CHAPTER 72: 72

It was raining the day Yeung Serng Yin got the call from the SSD. She’d had a rocky relationship ever since the department was established, but both sides knew that it was more a holdover from the dragon’s terse dealings with the SSD’s predecessor, The Merlin Club, so there were no real hard feelings.

But even so, she was not that much of a curmudgeon and had... at least one person in the SSD she called a friend. Her hair was mostly black with only a few, bright strands of white gracing her sole plait. That had to count for something, right?

"Wei?" said Yeung Serng Yin, phone receiver pinched with her shoulder against her ear as she wrote a quick note-to-self on a scrap of paper: eggs, yau mak choi, soy milk.

"Yin-Yin! You need to come here!"

Yeung Serng Yin set her pen and paper on the side table and shifted the phone into her hand. "Helen? What’s happened?"

There came some strange crackles and bangs from the other end of the line before there was a response. "He’s going to die!"

Yeung Serng Yin clicked her teeth and moved around the table toward the door where her shoes were while making sure not to yank too hard on the line. "Helen. Take a breath. Explain."

Helen Chu, part taotie but still a decade younger, did as she was told then spoke again. "I’m at Tong-gor’s shop in the Under City. He’s..." There was another deep breath. "He did a sundering of a human soul. The father... he wanted money, so Tong-gor..."

There was a sharp crackling then the distinct sound of someone else taking the phone and putting it to their ear. "Yin-jie! Listen to me, I didn’t know! I really didn’t know! They said he was-"

Some more scuffling, then Helen’s voice came back along the line. "You have to come. You’re the only person I can think of who can save him!"

But she needn’t have said that. As soon as she’d heard the words ’human soul’ and ’sundering’ she’d thrown the phone down and headed out the door.

The typhoon wasn’t forecast to make landfall until the next day yet the city and its residents were already being lashed by the storm. Broken umbrellas lined the side walk by the upturned rubbish bin and the few people that were on the street look practically drowned. A speeding taxi, just a smudge of red in the rain, sloshed past Yeung Serng Yin, spraying up a deluge of half-rain, half-sewage water. The dragon swore and cast a quick spell to get rid of the worst of it.

She no longer lived in the Under City and, while she mostly stood by this decision, it was during times like this when she wished she hadn’t moved. It had been cramped and expensive in that underground cavern, but it had been lively and work had been easy to come by. Now...

The dragon pushed all this from her mind as she pushed her way through a nondescript metal door in an alley between two nondescript buildings with a closed up newsstand at the end. She still remembered when most entrances to the Under City had been through public telephones but ever since the handover and the infrastructure started to change, adjustments had had to be made, this sketchy entrance being one of them.

But the rats and humans and human-rats all stood clear of the woman and caused her no trouble as she strode to the lift at the end of the narrow hallway. Likewise, no one got in the lift with her and she had a clear shot all the way down to the underground level.

The lift doors slid open and the smell of burning assaulted her sense. She grit her teeth and walked out.

Partial spirits of the dead meandered closer, drawn to the scene like moths to a flame as she cut a line through the gawking onlookers and headed to the pawnshop.

"Shoo," chided Yeung Serng Yin harshly with a swat of her hand.

The shimmering bodies stood unsteadily on transparent feet and gaped silent mouths at her. She raised two fingers, channeling a fraction of her qi to the tips, and pointed the makeshift laser gun at them. Something about that, be it the power or the body language, triggered a response in the ghosts and they turned slowly and meandered away.

They would be back, the dragon thought to herself, they always were.

"Yin-jie!"

Yeung Serng Yin’s eyes darted sideways then latched to the pale face peeking out of the window of the shop opposite. She hurried to the door and pushed her way inside.

"We had to move over here," said a breathless Helen. She would look much the same a decade later, such was the fate of a part magical being, but it was clear from her mannerisms and stance that she was new to the job and knew it. Yeung Serng Yin put a hand on the woman’s shoulder and looked into her eyes, not threateningly, but with authority.

"Breath," she said.

Helen blinked, bit her lower lip, then did her best to get her breathing under control. "We had to move over here," she continued once she had it all under control and her hands stopped shaking, "because the pawnshop got too crowded. Someone leaked what had happened then-"

Yeung Serng Yin cut her off. "I’ll leave the information leaks to you and yours," she said. "Take me to the human."

Helen nodded and gestured. "This way."

They were in a cafe that had had to close up shop quickish when the SSD carried in the boy on the stretcher that now lay in the centre of the room, the tables and chairs having been pushed out to the perimeters.

Yeung Serng Yin crouched and felt the boy’s pulse.

It was nearly nonexistent.

She let go then placed her index and middle finger against the boy’s forehead.

Cold. As cold as ice.

--

"Ten years is a long time for a child, but for me, that night could have been just yesterday," said Yeung Serng Yin. She cleared her throat almost to drag herself back to the present. "The sundering of a soul is a mostly frowned upon practice," she said, almost like a lecturer in a university. "Only to be used under the most extreme of circumstances, and even then, maybe not. But that is for a being of the jianghu. For a human..." The woman sighed. "Apart from our Bran, I’ve never heard of a case where any part of the person survived."

"But... but if it’s so bad, why would Feilou Tong do it?" I asked.

"He said that they told him that Bran was something of a changeling, that he was really jianghu and merely trapped in a human form. Stupid bastard. Even if that had been the case, he still shouldn’t have done it, changeling or not, but that would have interfered with his bottom line."

"He was paid to do it?"

"Not exactly. Your see, while the practice may be frowned upon, it does have its purposes, with some not being as altruistic as others." She glanced at me with curious eyes. "Can you guess what for?"

"Uh..." I looked away as I quickly tried to think of an answer. "Souls are... worth something, maybe?"

"No," was Aunt Yeung’s flat reply. "A whole soul, is worth next to nothing for anyone other than its owner."

"A whole

soul? So a partial soul is worth something?"

Aunt Yeung grinned with her sharp teeth, teeth that I now knew were draconic like mine. "In simplistic terms, a soul is pure energy, regardless if it is the hun or po portion. It is a... small stove that gives power to the rest of the body. In theory, it would be a perfect source of energy for someone else to use, and when you channel qi, that is what you are doing. However, in channeling, you are merely siphoning off a small fraction of that energy and drawing it out through a defined and protected channel. Do you know what I am getting at?"

For once I felt like I knew the answer. "If the energy of the soul isn’t protected, then it’ll fly off, just like if it’s sundered."

"Yes. Sundering is the act of destroying the protective membrane around the soul, letting its essence escape."

"So that’s why you said it’s worthless... But then-"

"Can you guess how many uses that membrane has?"

Something clicked in my brain. "They, they sunder souls just to... harvest the membrane? They kill someone just for that?"

Aunt Yeung sighed then shrugged. "Beings have been known to kill for less."

I looked away. I knew what she said was true, but to be suddenly reminded of it was still upsetting. "...And you said... Bran doesn’t know?"

Aunt Yeung looked at me with surprise. "No, he knows. When he woke, this was the first place I took him to, showed him his mother. No, what I meant earlier was... not telling him the reason why I was able to save him despite him being human."

I glanced at the tank and saw a tiny fairy-like creature swim through the water with a pair of scissors towards Lok Saan’s long flowing hair. "His mother," I said. "She did something, or you did something to her or with her, and that did the trick?"

Aunt Yeung chuckled. "You’re really not that bad," she said. "Some right, but not all right. Yes, his mother’s willing sacrifice was required to stabilise his soul, create scaffolding from something as close to him as possible, but during a sundering, the soul immediately shatters and its pieces fly off. Theories have been postulated as to where they go, but no one really knows. Point being, that he shouldn’t have had any soul left to save."

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"Then... why?"

The tiny fairy snipped a lock of hair from Bran’s mother, grasped it along with the pair of scissors, then nimbly swam back up to the top of the tank. There, one of the workers, or scientists, helped them out then took the hair from them.

The worker waved to Aunt Yeung and me. "We’ll get to work on the Compass Spell," she shouted.

Aunt Yeung nodded. "Thank you."

She turned and headed to one of the consoles by the tank. I followed.

"The seal on Bran’s soul was not placed there by me," said Aunt Yeung as she tapped at the console, "though I was indeed the one who originally weaved it. It was not a single person’s intent that he received it, but, from what I’ve been able to gather, merely the meddling of fate that settled this heavy mantle on that boy’s shoulders from the moment of his conception."

"His conception?"

"Yes," she said then stood back as the console’s screen spat out a deluge of information. I had a look but couldn’t understand anything. "At the moment of the handover, when Pretan territory returned to being Chinese, Bran’s father was making love to his mother and, at that very same moment, a powerful seal was being cast. Things went... awry with the spell and a portion of it spun off and entered the thing that was most similar to it, the thing that had been brought into being at the same moment."