"I guess it depends on what you mean by unfinished business?" Wen Qionglin says hesitantly. 

"Yeah, maybe.  Or it could be something totally weird, like, more atheists means more people don't expect to be able to come back and haunt shit, which makes them less... sticky? I dunno exactly, I don't think anyone's, like, studied why some people come back and some don't."

"That word isn't translating." He makes a fair attempt to pronounce 'atheist.'

"Oh, people who don't believe in gods- or like, I was using it to mean that sort of thing generally, I think if somebody believes in ghosts and magic but no higher powers they wouldn't call themselves an atheist even if it technically fits."

"Does America have a lot of those?" Wen Ning asks politely and almost entirely concealing his deep skepticism about how one might as well refuse to believe in trees. 

"Oh yeah, not like a lot a lot but more than anytime previously- uh, so at some point in the past- or like various points probably, I can't imagine anyone was better at agreeing on things back then- anyway.  All the various sorts of supernatural creatures are hiding from normal people for their own various reasons, so uh.  Mostly people, or like... the sort of person who studies things a lot, anyway, usually either believes in a god or gods who set the universe going and then mostly has a personal relationship with you but doesn't do big flashy miracles, or that the universe just straight up runs on math."

He has so many questions and eventually decides on "how do you get all the fierce corpses to pay attention to that?"

"We don't really have them?  Not in the sense I think you mean, physical nonsentient ones?  Most people can't see ghosts at all... I mean, you do get people believing in all sorts of things where you couldn't get taken seriously if you tried to go study them at a university, and I think ghosts is the most common.  They don't really police their own the way people who have to live in the physical world do."

"America must have very good programs for burying its dead. Or do you do soul-calming ceremonies?"

"Uh, couldn't say but it's definitely not, like, standard- but it's like, unfinished business, right, I'm not gonna go around trying to guess who wished they could've reconciled with their estranged relatives and who's living their best life far far away, that's not my place to judge and it's not my business and even if it was I wouldn't have time.  But some stuff is obvious, like, you've gotta figure every murder victim at least wants to see their murderer get caught, and even then not every murder leaves a ghost behind."

"Maybe you have soul-calming ceremonies and you didn't know," he says dubiously.

"I mean, there's a lot of stuff I don't know, sure- I guess a lot of funeral ceremonies are pretty standard, someone could've snuck something functional in there?  And I haven't like, personally done statistics on it, but you'd think someone would've noticed and said something if one religion leaves way fewer ghosts than everyone else..."  They twist slightly, trying to scratch the back of their head again and foiled by their limited range of motion.

"What's a"-- he tries to move his lips around the unfamiliar phonemes-- "re-lee-jion?"

"It's what set of gods and stuff you believe in, and the, like, holidays and prayers and stuff that go along with that?"

"Oh, we try not to do that, it just encourages them."

"Heh, fair enough."  Squirm squirm.  "What sorts of gods and stuff do you get around here, then?  None worth encouraging?"

"Oh, well, noncultivators worship them, sometimes they're fine and we just let them hang around, sometimes they kill people and we have to kill them. The usual."

"Ah, gotcha.  Do they get to be a lot to handle?  Like, individually or there being too many of them, either one."

"Oh, don't worry!" he said earnestly. "If a god got too powerful one of the immortals would come down from a mountain and deal with it."

"Oh huh, okay.  ...are there a lot of them?  Why do they live on a mountain the rest of the time?"

"You have to withdraw from the world if you want your cultivation to be high enough to become immortal."

"Does that happen like all at once, or is there- like, how do you know when it took, unless someone tries to kill you and you don't die?"

"Do... Americans not know how to sense the strength of their golden cores?"

"I, uh, don't know what that is.  So if we do there's a different word for it.  Or somebody else does and their friends and my friends don't talk."

"But.. you're a cultivator...?"