Chapter 70: Chapter 68: The Bamboo Eater Sage’s Book

He had followed them, standing behind Liu Xie's tall form quietly while he watched Bo.

Bo was staring at everything silently. There was no expression on his face or eyes. His arms were folded. "Boss?" He asked in a quiet voice.

"Yes?"

"...People come in here to die, right?" He said, his eyes falling upon the pearls. "...Those are people. Why, why does this place exist?"

"People grow weary," Rui Yifu spoke up, his hands folded into his sleeves. "Our physical bodies may die but our souls don't move on. We've become stuck in a cycle of conscious rebirth. When the heavens waged war on us, they punished us by separating us from the source of new life. So our ancestors took to taking the souls of humans. The unwanted. The abandoned. But they did not know that reusing the same soul over and over and over would lead to despair." As Rui Yifu spoke, he noticed a deep thoughtful frown appearing on Liu Xie. He wondered what sort of stories he had heard.

"I don't get it," Bo said. He wasn't talking to any of them, Rui Yifu thought, watching as the gaze in Bo's eyes seemed to fix on something only he could see.

"Imagine that you went to sleep and woke up as an infant," Liu Xie explained. "You still think like an adult, you know yourself as an adult, but you're a helpless infant."

Bo's expression changed, his eyes widening. "Oh... this... I don't know, I don't remember anything like this in my village..."

"Some of us live on the surface, they were probably planning to send your soul to-"

"Where does... where do the souls go here? Is it down to that light below?"

Rui Yifu nodded. "They get melted down here and pour out down to that light below. Eventually, it'll condense into a single soul. Right now it's just a very large amorphous mass."

"Burning brightly with thousands of tired souls," Liu Xie muttered, "all of which are still conscious."

"Yes," Rui Yifu's shoulders sagged. Part of him wanted to jump onto the coral bed himself and die. But the weight of the sword at his side reminded him that he still had things to do before death. Then he turned away from the beds and the thoughts faded away, as though only bidden by the sight of the coral itself. "I wonder, since you're the only immortal who handles the White Flame, are you more aware of those souls?"

"In a way," Liu Xie scratched his neck, "this city still feels 'alive', but there's nobody really here. It's strange though-"

"Rui," Bo walked over to him, his face was somewhat pale. "Where do the pearls come from?"

"We get them from dragons," Rui Yifu answered frankly. "They call us cousins and helped hide us from the heavens initially-" he noticed Liu Xie's eyebrows raise but continued on, "when a human dies their soul can be captured from the body in a pearl, which is then given to an infant. Then the soul just gets passed on."

"So, that's what... that's what my family was going to do to me?" The young man's face grew paler.

Rui Yifu realized what Bo was thinking. "If they were on the surface and you didn't know what they were, they weren't going to kill you. You would have lived and died a mud dwelling little peasant and then would have become a Fish Person with only dim memories of your first life, if any at all." He was lying. He knew nothing of Bo's village, but it made the most sense to him and it seemed to ease the terror on Bo's face. Rui Yifu told himself he did not want to deal with another person going through some sort of nervous collapse. Li Baobao was enough. He briefly wondered why Li Baobao was even still following, some sense of duty perhaps? He turned around and quickly left the house of rest, going past Ji Ying and Li and hearing the sounds of Liu Xie and Bo following. "The library and gates are not much farther from here," he explained.

The streets of the tier were at one point brightly lit places, with painted buildings and merchant stalls. He could still see the indentations on the floor from where old stalls would have stood, or decorations outside of houses. Like the hungry creatures on a whale's carcass, so much had been picked clean. As they went down a winding road he glanced into the empty windows, catching hints of furniture of sea rock, or a table where paper flowers still sat, their color long vanished.

Yet the coral lanterns still blazed their familiar light, illuminating the lonely halls. The emptiness was highlighted, rather than dispelled. As people came to shed life and being, their spiritual remains collected and became light for the decaying streets. Rui Yifu looked down at his own hands, the skin had smoothed out again but the flesh still clung tightly to the bone.

His body was not meant to last so long, after all. He was not an 'immortal' like Gu, Song, or Liu Xie.

But neither was Wang Huaqing, who mocked it all by feeding on those who trusted him.

He stopped in his walk, looking around and taking a deep breath to calm the twisting feeling in his chest. The street opened into a small round plaza that a tall statue made of a ostentatiously large chunk of mutton fat jade stood, with two more streets zig-zagging off into abyssal looking rooms with distant watery walls that caught the light of the coral lanterns in unusual ways, while a third street went down a short distance into a large building that had decorations at some point, but everything had been ripped away to leave behind the bare wall with deep gouges. The scent of bamboo and paper drifted from it. "There," he muttered. A bit of lift appeared in his heart. "The library."

"What a disgusting statue," Liu Xie's lip was curled with naked disdain, looking up at the gently sneering face of the Jade Prince. "I thought Fish People did not like the heavens?"

"We have an uneasy relationship with the Temperamental Lord of Water," Rui Yifu placed his hands on his hips as he looked at the statue. "The face was badly made I think, he's supposed to be much nicer looking." He looked over at Liu Xie who was still staring up at the statue with a nasty expression on his face. Rui Yifu felt he preferred Liu Xie's face when it was stuck in a sheer apathetic state, it seemed more natural than the sneer on his face at the moment. The sneer almost matched the one on the sculpted Jade Prince.

"What a gloomy place," Ji Ying loudly opined, breaking Rui Yifu's train of thought.

"Nobody asked you to come!" Bo snarled.

"I already told you, Lady Gu asked me to come," Ji Ying returned, "you're both forgetful and stupid!"

"Sto-stop..." Li Baobao begged. "Liu Xie, do something."

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"Stop. Do not." Liu Xie sounded resigned. "Rui, what book are you trying to get?"

"Why do you need a book! The gates are over in that weird watery room right? Lets go and lets save-lets save that little girl Lady Gu said was just soooooo important!" Ji Ying was pointing to the two streets, waving dramatically like his eyesight was based on motion.

He turned his gaze to Liu Xie, "it's called the Bamboo Eater Sage's Annal of the Fortieth Year," he answered. "There was a trend of using odd pseudonyms at the time," he added at the confused look on the other man's face. Rui Yifu then quickly sprinted off to the library, not even listening to the next insult thrown at him by Ji Ying.

The doors were already open. The doors to libraries were always open, and inside were shelves upon shelves of all sorts of written works. Silky looking lanterns that resembled jellyfish bobbled up and down, casting a gentle glow across the library so that no pool of shadow remained. Compared to the bleak city, the library was positively friendly and charming. There were notes on the shelves, like the words of ghosts, some ruined by time, while others looked fairly recent enough that dust had only just started to settle on them.

'Apologies to anyone who wants Three Songs of the Purple Lake, I spilled tea on it and had to repair it myself.'

'The Annotated Advice of the Bridgewater Sage Is Currently Unavailable, Please Return It!'

'If you are looking for History of Pottery in the Second Intermediate Dynasty we have moved them for safekeeping.'

'Stop giving the humans the books! They never return them!'

His fingers traced bindings, stone and wooden tablets, bamboo slips, all carefully arranged and labeled by long gone hands. His eyes swept over dozens of different books of all manner of subjects before he eyed the binding of the book he desired. He quickly snatched it from the shelf once he was sure the title was correct and began running out of the library, his pace arrested by something crunching underfoot and he found the ground suddenly slapping him the face.

Rui Yifu grunted in pain, covering his nose and curling up on the ground for a moment as the sharp pain pierced through his head. He forced himself to sit up, keeping his nose covered with one hand and using the other to grab the book he had dropped on the floor. His foot shifted against something sticky on the floor and he pulled it away with a frustrated snarl. Beneath his shoe was the crumpled remains of a thick dewy white flower. What was a flower doing growing in an empty city beneath the water? He thought, before his mind caught up to his confusion. "A moon flower," he whispered, his heart sinking.

Had the seed been carried in on accident? But there was no soil for it to grow in. What was it living off of?

"Rui!?" Bo's voice echoed in the library.

He stood back up, clutching the book and as a shadow passed overhead. He started running, speeding towards the entrance of the library where Bo lingered and grabbing him by the arm as he ran. "We need to leave!" He yelled, running into the plaza.

"What's wrong?" Liu Xie was a blur as Rui Yifu ran past him.

"The flowers! There's one here too so-"

A deep wet bellow echoed, like the pained call of a dying whale in the abyss. It thundered down the empty streets and rattled bones. There was a crashing sound distantly behind him from the library and Rui Yifu released Bo's hand to run even faster. Past the plaza he moved up onto one of the streets that divided and stretched outwards like fingers in the night, hovering above water, illuminated only by the soft glowing arcs that each one terminated at. He glanced over his shoulder to find Liu Xie right behind him, Ji Ying only a few feet behind, with Bo carrying Li Baobao on his back.

Behind them was a canine-looking creature, its long snout open with sharp teeth as its pearl studded flesh wriggled atop its bones, not far behind that creature was a pack of similar things, rapidly gaining on Bo and Li.

"Dammit!" Ji Ying stopped in her stride, turning on her heel as she pulled an arrow from her quiver and lifted her bow. "Damn both of you FOR MAKING ME WASTE AN ARROW!" Her screech echoed throughout the abyssal room and Rui Yifu paused in his own step to watch as an amber streak of light shot through the darkness, zipping narrowly pass Bo's face to strike one of the creatures in it's open mouth. Amber flames burst from its body as it let out a human-sounding scream, toppling over and catching its packmates in its wake.

Bo, red in the face, seemed to find a new vigor in his bones as he ran faster with the limp Li barely hanging onto him. Rui Yifu returned to his own sprint, pointing to one arc, "there! We're going there!"

"Where!?" Bo wheezed.

Rui Yifu did not answer, leaping into the arc and feeling blessed cool water embrace him. Like the arms of a worried mother, the torrent surrounded him. If they saw him change through the bubbles and swirling tide he did not care, snaking through the water as quick as he could while it carried him upwards. After so long, he was himself again, however brief it was. It sent a jolt through his degenerating body, as though simply returning to his shape had been enough to wipe away years of feasting on scum.

The light of a cold sky broke the surging water and he pulled himself half out of the water and onto a muddy riverbank, laughing exuberantly as warmth poured out from his neck. He wrapped his hands around his bleeding scars, bright eyed and gazing into a blue sky.

There was loud splashing and gasping, encouraging Rui Yifu to sit up and see Bo and Li Baobao partially sprawled out on the riverbank with their legs stuck in the water, Ji Ying on her knees violently vomiting water, and Liu Xie standing ankle deep in the river while squeezing water out from his long hair. To Rui Yifu's satisfaction, the book had also made it safely, having been expelled from the river and onto the first bit of dry land.

"You... you didn't say we'd go into the water," Bo's chest was rising and falling rapidly. "Is this what a fish feels like when it's going over a waterfall?" He rolled over onto his stomach, grabbing the wheezing Li Baobao's hand and pulling him upwards with him. "I-it's cold! We're gonna freeze, c'mon..."

"If I throw you back in, will you become a dragon?" Liu Xie asked, walking over to Rui Yifu and kicking some of the water onto him. "Your neck is bleeding, Rui."

"Thanks," Rui replied, sitting up. "If I remember correctly, finding Lang Lang had always been difficult. He uses maze curses, so don't leave the river yet-?"

Bo, Li Baobao, and Ji Ying were all gone.

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