Gunsoul: A Xianxia Apocalypse

The moon’s radiance crashed on Yuan’s Barrier and shredded it like paper.

A mighty wave of energy coming from the sky blew his poorly built defenses away and struck him in an instant. The moon’s rays were as cold as the sunlight was warm. It was like he was being buffeted by winter’s winds, except their chill ate away at his qi circulatory system rather than his flesh. His breath didn’t turn to mist when it escaped his lungs, but a sensation of frost and numbness coursed through the roots of Yuan’s bullet-core nonetheless. A great power subtler than the one coursing through the Thunderlands touched him, raw and alien.

The moonlight caressed his soul.

Yuan immediately created a new Barrier. Experiencing the moonlight first hand sharpened his understanding of it, so he attempted to keep it out with better boundaries. An octagonal protection arose from his bagua perimeter and held strong for a few seconds.

Then it collapsed like the first.

Yuan clenched his teeth as he furiously tried to figure out a solution. Moonlight used to be reflected sunlight in the days before the Blackmoon’s ascension. That was only half-true now. When Yuan adjusted a Barrier meant to repel the sun’s rays, which he understood well enough, the moon’s radiance continued to touch him. A stranger force changed it into something his mind struggled to understand.

What if Yuan blocked light? All forms of light? He had seen Arc pull it off, and though her Barrier shrank it still managed to cover her.

Yuan closed his eyes and focused on the flow of qi around him to better reshape it. He first tried to cover the entire bagua array, since he trusted Holster’s trigrams to help improve its solidity, but he failed to sustain the Barrier. The defensive perimeter collapsed before he could even complete it.

As expected, a Barrier that excluded something so pervasive and all-encompassing as light possessed both a narrow range and weak defenses. His next attempt only covered the yin-yang circle at the array’s center. Yuan reshaped the flow of qi rising from the nearby leyline along its edges.

Yuan immediately sensed the coldness receding. A circular space barely wide enough for his body to fit in protected and enveloped him in a shroud of thick darkness. When Yuan opened his eyes again, the universe had grown black.

Yet the moon continued to glare down at him.

Yuan realized he had failed, to his utter incomprehension. Light was what allowed the eye to see. No moonlight, no moon. Yet its eye remained visible above him, shining in a pitch-black expanse of thick darkness.

“How cute,” a familiar voice said on his left. “You think trash like you can keep the Dao out?”

Yuan’s head snapped to the side, his eyes catching a glimpse of a man peeking through the Barrier. His fanged mask stretched into a malevolent grin while its horns shed blood. His golden eyes peered at Yuan with the same cruel expression he bore before putting him in the ground.

Slash.

Yuan’s bullet-core began to pound in his skull so hard it hurt. The sight of his murderer grinning at him, his head so close that Yuan could feel his rancid breath on his face, filled him with panic and confusion.

Yuan instinctively shifted position, his foot flying at Slash’s face faster than a bullet. His nemesis easily dodged the blow with a laugh. Yuan’s inattention caused the Barrier around him to collapse into nothingness. The moonlight and starlight bathed him once more in their radiance, their rays barreling on his skin.

Yuan rose to his feet and immediately adopted a fighting stance, his attention entirely focused on his enemy. How did Slash get there without him noticing? The masked man stretched his legs in front of him without a care in the world on the bagua trigrams. If the moonburns affected him, he didn’t show it.

“Creating a Barrier to keep the Blackmoon out is like saying you’ll create one to keep quarks out, you witless trash,” Slash mocked him. “The Wayfinders are part of the Dao. They are everywhere.”

Something is wrong. All ofYuan’s senses told him that Slash stood in front of him–he could smell him for the Wayfinders’ sake—and his bullet-core pounded madly in his head, but he trusted his gut. His presence here doesn’t make sense.

Yuan’s eyes wandered to the spirit-train. Its windows had grown so black he couldn’t see the people inside, but Slash stood in the vehicle’s path. It would have been child’s play for Orient to run him over.

Why didn’t she then?

Because he’s not there, Yuan realized, a chill traveling down his spine. Slash had no reason to be there right now, and Yuan’s allies would have intervened if he were. Orient and Holster would have sent a warning had Yuan’s enemies sneaked up on him. He’s not real.

Yuan was already hallucinating.

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Impossible. Everyone knew that moonburns came from direct exposure to moonlight. Closed windows alone were enough to block out the effect. What did Yuan’s previous Barrier lack that glass did not? Was a mere glimpse of the moonlight enough to trigger the process?

Yuan quickly excluded that option. People caught in the moonlight could hope to save themselves by taking shelter inside. Only prolonged exposure caused moonburns.

If blocking the moonlight didn’t suffice, then what would?

“You know, I’m following the Path of the Dyad,” Slash’s illusion mumbled to himself. A katana appeared in his hands, its blade shining in the moonlight. “The dividing and the duality. The study of light and darkness, the separation between the self and the other. Master and servant, challenger and challenged, good and evil.”

Ignore him, Yuan told himself. This false Slash was a ploy, an illusion meant to distract him from the real danger. Can’t waste any time!

Yuan looked up at the moon’s eye. It studied him with such rapturous focus that Yuan finally caught on to his Barrier’s issue.

Wayfinders had become one with the Dao and imposed their hearts’ desire upon it. The Blackmoon’s rule was simple: everyone exposed to the moon’s gaze would have their inner truths revealed.

Yuan’s Barrier managed to reject light itself, but the moonlight wasn’t a vector through which the Blackmoon’s power traveled; it was one of its manifestations. A symptom of its attention.

It wasn’t the moonlight Yuan had to hide from, but the moon’s gaze. He had to create a Barrier that repelled its very concept and blocked the Blackmoon’s sight.

But how was he supposed to do that?

“Rivalries and divisions empower me in a way you can’t fathom yet.” Slash swung its false blade above Yuan’s head too fast for his eyes to follow. Yuan felt its edge caress his hair. The illusion was vividly realistic. “It’s why I go around picking fights, because my self defines itself in opposition to others.”

“Shut up,” Yuan ordered as he focused on the moon. He needed to understand it if he hoped to survive the next few hours. “You’re a hallucination. Not real.”

“You’re sure about that, trash?” Slash smirked ear to ear, his katana whistling as it moved. “Can hallucinations do this?”

He struck Yuan in the chest, his blade impaling him from one side and sticking out of the other.

Yuan gasped in shock and surprise. The pain was intense, sharp, and above all, real. He sensed a metal edge cut through the bullet roots coursing through his veins, followed by a surge of fire erupting within his flesh. Smoking red blisters formed around his wound.

Burns.

Moonburns.

“See?” The illusion taunted Yuan before viciously twisting the blade in the wound. “I’m real enough to kill you.”

Yuan grabbed the sword with his hands in an attempt to remove it. His hands burned at the metal’s contact, though he managed to force it out of his chest a little. The blade had weight and texture. The moonburns made it real.

Slash held his katana with both hands, then lifted Yuan up with it. Yuan’s thought process came to an abrupt halt as his feet dangled up in the air. Slash hurled him across the bagua array before he could react. Yuan landed face-first on a bed of petals and dirt, utterly shocked.

“You’re seriously deranged, trash,” the fake Slash taunted him. “You’ll throw your half-life away because some senile has-been told you so?”

Yuan gritted his teeth and focused on the flow of earthly qi. His senses told him that he had indeed landed outside the bagua array.

I moved. I actually moved. Either Slash’s illusion could throw him around like ragdoll, or Yuan’s mind was so far gone already that it compelled his body to shift position on its own. This is bad…

If this illusion could wound Yuan, then it could kill him.

Yuan rushed to his feet, his mind furiously trying to figure out a way out of this situation. His mentor’s instructions echoed in his mind. If Arc ordered him to complete the trial using only feng shui and sutras, then he either didn’t need techniques to prevail… or they wouldn’t do anything to help.

I can’t kill someone who doesn’t exist, Yuan realized. Slash lazily walked up to him with smug confidence. Either I find a way to block the moonburns or he’ll finish me off at his leisure.

Yuan began to cycle the lunar qi around him, embracing the moonlight and basking in its energies. He understood the risks, but he couldn’t create an effective Barrier against something he didn’t understand.

The lunar qi was quite different from the one surging from the earth: cold, evanescent, and difficult to grasp. Yuan felt like a man trying to shape an icy mist.

“Are you ignoring me right now? That’s quite insulting.” Slash shook his head with a look of absolute condescension. “I guess I’ll have to shorten your half-life then.”

He lunged at Yuan in a fearsome blur of speed, his blade aiming to kill.

Yuan’s reflexes barely let him step back to avoid a fatal blow. The illusory sword sliced across his chest with inhuman speed and cut all the way to the ribs. Fire seared Yuan’s flesh, his teeth gritting to suppress the pain. Slash would have cut him in half had he been a second slower.

“Is the pain really worth it?” The illusion taunted him. “Isn’t it enough that you survived getting shot in the head once and came back with powers?”

The fake Slash immediately continued his assault, his katana singing as its steel cut through the air. Yuan was forced on the defensive. He sidestepped and dodged, his enemy’s blade coming within an inch of slicing his throat more than once. The danger ahead of him moved too fast for him to focus on the ambient qi.

“Normal people in your situation don’t hunt down their murderers across the wasteland begging for a second round of gun roulette,” Slash taunted him in between swings. “They’re too busy celebrating being alive!”

Yuan gritted his teeth and backflipped in a vain attempt to put some distance between the mirage and himself. It did him little good. The false Slash closed the gap between them in an instant, his blade grazing the surface of Yuan’s stomach.

“The truth is, you’re sick in the head, Scrap trash. You’re a deviant who gets off on the idea of killing cultivators.” Another swing of his sword left a trail of burns across Yuan’s chest. “Murdering that oni, Toshiro was it? I’m sure blasting his head off gave you a boner bigger than my katana.”

“You killed Jaw-Long and Mingxia,” Yuan rasped angrily. If he denied the hallucination, maybe he could break its hold on his mind. “Can’t let you get away with it!”

“Come on, you don’t care about Jaw-Long and Mingxia. One of them was an idiot and the other a whore. They were just Scraps, both of them.”

Yuan’s hands clenched into fists. “Shut up!”

“If you’d cared about either of them…” Slash cackled cruelly. “They would be the ones showing up instead of me.”

The illusion’s words jolted Yuan worse than the rad-hag’s lightning. They were lies, he knew it, but somehow they managed to latch onto his soul. His hesitation was rewarded with another blow deadlier than the others.

Slash’s katana impaled him through the heart in a flash of fire.