I dragged Celes to a secluded garden and sat down with her, glancing at a particularly long and thin servitor ghost that was steadily trimming the nearby cherry blossoms with its razor-sharp chompers.

Five little spheres of stolen deus ex machina sat in a leather pouch strapped across my chest, microscopic shards of an alien god’s power ripped out by high-cultivators from dead beasts. I wondered how many cultivators perished each day trying to acquire more of these and how many had sacrificed themselves just to get these five.

Humanity had smoothly transitioned itself to fighting things within the depths of their new god, built up a cult around doing just that and worked hard to turn themselves into living weapons. The daily grind of a cultivator's lifestyle had no allowance for thought, no reason to ask the question such as - why do we fight?

I had encountered quite a few cultivator beast-hunter groups during my many trips into the dead city and back. Armed to the teeth with servitor lanterns, great swords, bows, dressed in fancy robes and wearing numerous gold bracelets they made a lot of noise, announcing their presence far in advance with obnoxious conversations or loud hymns praising Lord Boundless. I on the other hand was very small, quick and wore no shoes. I generally ran away and hid in small crevasses whenever I encountered cultivator beast-hunters, avoiding the tunnels labelled as “Extreme danger” like the plague.

Another piece started to fall into place inside my head, adding to my prior hypothesis when I thought about the predetermined fate of my new best friend Celes Rada.

“Celes, what happens to a cultivator if they die on a beast-hunt?” I asked.

“The death ceremony, praising the deeds of a fallen hero. The body is stripped of all possessions, taken to the central well and offered to Lord Boundless,” she answered.

“The central well… the maw of the beast… A place where god feasts on the hero’s life’s experience…” I muttered. “It all makes sense now.”

Like little moths fluttering to a flame, cultivators were drawn into the depths of Lord Boundless on an endless murder carousel fuelled by desire for power. It was a simple doctrine - kill more things to become stronger. If you die, your bones aka your memories will be donated to Lord Boundless in the central well.

“Weaker, low ranking cultivators do not reach heaven - they are turned into servitors. However...” Celes continued speaking and the hair on the back of my head rose at her trembling words, because I did not expect a continuation of this narrative. “...if the hero in question is strong-willed enough and they wish to return, they can break through the firmament of heaven and attempt to walk through ninety-nine thousand hells. Rare few make it back to the city, bearing numerous scars of their journey from hells. When they return to the compound, they are praised for breaking the firmament of heaven and declared an Immortal.”

“What?!” I gasped. “What, what, what?! The Immortals are actually... immortal? They can come back from death?!”

“High-cultivator Han Axiom Sempiter died by the claws of a leviathan burrowing dragon in the deep tunnels beneath the Gold city thirteen years ago,” Celes nodded. “The ceremony of his death was held within the central well and his body dissolved away into the golden field of eternity."

"Damn," I gulped.

"He came back, but he wasn’t the same. He never told me what he saw in heaven or of his trip across hells, but it had changed him. On one hand he had become much stronger, nearly unkillable even, but on another, he was far less human. His faith in Boundless Chorus became unshakable. He was able to cut away a lot of his earthly desires and rose in prominence through brutality, challenging his opponents in battle and eventually became the High-Administrator, the Enforcer of the Will of our Lord.”

“Deathstorm!” I muttered. “The hells are real and your boss returned from them.”

I looked at the tall gardener-servitor that was meticulously chopping leaves and branches away. This wasn’t a creature from earth. If Boundless Chorus could re-print people within his innards, then it stood to reason that he was printing alien life as well.

“Where did you come from?” I asked the servitor-gardener. “What distant world did you die on, long ago?”

The thin-limbed servitor paused his chopping, one of its beady, silver eyes glancing my way just for a brief second. It then resumed its mundane, repetitive job.

I stood up from the bench and walked up to the slender ghost. “I’m sorry. You were probably just trying to get home when a cultivator killed you and bound your bones to a servitor-lantern. Your home-world is probably long gone by now, sucked dry by the gargantuan, cosmic mosquitoes. I hope you can understand me. I’m so sorry.”

I tried to hug the ghost. My hands hovered on the edge of its silver shawl. It looked down at me, not speaking.

“We treat you like dumb animals, servants, but you must be more. You must have had a home once too, a family that was ripped away from you by the stars that fell from the sky.”

Celes squinted at me. I must have looked like a crazy girl in her eyes, speaking to a servitor-phantom like it was sentient, treating it like it was a human being. I didn’t give a damn about her theoretical judgement.

I peered at the servitor with my power and ripples of information coalesced above its head as a defining label. The name of the spirit wasn’t in any kind of human language, it was an over-simplified approximation, I knew.

[Ludjfurkvv-Murr - Servitor phantom - LV 205 Gardener]

“...Ludjfurkvv-Murr?” I tried to make first contact. “Sorry, I’m probably totally screwing up your name. My tongue is not long enough to say your name properly. You're a level two-hundred-and-five gardener. For how many centuries have you been taking care of the temple of Serenity’s gardens to reach a level that high?”

Saying its name worked! I had its attention now. The long spirit bent its limbs, folding itself down on far too many kneecaps, bringing its head down to my level. It looked straight at me, curiously. A long hand with at least seven knuckles started to unfold its long fingers from a closed fist. One, two, three, four.

“What in the ninety-nine-hells...” Celes whispered from the bench, her face turning pale. “It’s not supposed to do that!”

“So… you’ve been trimming trees in this compound, listening to geishas and cultivators chat away carelessly for four hundred years now. Do you understand me? Do you remember? Did you have someone you loved once?” I asked.

The alien creature nodded thrice.

“Did you have a home?”

Another nod.

“You’re a nice, long boy, aren’t you?”

A curious look, almost a smile forming across the razor-sharp mouth. A nod.

“Mr. Murr, you must be bored out of your mind here. Nobody here acknowledges you, nobody asks how your day has been. They treat you like furniture, a bit of the landscape. But you’re not. You’re an individual, with hopes and dreams. Do you want to be my friend?” I stood up on my tippy toes, smiling back at the phantom.

A nod.

Celes finally found the courage to get her butt off the stone bench. She cautiously stepped to my side.

“What are you doing?” She whispered.

“Making friends, duh. Everyone could use a friend. Everyone wants to be acknowledged, appreciated, loved.”

I looked at the servitor spirit once again. “I was lost and alone once too, trapped by the very limits of my mind, just trying to get by, until this clumsy geisha ran into me and accidentally gave me the power to free myself. We’re all bound by our chains, Mr. Murr. Would you like me to find a way to break yours, to liberate you from your lantern?”

A firm nod.

“You’re not just nodding along to everything I say, right?”

A sideways nudge of its head.

“Excellent!”

“If you shatter the lantern, break its core, it’ll just fade away, stop existing,” Celes commented.

“Don’t be absurd, I wouldn't want to kill my new friend,” I waved a hand to the servitor. “You wouldn't want to stop existing, right?”

The servitor didn’t move. I probably managed to confuse it with a double negative.

“Um, sorry. You want to see the world, go beyond the walls of this compound, leave the garden to which you have been bound?”

A nod.

“Do you want to come with... me, not as a servant but as a friend? I’ll let you do whatever you want. I’m not going to keep you pacified, I know how much it sucks to be chained,” I offered the tall servitor my hand.

Long, transparent, silver-blue fingers unfolded, stretched out to reach out to me. Silver sparks danced on the edges of my electrical tape as our hands connected.

“It’s a deal!” I grinned, turning back to my kitsune companion. “Feel free to bow down to my social skills, Miss Rada. I was here only a day and I already made a friend!”

Celes flapped her mouth open and closed like a fish, utterly befuddled. “I don’t understand. I tried to talk to servitors when I was younger. They don’t acknowledge anyone and respond only to their master’s last orders. The gardeners follow the same pattern, day in and day out. They do not deviate from the orders given to them centuries ago.”

“Hrm. I guess my special art IS a weapon of sorts. The kind of weapon that allows me to become friends with servitors,” I pursed my lips. “These old ghosts are made of memories. It took just the right amount of time and decay to make Mr. Murr acknowledge what he once had.”

“So, can you do the same for all servitors? Talk to them?”

“Doubtful. I tried to talk to the slow-moving, big ghosts in the market before too. They’re pretty inattentive, bound to their paths. You see, I’ve picked to sit in this garden on purpose. While you’ve been showing me this temple’s wares, I’ve been paying attention to the servitor lanterns. Metal corrodes over passing centuries, even if it's gold-plated. Mr. Murr’s lantern is the oldest one I’ve ever seen - a lot of runes on it have worn away and the latches are barely holding it together. The binding mechanism is failing and so he has a lot more initiative than the others, although it’s impossible to tell that just by looking at him.”

The lanky ghost nodded. Celes still looked a bit freaked out by this turn of events. She certainly didn’t expect me to make friends with Mister Slenderman of all people.