by Tang Qi
Rouge was looking at me anxiously, waiting for my response. It did not seem a very appropriate explanation to give a girl, and after a few awkward moments, I came up with some random excuse that I reeled off.
Soon it would be February.
The Purple Light Palace had been decorated for the nuptials, and the food had improved tremendously.
Receiving my note had obviously reassured Ling Yu, and he had just about managed to remain calm. However, the plan to get him out of the palace was top secret, and I had not mentioned it in my note. As the wedding drew near, he naturally started to panic. In a single morning he attempted to bite off his tongue, poison himself, and hang himself.
I paced back and forth in my room, wondering whether to go and see Li Jing and discuss it with him, see if we could carry out our plan a day earlier. But when I reached Li Jing’s bedchamber, two palace attendants stopped me and told me that the prince was not in. He had gone out hunting with a couple of his wives apparently. I left a message for when he returned, saying that Si Yin had an interesting new game and could not wait to play it with him.
I sat in my room, listlessly cracking sunflower seeds between my teeth. It was not Li Jing who came to my room in the end, but Master Mo Yuan.
Mo Yuan had a figure wrapped up in a quilt tucked under his arm, obviously Ninth Apprentice Ling Yu, who had fortunately not been successful in his suicide attempts.
Mo Yuan released Ling Yu and came over to embrace me, wrapping his arms tightly around my waist. We stayed like that for a long time before he eventually released me. “You haven’t done too badly for yourself, Little Seventeenth. Ling Yu has lost a lot of weight, but you actually seem to have put some on. All things considered, it would appear that we haven’t suffered too much here.”
I gave a sheepish grin and held out a handful of sunflower seeds, saying, “Master, have some seeds.”
Our escape that night was anything but smooth.
Taking into account the friendship between the gods and the demons, Mo Yuan had hoped not to resort to fighting. His plan had been to creep into the Purple Light Palace and steal Ling Yu and me back out without attracting any attention. This way he would allow the Demon Emperor a chance to maintain some dignity. But the Demon Prince was too foolish to appreciate this, and he moved his soldiers to the front of the palace gate to block our exit. Mo Yuan had no choice but to fight, and the whole thing escalated into a bloodbath.
Ling Yu was unconscious the whole time and did not witness the bloodshed. But I saw it all—the blood and the cracked skulls and ripped flesh. It was horrifying.
Mo Yuan had never lost a battle in his life, and this was no exception. He leaped over the palace gate with Ling Yu and me in his arms. I turned around, and all I could see was Qing Cang with his eight-pronged halberd, standing in the dark red sea of blood, his eyes so full of fury they looked as if they might explode from their sockets.
I did not see Li Jing this whole time.
Mo Yuan carried Ling Yu and me away from the Purple Light Palace. We fled through the night, finally arriving back at Mount Kunlun. Ling Yu was still unconscious, and Mo Yuan and I said nothing to each other the whole way.
I will remember that night for all eternity, although I never wish to recall it.
After racing us back to Mount Kunlun, Mo Yuan handed Ling Yu over to Fourth Apprentice and rushed with me to his alchemy room. He knocked me out with an arm and locked me inside his alchemy furnace.
I started to come to, wondering if Mo Yuan was punishing me, issuing me with a warning for my failure to look after Ling Yu properly. I wondered if he blamed me for his poor apprentice’s emotional trauma and his physical demise.
But hearing a loud boom of thunder, I realized that my predestined calamity had arrived. Mo Yuan must have placed me in the furnace so that I could hide and escape it. I had been born an immortal, but rising up through the ranks required hard work and the development of skills. Elevating yourself from a normal immortal to a higher immortal, and then from a higher immortal to a god or goddess took between seventy thousand and one hundred forty thousand years, and it required you to experience two calamities. If you were successful, you would live as long as the sky is wide, but if you were unsuccessful, your life would come to an abrupt end.
I had been Mo Yuan’s apprentice for twenty thousand years at that point and was expecting my predestined calamity to befall me at any time or place and in any shape or form. If I had been practicing magic, passing through these calamities would not have posed a problem. But I always hated the magic of deduction and found the scriptures deadly boring. Each time Mo Yuan taught this class, I would use it as an excuse for a nap. Despite all my years of study, all I had learned to do was to tell a mortal their rough fortune, and even this I would get wrong half the time.
I knew for certain that I had not cultivated enough spiritual energy. Facing a sky calamity without these things was like trying to cut a duck’s egg from a chicken’s stomach: absolutely impossible.
Fortunately I had spent the last seventy thousand years feeling free and unfettered, and if my soul were to fly and my spirit to flutter, I would feel no great regrets. I had expected my sky calamity to take place at some point in the next year, but I had not taken the reality of it very seriously.
I spent some time locked inside the alchemy furnace before it suddenly dawned on me: If I were hiding in here, who would my calamity find to replace me? Sky calamities were completely different from mortal calamities in that once they descended, someone had to undertake them, even if it was not the person for whom it had been intended.
The booming sound of the thunder helped to clear my head, and I tried every way I could to get out of the furnace, all to no avail. For the first time in my life, I was forced to acknowledge that these last twenty thousand years of study had been a complete waste of time.
The next day Master came and opened the lid to the furnace. “Little Seventeenth, I stood by the furnace last night and was struck by your three bolts of sky thunder. You must study better from now on and work on your skills. If you wish to become a god, you can’t expect Master to keep experiencing your calamities for you. That’s not how it works.”
Mo Yuan had suffered my sky calamity for me, and before I climbed out of the furnace, he had gone into confined recuperation. I knelt down in front of his cave for three days, sniveling and weeping, full of sadness and regret. “Master, are you hurt very badly? Are your injuries getting any better?” I asked. “Your lowlife apprentice has worn you out. Don’t fall ill, please. If you do, I’ll stew my body into medicinal soup and feed it to you to nourish you.”
Never in my life had I cried with such abandon and distress.
CHAPTER SIX
I worked really hard after that, spending all my days in my room, studying and thinking deeply about immortal magic and Taoist practice and reading the immortal classics left by the older generation of immortals in my spare time. My fellow apprentices were comforted by the transformation in my attitude.
Every time I learned a new skill, I stood outside Mo Yuan’s cave and practiced it. Even though he did not know I was doing this, it brought me peace of mind.
I was sitting in meditation in the peach grove on the back peak of the mountain one day when First Apprentice sent a messenger crane telling me to hurry to the front hall, where a guest was waiting for me.
I snapped off a branch of peach blossoms, as the one in Mo Yuan’s room had started to wilt.
He was still in confinement and had not been back to his room, but I wanted to keep it tidy and pleasant so that he had a comfortable place waiting for him when he came out of his confinement.
I walked to the front hall, twisting the branch of peach blossoms in my hand.
I went past the central courtyard, where Thirteenth and Fourteenth Apprentices were sitting under the date tree, taking bets about whether the guest in the front hall was male or female. I assumed that it must be Fourth Brother come to visit me, so I took
out my night pearl and hesitantly laid my bet. The person sitting in the front hall looked nothing like First Apprentice had described. It was that member of the Demon Clan: Second Prince Li Jing.
He was sitting in a graceful upright posture in the pear-wood imperial tutor’s chair, his eyes half closed as he sipped his tea. He gave a start when he saw me come in.
Mo Yuan had carried out a massacre in the Purple Light Palace, and I assumed that Li Jing was here to take revenge.
Instead he rushed over and grasped my hands with affection. “Si Yin, I’ve thought it all through. I want to spend my life with you.”
My peach blossom branch clattered to the floor. “Give me money, give me money, it is a girl!” Thirteenth Apprentice yelled loudly from outside the door.
I was extremely confused. I thought about it a moment before opening the front of my gown and giving him a flash of my chest. “But I’m a boy,” I said. “You have such a good relationship with all the wives in your bedchamber. You aren’t this way inclined.”
I was not really a boy. The fist-sized fox heart under my skin and flesh was not as broad as boy’s; it was a girl’s: slender, gentle, and delicate. But Mother had tricked Mo Yuan into taking me on, which meant that I was stuck in my male form until I had finished my studies.
Li Jing stared at my flat chest in surprise. “I’ve been thinking a lot since I left your room that morning. I was scared by my desire for you, and I spent my days surrounded by beautiful women, trying in vain . . . trying in vain to numb myself. It worked at first, but I didn’t expect to miss you so much, to think about you day and night. Si Yin . . .” Overcome by emotion he walked over to embrace me. “. . . I will be homosexual if it’s for you.”
I looked up at the peach blossom wood rafters, not knowing what to do.
Fourteenth Apprentice’s laughter drifted over from the distance. “Give you money? Who exactly is meant to be giving who money?”
Li Jing had walked for miles and miles to the remote Mount Kunlun to confess his feelings to me, but in a boy’s form, I did not feel that I could return his love. I tried to let him down gently.
It was getting dark and already too late for him to take the mountain path, so I allowed him to spend a night on the mountain. When First Apprentice heard that there was a homosexual Demon Clan member who had come up the mountain to kidnap me, he beat him up and drove him away.
I admired Li Jing’s courage. He refused to be cowered by the severe beating First Apprentice had served him. Every few days he would send over his stead, a fire qilin, with a poem describing his heartbreak. At the beginning they read, “We are a pair of lovebirds in the sky, intertwining roots beneath the ground.” A few days later, he was writing, “I yearn to see you, which day will it be, this anguish is slowly killing me.” A few days after that it was: “My belt is loose around my waist, but no regrets have I, for him I will gladly wither away, become sallow and finally die.”
The paper he wrote these on was useful for making fires, and Thirteenth Apprentice, who was in charge of stoking the stove, collected them all up for this purpose. I desperately tried to save them, but Thirteenth Apprentice protested. “You spend all day on the mountain doing nothing but waiting for others to feed you. Waste paper like this is rare. How can you be so selfish?” I felt unable to argue with that.
I was still young, and despite spending all my days with men, I still possessed some girlish sentiment. Li Jing persisted in writing to me despite my lack of response to his poems, and every day his fire qilin would arrive with a new poem.
Slowly but surely he was starting to win me over.
One day the fire qilin brought over a short poem that read, “Life is long, but it has an end, but this sorrow of mine will even death transcend.” I was filled with terror, thinking it must be a suicide note. In panic I jumped astride the fire qilin, planning to make myself invisible so that I could enter the Purple Light Palace and convince him not to do it. But the fire qilin carried me to a cave dwelling at the foot of our mountain instead.
It was a natural cave, which had been kept very neatly. Li Jing was sprawled out on a marble couch, and I could not see if he was dead or alive. I felt as if half the sky had just caved in. I jumped down off the fire qilin and went to shake him. I shook and shook and shook and shook, but I couldn’t wake him. Feeling completely helpless, I resorted to my weapon. I sent thunder and lightning storms at him along with vicious winds, one after another, but still he did not wake. The fire qilin could no longer bear to watch. “All your weapon is doing is hurting his flesh. Perhaps you should try to rouse the prince’s fragile heart instead? Say something that will give him hope.”
And that is when I said it. That sentence.
“Wake up and I will accept your love.”
Sure enough he opened his eyes, and although he had been brutally ravaged by my silk fan, he beamed. “Si Yin, if you tell me you accept my love, you can’t go back on your word. Help me up. You’ve given me such a battering with your fan that all my bones have loosened.”
Later Big Brother told me that romantic ploys were unlike other ploys, more like appeals. And romantic appeals were unlike other appeals, more like ploys. After suffering a period of heartbreak myself, I believe that to be true. However, I did not understand that truth back then.
Li Jing sent away all his bedchamber wives, and I stayed with him. It was Lunar April, and the peach blossoms along the mountainside had just burst into flower. Once Li Jing had been successful in his love crusade, the poetry stopped. There were no more visits from the fire qilin, which delighted First Apprentice, who assumed that Li Jing had finally lost patience and given up.
Li Jing still felt scared when he thought about the terrible beating First Apprentice had given him, and although he lived at the foot of the mountain, he never ventured up it. So it was I who would descend the mountain each day, after I had finished class and gone to Mo Yuan’s cave to report what I had learned, where Li Jing and I would have our tryst.
I still remember all the exquisite little things he gave me: crickets woven from coco grass, a piccolo made from bamboo husk, all crafted by his own fair hands, very lovely.
Once he gave me a bunch of bright yellow flowers from a cucumber vine. Back in the Purple Light Palace, Princess Rouge had once told me that her brother had suffered from an eye disorder that made it hard for him to distinguish between yellow and purple. He saw both these colors as a strange shade ordinary people could not even imagine. He gave me these cucumber flowers, thinking he was presenting me with some special rare species. I did not have the heart to tell him what they really were, and besides, a flower was a flower—even if it did come from a cucumber. I dried these flowers and pressed them between the pages of my Taoist practice book for safekeeping.
After my heart had been broken, I could no longer think about that period in my life, about falling in love with Li Jing. Many years had passed since then, and so much had happened, and many of the details had blurred in my mind.
But I remembered the next big thing that happened: Xuan Nu turned up.
Xuan Nu was the youngest sister of Big Brother’s wife. When Big Brother married my sister-in-law, she already had an infant in arms. An accident at her maiden home had meant that there was no one else to take care of Xuan Nu. Big Brother and his wife had looked after her for some time, and she and I would play together.
Xuan Nu was a beautiful girl, but for some reason she became infatuated by my looks. She was still just a child, but she would spend all day talking about how she wanted a face just like mine. Listening to her go on like this for a few hundred years was very annoying. She knew that Zhe Yan had excellent face-changing skills, and on her birthday one year, she made a special trip over to the Ten-Mile Peach Grove to ask him to transform her face to look like mine. Xuan Nu got her wish, which made her very happy. I got some peace and quiet, which made me happy too.
Not long after, I started noticing some imperfections. It was not Zhe Yan’s magic that w
as flawed—I just found it disconcerting and dizzying to look at a version of my own face every day. Gradually I started drawing away from Xuan Nu and spending time with Fourth Brother instead.
Xuan Nu grew up and returned to her family home, and the two of us rarely saw each other.
While Li Jing and I were in our honeymoon period, my sister-in-law sent me a letter explaining how her mother was forcing Xuan Nu to marry a blind bear spirit. Xuan Nu had run away from home and was living in their cave dwelling, but my sister-in-law worried that their mother would soon track her down. She and Big Brother had discussed it and wondered if Xuan Nu could take refuge with me for a while.
As soon as I received this letter, I went to arrange a room for her to stay. I went to First Apprentice with a letter explaining that an immortal friend was planning to visit me at Mount Kunlun and asking if they would mind accommodating her for a short time. First Apprentice had been in high spirits lately, and after discovering that my visitor was a female immortal, his spirits soared even higher, and he agreed readily.
Three days later Xuan Nu made her low-key entrance into Mount Kunlun, soaring in on a gray cloud. She gave a start when she saw me. In her letter, my sister-in-law had explained that Xuan Nu did not know she was to be staying with her childhood playmate, Bai Qian, just that I was an immortal friend that they were on good terms with.
Xuan Nu settled down on Mount Kunlun. She looked even more like me these days. “I can’t believe she’s not your sister!” First Apprentice said. “When you are with her, it’s only your listless spirit that allows me to tell you apart.”