“Boss, care to tell us about this grumpy old lady you’re gonna spend Christmas with?” when Jianmen, Caroline and Jason were sitting in a house that looked like a floating cupcake eating frozen yoghurt and ice cream, Jason asked Jianmen: “Is she someone from your past? Since … you know, now that we both know that almost everyone you know is magic or even immortal, it’s kinda hard to imagine that you still have a close civilian friend, and it is someone whom you are going to spend such a family festival with.”

“Yeah, is she your family? I thought you’re … you’re not from around here?” Caroline asked: “What made her so special? ”

“She’s not my friend … well, at least she wouldn’t call us that. And it’s a long and complicated story. And if I tell you in detail, I’m afraid it might be the same case with the time I gave you a knowledge dump - because it had to do with how I first got here.” Jianmen sighed and ate a spoonful of his bowl of ice cream that looked like a ugly haunted mountain with blood red lava dripping down the top: “But … maybe I think hard before I try - she’s a normal civilian, immigrated from China a long while back with her grandson. And … umm… her grandson died not long after I met them.”

“Oh my god, what happened?” Caroline almost dropped her spoon.

“Like I said, it was quite complicated. Well - complicated in the sense that it involved some very hard to handle truths about the world.” Jianmen hesitated for a short while, then continued: “So, let me ask you this: you know about the butterfly effect?”

“Yeah. It’s like a butterfly flaps its wings in one place and then a hurricane hits a place on the other side of the globe.” Caroline nodded.

“It’s a way to describe the extent of chaos that exists in a complex system, where the change in initial condition or chronologically upstream events can lead to drastic change in the downstream or the final product of the entire complex process.” Jason added to the answer while digging a hole on the skull of his green zombie coke with purple cream brains, and when he pulled the spoon out, a big jiggly piece of purple and red jello shaped like blood stained brains was stuck on his spoon.

“Woah woah, professor, there should be only one smartass here.” Caroline nudged Jason with her elbow: “And that is Boss.”

“She’s right. I have a world class super computer right here.” Jianmen laughed and pointed at his temple: “Anyway, the point of me bringing up the butterfly effect is, when I came into your world, even though I tried my hardest to be discreet, I unavoidably caused some disturbance in the flow of this world’s karma.

“And speaking of karma, let me tread carefully here, I don’t want the insecure manipulative bitch to mess with what a nice time we’re having here.” Jianmen continued slowly and with seconds of thought before each sentence: “Okay, do you know the wave-particle duality of light?”

“Holy crap Boss, I feel like I’m dragged into Jason’s engineering school lectures.” Caroline banged her head on the table and said: “Can you make it simpler? For non-STEM kids like me?”

“Basically, that light has both the properties of waves, and the properties of high speed particles.” Jason explained: “And what does that have to do with karma?”

“Simply put, karma flows are like light - they are both continuous streams and flows like water and air, and they are also chains with individual links.” Jianmen explained: “And each being in the world has at least one chain of karma flowing through them. But if you’re a complete out-of-worlder like me, your existence will disturb the normal karma flow. And the process of correction will create one for you, and thus changing the karma flows of those around you. Think about it this way - you need chains to hang things on the wall, then something new comes into the picture, and you don’t have any new chains. So you have to remove some links from this chain, then remove some links from that chain, and make a new chain from the links to hang the new thing on the wall.”

“So when you came, you broke some other people’s karma flow - chains?” Jason asked: “That doesn’t sound good, or fun for anyone else.”

“Not exactly, I am pretty familiar with how this works.” Jianmen gently tapped his spoon on his bowl: “So when I started my travel, I brought plenty of raw materials with me to help the correctional forces to construct the flow for me - you know, like something that came with the chains.”

“And then what happened?” Jason swallowed a mouthful of his “zombie brains” and asked.

“Well…”

-------------------------------------------

It was a windy and rainy night. Thunder rumbled and lightning shot down on the ground from the thick clouds above, the sky was completely obscured and neither the moon nor a star could be seen.

In a dark and empty parking lot, a red, hot, and round metal door with arcane symbols and relief sculptures of heads of dragons and lions carved on it appeared out of thin air. Then the next second, the door opened from the middle, and Jianmen, now with burn marks all over his body and his clothes torn up and bloodied, was thrown out of the metal door like a rag doll.

The metal door disappeared as swiftly and seamlessly as it appeared, leaving only Jianmen lying on the ground as the sole proof of its existence.

Jianmen struggled to face up to the sky, then he tore the small round jade coin with a silver metal frame from his neck and swallowed the coin in whole. This was his insurance policy - an extremely powerful one time artifact he crafted for himself, whose only purpose was to seal his power as much as possible when the worst that could happen actually happened and heal his injuries as much as possible. The sealing of his power was to lessen the disturbance he would cause to the destination when he could not do it by himself, thereby minimizing the power of reaction forces the destination’s universe could fire back at him. It also had the benefit of enhancing its own healing effect and almost any other healing spells - for something was true for almost all universes: the weaker the injured, the easier it was to heal it with spells.

After he swallowed the coin and pushed the coin to his stomach, a soft and soothing energy started flowing from his stomach - the position of the coin, which started healing his severely injured internal organs and meridians, as well as the burn marks on his skin.

Jianmen laid on the ground in the rain for a few hours before he could even get his upper body up, and before he could get up he fell two times, once on his back and once on his face. Blood was coming out of his mouth, eyes, ears and nose but was quickly washed away by the rain.

“Fuck your mom.” after giving up and starting staring at the sky after the entire agonizing process, Jianmen cursed in Mandarin, with steam and smoke coming from his mouth.