To the Sky Kingdom

by Tang Qi

  I was completely taken aback by what he was saying, and it took me a while to grasp the homosexual love triangle that De Yong was describing. The corners of my mouth twitched. I smiled through clenched teeth and said, “Yes, he does resist them. I have tried everything, but still he resists. I set my sights on the next best thing, and started to pursue you instead.”

  His face flushed red before the blood drained from it, turning it white.

  I had known that Ye Hua had the kind of face that provoked peach flower feeling in girls, but I had not imagined that the same might be true for men too. Fourth Brother was right when he said that we were living in strange times. I decided it would be for the best if I stopped Ye Hua from visiting the Western Sea in the future.

  De Yong’s pulse was steady and his energy calm.

  Wanting to be completely sure, I decided to perform another round of soul-chasing magic, to be certain that Zhe Yan’s immortal energy was doing what it should inside De Yong’s body: protecting and nurturing Mo Yuan’s soul.

  De Yong’s experiences did not seem to have taught him anything, and again I used the side of my hand to give him a karate chop, knocking him out. Because it was the second time I had performed soul-chasing magic on him, I had no obstacles to entering his primordial spirit this time. Nor did I need any Buddhist melodies to guide me. The journey to find Mo Yuan was a smooth one.

  The last time I had been inside here, all I had seen of Mo Yuan’s soul was that faint wisp of immortal energy nursing it. This time it was a huge surge, and I was unable to get anywhere near him. There was no way that such strong immortal energy could have been refined from mere tens of thousands of years of spiritual cultivation.

  Mo Yuan was obviously just about to wake up. But . . . the immortal energy nursing Mo Yuan . . . this energy was surging yet calm, restrained yet majestic, and so familiar, but it was not Zhe Yan’s. My heart turned icy cold. I finally understood what Zhe Yan had wanted to tell me when he had hesitated before giving me the pill. I finally understood why he did not have a single scratch on his body from his trip to Yingzhou.

  Zhe Yan had never actually been to Yingzhou. He had never roused the anger of those ferocious beasts guarding the grass. He was not always the most upright of people, but he never lied and he never took advantage of others. He had clearly wanted to tell me the truth about this pill: how it had been refined by Ye Hua. Why then had he hidden this from me? It couldn’t, it couldn’t be . . .

  I forced myself to calm down and retreated from De Yong’s primordial spirit. I stumbled out and grabbed the teacup from the table next to me. Before I had a chance to take a sip, I started to cough up blood. My soul was undulating wildly.

  My heart was beating rapidly and my legs felt weak. I leaned against the table and slid to my knees, my teacup smashing to the floor. De Yong stroked his head and sat up in bed in shock. “What’s happened to you?”

  I forced a smile, and placing a hand on the table, I managed to pull myself up. “Your illness is much better. You no longer need me to nurse you. Please explain to your father that I have some urgent business to attend to and that I’ve had to return to the peach grove.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I soared on a cloud through the resplendent, rosy-red clouds gathered above the Western Sea and up into the Ninth Sky. I tumbled off my cloud once on the way, and by the time I arrived the Southern Sky Gate, I was in a bit of a state. The two sky soldiers standing guard there stopped me courteously.

  I looked down at myself and realized I looked more than a little disheveled. Showing up at the Ninth Sky in this state was certain to bring dishonor upon Qingqiu. I was so anxious to see Ye Hua that I saw no option but to offer up Zhe Yan’s name again, posing once more as his immortal envoy. Zhe Yan had sent me to pay my respects to the heir to the Sky Throne, His Majesty Ye Hua, I explained.

  These two sky soldiers were extremely cautious in their handling of affairs. Politely they asked me to wait while they went to Xiwu Palace to announce my arrival. Although I was still burning with anxiety, my heart was soothed by the fact that they were taking news of my arrival to Xiwu Palace rather than Lingxiao Palace, where serious matters were handled. Since this was the case, I imagined that Ye Hua had not suffered any major misfortune.

  A short while later, the sky soldiers returned, followed by a young immortal attendant who led me inside. This immortal attendant looked familiar, and after a while I recognized her as the one who worked in Ye Hua’s study.

  Her eyes opened in wide surprise when she saw me. Working in Ye Hua’s study had obviously given her a fair idea of the ways of the world, and although her eyes were round as pancakes, she managed to keep her jaw steady. She straightened her clothes, bowed to me, and took the lead, cautiously and conscientiously showing me the way.

  There was a warm and gentle wind, and I smelled the faint scent of lotus flowers. “How has the prince been recently?” I asked quietly as we were nearing Xiwu Palace. “What is he doing at the moment?”

  The little immortal attendant turned around. “His Majesty is very well today,” she said with deference. “He has just finished a meeting with three Star Princes, and now he is waiting for you in his study.”

  I nodded.

  Less than half a month ago, he had lost tens of thousands of years of cultivated spiritual energy, and yet today he was sitting calmly in his study, conducting palace business. It seemed rather too quick a recovery.

  The little immortal attendant led me to the doorway of Ye Hua’s study before politely taking her leave.

  I eagerly pushed open his study door, stepped excitedly over the doorway, and enthusiastically lifted up the curtain of the inner room. I managed to carry out this series of keen movements without a hitch, but my agitated heart meant that I was not really looking around me, and I knocked over two antique plant pots in the courtyard, making a huge crash.

  Ye Hua raised his head from the pile of documents on his desk and gave a faint smile. He rubbed his temples saying, “Did you come here today just to demolish my study?” His desk was spread with documents and laid out with open books.

  He did not look as pale as he had the last time I had seen him at the Western Sea Water Crystal Palace, but he was visibly thinner.

  I was no longer the ignorant young girl I had once been. The years had taught me that if someone is intent on keeping something bad from you, they will manage to keep it hidden.

  I rushed over to him and reached for his wrist to check his pulse. He suddenly stopped smiling. He dodged my hand and took hold of my lapel. “What’s this?” he asked with a frown.

  I lowered my head to look. “Oh, it’s nothing. I was performing soul-chasing magic on the Western Sea’s oldest prince a couple of hours ago. I was careless and strayed from my soul and coughed up a bit of blood.”

  He stood up, picked up a cup, and turned around to fill it with tea. As he was pouring he said, “I know you are devoted to looking after Mo Yuan, but you must make sure you look after yourself too. We don’t want Mo Yuan waking up and you falling immediately unwell.”

  He was still facing away from me. Looking at his back, I said, “Can you guess what I saw when I climbed into the primordial spirit of the oldest prince of the Western Sea?”

  He turned around and handed me a cup of tea. “Mo Yuan?” he said, tilting his head.

  I took the cup, and with a sigh, I said, “Tell me about the four ferocious beasts guarding the immortal grass in Yingzhou, Ye Hua, what do they look like? I know it was you who refined the pill that Zhe Yan brought me. How much cultivated spiritual energy do you have left in your body?”

  The hand he was holding his cup in stopped in midair, but his facial expression did not alter. When he had recovered from his shock, he gave an understated smile and said, “Oh. Yes. You’re correct. It was me. The Sky Emperor sent me to visit the Eastern Sea a little while ago, and when I was passing Yingzhou, I suddenly remembered that you wanted a couple of stalks of immortal grass, so I went there an
d plucked some for you.

  “Those beasts guarding the grass weren’t as ferocious as everyone makes out. If they were a bit brighter, I might have captured one and brought it back for you to train to amuse yourself and help pass the time.”

  I could still remember the state Father had been in when he came back from Yingzhou, covered head to toe in wounds. “How much cultivated energy did it cost you?” I heard myself asking dryly. “And why did you get Zhe Yan to lie to me when he came over to deliver the pill?”

  “Oh?” he said, raising an eyebrow. “That’s the first I’ve heard about that! Didn’t Zhe Yan tell you that I was the one who refined it? I shouldn’t have trusted him with this matter,” he added with a laugh. “He’s decided to use the situation to his advantage obviously, to steal my thunder. My level of spiritual energy is actually higher than most immortals,” he explained as he rifled through the documents on his desk. “A while ago the Sky Emperor transferred some of his over to me too. Refining that pill was nothing.”

  I looked at his right hand, right up inside his sleeve. “I’ve been watching you,” I said gently. “You have added the tea leaves to the cups, poured the water, and shuffled through your documents, all using only your left hand. Why don’t you give your right hand some exercise too?”

  His left hand stopped still, hovering above the documents.

  He paused for only a short time before he continued flicking through the papers. “I was a bit careless when I was getting the immortal grass, and one of the beasts managed to bite me. My right hand is slightly injured, so it’s easier for me to just use my left at the moment. It’s nothing serious, though. The medicine prince has had a look, and said that in a month or two, it’ll be as good as new.”

  If I were his age and he mine, I might well have believed his nonsense. But over the years, I had learned to know when I was being deceived.

  He had told me that the Sky Emperor had transferred some cultivated spiritual energy over to him, but there was no way that the Sky Emperor would have done this without good reason. It must have happened after he had dived off the immortal punishment platform and lost so much cultivated energy he nearly died. That was the only circumstance in which I could see the Sky Emperor transferring over his own supply of cultivated energy. It was the same as seventy thousand years ago when Mother rescued me.

  And the Sky Emperor would have transferred only enough cultivated spiritual energy to make up for that lost; it would not have exceeded the amount Ye Hua had cultivated over the fifty thousand years he had been alive. From the immortal energy circling Ye Hua, I estimated that he must have lost an average immortal’s forty or fifty thousand years’ worth.

  He told me that the ferocious beast had bitten his right arm, but it had been only a minor injury and would be fine after he had given it a chance to rest. All the ancient gods knew how tenacious these beasts were, and generally if they bit into something, they tended to swallow it down skin, bones, tendons, and all. It was strange to hear being bitten by one described as just a minor injury.

  These lies he was telling seemed intended to comfort me, and not wanting to disappoint him, I ignored the tugging of my heartstrings and let him think that he had managed to deceive me. I let out a loud sigh of relief, and said, “Oh, that’s good to hear. You’ve really put my mind at rest.”

  “There’s absolutely nothing to worry about with me,” he said with one eyebrow raised and a smile on his face. “It’s the Western Sea’s oldest prince you should be thinking about. He took that pill fairly recently, and his condition could still be unstable. I think you’d be better placed back there, in case there are any complications with him.”

  This was clearly a tactful way of asking me to leave. He had been looking fine before, but now he was starting to look peaky. He had been putting on a show of strength, but was obviously not able to keep it up for too long.

  I decided to allow him his dignity and pretended that I suddenly remembered something important I had to do. “Oh dear. How could I have forgotten that!” I blustered. “I need to hurry back down right now. Please take good care of yourself, mind your injury.”

  Having to say these words upset me. I decided to go back to Qingqiu to question Zhe Yan and find out exactly how bad Ye Hua’s injury actually was. I charged back over there only to find that Zhe Yan was not at Qingqiu.

  Fourth Brother was sunning himself on the grass outside the foxhole, a stalk of dog-tail grass in his mouth. “Zhe Yan went back to the peach grove a few days ago,” he explained. “He told me he’d done something he was feeling very ashamed about. It has been a long time since he’s felt any shame, and he was nursing an exceptionally guilty conscience. He said he needed to go back to the peach grove to recover.”

  I uttered a few curses, and feeling bleak and wretched, I hopped onto another cloud and shot off toward the Ten-Mile Peach Grove. I found Zhe Yan next to the Jade Pool behind the peach grove mountain. It was midday, and the sun was still high in the sky. Zhe Yan’s mouth was clamped tightly shut. I waited for him to take the initiative and tell me about the matter with Ye Hua. It was only after midnight, when the moon was high in the sky, that he eventually came out and admitted it.

  He explained that it had happened a couple of weeks before, on the twenty-second of June. He and Fourth Brother had been moon gazing in the bamboo forest outside the foxhole when two immortals had suddenly descended. These immortals had been sent under the command of the Sky Emperor. They had made this urgent trip to the Qingqiu Valley to ask him to come to the Ninth Sky to save someone’s life.

  It was usually the medicine prince who presided over medical matters in the Sky Kingdom, but since the Sky Emperor had sent his people thousands of miles asking for Zhe Yan personally, he had assumed that none of the medicine being prescribed by the medicine prince was helping. Zhe Yan was not on the best terms with this generation’s Sky Emperor, but he knew that it was always wise to take the opportunity to have the Sky Emperor owe you a favor. He agreed to these visiting immortals’ deferential invitation and went back up with them to the Sky Kingdom.

  On arriving in the Ninth Sky, Zhe Yan discovered that the person the Sky Emperor had sent his people thousands of miles to save was none other than the Bai family’s future son-in-law: Ye Hua.

  He had examined Ye Hua and found that while he was not beyond help, neither was he in a very good state. The Taotie had completely bitten off his right arm, and all he had left was an empty sleeve and twenty thousand years of cultivated energy.

  At this point in the story, Zhe Yan started to get choked up. “Your husband-to-be is so young, but he’s always so sensible and well organized. A couple of days before he departed, he sent a note to the old Sky Emperor, explaining that the immortal grass growing in Yingzhou was in violation of the immortal laws and gave a long list of reasons why it should be destroyed. He asked the Sky Emperor for permission to travel to Yingzhou and remove every last blade growing there. After thinking it through carefully, the Sky Emperor granted him permission.

  “Two days after Ye Hua arrived in Yingzhou, the Sky Emperor received the news that the area had sunk into the Eastern Sea, which both pleased and reassured him. But when Ye Hua returned the next day, he was in this grievously injured state. The Sky Emperor chastised himself for overestimating his grandson. He should have provided the boy with a couple of good helpers to assist him in warding off the ferocious beasts keeping watch over the immortal grass.

  “The Sky Emperor assumed that Ye Hua’s spiritually cultivated energy had been depleted by this encounter with the four ferocious beasts. It was when Ye Hua secretly entrusted that pill to me that I found out that even though the beasts had been responsible for his missing arm, they had not caused him any other damage. With four swipes of his sword, he slayed them all.

  “The reason Ye Hua looked so unwell was due to the fact that having picked the grass, he used all of his cultivated spiritual energy to light the furnace to make that immortality pill. I’ve given him medi
cine for his physical injuries, and you mustn’t worry, he will recover over time. His arm is gone, but it isn’t a completely lost cause. I have fitted him with a new arm, and although he can’t use it yet, within the next ten thousand years, it will gradually develop its own life force, and he should be able to use it.”

  The moon looked like it was hanging askew from the tree branches. It was big and round and cool.

  Zhe Yan gave another sigh and said, “He didn’t trust anyone in the Sky Palace. That’s why I had to be the one to bring you your pill. As your husband-to-be, he wanted to help you repay your debt to Mo Yuan. He told me to hide this from you because he was scared of how doctrinaire you can be. He thought that if you knew that the pill had cost him over half his cultivated energy, you would refuse to use it.

  “Oh, and he thought you might be worried too. I’ve never thought of you as a careful type. I would never have imagined that after giving De Yong the pill, you might leap back into his primordial spirit to ensure it was working. But I still have a lot of admiration for Ye Hua, how responsible he is and how sturdy.” He gave another sigh, and in a voice full of regret he said, “Being able to slay those four ferocious beasts like that, and at only fifty thousand years old, his future prospects are limitless. What a pity to see all his pure spiritual energy dissipated away like that.”