Books: Blade of the Immortal Vol. #2: Cry of the Worm

Blade of the Immortal is shaping up to be one of the best arguments I’ve seen against living forever. There’s always a cost involved, and it’s usually not only paid in flesh and blood but spirit — and spirit is the one thing you can almost never get back. I remember reading Fritz Leiber’s oft-anthologized short story “The Man Who Never Grew Young,” about an immortal who experiences time in reverse, and is doubly estranged from the rest of the human race — both because he will outlive (or is that “outdie?") everyone around him, and because he has only the oblivion of being “unborn” to look forward to.BotI’s not quite that despairing — thank goodness — but the more we see of Manji the unkillable ronin and his female sidekick Rin, the more the idea of never being able to let go of life seems like a dread curse.

“Curse” is the best description for what’s happened to Manji. As punishment for evils past, he’s been condemned to live until he can claim the lives of one thousand wicked men. If he’s wounded, the countless thousands of parasitic worms that inhabit his body will stitch him back together, although they can’t replace the eye he lost before he was thus infected. They also can’t protect anyone else, which is always the downfall of an immortal — and so he wonders what kind of rotten luck he must have had to become partners-of-a-sort with Rin. She’s a young women out to avenge her father, and Manji’s reluctantly agreed to help her get justice … if only because it sounds like a convenient way to get the bad guys to come to him and get him off the hook all the sooner.

Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.