Fleshmarket Destruction was the Gun’s bombardment of the city, a catastrophe that made Yuan Guang face the human cost of his own strategy for exploiting the sects’ war. The attack destroyed Fleshmarket almost completely; its aftermath was marked by mass burial, a sparse rescue effort, and Yuan’s resolve to save Revolver from the Gun’s curse rather than leave another ally to suffer.

Causes and Escalation

Yuan had hoped to arm Fleshmarket’s warring sects during their ammunition shortage so that they would slaughter one another. When Arc later confronted him with what good that scheme had achieved, Yuan could not deny what he had intended. He was angry with her, but more with himself, and wondered whether his actions had helped draw the Gun to Fleshmarket. The possibility remained uncertain; what was clear was that the conflict he had tried to manipulate had become part of a far greater disaster.

The Gun announced its arrival with a rain of bullets. Gunsmoke thunderclouds poured millions of qi-charged projectiles onto Fleshmarket, their impacts and detonations turning the bombardment into a sustained assault on the whole city. Elder Polio raised another shell of flesh to protect himself, while Revolver, wounded and in pain, looked toward the sky with quiet acceptance. Yuan and Revolver formed layered Barriers around themselves, drawing on a defensive technique they had both learned early in their journeys. The Gun’s violence was no longer sects killing one another: it was a city beneath a storm of destruction.

The attack also revealed a disturbing contradiction in the Gun’s behavior. While Yuan and Revolver were caught in its bombardment, the Gun later engaged them in Death’s Roulette; Yuan sensed that its enthusiasm for the contest did not match its earlier cries and pleas. He recognized that it seemed intent on killing itself, not simply on killing its opponents. That discovery complicated the survivors’ response to the catastrophe: the Gun was both the source of Fleshmarket’s devastation and a being whose own destruction appeared to be part of the crisis.

Rescue, Burial, and Departure

The destruction left Fleshmarket’s ordinary infrastructure beyond repair: the Gun’s bombardment leveled every building and crushed even the sewers and basements into tombs. Searchers found only a handful of people alive in the ruins, and sunset threatened to cut short the effort. Orient had managed to save around a hundred people—mostly armed members of the Bullet Church, their families, and civilians who had taken refuge with them—a small fraction of the population of a city the size of Fleshmarket.

The survivors’ immediate work was divided between tending the living and dealing with the dead. Yuan spent much of the day carrying bodies to a trench dug by Bucket and the others, while Holster recited the Last Rites sutra over the dead and silently prayed for their souls. Others salvaged what they could from the wreckage, chiefly Metallist technology, weapons, and supplies. Even righting the spirit-train took considerable effort, despite Yuan’s strength. The salvage mattered, but it could not make the wrecked city habitable again; the trench, filled with hundreds of human remains, became the most visible measure of what had been lost.

Orient had protected her passengers from the bullet rain by forming a Barrier with Holster’s help. The defense was possible, Yuan surmised, because their days alongside him had taught them enough about the Gun’s attack to protect themselves. Their survival contrasted sharply with the devastation outside: a small group escaped aboard the train while the city around them became a mass grave.

By nightfall, the spirit-train departed with far more people than its cars were meant to carry. Wagons designed for a few dozen passengers held five times that number and their belongings; Orient made room in the luggage, panoramic, and restaurant cars. Yuan moved to the engine room with Holster and Arc. There, Holster held Arc’s arm and helped stabilize her broken bullet-core, having suppressed her Authority back inside her body. The effort left Holster visibly strained, but the crowded train carried the survivors away from the ruins.

Responsibility and the Gun’s Cycle

The catastrophe remained inseparable from Yuan’s own choices. He had intended to exploit Fleshmarket’s ammunition shortage by arming its warring sects and hoping they would destroy one another. After the bombardment, Arc confronted him with the outcome of that plan. Yuan could not deny his aim, and wondered whether his actions had helped lure the Gun to the city; the cause was uncertain, but his intended casualties were not. His admission that he had not expected the devastation to become so severe marks the difference between imagining violence as a means of manipulation and confronting its consequences in mass death.

The attack also became part of the sequence that sustained the Gun’s curse. Kaguya later explained that the Gun engaged Yuan and Revolver immediately after Revolver’s own murderer died in the bombardment: once a Gunsoul completed the quest for which he had risen from the dead, the Gun came to challenge him. The destruction of Fleshmarket thus did more than devastate a city. Its deaths helped bring Revolver to the threshold of that challenge, turning the aftermath into a new threat to the survivors.

For Yuan, Revolver’s predicament made the disaster’s personal cost impossible to leave behind. Revolver had saved Yuan twice, and Yuan refused to let one of the few people who had shown him unconditional kindness suffer forever under the Gun’s curse. He resolved to find a way to free Revolver, even if doing so delayed his revenge. Fleshmarket’s destruction consequently redirects Yuan’s purpose: amid the bodies he helps bury, he chooses not to let another ally become a casualty of the cycle.

The Meaning of Revenge

In a later message to Yuan, Revolver looked back on his own return from death. He barely remembered his first life: a bullet he fired into his own chest to escape prolonged agony from radiation poisoning had dragged him out of Nowhere, and he had spent more of his existence as a Gunsoul than as a human. He had already killed the nuclear cultivator who murdered him. The revenge brought only a brief satisfaction, not a lasting purpose or a better life.

That history gave Revolver a hard-earned warning about what might follow Fleshmarket. In his view, Gunsouls who achieved vengeance did not find durable fulfillment; once their original purpose was spent, they were left with the corpses accumulated on the way to it. He had turned instead toward the Dragon Sage’s Perfect Shot prophecy, hoping that ending the cycle of The Gun would give him a new purpose. But the effort had cost him Jim and many others, while the bullets continued to fly. The catastrophe in Fleshmarket therefore sits within a longer history of violence that cannot be undone simply by defeating one’s killer.

Revolver described The Gun’s curse as a mechanism that breeds the violence it feeds upon: it offers a false hope, draws people into carnage, and then comes for them, while their use of guns encourages still more people to take up arms. Its survival through successive hosts made the cycle seem almost self-renewing. Revolver recognized the resemblance between Yuan’s determination to save him and his own former wish to save Jim; he could warn Yuan where that hope had led without claiming that hope itself had disappeared. In this light, Fleshmarket’s destruction is not only a mass-casualty event but a grim demonstration of the problem the Perfect Shot must answer: violence can serve a purpose in the moment and still reproduce the conditions for further violence.

The Violence That Followed

Fleshmarket’s destruction became a turning point in the curse that had brought the Gun against Revolver: Kaguya explained that once a Gunsoul’s murderer had died in the bombardment, the Gun came to challenge that Gunsoul. Weeks after Revolver became the Gun, the cycle’s next horror was visible in his own account of what he had become. Strange laughter drew him toward its source; when he reached it, he raised his revolver, and the laughter turned to screams. He said he killed without distinction—enslavers and slaves, old and young, Scraps and cultivators alike—because they all looked the same to him at the barrel’s end. Yuan answered with an apology, while Revolver examined his weapon and described killing as inseparable from his nature. His transformation carried Fleshmarket’s violence beyond the ruined city: the Gun’s curse had made a former ally an instrument of indiscriminate killing, and Revolver could no longer separate that destruction from the weapon he had become.