The second harvest came three months after the fisherman's transformation. She was a woman named Chen Wei, a retired schoolteacher from a small city in Zhejiang province. Her life had been one of quiet, persistent virtue—she had taken in orphaned children, fed the hungry from her own meager table, and spent her evenings reading to the blind in a local nursing home. Nicholas had guided her subtly, nudging her toward opportunities for good deeds, amplifying the voice of her conscience when it whispered that she could do more.
She died at seventy-four, in her sleep, her hand resting on a stack of letters from children she had helped raise.
Nicholas, hidden in the deepest folds of her soul, felt the familiar pull of the channel opening beneath her. Where the fisherman's journey had been swift and direct, Chen Wei's was different. The channel was wider, brighter, as if her accumulated merit had paved a smoother path. She emerged not in the modest reception hall of a city of the dead, but in the same grand granite chamber where Qinguangwang held court.
The Yama King sat upon his throne, five meters of silent judgment, his green eyes burning like distant stars. The green flames in their braziers flickered as Chen Wei's soul materialized before him.
"Chen Wei," Qinguangwang intoned, his voice the grinding of tectonic plates. "You have lived a virtuous life. Your merits are substantial. By the law of the Six Realms, you are granted reincarnation into the Deva Realm, where you shall be born among the immortals and gods. All memories of this life will be washed away, and you shall become anew."
Chen Wei's soul pulsed, half in fear, half in confusion.
The Yama King's green eyes flickered. "But there is another path," he said, his voice carefully neutral. "Your merits are sufficient to purchase a position in the Netherworld hierarchy. You may serve as a messenger, a guide for the newly dead, a caretaker of souls. In exchange, your accumulated merit will be... spent. You will dwell here as a Ghost Immortal, your memories intact, your self preserved."
Chen Wei's soul pulsed again, but with suspicion now, not curiosity. She had been a teacher for forty years. She had seen administrators make promises they did not keep, offer positions that were less than they seemed. She had learned to ask questions.
"What would this position entail?" she asked. "What would my duties be? What authority would I have? Who would I answer to?"
Qinguangwang's expression did not change—his granite face was not capable of change—but something in his posture shifted. "You would serve under a supervisor. Your duties would include guiding souls, maintaining order, and, when necessary, pursuing cultivators who resist the wheel. You would be granted a chain of authority, allowing you to bind souls lower than yourself in the hierarchy."
"And I would be the lowest," Chen Wei said. It was not a question.
The Yama King did not answer. His silence was answer enough.
"I see." Chen Wei's soul pulsed with something that might have been dry amusement. "You want my merits—all of them—in exchange for a position at the bottom of the ladder. A position where I would spend eternity taking orders from beings who have more merits, better connections, or simply longer service. That is not a gift. That is a transaction. And not a particularly fair one."
The green flames in the braziers flickered. Qinguangwang's eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly.
"You would refuse the offer of a Yama King?" His voice carried a weight now, a pressure that made the air in the chamber grow heavy.
"I would," Chen Wei said. "I choose reincarnation. If I am to lose myself either way, let me lose myself in the Deva Realm, among gods and immortals. Perhaps, in that life, I will remember something of this one. Perhaps I will find my way back to myself. But I will not trade my hard-earned merits for a position of servitude, no matter how eternal."
The Yama King showed no emotion. His green eyes remained steady, his granite face unchanging. He simply raised his hand, and a suction force enveloped Chen Wei's soul—not violent, not painful, but absolute. The channel opened beneath her, and she was pulled downward, toward the wheel that turned in the eternal sky.
Nicholas was surprised, he had expected that the Yama king would tell her that she could stay in the cities of the dead as all other souls, but it appread that souls with merit as well as those with karma were forced to reincarnate weather they wanted to or not. Intresting.
He had anticipated the possibility that she would want to reincarnate and he had thought of plans on how to secure his own existence in the cycle of reincarnation.
In the moments before the suction took her, he splintered the fragment hidden in her soul. Again and again and again, he divided it, each fragment smaller than the last, until they were so tiny that they were indistinguishable from the individual motes of energy that composed her soul's essence. They scattered through her being like dust in sunlight, indivisible from her own substance, impossible to detect.
The suction pulled her down, and Nicholas's scattered fragments went with her.
---
The journey was different this time.
Where the boy's soul had drifted uncertainly through darkness, Chen Wei's soul was yanked with purpose toward the wheel. Nicholas could see it now—the vast circle that filled the sky, its six openings decorated with images of gods and humans, of beasts and hungry ghosts, of hells and titans. The wheel turned slowly, inexorably, and as they approached, Nicholas felt the weight of its authority pressing against him.
It was immense. Larger than any god he had encountered. Larger in essence than the Yama Kings, perhaps larger than most of the immortals, definitely larger than almost all of the western gods, except perhaps himself and his Attendants. It was the wheel of samsara, the engine of reincarnation, the mechanism that had been turning souls through lifetimes.
And it was about to process Chen Wei's soul.
She did not weep. She was too stubborn for weeping, too practical. But Nicholas could feel her fear—a cold, quiet terror at the thought of losing herself, of becoming someone else, of having everything she had been stripped away and replaced with something new.
"So this is it," she whispered, her voice thin but steady. "I cease to exist."
The wheel did not answer. It turned.
As it turned, Nicholas felt a spinning sensation—as if her soul was being twisted in a centrifugal force, pressed and pulled and kneaded like dough. He watched through his scattered fragments as pieces of her essence began to separate, to flake away, to be cleaned.
Her memories went first. The face of her mother, faded to a blur. The sound of her father's laugh, silenced. The children she had raised, the students she had taught, the old men and women she had read to in the nursing home—all of it dissolved, scattered into the void like ash on the wind.
Her personality followed. The sharp suspicion that had seen through the Yama King's offer. The stubborn courage that had made her choose reincarnation over servitude. The quiet compassion that had driven her to a lifetime of good deeds. One by one, these qualities were stripped away, leaving only the bare essence of what she had been.
Her thoughts began to disappear. Not all at once, but one by one, like candles being snuffed out. She stopped wondering where she was going. She stopped regretting her choice. She stopped thinking at all.
Nicholas watched all of this with clinical detachment, trying very hard to both memorize and feel how the wheel accomplished this feat, it would be interesting to see if he could try to implement this process for his own afterlife. Currently the shores of the unseen were vast beyond comprehension but even they would eventually be filled to capacity with new souls, not anytime soon but evenetually. His authority and the level of his souls essence shielded him from the wheel's influence—the foreign authority that stripped memories and thoughts could not touch him. He was immune, an observer in a process that could not affect him.
But he felt something else. Something beneath the stripping, beneath the cleaning. The wheel was not merely destroying. It was preparing. It was taking the raw material of Chen Wei's soul—the essence that remained after memories and personality and thoughts had been removed—and shaping it for rebirth.
The hole on the wheel's face opened. It was the first opening, the one decorated with images of immortals riding clouds and celestial palaces heavy with fruit. The Deva Realm.
A golden swirling vortex appeared within the opening, and Chen Wei's soul—what remained of it—was pulled through.
---
The next thing Nicholas sensed was a body.
He was shoved into it—not gently, not gradually, but with the sudden violence of a soul being forced into a vessel that had been prepared for its arrival. The body was human, or at least it appeared to be. A woman, pregnant, her belly swollen with new life. The soul settled into the fetus, and Nicholas's scattered fragments settled with it.
But this was not an ordinary body.
The woman—the mother—glowed. Not metaphorically. Literally. Her entire form was suffused with Qi, that mysterious energy that Nicholas had observed in spirit beasts and cultivators. It flowed through her veins like light through water, collected in her organs like pools of liquid starlight, radiated from her skin in waves that made the air around her shimmer.
She was a living Qi battery. A vessel of such concentrated spiritual energy that Nicholas could scarcely believe she was mortal, her soul on the brink of ascension.
And then the energy began to move.
It escaped her body in the form of smoky tendrils, twisting and swirling around her like mist on a mountain lake. The tendrils were beautiful—iridescent, shifting through colors that had no names, leaving trails of light that lingered in the air before fading. They swirled around her torso, her arms, her head, before being reabsorbed into her body through her skin, her breath, her very presence.
It was strangely mesmerizing. A dance of energy that had no purpose except to exist, to flow, to be.
Nicholas watched, hidden in the soul of the unborn child, and understood.
He had made it. He finally found an Immortal Grotto Heaven. Not as an observer, not as a messenger, but as a participant. A soul about to be born into a body that glowed with Qi, into a family that had spiritual roots, into a place where cultivation was finally easy to find and spy on.
The wheel had turned. The seed had been planted.
Now, he only had to wait for it to grow.
To be continued...
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