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The lid of her Soulscape opened steadily. She found herself lying on her back, her gaze hollow, aiming at an unknown point barely visible through a thick veil of darkness. Eigong knew that her nightmares would follow her into this world—they were flooding her mind faster than the fog was coming out of her Soulscape chamber, spreading across the sterile tiles of her laboratory. Eigong felt like her spirit of action left every tissue of her body, replaced by the lust to lay down forever and just forget. Forget about the Eternal Cauldron, the Tianhuo cure research, and every other failure she had caused.
Her twisted Soulscape demons were crawling from every direction, assaulting every sense and every part of her brain. At one moment her mind slipped in place and time, back to Penglai. The crowds of Solarians were cheering at her speech, their faces illuminated by the golden rays of sun. She felt relief washing over the people— her people—as they heard about the soon-to-arrive cure that would end the pandemic and bring back the long-awaited peace. Merely seconds later another vision came: the same Solarians were cheering as their mutated comrades shredded her old, wrinkled body to pieces. There was no sun, no stars—only the cursed flowers, their vibrant petals blown by the wind and rooted in every inch of Penglai's dirt.
Then she witnessed as the other Sols, her former colleagues—the ones with whom she shared rooms, dreams, and goals, now mutated and mindless creatures—rammed her door with unstoppable fury, possessed by crazed vengeance. They craved blood and blood only. The gore of the last Solarian, hiding like a rat under a counter of her laboratory and shaking in tears and terror. Unable not only to hold her blade and die in the way of a warrior but even to look up in their thirsty eyes.
Coward.
Sleeping.
Failing.
Eigong had no idea how much time she spent on the brink. New images seemed to flow in a never-ending current and even though she considered it impossible, every new wave was more horrible than the last. She could but lay still, too exhausted to make even a slightest move. She didn't know much about dying, but perhaps it was death, creeping closer and closer to her, sucking off her breaths and her will. Maybe her time was up…
Suddenly, a voice came to her rescue.
It wasn't a voice she felt she needed. It sounded terrible, sharp and cold like steel. Unforgiving, unchanging, and showing no sign of hesitation. It was her own voice.
Routine: interpret new data. Record progress. Skim through the surveillance. Activate hibernation procedure.
“Hearing the same audition over and over again will eventually make me go mad,” she thought to herself literal ages ago. Being in the limbo was causing her sanity to shatter piece by piece, like a mirror punched again and again, every blow stronger and stronger…
Although this time it appeared to be the last station for her train of thoughts, and it proved to be enough to shake her out of her current state. She blinked, stretched her arms and legs and cursed at the stiffness of her whole body.
“Getting up is going to be a horror,” Eigong murmured, and she was right.
As per usual, the world outside the capsule welcomed her with aggressive lights of the monitors on a wall, their glow unable to penetrate further corners of the room. The laboratory was the same as she left it—a complete mess. Glasses full or half full of mists and fluids, all of them in disgustingly vibrant colours. The Eigong that had launched the project had been buried somewhere between or under those glasses, as obscure as the initial, clean state of her lab.
Sitting on her bed made her feel dizzy, but the sensation was nothing new. Every awakening from the Soulscape made her head and limbs somewhat stiffer and heavier. She struggled to keep her balance as she got up—she leaned forward, trying to find support in the counter.
“Abacus, notes and changes on current progress,” she commanded, her voice fueled with exhaustion yet strong and harsh.
“On its way, Lady Eigong.”
As a piece of paper appeared from a niche in the counter, hesitation took over her. She knew the report already. She saw it countless times in her dreams and every single time it was worse and worse than before. Coward. Voices of her demons were out hunting again. After a long moment of stillness spent on a few deep breaths and trying to banish her grief, Eigong finally summoned all the courage left in her guts and reached for the paper with her shaking hand, letting her eyes wander through imprinted tables, numbers, and graphs.
If anyone was in the laboratory, they would see how her hope melted away with every line of the document that she glanced over. Nobody knew how much she wished for someone, anyone to be with her. Even Eigong herself buried her craving under layers upon layers of learnt self esteem and courageousness. She yearned for someone to embrace her, someone whose arms she could fall into and feel safe, away from her nightmares for at least a blink of an eye.
She knew someone who could do just that.
She killed him ages ago.
An image crossed her mind as she closed her eyes, bringing her back to the moment when she was trying to convince him.
“Put away your blade, Yi.” Inside, she fought her boiling emotions, finding no way out. The hatred she felt wasn’t directed at him—it was directed at herself. “I made a mistake and I deserve to be punished.” A burst of wind made the grassblades beneath their feet dance in line with the fabrics of their robes. “But no punishment shall include taking lives. Especially not ones of your own kind.”
The response was a dash and immediate slash she was forced to parry. Their eyes met as their swords clang, Qi blades kissing one another with burning passion. She never saw forgiveness in Yi’s eyes.
She dropped the paper with despair that couldn’t be hidden, and watched the parchment slowly fly down towards the dirty floor. Still looking for support on every possible surface, Eigong made her way to one of the monitors. She pressed a red button, starting the recording.
“We have concluded our clinical tests after no new qualitative changes were observed. 90% of those who received the serum failed to recover from Tianhuo. The remaining 10% turned into mutants… How are we supposed to find the solution?”
She pressed the button again. The recording stopped and her voice changed drastically: the facade of a scientist looking for an answer didn't so much crack as it tore down in the same manner as enough water pressure would tear down even the most solid, concrete dam.
“Why all the lies? Mistakes I've made can't be undone.” Her head suddenly felt heavier. She leaned against the lab table and placed her hands between the flasks, supporting herself solely on her elbows. “Another dead end. Everything I’ve been trying to accomplish has been wiped off by a single piece of paper.”
She felt the Soulscape demons launching another assault on her mind. This time she didn't try to resist them. Every effort she’d ever made had been twisted and turned against her will. She was so trusting in science, she broke her own rules and sacrificed lives in its name, but everything she got in return was a lone room in the dungeon of New Kunlun.
Coward.
Sleeping.
Failing…
She noticed something wet and warm on her cheek, then saw tears trailing down her nose and dropping into a flask, one by one. She was crumbling under her guilt running through her like a storm, and equally destructive.
“Yi,” Eigong struggled to speak. “You were right… child.” Her sobbing turned into cries. “Right from the beginning.”
But her lamentations couldn't bring him back.
The hatred painted over his face, twisted by years of Soulscape dreaming, the unforgiveness in Yi’s dear eyes… and the torture she brought upon herself by ending the life of her own apprentice. For one brief moment it had been dulled by a new idea, passing like a string of light through her neuroreceptors. “It was his choice, and his fault. You could do no bette—”
“STOP!” Suddenly, in one desperate movement she wiped away every piece of glass from the counter. Flasks met the dark floor with hellish clamour and broke into a million pieces. Fluids and vapors started oozing, covering the whole lab in a mist.
She took a few breaths, shallow at first, but deeper and deeper with time, paying no attention if the smokes were toxic or not.
“There's nothing more I can do,” she said through her tears, and slowly headed back towards her Soulscape chamber—beaten by her own goals and dreams.
“Nothing I can do without failing,” Eigong murmured as she laid down on her bed, feeling trails of teardrops all over her fur. She helplessly farewelled her lab and accepted new nightmares, awaiting her in the new reality.
When half asleep, her mind traced back to that day again. For a moment she thought that her fight with Yi, his blood on her sleeves and the ravine's edge were just another Soulspace nightmare. She wished it was true. She was sure about one thing: it all could have turned out well, if it weren’t the course of action chosen by herself.
“Yi, my child…” she said half consciously. ”I dream that someday we will meet again. And that day I could beg for your forgiveness, before it all ends.”
With these words, and a hope for a pardon in her disciple’s eyes, Eigong slipped back into deep slumber.
She couldn’t have known she’d never wake up the same again.