B2 Chapter 35
Orange-crest had no idea what he expected to find at the end of the tunnel. If he'd been pressed to guess, he would have said something surprisingly homey. A space cozy and warm, like Daoist Scouring Medicine's home, except perhaps larger and more gilded, as befitting a cultivator of Grand Elder Tian's stature. The beautiful glass lanterns, the metal double door wrought as beautifully as his master's cauldron, the way the rough stone of the mountain underfoot slowly gave way to a floor as polished as any mirror.
It all spoke to him of habitation. Which felt rather strange, considering it was the single most difficult to access location orange-crest could imagine. It also did not fit the concept of fate. But orange-crest struggled to imagine what could. Fate did not seem like an idea that could be confined to a place.
Xiao Yongzheng did not ask the monkey's thoughts. Instead he walked at orange-crest's side, his tongue as quiet as his slippers were loud. Every step made a muffled slap, the noise like a flailing fish slapping against a rock, except less wet. Orange-crest would normally have felt superior about this. His unshod feet padded at the prince's side almost as silently as the prince's entourage of half-remembered spirits. Instead, he just felt naked. Something about this place made him feel like he should be wearing a robe in a way the gathered gazes of half the sect did not.
It was not long before they came upon the second door. This one was wooden, painted the bright red of fresh blood. Patterned screens were set into the top half of it, the paper of them tinted just dark enough to obscure what waited beyond.
"Grand Elder Tian's legacy awaits." The Seventh Prince observed.
"It does." Orange-crest agreed. The monkey gently rubbed his lips against each other, thinking.
"There is no sense in tarrying at the threshold." The prince said, stepping forward.
"Do you ever feel like it is all going to go wrong?" Orange-crest asked suddenly. "Like everything is good now, and you see the tiger, but there is nothing you can do before the sword falls?"
The Seventh Prince blinked, then turned to face him.
"That is an ominous thing to say."
"Yes?"
"You cannot imagine how often I feel a similar sentiment steal over me. Like everyone else is sleepwalking toward catastrophe."
Orange-crest exhaled through his nose, then clicked his tongue.
"Good to know it is not just me."
He stepped forward before the Seventh Prince could say anything else, gently pushing in front of him, and swept the folding doors open.
Neither a home, nor a demon, greeted them.
"It looks like an official's office." Xiao Yongzheng said, stepping back past the monkey. "But... Even the Grand Councilors do not have offices so large as this. It is shaped like a minister's, but far grander in scale."
Orange-crest slipped around the prince, padding off to one side to inspect a writing desk. He'd never seen such a place before, but he couldn't say the prince was wrong. The room rather reminded him of the few glimpses he'd had of the Administration Hall, except writ impossibly large. Dozens upon dozens of desks. Rather than individual rooms, the writing desks were arranged in pairs along a central path. Shelves full of document cases surrounded each desk, and tall folding screens divided up the cavernous space further.
Clean white light emanated from windows set high above, ringing a second floor that orange-crest didn't immediately see a way to access. The monkey tried to fit the building within his understanding of the shape of the mountain. It didn't work. The tunnel was too long, the mountain too large, this room, for all its size, too small. Those couldn't be real windows leading to the surface of the realm. Space was being weird again.
The desk before the monkey had a sheet of paper laid out. It was blank. A brush rested on its holder, next to an inkstone. The tip was black, as if it had seen recent use, but when orange-crest reached out to touch it, it was dry. Orange-crest wasn't an expert on writing, but that seemed wrong. His master always made him clean his brushes when he was done with them.
"A graveyard for scholars." Orange-crest wasn't sure where the words came from, but something about this place was putting him in a poetic mood.
"Perhaps." Xiao Yongzheng said, not looking up from his own examinations.
Orange-crest pulled a leather document case from the wall, popping the cap off with a perfectly placed squeeze.
A sheaf of blank papers greeted him. All these desks, but no scholars. All these writing materials, but nothing was written. Something about it all seemed tragic to orange-crest in a way he could not satisfactorily put to words. An empty home would have been sad and lonely. But this... It was something that should exist differently, if it needed to exist at all.
There were limits to how lonely an empty glade could be. An empty home only so tragic. A place like this, with so much effort invested into it, was far eerier when abandoned.
"He failed." Orange-crest still didn't know what Grand Elder Tian had sought, but he knew it was true. This wasn't the sort of place a successful cultivator left behind.
"Perhaps." Xiao Yongzheng echoed.
Man and monkey moved deeper in unison, drawn to the lone desk in the center of the room. The one that sat upon a raised pedestal like an emperor's throne. Xiao Yongzheng had become taciturn since they entered the hall, as if he'd just now realized that they were in competition. Still, by unspoken agreement, neither of them broke the fragile peace between them to rush ahead.
They arrived at the foot of the desk side by side, a pair of petitioners before an absent king. Not the Monkey King, of course. He would love such a desk. But the Monkey King would never have held court in an empty room. Not that it was empty anymore, orange-crest supposed. The prince's eight bound spirits stopped just behind the pair of living cultivators, fanning out to guard the platform.
When the pair of them stepped over the threshold of the platform to stand level with the desk, the air changed. There had been qi in the hall, but there was little remarkable about the power that flowed through the air. The quantity and quality of it had been much the same as any other place within this strange realm. A study in contrasts and contradictions, easily yielding itself up to the grasp of any cultivator. Alive, but somehow stagnant. A heady rush, when one cultivated, but not intense enough to drive a Qi Condensation cultivator to distraction.
At Grand Elder Tian's desk, the qi was dense enough that orange-crest's vision began to swim. Every breath felt like he was underwater, and a heavy sense of potential weighed down upon him. He felt more naked than he ever had, standing before that empty desk. His own meager cultivation was a candle in a storm, an infant before a tiger, one wrong move from being snuffed out.
This, this was where the fate of nations might be decided. Where a stroke of a brush might condemn a man to death, or raise him to glory. A man, or a monkey.
The desk looked like any of the others. An inked brush, and a dry inkstone. A blank sheet of paper, and a crescent arc of shelving.
But there was one difference. A seal, as bone-white as orange-crest's staff, sat atop the desk.
Grand Elder Tian's seal.
They reached for it in unison. Paw clasped over hand. Their eyes met.
Orange-crest wanted it. He wanted it so badly, though he knew not what it truly was. But he could feel it, that seal was the core of the inheritance. The physical remains of Grand Elder Tian's authority. It emanated that impossible weight that was the unmistakable mark of a Nascent Soul cultivation base.
It hurt, to remove his hand from the Seventh Prince's.
The rage that had surged within him at Grand Elder Shen's rejection had cooled, a dull ember of the blazing hurt it had once been. But he still wanted this, the power to shape the world. To author a better future.
"I will not forget this." Xiao Yongzheng swore. The words rang heavy in the rarefied air.
Orange-crest had to trust. Believe in his instincts and deductions. This had been too easy. The inheritance ground was not the challenge Grand Elder Tian posed to his would-be inheritor, the other competitors were. The coincidences were too stark for it to be otherwise. And formless-gleam had not yet shown her face. Orange-crest believed the Seventh Prince could not succeed in claiming the inheritance until she did. Fighting now would be a mistake. They would exhaust themselves before formless-gleam arrived. She would kill the prince, and claim the inheritance. So he would do what the prince could not, and stand aside.
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All the same, it hurt to hand the Seventh Prince the seal. It felt worse than surrender. It felt like refusing to try. It felt like he imagined taking big-crest's hand would have felt.
Like he was submitting to fate.
The Seventh Prince stepped behind Grand Elder Tian's desk, and took a seat in the place of honor.
Orange-crest could not feel the Seventh Prince's qi. The power that poured from the seal, that hovered over the writing desk, was overwhelming. But he could tell the prince was trying to refine the seal like one would a magical treasure or a flying sword. Orange-crest had never performed the process, but it was supposed to be slow and difficult, especially with objects more powerful than the cultivator.
He simply had to hope the prince failed. Or, the monkey thought, make certain that he did. As the Seventh Prince cultivated the seal, orange-crest turned to the scroll cases. He pulled half a dozen free at random, placing them under his arm, and stepped off the platform, past the honor guard, to a lesser desk.
Orange-crest popped open the tube whose brocade cover was most pleasing to his eye, a riot of white clouds and golden lightning, and spread the papers before him.
The monkey grinned.
He was right. These were not blank. The other desks were part of the realm, or the inheritance. An expression of the ancient cultivator's art, but somehow fundamentally hollow. These though, these were Grand Elder Tian's true writings.
My mind cannot escape the moment of Ji Daxian's death. Again and again it returns, fascinated by the perfect cruelty of the demon's fate. The subtle symmetries that shaped his end. His victims moved in perfect unity without awareness of each other, and so snatched an impossible triumph through strange coincidence. What does power matter, if a higher order undermines its most resolute expressions? We speak of fate. Its influence and our defiance. But I am coming to wonder, how many of us truly believe in it, and act appropriately to that belief?
Orange-crest skipped past the stomach-turning descriptions of Ji Daxian's crimes. He didn't know how long he had, or what he was looking for.
The patriarch is disdainful of my work. Even the small measure of it I have shared with him. I should have known he would be. How pitiful, for a pride so small as mine to yet manage to blind me. He was not unkind in his dismissal of its potential, but there is a shame all its own in straying so far from the way that the Quicksilver Wind stoops to be comforting in correction. The kindest sentiment he shared was not that it was novel, and not unorthodox.
Orange-crest turned to another page, jumping ahead semi-randomly. He wanted to know more about the patriarch, but he needed to know more about who Grand Elder Tian had been. The new sheet's style of writing was completely different. Instead of tightly packed narrative, it was dominated by a single statement. A vertical hanging scroll in miniature.
Its greatest victory was convincing us that it could be defied.
That wasn't ominous at all. The next page was little better.
It? Or them? How much of what we are is given? And how much is taken? Is qi the tool of our liberation, or a subtler sort of trap? The mortal farmer at least understands that he exists by heaven's decree, his small peace eked out between drought and plague. My fellow disciples seem to have forgotten that, and so become ensnared all the further.
Orange-crest grabbed a different scroll case. As he did, he looked up. The Seventh Prince was still cultivating, still trying to refine the seal. He might be making progress. That was unacceptable. Carefully, orange-crest shrouded himself in an illusion of studious focus. He dipped behind a nearby screen, palming a pair of inkwells. When he sat back down a moment later, he tossed one, aiming high and far.
The Seventh Prince all but leapt to his feet at the sharp clatter of stone on stone. His eyes roved the room wildly. Orange-crest met them, then looked toward the noise, frowning. He reached for his staff, then hesitated.
The prince stared at the monkey. Orange-crest was certain he was weighing whether or not to command him to investigate. He was already looking forward to politely declining. Disappointingly, the prince dispatched one of his guardian spirits instead.
Orange-crest returned to his reading, and the prince to attempting to refine the seal. Better than nothing, but not as distracting as he'd hoped. Maybe he'd pitch the next one right at the prince's head, or start a fire. Better to start a fight than let him finish the process.
I was a fool. I am not Jin Qingyi, nor Shen Junjie.
Grand Elder Shen? And someone else?
I cannot walk their ways. Yet, if my own path is doomed, what road should I walk? My longevity wanes. How many times have I said that now? Thrice? Foundation Establishment, Core Formation, Nascent Soul. The Long Road looms, and I worry I do not have the strength to walk it. None of the ways I have learned lend themselves to my path. I lack the resolve to sever my spirit, or the strength to devote myself to lighting soul lamps. My road to immortality is shrouded in mist. Since forming my foundation each of my tribulations has been harsher and more inventive than the last. The others speak rarely of what they face, the higher we rise, the tighter our lips become. Yet I now begin to suspect I lost before I ever understood what I fought against. Only the patriarch's understanding of heaven's machinations exceeds my own, and even he does not dare attempt what I have mastered. I forge heaven's decrees, yet what does that avail me? The subtle trap is no less lethal when it is my hand that moves the brush. I now see that it is not idly that Heaven holds itself apart from the world. Anything that can be touched can be stained, and fated ink does not easily wash clean.
There. Grand Elder Tian forged heavenly decrees? Was that what the seal was for? Slowly, orange-crest was putting together a picture. It was frustrating, having so few true facts to work off. He knew Heaven was real. That it had sharp eyes and long fingers. In his stone dream, Shan had all but stated an affiliation with it. Grand Elder Tian's writings said the same thing, that they shaped outcomes in subtle ways, winning before they ever fought. Fate was their tool in this. The beginnings of a plan began to take shape in his mind.
Heaven controlled circumstances. But even Grand Elder Tian seemed to think that their choices mattered. Where was the line between fate and the will of the fated?
All my life, fate has fascinated me. Only now do I realize I mistook disgust for curiosity. Yet, as the end of my journey looms, I come to wonder who I have-
A cold wind blew through the hall. The shutters rattled, and screens fell to the floor. The light pouring in from above dimmed.
Orange-crest's stomach fell, and his heart beat faster. It was time.
He read faster, furiously sifting through the pages. Fog poured through the open door, and descended from the false-windows. It coiled about the edges of the room like a serpent, pulsing and breathing like a living thing. Or a dead thing, the breath of a corpse. Orange-crest shuddered at the sight of it.
The Seventh Prince rose to his feet, moving the seal to a pocket of his robes. Interesting. Was it too spiritually powerful to be placed in a storage ring? His master had said some things could be. That simplified matters a little. Now all he had to do was the impossible, and keep these two hard-headed fools from killing each other. If the Seventh Prince died, Li Xun and Li Hou would definitely be blamed. And despite everything, orange-crest liked formless-gleam. He cared, that she'd chosen a darker road. Judged, and feared, what she had done and become. But he didn't control what the fox did, only what the monkey did. And so long as he had the strength to keep them from a final parting, he would not give up hope.
Dim shapes moved in the mist, as it drifted to envelop the room.
One of them emerged from the shadows. A fox with snowy fur, three tails idly shifting behind her. Formless-gleam did not bother with the true tongue. Her voice was as human as her form was not.
"You have something that is rightfully mine. I have come to claim it."
The Seventh Prince frowned. The spirits surrounding him fanned out, forming an arc. Swords gleamed and spears bristled.
"Demon." He spat, as if that word alone should be sufficient, and all the rest mere formality. "What claim could one such as you possibly have upon a Prince of the Xiao and a Grand Elder of the Azure Mountain?"
Orange-crest wanted to say something. But what could he say, that would forestall this? He'd wracked his mind for hours, but come up with nothing.
"Do not pretend you would honor any claim I had, save that of force." The fox snarled.
The Seventh Prince swung one arm sharply. A sword appeared in his hand, as if descending from his sleeve.
"Then I suppose further words are worthless between us. You should have known your place, demon. For it was not here. Nothing but death awaits you for your trespass in this holy land."
Damn. Orange-crest had thought Xiao Yongzheng seemed reasonable for a human noble. That had vanished quickly. There was no way he could not feel formless-gleam's strength. She was not hiding her power. She stood at the Great Circle of Qi Condensation. The prince's cultivation base was only in the fourth stage. A fight between them should hardly be a fight at all. Yet, he did not even hesitate long enough to confirm that orange-crest would side with him.
Neither of them had even looked his way, and orange-crest hated both of them a little for it. His mind raced. Formless-gleam had seemingly little care for her earlier promise, not that it mattered much, with the prince already threatening her death.
"Wait!" The monkey barked.
Their eyes settled upon him.
"Stand aside, foolish monkey." Formless-gleam said, advancing slowly. "You need not suffer for his sins."
"Don't do this."
Orange-crest did not beg. But it was a close thing. He would have, if he thought formless-gleam would care for such appeals.
The fox grinned. Orange-crest had never seen sadness and bloodlust so commingled in any animal's face. The fox did not answer him.
Orange-crest turned to the prince. Formless-gleam would not stop. She had not come this far to falter now. But if he helped the prince, would he?
Orange-crest uttered the treasonous words.
"If I help you. If we win. Will you spare her life?"
"You know the demon." He was not asking. His face was stonier than any Stone Monkey.
"Not the question." Orange-crest hissed. He rose to his feet, knuckles clenched white around his staff. "I let you take the seal. You said you would remember. If I help you, will you spare her life?"
"Foolish monkey." Formless-gleam repeated sadly. "My life was forfeit the moment I was born."
Xiao Yongzheng closed his eyes.
"I am sorry." He said slowly.
"Sorry is not-"
"The Xiao do not keep many of Heaven's commandments." The Seventh Prince's voice was heavy. There was an authority in it beyond his years, or the volume of his speech, that silenced even the furious orange-crest. "But we remember Daji, and the dynasties that burned for her depravity. The tens of thousands executed at her word. Drowned in lakes of wine. Condemned to hunt their kin like animals, or be hunted in turn for their refusal. The emperors that beggared nations in the hopes of winning her affections, and the sects that fell to degeneracy practicing her arts. We are not the most orthodox of nations. But even distant tyrants can sometimes be correct."
Xiao Yongzheng opened his eyes, and there was no mercy in them.
"For peace among men, suffer no fox to live."