It had been fifty years since the Spiral Dancer ascended to the heavens by completing her Thunderdance; forty-five since the Sky-Biter unmade the world on his way out of it; and twenty since Yuan first drew breath.

  Two decades of sweat and struggle, only to end up buried at the bottom of a ditch in the middle of nowhere. His murderer dug him a tomb at least, before giving him and his team the last rites sutras.

  What a world they lived in. Killers gave their victims funerals so they wouldn’t return to haunt them as hungry ghosts.

  Did Yuan want to return? The question lingered in his mind as he faced the darkness between life and death. Part of him wanted to avenge his fallen friends and live up to his final curse to haunt his murderer. If he mustered enough willpower, his ghost might endure in spite of the sutras.

  Who was he kidding? Dead or undead, he would remain a Scrap.

  Yuan had accepted his limits the day he learned he was one of the many men born without the potential for a qi core. It wasn’t unusual. Half the world’s inhabitants were Scraps working themselves to the bones serving the cultivators. Those who served a sect well and pleased its elders might even receive an uncorrupted spirit pill allowing them to form a core.

  Yuan possessed that hope back when he worked for the Stoneskins, before realizing how slim his prospects truly were. Sects mostly used their rare pills to help Second Coil disciples ascend to the Third. Why waste them on a runt who couldn’t even cultivate on his own? Elders only elevated Scraps when the occasional spirit-beast attack or marauder raid claimed the life of too many disciples. The one time it happened to a sect for which Yuan was working, its elders chose local children over him. Cultivators became better the younger they were trained, and Yuan was pushing past twenty. Too old, the Elders had said. Too old.

  At least staying at that sect let him meet Mingxia and Jaw-Long.

  So he had become a courier instead. He had spent years transporting packages across the wasteland, hoping to one day scrape enough funds to buy a pill or get noticed by an Elder. Then he could have shown the world what he was truly made of.

  His dream had ended up like so many others: unfulfilled.

  Is this the Nowhere? Yuan pondered. He could hardly feel his limbs. His heartbeat had gone silent, and his lungs were still. His mind drifted ever downward in pitch black darkness. It’s almost peaceful.

  Those who returned from death before reincarnation described the Nowhere as a void in which the dead fell until they reached their new self. Those who committed great sins suffered in wasteful skins. Perhaps Yuan had committed a crime in a previous life to be born a Scrap. He could only hope to be reincarnated as a cultivator. That was his sincerest wish.

  He was tired of being weak.

  And that masked man… what he would give to gun down that asshole…

  Yuan had dedicated half his life to gunplay, only to have his art mocked. He picked it up when the attitude of the First and Second Coils started wearing on his nerves at the Stoneskin Sect, especially the former. Nothing annoyed Yuan more than young boys and girls half his age looking down on him. They thought his lack of core meant he couldn’t kill them.

  Most of them were wrong too. Yuan had killed First and Second Coil marauders in the past. Their skin was still soft at that stage, and few could dodge a projectile at point blank range. Guns had given Yuan what he had always craved: power. Meager power, but power nonetheless.

  If only there had been bullets that could pierce through the Immortals… if he had had one, Yuan would have tracked that Slash across the entire Unmade World and put three bullets in his skull; one for Jaw-Long, one for Mingxia, and the last one for Yuan himself.

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  A metal heartbeat shattered the silence.

  The sudden noise was enough to wake Yuan from his lethargy. He focused on the sudden source of the sound, tuning his mind to its source. He looked inside himself, at a piece of cold metal stuck inside him.

  The bullet.

  Yuan could sense the bullet that had slain him deep inside his flesh. A core of lead and steel in a shell of flesh and bone. It pulsed like a heart. With life.

  What was going on? Yuan focused further on the bullet and sensed it radiate power. A wave of energy pulsed from it. It carried the acrid scent of gunpowder, mixed with the metallic stench of oil and the burnt aroma of a discharged weapon. Yuan liked it.

  Was this… qi?

  Yuan had never wielded qi. No Scrap could sense it at all. He didn’t remember any cultivator mentioning that it smelled of firearms either. Then again, it was supposed to come in many different forms.

  Whatever that energy was, Yuan felt it spread through his body. He began to sense his limbs answering his thoughts once more. A wave of warmth flowed into his veins. Yuan recognized it immediately.

  The pulse of life.

  Seizing his chance, Yuan focused on the bullet. The more he did, the more he knew it, the stronger its iron heartbeat and the waves it sent. It filled Yuan’s flesh, strengthening it, and enhancing him. His numb fingers moved slightly.

  He saw a light at the end of a barrel. He went after this fleeting frame with all his might.

  Then he saw a monster on the other side.

  Yuan caught a glimpse of a grotesque abomination of flesh and twisted metal. Its form vaguely resembled that of an emaciated and harrowing parody of a humanoid, a maelstrom of charred bones and sinews melded with steel barrels jutting out of its back like a spider’s limbs. Its arms ended in cannons of monstrous proportions breathing smoke and bloody fumes.

  It barred the way back to the light.

  Yuan’s will briefly faltered. Whatever that entity was, he could feel its suffocating power. It dwarfed the malice of Yuan’s own killer.

  But between the certainty of death and the possibility of a new life, Yuan knew which one to take. He fearlessly went after the light, ready to stand his ground against that demon if need be.

  The monster opened its mouth, revealing jaws filled with gunshell teeth.

  “Kill me,” it said with a voice loud like gunfire. “If you can.”

  A gunshot resonated inside his skull, and Yuan Guang triggered back to life.

  His head burst out of the shallow ditch alongside most of his chest, sending dirt flying in all directions. His lungs gasped for air, but when he exhaled, his breath reeked of gunsmoke. The planetary ring shone bright blue in a sea of yellow. It was daylight again.

  How long had he slept in this tomb?

  How did he even survive? The creature… where was that creature?

  He couldn’t focus on anything with his awful headache. Yuan’s hand instinctively moved to his forehead, only to feel a patch of metal in the middle of his skin. The bullet was stuck in his skull, a crown of iron surrounded by lead veins. It pulsed stronger than his own heartbeat.

  What… What was the meaning of this? Did the cultivator who attacked him enchant his bullet? Or had Yuan returned as a hungry ghost somehow?

  The sound of a motorcycle coming from behind him drew him out of his thoughts. Yuan instinctively turned his head around, right in time to see a biker come from behind his ditch and stop at his side.

  The bike was one of the strangest he had seen yet; a heavy behemoth of steel with wheels of smokeless fire. Its rider was no less intimidating; some kind of desperado clad in a black duster, boots, and heavy gloves, with a hangman’s noose for a scarf. He wore a helmet stylized after a white skull, and a rounded hat on top of it. Yuan couldn’t see his eyes behind its black lenses, though he was more worried about the revolvers hanging from the man’s belt.

  For a moment, Yuan feared that this newcomer might be one of the marauders who had attacked him. Instead of returning him to his dirt nap, the stranger lowered his head and tipped his hat.

  “Wake up, Gunsoul,” he said with a deep, bellowing voice. “A child of the Gun doesn’t belong in a ditch.”

  He offered his hand to Yuan, who stared at it in doubt and confusion.

  “Who are you?” he asked the stranger.

  “Revolver. A Gunsoul like you. A man on the Path of the Gun.” His words made no sense, but Yuan sensed no hostility from him. “The Gun rewarded your dedication to vengeance and firearms with a half-life. Cherish it. You won’t get a second.”

  The Gun? Did he mean that creature Yuan saw in the Nowhere? The biker’s words made little sense, but Yuan at least understood the gist of it. Something had brought him back from the dead.

  “A half-life is still a life,” Yuan told himself as he took Revolver’s hand. His grip was strong and firm.

  “Now you get it,” Revolver said upon pulling him out of the ditch. “Congrats, by the way. You’ve just triggered and passed through the First Coil.”

  “The First Coil?” Either the man was mistaken or the world had gone mad in Yuan’s sleep. “I can’t have gotten past the First Coil. I’m a Scrap, I don’t have a core.”

  “A core?”

  Revolver laughed and pointed at the bullet stuck in Yuan’s face.

  “That’s your core, buddy,” the biker said. “The source and solution of all your problems.”

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