by R. F. Kuang
He put the poppy seeds down and gestured to the array of psychedelics before him. “Shamans across continents have used plants to alter their states of consciousness for centuries. The medicine men of the Hinterlands used this flower to fly upward like an arrow to enter into communion with the gods. This one will put you into a trance where you might enter the Pantheon.”
Rin’s eyes widened. Here it was. Slowly the lines began to connect. She was finally beginning to understand the purpose of the last six months of research and meditation. So far she had been pursuing two separate lines of inquiry—the shamans and their abilities; the gods and the nature of the universe.
Now, with the introduction of psychedelic plants, Jiang drew these threads into one unified theory, a theory of spiritual connection through psychedelics to the dream world where the gods might reside.
The separate concepts in her mind flung connections at one another, like a web suddenly grown overnight. The formative background Jiang had been laying suddenly made total, utter sense.
She had an outline, but the picture hadn’t fully developed. Something didn’t square.
“Contained within my mind?” Rin repeated carefully.
Jiang glanced sideways at her. “Do you know what the word entheogen means?”
She shook her head.
“It means the generation of the god within,” he said. He reached out and tapped her forehead in that same place. “The merging of god and person.”
“But we aren’t gods,” she said. She had spent the past week in the library trying to trace Nikara theology to its roots. Nikara religious mythology was full of encounters between the mortal and divine, but nowhere in her research had anyone mentioned anything about god-creation. “Shamans communicate with gods. They don’t create gods.”
“What’s the difference between a god within and a god outside? What is the difference between the universe contained in your mind and the universe external?” Jiang tapped both of her temples. “Wasn’t that the basis of your criticism of Hesperia’s theological hierarchy? That the idea of a divine creator separate from us and ruling over us made no sense?”
“Yes, but . . .” She trailed off, trying to make sense of what she wanted to say. “I didn’t mean that we are gods, I meant that . . .” She wasn’t sure what she meant. She looked at Jiang in supplication.
For once, he gave her the easy answer. “You must conflate these concepts. The god outside you. The god within. Once you understand that these are one and the same, once you can hold both concepts in your head and know them to be true, you’ll be a shaman.”
“But it can’t be so simple,” Rin stammered. Her mind was still reeling. She struggled to formulate her thoughts. “If this is . . . then . . . then why doesn’t everyone do this? Why doesn’t anyone in the opium houses stumble upon the gods?”
“Because they don’t know what they’re looking for. The Nikara don’t believe in their deities, remember?”
“Fine,” Rin said, refusing to rise to the bait of having her own words thrown in her face. “But why not?” She had thought the Nikara religious skepticism was reasonable, but not when people like Jiang could do the things they did. “Why aren’t there more believers?”
“Once there were,” Jiang said, and she was surprised at how bitter he sounded. “Once there were monasteries upon monasteries. Then the Red Emperor in his quest for unification came and burned them down. Shamans lost their power. The monks—the ones with real power, anyhow—died or disappeared.”
“Where are they now?”
“Hidden,” he said. “Forgotten. In recent history, only the nomadic clans of the Hinterlands and the tribes of Speer had anyone who could commune with the gods. This is no coincidence. The national quest to modernize and mobilize entails a faith in one’s ability to control world order, and when that happens, you lose your connection with the gods. When man begins to think that he is responsible for writing the script of the world, he forgets the forces that dream up our reality. Once, this academy was a monastery. Now it is a military training ground. You’ll find this same pattern has repeated itself in all the great powers of this world that have entered a so-called civilized age. Mugen doesn’t have shamans. Hesperia doesn’t have shamans. They worship men whom they believe are gods, not gods themselves.”
“What about Nikara superstition?” Rin asked. “I mean—in Sinegard, obviously, where people are educated, religion’s defunct, but what about the little villages? What about folk religion?”
“The Nikara believe in icons, not gods,” said Jiang. “They don’t understand what they’re worshipping. They’ve prioritized ritual over theology. Sixty-four gods of equal standing? How convenient, and how absurd. Religion cannot be packaged so cleanly. The gods are not so neatly organized.”
“But I don’t understand,” she said. “Why have the shamans disappeared? Wouldn’t the Red Emperor be all the more powerful for having shamans in his army?”
“No. In fact, the opposite is true. The creation of empire requires conformity and uniform obedience. It requires teachings that can be mass-produced across the entire country. The Militia is a bureaucratic entity that is purely interested in results. What I teach is impossible to duplicate to a class of fifty, much less a division of thousands. The Militia is composed almost entirely of people like Jun, who think that things matter only if they are getting results immediately, results that can be duplicated and reused. But shamanism is and always has been an imprecise art. How could it be anything else? It is about the most fundamental truths about each and every one of us, how we relate to the phenomenon of existence. Of course it is imprecise. If we understood it completely, then we would be gods.”
Rin was unconvinced. “But surely some teachings could be spread.”
“You overestimate the Empire. Think of martial arts. Why were you able to defeat your classmates in the trial? Because they learned a version that is watered down, distilled and packaged for convenience. The same is true of their religion.”
“But they can’t have forgotten completely,” Rin said. “This class still exists.”
“This class is a joke,” said Jiang.
“I don’t think it’s a joke.”
“You, and no one else,” said Jiang. “Even Jima doubts the value of this course, but she can’t bring herself to abolish it. On some level, Nikara has never given up hope that it can find its shamans again.”
“But it has them,” she said. “I’ll bring shamanism back to this world.”
She glanced hopefully toward him, but Jiang sat frozen, staring over the edge of the cliff as if his mind were somewhere far away. He looked very sad then.
“The age of the gods is over,” he said finally. “The Nikara may speak of shamans in their legends, but they cannot abide the prospect of the supernatural. To them, we are madmen.” He swallowed. “We are not madmen. But how can we convince anyone of this, when the rest of the world believes it so? Once an empire has become convinced of its worldview, anything that evidences the contrary must be erased. The Hinterlanders were banished to the north, cursed and suspected of witchcraft. The Speerlies were marginalized, enslaved, thrown into battle like wild dogs, and ultimately sacrificed.”
“Then we’ll teach them,” she said. “We’ll make them remember.”
“No one else would have the patience to learn what I have taught you. It’s merely our job to remember. I have searched for years for an apprentice, and only you have ever understood the truth of the world.”
Rin felt a pang of disappointment at those words; not for herself but for the Empire. It was difficult to know that she lived in a world where humans had once freely spoken to the gods but no longer did.
How could an entire nation simply forget about gods that might grant unimaginable power?
Easily, that’s how.
The world was simpler when all that existed was what you could perceive in front of you. Easier to forget the underlying forces that constructed the dream. Easier to
believe that reality existed only on one plane. Rin had believed that up until this very moment, and her mind still struggled to readjust.
But she knew the truth now, and that gave her power.
Rin stared silently out over the valley below, still grappling to absorb the magnitude of what she had just learned. Meanwhile Jiang packed the powders into a pipe, lit it up, and took a long, deep draught.
His eyes fluttered closed. A serene smile spread over his face.
“Up we go,” he said.
The thing about watching someone get high was that if you weren’t getting high yourself, things got very boring very soon. Rin prodded Jiang after a few minutes, and when he didn’t stir, she went back down the mountain by herself.
If Rin had thought Jiang might let her start using hallucinogens to meditate, she was wrong. He made her help out in the garden, had her watering the cacti and cultivating the mushrooms, but forbade her to try any plants until he gave her permission.
“Without the right mental preparation, psychedelics won’t do anything for you,” he said. “You’ll just become terribly annoying for a while.”
Rin had accepted this initially, but it had now been weeks. “When am I going to be mentally prepared, then?”
“When you can sit still for five minutes without opening your eyes,” he said.
“I can sit still! I’ve been sitting still for nearly a year! That’s all I’ve been doing!”
Jiang brandished his garden shears at her. “Don’t take that tone with me.”
She slammed her tray of cacti clippings on the shelf. “I know there are things you’re not teaching me. I know you’re keeping me behind on purpose. I just don’t understand why.”
“Because you worry me,” said Jiang said. “You have an aptitude for Lore like no one I’ve ever met, not even Altan. But you’re impatient. You’re careless. And you skimp on meditating.”
She had been skimping on meditating. She was supposed to keep a meditation log, to document each time she made it to the end of an hour successfully. But as coursework from her other classes piled up, Rin had neglected her daily requisite period of doing nothing.
“I don’t see the point,” she said. “If it’s focus that you want, I can give you focus. I can concentrate on anything. But to empty my mind? To be devoid of all thought? All sense of self? What good does that serve?”
“It serves to sever you from the material world,” Jiang answered. “How do you expect to reach the spirit realm when you’re obsessing over the things in front of you? I know why it’s hard for you. You like beating your classmates. You like harboring your old grudges. It feels good to hate, doesn’t it? Up until now you’ve been storing your anger up and using it as fuel. But unless you learn to let it go, you are never going to find your way to the gods.”
“So give me a psychedelic,” she suggested. “Make me let it go.”
“Now you’re being rash. I’m not letting you meddle in things that you barely understand yet. It’s too dangerous.”
“How dangerous could it be to just sit still?”
Jiang stood up straight. The hand holding the shears dropped to his side. “This isn’t some fairy story where you wave your hand and ask the gods for three wishes. We are not fucking around here. These are forces that could break you.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to me,” she snapped. “Nothing’s been happening to me for months. You keep going on about seeing the gods, but all that happens when I meditate is that I get bored, my nose itches, and every second takes an eternity.”
She reached for the poppy flowers.
He slapped her hand away. “You’re not ready. You’re not even close to ready.”
Rin flushed. “They’re just drugs—”
“Just drugs? Just drugs?” Jiang’s voice rose in pitch. “I’m going to issue you a warning. And I’m only going to do it once. You’re not the first student to pledge Lore, you know. Oh, Sinegard’s been trying to produce a shaman for years. But you want to know why no one takes this class seriously?”
“Because you keep farting in faculty meetings?”
He didn’t even laugh at that, which meant this was more serious than she’d thought.
Jiang, in fact, looked pained.
“We’ve tried,” he said. “Ten years ago. I had four students just as brilliant as you, without Altan’s rage or your impatience. I taught them to meditate, I taught them about the Pantheon, but those apprentices only had one thing on their minds, which was to call on the gods and siphon their power. Do you know what happened to them?”
“They called the gods and became great warriors?” Rin said hopefully.
Jiang fixed her with his pale, suffocating gaze. “They all went mad. Every single one. Two were calm enough to be locked in an asylum for the rest of their lives. The other two were a danger to themselves and others around them. The Empress had them sent to Baghra.”
She stared at him. She had no idea what to say to that.
“I have met spirits unable to find their bodies again,” said Jiang. He looked very old then. “I have met men who are only halfway to the spirit realm, caught between our world and the next. What does that mean? It means don’t. Fuck. Around.” He tapped her forehead with each word. “If you don’t want that brilliant little mind of yours to shatter, you’ll do as I say.”
The only time Rin felt fully grounded was during her other classes. These were proceeding at twice the rate as they had her first year, and though Rin barely managed to keep up given the absurd course load Jiang had already assigned her, it was nice to study things that made sense for a change.
Rin had always felt like an outsider among her classmates, but as the year carried on, she began to feel as if she inhabited an entirely separate world from them. She was steadily growing further and further away from the world where things functioned as they should, where reality was not constantly in flux, where she thought she knew the shape and nature of things instead of being constantly reminded that really she knew nothing at all.
“Seriously,” Kitay asked over lunch one day. “What are you learning?”
Kitay, like everyone else in her class, thought that Lore was a course in religious history, a smorgasbord of anthropology and folk mythology. She hadn’t bothered to correct them. Easier to spread a believable lie than to convince them of the truth.
“That none of my beliefs about the world were true,” Rin answered dreamily. “That reality is malleable. That hidden connections exist in every living object. That the whole of the world is merely a thought, a butterfly’s dream.”
“Rin?”
“Yes?”
“Your elbow is in my porridge.”
She blinked. “Oh. Sorry.”
Kitay slid his bowl farther away from her arm. “They talk about you, you know. The other apprentices.”
Rin folded her arms. “And what do they say?”
He paused. “You can probably catch the drift. It’s not, uh, good.”
Had she expected anything else? She rolled her eyes. “They don’t like me. Big surprise.”
“It’s not that,” Kitay said. “They’re scared of you.”
“Because I won the Tournament?”
“Because you stormed in here from a rural township no one’s ever heard of, then threw away one of the school’s most prestigious bids to study with the academy madman. They can’t figure you out. They don’t know what you’re trying to do.” Kitay cocked his head at her. “What are you trying to do?”
She hesitated. She knew that look on Kitay’s face. He’d been wearing it more often of late, as her own studies grew more and more distant from topics that she could easily explain to a layman. Kitay hated not having full access to information, and she hated keeping things from him. But how was she supposed to articulate the point of studying Lore to him, when often she could barely justify it to herself?
“Something happened to me that day in the ring,” she said finally. “I’m trying to figure out
what.”
She’d braced herself to deal with Kitay’s clinical skepticism, but he only nodded. “And you think Jiang has the answers?”
She exhaled. “If he doesn’t, nobody does.”
“You’ve heard the rumors, though—”
“The madmen. The dropouts. The prisoners at Baghra,” she said. Everyone had their own horror story about Jiang’s previous apprentices. “I know. Trust me, I know.”
Kitay gave her a long, searching look. Finally he nodded toward her untouched bowl of porridge. She’d been cramming for one of Jima’s exams; she’d forgotten to eat.
“Just take care of yourself,” he said.
Second-years were granted eligibility to fight in the ring.
Now that Altan had graduated, the star of the matches turned out to be Nezha, who was rapidly becoming an even more formidable fighter under Jun’s brutal training. Within a month he was challenging students two or three years his senior; by their second spring he was the undefeated champion of the rings.
Rin had been eager to enter the matches, but one conversation with Jiang had put an end to her aspirations.
“You don’t fight,” he said one day as they were balancing on posts above the stream.
She immediately splashed into the water.
“What?” she sputtered once she climbed out.
“The matches are only for apprentices whose masters have consented.”
“Then consent!”
Jiang dipped a toe into the water and pulled it back out gingerly. “Nah.”
“But I want to fight!”
“Interesting, but irrelevant.”
“But—”
“No buts. I’m your master. You don’t question my orders, you obey them.”
“I’ll obey orders that make sense to me,” she retorted as she teetered wildly on a post.
Jiang snorted. “The matches aren’t about winning, they’re about demonstrating new techniques. What are you going to do, light up in front of the entire student body?”