by Tang Qi
I sat down at the side. She put on a big smile and said, “I’m trying to work out why you’ve come here. I imagine it must be to inquire about the prince’s recent situation. If you wish to hear about the prince . . .” She paused, and her smile became even bigger. “Su Su is looking after the prince very well in the mortal world, and he is looking after her extremely well in return.”
The nasty smile on her face looked strange against her kind, twinkly eyes. I stroked the surface of the Kunlun fan and tried to show tolerance in my face. “Well, in that case it’s obviously a good thing that she’s there with him. It really puts my mind at rest to have you here to take care of Ye Hua. The reason I have come here today is because now it’s my turn to take care of you.”
She looked at me with suspicion, and I responded with a poised smile. “You have been using my eyes for the last three hundred years, Su Jin. Have you been enjoying them?” I asked.
She raised her head sharply, and I saw her face flush bloodred before turning a peachy pink, then going deathly white. I watched with intrigue as she passed through all these different shades.
“W-w-what did you just say?” she warbled.
I unfolded my fan, and with a laugh I said, “Three hundred years ago, I underwent a love calamity and lost my eyes. You were the one who stole them. After thinking it all through carefully, I decided to come over and get them back. So, would you like to be the one to do the honors, or shall I do it for you?”
She took two steps back and bumped into the armrest of the royal bed, although she did not seem to notice. “Are you . . . are you Su Su?” she asked, her lips trembling.
I extended my fan fully, and with a hint of impatience creeping into my voice, I said, “So which of us is going to cut them out then, you or me?”
She twisted her sleeves, her eyes expressionless. She gaped a couple of times, but no words came out. After a long time she made a sound, something between a laugh and a sob. “That girl . . . she was obviously a mortal. There’s no way it could have been you.”
I picked up a cup of tea from the table, strong and steaming. “What difference does it make if she was a mortal or a goddess?” I asked. “Just because I was transformed into a mortal three hundred years ago and was unaware of what was happening to me does not give some insignificant little immortal the right to take my eyes and trick me into jumping off the immortal punishment platform.”
Her legs went weak, and she crumpled to her side. “I . . . I . . . I . . . ,” she began, but never got any further with the sentence. I went over and stroked her eye sockets. “I was lucky enough to have been given some good wine recently,” I said softly. “Unfortunately I drank a little more than I could handle and my hands are still a bit shaky. It will probably hurt a lot less if you carry out the procedure yourself.”
Just as I was about to lower my hand, she gave a bloodcurdling shriek. I erected an immortal barrier in front of Changhe Hall to prevent any immortal children or palace attendants from entering. She was panicking so much that her pupils had become pinpricks. She grasped wildly at my hands, saying, “You can’t . . . you can’t . . .”
I patted her face and said, “Three hundred years ago, you used to pretend you were weak and gentle. You were always putting on that act. You didn’t allow me to see anything but your weak and gentle side, did you? When Ye Hua cut my eyes out, he said that what was owed must be returned, but we both know the real story. Since you were the one responsible for my eyes being cut out of my face and transferred into your own eye sockets, give me one reason why I should not take them back right now. Do you think the fact that you have been using them for the last three hundred years gives you ownership of them?”
I brought my hand down to her eyes and did the deed. She gave a bitter cry. I leaned in toward her ear and said, “The Sky Emperor dealt quietly with what happened three hundred years ago. And what has happened today will be dealt with quietly too. You have now repaid your eye debt, but you still owe me for making me jump down from the immortal punishment platform. To pay this debt, you can either jump down from it yourself or you can find the Sky Emperor and tell him you would like to be transferred to the banks of the Ruo River, where you can use your puny supply of immortal power to guard Qing Cang in the Eastern Desert Bell, and you will never return to the Sky Kingdom.”
She seemed to have gone into cramps. The agony must have been unbearable. I had experienced something similar, and being a mortal at the time, I had suffered all the more. She could hardly breathe from the pain, but she managed to force out the words, “There’s no way I will . . .”
There it was: the end of this weak and gentle pretense. I had forced her to show her true colors. I lifted her blood-drenched face and gave a laugh. “Oh? Would you rather I went to the Sky Emperor and told him myself? But I’m the kind of person who says one thing one day and a completely different thing the next. If I end up talking to the Sky Emperor, who knows what I’ll end up telling him.”
I felt her go stiff under my hand, and she curled up into a ball to deal with the pain. I recited a Buddhist mantra: “Good karma, bad karma. The natural law of retribution.”
Bi Fang had disappeared again, and Fourth Brother had gone after him, leaving Zhe Yan alone in the Ten-Mile Peach Grove. He was shocked when I handed him the bloody eyeballs. He held them up to the sun to inspect them. “It’s been three hundred years, but you’ve finally found your eyes! It’s a miracle! But you drank my medicine back then. How can you remember your past heartbreak? It’s another miracle!”
Because these eyes had been taken from an immortal body, they would need to be implanted within forty-nine days or they would lose their function.
Zhe Yan was extremely curious about what had happened. He had assumed that my eyes were lost for good. He had no idea that they had been put into someone else’s face and that one day they might be returned to me and fitted back into my eye sockets.
I forced a smile.
He looked at my face and realized that I did not want to talk about what had happened. He gave a cough but respected my wish and asked no more questions.
Zhe Yan explained that it would take a few days for the impure energy to be eliminated from my original eyes. He would wait until that had happened before carrying out the procedure to replace them with my current eyeballs. I gladly agreed and decided that while I was there, I would help myself to a couple more jars of wine from his back mountain cellar before getting onto a cloud and soaring back to Qingqiu.
I spent the next few days in a drunken stupor. I made two requests of Mystic Gorge: to keep a close eye on what Ye Hua’s head concubine was up to and to seal off the Qingqiu Valley to visitors; I wished to see no one.
Zhe Yan’s wine was much stronger than the stuff Mystic Gorge had been hoarding, and I got so drunk that night that I actually vomited up bile. My head ached to the point where I considered taking up a sword and slashing my own forehead open. But feeling like this had its benefits: as soon as I closed my eyes, everything started spinning, and there was no longer room in my head to think about anything else.
Mystic Gorge urged me to pace myself, take a couple of days off drinking, or at least to take more care of myself. But the heartbreak I was experiencing now was different from that in the past, and without getting drunk I had no means of sleeping. While I was blind drunk, I was oblivious to everything, although I had slightly more lucid spells during which I vaguely remembered Mystic Gorge coming over to talk to me.
He said many things, most of which were irrelevant, but two things he said stuck in my mind. The first was that the head concubine had gone to the Sky Emperor, presenting a letter requesting to leave the Sky Palace and move to the banks of the Ruo River, where she could cultivate spiritual energy by keeping guard over the imprisoned Qing Cang. The Sky Emperor was touched by her generous offer and granted her permission to do this.
The other news he gave me was related to Ye Hua’s mortal world calamity. Despite drinking water from the Forg
et River, which should have brought complete amnesia about the past, he had retained a strong belief in the supernatural and spent his whole life searching for the immortal realm of Qingqiu. He rose to the rank of prime minister but never married, and when he turned twenty-seven, he became depressed, grew ill, and died. His final request to his domestic servants was for his body to be cremated and his ashes buried along with a pearl bracelet he had kept on his person throughout his whole lifetime.
I cannot remember whether I cried when Mystic Gorge told me this. If I did shed a tear or two, I was not sure exactly why I was crying. I had drunk so much that I could not work out what I was feeling.
This was still the case a few days later when Mystic Gorge rushed into the foxhole with the news that Prince Ye Hua had been waiting in the mouth of the Qingqiu Valley for seven days now and wished to see me.
Mystic Gorge had followed my orders not let anyone in, even Ye Hua. But after seven days, Ye Hua still showed no signs of leaving, so Mystic Gorge decided to come and tell me and ask me for specific instructions about what I wished him to do.
My brain, unused for so long now, started to turn again.
Ye Hua had become ill in the mortal world and died at the age of twenty-seven, and naturally, following his mortal funeral, he would return to his immortal life.
My chest suddenly flooded with pain. I pressed my hand against my heart and slid down the table as my legs turned to jelly. Mystic Gorge came over to try to help me up, but I would not let him.
I leaned against a table leg and looked up at the rafters. I wanted to see Ye Hua. I wanted to ask him about all that had happened three hundred years ago. Had Su Jin betrayed him by marrying the Sky Emperor and broken his heart so badly? Was it in this wretched heartbroken state that he had met and married me in my mortal form?
Had he ever truly loved me? Was it really for my own good that he left me alone and miserable in the Sky Palace for those three years? Had he been in love with Su Jin while he was in love with me? And if so, how deeply? If Su Jin had not tricked me into jumping down from the immortal punishment platform, would he have married her? Was the deep affection he seemed to have for me now nothing but repentance for how he treated me before?
The more I thought about it, the worse my thinking got. I put my hand over my eyes, and it came back completely wet, water trickling between my fingers. What if he said yes? What if his answer to all these questions was yes?
I worried I would be so upset I could actually end up killing him. Mystic Gorge regarded me anxiously. “Are you going to go out and see him, Your Highness?”
I inhaled deeply. “No, I’m not. Tell him to leave Qingqiu and never come back. I’m going to visit the Sky Emperor tomorrow to call off the engagement.”
Mystic Gorge returned sometime later. He stood there quietly for a moment before saying, “His Majesty does not look very well. He has been standing in the valley for seven days and nights now and has not moved an inch this whole time.”
I glanced at him, took a sip of wine, but said nothing. He hesitated before saying, “His Majesty has asked me to give you a message, Your Highness. Apparently you told him that if he were to have a romance in the mortal world, you would capture him and bring him back to Qingqiu and lock him up. Apart from talking to a girl who looked identical to you in your mortal form and inviting her to his house, all he did was tend to his sick mother. He was not inspired with even a bud of peach blossom feeling. He wonders if the promise you made to him in the mortal world still stands, the one about marrying him when he grew up?”
I hurled a wine jar across the room. “Of course it doesn’t stand!” I cried out involuntarily. “None of his pack of lies stands! Get out and get rid of him too. I have absolutely no desire to see him.”
But even in the depths of my sorrow, I knew that it was not that I did not want to see him. But something was blocking my heart, and I did not know how I could possibly see him.
I did not end up going to the Ninth Sky the next day to cancel the engagement as I had stated. I decided to wait until I was in a better mood for it, which I suspected could take some time.
The next day, the one after that, and the one after that, Mystic Gorge reported that Ye Hua was still standing in the valley and that he had not moved an inch. I screamed that if he mentioned Ye Hua one more time, I was going to beat him back into his tree form and leave him like that for ten thousand years. He finally stopped bothering me with these reports.
I was not drinking so much alcohol anymore. Since finding out that Ye Hua was standing outside Qingqiu, drinking only served to make me more clearheaded and alert. The more alert I became, the deeper my pain, and the deeper my pain, the less able I was to sleep.
To rub salt on an already sore wound, I woke up one morning at the height of this misery and sensed big waves running through the immortal power I had used to seal Qing Cang within the Eastern Desert Bell five hundred years ago.
My heart gave a sudden lurch. This really was the darkest of times. It had been one thing after another recently, but all that came before paled in comparison to this. Qing Cang had obviously found a way of continuing to cultivate spiritual energy within the bell, and he was about to break out of it once more.
I gave my face a quick wash and sent Mystic Gorge off to the Ten-Mile Peach Grove to tell Zhe Yan what was happening and that I needed his help. Five hundred years ago when Qing Cang made his first attempt to break out of the bell, I was forced to stop him and lock him back inside. Our battle had caused grave damage to the bell, and I had been forced to use half my cultivated spiritual energy to repair it.
I tried to work out how much spiritual energy I had left and whether it would be better to launch a savage attack or to try to take him by ruse. I had enough self-awareness to know that I was no match for him either way.
Qing Cang was not a benevolent being at the best of times, and regaining his freedom after so many years of being locked up, he was likely to go berserk and ignite the most destructive weapon the Four Seas and Eight Deserts had ever seen, reducing the universe to a pile of cinders.
This realization made the romantic problems that had disturbed my sleep so much seem ridiculous. I pulled out my Kunlun fan, jumped to my feet, and set off toward Ruo River. I did not have time to wait for Zhe Yan; I needed to go straight there and try to hold Qing Cang back myself first. I could not risk him detonating the bell.
I was not surprised to see Ye Hua in the valley. I knew he was still waiting there and that I would have to pass him on my way out of Qingqiu. I closed my eyes and brushed past him, feigning indifference, but he reached out and grabbed hold of my sleeve. His face looked haggard, exhausted, and eerily pale.
Every moment was crucial, and I had no time to waste with him. I turned my head and used my fan to chop off the part of my sleeve in his grasp. He heard the sound of material ripping and looked up in surprise. “Qian Qian!” he called out in a hoarse voice.
I turned back to face the front, ignoring him, and continued speeding toward Ruo River. When I glanced back, I saw he had jumped onto a cloud too and was following me.
For years after, I often thought back to this moment and wished that I had just said something nice to him. Anything. But all I had done was give him a cold look. And said nothing.
I looked down at the monstrous white waters of Ruo River and up at the heavy black clouds pressing down from above. The tower-like structure of the Eastern Desert Bell stood on the bank of Ruo River. It was swaying and rumbling, causing the entire area to shake. There was no sign of Su Jin, who was supposed to be guarding the bell, and I imagined that all the commotion must have frightened her away into hiding.
Through the layers of clouds, I could partially make out the head of the earth god in charge of Ruo River’s wild lands. This earth god and I had been destined to meet five hundred years before too. He was hiding in the clouds, anxiously watching the restless Eastern Desert Bell, and I could just make out the top of his head. He turned around when
he saw Ye Hua and me approaching and hurriedly bowed down before coming over.
“Your Highness, you’ve arrived!” he said in a panic-stricken voice. “The immortal prince of Ruo River has gone to the Sky Palace to ask for army assistance, and he has asked me to wait here. Qing Cang’s anger is extreme this time. The immortal prince’s Ruo River residence has been shaking, as has my earth god temple . . .” He was still babbling on when the bell was lit up by a huge blast of white light, inside of which we could just make out the outline of a person.
I uttered a silent curse and was just about to jump off my cloud when this figure suddenly turned still. Ye Hua approached from behind and hooked his leg around my ankle to trip me. He recited an incantation to freeze me and whipped out a special trap that he used to bind my hands and feet. I was completely stuck. I could see that Qing Cang was moments away from breaking out of the bell. “Let me go!” I screamed in panic.
Ye Hua ignored me. He pushed me toward the Ruo River earth god with a simple message. “Look after her, and whatever happens, don’t let her fall down off this cloud.” He gave his left hand a turn, and in it appeared a double-edged sword, flowing with cold light. I saw him take the sword and move toward the blustering winds. He got off his cloud and headed straight for the silver light ribboning out of the Eastern Desert Bell. I felt as if the sky had just fallen in.
I opened my mouth a few times, but no words came out. An agonizing wind blew into my eyes. As Ye Hua was heading toward that silver light, I heard my voice come out sounding completely devoid of hope. “Earth God, please release me,” I was saying. “You have to think of a way to release me. Ye Hua is going to die if he does this. He only has a tiny amount of cultivated spiritual energy left. It’s suicide what he’s doing!”