A superhuman I was decidedly not. What was I exactly? I was a... My name is...

No. That’s not right. It can’t be right… Why is it hard to remember things?

I looked down at myself and saw a very skinny, girly body intermittently wrapped with black, electrical tape, wearing a torn, black undershirt with an eroded picture of Pikachu on it. This was decidedly not what I was wearing when I was driving to work this morning.

Why was I wearing electrical tape now? To resist ghosts, the answer was obvious.

Did I just get… isekai'd? Was I… in a magical world? I tried to think what my name was...

My name is Ash Sparks. I used a stolen beast core to awaken an ancient soul from an old skull and consumed it to gain power.

This is absolutely insane. Souls aren’t real. Are they? Clearly they are.

Focus. Observe. Look around. Understand. Adapt.

I looked up. A golden-eyed girl with distinctively fox-like features was sitting next to me inside my car, weeping softly. She was wearing a black kimono-like outfit that was decorated in pretty, absurdly detailed patterns of gold threads depicting men that were fighting dragons with swords.

“Hey. What’s going on?” I asked her. “Where am… ughhh...”

It was then that I realised that my Honda Accord was no longer in acceptable condition. It was in fact an utter, horrid wreck. Questionable green and black mold was growing through the seats. The windshield, side doors and mirrors were missing entirely. The roof was pitted with rusted holes and there was a red cherry tree growing right through the warped hood.

“Well, insurance isn’t going to cover this.” I blinked at the devastation of my vehicle. Primordial tool of the ancients. Oh. I focused past the bush, looking into the distance. The city around me looked just as ruined and overgrown as my car. Green mosses and large vines covered in colorful flowers stretched down. Numerous trees blossomed on the broken concrete, some hanging from buildings. A skyscraper had toppled across the road long ago. Other rusted cars stood here and there, burned, overgrown wrecks, remnants of a bygone catastrophe. Only a few skyscrapers were still standing upright, missing all of their windows. My favourite starbucks at the corner of Third and Main looked like a tank drove through it.

“Jesus fucking christ. Where am I going to get my lattes now…” I looked up and froze. Above the city was an inexplicable thing - a nightmarish monstrosity a thousand kilometers wide akin to something Hollywood producers would come up with to entertain movie-goers. It hovered, no stood above the devastated city, held up by hundreds of gargantuan yellow legs. I almost screamed and then I remembered that this was not a horrific abomination, but simply Lord Boundless Chorus. This was fine. This was normal. This was ordinary. Good old Boundless butt. Okay? Okay.

I blinked as two memories collided in my head against each other, one in which I was a sixteen year old girl with dreams of wisdom and power and another in which I was on my way to work about to purchase a latte... until a yellow comet had come from the sky and the world ignited and I screamed as my eyes melted out of my face.

“Fucki-Deathstorm!” I swore.

The geisha looked at me. “Was it worth it?”

“No!” I shook my head as the two memories merged into a jumble of horrifying understanding. The distant future into which I had awakened was fucked. Absolutely, positively fucked. The past had no knowledge of cultivation. None. Zero. Deathstorm damn it all!

“That's an old human skull, not the bones of a mighty beast,” the fox-girl pointed at the skull sitting between my legs. “You are an idiot! This skull was clearly empty of divine power, why in nine hells did you waste a core on it?!"

“I’ll have you know these are my bones, thank you very much,” I grabbed my skull, looking directly at it. "Have some respect!"

I turned the skull to face her and clicked its jaw as if it was speaking. “What’s your name by the way, fox-lady?”

She rubbed her face tiredly, wiping tears out of her eyes. “Celes Rada.”

“I’m... T.. bpff… Ash Sparks,” I offered my hand, stumbling a little at the strange pronunciation. The geisha stared at my hand. Right. Twenty-first century hand gestures aren’t a thing anymore. Cultivation is a thing though. Cultivators are a thing. Servitor spirits are a thing, aka bound-souls of creatures and men. I had consumed, bound a soul to myself. A soul of a very dead... ancient.

My soul! I was dead? I was alive. Was this necromancy? Had I just necromanced myself back into being? Having two memories was somewhat befuddling.

My stomach growled. Eating souls didn't fill me up one bit in terms of hunger - a rather disappointing development. I looked at the cherries hanging from the dashboard. They were tantalizing me, but a part of me knew that everything living in the city of the dead was contaminated with... something awful. The week-long stomach ache wasn't worth it.

I drew my eyes away from the unnerving temptation of the cherries and looked at my kitsune companion. “Umm... Why are you crying?”

“That beast core you’ve just wasted... belonged to the High-Administrator. Enforcer of the will of the Boundless Chorus, Han Axiom Sempiter.”

“You stole a beast core from the High-Administrator? How is this my problem, again?” I asked curiously.

“I was going to sell the orb in the market and buy my way out of Gold city,” Celes groaned. “When the Enforcer sends the hunters, who do you think they’re going to hack up first? Me or the one who smells of the orb’s power?”

I sniffed myself. I smelled like sweat and concrete dust. I focused on seeing the foreign Qi in my aura. Brilliant sparks made up of a thousand colors appeared in my vision, dancing on my electrical tape. The power of the beast core was still working its magic, pouring information and power from the skull into me. I shook my hands, trying to rid myself of the sparks, knowing fully well that they weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

I put my skull down on the windshield and gave it a gentle kiss on the forehead. It cracked, breaking apart into colorful sparks, spilling into ashes and dust, its power spent. Goodbye, old me. Goodbye starbucks, internet, comic books, office, bitcoins, interns and laboratory.

I realised that I was having trouble remembering some specific names for some things, just like my name. The beast core was certainly powerful, but it wasn’t perfect. Some of my knowledge had died with me, long ago. I wasn’t even speaking or thinking in english. I was using a strange, warped language with clicks, too many A's and missing tenses. How long has it been? How many centuries passed between my last commute to the office and my life as Ash, the little thief?

“They’ll come for us both now,” the geisha exhaled, looking aghast.

I shrugged and dug through the ashes on the seat. My lanyard was there! Yay! I smiled and put it on myself. It had survived the apocalypse, outlived my bones. My keys jingled.

Celes looked up at me.

“Come with me if you want to live,” I said, offering her a hand. My hand looked pitifully small and grimy. I was no terminator.

“What power could a human skull provide? Every cultivator knows that human bones down here are completely useless for getting stronger! The Enforcer will discover that one core is missing, send the hunters, track us and break you and then... end me,” she sobbed.

“We’ll see. Let’s go.” I started walking.

“Where are you going?” Celes inquired. She got out of the car and followed.

“I am going home.” I twirled the green fiber-cord lanyard.

“Home?” She asked.

“Home!” I pointed back at the ruined city. The lanyard snapped in half from my twirling and my keys flew off into the rubble and moss covered road. I rushed to pick them up, my cheeks twinging with mild embarrassment.

“You were marketed as indestructible! For shame,” I chided the broken, green lanyard, tying the remaining bits around my thin, tape-covered wrist. “This is the last time I trust a marketing ad.”

“Ad?” The girl following me asked.

“Ehhh… just some ancient speak! Ignore it!” I waved her off. Ads was the one thing I woudn't miss. Also, traffic. I passionately hated traffic. On the bright side, the traffic problem was solved forever it seemed. Also, I was starving. “Where’s my melon?”

“Did you honestly expect me to carry a melon…” Celes ground out. Her fancy robe was getting quite dirty from all the dirt around. The city had seen better days.

“Well, it would be nice if you did. Do you know how hard it is to steal breakfast?” I wiggled my eyebrows at her. “No wait... You’re a geisha. You don’t know anything except for looking good while serving fancy tea.”

She frowned.

“Sorry. I get miffy when I’m hungry,” I said. “Can you like... send your spirit ferret to fetch us some snacks?”

She squinted at me.

“Don’t judge me!” I declared. “I might look like a sixteen-year-old street urchin, but really I’m an ancient being! Full of incredible, forgotten wisdom from a thousand years ago.”

Her intense squint-glare was burning a hole in my head.

“Please?” I asked, making a cute face at her. Cute faces were easy with the combined intelligence of two people. My power worked on her.

“Knipz, buy us two breakfasts,” she sighed, sliding a few copper coins from her pouch to the spirit that materialised on her shoulder. The ferret nodded and sped away through the air upwards, heading towards the Gold city.

Eating a soul had definitely made me stronger! Not very much, but I now had the strength of a very nerdy human bean who only went to the gym once a year and a sixteen year old girl. It was still a million stars below that of a High-Cultivator. Trudging through the overgrown ruins was twice as easy now though. Hooray!

And trudge we did! As we walked further I noticed that the city looked... odd. Not odd in terms of the fact that everything was hella damaged. Things were freakishly strange in terms of decay and the more attention I paid to minute detail the more peculiar stuff I noticed. I paused when I saw a perfectly intact [ Twenty Third Street ] sign. The street sign looked nearly mint-condition, blue paint glistening and the pole itself barely had any rust on it. What the hell? This isn't how... things work. Metal corrodes, rusts away if simply given enough time. Paint peels, glass shatters!

I rolled information about the dead city in my mind. This place was at least ten centuries old. A thousand years! I looked down at the torn-up Pikachu-themed shirt on myself. It didn't look like a thousand-year-old artifact. At most it looked like about a decade or two of use was on it. I saw a reflection of myself in a glass bottle beneath my feet. There was a colorful wrapper on the bottle that said "Please recycle me". I squinted at the inexplicably intact wrapper. This was beyond impossible. That damn wrapper should have decayed in weeks! How?!

What... the... fu...

Was I not seeing the forest for the trees? Oh.

I looked up at the twinkling yellow stars of Lord Boundless overhead. Right. This... leviathan thing was too big to exist. It somehow broke the natural laws of the universe. It was screwing with the very base concept of decay and entropy... somehow. Maybe this monstrous aberration was bending or rewinding time itself? I had no idea. I couldn't even begin to theorise how something so big could even exist, let alone function... so I stopped thinking about it and ceased gawking up like an idiot before I tripped on something or stepped on a nail.

Through some trials and tribulations which consisted of mostly climbing over ferns and rubble, we had finally reached our destination - my apartment complex. I thanked my lucky stars that the building only toppled about 6 degrees, looking somewhat like a modern Tower of Pisa.

The stairwell was partially out of service past the 24th floor, so some serious jumping and climbing was required. Thankfully, it wasn’t a problem for either of us. I was used to climbing things and Miss Rada was a fit kitsune motivated by pure, undiluted fear of cultivator-shaped judgement. I shoved my keys into the steel door and pushed it open with my double-human strength. The door groaned, sliding open just enough for us to slip inside. Everything inside was in a state of horrendous decay. My beautiful Ikea furniture looked like giant moths had eaten it a thousand years ago.

“What are you expecting to find?” Celes asked.

I reached into the closet and put the keys into the old, small metal safe. It opened after some struggle. I reached inside and pulled out my handgun sitting within a leather holster. I promptly proceeded strapping the holster to my side.

The geisha looked at me. “What’s that?”

“It’s a gun!”

“A what?”

“A weapon that fires metal projectiles… uhh… kind of like a bow, but faster.”

“It won’t help us,” she signed, her face darkening. “The Enforcer’s skin can’t be pierced with a bow and it’ll just go through servitors.”

“I’m not planning to hunt Enforcers or ghosts with this. There’s other fish in the sea. Don’t you geishas know anything about cultivation?”

“I know… enough to make empowering teas from herbs. They produce the same effects as cultivation pills, but they taste nice."

“The world is broken and I don’t understand how it works,” I said, walking to my balcony and sitting down. The view of my devastated city was quite something… staggeringly sad. A big, new part of me still couldn't believe what it was seeing. “Tell me about your power.”

“What?”

“Tell me in exact detail how you make your magical drug-tea, woman!”

“Why?”

“As Ash Sparks, all I know is... how to steal stuff and run away. I’m not going to run anymore. I’m going to create things. I want to fix the world.”

“How?” Celes asked.

“The people who built this city long ago,” I pointed at the overgrown ruins. “We were pretty good at figuring stuff out. We made things without the aid of spirits and magic! We did things that you would likely find impossible and incredible. We bound rivers, created seas and carved apart mountains without having to eat souls. We made men fly without cultivation and magic pills. We had machines, technology, science, chemistry. We had the scientific method and rationality.”

“Hrm,” the geisha made a noise, not quite believing.

“I’m going to figure out exactly what the shit that is,” I pointed at Lord Boundless in the sky overhead. “It might have made quick work of my civilization, scorching us all into ashes and bones... Tell me in precise detail how you make your tea. If I can understand the exact process of your cultivation, then maybe I can improve upon it with my… um… arcane, lost knowledge,” I tried to simplify things for Celes. “Please teach me what you know. Maybe this memory of a long dead human that I have in me now is mostly useless in a world where magical ghost bullshit is everywhere and entropy doesn’t seem to be a problem… or maybe it’s our key out. The power of those you now call ancients was never strength or speed. It was our intelligence that built this city.”

I stood up, walked out on a rusted steel beam and stared out at the shattered, torn skyscrapers. Then I spun on the beam, basking in my twice-human agility and looked up at myriads of glittering gold stars that dotted the underside of Boundless Chorus.

“The cultivators of the Gold city know nothing of the heights humanity had achieved long ago. They rely on spirits to do their bidding. They do not know what the power of mathematics, reason and science could do, before it was all extinguished when the stars fell from the sky. My world might lay in ruins… but I am still alive,” I declared as I blinked tears from my eyes. “I will prevail!”