I was walking through the nearly empty dawn streets of the city, on my way to resume the investigation of the corpses that I hadn’t finished the day before. It was so early that the city gates hadn’t opened yet, so I swapped places with a shikigami outside the city once I reached the wall.
“Huh?” A lone figure stood in the middle of the field where the corpses lay. “Amyu?”
My voice must have reached her, as Amyu raised her head and looked at me. “Oh, Seika.”
“What are you doing so early in the morning?”
“Can’t you tell? Digging a hole,” she said, returning her eyes to the ground and stabbing her shovel into the earth. “We need to bury these people.” Amyu glanced at the rows of corpses. Purged of the zhen’s poison, the bodies of the formerly undead soldiers barely had a scratch on them, with looks of peaceful repose on their faces. How long had she been at it? A wide stretch of earth had already been dug up at Amyu’s feet.
“We don’t really have to,” I said hesitantly. We could just cremate them. That was what we had done in all the other cities until now.
“Maybe, but there’s no harm in it, is there? The ground here is all loose from your fight with the War Princess or whoever.” She was digging in the spot where the War Princess had called down her meteorites. The stones had been dispelled, but the ravaged earth remained. “I figured it was the perfect spot. They were already killed and turned into undead. Burning them after they die a second time just feels cruel.”
The empire had a tradition of burying its dead. It was for religious regions, but it wasn’t because they believed in life after death, like Christianity or Islam. Rather, it seemed to be a simple worldview rooted in nature—the idea that when one died, they returned to the earth had been passed down for generations. Cremation wasn’t unheard of, but it was seen as a sad way to be put to rest.
“I’m not asking you to help or anything. I’m doing this on my own,” Amyu said, continuing to shovel.
I watched her dig in silence for a while before walking up to the edge of the pit, pulling a shovel out of the other plane, and wordlessly driving it into the ground. Amyu said nothing as she watched me begin to dig. Only the sound of us digging a grave filled the air.
“How’d you get out of the city? The gate wasn’t open,” I asked, still working.
“There was a big tree, so I used it to jump up on the wall,” Amyu answered without looking back.
“Ha ha. Nice.” I couldn’t help but smile. That sounded like something she would do.
“Hey.” After a while, Amyu was the one to break the silence.
“Hmm?”
“Undead are corpses with the souls of dead people put in them, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Then do you think the people being controlled have thoughts and feelings too? I...” Amyu paused for a moment. “I cut some of them down too. At the time, I was just thinking that they couldn’t be allowed to attack the city, but maybe the people I cut down were thinking, ‘Why do we have to suffer like this?’ Maybe they were scared or in pain.” Her hands had stopped moving. “Do you know, Seika?” she asked without meeting my eyes.