Chương 70: Chapter 19

Yellow-Brow didn't answer. His aura lingered close and far at the same time, quiet and observing and grim. Wu Zetian let him. Shimmering fragments danced before her lips as she exhaled. Then, she laughed. Beware the dark. The sound echoed into the Night and grew. It spread, twisted, and tilted the world into a new, frightening shape. Fear had come. It flowed through the underground like tar, deepening shade and breaking certainty.

Every space, every insect, every living thing, no matter how small; they all acquired the ancient instinct that something terrifying was close. Because when sight failed and sound twisted, who could say if death wasn't near? Caverns became ominous. Fissures became threatening. Buried seams seemed to acquire unseen watchers. Beware! Beware! Danger is close! shouted the woman on the mountaintop, and the world shivered at her warning. And it trembled differently around the Seed.

Not because of what might be, but for what was. The Seed, an intruder, set quivering around it. The difference was infinitesimal. To an Immortal, it was enough.

"There you are." West. Moving fast toward her home. Wu Zetian reached for it. Yellow-Brow's answer was almost gentle. Why fear what cannot be prevented? It was a simple chain of reasoning. Fear, you see, required possibility. A beast feared death because it might escape. A traveler feared the thing in the darkness because perhaps it would pass him by. A kingdom feared destruction because tomorrow might still exist. Yellow-Brow reached into that fear and aged it. Fear became exhaustion.

Exhaustion became resignation. Resignation became hopelessness. Across the underground world, Wu Zetian felt her metaphysical warning system go silent. The darkness no longer trembled before the seed. It simply accepted it. Yes, it sighed. Everything dies. Everything rots. Why struggle? Why fear? A perfectly logical conclusion. The Seed disappeared among a sea of weary acceptance. Wu Zetian frowned. Yellow-Brow had turned her own fear against her. Still, her bag of tricks ran deep.

She raised a hand and made a sweeping gesture. There are no destinations in the Night. Somewhere far and close, an ancient being was appreciating the Seed's progress. Then, he frowned for the first time. The Seed had stopped. Not because she had found it, but because it didn't know where to go. The Mother of Night had pulled her Domain inward. She had wrapped her own territory in Night and Mystery. Mountains had been hidden metaphysically. Rivers had forgotten their names.

Distances had become uncertain and directions ceased agreeing with what made sense. Yellow-Brow could still feel them. He could still feel the forests, the pinnacle, the Plateau and the city on top of it. But the relationship between them had disappeared into Mystery. East may lead toward her Domain. East may lead away. Twenty Li may be twenty Li. Twenty Li may be the distance between waking and dreaming. The Seed crawled forward, and emerged thirty Li away from the Plateau. Yellow-Brow's appreciation disappeared.

In that place far and near, the Immortal of Rot pressed a hand against the ground. He stopped trying to give directions to the Seed and reminded it of an old truth. Rot needs no maps. The Seed of Rot was a hopeful thing that lived for one thing and one thing only: to decay the Plateau. The same instinct pushed birds across oceans and ants to find their nest across the desert. Paths may disappear. Direction may tangle. Neither could blind that distant, guiding star. No uncertainty could cloud that unerring yearning.

The Seed resumed moving toward the Plateau. It did so by a simple trick: looking for what was least decayed, what replied to its yearning heart. Like water finding the lowest ground, like entropy that sought the lowest gradient, it inched its way where her Domain was the most stable metaphysically, where it was the most powerful and ancient. With that knowledge before its eyes, directions lost any meaning. Wu Zetian narrowed her eyes. Clever. Very clever. She smiled.

She raised her finger, and did something extravagant. Everything belongs to the Night. Her Domain pulsed, then expanded. For a breathtaking moment, everything belonged to her. Every cave. Every buried root. Every stone. Every dead thing. Every living thing. Everything became Night, everything became Wu Zetian. The Seed hesitated. Its life-mission was simple: find the heart of Night and corrupt it. But now, everything brought the trace of the heart. Every pebble, every worm. An underground lake carried True Night.

Ten thousand Li of bedrock whispered the same identity of her Domain's center. Ten million things carried the scent of her beat. The Seed chose one. Wrong. It chose another. Wrong. It turned. Wrong again. Wu Zetian saw its confusion as a sun in the Night. She started closing her fingers. Yellow-Brow put himself in the way, a sad figure shaking his head in mourning. Rot devours falsehood. An immense presence pushed itself through the Seed.

Belonging to Rot, the little thing made for a perfect jumping point for his aura to expand. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. And expand it did. It expanded like a cloud of poison, covering everything. The real Night resisted. The borrowed Night did not. Stones forgot Wu Zetian. Roots surrendered her shadow. Caverns lost their mystery. One by one, the false manifestations collapsed beneath entropy.

One million became one thousand became one hundred became a dozen. The Seed brightened, finding its path again even as it slipped from her grasp. Yellow-Brow didn't smile. He never smiled. But there was something contented in his aura. He was very close now, his aura pressing against her senses like a film of fetid air. Eleven lies, and one truth. Found and unveiled. The Seed had reached the end of the forests.

Eager and bright-eyed, it started clinging the Plateau's walls, worming its way toward its final destination. Wu Zetian hardened her resolve. She smiled with mischief. Find thy hand. Yellow-Brow's presence was filled with weary contentment. Now, he paused. The Seed was gone. Not from the Mother, no. From him. The Night had laid its mantle over it, turned it into just another secret nestled in the dark. Yellow-Brow reached for it, but it was like searching for a treasure in a dark room.

He commanded it to keep moving forward. His reply was a wave of confusion. Forward relative to what? The Seed's destination burned bright in its heart. But how do you step toward something if you don't even know where your feet stand? And how do you make your way through a body you're part of? Yellow-Brow's consciousness brimmed with a slow danger. The Night had welcomed his Seed so completely that it had turned it into one of her hidden things. Things hers to take and destroy.

Wu Zetian reached, but then her hand felt a resistance. Rot claims what is decayed. Yellow-Brow's influence pressed against hers like winds keeping a storm at bay. He may not see his Seed anymore, but it remained His Seed. He had made it; he had given it its meaning and reason. It was his, as all things which rot were. Night claims what is hidden. Wu Zetian threw her answer into their interlocking Domains. Rotted it may be, still it was hidden, even from its creator.

The Seed belonged to her, to the Night which covered and veiled. Their claims had the same weight. What remained was a clash of will and strength. Wu Zetian pulled. Yellow-Brow pushed. For tense moments, the Seeds existed between two metaphysical Domains which claimed it and rejected the other. Stone screamed around it. Whole Li of underground turned to mulch, only to blacken into obsidian. The contradiction ripped apart hidden caverns, bringing them down in collapses.

The forests quailed under it, whole stretches flattened instantly as though raked by the claws of a colossal beast. Then… Yellow-Brow let go. Wu Zetian understood immediately. Still too late. Yellow-Brow didn't care where the Seed was. It had reached the Plateau. It didn't matter that it was hidden. It didn't matter that it wasn't His. All that mattered was that it completed the reason for its existence. A simple, marvelous final will. Bloom.

Wherever he was, whatever under which authority it existed, the Seed did what seeds did. That single command echoed to it and no power above or beneath the earth could keep a single-minded will from complying with its own reason. Far beneath the earth, nestled among a battlefield of black rock and rotted dirt, a tiny flower unfolded amidst absolute darkness. It did so with the laughing triumph of things who lived only for a moment. Petals the color of a sickened sky opened.

Rot poured out, ten thousand years of maladies compressed and refined to rotting perfection. Stone aged a million years in a heartbeat. Water turned to unspeakable poison. Minerals became dust became nothing. Wu Zetian had three heartbeats. The detonation wouldn't destroy her city, not completely. It still would have been enough to take out half of the Domain and break apart the Plateau. She would have to hold it together herself and protect his people. Those outside the walls would be forfeit.

The land would be scarred and poisoned for years to come. The metaphysical weight would mutate bodies and twist minds. She pressed her lips together, thinking. Or… In his cave, Yellow-Brow lay back, waiting for the explosion. He had five Seeds in total at the moment, each of them painstakingly crafted from the choicest pestilences. Letting go of one had been tough, especially because he had already wasted another during his recent war with Chi You. But it was worth it if it meant shattering the Night's power base.

Or to see such a marvel, the artist side of said. He waited, anticipating filling his chest. He waited. And waited. And waited. Nothing. Yellow-Brow frowned. The Night had dissipated. The Seed was still there, halfway to its destination, about to bloom. But it never did. The flower unfurled and unfurled and never quite opened. Yellow-Brow stared. He couldn't feel the flower anymore. Not because she had hidden it, no. Because she had hidden it from itself. The flower hadn't changed.

It was still the same masterpiece of death and virulence he had crafted. But something in its being had become mysterious, distant, even to his creator. Wu Zetian breathed over it a question. What are you? And the Seed, an element of its being caught in dark, faltered under it. What was it? A weapon? A plant? A fragment of the Saint of Rot? Decay? A promise of death? No thing could express its nature while its nature remained uncertain.

Wu Zetian had introduced uncertainty to a thing that shouldn't have known the concept. Yellow-Brow threw his will through his Domain. It's Rot, he said. You are Rot. But the words, filtered by his immortal nature into the full exposure of a concept that neither word nor action could match, failed to reach the Seed. He had relinquished his authority over it, and now the Night stood in the way, distorting his words into something unintelligible. Beyond fear, beyond darkness, beyond concealment.

Into Mystery and what lay beyond. But he could reach for it. The Seed was too close to his Domain to fully escape him. He only needed to push through the murk and impose his authority again, force a blooming again. Then, Wu Zetian lashed out at him. What is Rot? She asked. An ending? Is an ending the point beyond which continuation is impossible? But how can an ending be if it continues? Why does Rot continue if it's an ending? She threw the contradiction in his Domain like one would throw a spear at an auroch.

It infixed into his soul, breaking coherence and steadiness. For a moment, Yellow-Brow felt his nature contradict itself. He faltered, fighting to break the knot. Wu Zetian didn't let the chance pass. The Thing Hidden Beneath the Earth. It wasn't a reasoning, or a question. It was a command, and it thundered through the Night and into the Underworld like the voice of Lord Di. It shook through the world like the cry announcing the end. Every shadow of the Domain converged.

They gathered in ten thousand flows, gathering into a single mass of conceptual meaning. And just like that, the battlefield shrunk. All the hiding places, all the nooks and crannies and fissures where a soul could hide; they gathered, fused, became one, until there was only one great secret underworld, one hiding place and no more. Every cave was the same cave. Every grave was the same grave. Every crack beneath every stone was the same darkness. And the Seed, hidden among them, suddenly was hidden under each.

Ripping the contradiction apart, Yellow-Brow looked for it. He searched, he separated. He calculated and called. He invoked entropy to make false things decay. But where was falsehood to be found here? Everything was one, and everything was true. And underneath, the orphan Seed was hidden and lost. Yellow-Brow's will faltered. Wu Zetian's did not. Her hand plunged across the Night, across hundreds of Li of rock and soil that suddenly didn't matter. Her fingers closed, and she pulled.

Sitting in her chambers, Wu Zetian held a black seed. It was a tiny thing, smaller than a fingernail, smooth and lucid. A crack had appeared in its seamless surface, revealing three petals the colors of dying skies. Zetian watched it, and a chorus of howls screeched against her mind. Layers upon layers of Rot. Entropy, distilled and condensed. The purity of decay. A dream of a flower, floating in serenity among a melted world.

Ten thousand years of maladies, the power that would have been able to devour the Plateau, plunged into her body. Her fingertips aged fast. Her nails blackened. Her skin greyed, the flesh already cracking. Zetian focused her will upon it. True Night covered her hand. Clutched in her fist, a creature who knew of only one thing gave a gentle twitch, then stopped. The Night takes all. In the far-close distance, Yellow-Brow's presence was streaked with bafflement. Hiding a wound doesn't unvalidate it, he pointed out.

"No, but you misunderstand." Wu Zetian opened her hand. Her skin was pristine. Resting on her palm, the seed had turned white, the color of polished bone.

"I am not hiding the wound. I am hiding your seed from itself." All was forgotten, and all was forgiven. The ten thousand years of memories. The single-hearted pursuit. The yearning desire. All was lost amidst the layers of the Night. The Seed dreamed, unheeding of all that once made it what it was. A dream, forgotten with the first coming of light. Yellow-Brow didn't rage. He was too composed for that.

Still, his presence ran through with something that may have cracked the Plateaus in half, a red lightning beneath a cloud front. Then, he was gone. Wu Zetian laid the seed on the floor.

"Shanti?"

"Yes, Founder," said the voice right outside the door.

"Put on some more tea, would you?"

"Right away." Wu Zetian's smile was subtle. In this skirmish, victory belonged to her. Then the world decided to be rude, and the land trembled.