Chapter Two: The Incomplete
The dead man arrived before noon, which meant he was important.
Sera knew this because the cart was painted black lacquer with silver trim, the Thousandfold's official colors and because the driver was not a frightened disciple but a full cultivator, Empty Mirror by his gray robes, his presence a pressure against her damaged perception like a hand held too close to her face.
She counted her steps to the gate anyway. Twenty-seven. The number did not change, and she needed things that did not change.
"You are the gravedigger," he said. Not a question. He knew exactly who she was, which meant this was not a standard delivery.
"I am."
"The corpse requires discretion." He produced no paper. No documentation. "It will not appear in archives. You will not speak of its arrival, its processing, or its burial. Compensation reflects this requirement."
Sera considered the gaps in his statement. What was missing: sect affiliation, cause of death, name. What was present: the implicit threat beneath the polite diction, the way his qi pressed against her channels testing for weakness, the smell beneath his robes of something burning that should not burn.
"I require information to perform the work," she said. "Channel type, damage assessment, extraction requests."
"None. No extraction. No examination. Immediate burial, deepest section, unmarked."
This was wrong. The Thousandfold did not waste their dead. Every corpse was resource, potential, technique waiting to be harvested. Immediate burial without processing was not respect—it was erasure .
"I cannot prevent what I will perceive," she said carefully. "My condition—"
"Is known." For the first time, something moved in his expression. Not quite contempt. Pity, perhaps, or its cultivated cousin. "Do what you can to forget. You will be paid regardless."
He left the cart. He did not leave the mule. Sera watched him walk back up the road, his gray robes disappearing into mist that parted for him like a trained animal, and understood that she had been warned.
The body was wrapped in silk that blocked perception. Sera had heard of such material spun from Empty Mirror larvae, capable of containing qi, preventing the leakage that normally accompanied death. It was expensive beyond calculation. That they would use it for burial suggested the corpse's danger exceeded even its value.
She did not open the wrapping. She had given her word, or the approximation of word that silence and acceptance constituted. Instead she guided the cart to the Below, to the deepest section where even she rarely went, where the oldest graves had begun to compress into something like stone, layers of the dead becoming geology.
The digging was harder here. The soil resisted, dense with accumulated qi residue, with the memory of techniques performed and failed. Her spade struck something that was not rock—not quite—and she knelt to brush away dirt, revealing bone that had become translucent, crystalline, a femur from some early age of cultivation when the paths were new and their consequences not yet understood.
She buried the wrapped corpse beside it. No marker. No record. She would remember the location her damaged memory was unreliable for many things, but graves it held with perfect fidelity but she would not speak it. This was the contract. This was her complicity, deeper now, more explicit.
But she did not leave immediately. She sat beside the unmarked grave and let her perception drift, not toward the wrapped corpse that she avoided, the silk's containment a warning she respected but into the ground itself, the accumulation of the Below, the voices of the dead who had not been erased.
They spoke in fragments. A sword technique half-remembered. The taste of a particular tea. The sensation of falling, which seemed to be the most common final experience, regardless of actual cause of death. Sera had learned not to seek coherence in these voices. They were not ghosts, not properly. More like echoes, impressions, the qi equivalent of footprints in drying concrete.
But today, something was different. The voices were quieter, compressed, as if making room. And in the space they created, she felt something else not a voice but a presence , aware and waiting, patient in a way that suggested time measured differently.
She opened her eyes. The mist had thickened while she drifted, reducing visibility to arm's length. But she could see the grave she had just filled, and she could see that the soil was moving , subtle settling that might have been natural except for its pattern, its intentionality.
The silk had contained the corpse's qi. It had not contained whatever else the corpse carried.
Sera stood. Her damaged channels flared, not with warning but with recognition the same response she had felt with Shiran, with every body she processed, but amplified, concentrated, as if this presence had been waiting specifically for her.
"I cannot help you," she said aloud. "I was paid to forget. I will forget."
The soil stopped moving. In the silence that followed, she felt something like laughter not amused, not cruel, simply other , operating on principles she did not share.
Then: You cannot forget. That is your function. To remember what others discard.
The voice, if it was voice, came from everywhere and nowhere. From the ground, the mist, her own damaged channels resonating with frequencies that should not have been present. Sera had encountered many things in seven years of burial, but never communication this coherent, this direct .
"What are you?" she asked.
Incomplete. As you are incomplete. We share this, gravedigger. The named paths reject us both.
She thought of her own rupture, the advancement ritual that had broken rather than elevated her. The years since, rootless, accumulating fragments because she could not walk whole roads. The presence was right: she was incomplete, had been incomplete, would remain incomplete. It was not tragedy but description , the most accurate label she had found.
"What do you want?"
To be named. To be finished. The corpse carried me, but the corpse was insufficient. You, perhaps—
"No." Sera stepped back from the grave. "I am not a vessel. I process the dead, I do not become them."
You already are. You carry Shiran. You carry hundreds. What is one more?
She felt it then, the truth of the statement. Shiran's fragment, yes, and others accumulated over years, resonances she had thought were fading but had instead been building , layer upon layer, the incomplete dead making their home in her incomplete body. She was a graveyard herself, walking, breathing, processing without end.
"I will not," she said, but her voice was weaker now, uncertainty entering where certainty had been.
Not choice. Recognition. You have already accepted. You simply have not yet understood.
The presence withdrew. Not vanishing but receding , becoming part of the background noise of the Below, indistinguishable from the accumulated voices of the ordinary dead. Sera stood alone in mist that was slowly thinning, morning becoming afternoon becoming time she had lost track of, and felt the weight of what she carried more heavily than before.
She returned to her gate. Counted the steps,twenty-seven, always twenty-seven and found the payment waiting where the Empty Mirror cultivator had left it. Not coin but crystal, pure and empty, capable of holding any pattern she might extract. Enough to buy a year of food, of shelter, of the resources that kept her alive to continue her work.
She did not touch it. She sat in her preparation shed, in darkness she did not need to dispel, and examined herself with the same attention she gave to corpses. Her channels. Her damage. The resonances that were not hers but had made their home in her.
The presence was right: she was already vessel. Had been for years. The question was not whether to accept but whether to direct to shape the accumulation into something intentional, something named, or to continue her pretense of separation, of professionalism, of the gravedigger who merely processed rather than became.
She thought of the Thousandfold's named paths. Their geometry of perfection, their demand for adherence, their hidden reality of deviation and secret modification. She thought of her own path, unnamed, built from fragments and failures, from the techniques of the dead who could not complete them.
The presence wanted to be finished. But Sera was learning that completion was not the only goal. That there was power in the ongoing, the adaptive, the becoming that never arrived at final form.
She touched the crystal payment. She felt its emptiness, its potential, its waiting.
Then she placed it in her sleeve, beside the paper she had not read, and began preparing for the next arrival. The work continued. The accumulation continued. And somewhere in the Below, something incomplete waited with the patience of the dead, knowing that time was different for those who did not need to breathe.
Sera did not sleep that night. She drifted, as always, but tonight her drift was populated Shiran's geometric collapse, the presence's alien patience, and something new: a fragment she did not recognize, technique from a path she had never encountered, suggesting that her carrying capacity was expanding beyond her conscious control.
In the morning, there would be another body. Another fragment. Another choice between forgetting and remembering, between the named path of her employment and the unnamed path of her becoming.
She counted her breaths. One. Two. Three.
And for the first time in seven years, she allowed herself to wonder what she might become, if she stopped pretending to be merely what she had been.