Chapter 57: Imprisoned on the Moon
Lingering fragments of the dream refused to release their hold on Su Yao. She sat up in bed. A sudden, petty frustration cut through the weight of Li Xuan’s request. The mystery of the Li family’s chaotic bloodline was a tantalizing puzzle, and he'd been the one person who could have given her a straight answer.
Damn it. I forgot to ask who he married. How crazy was she, on a scale of one to ten? Was she a full-blown, world-burning yandere, or just eccentrically murderous? The fact that he'd procreated with someone unstable enough to pass the crazy to their descendants was a detail she desperately wanted.
A more pressing question arose. How did he even appear in my dream?
He'd said if she saw him, he was dead. Dead souls rarely get to schedule posthumous PowerPoint presentations in the minds of their former almost-lovers. Her eyes drifted toward the kitchen, where the jar of original Lao Gan Ma sat on the counter.
The sauce. Li Xuan’s final, fading words echoed: “the recipe is more than just sauce...”
Of course, she thought. A slow realization dawned. He was an alchemist. He encoded a part of his consciousness into the recipe as a spiritual trigger bound to the very essence of the flavors.
The act of recreating it, of consuming it, must have anchored his echo to her spiritual signature just enough for one final communication. It was a masterpiece of soul-alchemy, using culinary art as its medium. The ultimate message in a bottle, delivered via chili oil.
It was brilliant, pretentious, and exactly the kind of overcomplicated, sentimental gesture Li Xuan would pull. He had to embed his last will and testament in a condiment.
She flopped back onto the pillows with a groan. Now she was a sober celestial fox, a corporate consultant, a protector of a cursed bloodline, and the recipient of a posthumous message from a dead Daoist delivered through spicy fermented beans.
And she remained unsure whether his wife was a seven or a ten on the crazy scale. All she could do was guess.
Next time I see his ghost, she vowed, I'm asking about the wife first.
But for now, the sun was up. She had a Yuki Onna to stop from flash-freezing the plumbing, and a Li family to reluctantly look after. The burdens of eternity were endlessly, absurdly varied.
Su Yao’s phone buzzed on the nightstand, shattering the morning quiet. The caller ID flashed “Kayo.” With a sense of impending chaos, Su Yao answered.
“You will not believe the dream I had last night!” Kayo’s voice was a dramatic whisper, as if sharing a state secret. “Li Xuan! He appeared to me, all solemn and ghostly. He had the audacity to tell me he’s against my plan to turn the Li private mountain into a luxury spiritual retreat and real estate development! Can you believe it? He said it would ‘desecrate the ancestral legacy’ or some such nonsense.”
Su Yao sat up, rubbing her temples. “You're planning to what? Turn the mountain into real estate? When did this happen?”
“Oh, I drafted the proposal while you were in Tokyo. It’s brilliant! We can have onsen resorts, zip lines through the sacred groves, and a themed restaurant featuring that chili sauce. I even have a slogan: ‘Get Enlightened, Then Get Rich!’ But now your ex is haunting my dreams to be a buzzkill.”
Kayo sighed dramatically. “He was very insistent. Said something about ‘eternal consequences’ and ‘the balance of the dragon veins.’ Boring stuff.”
Su Yao took a deep breath. “Kayo, I just had a dream with him too. He asked me to protect his descendants. Turning their ancestral mountain into a tourist trap probably doesn't qualify.”
“But think of the profit, cousin! We could be billionaires! It’s not like the Li family is using it properly. They just have a dusty old tomb there. We'd be adding value!” Kayo protested. “Besides, I have a 3000-year-old claim to that land. Finders keepers!”
“Li Xuan might have something to say about that from beyond the grave,” Su Yao said dryly. “I made a promise. So, no real estate development.”
Kayo gasped. “You're taking his side? After everything? I thought we were partners in chaos!”
“We are, but this is different. I owe him one for not actually trying to kill me,” Su Yao replied. “If you develop that mountain, you'll have every cultivator in China after you. Not to mention the Li family itself.”
“Fine,” Kayo grumbled. “But I already had a meeting scheduled with a developer from Hong Kong. He was very excited about the ‘authentic spiritual vibe.’ Now I have to cancel and blame it on ‘ghostly interference.'“
She paused. “Speaking of, how did Li Xuan even get into our dreams? I thought he was dead-dead.”
“I think it’s the sauce,” Su Yao said. “The Lao Gan Ma recipe must have a spiritual component. He encoded his message into it.”
“Ugh, alchemists. Always so extra,” Kayo said. “Well, if I can't build a resort, I'm going to need a new project. Maybe I'll start a cult. Or a streaming channel. I'll get back to you.”
Before Su Yao could process the horror of Kayo starting a cult or a streaming channel, a more pressing question surfaced. “Wait, Kayo,” she said, stopping her from hanging up. “Li Xuan asked me to protect his descendants, but from what, exactly? Do you have any idea what they need protecting from? It can’t just be the Yamato, right?”
Kayo was silent for a moment. Then her voice dropped into a theatrical, storytelling whisper. “Well, have you considered the wife?”
“Which one? The file said he had a harem.”
“The mother of his main bloodline,” Kayo clarified, as if it were obvious. “What if she didn't take his death well? I mean, we're talking about the woman who married Li Xuan. She couldn't have been entirely stable. What if she went completely cosmically mad with grief after he was gone?”
Su Yao frowned. “Get to the point.”
“The point is,” Kayo said, her voice dripping with relish, “what if her son, Li Xuan’s heir, had no other choice? What if she became such a catastrophic threat that he had to split her into nine different entities and seal her body on the moon?”
Su Yao stared at the phone. “On the moon.”
“Where else? It’s the traditional celestial prison! Very spacious, great views, and administrated by Taiyin Xingjun, who, let’s be honest, has a track record of being accommodating to powerful problematic women.”
Kayo paused for effect. “So, what if the Li family’s real curse is a bloodline tether to their own ancestral matriarch whose sealed power occasionally leaks through? Causing the men to die too soon and making the women irresistible to spirits? What if someone is trying to unseal her?”
Su Yao was silent, turning the theory over in her mind. It was ludicrous. It was also, in the context of her life, perfectly plausible. A mad celestial mother-in-law sealed on the moon was just the sort of convoluted, cosmic family drama Li Xuan would leave in his wake.
“That’s the most unhinged theory you've ever come up with,” Su Yao stated flatly.
“Is it? Or is it just crazy enough to be true?” Kayo retorted. “You asked what they need protecting from. Maybe they need protecting from their own grandmother. Now, if you'll excuse me. I need to see if ‘Mad Moon Matriarch’ is a viable brand name for a new line of skincare.”
The line went dead. Su Yao lowered the phone. Her gaze drifted unconsciously toward the window, as if she could see the pale, pockmarked disk of the moon in the morning sky.
Protect my descendants, Li Xuan had said. He hadn't specified the threat was external. It seemed the Li family’s greatest enemy might be their own bloodline. She sighed. It was time to do some research on lunar legends and very, very angry mothers.
Su Yao sat down at her laptop. The morning light glinting off the screen. Kayo’s theory about a fragmented matriarch sealed on the moon was, even by their standards, exceptionally deranged. It nagged at her because it felt familiar in a way that had nothing to do with celestial history.
She typed a few keywords into a search engine: “split into entities,” “sealed on moon,” “mother figure.” The results were were all from fan wikis and discussion forums, centered entirely on the manga and anime Naruto.
Her eye twitched. She clicked on one.
Kaguya Ōtsutsuki
The Rabbit Goddess. Sealed away by her sons, Hagoromo and Hamura, after becoming the Ten-Tails (Jūbi). Her power was split into the nine Tailed Beasts.
Su Yao stared at the screen. Her expression was utterly deadpan. She read on. Her disbelief curdled into a weary annoyance. The parallels were blatant. A powerful, alien mother figure? Check. Sealed on the moon by her sons? Check. Split into multiple entities? Check.
She picked up her phone and dialed Kayo’s number. It rang once before connecting.
“You ripped your entire theory from Naruto,” Su Yao stated. Her voice was dangerously calm.
There was a beat of silence on the other end. “I prefer the term ‘homaged,'” Kayo replied, without a hint of shame. “It’s a classic narrative structure! The ancients knew it, the moderns just animated it. Besides, it fits perfectly, doesn't it? It has drama, pathos, a cool final boss...”
“It’s plagiarism from a Shōnen manga!”
“All mythology is just fanfiction that got out of hand,” Kayo retorted breezily. “My version is just, culturally updated. Think about it. If the idea is resonant enough to become a global pop culture phenomenon, doesn't that give it a certain spiritual weight? Maybe Masashi Kishimoto was a prophet!”
Su Yao took a deep, steadying breath. “You are impossible. I'm trying to uncover a genuine celestial conspiracy, and you're giving me recycled anime plotlines.”
“But it’s a good plotline!” Kayo insisted. “It’s not entirely wrong. The moon is a traditional sealing ground. Powerful women do get locked away there. The details are just, flexible. So what if the Li family’s granny isn't a rabbit goddess from space? Maybe she’s just a really, really angry Huli Jing who had a bad breakup. The principle is the same!”
Su Yao hung up. She massaged her temples. A headache formed behind her eyes. She had a dead alchemist communicating through chili sauce, a Yuki Onna doing housework, and a cousin who based her cosmic theories on Weekly Shōnen Jump.
Still, she looked back at the search results. Sealed on the moon. It was a trope, but tropes often had roots in older truths. The connection to Taiyin Xingjun was too convenient to ignore.
With a sigh of resignation, she opened a new tab and began searching the government’s classified archives for any records of lunar sealing rituals or unstable, powerful female entities. She might have to sift through Kayo’s nonsense, but there was likely a kernel of something real in there.
She typed in ‘sealed in the moon mythology’ and scrolled past the usual suspects from the Chinese legends of Chang'e, some obscure Babylonian goddess, and of course, more Naruto fan sites.
Her cursor hovered over a link from a card game wiki called Magic: The Gathering: Emrakul and the Moon of Innistrad. Curiosity piqued, she clicked through.
The article detailed the Eldrazi Titan Emrakul, a cosmic entity of corruption and madness, who was sealed within the moon of the gothic horror plane Innistrad by the planeswalker Tamiyo. Su Yao read with growing disbelief. Another powerful being, sealed in a moon?
She leaned back in her chair. A dry laugh escaped her lips. If I had a yuan for every fictional being sealed on the moon, I'd have two yuan, she thought. Which isn't a lot, but it’s strange that it happened twice.
“Kayo, you unoriginal hack,” she muttered to herself. After seeing her cousin lift from Naruto, Su Yao began noticing the same tropes in other media. It was enough to make her question the entire concept of celestial originality.
Her phone buzzed again. It was Kayo, probably with another ‘inspired’ theory. Su Yao ignored it. Instead, she stared at the screen. The prevalence of the trope was unsettling. Maybe there was a reason why moons were such a popular prison in stories across cultures.
Perhaps because, on some level, it had happened before. The moon was distant, cold, and tied to powerful spiritual energies like Taiyin Xingjun’s domain. It made sense as a sealing ground, even if modern writers were recycling the idea.
She opened a new tab and accessed the government’s restricted database, using her consultant credentials. She searched for ‘lunar containment rituals’ and ‘anomalies associated with the moon.’ If Kayo’s nonsense had a kernel of truth, she needed to find it before some real-world Emrakul or Kaguya decided to break free and cause problems for the Li family.
Or worse, for her.
As the search results loaded, Su Yao couldn't help but wonder if Li Xuan’s wife was up there, mingling with fictional deities and waiting for her chance to return. The thought was absurd, but in her life, absurdity was the new normal.
Su Yao’s foray into the government database was yielding dry, bureaucratic reports on lunar energy fluctuations and historical observations of “transient selenographic phenomena.” Frustrated, she opened a new incognito browser tab and fell down a very different rabbit hole.
She typed ‘moon conspiracy theories’ into a public search engine.
The results were a torrent of glorious, unhinged nonsense. She skimmed past the usual suspects about the moon landing being faked, though she noted with professional disdain that the ‘evidence’ of staged photography was pathetically easy to debunk with a basic understanding of light and shadow.
Then she found the weirder stuff. Forums dedicated to “Hollow Moon” theories, claiming it was a spaceship or a giant egg. Claims that the moon was an artificial construct built by ancient aliens to monitor Earth. Then, she found the video.
The thumbnail was a grainy, zoomed-in image of the lunar surface. The title, in all caps, read: ‘THE MOON WAKES.’
Skeptical but intrigued, she clicked play. The video was shaky, allegedly taken through a powerful telescope. The cratered surface filled the screen. A deep, resonant hum, clearly added in post-production, began to play.
A section of the moon’s surface, a vast, dark mare, seemed to shift. It was organic, like the skin of a great beast twitching in its sleep.
The ‘shift’ created a new, temporary pattern that, for a single, unnerving second, looked like a massive, slitted eye opening. The video then cut to a crude animation of the moon developing a gigantic maw and devouring the Earth, set to dramatic orchestral music.
It was ridiculous.
She sat back. The cheap horror music was still tinny in her headphones. The image of the lunar mare shifting, fake as it was, superimposed itself in her mind with Kayo’s theory and the Naruto and Magic lore. Was the moon a prison, a sealed entity, or a living prison?
It’s all just stories, she told herself firmly. Humans have always projected their fears onto the moon.
Yet, the thought persisted. What if the reason the ‘sealed on the moon’ trope was so ubiquitous across cultures and even fiction was because, on some primordial, subconscious level, humanity sensed it? What if the moon was the prisoner itself? A slumbering, cosmic entity that occasionally, stirred?
Su Yao shook her head, physically trying to dislodge the absurd idea. She was not some paranoid conspiracy theorist in a tin-foil hat.
With that thought in mind, she closed the browser and looked back at the sterile government reports on her main screen. They suddenly felt inadequate. The dry data about energy spikes and ‘anomalous gravitational lensing’ around the moon took on a new, more sinister light.
She had set out to find a mad mother-in-law sealed on the moon. Now she was wondering if the entire moon was the mother-in-law.
“Great,” she muttered to the empty apartment. “Now I'm considering the possibility that the Li family’s problem is a celestial body with indigestion.”
The path to the truth, it seemed, was paved with insane conspiracy theories and bad Douyin videos.
Su Yao leaned back from the computer. The cacophony of conspiracy theories and fictional tropes swirled in her mind. Her gaze drifted absently to a generic astronomy wallpaper on her desktop, showing the solar system.
Mars had Phobos and Deimos. Jupiter had Europa, Ganymede, Io, a whole retinue of named satellites. Even a dwarf planet like Pluto had Charon.
A simple, almost childish thought surfaced, cutting through the noise. That’s strange.
She opened a new search tab and typed: ‘What is the Moon’s name?’
The top result was a NASA page. She read it aloud, her voice flat. “'The Moon’ is the Earth’s only natural satellite. In Latin, it’s ‘Luna,’ the root of words like ‘lunar.’ In Greek, it’s ‘Selene.’ But its official astronomical name is simply ‘the Moon.’“
She stared at the sentence. Its official name is simply ‘the Moon.’
As if it were the only one of its kind. Its real name, if it had ever had one, seemed to have been forgotten or supressed.
Every other significant moon in the solar system had a unique, proper name from mythology. But Earth’s moon, the one that had governed tides, inspired poets, and witnessed all of human history, was just, the Moon.
That was the celestial equivalent of naming your dog ‘Dog.’
Kayo’s ridiculous theory and its parallels hinged on the moon being a prison. What better way to hide a prison than to make its name so bland, so obvious, that no one ever thought to question it? You don't give Alcatraz a flashy name. You just call it ‘The Rock.’
Somewhere in America, a professional wrestler sneezed.
‘The Moon’ was just the generic term. Was it a form of cosmic camouflage? A way to make sure that even in whispers and myths, its true nature as a seal, a vault, or a cage remained obscured by the sheer banality of its title?
She thought of Taiyin Xingjun, the Moon Goddess. Was her role to warden? Was her domain a maximum-security celestial prison?
If ancient cosmologies assigned gods to guard dangerous things, modern faiths preferred paperwork. Under an old Catholic doctrine, something Xiao Ling had read, any newly discovered land fell to the diocese it launched from.
By that logic, the Bishop of Orlando became the Bishop of the Moon, his diocese ballooning to over fourteen million square miles. Even a prison, after all, needed a chaplain.
Her government database search had yielded nothing but dry reports. What if the dryness itself was the clue? What if the most important secret was hidden in plain sight? In the very fact that humanity’s closest celestial neighbor had no real name?
Su Yao closed the laptop. A new, chilling certainty settled over her. The Li family’s troubles, the mad matriarch theory, Li Xuan’s plea, it was all connected to that silent, unnamed orb in the sky. She could be potentially protecting the world from whatever was locked away on, or as, the Moon.