One foot.

Other foot.

One.

Two.

He kept moving for as long as he could, and eventually — like he expected — the darkness began to ease up.

An exit.

Exit, entrance, whatever, he could see light, a rough circle where the bright silver of moonlight was poking its way though.

His heart was still going too fast, but at least the shakes were settling down a little. Not gone, never gone, but not the earthquake they’d been when he was running.

Then he heard them.

“...see ‘im?”

The shouts were farther away now but they were still there, faint angry noises drifting on the wind like smoke from a bad fire. They were still looking. They weren’t giving up.

Of course they’re not giving up.

The voices were muffled by all the tons of garbage between them, but he could make out the flat ugly junk-talk, the words landing like stones in his gut.

“...went this way... saw the little freak run past the old pipe-fall...”

Freak. Always freak. Even when he wasn’t there to hear it.

“...can’t be far... bleedin’ like he was...”

They were close and the running was already over.

The borrowed strength from fear and rage was gone, burned away like the fuel inside him and not even ashes left for the cook-fire. His legs felt like they were gonna fall off. The cuts on his foot may have stopped bleeding but they were still stinging even with the moss. And the shakes...

Oh no.

They were back. Worse than they’d ever been before.

His teeth chattered so hard his jaw ached, the sound echoing in the small space like rattling dice in a tin cup. Everything vibrated like an earthquake just inside him, the tremors starting deep in his bones and spreading out till his whole body was a single shuddering mess.

Stupid body. Useless meat.

He couldn’t make it stop. Couldn’t control it. Couldn’t do anything but shake and try not to make noise that would give him away.

The emptiness comes... you breathe.

He closed his eyes. One, two—Nggh! One, tw… two…twoooo, oNE! His hand went to his heart, the pain there too much, the squeezing in his lungs taking all his focus. The breathing exercises, he was trying them, trying as hard as he could to keep them going, but his chest just refused to keep the pace.

The shaking was too strong, control slipping from his fingers with everything else Gram had taught him, all the breathing and the calm and the feeding the hunger slow, it was all falling apart.

Fire wit’ no wood.

But the fire was eating everything now.

The emptiness inside him, the thing she told him to feed, it felt huge now. A big black gnawing hole that was swallowing him from the inside out, eating everything that used to be him. I can’t do it, Gram. I’m sorry.

So sorry.

He was gonna die here. They were gonna find him, twitching in the dark like Joric was, or he was just gonna shake himself apart, come undone like old cloth finally giving up.

His body was giving up. The fight was too much. The running, the hiding, the terror, and now this war inside himself, all of it pressing down on his chest like a mountain of scrap. Over.

Fire wit’ no wood.

But the fire had eaten all the wood. Had eaten him.

The darkness tightened like the grip on his chest, the exercises and techniques doing nothing even as he tried to keep them going. They only pushed the black at the edge of his vision closer, every breath he tried and failed to take squeezing it smaller and smaller. The shouts from outside had already vanished with everything else, the hunters and his heart all fading together into a low buzz that drowned out everything else.

Tired.

The thought was quiet surrender, white flag made of exhaustion and fear. Just stop. He just wanted it to stop, to not have to breathe so hard anymore, to not have to shake and hurt and be afraid.

Sleep sounds good.

Ken’s eyes started to drift closed, everything about to go completely black, when the small gray circle of light from the cave’s entrance disappeared.

Something was blocking it.

What?

A shape. From where he lay on the ground, drool pouring from his mouth as his head stayed stuck to the side like a broken doll, it looked kinda like a person. It was too dark, couldn’t see a face, couldn’t see any details at all, just the shape of a man standing in the mouth of his garbage cave.

One of them?

It was probably one of the hunters from the village but they weren’t screaming or holding a weapon or making a move or anything. Not like it mattered now, anyway. Not like his broken brain could figure it out, connections barely working anymore. Don’t care.

He didn’t have the energy to care.

The shakes were slowing down now, not because they were getting better but because everything was shutting down, his body finally giving up the fight it was never gonna win anyway. Bad meat.

Always bad meat.

The world blurred, shifted, fading into the edges of black, but the figure remained where he was.

Silent, dark, and perfectly still, just watching him in the gloom.

It didn’t matter.

They could do whatever they wanted with his body.

Sorry, Gram.

Then nothing.

All Ken could hear was the tearing of his own breath as air forced its way in and out, a rough file scraping its way into his ears. In-out. In-in-out. Even now, the breathing technique was still instinct, his body doing what his mind couldn’t manage.

At his feet, Joric’s body was still there.

Broken.

Broken worse than he was.

Legs kicked in a dance with no rhythm, a machine with its wires crossed. No more insults came from him, the only sound from the bigger boy’s throat a wet gurgle like sludge in a pipe to choked for anything else to make it out.

Blood trailed from his fingers, slick and warm and sick.

A single heavy drop hit the waste-dirt right in front of him with a soft splat.

He stared, head empty. Nothing more than a clean white space, nothing else inside.

Something inside him was screaming, the part of him that remembered another life, before all this. A world with laws and soft hands and clean water.

The sound was far away, muffled; a tiny noise from the very bottom of a deep, dark well. He could hear it, though. He wished he didn’t. He wished he couldn’t.

But he could hear it.

Finally, he heard something else.

A gasp.

The sharp inhale of air, thin and high, like a needle through stretched rubber.

Ken’s head went up, eyes wide, and all the noise of the world flooded back as if it had never even left. All the people—the other boys who had been Joric’s friends, the younger kids who had just been watching for the fun of it, the few grown-ups who had seen the whole thing from a distance and done nothing—gasped and neared him and Joric from the edge of the village.

Another kid shrieked, the sound no different than an animal caught in a scrapper’s wire-trap, and Ken saw all the eyes turn his way.

All of them.

Up and away from the still-twitching, still-bleeding heap on the ground, to him.

The looks, hot with shock just a second ago, turned cold all of a sudden, each one hardening as they found his eyes. It was like the sssss of hot steel in a junker’s dirty water, a small army of faces solid, sharp and dangerous.

A hand just as cold, the feel of scrap-metal left out overnight, closed tight around his lungs. Tell ‘em. Accident. Say it. Say it now.

His mouth fell open, suddenly dry, and his tongue a thick, useless root that he could barely move. “...d-didn’t… h-he…” As much as he tried, the words just came out wrong, rough and heavy as they fell from his lips.

“Chief’s boy.”

“Bleedin’ bad. Head’s all... wrong.”

“Gods, the freak did it.“ His words may have been rough and pointless, but all of theirs were hard and jagged, thrown his way like the same stones he was used to, Ken flinching with each one. “Freak killed ‘im.“

Tam stepped forward slow, Joric’s cousin breaking free of the small crowd, each boot-fall a heavy promise on the crunching waste-dirt. There was no laugh in his eyes now, no smile on his face, just a mouth too big for his face pulled into something ugly and sure.

Tam didn’t shout. “Gonna kill you.”

He didn’t need to.

Ken heard the words loud and clear, the small boy doing the only thing that his body knew to do.

He twisted on a bare foot, the motion clumsy, as the waste-dirt—that powder of rust and glass and dead things—puffed up in gritty clouds around his ankles. He took off without a thought, the heel of his foot connecting with the rock. The bloody one.

The Joric-rock.

A dull thump sounded off in his ears as it landed somewhere behind him, a sound swallowed whole by the new noise.

The world erupted in a roar of sound.

Not one voice, but at least a dozen, all the villagers behind him mashed together into a single, hungry sound, a united roar of hate. It wasn’t just anger in the sound, not anymore. This was different, a howl of the hunt.

His legs were already moving, pumping, tearing him away from the semi-circle of rust-bucket walls that was the only home he had known in this life.

Home, the word was a joke though. It hadn’t been a home for at least a year.

Nothing in that place felt like home.

He’d have slept outside, even in the forests or in the junk, if he didn’t have to worry about waking up surrounded by rust-rats and beasts of all kinds. Still, he knew his way around the forests — both wire and wood — the junk-mountains, and the husk-hills. He’d spent enough time navigating back and forth, figuring out which direction to go.

This time, Ken didn’t bother figuring out anything..

He only had one way to go. The Wall.

With all that hate he could feel chasing after him, all he had in front of him was that black, unfeeling line of perfect nothing cutting the forever-gray sky in half.

It didn’t move. It didn’t change. It didn’t have to or need to.

It was the only thing in this whole broken world that was reliable and it was the only place he knew to run to, instead of just away. They won’t go that far. They can’t go that far.

…right?

Even if the villagers did go that far outside the village, they’d be too scared of the god of the Great Wall to do anything in the first place… he hoped.

All he had was hopes and desperation right now, all his brainpower focused less on thinking and more on running.

A noise, a bark of air, almost escaped his throat. It felt like it could have been a laugh, something sharp and wild and brittle that would have shattered the air. Just like him. I’m running, he gasped in a mouthful of air.

My Dad. The word barely even made sense, especially not now, not something he ever used or bothered to even think about.

But somehow in the cold panic, it came to mind. They were both leaving.

Leaving the village.

Leaving a body behind.

It was a joke written in blood and rust. Almost funny.

He choked the feeling down either way. Not funny. Not funny.

Shaking his head against the thought, he risked it, an impulse driving him to just check with his neck already turning. A single, stupid glance over his shoulder, eyes straining to see through the gloom. The path back was gone.

Not empty, but blocked off.

He could see them in the gloom as night crept closer, almost a dozen shadows. Each one was a black cutout against the distant, dirty-orange glow of the cooking fires still visible in the village from here.

To the east, the sludge river shimmered like a dying rainbow, a barrier of poison that offered no path and a bitter burning death. To the west, the wire-trees, those skeletal ghosts of the Old Time, watched him with their thousands of fluttering plastic-bag eyes.

The hunt was on and everything was cutting off every other path but one: straight ahead.

Deeper into the wastes. Into the guts of the dead world.

A wall of rusted-out husks loomed ahead, a solid cliff of decay. The skeletal remains of machines from before the world broke. He didn’t know the names of all the vehicles, some of them nothing he recognized.

He didn’t slow to think as he pushed forward, only focused on freedom and staying alive long enough to think another day. He saw a gap, an opening just big enough for him to grab onto, a side panel had rusted away from a larger hunk of metal.

Whether it was a truck, a forklift, or a hunk of a dead plane, it didn’t matter.

It was all half-forgotten and half-crumbling anyway, chewed up by rust and thrown away to crumble to nothing who knows how long ago. Ken clawed his way up, sharp edges of old red-rimmed metal tearing at the thin fabric of his shirt. He felt it rip open, tired patches giving way as the cold air met the sweat-slick skin of his back.

His fingers, thin and shaking, found a higher handhold and Ken felt the metal crumble under his grip, eyes widening all of a sudden. A line of pure, white-hot fire shot from his palm up his arm, a nerve screaming its protest.

He ignored it.

His mind wasn’t in his arms. All he had up there was a single word, repeated over and over, a chant of motion. Climb. Climb. Climb.

Thok!

Something hit him hard, like a solid fist between his shoulder blades; almost enough to make him stumble as he flinched mid-step.

A rock.

They were throwing rocks.

His body curled tight, a reflexive ball of flesh as he crested the top of the junk-pile.

No other option in front of him, Ken dropped, falling hard to the ground below.

His feet hit the waste-dirt on the other side with a jarring thud that shot up his legs and rattled his teeth. D-damnnit!

Gritting those rattling teeth, Ken rounded a corner only to finally pause for a single instant as he saw it—a massive, wobbling piece of machinery, some kind of engine husk maybe, balanced shakily on a heap of smaller scrap. …oh.

He moved on instinct, idea already forming.

Rushing up to the shaky pillar, Ken slammed his shoulder into the standing block of metal and scrap. For a second, nothing happened.

Then, with a sound like a low groan, the weight of all that junk began to shift.

It tilted. It scraped.

And then, all at once, it fell.

With a long drawn-out shriek of tortured metal, it finally fell.

A furious, frustrated yell from behind the new barrier and a smile, unforced and wide, spread across his face. That was a good sound. It meant he was still ahead. It meant he had bought himself a few more seconds of life.

He started running and a few seconds later, a narrow ditch cut across his path, filled with a substance that wasn’t mud.

It was shiny, black and thick, running slower than tree sap and dragging hunks of dirt and metal along with it. The smell hit first, chemical rot mixed with something sweet and sickening. Please don’t be poison. Please please please.

Even if it was, he didn’t hesitate.

He slid down the steep bank, the cold, thick sludge sucking at his legs, a hungry mouth trying to pull him under. It clung to his skin, a foul second skin of poison. He used his hands and knees to claw his way up the other side, his lower body coated in the stinking paste, his lungs heaving.

Don’t look back. Don’t look. Just run. The thought wasn’t a thought anymore.

Every instinct screamed at him to glance over his shoulder, to check just how far they were behind, to see the faces of the hunters. He fought hard to not give in as he kept his eyes forward, focusing on the next junk-pile, the next gap, the next step.

Looking back cost time. Looking back cost hope. Both of those were all he had.

He dodged and weaved, his body a blur of panic and motion, still pumping his arms and legs, only for his eyes to widen again as he tore into a field of what the village kids called “glass-grass.”

A place where the waste-dirt was seeded with the remnants of a million broken bottles, jagged necks and sharp edges sticking out of the ground.

During the day, when the sun was at the highest, they looked magical.

Even still, they’d taken more toes than the villagers could count.

Literally.

He didn’t need to look down, didn’t dare, when he felt something dig into his foot.

Not when something on his sole tore.

Not even when he felt the hot liquid under his feet.

He couldn’t stop.

He couldn’t afford to.

Ken just kept on running, leaving a fresh trail; a dotted line of red-black drops on the gray ground. The fire in his lungs was no longer a burn. It was an inferno, a roaring forge in his chest. The muscles in his legs, which had felt impossibly strong just minutes ago, the borrowed strength of his rage and terror, were dissolving. The borrowed fuel was burning out. Both legs were turning to water, to jelly, to nothing, leaving only a deep, familiar ache and the profound, bone-deep weakness he knew so well.

Soon enough, it started.

The shakes.

His hands went first.

That same ugly trembling that began in his fingertips and snaked its way up his arms. Ken felt himself stumble, arms windmilling, the boy doing his best to catch himself just before he pitched face-first into the dirt.

Then his legs.

They began to feel wobbly, disconnected, the signals from his brain getting lost somewhere in the failing meat.

His stupid, weak, useless meat. It was going to stop working, right here, in the middle of this gray, empty hell, and it was going to let them catch him.

The shouting behind him was closer now. He could hear their feet. Not just a general roar, but individual sounds. The steady, heavy, confident crunch-crunch-crunch of their boots on the waste-dirt.

They weren’t shaking.

Their legs weren’t turning to water.

Ken pushed harder as tears of frustration and terror burned tracks through the dirt and grime on his cheeks. He had to find a place. A hole.

A crack somewhere for him to vanish into.

The next day crawled by, the world the same gray smear that blended into the next. No books to read, nothing to watch, just simple work to do; going root-hunting for Sora and stripping what little scrap he could for salvage.

It kept him busy, sure, but it was boring as boring could be.

No electricity meant nothing that could take you out of your thoughts. He knew people in the old world would have called that a good thing. He would have called them stupid, not knowing what they had. Nobody wants to be stuck with their thoughts.

Especially not when all those thoughts were only bad or worse.

The weak sphere he could only call the sun — half as bright and almost as hot — started sinking behind the Wall’s impossible line, dying light twisting familiar junk-piles into monster-shadows that clawed at the edges of everything. It wasn’t night, it wouldn’t be for hours, just a deeper denser gloomier gray tint to the world as the half-sun kept on its path across the true horizon behind the world’s edge that was the massive monolith.

It would only grow darker and darker until eventually his eyes would be worth as much as his muscle, but till then…

Well, he had time to do what he did.

Ken meandered around the edge of the village, bare feet still muddy from the day before, until he found his spot again. It was the same small piece of flattish ground on the north side, facing the wall. Tucked away from the noise and stares, he stood apart from the crumbling semi-circle of rusted metal sheets that pretended to be walls.

It was his spot, only because nobody else had taken it from him

Mostly because nobody even wanted it.

Even in the murk of the pre-night, this was the only place in the whole miserable world that felt like his. It wasn’t a good location, it didn’t have a good view, and worst of all, it wasn’t too far from the dumping pits so it just… stunk even worse than the rest of the village.

But it was his.

Cold gritty earth pressed against his legs as he settled down, compressed waste-dirt digging through his thin shorts. Time for the ritual. Two small acts that kept him from dissolving completely into the grayness, woven together like threads in burial cloth.

Don’t think about burial cloth.

First thing: breath.

Breath was important.

The most important.

It was the only thing he carried with him from the last life to the next, other than his skin, that same struggle with his breath. Even if the shakes were new, that didn’t change.

Breathing right was the only thing that kept him focused, the only thing that kept those same shakes down.

Kept them from keeping him down, too.

His hands clenched tight at his sides, before he raised them together the way Gram had shown him; fists meeting in front of his chest, raw, scarred knuckles touching each other tight. A prayer to the Hands Above, she said.

It didn’t look like any prayer hands he knew but he was used to not knowing anyway. Ken didn’t bother thinking much about what he knew or what he didn’t know, simply focusing on pulling the thick air into his lungs. Old metal, damp rot, and that sharp chemical tang drifting up from the sludge river and dumping pits where shit and piss and every bit of waste they added to the valley sat on his tongue and coated his nostrils a layer or three thick.

One, two, three... He held the rank breath, body as still as he could get it, trapping hostile air inside his ribs.

Don’t let it out yet.

The long controlled breathe out came next, some of the hunger, the gnawing deep in his chest going with it. One, two, three, four... Sometimes it felt like it was eating him alive; no food, no water, nothing else fighting it but what he was taught. You breathe in the world, Kenshi. You breathe out the pain.

The feel of old hands, knobbled and wrinkled, on his bare chest flickered in his thoughts. Feed the hunger, Kenny. Don’t let it feed on you.

He still had the souvenir from yesterday, the thing still stained with flecks of his blood.

A rock, sharp-edged and heavy, clutched tight in his right hand, its surface warm from his body heat. Its jagged points were familiar pressure, good weight. Ken leaned forward where he sat on the ground, back to a dead tree, and started scratching letters in the dirt. Shapes and symbols stark and alien against dark grimy soil, forms nobody else in the village would recognize even if they saw them.

S-C-H-O-O-L.

Don’t forget. These were the words he knew, the written language he remembered still even after twelve years. Don’t you dare forget. Nobody else knew a damn thing about this, writing not really a thing in this village of garbage.

Hell, most of them could barely count to twenty, and that was just the ones lucky enough not to lose any fingers or toes. Bad math. Something close to pride bubbled up in his chest; sure, it made him different but he knew that difference was good this time. The warm feeling in his chest didn’t last all that long though, Ken well aware that he only knew this because he at least had school.

Years of it, even.

Even still, a little ego didn’t hurt all that much. The Valley people could talk the words, kinda, their accents a clumsy mishmash of broken languages smashed together, but they couldn’t read them. They don’t know what flammable means, or anything about bacteria, and… he pulled a face, thinking back to some of the things he’d seen, definitely don’t wash their hands either.

S-C-I-E-N-C-E.

M-E-D-I-C-I-N-E.

His hands shook a little on the last letter, making the ‘E’ wobbly. Stupid shakes.

Sure, it came out a little rougher than the other letters but the word was still all there, carved into waste-dirt for nobody to see. The village might have had the spark, their magic they called a gift from their gods that didn’t even have names.

But Ken had his own things. Science. Technology. Math.

Things that could be learned, understood, explained.

Sure, he didn’t know how to make most of those things, but he’d figure it all out. The scientific method was there for a reason and he knew how to use that.

And he wasn’t gonna tell them.

Secret knowledge was power, even small power, even useless power. Better than no power at all.

Wind picked up, a strong breeze already hard at work at erasing his words already. Not like it mattered now anyway. Got them up here. He tapped his temple slow with one finger, index a little shaky still but nothing to worry about. Safe.

He kept writing, scratching words into the dirt, unbothered by the weather. Just nature’s dry-erase.

Tomorrow he’d come back, write new words. Bigger words.

Longer words that he still remembered.

He scratched the words in and he breathed, in-out, in-out, in-in-out. A steady rhythm of breath mixing with the soft scratch-scratch of rock against dirt as he thought back to the only person he ever wanted to share this stuff with.

Gram. Thinking of her even brought back memories, good ones. Good days of sitting in the dim gentle light of Gram’s shack.

The air in there somehow managed not to taste like rank or rust. No, Gram had too many herbs drying up on the wall, too many bundles of roots tied up; all of it filled her shack with the smell of thick, wet earth. It smelled like medicine, like healing, not the chemical sting of the outside. The small cookfire just outside the door always added something good to it too, rat-meat cooked right and tender with a thick stew that made everything taste even better.

Seven years old and he remembered his body shaking the way it always did now for the first time. It had happened before, sure, but he didn’t really remember it much back then. Besides, it was the first time it had gotten that bad, legs shuddering on the floor like he’d touched a livewire.

Her voice was the only thing that mattered. “Breathe, Kenshi.”

He never used his full name anymore, barely even thought it.

But he remembered her words. “Breathe.”

Old hands had been stitching a thick piece of canvas when he’d fallen off the mattress, needle steady as milky eyes stayed on him. “The shakin’ starts... you breathe. The emptiness comes... you breathe.”

She left her stitching behind to go over by his side, lifting him back to the bed.

“Not a curse, Kenshi. Don’t you let them tell you it’s a curse.” One gnarled finger tapped his chest. “It’s just hunger. Fire wit’ no wood. Your spark, it burn too fast. Got no fuel. So it try to burn you.”

She leaned forward over him, voice dropping to a low whisper as gray hair hung in his face and all he saw was a smile with missing teeth. “You gotta feed it slow. Wit’ your breath. Or it eats you.”

Nobody else had ever tried explaining what was wrong with him.

Hunger.

He could understand that much.

“Feed it slow or it eats you.” His own voice surprised him, throat barely working as the words slipped free. “...miss you, Gram.”

The rock was still warm in his palm, letters in dirt already blurring as wind shifted waste-dust over them, the sound of metallic rustling from the wire trees deeper out in the valley hitting his ears.

Thump. Thump.

Something else hit his ears, Ken’s eyes going wide as he sat up quick, back scraping against the rough bark. Dammnit.

Heavy boots crushed the quiet, the moment dead as big feet slid over the letters he’d scratched out in the dirt. Gone. With a few quick stomps, a careless — but not thoughtless — tread scuffed away the words like they never mattered.

“Oi, freak.” Joric’s voice rumbled low and mean, thick with that same bored hate Ken knew as well as his own bones. “Playin’ in the dirt?”

Don’t. Ken squeezed eyes shut tight for one second, just one. Don’t waste the breath. Don’t give him fuel. A sigh left his breath as Ken pushed himself up to his feet, not even going to bother to duck again. I’m close enough to the village. He was going to walk away, disappear back behind another shack where Joric couldn’t find him, couldn’t risk starting something without it getting back to his father or an elder.

Joric moved when he moved, the other boy built thick. He used it the best way he could too, being a solid wall of heavy weight to block the path. “Didn’t say you could leave.”

A shove, unexpected and hard, sent Ken stumbling backward till his back hit the side of another dead tree, this one bigger and sticking out of a junk-pile like bleached bone.

Joric leaned close, staring Ken in the eye, as he slammed a heavy hand against the tree trunk right next to Ken’s head and grunted like a beast. A foul wave washed over the smaller boy, something that smelled of greasy half-cooked meat that wasn’t just rat.

“Old man says I gotta go easy on you. Says you’re ‘thin metal’.” The smile on his face twisted ugly, making his broken teeth look sharper. His face already looked hateful, even his eyes; squinty and sharp, too thin for his face. “Look like scrap to me. Useless scrap.”

Ken’s eyes flickered to the side of Joric’s head. Huh. He saw the skin there, purple-black against pale, fresh enough to still be tender. Somebody hit back.

Something flickered in his chest, a spark — not the spark — but a spark still. It felt like anger, something strong and deeper than it, though. Hittin’ me ‘cause you can’t hit him back. It made sense, though. Chief’s sons didn’t get to fight their fathers, even when they deserved it.

Joric had to take that anger somewhere. Lucky me.

The spark lit a fire in his gut as the thought crossed his mind, mouth twisting down into scowl before he could stop it.

With a grunt of his own, Ken pushed back against Joric’s chest. It was weak, his own shaky arms not doing much up against a heavier body that didn’t want to be moved, but Ken couldn’t help but try anyway. The feeling of being trapped, Joric’s foul breath on face, and his ugly smile staring down at him… it was too much. Like drowning in stink and meanness.

“...leave me ‘lone.” The words came quiet, almost nothing; a slurred puff of wasted air that probably nobody else could even hear. “...juss go.”

Joric’s face tightened up, nothing but anger staring back down at Ken now. All raw heat and pride and red cheeks, the same look his father got during village meetings when someone questioned his decisions.

“You pushin’ me, freak?” It was one of those questions that never needed an answer. Joric definitely didn’t wait for one, either way.

Thok.

The first caught Ken high on the shoulder, pain shooting down his arm.

“I said—” Thok. “—y’pushin’ me?”

Ken’s arms came up late, another fist already in his stomach as another clipped his ribs. A fourth took him in the side, all the hurt blending in and making it hard to tell which was which and where was where.

The shakes started, arms refusing to listen.

Feed the hunger, Kenny. Gram sounded off again. Or it eats you.

Hard to feed anything when the breath kept getting knocked out of him.

Thok.

One of those heavy fists slammed into his chest, teeth rattling in his skull as another jarred his jaw. The world shook, vision a blur as he was pushed up against the tree harder and harder with every single hit. A backhand caught him in the side of his head, ears exploding with a whine that drowned out everything else.

“You costin’ us food!” Joric’s voice rose with a blow to Ken’s ribs that left him wheezing. “Always takin’, never givin’! Why can’t you just walk off into wastes like your crazy da’! Do us all a favor!”

The world got small.

Gray skies disappeared, junk-piles vanished, monster-shadows gone as a fist caught him hard in the ribs, another right after it, then another, another — until he couldn’t even keep track of who or where anymore.

Meat tenderizer.

He knew that word. He remembered that. That’s what this was.

Thud. Thud.

Fire wit’ no wood.

Gram’s words echoed in his head again as his chest seized, a hollow pull deep inside demanded everything he didn’t have. His breath went fast, his heart faster as eyes snapped open all of a sudden.

The rock was still in his hand. He’d been holding it all this time, fingers death-gripped around edges where his blood was still on it.

Ken didn’t think, arm snapping up on its own and something hit the side of Joric’s head.

It didn’t sound like the movies he remembered, half-flashes of action and violence he could remember. It was the sort of wet ugly noise a person’s skull should never make. Never.

Joric’s eyes shot wide open. Meanness wiped clean, replaced by a dumb wide-mouthed look of pure stupid surprise. He stumbled back from Ken as a dark red line suddenly stood out in the thick hair above his ear, more red leaking down the side of his face.

Too much.

Too red.

Oh.

The bigger boy wobbled, body suddenly loose, disconnected. One heavy clumsy hand went to his head, and then his eyes rolled back.

Ken saw whites.

Then Joric fell.

Arms and legs twitching, the chief’s son collapsed into a boneless heap in dirt; horrible shakes worse than Ken’s ever were. The low gurgling from the back of the throat, a sound like half breath, half drowning, only made it worse.

What did I—

Ken stood over him, the smaller boy’s breath a ragged sound as he stared down at what he’d done. Brown eyes fell to his own hand, at the rock now wet and sticky and horribly red as it fell from numb fingers.

A silent judgement sat on the horizon as Ken kept staring off at it, wind picking up low and sad through the scrap-fields. Dust flew far and high away from the village, a gray powder that could sometimes come packaged with a deadly payload; rust and glass and metal shavings worn down over who knew how long.

Fine and fragmented, the stuff managed to get into everything.

Absolutely everything.

Today’s dust was more annoying than deadly, the stuff stinging his eyes as a bit of it settled onto what bare skin it could reach. It took too much washing to ever get it all off. Not that we got much water for that anyway.

Dust aside, cold seeped through the thin fabric of his, some dead person’s oversized green cast-off too big in the shoulders, too long in the arms, and just too big all the way down to his knobby knees.

Even still, clothes were clothes.

Fingers rose up to the side of his head, dried blood stiff in a thick patch behind one eye. It still pulsed, dull ache steady as a heartbeat giving him something to focus on. Pain you knew was better than pain you didn’t.

I hate this place.

The thought came back cold and flat. No heat in it, the anger of when Gram was still around to hear him complain gone with her. It was a fact now, simple and solid as the waste-dirt under his feet.

I hate this life.

More than that, he hated the look of it.

The endless gray and brown and copper-red of rust, nothing bright or clean or alive outside the Valley, just an endless landscape of junk. He hated the feel of it too; a constant hunger in his belly and the deeper gnawing hunger that lived in his chest just above that, the one that always got worse just before the shakes would start up and leave him… useless.

He spat on the ground, saliva flecked with blood as his tongue scraped at his raw gums.

The smell of it was worse though, a permanent near-solid stink that clung to everything and he did mean everything. At least hundreds of years of death, decay and damp metal that crept up on you like rust-rats, a sick fog that got into your clothes, your hair, your breath.

It lived in his gut, more often than not, and he could only be happy he rarely had anything else in there. If he had more to eat… well, he might have thrown up more often than he already did.

His head pulsed harder, the whole world tilting sideways for a second as everything went dizzy and blurry and…

Ken blinked slow, fingers tracing the cut on his head again. Head wounds always looked worse than they were… right?

Maybe, but it didn’t explain why he could smell fresh-cut grass.

The same fresh-cut grass on his last hot summer day, the smell so clean and fresh it hurt to remember. The feel of his chest clamping shut came next, throat raw, and a fist of panic squeezing his lungs till they felt like burning paper.

The taste of iron and fear flooded his mouth as he fought for one useless breath.

He remembered the last thoughts in his head, the same last thoughts that did nothing but tell him what he already knew.

Can’t breathe can’t breathe can’t—

Then nothing. Fifteen years of a different life, a different world, just gone.

Wiped clean in suffocating darkness.

Waaaah!

Light so bright it was a physical blow, air so cold it burned, screaming from a throat he didn’t know, lungs from a different smaller throat; a brand-new baby, helpless and crying in a world he didn’t know and didn’t want to know.

Ken’s focus snapped back hard, breath catching in his throat as he forced out a gasp. Hand on his chest, gripping tight, he pulled in a quick breath. S-stop it. He scoffed on the inside, shaking his head slow.

Did it make sense?

‘Course not.

But twelve years of waking up every day in this garbage-heap of a world made him look stupid for thinking of this as a dream, or fake, or anything else but what it was.

Real.

A brief cold spike of gratitude hit him hard, Ken thankful that the rest of his old life stayed blurry and almost impossible to remember, nothing much to drag back with him to this hell. Knowing what he’d lost? Remembering it clearly, down to names and faces and feelings?

That would have made all this, every single terrible second of it, so much worse. Almost as bad as knowing this new body, his twelve-year-old one, was weaker than what he’d lost.

Bad meat gets worse meat.

Ken pushed the memories down, buried them under the cold hard weight of now. Thinking about it was a waste of energy, a waste of breath.

Just like thinking about his parents.

Gram had told him about them once, her voice quiet and sad as she stitched patches onto his pants by lamplight. Mother died giving birth to him, body too weak for the strain.

Another weak one.

And his father; a decent warrior, and a better hunter according to Gram, took one look at his newborn son and walked away. Not a word left his lips as he turned his back on the village and disappeared into the endless mountains of scrap.

Even good meat couldn’t stand bad meat.

Sparkless,

Gram had said about his father. Not one of the ones blessed with the power that made Chief chief, but still strong anyway.

Good man. Good meat.

A hunter’s memory could only last so long, no matter how good he was, but Ken knew he could thank that little thread of debt for the food the village bothered to give him everyday.

Fragile thread, though.

Thoughts of a dead man he never met bounced around no matter how hard Ken tried to push them away. After all, who’d want to think about someone that didn’t even bother to stick around to see if he lived past his first hour?

Gram told him he looked just like him, though, dark skin and curly hair, eyes almost as big, not like Gram. Not like most of the clan either.

He wasn’t pale and his hair wasn’t straight either. He didn’t like thinking about that either though, something else to remind him what he wasn’t.

A sigh slipped past Ken’s lips, eyes sliding up as the sky started shifting. It’d be night soon enough, the weak smear of light they called sun under the gray ceiling starting to dip behind that impossible Wall.

Soon, but not now.

The world had yet to go dark but junk-hills were already turning into monsters as the light changed, long grasping shadows making everything look hungry.

The distant sound of metal on metal came far from the village, the sound of someone doing the heavy-work carried on the wind.

Bare feet pressed into the ground, the ancient trash ground down to powder, mixed with real dirt till you couldn’t tell which was which anymore. Ken started the walk back, head down, trying to make the fresh cut on his forehead less obvious. He didn’t have to worry about checking his way. The path may have wound through the worst parts of the waste-field, treacherous and narrow but he knew every step by heart.

The sludge river moved slow and thick, nothing growing beside the purple-pink poison because what even could? There was a reason the village was built here and why so many other villages tried to take the same lands. The layered goop of the iridescent surface that ran around the village did more than just shimmer.

It promised a slow death if you were stupid enough to touch it, any beasts big enough to cause trouble also smart enough to stay well enough away from it. Bubbles broke the surface every few seconds, popping up with gas that made your eyes water even a good distance away.

Pretty colors, though.

To his right, the metal forest rustled in the wind, wire-trees dancing back and forth.

They weren’t real trees, just old power towers stripped down to skeleton frames, their branches heavy with plastic bags that whispered when air moved through them.

Not like anybody knows what power lines are.

And he definitely couldn’t explain it to anyone either.

Can’t explain how I know, and it’s not like they’d believe me in the first place.

He didn’t even really get how nobody knew what cars or electricity or power lines were if all the old stuff was still…around, but something had to have gone wrong, some crazy disaster or mess that brought the world to being like this.

Maybe I’m in the future.

It wasn’t the craziest thought, as much as he’d tossed it around for years and years trying to make sense of how that worked. Those thoughts got drowned out by village sounds as he got closer; a clang-clang-clang of hammers, murmur of voices mixing together, sharp greasy smell of roasted rat-meat cutting through the constant noise in his own head.

Nine hundred people in a tiny island of life floating in an ocean of decay.

It could have been less, though, or even more; Ken could only count so many and most could barely count up to what fingers and toes they had left.

His feet carried him to the village’s outer wall, the thing barely even worth the name as a patchwork mess of rust and sheets of metal lashed together with cable. Ten feet high in some places, barely six in others where they’d run out of good materials. It wasn’t like the inside was much to look at either, no matter how hard some in the village tried or how long they’d kept at it.

You couldn’t really do much when you started with shacks built from scrap and stacked tires and the spaces in-between packed with dirt.

His stomach complained, low and hungry. At least they had nature for food, ugly and weird as it was. Four-winged stringy birds and oversized rats with two heads were better than trying to eat the trash itself.

Ken slipped through a narrow gap in the wall, the world becoming smaller as a dozen eyes dropped on him with a weight that made him hunch.

There he is. Faces told it all, no words aimed his way that he hadn’t heard a hundred times already.

Poor boy. Even those that tried to be quiet couldn’t really keep their thoughts to themselves forever in a village this small.

Open mouth to feed. Pity came from the older women, annoyance from the hunters and hard stares from the scrappers and everyone else.

Ken did as he always did and kept his eyes on the ground, walking his way through the narrow pathways between shacks, mud from the cleared ground after heavy rains sticking to his bare feet.

He walked until something hit his ears, the sound he was looking for.

Sora’s fingers moved through stripped cables, barely shaking at all as they moved quicker than his own. Wrinkles crowded Old Sora’s face, years deeper than Gram’s had ever gotten and they deepened only further as she looked up to the fresh cut on his head.

“I… “ The words caught in his throat, each one stumbling over each other trying to get out. “I c-couldn’t find any blotroot, S-Sora.”

Stupid voice.

By the time Ken could even describe the way he hated how it made him sound weaker than he was, he’d already be coughing for air again.

She didn’t answer right away, lips pressed tight as she aimed hard thoughts his way. “Joric’s work?”

Ken nodded slow, eyes on the waste-dirt at his feet. “…yes, ma’am.”

“Thin metal, that one. All noise, no edge.” A gnarled hand reached into the leather pouch at her belt, fingers finding what they were looking for without looking. With a grunt, Old Sora pulled out a root, the dark orange thing still warm from her cook-fire. “Clean the cut. Don’t want rust-rot.”

Thank god for—

Something blocked the light, Ken freezing up under a big shadow; a shadow as dark as the man it belonged to was pale.

“Jax-boy-” A hand came up, two fingers pointing past Ken. “You move out my sun.”

The scrapper stood there with a face blank as stone; no spark in him, but strong enough to hoist a good six or seven sheets of dented metal all balanced on once shoulder. He didn’t bother to move, barely even acting lik he heard the words as his eyes flicked between Sora and Ken and back again.

“Still feedin’ that ghost, Sora-baa?” Jax’s voice was gravel against gravel, the words aimed at Sora even as hard eyes stayed firmly on Ken. “Boy eats. Don’t work. Bad math. Bad meat.”

Ken flinched hard, whole body jerking back before he could stop it. He couldn’t help it, even as his hand hesitated halfway to the root in Sora’s palm.

True, though.

Gritting his teeth, Ken reached out and took the root anyway, fingers shaking just enough to make it obvious. “…thank you.”

“Ain’t no need to thank old Sora, boy,” her voice went softer, just a fraction, but her eyes stayed hard on Jax, open disapproval written all over her weathered face.

“You see plants like your gram did. Good eye.” Sora sighed, eyes refusing to soften like her voice. “Pity your hands shake too much to do the work.”

Another fresh sting to his gut, sharp as the cut on his forehead. Not one he could deny thougj, not as he nodded again, head bobbing up and down with no more words to add.

Time to go.

Ken moved away quick before Jax could throw more insults on his head, the man’s voice as sharp as any rock Joric could throw. His corner in the shack was empty as always, the same lumpy mattress up against the wall. Home sweet home.

Ken dropped onto it hard enough to make the springs creak, springs digging into his back as a baby fought to be heard over the sound of someone hammering metal and someone else yelled for more wire.

Barely (and rarely) cleaned teeth gnawed on the root Sora had given him, a starchy, bitter taste filling his mouth familiar as hunger.

Better than nothing.

Always better than nothing.

Ghost. As much as he hated the name… Prolly true, though. A hard thing to deny when all he did was eat, sleep, and find a few roots when his hands let him.

Bad meat.

That one hurt worse.

The root was knobby, smelling thick and heavy and damp. Like sour earth mixed with something else. Same smell as Gram’s poultices, the ones she always used to mash up for his scrapes and cuts.

Good medicine.

Ken grit his teeth and smeared the wet stringy flesh over the cut above his eye, careful not to press too hard.

Sssss.

Hard or not, it didn’t matter much as a grunt spilled out of him anyway.

Clean sharp fire spread across the wound, sting pulling another sound from him; a tight hiss from between his teeth. But underneath the pain, angry heat started fading.

Same as Gram’s medicine.

She knew things, the same things she’d help him understand.

He didn’t understand these people, though. He saw them use the Spark every day, sure. He watched hunters make rebar-made spear-tips glow dull red just by staring at them hard enough. He’d even seen the chief lift fallen support beams that shoulda crushed him flat.

Old man’s got more strength than three good workers.

The Spark was as real as anything, Ken not dumb enough to argue with his own eyes. Some people had it and some didn’t, that thing inside them that made them just better than the rest; a fire on the inside making them more than just meat and bone.

That part was easy enough. But their stories, the way they explained it all, just felt so… weird.

So small.

The why just didn’t make sense.

Ken looked through the crack in the shack’s wall, one eye pulled to that impossible perfect line of black cutting the horizon in half. A wall that stretched forever, smooth as still water but solid as stone. Edge of the world, villagers called it. Divine Hand holding them safe.

Bullshit.

It didn’t make sense. None of it made any sense and he wasn’t gonna try to lie to himself about that.

His mind flashed to last week, that t-shirt half-buried in a trash heap near the sludge river. Bright blue, faded but still cheerful, cartoon bird on the front with words he could read perfect:

Froot Loops.

How could a world with Froot Loops have a magic wall at the edge of everything? How could a place with scavenged tech, scraps that could only be made with science and factories and television, also have men who made metal glow with their minds?

Oil and water.

It just didn’t mix, couldn’t mix, but here they were anyway. Everything mashed together in this garbage-heap world that made no damn sense.

Unless...

Something wrong twisted in his stomach, another old fear popping back up, another thought he didn’t like forcing its way in.

What if they’re right?

What if after twelve years of living in this impossible place, he was the one going crazy? What if walls that blotted out the gray sky were just...walls? What if the Spark was just how things worked, and he was the broken one for questioning it?

What if I’m wrong?

What if the blue sky was the fake part? Bad meat thinking bad thoughts, just misremembered dreams to make this life… easier.

That was scarier than anything.

Twelve years was a long time.

Some days he remembered Froot Loops more clearly than he remembered what a normal sky looked like. He’d already forgotten more than he’d ever learned.

Stop it.

He pushed the stupid thoughts away, doing his best to fight the shakes, the shudders, jaws working on the root in the silent, lonely dark. The waste-dirt floor was cold under him, springs in the mattress poking through thin fabric as the sounds of the village; the crying, the clanging, the combat forced its way in through the thin-metal walls.

Don’t think about it.

Thinking about it was a waste of energy, a waste of breath. Just like thinking about a dad who didn’t want him, or Gram who was gone like his mom, or any of the other holes inside that never stopped hurting.

Still here, though.

Still breathing. Still alive.

That had to be enough.

Rocks weren’t good for much.

Starting fires, grinding plants, maybe smashing things, sure. If you even went to all the trouble of sharpening it, you could tie it to a stick and then you had a good spear.

But other than that, there wasn’t much you could do with just a rock.

Still, that didn’t really matter much to some people.

Thok!

Not when they didn’t want to do much with them anyway.

Thok!

The next one caught him hard right above his stomach, hitting his chest through cloth, the sound blunt and heavy. The breath in his lungs hitched as he coughed with it, the sound rough and dry, air getting shoved back down his throat where it didn't want to go. His patched shirt might as well have been paper because it didn’t help not a bit; the rock found skin underneath just fine.

Another one, this time between his shoulders. Thok!

That one hit harder and he felt it, back arching as a whimper left him. N-no… He hated when he made noise.

It only made them keep going.

His body folded up on instinct, knees wanting to give up under him but his feet were already sinking into the not-soil that crunched like old bones under him. Years and years of garbage ground down to dust, Gram told him. Still garbage, though.

He knew he was gonna bruise, his back definitely. He could already feel it too, that deep ache that wouldn’t leave him till at least the next day. Prolly the day after, too. He knew that feeling better than he knew most people's names.

Another whimper slipped out before he could catch it, his head down, but he didn’t mind that one. As loud as they were, it got swallowed up by all that gray nothing stretching in every direction, like the valley didn't even care enough to echo it back.

Another rock bounced near his feet, rust-dust puffing up in a little cloud of red that made his nose itch. His whole body jerked back, arms coming up over his head even though that never helped much. Just made him look smaller. Weaker.

The laughter was still going, loud and wild, and that was always worse than the rocks. Rocks just hurt. Laughter made you keep the hurt.

"Lookit 'im," one of them said, cackling like a hunger-dog. "Shakes like scared rat."

Four of them today. Must be new trainin’.

Joric usually had at least five or six with him, his own men to grow up with, fight with, lead.

Ken’s eyes stayed on the blotroot he'd been digging, its gnarled red-brown surface still half-buried in the waste-dirt. Grandmother taught him which ones were good for the breath, back when she was still around to teach him anything.

"Oi, freaky." He didn’t look up but he knew a different voice when he heard it, deeper than the hunger-dog boy. This one was familiar too — Tam — the chief's second nephew, built thick like all of them were when they got first pick of everything. "Whatcha doin' out here? Stealin' good roots?"

Ken's hands twitched more and more the longer they clutched the small digging stick, the little plastic thing cutting into his palm. Keeping his hands from shaking was always the easiest and the hardest part at the same time but it was all he could do right now. Still, he wasn’t doing a good job and he knew it; the shakes always came when people got too close, when voices got too loud.

"I'm just—" The words came out quiet, careful, trying to see how much air they'd cost before he spent it. "I'm just picking herbs f—"

"He talkin'?" Hunger-dog laughed again, a laugh spilling out with the words "We ain't ask you to talk."

But you did. The thought sat there in his head, small and confused. They asked him the question. He answered. That was how talking worked, wasn't it?

It never made sense. None of this ever made sense, but the why of it all never managed to stick in his brain long enough to figure out.

The group shifted apart, boots crunching in the dust, and their leader stepped through. He knew the sound of good boots, of heavy feet, and the way he walked.

Joric.

A year older than him, and no more, but the older boy was still built like the mountain of car husks in the distance; all heavy angles and rusty strength. It made sense, though. Chief's son got fed first and got fed most, the thick muscle over his shoulders and his arms making it clear where the food went too.

Ken's chest got tighter, but that was just the usual thing. Nothing to do with fear. Much.

Joric spat near the blotroot, spit hitting the waste-dirt with a tiny splat. "Shut up, freak."

He always said it like that.

Not like an insult, but like it was just a fact. The same way the sky was gray or garbage was sharp, he was freak. Village law, written in the way people looked at him. "You eat our food. Take up space. Can't even scrap right wit' those shaky hands."

The shakes got worse now, running up Ken's arms to his elbows as his breathing went rougher, not enough air getting where it needed to go.

"You're bad meat," Joric said, and stepped closer.

Joric bent down, eyes still locked on Ken's face with a smile. That smile he knew, he hated that smile. It sat in a face twisted up wrong, the look showing off where Joric cracked his two front teeth running into a wire-tree years back. Gram said the hit to his head had made Joric mean.

Ken knew better.

The other boy was born mean.

Joric’s hand reached down, thick fingers gripping something new. Another rock.

This one was different from the others, bigger too. One side of it was jagged where it'd probably broken off something else. A metal fragment was still stuck to that same side, probably from old junker parts but it shone dully all the same.

Good throwing weight, though, he could tell. Balanced.

Ken's hands twitched around the digging stick. Useless. His teeth grit as he just watched as the bigger boy hefted the stone, testing it. Runnin’ not gonna do anything. It only made it worse. If anything, it made them try harder, made them do it out of anger instead of fun.

And they hated having to work for their fun.

That sick smile twisted itself wider across Joric’s face. The same smile as his chief got after a warband; when they came back with new women and new weapons.

The rock left Joric's hand and everything moved like tree-sap; the flex of muscle in Joric's thick arm, the grunt of effort as he put his whole weight behind it. The stone spinning, a dark speck against the metal-lid sky that never showed blue, never showed anything but gray like the inside of old cans.

Move. Move.

The thought was there, screaming in his head, but his body didn’t want to listen.

Bad meat, they always said that. He didn’t want to believe it, but it was all he knew. Good meat could run. Good meat could fight. Only bad meat was stuck in fog half the time. Something had to be wrong with meat for it to shake like he did.

Crack.

It hit hard, right above his right eye.

A sharp sting like broken glass, and the ground disappeared under him. Waste-dirt rushed up to meet his back and his head shuddered, teeth clicking together as his skull bounced off hard-packed dirt.

Pain came in layers.

First the bright white flash behind his eyes, so sharp it felt clean. Especially clean up against the messy dull ache that spread through his head.

Something hot trickled down the side of his head, blood standing out next to cool air. Vision in that eye went blurry too, the world smeared into a mess, like looking through dirty water.

There they are.

Like always, the hardest shakes started in his fingertips, deep in the bone and working their way up and out, same as always. It spread up his arms, fast and quick, muscles betraying him again, making it impossible to hide his weakness.

He knew he was small but they made him look smaller, made him look broken.

Joric and his boys weren't just laughing now. They were howling, pointing at his hands like they'd never seen anything so funny.

"There he goes!"

"Lookit the ghost-shakes!"

Always the damn shakes when things got bad. Stupid. Useless. Broken.

Why couldn't his body just work right? Other kids didn't fall apart when someone looked at them wrong. Other kids could run, could fight back, could breathe without thinking about it every damn minute.

Why me?

The cut stung sharper, Ken blinking past the blood as something shifted in his head, something bubbling its way back up where he had shoved it down.

You’re a good boy, Kenshi.

An old face, wrinkled and warm, a thick head of stringy silver hair, and knobby hands covering his small ones when the shakes got too bad to hide. Ain’t nothin’ wrong witchu.

She was gone.

All gone.

His hand jerked, fingers skittering across the waste-dirt like broken spider legs before they found it. The same rock that opened his head. His hand closed around it, sharp edges biting deep into his palm. He could feel his blood on it, a little bit at least, the rock a little slippery but he didn’t mind.

The rock felt real.

Real weight. Real hurt. Different from the other hurt, though. This one he could control.

Thunk. Thunk.

More rocks bouncing off his back, shoulders. Not meant to hurt now, just for the fun of watching something that wouldn't run anymore.

Air. Need air.

A shuddering gasp filled his chest, Ken holding the breath till his chest hurt even more. When he couldn’t hold it a second longer, he let it hiss out slow between his teeth. In. In. Out. Out.

The exercises.

Feed the hunger, Kenny. Gram's voice in his head, soft and scratchy like old cloth. Don't let it feed on you. He’d been doing them like she said, for as long as he could remember. The hunger only shrunk back, but it never left.

No matter how many times he tried to focus on his breath.

Ken pulled his arms over his head, doing what he always did. Turtle time. The world shrank to the dark space between his elbows, cramped and safe and small. Made himself the smallest target possible, knees to chest, everything tucked in tight.

Sounds got muffled now, distant, the other boys still talking.

Thud. Another rock against his ribs.

Still throwing, too.

"Borin' now," Tam's voice, already moving away. "Don't even squirm no more."

"Freak's broke," Joric grumbled. “...I’m hungry.”

“‘m hungry too!”

Their footsteps crunched away through the waste-dirt, boots heavy but Ken stayed curled up, listening.

He listened as wind moved through the junk-hills with that lonely whistle it always made, air trying to find its way home through a maze of broken things. Soon enough, there were no more voices. No more boots.

Just wind and the far-off sound of the village doing village things.

…hm.

Eventually, he opened an eye, his body uncurling, every muscle tight and sore. The narrow pass between junk-hills was empty now, just rust-colored dust and scattered pebbles. They're gone.

Pressing his back against a hill of compacted something (old clothes, maybe, or plastic bags, all pressed together till they turned into fake stone), Ken touched the cut above his eye. Blood had stopped weeping but the dried patch still felt tight, the cut pulling at his eyebrow every time he blinked. Gonna scar.

Another one for the collection.

His gaze drifted past the ramshackle cluster of shacks that counted as home, past the cooking fires and clotheslines made of wire, out to the real view.

Ocean of garbage. Miles and miles of it.

Towering hills of twisted steel reached up like skeletal fingers. Plains of shredded tires stretched black and shimmering under the weak gray light, all of them rippling like water when the wind hit them right. It stood tall next to the forest of dead trees growing straight out of compressed waste-soil, branches hung with plastic bags like flags of a dead world.

He didn’t understand it, this place.

Not after twelve years.

He was beginning to think he never would, had gotten used to that idea.

Honestly, it made his brain hurt to think about it.

Glass-grass caught the light in one direction, catching his eye as he stared at the million broken bottles turned into a field that sparkled and cut. Ken knew that field, knew which paths were safe, which ones would slice your feet to ribbons if you stepped wrong.

Being chased into it by Joric’s boys once had taught him that lesson.

That knowledge almost cost him two toes and a lot of blood, but he knew it now.

Good meat learns faster.

His eyes kept moving, traveling across the impossible landscape till they hit the thing that stopped everything.

The Wall.

Not a mountain.

Mountains were jagged, imperfect, real.

This was none of those things. Ken stared up, up, up at a perfect vertical line of absolute black, smooth as water but solid as stone. It rose straight up past the clouds, and disappeared into gray nothing above. On both sides, it stretched sideways from edge to edge of everything he could see, cutting the world off.

He couldn’t imagine what made it, where it came from, or what it was for. All he knew was that it wasn’t natural. No joints. No wear. No texture.

All he could see was smooth black nothing that seemed to suck in the light instead of reflecting it.

This ain't right.

The part of him that remembered different skies, blue instead of gray, trees that grew in real dirt instead of garbage-soil (that part he tried not to think about too much), that part screamed at the Wall's existence.

Nothing was that big. Nothing was that perfect.

Can't be real.

But there it was, every day, same as always. The edge of his cage.

The edge of the world.

Villagers called it the Great Wall.

He’d almost laughed when he heard it, but he knew better. It wasn’t original, sure, but what else would they call it, other than that? It’s great… it’s a wall…

The chief and the other old men in the village loved their little story. They always said it cradled the whole world, kept the people safe from the demons and monsters and evil gods on the other side. Apparently, the demons wanted their souls and the gods wanted their bodies and the monsters wanted them for dinner, or maybe they all wanted the same thing.

Half the time, they mixed up what they were even saying anyway. It was just weird bedtime stories as far as he could tell. A thousand years of monsters, eat-you-up bedtime stuff, all up until a “Divine Hand” slammed the door. All the same stuff, from old mouths full of half-missing teeth and too sure about stories their grandparents probably made up.

Ken didn’t know any better, didn’t know any more than they did, but he knew that just didn’t make any sense. Nothing makes any sense.

He sat there for a long moment, small and bruised in a world made of garbage, staring at the impossible line that marked where everything ended. Blood and rust coated his tongue, chest tight with more than just the usual breathing troubles.

Words slipped out before he could stop them, quiet as prayer and bitter as medicine.

"...I hate this place."

That is the Grand Tower—144 levels of war, hunger, and impossible power. Most climb for glory.

Kenshi was reborn into a world of rust and salvage, where survival in the junk-valley slums means fighting over scraps of qi like blood. Weak, starving, and cursed with the shakes, he was marked as bad meat before he even had a chance to prove himself.

But when desperation leaves blood on his hands, Ken is driven toward the one place nobody dares go willingly: the Wall. Inside waits the Grand Tower, a climb where every rung costs more than the last, where gods, beasts, and tyrants rule the higher floors—and where the real danger may be what he drags along with him from the ground up.

Shattered Ladder is an isekai cyberpunk cultivation epic—part tower-climber, part survival tale, part obsession spiral.

If you like underdogs who refuse to stay down, cult-like sects, and the grind of power earned the hard way, this one’s for you.

You know what that is. It’s 2025. You’re not a medieval peasant squinting at a woodcut illustration that some monk tried to draw from memory. You have the internet.

You’ve seen the DreamWorks movies.

You know Po.

And as much as the cultural zeitgeist wants to sell you on the image of a fluffy, ass-kicking, dumpling-obsessed hero, the reality of the giant panda is starkly less humorous. Or more, depending on your particular taste for tragicomedy.

Here’s the brutal, unvarnished truth: the panda, particularly the captive panda, is a monument to biological failure. It is a case study in evolutionary dead ends, a creature so profoundly inept at the most basic function of life—procreation—that its continued existence is a testament only to human intervention. They are as useless in the mating game as Michael J Fox in an operating room.

The males? Sad sacks of unrealized potential. They possess no instinct for courtship, no concept of flaunting their genetic qualities, no functional knowledge of the biological imperative that screams through the DNA of every other successful species on the planet. They have little energy to even attempt the act. Imagine a creature so divorced from its own nature that it cannot decipher the most fundamental signals from a potential mate.

Sound familiar?

To make this pathology even more complete, their already dismal drive is functionally extinct. They have no framework for understanding their situation, and therefore, no desire to change it. They exist in a state of ignorant bliss, minus the one thing that gives bliss any context: the continuation of their line. It’s a never-ending loop of unproductive days. Wake up, chew bamboo, sleep, repeat. There is no drive to survive beyond the next meal, no internal push to escape their placid obsolescence, no fucking clue what to do about any of it.

This isn’t just an absence of sexual prowess. It’s a fundamental rot in the core programming. It is a complete and total loss of instinct.

They are inmates in a comfortable prison, an enclosure built by an environment that demanded nothing of them and perpetuated by a catastrophic loss of their own vigor.

So, why are we dissecting the pathetic sex life of a glorified zoo animal? It’s not just for the grim humor of it. There is a metaphor here, a raw, uncomfortable parallel to be drawn. There is a point to be made.

What does any of this have to do with you?

Odds are good that if you’re reading this, you’re a fucking panda.

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o – o – o – o – o – o – o – o – o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

Let’s talk about domestication. Not of wolves into dogs, but of men into something… lesser. Friedrich Nietzsche wasn’t just a philosopher with a magnificent mustache; he was a diagnostician of cultural decay. In "The Antichrist," he delivered a verdict that should echo in the skull of every modern man: “I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, when it loses its instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers, what is harmful to it.” He went further, branding the human being as “the most bungled of all the animals, the sickliest, the one most dangerously strayed from its instincts.”

He wasn't alone. Decades earlier, Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that the very act of living in society was a corrupting force, a systematic stripping away of man’s natural freedom and potency.

What were these men seeing? They weren’t just complaining about city life or the death of the noble savage. They were prophets, witnessing the birth of a new kind of man, one whose cage was not made of iron bars, but of comfort. They foresaw the rise of the human panda.

Let’s dissect this pathology. The grim prophecy of Nietzsche and Rousseau has been fully realized. The more ‘civilized’ we become, the more we sever the tethers to our primal architecture. Our modern world, much like a well-intentioned but disastrously overbearing zookeeper, has engineered away the necessities that once forged us. We have outsourced our survival, trading the sharp edge of our instincts for the dull comfort of convenience.

Consider the foundational pillars of a man’s life: purpose, adventure, companionship.

Once, these were pursuits rooted in the unforgiving soil of reality. Purpose was found in tangible creation and contribution. Adventure required physical risk and navigating the unknown. Companionship was forged through direct interaction, through the complex, non-verbal dance of social dynamics, through the effort of building real, human connections.

Fast forward to today’s digital enclosure. What do we see?

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A systemic replacement of reality with simulation. Video games provide the illusion of adventure without risk, a neurological drip-feed of dopamine for achievements that don’t exist. Pornography and romantic comedies serve as parasitic stand-ins for genuine intimacy, training the male brain to respond to pixels on a screen rather than the intricate reality of a woman. Social media offers a hollow facsimile of community, a vast network of shallow connections that demand nothing and therefore provide nothing of substance.

We are in self-imposed captivity, and our keepers are the algorithms designed to keep us placid, consuming, and passive. Just like the panda, who no longer needs to hunt for food or fight for a mate, we have offloaded the fundamental labors of being human to the digital realm. We are comfortable. We are safe.

And we are atrophying.

Instinct is a muscle. It requires resistance to grow and necessity to remain sharp.

In the absence of necessity, it withers. When there is no need to be physically brave, courage becomes a LARP. When there is no need to be socially adept, charm becomes a script learned from a YouTube video. When problem-solving is reduced to a Google search, resilience never gets the chance to be forged.

And then there's the analysis paralysis. The modern man is bombarded by a tsunami of digital information defining what he should be. He sees curated images of success, of fitness, of relationships, creating an impossibly steep mountain of expectations. The natural response to an unwinnable game is to stop playing. "Why bother trying?" becomes the silent mantra of a generation that sees the finish line but believes it’s on another planet. It is a rational surrender to an irrational standard, a self-induced paralysis.

This brings us to the core of the rot: communication with women.

The modern man has stopped trying.

And those who try often falter.

How many men have you seen go out to clubs or parties, doing nothing but hanging back to stare, swiping through the weather app on their phone, trying to ignore the fact that the girl they’ve been watching for the last forty-five minutes has already signaled her friend to give her an out if you even take a step near her.

The traditional scripts that once governed interaction between the sexes have been systematically dismantled in the name of necessary progress.

And like all progress done for the sake of it, left behind a vacuum.

In the place of flawed but functional maps, there are now no maps at all. Many men feel they are navigating a social minefield where one wrong step can lead to social ostracization. The art of conversation, of flirtation, of simply being in the presence of a woman without a digital intermediary has decayed into a lost language.

And you’re left with nothing but the embarrassing hole in your gut, shame and bitterness, as you delete Hinge for the fifth time and you pretend like you’re not bothered.

This creates a vicious double bind: men crave the connection and validation that women provide, yet they lack the tools, the confidence, and the "frame" to pursue it in a healthy, masculine way. They are starving, but they have forgotten how to hunt.

The catastrophic decline in real-world socialization pours gasoline on this fire. Gone are the days of organic learning, where social cues were absorbed through constant, low-stakes interaction. There is no environment to sharpen the social sword, whether for platonic battle or romantic conquest. The sword was never forged to begin with; it’s still just a lump of pig iron in the back of the cave.

Dating and socializing have migrated online, a realm where body language, tone, presence, and the visceral, chemical reality of human interaction are completely absent. This leads to a profound social stunting. When finally thrust into a real social situation, the human panda is exposed. He is a performer who only practiced in front of a mirror, now suddenly on a real stage, blinded by the lights, with no idea what his lines are.

The cumulative effect is a generation of men who, like their black-and-white counterparts in the zoo, are fundamentally ill-equipped for the basics of their own existence. They are disconnected, unfulfilled, and lost.

Nietzsche and Rousseau were not just philosophers; they were seers. They understood that to sever man from his instincts is to create a sick animal. And they were right. Look around. We are drowning in a sea of connectivity, yet we have never been more isolated. We have endless entertainment, yet we are dying of boredom. We have every comfort, yet our souls are starving for the raw, unfiltered taste of reality.

We, and I mean men, have become human pandas. We exist in the safety of our digital habitats, fed and sheltered by the very system that saps our vitality.

We consume, but we do not create.

We observe, but we do not participate.

We exist, but we are not truly alive.

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The supreme irony is that in our relentless pursuit of an easier life, we have made living authentically infinitely more complex. Our needs are met, but our purpose is gone.

This is not a nostalgic cry to return to the past. That world is gone.

So what is the solution? It is not found in a listicle, a life hack, or another comforting video that tells you you’re fine just the way you are. The solution begins with a conscious and violent rejection of the enclosure. It begins with awareness, with the gut-wrenching recognition that you are more than a passive consumer.

You must challenge yourself.

You must learn the game.

You must stop being a panda and remember how to be a man.

It’s audible, visible, and dare I say, visceral. (I did. I dared.)

No woman wants a starving man.

Not physically starved (though hunger is hunger in all its forms) but starved of inner substance, starved of autonomy, starved of presence. You see the problem rippling through Red Pill culture: they call this oneitis, but it’s universal. A decent chunk of men fall short. They stake a potential relationship—or even just a casual interaction—on this one woman. They latch on, cling to every compliment, giggle, DM reply. Each reply is a rope, each interaction a rebar in their facade of worth. And when it stops, they vanish into second-guessing, woe-is-me swirl, even if only privately.

It's not that he's incapable of social grace or kindness. Going with that as the reasoning would be a simple sharp edge of an answer but cutting entirely the wrong way. No, it's that it’s clear to him and the stranger everything hinges on said stranger’s reaction. It's draped in an illusion of frame — the great redpill mythos of posture — but it’s a mythos built on the sand of those who barely understood what they were saying in the first place.

The “frame” isn’t yours if you’re reacting, not acting.

That’s not frame, that’s just sucking in your gut.

The mind that depends on external validation doesn’t know how to feed itself and never will unless something drastic happens. Without self-generated worth — which abundance can help build — what we’re looking at is just raw need. You don’t have presence; you have presence anxiety.

The hunger is palpable. Women feel it. They don’t need to detect ideology or manipulation. They sense that your center is orbiting them, that your ego is reflexively reactive.

That’s what they’re poking at, unintentionally or intentionally, with what the Red-Pillers call a shit-test. If you don’t know what that is, I’ll get into that maybe next year or so (at the pace I’m going, decade).

So what do hunger and frame-shambles look like in the wild? The guy who panic-sends when she doesn’t reply within ten minutes. The smarmy “reading between the likes” detective in DMs. The jittery expansion of presence on her timeline whenever she posts stories. The frantic volley of questions aimed to keep the conversation alive.

The average guy who feels his heart collapse because after a nice conversation with a girl, he found out she had a boyfriend.

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It's a very commonly held male response to the point most think nothing of it, even saying "aww that sucks" or "it happens" but it shouldn't even be remarked on, because why were you staking romantic opportunity on a stranger to the point it hurt your mood at all? This is the example of a mind that doesn't know how to love itself without a reflection.

Once again, No fucking spine.

It all reeks of need, and that’s signal for every woman that your center is absent. Cue internal vanishing act—shame and collapse.

And if you hang around echo chambers long enough, this collapse writes manifestos. Say something like, “If she didn’t love me at first sight, I would never find love.”

That’s blackpill.

That’s the mind that has longhoused itself—shoveling fantasy trappings into the void, because it can’t stand emptiness, because it desperately wants the love only a mother could give. The void is scary. The void is possible freedom. So we erect narratives to cover it—“If only she reacted, I’d be fine.” But the concrete fact: until you can stand without reply, without presence confirmation, nothing else matters.

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There’s no shortcut to this and there never will be, unless VR gets really good really soon, and even then, that’s just a gooner victory.

But no, there’s no quick fix and it’s intellectual laziness to suggest otherwise.

You need internal structure. You need sovereignty. It’s not “fake it till you make it” where you slaughter authenticity with affectation. You need actual internal support, a self that doesn’t cower when silence arrives, or hesitation, or rejection. That worst-case scenario—does “no” shrink him? Or does it prime him to go deeper, harder, better?

You’d be surprised how few men can answer that with confidence. The cushion of female attention, even fleeting, has protected them from seeing how hollow they stand.

Now, I don’t have a checklist for you, because lists are comforting when what you need is transformation. You don’t grow a backbone with bullet points.

Start with this: Men who stop starving stop measuring worth by response, because they have something that outlasts compliments. Something that survives misses. A purpose bigger than her. A mission bigger than your validation system. You show up because you want to, not because she winks. And that creates a gravitational field of integrity. People (and yes, especially women) can feel that field.

Call it women’s intuition. Call it evo-psych. Call it the power of the Divine Uterus. Whatever you call it, they feel something from you.

When it comes down to it, you also gotta treat these interactions as practice, not value judgements or verdicts of your worth. Seriously, stop, it’s disgusting to look at. It’s like watching a grown man using a sad eye emoji but on the inside. The grammar of need says: Invest everything and collapse at the first slight.

The grammar of sovereignty says: Engage, learn, correct, disengage gracefully—then move the hell on.

And again, no writing final drafts of your thesis in casual chat.

You also gotta do this; Practice discomfort.

Sit in the silence after sending the message. Drink your drink slowly. Get bored on purpose. Wait five minutes before responding. Forget to text back, and I don’t mean wait.

I mean, be so busy that you don’t remember about a girl’s text. Boredom is a muscle. Discomfort is vitamin. Both nurture your non-reliance.

The necessary evolution of presence requires stripping away necessity. You don’t feel that at first. You feel detached. Uninterested. But you have to pass through that to find dispassionate confidence. The kind that looks like indifference, but isn’t—it’s internal abundance.

There’s a certain type of guy (growing much rarer these days) that slides up, introduces himself, chats a bit, drops his name and does his thing. She smiles politely, gives a short answer, more than likely a “no”. He nods, says, “Cool, nice meeting you,” and steps away.

There’s no frowny faces here, no “can we try again?” And there’s certainly no constant texting or walls of text (Assume this guy got her number and she later iced him out for this to make sense.) That is presence.

Whether or not he succeeded, he just planted a seed, in both himself and her. Whether it sprouts or not, tomorrow is still ground.

Now take the guy who latches, who gets micro-anxious when the conversation stalls, who reacts with a flurry of questions, messages, or posture shifts. He flexes his internal frailty, and it shows. He’s starving for drip-feed attention.

He’s a dead desert. And he should feel bad.

“But Poe, this feels cold”

I say to you: who gives a fuck?

You’re not practicing vulnerability as a handshake here. What you’re looking for in yourself is stability. You’re recognizing that your growth is internal, demanding they recognize the simple fact on paper and in practice that your presence isn’t transactional.

That can’t be faked. It’s forged.

Now don’t be a robot, because that’s just sending yourself down another dark path, but you can care, enjoy, connect—without flinching when interest stops. You can recalibrate when feedback is positive, without intoxicating your worth on it. You can withdraw when the vibe’s off.

That’s just rolling with the punches.

No woman wants a starving man

As simply as it can be put, that incessant hunger wafting off that man kills attraction the same way the WNBA kills it’s viewership. It’s why men mindful of this shift faster than any other. You need a necessary switch from absence-based thirst to presence-based confidence.

It sounds ... boring, even.

But the raw substrate of attraction is what it is and your opinion on it doesn’t really do much, now does it?

A woman doesn’t want to nourish a collapse. She’d be fine building on a strong foundation but she at least wants a certain degree of certitude to the intactness of said foundation.

You get me?

A center stronger than her silence?

No?

Okay, look, she wants a man who’s unreactive enough, with an ego solid enough, not to shake all to pieces (even internally) from her “no.”

So if you’re tired of disappearing into the static of ego-craving, start here: be the man that doesn’t just have the ability to feed himself, but already does it.

Build a center that rejects casual collapse and stop spiraling for her attention. If you stop starving, that meting out of self-worth based on the response of others? That dries up too.

However, the moment you seek a reaction — a like, message, laugh — your ego perks up and transmits hunger. Build a fucking spine. Know that you matter, and she doesn’t.

Then you become a man who stands—not because she said yes, but because you’re already standing.

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Not because I particularly want to, but because context matters and you probably don't know what it is.

Written by Wildbow (John McCrae to his mom, probably), it's a 1.3 million-word descent into what happens when you take the superhero genre and dissolves it in acid, stripping away all the spandex-clad comfort. Raw systematic deconstruction, each chapter another layer stripped away until you're left with nothing but raw nerve endings.

The premise is straightforward: Girl gets powers. Controls bugs. Tries to be a hero. Fails spectacularly.

But that's not really what it's about.

It's about trauma. About how we break. About how powers in this universe are just crystallized psychological damage wrapped in a thin veneer of capability.

The worse your trauma, the better your powers. It's the universe's sick joke - here's some cosmic compensation for your suffering, now go make everyone else suffer nearly as much you have.

I find that telling.

The psychology of it is almost too obvious. Almost insulting in its transparency. Take your worst moment, crystallize it, turn it into power. Now watch as that power shapes everything you do, every choice you make.

It's like therapy through violence.

The main character, Taylor, starts out wanting to be a hero. That's cute. Naive. By the end she's basically a war criminal who saved the world, and you're not quite sure if it was worth it.

It probably wasn't.

The whole thing takes place in Brockton Bay, this festering wound of a city that's basically what happens when you take every failed American dream and leave them to rot by the ocean. The city itself is a character.

A dying one.

The kind that attracts parasites and predators and calls them heroes and villains depending on their PR budget.

The characters are all broken in interesting ways. Some are broken obviously - the kind of broken that levels cities. Others are broken quietly, in ways that only show up in the spaces between their words. Every power is a reflection of trauma. Every hero is a victim. Every villain is someone who decided to pass their pain downstream.

It's all very neat. Very systematic. Very much like watching someone dissect the superhero genre while it's still breathing.

And then there's Greg Veder.

Greg isn't broken. Greg isn't anything.

Barely fifteen lines of dialogue in 1.3 million words. Three scenes that don't affect his development in his slightest. A footnote in a story about the end of the world and every world along with it.

A 15 (soon to be 16?) year old blond blue-eyed boy who’s not even important enough to the plot to be a minor criminal or villain in a city that is to a great degree under the thrall of a gang of Neo-Nazi supervillains going two generations deep.

He's fascinating precisely because he's so… pointlessly insignificant.

In a story where everyone else is dealing with cosmic horror and multidimensional warfare, Greg is just... there. Being awkward. Missing social cues. Talking about video games to people who stopped listening five minutes ago. Blocking girls because they won’t send him a picture to prove they’re not some creepy old man in Canada.

He's what happens when you put a completely normal person in an abnormal world and they just stay normal.

And by nature of that, he’s incredibly important.

That's probably the most horrifying thing.

In any other story, Greg would be the protagonist. The awkward kid who discovers he's special. Gets powers. Saves the day.

But Worm isn't interested in that story.

So, Greg is just Greg.

Forever on the periphery. Forever missing the point. Forever being exactly who he is in a world that's rapidly moving past anything he could understand.

I find myself thinking about that a lot.

About how we expect stories to give everyone a purpose, a meaning, an arc of some kind.

About how reality doesn't work that way.

Some people just exist in the margins, being awkward and human and completely missing every important thing happening around them.

That's Greg.

That's probably most of us.

The brilliance of it is in the waste. In the pointlessness. In the fact that Greg exists in this story taking up space that could have been used for something more important.

Just like real life.

Just like most of us.

Let's dissect Greg Veder properly now.

Not because he matters. He doesn't. But because his insignificance is precisely what makes him interesting.

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When I asked Wildbow about how to write Greg, he handed me a few paragraphs on Reddit.

That was it.

No grand thesis, no breakdown of Greg’s backstory.

Because why would there be?

Just a snapshot of who Greg is and how he moves through the world. But in those paragraphs, I learned more about character writing than I have from entire craft books.

Wildbow described Greg as a car with bald tires. No brakes. Constant skidding. Zero traction with reality.

It's the perfect metaphor for someone who doesn't know how to exist in their own skin.

Watching Greg interact with people is watching a car crash in slow motion. You know exactly what's going to happen. You can see every mistake before he makes it.

He's utter momentum without direction. Distilled enthusiasm without purpose. Uninhibited social interaction without even the weakest inkling of social awareness.

Perfectly human because he’s designed to fail.

When Greg talks, it's what I call "consciousness vomit" – a straight dump of whatever's occupying his mental bandwidth. No filter, no organization, no awareness that the person he's talking to checked out five minutes ago.

Let's talk about what Greg actually teaches us about character writing, because it's more interesting than you'd think.

When Wildbow told me "Greg is a puppy in human form," he wasn't being cute or metaphorical. He was giving me the entire foundation of the character in five words. That's the first real lesson about character writing - sometimes the simplest description is the most useful one.

Most writers would try to complicate that. Add layers. Make it profound. Turn it into some grand metaphor about human nature or the loss of innocence or whatever literary buzzword they picked up in their MFA program. But that's masturbatory, really. Just writers trying to prove how clever they are.

The puppy metaphor works precisely because it's simple. Because it tells you exactly what not to write. You don't make a puppy bitter. You don't make a puppy cynical. You don't give a puppy hidden depths or a tragic backstory or some profound understanding of the human condition. A puppy is just a puppy. Greg is just Greg.

The brilliance is in the constraint. Most character writing fails because writers can't resist the urge to add complexity. To make their characters deeper, more meaningful, more important than they need to be. It's ego, really. The need to prove you're clever enough to write complex characters.

Greg is exactly what he appears to be, which is somehow more uncomfortable than any tragic backstory could make him.

He's not bitter. He's not jaded. He's not secretly harboring deep insights about the human condition.

He's just... Greg.

Forever operating at maximum intensity. Forever missing social cues. Forever being exactly who he is without a single shred of self-awareness.

The psychology of it is almost too perfect.

In a story where everyone else is defined by their trauma, Greg is defined by his lack of it. In a world where powers come from breaking, Greg remains stubbornly, persistently unbroken.

Not because he's strong. Not because he's special. Just because he's Greg.

Writing him taught me something interesting about character development: sometimes the most authentic thing you can do is let a character stay exactly who they are at their core.

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Growth doesn't always mean fundamental change. Sometimes it just means learning to crash into things a little more quietly.

Greg works because he's consistent in his chaos. Because every awkward interaction, every social misstep, every moment of cringe-inducing enthusiasm fits perfectly with who he is.

He's not trying to be anything else. He just is.

That's what makes him real. That's what makes him stick in your mind long after those fifteen lines of dialogue have faded.

Because we all know a Greg.

We've all been Greg at some point. Even if we don't want to admit it.

And that honestly explains why so many people seem to hate the character, more often than not and for no justifiable reason at all (I’m looking at you, Worm fanbase, gay as you are.)

He's the character who teaches us that sometimes the most compelling thing about a person isn't their complexity or their growth or their hidden depths.

Sometimes it's their raw, unadulterated commitment to being exactly who they are, even when – especially when – who they are makes everyone else uncomfortable.

Because in the end, that's what makes a character real. Not their powers, not their importance to the plot, but their commitment to being undeniably themselves in every moment they exist on the page.

Even if that existence is only fifteen lines long.

The psychology of it is almost beautiful in its simplicity. Almost perfect in its waste. Almost profound in its complete lack of profundity.

Just like Greg himself.

Picture a grand, old library, filled to the brim with books. 

Now, imagine an odd librarian who insists on categorizing the books into only two sections - sacred texts and pulp fiction. In the mind of the confused librarian, the sacred texts are the epitome of virtue and wisdom, to be revered, cared for and studied. The pulp fiction, on the other hand, is the guilty pleasure, to be consumed and discarded without a second thought. 

It's as absurd as a vegan at a bullfight, but that's the Madonna Whore complex in a nutshell. 

We often hear about the Madonna-Whore complex, a concept that's been a veritable hit since Freud introduced it. Men, apparently, subdivide women into two categories: the virtuous 'Madonna' and the promiscuous 'Whore.' This construct is frequently employed as a bludgeon to highlight male misogyny, encapsulating a fundamentally sexist view that reduces women to narrow, one-dimensional stereotypes.

Now, let's flip the script. Ever heard of the Knight-Brute complex? No? Well, that's hardly surprising. While men are repeatedly taken to task for their Madonna-Whore perceptions, women's equivalent psychological dichotomy, the Knight-Brute complex, often slips under the radar.

You see, if men are guilty of dichotomizing women into Madonnas and Whores, women are just as culpable of splitting men into Knights and Brutes. The former are the 'good guys,' the Knights the ideal man, reliable, morally upright, embodying stability, dependability, and emotional availability. In essence, he’s the type of man who checks off all the boxes in the traditionally accepted script of what makes a 'good' partner.

The Brute, on the other hand, symbolizes the archetypal thrill of the 'bad boy.' He's raw, exciting, and often unpredictable, alluring in their unpredictability and raw charisma. He possesses a certain charisma that is undeniably magnetic and incomparably attractive, yet he might not fit the conventional standards of what constitutes a 'suitable' partner.

In this dichotomy, the Knight is akin to the Madonna figure, seen as the more socially acceptable and 'safe' choice. He’s the one who is dependable, someone to whom a woman can entrust her future and that of her potential offspring. He is, in traditional terms, 'husband material.' However, he is often considered the boring choice; safe, staid, and always there waiting for you.

The Brute, similar to the Whore, is the more sexually alluring, thrilling, and dangerous option. He's the one who keeps a woman on her toes, the one who exudes an irresistible sexual energy. Although exciting, he is rarely considered to be the best choice for a stable, long-term relationship, due to his nature being generally less mature, reliable and, in a nutshell; agrestal.

The Knight-Brute complex presents a fascinating study in how social conditioning and biological impulses collide. Women are often socially conditioned to seek out the Knight, the provider and protector, for long-term commitments. Simultaneously, they might feel a primal, biological attraction to the Brute due to his raw energy and sexual charisma.

Again, in one corner, we have the Madonna-Whore complex, the infamous cognitive distortion plaguing men for centuries. You've got the pristine Madonna, all virtue and sanctity. But where's the spice, you ask? Enter the Whore, the embodiment of lustful, sensual femininity. Too bad she's not 'wife material.'

Let's switch gears to the other corner. We find the Knight-Brute complex waiting, brooding in the shadows. It's the same song with different lyrics. Here, we have our knight in shining armor. Mr. Dependable, Mr. Responsible, the ideal husband - financially secure, emotionally stable. He's the Madonna in pants.

Then there's the Brute, the untamed bad boy, oozing a magnetic, raw sexual energy that's irresistible. Women want him, but they're told they shouldn't. He's the equivalent of the sultry siren from the Madonna-Whore complex, enticing but not quite the man you bring home to mother.

These two constructs work in parallel, mirroring each other's oversimplification and polarization. They place men and women on pedestals, forcing them to be one-dimensional caricatures. It's like living in a world of pop-up books where everyone is flat and predictable.

This binary worldview leaves no room for the grey area. Men are either the noble savior or the dangerous outsider. Women are either pure Madonnas or sensual Whores. It's a simplistic dichotomy, a mere illusion of understanding the opposite sex.

What these constructs fail to consider is that humans are complex creatures, not comic book characters. The Knight can be exciting, and the Brute can be nurturing. The Madonna can have a wild side, and the Whore can be virtuous.

By reducing individuals to these roles, we're creating a recipe for disappointment. Unrealistic expectations are set, leading to frustration and heartache. No one is all saint or all sinner, all Knight or all Brute.

Yet, there seems to be a reluctance, or perhaps even a selective blindness, towards acknowledging the existence of the Knight-Brute complex. While the Madonna-Whore construct has been roundly criticized and considered an emblem of deep-seated male sexism, the Knight-Brute dichotomy escapes similar scrutiny.

The disparity in the societal reaction to these two analogous complexes shines a spotlight on an often overlooked form of bias. Men are vilified for their categorization of women into Madonnas and Whores, yet women's categorization of men into Knights and Brutes is largely ignored, even though both frameworks essentially commit the same crime of reducing the opposite sex to simplistic, binary stereotypes.

Perhaps the root of this inconsistency lies in societal norms and expectations. Men are expected to desire and value women for more than their virtue or lack thereof, whereas women's preferences for dependable Knights or exhilarating Brutes are seen as less problematic, even justifiable. This is a quintessential example of societal double standards, subtly coded into our collective understanding of gender roles.

This perception is a disservice to men, much like the Madonna-Whore complex is to women. It stifles men, forcing them into restrictive roles, denying them the freedom of multi-dimensionality.

It also fails women, who end up expecting too much or too little from their partners. There's no room for flaws in Mr. Knight and no room for redemption for the Brute.

But here's the kicker. Women don't consciously choose this. It's a societal construct, a psychological conditioning that seeps into the subconscious. It's not personal preference; it's societal pressure.

This complex doesn't acknowledge the myriad forms of masculinity. It doesn't consider that men, like women, are multi-faceted beings. It strips them of their individuality, reducing them to archetypes.

It's the product of a society that promotes polarized gender norms, a society that feeds on stereotypical roles and refuses to acknowledge complexity. It's a societal echo chamber, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Ironically, the Knight-Brute complex, much like the Madonna-Whore complex, leads to dissatisfaction. It traps women in a cycle of unrealized expectations, fostering resentment and disillusionment.

In reality, the Knight and the Brute are two sides of the same coin. They represent desirable traits, but they should coexist, not dominate. The ideal man is a blend of both.

Ultimately, both the Madonna-Whore complex and the Knight-Brute complex offer a myopic lens to view the opposite sex, leading to misconceptions and prejudiced expectations. They undermine the fact that human beings are intricate, multifaceted creatures who cannot be neatly pigeonholed into simplistic categories.

For any significant progress towards gender equality and mutual understanding, we need to address these biases in their entirety. Recognizing the Knight-Brute complex and treating it with the same scrutiny as the Madonna-Whore complex is a step in that direction. It is time we understand that simplistic stereotypes, regardless of who they target, do not serve our understanding of the complex human nature.

Ah, the Divine Feminine—sweet chaos of intuition and emotion, a whirlwind of spontaneity and sensuality. Society might shackle it with rules and boundaries, but it's a wild creature, untamed and unapologetically free. The Divine Feminine is a paradox, both nurturing and destructive, much like Mother Nature herself. But what of its counterpart?

Enter the Infernal Masculine—his touch as cold as logic, his gaze as unyielding as steel. He's the personification of order, the epitome of straightforwardness and rigidity. He stands tall, a paragon of rationality in a world gone mad. But like all great monuments, he's often misunderstood, even vilified.

Now don't get me wrong—the Infernal Masculine isn't your friendly neighborhood hero. He's authoritarian, brutal even. But it's a brutality tempered by logic, honed by focus. He's not the villain of the story, he's simply playing the hand he's been dealt.

This man of steel is as rigid as he is rational. There's no room for chaos in his world, no place for the wild and untamed. He's a fortress of order amidst the turbulence of modern life. But herein lies the rub—the fortress, while safe, is often isolating.

The Infernal Masculine is not a man, but a construct, an ideal borne out of societal expectations and gender norms. He's not real, but his impact is. He influences behaviors, shapes identities, and sadly, even distorts self-perceptions.

His influence is insidious. It seeps into our collective consciousness, poisoning our views of masculinity. It's a toxic cocktail of aggression, authority, and aloofness. And like any potent brew, it's intoxicating. But the hangover is a heavy one—misunderstood masculinity, suppressed emotions, unexpressed fears.

In a bid to conform to the Infernal Masculine, men often end up concealing their true selves. The mask of masculinity becomes a prison, the Infernal Masculine a jailer. This is where the real damage is done. In the pursuit of the ideal, the individual is lost.

The Infernal Masculine is indeed a force to be reckoned with. But in the grand scheme of things, he's just one side of the coin. A distorted view of what it means to be a man. But what if we flipped the coin? What if we embraced a broader, healthier version of masculinity?

The Divine Feminine and the Infernal Masculine—two sides of the same coin, two concepts shaped by societal norms and expectations. They're not representations of men and women, but caricatures, exaggerated sketches of gendered traits. It's high time we tore down these flawed archetypes and redefined what it means to be masculine or feminine, or at the very least, seek some sort of happy medium.

Balance—now there's a concept. But balance doesn't mean cloning the Infernal Masculine in female form. Rather, it's about embracing some of the traits that the Infernal Masculine embodies—the drive, the focus, the ability to remain logical under pressure.

Sure, there's a certain allure to the Divine Feminine's wild spontaneity, but a touch of the Infernal Masculine's disciplined structure can work wonders too. Call it yin and yang, light and shadow, divine and infernal—it's the blending of opposites that create a well-rounded individual.

Women harnessing the infernal can hone their focus, bolstering their ability to navigate the world with a clear head. They can cultivate resilience, standing firm when storms hit. They can refine their logical thinking, enhancing their problem-solving skills. It's not about sacrificing their femininity; it's about adding more tools to their arsenal.

And no, this isn't about embracing brutality or aggression. It's about adopting the positive aspects of the Infernal Masculine—the rationality, the determination, the ability to maintain focus amidst chaos. It's about balance, about becoming the best versions of themselves.

In the end, the Infernal Masculine is a cautionary tale as much as the Divine Feminine is, despite one being vilified and the other… well, not so much. It’s all a lesson in the dangers of rigid gender norms and toxic essentialism. The Infernal is a reminder that it's okay for men to express emotions, to show vulnerability. The Divine is the same for women, embracing the nature of order, focus and rationality. It's okay to break free from the chains of societal expectations and be one's true self.

After all, as the saying goes, "no man is an island."

And that includes the Infernal Masculine. Because at the end of the day, it's not about being divine or infernal—it's about being human.

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