Chapter 2

I dreamed (or at least I think I did) of a sea of black, bubbling blood with bodies floating in it—dozens, hundreds, thousands of them, all some sort of vaguely Chinese warriors. A crimson sky stretched from horizon to horizon and stung my eyes a little, and every so often screams full of pain and despair rang out from everywhere at once. The stench of blood was scary strong. The only reason I didn't throw up was that I'd slipped out of my body on pure reflex. Either that, or being inside my own head rather than the real world let me ignore the, ahem, sordid details. Depends how you look at it. My eyes were watering, though. Hopefully not with blood.

My gaze drifted down on its own, and once again, only the detached state kept me calm.

Twenty-three years of life, and I'd never felt—or, technically, not-felt—such a strange range of emotions.

"Rough day?" I flopped down into the black muck without stopping to wonder why it wasn't swallowing me, or why I was back in my old… um, packaging. I was steering my body from the outside, same as before. A bizarre but genuinely useful trick. "Trust me, you're not the only one…"

Perhaps in my own dream I was some sort of minor god? I wondered if I could turn this sea of blood into wine and the warriors' corpses into virgins. Living ones. Of sound mind, ideally.

…though that already sounds kind of demonic, to be honest…

"Ghaaaa!"

A man tried to grab me. Gray-haired, probably middle-aged, in heavy armor, he was half swallowed by the black blood, which seemed very much alive. His eyes were clouded with insane pain, terror, rage, and despair. I'd never seen that many emotions on one face. For some reason I felt that all this wasn't just (or wasn't only) a glitch in my sick mind—and after all that "stress," my mind had every right to be sick, having just managed to outli… out-exist death. No, this was something far more frightening and vile.

"I guess there are scarier things than an unpaid loan," I said with a wide grin. For a moment my face twisted, my new emotional detachment notwithstanding.

The unreality around me seemed to shudder for an instant.

Just for a second.

With a frighteningly blank face and completely irrational glee, I got up and walked on, past the corpses… and not only corpses. I knew where I had to go. I didn't doubt for a moment that if I didn't walk this road, something inside me might break. My inner self (my subconscious acting up, maybe?) was practically screaming that the evil dust had gotten something wrong and it needed fixing—or it would come back to bite me, and more than once.

I'm afraid that if I'd really been an ordinary baby—or even just an ordinary person who couldn't keep their emotions in check in this bizarre dream—things could've ended pretty badly.

Little by little, the red sky darkened to black. Fewer bodies floated in the blood, at some point the screams stopped, and even the smell began to fade. It got noticeably colder, though outside my body I didn't so much feel it as receive it as information—odd information, but still. The longer I spent as a disembodied scrap of consciousness pulling my body's strings, the easier it got. Like a puppeteer getting some practice in.

I don't remember having any abilities like this before my body got annihilated. I was a perfectly ordinary person, no question. Something has clearly happened to me (boy, am I quick on the uptake), but I doubt I'll find out what anytime soon, if ever. The scariest part is that something in my personality has definitely changed, and I can't put my finger on what. Not some new "ability." Something deeper, something that feels natural to me.

Did I have fits of irrational glee before? Am I sure I didn't?

At some point I started hearing a beat. Quiet at first, then louder. Unhurried, rhythmic, familiar in some ways and utterly alien in others. It matched my own heartbeat exactly, and the synchronicity was unsettling—as though the beat were a part of me, just one that didn't belong.

I had to fix that. Right now.

"So that's what you look like," I murmured, studying the tiny—literally baby-sized—black, terrifying heart with the keen interest of someone who doesn't understand a damn thing.

The heart was giving off so much cold that my body was close to freezing solid. I could hardly feel it, and it threatened to give out at any second. Being outside it somehow compensated: I was sending orders straight to individual body parts and forcing them to move. That couldn't last long.

Trying not to think about the fact that, technically, I didn't have a body here, I followed my instincts, reached out with a hand gone white, and grabbed the heart. Somewhere at the edge of my awareness, a report came in: insane pain had erupted in my chest. I didn't stop. I squeezed the black heart harder.

To my sincere disappointment, all that dramatic posturing wasn't enough. The heart refused to give. Something underfoot started vibrating in a very unhealthy way, as if…

I'd triggered some shady security system.

Okay, okay, okay, okay, this is bad… THIS IS VERY BAD!

Oh craaap…

The sea of blood under my feet began to boil, and a whirlwind rose in the black sky. The bone-chilling howl of hundreds of vaguely Chinese warriors slammed into my ears. It took me a second to realize that one of the howlers was me. Even outside my illusory body, even without really feeling any of it, getting only dry reports of what was going on to me—it was enough to grasp just how messed up the situation was.

The black blood came alive and began crawling up my body, as if trying to stop me, to crush me. It wrapped around me, and I couldn't fight it—no way, no how. My screams started to harmonize with the locals'. In an instant they'd become my old buddies, the kind you've been through some shit with. And were still going through it with.

I think my new buddies felt the same way.

Only one thought pounded in my head, my one hope of climbing out of the hole I'd dug myself into: the black heart, the fossil's gift and curse.

Come on, give, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, you idiot, this is going to suck for everyone…

When the black blood had swallowed my entire body, long-suffering head included, and was about to take the hand still stubbornly (by now, mechanically) squeezing the black heart, the heart appeared to realize, as if on instinct, that it couldn't stay "neutral" anymore.

Something cracked in my hand, loud and clear, and then…

A black, all-consuming flash swallowed the entire illusory space, and this time it put me under for good.

***

As it turned out, being the mad dust's victim wasn't all that bad. Nobody tortured me, there were no more evil rituals, and on the whole I lived like a little prince. Two black-haired girls, no older than twenty, came to my nursery regularly to clean (yes, the same room where my new body's mother was killed). Their eyes were bound with white cloth, which didn't slow them down one bit. As far as I could tell, they saw me as a piece of furniture. A valuable piece of furniture: not to be touched, not to be looked at, to be kept at a respectful distance, never to be spoken near or disturbed by a loud noise.

Or any noise at all.

Their cleaning was nearly a dance: smooth, synchronized, precise, careful. Sometimes it looked like they were catching the dust (the regular kind, not the geezer, sadly) with their bare hands and steering it away from me, but really they were just waving their arms around. Without my ability, I wouldn't have noticed a single one of their visits—I was a baby, after all. I have no idea how my skull was processing this much information. Let's call it part of my "quirk." I could think outside my own body, after all. Maybe there was some other memory storage in there too, and that was perfectly normal. Sure.

The rare outings deserve a special mention. From time to time, a very old biddy with dull, clearly blind eyes would come and move me into something like a stroller (more of a bed on wheels, really). Then she'd wheel me out for some fresh air on an empty training ground, screened off from prying eyes.

I was clearly in some sort of palace. The corridors were long, and the entire place had an air of… uh, evil solemnity. To my displeasure, there was a lot of red: runners that looked soaked in blood and reminded me of that sea. And it was depressingly empty and… cold. Not literally—they bundled me up like crazy, so no danger of catching a chill. The cold was more spiritual, and to my surprise, I felt it better outside my body, when every other sensation faded into the background.

As I said, we normally stopped at the training ground, though sometimes we went out into a small courtyard instead. Morning or night, it didn't matter. The old woman moved as though she were running on some algorithm. If she hadn't occasionally let her gaze linger (blind or not) on the full blue moon, I would've seriously suspected she was an android that didn't respond to stimuli at all. Sure, when I put on a show of crying, she'd pick me up and try to soothe me, but…

Even then, her movements were mechanical. No feeling at all. Like she was following an instruction.

Which leaves the question of who fed me, right? I wasn't running on solar power. For the first couple of weeks, middle-aged women came—blindfolded, naturally—but then… ahem, something changed. Changed so much it turned the rest of my life upside down.

Let's just say our first meeting didn't go smoothly. It's hard to describe how stunned I was. There you are, lying peacefully in your crib, trying to make sense of the supernatural energy inside you, when into your nursery walks a big, burly guy with long red hair, in red, bloody-looking robes (I think I've developed a mild phobia of that color). He has a face like a brick wall, detached, unnaturally calm red eyes, and a big, long sword. He walks right up to you, stares into your very soul, and then suddenly starts taking off his robe. Or is it… what's it called… Right, a hanfu! Or something like it.

The panic that hit me then was worse than anything I'd felt while getting acquainted with the black heart. Pure, primal terror. I announced it immediately by bawling at the top of my lungs, hoping someone would come save me. Slipping out of my body (I couldn't stay out all the time, and my eyesight had gotten a lot better by then) helped me calm down, but I had no intention of stopping the waterworks. None. I even seriously considered trying to detonate my supernatural energy generator and take that way-too-red creep down with me.

My terrified wailing cooled the half-undressed guy's enthusiasm a little. He stared straight into my teary little eyes with that same cold, detached look. And then my whole understanding of the world fell apart: the big guy tilted his head, grabbed the skin of his face, and started peeling it off. I was living in a horror movie. Someone was peeling off their own skin, alive, while staring right at me!

Beneath the rough skin was another layer, much softer and… more feminine. Mentally slack-jawed, refusing to believe makeup this good could exist, I found myself looking at a perfectly attractive—beautiful, even—red-haired woman. Not exactly delicate, granted, but the transformation was so unbelievable that I barely noticed.

The woman touched her neck, fiddled with something, and coughed. I tried to pretend I hadn't noticed her voice change mid-cough, from a low, rough male voice to a perfectly normal high female one.

The scary lady with the even scarier hobbies lifted me out of the crib and began rocking me, apparently trying to calm me down, and even started singing. I didn't understand a word, but she had a nice voice—gentle, soothing. If not for that expression of hers, practically begging for a slap, it would've been downright pleasant.

With the primal terror gone and the worst apparently avoided, I switched off the biological alarm and waited to see what would happen next. The woman hummed a bit longer, until she was sure I wasn't going to cry again, then put me back in the crib. With the same cold, detached face, she took off her top completely and spent quite a while unwinding the bandages around her chest; they'd been wrapped way too tight. So she was passing herself off as a man for some reason. Good to know, but not very useful.

By then I'd figured out what she was about to do, so I stopped resisting. Talk about a stern wet nurse…

The entire time, the redhead kept her eyes fixed on my face, which was a bit unnerving. After the feeding, she kept looking at me for a while, as if trying to make something out, then gave up, put me back in the crib, disguised herself as a man again, and left without a word.

And that was how my days went: the cleaners came regularly, I got fed regularly (luckily or sadly, the wet nurse never changed again), I got wheeled out for walks, and sometimes the same old woman bathed me. That was about it. Oh, right. Every week or two, the evil dust would come by to check on something. Gradually the evil geezer came less and less often, until he stopped coming altogether—apparently convinced I wasn't going to die and everything was "going according to plan."

The warmest one towards me was probably the lady with the odd habits. Every day she got softer with me, more… homey. I even began to think she saw me as her own son. During feedings she hummed all kinds of songs, told me things, and found time to play: she made little spots of energy dance across the walls like reflected sunlight, literally levitated me around the nursery, that kind of thing. Once she showed me her sword and sliced a passing fly clean in half, which made me laugh with delight. The redhead definitely liked that. She'd brought an unexpected little miracle into my life, and I brought one into hers, even if mostly by accident.

But the real turning point wasn't these little things. They mattered, but they were more like the bricks of a future house than the house itself.

At some point, around three months in—maybe four—the redhead held out a finger to my little hands and waited. She waited stubbornly, and I could tell from her face that I absolutely had to do something.

Not really understanding what she wanted, I grabbed her finger on reflex—and probably for the first time ever, I saw a sincere, wide smile on her face. Um, a slightly unhinged smile, and somehow a sad one too. The way the locals show emotion is just so vivid. I still can't get used to it. Especially beside her usual brick-wall face.

"You have done […] well, […]," the woman said, kissing me on the forehead. For a moment her gaze turned warm, truly motherly, then went cold and distant again. "[…] heir, […] Cult Leader…"

I was picking up the language abnormally fast. Something insanely strange was clearly going on in my space-time-mangled brain, energy-based or otherwise, because I was memorizing and understanding everything maybe ten times faster and more easily than before I died. Making sense of the sounds coming out of my wet nurse's mouth didn't happen instantly, naturally, but a couple of repetitions were enough to get the gist. Frankly, it scared me. I couldn't explain how or why it worked, and that was quietly wrecking my picture of the world and pulling me further and further from reality. Believe me, I tried to find a reasonable explanation, but no matter how wild and far-fetched my theories got, I just couldn't.

Well, fortunately, I gave up on that pretty quickly and started using my abilities to the fullest.

Truth be told, I'd stopped believing anything in my daily life would ever change. I'd gotten too used to it. Used to watching the energy inside me, used to not knowing my own name, used to my new energy brains, used to the redhead, used to the cleaning virtuosos, even used to the old woman. I'd started to believe it would always be this way. Apparently this unhinged and extremely weird world had other plans, because one day I was brazenly kidnapped—and not by just anyone, but by the good guys! With help from the very person who was supposed to make sure nothing like that ever happened!

That was probably when I first started doubting the sanity of the reality around me—and along with the doubts came the certainty that what was happening here was some…

Grade-A lunacy.