As far as I could tell from my current observations of my kitsune companion and Ash’s prior observations of people in the market, there were no static chakras in someone’s body.

Maybe my Qi-vision was simply untrained or color-blind? The Qi currents in Celes’ body and my own were made up of impossible combinations of colors that the rational part of my brain utterly failed to define.

For example, my Qi-infused eyes saw a color made up of red and green tones at the same time, and it definitely wasn’t brown, nor a pattern of the two.

The longer and deeper I stared at the geisha’s aura, the more impossible colors I noticed! My eyes started to water and an enormous migraine flared in my head.

“You should take it easy on the use of excessive Qi in your eyes,” Celes said, noticing my struggle. “They’re practically glowing now! You could go blind doing that. If you want to see a specific flow of Qi better, you need to cultivate your Visu. There are specific meditation techniques for improving vision.”

“Eh, not the first time I’ve gone blind,” I said, waving her off.

I pulled my Qi from my eyes, just to be safe, blinking rapidly to clear the ghosts of paradoxical flickers from my vision. Celes didn’t look impressed.

“Can you show me that purification spell you mentioned earlier? I feel like the last time I took a bath was at least a thousand years ago.” I made a pleading kitten face at Celes.

“Um, it’s not used to clean people,” she muttered. “Also, it’s not a spell. It’s song-art, and it’s part of the long, sacred, tea-serving geisha ceremony. I can’t just—”

“I don’t think that you have such a great standing with the cult at this point that you need to worry about such trivialities as exposing their secrets!”

I tried to push Celes to expand her mind with possibilities. People in cults were clearly limited by rules and constrained by ceremonies. True power came from exploration and experimentation. “Look at how dirty we both are! Your pretty robe is all stained. Won’t the gate guards super-shame you if they see you like that upon your return?”

“Oh.” Celes looked at her mud-covered robe. Her eyes bulged as she realized exactly how dirty it had become during the trek across the ruins.

“You don’t gotta reveal your song-jitsu to random strangers. Make me your apprentice! I’ll be an extra-hard worker, I promise,” I alleged. “That way, you won’t have to release the super-secret secrets into the wilds. I’m very trustworthy, trust me!”

I was stumbling over my words due to over-excitement.

“Fine.” Celes cleared her throat, assumed a lotus posture, and started to sing.

She was right about the ceremony thing. It didn’t feel like the song had a beginning, and the rather abrupt start surprised me. I really wanted to learn her purification magic, but unfortunately, there was no way for me to easily replicate what she was doing.

The words of the song weren’t anything I could understand—they seemed to be woven from transcendent rising and falling tones. She must have pushed her Qi into specific parts of her lungs and throat to produce this sort of inhuman, resonating tone that seemed to warp space around her.

I could understand why the cultivators hid this sort of thing from prying eyes and ears in their compound—this was a truly divine experience, magic unlike anything I’d ever seen in the market. The world around Celes stilled, frozen as if suspended in time. Little drops of water coming down from above paused their fall, glittering in mid-air.

The bubble of frozen time engulfed me, drew me into its embrace. A fractal pattern of Qi blossomed from her body, reaching out across the time-bound sphere.

As it ran over me, its tendrils hugged my soul, gently caressed my aura, and I felt pure, absolute serenity of being woven from calmness and inner peace. The pattern was alive; I felt it rushing across my body, observing me with a thousand invisible eyes.

I would have been extremely freaked out by this, were I not practically drowning in serenity.

Low and high tones collided with each other, multiplying, entwining into a single, perfectly resonant, impossible sound emanating from her throat. As the tone of Celes’ song reached its final crescendo, every bit of dust and dirt within the bubble shimmered and vanished as if licked away by a thousand invisible tongues.

The song dropped off just as abruptly as it had started, and the bubble of stillness around us collapsed, the water resuming its trip down to the ground. Every blade of grass, every concrete pebble, every flower in a perfect circumference around Celes had been meticulously wiped clean.

“Wow,” I uttered. I looked at myself. I had never felt so clean in either of my two lives. My electrical tape shimmered, my nails were pristine even if still chipped in places, and my silver-blue hair shone in the rising sun. My skin felt like it had been scrubbed, exfoliated, every single pore cleansed. “This… this is truly divine magic.”

Celes nodded. “It is gratifying… even if it is quite draining on my Qi.”

“So you don’t have to give your body to the cultists, and your magic is pretty and enjoyable. Why steal a beast core from the High-Administrator? Why ruin your seemingly cushy position as a geisha? I hear the punishment for stealing from the Enforcer of the Will of God is extra painful death with a side of odious suffering.”

“I…” Celes paused, looking like she wasn’t sure if she should reveal her motives to a stranger that she had just met.

“I wanted to know my future.” Her voice solidified. “I wanted to know my place in the cult, my purpose.

“After a few years in the compound, I noticed something very troubling — there were no old geishas in the Gold City. It was possible that maybe the cult traded them to another god-city, but I still wanted to know the answer.

“I’ve been slowly adding confidence, trust, truth, and serenity herbs into the High Administrator’s tea. When he saw me as someone he could trust, he told me that… I am to be sacrificed to the Boundless Chorus and turned into a servitor spirit before my voice fades.”

She sniffed, her hands trembling. “I don’t… I don’t want to become a servitor ghost, a shattered, broken soul. I think that some of them remember things. They don’t look happy.”

“Damn.” I nodded. “This is some shitty human resources management—no retirement package for local geishas. Good on you for figuring out the truth.”

“I don’t want to serve them… or it… anymore.” Celes glanced at the gargantuan, shimmering yellow tentacles with visible worry, perhaps terrified that one of them would reach out and smite her for these words.

“Eh, don’t worry about those. I’ve been to the surface like a thousand times. I doubt that Lord Boundless-butt cares for your vocal blasphemy or whether you die faster or slower.

“Also, he doesn’t pass through the same place twice—there’s a pattern to his walk. I take mundane things from the so-called ‘cursed dead’ all the time. Where do you think I stole this undershirt?” I pointed at the Pikachu on my torn-up top.

“You got that shirt from here?” Celes blinked.

“Yeppers. See—it’s black and yellow! It fits the god-approved color theme so I don’t get slapped by anyone for being a blasphemer out on the streets.”

I beamed and pointed at a ladder that was slowly moving toward us. “People like me come down here to steal things. Have you never been down on the surface before?”

The kitsune shook her head. “Only the chosen High-Cultivators are permitted to walk the Dead City. I was told it is extremely dangerous for a low-level commoner to be here—this land is cursed.”

“It’s actually relatively safe down here… as long as you watch out for the soul-grabbing tentacles!” I laughed. “Also, some things around these parts hardly decay. I think Boundless-bum has something to do with it.”

My memories presented me with a double mental map of the city. I now knew what things looked like before and after the end of 21st century human civilization. I smiled cheerfully at the vast new theft opportunities presented to me.

A part of me pulled from the old skull was daunted by the monstrously titanic, hundred-kilometer wide creature that carried the Gold City on its back. Yet, the sixteen-year-old girl-me wasn’t afraid of god. I had sinned countlessly against his tenets, and yet I still lived.

“I can’t believe that you’re still sane after what you’ve done to yourself,” the geisha sighed. “High-Cultivators know that it is extremely dangerous to fully consume human souls. It is said that the conflict of desires between the foreign soul and your own shatters them both. A human mind is not like that of a beast.”

“I’m perfectly fine and unshattered over here.” I waved her off. “Either your High-Cultivators are uncreatively square, or maybe they’re simply hoarding all the good, yummy human souls for themselves!”