We departed from the cultivator compound dressed in new gaudy outfits acquired from the storage catacombs. I sighed deeply as I looked behind me, thinking of all of the fancy, rare, unique plants hanging within crystal bowls. I really needed to sit down and do some actual science, try to understand how alchemy worked and how Qi affected the concoctions, etc.

I had dismissed a lot of cultivation stuff as irrational mysticism without even remotely touching on core concepts, without testing, without deep investigation, trial and error. Time was my biggest enemy.

The vast opportunities that presented themselves to me had to be grabbed by the hair and not let go of - there were things to do and people to meet. The world didn’t wait for me, didn’t give me a chance to sit down to relax or to slowly and meticulously investigate things. The Convergence was coming.

Beyond the compound walls I had immediately noticed the effects of what I had done. Numerous shops had [CLOSED - preparing for Deathstorm Convergence!] signs on them. Wiser merchants had the [Deathstorm Convergence SALE! Stock up! Protect your family!] signs up.

The city had never been so alive, so boisterous, streets bursting to the seams with people and ghosts rushing to and fro in an ever-increasing, frantic pace. Everyone here seemed to be aware of what was coming. Whispers, words and shouts of the coming doomsday resonated from every corner.

Foodstuffs and weapons merchants had long lines outside of their stalls and shops, people grabbing things off the shelves or yelling at each other to hurry it up. It was pandemonium. I had inadvertently brought some kind of buyers-panic to the Gold city with my mere presence here.

“Shit,” Arianna commented when she saw the hubbub on the streets. “You actually did it. You changed… things. Everyone is getting ready! I can’t believe it.”

“Yep,” I nodded. “Honestly, I didn’t expect this much activity this soon. This is awesome!”

I summoned Ludj to walk behind us as an imposing, tall figure so that the bewildered citizens wouldn't trample the three skinny girls that entered into the market. As soon as he emerged from my lantern, people started to give us a wide berth - the citizens of the city knew to respect high-cultivators and we certainly looked the part, dressed like pompous lordlings with a large servitor marching behind us, scanning the city for anything that could threaten us.

We headed straight for the middle of the market where an archangel of Lord Boundless hung in the air, eternally observing the crowd with a thousand eyes.

"Ash… are you sure you want to do this?" Celes asked, gently grabbing me by the shoulder. "It's not too late too…"

“I’m sure,” I turned to her. “I need to do this. Arianna is right. The Guild heads will try to crush us - they’re not a bunch of kids.”

“But if the Voice takes your soul…” My kitsune friend sniffed.

“It won’t,” I shook my head. “I’m scared too… but I’ve never seen a Voice actually hurt someone. It’s all tales, stories, maybe cult propaganda. Maybe if I can turn the Angels to our aid we can actually repel the Stormweavers… wouldn't that be nice?”

Celes sighed. “Okay… just promise me to be careful and not to agitate it like you normally…”

“Ah come on, I’m not that big of an annoyance, am I?”

“You’re the biggest annoyance in this city, Sparks,” Arianna commented, waving a hand at the pandemonium. "Look at how much you've annoyed the entire city."

"Thank you for that excellent character assessment," I drily told the highborn.

"It's a good kind of annoyance. Everyone will be ready for the Deathstorm now," Celes added. "I do wonder why the cult keeps them a secret if they know ahead of time."

"People in power like to maintain their power." I shrugged. "Don't underestimate human stupidity and greed."

"That is true," the highborn ginger nodded. "I can see my Grandfather weaponizing such knowledge to make a lot of deals ahead of time. Keeping it a secret and selling the date to a select few families would be an incredibly profitable enterprise. People could even bid on the information to bring the price up…"

"It's also a common thing in history for religious orders to stick to the most irrational option possible simply because doing the opposite might anger their god." I pointed at the archangel, delaying the inevitable. "History is full of odd rituals. Human sacrifice for example. Ancient Mayans sacrificed their enemies because they believed blood was feeding their gods."

"You said that the ancients didn't have gods ruling over them," Arianna addressed me.

"A lack of physical gods didn't stop people from inventing all sorts of metaphysical entities and assigning them specific traits that demanded sacrifice of blood, lives, parts or pain. A whole bunch of ancient religions had self-mutilation or self-flagellation aka the ritual of hitting yourself with chains and sharp objects."

"Imaginary gods?" Arianna gasped. "Self-mutilation for imaginary causes?! Why would someone do such a thing?!"

"Yeah, humanity was pretty creative in that department," I replied. "Anyways. I gotta stop stalling… wish me luck."

"I'm with you," Celes whispered, hugging me.

I pointed my finger in the direction of the archangel.

"Go-go-gadget-Pharmacist!" I sang, pushing Qi to form my secondary soul into the shape of a servitor phantom. The Pharmacist blossomed into being, heading towards the archangel. I idly noted that Arianna retreated away from the two of us, cowardly hiding behind an empty merchant's stall as if the shoddy, wooden barricade could somehow prevent the archangel from taking her soul.

The brilliant being made from Mobius loops and hexagonal eyes paid no attention to the barely-visible ghost of a human heading towards it. I stopped my servitor-self a mere meter from the seraphim's position above the middle of the Main Street.

Not many people around paid attention to what I was doing - I didn't have that much Qi so the Pharmacist was a rather dim phantom, barely visible in the midday sunlight.

I looked at the archangel with my incredible all-scanning power.

[ ] [ - ]

Well, that was a very helpful information window. I thought sarcastically. Was my scanning too weak to define it or maybe it didn’t want to be defined or observed? Bah!

"Greetings, venerable seraphim," I spoke with both of my bodies, making the Pharmacist take another step towards the archangel. There was some resistance to it, something pushing my ghost away like an invisible magnetic field.

A single hexagonal eye turned in the direction of my weak-ass, human-shaped ghost. A few people in the crowd noticed what I was doing and gasped, pointing their fingers at me, whispering to each other.

"Would you be so kind as to ask Lord Boundless…" I paused, not wanting to offend the colossus holding up my city with an insulting question. "...why do I exist?"

Another hexagonal eye moved, focusing on my ghost.

"No rush," I added, starting to sweat.

One by one, more of the seraphim's eyes settled on the Pharmacist. The angel didn't speak, didn't answer my query. It simply stared.

"What does Lord Boundless think of the fair people of the Gold city?" I tried another question, pushing Qi into my words. "Do we please his census? Does he find us... acceptable?"

I felt that I was rambling on, talking to a brick wall. The hexagonal eyes stared. The market crowd of onlookers grew.

"Uh-huh," I said, after a few minutes of extremely tense silence. "Excellent answers, thank you for listening."

I made a bow. The Pharmacist bowed along with me.

"What's going on?" Celes whispered.

"Shhh," I replied quietly, answering her with my eyes alone that I had no clue. I had failed. The angel didn't answer.

I made the Pharmacist wave at the archangel. The mobius-loop construct didn't have arms. It didn't wave back. So much for that genius plan.

Hmmmm…

I flashed "hello" in morse code at the Voice by making the Pharmacist brighter and dimmer. The face-less thing simply stared back, silently judging. Its eyes didn't even have lids, didn't blink. It didn’t dim or brighten either.

"Two plus two is four?" I tried some math, starting to lose confidence.

Nothing.

"Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared!" I tried Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity aka E = mc2.

No response. I felt mildly annoyed. Was god asleep at the wheel or simply too busy to answer me? Had my call to the highest department in the land been put on hold? I had no idea. At the very least some annoying elevator-style waiting music or a polite “Please hold” would be nice. In fact anything would be nicer than whatever the hell was happening.

I didn't come here to play a staring game with the seraphim!

The Voice had no mouth, I noted. It could not speak. Servitor ghosts didn't speak either, they only did stuff when commanded. The crowd formed a very wide gap around me. People were truly terrified of the Voice… although personally I would call it "the Overseer" because it didn't do shit except stare at me.

"Do you understand me?" I quietly whispered. "Please float up and down for yes at the very least?"

Nothing.

I encoded the word “H E L L O” into an infinite pattern of fractal math, turned it into Qi, pointed the Pharmacist’s finger at the archangel and shot a tiny spark of information at the brilliant construct. A hundred eyes turned my way all at once.

Yay?

I waited a few more minutes. No response. Damn it. It was really starting to hurt to keep the Pharmacist in existence - I was running out of Qi! With every breath my phantom dimmed further and further.

"Okay, I can see that you are busy. I'll come back another time," I quietly whispered, shaking from tiredness.

Not even a polite Goodbye. Sigh.

As I pulled the Pharmacist back a step, I noticed that the archangel shuddered, moving after it. Oh-oh. I had the thing's attention.

I directed my servitor-self to move left. The archangel moved left too. Great. Just great. People in the crowd gasped. Some of them started to panic, rapidly departing. It caused the dam to break and the street around us rapidly emptied. Nobody wanted to have their soul sucked out of them. The 'archangels are the baddies that take souls' propaganda was strong.

I moved the Pharmacist right and the archangel moved too, copying the motion exactly. What the hell was this? Was I about to get eaten? I had no idea what I was doing at this point. I felt that I had spectacularly bumbled up first contact.

I moved my ghost back one more step and the seraphim silently moved after it. I squinted at it. I could work with this… maybe. I moved the Pharmacist in a Konami pattern: up, up, down, down, left right, left, right.

The archangel replicated the motion perfectly. It didn’t show any kind of visible intelligence. There was nothing behind those hexagonal eyes - no emotions or self-awareness of any kind. It was acting akin to a dumb algorithm, a virus, a computer program left running for a million years… a perfectly obedient, perfectly bound servitor that was simply following the last order of its master - to observe.

I wondered what it was watching for exactly. Powerful cultivators? Some event? Unique servitors? Unique Qi compositions? Were the archangels guarding something? I had no answers, no solid guesses - the damn thing was simply too alien. Did the Voices even belong to Lord Boundless? Did some powerful cultivators create them centuries ago to observe the city?!

Whatever. Doesn’t matter right now. I had a job to do and I needed as much help as possible. As much as I hated doing so, it was time to weaponize belief itself, time to become famous.

“Rise for me, o’ archangel!” I yelled as loudly as I could and moved my nearly-invisible servitor-self up.

The archangel moved up. A smile spread across my face. Bingo. It didn’t matter if the archangel was as stupid as a brick. It didn’t matter that it was following me like a lost puppy. To all appearances, I now commanded the Voice.

“Now! Come down here, I wish to see you up close! Bathe me in your divine blessings!” I shouted, moving the Pharmacist down to the ground. The Voice followed my ghost, settling only a few inches above the yellow and black cobblestones, a few hundred hexagonal eyes pointed at me through the barely-visible, shimmering phantom.

He he he.

“What… what in the hells?” Arianna muttered from her hiding-place. “It’s listening to her. Oh gods… oh gods. This can’t be happening.”

“Ash… how are you doing that?” Celes asked, her voice trembling.

“BEHOLD! I am the chosen avatar of humanity!” I announced loudly, walking towards the archangel. The silver-blue brilliant light bathed and lit up my figure. It became harder to walk towards the archangel. It was far more potent than any ghost I stood in. My silver-blue hair ignited with brilliant, shimmering coronas and dancing sparks. My heart started to stutter.

The marketplace crowd had retreated far enough from me, but they still stared and listened to what I was doing from afar. Curiosity was the biggest bane of humanity.

I was indeed chosen. Chosen by me. Ha ha ha.

“Bow,” I whisper-hissed back at Celes. My kitsune friend didn’t have to be asked twice. She dropped to her knees, bowing.

Like a stone dropped in the lake what Celes had done caused a ripple in the watching crowd. One by one people started to drop to their knees, until there was no-one left standing, except for servitors that continued to guard shops, promote sales or move around doing deliveries.

“I am Lady Ash Sparks! My aim is to defend this city from the Deathstorm Convergence!” I bellowed with conviction, my words resonating across the eerily-quiet market. “Pass the word to all willing to stand together with me! I will protect this city or die trying!”

“Thank you for acknowledging me, archangel! Thank you for blessing me with your radiance!” I told the Voice and bowed. I wanted to bring it with me to the meeting, but alas I couldn't keep it up - my usable Qi was almost at zero.

Besides the point, standing only a few meters away from the archangel hurt like hell - it was indeed a phantom, the most potent, heart-stopping phantom I’ve encountered. Passing through it would absolutely give me a heart attack and end my life. That’s probably how the cultivators of legend died - they likely tried slapping this ghost and then their hearts stopped when they came too close.

If I pushed myself any further, I would faint and that would be a highly embarrassing thing for the ‘chosen one’ to undergo. The Pharmacist’s ghost winked out of existence.

The hexagonal eyes of the archangel suddenly moved in completely random directions, no longer focused on me. It detached from the ground and glided back upwards to its previous position overhead the market. The blue shimmers that were dancing on my hair and tape-covered arms dimmed.

I exhaled and started to hum the Portal song in my head, wobbling ever so slightly.

“...I feel fantastic and I'm Still alive!”