Chapter 123: Portrait of Hell

The abandoned factory floor was frigid. Dust hung in the thin light slanting through broken windows. Su Yao scraped rubble and old rags aside with her boot, clearing a wide space. She unrolled the scroll onto the concrete and anchored its corners with chunks of brick.

Her attempt at an inverted circle in her apartment had failed. Here, she would build it right. She drew precise lines with a fresh stick of warehouse chalk, copying each sigil from the scroll’s complex diagrams before reversing its direction.

Su Yao replaced the offerings of blood and silver with binding and passage components: sharp iron filings, a twist of her own dark hair, and a drop of distilled mountain spring water. She worked in silence for an hour. Only the scrape of chalk and the distant hum of city traffic broke the stillness.

When she finished drawing, the circle spanned ten feet across. Her phone vibrated. Zhang Wei was calling.

“Are you in the factory?” he asked.

“I’m conducting an experiment,” she replied.

“Do you need a hazard team on standby?”

“I need quiet.” She ended the call and powered the phone off, standing at the edge of the immense circle. Taking a steadying breath, she stepped into the exact center.

Power flowed from her core down through her feet and into the chalk lines. The light rose in columns, forming an archway within the circle’s perimeter.

Through the arch, the factory wall vanished.

In its place stood a vista of shattered basalt and sluggish rivers of glowing magma. The stench of sulfur flooded the space.

The gateway held. Is it permanent? The scroll offered no answer for a reversed ritual. It only detailed how to call things forth. She studied the archway’s edges. The light was stable, the image clear. So this is Gehenna. The six great officers resides here.

She looked at the reflected hellscape. Ancient texts claimed it was a mirror of Assiah, the world of action. When the One banished the rebellious hosts, he cast them into this dark reflection. Adam and Eve were cast into Assiah to toil. Their tempter was cast here to rule over a kingdom of ashes.

Su Yao took a single step forward. The air beyond the gateway rippled like heat haze. She could feel its scorching breath on her face.

Zhang Wei would call this insane. Mei would ask for pictures. Li Xiu would probably faint.

She adjusted the strap of the scroll tube across her chest. Then she walked through the arch.

The factory’s chill vanished. Under her shoes, the ground was warm to the touch. She turned to look back. The gateway stood solid in the air, showing her dusty factory floor.

Good.

The sharp crack of gunfire echoed against the basalt cliffs. Su Yao dropped into a crouch behind a sharp rock spire.

Through the sulfur haze, she saw men in uniforms taking cover behind jagged outcrops. Muzzle flashes lit the perpetual gloom. The language that reached her was Japanese. Orders were shouted. Then another voice answered in a Slavic tongue, but the cadence was older than modern Russian.

What is this?

She peered around the rock. A group of soldiers in khaki advanced, bayonets fixed to their rifles. They fired in disciplined bursts toward a fortified position nested in a cluster of petrified black trees.

Return fire came from the trees. The shouts from there were Russian. She recognized the shape of their caps and the red star pinned to the front. That symbol is a century out of date.

A Japanese soldier fell, his dark blood pooling on the hot stone. His comrade dragged him back, snarling a command. The Slavic-speaking soldier beside him lobbed a german stick grenade. None of this fits.

Frozen in a hellish snapshot was a mortal wart. The Bolsheviks perished in fire and time. Yet here they were, holding a line in Gehenna against the Imperial Japanese army and their allies.

A ricochet whined off the rock above her head. Stone chips stung her cheek. This is a problem.

She needed a better view. Su Yao moved, keeping low against the uneven ground. She scrambled up a fractured ledge. The movement caught a soldier’s eye. A young man wearing a red star turned his rifle toward her.

“Stoi! Kto ty?”

“I’m a tourist,” Su Yao muttered. She kept her hands visible, away from her body.

His finger tightened on the trigger, but a burst of Japanese fire forced him back into cover.

Su Yao reached the top of the ledge. Below, two dozen Bolsheviks held the treeline.

About thirty Japanese infantry advanced against them, supported by a squad in grayer uniforms. The second group moved in tight formation, firing in controlled bursts as they pushed forward. Their shouted commands came in the same Slavic tongue she had heard before.

A memory from a documentary Mei had left playing surfaced. The uniforms and the language matched the Interwar period from a specific faction.

“Czechoslovak Legion,” she breathed.

That makes no sense. They didn’t fight the Reds alongside the Japanese. The Japanese forces in Outer Manchuria never collaborated with them like this. And none of them belonged here in a demonic plane, fighting the same battle for what looked like forever.

An artillery shell screamed overhead. All the soldiers ducked at once, reacting before the shell had even landed. This is a memory.

This patch of Gehenna held the remains of a battle long past. Whatever lingered here remembered the feel of a Mosin-Nagant and the dread that came before the charge.

A Japanese officer stood, waving his sword. “Totsugeki!”

As the charge began, the Bolsheviks leveled their rifles. Across from them, the Czechoslovaks fixed bayonets with a single, synchronized shout.

Su Yao watched the collision. The gateway was behind her, and this battle was between her and any further exploration. I need to make them stop.

A figure emerged through the drifting gunsmoke and stepped into the line of fire. He wore the brown uniform and officer’s cap of the Imperial Japanese Army.

The Japanese advance faltered. A sergeant near the front lowered his rifle. “Tenkuji-Taichou?”

The figure raised an open hand. “Retreat! Fall back to the ridge line! Now!”

His voice silenced the crack of rifles. The Japanese soldiers glanced at each other and began to pull back, dragging their wounded. The Czechoslovak fighters hesitated, then followed with a series of calls.

Tenkuji… Of course.Ten (Jeon). Kuji (Woochi).

The name as written in Hanja, read the Japanese way.

Su Yao stood up from her crouch. “Jeon Woochi.”

He turned. The face under the peaked cap was indeed the Daoist from the Great Wall. “Fox. You picked a dangerous room to explore.”

“What is happening here?” She gestured at the retreating soldiers. “They look and sound real, but they belong in a history book.”

Jeon Woochi watched the Bolsheviks also melting back into the petrified trees, their red stars glinting. “They are real, and they are trapped here.”

“Like the tourists at your wall?”

“A similar principle. Only a stronger version.” He peeled off his leather gloves, tucking them into his belt. His hands were clean, unlike the grime-streaked soldiers. “Something has been pulling people in for a long time. My sanctuary at the Wall catches wanderers. This place catches battles. It caught this one from the Siberian frontiers a century past. Time is weak here. It bends and loops.”

A distant artillery shell screamed again. Both of them ignored it. Su Yao studied the face of a young Czechoslovak soldier who paused to drink from an empty canteen.

“They don’t act like ghosts.”

“A ghost is a soul,” Jeon Woochi’s said. “These men have no souls left. Gehenna stripped away their mortal essence and replaced it with a demonic imprint. We call them vestiges. Chaotic creatia molded into imitations of the lives they once lived.”

“So they’re demons?”

“Yes. But they believe they are still fighting their war.” He nodded toward the Japanese lines. “They think if they win this ridge, they can go home.”

“Can they be freed?”

Jeon Woochi looked at her. “Free a vestige? You would be unmaking a demon. It’s possible. But you would not be saving the man. That man is gone. You would only be granting him final death.”

A command to regroup echoed from the Bolshevik’s position.

“I monitor this battle and try to contain its edges,” Jeon Woochi said. “Today, you opened a new door right in its path.”

Su Yao looked back at her gateway. It stood a hundred yards behind them between the two trench lines. “Will they try to use it?”

“They see a strange light. It isn’t a trench or a hill. They will investigate it, maybe even try to capture it.” He adjusted his officer’s cap. “They might think it’s a way home.”

Su Yao raised her hand toward the glowing gateway. The green light blurred and then folded into the landscape. To any watching eye, it now appeared as just another jagged basalt outcrop.

She turned her attention back to the ridge line. The Japanese and Czechoslovak forces had settled into a defensive position. Men sat on rocks, cleaning rifles. Others tended to the wounded.

Then she saw the attendants bandaging a gunshot wound and offering sips of water from actual canteens. They wore modified uniforms, but their features were wrong. The planes of their faces were too perfect. Their eyes held a reflective sheen like wet stone. One adjusted a soldier’s sling with long fingers that ended in nails too dark and hard.

Demons. She had almost missed them. “Why are they helping?”

Jeon Woochi followed her gaze. “Because the enemy of their enemy shoots a Mosin-Nagant. The political situation here is… complicated.”

He pointed toward the Bolshevik treeline. “The forces holding that position are led by a revolutionary mind.”

“They overthrew hell’s nobility.”

“And replaced it with a classless society.” Jeon Woochi frowned. “Most demons aren’t immune to bullets, especially bullets fired by souls turned into believing fixtures. The Bolsheviks had the weapons and numbers. They subjugated the local demon populations easily.”

Su Yao watched a demonic medic press a damp cloth to a Czech soldier’s forehead. “So these demons joined the other side.”

“They want the Bolsheviks gone. It’s an alliance of pure survival.” He sighed. “The war commissar over there is very persuasive. He organized the vestiges and armed them with doctrine. Now he rules this sector of Gehenna.”

“Commissar?” Su Yao asked.

“The man who uses the name Trotsky and believes this is the true permanent revolution,” Jeon Woochi said.

A whistle blew from the petrified forest. The Bolshevik vestiges began forming up again into ranks, their movements synchronized. A figure on a black rock raised a hand, rallying them. He wore a long coat and a fur cap.

The demon medics finished their work and blended into the rocks. Their human charges checked weapons, preparing to return to the fight. They still think they can win and go home.

Su Yao looked at the illusion-hidden gateway, then at the gathering storm in the trees. “He will try to expand.”

“He is already expanding,” Jeon Woochi said. “This battle is just a border skirmish. My presence here as ‘Captain Tenkuji’ is the only reason this front has held. But I can’t be everywhere.”

Su Yao frowned at him. “Then why bother? This isn’t your war.”

“I saw a vision of Korea split in two by foreign power. The north strangled by a dictatorship, the south devoured by corporate greed. If I do nothing, that future becomes inevitable.”

Jeon Woochi continued, “When the Japanese occupation finally breaks, the people deserve a future shaped by their own hopes and principles rather than the ambitions of a few.”

His words lingered in the air, and Su Yao followed his gaze to the distant figure on the black rock. His gestures were theatrical. “Why Trotsky?”

Lenin carried more historical weight. He was the symbol.

Xiao Ling’s memories provided a cascade of textbook summaries. The Bolshevik Revolution failed after Lenin’s assassination in 1918. Stalin then twisted the party into something else, betraying the original cadre. Trotsky was the exiled theorist with the ice pick in his head.

“Lenin is too iconic,” she said aloud. “His legend is a blueprint. Followers would demand specific answers.”

Jeon Woochi listened, his eyes on the gathering troops. “You think he would fail the test.”

“A vestige is an imitation. It runs on memory and obsession.” Su Yao watched the commissar point toward their hidden gateway. “Lenin’s memory is a rigid doctrine. Trotsky’s memory is about the struggle itself: the permanent revolution. It fits this endless battle better.”

“Or,” Jeon Woochi said, “he is the actual Trotsky.”

“You mean his soul? Trapped here?”

“I mean the man died far from home. His life was defined by exile and ideological war.” Jeon Woochi adjusted his officer’s cap. “A powerful mind severed from its body at the moment of violent death could be pulled into a leak like this. His soul could have been replaced here, turned into a vestige that remembers its own name.”

The commissar shouted an order across the blasted ground.

“That would make him a demon leading demons,” Su Yao said.

“A true believer in a hell of his own making.” Jeon Woochi turned to face her. “Which possibility troubles you more, fox? A clever imitation, or the real article?”

A real Trotsky would understand the gateway and could try to expand his campaign beyond Gehenna.

The whistle blew again. Ranks of Bolshevik vestiges began to advance, their boots crunching on the scree in unison.

“Both options are problematic,” Su Yao said. She kept her gaze on the advancing line. “How do we stop a revolution that has already conquered hell?”

Where are the governors? The great officers should have crushed this uprising at its first spark. Have they been overrun, or are they simply that weak? Paper tyrants whose thrones collapsed the moment real opposition walked in?

Su Yao pulled the scroll from its tube. She unrolled it on the flat surface of a basalt rock. Her finger traced the name and title inscribed in the grimoire. “Halphas. White Countess. I call you by name and title.”

She channeled a thin stream of power into the words. The air before her chilled. A scent of frost and dry parchment cut through the sulfur as Halphas coalesced from the gloom.

The White Countess. stared at Su Yao. “You. I expected a longer interval between your disasters.”

“I have questions,” Su Yao said.

Halphas regarded her for another moment. “The answer is the Illuminati. Their attempted ritual to merge worlds was a catastrophic stupidity. It weakened the structures between realms and left backdoors that distracted the governors of Gehenna at a critical moment.”

Jeon Woochi observed in silence, his hands tucked into his sleeves.

“Distracted how?” Su Yao pressed.

“Six great officers govern Gehenna.” Halphas tilted her head. “Sargatanas is one. His attempt to exploit the Illuminati’s rift failed. The others pursued similar opportunities. Some are sealed in your world. Others are recuperating from their own miscalculations.”

So hell has no competent management. Su Yao glanced toward the Bolshevik lines. Their advance had paused. “And the vestiges filled it.”

“Mortals with demonic cores. They are crude things that should have been ground into the ash. Instead, they organized. They found a leader with a mind for tactics and a dogma of perpetual conflict.”

“You let them conquer you,” Su Yao said.

“We were not present to stop them. The great officers are prisoners of their own ambition. The Illuminati’s folly provided the cell. Now a revolutionary commands the guards.”

A volley of rifle fire echoed from the treeline. Halphas turned her head toward the sound. She watched the vestiges move. “This is the result. A classless society of the damned. How fitting.”

“What do you want?” Su Yao asked.

“I want order restored.” Halphas looked back at her. “For now, you’re a relevant variable. I will provide information. You will act.”

“Why would I help you?”

“Because their next revolution will not be contained here.” Halphas pointed a finger at the illusion-hidden gateway. “He will find your door and see it as the perfect beachhead for exporting his permanent revolution to Assiah. Your world is already fractured by supernatural conspiracies. Imagine it reforged by Bolshevik vestiges with demonic resilience and nothing to lose.”

Su Yao followed the line of her finger. The commissar was now staring at the patch of disguised rock. He suspects.