The second harvest ca three months after the fisherman's transformation. She was a woman nad Chen Wei, a retired schoolteacher from a small city in Zhejiang province. Her life had been one of quiet, persistent virtue—she had taken in orphaned children, fed the hungry from her own ager table, and spent her evenings reading to the blind in a local nursing ho. Nicholas had guided her subtly, nudging her toward opportunities for good deeds, amplifying the voice of her conscience when it whispered that she could do more.
She died at seventy-four, in her sleep, her hand resting on a stack of letters from children she had helped raise.
Nicholas, hidden in the deepest folds of her soul, felt the familiar pull of the channel opening beneath her. Where the fisherman's journey had been swift and direct, Chen Wei's was different. The channel was wider, brighter, as if her accumulated rit had paved a smoother path. She erged not in the modest reception hall of a city of the dead, but in the sa grand granite chamber where Qinguangwang held court.
The Yama King sat upon his throne, five ters of silent judgnt, his green eyes burning like distant stars. The green flas in their braziers flickered as Chen Wei's soul materialized before him.
"Chen Wei," Qinguangwang intoned, his voice the grinding of tectonic plates. "You have lived a virtuous life. Your rits are substantial. By the law of the Six Realms, you are granted reincarnation into the Deva Realm, where you shall be born among the immortals and gods. All mories of this life will be washed away, and you shall beco anew."
Chen Wei's soul pulsed, half in fear, half in confusion.
The Yama King's green eyes flickered. "But there is another path," he said, his voice carefully neutral. "Your rits are sufficient to purchase a position in the Netherworld hierarchy. You may serve as a ssenger, a guide for the newly dead, a caretaker of souls. In exchange, your accumulated rit will be... spent. You will dwell here as a Ghost Immortal, your mories intact, your self preserved."
Chen Wei's soul pulsed again, but with suspicion now, not curiosity. She had been a teacher for forty years. She had seen administrators make promises they did not keep, offer positions that were less than they seed. She had learned to ask questions.
"What would this position entail?" she asked. "What would my duties be? What authority would I have? Who would I answer to?"
Qinguangwang's expression did not change—his granite face was not capable of change—but sothing in his posture shifted. "You would serve under a supervisor. Your duties would include guiding souls, maintaining order, and, when necessary, pursuing cultivators who resist the wheel. You would be granted a chain of authority, allowing you to bind souls lower than yourself in the hierarchy."
"And I would be the lowest," Chen Wei said. It was not a question.
The Yama King did not answer. His silence was answer enough.
"I see." Chen Wei's soul pulsed with sothing that might have been dry amusent. "You want my rits—all of them—in exchange for a position at the bottom of the ladder. A position where I would spend eternity taking orders from beings who have more rits, better connections, or simply longer service. That is not a gift. That is a transaction. And not a particularly fair one."
The green flas in the braziers flickered. Qinguangwang's eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly.
"You would refuse the offer of a Yama King?" His voice carried a weight now, a pressure that made the air in the chamber grow heavy.
"I would," Chen Wei said. "I choose reincarnation. If I am to lose myself either way, let lose myself in the Deva Realm, among gods and immortals. Perhaps, in that life, I will rember sothing of this one. Perhaps I will find my way back to myself. But I will not trade my hard-earned rits for a position of servitude, no matter how eternal."
The Yama King showed no emotion. His green eyes remained steady, his granite face unchanging. He simply raised his hand, and a suction force enveloped Chen Wei's soul—not violent, not painful, but absolute. The channel opened beneath her, and she was pulled downward, toward the wheel that turned in the eternal sky.
Nicholas was surprised, he had expected that the Yama king would tell her that she could stay in the cities of the dead as all other souls, but it appread that souls with rit as well as those with karma were forced to reincarnate weather they wanted to or not. Intresting.
He had anticipated the possibility that she would want to reincarnate and he had thought of plans on how to secure his own existence in the cycle of reincarnation.
In the monts before the suction took her, he splintered the fragnt hidden in her soul. Again and again and again, he divided it, each fragnt smaller than the last, until they were so tiny that they were indistinguishable from the individual motes of energy that composed her soul's essence. They scattered through her being like dust in sunlight, indivisible from her own substance, impossible to detect.
The suction pulled her down, and Nicholas's scattered fragnts went with her.
---
The journey was different this ti.
Where the boy's soul had drifted uncertainly through darkness, Chen Wei's soul was yanked with purpose toward the wheel. Nicholas could see it now—the vast circle that filled the sky, its six openings decorated with images of gods and humans, of beasts and hungry ghosts, of hells and titans. The wheel turned slowly, inexorably, and as they approached, Nicholas felt the weight of its authority pressing against him.
It was imnse. Larger than any god he had encountered. Larger in essence than the Yama Kings, perhaps larger than most of the immortals, definitely larger than almost all of the western gods, except perhaps himself and his Attendants. It was the wheel of samsara, the engine of reincarnation, the chanism that had been turning souls through lifetis.
And it was about to process Chen Wei's soul.
She did not weep. She was too stubborn for weeping, too practical. But Nicholas could feel her fear—a cold, quiet terror at the thought of losing herself, of becoming soone else, of having everything she had been stripped away and replaced with sothing new.
"So this is it," she whispered, her voice thin but steady. "I cease to exist."
The wheel did not answer. It turned.
As it turned, Nicholas felt a spinning sensation—as if her soul was being twisted in a centrifugal force, pressed and pulled and kneaded like dough. He watched through his scattered fragnts as pieces of her essence began to separate, to flake away, to be cleaned.
Her mories went first. The face of her mother, faded to a blur. The sound of her father's laugh, silenced. The children she had raised, the students she had taught, the old n and won she had read to in the nursing ho—all of it dissolved, scattered into the void like ash on the wind.
Her personality followed. The sharp suspicion that had seen through the Yama King's offer. The stubborn courage that had made her choose reincarnation over servitude. The quiet compassion that had driven her to a lifeti of good deeds. One by one, these qualities were stripped away, leaving only the bare essence of what she had been.
Her thoughts began to disappear. Not all at once, but one by one, like candles being snuffed out. She stopped wondering where she was going. She stopped regretting her choice. She stopped thinking at all.
Nicholas watched all of this with clinical detachnt, trying very hard to both morize and feel how the wheel accomplished this feat, it would be interesting to see if he could try to implent this process for his own afterlife. Currently the shores of the unseen were vast beyond comprehension but even they would eventually be filled to capacity with new souls, not anyti soon but evenetually. His authority and the level of his souls essence shielded him from the wheel's influence—the foreign authority that stripped mories and thoughts could not touch him. He was immune, an observer in a process that could not affect him.
But he felt sothing else. Sothing beneath the stripping, beneath the cleaning. The wheel was not rely destroying. It was preparing. It was taking the raw material of Chen Wei's soul—the essence that remained after mories and personality and thoughts had been removed—and shaping it for rebirth.
The hole on the wheel's face opened. It was the first opening, the one decorated with images of immortals riding clouds and celestial palaces heavy with fruit. The Deva Realm.
A golden swirling vortex appeared within the opening, and Chen Wei's soul—what remained of it—was pulled through.
---
The next thing Nicholas sensed was a body.
He was shoved into it—not gently, not gradually, but with the sudden violence of a soul being forced into a vessel that had been prepared for its arrival. The body was human, or at least it appeared to be. A woman, pregnant, her belly swollen with new life. The soul settled into the fetus, and Nicholas's scattered fragnts settled with it.
But this was not an ordinary body.
The woman—the mother—glowed. Not taphorically. Literally. Her entire form was suffused with Qi, that mysterious energy that Nicholas had observed in spirit beasts and cultivators. It flowed through her veins like light through water, collected in her organs like pools of liquid starlight, radiated from her skin in waves that made the air around her shimr.
She was a living Qi battery. A vessel of such concentrated spiritual energy that Nicholas could scarcely believe she was mortal, her soul on the brink of ascension.
And then the energy began to move.
It escaped her body in the form of smoky tendrils, twisting and swirling around her like mist on a mountain lake. The tendrils were beautiful—iridescent, shifting through colors that had no nas, leaving trails of light that lingered in the air before fading. They swirled around her torso, her arms, her head, before being reabsorbed into her body through her skin, her breath, her very presence.
It was strangely srizing. A dance of energy that had no purpose except to exist, to flow, to be.
Nicholas watched, hidden in the soul of the unborn child, and understood.
He had made it. He finally found an Immortal Grotto Heaven. Not as an observer, not as a ssenger, but as a participant. A soul about to be born into a body that glowed with Qi, into a family that had spiritual roots, into a place where cultivation was finally easy to find and spy on.
The wheel had turned. The seed had been planted.
Now, he only had to wait for it to grow.
To be continued...
------------------------------------------------
Enjoying the story?
If you want to read up to 5 chapters in advance, you can join over at p.a.t.r.e.o.n/AtanorWrites
User Comments
0 comments from readers