Chapter 2 - Afterlife 2

The girl who had been bustling about left, and the head, now alone, sank into contemplation.

'What in the world is this situation?'

Adapting to something was harder than one might think. All the more so when it was something one had never seen or experienced before.

A makeshift workshop stood in a corner of a waste disposal yard. This inexorable law applied just as much to the humanoid dangling there, with nothing left of it but a head.

The optical sensors on the head moved this way and that. Everywhere he looked was dark and damp. Machines stained with waste oil and rust lay strewn about, while tools of unknown purpose were piled in disarray.

His own condition was no less bizarre. Like those machines, he too hung on the wall. Quite high up, at that, leaving him feeling exactly like a disembodied soul floating in midair.

He could see and hear, yet do nothing. What could he be but a ghost!

At that moment, a small realization dawned on him.

'... A ghost?'

That thought naturally brought him to the end of his memories.

The silent, snow-covered mountain.

The snow still falling.

The Heavenly Demon collapsing as he coughed up blood.

And after that?

He had looked up at the sky. Closed his eyes and fallen.

Thus had Kunlun's Blood Immortal met his end.

'Yes.'

He had died. Then awakened once more in this grotesque place.

His form, reduced to a head, like a disembodied soul.

A consciousness roused against his will.

The strange and mysterious girl who had welcomed him.

This dark, desolate space.

Death. The unfamiliar sights that followed.

The fragments of information gathered together, giving shape to one chilling possibility.

'... Could this be the Underworld?'

The Underworld.

The place one reached after death.

The place where the dead gathered.

It might be an absurd conjecture, but to make sense of his situation, he had to venture even that much. Strangely enough, once he thought of this place as the Underworld, all its odd phenomena began to seem plausible.

With that conclusion, everything looked a little different.

The data pad casting faint holograms into the air. The complex tools whose purposes he could not fathom. The machine parts piled haphazardly, steeped in grease and rust.

These strange objects must be tools of the afterlife. Or perhaps they were the remains of other beings who had fallen into the Underworld, just as he had.

Then why had he alone awakened in this form, still holding memories of the living world?

An answer came to him surprisingly quickly.

'Karmic retribution.'

Kunlun's Blood Immortal had taken countless lives in his pursuit of vengeance. Even if his victims were members of the Demonic Cult, there was no denying his intent to kill. A bloody revenge for which he had abandoned even the Way. The karmic burden of it could hardly be light.

Was the Underworld not said to be where the sins of the living were judged, their gravity weighed, and fitting punishment meted out?

Perhaps, at this very moment, his sins were being put on trial. Perhaps that was why he had been roused from the eternal rest of death.

He could not know the answer. For now, all he could do was accept this incomprehensible place and his own existence within it, and wait for what came next.

'O Heavenly Lord of Primordial Beginning...'

The humanoid, reduced to a head, sank once more into contemplation.

* * *

A fortnight.

That much time had passed since he opened his eyes in this unfamiliar place.

A fortnight was by no means a short time. Much had changed.

He was no longer merely a head.

A dull, dark torso had been attached beneath his head, and he had acquired a left leg that lacked even a coat of paint, let alone a steel covering. Thanks to that, he no longer had to hang in midair. Incomplete though he still was, he could now support himself on one leg.

Another notable development was his ability to make sounds. The old voice module produced a crude voice riddled with electronic noise, but it was sufficient to make himself understood.

Yet something mattered more than any of those changes: his relationship with the girl.

"Mister!"

Just then, the workshop door opened and the girl came in, carrying a hefty-looking mechanical arm over her shoulder.

"Mr. Ash! Look at this!"

Akina called him Ash. There was no profound reason for it. The humanoid's head simply bore the painted marking [ASH], indicating waste designated for incineration.

Ash.

What remained after burning.

Ash had not bothered to correct the name. Having come to the Underworld, should he not follow its customs?

Rousing himself from contemplation, he lifted his head and addressed the girl.

"Ah, Lady A. You have returned?"

In contrast to his noise-ridden electronic voice, his manner of speech was exceedingly archaic and refined. Perhaps because of that, Akina had begun speaking to him politely at some point, rather than using her former casual tone. She said she somehow felt guilty otherwise.

"Everything been all right?"

"All has been peaceful."

With a grin, Akina lowered the mechanical arm from her shoulder onto the workbench. Judging by the thud it made, it weighed a fair amount.

Ash's optical sensors shifted between Akina and the mechanical arm before he activated his voice module softly.

"You go to a great deal of trouble for me, Lady A."

"Oh, this is nothing. Shall we get started?"

"As you please."

Grinning, Akina gathered her tools and approached Ash. She examined his left shoulder—or, more precisely, the severed artificial neural network matrix at the shoulder. Then immediately looked perplexed.

"Huh? The slot doesn't fit. That's weird. I definitely brought the same Type C. Is it because he's an older model? Why is this backward...?"

Watching her, Ash suddenly called out.

"Lady A."

"Just a moment. I'm thinking. Later."

"... Lady A?"

"Oh, honestly. What is it?"

Grumbling, the girl raised her head and met Ash's teal optical sensors. He looked into her blue eyes for a moment, then calmly stated his business.

"That is not the correct side."

"What isn't?"

"The arm you brought is a right arm."

At Ash's words, Akina turned toward the mechanical arm she had set down a moment earlier. She compared it with each of her own arms in turn, then finally realized that it was indeed a right arm.

Akina's face turned carrot-red, the color all the more conspicuous against her naturally pale skin.

"I-I knew that, you know! I was just checking the left shoulder too!"

"Were you?"

"... I really was!"

"It seems I interfered needlessly out of misplaced concern. If I have offended you, I apologize."

Faced with such an impeccably straightforward apology, Akina could only fall silent. In the somewhat awkward atmosphere, she edged around to Ash's right shoulder, muttering under her breath.

"... Are all older-generation humanoids like this? Why is he so good with words? He couldn't even understand me at first."

Quiet though she was, the audio input device mounted in Ash's head caught every word.

"It is thanks to the integrated language pack data card you gave me. I remain ever grateful."

"... I was talking to myself."

"It sounded quite loud, so I could not tell. I am not yet accustomed to this."

Akina gave him a sidelong glare, then smiled sheepishly. Suddenly remembering something, she rummaged through the pocket on her chest. What emerged in her hand was another data card.

"A new tome?"

"Tome?"

Akina tilted her head.

"Ah. My mistake. A new data card?"

"That's right. Have you read everything on the last one?"

"I have."

Nodding at his answer, Akina inserted the new data card into the slot on the side of his head. A small click signaled that it had locked into place.

[EXTERNAL DATA-CARD DETECTED]

"I'll get to work now, so you look through the data. Ask me if there's anything you're curious about."

"I shall."

With a sensation that had grown quite familiar by now, Ash accessed his system. Crisp green strings of text began appearing in a corner of his optical sensors.

[DIRECT MEMORY INTERFACE ACTIVE]

[ACCESS PROTOCOL. . . ENGAGED]

[INITIATING DATA STREAM. . . DONE]

[DATA INDEXING. . . DONE]

[DATA: Akina's General Knowledge♥ Ver 1.3]

[RESEARCH. . . NOW<<<]

Information poured in alongside the blinking system messages. The way knowledge was passed on in this world differed fundamentally from that of his former world. Vast knowledge that might scarcely be acquired through a lifetime of dedication was injected in an instant.

It was a veritable storm of data, staggering in volume. The sensation was incomprehensible and overwhelming, as though hundreds of decades-old Taoist scriptures were flooding into his mind in the blink of an eye.

Akina's muttering, the sounds of her tools, and the crackle of welding sparks gradually receded. Ash focused entirely on the torrent of information.

The information came from a single girl's perspective, complete with highly subjective interpretations and annotations. Even allowing for that, everything about this world was bizarre and cruel. Amid the flood, Ash quickly sorted out what seemed to be its key terms.

Sanctum.

The Outer.

Pathfinder.

Most of the information was connected to those three terms. Surely these were the defining elements of the Underworld. Within that ocean of knowledge, Ash concentrated his investigation on those three subjects.

Before long, he let out a low sigh.

'... This is truly hell.'

Humanity's only city and its final bastion.

Sanctum.

Contrary to the word's dictionary meaning of a sacred place, Sanctum could be considered an arena for a ruthless struggle to survive.

Every citizen had to hand over a vast sum of money—credits—each month under the bizarre pretext of an "individual contribution assessment." Akina had annotated this with the expression "breathing fee," which struck him as a truly apt metaphor.

The problem was that it did not end with the breathing fee. Sanctum demanded credits at every turn, driving ordinary people's lives to the brink. In the end, those pushed out to the city's outskirts were forced into one final choice.

They abandoned their frail flesh and converted their entire bodies into cold metal—cyberware. Then, in those mechanized bodies, they headed into the ruins of an ancient civilization: the Outer, their last hope and a trove of despair.

A handful of artifacts and ancient data salvaged from that land of death, lashed by ion storms, offered their only chance to cling to life for another day.

Those who risked their lives venturing into the remnants of the past in search of a future—all such people were called Pathfinders...

'I suspected this would be no easy world, but never imagined it would be this bad. A life crushed beneath invisible pressure day after day. Could there be a worse hell? Truly, this is the Underworld. Not a shred of mercy to be found!'

His misunderstanding only deepened.

"All done!"

Akina, who had finished her work in the meantime, called out brightly. At her cry, strings of text scrolled down, indicating that the system connection was complete.

[R-ARM UNIT: CONNECTION STABLE]

[NEURAL MATRIX: SYNC OPTIMAL. . .]

[. . .]

"Want to try moving it?"

At her prompting, Ash slowly moved his newly acquired right arm. It moved far more smoothly and precisely than the left leg he had received earlier.

He clenched and unclenched his fist, then tried bending the joints. There was an unfamiliar sensation, along with a faint tremor, but the arm unquestionably moved according to his will.

It was a marvel. He had merely acquired one arm, yet for some reason he felt a sense of security and freedom. Perhaps it was because he had been a swordsman in life?

Confidence welled up within him that he could boldly face even the laws of the Underworld that had so horrified him only moments before.

With utterly sincere respect, Ash spoke.

"You never cease to amaze me. Lady A, you are more than worthy of being called a genius."

Apparently delighted by his praise, Akina burst into bright laughter. Then she paused and clapped her hands.

"Mister, can you try making this shape with your hand?"

She demonstrated a somewhat unusual gesture, extending only her index and little fingers while folding the others down.

Ash studied the strange gesture for a moment, then folded his steel fingers. It was a little clumsy, but unmistakably the same shape. Akina made the gesture with both hands and shouted.

"Yeah! Rock and roll!"

Whatever she found so amusing, the girl beamed with innocent delight.

That smile was something the data card did not contain.