To the Sky Kingdom

by Tang Qi

  I might have been content; however, Zhe Yan, Fourth Brother, Mystic Gorge, and Bi Fang were not. On the evening of the sixteenth day I spent out there, Fourth Brother finally could bear it no longer, and he picked me up, carried me into the foxhole, and placed me in front of a water mirror so I could see myself. With barely suppressed rage, he said, “Look at what you’ve become! Ye Hua may be dead, but that doesn’t mean you have to stop living.”

  Fourth Brother was right: I did not think I could carry on living. I was not sure if turning to dust flying and flames dying would definitely reunite me with Ye Hua; however, I had always thought that turning to dust flying and flames dying meant that there would be nothing left of you, all parts returned to the soil. If this were to happen to me, I would no longer remember Ye Hua, and I did not want that. At least now, every so often I got to enjoy seeing him standing in front of me and smiling.

  The goddess reflected in the water mirror was pale and haggard. There was a thick white cloth around her eyes, with a few dried leaves stuck to it. But it was a different white cloth from the one I usually wore. My brain was turning very slowly. Oh, I remembered now, at the beginning of the month, Zhe Yan had grabbed me and placed my old eyes back in my head. He had made this white cloth and doused it in a special medicinal solution in order to protect them. It was a different cloth from the one Father had made for me.

  Fourth Brother gave a sigh. “Wake up!” he said sternly. “You’ve been alive so long, surely you’ve seen enough life and death, separation and reunion. Can’t you just accept your situation and move on?”

  It was not that I was unable to accept my situation, more that I did not know how. If I had known how to, I would certainly have done it. When I got drunk and smashed up the soul-binding lamp that time, it had released my memories of what had happened three hundred years ago. For some reason, at that time, I had been unable to remember anything good about Ye Hua.

  Since he had left, I could not think of a single misdeed: all that flashed through my mind were his good points. In the past I had castigated Li Jing from up on my high horse about how he always wanted what he did not have and never cherished things when he had them. But was I not just the same?

  The moon was round in the sky and bright were the stars. It was late and there was no one about. There was nothing for me to do except sleep. I had never expected that I might dream of Ye Hua, but that night I did. He was sitting behind a desk, reading through a set of documents. He placed them to the side, took a sip of tea, and gave a slight frown. He placed the teacup down, lifted his head, and gave me a wide smile. “Qian Qian, come over here and tell me about the play you read yesterday,” he said.

  I was completely absorbed in this dream and did not want to wake up. Old Fate really had done me a favor this time. When I hallucinated Ye Hua sitting with me under the peach tree, he was unable to speak, but in this dream he was just like in real life. Not only could we take walks together and play chess, he could also talk to me.

  From then on I started to dream about him every night. I started to adore sleeping. I had a shift in mindset, which made me feel a lot more comfortable. There is a story in the mortal world called Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream. It is a classic tale about a mortal called Zhuangzi, who one night dreams that he is a butterfly and flutters around filled with joy. But then all of a sudden, he wakes up and finds that he is in fact a mortal called Zhuangzi and not a butterfly after all. He does not know if he is Zhuangzi who has just woken up from a dream about being a butterfly or a butterfly currently having a dream about being Zhuangzi.

  In the past, I viewed my waking life as the reality and my dreams as illusions. But the reality of my life depressed me now. Was it not better to alter my perspective, therefore, to view my dreams with Ye Hua as the reality and my daytime life as the illusion?

  Zhe Yan and Fourth Brother saw the color gradually return to my cheeks. The only problem now was that I was asleep so much. But they were clearly relieved and stopped keeping such a close eye on me.

  No news came from the Ninth Sky about who would be the next heir to the Sky Throne. I had heard that Su Jin’s immortal status had been revoked forever due to her negligence while watching over the Eastern Desert Bell.

  Her dereliction of duty made her indirectly responsible for Ye Hua’s battle with Qing Cang and led to him having to sacrifice his primordial spirit and his spirit flying. The Sky Emperor was devastated to lose his oldest grandson and also extremely angry, and as soon as he heard the part Su Jin had played in this, he banished her from the Ninth Sky and sent her into six reincarnation cycles, during which she would experience a hundred love calamities.

  Changing my attitude toward life made me feel a lot better. Now I could still believe that Ye Hua was alive.

  I no longer wished to see the cenotaph I had made for him, because it reminded me that he only existed in my imagination, while in reality Ye Hua was dead, dead and gone. I started to develop a phobia about going near the cenotaph, but I could not bring myself to ask Mystic Gorge to dig it up. Instead we made another entrance to the foxhole, and I used that.

  When he had time, Fourth Brother would come around and pick me up and take me for trips to the mortal world. It was his way of taking my mind off things, while giving himself a nice day out too. While we were roaming the mountains, he would say, “Look at that mountain standing so tall it touches the clouds. If you stand at the top and look down, you’ll see how insignificant everything in the world is. Doesn’t thinking about that make your mind feel like it’s expanding? Doesn’t it make you feel as if your experience of sadness might be nothing but a cloud floating in the sky, which you might just wave your hand at and waft away?”

  While in the water, he would say, “Look at the water rushing down from that waterfall and tumbling to join the river. It flows out day and night and never turns back. Don’t you look at that waterfall and think it’s just like life? You have no way to turn back, so you have to just keep looking straight ahead?”

  When we visited market towns, he would say, “Look at all the mortals running around like ants. They are only on this earth for six or seven decades, and during that time, they are bound by the destinies Si Ming has set for them. The farmers spend most of their lives toiling hard in the field, the academics spend most of their time not achieving what they set out to, most of the good women raised end up marrying rascals. But they go contentedly about their business all the same. How can you look at these mortals and think you are so much better than them?”

  At first I listened to him, but he started to become fanatical about speaking like this, and his long-windedness started to annoy me. After that, I started to go to the mortal world on my own.

  And that was where I was on the third of September: three years after Ye Hua departed. I was listening to a play when I spotted a young immortal called Zhi Yue who came from the immortal Fanghu Mountain. When you went to a play in the mortal world, you followed the local custom of throwing a handful of coins onto the stage during the applause at the end if you thought the actors had performed well to boost their morale and thank them for their hard work.

  It must have been Zhi Yue’s first time to come to a play in the mortal world, as she looked on enviously as everyone started tossing their money down from the carved mahogany railings, obviously wishing she had some to throw too. She could tell that I was an immortal in one glance and skipped over to introduce herself and ask if I could lend her some money to throw over, as she felt mean not giving any. I was slightly puzzled as to why a little immortal who obviously had magic skills would not be able to do a simple thing like conjure up a couple of coins, but I lent her a couple of night pearls anyway.

  At the start we were more like acquaintances, but every time I went to the mortal world to see a play, I would bump into her, and over time we became friends. Zhi Yue was a lively girl, but she never pestered me by asking details about where I was from, who my family was, how old I was, and so on, which was fairly unusual. An
d it was wonderful going to plays with someone else and being able to talk about them afterward.

  She and I must have gone to see more than ten plays over the course of two months.

  Tonight’s play was The Peony Pavilion, which was about a couple overcoming difficulties so that they could be together. It was the fifth of October, which, in the lunar calendar, was a good day for a marriage, but a bad day to have an argument or go to war. It was three years to the day that Ye Hua had departed. I took a sip of wine and looked to the stage, where an actress in a blue dress was dancing and making her sleeves shimmy.

  “You are as beautiful as a flower and young as flowing water, but why are you sitting alone in your boudoir so overcome with sadness?” one of the actors was singing. At that moment Zhi Yue arrived. She walked in late without a hint of embarrassment and sat down next to me.

  Halfway through the play, she turned to me and covered her mouth to whisper, “Do you remember me telling you about my talented cousin who died some time ago?”

  I nodded.

  Apart from talking about the plays we saw, Zhi Yue would often mention this older male cousin of hers. He had been a brilliant, wise warrior and an exceptionally talented young man, but had sadly died in battle when he was still very young, leaving behind parents so grief stricken they could barely carry on living and a feeble little son who spent his days sobbing. The poor things. The poor, poor things. Every time she sighed and said, “Poor things,” she looked so full of sadness at their sorry fate. I found it hard to summon any great sympathy for her cousin’s household. Perhaps I really had learned to accept the reality of death.

  Zhi Yue reached for the teapot and poured herself a cup of cold tea to wet her throat. She looked around, covered her mouth again, and moved closer to me, saying, “Did I not tell you that my cousin has been dead for three years? The He Clan thought that all that was left of him was his corpse and that his primordial spirit had turned to dust flying and flames dying long ago. They made a black crystal ice coffin and lowered him into the sea. I was there, I saw it. Last night the waters of that sea, which had been calm for tens of thousands of years, suddenly started to swirl. The water splashed up, forming waves ten feet high, and the black crystal ice coffin floated to the surface. Immortal energy was curling around all four sides of the ice coffin apparently, and that was why the water was so choppy and these high waves were rising up.

  “Don’t you think it’s strange that my cousin’s primordial spirit turned to dust flying and flames dying and yet he still has such a powerful source of immortal energy protecting him? None of the He Clan knew what to think. Members of the younger generation were sent outside while the clan elders sent a message to our clan’s revered god to ask what was happening. My parents think there is a chance that my cousin didn’t die after all. Oh, if that’s true, then poor little Ali will no longer have to spend his days sobbing and wailing.”

  Suddenly I was surrounded by a heavy silence. The cup in my hand crashed to the floor, and I heard my own hollow voice saying, “Is it the Wuwang Sea you are talking about? Your cousin . . . your cousin . . . he’s not the Sky Emperor’s oldest grandson, heir to the Sky Throne, Ye Hua?”

  Zhi Yue looked at me, gaping, and then stammered, “H-h-how do you know?”

  I rushed out of the teahouse and stumbled onto the street before I remembered I would need a cloud to get to the Ninth Sky. I summoned a cloud and stumbled onto it. I looked down to see a crowd of mortals kneeling on the ground beneath me and realized I had jumped astride my lucky cloud without making myself invisible in front of everyone in this busy marketplace.

  I got off the cloud and stepped into the air. I was high above the ground. Looking down, I saw a vast expanse of fields. My mind went empty, and I could not for the life of me remember the way to the Southern Sky Gate. The more anxious and impatient I got, the emptier my mind became. I got on the cloud again and floated back and forth a number of times, not sure what I should do.

  My foot slipped and I nearly fell off the cloud, but luckily I was a caught by a firm pair of hands. I heard Mo Yuan’s voice from behind me. “How can you be so careless, nearly falling off your cloud like that?”

  I turned around and grabbed hold of his hands. “Where’s Ye Hua?” I asked in a panic. “Master, tell me where Ye Hua is!”

  He frowned. “First wipe your eyes,” he said. “I was just coming to tell you the news.”

  Mo Yuan explained how Father of the Universe had used half his godly power to make an immortal embryo so that Ye Hua could be reborn. After he had been reborn, this godly power continued to remain within him, hidden inside his primordial spirit. Mo Yuan had not appreciated that when Ye Hua slayed the four ferocious beasts from Yingzhou, he had received the other half of Father of the Universe’s godly power, without which he would certainly have died.

  Ye Hua must have used all of Father of the Universe’s godly power to fight against the power of the Eastern Desert Bell and stop it from destroying everything under the sky. His primordial spirit was badly damaged in the fight between these two powers, and he fell into a deep sleep. Everyone had assumed his soul had flown and that he had turned to dust flying and flames dying. Ye Hua must have also assumed this.

  He should have needed at least a few decades of deep sleep, but the black crystal ice coffin had some beneficial power, and despite being used as a burial ground by the Sky Clan, Wuwang Sea was actually a sacred site and had special properties to help assist recovery. Ye Hua was lucky, and he woke up after only three years.

  I did not hear most of what Mo Yuan said. The only thing I properly heard was “Little Seventeenth, Ye Hua has returned! He is currently making his way to Qingqiu to see you. You must hurry back.”

  I had never dared to imagine that Ye Hua might actually still be alive. I had prayed for this a million times, but in my heart of hearts, I had always known that it was nothing but an absurd dream. Three years ago Ye Hua had turned to dust flying and flames dying. Buried under my peach tree was the cloak he wore as he died. Before he died, he had told me to forget him and urged me to live a happy life.

  But. But Mo Yuan said that Ye Hua had woken up. That he was not dead. He had been alive all along.

  I got onto a cloud and soared all the way back to Qingqiu, but I kept losing concentration and tumbled off four times along the way.

  When I got past the mouth of the valley, I dropped down from my cloud and stumbled along the ground the rest of the way to the foxhole. Some little immortals I passed on the way called out to me in greeting, but I did not see them. My hands and feet started to shake. I was terrified that Ye Hua would not be there, that Mo Yuan had said what he had said just to trick me.

  As soon as the foxhole was in sight, I slowed my pace. It had been a while since I had used the main entrance, and I had not noticed how big the peach tree I had planted there three years ago had become. It was the first time in three years that I was able to see clearly the bluish green of the mountains, the verdant lushness of the trees, and the emerald blue of the lake: the myriad colors of Qingqiu.

  The sunlight filtered down through the clouds and shone onto the blossom-covered peach tree between the bluish-green mountain and the emerald-blue water of the lake, creating a gorgeous pink haze.

  Underneath this haze stood a young man in a black cloak. He was leaning over, stroking the tombstone in front of him with his slender fingers.

  It was like a scene from my dream.

  Holding my breath, I took two steps forward, afraid that any sudden movement might cause the scene in front of me to just disappear.

  As he turned his head, a breeze blew over the tree, causing the branches of petals to undulate, looking like a series of pinkish-red waves. He gave a slight smile. He was the same as before, with his fine face and his jet-black hair. Petals floated down from the pink sea above our heads, and between the sky and earth, there was no other color, no other sound.

  He reached out a hand, and in a quiet voice he said, “Qia
n Qian, come over here.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Tang Qi is a writer of fantasy and romance novels. Her works include Life Is a Flower That Blooms Twice and The Nine Realms: Hua Xuyin.

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  Photo © 2015 Paul Ryan

  Poppy Toland is a freelance literary translator who studied Chinese at Leeds University. While living in Beijing, she worked as an editor for Time Out Beijing and as a field research supervisor for the BBC’s Wild China television series. Poppy is now based primarily in London. She wishes to thank Nala Changjing Liu for her help with the translation.