Gunsoul

Tracking down a spirit-car was no different from catching an animal. One needed to learn of the target’s location, set up a trap, and then bait it to its doom.

It didn’t take Yuan long to find wheel marks among the rusty dunes and stone roads. Considering how many of them there were, he expected to find a wild herd driving around.

The gasoline canister would prove too much of a delicacy for a wild vehicle to resist, but taming a spirit-car involved jumping into the driver’s seat and surviving the rage-fueled trip that followed. Yuan would have to find a location where he could sneak up on his target undetected. A narrow pass or an elevated spot would do.

Yuan walked around the badlands searching for one such place. He traveled barefoot to better sense vibrations in the ground and easily noticed centideads crawling underground every step of the way. None of them dared to attack him though.

Funny how parading a bleeding corpse around kept trouble away.

However, walking around for hours was starting to take its toll on Yuan. After climbing atop a dune of iron sand, he surveyed the area in search of a viable hiding spot to set up camp for the night.

He quickly noticed a viable choice a short walk north: the carcass of a colossal machine slumbering on half-buried tracks. Its boiler was larger than a house; its ancient wheels were larger than Yuan himself, and a chimney stood at the forefront alongside a cyclopean, inactive headlamp. Yuan had seen one of these Lost Age machines in the past at a junkyard.

Its owner called it a train.

Yuan didn’t see how this metal behemoth could have ever helped anyone train, but he had no interest in solving Lost Age mysteries. He supposed the first cultivator used these contraptions to weight-lift.

It would make for a good hideout for the night in any case. He would resume his hunt for a spirit-car in the morning after a short rest.

Yuan did notice a strange oddity as he walked towards the train: a group of cacti wearing ponchos and broad-brimmed hats lined up at the machine’s side, taking in the shade. Though such strange scenes were not unusual in the Thunderlands, Yuan kept his revolver ready to fire at the first sign of trouble.

A small rusted ladder allowed him to climb his way up to an old metal door leading inside the train. A good kick forced it open, revealing a strange room filled with moldy benches and a set of pistons, gears, and other contraptions. An inactive oven lay at the center. Yuan assumed this used to be the mechanist’s bedroom or something. He had no idea how to wake up this titan of steel—if it remained functional at all—but it would provide an excellent defensive position.

“Perfect,” Yuan muttered to himself upon checking the windows. The left side was buried by the sand, and the right one gave him an excellent angle to shoot down any monster trying to sneak up on him. “I can defend this place.”

Closing the door behind himself for added safety and dropping the centidead corpse to the ground, Yuan sat on the nearest bench and allowed himself a moment to breathe.

I guess this is as good of a spot as any to practice. Yuan closed his eyes and focused on his bullet core. He sensed it faintly pulsing inside his flesh and bones. It hungered for what the Thunderlands had to offer. Let’s try cycling.

Yuan had seen most cultivators practice in a lotus position, so he adopted one himself. He found it hideously uncomfortable, but at least it forced him to focus on his body. He kept his revolver in hand, however.

The Thunderlands breathed qi, and this cabin in the middle of nowhere was no exception. Yuan sensed the power floating around him; whereas the wasteland around Gatesville had been a polluted desert, the region felt like the edge of a thunderstorm. Yuan simply had to open his mouth to drink the region’s energies.

Which he did.

Yuan inhaled and guided the qi inside him. The sensation of striking lightning coursed through his body. The power flowed inside him, strands of pure gold surging with electricity. His brain erupted with sharp pain around his bullet-core.

Yuan gasped as his eyes snapped open. His bullet-core pounded in his skull like an overtaxed heart. He massaged his head and waited for the pain to pass.

“Too much…” His body wasn’t yet used to cycling such amounts of energy. “Gotta go slower. Don’t skip the steps, Yuan.”

This time, Yuan tried to take in the minimum amount of qi into his body before he began to cycle. The qi became a lot more tolerable once he reduced the input. Instead of drinking lightning, he simply charged his bullet-core like a battery. It continued to beat in his skull as it drank the qi, but it no longer threatened to burst and blow up Yuan’s brain.

Revolver had informed him that most cultivators channeled their qi through their dantian cores. Yuan sensed them when he focused on his body, in his stomach, in his heart, and between his eyes. The parts of him that would have awoken if he had consumed a pill and become a cultivator the ‘normal’ way remained after his transformation into a Gunsoul.

They simply died in the process.

They were dead zones inside his own flesh. When Yuan breathed, his bullet-core redirected the qi entering his lungs back to itself before redistributing it back to the rest of his body. It allowed no competition for that precious resource.

Slash had shot him straight in his upper dantian core. It could have been a coincidence, but Yuan found it more likely that it was some sort of final insult: a Scrap slain by a blow in the very place that would have made him a cultivator. Yet another reason for Yuan to loathe the bastard.

His bullet-core had done more than just destroy his upper dantian core on its way in though.

It had taken root.

With each cycle of his qi coursing his veins, Yuan grew more aware of his own body. He began to see the lead tendrils worming their way into his brain. Strands of metal coiled around his bones, set his neurons alight with gunpowder, and pumped oil into his blood vessels.

Yuan’s bullet-core did more than save his life. It was changing him. It took the qi from the outside world and used it to grow. The first thought that crossed his mind was that of a parasite asserting itself on its host; though it could also be a seed spreading its roots in fertile soil and enriching it. It did keep Yuan alive after all.

At this rate, the tendrils would begin to work their way down the spine and slowly overtake the rest of Yuan’s body. It made sense for Gunsouls to have a metal elemental affinity when their veins turned into iron and lead.

Was that what Revolver meant when he said that passing the Second Coil involved reinforcing one’s body until it could sustain a technique? Should Yuan allow the bullet-core to change him?

Change him into what?

“You’re on the Path of the Gun now, Yuan,” Revolver had told him earlier. “Don’t expect to look like a human once you reach the barrel’s end.”

Would he grow a gun for a nose? Or gain triggers for hands?

Somehow the thought didn’t bother Yuan as much as he expected it to. He had spent twenty years being looked down upon as a Scrap, and he wasn’t particularly bothered by his appearance. In the Unmade World, nobody cared how you looked; people judged others on their strength alone. If having his veins turn to lead and his skin to steel was the price to pay for the Gun Path’s power, Yuan was more than willing to pay it.

A pity though. Mingxia used to call him handsome in spite of his scars.

Turning his attention away from his body, Yuan expanded his consciousness outward to better focus on the flow of qi. He remembered the lessons of the Stoneskin Sect: that the goal of all cultivation Paths, no matter their kind, was to become one with the Dao. To find their Way.

The Dao, the Way, the Axiom. So many names to define something that encompasses all of existence; the origin and summation of all things. Yuan felt its presence all around him. He had been blind all his life, but now he saw it everywhere. The Thunderlands’ qi sprung directly from it, like how the sun radiated sunlight. Its golden hue swirled around him as the very essence of sorcery.

Even then, the gold carried strands of green. Of sickness. The same radiation that Yuan sensed in the wasteland had infected this region.

The source of the Thunderlands’ power lay farther to the west. It looked akin to the eye of a sandstorm to Yuan’s senses: the closer to the center, the deadlier the current. The rad-hag probably set up shop there.

All Thunderlands manifested a caretaker spirit; a physical incarnation of the region itself. Yuan once heard that the first Longs descended from them. The corrupted rad-hag ruling over this patch didn’t feel too strong, but he would rather avoid picking up a fight with it now with his limited resources.

Yuan continued to cycle his qi for the Waybringers knew how long, rationing the amount that went into his bullet-core. He would increase the amount coming in with each session once he got the hang of it. By the time he emerged from his meditation, his exhaustion had all but vanished and his body surged with newfound strength.

His hand moved to his forehead and touched it. The lead veins surging from his bullet-core had spread further like a great scar and now reached the eyes. Yuan would probably start to look quite ghoulish after a few sessions.

All Paths led to the Dao in their own unique way. The Spiral Dancer practiced a dance so entrancing that it opened the heavens’ gates; the Sky-Biter devoured so many sins that he achieved enlightenment; the Fleshmancer perfected themselves into the perfect lifeform… Each of the Waybringers had ascended upon reaching the apex of their discipline.

Where would the Path of the Gun lead him?