“I’ve never been on a quest before!” Jim-nang kept telling Rali as he bustled around his massive intergalactic cargo transport. “No one’s ever even invited me!”

  After the first week of travel, Rali had stopped trying to explain to the rich young master that quests didn’t always mean a perilous journey in pursuit of an epic reward. Sometimes quests were internal, a search for what could only be found within. Uncovering even the smallest gleam of wisdom where before there had been only darkness was a treasure beyond price. In that way, people undertook unfathomably heroic quests every day.

  The fact that this particular quest was the kind with the palpable journey and reward didn’t help the lesson sink in.

  Their destination, Xing Sishen, didn’t appear on any maps of the known universe. Uchiko kept them on course by conferring frequently with Jim-nang’s crew. The crew thought it was highly strange that the angel couldn’t navigate using the transport’s flight programs, but the rich young merchant insisted they follow her instructions to the letter. Periodically, they rolled opened the manual emergency landing screens to allow Uchiko to assess the galaxies and voids around them by eye.

  Often while this was going on, Sushi would press her round face against the tensile glass windows and dart along, following comets, asteroids, and the other items traversing space as if she wanted to pounce on them.

  “Does sparkle rocks crunch, Rali?” Sushi asked when they passed a distant showerfall of burning meteors.

  “I don’t know. I’ve only encountered the ones that land on planetary surfaces. Most of them are metal.”

  The little fish smeared her face along the window, following the glittering, sparking show with her entire body.

  “Sushi eats sparkle rocks,” she said.

  “Most of those sparkle rocks are bigger up close,” Rali warned her.

  “Shiny round is bigger, and Sushi eats shiny round.”

  Shiny round, Rali had learned, was Sushi’s name for the ancient bronze mirror she had eaten to gain her Lost Mirror Spirit. In the memory she had shown him, Warcry, and Hake in Heartchamber 2, the mirror had been much larger than Sushi, but she had somehow swallowed it whole. After alarmingly bulging out her sides and belly, the mirror had simply disappeared, and Sushi had gone on with her strange little life.

  Rali assessed her. “Would Sushi be harmed if she went out into space to get to these sparkle rocks?”

  “Harmed?” In the window’s smeared reflection, he saw determination settled into her round face. “Sushi not is afraid of harmed. Sushi crunches sparkle rocks.”

  Unfortunately, a crew member had come upon their discussion, and immediately taken it to the captain, who loudly and angrily forbade Rali and Sushi—and Uchiko while they were at it—from making any attempts to exit the transport in zero-atmosphere environments.

  At the dressing down, Sushi’s eyes narrowed.

  “Sushi sneaks,” she whispered. Then in a glimmer of purple and white scales, she disappeared.

  After a brief uproar, in which the captain and crew threatened Jim-nang with docking immediately at the closest planet and kicking out their troublesome passengers, Rali found the little fish pouting at a rear window.

  “Rali said Sushi goes to Grady,” she said forlornly. “When does Sushi see Grady?”

  “What Rali actually said was that Sushi and Rali had to get a couple items to help Hake first,” he reminded her. “Once we have those, we can save him. So we have to get those items we talked about, then we’ll go to him.”

  Sushi huffed, her exhale blurring the glass.

  Rali leaned against the sill beside her.

  “These crewmen are trying to help us so we can help Hake, Sushi. But they’re scared you’re going to kill us all if you go outside to eat the sparkle rocks. Now they’re refusing to help until you promise not to try to get out of the transport.”

  The little fish scrunched down grumpily, mismatched blue and brown eyes glaring out into space. Rali got the feeling that if her pectoral fins were long enough, she would have crossed them.

  “Sushi not eats sparkle rocks yet,” she muttered.

  He bowed to her. “Thank you, honored Lost Mirror cultivator.”

  ***

  “Have you considered that enlightenment is bugs?”

  Rali grinned without opening his eyes. “I have considered that, great sage. I have also considered that a certain Lost Mirror Spirit might be influencing my meditations by claiming that she knows hakkeyoi when she sees it.”

  Sushi giggled at the edges of Rali’s consciousness, but the sage remained.

  “What do you think bugs represent for that Lost Mirror Spirit?”

  “Hunting instincts,” Rali replied, “having fun prowling and pouncing, enjoying a delicious meal.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “A food source. Survival, at the most basic.”

  “But nothing else,” the sage pressed.

  He must be on to something here. Sages rarely mined so deeply without a reason. Rali took a deep breath and forced himself to reconsider bugs as enlightenment from Sushi’s perspective.

  “They’re fun to catch and to crunch.” Rali remembered the little fish saying as much. “Playing with your food. Balancing fun and survival.” What was it Sushi always said when she ate one? Sushi is useful? “Feeling a sense of accomplishment and worth.”

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  “A fish’s sense,” the sage specified. “But what bugs does a Rali hunt? What bugs does he crunch?”

  Though Rali knew for certain this time that he sat alone in his quarters meditating, the imaginary sage’s question blindsided him.

  Rali thought for a long time before beginning his answer.

  “Once I hunted supremacy, racing after my desire to be unequaled in my kishotenketsu. But that path led only to dissatisfaction and isolation from everyone around me. So I left it behind and hunted friendship and connection instead. And even if it turns out that this life is an illusion, that path filled my Spirit sea and satisfied my soul. But now…” His voice broke, but he forced himself to forge ahead. “…now I don’t know what a Rali hunts. Maybe I never truly gave up the desire for supremacy. Maybe I only stopped measuring my advancement so I could pretend I left that path behind and feel superior to everyone who hadn’t done the same. Maybe that’s why it’s been so hard to accept that I can’t cultivate anymore.”

  Burning wetness filled Rali’s closed eyes and leaked out onto his cheeks.

  “I can’t cultivate anymore,” he repeated. “I can never use Warm Heart Spirit again.”

  He’d never said that out loud before. Not even in meditation.

  “Ah,” the sage breathed. “Then it’s a good thing enlightenment is bugs, not Spirit, eh?”

  Rali let out a broken laugh. Contorting his face into the smile sent more tears rolling from beneath his closed eyelids. He sniffed hard and scrubbed them away.

  “Tell me now, my son,” the sage said gently, “what do you seek?”

  A cool marble hand shook Rali’s shoulder roughly, startling him from his meditation.

  “We are approaching Xing Sishen,” Uchiko said, her voice unnaturally sharp in the midst of his mental wanderings. “Get up. I’ve sent for the shuttle to the surface.”

  Breathing into where his Spirit sea had once been, Rali sped up his reemergence, slipping through layers and layers to return to reality, if that was what it was. He felt as if he’d just left off battling some great beast for the future of his soul.

  Maybe that heralded difficulties on the next leg of their journey. Or maybe it was just the nature of being ripped out of your inner world before you were ready.

  He picked up his walking stick and joined Uchiko, Sushi, and Jim-nang in the transport bay.

  A few members of the docking crew crowded around the view port, staring suspiciously out at the Reaper’s homeworld.

  “Fairy musta made a mistake in her navigations,” one of the crew members whispered. “There ain’t nothing there.”

  Rali joined the crew members, peering between heads. At first, he thought he was looking at a freak cloud of comets pinging around some sort of gravitational anomaly. But Rali could sense an enormous mass floating where there appeared to be nothing but streaking lights.

  Wishing he had his Spirit to reach out with, he studied the flashes of brilliant white. And suddenly he realized they weren’t comets at all.

  “They’re Reapers,” he whispered. “Xing Sishen is a void planet.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Uchiko snapped. “It’s a series of offices built on a universal matrix.”

  “Just imagine it!” Jim-nang rocked on his toes, radiating excitement as he looked out at the nothingness. “An entirely untapped market. I’ll need directions to the business district, Fairy Uchiko. I’d like to start making contacts the moment we touch down.”

  The arrival of Xing Sishen’s shuttle temporarily dampened Jim-nang’s enthusiasm. Rali had to admit, the craft was intimidating. Its hull was so black that it looked as if Rali could reach out and put his hand through it into an infinite void. The door didn’t so much open as a portion of the hull melted into a set of steps and revealed an interior of gleaming white.

  A white-haired, marble-skinned man of impossible agelessness stood at the top of the stairs. Another Reaper.

  Silently, he beckoned.

  Uchiko took the lead, marching up the steps and into the shuttle without hesitation. Her businesslike approach shook Rali and Jim-nang from their awed daze, and they followed her into the shuttle. Sushi had disappeared at some point, but Rali felt her swimming along by his shoulder.

  The hull melted back into place behind them.

  “Reaper Eleven of the Second Flight,” Uchiko said to their escort. Her usually harsh tones sounded muted, as if they had been captured and compressed by the glaringly white environment inside the shuttle.

  Slowly, over the course of what felt like centuries, the silent Reaper nodded.

  At first glance, Rali had thought Uchiko and their escort could be sister and brother, but further inspection revealed that though they shared hair, skin, and eye coloring, they hadn’t come from the same original race.

  When the silent Reaper turned to take the shuttle’s controls, he didn’t use his feet to turn his body around like Rali would have. Instead, he rotated his torso smoothly one hundred and eighty degrees at the waist. His arm and leg joints shifted backward, so that the limbs faced the new forward.

  Landing on Xing Sishen was a surreal experience. They stepped out of the shuttle onto nothing.

  Rali felt a solid ground textured with a roughness akin to concrete, but all he saw below and all around were stars. Behind them, the shuttle’s black was barely a shadow in the light-spotted void. His head spun, and his stomach protested.

  A scaly little body slumped onto his shoulder.

  “Rali, where is up?” Sushi’s pectoral fins gripped his shirt and hair as if she was holding on for dear life. “Sushi can’t find up.”

  “I’m having some trouble with that myself,” he admitted. “Would you like to ride in my pocket?”

  The little fish nodded with her whole body. Rali scooped her into his pocket.

  Unaffected by the infinite directionlessness, Uchiko strode off at a brisk pace.

  Jim-nang stumbled hurriedly after her. “Fairy Uchiko! Fairy Uchiko, the business district?”

  She stopped and gave him a long list of instructions on how to find it. They sounded insanely complicated to Rali, but Jim-nang cheerfully headed off in the direction she pointed.

  Rali watched the young master go. “There’s no way to accidentally fall off this planet—I mean, matrix—is there, Uchiko?”

  “Of course not. It has the requisite gravitational pull.”

  Her robes swirled as she spun on her heel and started walking again.

  Walking along streets of nothing.

  For a moment, Rali considered calling out to Jim-nang and warning him to be careful. He decided against it. The young master was so obviously overjoyed that, even without his Warm Heart Spirit, Rali could feel the contentment burning within him. Maybe here and now, in this disorienting place, Jim-nang would finally find what he needed to break through his plateau and advance to Ten.

  Fighting the dizziness, Rali went to follow Uchiko. He slammed into a solid wall of nothing.

  Wincing, he felt along a smooth, invisible surface like glass or polished stone until he found empty air. He’d only been a foot from the corner of whatever this was.

  This time, Rali followed in a line directly behind Uchiko.

  “Did you say Xing Sishen was a bunch of office buildings built onto this matrix?”

  She glanced over her shoulder at him without slowing down.

  “Yes. It’s the heart of our organization,” she said. “There are tens of thousands of Reapers across hundreds of thousands of universes. That requires intense order and regulation. If we all acted independently of one another, it would be chaos.”

  As they walked, brilliantly glowing Reapers shot past overhead. Others suddenly blazed into being out of nowhere. Hundreds of races in the same monochrome color scheme as Uchiko.

  Pale Reapers, she had called them. A few familiar body types passed along the walkways or darted overhead, but there were many more Rali couldn’t identify. Peoples who could have been extinct for centuries.

  “How many Reapers are there in total?” he asked Uchiko.

  “We’re nearing a hundred thousand.”

  “That’s all?”

  “I told you, Death is an uncommon Spirit, and even less common are the mortals who advance to immortality. Our last Reaper was inducted one thousand nine hundred and twenty-six years ago.”

  Wind rustled Rali’s hair and clothes as a Reaper flew past.

  “Where are all the Dark Reapers?” he asked.

  Her strides faltered. “There weren’t many survivors of the first Reaper War. Most of those chose to retire. Back then, we had twice the manpower we have now. We’re slightly understaffed.” She picked up the pace again. “But I’m sure it’s only temporary.”

  “In that light, it’s easy to see how a mistake could occur,” Rali said. “An overworked Reaper might not have realized until it was too late that she had reaped the wrong guy.”

  Uchiko’s shoulders stiffened. “Reapers do not make mistakes.”

  Then she took a sharp left and disappeared.

  my Patreon is way ahead. I have no idea the exact chapter count, I just know it's a lot. We're in the middle of Book 4's final fight over there.

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