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ARCHIVIST
Statement of He Xuan as recorded and subsequently transcribed in the immediate aftermath of the completion of his revenge, regarding the material state of a body that used to be human. Recorded on March 20th, 2017, by Jonathan Sims, the Archivist.
Statement begins.
ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
I have always had trouble seeing people as more than the sum of their parts, in the physical sense. It seems silly to deny what we are, and many would agree with me. Whether their actions would speak to their words, though, is a different matter entirely.
My earliest memory is of my sister skinning her knee for the first time. She cried, of course, but at the time I didn’t understand why. I knew that it would have hurt if it had happened to me, but I couldn’t think of a reason for the extent of her upset. It was just skin – not even bone, really – and the barest bit of blood. Sure, she had been minorly reduced, but nothing that wouldn’t grow over again. She didn’t need to be so dramatic about it.
Learning about how people worked was part of what helped me to make it in the world of the scholarly upper class. They think in such a convoluted way that it can be hard to tell that they’re thinking at all. It helped that I didn’t think of them as people. It helped also, in a sense, that this sentiment was mutual.
I think that might have been the only thing that kept me from snapping sooner. I let myself fantasise, but not act. Never act. I played pretend, because wasn’t that the game? Wasn’t that the real lesson we were learning – how to navigate an environment so deceptively hostile that one wrong breath could bring you fortune or ruin, depending entirely on the toss of a coin? Weren’t we all just flesh and bone, fancying ourselves something more?
I know now that I share my core rationale with very few, if any others. Hua Cheng may have similar ideas, but he too was once nothing more than animate meat, and so was his precious Crown Prince. They’re both a little more than that now, as am I; as were the Shi brothers. Well, not entirely. They were always a little more than the meat of the world, marked by things they’d grow into with time. Nonetheless, they could not have been physical if they had not been flesh and blood, at least on some inconsequential level. I know that when I knew Shi Qingxuan, we were certainly flesh enough for it to matter.
It began – truly began – with an axe in my trembling hands, the blood of my sister’s rapist splattered over my robes, and not a single change in the rest of the world.
I saw that he had taken my sister and her life both – saw that he faced no consequence. Saw that he still lived in the same luxury that allowed him to buy my sister off the street and drag her, screaming, into his bed. I decided to change that. If he had seen my sister as nothing more than a body to chase after and throw out to rot the second he’d had his fill, I had the right to see him the same. The only difference between them was how they faced the world. I don’t like how many similarities I share with the first man I killed.
It took a few moments for my actions to catch up to me. I have always been somewhat detached from the idea of the conscious mind, despite my scholarly ideals and the love I feel too deeply but pretend not to understand. I do not know where the axe came from, and it has been centuries since I finally put it down. It seemed to become an extension of my limbs; of myself. I felt it take over, but not in the sense that it possessed me. No – it allowed me to express a feeling I’d long since resigned myself to burying between the cavities of my heart and lungs. It allowed me a single, bloodsoaked breath. I swallowed the sensation whole.
They tell tales of me still, you know. The scholar who was denied too many times and finally went mad with the weight of his failure and the death of the last family he had. Took it out on everyone who deserved it and left a bloody trail of their bodies in his wake, but didn’t touch a soul who hadn’t wronged him and his.
Tales are such flimsy things. They tend to forget pieces; strip to the bone but hollow out the marrow.
The tales don’t mention the way the men who were supposedly my peers would not even deign to glare at my back, or the way that our tutors always managed to lose my assignments but never theirs. The way that their carriages would veer just too close for comfort and muddy my robes in the rain. The way that I would find myself always with fewer and fewer coins in my pocket as they demanded I present myself a proper scholar, all the while making it near impossible to do so.
Then again, I have always been good at the impossible.
I did not kill anyone on that day who did not deserve to be cleaved of their consciousness. I swung the axe on all of them and I would not have stopped if I had lived past that night. I would never have seen peace, but I would not have been trapped by my violence. Not a single soul in this world is truly human, and anyone who pretends otherwise is lying to themselves. Each and every one of us is a chunk ripped violently from the flesh of the rest of the universe. What does it matter, how many pieces we’re in?
All of this is, of course, the fault of Shi Wudu.
It took far less time to find out he’d been the one to kill me than I first expected. This, I am grateful for, and I will never tell Hua Cheng how much his words meant to me when he told me it wasn’t my fault. He was not gentle – it’s not in his nature to be gentle with anyone other than the man he walked out of death for, and I have never existed for love the way that he has – but he is likely the only reason I am still here. Had I not discovered the true reason for my tragedy, I would have returned to the void from whence I emerged, none the wiser to all that was stolen from me and consumed by the finality before I could even draw blood. I complain about being in his debt, but although I will never admit it aloud, I will forever be grateful to Hua Cheng for all he has done. Even if he is a bastard.
It’s over now. It’s been less than ten days, more than three, but I couldn’t tell you the exact number. I have been hungry since long before I finally died. In the absence of anything else to feed it, it ate me instead. It left me hollowed out with the emptiness and wanting, always, insatiably, for more.
I am not hungry anymore. I have eaten more than my fill on my quest for revenge.
The first of these meals that I carved out of the world was the same one that ate at me in life. The curse that caused my downfall. The curse that ate my career, and my life, and my mother, and my fiancé, and my sister, and all the hope I could bear to muster for its uncaring jaws. It whispered its sick promises in my ear, creeping into my brain on the pathway of paranoia and burrowing so deeply I had to crack open my skull to get it out.
It tasted of ash and broken promises. It tasted like my life, and I choked it down like the snake I was becoming; a precursor to the Serpent of the Black Waters whose name would come to rival the Water Master Shi Wudu. Funny, how even before I tried to take his life the same but different way he’d taken mine, we were already inseparable in forms beyond either of our control.
The second of my meals was a man who had not done nearly enough wrong to deserve it. His is the only death I sometimes wonder if I regret. He tasted of promise and iron and glory, the crunch of him in my jaw a satisfying ache as he became what he had always been, returning to the natural cycle of eternal decay from which he had so briefly escaped.
Ming Yi was something I became out of necessity. Stepping into his hollow skin was simple enough. Hollowing it out in the first place was a task that left me coated in his gore, in a mound of his hopes and bones and dreams and flesh that contained all he should have been, and all that I stole from him.
I am not better than Shi Wudu – I have never pretended to be. I am all he pretends not to be; all he hides away beneath the surface of his skin, unable to sweat it out, stuck forever with the cage of his own machinations. I am the black dog at his heels because I did not know how to stay down, and I did not ever learn. He’s more than a man now, but he was a man once before, and I know that it lingers like consumption and hangs off the threads of the tendons that trail behind. He could not outrun what he was any more than I could eat to satiate my hunger. He and I and Ming Yi and Shi Qingxuan – we were all the same. Some of us were just deeper into our transformations. Animate meat, trying to tell the world how it should shape itself, and throwing temper tantrums when the will of its forces did not bend to our whims.
Ming Yi screamed when I ate him. He was dead by that point, the truth of him laid bare, but I have come to learn that you do not need lungs to voice your pain. His had long since filled with water, bloated by my own design in an effort to ease his flaying. He tasted of salt and loss and longing, and I swallowed him down just the same. There was no one to miss him. No one to mourn. It was like he had never existed at all.
I don’t know if I ever intended to eat Shi Qingxuan. I don’t know how I wanted it to happen either, if I did intend to do so. I wanted to drink her in like the fine wine of her title; wanted to breathe the air of her laughter and choke on her tongue as I swallowed around the name I stole to kill her family. I wanted to taste his very being and lick it off his mouth; I wanted a gateway under his skin, and a mouthful of his fear, and a cold spot in his bed beside his warmth.
Shi Qingxuan was everything I should have been, and I wanted to strip that tender flesh from the bone so I could piece it back together just like how it was before it was ripped away from me. Shi Qingxuan was a physical embodiment of all that had been taken from the man I used to be, and that was more dangerous than he ever knew.
I ate Shi Qingxuan in a different way than the rest. Her, I did not have to lure into my trap. That almost made it worse. He was always so trusting, so bright; so well-liked. I do not often forget, but in this instance, I did. I was her only true friend.
Even as I ate her brother alive.
Unlike Ming Yi, I did not drown Shi Wudu before I began to rend the meat from all he had built upon my stolen life. I made him watch as I broke him down into his constituent parts – a revenge written on the pages of his muscles, sliding between the gaps in his organs, dark against the yellowing of his exposed bones. I reduced him to bite-sized chunks, and they then became little more than the only thing that could satisfy my unending gluttony. He had always been more than what he was made from, but in the end, he had always been made of meat, held together through no will of his own. I don’t care for the mind. The flesh is always far more honest than it could hope to be.
Shi Wudu became the sum of his parts, and they did not look any different from any of the bodies that came before him. It was disappointing. It was vindicating. It was everything I ever wanted.
Shi Qingxuan was there. Keeping him away from it was the only thing Shi Wudu and I ever agreed on. I hate Shi Wudu for many things, but not for his reasons. Those, I understand all too well. To have a younger sibling who relies on you entirely for their future. To cut out your own tongue to sell for scraps before even considering letting them come to harm.
If Shi Qingxuan had just stayed away, I would not have done what I did. If he had not called me by a name not my own, maybe, even in the state I was, I would have allowed him my life.
But he called me Ming-xiong. He chose his brother. He slipped. And I let him fall.
Ignorance is not a kind thing. It is its own breed of well-intentioned cruelty, a glass tower built on a lie and an inevitable shattering that all who inflict it believe they can overcome. There is no overcoming this. Shi Wudu dug his own grave. Shi Qingxuan’s was always too deep for him to fill in.
Shi Qingxuan and I were… something. Perhaps to each other. Perhaps balanced on a biased scale. We will never know. I remember her in the same way that I remember my fiancé. Does that make me a hypocrite? To remember his body and hers in the same breath, their laughter harmonising on the breeze, made of the same flesh as everyone else and yet inhuman enough to matter?
Ironic, that I loved her. Pathetic, that I still do.
I can feel the end creeping up on me, its needle-like spines pulling at my hair, my scalp, my skull. I am no longer driven by rage and revenge, and the love I could have lived for was shredded between my own too-sharp teeth. I am, somehow, more alone than I have ever been, despite having nothing to lose.
I think I will rot here. Gift my flesh back to the world; let the sea eat me alive like I ate Shi Wudu. Let us fade as one and leave the waters masterless once more. Leave the waves to their own governance, uncaring of the bodies beneath them.
No one will mourn us. We were violent, vile creatures, hungry for different things but both ravenous for destruction. The black depths of my title and the sunken ships it claims will cradle us both long past our dissolution. The one thing I truly share with the sea; a body is nothing more than the broken pieces it becomes. I will become to the sea as the empty plates I ate from were in my life; a mere drop in the water’s hunger.
If only Shi Wudu had left well enough alone. If only he had not tried to manipulate the web of the fates, and been able to abandon his brother to die.
If only I had never know the truth. If only I had not chosen his insignificant flesh on which to paint my grief.
On my own head be it. But, before mine – on his.
ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.
I had my suspicions since reading the statement of Shi Qingxuan, but… [SIGH] It is evident that He Xuan was an Avatar of the Flesh. There is something unsettling about the way he describes even his loved ones; the way he only sees them as people second to the fact of their… well. Their flesh.
Through the numerous mentions of Hua Cheng, I began my search into He Xuan’s activity in the wake of his ‘death’ by route of tales surrounding Crimson Rain Sought Flower. It was in this search that I found the name Ship-Sinking Black Water.
From the language of his statement and from the method of its method of attainment, it can be safely assumed that He Xuan was at the very least an acquaintance of Hua Cheng, and therefore the source of the myth that surrounds the entity known as ‘Black Water’. Black Water is described inconsistently – some accounts depict him as a serpent, others a creature more akin to the western idea of the kraken, and others still describe an unsettling derivation of a merman. None depict him as a human. Perhaps they’re right to do so.
Shi Wudu has, evidently, also appeared in the statement of Shi Qingxuan. His story and He Xuan’s and Shi Qingxuan’s are, of course, inseperably tied together. I suspect that this entanglement is what caused their collective downfall. In trying to save his sibling, Shi Wudu only ensured a tragedy.
I cannot say that I don’t… understand He Xuan. He fought so hard for a life that was stolen from him before he could make anything of it, and then had to watch as he slowly fell in love with the person it was unknowingly given to. And he understood it. He would have done the same. He couldn’t be angry, not in the way he wanted to be, but he forced himself into the mould of the violence he wanted to wreak and ended up helpless to resist the temptations he’d moulded into his pieced-together parts.
He Xuan died, the second time, in the arms of his namesake – cold, and very nearly alone. I cannot pass judgement on whether or not he deserved it, but… he, too, dug a grave. In the end, he became nothing more than the flesh he knew he’d always been, no different to the meat he’d tried to fill his hunger with in life. And decay doesn’t tend to care for the difference.
End recording.
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