The Evil God Who Raised Me

Night wind howled across the hills, scouring the ridge from every direction until it set a chill deep into the spine.

In the midst of the endless Gobi wasteland squatted a military base. Under its long stretch of steel ramparts, a knot of soldiers had gathered, hemming something in.

A boy was being driven back toward the very lip of an abyss, penned in by the crowd. The cold wind spilling up from below made him shiver.

He was only fourteen, yet he already wore a dark green uniform. His lowered eyes, narrow and bright like a young cat’s, still held a trace of softness. His mouth was pressed tight, stubbornness written plain across his face.

The men had shackled him right at the brink. His frame was slight, his movements restless and constrained.

Someone glanced over at him—and immediately started shouting.

“Seriously? They dug up a little brat like this to throw in as our offering?”

“No one’s ever had the guts to take this job. Unless you’re planning to haul the officers from Central Command over here yourself?”

“If this abyss wasn’t really haunted, why wouldn’t we just pour concrete into it and seal the damn thing up?”

“Hush—” someone whispered. “The captain from the Southwest Military District tried that once. And then—”

“And then what?”

“Ran into a berserk AI combat droid during training. Now his left arm’s a prosthetic.”

“Lieutenant Colonel Aite ordered this place fenced off as a forbidden zone. Rumor has it he’s still drifting around out in space.”

“No wonder the officers at Central Command would rather cross two oceans than set foot here.”

…

The soldiers traded remarks back and forth. All of them were fourth-class privates assigned to this base, their skin tones all different, drifters from off-world planets, half-wild and rootless. Only after they’d served out their term would they qualify for citizenship. Fourth-class privates got the worst of everything to begin with, and now they’d drawn this wretched assignment on top of it—to offer up a tribute to the “ghost” in the abyss.

Some, after hearing the orders, had stayed up through the night recording their last messages. Others had rushed to request a day of leave so they could go home one more time. To anyone who didn’t know better, it would have looked as if an interstellar war was going to break out the very next day.

And yet, when they thought of Shi Yuanxu, their mood improved, if only by a fraction. At least this mess had been dumped on him.

The boy was of alien blood. Rumor had it he belonged to a near-extinct species—the kind so fragile a single bad fall could snap a bone clean in two. Compared to him, they told themselves, they had far more reason to cling to life. At the very least, they still had a chance to fight their way to citizenship. As for him… he might well be dead before he even made it through his two years of service.

“Hey, brat. Hurry up and offer the tribute,” a few of the soldiers barked at him, voices rough and impatient. “If you don’t even have the guts for this, you might as well plan on dying as cannon fodder once you hit the front lines!”

Shi Yuanxu’s expression was dark and steady. He was gripping a woven sack, and inside it were the few things he had managed to hoard over time: synthetic steamed buns from the mess hall, so hard no one could chew them and solid enough to hand to a convict for tunneling out of prison; a bottle of nutrient solution he’d already drunk halfway through before realizing it was past its expiration date; a tattered rag doll stuffed with dried lavender; and half a sheet of scrap metal he hadn’t been able to bring himself to throw away.

Someone beside him bent closer to get a good look at what he’d brought, and their face changed at once.

“—This is the tribute you spent a whole week putting together?”

The boy lifted his eyes and gave them a long, quiet look. No sense for value at all, these people. This wasn’t junk. These were the treasures he had scraped together over the years—everything he relied on to keep himself alive in this military district.

Yet with those cat-like eyes and that pale, obedient face, he looked so meek that no one ever noticed the faint, brooding resentment in his gaze.

The abyss itself had squatted beside the Fourth Military District for years on end. The base crawled with rumors: some said demons were imprisoned down there, others claimed a god had been bound in its depths. Fantastical tales sprang up one after another. But everyone agreed on at least one truth—if no tribute was offered for too long, the Fourth Military District would start to be haunted.

Every year, the base would single someone out to carry tribute into the abyss.

The problem was, no one had any idea what kind of “taste” the one in the abyss possessed. If ordinary people meddled in it, there was no telling who might end up taking the punishment.

Once, someone had thrown in a big sack of potatoes already sprouting green shoots; a few minutes later, he was being carried into the infirmary on a stretcher. Another man had casually tossed in a can of military rations, only to bolt for the base gates in blind panic, tumbling and scrambling as he went—he had come within a hair’s breadth of being charred black by the electric fence encircling the grounds…

Everyone whose turn came up after that either suddenly claimed to be ill or put in for leave at the last minute. This time, however, someone had a sudden flash of inspiration: they would drag some pitiful little wretch over and make him deliver the tribute.

And now, when this pathetic boy’s turn had come to present tribute to the god, he had actually arrived with a bulging sack of “trash.”

The onlookers were half sick with dread and half secretly gloating. They seemed almost able to see, in advance, what was about to happen to him.

Shi Yuanxu’s eyes were already reddening as he hefted the woven sack and began pitching its contents down into the dark.

“Look at him—he’s so scared he’s about to cry,” someone laughed. “Take it easy, kid. You’re supposed to be making a devout little wish while you do it.”

…

Shi Yuanxu did, in fact, have tears trembling in his eyes—

Those rock-hard synthetic buns he could never bite through still worked as passable weapons when he stuffed them into his pockets for self-defense; the rag doll that still carried a faint trace of fragrance was wonderfully comfortable to sleep on; and that lemon-flavored, high-grade nutrient supplement he’d secretly drunk halfway through could have helped fill his stomach a little at night.

Grinding his teeth and forcing the tears back down, he hurled the buns, the nutrient solution, the rag doll—every last bit of it—into the abyss.

“The buns… that’s three days’ worth of food for me… Take them!”

“The nutrient solution… I still wanted one more sip… Forget it… I don’t want it anymore!”

…

All at once, it occurred to Shi Yuanxu that when you offered tribute to a god, you were supposed to be sincerely devout. His gaze steadied as he stared into the abyss.

He folded his palms together, his expression growing more solemn, and in an instant he looked like a loyal little believer. He even let his eyes fall shut, murmuring under his breath as he recited an old inscription once used to summon gods.

“God of the earth’s dark abyss, I offer up my heart’s blood in the name of my oldest wish…”

His face was still all meek grievance and obedient softness—but in his eyes, something was slowly turning savage.

His long-cherished wish?Of course it was to live safely through his term of service, make it to discharge in one piece—and then demand payment, with interest, from every last one of these thankless bastards. A pack of villains and thugs, forever finding excuses to shake down his already pitiful living allowance, even sneaking away his brand-new uniform and switching it for dusty, threadbare rags. Tonight he was supposed to be curled up with his beloved teddy-bear pillow, finally getting one decent night’s sleep…

In that instant, a sacred bell pealed. All at once he was standing in a sanctuary above the clouds. Overhead, gauzy veils like the aurora swept past his hair in layer upon layer, as if every shimmering strand were tugging at a different nerve, a different inch of skin.

He felt as though he were steeped in boundless light—and at the same time plunged into a chill, lightless ice cellar.

Suddenly, he seemed to hear a low chuckle, the speaker’s tone impossible to read.

“So you woke me… just for this?”

Shi Yuanxu came back to himself with a jolt, utterly at a loss, convinced he must have misheard. The abyss below was still nothing but solid, suffocating black, perfectly still, without the faintest echo.

His hands were empty now. A hollow sense of loss opened up in his chest when he realized there was nothing left at all. The ones who had been gloating over him were still craning their necks at his side, waiting to enjoy the spectacle.

“Tsk. Looks like we’ll just have to kick you in,” someone drawled. When they saw the boy standing there unharmed, they suddenly found the whole thing dull—and in men like that, boredom slid easily into vicious ideas.

Panic flashed across Shi Yuanxu’s face. He braced himself hard against the hands shoving at him, refusing to let them force him even half a step closer to the edge. But the more he resisted, the rougher they became, intent on dragging him straight into the abyss. His chest rose and fell violently as he staggered backward.

Then his foot slipped. His vision went black in an instant as his body lost all balance. He pitched backward, the sky above him a curtain of endless, ink-dark night, and he squeezed his eyes shut in terror.

So he really was going to die here after all?

Perhaps all of this was simply because he was an orphan from another world.

He had left his parents and his home when he was very young. Alone in this military district, he had been toyed with and tormented at will by comrades as savage as wild wolves, helpless to do anything but flounder. At the end of the day, he wasn’t even cut out for war. All he had ever wanted was to curl up quietly in some forgotten corner, plant flowers, tend a bit of green, bask in the sun. He didn’t even dare raise a hand in his own defense.

But in the Imperial Alliance, off-world immigrants could only become citizens by completing their term of service. Otherwise, they were doomed to drift through the slums for the rest of their lives.

Maybe, he thought, down in the abyss he could at least keep that lonely rag doll company—no. He knew better. Nothing that fell into the abyss ever made a sound. Perhaps it had no bottom at all. Perhaps he would just keep falling, and falling, until the darkness finally swallowed him whole.

Yet Shi Yuanxu did not fall for long. All at once he collided with a body as cold as ice, and in the next heartbeat, a long, sharply-jointed hand closed around him.

He had hit a man’s chest—hard, unyielding. At once he was drenched in the other’s presence, a chill that seemed to bore straight into his bones, like a coiled, frozen serpent winding itself around his body.

The cold made him shudder despite himself.

“A living sacrifice,” a voice said—low, magnetic, edged with impatience. “Little thing, even you must know your tribute is barely fit to show.”

Shi Yuanxu went rigid from head to toe. He still couldn’t see a thing in the smothering dark, but the thought of the teddy-bear pillow he clutched every night, thrown away for nothing into the abyss, made his eyes burn hot.“If you don’t want it,” he choked out, “then give my tribute back!”

“Mm. That will do as well.”The other seemed to turn something over in his mind. “How about I take you in exchange?”

He was still so young, far too young to grasp what that meant. Smearing at his eyes with his fists, he snapped through his tears, all bristling ferocity, “And you have to give me back the buns too.”

“The wire, and the nutrient solution, and the water bottle, and the scrap metal, and the little car…”He sounded so aggrieved that he rattled them off like a menu, unable to stop.

The other fell silent for a heartbeat. “I’ll return all of it to you. How does that sound?”

Shi Yuanxu nodded, dazed and uncomprehending. The other let out a few low, cold laughs and said nothing more.

In the next instant, Shi Yuanxu came back to himself and found he was still standing at the edge of the abyss. At his side sat his bulging woven sack of “treasures,” as though nothing at all had happened.

The soldiers around him, however, had gone rigid. None of them had expected the boy who had just toppled into the abyss to be standing there again in one piece.

“Damn it, how the hell did you get back up here—fuck, this place really is haunted, there really is something down there—ah!”

One man, still oblivious to how wrong the air had turned and intent on picking a fight with him, suddenly clutched his chest, as if a spike of pain had been driven straight through his heart.

Another burly man went down hard, and the rest, seeing it, blanched even further, realizing that something was terribly off.

“What did you just see?”

“It looked like… someone…”

“Something was crawling—wait, it’s on you!”

“—Sound the alarm! The base is haunted!”

The soldiers who had crowded in to watch the show by the abyss were all veterans of a hundred battles; some had fought in planetary wars, the sort to charge straight into enemy fire with shells screaming past their faces. Others had once slit the throats of mutated, bloodthirsty star-beasts with their bare hands, holding steady even as those monstrous fangs sank into their flesh. And yet now their pupils contracted, their breathing turned ragged, and more than one of them was yelling for his mother.

It felt as if something twisted and monstrous had crawled out of the abyss and hurled itself at them. An instant later, they were tumbling into some unseen pit, howls of pain tearing from their throats.

Beside this chorus of wails and panic, Shi Yuanxu was calmly taking inventory of the odds and ends in his woven sack. Little bath balls, tiny toy cars… He let out a soft breath when he finished counting—thirty-two pieces in all. On his still-childish face, the tear tracks had not yet dried, but the stormy expression slowly cleared, a small smile beginning to show. All of his things had come back.

“Shi, there’s a prospective guardian here to see you. Could you come out for a bit?”

He didn’t even bother putting the sack down. With the big bundle slung on his back and his solid little frame barreling forward, he trotted into the waiting room—and saw that someone was already there.

A man was half-reclining along a bench, silver hair spilling down one side like liquid metal. His features were cleanly cut, brow high and proud, and his mouth was a thin, austere line.

Cold, clear moonlight climbed the planes of his face, draping his profile in a pale sheen.

His eyes were closed—until they opened. A pair of long, narrow eyes slanted toward Shi Yuanxu, flicking him a slow, measuring glance.

“Come here.”

Shi Yuanxu hitched the woven sack higher on his shoulder and crept forward, hesitant step by hesitant step—only to flinch as that cold, cutting presence grazed his skin. The man in front of him looked scarcely human. The small boy was still too young to have any real sense of what beauty was.“You… are you a ghost?”

“A ghost?” One dark brow lifted. A moment later, the man’s mouth curved, almost lazily. “Would a ghost bother to return a mortal’s tribute?”

“Then… then you’re—”Shi Yuanxu’s thoughts moved at a child’s pace. In his little, narrow world, anything that wasn’t human could only be either a ghost or a god. At last he seemed to land on the right answer; panic slowly crept into his expression. “A god?”