-=[Celes Rada]=-

Geisha Celes Rada stared at her face in the crystalline, gold-plated mirror. She noticed the deepening circles under her gold eyes and realized that her time in the world of the living was nearly at an end.

The thunderous snore emanating from behind her reminded her of the fact that she was a prisoner of the Gold City and property of the Boundless Chorus cult. With every passing year, the invisible shackles around her neck were becoming tighter.

The Gold City, for all of its prosperity and wealth, wasn’t the paradise she had imagined it to be. Coming here thinking that things were better elsewhere... was a mistake.

It was just like the other god-administered cities. Beneath the shiny veneer of gold-plated roofs of imposing compound temples, there was corruption and rot that changed people, driving them towards vile deeds on a quest for absolute power.

Contrary to what most people believed, being a geisha wasn’t a cushy job. She touched her chest and felt the deepening ache within it. The divine-song-art she had been taught was slowly wearing her out from within, and with each sacred tea ceremony, it was becoming harder to keep the tones perfect.

Han Axiom Sempiter, the lanky silver-haired and currently sleeping High-Administrator, had told her what awaited her once her singing voice started to fade.

In his words, people like her thrived in their prime and were discarded shortly thereafter, a harsh reminder that her time was limited.

Her life’s purpose and her fate were inescapable. As soon as she turned twenty, the cult would take her into the central pit to sing her final song and be sacrificed to Lord Boundless Chorus.

His words were festering in her mind, haunting her more and more with each passing day. Predetermination. Inevitability. Sacrifice.

Once she became a spirit, she would be worth far more to the local ghost-obsessed cult. Servitor spirits didn’t age, didn’t disobey. The High-Cultivators here had no qualms about turning her into an absolute servant.

She had come to the Gold City of Boundless Chorus from the Azure City of Prodigious Desiccator only to learn that human life was nearly worthless here.

Celes looked at the sleeping Enforcer and at the knife in her hands. She’d had enough.

With the swiftest thrust she could manage, she stabbed Han in the throat. The knife shattered in half with a pling before it could break the skin, and Han continued to snore, completely oblivious to being stabbed.

Celes closed her eyes and sniffed. She knew that immortal cultivators couldn’t be hurt or killed—their skin was tougher than diamonds. They were unfeeling, unstoppable monsters who did whatever they wanted, answering only to those above them.

And above them all was the true abomination that called itself the Boundless Chorus.

Celes was assured now that the Enforcer was in a deep sleep. The relaxing tea she had brewed earlier had done its job perfectly.

She hid the shards of the broken knife. With her hands shaking, the geisha did something that she never would have done otherwise—she pulled a pin from her hair and shoved it into the small keyhole of a gilded case that stood beside the bed.

A black chain dotted with gold sparks connected the case to the arm of the Enforcer. Sweat poured from her face as Celes put all of her lockpicking skills into action. To steal from the Enforcer was courting death.

She was rewarded with the sight of seven glittering orbs which cast colorful radiance on her face as the case clicked open.

Beast cores—the divine power of cultivators.

She pulled out an old, cracked, empty core from underneath her shelf and replaced one of the similarly sized spheres.

She was momentarily tempted to take more than one... but she only had the one depleted core that she’d been able to steal from another temple. She was far too terrified of the Temple of Inquiry’s Hunters to take all of the cores.

She hoped that Han would simply assume that the one core had a fatal flaw in it that slowly leached out its power while it was in the case. She snapped the case closed, sliding it back into place.

Celes held the small, shimmering orb tightly in her hands. It was her ticket out of the Gold City; it was power and wealth and freedom combined into one.

She had been formulating the escape plan for a while now. It had taken Celes all of her social skills to find a merchant that was unscrupulous enough to purchase a stolen core. He’d had a servitor box in his possession that hid all Qi emanations and offered Celes 100 gold for a high-grade beast core.

She had inquired if he would take more than one, but the merchant shook his head in refusal—for to hide and pawn one powerful core was possible, but to keep many from the noses of the Hunters was extremely dangerous.

Celes planned to buy an aura disruption bracelet and a ticket out of the Gold City with the money, while giving the rest away as small coins infused with her Qi to as many local urchins as possible.

It would help them survive another day and hopefully confuse the ghost hounds long enough for her to escape—they would have too many trails to follow.

The geisha glanced at the sleeping cultivator for the last time and set off for the Grand Bazaar, where she had agreed to meet the buyer.

-=[Ash Sparks]=-

I loved the Grand Bazaar. The Gold City’s marketplace was a place of noise and mayhem, a discordant sprawl of tents, carts, people, and ghosts of all shapes and sizes.

It was located halfway up the Gold City with a view of the distant towers and imposing walls of the Cult of Boundless Chorus, which glittered in the distance beneath the azure morning sky.

Unlike the orderly, perfectly maintained compound of the cultivators, the Bazaar was a disorganized mess made up of beautiful, pure chaos.

The only thing uniting the discordant mayhem was yellow and black all over the place—the colors preferred by Lord Boundless Chorus.

A thousand merchants loudly peddled their wares to even more buyers crowding the busy streets. The nature of the chaotic layout of this place had allowed me to exist, to survive, and to do my dirty job.

“Wretched thief! Ataz! Vaz! Gabz! Stop her!” I heard the shout of the merchant behind me.

Tough luck, buddy. Ash is gonna eat today!

My mouth watered as I held the melon in my hands while sliding down heaps of litter to a lower level and weaving across rapidly moving traffic of carts, spirits, and men.

There were tricks to escaping with your life and breakfast and I had mastered them well at my young age of sixteen. Tricks such as taking the streets leading down, avoiding the Voices of the Boundless Chorus at all cost, leaping over carts, trying not to step on anyone’s foot, and passing through as many servitor spirits as possible.

Passing through ghosts was crucial to avoid the hostile presence behind me—the hunter phantoms sent by the irate melon merchant.

There were three this time. They silently rushed after me, and if they reached me, I wouldn’t get to enjoy this melon… or being alive.

I aimed my escape trajectory towards the king-sized spirit of a lumbering beast, carrying on its back a bundle of a hundred yellow crates full of bees.

As I leapt through the phantom, silver-blue sparks danced on my thin, grimy wrists and fingers, both bound in black tape.

The black tape was an essential key to passing through spirits without getting increasingly worse heart palpitations.

I grunted as a mild Qi-shock shot through the servitor-made scar on the side of my head, and I focused on the polished black cobblestones interspersed with yellow pebbles that flashed beneath my feet.

The three phantom hounds became momentarily confused as they dove into the giant ghost after me.

They wobbled angrily within the beastly apparition like flies trapped in amber jelly for exactly six and a half heartbeats. It was sufficient time for me to get away and roll into a decrepit alley that descended into the lower level of the city.

Gasping for breath, I leaped atop a hanging tarp and took off the yellow, sweat-stained cloth that I was wearing. I balled it up and chucked it into an open window.

A ghost-lantern within the room flashed, releasing an angry guard dog phantom that silently snarled.