Fleshmarket in Ruins

Fleshmarket in Ruins is the state left by The Gun’s bombardment: a city reduced to rubble, its population devastated, and its remaining water rendered unsafe. The destruction ended the battle without producing a victor. For Yuan Guang, the ruins became at once a mass grave, a humanitarian crisis, and the setting for a painful reckoning with the consequences of his own choices.

The Bombardment and Its Scope

The Gun announced its arrival with bullets falling from the gunsmoke thunderclouds. Millions upon millions of projectiles, each charged with Qi, poured over Fleshmarket in a deluge of gunfire and detonations. Yuan Guang and Revolver answered with layered Barriers, each forming a dome around them; their instinctive command of defenses against this kind of attack helped them survive while the city was struck around them. The assault was not confined to one faction or district. Weaker buildings vanished into dust, while stronger structures broke apart into stone and steel. The outer walls endured for a time, then cracked and collapsed under repeated impacts and shockwaves. Metallist screen-towers and the organic corruption of the Flesh Mansion Sect alike were caught in the barrage. Elder Polio raised a Barrier after the rain tore apart his flesh shell, but he had not spent enough time around Gunsouls to tune it properly. Qi-charged bullets pierced and annihilated him. When the gunfire stopped as abruptly as it had begun, the resulting silence was almost as terrifying as the bombardment. Smoke and dust obscured the city until Yuan Guang could see little beyond his feet. He feared that Holster and Orient were still inside the ruins; the thought shook his Barrier, and Revolver had to help sustain it. Yuan Guang’s terror was sharpened by the memory of having already lost a team and by his refusal to outlive another.

Ruins, Dead, and the Living

The devastation extended below the visible wreckage. The bombardment leveled buildings so thoroughly that sewers and basements became tombs. Searchers found only a handful of survivors, while the approaching sunset threatened to end the day’s rescue efforts. Orient had managed to save around a hundred people, chiefly Bullet Church fighters, their families, and civilians who had taken refuge with them. That was only a small fraction of the people needed to fill a city the size of Fleshmarket. The Spirit-train itself had derailed, and getting it upright again took considerable effort, even with Yuan Guang’s strength. Survivors and crew gathered what could be salvaged, including Metallist technology, weapons, and supplies that had survived the impacts. Orient had protected her passengers by creating a Barrier around herself with Holster’s help; Yuan Guang suspected that their days spent around him had given them enough understanding to defend against The Gun’s attack. The city’s water reservoir, however, had been contaminated with lead from the bombardment. Even if the survivors had remained, they could no longer rely on the supply to sustain a rebuilt settlement. Hundreds of dead remained undiscovered, and Yuan Guang feared they would become Hungry ghosts by the next day. The ruins thus held two forms of danger: the physical consequences of the attack and the spiritual threat posed by those left unburied. Fleshmarket was doomed, and the search for survivors had to proceed against a closing window of time.

Burial and the Cost of Survival

Yuan Guang helped carry corpses to a trench dug by Bucket and the others while Holster recited the Last Rites Sutra over the dead, praying silently for their souls. The trench became a common grave for hundreds of bodies. Yuan Guang also buried Gayak and Elder Polio there. Identifying which fragments belonged to them, rather than to the thousands of other victims, was difficult even with his Qi sight; the bombardment had torn apart their remains, Gatling Man’s remains, and countless others. Placing the enemies in the trench was easier than attempting separate graves. The burial was not an act of respect for the men Yuan Guang had fought. He considered that neither deserved an honorable grave. He buried them because a cultivator’s Hungry ghost, though only a pale remnant of its former self, could still torment the living. The practical urgency of the work therefore outweighed any distinction between friend, foe, and stranger: the dead had to be covered before they could become a further danger.

Responsibility and Departure

The ruin also forced Yuan Guang to face his role in the conditions surrounding the catastrophe. Arc confronted him with the consequences of the ammunition scheme: he had used the techniques she taught him to help relieve Fleshmarket’s ammunition shortage, hoping its warring sects would destroy one another. He could not deny that he had armed the conflict with casualties accepted as part of the plan. Whether his actions had helped lure The Gun to the city remained an agonizing uncertainty, but he admitted that he had not expected the devastation to reach this scale. The bombardment also transformed Yuan Guang’s priorities. Revolver had struggled against the bloodlust of The Gun’s curse and had saved Yuan Guang’s life, including during the attack on Fleshmarket. Haunted by that struggle, Yuan Guang resolved to find a way to free his ally, even if doing so delayed his own revenge. Revolver left on his cruiser, disappearing into the wasteland in search of victims or release from death; Yuan Guang remained among the ruins with the dead and the survivors. By nightfall, the Spirit-train departed with far more people than its wagons were built to carry. Orient made space in the luggage, panoramic, and restaurant cars, while Yuan Guang moved to the engine room with Holster and Arc. The departure did not undo the destruction or make Fleshmarket habitable again. It carried the few who could be rescued away from a city where both the buried dead and the poisoned water made staying untenable. The battle was over, but its survivors left without any sense of fulfillment: in the ruins of Fleshmarket, nobody had won.