“So, you don’t know what a gun is, right?” I panted and straightened my back. It was bad enough having to bury these things in the first place. Now trying to dig them up? Ugh.

  “A gun?” Niku stood over me looking down at the shallow hole I had dug. She had tried to help, had wanted to. I told her it wasn’t necessary. Betsy and I would be able to do the task at hand easily enough.

  I grunted and went back to digging a little more. I had to be getting close to the crate I buried here. Though I did have Betsy helping me when I originally buried them, she absolutely refused to help me unbury them. We had argued about it a little when we first got to the spot, but it was useless. Betsy was as stubborn as a.. Well, as stubborn as an ox.

  Before I started digging, I had removed my outer robe, and even on the cool autumn day, I was sweating as I dug. Wasn’t being a cultivator supposed to make shit like this easy? Still, I was sweaty and my back was hurting. I stared up at the sun for a second and wiped my brow while I stretched my back out a little.

  “Yeah, you know fireworks?” I looked up at her after I heard my shovel hit hardwood, and the thunk rang out in the air. They had to have fireworks here, right? Like it’s Japan with a lil bit of China.

  “Yes, the fire flowers,” Niku nodded her head. The woman was still staring at me, half curious and half like I was a crazed idiot.

  I glowered over at Betsy. “Will you at least help me pull the crates out?”

  Betsy glared back at me and shook her massive head. The ox even turned up her snout and walked away. I growled at her back and climbed out of my shallow hole.

  “Yeah, so a gun is kinda like that? Sort of? It uses black powder and shoots a projectile. In this case, a small metal ball. It shoots at incredible speeds and can rip through flesh and into a body,” I was explaining while I lay on my stomach over the hole and reached down to open the crate and pull out one of the long wooden and metal guns.

  Niku stared at it and raised her eyebrows. It obviously was nothing like the young alchemist had ever seen before. Honestly, I wasn’t sure what I was expecting her reaction to be, but for some reason it wasn’t her immediately walking over and taking it from me. She took the wooden-framed rifle and looked over the dull gray metal and fully inspected the weapon.

  I shifted around so I was sitting with my feet on top of the crate I unburied and watched her. The musket looked exactly like something from a Revolutionary War era movie, and I could fully see Mel Gibson running around in the woods with it. I glared over at Betsy for a second, who was ignoring us, and when I looked back at Niku, she was inspecting the flintlock and trigger. The girl even turned the gun around to look down the dark barrel with one of her eyes.

  “Careful now,” I said and held out a hand. It was unloaded so she’d be fine, or well, I’m pretty sure it was?

  Niku waved away my concern and looked over at me. “So, you put a metal ball and black powder down the tube and then fire?”

  I stared at her and grinned. “Yeah, that’s about the sum of it.”

  Hell, alright. Sitting there watching her dressed like she held that sort of gun, all I could think of was my reenactment days. Back when I thought I was a history nerd, I signed up to do reenactments while I was on the road if I was able to swing it. Kept all the clothing in a suitcase and, well, let’s not dwell on how the musket was carried around. Anyway, it turned out while I thought I was a history nerd. I was a normie compared to the people who did that stuff. Still, it was fun, and I needed a hobby to get me out of the truck sometimes, so that was where I landed for a little while.

  “Can I try?” She looked at me and was absolutely glowing with excitement.

  “Uh… Yeah, I guess?” I thought about it and couldn’t really think of a good reason she shouldn’t. I knew some basics, so I shrugged and then wiggled around back on my stomach to get back into the crate. In addition to the guns, the crates also had boxes of ammo and gunpowder.

  I had buried the crates next to a small farm behind a hill off the Royal Road. So there was plenty of room to do some test shots without harm. It only took me a few minutes before I had Niku set up pointing towards a scarecrow. We had gone through packing a ball with powder, and I showed her where the plunger was, and all of that. Currently, I was standing behind her, helping her line up a shot towards the scarecrow’s middle.

  “So you want to line up your shot through this and then the point on the end,” I explained.

  She nodded her head and closed one of her eyes as she lined up her shot. “You know, we use this stuff for more than just fireworks. The black powder. There are parts of it we use for alchemy and also medicine.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, the place I picked this stuff up at was a warehouse that looked like it was used for pharmacy stuff.”

  “Yeah, not a bad cover since they’d have all the ingredients needed, anyway.”

  “Alright then, whenever you’re ready, go ahe-”

  KA-THOOM

  She didn’t even wait until I was finished giving her the go-ahead before she cracked the shot. The loud, deep, echoing blast of the musket rang through the air. Thanks to my cultivator senses, I could watch the ball zoom through the air and rip into the scarecrow’s middle. The clothing and straw exploded out on impact, and I whistled through my teeth. “Nice shot.”

  Birds cawed and scattered, and I heard some dogs barking off towards the farmer’s house. A horse neighed, and someone cursed as they were traveling down the road. The man cursed and then rode away at speed, yelling something about damn kids. Betsy even gave a loud angry bellow at the crack through the air.

  I remember shooting those things would rock my arm, and Niku barely moved. While we got ready to fire, I told her to make sure to have a firm grip and warned her about the recoil. The cultivating alchemist handled it like a professional. She and I both coughed a little from the smoke, but after everything registered, she turned towards me.

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  “And you don’t need to be a cultivator to fire this?” she asked me with a raised brow.

  I shook my head. “Negative. You could give this to any farmer or whoever, and it could be lethal.”

  “And you could make the little balls with different things or inscribe runes…” Niku trailed off, and I just sighed and nodded along.

  “Yeah, it’s... not great.” I waved away the last of the smoke.

  “Where did these come from?” She looked up at me with a furrowed brow and bit her lower lip. She went from excited to deadly worried in the span of a musket shot.

  I shrugged and sighed. “I’m not sure. We picked them up in Lijiang under the premise that I was taking medical aid to Toyo. The cultivators I picked them up from seemed kinda shifty, but what do I know? People always seem shifty in my line of work. I just kind of went with it, yanno? I didn’t realize what was in the crates until me and Hisai were moving them to my new wagon and dropped one of them. The crate broke open, and these came spilling out.”

  Niku nodded along. “This isn’t good. We need to figure these out, figure out what’s going on.”

  Before I could answer, there was an angry old man shouting from the house. The dogs hadn’t stopped barking after she fired, and now the owner of the farm was taking issue.

  “By the kami! If there’s anyone out there stealin’ from my fields, the dogs will be eating good tonight!”

  The voice came and rang out over the fields of grain. I stared at Niku, and she gave an honest to heaven giggle. I almost melted when I looked at her with a smirk.

  “What are you laughing at? Come on, we've gotta get out of here.”

  She nodded, and we just turned around, getting ready to go back to where I had unburied the guns when three white shiba looking dogs revealed themselves. They were growling and had their ears lowered, and I could see their hair standing on end. These dogs were not the cute, silly shibas that were getting stuck in fences and pretended like nothing was wrong.

  “Oops,” I said and stared at the three animals and raised my hands. I tried to back up, but I had only gone a step before the dogs advanced and growled louder and barked at me.

  It was an uncertain moment later before I realized the farmer was there now too. His eyes went wide, and he looked us over. “Oh, uh, cultivators?”

  The man seemed healthy enough and had some gray in his long jet black hair, which he wore in a topknot that was all too common. He seemed more of a well-to-do farmer because he didn’t wear the simple cloak like robe Nakayasu wore but more like what you expected Nakayasu to wear considering the man’s wealth.

  “Yes, sorry about disturbing you and your dogs,” I offered with a still nervous smile.

  The dogs barked again, and he yelled down to them to shut up. This seemed to cow the dogs, who relaxed at his order to shut up. I could still feel them eyeing me like a five-course meal. Even though, I’ll have you know, I had started to shed some of my excess weight by this point.

  “We were just testing something. I’m an alchemist from the Northwest Showa region. We came to investigate Toyo,” Niku offered and held out the musket.

  The farmer looked it over dubiously and then looked at his scarecrow. “I don’t know what that is, ah hells! What’d you guys do to my scarecrow? That thing, you’re lucky it didn’t shift again.”

  I stared at him and then raised an eyebrow. “Shift?”

  The man looked back at me with his eyes wide and eyebrows in his hair. “Yes. Minoru. He was here. He came here and blessed my farm. We were practically peasants just last week. The skeleton god himself came and blessed our farms. It’s been a windfall ever since.” He almost laughed when he said the last and his eyes welled with tears.

  I just kept staring at him.

  “Minoru? Sir, are you…?” Niku had started to ask, but the farmer glared at her, stopping her line of thought.

  “Of course I’m sure. Lord, I was so scared. My idiot ass thought it was a demon coming to ruin me and mine. My wife, though, she knew and told me, and she was right! Though I guess wives usually are,” he said with a small chuckle and rubbed at his eyes.

  I chuckled along with the man and nodded just because, well, it seemed like the thing to do. What the hell did I know about having a wife? Though I did look over at Niku for a second before I looked back at the man. I was thankful she didn’t notice.

  “But, Minoru, he was here?” I asked and wanted to press for any details about his encounter.

  The man nodded and looked at me solemnly. “Yes. One minute I was fighting with my plow ox, damn stubborn beasts.”

  “Yeah, I know how that goes,” I thought and glared back to where Betsy was waiting for us.

  “Huh? Yeah, anyway. I was fighting with my ox, and the scarecrow was just hanging there on the pole, you know? Next thing I know, he’s climbing down and turning into a skeleton.”

  “Sir, can you tell us what he did?” I asked and held out a hand towards him. Niku looked at me curiously, and I wondered if I told her about my dream that I’m almost sure wasn’t actually a dream.

  He pointed to a patch of dirt away from the field. “He went over and crouched down, picked up some dirt and sniffed it. Then he just let it blow away in the wind.”

  I looked over where the man pointed in thought.

  “My wife is off in the city talking to some masons to get a statue made or something. We have to honor him. Him and Aiko. He said he had to ask her for help, but by the kami they did,” he said and laughed again.

  I looked over at Niku with a raised brow, and she just shook her head. “I’ll tell you later.”

  I nodded and then walked over to the patch of dirt the man pointed at. You could still tell where a hand reached down into the dirt. A bony, thin hand. I just stared at it and shrugged before I leaned down.

  “No, sir. Honored cultivator!” The man stepped towards me with his hand outstretched.

  I was about to grab some dirt myself and do what Minoru did to see if I could figure out what the god was doing, but I stopped and looked at him.

  “Please don’t disturb that spot. There’s no harm in what you did to the scarecrow, and I hold no ill will towards you. It’s just a scarecrow, but please. As honored as you are as a cultivator…” the man gave me a look. I could almost hear him ‘do I really need to explain?’

  “Oh!” I nodded and stood quickly before I stepped away and held my hands out towards the small pile. “Oh, yes. Of course, I’m sorry.”

  The farmer gave a nervous laugh and waved it away. “No, no, it’s fine. Thank you.” He bowed to me.

  Niku took a step towards him and reached into a pocket. I watched her hand him a coin. “Sorry for the damage to the scarecrow, Senior. The least we can do is pay for the material to patch it back up.”

  The farmer laughed and shook his head. “Are you kidding me? No, no. That’s not needed. You were here testing whatever that is, right?” He pointed towards the musket.

  Niku and I both nodded.

  “Then in the last month I’ve had a kami visit me, two cultivators and an alchemist test something on my lands. It’s fine. I’m honored.” He turned and gave her a soft bow now as well.

  Niku didn’t look happy about not being able to pay the man,you, but she relented and put the coin away. “Very well. Thank you, senior, for telling us what happened.”

  “Of course, of course.”

  She gave him a soft bow, and then we said our goodbyes and then walked away from his farm back towards my wagon and Betsy.

  “So, do you think we can take two back? I kind of want to take one of them apart,” Niku asked me, and Betsy gave a loud, annoyed grunt.

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