Thankfully, Kaguya took Yuan’s rejection in stride.

  “It is a shame that you would deny us,” she said. “I assure you that we are not like most sects and their rigid traditions. We Moonlighters are more of a collective of scholars dedicated to the understanding of ourselves.”

  “All sects say that,” Yuan replied with skepticism. He had heard too many empty promises to buy this one. “Stoneskin, Flesh Mansion, Metallists… beneath the veneer, you all serve the same shit."

  “While hierarchies are inherent to any kind of organization, ours is loose,” Kaguya replied, though Yuan didn’t believe her. “Nonetheless, my invitation does not come with a time limit. Venture forth and walk your own path, if that is your wish. Should you change your mind one night, you only need to pray for the Blackmoon’s mercy and I shall answer in its stead.”

  Yuan shrugged. As far as recruitment speeches went, he had heard better. “I don’t think we’ll meet again.”

  The moon cultivator gave him a wry smile. “I am not so certain, Yuan Guang.”

  He bristled. “How do you know my name?”

  “The moonlight unveils everything,” she replied. “Our Lord is a Wayfinder and a kinder guide than the Gun. We would be happy to free you from the Gunsoul curse and give you your half-life back.”

  “This core is the seat of my soul,” Yuan replied with a snort. “I’ll die without it.”

  “You would,” Kaguya conceded. “But there are other forces that can fill that void. So long as you do not cross the Fourth Coil and dedicate yourself to a Path, the Gun will not be your only option.”

  Yuan squinted at her with suspicion. “What do you know of Gunsouls?”

  “Enough to pity your kind.” Kaguya disappeared behind her umbrella. “Ponder this when you find yourself at the barrel’s end.”

  She vanished in a blink of an eye, leaving Yuan alone in the pale moonlight.

  He was tempted to brush off Kaguya’s words as the empty boasts of a cultivator seeking to impress a potential recruit, but she also called being a Gunsoul a curse, just like Arc before her. The Moonlight Sect focused on gathering secrets, so they might know more about the Gun than he thought.

  Yuan shook his head and sat back into a lotus position. He had no intention of joining a Sect or straying from the Path of the Gun so far. He was fine bearing a curse’s burden if it meant gaining the power to stand on his own two legs, independent from Sects and warlords alike.

  Arc ordered that he spend the night cycling while raising a Barrier to stop the moonburns, and while the latter exercise was apparently impossible, he was determined to complete the former task.

  Yuan noticed an improvement the moment he closed his eyes and absorbed the local qi into himself. He breathed in the cold moonlight and invited the starlight into himself. The once-disturbing experience had become soothing, almost enjoyable. The lunar energies moved through his metal veins faster than ever before, and the night no longer felt hostile to him.

  Orient was right, purifying himself of emotional debris had eased his qi’s circulation. Yuan could feel it move seamlessly inside him, without obstruction or speed bumps. His burns and wounds didn’t impair him.

  Taking a step towards enlightenment had given Yuan a greater sense of self-awareness. By gaining a glimpse of his soul and understanding its own shape, the divide between his sense of individuality and the rest of the universe had become starker. Seeing the outline of a piece let him see how it differed from the whole.

  The Dao was everything and everywhere at once, but Yuan was more than a cog in a machine. He knew where he stopped and the cosmos began. The lunar qi only helped to illustrate that frontier by shining on him.

  Arc told him that she created bullets by using two overlapping Barriers: one to draw in the qi required to forge them, and another to exclude everything else. Yuan realized that he had an easier time with the latter after surviving the moonburns. Moreover, his soul was encased in a bullet-core. He understood its composition on an instinctual level, the same way a man knew his own hands.

  Can I do it? Yuan wondered before experimenting with Barriers. He focused on the qi around him, trying to understand how everything fit together. Metal overcomes wood, like fire triumphs over metal.

  Yuan was taught that the five elements were metaphorical; they represented a state of qi energy rather than actual fire or water. Nonetheless, techniques like Elemental Infusion taught him that this metaphor could easily become reality.

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  The more things a Barrier excluded, the smaller its radius and the more difficult it became to maintain. Yuan created one that repelled everything except metal-aligned qi. He sensed the world change at his command as the building blocks of reality rearranged themselves. It took a few tries, but the result of his labor soon materialized within the palm of his hand: a bullet, raw and pure.

  Strange. Why would Arc tell him to use two overlapping Barriers when one that excluded everything except metal qi could do the job? Yuan studied his creation and quickly noticed the issue.

  A bullet was easy enough to build, since it was nothing more than a piece of metal. A functional cartridge was a different matter altogether. He needed a casing to hold the gunpowder required to propel it, and a primer to help ignite it. In its current state, his creation was no more than a lump of lead unfit for a gun.

  Yuan would have to segment his Barrier to materialize its individual components. The casing and bullet would be easy to make, since they were both made of metal qi he could easily produce himself; the gunpowder and primer would prove more difficult to obtain.

  Charcoal, sulfur, saltpeter, Yuan thought as he recalled the primary ingredients for basic gunpowder. He had spent his life learning about guns and researching its components after all. Fulminate primer.

  Yuan knew how to identify these elements, since they made up a part of his soul, but they differed too much from mere metal for him to summon them from nothing. He put a hand against the earth and analyzed the flow of qi.

  To a Scrap, the region around him would look like a useless expanse of white flowers blooming over a desolate wasteland; but the Fleshmancer’s creations still required water, however rare, to bloom. They’d sucked the ground of it and left only precious minerals. Yuan detected those deposits sleeping beneath the earth, from the remains of ancient trees to sulfur and lead.

  Arc didn’t choose this leyline to stabilize her broken Authority for nothing. If ammo could naturally grow from the earth, they would find these fields quite nutritious. Yuan never imagined himself as a farmer, but he supposed being a cultivator wasn’t so far off from one. Both exploited the environment to nourish themselves.

  Yuan pressed his palm against the ground and designed overlapping Barriers. His first three tries ended in abject failures, either because he failed to segment them properly or because he couldn’t isolate the elements he wanted. The fourth, though, resulted in a strange fruit: a conical piece of metal, nine millimeters in diameter and filled with explosive powder.

  A cartridge.

  “Neat,” Yuan said.

  By sunrise, Yuan finished his cycling surrounded by bullet piles.

  He’d spent hour after hour refining his cartridges, from his crude first attempts to good-quality projectiles that looked indistinguishable from handmade ammunition.

  These seem good, though I’ll need a gun to test them, Yuan thought, right before a strange idea crossed his mind. Do I?

  Yuan grabbed one of his own cartridges between his thumb and index finger, faced the horizon, and then triggered his Recoil Fist. The pulse successfully ignited the projectile and sent it flying across the land with the familiar sound of a gunshot.

  Yuan smiled in pride. Combining Item Materialization and the Recoil Fist consumed far more energy than using normal firearms, but he wouldn’t need to rely on them. Arc would be pleased.

  His moonburns had healed too, though not in the way Yuan would have expected. His charred skin had turned into a thin metallic sheen where the fake Slash had inflicted damage. A network of intertwined iron coils occupied the space where his old human heart used to be.

  Revolver warned him that he shouldn’t expect to look human if he progressed further on the Path of the Gun. Yuan understood what he meant by that now. His bullet-core was slowly changing his body into a shape that better fit his gunpowder-fueled soul.

  Yuan could live with that outcome. Facing his fears and doubts had only hardened his resolve. He would do whatever it took to crush Slash and his kind.

  Yuan grabbed a few of his cartridges at the exact moment the door to the spirit-train’s panoramic wagon opened up. Holster immediately rushed out of it to hug him tightly, with the cultists stepping down after her.

  “Holy bullet,” Bucket said in adoration, his hands forming a rifle sign as he greeted Yuan. “The moon itself recoils from the Gun Father’s chosen!”

  “Told you I would succeed,” Yuan said, mostly for Holster’s sake than that of the cultists.

  “You made us wonder, Honored Guest Yuan,” Orient said. The caretaker spirit stood on the wagon’s threshold, her eyes studying Yuan’s healed wounds. “Watching moonburns overtake you was quite the disturbing display.”

  Yuan scowled. “How did it look on your end?”

  “Frightening,” Orient replied bluntly. “You began to argue with a person who wasn’t there, then ran outside your own Barrier while burns consumed your flesh. We were steadily growing concerned for your safety, doubly so when that woman came down from the sky. Had she attacked you, I would have had no choice but to intervene.”

  “The woman?” Yuan clenched his fists. “You mean the girl with the umbrella?”

  “Indeed,” Orient confirmed. “I must say, I do not understand what artifice she used to disguise her presence and leave without leaving a trail. I suspect the use of an innate technique.”

  So the Slash hallucination took place in his own head, but Kaguya was entirely real. Yuan wasn’t sure what to make of that information. The fact the Moonlight Sect could instantly intercept anyone surviving their moonburns and escape without a trace disturbed him greatly.

  At least he fulfilled Arc’s trial and came out stronger. His improved cycling, greater insight into Barriers, and newfound mastery of Item Materialization were more than worth the pain he went through.

  Bucket proved all too eager to test Yuan’s creations too. He grabbed one of the 9mm bullets, put it in a handgun, and fired at the horizon. The gunshot echoed across the landscape, and the smoke rising from the barrel had never smelt sweeter to Yuan.

  “These can fly, sir!” Bucket said.

  “Would the Bullet Church have ammo schematics I could use?” Yuan asked.

  “Of course!” Bucket clapped his hands in his giddiness. “Nine millimeters, ten millimeters, as many millimeters as you need!”

  “In that case, I’ll solve your ammo shortage all by myself,” Yuan replied with no small amount of pride while patting Holster on the head. “Let’s fill one of the wagons to the brim with an ammo harvest.”

  He would give Fleshmarket’s Sects a taste of Bullet Hell.

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