Chapter 113: Kitty's Wild Thoughts (Bonus Chapter) (Patreon)

"Hmph, see? I told you it was nothing. All I have to do now is change back..."

And just as Guizhong was working the spell to return to her normal body...

"...? That's not right. Why do I still have no power?"

"Piers, I heard you were back, so I came to see..."

Sandrone's voice came from beyond the door. Piers's attention had been fixed entirely on Guizhong; he hadn't registered her approach at all, and by the time he heard her the door was already swinging open.

"You—" Sandrone stopped dead in the doorway. Piers was crouched on the floor, and in front of him sat a small child with long ash-white hair.

"Where did you abduct a child from? I have heard there are adepts in Liyue who like to collect orphans. Have you picked up the habit as well?"

"'Collect'? Nellie, I think your vocabulary database needs an update. This is my master, the God of Dust, Guizhong. Ah... the child edition."

"Ha? You're telling me this little thing is the God of Dust?"

Sandrone came closer and crouched down beside him.

"That's right. The God of Dust. I found her soul and brought her back, but for various reasons she's got no power at the moment."

"Hey. You two. Seen enough? So I can't change back — is that any reason to keep staring at me?"

With her body shrunk down, Guizhong's voice had gone as high and small as a child's.

"Sister Guizhong, why not... find another adept and see whether they can sort this out? I don't really know how to help you, and you can't stay like this forever."

"Absolutely not!! No one is seeing me like this. I'll find my own way to change back. Oh, and don't tell a single soul I've been brought back — not even Morax!"

Piers glanced over at Sandrone.

"Why are you looking at me... I'm hardly going to go blabbing about it. Besides, I don't know any adepts."

"Little Piers, open the cavern realm. I'm going inside, and I'll come out when I've recovered."

Little Guizhong planted both hands on her hips and issued her orders in that soft, squishy voice.

Fighting down a laugh, Piers waved a hand and swept her in, and only when he turned did he remember Sandrone standing there.

"Oh, right. What did you come for, Nellie?"

"To see whether you'd died." Sandrone turned her face aside.

"Nellie, your words are so cruel. You've wounded me."

"I... no... that's not... that isn't what I..."

Piers put on a stricken face, and guilt began to work at her. He didn't push it too far, though. He knew that sharp tongue of hers covered a soft heart.

"Come on, let's go out for a walk. I figure you can't sit still anyway — the Wangsheng Funeral Parlor doesn't have so much as a spare machine part lying around. I should have brought Cocoa along."

The whole day passed, and by evening the two of them were back at the Wangsheng Funeral Parlor. Hu Tao never came home that night. Piers wasn't surprised. He'd played through this stretch of the story before, and laying out the Seven-and-Eight-Gates Method really was a painstaking business.

Soon enough the Lantern Rite arrived, and as expected the streets were mobbed — which was precisely why neither Piers nor Sandrone had any interest in going out.

A large part of it was that they'd already walked those same streets the day before. There was nothing left to see, only noise and crush.

So they simply took the wooden benches on opposite sides of the corridor and sat there staring into space. Sandrone kept her eyes on the parlor's front gate, her mind circling the same question: what present would Piers give her tonight?

She willed the hours to move faster, and the harder she willed it the slower they crawled, so she reversed her approach and made an effort not to think about it at all.

It made no difference. Weighing possibilities and running the odds was in a puppet's nature, and partway through the calculations a few scenes from novels she'd read — the sort that would never make it past a censor — kept surfacing unbidden.

Why is he still sitting there in a daze? Didn't he say he'd give me a present tonight? He can't have forgotten, can he?

"Ahem, ahem..." Sandrone coughed twice, hoping to jolt Piers out of his trance. It had no effect whatsoever. At last the curiosity became unbearable, and she decided to drop him a hint outright.

"Um... Piers, do you have anything arranged for today? Don't go forgetting it."

"Don't think so," Piers said offhandedly, his train of thought interrupted, and promptly drifted off again.

He wanted the opposite of what she did. He wanted the hours to crawl, because he still hadn't worked out a way to save Hu Tao and come out of it alive himself.

The old geezer's protection was beyond question, granted, but hanging his own survival on somebody else had never sat right with him.

And so the two of them sat there from morning through to nightfall. At dusk, dim lamplight came on in the alley outside the Wangsheng Funeral Parlor, and the first Xiao Lantern appeared in the sky.

"Come on, Nellie. We've been sitting all day. The best part of Liyue's Lantern Rite is about to start — we can't just stay parked here. It only comes once a year. Missing it would be a waste," Piers said, getting to his feet, to a Sandrone who was still lost somewhere behind her own eyes.

"Oh — huh? It's dark already?"

She had sat there the whole day. At first she'd glanced at Piers now and then to see when he'd stand up; later she'd sunk so deep into the scenes running through her head that if you wrote them out they'd fill another romance novel.

"What were you thinking about? You didn't even notice the sun go down."

"N-nothing. Let's go. Oh — where are we going, anyway?"

"Nellie, it's about time you got a new processor."

Piers reached out and rapped her on the head.

"It's Liyue's Lantern Rite. At night you go down to the docks to watch the Xiao Lanterns, obviously. At this hour... the docks are probably packed solid. Doesn't matter, though. We can just stand on the hundred steps at Feiyun Slope and look down from there. Better view anyway."

As he drew his hand back, something struck him as wrong. He reached out again and laid his palm against her forehead.

"Nellie, are you... running a fever? Why are you this hot? Can puppets even run fevers? Don't tell me your processor really is acting up."

"What a fuss over nothing. Am I not permitted to work through mechanical equations while I sit? Mental effort generates heat. It's perfectly normal."

Sandrone swatted his hand away and walked off toward the gate.

There it is. Kitty's still the same old Kitty. Processor's fine, then.

The hundred steps at Feiyun Slope that Piers had mentioned were just around the corner from the parlor's front door, a few seconds' walk at most. The spot proved to be a good one: apart from a scattered handful of people, everyone else was packed down at the harbor releasing Xiao Lanterns.

The two of them climbed up and sat. Light from the tall buildings on either side spilled across the stone in warm gold, brighter by far than the single dim lamp in the little alley.

Just then a man crouched off to one side gathered up the erhu in his arms and began to play, the sound stark and mournful.

Piers had no idea why anyone would perform something that sad during the Lantern Rite, and he had no wish to hear it. He had a rescue to carry out shortly. The least he was owed was something cheerful.

"Hey. Look, mister, there's really no call to make the Lantern Rite this bleak. Can that erhu manage something in a different mood? I'll pay in Mora."

He held out a five-hundred Mora coin. The man didn't take it, but he stopped playing all the same.

A hundred meters off along the shore, the enormous bonfire the Qixing had laid out roared up all at once. From that moment, the Seven-and-Eight-Gates Method was underway.

"Mister Piers has not prepared a Xiao Lantern? Then how would it be if I gave you this one."

Zhongli's voice came from behind him. In his hand was a Xiao Lantern of somewhat old-fashioned make, not unlike the red lanterns hanging under the eaves of the shops around them.

"Mister Zhongli. I assumed you'd be down at the harbor."

"I met a friend at Chihu Rock a short while ago and we talked awhile. It occurred to me that there would be no room left below, and so I thought of Feiyun Slope."

"I may need to step away for a few minutes shortly. Would you mind keeping an eye on Miss Sandrone for me?"

Piers kept his gaze on the distant flames and didn't turn to look at Zhongli, because he already knew the answer would be yes.

"Where are you going?" Sandrone asked, curious.

"Small errand. A few minutes at most."

Then, as though something had only now come back to him, Piers fished a small marble out of his robes and held it out to her.

"Here, this is for you. Go down to the shore and drop this little thing into the sea. That's your Lantern Rite present."

Disappointment crossed her face at the sight of the marble. In truth she'd have been disappointed by anything he handed her — even she knew the present she'd been picturing was impossible.

"Hey, hey. Since when does the person getting the gift have to walk halfway across town to receive it?"

Sandrone pinched the marble between two fingers, unimpressed.

"Think of it as unwrapping the box. It's a surprise — half the fun is opening it yourself."

That much struck her as fair enough, so she rose and set off down toward the water.

"Mister Zhongli's already got a Xiao Lantern in hand. Aren't you going down to the shore to release it?"

Piers glanced sideways at him.

"It may be released just as well from here."

Seeing that Zhongli meant to stand watch over him, Piers relaxed considerably. It meant the odds were good he'd come through alive — though even without Zhongli he'd worked out a way to survive.

Then he took out the plum branch Hu Tao had given him, closed his hand around it, and shut his eyes. A thread of adept power sank into the wood, and Hu Tao's figure rose at once in his mind.

"Deep and secret verse of fire, the worldly truth of Homa; hook and summon, subdue and bind; quell calamity, bestow increase — hah! Boundless is the twilight of life, and impermanent the final hour."

Hu Tao swept the Staff of Homa in a full circle, and dim red flame ran over her from head to foot. Seconds later the black mist ate into that flame. She dropped to one knee, black cracks spreading across her face.

In the same instant that her knee struck the ground, the bonfire at the harbor shrank down until it was nearly out.

In the vision, Hu Tao gripped the Staff of Homa and forced herself upright. The pain of the corrosion twisted her expression; the nails on all ten of her fingers had gone black and were smoking.

"So. The hour has come. Boundless the twilight of life, impermanent the final hour. All the karma of passing on — this is Spirit Soother."

With those blackened fingers she formed Guide to Afterlife. In that instant the black mist all but filled her from within, and along the shore the bonfire caught again, burning hotter than before, throwing off butterflies of flame one after another.

"Almost there."

Piers muttered it to himself and drove more adept power into the branch. It began to seep out around him, thick as water, and the few people still sitting nearby to admire the harbor picked themselves up and fled outright.

"Next year's Lantern Rite... if a butterfly comes flying by, that'll be me, come back to see everyone..."

By now Hu Tao's strength was spent and she had sunk to the ground. Her soul slipped free of her body, and when she opened her eyes again she saw her father and her grandfather standing before her, smiling at her.

"Dad... Grandpa... have you come to take me with you?"

She walked toward the two of them, step by step, and in the instant she would have touched them a plum branch drifted down and settled squarely into her hand.

The next moment Piers was there, seizing that hand as it began to give off black smoke.

"Now — while you're closest to the ley lines! Hu Tao, get back here!"

In one motion he pulled the black mist off her and into himself. That mist was the lingering will of Tao Dou; adept though Piers had become, once he'd taken every last wisp of it onto himself, only a final thread of adept power remained in him.

He turned that last thread into a sphere of light and threw it to Hu Tao. The adept power gathered up her soul and carried it back into her body.

But with nothing left to hold it off, the black mist claimed him. It stained him through in an instant, flooding his eyes until not a speck of white could be found in them.

He did not fall. His legs held, and he pushed himself up to stand. A second later his hand whipped something out into the air, and the moment it left his fingers the black mist tore off him and gave chase, as though drawn to it.

And then... and then Piers coughed up a great mouthful of blood. There was no wound anywhere to be seen on him, yet his clothes had gone a mottled crimson. The last of his strength left him, and he went down.

...

On the night of the Lantern Rite the harbor shore was packed shoulder to shoulder. Sandrone worked her way through the crush to the water's edge and tossed the little marble into the sea.

The black surface lit up all at once in azure fluorescence, spreading out for who knew how many kilometers. The glow lifted the whole night sky a few shades brighter, and even the river lanterns drifting on the water were dimmed to nothing beside it.

"So... beautiful."

Sandrone stared out over the sea, transfixed for a moment. The first thing she did when she came back to herself was turn to look at Piers, far off on the steps.

But when she turned, her face full of smile, the place where he'd been sitting was empty. Recalling what he'd said a moment ago, she couldn't keep down a small sinking feeling.

The sudden spectacle drew the notice of everyone around her as well. Assuming it was some display arranged by the Qixing, they reached down curiously to scoop up the seawater — only to find that the glow was not light shining upon the sea at all. The water itself had turned into blue fluorescence.