“Midday beckons!” I announced with overly cheerful abandon. “Soon we shall tell those wicked old men what to do and all will be swell and good. We shall cure the city of its ailments and build a utopia where humans and ghosts can coexist in peaceful harmony!”

“What have you done with her?” Arianna glared at Celes. “She is sounding like a psychopath.”

“Why are you so rude?” I levelled my head with Arianna’s. “Did your granddaddy teach you to be a crotchety prude or are you a prude by nature?”

I saw that Arianna squeezed her knuckles. She definitely had the urge to hit me right now. “You know if you were a little nicer to our lovely Celes, you’d have some of this sweet, sweet serenity.” I pushed her further.

Arianna’s eye started to twitch.

“Good, good. Use that anger to motivate yourself! Let the hate flow through you, mwa ha ha.” I giggled, unable to resist making references to things only I understood.

Arianna’s fist came up to smack me and froze in front of my face as the pact gripped her heart. She made an extremely sour face. I fist-bumped her.

“Wha…?” She blinked.

“Fistbumps are an essential component of friendship!” I declared. I knew that I was bullying her, yet I couldn't resist. It’s not everyday one gets to turn a nemesis into a friend via use of merchant contract magic. I briefly pondered if I could use contract magic on myself, in the manner of a self-declared pact to make myself twice as focused.

I noticed that Celes was smiling like Palpatine in the background, foxy chompers glinting. She was really into this noble-abuse business. When I met the kitsune girl she seemed like an NPC, an invisible part of the background, but now I knew better - geishas for all of their servitude had power. Celes didn't accept her doomed future - instead she learned to wield her serenity field with incredible precision.

My adorable, harmless-looking geisha friend could manipulate minds with her field, I realised. Slowly, over the years she had made the almighty, Immortal High-Administrator believe that she was his best friend. She had become Han's most trusted associate until he told her everything about geishas! Why, if it wasn’t for Celes mentally breaking and drugging the Enforcer of god’s Will, I wouldn't be able to steal all of his beast cores. She was full of inner strength, viciousness and cleverness that went far deeper, beyond my initial observations.

“Okkay, ladies,” I spun. “For my next magic trick I am going to chat up an archangel.”

“Again with the archangels?” Arianna groaned.

“Yes,” I nodded. “We must add an archangel to our band of… what are we? Right… um... The Radiant Knights of Serenity!”

“That is the stupidest name I’ve…” the highborn began.

“A-pa-pa. This is a democracy! Celes, do you approve of our group-name?”

Celes nodded.

“What about you, Mr. Murr?” I inquired.

The lanky ghost nodded.

“What the freaking hells is... a democracy?” Arianna whined.

“The rule of numbers aka majority! I, as the figurehead, put forward a motion and everyone votes aye or nay.” I postulated as I strutted about, contemplating how I could talk to a seraphim.

“Well it’s moronic is what it is,” she said. “I want a recount. Why does the servitor get to vote?”

“Because he’s a person too, with hopes and dreams. Hang on. Recounting…. Brrrr… Aaaand it’s four versus one now,” I commented.

“Four? What? Who…?” the ginger teen asked, looking around.

“Me.” I spoke with a voice that was a bit deeper and crustier. “See? The Pharmacist gets a vote too!”

“For Qi-s sake!” Arianna covered her face with her hands. “Now you’ve given your imaginary, ancient brain-parasite a voice too?”

“Okay,” I rolled my eyes. “First of all, the Pharmacist isn’t imaginary. The forgotten knowledge in my head from a thousand years ago is quite real. Secondly - a symbiote, not a parasite. We have a wonderful, respectful and collaborative relationship. Yes, it’s true I probably glued my new best friend together out of a bunch of scattered half-degraded memories, but that’s on you Arianne.”

“On me?”

“You were a gargantuan moon-sized asshole to me my entire life! You pushed me away and ordered others to kick me while I was down!” I huffed. “I was so freaking lonely so I found myself a bleached skull in the dead city and created a best friend for myself using the power of a superior-grade beast core. Happy? Can we move on?”

My words finally got through to the obtuse noble. “I… uh… I.” She tried to say something, but couldn't formulate the words. She knew that I was right. I was her greatest mistake that now haunted her with a terrible vengeance.

“You’re… what?” I prodded her. “Ohhh, remember that time when you set an abandoned building on fire and shoved me inside to ‘build up Qi-based fire resistance’? I remember. My hair took a long time to grow back.”

Arianna swallowed her words.

"Remember that time you threw me down five storeys into a pile of rubble to teach me how to land? I remember. I broke my freaking wrist and my tailbone!" I snarled, tears forming at the edges of my eyes.

There was no way that the stuck-up highborn would admit that she was wrong or…

“Oh, Ash. I’m so sorry,” Celes was the one to respond to my words that were filled with old wounds. She stood up and suddenly gave me a fierce hug. “I’m sorry you had that wretched blackguard instead of a family.”

In that instance, her serenity field focused on me even more, targeting my very twin-soul like a laser-guided missile. Her power ignited my mind, like a parabolic mirror that I used at university as a homework experiment at building a solar-powered steam engine.

The serenity pulse set me alight, intensified tenfold and I liquified, melted away into the first act of true, absolute kindness and friendship anyone’s ever shown me. My first hug. My first best friend. I felt that my face was really wet now. Were these tears of joy? I've never been this happy...

Tick, tick, tick, boom.

The fractal machinery of the stars wielded by the Pharmacist inside my brain that worked in some sort of a parallel to my own mind relentlessly spun, gears woven of infinite, mathematical constellations turning.

I hung onto that happy feeling, that thought of pure bliss as time around me slowed. I saved, encoded the emotional explosion within my physical, meaty brain into fractal math that composed my secondary, parapsychological mind.

A finite, temporary, chemical feeling of happiness turned into a weapon, a device woven from infinite, self-repeating algorithms.

[Secondary weapon - Death Filter]

I assigned it a name.

I squeezed one of the beast cores still held in my hand. I pulled, drew power through it, passing the current through the prism of absolute happiness that I felt as Celes held me. A filter woven from the feelings of trust and of my first, real friendship versus the river of power polluted with death.

It worked!

I felt that the energy flowing into me was pure, empty of concealed desire to irrationally murder everything in sight.

Power, clear, incredible power flowed into me like a raging current. I suddenly realised with a panic that I couldn't stop it even if I tried! I had to use it or lose it! The fantastic amount of Qi held by a Level 700 beast core would vaporize, fry me from within if I didn’t utilize it, didn't give it purpose.

I thought of what I really wanted, what I wished - to give the Pharmacist form and a voice, to fully wield a valuable, new part of myself, to build a better world for people like Celes.

“Expect-a-Pharmacist!” I sang in resonant, alien tones, pointed my finger at the empty air in front of me and opened my eyes. Qi continuously flowed from the beast core into my happy-thought-filter, passed through my Dantian and poured from my finger weaving a shimmering, silver-blue ghostly figure in the air.

I tried to attach the idea, the voice and concept of the priorly constructed purple fractal that represented the Pharmacist to it. The figure sprouting in the air from my hand was that of a human, a strange ghost made from infinite swirls that spiralled in on themselves. It wasn’t perfect, it wasn't feminine or masculine. It was an idea of a person, a memory weaved together from shattered fragments that I was priorly holding together with my imagination alone.

The sixth sphere felt dead in my hand.

One wish left.

I dropped the cold, dim crystal ball on the table. It clattered across it and rolled towards Arianna who looked at it in utter befuddlement.

“Did… did you just…” She whispered and looked to where I was pointing with my finger.

“Behold! I have given birth to myself!” I spoke.

The noble-nose inhaled. “You gotta be kidding me,” she said. “A human servitor phantom? You wasted another core and... gave yourself one? To what end?! Why? It doesn't even smell that strong! Why does it look so… messed up?”

Celes was looking at the odd, somewhat disjointed, dim, semi-transparent human too, her jaw dropping. After a minute of silent gawking she closed her mouth.

"Good tomorrow, Celes Rada. Thank you for being my first friend in this world," the ghost bowed.

“The Pharmacist, I presume?” She curtsied back.

“Indeed I am,” the flickering phantom spoke. Okay, the Pharmacist's ghost wasn’t actually speaking. It was my human mouth making the voice, using the same, slightly deeper and rougher voice, pantomiming for the ghost in perfect synchronicity with the way its mouth moved.

“A talking phantom? This is the weirdest freakin’ thing I’ve seen…” Arianna pointed out. "Wait just a heartbeat. It's Ash speaking for it! What...?"

I lifted my arm to my face and the strange ghost replicated my motion exactly. It was odd. We were still two personalities within one body, a frankensteinian amalgamation of a twenty-first century human mind and a thirty-first century girl.

“Now, as for your questions, Arianna Manning,” the Pharmacist's ghost spoke. “While Ash was having fun at your expense, I was contemplating the matter of talking to an archangel of Lord Boundless."

"Again with that dangerous nonsense." Arianna frowned.

"I am quite the persistent problem-solver. My purpose is to help all of you. Yes, especially you, Miss Manning. Out of all of us you need the most help, because you wield real power over numerous human lives."

"I don't need your freaking help," Arianna muttered. "I can manage my estate just fine."

"Can your esteemed estate save the people of the Gold city from the Deathstorm Matriarch?" The ghost boomed. "Do the Mannings have a magic card up their gold-threaded sleeves that can protect the city when the Stormweavers come for their harvest of death?"

Arianna deflated.

"You can't save everyone, Sparks! The high-cultivators can barely defend what's theirs during the Deathstorm Convergence. You are a sixteen-year-old girl, a nobody, with barely any Qi in you! You can't stop the Deathstorm Matriarch." She shot back. "You are obviously high from the geisha's mental influence! Be realistic!"

"I don't expect to stop a god or her devout sky-cultivators, Arianna," the Pharmacist sighed. "I don't even expect to save everyone. I know that I won't be able to stop the firestorm assault of the Stormweavers with my bare hands. I am well aware of my physical strength."

"Then what the friggin hells is your goal?!" Arianna howled.

"To try to minimize the degree of death," I said with my normal voice with a sniff. "So that at least one person won't lose their family like I have. So that at least one girl will still have her mother!"

Arianna curiously looked at me with her emerald eyes.

"When have the Mannings ever lost one of their own?!" My voice trembled. "Do you even know what it's like to lose everyone, everything?! To not remember your parents' faces?! Are you going to try to help people or will you hide behind an army of high-cultivator bodyguards, shielded by the barrier-walls of your castle?!"

"When the gong of Convergence rings across the city, I will leave it to people who are stronger to defend me," Arianna replied. "But… until then. I… will help my people. I just don't know how we'll be able to convince the Guilds to obey us. They will bring truth-seekers. The Heads are all talented at catching lies too. They won't be deceived as easily as a gang of teenage orphans."

"I am aware," I replied. "This is why I need to know more. Here's what I think - the archangels of Lord Boundless are not fully solid, unlike the god that we live on. They’re bright as heck, but also ever-so slightly transparent. They are ghosts, phantoms, echoes of something ancient... like myself, but far older."

"I was going to suggest sending Knipz," Celes said.

"What about Murr?" Arianna raised an eyebrow. "Why bother making yet another servitor?"

"Well, logically, we are going to need as much phantom firepower as possible if things go sideways," I said. "But really… It needs to be a human ghost. I need a human servitor that's perfectly synchronized with my own rational mind. I need not to bumble this up, to make first contact with an alien god's representative, not use a one-way telephone of a beast-servitor."

"So you're really going to do it? You are going to talk to a seraphim," the highborn mulled, not even bothering to ask what a telephone was.

Both the Pharmacist and I nodded. "I have been terrified of seraphims my entire life. The fear of the Voices is ingrained into our culture. I want to know what god really thinks of us, not guess the answers based on thousand-year-old cult dogma. At best I might be able to convince an archangel to help us. At worst… it will vaporize the Pharmacist's ghost."

"No," Celes whispered. "You don't have to…"

"This is a gamble, a sacrifice I am willing to make," the Pharmacist spoke. "Even if the Voice of god rips this ghostly-shell away from me, my memories will still exist within the mind of Ash Sparks."

“You’re really the bravest person I’ve ever met,” Celes whispered.

“Or the stupidest,” Arianna added. “I’m voting against this plan, not that anyone here listens to me.”

“I do listen to you, Annie,” The Pharmacist said. “You’re the contrarian voice in our group -”

"Contra-what-now?” She inquired.

“One who debates from an opposing viewpoint. A non-conformist." I affirmed.

Arianna sighed exasperatedly.

"Time's-a-wasting." I looked up at the city below us. "Let's go punch the Voice of god with some clever words and hope for the best."