Boundary

"Ok. I will choke them, but I can't eat them for soul stones?" Alex asked as Arahabaki stood back and stared from top to bottom in feigned surprise.

"Not at your stage," Arahabaki said.

"That ghost just popped a soul stone out of his mouth after eating the other…"

"Try opening your mouth," came Arahabaki's sharp reply.

Alex opened his mouth as widely as he could. Before he could say anything, Arahabaki jammed his fist into his mouth and forced it further in, stretching it in cramping pain until Alex felt like he was choking. The size of Arahabaki's fist almost pushed his jaw and teeth into breaking point. If they could break.

Kanghui folded her arms at their antics and shook her head with disapproval as others around them gather to watch the scene. One sharp glare from her and they fled for their lives.

"FrUUUUHHHH" Alex tried to yell from the pain, flailing his arms in pain, oblivious to everything else.

Pulling his fist out, Arahabaki spat in disgust, "You can't swallow shit. Let alone a damn ghost. They are bigger than my fist. Your form is still stuck in its human way."

"And that will get fixed at the Ten Courts of Hell," she stopped and looked at Alex.

Her eyes turned from cold to twinkling as she stifled a laugh. Arahabaki guffawed loudly.

"WHFuuuU?"

"Fix your jaw."

"Hufuuu?" Alex replied as Arahabaki's hands reached out and grabbed his face.

Words were not coming forth. Nothing made sense, yet he felt nothing. Just normal.

"You idiot, your face...," Arahabaki grumbled and tightened his grip around a stunned Alex. "Damn jaw out of place."

Before Alex could do anything, he jumped at the sound of a quick snap. He felt no pain at all, only a warm fuzzy feeling.

The pain would have warned him of the changed position of his jaw. A few punches in his jawline by bullies experienced during his human life told Alex that he should have felt extreme pain and swelling. Arahabaki relaxed his hands and stepped back.

"WHAT… wait… is my face swollen?" Alex asked.

"huh? What are you on about?" Arahabaki's reply confirmed he pulled a fix on Alex without pain or any temporary disfigurement.

"Your body isn't a biological body, but a deep, embedded memory in your soul now. So it acts like a human body. I just fixed it," Arahabaki replied nonchalantly.

"But earlier…"

"Your soul is forgetting memories of pain."

"So the pain is also phantom? You know when humans have their limb cut off, some will think that it still exists, kinda scenario?"

Being dead, Alex still felt pain, yet no biological pain receptors existed in his form. The only other way was a phantom memory, but he had no neural pathways, nerves or anything with a biological brain to boot, too. Heck, he didn't have a brain at all.

Everything about his form is just fluffy energy waves, yet Alex still felt unchanged, just like when he was human.

Kanghui looked at Arahabaki, who shrugged. "Don't ask me. I wasn't human before. Nor had I experienced limb amputation."

"I wasn't human too."

"But you both have a human form…" Alex cried out in frustration.

"Pretty boy, some of us are several millennia old. Being a mortal, subjected to death was like… do you even remember going through your birth as a human?" Arahabaki patted his head condescendingly, like Alex was a three-year-old kid.

"Well, I can only remember as far back as four years old."

"Uh, huh? Same situation for us. You exist too long and you forget," Arahabaki shrugged again.

"Pain exists," Kanghui replied. "But how you perceive it differs from us."

"So if I pinch you, you don't feel pain?"

"Not here, only when we take physical forms in the mortal world… but damage incurred in one of our seven soul components, we get a milder version of soul shearing," she replied matter-of-factly.

"That's still pain…" Alex mumbled. "How the heck do you all differentiate things?"

"How do you tell if a ghost is a ghost?" Kanghui asked.

"Like differentiating ghosts from others? They look translucent."

Arahabaki rolled his eyes and turned away, whistling while shaking his head, and went a few paces to a neighbouring shop.

Alex snapped his fingers. Somehow that was not how it work. Kanghui pointed to a shopkeeper shooing away the two wretched looking human-like beings tugging at the shopkeeper's sleeves. "Can you see their auras?"

Alex scratched his head and squinted his eyes as Arahabaki feigned a coughing fit. Was it even a hint?

"They look… well, no."

"Green for ghosts. Other than that, not ghosts," Kanghui said.

Alex stared as hard as he could. He couldn't see the auras at all.

Noticing his frustrated frown, Kanghui added, "that's why we need to go to the Ten Courts of Hell. Only they can remove the unnecessary mortal bindings."

"Mortal bindings?"

"Memories of attachment to your old body. Erased," she replied, as though the procedure was some casual action, like ordering a beer at a pub. "Think of it as erasing your ties to Earth for you to function.

"Like memories of my parents?" Alex wanted confirmation.

"All human memories? Not really, unless they want you to go to Mengpo…"

"Mengpo?" Alex gasped.

Mengpo was a mythical figure who erased human memories before reincarnation. Tales depicted her as an old lady with an enormous cauldron of soup which was doled out to each soul before they entered reincarnation. And reincarnation existed.

"Yeah. The mythical old lady is not that old looking. And she doesn't use soup," Kanghui replied. "She charges us for time serviced to erase specific memories because she is often busy cleaning up energy waves to resend them back to populate the living beings in your human world."

"How do you clean energy waves?"

"Ever seen a washing machine?" Kanghui asked.

"Well, duh… wait, she dumps into something like a washing machine?"

Kanghui's eyes twinkled for a bit with amusement in her smile. This was the first Alex had seen an expression on her face. Then the expression vanished into the same poker face.

"See it to believe it," she replied. "Come along, a bored Arahabaki means trouble."

"How do…" Alex looked over at Arahabaki's side. He was arguing with the shopkeeper.

"Yeah, he picks a fight when bored," she replied.

"I can see that," Alex muttered as Kanghui approached Arahabaki and yanked him by the collar.

Turning to Alex while dragging a grouchy Arahabaki along, Kanghui said, "Oh and don't step into dark alleyways."

Arahabaki started snickering at her words as he stood up straight and adjusted his leather jacket's collar after Kanghui released her hold.

"Where?" Alex looked at the streets as they continue walking along the street in the perpetual day light. He had seen no dark alleyways around.

"There," she replied and then pointed to a tall skyscraper to the right behind the shop houses. "There's the border to the ghost city, Ming City, the largest city in our territory. It's the capital of all our ghosts."

Its architecture resembled One Times Square of New York, decked with flashing monitors and billboards of advertisements which he couldn't make out.

"If there's a ghost city there, why are the ghosts here?" Alex tilted his head at a few starving ghosts sitting on the side.

Like the earlier ones, they resembled human beggars from all Chinese eras, especially with the translucence forms. A few dressed in shabby jackets, T-shirts and jeans, but most wore ancient tattered gowns with dirty faces.

"Those are not ghosts. They are undercover officials of the Courts," came her reply he had least expected.

Alex would have expected some court uniform, like those seen in television dramas and even the hell exhibit in Haw Par Villa. Not shabbily dressed ghouls.

"They camouflage as ghosts to capture the ones which have not attended the Courts to decide whether they stay or go into the reincarnation cycle," Kanghui said.

"How do they tell who has been to the Courts?"

"Too many questions asked," Kanghui said. "Be a court official and you will find out."

"I can apply for a job there?"

"Yes. They are our kind, but it doesn't pay much soul stones… your choice. Be like a human and constantly work at a meagre job earning minimum wage," she replied.

"Or work for her," Arahabaki quipped. "Primevals have their own stable. Like I do."

"Welcome to the boundaries, dark side is Ming city, and the other is leads on to the street boundary shared between the Xitian and Takamagahara."

Their conversation had engrossed Alex so much that he didn't notice where they were going. Now before the tall skyscraper, standing there among the flickering shops, Alex noticed the street forking in two directions around it.

One direction in broad day light.

The other had what he would call an instant night once over the line, illuminated by lanterns hung high around shop houses which didn't just vanish and appear while the other had shops coming and going between the city.

"Holy shit, an entire fucking ghost city," Arahabaki peered into the night lit streets.

"Doesn't Takamagahara have Yomi-no-Kuni?" Alex asked.

"Yomi-no-kuni is underground. This one is above ground and probably extends below," Arahabaki uttered.

"Over eight billion ghosts live in many of our ghost cities. Ming city is the capital to their many cities," Kanghui said.

"Eight billion…," Alex blurted out in astonishment.

"Uncontrolled human breeding in the past, compounded by centuries of regulation which allowed men to take several wives," she replied. "And the need to breed until a male heir born. Or sometimes for more male spares. Not just Earth."

"Mine did that, and they even allowed affairs on, as long as it is discrete," Arahabaki muttered.

"Takamagahara and your kind have a knack for picking places with a lot of natural hazards. Not just Japan," Kanghui snapped back.

"Keeps our job easy. No need to control the population that much," Arahabaki snorted as he continued staring at the billboards.

"But your damn ghosts even have a freaking economy. Even Yomi-no-Kuni doesn't do that." Arahabaki studied the flashing advertising on the monitors. Alex looked at where Arahabaki looked and noticed the advertisements in an ancient script which resembled the first Chinese scripts with a few in modern Chinese.

No English at all. Alex knew his level of Chinese threw him right smack into deep shit - he couldn't understand most of the advertisements. His command of the Chinese language wasn't even good enough to beat the level of a primary school kid in China.

If only he listen to his mother, he would have read the monitors with ease, instead of relying on the pictures.