“I belong to the Little Hand Gang of the Thieves and Concubines Guild,” I explained with a small shudder. “My Master was like a sister to me. She taught me how to steal and how to survive down here—how to observe Qi and how to cultivate.

“Then... one day I brought her a book from the Dead City, and... she started treating me like shit, told me that I’m better off dead.”

My heart started to palpitate when I thought of my Master’s betrayal. I had no family, no friends, no connections in the Gold City, only enemies. Whatever relationships I had in the Thieves Guild had been completely obliterated when my Master cast me out of the Little Hand Gang.

My hands closed over nothing, knuckles turning white. I hated my treacherous Master, hated everyone I had once considered friends as I spent months and then years down on these cursed streets where the others couldn’t find me and hurt me, only coming up only to steal some lousy fruits.

It’s no way to live. I have nothing... and now I’ve signed my death warrant by stealing a beast core. I am… nothing.

I blinked as my eyes threatened to overflow with tears of betrayal and misery, the cursed ruins looming over me.

No. I wasn’t a mere orphan. I knew these streets. I knew everything about the past.

Feeling like a girl adrift in a turbulent sea, I desperately clung to my adult personality, to my knowledge of rationality, history, and science.

“I see,” the geisha said.

“I’m no longer an abandoned, broken orphan. I’m... something more,” I said, mostly to myself.

“Something more?” Celes asked.

“A... convergence of a sixteen-year-old cultivator and an ancient mind,” I said. “I remember what the city was like before Lord Boundless came from the sky.”

“What was it like?” she asked curiously.

“Oh, it was... quite different,” I said, eyeing the devastation around me. “This place was alive. Over ten million people lived here.”

“Ten... million?” She looked at me, not believing the number.

“Yes.” I nodded. “A civilization nothing like that of the cultivators of the Gold City.”

“I doubt that your ancient knowledge of the Cursed City will keep us alive,” the geisha muttered, looking dejected. “Whatever wonders the Ancients possessed are long gone. It’s been a thousand years.”

I shrugged and dug through the ashes on the seat with my hand. My lanyard was there! I smiled and put it on myself as my keys jingled. It had survived the apocalypse, outlived my bones.

There was something else of value here.

Something... important to me. Someone that I cared for? It didn’t matter. Everyone I’d known as an adult was dead.

I tried to think of their names but didn’t arrive at an answer. My memories had far too many gaping, unnerving holes, which made me feel like I was prodding at an abscessed tooth. I sighed as I climbed out of the car.

Celes looked up at me.

“Come with me if you want to live,” I said, offering her my hand. It looked pitifully small and grimy. I was no terminator.

“What power or knowledge could a human skull provide? Don’t you understand? Every cultivator knows that human bones down here are completely useless for getting stronger! The Enforcer will discover that one core is missing, and then he’ll send the hunters to track us down to break you and then... end me!” she said with a sniff.

“We’ll see. Let’s go.” I started walking.

“Where are you going?” Celes inquired. She got out of the car and followed.

“Home,” I said, taking off the lanyard and twirling the green fiber-cord around my finger.

“Home?” she asked.

“Home!” I pointed back at the ruined city. The lanyard snapped in half from my twirling and my keys flew off into the rubble and moss-covered road. I rushed to pick them up, my cheeks twinging with mild embarrassment.

“You were marketed as indestructible! For shame,” I chided the broken green lanyard as I tied the remaining bits around my thin, tape-covered wrist. “This is the last time I trust a marketing ad.”

“Ad?” the fox-girl following me asked.

“Ehhh… just some ancient-speak,” I said, waving her off.

Ads were the one thing I wouldn’t miss. Also, traffic. I passionately hated traffic. On the bright side, the traffic problem was solved forever, it seemed.

My stomach grumbled. Oh, yeah… I was starving.

“Where’s my melon?” the Ash part of me asked.

“Did you honestly expect me to carry that melon?” Celes ground out her words through clenched teeth.

Her fancy robe was getting quite dirty from all the grime around. The city had seen better days.

“Well, it woulda been nice if you had. Do you know how hard it is to steal breakfast?” I smiled at her.

She frowned.

“Sorry. That’s... a joke from Ash. It’s a long way across the ruins, and I’m starving,” I said. “Could you maybe... send your spirit ferret to fetch us some snacks?”

She squinted at me.

“Don’t judge me!” I declared. “I might look like a sixteen-year-old street urchin, but really, I’m an ancient being! Full of forgotten wisdom from a thousand years ago.”

Her intense squint-glare was burning a hole in my head.

“Please?” I asked, making a cute face at her. Cute faces were easy with the combined intelligence of two people. My power worked on her.

“Knipz, buy us two breakfasts.” She sighed, sliding a few copper coins from her pouch to the spirit that materialized on her shoulder. The ferret nodded and sped away through the air upwards, heading towards the Gold City.

I climbed over a pile of moss-covered rubble, noticing that my legs felt less tired than before.

Eating a soul had definitely made me stronger! It wasn’t much, but I now had the strength of a very nerdy human being who only went to the gym once a year, plus a sixteen-year-old girl with the arms of a dried twig. It was still a million gold stars below that of a High-Cultivator.

Trudging through the overgrown ruins was twice as easy now though. Silver lining!

For some reason, I felt increasingly euphoric, nearly manic. I wondered if it had anything to do with eating an Ancient ghost.

Celes didn’t share my cheerfulness. She looked very depressed.

“Why the glum expression?” I paused my climb over a pile of broken concrete, glancing back at her.

“I... really need to get back to the city,” she muttered. “I promised to bring a beast core to a merchant... by today. I might be able to get another if I return to the city before the noon bell.”

“You have a handy supply of high-grade beast cores?” I arched an eyebrow at her. “So why are you politely following me and not rushing back to the Gold City to steal another core from Lord Axiom?”

“I don’t know how to get back up,” she admitted after a long pause. “I followed you down a bunch of very sodden, nearly vertical drain pipes. I won’t be able to climb back up the same way. I’ve never been down here.”

I nodded and glanced at the wedge of the pink sky in the distance. Judging by the warm weather and the sun’s position, it was around 5 a.m.

Seven hours.

“We’ll get back to the Gold City before noon, don’t worry. I just have to grab something from... home! Hopefully, it’s still there. It’s been... a while.” I said.

She sighed at this. I noted that her personality wasn’t very assertive, even in the face of death. That was probably why she became a geisha in the first place. One would have to be incredibly timid to get conned into becoming the servant class of the compound, the Ash part of my mind told me.

We trudged on. As we walked farther, a new part of me noticed that the city looked... odd. Not odd in terms of the fact that everything was incredibly damaged. Things were freakishly strange in terms of decay, and the more attention I paid to the minute details, the more peculiar stuff I noticed.

I paused when I saw a perfectly intact “Twenty-Third Street” sign. The sign looked nearly mint condition with its blue paint glistening. The pole itself barely had any rust on it. What the hell?

This isn’t how things work. Metal rusts away if simply given enough time. Paint peels, glass shatters!

I rolled information about the Dead City in my mind. This place was more than ten centuries old. A thousand years!

I looked down at the torn-up Pikachu-themed shirt on myself. It didn’t look like a thousand-year-old artifact. At most it looked like about a decade or two of use was on it.

I saw a reflection of myself in a glass bottle beneath my feet. There was a colorful wrapper on the bottle that said, Please recycle me.

I squinted at the inexplicably intact wrapper. This was beyond impossible. That wrapper should have decayed in weeks! How did it last a thousand years?!

What... the... fu…? Was I not seeing the forest for the trees? Oh.

I looked up at the twinkling yellow stars of Lord Boundless overhead. Right. This... leviathan thing was too big to exist. It somehow broke the natural laws of the universe.

It was screwing with the very base concept of decay and entropy... somehow. Maybe this monstrous aberration was bending or rewinding, eating time itself?

I had no idea. I couldn’t even begin to theorize how something so big could even exist, let alone function or hold itself up on those yellow legs... so I stopped thinking about it and ceased gawking up like an idiot before I tripped on something or stepped on a nail.

Besides, there was no time to gawk anyway. Through the rusted rebar and cracked concrete, I finally saw our destination—my apartment complex.