by F. C. Yee
Quentin’s disappointment was palpable. I felt the leaden weight of it on my shoulders as I escaped through the portal to another dimension.
18
Traveling to another plane of existence tasted like cyan. It smelled like a stubbed toe. I detected notes of lighthouse, iambic pentameter, and general relativity.
I stumbled forward as if I’d stepped off a moving walkway too quickly. The first part of me to regain consciousness was my skin. It itched and burned all over.
A heavy object collided with my back and threw me to the ground. My hands found fistfuls of dirt. I crawled around in circles and blinked furiously.
Someone grabbed me by the armpits and hoisted me to my feet. It was Guanyin. “What happened?” I yelled, dizzy from the journey. If we had even made a journey. “Are we in the right place?”
“We’re in the right realm of existence,” Guanyin said, pointing me by the shoulders. “A dimension that’s neither Heaven, Hell, nor Earth.”
As my vision came back, I saw we were standing in the middle of a scrubby desert that stretched all the way to the horizon. The pool was nowhere to be found, and my clothes were dry.
“Welcome to the Blissful Planes,” Quentin said as he dusted himself off. I assumed he was what knocked into me from behind when I didn’t get out of the way fast enough.
The Blissful Planes looked like Utah. The hard-packed sand around us was littered with striated orange monoliths of stone. The nearest ones looked like Earthly buttes and karsts, but farther in the distance they took strange, loopy, cursive forms, like the terrain had been designed by Dr. Seuss. I did not want to walk too far in that direction. It was likely going to screw my mind up with non-Euclidean geometry. I’d read enough cosmic horror fiction to guess.
Looking upward confirmed the weirdness. I could see like it was daytime, but there was no light source to be found. And the sky was pink. Not pink as in sunrise watercolors, but pink as in solid salmon across the board.
“I think this is a touch too whimsical for me,” I said, feeling queasy. I glanced back in the direction it felt like we’d come and saw an irregular patch of warm yellow glow hovering at eye level in the air, like a lens flare. I assumed it marked the terminus of the portal we’d taken.
“It’s not easy for human brains to process unearthly surroundings,” Guanyin said, echoing Quentin from earlier. “Do you want to go back?”
I shook my head. Not this soon into the challenge. I looked for the rest of the traveling party. They stood scattered in a loose group, groaning from the rough ride.
“Well, that was certainly uncategorizable,” the Great White Planet muttered. He took deep breaths as he leaned heavily on his staff. “I hadn’t realized that Ao Guang had torn such a crude rift to Earth.”
“If this realm is where he fought the Yin Mo, he would have been at a severe disadvantage,” Erlang Shen said. He sniffed the air. “His forces are aquatic in nature. This place is as dry as a bone.”
The traitor god jangled his chains. “Speaking of which, can I have some water? I haven’t had a drink since Hell.”
“Make it yourself,” I snapped.
“I can’t make it,” he said, annoyed. “On Earth I was drawing on the abundance of liquid in my surroundings. I’m only asking for a mouthful.”
“Yeah, right, so you can craft a shank or a lockpick?” I said. “We don’t have any water to begin with. Now shut up before I shove your head down your own neck.”
“If you did, at least this infernal beard might stop itching,” he muttered. He tried to scrape his chin with his shoulder. “I don’t know how Guan Yu manages it.”
At least some of us remembered we were in this dimension for reasons other than chit-chatting. Nezha stepped in front of the group and heroically gazed into the distance.
“Behold! I sense the demonic qi that plagues Heaven on this realm. . . .” He operatically swept his arm toward the funkier-looking rock formations. “In that direction.”
His statement was for the benefit of the Great White Planet, who already had his judging notebook out. The old god gave a little shake of his head. Apparently that was too much of a gimme to be worth anything.
“I’ve got a better way to find our enemy with more specificity,” Erlang Shen said, making Nezha scowl. “Genie can do it.”
The gods turned to me. “She has true sight,” Erlang Shen explained to the others who hadn’t known me for long. “Finding a powerful source of demon energy would be a snap for her.”
It was technically true, but hearing him mansplain my own abilities made me want to claw my eyes out from sheer spite. “Hey!” I yelled at the Great White Planet, who was scribbling away. “Do not give him points for that!”
“He thought of the idea,” the old man said without looking up from his writing. “And he’s why you’re here to begin with. You and the Monkey King are neutral parties. Guanyin doesn’t automatically receive the benefit of any good you do, nor does Guan Yu from Sun Wukong.”
My temper flared at him, for boosting Erlang Shen and also for noticing the all-too-real split between me and Quentin. “Genie,” Guanyin said, sensing my blood heating up. “It’s okay. You helping us out will only be a good thing in the long run.”
“Fine,” I sulked. I went over to where Nezha was standing, and he got out of my way before I shouldered him aside. I faced the direction where the landscape got weirder and held my fingers to my temple.
And shrieked.
The purple light that bombarded my eyes was like a flashbang going off in a dark room. I fell on my rear in surprise and tried to press the sting out of my retinas.
“Yaoguai!” I shouted. “They’re right there!”
“Where?” Quentin said.
“Everywhere!”
The area had looked clear and pristine when we’d arrived, untouched by any living presence. But the moment I’d had true sight on revealed that less than a hundred yards away, the landscape was absolutely covered with the telltale purple glow of demon qi.
Nezha tried tilting his head. “I don’t see any yaoguai.”
I knew what I saw. Less than a hundred yards away, there were so many sources of demonic energy that they blended together in a Pointillist mass of light. And they were shining stronger than any of the monsters I’d fought on Earth.
“I can settle this,” Guan Yu said. He stepped forward and raised his halberd. It quickly started to glow brighter and brighter. My horror truly sunk in once I realized he was doing it on purpose.
“Foul creatures!” he roared at the empty space, waving his luminescent weapon like a road flare. “If you are out there, be warned that you stand in the presence of Heavenly gods, as well as your mortal enemies the Shouhushen and Sun Wukong, who each have slain scores of your kind in the past! You would do well to consider the circumstances before making any aggressive maneuvers! Now show your ugly faces, cowards!”
There was a moment where nothing happened. And then, as if they’d taken Guan Yu’s advice to heart and carefully tallied our numbers and strength, the yaoguai revealed themselves.
Powerful individual cloaking spells shimmered and melted away. Irregular shapes unfurled and stretched to their full height. I saw animal limbs and bird talons and tree boughs waving ominously at us.
Yaoguai. Hundreds of them—maybe a thousand.
And not just any garden variety. These were heavies. Many were bigger than Yellow-Toothed Elephant or radiated the magical power of the Six-Eared Macaque. Or both. The yaoguai of the Blessed Planes belonged on a different level than the ones I babysat in the forest. Those demons were high school. These demons were NCAA with options to go pro.
And with their concealment magic, they’d caught us in a perfect ambush. We’d blundered into an army of the unseen. The Yin Mo.
Because there were so many yaoguai, and because a lot of them had so many eyes, I could nearly hear them blink in unison. They stared at our numbers, verifying how outmatched we were. Gods or not, we were so far
up the creek we could have drunk from the source.
Their faces twisted open to reveal glistening fangs and ravenous tongues. A howl went up through the demons’ ranks, and the ones in front began a measured jog at us, the kind that turned into a full-out charge.
Guan Yu would not be beaten to the punch. “Battle commences!” he said with glee. He took off for the opposing horde by himself.
“Tactical genius, huh?” I yelled at Quentin over the noise of the demons’ animalistic baying.
“Quit turning this into a contest!” he snapped at me, before running off to help his friend.
Bad air between us or not, I had to go prevent my boyfriend from being killed. I joined Quentin and Guan Yu in their charge. We didn’t want to receive the attack flat-footed.
Nezha fell in beside me. “Uh, Erlang Shen?” I yelled, trying to remind him that we had a prisoner that needed watching. I knew Guanyin had stayed behind, but I wanted at least two gods on him at all times. The Great White Planet didn’t count.
“He can’t keep up in those restraints,” Nezha said happily, completely missing my point. “He’ll have to miss out on the glory!”
I was going to kill these idiots, assuming the yaoguai didn’t beat me to it. It was too late to go back. The tsunami of demons made our little god squad look like surfers paddling into a hurricane.
While the vanguard of burliest yaoguai came straight at us, maintaining eye contact and hurling threats at the top of their lungs as they came closer, the rest went for the left and right as fast as they could, trying to outflank us, trailing streams of black blood and ooze in their wake. With their numbers they could have surrounded us almost immediately, but they hobbled and limped along without trying to shut the jaws of their trap.
Something didn’t add up. And I had near zero time to figure out what. I zoomed in on the nearest demon stragglers.
They were injured. In some cases, mutilated, slashed up by sharp blades just like Ao Guang and his spirit soldiers. I hadn’t noticed it earlier due to the wonky shapes that yaoguai came in, but these demons already had their asses kicked by the same force that attacked the army of Heaven.
They weren’t the Yin Mo. They were fleeing the Yin Mo.
“Stop!” I screamed as I sprinted ahead of my group, my lengthening legs giving me the speed advantage. “Everyone stop!” I increased in size as I ran, planning to become a mountain in the middle of the battlefield that would keep the opposing forces apart.
That would have been cool and impressive and gotten everyone to listen to me right away. Instead, I tripped like a clown.
Growing while running threw off my center of balance, and I faceplanted in the dust, tumbling head over heels from the momentum of my still-increasing mass. I heard terrified screams from the yaoguai who might have thought I was trying to roll over them.
Luckily I skidded to a spread-eagled halt before I turned anyone into paste. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that Quentin and the gods had stopped charging, possibly out of sheer embarrassment for me. It was a good thing phones weren’t common with this crowd. On Earth I would have been turned into a meme before I could catch my breath.
“Okay,” I said, my voice booming over the alien landscape. “Everyone just give me a second here.”
The good thing about being this size was that compliance was immediate. Not a peep came from anyone as I got to my truck-sized feet and cleared the debris from my clothes. What appeared to me as pebbles lodged in my waistband were more like boulders that crashed to the ground, sowing more fear in my audience.
“Sorry!” I said. “Not trying to hurt anyone—I’m coming down, okay?”
The yaoguai and gods gave me plenty of space as I reduced to my normal size. They were clearly more afraid of my incompetence and lack of control than anything else, but whatever. I got the effect I wanted.
“Who’s your leader?” I said to the demons. “Who’ll speak for you?”
I saw the sea of demons part ways around one of the toughest-looking warriors, who was pretty much a straight-up werewolf with no extra bits. He glared at me with suspicion, his lips curling to reveal dagger-like fangs. His muscles ripped under a hide that was scarred and pitted from countless fights.
But as I approached the gray-furred beast, he held out his hand in what I thought was a strange palm-up salute. He got down onto his knees and pressed the back of his knuckles to the earth. At my look of confusion he pointed to the dirt in front of him.
There was a moving speck on the dusty ground. I had to get down on my hands and knees to make out the features of a thumbnail-sized ant yaoguai.
For his size, the little guy was pretty brave. The tiny demon stared at me, only inches from my nose, pure defiance in his compound eyes. Four of his arms were crossed in front of his thorax.
“Why did you stop?” the yaoguai asked in a wizened, disproportionately deep voice. He could have narrated a nature documentary about himself.
“Why did you start?” I said.
One of his antennas served as an eyebrow, raising slightly into the air. Reluctantly, he gave up his information.
“We . . . had heard this place contained a rift that would let us escape this plane,” he said. “But tears in the fabric of reality are inherently unstable. We weren’t sure the rumor was true until you arrived. Once you and the gods made your presence known, we had to act quickly or lose our chance.”
“You’re not here to fight, are you?” I said. “You’re running from the Yin Mo.”
Tiny snorted, which shouldn’t have been possible without a nose. “Several of us were here to fight. We thought the gods were coming to close our one way out, so our vanguard was willing to sacrifice themselves to hold it open. Our bravest and strongest were prepared to die so the rest could make it to safety.”
I glanced around. The wounded demons leaned on one another for support, or simply gave up and sat on the ground in miserable huddles. Their earlier ferocity had been born of desperation. They were scared and broken, much like the remnants of Ao Guang’s army.
This was a pivotal moment. I swallowed my hesitation. “Maybe we can work something out,” I said. “Do you know who I am?”
Tiny was cautious. “Someone powerful and dangerously clumsy?”
Okay, ouch. “I’m the Shouhushen of California on Earth. There might be a way to get you off this plane to safety if you do exactly what I say.”
Both of his antenna swung wildly in the air, ruining his poker face. “Why—why would Heaven make that offer?” he said.
“It wouldn’t. I would.”
Tiny’s mandibles stretched open and shut with a click. He beckoned Clean Werewolf over. The large demon leaned down so his ant boss could whisper in his ear. The wolf’s eyes went wide with shock before he flinched, likely from Tiny yelling at him not to give too much away.
Wolf Guy straightened up and disappeared into the crowd with a sense of purpose. It made me think that he was passing the message along to other trusted lieutenants, so that frenzied excitement wouldn’t overcome the crowd. If that was true, then I had to hand it to Tiny. He was a pretty good leader.
Wait a second, I thought. Tiny’s a “she.” Ants are led by queens.
The little yaoguai, who definitely had the proportions and wings of a pre-laying queen now that I remembered my bio, regained her composure. “How do we know we can trust you?” she asked. “We have no assurances.”
Maybe the fact that I haven’t squished you already, huh? I wanted to retort. But I held my tongue. I had to remember that demons weren’t used to kindness. Especially not from me.
Shrink, I said to myself.
The world around me grew bigger, grains of sand becoming pebbles, rocks becoming boulders, and the yaoguai surrounding us turning so large that I could hardly tell them apart against the backdrop of the sky. I stood up, no longer needing to crouch to see the ant.
Tiny, at eye level, turned out to be pretty gross. Her carapace was covered in sticky hairs, and her
body twitched constantly. But despite her alien appearance at this scale, she seemed astonished that I’d willingly join her down in the dust.
“Well then,” I said in a squeaky, mouse-lung voice. “I guess we’ll have to negotiate like equals.”
19
Thankfully Tiny recognized my gesture of shrinking as just that—a gesture. I was allowed to resume my normal size for our peace talks. Since we had to stand around like jerks without furniture, it felt rather like a middle school dance where everyone clumped in opposite corners and occasionally sent ambassadors to neutral ground in order to discuss who liked whom.
Sun Wukong, the Goddess of Mercy, and the Shouhushen represented our side, though Quentin wasn’t doing much other than trading glares with the wolf bodyguard accompanying Tiny. The two snarled and flexed at each other in a contest of macho posturing while the rest of us worked.
“I don’t understand,” the leader of the yaoguai said. “The Earth end of the rift is in a what?”
“It’s like a . . . a nursery for grown-up children,” Guanyin said, doing her best to describe the college experience in a way the demon would understand.
“You can’t eat them,” I said.
Tiny gave me a look like I was being a condescending fool. “I assumed that was implicit in any bargain we struck.”
“Well, I’m making it explicit. No human consumption. Don’t touch anyone or anything.”
“You’re going to have to provide your own concealment,” Guanyin said. “There’s too many of you for me to hide at the same time.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” Tiny said. “We got the drop on you lot, didn’t we?”
Part of me was really annoyed with the demon’s sass, and part of me liked the hell out of her attitude. Between her and Yunie, maybe I had an affinity for feisty small things.
“Look, the forces under my command are all powerful enough to restrain our hunger and stay invisible to the human eye,” the ant queen said. “But not indefinitely. Without a strong enough divine presence on Earth, this truce of ours could go sideways fast.”