by F. C. Yee
“Like I’m going to make myself an easily spotted target,” he scoffed. “You saw what happened to Nezha.”
I frowned at him.
“Get off your high horse,” he said. “You knew him for a single morning. I already told you that Nezha was my friend.”
He had, but I’d assumed he was making stuff up at the time. “Nezha was one of the few gods close to my age in centuries,” Erlang Shen said with genuine bitterness. “After you exposed me for a traitor, he pleaded for mercy on my behalf. So don’t you dare act like I’m incapable of feeling for him.”
We climbed in silence for another minute. The memory of Nezha must have been really eating at Erlang Shen, because he spoke again, unprompted.
“If anything, you’re the outsider,” he said. “Getting involved in the business of the gods. You think you have us figured out. You understand us as well as the roach does the humans who’re dropping crumbs on its head.”
An errant step of his sent pebbles and dust cascading into my face and down my shirt. I scowled and moved over to the side where the path was less obvious but still manageable. The next kick upward I took brought me parallel with him.
Guanyin had said something similar once, about me not knowing what happened upstairs. I decided to tug on this string, partly out of interest and mostly because it seemed like a chance to get under Erlang Shen’s skin for once.
“Yeah, well, sometimes you gods act as petty as the rest of us roaches,” I said. “You created the mess with Red Boy because of a spat with your uncle.”
He stopped where he was. I’d struck the nerve I was ostensibly looking for, but perhaps had dug too deep.
“A spat. With my uncle the Jade Emperor. Yes. That was why I did what I did. A spat.”
Glancing at his face, I was taken aback. I knew that look, when your rage was so cold and ossified that it was part of the foundation the rest of you was built on. Poured into the concrete, invisible to everyone except those who understood the signs.
“I used to have a third eye,” he said.
“What?”
“I used to have a third eye. For real. Right here, in the middle of my forehead.” He pointed to his skull and made a little circling bullseye over his skin. “I was an honest-to-goodness tri-clops when I was younger.”
I shouldn’t have wanted to laugh at the image. A little snort came out. Erlang Shen almost smiled. Almost.
“My third eye granted me true sight,” he said. “You think yours is special, but I can tell you right now that what you have is like being gifted a flashlight inside a coffin compared to what I had. I could see more than lies and faraway objects. I could see possibilities. I could see reasons. Futures. Threads of fate that might weave themselves into the most beautiful outcomes if only the right strands were tugged.”
Erlang Shen closed his eyes, his two remaining regular ones. “There was a world I glimpsed, a timeline that was perfect. Heaven and Earth in alignment. Every human born would have been cared for, and every god would have done their part to make it happen. It would have been something out of Guanyin’s most hopeful dreams.”
I wanted to say something but hesitated. I had delighted, once, in the prospect of a better tomorrow under the Goddess of Mercy while lying on the cheap, scratchy carpet of an office building. It was a little frightening how much his words sounded like my own thoughts.
“I went running to the Jade Emperor once I was sure my gift had been developed enough,” Erlang Shen said. “I wanted to help him, down to the sinews of my being. I thought we were going to do so much good together, my uncle and me bringing a grand new destiny to the cosmos. My uncle and me! Ha!”
The rocks he was holding on to began to sprout cracks under his fingers.
“The Jade Emperor looked at me like I’d drawn a knife and rammed it between his ribs,” Erlang Shen choked out. “How dare I. How dare I try to stick my nose where it didn’t belong. To suggest that his mandate-appointed rule could ever be improved. The very act of thinking that I could play a part in guiding Heaven and Earth was both treason and a stunning lack of filial piety. It had to be punished.”
He clenched his teeth. “The Jade Emperor took my third eye from me. He ripped my flesh apart in a great big ceremony in front of the Court of Heaven. You would have thought I was getting a medal. Instead he lectured me in front of the other gods while I screamed on the floor of the Peach Banquet Hall, clutching a bloody crater in my skull!”
I winced and looked away.
“My special sight, gone forever,” Erlang Shen said, his voice raw like scraped leather. “Don’t you get it? The enormity of what he did? It wasn’t just me he punished back then! By taking that vision of beauty, of what could have been, and destroying it, he hurt you, he hurt humanity, the gods, even the demons! He cheated us! He swindled us! He robbed us all of a perfect future!”
I heard the noise of rocks exploding under pressure. Without thinking, I reached behind me as quick as I could with one hand and grabbed Erlang Shen’s arm before he fell down the mountain.
In retrospect the gesture was actually kind of pointless. We were still on a slope, not dangling dramatically off a cliff edge. Neither of us would have been greatly injured by a slight tumble. At best I’d saved us the time it would take waiting for him to catch up with me again.
But still. He and I clung to each other’s wrists like our lives depended on it. We both managed to save our footing, so we ended up frozen in the apex of the world’s most awkward ballroom twirl.
Erlang Shen tried to still his features back to his normal self, but the best he could manage was shame at spilling his guts. He relaxed there, letting me keep him upright, knowing I could hold him easily.
“And I used to have a trident,” he muttered.
“What?”
“A magic trident,” he said, deciding that petulance was a better emotion to show me than sincerity. “A unique weapon of my own, similar to Guan Yu’s Green Dragon Crescent Blade. The Jade Emperor took that away from me as well. So if you were wondering why I had such a fixation on you as the reincarnated Ruyi Jingu Bang, it was because you were the closest thing to what I’d lost, in one package. A weapon and true sight.”
I sighed deeply. In an unnecessary move that I’d only seen in action movies, I swung him like a pendulum. The momentum took him to the same elevation as me and he caught his grip on the rock face once more.
“So,” he said, pretending like the last few minutes didn’t happen. “Do you have any embarrassing family stories you feel like sharing?”
He was only covering for his lapse by being a smartass, but I found I suddenly did want to talk about my family. Overwhelmingly so. I needed the reminder of why I’d taken the ride that had eventually landed me here, far from them and Earth.
I resumed climbing. Erlang Shen kept pace beside me. We both kept our eyes on the mountain.
“When I was younger, there was this plush toy that came out one year,” I said. I tested my next foothold and stepped higher. “Everyone at school had one. It was like a bear . . . deer . . . cat thing. I wasn’t sure what animal it was supposed to be.”
“Sounds like a yaoguai,” Erlang Shen said.
“Ha! Maybe. I asked my parents for one, for my birthday. It was overpriced but they didn’t say no. It was right after the two of them had opened the store they’d been working on, so they must have been feeling flush and confident. They must have been so sure they were going to succeed.”
I’d never told Erlang Shen my personal family history, but you didn’t need a third eye to see it wasn’t perfectly happy. He was content not to interrupt my fairly trivial story and keep quiet for once.
“I was so excited when I tore off the wrapping paper,” I said, still climbing. “Only to find it wasn’t the right toy. My guess is that the shop wanted to hang on to as much stock as they could to see if the price would rise, so when my dad asked for one, they pawned off something similar on him or convinced him a different toy was better than the original.”
I could imagine how my dad would have looked like an easy mark. “Sometimes parents do that, you know? They’re not content to give you what you ask for and feel like they have to go the extra mile or think of something super special and different for you. When all you want is the basics.”
“What did you do?” Erlang Shen asked.
“I just kind of froze. It was obvious from my reaction that I wasn’t happy. My mother started yelling at my dad for screwing up, and my dad was yelling that he’d make it right. But he couldn’t. They couldn’t get a new one because both toys were expensive, and that was the moment where it dawned on me how strapped for cash my family really was. I was a child, and I didn’t understand the concept of being poor. Until right then and there.”
We reached a little flat terrace with enough room for both of us to stand. It seemed like a good place to take a break. Erlang Shen and I stood on the level terrain and wrung out our fingers. I wasn’t done talking.
“It was also the first fight they had after opening their store,” I said. “So for a very long time I assumed all the bad luck that happened afterward was my fault. I’d cursed their business with misfortune. Which meant their eventual split was my fault, too. Because the tiniest chains of events matter.”
Erlang Shen shook his head at the ground, taking this anecdote about luck and fate and money very seriously. God or not, he was still Chinese, after all. “Family is the worst.”
“No,” I said. “You don’t understand. I love my family more than anything. My mother took it out on my father because she wanted me to have my heart’s desire. My father withdrew into a shell because he couldn’t handle disappointing me. I am their whole world, and they are mine.”
Erlang Shen looked up to see my index finger, doubled in length, pressing dangerously close to his eyeball. He jerked his head away in surprise, but my finger extended to follow him, threatening to pierce his brain.
“You put my mother in danger,” I snarled. “And you tried to kill my father. So don’t you ever get chummy with me, or I will make a corpse out of you and hang it on my wall, right above the spot where I’ve kept that wrong stuffed animal all these years.”
Erlang Shen had done me a favor. The exhaustion, the sense of surrender that threatened to drag me down to the bottom of the sea lost its grip. Bringing up family had caused the shackles to break, allowing me to rocket back to the surface, buoyed by the one emotion that would always be there to provide me high-octane fuel.
The color drained out of Erlang Shen’s face, replaced by a killer’s pale calm. A glaze fell over his eyes, like a reptile’s second lid closing itself before the attack. He cricked his neck, beckoning me to look downward.
In his hand was a small blade made of water he’d hidden somewhere on his person. The point of it was aimed right at my kidney. The encounter with Princess Iron Fan had illustrated to us the advantages of using our powers in smaller, subtler, more lethal ways.
For perhaps the first time ever, Erlang Shen and I stared at each other with something akin to mutual understanding. There was a measure of respect in his gaze. He was looking at someone as awful and hate-filled as him. Rage was our common ground, a lack of forgiveness our shared little plot.
He raised his hands, and the shank of water disappeared into his sleeve. I retracted my finger. We went back to climbing. If we ever ran out of mountain, there would be a whole lot of feelings and bloody guts strewn over the rocks.
“You would have done well as my weapon,” Erlang Shen said.
His comment made me remember those wild, overwhelming days when Quentin and I first unlocked my Ruyi Jingu Bang powers together. After the first couple of critical missteps, Sun Wukong stopped referring to me as “his weapon.” We became partners. A duo. I shuddered to think of the tutelage I would have received from the god next to me, a doubling of my worst traits instead of Quentin’s warm affection.
“No,” I said with absolute certainty. “I wouldn’t have.”
25
We reached the top of the mountain right around nightfall on this plane. It hurt to think of how much time we’d lost. By my rough calculations, the third day of my long weekend was over.
I couldn’t check how long I’d been gone. I’d intentionally left my phone back on Earth, afraid it wouldn’t survive a supernatural adventure. Maybe if I joined Ax, I could start affording replacements. I wanted to both laugh and cry, remembering my Earthly problems.
The peak, which had looked like a point from down below, was now a long-edged plateau that implied the very size of the rock formation had changed in the second we weren’t thinking about it. I had the feeling that physics was getting looser with our altitude. I refused to look down the slope behind me, fearing that instead of clouds I’d see an unrendered, placeholding void.
I was still ahead of Erlang Shen and didn’t want to wait, so I peeped over the side like a badger. There, I spotted the first good news I’d had all day. Quentin, Guanyin, Guan Yu, and the Great White Planet were sitting close to the mountain’s edge, circled around a small fire.
I shouted incoherently like a shipwreck survivor. Vaulting over the top, I ran at them, waving my arms. Quentin was the first to his feet, but instead of coming to greet me, he stayed where he was like a statue, frigid and unyielding.
Way to ruin the moment, I thought. I collided with Guanyin instead and hugged her into the air.
“Genie,” she said, rubbing her knuckles against my scalp.
“Were you waiting here for us?” I said. “How did you know where we’d be?”
“I had a feeling,” Quentin said, his voice even more robotic than his stance.
Oh, right. Our “mystical connection that spanned time and space, forever linking our souls in the most intimate manner imaginable.” Pfft. Whatever.
I put Guanyin down so I could take in our surroundings properly. Behind the other gods was a forest, thick and dense enough to house a horde of German witches. There were barely any gaps between the trunks, and the canopy seemed to replace the sky itself. Quentin and Guanyin were right; the geography here wiped its butt with Earth-based standards.
The Great White Planet stared at the woods with a face of extreme worry. “There’s been many false starts to our adventure, but without a doubt it ends here, one way or another.”
I didn’t need to turn true sight on to confirm his statement. Being this close to the gigantic source of qi, I could feel the troubling energy on my skin in rhythmic waves, like something breathing on me. Rather than having to detect its presence, we had to mentally block it out so as not to lose our minds.
“Princess Iron Fan may have been the one who defeated Ao Guang and attacked the yaoguai, but whatever this phenomenon is, it’s orders of magnitude more powerful than her,” the Great White Planet said. “If it grows any stronger it could crush entire realms of existence under the mass of its energy.”
He reached into his robes and pulled out his notebook. I thought he was going to scribble more in it, but he shocked me by tearing out his older pages entirely and crumpling them in his fist. The notebook was much thinner now, with only a thin sheaf of blank space remaining.
“I’m declaring that the Mandate Challenge is still ongoing,” he said. He gestured toward the woods. “Whoever can safeguard Heaven and Earth and all the planes in between against that will be the victor.”
“Oh come on!” Erlang Shen snapped. He was either protesting the Great White Planet’s decision to cancel his previous victories or the fact that Guan Yu had the edge of his halberd pressed against his neck.
Good on Guan Yu for showing initiative. “What, are you going to whine when things don’t break exactly your way for once?” I said to Erlang Shen. “Because that would be a pretty spineless move of you.”
“I’m saying there is no fighting whatever ‘that’ is,” he said, wiggling his fingers in air quotes, a gesture that was probably lost on the more traditional gods. “If whatever’s out there is many times stronger t
han Princess Iron Fan, then we don’t have any hope of beating it. I say better to leave it alone and hope it doesn’t stir. Now that we’re together, we can combine our powers to figure out a way off this blasted plane.”
“We already tried opening a portal while we waited for you, and it fizzled,” Guanyin said. “That energy source is like a dwarf star pulling us in and trapping us on its surface. Spiritual gravity, remember?”
Erlang Shen swore up and down. He was the one who’d explained the concept to me in the first place. Spiritual power attracted spiritual power like magnets, the smaller charge getting stuck to the larger. That was why yaoguai tended to cluster around me in the Bay Area. I couldn’t imagine what kind of power was needed to immobilize Guanyin, Sun Wukong, and three other full-fledged gods.
“We can’t get back to Heaven, and Genie can’t get back to Earth, until we shut down the source of that qi,” Guanyin said. “The only way out is through.”
Erlang Shen grimaced. Part of it was that he wanted to call the game early while he was still winning. But there was another emotion behind his mask, one I recognized because I’d put it in him before. The god was afraid. He didn’t want to confront the monster in the forest. By the looks on everyone’s faces, no one did. I could tell they were thinking of Nezha, how the young god’s power and immortality had failed him.
“Welcome to our world,” I said.
The assembled divinities looked at me, confused.
“Now you know what we humans feel like,” I said. I could smell the hospital disinfectant as I spoke and could see my mother’s thin hands worry her nails as she tried to be brave in front of me. “We’re afraid. We’re vulnerable. We have no control over when death comes for us. Life isn’t some grand adventuring quest where each setback is really a leap forward to victory. Sometimes you get set back into the dirt six feet deep, and there you stay.”
I knew Guanyin already understood this. I was trying to deliver the message to Guan Yu and Erlang Shen in case one of them ended up the new King of Heaven. The Great White Planet needed to hear it, too, for the next time he tried to dungeon master a Mandate Challenge without concern for who might perish in the upheaval.