First line of Nine: The dragon lies hidden in the deep. It is not time for active doing.
-----The Book of Changes
Travel Advisory of China-Level 4: Do Not Travel
Do not travel to China due to civil unrest, kidnapping, and armed conflict. No part of China is safe from violence except the city of Canton in the Southern region. Killings by warlords, arbitrary arrests, use of shelling, explosives, and shamanic powers pose a significant risk of death or serious injury. The destruction of infrastructure, housing, shrines, medical facilities, schools, and power and water utilities has also increased turmoil inside the country.
----- United Kingdom, Department of State
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One Month Ago
Joyce sat on the steps of an abandoned restaurant, holding her phone towards the sky at a 92-degree angle to get better reception. She swatted aside a purple blob of a plant spirit that curled around her wrist. A stray cat skittled past, mangled fur dotted with dried blood.
"Shamans are the bridge to the spirit world," the lecturer in the video droned on, "Their abilities include summoning and forming contracts with spirits, and drawing spiritual energy from their surroundings to cast spells and wards."
Joyce sighed as the video stopped to buffer, freezing on a frame with the lecturer's mouth half-open. She stared at his crooked teeth in exasperation. She had finally gotten her hands on a working phone and working internet, and it still took fifteen minutes to watch a five-minute video.
The video started again. "—Spirits are everywhere in our world, both good and bad. Rocks have spirits. Plants have spirits. Diseases also have spirits." Joyce sighed as the lecturer went to list fifteen more things that had spirits, watching for movement out of the corner of her eye.
"Those who may master control over their powers can complete feats such as commanding storms, summoning multi-colored lightning, and banishing spirits with only the use of salt—"
Spade pulled the phone from her hands. "Stop listening to this drivel," he said, voice tight with annoyance. "Ninety percent of it is bullshit." His annoyance meter went further up as the purple plant spirit splatted onto his face.
"What's the ten percent that isn't?" she shot back. He ignored her in favor of peeling off the purple form and slapping it out of existence.
Joyce tried again. "What's the ten percent that isn't? Come one, this is importa—" A rumbling sound interrupted her, and both of them glanced down the street at the tank turning the corner.
Spade sighed. "We can worry about that later."
///////
Taeyun sighed, flipping through the files a third time. As the head of the Hengshan Association, it was rare that persons of interest were dangerous enough to make it onto his desk. On one hand, it showed that his subordinates were competent. On the other...Taeyun sighed again.
Bad enough he had to deal with troublesome people. Even worse, the wind spirits had brought whispers of a storm not too far away and the resulting humidity that was sure to come, and now he had to deal with troublesome people in bad weather.
"Can you please stop sighing and get on with a decision?" Helang snapped. Taeyun had half a mind to chuck the files at his friend, but within minutes the whole Association would be gossiping that their bosses were fighting again, which would be more of a headache than it was worth.
Taeyun ignored Helang in favor of sighing a third time. Helang promptly slammed his hand onto the desk, slapping onto the picture of a handsome white-blond man wearing an insignia.
"What are we doing about this?" Helang demanded.
Taeyun stared at him, unimpressed. "We're not doing anything, these imposters will trip themselves up soon enough."
"Taeyun! If the Flying Dragons are really back we'll need to act, and act soon."
Taeyun ignored him in favor of sighing yet again, in hopes of somehow making the files vanish. He waggled his fingers and the wind spirit blowing air at his face floated back out the window. Helang continued undeterred, voice increasingly impatient.
"If you let Jia Xu get to them first we'll be at a disadvantage and you know it!" Helang was halfway to throwing the files in Taeyun's face, which would still set off the gossip mill and the popcorn machine. Taeyun closed his eyes in exasperation, imagining the headache-in-making. Who the hell had even bought the damn popcorn machine?
"Helang," he said slowly, "A foreigner and a teenage girl walk into Canton..." he paused. That line could've made for the start of a good joke. "...and you all start panicking as if they were really from the Flying Dragons. That group's been gone since the last emperor's time. Just let the scammers make some coin. For god's sake, the economy's in shambles."
Taeyun pried Helang's hand off the file. Their intelligence had come up with less information than a bag of chips had chips, and other than a few photos of the man that looked like model audition shots and a few of the girl eating three different bowls of instant noodles, there was nothing of substance. Their names though...
"Joyce Lee, was she raised in Europe? The file said she's Chinese, so what's with her name?" Taeyun frowned, "And Spade, no reported last name, who the hell names their kid Spade? Is that even Russian?"
He actually could think of a few rich merchants who gave their kids names ridiculous enough to make patricide via a brick and two liters of orange juice look like self-defense.
"No one said he's Russian," Helang said, "They said he and the girl came from the Russian border. And no one knows what's up with the girl either, apparently, she doesn't read well."
"She's like sixteen and she can't read," Taeyun deadpanned, "I don't see why you're worried."
Helang shifted uncomfortably. "Well, there were some things that didn't make it on file. Things are a mess anywhere north of the Yangtze so we couldn't say for sure, but apparently they didn't take the safe route here."
Taeyun raised an eyebrow.
"They plowed straight through all the combat zones," Helang continued, "and every single place there's been a freak storm or flash flood, or some kind of accident, right when they pass through. And every time it's large enough to stop the warlords from their slap fighting...and you know they love their slap fights."
Taeyun frowned. The warlords couldn't be persuaded to stop shooting each other for the Lunar New Year, and they had stopped for a few storms. And hadn't the wind spirits just warned of a storm? That probably wasn't good.
"Coincidence?" he offered. It probably wasn't. If their luck was that good, he'd light three shipping crates of incense to whoever they were praying to, thank you very much.
Helang only shook his head and tapped the insignia in the picture. "I think the Flying Dragons are back," he said, "and that we'd better do something about it."
///////
Joyce sipped the last of her soft drink, ignoring the glare from her companion as the straw made an ungodly slurping noise.
"For god's sake," Spade began, raising his hands to the air as if starting an actual prayer. Joker cut him off before he could launch into another nagging session.
"Weather's nice here," she said cheerfully. The humid air seemed to shimmer disdainfully in response. Spade glared disdainfully to match.
"If you are quite done eating," he said through gritted teeth, "We should get going already."
Joker sheepishly pushed aside the stack of paper plates. "I'm done."
Spade pinched the bridge of his nose as she moved to throw out the trash. People glanced at him nervously as they passed, but she couldn't tell if it were the insignia on his clothes or the exasperation rolling off him in waves. Not that she could complain about the latter since most of it was probably her fault.
Their intention was to hit the shaman hotspot of Canton where they would be able to lie low, but somewhere in the northern corner of the Peking Plains, Joyce had summoned a tropical storm in a colossal fuckup that had Spade resorting to shady dealings with a warlord's third concubine in order to smooth things over. By the next day, it was already on the gossip mill that the Flying Dragons were back with all the boom-shaka-laka that implied, and it was too late to back out.
Three destroyed tanks and eight untimely hail storms later, Joyce had not just dug her grave but built an elaborate tomb in it, having all but staffed it with terracotta soldiers and eight hundred jade vases. Spade was furious that she had messed up such a straightforward plan, but chaos breeds chaos and he knew it.
Then again, they had also expected seeking work to be straightforward. They would just register with the Shaman Council and quietly make a living, as people did back in the last dynasty. But after two days of eating breakfast with strippers finishing their shift, Spade had gleaned enough information from the legally certified Number 1 gossip mill in the country to figure out that there were too many factions for things to be that easy.
All over the country, shamans had splintered into groups to huddle together where they could; throwing their support behind whichever warlord promised the best conditions. In Canton, the heartland of shamanic activity, the situation was even more chaotic. Even the Shaman Council with all its historical backing had met its match in the newly sprung up Hengshan Association, making the entirety of the Southern region a political boxing ring. In other words? Not good.
The biggest problem with this whole thing was that Joyce and Spade didn't even know enough about the Order of the Flying Dragons, other than that it sounded like the name of a cult or a criminal organization. Joyce was almost 90% sure that there had been a gang in her hometown with the same name.
Spade had his mother's old uniforms and some information on what shamans of the Order had been capable of, but in terms of organizational structure and values, they had no idea. And that was a problem.
After all, it makes sense for an organization to change in sixty years as "We are committed to providing comprehensive health insurance for our employees and have updated our values to stand in support of diversity and inclusion when it is profitable for us but to take no real action otherwise." But it definitely didn't make sense to have shrunk to a total of two members who know little to nothing about what they were doing.
Which was exactly why, she assumed, they were seeking answers from the most dangerous place.
A paper bird flew past, navigating the crowd with ease. Joyce watched it go with a smile. "Let's go steal shit," Joyce patted Spade's arm. He turned an angry glance towards her.
"Don't say that out loud," he snapped. Between babysitting an overpowered teen and staying alive, the man was at his wits' end. Not that Joyce was making it any easier by goading him into her plan to steal files from the Shaman Council.
Her plan was stupid, which was why she thought it would work. Everyone was waiting for them to slip up. No one would think she could be that stupidly bold in maintaining her cover. She patted Spade's arm again.
"Thank you for your hard work," she said sincerely, well aware she was leaving the heavy lifting to him. For one, the Russian could read Chinese better than she did. Joyce struggled to understand Traditional Chinese, even if the Simplified version simply did not exist here. If Spade actually left the files to her, she'd probably end up with something about a politician's sordid affair with his sister-in-law instead of what they actually needed.
Spade groaned, probably thinking the same thing. "Better than having you blow something up again. Let's go."