Chương 86: B2 Epilogue

Autumn came and went. Orange-crest hardly remembered most of it. There were so many things orange-crest had wanted to do when he returned to Mount Yuelu. Things to teach his kin, and show his master. Old haunts to explore with new eyes, friendships and rivalries to rekindle. He'd even thought of building things. Not as men did, proper and enclosed, but...

His master had promised to teach him more secrets of carpentry and fire, that he might not merely know how to manage a hearth, but properly create and maintain one. To be certain his fire would not escape its cage, to know how to ignite the blaze anew even when strong winds blew. Orange-crest could still see it in his mind's eye. A circle of stones by the edge of the great lake, lining the bottom of a pit. A woodpile, and a spit. A single shelf, for jars of wine.

Perhaps a few screens, or a chest full of cushions, to be dragged out of a cave when the weather was nice. Not a house, like the one his master would have no doubt built. But something more suitable for him, and the other monkeys. Orange-crest shuddered. His master. The tawny monkey fell over, boneless. Stared up at the clouds, listlessly crossing the cruel sky. His head lolled to the side. He couldn't see the cave from here. But he knew where it was, and faced it.

He grabbed a persimmon and mashed it into his mouth like he was making wine with it. Filthy monkey. A disciple ought be clean. Don't make me get out the tub. The voice wasn't as clear as it once was. Orange-crest stuffed another wrinkled persimmon down his throat. The elder of quick-finger's children, yet innocent of a name, stared at the strange monkey eating without joy. Orange-crest rose to his feet. Every evening, without fail, the monkey returned to his master's side.

On days like this one, he returned far earlier. His master was alone, and one place seemed much the same as any other. He walked familiar paths in a haze of waking dreams. Watched his first family pass by, separated from them by an oily film thinner than glass, but sturdier than mountains. Orange-crest tried not to think this much. To shy away from his human side, the one that thought in words, and acted in reasons. If he could only remember how to simply exist, to do, or not do, as he pleased.

The hole in his heart would not close. But perhaps it would be easier to bear, without his head always picking at it. But what was the point of building something rain and lightning would one day lay low? What was the point of an open-air feasting hall beneath such a hollow sky? Orange-crest was bad at this. Bad at forgetting how to live in the world he'd left behind. The sun still hung in the sky. It had yet to even begin to set. But orange-crest was tired.

So he shut his eyes against the day, chasing after the one place where his head was quiet, and his heart did not hurt. Orange-crest awoke after midnight, his toes tingling as if ants crawled upon them. He always slept poorly in Li Xun's cave, now that he'd let the stone fully fall away. Heat and chills would set him to sweating and shivering in turns. Whatever poison escaped his king's circle would sometimes leave him coughing the day that followed, or lead his dreams down dark paths.

Yet he refused to sleep under the stars. He would endure his master's venom. In his mind, he called it training. Daoist Scouring Medicine would have liked that. Orange-crest rolled over, staring through the flames at his master's sunken face. Orange-crest did not talk much to Li Xun. His master had always been the one to do that. Li Xun spoke, and orange-crest responded. It felt wrong to take his role, and carry the conversation. It felt like admitting something. Each day he sought new cover for his master's body.

His robes had rotted away, and it would not do for him to be without a blanket in his sleep. Man's modesty was silly, his master's dignity was important. Yet, even within the Ring of Fire, Li Xun's body rotted through anything once living that orange-crest placed upon it. The leaves of great ferns. The inner bark of trees. None of it was worthy to touch his master, and all of it turned to dust in a day's time. But, it was something to do.

Something other than half-hearted cultivation to fill the many empty hours that stretched before him. There was nothing to do now, in the night. Orange-crest wasn't tired enough to sleep, nor hungry enough to move. Through the night that followed his forty-first day upon Mount Yuelu, orange-crest sat, and thought. He thought grudgingly, and hatefully. Furiously, and shamefully. But he thought all the same, thought until he could look the inescapable ideas in the eye.

Orange-crest reached up, and removed the band of jade from his arm. Reverently, he reached through the fire, placing it on his master's chest. His hand grew feverish at even that brief contact. Fur fell away from his knuckles, and his arm began to itch even worse than his toes had. His punishment, for reaching into the Ring of Fire.

"I'm so sorry, master. For not being a better disciple." Too human, he'd become. That was the conclusion he'd reached. The first part of it at least. He'd tried so hard to embrace the ways and traditions of man. Tried harder to walk their way, than he'd realized or intended. Big-crest had been right in some ways, in his stone dream. Men pretended to be more than beasts. And they were. But to be more than something meant one was still something at their core.

For all their protestations of justice and civilization, when fangs were bared, men too respected only power. That was his mistake, in the end. Trusting in where men drew the limits of kin and kind. Humans might be pack. Humanity never would. Orange-crest had kept shrugging off clothes as if not wearing a robe would let him stay true to himself. As if a clothed monkey could not be itself, nor a naked monkey wish itself a man. No more. Orange-crest had changed.

He lied to himself, when he thought he could be true to what he was. The only way was forward. Yet, though the shape of the world might not let him go back, he refused to go forward alone. Li Xun had changed orange-crest's fate. With hubris and cleverness, boldness and love. So for him, orange-crest would do the same. This, and this alone, he was certain of. He knew not when. He knew not how. But his master's body was not cold. He still drew infrequent agonized breaths. He did not eat.

Food rotted away in his mouth. But his body did not wither further within the Ring of Fire. Between life and death, Li Xun lingered. And orange-crest refused to accept that he would not recover. It was here, that it rested. The thought orange-crest had spent weeks not daring to think. Li Xun had changed his fate. And he had changed Li Xun's. He understood little of what had passed when he expended Grand Elder Tian's seal. But he'd got what he wanted, hadn't he? Everyone he cared for had lived.

He did not know for certain the fate of some, like Wu Yingjie or Li Shuwen. He had not seen the end of the fight between Yang Wei and formless-gleam. But in his bones he knew it to be true, they had all escaped that realm alive, even Xiao Shulan and Huo'er. Even Li Xun. After all, what could one call it to endure between life and death, if not living? He'd known there would be a price. Grand Elder Tian had written obliquely, but not unclearly. He'd been so willing to write off a distant future.

To sever his fate with immortality, or bear the yoke of the Azure Mountain Sect for the rest of his days. He'd not realized that another would pay the price for his greed. For his refusal to accept the consequences of choices already written. What a terrible trade he'd made. Formless-gleam for his master? He cared for the fox. More than he should. But even now, with his heart more than a month cooled, he would have wrung her milky neck in a heartbeat if it would have opened his master's eyes again.

Orange-crest dug his nails into the floor of the cave, felt them threaten to bend back, and snap free. It didn't feel good, it felt horrible, but it felt better. That was a regret he would carry until his master recovered. And he would recover. Any future in which he did not, was a future in which orange-crest no longer walked the world. Orange-crest regretted his greed. His optimism. He regretted so many things. He even regretted his final thoughtless choice. The killing of Elder Lu.

His mind had been far from clear, when he'd wrapped his fingers around Elder Lu's skull and squeezed. He'd not properly considered the consequences of his master's body being absent. The sect would think his master slew Elder Lu and walked away. Elder Lu himself was gone, one threat, forever removed. But orange-crest had made his master an adversary as resolved, and a hundred times more powerful, in setting him against Azure Mountain Sect itself. Not that it much mattered.

His master did not need to fear discovery, when he never emerged from his cave. It was such a small regret, compared to the one he slept next to. A regret that shamed him, tasting like betrayal. But... He'd read one of Lu Xiaosheng's cultivation methods once. Seen the thinnest outline of how he thought, and found something worthy in it. Heard his master's stories of the good he'd done standing against demons that made formless-gleam look as harmless as a cub.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. Should he have done it? Should he regret it? All he knew is that he had, and he did. He didn't regret the choice. He regretted that even now, he could not see a better one. He could not have kept the elder captive upon Mount Yuelu. Even if the Monkey King had agreed, it would never have worked forever. Yet to allow him to walk away, after what he'd done to Li Xun? No. The consequences aside, no.

Orange-crest could see the shadow of the goodness in Lu Xiaosheng. But that only made what he did worse. He could not, would not, would never, forgive him. Let him rot and be forgotten. This regret at least, he hoped would fade. Once, he'd told his master monkeys did not regret. That it was a human thing. Oh but how naive he'd been. More than anything, orange-crest regretted his failure. His weakness. That he'd not been strong enough to stand at Li Xun's side as he faced his fate.

Qi Condensation had not been enough for him to save his master from Elder Lu. It would not be enough to heal him from the consequences of that fight. To take from the world, human or otherwise, what he would need to forge his master a body strong enough to bear the venom within him. He would need to reach the peak of Foundation Establishment at the very least. Ideally attain Core Formation himself, if not knock at the door of Nascent Soul. Steal a cauldron. Master alchemy. Steal books.

Learn the principles of bodily refinement. Acquire heaven-defying ingredients. So many things, he would need. The logic of man said it would take decades at minimum for orange-crest to become strong enough to matter. Centuries perhaps, to reach Core Formation or Nascent Soul. A cultivator did not advance that quickly. So orange-crest would discard that logic. The calculus of fate said this was his punishment. The ink that stained his paws.

His master trapped between life and death, for his greedy demand that they all should survive. He would change that math. He would be better. He would become more. He did not need to kill indiscriminately. To embrace the rapacious hunger that formless-gleam hated and reflected, a tarnished mirror of humanity in more than her form. Orange-crest could be better than men, but still loot bare their larders until he had what he needed to reforge his master's body.

There were more things beneath heavens than man's orthodoxy and their demons. He would be one of them. Man's orthodoxy? Or Heaven's? Nobody had ever given orange-crest a straight answer about that. Where the line between righteousness of men and the will of their gods lay. It was a pointless thought. One more suitable for Li Hou than orange-crest. Li Hou was dead. No, not dead. Yet not living either, trapped like his master in a place between extremes. The name would spread still.

From his deeds in the sect and below it, and his deeds yet to come. But it wasn't his anymore. There were no more than two or three humans whose lips gave it worth. It was a shield and a challenge now, not an identity. These things, and a reminder. Li Xun had lived, and Li Hou would be proof of it. Orange-crest wouldn't trust in his king's strength. He wouldn't trust in anyone else's. The shape of the world was wrong. No other had righted it. So he would. However far that way would carry him.

And the first step would be healing his master. He'd averted his eyes from formless-gleam. From what she'd been in the process of becoming from the first day he'd met her. Perhaps that was right. Perhaps it was wrong. Perhaps it was a thing beyond man's rules. But he knew wrong. And if wrong was anything, it was this, his master rotting from within. This madness that had set elder against daoist, and brother against brother. This red and golden greed. Orange-crest turned away from his master.

Stared at the stone wall. Right now, he desperately wished he was drunk. So drunk he could sleep insensate. Li Xun would have cuffed him for that, if he voiced the thought. Gently. As much a pat as a strike, but sharper for the shame. Orange-crest wished so badly for it, his master's rebuke. He waited, hoping against hope for it to come. Instead, a hand rested on his shoulder. Orange-crest turned his head, not daring to believe. It wasn't a hand. Just the most handlike of paws.

"I found your staff." The Monkey King said, placing it against the wall of the cave. Neither of them said what both monkeys were thinking. All his kingly power, and this alone he could recover. Orange-crest grasped his king's wrist, grabbing at it as desperately as when he'd been drowning in dark waters.

"Who named you?" He asked, suddenly needing an answer.

"Who is Sun Wuming?" He was thinking too much. Dreaming of the impossible. Dreams as hollow as the sky, as touchable as the reflection of the moon in water. He needed something, anything, that could devour all his attention. His king had roused him. He would provide it. The Monkey King of Mount Yuelu stared through orange-crest.

"Have you yet had the dreams?" He asked quietly, as if afraid someone might overhear. Orange-crest tilted his head.

"What sort of dreams?"

"You haven't, then. You will know them, if they come to you."

"Tell me? I have had... Strange dreams. Dreams of Heaven, and earth."

"Not yet."

"Why not?" The Monkey King smiled. He looked like everything orange-crest had once hoped to be.

"You decided something heavy tonight, didn't you?" The king asked.

"Maybe."

"You can tell me."

"I did tell you. Maybe." The Monkey King laughed. Orange-crest did not, but he did crack a quick grin. He saw clearly where the strangeness in the Monkey King's mannerisms came from, now that he shared it.

"I have some wine. We should drink it tonight. You seem whole enough. And the night seems right." Orange-crest was not so sure, that anything about this night was right, but he did not contradict his king. He'd wished for a distraction. He wouldn't question it now. Besides. He was desperately thirsty for something other than water. Orange-crest had expected the Monkey King to insist they drink under the open sky. He did not. The story he would share, he said, was one best not related where Heaven could hear.

That was almost intriguing enough for orange-crest to forget the third primate silently listening to their conversation. Instead, after retrieving two great jugs of rice wine of clearly human origin, the Monkey King placed his hands upon the floor of the cave. His qi flowed smoothly through the stone, and as he lifted his hands from the floor, the stone came with it, rising like a waterfall reversed. When he'd finished, the door to the cave had all but vanished. There were now but two small holes.

One near the floor, and one near the ceiling, which let smoke in, and light out.

"For breathing." The Monkey King said, seeing orange-crest stare at his work. There was something there. A similarity to the furnaces and bellows orange-crest had seen. But he was too tired to grasp the thought. The darkness was not absolute, between the Ring of Fire and the small hole. But it heavy and velvety, clouded with thin wisps of white smoke that smelled of herbs and rot. It made for a very strange atmosphere, when the Monkey King poured the first round. Orange-crest took a sip. Euch. Rice wine.

Even the Monkey King could not be perfect he supposed.

"Nobody named me. Though several tried." The Monkey King spoke in the elegant tongue. Made no move to explain his choice of language. Quickly, he finished his cup of wine, and poured himself a second, letting the words hang in the air.

"I was gold-mantle, in those distant days. There was no king upon Mount Yuelu. And I was... Exceptional. By any standards. I came to feel this place too small." Orange-crest finished his own cup of wine, drawing permission from his king's quick pace. He relished the burn, the salty bitterness of the rice that was one of his least favorite flavors when it had appeared in his centipede wine. He licked up the gritty powder at the bottom of the cup, leaving not a drop of alcohol, before he poured himself a second.

"Perhaps that is the wrong place to begin the story. I never had a master as you did, but my story did not start with me." Orange-crest shivered as he met his king's eyes. Old eyes, eyes that had seen all the cruelty of man's world, but had neither buckled nor yielded. How had he never seen their depths before?

"My king." Orange-crest relished the words. The connection. His king. His mountain.

"Forgive this small one for making you worry." The Monkey King waved a hand. Insignificant. A trespass too small to be forgivable.

"You asked how I got my name. Sun Wuming. The descendant who is nameless."

"Very odd name. I like mine better. The Li who is a monkey." For the first time in weeks, orange-crest felt a hint of who he was beneath the mountains of grief peek through the surface. He took another deep swallow, watching his king through the half-light.

"It is a better name. Before I became king, monkeys upon Mount Yuelu named themselves. They did as I did, and stole and scavenged boastful names." The king's voice was wistful, his speech wandering.

"It was I who decided that you should name each other. I like the name you have given me, the Monkey King. Given names are better than taken ones. I try to live up to it." Orange-crest scrunched up his nose.

"What do you have to live up to?" He demanded.

"You are the king? We try to live up to you." The Monkey King of Mount Yuelu took a deep breath, as if readying himself for a plunge.

"They made a monkey a god once." He said, speaking with all the gravity of Daoist Enduring Oath holding forth on the matter of cultivation.

"A god, and then a buddha." Orange-crest opened his mouth, a dozen questions on his tongue. And then thunder boomed above. There had been no thunderclouds upon the horizon, when orange-crest had fallen into his early slumber. He did not need to wonder who they were. The Monkey King was silent, waiting. Orange-crest's heart pounded. This was a secret. A secret more terrible than any he could have imagined, when he first left Mount Yuelu. One like fate, that Heaven itself abjured speaking or knowing.

"Why would a monkey want to be a god? Seems like a pain." Gold-mantle coughed, halfway through polishing off his third cup. Thunder rumbled once more.

"I don't think he knew men well, before he met gods."

"Oh. Makes sense. I know gods, but what are buddhas? Heard word, but master..." Orange-crest trailed off, struck dumb by the distant memory of one of Li Xun's many half-remembered lectures about ascetics and fanatics. The Monkey King poured himself a fourth cup, and polished it off in a single swallow.

"Daoists are like macaques." The king said, with the air of someone relating a profound truth.

"But buddhists are like gorillas."

"What?"

"Both monkeys. Never get along." Orange-crest frowned.

"Is that... True? Or joke?"

"Yes." The Monkey King agreed, nodding to himself.

"True joke. Buddhas like gorillas. Lazy. But scary when they get out of bed."

"Explain more about buddhas?"

"No."

"No?"

"Do I ask you to explain empires? Met some. Am not one. Buddhists are nicer than daoists. But fond of looking away from dark things." Orange-crest opened his mouth, but gold-mantle cut him off.

"Like me." His king added. They finished their fifth cups of wine in silence. Orange-crest felt himself drifting upon pleasant waves, engulfed in a warm pool. The hole in him could never be filled with wine, but the edges felt softer this night, and so many fond memories came easily to him. If he pinched shut his eyes and squinted just right, gold became white, and he could have been sitting with his master in his home as the fire burned low, and Li Xun prepared to retire for the night.

"I look away from things too. I had a friend. I didn't watch, as she became a demon." The Monkey King nodded with tipsy amiability, then put a hand on his young subject's shoulder.

"And I have lost friends. Lost so many. But I don't pretend to share your grief. Don't borrow my failings. Not tonight." Orange-crest nodded, leaning in to the touch. That made half-sense, and tonight, that was enough. They'd kept drinking, through the quiet interlude. He'd lost track of how many cups. He almost felt like he could sleep again. But for the first time since he'd seen his master's ruined body, he did not long to.

"All the same, it ended in tragedy. And they have never forgotten it."

"Huh?"

"Him. The Monkey King." Orange-crest sat up straighter, an actinic tension in the words. The Monkey King. No qualifiers. No hesitation. Outside the mountain, the winds blew faster, sharper.

"Men?"

"Heaven." Gold-mantle corrected.

"Men are of a kind, but their memories are short. Some grudges are too important for Heaven to entrust to them."

"The Monkey King." Orange-crest repeated. He could never have imagined it before. But he knew it now, that'd he'd always longed for a king. He stared into gold-mantle's eyes. A Nascent Soul cultivator. A monkey strong enough to slay elders and contend with sects. A cultivator and martial artist so great that orange-crest had only ever seen the least of his arts when he gently dispensed with threats in Qi Condensation and Foundation Establishment. And it was in him too.

A hole that the world had not put there, one they had been born with. A longing, for a king. How heavy the burden the monkeys of Mount Yuelu had placed upon gold-mantle. How broad his back and sturdy his resolve, to bear it.

"Who was he?" Orange-crest asked.

"It is a long story." Gold-mantle said.

"I know little of it, but it is still much in the telling." The air in their little cave seemed to grow thinner. Heavy rains poured down, a dull thunder to drown out the protesting Heavens. Across Mount Yuelu, monkeys found shelter and huddled close to their kin, as an unseasonable winter storm raged across the skies of their home.

"I dreamed of him, when I walked the wider world." Gold-mantle continued. There was an energy to the king that orange-crest couldn't quite place. A transgressive sort of anticipation, as if he'd hungered to share this story for centuries, but had ever held himself back.

"You will dream of him one day too, I think. His legacy calls to us, we who cannot help but go where we are not wanted."

"But who is he?" Orange-crest pressed.

"The first Stone Monkey, the Stone Monkey of Numinous Wisdom. The Great Sage Equal to Heaven, and Protector of the Peaches. The Pilgrim, and the Victorious Fighting Buddha. The Handsome Monkey King."

"Sun Wukong, was the name his master gave him. The name that shook the heavens."