We made it the rest of the way across the market and past the compound's South-West gate without any further issues.

Celes had claimed that I was her new “apprentice in the geisha arts”. Her serenity field did most of the work for her - the gate guard didn't even pay attention to how soaked we were. He was a lowly cultivator and he looked at peace with the world, smiling and nodding to whatever excuse Celes made up for looking so tired and wet.

I merrily nodded along. I didn't even have to fake my excitement at the prospect of being a drug-tea intern. The Pharmacist-me was greatly interested in learning more about the magic of cultivation and the urchin-me had never been truly accepted or welcomed anywhere before.

We had passed into the innermost sanctum of the cult compound and entered into the palace of Serenity, a temple surrounded by perfectly arranged blossoms that were growing within perfectly manicured lily gardens framed by gold statues of famed cultivators.

I blanched at the sight - the damned high-cultivators lived in opulence while kids like me starved on the streets. The Pharmacist agreed with me on that front, but for entirely other reasons - this was clearly a positively feudal, brutal society where strength ruled and intelligence was scoffed at. It was a new, grotesque culture built atop the ruins of the old, filled with disdain for accomplishments of fallen humanity, treating the land beneath Lord Boundless as “cursed”.

Our former space-age civilization had touched the stars. We had sent the Voyager probe past the solar system with a golden phonograph record that contained pictures and sounds of Earth, symbolic directions on the cover for playing the record, and data detailing the location of our world. Where was Voyager now? Was it still sending data to a planet that could no longer answer it or had it finally fallen silent?

As I looked at the glamorous, palatial temples, rising fury thrummed in my arcane soul. This was a cult based upon the worship of gargantuan monstrosities that had come from the sky to end us! These false gods had done away with nearly everything that humanity had worked on century after century to uplift itself from medieval poverty and ignorance into the age of reason.

Only a single spark, an echo of the industrial civilization, the last vestige of rational thought had survived and now lived in me - an enduring good reaching out from a thousand years in the past.

The only problem was that I wasn’t an all-knowing mechanical engineer. I was… just a nerdy pharmacist. I didn’t know how nuclear reactors really worked. I could probably make gunpowder if I had the ingredients, but forget a reactor, I couldn’t even make a steam-engine if my life depended on it. Perhaps if I could find an intact, sealed-off library somewhere down in the dead city...

The biggest problem I foresaw was I couldn't just set all of such knowledge free, couldn't uplift the citizens of the city of Gold via some good-old-fashioned industrialization. Lord Boundless would likely notice factories atop his back. I knew that things were the way they were, because the colossus that ruled this city had permitted it.

There were stories of cultivators who went mad with power, declaring themselves invincible and refusing to follow the tenets of Lord Boundless. The Voices had disposed of such heretics pretty quickly.

I had to be very careful about what I did and how. I had to work within what was permitted to change the world. If I pushed too hard in the wrong direction, the archangels would notice and literally rip my soul from my body to drag it into the depths of Lord Boundless. I profoundly hoped that the next part of my plan would not bother Boundless-butt or his seraphims.

Celes led me into one of the rooms within the temple. The High-Administrator was thankfully still there, his snoring vibrated the crystalline-blue stained glass. She rushed to unlock a case that was bound to his arm with a gold chain. I pulled six beast cores from within it, sliding them into my gun holster side compartment. Han coughed in his sleep, he was definitely about to wake.

I pushed all of my Qi into the Rat-King's beast core, forming a spiralling pattern that spun into itself, dropped the flashing core into the open case and collapsed into the floor in exhaustion. Celes snapped the case shut and effortlessly shoved me under the bed with her foot.

"Hrmpff… yaamnnn?" Han yawned.

"Master, you asked to be awakened at noon," Celes spoke, her voice bearing an evident twinge of fear. The noon gong resounded across the compound, making me twitch.

The High-Administrator nearly stepped on my precariously-located toes as he stood up.

"Ah, yes. That was quite the hearty nap! I feel greatly invigorated,” Enforcer Sempiter stretched, his joints cracking.

“I am pleased to hear that, Master,” Celes demurely murmured in an overly-sweet voice.

“I should have no issues flying for three days straight to reach the city of the Eternal Flames now," Han put his gemstone-encrusted sword on the ground and stepped on it.

“I shall be back within the week with as many high-cultivators as I can convince to join us for the coming Convergence. Prepare the temple of Serenity for a party of ten to twenty most-esteemed Immortal guests,” he concluded.

“Your wish is my command, Master.”

"Good tomorrow, geisha Rada."

"Good tomorrow, Master Sempiter," Celes bowed.

Defying Newton's law of universal gravitation the Enforcer rose into the air on his sword. He waved a hand and the stained glass window latch unlocked itself, the window opening for him. With a noise of flapping robes he was gone. I endured a pang of jealousy from the Pharmacist watching a fundamental law of nature, gravity, getting defied so easily and I couldn’t help but smirk.

I crawled out from under the bed, wobbling from severe Qi deprivation and stared at the decreasing figure in the sky, knowing quite well that the swirling pattern of Qi that I had pushed into the core was slowing down. If I was right, when the miniature Qi storm I jump-started inside the Rat-King’s core stopped spinning, the magical sphere would shatter from within, hopefully rather catastrophically.

“...three, two, one,” I whispered, my timing estimate based on round pebbles that I had practiced blowing up with my Qi most of my conscious life as a thief.

The case held by Han flashed like a little star flaring to life. The Rat-King's beast core responded just as I desired it to - it pushed all of its power into itself, creating a microscopic singularity, a tiny fracture within the fabric of space. In another second, the core went supernova and the high-cultivator ignited in the sky. The explosion blew him off his sword and a little, distant, smoking figure and the glittering sword plummeted down through the clouds, beyond the boundary of the Gold city.

The still-growing paroxysm pushed apart cumulus clouds, the blastwave carving a circle of empty, blue sky in the distance.

"Minus one Boundless Immortal!" I mused as the booming sound of the blast reached us, rattling the stained glass window. “Are you not impr-r...”

My voice stuttered into silence as a seraphim of Lord Boundless took off from the city with a rapid flicker and hovered next to the hole in the clouds, not knowing what to make of it. My heartbeat intensified tenfold as it spun about lazily, a hundred eyes searching for the cause of the blast. I froze, white knuckles digging into the windowsill, unable to draw my eyes away from the archangel. A minute passed, then another. It didn’t move towards us, instead slowly coming back down to the city. I deflated, sliding down. Fortunately, or through sheer luck, it didn’t figure out what had blown up the High-Administrator! The tiny mote in the eye of god had won this round. I was still alive.

“Ninety-nine hells, that was terrifying,” Celes exhaled beside me. “I’ve never seen the Voice move that fast.”

“Yeah, not everyday you get to annoy an archangel of our Lord,” my smile came out very crooked. “If the Voice couldn't figure out what got Han, I doubt that the ghost-hounds will be able to track the stolen cores.”

An awkward silence settled between us as each of us considered what had just transpired.

"You… really blew up the Rat-King’s beast core? A core you acquired through your own merit?!” my companion finally spoke. “I didn’t know that beast cores could explode like that.”

"Yeppers. A beast core is just a rock,” I chattered, feeling immensely relieved that the Voice didn't come for my twin-soul. “Solidified, crystallized excess Qi. Power. Energy. I had figured out how to make Qi-infused rocks explode a long time ago. A lot of things can explode. Nobody expects a beast core to explode because to make one detonate is a truly enormous waste of a very handy resource that lasts hundreds of years. Making servitor spirits is much more useful.”

“Why not use one of the cores from the case for that?” She asked.

“Those are bigger and therefore more awesome!”

“But.. you can’t even make servitors with them.”

“I have zero plans to make servitors, Celes,” I replied. “There’s already an abundant excess of spooky ghosts in the Gold city! Nevermind that I have an issue with binding souls to eternal servitude.”

Celes looked at me like I was mentally challenged. In her world-view making beast servitor-phantoms was the natural thing to do.

“It didn’t even make that much of a Big-bada-boom, honestly. Hard to tell the actual size, since Han flew off so quickly,” I changed the subject before it became an argument.

“It looked pretty big from here,” Celes commented.

“S’okay, I’ve seen bigger explosions. The biggest bomb humanity built was the Tzar Bomba. The blastwave went three times around the planet!”

“Three times… around the planet?” Celes whispered. “Would that be enough to bring down... a god?”

“Maybe,” I shrugged. “However, bombs like that took supernations with a population of 200+ million people, all of combined human knowledge and a whole lot of scientists to design and... I’m just one sixteen-year-old girl.”

“The most dangerous sixteen-year old girl I know, what with how easily you slapped Administrator Han from the sky—an Immortal-level cultivator very few people could annoy and live to tell of it,” the kitsune commented dryly. “Are you going to blow up the entire compound next? I saw you glaring angrily at it. I doubt that the Voice will give up so easily if you do this sorta thing again.”

“Han was an exception, he’d cause problems for us when he saw he was robbed! I’m totally laying off explosions for now!” I crossed my arms, shuddering a little at her mention of the archangel. “Going to keep it down low and learn some meditation and singing from you. I’m addicted to peace, not war, I swear!”