Gunsoul: A Xianxia Apocalypse

The marauders had robbed Yuan of everything: his friends, his package, his car, and even his handgun. That last one felt like the pill on top of a humongous pile of shit.

His killers had thoroughly searched his cold dead corpse, though they had enough decency to bury him with his shirt and pants instead of stripping him naked. Yuan might as well be. He had no money, no weapons, no supplies, and no means of transportation. A death sentence in the wasteland.

Revolver sensed his distress. “Those who buried you stole your iron.”

“They took everything,” Yuan replied with bitter hatred. A quick glance at the spots where the marauders hastily buried his murdered friends filled him with anger. “And they’ll pay dearly for it. I swear to the Wayfinders.”

“That’s the spirit.” Revolver searched one of his duster’s pockets, grabbed one of his namesake weapons, and tossed it at Yuan alongside its holster. “Here, take this. I stole that one from some bandit a while ago… I think.”

The revolver was fully loaded, with six bullets already inside its round cylinder. Small caliber, .38. Yuan would have to make each of them count. He did swear to put three of them in Slash’s head.

Killing them would prove troublesome. Slash shrugged off his bullets and he had a large warband at his disposal. Even after awakening as a cultivator, Yuan had only reached the First Coil. He would need intense training, allies, and firepower to tip the balance in his favor.

Yuan banished these thoughts from his mind. Before he could consider how to kill Slash and his cohorts, he would have to find them first.

At least he had a vague idea of where to look. The traces of Slash’s convoy pointed westward. A group of a dozen or so humvees wasn’t particularly subtle. Yuan would just have to follow their trail on the road.

“I’m on my way to Gatesville,” Revolver said. “You can come with me if you want. Seems that your killers are headed this way.”

“Gatesville?” Yuan quickly recalled the name. “That’s a small frontier settlement, right? So small it doesn’t even have a sect.”

“So I’ve heard.” Revolver tipped his hat at Yuan. “You’re well-informed, traveler.”

“My team and I were supposed to make a stop there to refuel.” Saying the word ‘team’ left a bitter aftertaste in Yuan’s mouth, but he didn’t forget to thank Revolver for his gift. “The name’s Yuan by the way,” he said after attaching his new gun and its holster to his waist. “I’m grateful for the weapon, and for the ride.”

“Don’t mention it. We Gunsouls have to help each other reload now and then.” Revolver chuckled to himself. Yuan was polite enough to smile, though he didn’t find the pun particularly funny. “Climb on, buddy. I’ll show you the ropes.”

Yuan hesitated. He couldn’t help but glance at his friends’ tombs, his hand brushing against the bullet keeping him alive. If a shot to the head was all it took to transcend death…

“If I shoot corpses…” Yuan muttered to himself. “Would they rise back up?”

Revolver shook his head with a sigh of sympathy. “Sorry, bud. If someone wished your pals to rise again, either as ghosts or Gunsouls, they would have awoken by now. They’re gone.”

Yuan assumed as much. He had filled quite a few graves himself and never saw one of his victims arise as a Gunsoul to take revenge. Yuan was a special case, for better and worse.

With no other choice nor reason to stay any further, Yuan offered one last prayer to his departed friends and then climbed on Revolver’s motorcycle. It pained him to leave Jaw-Long and Mingxia behind in the middle of nowhere, but the best he could do was to avenge them.

Revolver’s bike woke up with a roar of its engine. Its flaming wheels left a blazing path of crimson flames in their wake. Yuan had to hold on to his savior’s chest so as not to be thrown overboard by the sudden burst of speed. Mingxia and Jaw-Long’s tombs vanished behind them in an instant, replaced by the light of rising dawn.

The landscape ahead proved beautiful in its desolation. A vast desert of salt and sand stretched as far as Yuan’s eyes could see, with naught but a half-buried road of fossilized asphalt crossing it. The light reflecting on the shifting dunes made it difficult to see too far ahead. The presence of golden auroras and the soft sound of spirit lightning belied the presence of the Thunderlands somewhere close.

Gatesville shouldn’t be more than an hour away from what Yuan remembered. Thankfully, they would reach it long before night. It had become a time of terror since the Blackmoon’s ascension decades ago.

“So what’s your story, Yuan?” Revolver asked, trying to make small talk. “Are you an adventurer in search of blood and fortune?”

“I’m just a courier,” Yuan replied humbly, the warm wind of the wasteland blowing on his face. “I was supposed to deliver my package to a place called Fleshmarket, but that won’t be possible anymore. My killers stole the cargo.”

“Fleshmarket? That slavers’ den?” Revolver let out a dismissive grunt. “Your stolen package wouldn’t happen to be people, I hope? If so, you should crawl back into your ditch.”

Yuan shook his head. Slaves were one of the few types of cargo his team unanimously refused to transport. “We were supposed to deliver some kind of qi artifact; a cube with eyes.”

His answer reassured Revolver. “Good for you. I would have put another hole in your head otherwise.”

“You had a bad run with slavers?” Yuan guessed.

“Who do you think put me in the ground?” Revolver shrugged his shoulders. “Fleshmarket is one of those places begging me to grab my iron and pump it full of lead. The world might be Unmade, but we can’t remake it without taking out the trash first.”

Personally, Yuan didn’t have any lofty goals of rebuilding ancient civilizations. Living to see tomorrow had already been hard enough; something he already failed to do once and now had to take another shot at. The Lost Age that preceded the Thunderdance died long before Yuan was born, so he had never learned to mourn it.

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Something about Revolver’s words did pique his interest though. Fleshmarket was under the Flesh Mansion Sect’s control according to Yuan’s information; one of the largest and most powerful groups on the Fanged Coast. Yet Revolver sounded confident he could take on the town and survive the experience. That implied a great deal of firepower.

“How many Coils have you unlocked?” Yuan asked Revolver.

“Can’t you tell?” Revolver looked over his shoulder. “I’m on my fourth, pushing the fifth.”

“The fourth?” Yuan didn’t hide his surprise. Reaching the Fourth Coil of Infinity involved dedicating oneself to a Path or creating their own; sacrificing the chaos of versatility for a unique discipline and innate techniques. Few among the Stoneskin Sect had reached that stage at all. “That’s impressive.”

“You make me blush. You’ll reach it too if you work hard enough.” Revolver focused back on the road. “Activating your core means that you have passed through the First Coil, so you should be able to sense qi now. Close your eyes and focus.”

Yuan followed his advice. It didn’t take him long to achieve a meditative state. He had practiced similar exercises for years back when he thought that he could awaken his core naturally.

Yuan gathered his breath, and for the first time in his life he began to see.

He sensed the flow of air entering his lungs and flowing into his beating bullet-core, only to be expelled as gunsmoke warming his veins. He recalled the words of the Stoneskins Elders to their students.

Qi is everywhere. Qi is the breath that opens the way. Qi is the holy flow that paves the Way.

There was nothing holy about Yuan’s qi.

The energy he took from the world passed into his bullet-core the way an engine consumed fuel to produce heat and smoke. The external qi that entered Yuan’s flesh was pure air charged with power; the one that his bullet pumped into his veins carried the smell of gunpowder and the texture of lead. Molten iron flowed into his veins. The flow extended beyond his body’s limits and reached all the way to the gun that Revolver gave him earlier, coiling around its cylinder and watering its bullets like seeds of death.

How could something so good feel so wrong? For the first time in his two lives, Yuan caressed the Axiom of the universe; he touched the flow of power that belied all of existence, inhaled it, recycled it. He should have achieved a state of peace and harmony with the universe. Instead, his bullet-core roared with an engine’s hunger for more fuel to burn.

Yuan felt unnatural.

A primal instinct inside of him told him that things were not as they should. That the power keeping him alive was never meant to exist, yet did so nonetheless.

Who cares? Yuan brushed off that awful feeling and focused on cycling qi into his body, as he dreamed of doing for so many years. The spiritual flow reached his closed eyes and opened them from the inside. This is my life now.

Revolver’s outline appeared to Yuan in the darkness of his eyelids; not as a man in a duster, but a skeletal shadow of gunpowder spirit-smoke raging with the sound of whirling cylinders and gunfire. His gaunt appearance was but a flesh disguise for a battle-hardened soul tempered in a bullet hell’s flames. It felt downright oppressive, like facing a thunderstorm.

This man was strong.

The motorcycle’s aura paled before that of its rider, but Yuan sensed a presence within its metal frame; a being of ephemeral fire filling its motors with its will and power. A flaming spirit had taken hold of it, possessing its engines and fueling its blazing wheels.

No wonder Revolver seemed so casual on the road. His power cruiser drove itself.

“Now you truly see me,” Revolver congratulated him once Yuan opened his eyelids. “What do you know about cultivation?”

“The basics,” Yuan replied with a little bit of shame in his voice. Even after gaining a core—albeit an unusual one—he still felt like a Scrap. “I worked for a sect once.”

“Forget everything they’ve taught you,” Revolver said brusquely. “We Gunsouls are anomalies. Most cultivators cycle their qi through one of their three dantian cores; the stomach, the heart, and the brain. We only have one to worry about.”

“The bullet?” Yuan guessed.

“Exactly. That bullet is the source of your half-life. Your new heart and the seat of your soul. Cherish and protect it.” Revolver peeked over his shoulder. “You must have noticed another detail too.”

“The gun that you gave me feels like an extension of my body,” Yuan noted. Which wasn’t the case for his clothes. “My qi flowed through it alongside my flesh.”

“You are a child of the Gun. We can charge firearms with our qi to strengthen the projectiles.”

A dark thought crossed Yuan’s mind. “Enough to pierce through a Third Coil’s skin?”

“You catch on quickly.” Revolver let out a dark chuckle. “Let me show you.”

A small revolver appeared in the man’s hand, so fast Yuan couldn’t tell whether it had been conjured out of thin air or taken from a pocket. Revolver pointed his weapon at a dune to their left without stopping. Yuan focused on the weapon and watched the qi move from the gunner’s hand to the gun itself.

The revolver whirred like roaring thunder, and its bullet hit the dune with a missile’s strength.

Yuan gasped in shock at the sight of tons of salt and sand erupting in an instant. The projectile raised a whirlwind in its path, cutting through the dune and then the next. Neither the wind nor other obstacles could slow down its advance. It blazed across the landscape like a comet and left naught but dust in its wake.

Revolver lowered his weapon while laughing at Yuan’s reaction. “Pretty good, am I right?”

“Incredible…” Yuan whispered, unable to suppress his enthusiasm. His hand instinctively reached for his new weapon. Only the idea of wasting good bullets stopped him from firing one of his own. “Was that a technique?!”

“If you consider spitting or shitting a technique. Do you teach a snake how to produce its venom?” Revolver chuckled. “That’s just something we do. Gun techniques are much more grandiose.”

“I’ve never seen any cultivator do that,” Yuan muttered to himself. He felt like a scroll-hunter who happened to stumble on an ancient, undiscovered treasure. “What is that Gun anyway? A Wayfinder?”

“The Gun is the spirit of vengeance and firearms,” Revolver explained. “The demigod of ultraviolence and apostle of gunplay.”

Yuan scoffed. “That doesn’t explain much.”

“Beats me, I don’t know much more either. Maybe it used to be a gun that killed so many people that it became a spirit-machine of immense power. Maybe it was a man once. Maybe it’s an ancient murder demon taking a modern shape.” Revolver shrugged his shoulders. “Where the Gun comes from doesn’t matter. What matters is that it exists, and sometimes those who die by the gun are raised by the Gun. That’s all there is to it.”

Yuan believed otherwise. He recalled the words the creature told him upon raising him from the dead. “It asked me to kill it.”

“Me too,” Revolver replied. “All the Gunsouls I’ve encountered said the same.”

“Why?” Yuan asked with a frown. “Does it want to die?”

It seemed strange to him that an entity powerful enough to raise someone like him from the dead couldn’t simply blow its brains out; if it had any. Perhaps it was bound by magical restrictions?

Yuan was in no hurry to track down that monster, even if he felt grateful enough for the free resurrection. He would like to pay back that debt somehow, but he needed to learn more first.

“How the hell should I know? I ain’t mad enough to pick a fight with the creature who brought me back! Whoever was crazy enough to try has failed miserably.” Revolver hid his weapon back inside his duster. “Although…”

Revolver briefly fell into a deep, thoughtful silence. His hands tightly gripped his power cruiser’s handlebars and his spine stiffened. Yuan knew that posture well: that of a man trying not to think about something bothersome.

“Although?” Yuan probed further.

“Somebody told me once that the fate of all Gunsouls is to either kill the Gun… or to be killed by it.” Revolver looked at the horizon and avoided Yuan’s own gaze. “Do what you must while you still can. Your mercy lead won’t last forever.”