Chapter 43: Among the Ruins
Yuan buried Gayak and Polio in the city of the dead.
Telling which pieces of meat belonged to them and which ones belonged to the thousands of victims that the Gun claimed today was a difficult task, even with his qi sight. The bombardment shredded them to pieces alongside Gatling Man’s remains and countless others. Throwing them into a ditch proved much easier than digging individual graves.
Yuan didn’t want to give his enemies a fair burial out of respect–since none of them deserved it–but while a cultivator’s hungry ghost was a pale shadow of what they were while alive, they remained very dangerous. Yuan had no intention of allowing his dead foes to torment the living any longer.
Yuan had heard tales that the Deathsong allowed hungry ghosts to linger after death to give them one last chance to settle their affairs and pass on to their next life without regrets; others said it was to force the living to take responsibility for their dead and ensure a fair burial for everyone.
If so, then she had succeeded. Yuan had spent the better part of the day carrying corpses around to a trench dug by Bucket and the others where Holster had been giving the dead the Last Rites sutra nonstop, silently praying for their souls. Other men gathered everything they could salvage onto the spirit-train; mostly pieces of Metallist tech, weapons, or supplies that survived the bombardment. Getting the vehicle upright again had taken a lot of effort, even with Yuan’s own superhuman strength.
From what Yuan gathered, Orient saved her passengers from the bullet rain by creating a Barrier around herself with Holster’s help. He guessed that spending days around him gave them enough insight to defend themselves against the Gun’s bombardment.
The rest of the city didn’t fare as well. The Gun’s visit thoroughly destroyed every building in town and leveled the ground to such a degree that even the sewers and basements turned into tombs. They’d only managed to find a handful of survivors hiding so far, and the encroaching sunset would put an end to those searches soon.
Moreover, Orient could only rescue around a hundred people; mostly a handful of Bullet Church armed men, their families, and civilians who took refuge with the cult. Hardly enough manpower to cover a ghost town of Fleshmarket’s size.
Too many corpses, Yuan thought grimly as he tossed his enemies’ remains into a trench filled with hundreds of human remains. Too few gravediggers.