bluedragonauthor

VIP: The Blue Dragon: Chapter 38

Added 2024-10-09 20:11:09 +0000 UTC

-- CHAPTER 38: Soul --

****

“Nnnggghhh…”

“Yesss…”

“Hooooly fuuuuck…”

“Yesss… yesss… yesss…”

There weren’t any non-stop commercial flights from Osaka, Japan to Guilin, China, so rather than take a one-stop connecting flight that would still require an overnight layover and sixteen hours of total travel time, Tianshi simply chartered a private jet that would get us there in less than four hours instead.

“Nnnggghhh… nnnggghhh… nnnggghhh…”

“Oh fuck me…”

The Gulfstream G700 was ultra-luxurious, far beyond anything I’d ever experienced before, including the Qatar Qsuite. In addition to the plush, ergonomic chairs, convenient tables, comfortable sofa, and all kinds of technology bells and whistles, the long-range business jet ALSO featured a master suite with a full-size bed.

“Fuck… fuck… fuck!”

“Sooo gooood! Yes! Yes!”

One guess what Hannah wanted to do first as soon as we got onboard. I didn’t even need to “power-up” for any reason, she just wanted another mile-high experience. As soon as we were done, Tianshi took Rae into the back and they started making enough noise to rival the sounds Hannah had been making earlier, and since she was in her Canadian internet model “Angelika” form in front of the flight crew, I had all sorts of mixed feelings about the images running through my mind. The sounds of their lovemaking were enough to put Magdalena in the mood and the impatient Italian didn’t want to wait for the bedroom to become available again. So the next thing I knew, we were having a threesome right there in the middle of the main cabin with the busty brunette riding me cowgirl while Hannah knelt on the seat next to us with her tongue licking Lena’s lips and a couple of fingers up the other girl’s ass.

“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

“Mmph! Mmph! Mmph!”

Make that a foursome. Did I neglect to mention that our charter jet included a very attractive young flight attendant?

Hinata was a skinny little thing with creamy white skin, delicate features, and an eager-to-please demeanor. The sounds of passenger lovemaking in the bedroom had a similar influence on her mood, and her eyes had gone wide in both shock and arousal at the sight of me and the girls fucking up a storm right there in the main cabin. So between her subservient nature and The Ax Effect, the girl was quite keen to obey Magdalena’s instructions to kneel down next to Hannah and join in sucking my dick while I reclined in the Gulfstream’s handcrafted, plush leather seats.

“Non fermarti! Prendilo tutto!” Magdalena commanded. “Take it all little one!”

Unfortunately, she couldn’t quite “take it all”. The petite Japanese stewardess choked on my massive mushroom head, her tiny little hand tightly gripping the final few inches of my shaft. Her doe eyes shimmered with moisture as she looked up at me apologetically, and I gave her an encouraging smile while reaching down to caress her snowy white cheek.

“It’s alright. I know that’s a lot of meat to handle,” Hannah soothed from her spot kneeling beside Hinata, pulling her face out from between Magdalena’s spread thighs with the Italian woman’s skirt bunched up around her waist. All four of us were still technically clothed, albeit with bits and pieces rearranged to provide access to the good stuff. Hinata was the only one still completely covered, but Hannah reached over to start unbuttoning the young Japanese girl’s uniform and leaned in for a quick peck on the lips before finishing, “but even if you can’t fit it all in your mouth, I promise we’ll make it fit somewhere else.”

We made it fit.

Barely.

Fuck the lovely Japanese girl’s tight twat felt soooo incredibly snug as she slowly slid herself down on me reverse-cowgirl. Even with Hannah licking her slit for both distraction and extra lubrication, the petite girl’s pussy clamped around my cock like a vise and I actually bit down on one of Magdalena’s taut teats in a grimace while nursing at her massive mammaries (not that she seemed to mind). And when Hinata’s cunt convulsed in climax, her internal grip around my dick was so strong that Hannah couldn’t even pull her off me in time to swallow my load, having to settle for slurping my seed straight out of the girl’s sodden snatch.

While Hannah was busy sucking out my sperm, I was quick to roll over onto Magdalena, hoist her long legs over my shoulders, and hammer her into the seat beside me. The lusty, busty babe shrieked her satisfaction (twice) while I busied myself motorboating her melons. Hinata and Hannah settled into a sixty-nine on the private jet’s couch across the aisle, and the four of us fucked away to our heart’s content long enough for Rae and Angelika to return to the main cabin, where Rae promptly joined in to make it a fivesome.

And then Angelika grabbed Hinata to make it a sixsome. My heart still burned with anger at the woman knowing what she’d done to me, but damn I had to admit it was still wicked hot watching that ridonkulously gorgeous Canadian Internet Model body having sweaty and steamy lesbian sex.

Anyways, at the very end Magdalena pulled my dick out at the last second so she could swallow down my load, and the Italian woman waggled her head while admitting to Hannah, “Perhaps his cum does taste better than gelato al cioccolato fondente. Perhaps.”

Rae rolled off of Hannah, the two of them grinning sheepishly.

Hinata brushed back the sweaty bangs that had come free of her tightly wound bun, thanked Angelika and the rest of us for the ride, and staggered somewhat unevenly to the galley to fetch us some drinks.

So far, our little group hadn’t done anything that couldn’t be explained away as “rich people doing rich people things” (I mean, there’s a freaking bed in the back). Still, I found myself wondering if Tianshi would erase Hinata’s memory at the end of the flight, the way she’d done with Camila on the Frecciarossa train back in Italy. Then, Tianshi had assured me that Camila would still remember the sex, just not any of the potentially compromising stuff afterwards, and would head back home none the worse for wear. And I sincerely hoped for Hinata’s sake that her end result would be the same.

We all took our seats. Five out of the six of us passengers were seated together, with Angelika and Rae seated across a small table on the right side of the plane. Hannah and I sat together on the left side of the plane, with Magdalena across the table between us. But Jade was on her own by the very front of the plane, so silently invisible that I’d forgotten she was even aboard for a while, caught up as I was having sex.

Stock-still like a statue, Jade mutely stared down at the Sword of Baihu laid out on the table in front of her. It was a sword unlike any I had ever seen, not even a thousand years ago in Luoyang. Back then, Ziyi had wrapped up the sword in cloth and fastened it across her back with a cross-body tie so she could have full use of her limbs as we escaped from the entire Liang Army, and I’d died before ever seeing the sword unwrapped.

The Chinese jian-style double-edged sword wasn’t made of metal, near as I could tell. Instead, the sword appeared to be constructed entirely of white ceramic from tip to pommel, with Chinese characters etched vertically into its blade and stylish lines cut into its curved hilt. I’d been allowed to briefly hold the sword in my hands back at the Ritz-Carlton Kyoto, and I’d marveled at how exceptionally light and maneuverable the weapon had felt in my hands.

There hadn’t been much time to talk back then. Rae had left to start making travel arrangements and Tianshi had taken Jade - and the sword - with her back to the Tsukimi Penthouse Suite. Hannah had fortunately kept my suitcase with her when switching hotels, so I was able to change into my own clothes and pack for the trip. But now that the travel part was underway, and everyone’s sexual appetites had been satiated for the moment, I finally had the opportunity to ask a few questions.

“So I need you to explain something to me,” I began, glancing at Rae but mostly keeping my focus on Angelika seated just across the aisle from me. “If you had the ability to enter the portal in the Ōkōchi Sansō villa at any time you wanted, why the hell did you lie to us all that it was completely inaccessible, even to you, except for a one-hour-window beneath the zenith of the full moon? We wound up walking straight into an ambush fighting ninja, zombies, spiders, and flying monkeys because our enemies knew exactly where and precisely when we would arrive, the end result of which was Ziyi’s capture and untimely death. And no, I don’t consider that thing over there to be truly alive.”

Nobody bothered to look towards the front of the cabin where I was pointing, not even me. We all knew exactly what “thing” I was pointing at.

Angelika rolled her eyes and then pointedly stared out the wide, oval window, her expression making clear that she felt no need to explain herself to me.

“It seems obvious that what we should have done was wait until after the full moon,” I insisted. “Let all the bad guys go back home, wait for the coast to be clear, and THEN go after the sword.”

Rae spoke up, “She didn’t lie.”

“Obviously she did, unless that’s a very pretty but fake sword on the table in front of Jade.” I gestured vaguely towards the front of the cabin again.

“She didn’t lie at all. Or, actually, she lied about lying. The portal wasn’t accessible, at least not at first.”

“Not at first?” I queried dubiously.

The half-Chinese fox spirit glanced at her teacher for a moment as if checking to make sure Angelika didn’t give her a look or kick her shin beneath the table or anything like that to indicate that Rae should shut the fuck up the way that girls so often did with me whenever I started to talk about something they didn’t want me to talk about. When no such indicator came, Rae put her forearms on the table and clasped her hands together, explaining, “Our job was to both hide and protect the four relics, remember? The precaution of making the Ōkōchi Sansō portal accessible only for one hour every month was to ensure nobody else got a hold of you or any other Chosen One to obtain the sword without the Shu Han having the ability to mount forces in its defense. For example, had the Cao Wei been using you to go around hunting relics, we would have been the ones laying in ambush in the bamboo grove.”

“Fair enough, but that doesn’t explain why the rules suddenly changed.”

“The rules only changed because you went through the portal first,” Rae stated. “Think of it like a combination lock. The combination cannot be changed while the lock is closed, but if the lock is opened, the combination can then be reset. After you passed through the portal, Tianshi was able to modify the conditions that would permit future passage. That was important because we had no idea how long it would take for you to return. She was still in the process of making it so that the portal would be accessible anytime and allow anyone to pass through it - much like the portals you already used to visit our headquarters in Venice or the Mini-mart in Rome - when you returned from the Arabian Desert empty-handed.”

I frowned. “You mean the portal is now wide open? Like… any random tourists who slide open that shoji door can walk through and find themselves in the Empty Quarter? Or wait, didn’t you say the portal is tethered to the sword? Would they be transported straight here?”

“Aksel-Aksel-Aksel,” Rae had started, gesturing with both hands and trying to talk over me while I’d been rambling. And when I finally shut up, she explained, “First of all, only Tianshi can open the portal. She still needs to speak the spell in order to activate it.”

“Oh. Okay…”

“The portal is also tethered to the casket, not to the sword itself, no?” Magdalena interjected.

“Correct,” Rae confirmed. “And that empty casket is still in the Empty Quarter. So even if a hypothetical person opened the portal right now, they would get transported there, not here.”

“But you’ve been there now, right?” I asked. “Given that you obviously returned with the sword, you must have been to the Empty Quarter, to the Cave of Wonders. Did you meet Baihu?”

Rae shook her head in the negative. “We were transported to the Empty Quarter, yes, but there wasn’t any ‘Cave of Wonders’ and we didn’t meet Baihu. The casket was just sitting there half-buried in the sand, and as soon as Jade put her hand on the lock, it opened up. Easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy.”

“Really?” I frowned and glanced back at Hannah, who held my hand and rubbed my forearm reassuringly. “I guess she really is The Chosen One of Baihu, even in her present state. But it makes me wonder WHY Baihu let Jade take the sword so easily, when she seemed so adamant that we should find a way to stop Shen Wu without retrieving Faguang Long.”

Hannah cracked a smile and remarked, “Do not attempt to derive logical consistency from the minds of the gods. To attempt so is to invite madness.”

I nodded. “Lin Tang said something like that once.”

“Lin Tang is a very smart woman.”

“No argument from me. I just… I suppose that if Baihu still considers Jade to be… But even if, she said flat out that she wouldn’t reconsider letting us take the sword and… It doesn’t make sense. Why would she let Jade take--”

“Does it really matter?” Magdalena interjected, cutting me off. “Gods are selfish, capricious, and unreliable. Believe me, I know.”

I’m not capricious, Dong noted in my head.

Magdalena continued, “I do not care why this Tiger goddess permitted Jade to take the sword. All that matters now is that she did. We have all four relics, and we must properly use them to find this Golden Dragon, yes?”

I was still confused, but I nodded slowly and replied, “Agreed.”

Magdalena met my gaze with a firm nod of her own before glancing over her shoulder back at Jade, still seated by herself, still mutely staring at the sword. Then she pointedly looked across the aisle at Rae, adding, “And then we will use The Golden Dragon to restore Jade. Agreed?”

Rae didn’t answer right away. She first glanced over at Angelika, but the teacher must not have kicked her student beneath the table, because Rae returned her gaze back to us as she said softly, “Agreed.”

“Do you - or does Tianshi - know how to restore Jade?” I asked. “I told you in the car that Shen Wu claims that only he knows the proper spells to reunite Ziyi’s soul with her body. Is that true?”

Rae again glanced over at her teacher, pursed her lips, and then looked back at us. “Tianshi doesn’t know a spell that would restore Ziyi’s hun back to her body. But we promise you that we’ll figure it out.”

“The same way she promised to rescue Ziyi after the Arashiyama Bamboo Grove?” I drawled skeptically.

“We were going to rescue her, and in fact we were in her room planning how to do just that when you were captured, remember?” Rae insisted.

“Yeah well in the end, I’m the one who had to bring her back - undead, I might add - which means that you didn’t exactly fulfill that promise, and I’m not sure how much faith I can put in your promises right now.”

“Aksel, please. This is me. I KNOW how important Ziyi is to you, and I’M promising you that I’ll do everything in my power to restore her hun soul.”

“I wish I could believe that.”

“Aksel. Really?” Rae looked a little hurt.

“I want to believe you’ll uphold that promise. Really, I do. But the simple fact of the matter is that I don’t trust--”

I’d abruptly shut up after getting kicked in the shin, and Magdalena rolled her eyes and shook her head. I shot her a look that clearly said, I wasn’t gonna say that. And then I refocused my attention on Rae.

“Look, it’s no secret that I don’t trust Tianshi,” I stated flatly, not giving a fuck that it was impolite to speak of someone in the third person while they were present. “I want to believe that you really will do everything you can to help me bring Ziyi back. Really, I do. But if faced with a choice between bringing her back or obeying one of your teacher’s orders, I think I already know which choice you’ll make.”

“Aksel…” Rae seemed genuinely hurt. “After everything we’ve already been through together…”

“Look, I don’t blame you. She’s obviously much more… intimately close… to you than I am.” I gestured towards the bedroom in the back of the plane. “She’s your boss. She’s your mentor. She’s guided you for years. But she’s even more selfish, capricious, and unreliable than Magdalena’s gods. She’s the reason I’ve been constantly kept in the dark and limited to only understanding the depth of the shit I’m in on a ‘need to know basis’. We’re nothing but disposable pawns to her, easily discarded once we’re no longer useful. Nothing is more important to her than this mission and I wholeheartedly believe that she will sacrifice any of us without hesitation - including you - to ensure its success.”

“On that, we can agree,” Angelika stated evenly, her cold eyes piercing back at me when I looked over at her.

I then looked back at Rae, who blushed and then grimaced, seeming to ponder things in her mind. I glanced at Magdalena, who shrugged. And Hannah squeezed my hand, drawing my attention to her reassuring smile.

But then my gaze was drawn forward to the front of the plane and the stock-still, mute figure seated there. “How long until you get rid of her?” I asked, my own cold eyes piercing as I stared down Angelika. “You’ve got the sword now. She’s no longer useful. Why would you keep around an undead zombie?”

She looked at me curiously. “Are you asking me to dispose of her?”

“Try it and I’ll dispose of you,” I shot back immediately.

“Heroes don’t murder people in their sleep,” she scoffed.

Her diamond irises glittered, and her expression told me without words that she’d pulled that particular saying straight out of my head even though it was a bit of a non sequitur. And it made me swallow and sweat a little bit with anxiety about what else she’d pulled out of my head.

‘Weren’t you supposed to stop her from doing that?’

My bad, bro.

“You’re so touchy about someone you scorned as ‘a thing’ a few minutes ago,” Angelika continued. “You present an interesting contrast: simultaneously protective and dismissive of the serpent demon.”

“She’s not a demon,” I vehemently insisted.

Angelika stretched her hand out as if to say, I rest my case.

“Jade is the only hope I have for getting Ziyi back,” I stated wearily. “But that doesn’t mean I like having her around. In fact, we probably shouldn’t even be having this conversation while she’s in earshot. For all we know, she’s relaying everything we say back to Shen Wu as we speak.”

“She isn’t,” Rae interjected. “She can’t.”

I frowned. “How would you know that?”

“Because Jade told us.”

I snorted. “And you believed her?”

Rae gestured across the table. “Tianshi’s a telepath. I believe her when she says she’s sifted through Jade’s mind and confirmed that Jade neither consciously nor subconsciously is able to communicate with Shen Wu. Although he was able to reanimate her body, he can’t give her telepathic abilities, nor does he seem to have telepathic abilities of his own.”

“You might not term his control over her to be ‘telepathic’, but I’ve witnessed his ability to control her.”

“Not from wherever he is, he can’t,” Rae contradicted. “There’s a limit on Shen Wu’s ability to control his undead creations, and unless he’s in the baggage hold of this airplane, he’s far out of range. Even then, we doubt that he could read her mind or otherwise pull information out of her. His abilities appear limited to using their bodies like puppets: telekinetic physical control, but not mental.”

“Oh.” I glanced at Magdalena and Hannah both, pondering this new information.

“You don’t have to take my word for it,” Rae said with a shrug. “If you like, you can ask Jade yourself.”

“Pass,” I said immediately, holding a hand up.

“You sure?” Rae asked, glancing back towards the front of the airplane. “Look, I know how much you love Ziyi and how much you miss her, and seeing her body like this while knowing that her hun soul isn’t inside is messing with your head. But there’s still a person in there, a very sad person. A person who misses you.”

That brought my head up. “What?”

Rae glanced back to the front of the plane again. “Her hun soul may be gone, but she still has all of her memories intact. She remembers everything. She remembers Luoyang. She remembers Liu Kang. She remembers taking the Sword of Baihu to Guilin, China, which is why we’re heading there now. And she remembers you.”

I frowned and turned my head to look towards the front of the cabin myself.

Jade continued to sit stock-still like a statue.

She continued to be completely mute.

But she wasn’t staring down at the sword on the table any longer.

She was looking at me.

“Talk to her,” Rae urged.

I got out of my seat.

****

Although Jade had stared straight at me from across the cabin, when I got up and walked down the aisle to approach her, she returned her gaze down to the sword on the table.

Taking the seat across from her, I likewise silently stared down at the sword. It wasn’t particularly large, the blade about thirty inches long, and it could be wielded with one hand. Upon closer inspection, I realized that the curving hilt featured triangular protrusions and was carved in a way that evoked the essence of a growling tiger’s mouth. Coupled with the milky-white ceramic color, like tiger teeth, it truly felt like the Great Sword of Baihu, the White Tiger.

Then of course there was the surge of energy that coursed through my veins when I’d briefly held the sword in my hands back at the Ritz-Carlton Kyoto. Unlike the colorful flow of chi energy that had passed through me and back to my lovers during sex, however, this particular energy seemed to be draining out of me as I held the sword, and I’d quickly handed it back to Jade before it drained me any further. Even now, I wondered if the sword would continue to drain my energy just from sitting this close to it.

It was a divine weapon, and Baihu had warned me that I did not have the constitution to wield it. Was Jade our cheat code around that little condition? She wasn’t technically alive, so therefore the sword couldn’t drain her of her life force? Regardless, I knew that the sword’s power paled in comparison to the power of Faguang Long, and I was once again reminded of my bewilderment over why Baihu would let Jade take the sword when the tiger goddess had previously been so adamant that The Golden Dragon should not fall into mortal hands.

I was so lost in thought pondering all of this that I failed to notice Jade reaching for me until her hand covered the back of mine. I reacted instinctively, as if her touch was that of a half-decomposed zombie rat, jerking my arm back and exclaiming, “Fuckity-fuck!”

Jade withdrew her hand, her dark eyes moist and a disappointed look on her face. I found myself confused by her expression. After all, reanimated corpses shouldn’t feel disappointment.

But this one apparently did, and I felt bad for being the cause of it. I felt so bad that my instinctive reaction for dealing with upset females kicked in, and I apologized. “Sorry. I… I shouldn’t have reacted like that. You surprised me, that’s all.”

Jade closed her eyes, which pressed out a pair of tears that rolled down her cheeks, and then shook her head. “I should apologize. I should not have tried to touch you. I just wanted…” Her voice trailed off rather than finish that sentence. And in the end, she merely shook her head again and gave me a sad look.

“You just wanted… what?” I asked curiously.

“I just…” she started hesitantly before taking a deep breath and exhaling sorrowfully. “I wanted to know what that would feel like.”

At that moment, had I not known that Jade was a reanimated corpse, I would’ve been hard-pressed to distinguish her from a regular human. Her shapeshifting appearance was perfect, looking exactly like my Ziyi in every way save for the color of her irises still being black instead of green. She took deep breaths as if trying to get her shit together and keep herself from crying. Her skin was still pale, but in more of an “idealized Asian female pale” than “corpse-like pale”. She even had a bit of an embarrassed blush in her cheeks, and for a moment, all I wanted to do was reach out and squeeze her hand. But then she shivered and I felt that unnatural chill wind surrounding me, which snapped me back to defensive alertness, and I pulled both hands into my lap beneath the table.

But rather than look disappointed again by my withdrawal, Jade merely sat up a little straighter, clasped her hands together atop the table, and then went stock-still once more. Her unblinking eyes took on a vacant look, and she didn’t appear to be breathing anymore. Her expression was blank, her lips were together but not pressed shut, and her coloration paled to that of an actual corpse devoid of life as if her veins and arteries had stopped pumping blood through her body.

Did she just… turn “off”?

‘She’s as still as a statue.’

As still as a jade sta--

‘Dude, it’s not as funny the second time around.’

The mute figure before me was only as lifelike as one of the RealDolls sold in a seedy shop not far from the Dōtonbori area of Osaka that one night we’d gone sightseeing, and it seemed to me that she would remain in that state indefinitely unless otherwise prompted. I thought about what Rae had said about there still being a person in there, a very sad person who missed me. And after taking a deep breath, I raised my hands back up from underneath the table between us and put my right palm on top of her interlaced fingers.

The bit of lifelike color in Jade’s skin returned as if her veins and arteries had started pumping blood again. She inhaled, blinked twice, and then looked down at my hand on top of hers. Immediately, she opened her hands and then clasped both of them around mine, holding on as if afraid I would take it away again. And then she looked up at me with an expression of such heartbroken pain that I nearly started crying myself in sympathy.

Since when did reanimated corpses feel emotions?

“Holy shit,” Dong suddenly exclaimed as he appeared on the table between us, although he wasn’t looking at me. He stood upright on two feet but leaned forward towards Jade, and a handheld magnifying glass appeared in his hand so that he could peer a little more closely at her.

Jade instinctively pulled back her head to put a little more distance between herself and the little gecko, even though the magnifying glass was aimed straight at her boobs. She even let go of my hand, withdrawing both of her arms and holding them up defensively. But she looked up at me, her eyes pleading for help.

“‘Holy shit’ what?” I asked Dong.

“I don’t… I don’t get it. It’s… It’s her hun,” he said without altering his up-close inspection of her boobs.

“Yeah. It’s gone. We know.”

“No. This girl has one.”

I blinked twice. “Um, what?”

“She has a ‘hun’, but it’s… I mean…” Dong finally put away the magnifying glass and turned around to face me. He spread his hands apart and looked up at me, repeating, “She has a ‘hun’. She has a soul.”

“That’s impossible. I was there when Shen Wu killed her and reanimated her.”

“Yeah. I was there too, remember?”

“The point is: when she opened her eyes again, she said flat out that my Ziyi was gone and that she was only ‘Jade’. She doesn’t have a soul anymore.”

“She doesn’t have Ziyi’s soul, true enough. The soul of the woman you fell in love with back in Luoyang a thousand years ago? That’s gone, and the only way I can think of for getting it back is Faguang Long.”

“Then why do you keep insisting she has a soul? Or is this just my Western confusion about Chinese people having two souls?”

“Chinese people DO have two souls: hun and po. Jade’s corporeal body kept her po: the soul that provides her substance, the shape of her face, her central nervous system, etcetera, etcetera. The zombies from the bamboo forest and the undead rats in the Himeji Castle crypt: they all have po souls. But they didn’t have hun spiritual souls.”

“And neither does she,” I said, pointing straight at Jade.

Dong shook his head. “Yes she does, hence my ‘holy shit’. But her hun soul seems… brand new. It’s a blank slate: undeveloped, immature, and trying to make sense of more than a thousand years of memories that she can access as if they were books on shelves in a vast library, but without the context of any of the emotions or feelings of having experienced those memories herself.”

“Wait, what?” I sat back and frowned, trying to process all of that.

“She’s like an amnesia victim watching home videos of a life she can’t remember living.”

“I know who you are, Aksel Andersen,” Jade said quietly. “I know you’re The Chosen One of this quest for Faguang Long. I know I’m supposed to love you. I know I’m supposed to trust you. I want to love you. And I want to trust you. But… But…”

Jade’s voice trailed off as she broke down in tears. Her face sank into a mask of anguish, and she shuddered just once in utter pain.

And then she turned off again.

Her expression of anguish faded into complete blankness as her body went stock-still once more. Her unblinking eyes went vacant. She stopped breathing. And her skin again paled to that of a corpse.

“What just happened?”

Still on the table, Dong looked back at me with a frown. “I can’t feel her new hun soul anymore. It’s like it… retreated.”

“Retreated? What, like a turtle pulling its head inside its shell?”

Dong looked thoughtful. “That’s a pretty good metaphor.”

“She can do that?”

“Evidently, although I can’t tell if she did it intentionally or if it’s just a defense mechanism trying to cope with emotions she can’t process right now.”

“Is that normal behavior for a hun soul?”

“Nothing about this situation is ‘normal’. Dead people aren’t normally supposed to be reanimated. People don’t normally have two different hun souls. Wait, I take that back. Some Chinese philosophy consider that a person has three hun and seven po, but that’s more a matter of semantics conceptualizing the different parts of a person’s soul into distinctly uniq--”

“Dong.”

“Right. Well, you have to understand, a person’s hun is what defines their identity. It’s their personality, their sense of being. The hun that identified as ‘Ziyi’ is gone. This new hun is someone else, and she’s responding to the name ‘Jade’. It’s the same body, but she’s not the same person. But what’s most important for you to understand right now, is that she is a person. She’s not just a reanimated corpse with no sense of self. And you’ve kinda been a major asshole to her ever since she was born.”

I blinked and then swallowed thickly, thinking back to when Shen Wu had been torturing Jade and I’d so callously dismissed her as “that thing”.

“Actually, don’t feel so bad about that part,” Dong reassured me.

“Why not?”

“Because I’m pretty sure she didn’t have a hun soul back when Shen Wu first reanimated her.”

“What?” I arched an eyebrow, not understanding.

Dong teleported from the table onto Jade’s shoulder, where she remained as still as a statue, not reacting whatsoever to the little gecko’s presence. Her eyes remained open, staring blankly at the sword. Dong leaned in, conjuring a tiny physician’s otoscope and using it to peer into her ear canal. A moment later, he rapped his knuckles against the side of her head as if knocking on the door. Still, there was no response.

“Okay, now I’m dead certain she didn’t have a hun soul before. This soul is new, less than a day old.”

I raised both eyebrows. “Less than a day old? Wait, she just came back from… But then that would mean…”

Dong folded his arms over his chest and gave me a firm nod, confirming we were on the same page. “This has something to do with Baihu and the sword.”

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TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Prologue & Chapter 1: The Ax Effect: https://www.patreon.com/posts/99894240

Chapter 2: Santa Monica: https://www.patreon.com/posts/100614606

Chapter 3: The Zellij Fountain: https://www.patreon.com/posts/100887440

Chapter 4: Euhemerism: https://www.patreon.com/posts/101140816

Chapter 5: The Fremont Troll: https://www.patreon.com/posts/101373122

Chapter 6: Jade: https://www.patreon.com/posts/101713211

Chapter 7: The Blue Gecko: https://www.patreon.com/posts/101962728

Chapter 8: Yaoguai: https://www.patreon.com/posts/102225122

Chapter 9: Rome: https://www.patreon.com/posts/102437581

Chapter 10: Seeing Sights: https://www.patreon.com/posts/102690886

Chapter 11: Liu Kang: https://www.patreon.com/posts/102919633