Warning: graphic description of violence, gore, and sexual content
It's a beautiful whorehouse in the south of Dōngguǎn, because Toji always finds all filthy rundown things beautiful, and the prostitute he's fucking is a particularly pretty little thing. The room blisters with the scent of sweat and sex, perfume and polyester, cheap and cloying. From the open window, a soft waft of incense slinks into the room like a dying thief. The aroma of the degenerate meets one of the deified, saturating each other into a sick, revolting smell.
Toji adores it. He fucks into her harder, liking the way she tries to hold on; lacquered fingernails failing to draw blood on the skin of his back. It's adorable. Nearly endearing, if he were ever capable of such sentiments.
The sheet ranks of Chinese liquor, the bottle toppled over by a kick of her feet when he ate her out the second time. He doesn't mind; he was never one to drink, and the money is not his. Still, he had made sure to hold her legs down when he ate her out the third time. It had been easy. This is easy. Sex is never a struggle. She shudders through her orgasm and he cradles her neck without love, his fingers like a noose, and her voice slits the air breathlessly. He fucks her through it, and then after it as well, his pace languid and unrelenting—
Toji hears the door open in the next room.
The brothel room is overstuffed, its decor pseudo-versailles with plastic velvet pillows and moth-riddled canopies—an imitation of decadence so poor that it's richer than the original. The walls are laughably thin, cheap duplex layered with gaudy wallpapers. Conversations in local dialect leak through like rainwater, humid, porous. He hears a creak, a slam, and then a string of giggles from a man and a woman. The man's low and drunk, the woman's lilting and playful. Both bargaining. It is a whorehouse, after all.
Toji isn't the kind of man who pays for sex. Correction: Toji isn't the kind of man who pays. Not with money and certainly not with his life. It's a different story, of course, when the money and the life in question belong to someone else. After all, what good are work expenses if not to rent an entire brothel for himself?
Or two, or three, or five?
Toji does love his business trips.
The women here are just his type, too, because most women anywhere are just his type. Toji isn't particularly picky with his vices. Things unindulged, as far as he is concerned, are things wasted. Despite what the state of his fluctuating bank account might imply, Toji is not a wasteful man. He doesn't waste money—he just spends them until they're gone. What is life for, if not to be lived?
He hears the bargaining stops, delving into another string of giggles. And then moans. The bed creaks next door, a metallic groan. Toji pulls out of the whore.
The woman under him whines a protest that turns into a delighted gasp when he lifts her easily, his hands wrapping around her waist entirely. She weighs nothing to him. He flips her body over and drags her hips to the edge of the bed before fucking into her again. Satisfied with this arrangement, Toji keeps his pace inside her as he reaches to take his gun from his Curse.
His choice of pistol today is a double-action Walther that he favors for its ambidextrous controls. It's a familiar weight in his hand, the leather easy in his grip. Still fucking the woman, he checks the chambers idly before flipping the safety off.
He tilts his head to the side, listening carefully for the hitch and the creak of the bed next door, the wet sound of meat meeting meat, the sighing and moaning of the neighboring prostitute—her voice just a tad higher than Toji's whore, and much more artificial. Poor girl. But that's business for you. And Toji understands business perfectly well.
Toji stops thrusting. The prostitute bucks under him at the abrupt pause, pushing her ass back against his cock with another protesting whine. He tuts at her disapprovingly. "Keep still, darling," he says, raising his pistol and aiming at the spot on the wall where he knows his target's head would be.
It would be a perfect headshot.
It always is. He had cased the neighboring room beforehand, its layout the exact replica of this one. The picture is easy in his head—all six of his senses reconstructing a crystal clear visual. Toji's bullets are special-made; armor-piercing tungsten encased in copper jacket cursed to hell and back—they'll pierce the brothel's poor excuse of a wall with no problem. And he's generous with them too—Toji always double-taps for insurance. Two pulls of the trigger and this job will be over without fanfare.
But Toji has always found it a little more interesting when they struggle.
He aims his pistol down and shoots where he knows his target's kneecap would be.
He doesn't bother with a silencer. The shot breaks through the night like shattered glass, a shrill, guttural scream startling the damp darkness. Somewhere a street cat yowls and the streetlights shudder in surprise. But the night continues on. It always does. Outside the brothel are other brothels, and then the night market, and then the gambling dens with their clusters of old men and women playing mahjong. Nobody would bother with some gunshot, because they know enough not to. They also know enough not to bother with sorcerers' business.
Well, the fact that he paid off the entire red light district probably helps.
Gun still in hand, Toji leans down to kiss the whore who had been so good as to stay still. Her lipstick tastes like cherry, so he bites down until he tastes blood. "Good girl," he tells her in Mandarin. She giggles, and then moans when his one weaponless hand travels down to finish her for the fourth time.
He doesn't bother to wear his clothes when he walks over to the next room. He knocks before he swings it open, though, because he likes to keep his manners with a lady in the room.
The dark has never been an obstacle to his eyes. His target has stopped screaming and is now sobbing, body contorted on the reddening bed sheet, shirtless with his pants around his ankles. His right knee is obliterated. The prostitute the target had been fucking is still on the bed as well, looking bored to the world now that she doesn't have to fake an orgasm for a measly few hundred yuan. The moment Toji enters, she bats tarred lashes in his direction, daintily stepping down the bedding and around the writhing target as if the latter is an unpleasant stain on the sheet.
Toji winks at her. "Room service," he says. "Anything you'd like, beautiful?" She laughs prettily. The prostitute does not understand the joke, but the Japanese word for beautiful must strike a familiar chord. That aside, it's a prostitute's trade to smile at whatever the fuck her customer says. He snags her by the waist when she's close enough, her mouth soft under his, and she makes a nice sound when his hand finds her ass. He hasn't finished. Maybe he'll fuck her next.
But work, unfortunately, comes first. Toji does not have many virtues attached to his name, but a slacker he is not.
His right hand stays on her, while his left, the one with the gun, reaches for his Curse. The Curse is obedient. Immateriality is a strange sensation he has long gotten used to—the gun slips from his fingers and in return, a throwing knife glides into existence in his grip. He palms it, pulling away from the kiss. "Close your eyes, sweetheart," Toji tells her. And then he throws the knife right into the target's hand.
The target wails. Toji waves a careless hand at the whore in the universal sign of get the fuck out, and she obeys wordlessly.
Toji kicks off the gun the target has been reaching for under the bed. Always nice to see when people have a will to live, truly—quite inspiring how most of his targets would kick and punch their way in the hope to live for just a second longer. Humanity is at its most optimistic at the brink of death. Toji reaches for his Curse, ready to take his Walther out and finally get this over with when something makes him stop short.
Ah. So this is why they hired him. Double-tapping might not be enough, after all.
"Oh?" Toji crouches down over the man, interested now. The bed protests under their combined weight. "What do we have here.."
His kneecap. It had been shattered, and even now, Toji can see chunks of bone and meat scattered on the bed sheet like confetti. But now the wound has miraculously closed. Curiously, underneath the blood, the skin has sealed itself shut. Huh. Toji leans forward to pull out the knife embedded in the target's palm.
Another wail. Toji ignores him, pulling the target's hand towards him in inspection. It's a deep wound—the blade had pierced straight through, a nasty gash revealing meat—but the wound is not still. Fascinated, Toji watches as the gash stitches itself back, patch by patch—
Seemingly having found himself, the target fights back—an attempt quickly shut down. Toji holds the flailing legs and twists them until he hears two resonant snaps. It's annoyingly noisy, the screams, but Toji has since long gotten used to that as well. He inspects the target's hand once more—half-healed, now. A fast recovery. Idly, he wonders if he could see the bruises above the broken femurs bloom and unbloom in real time, but Toji isn't sure if he's that much of a sadistic bastard to be into that. Probably not.
Probably.
"It hurts, huh?" Toji says, conversationally and entirely unsympathetic. "Healing?"
He had screamed louder when he healed more so than when he got the hit. He's human, Toji can see that much—little to no Curse energy. Just a businessman who deals business in all the wrong places, thinking he could build an empire off things he does not understand. Immortality isn't something you can impose on human flesh, let alone one belonging to a non-Sorcerer. There is a reason why wounds don't heal in a blink of an eye.
The man sobs. He's young, younger than Toji and far smaller than him. A cocky newcomer who bit more than he could chew. His mind is nearly gone from the pain, and beneath the thick dialect, Toji manages to understand one thing coming out of his mouth.
"Yāoshù shī shāshǒu," the target chokes out. Sorcerer Killer.
Toji smiles. It's always nice to meet a fan.
The target says something else, delirious and desperate. The dialect is too heavy for Toji to understand on top of his only passable understanding of Mandarin, but the message is clear. "You can pay me more, eh?" he scratches his jaw thoughtfully with the hilt of his throwing knife. "Oh, I don't know. It's not good for my rep to switch sides all willy nilly, y'see. Makes me look unprofessional."
Not that Toji can't be bought, of course. Plenty of men and women can attest to that.
"Plus," Toji says, taking a wakizashi out of his Curse, "I wouldn't wanna piss off the folks who have it out for you, would I now."
The blade gleams cruelly under the low light from the window—a stray reflection of the neon lights of the district, outshining the moon. The target struggles again at the sight, hysterical at the promise of pain. Cutting off his arms is a choice Toji makes without hesitation.
It's a clean amputation. Cursed blades are meant to cut down Curses, and thus they slice easily through bone. The blood is messy, however. Not that Toji minds. "Oh, look. It's growing back." Sinews of muscles intertwine with each other, wrapping around newborn bone. The target convulses, choking on his own scream. Toji wonders if the body can heal itself fast enough before it runs out of blood. What a thing, immortality! What a curse. Immortality, huh.. immortality wasn't in the dossier, though.
Toji takes out his gun and shoots the target.
"Don't kill me," the target says, after a while. The phrase don't kill me is something Toji quickly picks up in many languages and dialects. Mostly because people say it to him all the time. "Please don't kill me."
"I already killed you," Toji answers, both bored and annoyed. He had shot the target four times in the head. His fascination has long since left, replaced with the irritation of having to do overtime. He reaches into his Curse for his phone. "You just won't die."
"Please don't kill me, please, please don't—"
Toji shoots him, a chore done lazily. "Shut up," he says. "I'm on the phone. Hello?"
"Hello, Fushiguro."
"My clients are the Bāxiān, aren't they?" Toji says point-blank. To his annoyance, the target's head has already started to fix itself again, the cursed bullet rolling from the bed to the floor with a clang.
To his fixer's merit, they barely missed a beat before their reply. "The client wishes to have their identity unrevealed. The advanced pay we have wired to your account is ample enough for that confidentiality, have we not agreed?"
Toji laughs. If Japan has its Master Tengen, China has its Bāxiān—the holy Eight Immortal Sorcerers that have stood at the apex of the country since the Tang dynasty. "Look, sweetheart," Toji says, reloading his ammo. "Everybody knows they've been having an internal problem for a while now. They got a rat there who leaked the Peach of Immortality to the public, didn't they?" The exact phrase that has been thrown around is perverting their Holiness.
Pántáo—Peach of Immortality. A mythical fruit that grows in the garden of Xi Wangmu, said to be the source of the Eight Immortals' longevity. The fruit gifted them the eternity of Heaven and Earth and Sun and Moon, or so the legends say. Someone in their organization had artificially manufactured a pharmaceutical version of the holy fruit and auctioned them on the black market. And from the black market, the fruit makes its way to factories, and then to wholesale. Something reserved only for the gods was then mass-produced and sold to the masses in pills. The most human form of blasphemy: profit.
The Eight Immortals didn't stay still, of course. The factories were quickly torched and the products disappeared from the counter and all over the nation, the medicine was banned. The response had been quick and efficient. But it might not be that efficient after all.
"You told me I was to assassinate a businessman trading in illegal spiritual weaponry. Not someone—"
"Please don't kill m—"
Gunshot. "Not someone," Toji says flatly, "who can grow his brains back in twenty-six seconds."
A pause, this time. Nearly indiscernible, but it's there nonetheless. "You're making things hard for me, Fushiguro."
"Oh, it doesn't have to be hard, sweetheart. Just an extra tip would do," Toji says with a smile. "Occupational hazards happen all the time."
"..The client will compensate for the additional hazards."
"Generously?"
"Generously."
The Eight Immortals would rather not get their holy hands dirty, it seems. Luckily for them, Toji has no holiness to speak of and enough penchant for filth to compensate. "I am honored that this elusive client chooses to use my services."
"You better deliver, then."
When the target has finished repairing his brains, he wakes up to see Toji elbow deep in his stomach. The poor thing howls a screeching, animal sound, body twisting in a shocked seizure.
Toji tuts. "Keep still, darling," he says. He flips his sword by the handle, using it as a makeshift scalpel, and pulls the flesh apart to reveal the innards. "Let's see.."
The insides of the human body aren't very colorful—just red, more red, and the occasional variety of a jaundice, sickly yellow. The scent of blood and bile hits his nose, raw, raucous, rank. "Impressive. Even like this, your body is still trying to patch itself up." He can see the tissues attempting to reconnect themselves inch by inch. Very impressive indeed. "I think those folks aren't giving your product enough credit. It was you, wasn't it?"
The target gurgles and bleeds and bleeds. Too busy bleeding to form a coherent reply.. Toji doesn't mind. The content of the target's abdomen spills forth like a wet trashcan toppled over. "Real pántáo can give you three thousand years of life with one consummation, I've heard," he says thoughtfully. Toji has had his doubts, but it might not just be a fairytale, after all. The man is still alive. Not lucid, but alive, as Toji wreaks havoc in his digestive system. "But your commercialized product has to be ingested daily, am I right?"
It's a tedious thing, trying to find a needle in a haystack. Toji doesn't find what he's looking for in the stomach. Toji's blade moves down to the small intestines and proceeds to slice it string by string, and—aha. Found it. Toji gouges the object out with the tip of his wakizashi.
The pill is small, its size just a tip of a pinkie finger. Already half-absorbed by the body, it seems, but intact enough that Toji can pinch it between his fingers, curiously holding it close to his eyes. It's too bloody for him to see the color it once had. "Huh. Sure looks underwhelming."
Target does not respond—he has been silent for a while now. The body has stopped fixing itself now that the artificial pántáo has been removed. Toji has half the mind to take apart the ribcage as well, just to see if the target's heart still beats, just out of curiosity. Eh. Maybe that's a bit too much—Toji does have limits.
He flips his blade for a better handle to nail where the heart should be. There. That should do it. If not ... there is a butcher stall just a few blocks away. He'll rent himself a meat grinder later on.
He stands up, storing the bloody wakizashi to his Curse as a treat—his Curse has a taste for human blood. He inspects the pill pinched between his fingers. A bastardized version of holiness, eh? It does not smell of Curse, this thing. It smells of something raw—something that screams essence, both the flesh and the earth kind—the putridity of something organic in its purest sense, but not the way Curses do. Curses smell too much like human heart—they rank of anger and anguish. But this has nothing human in it. It's heartless. Unfeeling.
With the slightest of force, the pill shatters between his fingertips. Ashes of immortality fall to the floorboards like dust. It isn't attractive to him, the prospect of eternity. Immortality has no soul. Life, for Toji, is to take, and be taken.
Fushiguro Toji is in the business of death.
He finds a bottle of pántáo pills in the target's bag, unlabeled. Toji is not a wasteful man. These would fetch a pretty penny, either from the black market or the Eight Immortals themselves—whoever bids the highest. First pay first serve. All lives have a price, after all. What does that say about immortality?
He smiles. He loves his job.
The women are waiting for him when he returns to the next room. The target's blood smears on the whores as he holds them, tracing lines of sticky red to the slick of their crevices. Velvet crushes underneath the weight of their bodies, silk meets skin, languid lips littering every single inch. With lust and without love. The air reeks of heartlessness, but this is better than immortality. This, right here, is mean. All passion and no promises. All desire and none at all dear. Pleasure is short-lived, just how he likes it.
He is a rich man tonight, surrounded by stunning, short-lived, filthy little things. That's what makes it so good—that ever present urgency, the knowledge that all things die. That's what makes him feel alive. That's what makes him feel so unkind and so terrible. He is king of the moment, and not one second longer.
Fushiguro Toji is in the business of death. And business is good.