Untitled Space Xianxia - Chapter 1

Chapter 1: The Call of the Void

The call of the void is that feeling when you stand in a high place and think about jumping, but don't actually want to and don't actually do it. It's a feeling more people have had than they'd like to admit.

-Words from the ancient scholar, Ghoo Guhl

——

The day I died started off as boring as the day before it.

My holopad beeped angrily that Foreman expected my brother and I five minutes ago, but I ignored it. I could wait for Brady at the locker room, or I could wait for him here. I liked it here better.

I breathed deeply into my belly as my eyes drifted over the viewing deck window, my mind at rest as I contemplated the vastness of the nothing that awaited just beyond a few inches of reinforced glass.

Every day I came up here, taking Brady’s excessive morning routine as an opportunity to gaze off into space and clear my head in my own, mortal simulacrum of actual meditation. None of the sects bothered to teach lowly vac-welders fuck all about cultivation, but I’d seen the way they breathed, and gods knew they meditated a lot.

I just did it because it felt nice. It kept me calm. It stopped me from thinking too deeply about just how many punctures I’d sealed up in this tin can we called a home. Hey, just cause I wasn’t meditating to manipulate qi or sense the way of the world or whatever spiritual bullshit didn’t mean it wasn’t useful. You should try it some time.

“Keep that up and I’ll have to report you for VIP.”

“Maybe some day that joke’ll be funny, Brady. Looks like it’s not today.” I turned away from the windows to face my older brother. Growing up, people always thought we were twins. We shared the same sickly-pale skin, over-pronounced cheekbones, and soft jawline. Hell, we even smiled the same lopsided grin when we thought we knew something somebody else didn’t.

These days, we differentiated ourselves with our hair. He kept his head shaved, as if anybody wanted to see more of his uv-starved skin, while I let my light brown locks sweep past my forehead to cover my ears and the back of my neck.

“Maybe I’m serious,” Brady said. “You spend too much time up here. People will start to think you’re losing it.”

“I’m not a cultivator. How am I gonna get VIP?”

“Knowing you?” Brady snorted. “You’ll discover a whole new type of crazy, all your own.”

I rolled my eyes. “C’mon, we’re late. Foreman’ll be pissed.” I stepped past him, putting an end to the conversation even as my gaze lingered on the poster next to the door.

“Know the Signs of VIP,” it read, just above a series of images in that hyper-generic corporate art style we all know and hate. The posters were everywhere, everywhere enough that I’d long memorized every inch of them, including the bit depicting a cartoon man staring forlornly into space.

Obsessive thoughts about space was symptom number one of void-induced psychosis, a disease, I repeat, that I very much did not have. It was just common enough for people to worry about it, but not quite common enough for them to actually do anything about it.

Basically, every once in a while, a cultivator in deep space goes batshit from the lack of qi in the environment. They start running around draining the qi from everything and everyone they can get their hands on, until either someone puts them down, or all the foreign qi kills them. A bronze core cultivator can chew through about a dozen mortals before that happens. Keep that in mind.

Our station—officially RF-31, but we all called it roofie—floated far enough from literally anything that we had these VIP prevention posters all over, not that VIP ever manifests on tiny refueling stations with no cultivators. Still, our ambient qi levels sat low enough that regulation mandated we keep the posters up, so up they stayed. Brady liked to wonder how a bunch of mortals were ever supposed to stop a void psycho, but whenever he asked, the higher-ups just regurgitated some line about catching it early.

Our roofie sat on the proverbial crossroads of two midsized long-haul shipping routes. Most freighters didn’t need the re-up, but every once in a while they had to burn some fuel to escape pirates or reroute around a void beast. When that happened, they’d stop here to replace what they’d spent.

We didn’t get many visitors. Other than our quarterly resupply, someone’d stop by every other week or so, but nobody stayed long. The cultivators especially hated it out here. VIP aside, the low ambient qi made their lives harder. We liked it that way. Our little family got to steer clear of the arrogant bastards.

Roofie kept on a small full-time crew to keep the lights on, about half of which were vac-welders like my brother and I. Our job was to patch up the various holes in the hull caused by random bits of space debris—a common hazard on these trade routes. Between us, management, agri-production, and maintenance, RF-31 employed and housed a grand total of seventeen people. Remember that number. I will.

“Hey, I didn’t know we had visitors,” Brady’s voice pulled me from my thoughts as we passed the window to dock four. Sure enough, the gangway led to a small skiff.

I squinted through the glass as we walked to try and get a glimpse of its name, but the angle was wrong. All I got was pristine white paint and a single, off-center orange stripe. “Can’t be many of them on a ship that small,” I reasoned. “And gotta have one hell of a reactor to make it out here in that thing.”

“We could ask,” Brady offered.

“We’re already late,” I countered. “If they’re still here once Foreman’s done with us, maybe we can find ‘em. Otherwise…” I shrugged.

“Where the hell have you two been?” Foreman’s voice greeted us on cue the moment we stepped through the door into the locker room.

“Brady spent all morning getting his hair just right,” I muttered.

“Cool it, Cal,” Foreman snapped at me. “You’re both late.”

“Yeah, Cal,” Brady said, gently ribbing me with his elbow, “cool it.”

The six-foot-four hunk of meat before us glowered. Foreman—his real name was Josh. Jacob? Jackson? I don’t fucking know; everybody called him Foreman—shoved our vac suits at us. “Suit up. There was a pirate skirmish a few hours away, and I want us whole as we can get before any of that debris gets here.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” I said with a slight grin and a sloppy salute.

“And steer clear of our guest. He catches you saluting like that, you might not like the outcome.”

Brady blinked. “We have a cultivator on station?”

“Yup,” Foreman answered. “I’d tell you two not to piss him off, but we all know that’s beyond you, so instead, you’re gonna spend the entirety of his visit outside.” He once again shoved the vac suits in our direction. “Understood?”

“Understood,” I muttered, taking my suit and beginning the long process of putting it on. There was a reason nobody liked cultivators. They tended to find disrespect wherever they looked, and boy, they did not take it well. Thankfully, odds were our mystery cultivator was off sipping spill-off qi from the station’s reactor rather than watching us mortals refuel his ship. Brady and I would probably still be out working when he left.

I want to take a moment to acknowledge that you and I both know exactly where this is going. I haven’t been subtle. All I ask is that you come along for the ride with an open mind. I promise it gets interesting.

My ears popped as my suit pressurized, the locker room going silent until the shitty comms crackled in my ear.

“You hear me okay?”

“Yes, Brady, I can hear you,” I spoke into my mic. “You ready?”

“Let’s do this.”

We grabbed our weld kits and waddled over to the airlock—yes, waddled. Three years we’d been doing this job, and neither one of us had gotten remotely better at walking in a pressurized vac suit, but I digress.

My hud flickered to life on the glass face of my suit as the airlock hissed open. Another step, and we’d left the station’s artificial gravity.

Most people hate spacewalks. It’s one thing to perceive the vastness of space on a screen or through a window, but out there, when it’s all around you, it fucks people up. Some folks start screaming the moment they step outside, and they don’t stop until they feel gravity again. Most just get used to it over time.

I loved it. There was something peaceful about all that nothingness, like it put everything into perspective. I think you have to truly grasp the concept of nothing before you even begin to comprehend the idea of something. I tried explaining that to my brother once, and he asked who on roofie was mixing narcotics.

Now, I won’t bore you with the specifics of vac-welding. You’re here for the bloodshed, so I’ll just say our job involved crawling around the outside of the station until we got to where our huds told us to go, patching up whatever hole or damage we found, then doing it all again. It was boring, arduous, repetitive work that only paid a decent wage because we did it in a place nobody wanted to be—bumfuck nowhere.

All you need to know is we were about two hours into our shift, and my lower back was killing me when the lights went out.

It happened all at once. I like to imagine there was this great big perklunk as every system on roofie went down at the same time, but obviously I didn’t hear anything—vacuum of space and all that. Brady and I were perched up on the wall overlooking dock three when it happened.

“What’s that? What’s going on?”

“Caliban to roofie, Caliban to roofie, do you read me?” I spoke into the mic, but no response came. I exhaled. “Comms are dead.”

“Shit,” Brady cursed. “They would’ve told us if they were planning a reactor reboot today, right?”

I scowled. “I didn’t see anything on the docket, but it could’ve been a last-minute addition. We were late this morning.”

“We should go in. Maybe something’s wrong.”

“If they wanted us in, they would’ve called us in. Come on, we’re almost done with this one.”

“I don’t know, Cal,” said Brady. “They wouldn’t just leave us out here like this, would they?”

“They would if we, I don’t know, had work to do. Now, come on, help me finish this.” I held down the piece of sheet metal as Brady tacked it on, reinforcing the dented hull enough that it probably wouldn’t puncture if something else hit it. I’d just pulled back to admire our work when the panic returned to Brady’s voice.

“Cal, you should look at this.”

“Look at what?”

“Your fucking hud. You know, the thing they pay you to look at?”

With I sigh I tapped the button on my wrist that marked the current job as done and glanced up at my hud to read the next one. None appeared. “It’s gone.”

“You’re damn right it’s fucking gone,” Brady cursed yet again. “We need to go back. Something’s wrong.”

“Alright, alright,” I breathed, fighting back my own mounting sense of trepidation. “Lead the way.”

We took turns trying the comms again as we crawled hand over hand across the patchy hull. With every failed attempt my anxiety grew. As long as we’d been on roofie, maintenance had never taken the reactor down for more than a few minutes. By the time we reached the airlock, it’d been twenty.

Luckily for us, some engineer three centuries ago had the bright idea that airlocks should stay tied to the back-up batteries just in case a pair of vac-welders got caught outside during a reactor failure. While they weren’t quite as important as, well, clean air, Brady and I certainly appreciated it. Well, I appreciated it. I think Brady was busy thinking about other things.

Namely the corpse on the staging room floor.

If I were one of those biased narrators, this would be the part where I claim I heroically rushed to Foreman’s side to take his pulse and call for help. I would absolutely not stand perfectly still for three heartbeats then vomit in my suit.

“Foreman!” Brady tore his helmet off and heroically rushed to Foreman’s side to take his pulse. “We need help down here!” he shouted. “Somebody!”

His voice echoed pitifully through the empty staging room. No-one came.

“Cal, help me with him!” Brady yelled at me, already shoving Foreman on his back and getting on top of him. “He’s not breathing!”

Adrenaline finally kicking in and banishing the nausea, I wiped my mouth as best I could and darted to my brother’s side as he started chest compressions. A hideous crack rang out as Brady broke one of Foreman’s ribs. I tapped my foot to the rhythm, clapping Brady on the back to help him keep time. That’s when I saw it.

“His eyes, Brady,” I managed at little more than a whisper. “Look at his eyes.”

“Shit.” Brady deflated as he saw what I saw, stopping CPR the moment he realized its futility. “He has all the signs.”

“I—” I stuttered, “I didn’t notice—I didn’t think—pallid and clammy skin are classic signs, but Foreman’s always had pallid and clammy skin.”

“The eyes confirm it,” Brady said, his own gaze fixed on the milky white orbs that had once shined deep azure.

The posters listed three telltale symptoms of lethal qi depletion. Sickly and sweaty skin we could excuse, but I only knew of one thing that could drain the color from a person’s eyes so quickly and so completely as Foreman’s.

“We need to find the others!” Brady shot to his feet, not even bothering to strip out of his suit before he moved for the door.

“Are you kidding?” I shouted at him, already reaching for my sick-filled helmet. “We need to get the fuck out of here. If that cultivator’s gone vip, there’s nothing we can do to stop him. Our best bet is to get back outside and hope he doesn’t notice us.”

“I’m not gonna hide while some void psycho kills my friends.”

“Our friends,” I corrected him. “And if they’re smart, they’re hiding too. Now, come on, we need to—” Before I could even finish Brady had darted out of the room, leaving me, Foreman, and a vac suit full of vomit.

I chased him.

Before anyone starts calling me a coward for wanting to hide outside instead of trying to help people, it’s important for you to understand that I was right. The most good any of us could’ve hoped to do was warn someone to hide before the void psycho found them, but what with all those enhanced senses cultivators have, the mere act of warning someone meant practically shouting our location to the high heavens.

As it turned out, we didn’t need to shout or warn anybody at all. The mere sound of our feet against the metal walkway was enough.

He appeared out of nowhere, seeming to pop out of thin air as he stepped in front of Brady faster than my eyes could register the motion. Brady slammed into him, the entire body mass of my six-foot-one older brother failing to budge the cultivator an inch. Some dozen yards behind, I skidded to a halt.

The void psycho leered down at my brother with eyes as black as the abyss. Sweat dripped down his brow. One of the muscles on his face twitched uncontrollably, forcing his mouth in and out of a one-sided smile with no discernible rhythm. He wrapped a shaky hand around my brother’s throat and licked his lips.

If this were a lighthearted, fun, adventure story, this would be the part where Brady broke free and escaped down the hall, all the while shouting some line like, “he’s got the signs, Cal! He’s got the signs!” Then we would’ve outwitted the insane cultivator, saved someone’s life, and in the process won the approval of some powerful benefactor who’d whisk us away from this mundane existence to begin our true journey down the path of cultivation.

This isn’t that story.

My brother’s corpse hit the deck with a wet thump.

The cultivator shivered, his entire body quaking as he drank of Brady’s qi. For a moment, for a brief, horrible, precious moment, there was only me and him.

I didn’t see red. My heart didn’t race with undying fury. My soul didn’t wail with helpless sorrow. Somehow, in the maelstrom of fear and adrenaline and grief and hopelessness, my mind found itself at the eye of the storm, and a sense of calm overtook me.

I had two options. I could pray to whichever god would listen that Brady’s had been the last foreign qi the vip could handle, or I could go down swinging. With all the rational forethought of a man staring down his brother’s murderer, I made my choice.

The cultivator didn’t even look at me as I charged him. He didn’t break from his stupor as I lunged over Brady’s lifeless body. He didn’t so much as flinch when my fist struck his jaw. I may as well have punched the outer hull.

Later on, I would learn that the most forceful punch of my mortal life was strong enough to break three bones in my forefingers, and one in my hand itself. At the moment, I just knew it hurt like hell.

The cultivator laughed.

It started low, a soft, quick, rhythmic exhalation as I first recoiled and clutched my injured hand. It built from there, rising in pitch and volume until his cackles echoed hauntingly down the metal hallway. He clutched his belly and doubled over, apparently finding my attempt at fighting back too funny to remain standing.

I ran.

The thick boots of my vac suit clanged against the walkway as I sprinted for my life, mind racing in desperate panic. He’s dead. He’s dead. They’re all dead. No. Stop. That doesn’t matter right now. I need to do something or I’ll be dead. I ran and I ran and I ran, taking corners at random, leaping over the pallid corpses of my crew-mates as I found them. I didn’t bother to check for a pulse. I didn’t dare look back.

I knew it was futile. I knew there was nowhere I could hide where the cultivator wouldn’t find me, nowhere I could run faster than he could follow. All I had was a paltry few moments of head start while he cackled. If he’d already made his way through the reactor core and the other crewman without dying to qi poisoning, nothing would stop him from taking me too. Nothing, unless…

“Scan for life signs on the ship in dock four!” I shouted the command at my holopad, taking a sharp left at the next available turn before its response even appeared. The display popped into view above my left wrist—no life signs, no lockdown.

I plotted the route in my mind, opening doors and making turns on instinct over anything else. Fear and adrenaline spurred me onward, my heart pounding in my chest as I kept imagining the void psycho popping out of nowhere directly in front of me, just like he did Brady. Brady…

I shook the thought from my mind. Survival first, grief second, I told myself.

The first glimmer of real hope sparked when I rounded the bend onto the gangway. The door to the cultivator’s skiff hung open, its interior the only space free of the dull back-up lighting. I chanced a grin—the ship’s reactor was online!

I booked it down the gangway, feeling the narrow passage shake as my feet impacted against it. I was so close. So close. I just had to—

The doors slammed shut in front of me. I collided with them, my face pressing up against the small glass porthole. My panting breath fogged it up as I gazed through it, as I watched, with desperate eyes, my only chance drift away.

Unoccupied, unpiloted, seemingly of its own volition, the skiff abandoned me to die.

“No,” I breathed, pounding my fist against the door. I felt the hope drain from my body as the skiff distanced itself, as more and more hard vacuum separated me and it.

“And then there was one.”

I jumped as the singsong voice breathed down my neck, spinning in place to find the cultivator standing directly behind me. I panicked. I scrambled back, feet scraping against the floor as I pushed myself as far away as I could manage. My back pressed up to the gangway door, to the vacuum beyond.

The cultivator tilted his head. The spasms on his face had grown more frequent, more intense. He wrapped a hand around my throat.

There can be no words to adequately describe how it feels to have your qi torn from you, to have your life force so completely rent from your body that your every spiritual and biological function shuts down at once. There was pain, but no working nerves to register it. There was sorrow, but no working tear ducts with which to cry. There was torment, but no air with which to scream.

“Yes, yes!”

The man’s hand twitched and released me. I slumped to the floor.

He turned and began to limp away, the spasms spreading and intensifying throughout his body as his muscles seized with foreign qi. He made it four awkward, jerking steps before he turned on his heel, opened his mouth as if to speak or to shout, and promptly exploded.

Blood and viscera rained down on me. Bone fragments pierced my vac suit in a dozen places, but I didn’t care.

I was dead.

My only regret, in that moment, was that I wasn’t lucid enough to truly enjoy the gruesomeness of the psycho’s death.

But already I’d breathed my last. Already the color faded from my eyes. In those final seconds, as the neurons in my brain fired their desperate final thoughts, something miraculous happened.

I understood.

For all the time I’d spent gazing out at the stars, for all the contemplation I’d done, all the spacewalks I’d taken, it took all this to truly understand it. It took existing on a dead station in the middle of nowhere without a living soul around. It took the realization of how truly meaningless my life had been. It took experiencing true emptiness, lethal emptiness.

The void was infinite, and the void was nothing, and yet in its infinity, the void rendered all else nothing in comparison.

I was nothing. Roofie was nothing. The cultivator had been nothing. The scale of our existence touched so little that any distinction between us and the infinite nothing broke apart.

For all my life I’ve felt the call of the void, but it was there, alone, bleeding from a dozen small punctures and a shattered hand, by brain shutting down from qi deprivation, that I called back.

And the void answered.

Energy flooded through me, energy I didn’t recognize yet knew like a close friend. I seized as my brain fired back up. I coughed great, horrible, full-body coughs as the air returned to my lungs and found them full of blood.

I made it eight seconds before the pain crashed into me, a tidal wave that rippled up from my very soul only to wash against my various injuries like an acid bath. I lasted three breaths more before it proved too much for my overwhelmed mind, and at long last, consciousness escaped me.

According to my holopad, I was mentally, physically, and spiritually dead for four minutes and twenty-three seconds. I can’t say for sure whether or not I woke up the same person. All I know is that I woke up, and, including the cultivator, seventeen men and women aboard RF-31 didn’t.

I told you I’d remember that number.

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