Chapter 41 Tāo Tiè

And greed, again, and the blind lust of honours

Which force poor wretches past the bounds of law,

And, oft allies and ministers of crime,

To push through nights and days with hugest toil

To rise untrammelled to the peaks of power-

These wounds of life in no mean part are kept

Festering and open by this fright of death. - Some dead poet who thought too much.

The third universal constant, Aiden sardonically thought, was systemic hypocrisy.

His story to Ranpo was not the only he had of his old world, his mentor- the person who showed him the ropes when he first took a job- once worked at an oil company operating in the arctic circle. Said company realised the implications of fossil fuels on the climate decades before anyone else did, spending millions on researching its effects on the world.

Years before the first major scientific discussion, the oil company realised the overuse of fossil fuels led to climate change.

They decided the melting of the arctic circle would lead to easier access to their drilling stations, saving them billions of transport costs over the years.

And so, they said nothing as the world burned around them.

Compared to that, his water bottle story was tiny, inconsequential.

When the HR manager pressed a wad of cash into his chest, laughing about how he should buy a fresh bottle of champagne with the money, he did not immediately take it. He did not immediately begin working on the falsified accounts.

Aiden Lu had stewed over it, realising the hypocrisy of a company that claimed to be working for the benefit of its customers.

And when this world gave him another choice, when they pressed another metaphorical wad of cash into his chest, he had pondered again, of why it asked him to go against their written laws, the ideals they held in high regard, why this society criminalised a significant portion of its people.

The answer was simple.

Because they benefited from it.

“They were both, in the end, reliant on hypocrisy,” he murmured.

In realising the world wasn’t good, it lowered the bar on what his good can be, giving him more leeway on his definition of morality.

It was hypocrisy, and he knew it, he knew that he was retracting the ideals of his old world, the adherrance to law and order, because the current one did not see such things in the same light.

In his previous world, if he got a reckoning, he might be thrown in prison for a few months, maybe gotten a large fine, if he was unlucky he might’ve been used as a scapegoat and the sentence rose from months to years, but his time rotting in jail would only serve to waste taxpayer money.

Here, a reckoning came with the only thing worthwhile to his existence ripped from him and given to someone better qualified. Oh sure, he would get it back after his sentence was done, but it was stupid to believe several years or decades with a Spawner power as good as his would be worth less than the cost of a jail cell.

It was better, if only slightly.

Now he knew that the society he was in would not shun him, would not ostracize him for taking this path, his worries were abated. There was still the niggling idea of someone punching his door down and arresting him in the night, but so long as he didn’t step over that unspoken line, so long as he fulfilled the expectations of the world, he could profit off it more than it risked him.

“Barely two weeks old and I have already learnt that morality is relative,” Ranpo blithely commented. “Truly, I am speedrunning old age.”

He did quietly disagree with that. Good men lived good lives, Aiden still believed that, well and truly.

But never once did he truly believe that he was good.

The world wasn’t right, and neither was he, so his heart only felt a familiar emptiness.

“Old age isn’t such stupid life lessons,” Aiden chuckled. “It is realising your favourite kebab place has closed down, it is finding more hair on your pillow every time you wake up, it is hearing your college friends had gotten married and become completely different people.”

His eyes turned to the hospital he was leaving, the rising dawn casting long shadows on its structure.

“It is realising you have outlived what you believed to be constant.”

In the hospital, there was a vase of fresh flowers by a comatose girl’s bed.

“I refuse to outlive constancy again,” Aiden muttered.

As Aiden turned and left, Ranpo saw on his creator’s cheek, Oros, the white serpent biting its tail, a symbol of infinity.

‘Or perhaps,’ the crow mused, ‘self destruction.’

Aiden had stopped by a cart, one selling various masks, bargaining, he bought one, and gestured at Ranpo to hurry up.

As the crow did, he looked at the details of the mask Aiden had just bought.

Metallic, either bronze or copper. The mask was carved in an old eastern way, angular with squarish features depicting a bug-eyed creature with no lower jaw and goat horns that curved like squares. All in all, the mask would completely cover Aiden’s upper face.

“What is it?” Ranpo asked

“I heard it is called a 饕餮.”

‘Taotie,’ Ranpo heard.

“It’s a rather funny name,” Aiden told him, “both words individually mean gluttony, added together it just means gluttony again. I suppose it’s a pun of sorts.”

“What is it supposed to depict?” the crow asked, peering at it, “A chimera of some kind?”

Aiden shrugged. “Who knows.”

“What the creature meant or was named is forgotten even in my old world, 饕餮 was just a later name that was given to it, long after its first was lost.”

He continued, talking as he walked, “It could’ve been a god that was worshipped, it could’ve been a monster that was feared, it could’ve just been a misdrawn goat.”

And he put the mask on.

“Whatever it was, it doesn’t really matter now, does it?”

Boss Huang noted he would pay Aiden $10 per hour, a generous $1.58 above the teen minimum wage, almost 20% more per hour. If he worked the entire week, took every shift from 4pm to 10pm night, it would yield him about $420 per week. Teenage Aiden Lu might’ve cried tears of joy at such rates.

It was blindly obvious that it wasn’t enough.

He was on week three in this world, taking just this job would buy him only two and a half weeks before his inheritance runs out. Jaiden’s plug gets pulled on week eight and a half instead of on week six.

The time he was allowed faffing about was nearing its end.

He patted Ranpo on the back of the head, “I go this alone, don’t risk yourself.”

The crow frowned.

“I’m not going to leave you alone on this,” Ranpo answered.

“There’s no need to risk yourself on this,” he gently said, “I risk no life other than my own.”

The crow scoffed, “As if your life is worth any less than mine.”

“It is,” Aiden quietly said. Without listening for an answer, Aiden left the crow outside as he entered.

Wearing the taotie mask, a large hoodie and a scarf that obscured a lot of his features, he knocked on the shutters of the Sweets Shop.

The old woman that opened the shutters was shorter than him, at least by a head. She looked as he remembered her, appearing like a sweet old woman who wouldn’t look out of place in a primary school.

But he noticed the limp she walked with, how one of her legs fell harder on the ground than the other, and the scarred hand that was missing its ring and pinky finger.

“I heard you give commissions?”

The old lady appraised him for a moment, and gestured inside, “Hurry in, I will tell you of how this works.”

He entered quietly after her, passing rows and rows of strangely coloured candies. Each of them were perfect spheres, reminding him greatly of gobstoppers.

She opened and entered the staff room in the back without a word, and Aiden followed.

Entering, he found a sparsely decorated storage area, filled with cardboard boxes and a stray computer hidden behind a tall pile of boxes. The tops, shelves and such, he noted, were covered in dust.

“It’s been a long time since I was young,” the old woman amicably began as she rifled through a box. “I can’t quite reach the places I could before.”

“You could get some help,” Aiden replied, “the costs of your cover store is practically daylight robbery.”

She chuckled, still bent over, searching for something in the boxes. “Oh sure I could hire someone else, but there aren’t a lot of people I can quite trust at this age.”

And when she found what she was looking for, she rose and turned around. Aiden eye’s narrowed slightly, as he saw a clear plastic pipe tube in her hands.

Within the tube were five multicoloured candies.

“Oh you didn’t believe those small parlour tricks were the limit of my ability did you?” she asked. “My name is Sarah Sour, but just call me Sarah.”

“Is that a threat?” Aiden asked, eyes watching the tube. She had done a good job calculating distance, Aiden wouldn’t be able to reach her before she ate the candies. So he stood planted to the ground for now, not making a move.

She shrugged, “Just an extra measure, my operation is nowhere near a secret, and there are plenty of people who can profit off of an ability generator, even if temporary.”

“So why don’t they?” Aiden asked.

Sarah shook the tube, rattling the five candies inside, “You’re looking at it.”

Five unknown abilities that can be accessed by the person in front of him with a single mouthful.

“Fair enough,” Aiden agreed.

It didn’t permanently grant, that he was sure of given that none of the ones in the store lasted more than an hour.

But a fight could be ended in less than a minute.

And what were the chances that the five candies were a bait? If it were such a valuable defensive weapon, why did she keep it in a box at the back of the store?

She must have some other way of protecting herself, maybe she hid more candies in her clothing, maybe she had an ability item like his Umbrella or the fidget spinner Trist had.

Not to mention, she was one of the only people the paper mentioned as actively dangerous.

“I know you are sizing me up.”

Aiden paused, and shook his head, “Sorry, force of habit.”

“I don’t blame you,” she mused, “it is one of the better habits.”

She gestured to the computer desk, towards a sheaf of papers. “How I function is simple, write down your phone number on one of those papers, and I’ll text you the website and your password for logging in. It’ll display to you a list of requests from people who require a more specialised hand. You choose whether to take them up, but so long as you follow the client’s requests there will be no problem.”

“And finally, I need to ask if you are a meta.”

Aiden paused, considering the person before him.

“I am,” he said.

“Then we will need this.”

Suddenly, something began to manifest to Sarah’s left side, Aiden shifted a step back, watching the thing warily as it phased into existence.

It at first appeared like a UFO, the circular kind made of some kind of smooth metal, with eight glass bulbs spaced evenly underneath, but from the top centre of the disk rose a large pink… foamy thing, its material almost looking like a pool noodle. It blinked at him, eyes placed to the side of the foam shape, and as the foam expanded behind it, he realised it looked like an octopus. A pink octopus made of pool foam, whose body underneath its eyes was replaced by a shiny, metallic UFO.

“Blend S,” Sarah said, “the second part of your contract is simple. Every week you intend to use my service, you come here and let me imprint my ability with yours.”

“What does it do?” Aiden asked, examining the strange thing.

“It will be simpler to show you,” she said.

Suddenly, a green light lit up above one of the glass bulbs, the one directly in Sarah’s direction.

“Blend,” a voice rang out, coming from the summoned entity.

Suddenly, multicoloured liquid poured out from inside the UFO and filled that glass bulb until the entire thing appeared multicoloured.

Another light lit up, the one above the bulb directly clockwise after the last, this time the light was red, and the bulb was pointing towards nothing. No liquid fell into the bulb.

“Don’t move, or you’ll mess it up.”

Aiden stood still, watching the thing as another light lit up red, then came the bulb pointed in his general direction.

It lit up green.

“Moult,” Blend S said, and liquid was pumped into the glass bulb, milky white, and strangely, a bit scaly.

The summon remained stationary, not moving as the lights passed one by one. The remaining glass bulbs all lit up red, no one being in their direction.

Once all eight bulbs were finished, six empty and only two filled, the disk began to spin, the colours of the two filled bulbs blurred together as the thing spun, a whiring sound filled the room, not unlike a blender.

Then there was a ding as it slowed to a stop. The two filled bulbs were now empty.

Sarah placed her hand underneath the octopus, where a hatch opened and a scaly white candy with rainbow highlights dropped into her palm.

Aiden took a step back.

He almost wanted to swear at the cold sweat that just went down his nape.

She didn’t make abilities, she copied them.

And that octopus thing had eight bulbs.

“Are those exact copies?” Aiden asked, the curiosity opening his mouth before sense could shut it.

“Why should I disclose such a thing?” she mildly asked.

At this point, Aiden remembered she still held six candies on her person that he was aware of.

He mused over the question for a moment, before deciding with half truth.

“If it is an exact copy, then you won’t want to use my ability without knowing what it is.”

“Hoh? And what might your ability be?”

She couldn’t see his mouth underneath the scarf, but he was smirking when he replied, “Why should I disclose such a thing?”

Sarah rolled the white scaled candy between her fingers, “I can tell it is one with a decently high difficulty level if you gave such a warning.”

“Though such a business should begin first and foremost with trust,” she continued. “You can find this information rather easily, especially if you met some of your peers. My ability does not copy others, it takes impressions, themes and general ideas. It recognised your ability as having the general theme of moult, so that is what it generated. Whatever it is can be completely different from what your ability really is, or it can be exactly the same. So long as it follows the generic theme of moulting.”

“Are there different themes for each ability,” he asked.

“Of course, some people even have the same themes, in which case they can be counted twice.”

“And your ability can take up to eight?”

She shrugged, “Of course it can. They mix into a single ability that is more complex the more themes that were taken. Though the ability’s strength is not determined by number of impressions.”

‘Something else then?’

“What determines strength?” he asked, before pausing, “Should you really be telling me this? You are wasting a potential Hand Reveal against me.”

She blinked, then chuckled, “So one of the M.I.A kids.”

Aiden froze, his expression becoming completely neutral, despite already being hidden.

“Don’t worry, my ability isn’t worth anything in a direct fight, and you aren’t the first from that school to take a jaunt here.”

She mimed zipping her lips, “Your secrets are safe with this old lady.”

He was wary, more so than he was before.

“I think I’ll go before I reveal something else,” he said, turning his back to the woman as he headed for the door.

“A fair choice.”

As Aiden stepped out of the store, he noticed a small shadow dart away from under his feets, eye following it, he mentally cursed as he made his way back outside.

Where Ranpo slid off the concrete and onto his body.

“You followed me.”

Ranpo shrugged, “Only into the store, I couldn’t get into the back without your notice.”

“Are you fucking stupid?” Aiden asked, “We didn’t know who we were dealing with, what they were capable of and-”

He stopped, and very deliberately sucked in a deep breath and exhaled.

Rubbing his head, Aiden asked, “How much did you hear?”

“Enough.”

“Then we’ll talk about this later,” he said, flipping open his phone, seeing the new text message that just popped up.

Sat on a park bench, Aiden inputted the details that were texted to his phone, logging into the website Sarah had linked him.

The website listed various commission requests and their details, the location, what they needed done, and how much they were willing to pay.

Finding one he found relatively simple, he clicked on it, requesting to be the one completing it.

After a few seconds, his request was approved.

The location was rather close by.

Only a few bus stops out of the city, into the suburban areas. From the disrepair and overgrown lawns, he knew most of these homes were unnoccupied.

Except for one.

Looking almost blindingly obviously, it had piles and piles of delivery boxes marked with the logos of various corporations littered across its porch and driveway.

Aiden checked the details on his phone again.

“Ranpo, this time make sure you stay back.”

The crow nodded, he did not argue back, for he was smelling the same thing he was.

The smell of rotting flesh.

Aiden took a step onto the asphalt road, walking towards the house whose front was covered in delivery boxes.

He took a step onto the pavement, onto the walkway, adjusting his mask as he neared.

Then he took a step onto the grass.

One of the delivery boxes ripped itself open, a long fleshy tendril barbed with teeth lashing out towards him!

But the appendage stopped, less than a metre away from Aiden.

“Delivery mimics,” he muttered.

Creatures that disguised themselves as delivery packages, spreading throughout society through the delivery system and once delivered began preying on anything that got too close.

As he walked forward, more boxes lashed open, meaty pink tendrils lashing blindly towards the source of movement.

All stopped before they could reach Aiden.

His Umbrella in his left hand, Aiden’s false right rose up as a serpent, biting into the still tendrils that surrounded him.

Injecting venom.

It took a solid hour before the last of the delivery mimics died.

At the end of it, he knocked on the door of the house, the peephole flashing briefly before the tired man behind it opened the door, eyes widening and tearing in elation as he saw the things trapping him inside had all died.

Aiden was thanked profusely, asked to ignore the meth lab underneath the house and given two hundred dollars in bills.

For one hour of work.

“Fucking hell,” Aiden muttered as he examined the corpse in front of him. “I can see why this is so profitable.”

With his Umbrella, he nudged aside the dissected flap of the delivery mimic. “Redundant organs, a distributed cardiovascular system, multiple brains…”

“It would be extremely difficult to kill one of these normally is what you are saying?” Ranpo asked.

He nodded. “Australia went to war with emus once, and they found that those buggers were tough as hell to bring down. Unlike humans, their vital organs only occupy a small portion of their body, meaning most could tank up to ten bullets without going down.”

Aiden wiped some blood off his Umbrella, “And these mimics are that but on steroids. Even if they are stationary targets, I’m not actually sure if firing an entire round into them would actually kill them. You need to spread the damage through the entire body, otherwise the redundancies will kick in. The appendages also resemble octopi, so they might independantly act after the main body is dead. You can pick them off sure, but it would take a lot of bullets. Not to mention the colateral damage.”

To his knowledge a few non-ability users also used Sarah’s service, about equal to the number of metahumans, fulfilling commissions themselves with normal tools, paying just a service fee rather than with their abilities.

“With the amount you just fought…” Ranpo murmured, mentally doing arithmetic, “It would’ve been extremely costly in munitions and weapons maintainence. That explains why someone didn’t just give it a go with their rifle, even if they can, the profit margin would be minimal.”

“But we sidestepped all that,” he muttered, glancing at his arm where Oros slept. “With my ability, the only real cost was showing up. I didn’t have to spend time or money buying bullets, training with weapons or regularly maintaining them.”

And it wasn’t even that dangerous because of how good of a defensive ability his Umbrella was.

“This feels weird,” he muttered as he shoved the corpse back into the garbage bag.

That meth maker was undoubtedly one of the more desperate clients on the list, but he still made two-hundred dollars in an hour.

Sure, you could add in the travel to and from, along with the bus costs, but at best that just lowered the value to a hundred dollars an hour.

That amount of money that quickly just felt weird.

“Jesus christ, is this what people feel when they quit their desk job and open an OnlyFans?” he asked.

Suddenly realising that the job they trained for their entire life paid less than intelligently utilising an intrinsic quality of themselves?

That woman who acted as a dog was onto something.

“Is this what they mean by work smarter not harder?” he asked, feeling an epiphany come through.

“What is an Only Fans?” Ranpo asked, poking the corpse meat.

“Don’t ask, and don’t eat that, it has cobra venom in it.”

“I know,” Ranpo sighed, sounding genuinely disappointed. “It would’ve been interesting to sample mimic though.”

Killing those mimics would’ve needed a specialised weapon, either gas or a flamethrower, and those were costly, especially if you wanted to manage damage control.

Aiden checked that website again.

The other jobs didn’t seem as easy as the mimic one, or at least, not as well suited for him. Prices also varied greatly, though the average seemed to be in the range of eighty dollars or so for similar extermination requests. That meth maker was also clearly desperate to be freed from his home, so he might’ve risen the price a few times to entice more people to help.

“I can do this,” Aiden muttered.

The commissions weren’t consistent income, that was their limitation. If he did five per week then he would clean out all jobs in the city in less than a month. After that it was moving farther and farther away into the suburbs, where the time spent travelling would dint the efficiency of the method somewhat, along with waiting for new commissions to come up, which was still unreliable in his eyes.

It was a short term fix, an extremely good short term fix, but a short term fix nonetheless.

“I will need to route the cash through something to make it legit, that’s another cost,” Aiden muttered. “But doing this buys me at least another month, maybe two if I’m lucky with new commissions.”

Aiden’s eyes glimmered, “Yes, I can see it.”

“This is becoming doable.”