The Iron Will of Genie Lo

by F. C. Yee

  It was a portal.

  Creating a rift out of this plane was not going to work. Guanyin said so herself. But she was trying anyway. Putting her life into it. In the last moments before the Jade Emperor did who knew what to her, her only thought was to get me home.

  But we got caught. The Jade Emperor noticed the weak, flickering shine of the portal and laughed. Under the crushing weight of his spiritual power, it was like a candle at the bottom of a deep-sea trench. He came over to me and grabbed me roughly by the back of my neck.

  “What do we have here?” he said. “A rift to Earth? Interesting.” He thrust my face toward the flickering glow. “Let’s see what channels we can get.”

  Up close to the portal, my eyes swam in a sea of amber. I saw Earth as a planet, a swirling blue and green marble, before plummeting down, zooming in, freefalling into the western half of North America, landing nearby the college campus before I could register the distance that had passed.

  Suddenly I was inside a building undergoing construction, an off-campus apartment complex similar to Ji-Hyun’s. The top floors were still nothing but I-beam skeletons. Hunched figures perched on the girders and stalked through the shadows. Yaoguai. I could see through their shrouds of concealment, the layers of magic moving along with their bodies.

  They weren’t using the spell by sitting still and keeping quiet like I thought when I’d negotiated our truce. The demons had mastered a perfect mobile camouflage, the kind that would let a hunter remain invisible to its prey. And every single one of them was fixated on a human walking down the street toward the construction lot.

  Yunie.

  I recognized her face, her stride, the way she held that stupid shoulder bag that was too big for her. I used to have nightmares and cold sweats about my friend being pursued by yaoguai, and now she was blundering straight into a nest of them, her life on offer without the cost of a chase. Those demons were hungry and wounded. I couldn’t have put her in more danger if I’d tried.

  I couldn’t protect her. I couldn’t protect anyone.

  Please, I begged, not knowing whom I was speaking to. I gasped for air I didn’t deserve. Make it stop.

  The Jade Emperor yanked me back. I lost sight of Yunie and wailed like a child.

  “Oh, you look like you want to go home,” he said, tsking. “You know, I think I might let you. This isn’t business for a human girl, no matter how strong she is. Tell me, Shouhushen. Would you like to give up and go home?”

  “Yes,” I sobbed. I was so broken it came out as two syllables.

  “I’ll send you home,” he whispered. “But just you. You’ll have to leave everyone else behind. Oh, what I’ll do to them. You can’t imagine.”

  He twisted my head around so I could face Quentin and Guanyin. I could barely make their forms out through my tears. Quentin had managed to move a few paces toward me. His mouth was bleeding from a self-inflicted bite. Guanyin was shaking with effort. She couldn’t hold the portal open any longer and was on the verge of losing the spell. There wouldn’t be another.

  Between two worlds, I made a choice. There was no way to say if it was the right one. But as with all of my choices, I could and would hate myself later.

  “So?” the Jade Emperor said. “Are you going back to Earth?”

  He let me drop my arms onto his shoulders to steady myself. They felt like jelly. He glanced left and right at the two useless blobs that were my hands and smirked. He released me out of pity, knowing that whatever I did next, it would eat me up inside.

  He was kind of right.

  My fingers clenched like I’d stuck them into a wall socket. They made an audible bone-crunching noise as they dug into the Jade Emperor’s shoulders.

  “You first,” I said.

  His eyes widened. I shoved his head into the portal, and it snapped shut, leaving the rest of his body on this plane.

  27

  Everything stopped.

  The suffocating spiritual pressure emanating from the Jade Emperor ceased. It felt like gravity had cut out on a space station. Even though my feet were still planted on the ground, my newfound freedom gave me the sensation of drifting.

  The endless chanting of the sleep spell stopped, too. It must have required the maintained attention of its caster. Who I presumed was the guy lying on the floor without his head.

  Footsteps came running up behind me. I turned, expecting Quentin, but found the Great White Planet instead. Man, I kept forgetting about him.

  “You—you killed the King of Heaven!” the Great White Planet cried.

  “Was I not supposed to?” I slurred.

  “No!”

  I laughed. Having been blasted with so much spiritual power was only now catching up to me. It made me loopy. Intoxicated. Being out of my mind was better than facing the repercussions of my actions and the damage I’d caused.

  I pitched forward and dry heaved. Quentin and Guanyin caught me before I hit the ground. They propped me up on either side. Guan Yu started to help, too, but backed off once he saw they had me. Good guy, that Guan Yu.

  “He was gonna kill us,” I said. “Couldn’t let that happen. Not even if—not even if . . .”

  Not even if it meant the end of the world. I shut my eyes so I wouldn’t cry at what I’d done. The window that had closed. Whatever ruin waited for me back on Earth was on my shoulders. Yunie. Oh god, Yunie. I’d—I’d—

  Guanyin gripped my upper arms. “Genie, I swear to you, everything will be okay on Earth.” She shook me hard, trying to get through. “Your friends will be okay. I give you my word. Genie, listen to me!”

  She was lying, of course. This whole business was a lie. Telling ourselves we could do the right thing. There was no such animal as the right thing. It was less real than dragons.

  A high-pitched shriek startled us out of our huddle. It came from Guan Yu.

  The warrior god looked like he’d seen a ghost. He pointed his weapon, the tip trembling as his hands shook.

  The Jade Emperor was sitting upright on the floor.

  As a favor to those of us who’d missed it moving, the body lurched again, staggering to its feet. This time we all shrieked.

  The Jade Emperor was still headless, but decidedly less so than a few minutes ago. The sawed-off surface of his neck tilted at us, and I got ready to puke, but instead of being filled with gore, it was a blank void, almost digital in its emptiness. And around the edge of his wound, the surfaces were reconstituting themselves, cell by cell, pixel by pixel. The Jade Emperor’s nose, ears, eyes, and the rest of his skull came back from the foundation upward, as if a team of invisible tiny bricklayers was working overtime to restore a giant statue.

  I’d come to understand that each god of Heaven had a personal power, a domain of reality that was theirs to command. Erlang Shen’s was water. Guanyin’s was time. The Jade Emperor’s unique ability appeared to be regeneration. Cellular self-dominance. The perfect specialty for a self-concerned god.

  His new head was closer to the one I recognized. Jowly and soft, untouched by the sun. The shade of the skin didn’t match the rest of his body. He came to his senses and looked around, taking stock. And then his eyes widened.

  “No no NO!” he screamed. “What did you bai chi do? You’ve ruined everything!”

  I ran at him and closed my hands around his throat. He must have still been recovering, because he seemed to lack the spiritual force and physical strength to fend me off. Only three different gods and a Monkey King pulling me away kept me from doing to him what he’d done to Erlang Shen. Heck, his powers meant I could kill him again and again, for eternity. Not the worst way I could spend the rest of my useless life.

  “The sleep spell!” the Jade Emperor shrieked. “You broke the sleep spell! Did none of you think about what I was casting it on!?”

  The ground underneath us began to shake.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  I was a girl from the Bay. I knew my quakes, from s-waves to aftershocks. I could tell you the Richter
score of any given tremor down to half a point.

  So I immediately knew that this earthquake, even if it was in a different dimension, wasn’t normal geology at work. There was an insistent thrashing to it that felt like someone lacing their fingers through the bars of a gate and yanking back and forth out of rage.

  I felt the others losing their balance, but I grabbed the Jade Emperor again to make a stable structure. “What are you talking about?” I shouted.

  “I left the court of Heaven and came here in the first place because I had to hold it off! Someone always has to hold it off!”

  “Hold what off?”

  “Anarchy. Apocalypse. The Anti-Way.”

  Saying those words out loud calmed the Jade Emperor. He laughed in resignation. “The secret you learn once you become the ruler of Heaven,” he said as if we had all the time in the world, “is that you have one, and only one, duty. To make sure Heaven survives. Nothing else matters. And today, because of you, I’ve failed.”

  From a center point off in the distance, the plateau bulged upward. The stone should have broken into fault lines, but instead it warped, elastic, like fake rock painted on a flat canvas.

  The bulge grew bigger and bigger, and reality around it got thinner and thinner, until with a birthing, nuclear hiss, it ripped asunder. The film strip of the movie playing in my eyes tore apart and let the white projection show through the gap.

  Something crawled out of it.

  An arm the size of a blue whale reached out of the void between the rocks. It crashed down onto the plateau, spreading its giant fingers over the terrain, gripping for purchase like a tentacled alien landing on Earth and deciding Yes, this’ll do. Another arm, the mate to the first, elevated itself from the rift and pushed at the other side. Triceps as big as a subway car flexed and pushed until they pressed their owner upward.

  What little logic that remained to me, after the fires of shock and dread had burned my mind to ashes, was expecting a massive, horrible head to poke its way out of the hole. Humanlike, to match the arms. Or perhaps an animal’s, like a yaoguai. But no head came. Instead the titanic shoulders that emerged had nothing in between them.

  The headless, mountainous torso rose into the air, a tectonic act, a new range forming, until it paused, seemingly stuck by its waist. Its pectorals blinked. They blinked. Like eyes. Right where its nipples would have been, the skin of its chest folded rapidly in the unmistakable pattern of a pair of eyes adjusting to the light.

  “Nüwa have mercy on us,” the Great White Planet whispered, his entire body reliving a nightmare. “It’s a Primordial!”

  “Xing Tian,” the Jade Emperor said. “The embodiment of resistance. It is hundun, chaos, un-creation. The destruction that constantly lurks behind the veil.” He gazed upward at the monster with an almost appreciative calmness, in the same way a skier might stop to recognize the beauty of an oncoming avalanche. For the moment, it was far enough away that it was still a landmark.

  “Xing Tian cannot be killed,” he said. “It cannot be fought to any end. When it rouses, it can only be appeased and suppressed, as it has been for eons by the holder of the mandate. I originally came here to reinforce the wards that keep it from tearing through the boundaries of Heaven and Earth and obliterating the Universe.”

  The missing piece. I understood everything now. The Jade Emperor had detected Xing Tian stirring and rushed here to contain the threat. But he didn’t want to be trapped in this duty forever, when someone else could possibly shoulder the burden.

  In a spectacular display of wu wei, letting events unfold to his advantage, he waited for a Mandate Challenge to be called in his absence, knowing that strong gods would step up. He’d sent Princess Iron Fan to filter out the most powerful challenger and discard the rest. The plan had been to swap whichever god it was into the job of keeping Xing Tian at bay, like a fresh battery.

  It was Atlas tricking Hercules into holding up the firmament in his stead. And the rest of us had fallen for the gambit, right until the point where I’d veered off script.

  Finally comprehending the chain of events that led us here did absolutely nothing for our situation. The thing blotting out the sky twisted around. The false eyes on its chest lowered their gaze until they spotted our group standing there, dumbfounded.

  Xing Tian’s reaction was as immediate as ours was slow. I’d never truly appreciated the term abomination before I saw it painted on the giant’s expression. Its eyes turned to furious slits, and the torso’s cavernous navel suddenly expanded to encompass its entire waist, forming a fleshy abyss like a whirlpool out of Greek myth.

  It’s screaming at us, I thought. It hates us more than anything in the world. Its very purpose is to hate us.

  Had Xing Tian lungs connected to its navel-mouth, I was one hundred percent sure that the noise from its roar would have liquefied us outright. But the colossus was horrifically silent, making our voices sound like they were cutting through the aftermath of an explosion.

  “Run!” the Great White Planet said. Whatever level of familiarity he had with these types of beings gave him his wits back while the rest of us were stunned stupid. “We have to run!”

  The Jade Emperor laughed again. “Where? Now that it’s fully awake, it’ll pull down the walls of the Universe.”

  “Anywhere but here!” the Great White Planet snapped.

  This time there was no need to carry the old man. Terror made us all equally speedy. We sprinted back in the direction we came, even the Jade Emperor with his defeatist attitude. For someone who’d accepted his fate, he was pretty damn fast.

  The sky turned darker over our heads.

  A ponderous crash behind us nearly sent me flying into the air. I glanced back to see we’d just managed to avoid getting squashed by the monument of Xing Tian’s hand, slapping the ground. From its position stuck in the rift, it’d flung itself out as far as it could reach to try and kill us. It was so big it had crossed the distance with one flop.

  It wasn’t going to stay stuck long. The hand clawed into the ground, fingernails punching deep into the stone. Xing Tian pulled with the force of a million pack animals and heaved forward, a man on the verge of successfully climbing out of the ice he’d fallen through.

  The shadow from its other hand loomed overhead, blotting out the light. We were going to get crushed if we stayed our course. Maybe the gods of Heaven had watched as many terrible movies as me where people were flattened by trying to outrace a rolling boulder, because we all cut sharply to the side, right in the nick of time. The gust of wind from Xing Tian’s falling-log fingers twisted my knees up and sent me tumbling.

  Is this what it’s like to fight me? I thought as I hit my head on the stone floor. How completely unfair.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the Jade Emperor open a portal for himself with great difficulty. Xing Tian’s spiritual gravity made it no sure thing. The King of Heaven wriggled through the miniscule window, disappearing down to his thighs before the rift snapped shut, leaving chunks of his legs behind. He’d simply regenerate them later.

  I hadn’t the notion to be upset about his comical, lizard-like escape. If nowhere was safe from Xing Tian, then the most the Jade Emperor had secured himself was dying in his own bed.

  Quentin picked me up off the ground. “We have to make a stand!” I yelled. “Why aren’t we fighting?”

  “We can’t!” Quentin said, echoing the now-gone Jade Emperor. “It’s more than a god! It’s a concept! It’s resistance itself! It can fight back forever until it wears us down and kills us!”

  He pulled me away from the giant hand that was beginning to stir again, and I heard the unthinkable spill from his lips.

  “We lose, Genie!” he said. “There’s nothing we can do! We’ve lost, and it’s over!”

  I couldn’t believe it. Quentin would never say that. Not when the two of us were together and there was something left to struggle against.

  Xing Tian pulled back both of its hands this time
, opting to push itself upward instead of pull itself along the ground any farther. Its torso raised into the air, a gigantic barn being raised, nearly causing a vacuum in the atmosphere. It shifted ponderously, like it was getting ready to try standing up for the first time. I couldn’t imagine how big it would be if it got to its feet. We all backed away from its growing height.

  Except for Guanyin.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  At that moment, I would have sworn up and down that somehow, Erlang Shen had planted his future-glimpsing eye in my forehead, as some kind of parting curse. Because I could see the threads of possibilities weaving themselves together into one singular outcome.

  “What are you doing?” Quentin shouted at her. “You can’t fight it!”

  Guanyin smiled, and her face shone with light. “Since when am I a fighter?”

  She beckoned Guan Yu closer and whispered in the general’s ear. The stoic god’s face crumbled. He nodded and muttered something back.

  “No!” I cried. I tried to grab her and pull her away from Xing Tian, but Guan Yu tackled me by the waist as hard as he could and ran in the other direction.

  “Quentin!” I screamed. I tried to find purchase with my feet so I could push back. “You can’t let her! Stop her!”

  Quentin shared one last glance with Guanyin, their centuries of friendship unable to buy them a proper farewell. She pointed with her chin at me, and Quentin turned away with tears streaming down his face. He caught up with Guan Yu and grabbed me right when I almost slipped free. Together they managed to keep me from digging my heels in.

  I could no longer hear what I was screaming. Guanyin walked up to Xing Tian.

  The monster had shoved one knee under itself, readying to get up. But upon spotting the easy prey, it clasped its hands together above its headless shoulders in a double hammer-fist. It wanted more than to kill her. It wanted to erase her existence.