Chapter 5: Inventory

Chapter 5: Inventory

HEAVENLY DEMON OF THE DEAD GATE

Volume 1: Risen from Suicide

***

He woke at 3:12 a.m., and for a moment he didn’t know where he was.

That was the dangerous part of a new body. The mind remembered, but the muscles didn’t. Yun Zhou lay still in the dark, listening to the apartment settle, and ran the old checklist.

Breathing: shallow. Heartbeat: slow. Hands: cold. Hunger: yes.

Hunger: yes, and not for food.

He frowned at the ceiling. The feeling was back, that faint hook under his sternum. It wasn’t strong. It was more like a dog sitting at the foot of the bed, patient, staring at him with its head tilted.

“Not tonight,” he muttered.

He turned on the lamp, a bare bulb with a string pull, and sat up. His stomach gave a long, hollow groan.

Fine. Business first.

***

Every campaign starts the same way. Before you plan the war, you count what’s in the warehouse.

Yun Zhou cleared the folding table and laid everything out in rows, like a shopkeeper preparing for a very bad day.

Cash. He emptied the wallet, the jacket pockets, the coffee can on the shelf, and the gap under the mattress. Sixty-seven thousand, four hundred. It would have been eighty-seven before the noodle stall.

I tipped twenty thousand for an extra egg, he thought. Sentimental idiot.

But he didn’t regret it. Not exactly.

Food. Three packs of instant ramen. Half a jar of sugar. A bottle of cooking oil, a quarter full. At two meals a day, that was a day and a half.

Gear. One dented flashlight. Two bandages. A folding knife with a cracked handle. A gray hunter jacket with patched elbows.

Documents. One Hunter license, E-rank, class: unknown. A debt notice for forty-eight million. Two overdue electric bills. A cracked phone with eleven percent battery, now seven.

Weapons. None that mattered.

Allies. None.

He looked at the neat rows for a long moment, and a thin, dry smile crossed his face.

“I’ve started with less,” he said to the empty room. “Once. Barely.”

It was a lie. In his old life, even in the worst years, he’d had a sword, a name, and a handful of men willing to die for him. Or so he’d thought.

Better to have nothing and know it, he reflected, than to have everything and be wrong.

***

He tore a sheet from the notebook and drew a triangle. At each corner he wrote a single word.

INFORMATION.

LIES.

TIME.

These were the only three things he had to sell.

Information was easy to understand. Oculus could pull secrets out of a man’s head like a fishhook, and Marlo’s secret was already worth more than forty-eight million to the right buyer. The problem was that information only has value if someone is willing to pay for it, and the buyers around here were the kind of men who preferred to simply take it.

Lies were harder. A good lie wasn’t just a false statement. It was an architecture. It needed foundations (a believable motive), load-bearing walls (supporting details), and an exit (a way for the liar to walk away unharmed). Yun Zhou had built thousand-room palaces out of them. He could do it again. But the walls had to be tested, and he didn’t have time to test them.

Time was the trickiest of all, because it was the one thing he had less of than anything else. Seventy-two hours, minus the day he’d already burned. Call it fifty-two.

He tapped the pencil against the edge of the table.

“Not enough time to build a network,” he murmured. “Not enough money to buy muscle. Not enough Ki to cross a street without wheezing.”

He paused.

“So I need to make Marlo’s boss do the work.”

The idea settled into place with a faint, satisfying click.

The boss. A man Marlo feared. A man Marlo was stealing from. A man who, once he became suspicious, would solve the problem far more thoroughly than a skinny hunter ever could.

All Yun Zhou had to do was give him a reason to look.

He smiled, and it wasn’t pleasant.

Excellent. Now I just need to survive long enough for it to work.

***

That was the part that bothered him.

Because if Marlo came back in three days and Yun Zhou had nothing, the clinic man’s price list would stop being a threat and start being a schedule.

I need an insurance policy. Something that keeps me alive if the plan stalls.

He turned back to the notebook and underlined a word he’d written earlier, in the margin, almost as an afterthought:

Feign.

Mortem Simulo. The old name for it, the one he’d used in the cultivation halls, had meant I pretend to die. Among the Demon Sect’s lower ranks it was a beginner’s technique, barely worth teaching. You slowed your heart, stilled your breath, and let your Ki vanish from the surface of your body. To any sensing master, you were a corpse.

It had saved him three times in his youth. Twice from assassins, once from a famine.

It required almost no Ki at all. In theory, even this wreck of a body could manage it.

In theory.

He stood and moved the folding table to the wall, clearing a patch of floor. Then he lay down on his back, arms at his sides, and stared at the ceiling.

“All right,” he said. “Show me what you’ve got.”

***

Attempt one.

He closed his eyes. He let the breath fall out of him in a long, slow stream, and began to count his heartbeat. Seventy. Sixty-five. Sixty. Fifty-five.

He pulled his attention inward, toward the dry well in his abdomen, and tried to do what he’d done ten thousand times before: draw a thread of Ki up through the channels and close it, like drawing a curtain across a window.

There was no thread.

There was nothing to draw. The well was empty. His mind reached for the old motion and closed on air.

His heart, which had been dropping nicely, stuttered. Then it sped up. Then it began to pound.

Wrong. The technique wasn’t about the Ki. Not entirely. Ki was the finishing touch, the seal. The core of Feign was control, deep, deliberate command over autonomic functions, the kind of discipline that took years to build.

I have the discipline, he thought. I just have to use it without the crutch.

He started over. And this time, instead of reaching for Ki, he reached for the muscles.

He relaxed his diaphragm one fiber at a time. He loosened his jaw, his tongue, the tiny muscles around his eyes. He told his heart to slow, not with force but with suggestion, the way you coax a nervous horse.

Sixty. Fifty. Forty-five.

The room began to tilt.

Forty. Thirty-eight.

A faint ringing started in his ears.

Thirty-five.

His chest tightened. A band of iron closed around his ribs. The lamp, even through his eyelids, turned the world red, then violet, then a hot, throbbing black.

Too much. Too fast. The body can’t take it.

He snapped his eyes open and sucked in a ragged breath. His heart hammered back to life like a startled bird.

He lay there gasping, drenched in cold sweat, staring at the ceiling.

“One,” he wheezed. “Zero.”

***

Attempt two.

He waited ten minutes. He drank a glass of water from the tap, sat on the floor, and thought.

The body’s heart is weak. Pushing it down quickly is dangerous. I need to go slower. Gentler. Let the heart think it’s falling asleep.

He lay back down. This time he began with the breath only, a long, slow, almost meditative pattern, with each exhale a fraction longer than the last. He let the heartbeat follow. He didn’t command it.

Sixty-two. Sixty. Fifty-eight. Fifty-five.

Better.

Fifty. Forty-eight.

His vision narrowed. Not the sudden red of the first attempt, but a soft, creeping dimness, like a lamp being turned down.

Forty-five.

He felt it start to work. The strange, slippery sensation of his own body fading from his awareness, the edges going soft, the weight of his limbs becoming something that belonged to someone else.

Forty-two.

This is it.

Forty.

And then, without warning, the floor fell out from under him.

The last thing he registered was the surprising, almost comical thought: Oh. I’m fainting.

Then nothing.

***

He came to with a stiff neck and a pool of drool on his cheek.

The window had gone from black to deep gray. By the angle of the light, he’d been out for at least forty minutes.

Yun Zhou sat up slowly, pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead, and let out a long, slow breath.

“Two,” he said hoarsely. “Zero.”

He waited for the familiar, hot flush of humiliation, the one that told him he’d embarrassed himself. It never came. In its place was a calm, clinical interest.

The failure wasn’t in the technique. It was in the margin. I overshot the threshold and the body shut down to protect itself.

So the safe zone is narrow. Forty-five to forty-eight beats per minute. Below that, I pass out.

Good. Now I know where the edge is.

He picked up the pencil and wrote it on his palm.

Feign: floor = 45 bpm.

***

Attempt three.

By now the sun was nearly up. A strip of pale gold crept across the floorboards. Outside, the neighborhood was waking. A rooster, absurdly, in the courtyard. A baby crying. The clank of someone’s shutters going up.

Yun Zhou lay down for the third time.

He didn’t rush. He didn’t force. He began again from the bottom, with the breath, with the muscles, with the slow, patient suggestion to the heart, and he held the number in his mind like a rope he refused to let go.

Fifty-five. Fifty-two. Fifty.

Forty-eight.

Forty-six.

Forty-five.

He stopped.

There was a point, he discovered, where the heart stopped resisting. A kind of plateau. The body had found a balance and decided, reluctantly, that it was safe.

His breath was almost imperceptible, one shallow rise of the chest every twelve or fifteen seconds. His skin, already cool, went cooler. His pulse was a faint, distant tick that anyone pressing a finger to his wrist would have needed to search for.

And inside, in the cold, empty well where his Ki should have been, something stirred.

It wasn’t Ki. It was too dark, too slow, too heavy for that. It was more like a shadow rising up to meet the surface, spreading a thin, cold film over his skin.

What is that?

He didn’t know. But as it settled over him, the world went very, very quiet. The street sounds receded. The room seemed to shrink and grow distant, as though he were lying at the bottom of a deep pool, looking up at the light.

I’m... dead.

It wasn’t frightening. That was the strangest part. It was the most natural thing in the world, like finally putting down a heavy load.

He held it. Counting, not heartbeats now, but seconds.

One minute.

Two.

Three.

A fly landed on his cheek. He didn’t flinch. It crawled across his skin, tickled his nostril, and flew off.

Four.

Five.

At five minutes and ten seconds, the first crack appeared. His chest tightened, and the iron band from before began to squeeze again.

He released the technique slowly, carefully, and let the breath come back in a long, shuddering rush.

His heart thudded. The room swam back into focus. The sunlight was brighter now, painfully so.

Yun Zhou lay on the floor, sweat running into his ears, and began to laugh.

It was a quiet laugh. Hoarse. Almost silent. A sound that would have been terrifying to anyone who’d heard it.

“Five minutes,” he whispered. “Five minutes.”

It wasn’t much. It wasn’t anywhere near what he could once do. In his old life, he’d once lain “dead” for three days in a mass grave while a hunting party searched the field above him.

But it was something.

Enough, he thought, wiping his face. Enough to survive one bad moment.

***

He ate two packs of ramen for breakfast, raw, broken into pieces and sprinkled with the seasoning powder, because he didn’t have the strength to boil water. It tasted like salt and cardboard. He finished every crumb.

Afterward, he stood in front of the cracked mirror and studied his face. The hollowed cheeks had a bit more color. The rope scar had darkened to an ugly purple-black. The eyes were the same as ever: dark, steady, unreadable.

“Marlo Chen,” he said softly, to no one.

He thought of the new gold ring. The fake watch. The briefcase that made the thin man flinch.

He thought of the corner of Marlo’s mind that had murmured ...if the boss finds out about the shortfall...

Where does a man like that hide money he’s stolen?

Not at home. His wife would find it. Not in a bank. Too traceable. Not on his person.

Somewhere public. Somewhere impersonal. Somewhere with a lock and a key and no one asking questions.

Yun Zhou turned from the mirror and picked up his jacket.

“Time to go shopping,” he said.

He tucked the notebook into his pocket, slid the folding knife into his sleeve out of habit, and pulled the door shut behind him. The paperclip lock was a joke, but he gave the handle a firm tug anyway, because some rituals deserved to be kept.

Halfway down the stairs, as he passed the landing, he stopped.

A faint tug had returned under his sternum, soft and insistent, like fingers brushing the inside of a wall.

It wasn’t coming from the street. It wasn’t coming from the neighbors’ apartments.

It was coming from behind him.

From the room he’d just left.

From the closet.

Yun Zhou stood very still on the stairs, his hand tightening on the railing, and listened to a silence that was suddenly, impossibly, listening back.

Then he shook his head, forced his shoulders down, and kept walking.

Not now, he told himself.

Later.

***

To be continued in Chapter 6: “Research”