Chương 73: Chapter 21

Wu Zetian stood atop the tallest spire, watching the apocalypse unfold. Chi You's attack had swallowed half the sky. It was difficult to call the thing a technique anymore. Technique implied boundaries, intention disciplined into purpose. This was closer to a second sun being born. A colossal sphere of demonic qi hung above the city, red-black at its heart and incandescent around its edges. Fire and howling faces crawled across its surface in continents.

Lightning writhed within it, appearing and disappearing beneath layers of churning madness. Vast currents folded endlessly through one another, consuming themselves only to be reborn an instant later. Beneath, her city screamed. Soldiers shouted themselves hoarse along the walls. Formation masters drove spirit stones into arrays with shaking hands. Disciples ran through streets that had ceased pretending there was anywhere useful to run. Parents dragged children into cellars. Merchants abandoned shops.

Servants crowded temples whose gods the Sect did not worship. And they all prayed. Not to Gods. To the Night, to the Earth, to whoever would listen. To her. Wu Zetian heard them all. She could have listened to every individual voice had she wished, but she did not. Her eyes remained upon the thing descending from heaven. It was… Magnificent. The admission came without shame. She had lived too long to require comforting lies. It was magnificent, terrifyingly so. There was something pure within that demonic qi.

Not pure as mortals understood purity, of course. Nothing clean or righteous about it. It was madness, slaughter, fury and will stripped of every restraint that lesser creatures invented to make existence tolerable. But it was pure in purpose. It wanted. It raged. It consumed. It never tired of wanting, never tired of raging, never tired of consuming. Every fragment of it contained the same impossible vitality. Destroy one current and another surged into its place.

Break its structure and the fragments continued fighting independently. Scatter them and every mote remained furious at the indignity of having been scattered. An ever-gnawing thing. As likely to stop and die as the world was to crumble. A billion chaotic impulses made somehow singular through the sheer enormity of their common desire. Burn. Wu Zetian watched it descend, and, for one dangerous moment, she understood why immortals forgot the world beneath them. What was a mortal beside that?

What were eighty years of life trudging in the mud? What was a hundred? A mortal struggled into existence helpless and screaming. He spent years learning how to stand, more learning how to think, more learning how to control appetites it had never asked to possess. It became jealous, petty, cruel, afraid.

It lied for scraps of silver, quarreled over inheritance, betrayed friends for advancement, desired people who did not desire it, hated neighbors over insults forgotten by everyone else, grew fat when food was plentiful and stole when it was scarce. It spent half its life trying to understand itself and usually failed. Then its back bent, its hands trembled, its teeth loosened, its memories faded. And it died.

It might or might not be mourned for a few generations and then was forgotten, gone like he had never lived at all. What was such a creature before the power above her? Dust endured longer. The thought was neither cruel nor kind. Wu Zetian understood, suddenly and intimately, the temptation of Heaven. To climb high enough was to acquire perspective; to acquire perspective was to understand scale. And scale was merciless.

From here, she could not distinguish the old woman who had opened a dumpling stand near the western academy from the stones surrounding her stall. From here, a thousand people running through the streets became movement. Ten thousand became a pattern. A hundred thousand became a statistic. A city became an object. A civilization became a phenomenon. An age became a moment. Climb high enough and eventually everything became small. Perhaps that was how an immortal lost himself.

Not through hatred, hatred still acknowledged the object of hatred. Perhaps it happened much more quietly. Wu Zetian lowered her eyes. Far below, the city burned with panic. She remembered walking those streets. When Chi You's maddened qi had first washed against the defensive formations and contaminated those unfortunate enough to be caught outside, she had taken a moment to fix the issue.

She had seen a merchant bite through his own tongue while trying to strangle his brother; a woman clawing at her own eyes because she insisted something was looking through them; two disciples hacking at one another until Wu Zetian's presence crushed them both unconscious. And amid that chaos, she had seen a soldier. She did not know his name, and, surprisingly, that bothered her now. Perhaps she could find it later. He had been wounded, badly. One leg bent the wrong way and blood ran across his neck.

The back of his armor was rent and bloody. He should have been running. His cultivation was pitiful, but he could. Instead, the soldier stood atop a little girl, covering her with body, raising the pitiful remains of his qi around her. Barrier. How optimistic. It was a pathetic thing, Foundation Establishment, and not even particularly impressive even for that Realm. Against Chi You. Against that. Wu Zetian looked upward again. The demonic sphere filled the heavens.

The soldier's barriers wouldn't have lasted another ten breaths. He must have known, not precisely maybe, mortals were poor judges of such things, but enough. Enough to realize that his little veil of Qi would fail, that his flesh couldn't hold what was to come. He must have known that putting his body between the Heavens falling and that child was useless, absurd, pointless. He had done it anyway. Wu Zetian stared at the approaching inferno. How strange. Chi You's power was so much greater.

There was no comparison, really. The soldier's entire existence could have been consumed to produce a spark within that sphere, and the sphere would not have noticed the addition. Yet she found herself thinking about him. A nameless man crouched in a filthy street, bleeding through cracked armor, performing an act that accomplished absolutely nothing… until she arrived. Her lips curved. Mortals. What ridiculous creatures. They were cowardly until the moment they were brave.

Greedy until the moment they gave everything away. Cruel, spiteful, lustful, vain little things capable of carrying grudges for forty years over the division of a field… and then one of them saw a frightened child in the street and decided to die. How could one not be smitten with such creatures? Not because they could overcome their limitations. They rarely did. But that they could act beautiful while remaining weak. An Immortal could give away a fortune and remain wealthy.

He could serve another for one hundred years and still have eternity. That soldier? He had only one life to give, one fragile, unremarkable, precious life, and he had placed it between hell and a child. Before that, scale became less convincing. Below her, the city prayed. Wu Zetian could feel them now. Thousands upon thousands, doing something a bit more uncomfortable than worship. Trust. She is there. The Founder is there. The Night Immortal is there. She will stop it. What foolish confidence.

The sphere descending toward them contained enough power to scour mountains from the earth. And somewhere below, a mother was telling her daughter not to be frightened because the Ancestor would protect them. Somewhere else, soldiers were holding a wall that would cease to exist if Wu Zetian decided not to move. Clerks still carried messages. Healers still treated patients. Formation masters still replaced shattered spirit stones. People still dragged strangers from burning houses. Pointless acts. Tiny acts.

Mortal acts. Wu Zetian closed her eyes. She had been listening. How could she not, when she was the Night? She remembered warm streets. Arguments outside newly-opened noodle shops. Children chasing one another beneath lanterns. A clerk complaining about his superior. A young disciple pretending not to stare when his sweetheart passed. A husband being publicly berated by his wife over vegetables. Drunken songs. Bad poetry. Cheap incense. Ambition. Cowardice. Generosity. Lust. Spite. Love.

All the embarrassing clutter of being alive. An imperfect world. A vicious world, sometimes. A world whose inhabitants were born knowing nothing, understood little, hurt one another constantly and vanished almost as soon as they had begun to comprehend what they might have done differently. The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. And yet. And yet… She opened her eyes, and raised a hand. Her body, brought into existence by immortal will, shifted.

Like pulling herself out of a shell too tight, far too tight. Her being grew, sighed in relief. Geometric black ran beneath skin that gleamed with moon glow. Around her, shadow folded over shadow until the sky beneath Wu Zetian became a second firmament, deep and cool and immeasurably still. The maddened sphere descended into it, and for an instant the world seemed divided between two principles. Above, fire, hunger, motion. Below, darkness, patience, silence.

They touched, and the Plateau shivered, sinking three feet into the earth beneath it. The sun stopped. The sphere burned to descend, but Night coolly refused. Fire poured downward in rivers and vanished into darkness. Demonic qi screamed through the air, infecting stone and cloud and empty space with furious purpose. Sleeve fluttering, Wu Zetian looked upward, and her lips curved up. Withing that impossible ocean of chaotic weill, someone was looking back, at last.

"Mistress Chi You." Her voice crossed the apocalypse without effort.

"It has been too long." The fire laughed. Continents of flame split into enormous grinning shapes before collapsing again. A voice answered from everywhere, ecstatic with laughter.

"HELLO, HELLO! ZETIAN OF THE EAST. USURPER. BOTHERER. PLAYMATE." Somewhere, a maw able to devour a continent and not be satisfied grinned widely.

"DO THAT AGAIN." Wu Zetian's smile grew slightly. She had regretted Yellow-Brow. Not defeating him; that had been necessary, but the circumstances. Their conflict had been metaphysical almost immediately. There had been no leisurely exchange between peers, no opportunity to compare paths or ask questions accumulated over millennia. Two immortal wills had collided. Thereafter, conversation had become somewhat IMPOSSIBLE.

Wu Zetian had inherited her old self's wants, and she had spent twenty thousand years surrounded by beings who could not truly understand what she was. She loved them, some of them deeply, but there remained a difference that affection could not erase. A mortal asking an immortal about immortality was like a child asking an old woman about age: the child could understand the words, but not the weight, never the weight. And now, another immortal.

A living being who had walked the closest this world has seen to eternity, who had cultivated a Dao to its ultimate conclusion. Wu Zetian would have been lying if she claimed she was not curious. The world might currently be ending around them. Still, one had priorities.

"You wish for me to disappear, so that you and Yellow-Brow may continue your rivalry," she said. The sphere convulsed, and, for the first time, its descent ceased voluntarily.

"YES." The word carried such joy that Wu Zetian smiled.

"Why?" A face emerged from the flames. Horns emerged first. Then teeth, so many of them. Then burning eyes stretched wide with something between hatred and delight. It was not truly Chi You's face. Wu Zetian suspected Chi You had long ago stopped possessing anything so limiting as a single physical appearance. But it would suffice.

"TO KILL HIM."

"I gathered."

"TO TEAR HIM OPEN."

"Yes."

"TO BURN HIS BONES."

"Naturally."

"TO MAKE HIM ANGRY." That was new. Wu Zetian tilted her head.

"To make him angry?" The eyes widened.

"YES!" The fire surged. Wu Zetian pushed it back down with two fingers. Chi You laughed again.

"HE HATES IT."

"I imagine most people dislike being burned."

"NO. HE HATES WHEN I WIN." Wu Zetian considered this.

"And you enjoy that."

"YES."

"Do you hate him?" There was a moment of absolute stillness.

"YES."

"Do you love him?" Another pause. Shorter.

"YES." There it was. No embarrassment. No contradiction. No mortal need to untangle the two emotions and decide which one was legitimate. Chi You simply accepted both. Wu Zetian found that strangely refreshing.

"How long?" She asked. The fire shifted; images appeared within it. Wu Zetian saw mountains she did not recognize. Cities long gone. A desert beneath three moons. Yellow-Brow sighed as half his body regenerated. Chi You impaled upon something enormous, biting whatever had impaled her. Two figures fighting upon the surface of an ocean until the water boiled away. Someone laughing. Someone screaming. It was difficult to tell which was which.

"LONG."

"Centuries?"

"YES."

"Millennia?" Chi You seemed to think.

"MAYBE." Wu Zetian almost chuckled.

"Your record-keeping is atrocious."

"WE WERE BUSY." That earned an actual laugh. A small one. Below them, hundreds of thousands of people waited to discover whether they would live through the hour. Above them, two immortals discussed an ancient love affair while holding an apocalypse between them. The absurdity was exquisite.

"So," Wu Zetian said, "you have spent centuries trying to kill one another."

"YES."

"And neither of you has succeeded." The flames bristled.

"Observation, Lady Chi You. Not an insult." They settled, slowly.

"And you intend to continue."

"YES."

"Until?" Chi You did not answer. Wu Zetian waited. The demonic immortal seemed genuinely confused by the question.

"UNTIL?"

"Until one of you wins."

"THEN WE FIGHT AGAIN."

"If one of you falls?"

"THEN THEY COME BACK."

"And if they do not?" That possibility seemed not merely undesirable to Chi You. It seemed incomprehensible.

"HE COMES BACK."

"You sound confident."

"HE ALWAYS COMES BACK." There was something unexpectedly soft beneath those words. A possessive feeling that was almost tender. Wu Zetian understood. Yellow-Brow belonged to Chi You. Not as property, as opposition, as companion, as beloved enemy. Yellow-Brow must have felt the same. Their relationship had been hammered into something beyond ordinary categories by centuries of mutual violence. They knew one another through wounds, defeats, victories and battles wide enough to crush kingdoms.

Each was the one creature in existence capable of giving the other what they desired most: resistance. Wu Zetian found herself almost moved. Almost.

"And I am preventing this reunion." The fire brightened.

"YES."

"I see."

"MOVE."

"No."

"MOVE."

"No."

"MOVE MOVE MOVE MOVE MOVE…!"

"Repeating yourself is unlikely to improve the argument." The sphere exploded outward, and Night tightened around it. For a heartbeat, every shadow across the continent pointed toward Wu Zetian. Then equilibrium returned. Chi You laughed, not at all frustrated, but delighted.

"YOU ARE FUN."

"Thank you."

"MOVE."

"No."

"THEN I BREAK YOU."

"I suspected we would arrive there eventually." Wu Zetian remained genuinely amused. She had not yet abandoned the conversation. Perhaps there was something here, beneath the appetite. There had to be, no matter how much her previous self's memories said there wasn't. One did not become immortal accidentally. This creature had cultivated, learned, adapted, survived. She was not stupid. The problem was that Chi You seemed to understand Wu Zetian perfectly well. She just seemed not to care.

Wu Zetian gestured downward.

"Do you understand what lies beneath us?" The burning eyes glanced toward the city.

"THINGS."

"People."

"YES."

"Mortals."

"YES."

"Several hundred thousand."

"MAYBE."

"They will die if I move."

"YES."

"And?"

"AND WHAT?" There was no cruelty in it. That was what extinguished the last of Wu Zetian's amusement. Cruelty would have been reassuring; it required recognition. A cruel person understood suffering and found pleasure in causing it. Chi You did not hate the city. She did not resent its inhabitants, nor did she enjoy their terror. They simply did not enter the calculation.

"Do you understand that they wish to live?"

"EVERYTHING WANTS."

"And that matters nothing to you?"

"WHY WOULD IT?" Wu Zetian studied her. Two immortals. Two minds sharpened across ages. Neither misunderstood the question. Neither misunderstood the answer.

"They have families."

"YES."

"Ambitions."

"YES."

"People they love."

"YES."

"Children."

"YES."

"And you would burn all of them because your rivalry with Yellow-Brow awaits."

"YES." The smile got larger.

"IT'S A BET."

"Even though their deaths accomplish nothing." The face in the fire twisted. Not with anger, just confusion.

"WHY DO YOU KEEP ASKING?" Wu Zetian paused. That was the answer. There was no wounded child inside Chi You, no forgotten humanity waiting to be uncovered, no philosophical argument that would suddenly awaken compassion if Wu Zetian arranged the words cleverly enough. Chi You was not human. She had never been human. She was a demonic beast that had clawed its way to immortality. Perhaps expecting a human answer from her had been Wu Zetian's mistake. Still… curiosity persisted.

"What do you want?" That question Chi You understood, and the heavens ignited in answer.

"YELLOW-BROW."

"Besides him."

"FIGHT."

"Besides fighting."

"PLAY."

"Besides play."

"GROW."

"And then?"

"FIGHT BIGGER."

"And then?"

"PLAY MORE."

"And then?"

"GROW MORE."

"And then?" The demonic immortal laughed.

"FIGHT BIGGER!" Wu Zetian didn't speak. Chi You mistook her silence for difficulty understanding.

"BIGGER. BIGGER. BIGGER. UNTIL EVERYTHING SHAKES," she elaborated, sounding delighted by the prospect.

"UNTIL HE HITS ME AND MOUNTAINS BREAK. UNTIL I BITE HIM AND THE SKY BLEEDS. UNTIL HE GETS STRONGER. THEN I GET STRONGER. THEN HE GETS STRONGER. THEN I GET STRONGER."

"Why?" Again… confusion.

"BECAUSE I WANT TO." There it was. Wu Zetian almost sighed. Twenty thousand years. Dao comprehension. Tribulations. Refinement of flesh. Refinement of spirit. Refinement of soul. The gradual transcendence of mortality. The accumulation of power sufficient to alter geography through irritation. An existence that had climbed so high that nations became ephemeral. And at the summit… Because I want to. The irony was almost offensive. Immortals spent centuries contemplating purpose.

And Chi You had apparently solved the great question of existence by refusing to ask it. She wanted. Therefore she pursued. She enjoyed. Therefore she repeated. Something obstructed enjoyment. Therefore she destroyed it. Food. Play. Growth. Violence. Yellow-Brow. Again. Again. Again. Wu Zetian suddenly thought of a cat. A very particular cat she remembered from centuries ago. It had lived near one of the kitchens. Fat, orange, entirely shameless.

It slept when tired, ate when hungry, demanded affection when lonely, killed mice when interested, tormented insects for amusement, bit anyone who touched it when it did not wish to be touched. No theology. No ethics. No existential crisis. It wanted something and pursued the satisfaction of wanting it. Wu Zetian stared at the immortal monstrosity blazing across half the heavens. A cat. The comparison was deeply unfair. To the cat. Her lips twitched. Chi You noticed.

"WHAT?"

"Nothing."

"TELL ME."

"I was thinking."

"BORING."

"Yes. I suspect you would find it so."

"FIGHT ME."

"In a moment."

"NOW."

"We are having a conversation."

"WE CAN TALK WHILE FIGHTING." Wu Zetian paused, and, despite herself, she laughed too.

"Very well." Night erupted upward. The demonic sphere lurched backward. Thousands of li of cloud vanished. Chi You roared in delight. And they continued speaking.

"What is cultivation to you?"

"GETTING STRONGER."

"Why become stronger?"

"SO THINGS CAN'T STOP ME."

"Nothing else?"

"SO YELLOW-BROW HAS TO GET STRONGER." Wu Zetian pushed. Chi You pushed harder. The sky cracked between them.

"And if there were no Yellow-Brow?" Chi You was confused.

"THERE IS ALWAYS YELLOW-BROW." Wu Zetian closed her eyes briefly. Of course.

"Lady Chi You."

"YES?"

"I believe I understand you now."

"GOOD."

"And I believe you understand me."

"YES."

"You know I will not move."

"YES."

"You know I will protect the people beneath us."

"YES."

"You know I will prevent you from returning to Yellow-Brow." The smile inside the inferno widened.

"YES."

"And therefore?" The answer came with overwhelming happiness.

"I GET TO BREAK YOU." Wu Zetian nodded. There was no anger in her. Oddly, there was not even disappointment, only recognition. This was not a disagreement awaiting resolution. There simply was no shared premise beneath them. Wu Zetian believed that desire could be judged, that power created obligations, that another creature's suffering could impose limits upon one's own wants. Chi You did not reject those propositions. Rejection would require granting them relevance.

To Chi You, asking whether desire ought to be satisfied was like asking whether fire had permission to rise. It wanted; therefore it acted. That was all. And Wu Zetian finally understood something else. This was what immortality looked like without attachment. Appetite without consequence. Mortality imposed limits even upon those who refused to impose limits upon themselves. But remove death, remove frailty, give appetite centuries to refine itself. And perhaps eventually... this.

An immortal who could shake Heaven and Earth yet possessed no more reason to restrain herself than a cat possessed reason to spare a mouse. Wu Zetian did not hate her for it. One did not hate winter for being cold. One did not condemn poison for being poisonous. One simply decided whether it could be permitted near the things one loved.

"Lady Chi You."

"YES?"

"It has been a pleasure." The demonic immortal laughed.

"ARE WE PLAYING NOW?" Wu Zetian looked down. Her city remained beneath her, tiny from here, insignificant by every measure Heaven cared to use. She thought of the soldier crouched over the child. One fragile life shielding another fragile life. Ridiculous. Beautiful. Worth infinitely more, at this moment, than the immortal thing before her. Wu Zetian looked back up. Her expression was gentle.

"Yes." Chi You's joy shook the world.

"GOOD!" Night began swallowing the sky. Chi You gathered herself eagerly, madness folding inward, condensing from an ocean into something infinitely worse. She screamed with delighted laughter.

"PLAY! PLAY! PLAY!" Wu Zetian smiled faintly. Perhaps cultivation did not elevate one's nature after all. Perhaps it merely gave that nature increasingly impressive ways to express itself. An important lesson she would remember it.

"Come, then." The Night Immortal opened her eyes fully.

"Let us play."