Engraving an innate technique turned out to be a very literal experience.

  The Third Coil’s changes had been automatic so far, natural. Yuan hardly had to think about them. The mere act of cycling replaced his human flesh with qi-forged steel.

  Learning an innate technique meant directing that transformation. Arc had him write sutras onto his nervous circuits first, an act which required him to cycle in a very precise and deliberate way. It hurt too. Each inscription, each word set his neurons ablaze with pain.

  “Struggling yet?” Arc asked. Teacher and student meditated face to face in a lotus position, though she mostly cycled to show him how to engrave sutra scripts on his nerves.

  The actual words came to Yuan in flashes of inspiration.

  “It's hard,” Yuan replied with a grunt as a flash of agony coursed through his spine. “The sutras come on their own, but metal is not paper.”

  Yuan couldn't quite explain it. He had been dubious when Arc insisted the correct scripts would come to him during meditation, but they did. Strings of words written in a language he did not recognize flared in his mind when he cycled.

  Yuan intuitively understood their meaning. Gun, firearm, gunsmoke, bullet, hell… All the words that could be used to describe his chosen Bullet Hell subpath and resolve.

  “Surviving the moonburns cleared your qi circuits of emotional sludge and strengthened your spiritual awareness,” Arc explained. “You are hearing your soul’s whispers and aligning your body with it.”

  “Is that why you had me brave the Blackmoon's trial?” Yuan asked. “To make this step easier?”

  “Everyone should brave the moonburns.” Arc scoffed. “Engraving your soul’s chosen Path sutras is only the first step to crossing the Fourth Coil. Next, you will have to weave the scripts into your very core, and only then will you be able to learn innate techniques.”

  Considering how much pain tuning his body to the Gun Path and its branches required, Yuan could guess doing the same with his bullet-core would be immeasurably worse.

  No matter. He would bear any pain for victory’s sake.

  Orient’s train whistle echoed across the wagon, followed by an announcement whose content Yuan could already guess.

  “Honored Conductor Yuan, Lady Arc, I have detected a large dust cloud coming from the south,” Orient announced. “I suspect a sizable vehicle fleet is on its way to intercept us.”

  “The plastic men,” Yuan guessed. He interrupted his cycling and rose to his feet. He could use some action. “Orient, tell everyone to tool up. I’ll be on my way to the roof.”

  “No,” Arc said.

  Yuan scowled at her. “I can't just stand here and watch.”

  “You can go.” Arc pointed at the revolver on his belt with her chin. “Just not with that.”

  Yuan quickly caught on. “No need for weapons when you are one?”

  “If you're serious about becoming a gun, then you'll have to act the part,” Arc said before returning to her meditation. “I would tell you good luck, but real cultivators make their own.”

  “I would tell you to watch,” Yuan replied as he surrendered his revolver to her. “But I know you'll do it anyway.”

  Yuan could have sworn he had heard Arc chuckling when he exited the wagon. As he’d guessed, she was invested in his progress.

  Yuan walked up a ladder to the fire wagon’s roof under the midday sun. A handful of gunners had taken over the three artillery pieces, with Bucket himself taking over the cannon near the locomotive. Iron barrels peeked out of the spirit-train’s windows along its entire length. A few people on the upper floors also carried Molotov cocktails–named after the famous folk Fire Path cultivator–ready to ignite once the enemy approached.

  The passengers had no shortage of weapons and ammo onboard, but whether they had the skills to make good use of them remained to be seen.

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  Yuan only had to take a look to see the dust rising on the horizon. It was huge, blanketing a large part of the desert and quickly gaining ground on the spirit-train due to its slower speed; an unfortunate consequence of Orient redirecting a sizable amount of her qi to keeping Arc’s authority suppressed and doubling her length.

  Yuan focused on the dust with his enhanced senses. He analyzed the faint yet strengthening vibrations spreading through the air to estimate the number of enemies, smelled the streams of burnt fuel in the air to identify what kind of vehicles produced them, and studied the faint hints of yellow smoke mixed with the dirt.

  Twenty-three vehicles, mostly cars, with a few motorbikes, Yuan ascertained, his jaw clenching as he identified a massive object among their number. And something heavier than all of them combined.

  A party that size was bound to have cultivators with them. Plastic men were usually nothing to write home about in that department, but Yuan knew better than to underestimate anybody. The heavy vehicle traveling with the party bothered him the most. Yuan briefly wondered if the plastic men had found a spirit-train of their own until he sensed the presence of a vile, poisonous qi in the dust cloud. Thick orange smog grew visible among the dust.

  The qi was too wild for a cultivator, and only one kind of spirit-beast shared a kinship with plastic men.

  Trashemoths.

  No wonder they think they can take on Orient, Yuan thought before shouting a warning. “They have a trashemoth with them!”

  A few barrels wavered in unease, at least for those familiar with the term. Bucket’s cannon wasn’t among them. “We’ll blow away that foul creature before it can touch Saint Orient, sir!” he boasted. “Just give the command!”

  “Don’t bother!” Yuan replied. Even artillery would struggle to punch through a trashemoth’s hide, unlike the plastic men’s vehicles. “Focus on the escort, I’ll fend off the beast!”

  How strange. Yuan uttered those words without thinking, when his first instinct a month ago would have been to throw any extra weight off the spirit-train to speed it up rather than face such a dangerous spirit-beast. Every fiber of his being told him he could take on the creature now. His allies’ lack of worry and retort showed that they thought the same.

  No man climbed a mountain by fleeing from the hills.

  The dust cloud grew closer, as did the sputtering roars of old engines and the clinking of metal wheels pounding against the ground. The plastic men raiding party emerged as a chaotic mess of dirty mannequin bikers, trash trucks filled to the brim with humanoids with black bags for faces and tableware for hands, and makeshift cars built from scavenged parts. Yuan recognized the few First Coil cultivators among them by the way their bodies merged with their vehicles, with some being little more than plastic torsos melded to their motorbikes or rubber masses filling out a car’s seats. They advanced in a disorganized formation with no regard for self-preservation.

  They were little more than shepherds herding a giant forward.

  Yuan had only seen a trashemoth once before in his life, and the colossus lumbering after the spirit-train was at least twice its size; enough to match three of Orient’s wagons in length. Decades of accumulated plastic trash, gelatinous gasoline ooze, and orange sinew formed the bulk of the abomination’s sluglike body. Sharp metal talons sprouted at the end of its two forelimbs and boasted claws capable of cutting a house in two.

  The sick yellow smog Yuan had noticed earlier spewed forth from a set of three metal chimneys on its back, while the head reminded him a bit too much of Orient’s locomotive; albeit that one boasted jagged teeth and a pair of vicious golden eyes on each side eying the spirit-train with hunger. Half a dozen smaller mouths of steel and plastic gnashed along the monster’s body.

  Arc had landed a five-hundred kilometers shot and attacked the Gun from a day’s ride away. She had to have known this monster would show up when she asked Yuan to relinquish his revolver.

  A would-be Third Coil cultivator unable to secure a pill usually had to kill a spirit-beast and eat its core as a substitute. This was yet another test. One which Yuan would pass with a hail of gunfire.

  Yuan used Sniper’s Bore to wrap his index finger in a cylindrical Barrier, then slightly rifled his original design to improve precision. He stuffed a bullet crafted with Item Materialization inside the makeshift barrel, then aimed at one of the trashemoth’s eyes. Qi poured into his bullet and vibrated it at a very specific frequency.

  “Ready?!” Yuan asked, the noise of dozens of firearm safeties clicking in response. “Fire!”

  Yuan unleashed the first shot, and his allies followed through with a hail of bullets.

  His projectile hit one of the trashemoth’s right eyes with the impact of a qi-charged handgun strike. The blast wasn’t as big as Revolver’s own shooting stars, but it blew up its target well enough. The trashemoth’s main maw let out a bellowing, low-pitched roar as yellow pus and poisonous blood leaked down its face.

  Yuan’s allies didn’t match his success. While there were a few good shots among the passengers, most were too untrained and the enemy was too far away for firearm projectiles to connect. Bucket and the other gunners had more luck. One artillery shot blew up a car, another landed close enough to two motorcycles to make them lose control of their trajectory and fall to the ground, while the third hit nothing.

  A few of their foes returned fire with flash-ball weapons and rubber bullets, but most focused on closing the gap. Plastic men usually preferred the intimacy of a close-kill and their warband’s equipment reflected their preferences. Harpoons arose from the back of their trash trucks, their barbed heads pointing at Orient’s windows and ready to fire once in range.

  Not on Yuan’s watch.

  Yuan didn’t need to take a step back. He simply leaped into battle and crossed the distance in a single bound. He landed on the nearest plastic man's car with such force that he crushed the engine on impact. By the time the car and its drivers flew off its wheels, Yuan had already jumped onto the next one with a Recoil Kick.

  This would be fun.

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