Crow said, “We’ve turned Qianyun City into a place where folk may enter but not leave. What if he doesn’t dare come?”
Chongming laughed. “I know human nature better than anyone. Since he had the nerve to sneak into Qianyun City at night and stir up such chaos, he’s clearly a master of his craft with courage to match. For someone like him, the greater the terror and bloodshed, the more he’ll push forwards. My dear gods, all we need do is sit tight and wait to catch the turtle in the jar.”
“The great gods have begun to revive. Heaven’s gods will be watching them like hawks.”
“If they truly have revived, they’ll be desperate to hide it. Far better for the likes of us, the lesser gods, to move freely.”
“Since their true bodies cannot descend, what have you and I to fear?”
Crow said nothing. The other three gods had already made up their minds: day and night, they would hold their posts in the city, and the moment they saw any trace of the youth, they would strike.
…
Outside the city gate, Xue Cuo stared at Qianyun City for a moment, then turned on his heel and left.
Xuan Zhao was amused. “Running away, are you?”
Xue Cuo replied with full confidence, seeing nothing odd about it. “They’ve sealed it up so tightly. There’s only in, no out. Only a fool would walk in.”
Xuan Zhao: “Heh.”
Wearing his bamboo hat, Xue Cuo mulled things over in silence. Feeling unsettled, he even climbed a high mountain outside the city to observe Qianyun City’s qi-flow. A faint sense of dread prickled at him.
In the clouds, incense smoke curled. Invisible to the naked eye, the incense condensed into the vague shapes of four gods. In that drifting mist, they glared down at the city, watchful as tigers. And within the incense hovered a darker shadow… one Xue Cuo could neither make out nor bear to look at for long.
He kept watch the whole night. Near dawn, he crouched down with a tree branch, scratching lines into the mud without pause. Slowly, a deep and intricate talisman took shape.
Well-travelled as he was, even Xuan Zhao could make no sense of it.
Xue Cuo rested his chin in one hand and poked absently at the ground with his stick, completely absorbed in thought, thoroughly vexed.
A moment later, he rubbed the whole thing out and started again, slowly.
“Xue Cuo, are you drawing the cycle of reincarnation? Why is it so damned sinister?”
Interrupted, Xue Cuo looked up. “Ah, Master Xuan, you’re awake? Look.”
He pointed at one corner of the talisman. “This is the Fertility God. Most of the city’s people come from His domain. He’s the talisman’s head. And this is the Marriage God, who governs the union of yin and yang, the pleasures of human life. He forms the heart of the talisman. This here is Death and Reincarnation, who commands the life and death of all Qianyun City. He’s the talisman’s tail.”
Xuan Zhao nodded. “Correct.”
Something suddenly occurred to him; he hissed softly but said nothing. What Xue Cuo was thinking now had been utterly commonplace ten thousand years ago. At the very beginning of the God-Slaying War.
Xue Cuo tapped the ground with his stick, face darkening. “Master Xuan, you said they were building a kingdom of gods on earth.”
“I always wondered why Her Ladyship held the authority of reincarnation, why She made me open [Infernal], why Bo Jinling’s deity viewed all beings as offerings. Nine out of ten Xianghuo gods I’ve encountered are the same.”
“Could it be that ten thousand years ago, all gods had their own divine kingdoms, within which they ruled every aspect of life. Death, reincarnation, marriage, childbirth?”
Such authority… divine grace like the sea, divine might like a prison.
All mortals reduced to lambs penned in the gods’ pasture. The gods deciding when they mate, when they bear children, when they sicken, when they die, when they reincarnate.
Their bodies rot, but their souls never break. Lifetime after lifetime, forever, they remain crawling lambs in the gods’ fields, offering piety, serving as the most faithful of slaves.
Xuan Zhao said dryly, “How on earth did you come to think such things?”
Cross-legged, dirt smeared across his face, Xue Cuo traced the talisman he had spent all night on. “I’m only curious about what truly happened during the great calamity ten thousand years ago. Sadly, all Daoist scripture and historical records are impossible to verify now. No one knows the truth. Master Xuan, you’ve lived long enough. You must know?”
Xuan Zhao shivered. How had this brat worked all that out? “Don’t ask me. I took an oath. I cannot speak.”
Xue Cuo snorted, his gaze deep, his thoughts unreadable. “Then Her Ladyship, She…”
Xuan Zhao cut him off at once. “Boy! Don’t you go making wild guesses!”
He held his tongue for a long moment, then spoke earnestly. “Think. Why was it that the Goddess of the Great Loch’s divine kingdom survived, while the others perished? Xue Cuo, you are Her only true heir in thirty-eight thousand years. How could you possibly doubt Her? She sacrificed greatly for the people of the Eastern Lands. It was through the Golden Pool and Golden Lotus, formed from the will of all living beings, that Her true spirit was preserved for millennia. Her intentions were pure.”
Xue Cuo’s expression grew solemn at once. “What are you saying? I would certainly never doubt Her Ladyship. Her compassion is boundless and Her Dao profound. How could I dare speculate about Her?”
Xuan Zhao: “…” What a black-hearted little brat.
Xue Cuo sat a while longer, then casually wiped away the talisman. A faint thought had taken shape in his mind, and he finally remembered what he had forgotten.
He reached into his robes and produced one doll, then another, then another… on and on, until over forty dolls sat in a heap before him.
The dolls stared at him and burst into loud wails.
Xue Cuo broke into a sweat. He patted one, hugged another, but when none of them would stop crying, he let the little golden dragon out.
“Mu, over to you.”
The little golden dragon had been locked up for three days and two nights. Before he could even complain to his shixiong, he was smothered by the horde of shrieking children.
Fortunately, as a dragon who had long served as a god, he had no shortage of experience. He swished his head and tail, scooped the children up one by one into a sack, hoisted it over his shoulder, and soared into the clouds.
…
Fangzhou, Little Golden Dragon Temple.
Incense burned fervently; worshippers thronged the halls.
Suddenly, dark clouds gathered overhead. Snow and wind swept in. After a low, resonant dragon-cry, a rain of children came tumbling down. Forty-odd weeping toddlers pelted the ground in a clatter of limbs and tears.
The villagers looked at one another in bewilderment, unsure what to do. In the end, the temple keeper declared that the babies had been brought by the Little Golden Dragon God, and the kind-hearted villagers took the children home one by one.
After that day, another local legend took root.
They said that every year on the eighth day of the third lunar month, babies would fall from the heavens like rain, and that praying for children on that day was especially efficacious.
Another rumour claimed that the Little Golden Dragon God was actually a mother dragon, and that the babies were her own offspring. Terrified, the villagers hurried to sculpt a new, alluring statue of the goddess. Halfway through, the temple keeper announced it was all a misunderstanding, and the villagers, crestfallen, could only give up.
However, the statue was already finished, and it felt rather lonely to leave it unused. So they placed the newly crafted Dragon Goddess statue in the temple anyway as a companion for the Little Golden Dragon God.
…
Back to Qianyun City.
After Xue Cuo had sorted out the matter of the little dolls, he followed a narrow path up the mountain and came upon a temple. It was terribly dilapidated, with only a few meagre offerings before it. It was pathetically shabby, really.
Clearly, most of the local faith had long been siphoned away by Qianyun City. This sort of remote mountain shrine had scarcely any incense left.
He circled the area and discovered that in the caves along the cliffs lived a dozen or so elderly people. Some were ill, some injured, all at the end of their strength.
Starving in the mountains, they planted a little millet to provide offerings for the temple.
Xue Cuo shared the Little Golden Dragon’s secret stash with them. As they talked, he learnt that most of them were abandoned elders from nearby villages. Too old to work, they had come to the cliff caves to wait for death.
“There’s a mountain god in the temple,” one said. “Bad-tempered and fierce. He demands offerings every day. If we can’t provide them, he beats us. But we came here to die anyway. If the mountain god were to take action, it would spare us some suffering.”
“Sometimes he gets peckish and eats a few of us. But we’re old, tough, and stringy, so he doesn’t eat much.”
“It’s only that those he eats never have a whole body left, and it’s hard to bury them. We only hope to keep a full corpse. So each of us saves him a few bites.”
Life was instinct; death, resignation. The old man seemed calm but was helpless all the same. He asked Xue Cuo whether he would go down the mountain. Xue Cuo replied, “I’ll leave towards evening.”
An old woman shuffled forward. Her clothes were in tatters. She held a pair of hand-stitched shoes, the uppers cut from her own garments. “If you pass through our village, please give these shoes to my daughter-in-law. I forgot to take off my clothes before coming up the mountain, so I made her and my grandson two pairs.”
Xue Cuo looked at the other elderly folk. Those still able to move produced whatever they’d found in the mountains; those with nothing offered half a handful of wild fruit, begging him to take it home.
Xue Cuo watched them in silence, then said gently, “Why don’t you go back down the mountain?”
“The head tax is too heavy. We cannot afford to live.”
“Death is quieter.”
Xue Cuo did not press them. He stayed until midnight, using talismans to drive off all the snakes, insects, and poisonous creatures nearby. Then, hands clasped behind his back, he wandered towards the mountain temple.
In front of the shrine stood half a handful of millet, a few small animals, and a mound of gnawed, unrecognisable human bones.
Xuan Zhao glanced about, his disdain impossible to hide. “Is this what passes for a righteous god of heaven and earth these days?”
Xue Cuo ignored him. From his robes he drew a table, a few stools, brush, ink, and talisman paper. After steadying his mind, he lifted his brush.
Lowering his gaze, he focused intently on the brush-tip, drawing a crimson talisman. Then he lit a stick of incense and set it before the temple.
Before long, cracks split the red-draped clay statue inside. The rigid, sculpted eyes suddenly shifted, and in a fit of fury, the statue stamped out the incense and candles, roaring, “Who stands before this temple? Are you trying to murder me?!”
The clay figure opened its eyes wide in rage. Seeing a human lounging on a branch before it, it barked, “Who are you?”
Xue Cuo pressed two fingers together. A green talisman fluttered into place, pinning the mountain god where he stood, unable to move.
Rooted to the spot, the mountain god stared at Xue Cuo.
A murderous glint slowly crept over Xue Cuo’s features. He rolled up his sleeves and proceeded to thrash the statue soundly. The god screamed for help, but no answer came. Trapped in the clay, he shed flakes of mud with every blow.
Xue Cuo paid him no heed. Folding the red talisman into a tiny corner, he forced it into the statue’s mouth.
Terrified, the statue watched its consciousness drawn helplessly into the talisman. And the fearsome human, speaking into the empty air, said, “Master Xuan, I’m going to borrow his body. You’ll have to guard me.”
Xuan Zhao recognised the talisman and was even more astonished. How old was Xue Cuo, exactly? At merely the Spiritual Domain realm, he could already draw a Red Talisman, separate his soul, and possess another body.
“You’ll take his place. If they discover you…”
Xue Cuo cut him off. “Win by surprise.”
Xuan Zhao considered this. He could protect the boy, at least somewhat. He nodded. Xue Cuo immediately sat cross-legged and pressed the same red talisman onto his own body.
Before long, the clay statue opened its eyes again and blinked. It was alive and alert.
Xuan Zhao frowned. “What exactly are you planning?”
Adjusting to his three-inch height, Xue Cuo thumped his tiny belly and declared solemnly, “I’m going to the local Temple of Civil and Martial Deities to lodge a complaint. I’ll report that demons are gathering here and an evil god has returned, and ask the authorities to send cultivators or righteous gods to cleanse the place.”
Xuan Zhao said nothing for a long moment.
“…You’re astonishingly bold.”
